The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III
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Title: The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III
Editor: Henry Cabot Lodge
Francis W. Halsey
Release date: July 30, 2007 [eBook #22182]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/22182
Credits: Produced by Joseph R. Hauser, Sankar Viswanathan, and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BEST OF THE WORLD'S CLASSICS, VOL. V (OF X) - GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND III ***
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[Illustration: LAMB, MACAULAY, SCOTT, and CARLYLE]
THE BEST
_of the_
WORLD'S CLASSICS
RESTRICTED TO PROSE
HENRY CABOT LODGE
_Editor-in-Chief_
FRANCIS W. HALSEY
_Associate Editor_
With an Introduction, Biographical
and Explanatory Notes, etc.
IN TEN VOLUMES
Vol. V
GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND--III
FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY
NEW YORK AND LONDON
COPYRIGHT, 1909, BY
FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY
* * * * *
The Best of the World's Classics
VOL. V
GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND--III
1740--1881
* * * * *
CONTENTS
VOL. V--GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND--III
JAMES BOSWELL--(Born in 1740, died in 1795.)
I Boswell's Introduction to Johnson.
(From Boswell's "Life of Johnson")
II Johnson's Audience with George III.
(From Boswell's "Life of Johnson")
III The Meeting of Johnson and John Wilkes.
(From Boswell's "Life of Johnson")
IV Johnson's Wedding-Day.
(From Boswell's "Life of Johnson")
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH--(Born in 1770, died in 1850.)
A Poet Defined.
(From the Preface to the second edition of "Lyrical Ballads")
SIR WALTER SCOTT--(Born in 1771, died in 1832.)
I The Arrival of the Master of Ravenswood.
(From Chapter XXXIII of "The Bride of Lammermoor")
II The Death of Meg Merriles.
(From Chapter LV of "Guy Mannering")
III A Vision of Rob Roy.
(From Chapter XXIII of "Rob Roy")
IV Queen Elizabeth and Amy Robsart at Kenilworth.
(From "Kenilworth")
V The Illness and Death of Lady Scott.
(From Scott's "Journal")
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE--(Born in 1772, died in 1834.)
I Does Fortune Favor Fools?
(From "A Sailor's Fortune")
II The Destiny of the United States.
(From the "Table Talk")
ROBERT SOUTHEY--(Born in 1774, died in 1843.)
Nelson's Death at Trafalgar.
(From the "Life of Nelson")
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR--(Born in 1775, died in 1864.)
I The Death of Hofer
II Napoleon and Pericles
CHARLES LAMB--(Born in 1775, died in 1834.)
I Dream Children--A Reverie.
(From the "Essays of Elia")
II Poor Relations.
(From the "Essays of Elia")
III The Origin of Roast Pig.
(From the "Essays of Elia")
IV That We Should Rise with the Lark.
(From the "Essays of Elia")
WILLIAM HAZLITT--(Born in 1778, died in 1830.)
Hamlet.
(From the "Characters of Shakespeare's Plays")
THOMAS DE QUINCEY--(Born in 1785, died in 1859.)
I Dreams of an Opium-Eater.
(From the "Confessions of an English Opium-Eater")
II Joan of Arc.
(From the "Biographical and Historical Essays")
III Charles Lamb.
(From the "Literary Reminiscences")
LORD BYRON--(Born in 1788, died in 1824.)
I Of His Mother's Treatment of Him.
(A letter to his half-sister, Augusta)
II To His Wife after the Separation.
(A letter written in Italy)
III To Sir Walter Scott.
(A letter written in Italy)
IV Of Art and Nature as Poetical Subjects.
(From the "Reply to Bowles")
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY--(Born in 1792, died in 1822.)
I In Defense of Poetry.
(From an essay written some time in 1820-21)
II The Baths of Caracalla.
(From a letter to Thomas Love Peacock)
III The ruins of Pompeii.
(A letter to Thomas Love Peacock)
GEORGE GROTE--(Born in 1794, died in 1871.)
I The Mutilation of the Hermæ.
(From Chapter LVIII of the "History of Greece")
II If Alexander Had Lived.
(From Chapter XCIV of the "History of Greece")
THOMAS CARLYLE--(Born in 1795, died in 1881.)
I Charlotte Corday.
(From the "History of the French Revolution")
II The Blessedness of Work.
(From "Past and Present")
III Cromwell.
(From "Heroes and Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History")
IV In Praise of Those Who Toil.
(From "Sartor Resartus")
V The Certainty of Justice.
(From "Past and Present")
VI The Greatness of Scott.
(From the essay on Lockhart's "Life of Scott")
VII Boswell and His Book.
(From the essay on Croker's edition of Boswell)
VIII Might Burns Have Been Saved?
(From the essay on Burns)
LORD MACAULAY--(Born in 1800, died in 1859.)
I Puritans and Royalists.
(From the essay on Milton)
II Cromwell's Army.
(From Chapter I of the "History of England")
III The Opening of the Trial of Warren Hastings.
(From the essay on Hastings)
IV The Gift of Athens to Man.
(From the essay on Mitford's "History of Greece")
V The Pathos of Byron's Life.
(From the essay on Moore's "Life of Byron")
* * * * *
GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND--III
1740--1881
* * * * *
JAMES BOSWELL
Born in 1740, died in 1795; son of a Scottish judge;
admitted to the bar in 1766; recorder of Carlisle in 1788;
removed to London in 1789; visited Corsica in 1766; first
met Dr. Johnson in 1763; went with him to the Hebrides in
1773; published his "Life of Johnson" in 1791.
I
BOSWELL'S INTRODUCTION TO DR. JOHNSON[1]
Mr. Thomas Davies the actor, who then kept a bookseller's shop in
Russell street, Covent Garden, told me that Johnson was very much his
friend, and came frequently to his house, where he more than once
invited me to meet him; but by some unlucky accident or other he was
prevented from coming to us.
Mr. Thomas Davies was a man of good understanding and talents, with
the advantage of a liberal education. Tho somewhat pompous, he was an
entertaining companion; and his literary performances have no
inconsiderable share of merit. He was a friendly and very hospitable
man. Both he and his wife (who has been celebrated for her beauty),
tho upon the stage for many years, maintained a uniform decency of
character; and Johnson esteemed them, and lived in as easy an intimacy
with them as with any family which he used to visit. Mr. Davies
recollected several of Johnson's remarkable sayings, and was one of
the best of the many imitators of his voice and manner, while relating
them. He increased my impatience more and more to see the
extraordinary man whose works I highly valued, and whose conversation
was reported to be so peculiarly excellent.
At last, on Monday the 16th of May, when I was sitting in Mr. Davies'
back parlor, after having drunk tea with him and Mrs. Davies, Johnson
unexpectedly came into the shop; and Mr. Davies having perceived him
through the glass door in the room in which we were sitting, advancing
toward us, he announced his awful approach to me, somewhat in the
manner of an actor in the part of Horatio, when he addresses Hamlet on
the appearance of his father's ghost--"Look, my lord, it comes." I
found that I had a very perfect idea of Johnson's figure from the
portrait of him painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds soon after he had
published his Dictionary, in the attitude of sitting in his easy chair
in deep meditation; which was the first picture his friend did for
him, which Sir Joshua very kindly presented to me, and from which an
engraving has been made for this work. Mr. Davies mentioned my name,
and respectfully introduced me to him. I was much agitated, and
recollecting his prejudice against the Scotch, of which I had heard
much, I said to Davies, "Don't tell where I came from." "From
Scotland," cried Davies, roguishly. "Mr. Johnson" (said I), "I do
indeed come from Scotland, but I can not help it." I am willing to
flatter myself that I meant this as light pleasantry to soothe and
conciliate him, and not as an humiliating abasement at the expense of
my country. But however that might be, this speech was somewhat
unlucky; for with that quickness of wit for which he was so
remarkable, he seized the expression "come from Scotland," which I
used in the sense of being of that country; and as if I had said that
I had come away from it, or left it, retorted, "That, sir, I find is
what a very great many of your countrymen can not help." This stroke
stunned me a good deal; and when he had sat down, I felt myself not a
little embarrassed, and apprehensive of what might come next. He then
addrest himself to Davies: "What do you think of Garrick? He has
refused me an order for the play of Miss Williams, because he knows
the house will be full, and that an order would be worth three
shillings." Eager to take any opening to get into conversation with
him, I ventured to say, "Oh, sir, I can not think Mr. Garrick would
grudge such a trifle to you."
"Sir" (said he, with a stern look), "I have known David Garrick longer
than you have done; and I know no right you have to talk to me on the
subject." Perhaps I deserved this check; for it was rather
presumptuous in me, an entire stranger, to express any doubt of the
justice of his animadversion upon his old acquaintance and pupil. I
now felt myself much mortified, and began to think that the hope which
I had long indulged of obtaining his acquaintance was blasted. And in
truth, had not my ardor been uncommonly strong, and my resolution
uncommonly persevering, so rough a reception might have deterred me
forever from making any further attempts....
I was highly pleased with the extraordinary vigor of his conversation,
and regretted that I was drawn away from it by an engagement at
another place. I had for a part of the evening been left alone with
him, and had ventured to make an observation now and then, which he
received very civilly; so that I was satisfied that tho there was a
roughness in his manner, there was no ill-nature in his disposition.
Davies followed me to the door, and when I complained to him a little
of the hard blows which the great man had given me, he kindly took
upon him to console me by saying, "Don't be uneasy. I can see he likes
you very well."
A few days afterward I called on Davies, and asked him if he thought I
might take the liberty of waiting on Mr. Johnson at his chambers in
the Temple. He said I certainly might, and that Mr. Johnson would take
it as a compliment. So on Tuesday the 24th of May, after having been
enlivened by the witty sallies of Messieurs Thornton, Wilkes,
Churchill, and Lloyd, with whom I had passed the morning, I boldly
repaired to Johnson. His chambers were on the first floor of No. 1,
Inner Temple Lane, and I entered them with an impression given me by
the Rev. Dr. Blair,[2] of Edinburgh, who had been introduced to him
not long before, and described his having "found the giant in his
den"; an expression which, when I came to be pretty well acquainted
with Johnson, I repeated to him, and he was diverted at this
picturesque account of himself. Dr. Blair had been presented to him
by Dr. James Fordyce. At this time the controversy concerning the
pieces published by Mr. James Macpherson as translations of Ossian was
at its height. Johnson had all along denied their authenticity; and
what was still more provoking to their admirers, maintained that they
had no merit. The subject having been introduced by Dr. Fordyce, Dr.
Blair, relying on the internal evidence of their antiquity, asked Dr.
Johnson whether he thought any man of a modern age could have written
such poems. Johnson replied, "Yes, sir, many men, many women, and many
children." Johnson, at this time, did not know that Dr. Blair had just
published a Dissertation, not only defending their authenticity, but
seriously ranking them with the poems of Homer and Virgil; and when he
was afterward informed of this circumstance, he exprest some
displeasure at Dr. Fordyce's having suggested the topic, and said, "I
am not sorry that they got thus much for their pains. Sir, it was like
leading one to talk of a book when the author is concealed behind the
door."
He received me very courteously; but it must be confest that his
apartment and furniture and morning dress were sufficiently uncouth.
His brown suit of clothes looked very rusty; he had on a little
shriveled unpowdered wig, which was too small for his head; his
shirt-neck and the knees of his breeches were loose; his black worsted
stockings ill drawn up; and he had a pair of unbuckled shoes by way of
slippers. But all these slovenly particularities were forgotten the
moment that he began to talk. Some gentlemen, whom I do not recollect,
were sitting with him; and when they went away, I also rose; but he
said to me, "Nay, don't go." "Sir" (said I), "I am afraid that I
intrude upon you. It is benevolent to allow me to sit and hear you."
He seemed pleased with this compliment, which I sincerely paid him,
and answered, "Sir, I am obliged to any man who visits me."
II
JOHNSON'S AUDIENCE WITH GEORGE III[3]
In February, 1767, there happened one of the most remarkable incidents
of Johnson's life, which gratified his monarchical enthusiasm, and
which he loved to relate with all its circumstances, when requested by
his friends. This was his being honored by a private conversation with
his Majesty, in the library at the Queen's house. He had frequently
visited those splendid rooms and noble collection of books, which he
used to say was more numerous and curious than he supposed any person
could have made in the time which the King had employed. Mr. Barnard,
the librarian, took care that he should have every accommodation that
could contribute to his ease and convenience, while indulging his
literary taste in that place; so that he had here a very agreeable
resource at leisure hours.
His Majesty, having been informed of his occasional visits, was
pleased to signify a desire that he should be told when Dr. Johnson
came next to the library. Accordingly, the next time that Johnson did
come, as soon as he was fairly engaged with the book, on which, while
he sat by the fire, he seemed quite intent, Mr. Barnard stole round to
the apartment where the King was, and in obedience to his Majesty's
commands mentioned that Dr. Johnson was then in the library. His
Majesty said that he was at leisure, and would go to him; upon which
Mr. Barnard took one of the candles that stood on the King's table and
lighted his Majesty through a suite of rooms, till they came to a
private door into the library of which his Majesty had the key. Being
entered, Mr. Barnard stept forward hastily to Dr. Johnson, who was
still in a profound study, and whispered him, "Sir, here is the King."
Johnson started up, and stood still. His Majesty approached him, and
at once was courteously easy.
His Majesty began by observing that he understood he came sometimes to
the library; and then mentioned his having heard that the Doctor had
been lately at Oxford, and asked him if he was not fond of going
thither. To which Johnson answered that he was indeed fond of going to
Oxford sometimes, but was likewise glad to come back again. The King
then asked him what they were doing at Oxford. Johnson answered, he
could not much commend their diligence, but that in some respect they
were mended, for they had put their press under better regulations,
and at that time were printing Polybius. He was then asked whether
there were better libraries at Oxford or Cambridge. He answered, he
believed the Bodleian was larger than any they had at Cambridge; at
the same time adding, "I hope, whether we have more books or not than
they have at Cambridge, we shall make as good use of them as they do."
Being asked whether All-Souls or Christ Church library was the
largest, he answered, "All-Souls library is the largest we have,
except the Bodleian." "Ay" (said the King), "that is the public
library."
His Majesty inquired if he was then writing anything. He answered he
was not, for he had pretty well told the world what he knew, and must
now read to acquire more knowledge. The King, as it should seem with a
view to urge him to rely on his own stores as an original writer, and
to continue his labors, then said, "I do not think you borrow much
from anybody."
Johnson said he thought he had already done his part as a writer. "I
should have thought so too" (said the King), "if you had not written
so well." Johnson observed to me, upon this, that "No man could have
paid a handsomer compliment; and it was fit for a king to pay. It was
decisive." When asked by another friend, at Sir Joshua Reynolds's,
whether he made any reply to this high compliment, he answered, "No,
sir. When the King had said it, it was to be so. It was not for me to
bandy civilities with my Sovereign." Perhaps no man who had spent his
whole life in courts could have shown a more nice and dignified sense
of true politeness than Johnson did in this instance.
His Majesty having observed to him that he supposed he must have read
a good deal, Johnson answered that he thought more than he read; that
he had read a great deal in the early part of his life, but having
fallen into ill health, he had not been able to read much compared
with others: for instance, he said, he had not read much compared with
Dr. Warburton. Upon which the King said that he heard Dr. Warburton
was a man of much general knowledge; that you could scarce talk with
him on any subject on which he was not qualified to speak: and that
his learning resembled Garrick's acting in its universality. His
Majesty then talked of the controversy between Warburton and Lowth,
which he seemed to have read, and asked Johnson what he thought of it.
Johnson answered, "Warburton has the most general, most scholastic
learning; Lowth is the more correct scholar. I do not know which of
them calls names best." The King was pleased to say he was of the same
opinion: adding, "You do not think then, Dr. Johnson, that there was
much argument in the case?" Johnson said he did not think there was.
"Why, truly" (said the King), "when once it comes to calling names,
argument is pretty well at an end."
His Majesty then asked him what he thought of Lord Lyttelton's
history, which was just then published. Johnson said he thought his
style pretty good, but that he had blamed Henry the Second rather too
much. "Why" (said the King), "they seldom do these things by halves."
"No, sir" (answered Johnson), "not to kings." But fearing to be
misunderstood, he proceeded to explain himself; and immediately
subjoined, "That for those who spoke worse of kings than they
deserved, he could find no excuse; but that he could more easily
conceive how some one might speak better of them than they deserved,
without any ill intention: for as kings had much in their power to
give, those who were favored by them would frequently, from gratitude,
exaggerate their praises; and as this proceeded from a good motive, it
was certainly excusable as far as error could be excusable."
The King then asked him what he thought of Dr. Hill. Johnson answered
that he was an ingenious man, but had no veracity; and immediately
mentioned as an instance of it an assertion of that writer, that he
had seen objects magnified to a much greater degree by using three or
four microscopes at a time than by using one. "Now" (added Johnson),
"every one acquainted with microscopes knows that the more of them he
looks through, the less the object will appear." "Why" (replied the
King), "this is not only telling an untruth, but telling it clumsily;
for if that be the case, every one who can look through a microscope
will be able to detect him."
"I now" (said Johnson to his friends, when relating what had passed)
"began to consider that I was depreciating this man in the estimation
of his Sovereign, and thought it was time for me to say something that
might be more favorable." He added, therefore, that Dr. Hill was
notwithstanding a very curious observer; and if he would have been
contented to tell the world no more than he knew, he might have been a
very considerable man, and needed not to have recourse to such mean
expedients to raise his reputation.
The King then talked of literary journals, mentioned particularly the
_Journal des Savants_, and asked Johnson if it was well done. Johnson
said it was formerly very well done, and gave some account of the
persons who began it, and carried it on for some years; enlarging at
the same time on the nature and use of such works. The King asked him
if it was well done now. Johnson answered he had no reason to think
that it was. The King then asked him if there were any other literary
journals published in this kingdom except the _Monthly_ and _Critical
Reviews_; and on being answered there was no other, his Majesty asked
which of them was the best. Johnson answered that the _Monthly Review_
was done with most care, the _Critical_ upon the best principles;
adding that the authors of the _Monthly Review_ were enemies to the
Church. This the King said he was sorry to hear.
The conversation next turned on the Philosophical Transactions, when
Johnson observed that they had now a better method of arranging their
materials than formerly. "Ay" (said the King), "they are obliged to
Dr. Johnson for that"; for his Majesty had heard and remembered the
circumstance, which Johnson himself had forgot.
His Majesty exprest a desire to have the literary biography of this
country ably executed, and proposed to Dr. Johnson to undertake it.
Johnson signified his readiness to comply with his Majesty's wishes.
During the whole of this interview, Johnson talked to his Majesty with
profound respect, but still in his firm, manly manner, with a sonorous
voice, and never in that subdued tone which is commonly used at the
levee and in the drawing-room. After the King withdrew, Johnson
showed himself highly pleased with his Majesty's conversation and
gracious behavior. He said to Mr. Barnard, "Sir, they may talk of the
King as they will; but he is the finest gentleman that I have ever
seen." And he afterward observed to Mr. Langton, "Sir, his manners are
those of as fine a gentleman as we may suppose Lewis the Fourteenth or
Charles the Second."
At Sir Joshua Reynolds's, where a circle of Johnson's friends were
collected round him to hear his account of this memorable
conversation, Dr. Joseph Warton, in his frank and lively manner, was
very active in pressing him to mention the particulars, "Come, now,
sir, this is an interesting matter; do favor us with it." Johnson,
with great good humor, complied.
He told them: "I found his Majesty wished I should talk, and I made it
my business to talk. I find it does a man good to be talked to by his
Sovereign. In the first place, a man can not be in a passion--" Here
some question interrupted him; which is to be regretted, as he
certainly would have pointed out and illustrated many circumstances of
advantage, from being in a situation where the powers of the mind are
at once excited to vigorous exertion and tempered by reverential awe.
III
THE MEETING OF DR. JOHNSON AND JOHN WILKES[4]
I am now to record a very curious incident in Dr. Johnson's life which
fell under my own observation; of which _pars magna fui_, and which I
am persuaded will, with the liberal-minded, be much to his credit.
My desire of being acquainted with celebrated men of every description
had made me, much about the same time, obtain an introduction to Dr.
Samuel Johnson and to John Wilkes, Esq. Two men more different could
perhaps not be selected out of all mankind. They had even attacked one
another with some asperity in their writings; yet I lived in habits of
friendship with both. I could fully relish the excellence of each; for
I have ever delighted in that intellectual chemistry which can
separate good qualities from evil in the same person.
My worthy booksellers and friends, Messieurs Dilly in the Poultry, at
whose hospitable and well-covered table I have seen a greater number
of literary men than at any other except that of Sir Joshua Reynolds,
had invited me to meet Mr. Wilkes and some more gentlemen on
Wednesday, May 15th. "Pray" (said I), "let us have Dr. Johnson."
"What, with Mr. Wilkes? not for the world" (said Mr. Edward Dilly):
"Dr. Johnson would never forgive me." "Come" (said I), "if you'll let
me negotiate for you, I will be answerable that all shall go well."
_Dilly_: Nay, if you will take it upon you, I am sure I shall be very
happy to see them both here.
Notwithstanding the high veneration which I entertained for Dr.
Johnson, I was sensible that he was sometimes a little actuated by the
spirit of contradiction, and by means of that I hoped I should gain my
point. I was persuaded that if I had come upon him with a direct
proposal, "Sir, will you dine in company with Jack Wilkes?" he would
have flown into a passion, and would probably have answered, "Dine
with Jack Wilkes, sir! I'd as soon dine with Jack Ketch." I therefore,
while we were sitting quietly by ourselves at his house in an evening,
took occasion to open my plan thus:
"Mr. Dilly, sir, sends his respectful compliments to you, and would be
happy if you would do him the honor to dine with him on Wednesday next
along with me, as I must soon go to Scotland."
_Johnson_: Sir, I am obliged to Mr. Dilly. I will wait upon him--
_Boswell_: Provided, sir, I suppose, that the company which he is to
have is agreeable to you.
_Johnson_: What do you mean, sir? What do you take me for? Do you
think I am so ignorant of the world as to imagine that I am to
prescribe to a gentleman what company he is to have at his table?
_Boswell_: I beg your pardon, sir, for wishing to prevent you from
meeting people whom you might not like. Perhaps he may have some of
what he calls his patriotic friends with him.
_Johnson_: Well, sir, and what then? What care I for his _patriotic
friends_? Poh!
_Boswell_: I should not be surprized to find Jack Wilkes there.
_Johnson_: And if Jack Wilkes _should_ be there, what is that to _me_,
sir? My dear friend, let us have no more of this. I am sorry to be
angry with you; but really it is treating me strangely to talk to me
as if I could not meet any company whatever, occasionally.
_Boswell_: Pray forgive me, sir: I meant well. But you shall meet
whoever comes, for me.
Thus I secured him, and told Dilly that he would find him very well
pleased to be one of his guests on the day appointed.
Upon the much-expected Wednesday I called on him about half an hour
before dinner, as I often did when we were to dine out together, to
see that he was ready in time, and to accompany him. I found him
buffeting his books, as upon a former occasion, covered with dust, and
making no preparation for going abroad. "How is this, sir?" (said I).
"Don't you recollect that you are to dine at Mr. Dilly's?"
_Johnson_: Sir, I did not think of going to Dilly's: it went out of my
head. I have ordered dinner at home with Mrs. Williams.
_Boswell_: But, my dear sir, you know you were engaged to Mr. Dilly,
and I told him so. He will expect you, and will be much disappointed
if you don't come.
_Johnson_: You must talk to Mrs. Williams about this.
Here was a sad dilemma. I feared that what I was so confident I had
secured, would yet be frustrated. He had accustomed himself to show
Mrs. Williams such a degree of humane attention as frequently imposed
some restraint upon him; and I knew that if she should be obstinate,
he would not stir. I hastened down-stairs to the blind lady's room,
and told her I was in great uneasiness, for Dr. Johnson had engaged to
me to dine this day at Mr. Dilly's, but that he had told me he had
forgotten his engagement, and had ordered dinner at home. "Yes, sir"
(said she, pretty peevishly), "Dr. Johnson is to dine at home."
"Madam" (said I), "his respect for you is such that I know he will not
leave you, unless you absolutely desire it. But as you have so much of
his company, I hope you will be good enough to forego it for a day; as
Mr. Dilly is a very worthy man, has frequently had agreeable parties
at his house for Dr. Johnson, and will be vexed if the Doctor neglects
him to-day. And then, madam, be pleased to consider my situation: I
carried the message, and I assured Mr. Dilly that Dr. Johnson was to
come; and no doubt he has made a dinner, and invited a company, and
boasted of the honor he expected to have. I shall be quite disgraced
if the Doctor is not there."
She gradually softened to my solicitations, which were certainly as
earnest as most entreaties to ladies upon any occasion, and was
graciously pleased to empower me to tell Dr. Johnson "that, all things
considered, she thought he should certainly go." I flew back to him,
still in dust, and careless of what should be the event, "indifferent
in his choice to go or stay"; but as soon as I had announced to him
Mrs. Williams's consent, he roared, "Frank, a clean shirt," and was
very soon drest. When I had him fairly seated in a hackney-coach with
me, I exulted as much as a fortune-hunter who has got an heiress into
a post-chaise with him to set out for Gretna Green.
When we entered Mr. Dilly's drawing-room, he found himself in the
midst of a company he did not know. I kept myself snug and silent,
watching how he would conduct himself. I observed him whispering to
Mr. Dilly, "Who is that gentleman, sir?" "Mr. Arthur Lee." _Johnson_:
"Too, too, too" (under his breath), which was one of his habitual
mutterings. Mr. Arthur Lee could not but be very obnoxious to Johnson,
for he was not only a _patriot_ but an _American_. He was afterward
minister from the United States at the court of Madrid. "And who is
the gentleman in lace?" "Mr. Wilkes, sir." This information confounded
him still more; he had some difficulty to restrain himself, and taking
up a book, sat down upon a window-seat and read, or at least kept his
eye upon it intently for some time, till he composed himself. His
feelings, I dare say, were awkward enough. But he no doubt recollected
his having rated me for supposing that he could be at all disconcerted
by any company, and he therefore resolutely set himself to behave
quite as an easy man of the World, who could adapt himself at once to
the disposition and manners of those whom he might chance to meet.
The cheering sound of "Dinner is upon the table" dissolved his
reverie, and we all sat down without any symptom of ill-humor. There
were present, besides Mr. Wilkes, and Mr. Arthur Lee, who was an old
companion of mine when he studied physics at Edinburgh, Mr. (now Sir
John) Miller, Dr. Lettson, and Mr. Slater the druggist. Mr. Wilkes
placed himself next to Dr. Johnson, and behaved to him with so much
attention and politeness that he gained upon him insensibly. No man
ate more heartily than Johnson, or loved better what was nice and
delicate. Mr. Wilkes was very assiduous in helping him to some fine
veal. "Pray give me leave, sir--It is better here--A little of the
brown--Some fat, sir--A little of the stuffing--Some gravy--Let me
have the pleasure of giving you some butter--Allow me to recommend a
squeeze of this orange; or the lemon, perhaps, may have more zest."
"Sir, sir, I am obliged to you, sir," cried Johnson, bowing, and
turning his head to him with a look for some time of "surly virtue,"
but in a short while of complacency.
IV
JOHNSON'S WEDDING-DAY[5]
Tho Mrs. Porter was double the age of Johnson, and her person and
manner, as described to me by the late Mr. Garrick, were by no means
pleasing to others, she must have had a superiority of understanding
and talents, as she certainly inspired him with a more than ordinary
passion; and she having signified her willingness to accept of his
hand, he went to Lichfield to ask his mother's consent to the
marriage, which he could not but be conscious was a very imprudent
scheme, both on account of their disparity of years, and her want of
fortune. But Mrs. Johnson knew too well the ardor of her son's temper,
and was too tender a parent to oppose his inclinations.
I know not for what reason the marriage ceremony was not performed at
Birmingham; but a resolution was taken that it should be at Derby, for
which place the bride and bridegroom set out on horseback, I suppose
in very good humor. But tho Mr. Topham Beauclerk used archly to
mention Johnson's having told him, with much gravity, "Sir, it was a
love marriage on both sides," I have had from my illustrious friend
the following curious account of their journey to church upon the
nuptial morn (9th July):
"Sir, she had read the old romances, and had got into her head the
fantastical notion that a woman of spirit should use her lover like a
dog. So, sir, at first she told me that I rode too fast, and she could
not keep up with me; and, when I rode a little slower, she passed me,
and complained that I lagged behind. I was not to be made the slave of
caprice; and I resolved to begin as I meant to end. I therefore pushed
on briskly, till I was fairly out of her sight. The road lay between
two hedges, so I was sure she could not miss it; and I contrived that
she should soon come up with me. When she did, I observed her to be in
tears."
This, it must be allowed, was a singular beginning of connubial
felicity; but there is no doubt that Johnson, tho he thus showed a
manly firmness, proved a most affectionate and indulgent husband to
the last moment of Mrs. Johnson's life: and in his "Prayers and
Meditations," we find very remarkable evidence that his regard and
fondness for her never ceased, even after her death.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: From Boswell's "Life of Johnson."]
[Footnote 2: The author of the "Lectures on Rhetoric," who was born in
1718 and died in 1800.]
[Footnote 3: From Boswell's "Life of Johnson."]
[Footnote 4: From Boswell's "Life of Johnson." Wilkes was the famous
publicist and political agitator who was expelled from Parliament,
imprisoned and outlawed, but afterward elected Lord Mayor of London
and allowed to sit in Parliament many years.]
[Footnote 5: From Boswell's "Life of Johnson." Johnson was married in
1734, when his age was twenty-five.]
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
Born in 1770; died in 1850; graduated from Cambridge in
1791; traveled on the Continent in 1790-92; settled at
Grasmere in 1799; married Mary Hutchinson in 1802; settled
at Rydal Mount in 1813; traveled in Scotland in 1814 and in
1832; traveled on the Continent again in 1820 and in 1837;
became poet laureate in 1843; published his first volume in
1793 and his last, "The Prelude," in 1850.
A POET DEFINED[6]
Taking up the subject upon general grounds, I ask what is meant by the
word Poet? What is a poet? To whom does he address himself? And what
language is to be expected from him? He is a man speaking to men: a
man, it is true, endued with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm
and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a
more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind;
a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices
more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him; delighting
to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the
goings on of the universe, and habitually impelled to create them
where he does not find them. To these qualities he has added a
disposition to be affected more than other men by absent things as if
they were present; an ability of conjuring up in himself passions,
which are indeed far from being the same as those produced by real
events, yet especially in those parts of the general sympathy which
are pleasing and delightful do more nearly resemble the passions
produced by real events than anything which, from the motions of their
own minds merely, other men are accustomed to feel in themselves;
whence, and from practise, he has acquired a greater readiness and
power in expressing what he thinks and feels, and especially those
thoughts and feelings which, by his own choice, or from the structure
of his own mind, arise in him without immediate external excitement.
But whatever portion of this faculty we may suppose even the greatest
poet to possess, there can not be a doubt but that the language which
it will suggest to him must, in liveliness and truth, fall far short
of that which is uttered by men in real life, under the actual
pressure of those passions, certain shadows of which the poet thus
produces, or feels to be produced, in himself.
However exalted a notion we would wish to cherish of the character of
the poet, it is obvious that, while he describes and imitates
passions, his situation is altogether slavish and mechanical, compared
with the freedom and power of real and substantial action and
suffering. So that it will be the wish of the poet to bring his
feelings near to those of the persons whose feelings he describes,
nay, for short spaces of time, perhaps, to let himself slip into an
entire delusion, and even confound and identify his own feelings with
theirs; modifying only the language which is thus suggested to him by
a consideration that he describes for a particular purpose, that of
giving pleasure. Here, then, he will apply the principle on which I
have so much insisted, namely, that of selection; on this he will
depend for removing what would otherwise be painful or disgusting in
the passion; he will feel that there is no necessity to trick out or
elevate nature; and, the more industriously he applies this principle,
the deeper will be his faith that no words which his fancy or
imagination can suggest will bear to be compared with those which are
the emanations of reality and truth.
But it may be said by those who do not object to the general spirit of
these remarks, that, as it is impossible for the poet to produce upon
all occasions language as exquisitely fitted for the passion as that
which the real passion itself suggests, it is proper that he should
consider himself as in the situation of a translator, who deems
himself justified when he substitutes excellences of another kind for
those which are unattainable by him; and endeavors occasionally to
surpass his original, in order to make some amends for the general
inferiority to which he feels that he must submit. But this would be
to encourage idleness and unmanly despair. Further, it is the language
of men who speak of what they do not understand; who talk of poetry as
of a matter of amusement and idle pleasure; who will converse with us
as gravely about a taste for poetry, as they express it, as if it were
a thing as indifferent as a taste for rope-dancing, or Frontignac, or
Sherry. Aristotle, I have been told, hath said that poetry is the most
philosophic of all writing; it is so: its object is truth, not
individual and local, but general and operative; not standing upon
external testimony, but carried alive into the heart by passion; truth
which is its own testimony, which gives strength and divinity to the
tribunal to which it appeals, and receives them from the same
tribunal. Poetry is the image of man and nature. The obstacles which
stand in the way of the fidelity of the biographer and historian, and
of their consequent utility, are incalculably greater than those which
are to be encountered by the poet who has an adequate notion of the
dignity of his art. The poet writes under one restriction only,
namely, that of the necessity of giving immediate pleasure to a human
being possest of that information which may be expected from him, not
as a lawyer, a physician, a mariner, an astronomer, or a natural
philosopher, but as a man. Except this one restriction, there is no
object standing between the poet and the image of things: between this
and the biographer and the historian there are a thousand.
Nor let this necessity of producing immediate pleasure be considered
as a degradation of the poet's art. It is far otherwise. It is an
acknowledgment of the beauty of the universe, an acknowledgment the
more sincere because it is not formal, but indirect; it is a task
light and easy to him who looks at the world in the spirit of love:
further, it is an homage paid to the native and naked dignity of man,
to the grand elementary principle of pleasure, by which he knows, and
feels, and lives, and moves. We have no sympathy but what is
propagated by pleasure. I would not be misunderstood, but wherever we
sympathize with pain it will be found that the sympathy is produced
and carried on by subtle combinations with pleasure. We have no
knowledge, that is, no general principles drawn from the contemplation
of particular facts, but what has been built up by pleasure, and
exists in us by pleasure alone. The man of science, the chemist, and
mathematician, whatever difficulties and disgusts they may have had to
struggle with, know and feel this. However painful may be the objects
with which the anatomist's knowledge is connected, he feels that his
knowledge is pleasure; and where he has no pleasure he has no
knowledge. What then does the poet? He considers man and the objects
that surround him as acting and reacting upon each other, so as to
produce an infinite complexity of pain and pleasure; he considers man
in his own nature and in his ordinary life as contemplating this with
a certain quantity of immediate knowledge, with certain convictions,
intuitions, and deductions, which by habit become of the nature of
intuitions; he considers him as looking upon this complex scene of
ideas and sensations, and finding everywhere objects that immediately
excite in him sympathies which, from the necessities of his nature,
are accompanied by an overbalance of enjoyment.
To this knowledge which all men carry about with them, and to these
sympathies in which, without any other discipline than that of our
daily life, we are fitted to take delight, the poet principally
directs his attention. He considers man and nature as essentially
adapted to each other, and the mind of man as naturally the mirror of
the fairest and most interesting qualities of nature. And thus the
poet, prompted by this feeling of pleasure which accompanies him
through the whole course of his studies, converses with general nature
with affections akin to those which, through labor and length of time,
the man of science has raised up in himself, by conversing with those
parts of nature which are the objects of his studies. The knowledge
both of the poet and the man of science is pleasure; but the knowledge
of the one cleaves to us as a necessary part of our existence, our
natural and unalienable inheritance; the other is a personal and
individual acquisition, slow to come to us, and by no habitual and
direct sympathy connecting us with our fellow beings. The man of
science seeks truth as a remote and unknown benefactor; he cherishes
and loves it in his solitude; the poet, singing a song in which all
human beings join with him, rejoices in the presence of truth as our
visible friend and hourly companion. Poetry is the breath and finer
spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in
the countenance of all science. Emphatically may be said of the poet,
as Shakespeare hath said of man, "that he looks before and after." He
is the rock of defense of human nature, an upholder and preserver,
carrying everywhere with him relationship and love. In spite of
difference of soil and climate, of language and manners, of laws and
customs, in spite of things silently gone out of mind, and things
violently destroyed, the poet binds together by passion and knowledge
the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth
and over all time. The objects of the poet's thoughts are everywhere;
tho the eyes and senses of man are, it is true, his favorite guides,
yet he will follow wheresoever he can find an atmosphere of sensation
in which to move his wings. Poetry is the first and last of all
knowledge--it is as immortal as the heart of man.
If the labors of men of science should ever create any material
revolution, direct or indirect, in our condition, and in the
impressions which we habitually receive, the poet will sleep then no
more than at present, but he will be ready to follow the steps of the
man of science, not only in those general indirect effects, but he
will be at his side, carrying sensation into the midst of the science
itself. The remotest discoveries of the chemist, the botanist, or
mineralogist will be as proper objects of the poet's art as any upon
which it can be employed, if the time should ever come when these
things shall be familiar to us, and the relations under which they are
contemplated by the followers of these respective sciences shall be
manifestly and palpably material to us as enjoying and suffering
beings. If the time should ever come when what is now called science,
thus familiarized to men, shall be ready to put on, as it were, a form
of flesh and blood, the poet will lend his divine spirit to aid the
transfiguration, and will welcome the being thus produced as a dear
and genuine inmate of the household of man. It is not, then, to be
supposed that any one, who holds that sublime notion of poetry which I
have attempted to convey, will break in upon the sanctity and truth of
his pictures by transitory and accidental ornaments, and endeavor to
excite admiration of himself by arts, the necessity of which must
manifestly depend upon the assumed meanness of his subject.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 6: From the famous "Preface" to the second edition of
"Lyrical Ballads," published in 1800. The poems in the first edition
of "Lyrical Ballads," published in 1798, had been the joint production
of Wordsworth and Coleridge. The volume was published in Bristol by
Cottle. It met with a cold, if not scoffing, reception, altho among
its contents were the "Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey." When
Cottle's publishing business was transferred to Longmans in 1799, the
value of the copyright of "Lyrical Ballads," for which Cottle had paid
the authors 30 guineas, was estimated at nothing. Cottle then
presented the copyright to Wordsworth and Coleridge. Wordsworth,
meanwhile, had written other poems and Longmans offered him £100 for a
new and enlarged edition of "Lyrical Ballads," restricted to his own
verse and to which Wordsworth was to contribute an explanatory
preface, the same being the "Preface" which aroused a controversy now
historical in the history of English poetry. Critics were deeply
incensed at Wordsworth's defense of his own poems. The "Preface" was a
revolutionary proclamation against the taste in poetry which had been
established in a previous century.]
SIR WALTER SCOTT
Born in 1771, died in 1832; educated at Edinburgh; sheriff
of Selkirkshire in 1799; published "The Minstrelsy of the
Scottish Border" in 1802-03; "The Lay of the Last Minstrel"
in 1805, followed by "Marmion" in 1808, and "The Lady of the
Lake" in 1810; his first novel, "Waverley," published in
1814; involved to the extent of £120,000 in the failure of
his publishers in 1826; with additional private debts of
£30,000; struggled the rest of his life under this load of
debt, which his writings finally extinguished; made a
baronet in 1820; lived at Abbotsford, 1812-1826.
I
THE ARRIVAL OF THE MASTER OF RAVENSWOOD[7]
Hardly had Miss Ashton dropt the pen, when the door of the apartment
flew open, and the Master of Ravenswood, entered the apartment.
Lockhart and another domestic, who had in vain attempted to oppose his
passage through the gallery or antechamber, were seen standing on the
threshhold transfixt with surprize, which was instantly communicated
to the whole party in the stateroom. That of Colonel Douglas Ashton
was mingled with resentment; that of Bucklaw with haughty and affected
indifference; the rest, even Lady Ashton herself, showed signs of
fear; and Lucy seemed stiffened to stone by this unexpected
apparition. Apparition it might well be termed, for Ravenswood had
more the appearance of one returned from the dead than of a living
visitor.
He planted himself full in the middle of the apartment, opposite to
the table at which Lucy was seated, on whom, as if she had been alone
in the chamber, he bent his eyes with a mingled expression of deep
grief and deliberate indignation. His dark-colored riding cloak,
displaced from one shoulder, hung around one side of his person in the
ample folds of the Spanish mantle. The rest of his rich dress was
travel-soiled, and deranged by hard riding. He had a sword by his
side, and pistols in his belt. His slouched hat, which he had not yet
removed at entrance, gave an additional gloom to his dark features,
which, wasted by sorrow and marked by the ghastly look communicated by
long illness, added to a countenance naturally somewhat stern and
wild, a fierce and even savage expression. The matted and disheveled
locks of hair which escaped from under his hat, together with his fixt
and unmoved posture, made his head more resemble that of a marble bust
than that of a living man. He said not a single word, and there was a
deep silence in the company for more than two minutes.
It was broken by Lady Ashton, who in that space partly recovered her
natural audacity. She demanded to know the cause of his unauthorized
intrusion.
"That is a question, madam," said her son, "which I have the best
right to ask; and I must request of the Master of Ravenswood to follow
me where he can answer it at leisure."
Bucklaw interposed, saying, "No man on earth should usurp his
previous right in demanding an explanation from the Master.
Craigengelt," he added, in an undertone, "d--n ye, why do you stand
staring as if you saw a ghost? fetch me my sword from the gallery."
"I will relinquish to none," said Colonel Ashton, "my right of calling
to account the man who has offered this unparalleled affront to my
family."
"Be patient, gentlemen," said Ravenswood, turning sternly toward them,
and waving his hand as if to impose silence on their altercation. "If
you are as weary of your lives as I am, I will find time and place to
pledge mine against one or both; at present, I have no leisure for the
dispute of triflers."
"Triflers!" cried Colonel Ashton, half unsheathing his sword, while
Bucklaw laid his hand on the hilt of that which Craigengelt had just
reached him.
Sir William Ashton, alarmed for his son's safety, rushed between the
young men and Ravenswood, exclaiming, "My son, I command you--Bucklaw,
I entreat you--keep the peace, in the name of the Queen and of the
law!"
"In the name of the law of God," said Brid-the-Bent, advancing also
with uplifted hands between Bucklaw, the Colonel, and the object of
their resentment--"in the name of Him who brought peace on earth and
good-will to mankind, I implore--I beseech--I command you to forbear
violence toward each other! God hateth the bloodthirsty man; he who
striketh with the sword shall perish with the sword."
"Do you take me for a dog, sir," said Colonel Ashton, turning
fiercely upon him, "or something more brutally stupid, to endure this
insult in my father's house? Let me go, Bucklaw! He shall account to
me, or, by Heavens I will stab him where he stands!"
"You shall not touch him here," said Bucklaw; "he once gave me my
life, and were the devil come to fly away with the whole house and
generation, he shall have nothing but fair play."
The passions of the two young men thus counteracting each other gave
Ravenswood leisure to exclaim, in a stern and steady voice,
"Silence!--let him who really seeks danger take the fitting time when
it is to be found; my mission here will be shortly accomplished. Is
that your handwriting, madam?" he added in a softer tone, extending
toward Miss Ashton her last letter.
A faltering "Yes," seemed rather to escape from her lips than to be
uttered as a voluntary answer.
"And is this also your handwriting?" extending toward her the mutual
engagement.
Lucy remained silent. Terror, and a yet stronger and more confused
feeling, so utterly disturbed her understanding that she probably
scarcely comprehended the question that was put to her.
"If you design," said Sir William Ashton, "to found any legal claim on
that paper, sir, do not expect to receive any answer to an
extrajudicial question."
"Sir William Ashton," said Ravenswood, "I pray you, and all who hear
me, that you will not mistake my purpose. If this young lady, of her
own free will desires the restoration of this contract, as her letter
would seem to imply, there is not a withered leaf which this autumn
wind strews on the heath that is more valueless in my eyes. But I must
and will hear the truth from her own mouth; without this satisfaction
I will not leave this spot. Murder me by numbers you possibly may; but
I am an armed man--I am a desperate man, and I will not die without
ample vengeance. This is my resolution, take it as you may. I WILL
hear her determination from her own mouth; from her own mouth, alone,
and without witnesses, will I hear it. Now, choose," he said drawing
his sword with the right hand, and, with the left, by the same motion
taking a pistol from his belt and cocking it, but turning the point of
one weapon and the muzzle of the other to the ground--"choose if you
will have this hall flooded with blood, or if you will grant me the
decisive interview with my affianced bride which the laws of God and
the country alike entitle me to demand."
II
THE DEATH OF MEG MERRILES[8]
The surgeon arrived at the same time, and was about to probe the
wound; but Meg resisted the assistance of either. "It's no what man
can do, that will heal my body, or save my spirit. Let me speak what I
have to say, and then ye may work your will, I'se be nae hinderance.
But where's Henry Bertram?" The assistants, to whom this name had
been long a stranger, gazed upon each other. "Yes," she said, in a
stronger and harsher tone, "I said Henry Bertram of Ellangowan. Stand
from the light and let me see him."
All eyes were turned toward Bertram, who approached the wretched
couch. The wounded woman took hold of his hand. "Look at him," she
said, "all that ever saw his father or his grandfather, and bear
witness if he is not their living image?" A murmur went through the
crowd--the resemblance was too striking to be denied. "And now hear
me--and let that man," pointing to Hatteraick, who was seated with his
keepers on a sea-chest at some distance--"let him deny what I say, if
he can. That is Henry Bertram, son to Godfrey Bertram, umquihile of
Ellangowan; that young man is the very lad-bairn that Dirk Hatteraick
carried off from Warroch wood the day that he murdered the gager. I
was there like a wandering spirit--for I longed to see that wood or we
left the country. I saved the bairn's life, and sair, sair I prigged
and prayed they would leave him wi' me--but they bore him away, and
he's been lang ower the sea, and now he's come for his ain, and what
should withstand him? I swore to keep the secret till he was
ane-an'-twenty--I kenn'd he behoved to dree his weird till that day
cam--I keepit that oath which I took to them--but I made another vow
to myself, and if I lived to see the day of his return, I would set
him in his father's seat, if every step was on a dead man. I have
keepit that oath, too;--I will be ae step mysell--he" (pointing to
Hatteraick), "will soon be another, and there will me ane mair yet."
The clergyman now interposing, remarked it was a pity this deposition
was not regularly taken and written down, and the surgeon urged the
necessity of examining the wound, previously to exhausting her by
questions. When she saw them removing Hatteraick, in order to clear
the room and leave the surgeon to his operations, she called out
aloud, raising herself at the same time upon the couch, "Dirk
Hatteraick, you and I will never meet again until we are before the
judgment seat--will you own to what I have said, or will you dare deny
it?" He turned his hardened brow upon her, with a look of dumb and
inflexible defiance. "Dirk Hatteraick, dare ye deny, with my blood
upon your hands, one word of what my dying breath is uttering?" He
looked at her with the same expression of hardihood and dogged
stubbornness, and moved his lips, but uttered no sound. "Then
fareweel!" she said, "and God forgive you! your hand has sealed my
evidence. When I was in life, I was the mad randy gipsy, that had been
scourged, and banished, and branded--that had begged from door to
door, and been hounded like a stray from parish to parish--wha would
hae minded her tale? But now I am a dying woman, and my words will not
fall to the ground, any more than the earth will cover my blood!"
She here paused, and all left the hut except the surgeon and two or
three women. After a short examination, he shook his head, and
resigned his post by the dying woman's side to the clergyman.
A chaise returning empty to Kippletringan had been stopt on the
high-road by a constable, who foresaw it would be necessary to convey
Hatteraick to jail. The driver, understanding what was going on at
Derncleugh, left his horses to the care of the blackguard boy,
confiding, it is to be supposed, rather in the years and discretion of
the cattle, than in those of their keeper, and set off full speed, to
see, as he exprest himself, "whaten a sort o' fun was gaun on." He
arrived just as the group of tenants and peasants, whose numbers
increased every moment, satiated with gazing upon the rugged features
of Hatteraick, had turned their attention toward Bertram. Almost all
of them, especially the aged men who had seen Ellengowan in his better
days, felt and acknowledged the justice of Meg Merriles's appeal. But
the Scotch are a cautious people; they remembered there was another in
possession of the estate, and they as yet only exprest their feelings
in low whispers to each other. Our friend, Jock Jabos, the postilion,
forced his way into the middle of the circle; but no sooner cast his
eyes upon Bertram, than he started back in amazement, with a solemn
exclamation, "As sure as there's breath in man, it's auld Ellengowan."
This public declaration of an unprejudiced witness was just the spark
wanted to give fire to the popular feeling, which burst forth in three
distinct shouts: "Bertram forever!" "Long life to the heir of
Ellangowan!" "God send him his ain, and to live among us as his
forebears did of yore!"
"I hae been seventy years on the land," said one person.
"I and mine hae been seventy and seven to that," said another; "I have
a right to ken the glance of a Bertram."
"I and mine hae been three hundred years here," said another old man,
"and I shall sell my last cow but I'll see the young laird placed in
his right."
The women, ever delighted with the marvelous, and not less so when a
handsome young man is the subject of the tale, added their shrill
acclamations to the general all-hail. "Blessings on him--he's the very
picture o' his father! The Bertrams were ay the wale o' the
countryside!"
"Eh! that his puir mother, that died of grief and in doubt about him,
had but lived to see this day!" exclaimed some female voices.
"But we'll help him to his ain, kimmers," cried others; "and before
Gossin shall keep the Place of Ellangowan, we'll howk him out o't wi'
our nails!"
Others crowded around Dinmont, who was nothing loath to tell what he
knew of his friend, and to boast the honor which he had in
contributing to the discovery. As he was known to several of the
principal farmers present, his testimony afforded an additional motive
to the general enthusiasm. In short, it was one of those moments of
intense feeling, when the frost of the Scottish people melts like a
snow-wreath, and the dissolving torrent carries dam and dike before
it.
The sudden shouts interrupted the devotions of the clergyman; and Meg,
who was in one of those dozing fits of stupefaction that precede the
close of existence, suddenly started, "Dinna ye hear?--dinna ye
hear?--he's owned!--he's owned!--I lived but for this. I am a sinful
woman; but if my curse brought it down, my blessing has taen it off!
And now I wad hae liked to hae said mair. But it can not be.
Stay"--she continued, stretched her head toward the gleam of light
that shot through the narrow slit which served for a window--"is he
not there?--stand out o' the light, and let me look upon him ance
mair. But the darkness is in my ain een," she said, sinking back,
after an earnest gaze upon vacuity--"it's a' ended now.
'Pass breath,
Come death!"
And, sinking back upon her couch of straw, she expired without a
groan.
III
A VISION OF ROB ROY[9]
When, however, I recollected the circumstances in which we formerly
met, I could not doubt that the billet was most probably designed for
him. He had made a marked figure among those mysterious personages
over whom Diana seemed to exercise an influence, and from whom she
experienced an influence in her turn. It was painful to think that
the fate of a being so amiable was involved in that of desperadoes of
this man's description; yet it seemed impossible to doubt it. Of what
use, however, could this person be to my father's affairs. I could
think only of one. Rashleigh Osbaldistone had, at the instigation of
Miss Vernon, certainly found means to produce Mr. Campbell when his
presence was necessary to exculpate me from Morris's accusation. Was
it not possible that her influence, in like manner, might prevail on
Campbell to produce Rashleigh? Speaking on this supposition, I
requested to know where my dangerous kinsman was, and when Mr.
Campbell had seen him. The answer was indirect.
"It's a kittle cast she has gien me to play; but yet it's fair play,
and I winna baulk her. Mr. Osbaldistone, I dwell not very far from
hence--my kinsman can show you the way. Leave Mr. Owen to do the best
he can in Glasgow--do you come and see me in the glens, and it's like
I may pleasure you, and stead your father in his extremity. I am but a
poor man; but wit's better than wealth--and, cousin" (turning from me
to address Mr. Jarvie), "if ye daur venture sae muckle as to eat a
dish of Scotch collops, and a leg o' red-deer venison wi' me, come ye
wi' this Sassenach gentleman as far as Drymen or Bucklivie, or the
Clachan of Aberfoil, will be better than ony o' them, and I'll hae
somebody waiting to weise ye to the gate to the place where I may be
for the time. What say ye, man? There's my thumb, I'll ne'er beguile
thee."
"Na, na, Robin," said the cautious burgher, "I seldom like to leave
the Gorbals, I have nae freedom to gang among your wild hills, Robin,
and your kilted red-shanks--it disna become my place, man."
"The devil damn your place and you baith!" reiterated Campbell. "The
only drap o' gentle bluid that's in your body was our great
grand-uncle's that was justified at Dumbarton, and you set yourself up
to say ye wad degrogate frae your place to visit me! Hark thee, man, I
owe thee a day in harst--I'll pay up your thousan pund Scots, plack
and bawbee, gin ye'll be an honest fellow for anes, and just daiker up
the gate wi' this Sassenach."
"Hout awa' wi' your gentility," replied the Bailie: "carry your gentle
bluid to the Cross, and see what ye'll buy wi't. But, if I were to
come, wad ye really and soothfastly pay me the siller?"
"I swear to ye," said the Highlander, "upon the halidome of him that
sleeps beneath the gray stane at Inche-Cailleach."
"Say nae mair, Robin--say nae mair. We'll see what may be dune. But ye
maunna expect me to gang ower the Hieland line--I'll gae beyond the
line at no rate. Ye maun meet me about Bucklivie or the Clachan of
Aberfoil, and dinna forget the needful."
"Nae fear--nae fear," said Campbell; "I'll be as true as the steel
blade that never failed its master. But I must be budging, cousin,
for the air o' Glasgow tolbooth is no that ower salutary to be a
Highlander's constitution."
"Troth," replied the merchant, "and if my duty were to be dune, ye
couldna change your atmosphere, as the minister ca's it, this ae wee
while. Ochon, that I ad ever be concerned in aiding and abetting an
escape frae justice! it will be a shame and disgrace to me and mine,
and my father's memory, forever."
"Hout tout, man! let that flee stick in the wa'," answered his
kinsman; "when the dirt's dry it will rub out. Your father, honest
man, could look over a friend's fault as weel as anither."
"Ye may be right, Robin," replied the Bailie, after a moment's
reflection; "he was a considerate man the deacon; he ken'd we had a'
our frailties, and he lo'ed his friends. Ye'll no hae forgotten him,
Robin?" This question he put in a softened tone, conveying as much at
least of the ludicrous as the pathetic.
"Forgotten him!" replied his kinsman, "what suld ail me to forget
him?--a wapping weaver he was, and wrought my first pair o' hose. But
come awa, kinsman,
"Come fill up my cup, come fill up my can,
Come saddle my horses, and call up my man;
Come open your gates, and let me gae free,
I daurna stay langer in bonny Dundee."
"Whisht, sir," said the magistrate, in an authoritative tone--"lilting
and singing sae near the latter end o' the Sabbath! This house may
hear ye sing anither tune yet. Aweel, we hae a' backslidings to
answer for--Stanchells, open the door."
The jailer obeyed, and we all sallied forth. Stanchells looked with
some surprize at the two strangers, wondering, doubtless, how they
came into these premises without his knowledge; but Mr. Jarvie's
"Friends o' mine, Stanchells--friends o' mine," silenced all
disposition to inquiries. We now descended into the lower vestibule,
and hallooed more than once for Dougal, to which summons no answer was
returned; when Campbell observed, with a sardonic smile, "That if
Dougal was the lad he kent him, he would scarce wait to get thanks for
his ain share of the night's wark, but was in all probability on the
full trot to the pass of Ballmaha"--
"And left us--and, abune a', me mysell, locked up in the tolbooth a'
night!" exclaimed the Bailie, in ire and perturbation. "Ca' for
fore-hammers, sledge-hammers, pinches, and coulters; send for Deacon
Yettlin, the smith, and let him ken that Bailie Jarvie's shut up in
the tolbooth by a Hieland blackguard, whom he'll hang up as high as
Haman"--
"When we catch him," said Campbell gravely; "but stay, the door is
surely not locked."
Indeed, on examination, we found that the door was not only left open,
but that Dougal in his retreat had, by carrying off the keys along
with him, taken care that no one should exercise his office of porter
in a hurry.
"He has glimmerings o' common sense now, that creature Dougal," said
Campbell; "he ken'd an open door might hae served me at a pinch."
We were by this time in the street.
"I tell you, Robin," said the magistrate, "in my puir mind, if ye live
the life ye do, ye suld hae ane o' your gillies doorkeeper in every
jail of Scotland, in case o' the warst."
"Ane o' my kinsman a bailie in ilka burgh will just do as weel, Cousin
Nicol. So, gude-nicht or gude-morning to ye; and forget not the
Clachan of Aberfoil."
And without waiting for an answer, he sprang to the other side of the
street, and was lost in darkness. Immediately on his disappearance, we
heard him give a low whistle of peculiar modulation, which was
instantly replied to.
"Hear to the Hieland deevils," said Mr. Jarvie; "they think themselves
on the skirts of Benlomond already, where they may gang whewing,
whistling about without minding Sunday or Saturday." Here he was
interrupted by some thing which fell with a heavy clash on the street
before us. "Gude guide us! what's this mair o't--Mattie, haud up the
lantern--conscience! if it isna the keys! Weel, that's just as
well--they cost the burgh siller, and there might hae been some
clavers about the loss o' them--O, an Bailie Grahame were to get word
o' this nicht's job, it wad be a sair hair in my neck!"
As we were still but a few steps from the tolbooth door, we carried
back these implements of office, and consigned them to the head
jailer, who, in lieu of the usual mode of making good his post by
turning the keys, was keeping sentry in the vestibule till the arrival
of some assistant whom he had summoned in order to replace Celtic
fugitive Dougal.
Having discharged this piece of duty to the burgh, and my road lying
the same way with the honest magistrate's, I profited by the light of
his lantern, and he by my arm, to find our way through the streets,
which, whatever they may now be, were then dark, uneven, and
ill-paved. Age is easily propitiated by attentions from the young. The
Bailie exprest himself interested in me, and added, "That since I was
nane o' that play-acting and play-ganging generation, whom his saul
hated, he wad eat a reisted haddock, or a fresh herring, at breakfast
wi' him the morn, and meet my friend, Mr. Owen, whom, by that time, he
would place at liberty."
"My dear sir," said I, when I had accepted of the invitation with
thanks, "how could you possibly connect me with the stage?"
"I watna," replied Mr. Jarvie; "it was a bletherin' phrasin' chield
they ca' Fairservice that cam at e'en to get an order to send the
crier through the toun for ye at skreigh o' day the morn. He tell't me
whae ye were, and how ye were sent frae your father's house because ye
wadna be a dealer, and that ye michtna disgrace your family wi'
ganging on the stage. Ane Hammorgaw, our precentor, brought him here,
and said he was an auld acquaintance; but I sent them baith awa' wi' a
flae in their lug for bringing me sic an errand on sic a night. But I
see he's a fule-creature a' thegither and clean mista'en about ye. I
like ye, man," he continued; "I like a lad that will stand by his
friends in troubles--I ay did it mysell, and sae did the deacon my
father, rest and bless him! But he suldna keep ower muckle company wi'
Hielandmen and thae wild cattle. Can a man touch pitch and no be
defiled?--aye mind that. Nae doubt, the best and wisest may err--once,
twice, and thrice, have I backslidden, man, and dune three things this
night--my father wadna hae believed his een if he could hae looked up
and seen me do them."
He was by this time arrived at the door of his own dwelling. He
paused, however, on the threshold, and went on in a solemn tone of
deep contrition, "Firstly, I hae thought my ain thought on the
Sabbath. Secondly, I hae gien security for an Englishman--and, in the
third and last place, well a-day! I hae let an ill-doer escape from
the place of imprisonment. But there's balm in Gilead, Mr.
Osbaldistone--Mattie, I can let mysell in--see Mr. Osbaldistone to
Luckie Flyter's, at the corner o' the wynd. Mr. Osbaldistone"--in a
whisper--"ye'll offer nae incivility to Mattie--she's an honest man's
daughter, and a near cousin o' the Laird o' Limmerfield's."
IV
QUEEN ELIZABETH AND AMY ROBSART AT KENILWORTH[10]
It chanced upon that memorable morning, that one of the earliest of
the huntress train who appeared from her chamber in full array for the
chase was the princess for whom all these pleasures were instituted,
England's Maiden Queen. I know not if it were by chance, or out of the
befitting courtesy due to a mistress by whom he was so much honored,
that she had scarcely made one step beyond the threshold of her
chamber ere Leicester was by her side; and proposed to her, until the
preparations for the chase had been completed, to view the pleasance,
and the gardens which, it connected with the castle-yard....
Horses in the meanwhile neighed, and champed the bits with impatience
in the base-court; hounds yelled in their couples, and yeomen,
rangers, and prickers lamented the exhaling of the dew, which would
prevent the scent from lying. But Leicester had another chase in view:
or, to speak more justly toward him, had become engaged in it without
premeditation, as the high-spirited hunter which follows the cry of
the hounds that hath crost his path by accident. The Queen--an
accomplished and handsome woman, the pride of England, the hope of
France and Holland, and the dread of Spain--had probably listened with
more than usual favor to that mixture of romantic gallantry with which
she always loved to be addrest, and the earl had, in vanity, in
ambition, or in both, thrown in more and more of that delicious
ingredient, until his importunity became the language of love itself.
"No, Dudley," said Elizabeth, yet it was with broken accents,--"no, I
must be the mother of my people. Other ties, that make the lowly
maiden happy, are denied to her sovereign--No, Leicester, urge it no
more--Were I as others, free to seek my own happiness--then,
indeed--but it can not--can not be.--Delay the chase--delay it for
half an hour--and leave me, my lord."
"How--leave you, madam!" said Leicester. "Has my madness offended
you?"
"No, Leicester, not so!" answered the Queen hastily; "but it is
madness, and must not be repeated. Go--but go not far from hence; and
meantime let no one intrude on my privacy."
While she spoke thus, Dudley bowed deeply, and retired with a slow and
melancholy air. The Queen stood gazing after him, and murmured to
herself, "Were it possible--were it _but_ possible!--But
no--no--Elizabeth must be the wife and mother of England alone."
As she spoke thus, and in order to avoid some one whose step she heard
approaching, the Queen turned into the grotto in which her hapless and
yet but too successful rival lay concealed.
The mind of England's Elizabeth, if somewhat shaken by the agitating
interview to which she had just put a period, was of that firm and
decided character which soon recovers its natural tone. It was like
one of those ancient druidical monuments called rocking-stones. The
finger of Cupid, boy as he is painted, could put her feelings in
motion; but the power of Hercules could not have destroyed their
equilibrium. As she advanced with a slow pace toward the inmost
extremity of the grotto, her countenance, ere she had proceeded half
the length, had recovered its dignity of look and her mien its air of
command.
It was then the Queen became aware that a female figure was placed
beside, or rather partly behind, an alabaster column, at the foot of
which arose the pellucid fountain which occupied the inmost recess of
the twilight grotto. The classical mind of Elizabeth suggested the
story of Numa and Egeria; and she doubted not that some Italian
sculptor had here represented the Naiad whose inspirations gave laws
to Rome. As she advanced, she became doubtful whether she beheld a
statue or form of flesh and blood. The unfortunate Amy, indeed,
remained motionless betwixt the desire which she had to make her
condition known to one of her own sex, and her awe for the stately
form that approached her,--and which, tho her eyes had never before
beheld, her fears instantly suspected to be the personage she really
was. Amy had arisen from her seat with the purpose of addressing the
lady, who entered the grotto alone, and as she at first thought, so
opportunely. But when she recollected the alarm which Leicester had
exprest at the Queen's knowing aught of their union, and became more
and more satisfied that the person whom she now beheld was Elizabeth
herself, she stood with one foot advanced and one withdrawn, her arms,
head, and hands perfectly motionless, and her cheek as pallid as the
alabaster pedestal against which she leaned. Her dress was of a pale
sea-green silk, little distinguished in that imperfect light, and
somewhat resembled the drapery of a Grecian nymph,--such an antique
disguise having been thought the most secure where so many maskers and
revelers were assembled; so that the Queen's doubt of her being a
living form was justified by all contingent circumstances, as well as
by the bloodless cheek and fixt eye.
From her dress, and the casket which she instinctively held in her
hand, Elizabeth naturally conjectured that the beautiful, but mute
figure which she beheld was a performer in one of the various
theatrical pageants which had been placed in different situations to
surprize her with their homage; and that the poor player, overcome
with awe at her presence, had either forgot the part assigned her, or
lacked courage to go through it. It was natural and courteous to give
her some encouragement; and Elizabeth accordingly said, in a tone of
condescending kindness: "How now, fair nymph of this lovely
grotto--art thou spellbound and struck with dumbness by the wicked
enchanter whom men term Fear? We are his sworn enemy, maiden, and can
reverse his charm. Speak, we command thee."
Instead of answering her by speech, the unfortunate countess dropt on
her knee before the Queen, let her casket fall from her hand, and
clasping her palms together, looked up in the Queen's face with such a
mixt agony of fear and supplication, that Elizabeth was considerably
affected.
"What may this mean?" she said: "this is a stronger passion than
befits the occasion. Stand up, damsel: what wouldst thou have with
us?"
"Your protection, madam," faltered forth the unhappy petitioner.
"Each daughter of England has it while she is worthy of it," replied
the Queen; "but your distress seems to have a deeper root than a
forgotten task. Why, and in what, do you crave our protection?"
Amy hastily endeavored to recall what she were best to say, which
might secure herself from the imminent dangers that surrounded her,
without endangering her husband; and plunging from one thought to
another, amidst the chaos which filled her mind, she could at length,
in answer to the Queen's repeated inquiries in what she sought
protection, only falter out, "Alas! I know not."
"This is folly, maiden," said Elizabeth impatiently; for there was
something in the extreme confusion of the suppliant which irritated
her curiosity as well as interested her feelings. "The sick man must
tell his malady to the physician; nor are WE accustomed to ask
questions so oft, without receiving an answer."
"I request--I implore--" stammered forth the unfortunate countess--"I
beseech your gracious protection--against--against one Varney." She
choked well-nigh as she uttered the fatal word, which was instantly
caught up by the Queen.
"What, Varney--Sir Richard Varney--the servant of Lord Leicester!
What, damsel, are you to him, or he to you?"
"I--I--was his prisoner--and he practised on my life--and I broke
forth to--to--"
"To throw thyself on my protection, doubtless," said Elizabeth. "Thou
shalt have it--that is, if thou art worthy; for we will sift this
matter to the uttermost.--Thou art," she said, bending on the countess
an eye which seemed designed to pierce her very inmost soul,--"thou
art Amy, daughter of Sir Hugh Robsart of Lidcote Hall?"
"Forgive me--forgive me--most gracious princess!" said Amy, dropping
once more on her knee from which she had arisen.
"For what should I forgive thee, silly wench?" said Elizabeth; "for
being the daughter of thine own father? Thou art brainsick, surely.
Well, I see I must wring the story from thee by inches: Thou didst
deceive thine old and honored father,--thy look confesses it; cheated
Master Tressilian,--thy blush avouches it; and married this same
Varney."
Amy sprung on her feet, and interrupted the Queen eagerly with--"No,
madam, no: as there is a God above us, I am not the sordid wretch you
would make me! I am not the wife of that contemptible slave--of that
most deliberate villain! I am not the wife of Varney! I would rather
be the bride of Destruction!"
The Queen, overwhelmed in her turn by Amy's vehemence, stood silent
for an instant, and then replied, "Why, God ha' mercy, woman! I see
thou canst talk fast enough when the theme likes thee. Nay, tell me,
woman," she continued, for to the impulse of curiosity was now added
that of an undefined jealousy that some deception had been practised
on her--"tell me, woman,--for by God's day, I WILL know,--whose wife
or whose paramour art thou? Speak out, and be speedy: thou wert better
dally with a lioness than with Elizabeth."
Urged to this extremity, dragged as it were by irresistible force to
the verge of a precipice which she saw but could not avoid, permitted
not a moment's respite by the eager words and menacing gestures of the
offended Queen,--Amy at length uttered in despair, "The Earl of
Leicester knows it all."
"The Earl of Leicester!" said Elizabeth in utter astonishment.--"The
Earl of Leicester!" she repeated with kindling anger.--"Woman, thou
art set on to this--thou dost belie him--he takes no keep of such
things as thou art. Thou art suborned to slander the noblest lord, and
the truest-hearted gentleman, in England! But were he the right hand
of our trust, or something yet dearer to us, thou shalt have thy
hearing, and that in his presence. Come with me--come with me
instantly!"
As Amy shrunk back with terror, which the incensed Queen interpreted
as that of conscious guilt, Elizabeth rapidly advanced, seized on her
arm, and hastened with swift and long steps out of the grotto and
along the principal alley of the pleasance, dragging with her the
terrified countess, whom she still held by the arm, and with utmost
exertion could but just keep pace with those of the indignant Queen.
Leicester was at this moment the center of a splendid group of lords
and ladies assembled together under an arcade, or portico, which
closed the alley. The company had drawn together in that place, to
attend the commands of her Majesty when the hunting party should go
forward: and their astonishment may be imagined, when, instead of
seeing Elizabeth advance toward them with her usual measured dignity
of motion, they beheld her walking so rapidly that she was in the
midst of them ere they were aware; and then observed, with fear and
surprize, that her features were flushed betwixt anger and agitation,
that her hair was loosened by her haste of motion, and that her eyes
sparkled as they were wont when the spirit of Henry VIII. mounted
highest in his daughter. Nor were they less astonished at the
appearance of the pale, attenuated, half dead, yet still lovely
female, whom the Queen upheld by main strength with one hand, while
with the other she waved aside the ladies and nobles who prest toward
her under the idea that she was taken suddenly ill.--"Where is my Lord
of Leicester?" she said, in a tone, that thrilled with astonishment
all the courtiers who stood around.--"Stand forth, my Lord of
Leicester!"
If, in the midst of the most serene day of summer, when all is light
and laughing around, a thunderbolt were to fall from the clear blue
vault of heaven and rend the earth at the very feet of some careless
traveler, he could not gaze upon the smoldering chasm which so
unexpectedly yawned before him, with half the astonishment and fear
which Leicester felt at the sight that so suddenly presented itself.
He had that instant been receiving, with a political affectation of
disavowing and misunderstanding their meaning, the half uttered, half
intimated congratulations of the courtiers upon the favor of the Queen
carried apparently to its highest pitch during the interview of that
morning; from which most of them seemed to augur that he might soon
arise from their equal in rank to become their master. And now, while
the subdued yet proud smile with which he disclaimed those inferences
was yet curling his cheek, the Queen shot into the circle, her
passions excited to the uttermost; and supporting with one hand, and
apparently without an effort, the pale and sinking form of his almost
expiring wife, and pointing with the finger of the other to her
half-dead features, demanded in a voice that sounded to the ear of the
astounded statesman like the last dread trumpet-all that is to summon
body and spirit to the judgment-seat, "Knowest thou this woman?"
As, at the blast of that last trumpet, the guilty shall call upon the
mountains to cover them, Leicester's inward thoughts invoked the
stately arch which he had built in his pride, to burst its strong
conjunction and overwhelm them in its ruins. But the cemented stones,
architrave and battlement, stood fast; and it was the proud master
himself, who, as if some actual pressure had bent him to the earth,
kneeled down before Elizabeth, and prostrated his brow to the marble
flagstones on which she stood.
"Leicester," said Elizabeth, in a voice which trembled with passion,
"could I think thou hast practised on me--on me thy sovereign--on me
thy confiding, thy too partial mistress, the base and ungrateful
deception which thy present confusion surmises--by all that is holy,
false lord, that head of thine were in as great peril as ever was thy
father's!"
Leicester had not conscious innocence, but he had pride, to support
him. He raised slowly his brow and features, which were black and
swollen with contending emotions, and only replied, "My head can not
fall but by the sentence of my peers; to them I will plead, and not to
a princess who thus requites my faithful service."
"What! my lords," said Elizabeth, looking around, "we are defied, I
think--defied in the castle we have ourselves bestowed on this proud
man?[11]--My Lord Shrewsbury, you are marshal of England: attach him
for high treason."
"Whom does your Grace mean?" said Shrewsbury, much surprized,--for he
had that instant joined the astonished circle.
"Whom should I mean but that traitor Dudley, Earl of
Leicester!--Cousin of Hunsdon, order out your band of gentlemen
pensioners, and take him into custody.--I say, villain, make haste!"
Hunsdon, a rough old noble, who, from his relationship to the Boleyns,
was accustomed to use more freedom with the Queen than almost any
other dared to do, replied bluntly, "And it is like your Grace might
order me to the Tower to-morrow for making too much haste. I do
beseech you to be patient."
"Patient--God's life!" exclaimed the Queen, "name not the word to me:
thou know'st not of what he is guilty!"
Amy, who had by this time in some degree recovered herself, and who
saw her husband, as she conceived, in the utmost danger from the rage
of an offended sovereign, instantly (and alas, how many women have
done the same!) forgot her own wrongs and her own danger in her
apprehensions for him; and throwing herself before the Queen, embraced
her knees, while she exclaimed, "He is guiltless, madam, he is
guiltless--no one can lay aught to the charge of the noble Leicester."
"Why, minion," answered the Queen, "didst not thou thyself say that
the Earl of Leicester was privy to thy whole history?"
"Did I say so?" repeated the unhappy Amy, laying aside every
consideration of consistency and of self-interest: "oh, if I did, I
foully belied him. May God so judge me, as I believe he was never
privy to a thought that would harm me!"
"Woman!" said Elizabeth, "I will know who has moved thee to this; or
my wrath--and the wrath of kings is a flaming fire--shall wither and
consume thee like a weed in the furnace."
As the Queen uttered this threat, Leicester's better angel called his
pride to his aid, and reproached him with the utter extremity of
meanness which would overwhelm him forever, if he stooped to take
shelter under the generous interposition of his wife, and abandon her,
in return for her kindness, to the resentment of the Queen. He had
already raised his head, with the dignity of a man of honor, to avow
his marriage and proclaim himself the protector of his countess, when
Varney--born, as it appeared, to be his master's evil genius--rushed
into the presence, with every mark of disorder on his face and
apparel.
"What means this saucy intrusion?" said Elizabeth.
Varney, with the air of a man overwhelmed with grief and confusion,
prostrated himself before her feet, exclaiming, "Pardon, my Liege,
pardon! or at least let your justice avenge itself on me, where it is
due; but spare my noble, my generous, my innocent patron and master!"
Amy, who was yet kneeling, started up as she saw the man whom she
deemed most odious place himself so near her; and was about to fly
toward Leicester, when checked at once by the uncertainty and even
timidity which his looks had reassumed as soon as the appearance of
his confidant seemed to open a new scene, she hung back, and uttering
a faint scream, besought of her Majesty to cause her to be imprisoned
in the lowest dungeon of the castle--to deal with her as the worst of
criminals--"But spare," she exclaimed, "my sight and hearing what will
destroy the little judgment I have left--the sight of that unutterable
and most shameless villain!"
"And why, sweetheart?" said the Queen, moved by a new impulse: "what
hath he, this false knight, since such thou accountest him, done to
thee?"
"Oh, worse than sorrow, madam, and worse than injury--he has sown
dissension where most there should be peace. I shall go mad if I look
longer on him."
"Beshrew me, but I think thou are distraught already," answered the
Queen. "My Lord Hunsdon, look to this poor distrest young woman, and
let her be safely bestowed and in honest keeping, till we require her
to be forthcoming."
Two or three of the ladies in attendance, either moved by compassion
for a creature so interesting, or by some other motive, offered their
service to look after her; but the Queen briefly answered, "Ladies,
under favor, no. You have all (give God thanks) sharp ears and nimble
tongues: our kinsman Hunsdon has ears of the dullest, and a tongue
somewhat rough, but yet of the slowest. Hunsdon, look to it that none
have speech of her."
"By our Lady!" said Hunsdon, taking in his strong sinewy arms the
fading and almost swooning form of Amy, "she is a lovely child; and
tho a rough nurse, your Grace hath given her a kind one. She is safe
with me as one of my own lady-birds of daughters."
So saying, he carried her off, unresistingly and almost unconsciously;
his war-worn locks and long gray beard mingling with her light-brown
tresses, as her head reclined on his strong square shoulder. The Queen
followed him with her eye. She had already, with that self-command
which forms so necessary a part of a sovereign's accomplishments,
supprest every appearance of agitation, and seemed as if she desired
to banish all traces of her burst of passion from the recollection of
those who had witnessed it. "My Lord of Hunsdon says well," she
observed: "he is indeed but a rough nurse for so tender a babe."...
Leicester partly started; but making a strong effort, he subdued his
emotion, while Elizabeth answered sharply, "You are something too
hasty, Master Varney: we will have first a report of the lady's health
and state of mind from Masters, our own physician, and then determine
what shall be thought just. You shall have license, however, to see
her, that if there be any matrimonial quarrel betwixt you--such things
we have heard do occur, even betwixt a loving couple--you may make it
up, without further scandal to our court or trouble to ourselves."
Varney bowed low, and made no other answer.
Elizabeth again looked toward Leicester, and said, with a degree of
condescension which could only arise out of the most heartfelt
interest, "Discord, as the Italian poet says, will find her way into
peaceful convents, as well as into the privacy of families; and we
fear our own guards and ushers will hardly exclude her from courts. My
Lord of Leicester, you are offended with us, and we have right to be
offended with you. We will take the lion's part upon us, and be the
first to forgive."
Leicester smoothed his brow, as if by an effort; but the trouble was
too deep-seated that its placidity should at once return. He said,
however, that which fitted the occasion, that "he could not have the
happiness of forgiving, because she who commanded him to do so could
commit no injury toward him."
V
THE ILLNESS AND DEATH OF LADY SCOTT[12]
(1826)
_Abbotsford, April 16, 1826._--I am now far ahead with _Nap_.[13] I
wrote a little this morning, but this forenoon I must write letters, a
task in which I am far behind. Lady Scott seems to make no way, yet
can scarce be said to lose any. She suffers much occasionally,
especially during the night. Sleeps a great deal when at ease; all
symptoms announce water upon the chest. A sad prospect.
_April 19._--Two melancholy things. Last night I left my pallet in our
family apartment, to make way for a female attendant, and removed to a
dressing-room adjoining, when to return, or whether ever, God only can
tell. Also my servant cut my hair, which used to be poor Charlotte's
personal task. I hope she will not observe it.
_April 21._--Had the grief to find Lady Scott had insisted on coming
down-stairs and was the worse of it. Also a letter from Lockhart,
giving a poor account of the infant. God help us! earth can not.
_May 2._--I wrote and read for three hours, and then walked, the day
being soft and delightful; but alas! all my walks are lonely from the
absence of my poor companion. She does not suffer, thank God, but
strength must fail at last. Since Sunday there has been a gradual
change--very gradual--but, alas! to the worse. My hopes are almost
gone. But I am determined to stand this grief as I have done others.
_May 4._--On visiting Lady Scott's sick-room this morning, I found her
suffering, and I doubt if she knew me. Yet, after breakfast, she
seemed serene and composed. The worst is, she will not speak out about
the symptoms under which she labors. Sad, sad work; I am under the
most melancholy apprehension, for what constitution can hold out under
these continued and wasting attacks.
_May 6._--The same scene of hopeless (almost) and unavailing anxiety.
Still welcoming me with a smile, and asserting she is better. I fear
the disease is too deeply entwined with the principles of life. Yet
the increase of good weather, especially if it would turn more genial,
might, I think, aid her excellent constitution. Still laboring at this
_Review_, without heart or spirits to finish it.
_May 10._--To-morrow I leave my home. To what scene I may suddenly be
recalled, it wrings my heart to think.
_Edinburgh, May 11._--Charlotte was unable to take leave of me, being
in a sound sleep, after a very indifferent night. Perhaps it was as
well. Emotion might have hurt her; and nothing I could have exprest
would have been worth the risk. I have foreseen, for two years and
more, that this menaced event could not be far distant. I have seen
plainly, within the last two months, that recovery was hopeless. And
yet to part with the companion of twenty-nine years when so very
ill--that I did not, could not foresee. It withers my heart to think
of it, and to recollect that I can hardly hope again to seek
confidence and counsel from that ear to which all might be safely
confided. But in her present lethargic state, what would my attentions
have availed? and Anne has promised close and constant intelligence. I
must dine with James Ballantyne to-day _en famille_. I can not help
it; but would rather be at home and alone. However, I can go out too.
I will not yield to the barren sense of hopelessness which struggles
to invade me. I past a pleasant day with J. B.,[14] which was a great
relief from the black dog which would have worried me at home. We were
quite alone.
_May 15._--Received the melancholy intelligence that all is over at
Abbotsford.
_Abbotsford, May 16._--She died at nine in the morning, after being
very ill for two days--easy at last.
I arrived here late last night. Anne is worn out, and has had
hysterics, which returned on my arrival. Her broken accents were like
those of a child, the language, as well as the tones, broken, but in
the most gentle voice of submission. "Poor mama--never return
again--gone forever--a better place." Then, when she came to herself,
she spoke with sense, freedom, and strength of mind, till her weakness
returned. It would have been inexpressibly moving to me as a
stranger--what was it then to the father and the husband? For myself,
I scarce know how I feel, sometimes as firm as the Bass Rock,
sometimes as weak as the wave that breaks on it.
I am as alert at thinking and deciding as I ever was in my life. Yet,
when I contrast what this place now is, with what it has been not long
since, I think my heart will break. Lonely, aged, deprived of my
family--all but poor Anne, an impoverished and embarrassed man, I am
deprived of the sharer of my thoughts and counsels, who could always
talk down my sense of the calamitous apprehensions which break the
heart that must bear them alone. Even her foibles were of service to
me, by giving me things to think of beyond my weary self-reflections.
I have seen her. The figure I beheld is, and is not, my Charlotte--my
thirty years' companion. There is the same symmetry of form, tho those
limbs are rigid which were once so gracefully elastic--but that yellow
mask, with pinched features, which seem to mock life rather than
emulate it, can it be the face that was once so full of lively
expression? I will not look on it again. Anne thinks her little
changed, because the latest idea she had formed of her mother is as
she appeared under circumstances of sickness and pain. Mine go back to
a period of comparative health. If I write long in this way, I shall
write down my resolution, which I should rather write up, if I could.
I wonder how I shall do with the large portion of thoughts which were
hers for thirty years. I suspect they will be hers yet for a long time
at least. But I will not blaze cambric and crape in the public eye
like a disconsolate widower, that most affected of all characters.
_May 18._--Another day, and a bright one to the external world, again
opens on us; the air is soft, and the flowers smiling, and the leaves
glittering. They can not refresh her to whom mild weather was a
natural enjoyment. Cerements of lead and of wood already hold her;
cold earth must have her soon. But it is not my Charlotte, it is not
the bride of my youth, the mother of my children, that will be laid
among the ruins of Dryburgh, which we have so often visited in gaiety
and pastime. No, no. She is sentient and conscious of my emotions
somewhere--somehow; _where_ we can not tell; _how_ we can not tell;
yet would I not at this moment renounce the mysterious yet certain
hope that I shall see her in a better world, for all that this world
can give me. The necessity of this separation--that necessity which
rendered it even a relief--that and patience must be my comfort. I do
not experience those paroxysms of grief which others do on the same
occasion. I can exert myself and speak even cheerfully with the poor
girls. But alone, or if anything touches me--the choking sensation. I
have been to her room: there was no voice in it--no stirring; the
pressure of the coffin was visible on the bed, but it had been removed
elsewhere; all was neat as she loved it, but all was calm--calm as
death. I remembered the last sight of her; she raised herself in bed,
and tried to turn her eyes after me, and said, with a sort of smile,
"You all have such melancholy faces." They were the last words I ever
heard her utter, and I hurried away, for she did not seem quite
conscious of what she said. When I returned, immediately (before)
departing, she was in a deep sleep. It is deeper now. This was but
seven days since.
They are arranging the chamber of death; that which was long the
apartment of connubial happiness, and of whose arrangements (better
than in richer houses) she was so proud. They are treading fast and
thick. For weeks you could have heard a foot-fall. Oh, my God!
_May 21._--Our sad preparations for to-morrow continue. A letter from
Lockhart; doubtful if Sophia's health or his own state of business
will let him be here. If things permit he comes tonight. From Charles
not a word; but I think I may expect him. I wish to-morrow were over;
not that I fear it, for my nerves are pretty good, but it will be a
day of many recollections.
_May 22._--Charles arrived last night, much affected of course. Anne
had a return of her fainting-fits on seeing him, and again upon seeing
Mr. Ramsay, the gentleman who performs the service. I heard him do so
with the utmost propriety for my late friend, Lady Alvanley, the
arrangement of whose funeral devolved upon me. How little I could
guess when, where, and with respect to whom I should next hear those
solemn words. Well, I am not apt to shrink from that which is my duty,
merely because it is painful; but I wish this day over. A kind of
cloud of stupidity hangs about me, as if all were unreal that men seem
to be doing and talking about.
_May 23._--About an hour before the mournful ceremony of yesterday,
Walter arrived, having traveled express from Ireland on receiving the
news. He was much affected, poor fellow, and no wonder. Poor Charlotte
nursed him, and perhaps for that reason she was ever partial to him.
The whole scene floats as a sort of dream before me--the beautiful
day, the gray ruins covered and hidden among clouds of foliage and
flourish, where the grave, even in the lap of beauty, lay lurking and
gaped for its prey. Then the grave looks, the hasty important bustle
of men with spades and mattocks--the train of carriages--the coffin
containing the creature that was so long the dearest on earth to me,
and whom I was to consign to the very spot which in pleasure-parties
we so frequently visited. It seems still as if this could not be
really so. But it is so--and duty to God and to my children must teach
me patience.
_May 24._--Slept wretchedly, or rather waked wretchedly, all night,
and was very sick and bilious in consequence, and scarce able to hold
up my head with pain. A walk, however, with my sons did me a great
deal of good; indeed their society is the greatest support the world
can afford me. Their ideas of everything are so just and honorable,
kind toward their sisters, and affectionate to me, that I must be
grateful to God for sparing them to me, and continue to battle with
the world for their sakes, if not for my own.
_May 26._--Were an enemy coming upon my house, would I not do my best
to fight, altho opprest in spirits; and shall a similar despondency
prevent me from mental exertion? It shall not, by Heaven!
_May 30._--This has been a melancholy day--most melancholy. I am
afraid poor Charles found me weeping. I do not know what other folks
feel, but with me the hysterical passion that impels tears is a
terrible violence--a sort of throttling sensation--then succeeded by a
state of dreaming stupidity, in which I ask if my poor Charlotte can
actually be dead.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 7: From Chapter XXXIII of "The Bride of Lammermoor."]
[Footnote 8: From Chapter LV of "Guy Mannering."]
[Footnote 9: From Chapter XXIII of "Rob Roy." Scott's celebrated
character was a real person, his name being Robert MacGregor, or, as
he chose to call himself, Robert Campbell. He was born in 1671 and
died in 1734, and was a son of Donald MacGregor, a lieutenant in the
army of James II, from whom after the accession of William of Orange,
Robert obtained a commission. Afterward he became a freebooter. He was
included in the Act of Attainder, but continued to levy blackmail on
the gentry of Scotland while in the enjoyment of the protection of the
Duke of Argyle.]
[Footnote 10: From "Kenilworth," which in general is founded on actual
occurrences, altho there are many incongruities in the story as to
time and circumstances. Queen Elizabeth's actual visit to Kenilworth
took place in 1575. The castle is now one of the most picturesque
ruins in England. It was dismantled under Cromwell.]
[Footnote 11: Kenilworth, which dates from 1120, was long a royal
residence. Here in 1327 Edward III was imprisoned. It was afterward
granted to John of Gaunt, "time-honored Lancaster," and in 1562 to the
Earl of Leicester.]
[Footnote 12: From "The Journal." Lady Scott died in the midst of
Scott's financial misfortunes. She was Charlotte Mary Carpenter,
daughter of a French refugee, Jean Charpentier.]
[Footnote 13: The "Life of Napoleon."]
[Footnote 14: James Ballantyne was the printer of Scott's books and
his partner in the firm of James Ballantyne & Co., which failed in
1826, in consequence of being involved in the bankruptcy of the
publishing house of Constable & Co., with which also Scott was
connected.]
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
Born in 1772, died in 1834; educated at Cambridge, but was
not graduated; formed an unsuccessful scheme for a
communistic settlement on the Susquehanna River, in
Pennsylvania; married a sister of Southey's wife in 1795;
published at Bristol a volume of poems in 1796; "The Ancient
Mariner" in 1798; settled at Keswick with Southey and
Wordsworth in 1800; lectured in London to fashionable
audiences, becoming in 1816 the guest of Mr. Gillman, a
London physician, at Highgate, where he spent the remainder
of his life; published "Christabel" in 1816, "Aids to
Reflection" in 1825, his "Literary Remains" appearing in
1836-39.
I
DOES FORTUNE FAVOR FOOLS?[15]
"Does Fortune favor fools? Or how do you explain the origin of the
proverb, which, differently worded, is to be found in all the
languages of Europe?"
This proverb admits of various explanations, according to the moods of
mind in which it is used. It may arise from pity, and the soothing
persuasion that Providence is eminently watchful over the helpless,
and extends an especial care to those who are not capable of caring
for themselves. So used, it breathes the same feeling as "God tempers
the wind to the shorn lamb"--or the more sportive adage, that "the
fairies take care of children and tipsy folk." The persuasion itself,
in addition to the general religious feeling of mankind, and the
scarcely less general love of the marvelous, may be accounted for from
our tendency to exaggerate all effects that seem disproportionate to
their visible cause, and all circumstances that are in any way
strongly contrasted with our notions of the persons under them.
Secondly, it arises from the safety and success which an ignorance of
danger and difficulty sometimes actually assists in procuring;
inasmuch as it precludes the despondence which might have kept the
more foresighted from undertaking the enterprise, the depression which
would retard its progress, and those overwhelming influences of terror
in cases where the vivid perception of the danger constitutes the
greater part of the danger itself. Thus men are said to have swooned
and even died at the sight of a narrow bridge, over which they had
ridden the night before in perfect safety, or at tracing the footmarks
along the edge of a precipice which the darkness had concealed from
them. A more obscure cause, yet not wholly to be omitted, is afforded
by the undoubted fact that the exertion of the reasoning faculties
tends to extinguish or bedim those mysterious instincts of skill,
which, tho for the most part latent, we nevertheless possess in common
with other animals.
Or the proverb may be used invidiously; and folly in the vocabulary of
envy or baseness may signify courage and magnanimity. Hardihood and
foolhardiness are indeed as different as green and yellow, yet will
appear the same to the jaundiced eye. Courage multiplies the chances
of success by sometimes making opportunities, and always availing
itself of them: and in this sense Fortune may be said to favor fools
by those who, however prudent in their own opinion, are deficient in
valor and enterprise. Again, an eminently good and wise man, for whom
the praises of the judicious have procured a high reputation even with
the world at large, proposes to himself certain objects, and adapting
the right means to the right end attains them; but his objects not
being what the world calls Fortune, neither money nor artificial rank,
his admitted inferiors in moral and intellectual worth, but more
prosperous in their worldly concerns, are said to have been favored by
Fortune and be slighted; altho the fools did the same in their line as
the wise man in his; they adapted the appropriate means to the desired
end, and so succeeded. In this sense the proverb is current by a
misuse, or a catachresis at least of both the words, Fortune and
Fools.
How seldom, friend, a good great man inherits
Honor or wealth with all his worth and pains!
It sounds like stories from the land of spirits,
If any man obtain that which he merits,
Or any merit that which he obtains.
REPLY
For shame! dear friend, renounce this canting strain!
What would'st thou have a good great man obtain?
Place? titles? salary? a gilded chain?
Or throne of corses which his sword hath slain?
Greatness and goodness are not means, but ends!
Hath he not always treasures, always friends,
The good great man? Three treasures, love, and light,
And calm thoughts regular as infants' breath:
And three firm friends, more sure than day and night,
Himself, his Maker, and the angel Death?
But, lastly, there is, doubtless, a true meaning attached to Fortune,
distinct both from prudence and from courage; and distinct too from
that absence of depressing or bewildering passions, which (according
to my favorite proverb, "extremes meet") the fool not seldom obtains
in as great perfection by his ignorance as the wise man by the highest
energies of thought and self-discipline. Luck has a real existence in
human affairs, from the infinite number of powers that are in action
at the same time, and from the coexistence of things contingent and
accidental (such as to us at least are accidental) with the regular
appearances and general laws of nature. A familiar instance will make
these words intelligible. The moon waxes and wanes according to a
necessary law. The clouds likewise, and all the manifold appearances
connected with them, are governed by certain laws no less than the
phases of the moon. But the laws which determine the latter are known
and calculable, while those of the former are hidden from us.
At all events, the number and variety of their effects baffle our
powers of calculation; and that the sky is clear or obscured at any
particular time, we speak of, in common language, as a matter of
accident. Well! at the time of the full moon, but when the sky is
completely covered with black clouds, I am walking on in the dark,
aware of no particular danger; a sudden gust of wind rends the clouds
for a moment, and the moon emerging discloses to me a chasm or
precipice, to the very brink of which I had advanced my foot. This is
what is meant by luck, and according to the more or less serious mood
or habit of our mind, we exclaim, how lucky, or how providential! The
copresence of numberless phenomena, which from the complexity or
subtlety of their determining causes are called contingencies, and the
coexistence of these with any regular or necessary phenomenon (as the
clouds with the moon, for instance) occasion coincidences, which, when
they are attended by any advantage or injury, and are at the same time
incapable of being calculated or foreseen by human prudence, form good
or ill luck. On a hot sunshiny afternoon came on a sudden storm and
spoiled the farmer's hay; and this is called ill luck. We will suppose
the same event to take place when meteorology shall have been
perfected into a science, provided with unerring instruments; but
which the farmer had neglected to examine. This is no longer ill luck,
but imprudence.
Now apply this to our proverb. Unforeseen coincidences may have
greatly helped a man, yet if they have done for him only what possibly
from his own abilities he might have effected for himself, his good
luck will excite less attention and the instances be less remembered.
That clever men should attain their objects seems natural, and we
neglect the circumstances that perhaps produced that success of
themselves without the intervention of skill or foresight; but we
dwell on the fact and remember it, as something strange, when the same
happens to a weak or ignorant man. So, too, tho the latter should fail
in his undertakings from concurrences that might have happened to the
wisest man, yet his failure being no more than might have been
expected and accounted for from his folly, it lays no hold on our
attention, but fleets away among the other undistinguished waves, in
which the stream of ordinary life murmurs by us and is forgotten. Had
it been as true as it was notoriously false, that those all-embracing
discoveries, which have shed a dawn of science on the art of
chemistry, and give no obscure promise of some one great constitutive
law, in the light of which dwell dominion and the power of prophecy;
if these discoveries, instead of having been, as they really were,
preconcerted by meditation, and evolved out of his own intellect, had
occurred by a set of lucky accidents to the illustrious father and
founder of philosophic alchemy; if they presented themselves to Sir
Humphry Davy exclusively in consequence of his luck in possessing a
particular galvanic battery; if this battery, as far as Davy was
concerned, had itself been an accident, and not (as in point of fact
it was) desired and obtained by him for the purpose of insuring the
testimony of experience to his principles, and in order to bind down
material nature under the inquisition of reason, and forced from her
as by torture, unequivocal answers to prepared and preconceived
questions--yet still they would not have been talked of or described
as instances of luck, but as the natural results of his admitted
genius and known skill. But should an accident have disclosed similar
discoveries to a mechanic at Birmingham or Sheffield, and if the man
should grow rich in consequence, and partly by the envy of his
neighbors, and partly with good reason, be considered by them as a man
below par in the general powers of his understanding; then, "Oh what a
lucky fellow! Well, Fortune does favor fools--that's certain! It is
always so!"--and forthwith the exclaimer relates half a dozen similar
instances. Thus accumulating the one sort of facts and never
collecting the other, we do, as poets in their diction and quacks of
all denominations do in their reasoning, put a part for the whole, and
at once soothe our envy and gratify our love of the marvelous, by the
sweeping proverb, "Fortune favors fools."
II
THE DESTINY OF THE UNITED STATES[16]
The possible destiny of the United States of America--as a nation of a
hundred millions of freemen--stretching from the Atlantic to the
Pacific, living under the laws of Alfred, and speaking the language of
Shakespeare and Milton, is an august conception. Why should we not
wish to see it realized? America would then be England viewed through
a solar microscope; Great Britain in a state of glorious
magnification! How deeply to be lamented is the spirit of hostility
and sneering which some of the popular books of travels have shown in
treating of the Americans! They hate us, no doubt, just as brothers
hate; but they respect the opinion of an Englishman concerning
themselves ten times as much as that of a native of any other country
on earth. A very little humoring of their prejudices, and some
courtesy of language and demeanor on the part of Englishmen, would
work wonders, even as it is, with the public mind of the Americans.
Capt. Basil Hall's[17] book is certainly very entertaining and
instructive; but, in my judgment, his sentiments upon many points, and
more especially his mode of expression, are unwise and uncharitable.
After all, are not most of the things shown up with so much bitterness
by him mere national foibles, parallels to which every people has and
must of necessity have?
What you say about the quarrel in the United States is sophistical. No
doubt, taxation may, and perhaps in some cases must, press unequally,
or apparently so, on different classes of people in a state. In such
cases there is a hardship; but in the long run, the matter is fully
compensated to the overtaxed class. For example, take the householders
in London who complain so bitterly of the house and window taxes. Is
it not pretty clear that, whether such householder be a tradesman who
indemnifies himself in the price of his goods; or a letter of lodgings
who does so in his rent; or a stockholder who receives it back again
in his dividends; or a country gentleman who has saved so much fresh
levy on his land or his other property; one way or other, it comes at
last pretty nearly to the same thing, tho the pressure for the time
may be unjust and vexatious, and fit to be removed? But when New
England, which may be considered a state in itself, taxes the
admission of foreign manufactures in order to cherish manufactures of
its own, and thereby forces the Carolinas, another state of itself,
with which there is little inter-communion, which has no such desire
or interest to serve, to buy worse articles at a higher price, it is
altogether a different question, and is, in fact, downright tyranny of
the worst, because of the most sordid, kind. What would you think of a
law which should tax every person in Devonshire for the pecuniary
benefit of every person in Yorkshire? And yet that is a feeble image
of the actual usurpation of the New England deputies over the property
of the Southern States.
There are two possible modes of unity in a state; one by absolute
coordination of each to all, and of all to each; the other by
subordination of classes and offices. Now, I maintain that there never
was an instance of the first, nor can there be, without slavery as its
condition and accompaniment, as in Athens. The poor Swiss cantons are
no exception.
The mistake lies in confounding a state which must be based on
classes and interests and unequal property, with a church, which is
founded on the person, and has no qualification but personal merit.
Such a community may exist, as in the case of the Quakers; but in
order to exist, it must be comprest and hedged in by another
society--_mundus mundulus in mundo immundo_.
The free class in a slave state is always, in one sense, the most
patriotic class of people in an empire; for their patriotism is not
simply the patriotism of other people, but an aggregate of lust of
power and distinction and supremacy.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 15: From "A Sailor's Fortune."]
[Footnote 16: From the "Table Talk."]
[Footnote 17: Hall was a British naval officer, who visited the United
States in 1827-28, and in 1829 published the book Coleridge refers to,
"Travels in North America."]
ROBERT SOUTHEY
Born in 1774, died in 1843; educated at Oxford; traveled in
Spain and Portugal in 1795-96; settled near Keswick in the
lake region in 1804; became poet laureate in 1813, his "Life
of Nelson" published in 1813, a small book, but to-day the
best known of all his many writings.
NELSON'S DEATH AT TRAFALGAR[18]
(1805)
It had been part of Nelson's prayer, that the British fleet might be
distinguished by humanity in the victory which he expected. Setting an
example himself, he twice gave orders to cease firing on the
_Redoubtable_, supposing that she had struck, because her guns were
silent; for, as she carried no flag, there was no means of instantly
ascertaining the fact. From this ship, which he had thus twice spared,
he received his death. A ball fired from her mizzen-top, which, in the
then situation of the two vessels, was not more than fifteen yards
from that part of the deck where he was standing, struck the epaulet
on his left shoulder, about a quarter after one, just in the heat of
action. He fell upon his face, on the spot which was covered with his
poor secretary's blood. Hardy,[19] who was a few steps from him,
turning round, saw three men raising him up. "They have done for me
at last, Hardy," said he. "I hope not," cried Hardy. "Yes," he
replied; "my backbone is shot through." Yet even now, not for a moment
losing his presence of mind, he observed, as they were carrying him
down the ladder, that the tiller ropes, which had been shot away, were
not yet replaced, and ordered that new ones should be rove
immediately: then, that he might not be seen by the crew, he took out
his handkerchief, and covered his face and his stars. Had he but
concealed these badges of honor from the enemy, England perhaps would
not have had cause to receive with sorrow the news of the battle of
Trafalgar. The cockpit was crowded with wounded and dying men; over
whose bodies he was with some difficulty conveyed, and laid upon a
pallet in the midshipmen's berth. It was soon perceived, upon
examination, that the wound was mortal. This, however, was concealed
from all except Captain Hardy, the chaplain, and the medical
attendants. He himself being certain, from the sensation in his back,
and the gush of blood he felt momentarily within his breast, that no
human care could avail him, insisted that the surgeon should leave
him, and attend to those to whom he might be useful; "for," said he,
"you can do nothing for me."
All that could be done was to fan him with paper, and frequently to
give him lemonade to alleviate his intense thirst. He was in great
pain, and exprest much anxiety, for the event of the action, which now
began to declare itself. As often as a ship struck, the crew of the
_Victory_ hurrahed; and at every hurrah a visible expression of joy
gleamed in the eyes, and marked the countenance of the dying hero. But
he became impatient to see Hardy; and as that officer, tho often sent
for, could not leave the deck, Nelson feared that some fatal cause
prevented him, and repeatedly cried: "Will no one bring Hardy to me?
he must be killed; he is surely dead!" An hour and ten minutes elapsed
from the time when Nelson received his wound before Hardy could come
to him. They shook hands in silence: Hardy in vain struggling to
suppress the feelings of that most painful and yet sublimest moment.
"Well, Hardy," said Nelson, "how goes the day with us?" "Very well,"
replied Hardy; "ten ships have struck, but five of the van have
tacked, and show an intention to bear down upon the _Victory_. I have
called two or three of our fresh ships round, and have no doubt of
giving them a drubbing." "I hope," said Nelson, "none of our ships
have struck?" Hardy answered, "There was no fear of that." Then, and
not till then, Nelson spoke of himself. "I am a dead man, Hardy," said
he; "I am going fast: it will be all over with me soon. Come nearer to
me. Let my dear Lady Hamilton have my hair, and all other things
belonging to me." Hardy observed, that he hoped Mr. Beatty could yet
hold out some prospect of life. "O no," he replied; "it is impossible.
My back is shot through. Beatty will tell you so." Hardy then, once
more, shook hands with him, and with a heart almost bursting, hastened
upon deck.
By this time all feeling below the breast was gone; and Nelson, having
made the surgeon ascertain this, said to him: "You know I am gone. I
know it. I feel something rising in my breast," putting his hand on
his left side, "which tells me so." And upon Beatty's inquiring
whether his pain was very great, he replied, "So great that he wished
he was dead. Yet," said he, in a lower voice, "one would like to live
a little longer too!" And after a few minutes, in the same undertone,
he added: "What would become of poor Lady Hamilton, if she knew my
situation!" Next to his country she occupied his thoughts. Captain
Hardy, some fifty minutes after he had left the cockpit, returned;
and, again taking the hand of his dying friend and commander,
congratulated him on having gained a complete victory. How many of the
enemy were taken he did not know, as it was impossible to perceive
them distinctly; but fourteen or fifteen at least. "That's well,"
cried Nelson; "but I bargained for twenty." And then, in a stronger
voice, he said: "Anchor, Hardy; anchor." Hardy, upon this, hinted that
Admiral Collingwood would take upon himself the direction of affairs.
"Not while I live, Hardy," said the dying Nelson, ineffectually
endeavoring to raise himself from the bed: "do you anchor." His
previous orders for preparing to anchor had shown clearly he foresaw
the necessity of this. Presently, calling Hardy back, he said to him,
in a low voice, "Don't throw me overboard"; and he desired that he
might be buried by his parents, unless it should please the King to
order otherwise. Then reverting to private feelings: "Take care of my
dear Lady Hamilton, Hardy: take care of poor Lady Hamilton. Kiss me,
Hardy," said he. Hardy knelt down and kissed his cheek; and Nelson
said, "Now I am satisfied. Thank God, I have done my duty!" Hardy
stood over him in silence for a moment or two, then knelt again and
kissed his forehead. "Who is that?" said Nelson; and being informed,
he replied, "God bless you, Hardy." And Hardy then left him--forever.
Nelson now desired to be turned upon his right side, and said, "I wish
I had not left the deck; for I shall soon be gone." Death was, indeed,
rapidly approaching. He said to the chaplain, "Doctor, I have _not_
been a _great_ sinner"; and after a short pause, "Remember that I
leave Lady Hamilton and my daughter Horatia as a legacy to my
country." His articulation now became difficult; but he was distinctly
heard to say, "Thank God, I have done my duty!" These words he
repeatedly pronounced; and they were the last words which he uttered.
He expired at thirty minutes after four--three hours and a quarter
after he had received his wound.
The death of Nelson was felt in England as something more than a
public calamity: men started at the intelligence, and turned pale, as
if they had heard of the loss of a dear friend. An object of our
admiration and affection, of our pride and of our hopes, was suddenly
taken from us; and it seemed as if we had never till then known how
deeply we loved and reverenced him. What the country had lost in its
great naval hero--the greatest of our own and of all former times--was
scarcely taken into the account of grief. So perfectly, indeed, had he
performed his part, that the maritime war, after the battle of
Trafalgar, was considered at an end. The fleets of the enemy were not
merely defeated, but destroyed; new navies must be built, and a new
race of seamen reared for them, before the possibility of their
invading our shores could again be contemplated. It was not,
therefore, from any selfish reflection upon the magnitude of our loss
that we mourned for him: the general sorrow was of a higher character.
The people of England grieved that funeral ceremonies, and public
monuments, and posthumous rewards, were all which they could now
bestow upon him whom the King, the legislature, and the nation would
have alike delighted to honor; whom every tongue would have blest;
whose presence in every village through which he might have passed
would have wakened the church-bells, have given schoolboys a holiday,
have drawn children from their sports to gaze upon him, and "old men
from the chimney-corner" to look upon Nelson ere they died. The
victory of Trafalgar was celebrated, indeed, with the usual forms of
rejoicing, but they were without joy; for such already was the glory
of the British navy, through Nelson's surpassing genius, that it
scarcely seemed to receive any addition from the most signal victory
that ever was achieved upon the seas; and the destruction of this
mighty fleet, by which all the maritime schemes of France were totally
frustrated, hardly appeared to add to our security or strength; for,
while Nelson was living to watch the combined squadrons of the enemy,
we felt ourselves as secure as now, when they were no longer in
existence.
There was reason to suppose, from the appearances upon opening his
body, that in the course of nature he might have attained, like his
father, to a good old age. Yet he can not be said to have fallen
prematurely whose work was done; nor ought he to be lamented, who died
so full of honors, and at the height of human fame. The most
triumphant death is that of the martyr; the most awful, that of the
martyred patriot; the most splendid, that of the hero in the hour of
victory; and if the chariot and the horses of fire had been vouchsafed
for Nelson's translation, he could scarcely have departed in a
brighter blaze of glory. He has left us, not indeed his mantle of
inspiration, but a name and an example which are at this hour
inspiring thousands of the youth of England--a name which is our pride
and an example which will continue to be our shield and our strength.
Thus it is that the spirits of the great and the wise continue to live
and to act after them.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 18: From "The Life of Nelson."]
[Footnote 19: Sir Thomas Hardy was flag captain of the _Victory_,
Nelson's ship at Trafalgar, and acting captain of the fleet during the
battle. Hardy was walking on deck with Nelson when Nelson received the
shot that caused his death. He was made Vice-Admiral in 1837.]
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
Born in 1775, died in 1864; educated at Oxford; visited
Paris in 1802; joined the Spaniards at Corunna against the
French in 1808; purchased Llanthony Abbey in 1809; owing to
family troubles, removed to Jersey in 1814; and then to
France and Italy, settling in Florence in 1821, where he
remained until his return to England in 1835; his first
book, a volume of poems, appeared in 1795, and his last,
"Heroic Idyls," in 1863.
I
THE DEATH OF HOFER[20]
(1810)
I passed two entire months in Germany, and like the people. On my way
I saw Waterloo, an ugly table for an ugly game. At Innsbruck I entered
the church in which Andreas Hofer is buried. He lies under a plain
slab, on the left, near the door. I admired the magnificent tomb of
bronze, in the center, surmounted by heroes, real and imaginary. They
did not fight, tens against thousands; they did not fight for wives
and children, but for lands and plunder; therefore they are heroes! My
admiration for these works of art was soon satisfied, which perhaps it
would not have been in any other place. Snow, mixt with rain, was
falling, and was blown by the wind upon the tomb of Hofer. I thought
how often he had taken advantage of such weather for his attacks
against the enemies of his country, and I seemed to hear his whistle
in the wind. At the little village of Landro (I feel a whimsical
satisfaction in the likeness of the name to mine), the innkeeper was
the friend of this truly great man--the greatest man that Europe has
produced in our days, excepting his true compeer, Kosciusko. Andreas
Hofer gave him the chain and crucifix he wore three days before his
death. You may imagine this man's enthusiasm, who, because I had said
that Hofer was greater than king or emperor, and had made him a
present of small value, as the companion and friend of that harmless
and irreproachable hero, took this precious relic from his neck and
offered it to me.
By the order of Bonaparte, the companions of Hofer, eighty in number,
were chained, thumb-screwed, and taken out of prison in couples, to
see him shot. He had about him one thousand florins, in paper
currency, which he delivered to his confessor, requesting him to
divide it impartially among his unfortunate countrymen. The confessor,
an Italian who spoke German, kept it, and never gave relief from it to
any of them, most of whom were suffering, not only from privation of
wholesome air, to which, among other privations, they never had been
accustomed, but also from scantiness of nourishment and clothing. Even
in Mantua, where, as in the rest of Italy, sympathy is both weak and
silent, the lowest of the people were indignant at the sight of so
brave a defender of his country led into the public square to expiate
a crime unheard of for many centuries in their nation. When they saw
him walk forth, with unaltered countenance and firm step before them;
when, stopping on the ground which was about to receive his blood,
they heard him with unfaltering voice commend his soul and his country
to the Creator; and, as if still under his own roof (a custom with him
after the evening prayer), implore a blessing for his boys and his
little daughter, and for the mother who had reared them up carefully
and tenderly thus far through the perils of childhood; finally, when
in a lower tone, but earnestly and emphatically, he besought pardon
from the Fount of Mercy for her brother, his betrayer, many smote
their breasts aloud; many, thinking that sorrow was shameful, lowered
their heads and wept; many, knowing that it was dangerous, yet wept
too. The people remained upon the spot an unusual time, and the
French, fearing some commotion, pretended to have received an order
from Bonaparte for the mitigation of the sentence, and publicly
announced it.
Among his many falsehoods, any one of which would have excluded him
forever from the society of men of honor, this is perhaps the basest;
as indeed of all his atrocities the death of Hofer, which he had
ordered long before, and appointed the time and circumstances, is that
which the brave and virtuous will reprobate the most severely. He was
urged by no necessity, he was prompted by no policy; his impatience of
courage in an enemy, his hatred of patriotism and integrity in all, of
which he had no idea himself, and saw no image in those about him,
outstript his blind passion for fame, and left him nothing but power
and celebrity.
The name of Andreas Hofer will be honored by posterity far above any
of the present age, and together with the most glorious of the last,
Washington and Kosciusko. For it rests on the same foundation, and
indeed on a higher basis. In virtue and wisdom their coequal, he
vanquished on several occasions a force greatly superior to his own in
numbers and in discipline, by the courage and confidence he inspired,
and by his brotherly care and anxiety for those who were fighting at
his side. Differently, far differently, ought we to estimate the
squanderers of human blood, and the scorners of human tears. _We_ also
may boast of our great men in a cause as great; for without it they
could not be so. We may look back upon our Blake; whom the prodigies
of a Nelson do not eclipse, nor would he have wished (such was his
generosity) to obscure it. Blake was among the founders of freedom;
Nelson was the vanquisher of its destroyers. Washington was both;
Kosciusko was neither; neither was Hofer. But the aim of all three was
alike; and in the armory of God are suspended the arms the two last of
them bore; suspended for success more signal and for vengeance more
complete.
I am writing this from Venice, which is among cities what Shakespeare
is among men. He will give her immortality by his works, which neither
her patron saint could do, nor her surrounding sea.
II
NAPOLEON AND PERICLES
Two powerful nations have been vitally affected by natural calamities.
The former of these calamities was inevitable by human prudence, and
uncontrollable by human skill; the latter was to be foreseen at any
distance by the most ignorant, and to be avoided by the most unwary. I
mean in the first the Plague of the Athenians; in the second the
starvation of the French. The first happened under the administration
of a man transcendently brave; a man cautious, temperate, eloquent,
prompt, sagacious, above all that ever guided the councils and
animated the energies of a state; the second under a soldier of
fortune, expert and enthusiastic; but often deficient in moral
courage, not seldom in personal; rude, insolent, rash, rapacious;
valuing but one human life among the myriads at his disposal, and that
one far from the worthiest, in the estimation of an honester and a
saner mind.
It is with reluctant shame I enter on a comparison of such a person
and Pericles. On one hand we behold the richest cultivation of the
most varied and extensive genius; the confidence of courage, the
sedateness of wisdom, the stateliness of integrity; on the other,
coarse manners, rude language, violent passions continually exploding,
a bottomless void on the side of truth, and a rueful waste on that of
common honesty.... So many pernicious faults were not committed by
Xerxes or Darius, whom ancient historians call feeble princes, as were
committed by Napoleon, whom the modern do not call feeble, because he
felt nothing for others, coerced pertinaciously, promised rashly, gave
indiscriminately, looked tranquilly, and spoke mysteriously. Even in
his flight, signalized by nothing but despondency, Segur, his
panegyrist, hath clearly shown that, had he retained any presence of
mind, any sympathy, or any shame, he might have checked and crippled
his adversary. One glory he shares with Trajan and with Pericles, and
neither time nor malice can diminish it. He raised up and rewarded all
kinds of merit, even in those arts to which he was a stranger. In this
indeed he is more remarkable, perhaps more admirable, than Pericles
himself, for Pericles was a stranger to none of them.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 20: Hofer had led the Tyrolese insurrection against
Napoleon's government in 1809, gaining victories at Sterzing,
Innsbruck and Isel. He became the head of the government of the Tyrol
which for two months maintained her freedom.]
CHARLES LAMB
Born in The Temple, London, 1775, died in 1834; his father
the clerk of a bencher in the Inner Temple; entered Christ
Hospital in 1782, where he met Coleridge and remained seven
years; became a clerk in the South Sea House in 1789, and in
the India House in 1792; his sister, Mary Lamb, in a fit of
temporary insanity, killed their mother in 1796, Charles
becoming her guardian for the remainder of her life; began
to publish verse in 1796; published "Rosamond Gray" in 1798,
a two-act farce produced at Drury Lane in 1805, "Tales from
Shakespeare," in which his sister shared the labor with him,
in 1807; and essays in various magazines, first collected in
1823 as the "Essays of Elia"; went abroad with his sister in
1822; retired from the India House with a pension of £441 in
1825; published the "Last Essays of Elia" in 1833.
I
DREAM-CHILDREN--A REVERIE[21]
Children love to listen to stories about their elders, when _they_
were children; to stretch their imagination to the conception of a
traditionary great-uncle, or grandame, whom they never saw. It was in
this spirit that my little ones crept about me the other evening to
hear about their great-grandmother Field, who lived in a great house
in Norfolk--a hundred times bigger than that in which they and papa
lived--which had been the scene--so at least it was generally believed
in that part of the country--of the tragic incidents which they had
lately become familiar with from the ballad of the Children in the
Wood. Certain it is that the whole story of the children and their
cruel uncle was to be seen fairly carved out in wood upon the
chimney-piece of the great hall, the whole story down to the Robin
Red-breasts, till a foolish rich uncle pulled it down to set up a
marble one of modern invention in its stead, with no story upon it.
Here Alice put out one of her dear mother's looks, too tender to be
called upbraiding.
Then I went on to say how religious and how good their
great-grandmother Field was, how beloved and respected by everybody,
tho she was not indeed the mistress of this great house, but had only
the charge of it--and yet in some respects she might be said to be the
mistress of it too--committed to her by the owner, who preferred
living in a newer and more fashionable mansion which he had purchased
somewhere in the adjoining county; but still she lived in it in a
manner as if it had been her own, and kept up the dignity of the great
house in a sort while she lived, which afterward came to decay, and
was nearly pulled down, and all its old ornaments stript and carried
away to the owner's other house, where they were set up, and looked as
awkward as if some one were to carry away the old tombs they had seen
lately at the Abbey, and stick them up in Lady C.'s tawdry gilt
drawing-room. Here John smiled, as much as to say, "That would be
foolish indeed." And then I told how, when she came to die, her
funeral was attended by a concourse of all the poor, and some of the
gentry too, of the neighborhood for many miles round, to show their
respect for her memory, because she had been such a good and religious
woman; so good, indeed, that she knew all the Psaltery by heart, ay,
and a great part of the Testament besides. Here little Alice spread
her hands.
Then I told what a tall, upright, graceful person their
great-grandmother Field once was; and how in her youth she was
esteemed the best dancer. Here Alice's little right foot played an
involuntary movement, till, upon my looking grave, it desisted--the
best dancer, I was saying, in the county, till a cruel disease, called
a cancer, came, and bowed her down with pain; but it could never bend
her good spirits, or make them stoop, but they were still upright,
because she was so good and religious. Then I told how she was used to
sleep by herself in a lone chamber of the great lone house; and how
she believed that an apparition of two infants was to be seen at
midnight gliding up and down the great staircase near where she slept;
but she said "those innocents would do her no harm"; and how
frightened I used to be, tho in those days I had my maid to sleep with
me, because I was never half so good or religious as she--and yet I
never saw the infants. Here John expanded all his eyebrows, and tried
to look courageous.
Then I told how good she was to all her grandchildren, having us to
the great house in the holidays, where I, in particular, used to spend
many hours by myself in gazing upon the old busts of the twelve Cæsars
that had been emperors of Rome, till the old marble heads would seem
to live again, or I to be turned into marble with them; how I never
could be tired with roaming about that huge mansion, with its vast
empty rooms, with their worn-out hangings, fluttering tapestry, and
carved oaken panels, with the gilding almost rubbed out--sometimes in
the spacious old-fashioned gardens, which I had almost to myself,
unless when now and then a solitary gardening man would cross me--and
how the nectarines and peaches hung upon the walls, without my ever
offering to pluck them, because they were forbidden fruit, unless now
and then, and because I had more pleasure in strolling about among the
old melancholy-looking yew-trees, or the firs, and picking up the red
berries and the fir apples, which were good for nothing but to look
at; or in lying about upon the fresh grass, with all the fine garden
smells around me; or basking in the orangery, till I could almost
fancy myself ripening, too, along with the oranges and the limes, in
that grateful warmth; or in watching the dace that darted to and fro
in the fish-pond at the bottom of the garden, with here and there a
great sulky pike hanging midway down the water in silent state, as if
it mocked at their impertinent friskings. I had more pleasure in these
busy-idle diversions than in all the sweet flavors of peaches,
nectarines, oranges, and such like common baits of children. Here John
slyly deposited back upon the plate a bunch of grapes, which, not
unobserved by Alice, he had meditated dividing with her, and both
seemed willing to relinquish them for the present as irrelevant. Then,
in somewhat a more heightened tone, I told how, tho their
great-grandmother Field loved all her grandchildren, yet in an
especial manner she might be said to love their uncle, John L----,
because he was so handsome and spirited a youth, and a king to the
rest of us; and, instead of moping about in solitary corners, like
some of us, he would mount the most mettlesome horse he could get,
when but an imp no bigger than themselves, and make it carry him half
over the county in a morning, and join the hunters when there were any
out; and yet he loved the old great house and gardens too, but had too
much spirit to be always pent up within their boundaries; and how
their uncle grew up to man's estate as brave as he was handsome, to
the admiration of everybody, but of the great-grandmother Field most
especially; and how he used to carry me upon his back when I was a
lame-footed boy--for he was a good bit older than me--many a mile when
I could not walk for pain; and how, in after-life, he became
lame-footed too, and I did not always, I fear, make allowances enough
for him when he was impatient and in pain, nor remember sufficiently
how considerate he had been to me when I was lame-footed; and how,
when he died, tho he had not been dead an hour, it seemed as if he had
died a great while ago, such a distance there is betwixt life and
death; and how I bore his death, as I thought, pretty well at first,
but afterward it haunted and haunted me; and tho I did not cry or take
it to heart as some do, and as I think he would have done if I had
died, yet I missed him all day long, and knew not till then how much I
had loved him.
I missed his kindness, and I missed his crossness, and wished him to
be alive again, to be quarreling with him--for we quarreled
sometimes--rather than not have him again; and was as uneasy without
him, as he, their poor uncle, must have been when the doctor took off
his limb. Here the children fell a-crying, and asked if their little
mourning which they had on was not for Uncle John; and they looked up
and prayed me not to go on about their uncle, but to tell them some
stories about their pretty dead mother. Then I told how, for seven
long years, in hope sometimes, sometimes in despair, yet persisting
ever, I courted the fair Alice W--n; and, as much as children could
understand, I explained to them what coyness, and difficulty, and
denial meant in maidens; when suddenly turning to Alice, the soul of
the first Alice looked out at her eyes with such a reality of
representment, that I became in doubt which of them stood there before
me, or whose that bright hair was; and while I stood gazing, both the
children gradually grew fainter to my view, receding, and still
receding, till nothing at last but two mournful features were seen in
the uttermost distance, which, without speech, strangely imprest upon
me the effects of speech: "We are not of Alice, nor of thee; nor are
we children at all. The children of Alice call Bartrum father. We are
nothing, less than nothing, and dreams. We are only what might have
been, and must wait upon the tedious shores of Lethe millions of ages
before we have existence and a name"; and immediately awaking, I found
myself quietly seated in my bachelor arm-chair, where I had fallen
asleep, with the faithful Bridget unchanged by my side--but John L.
(or James Elia) was gone forever.
II
POOR RELATIONS[22]
A poor relation is the most irrelevant thing in nature, a piece of
impertinent correspondency, an odious approximation, a haunting
conscience, a preposterous shadow, lengthening in the noontide of your
prosperity, an unwelcome remembrancer, a perpetually recurring
mortification, a drain on your purse, a more intolerable dun upon your
pride, a drawback upon success, a rebuke to your rising, a stain in
your blood, a blot on your scutcheon, a rent in your garment, a
death's-head at your banquet, Agathocles' pot, a Mordecai in your
gate, a Lazarus at your door, a lion in your path, a frog in your
chamber, a fly in your ointment, a mote in your eye, a triumph to your
enemy, an apology to your friends, the one thing not needful, the hail
in harvest, the ounce of sour in a pound of sweet.
He is known by his knock. Your heart telleth you, "That is Mr. ----."
A rap between familiarity and respect, that demands, and at the same
time seems to despair of entertainment. He entereth smiling and
embarrassed. He holdeth out his hand to you to shake, and draweth it
back again. He casually looketh in about dinnertime, when the table is
full. He offereth to go away, seeing you have company, but is induced
to stay. He filleth a chair, and your visitor's two children are
accommodated at a side-table.
He never cometh upon open days, when your wife says with some
complacency: "My dear, perhaps Mr. ---- will drop in to-day." He
remembereth birthdays, and professeth he is fortunate to have stumbled
upon one. He declareth against fish, the turbot being small, yet
suffereth himself to be importuned into a slice against his first
resolution. He sticketh by the port, yet will be prevailed up to empty
the remainder glass of claret, if a stranger press it upon him. He is
a puzzle to the servants, who are fearful of being too obsequious, or
not civil enough to him. The guests think "they have seen him before."
Every one speculateth upon his condition; and the most part take him
to be a tide-waiter. He calleth you by your Christian name, to imply
that his other is the same with your own. He is too familiar by half,
yet you wish he had less diffidence. With half the familiarity, he
might pass for a casual dependent; with more boldness, he would be in
no danger of being taken for what he is. He is too humble for a
friend, yet taketh on him more state than befits a client. He is a
worse guest than a country tenant, inasmuch as he bringeth up no rent;
yet 'tis odds, from his garb and demeanor, that your guests take him
for one. He is asked to make one at the whist-table; refuseth on the
score of poverty, and resents being left out. When the company break
up, he proferreth to go for a coach, and lets the servant go. He
recollects your grandfather; and will thrust in some mean and quite
unimportant anecdote of the family. He knew it when it was not quite
so flourishing as "he is blest in seeing it now." He reviveth past
situations, to institute what he calleth favorable comparisons. With
a reflecting sort of congratulation he will inquire the price of your
furniture; and insult you with a special commendation of your
window-curtains. He is of opinion that the urn is the more elegant
shape; but, after all, there was something more comfortable about the
old tea-kettle, which you must remember. He dare say you must find a
great convenience in having a carriage of your own, and appealeth to
your lady if it is not so. Inquireth if you have had your arms done on
vellum yet; and did not know till lately that such and such had been
the crest of the family. His memory is unseasonable, his compliments
perverse, his talk a trouble, his stay pertinacious; and when he goeth
away, you dismiss his chair into a corner as precipitately as
possible, and feel fairly rid of two nuisances.
There is a worse evil under the sun, and that is a female poor
relation. You may do something with the other; you may pass him off
tolerably well; but your indigent she-relative is hopeless. "He is an
old humorist," you may say, "and affects to go threadbare. His
circumstances are better than folks would take them to be. You are
fond of having a character at your table, and truly he is one." But in
the indications of female poverty there can be no disguise. No woman
dresses below herself from caprice. The truth must out without
shuffling. "She is plainly related to the L----s, or what does she at
their house?" She is, in all probability, your wife's cousin. Nine
times out of ten, at least, this is the case. Her garb is something
between a gentlewoman and a beggar, yet the former evidently
predominates. She is most provokingly humble, and ostentatiously
sensible to her inferiority. He may require to be represt
sometimes--_aliquando sufflaminandus erat_--but there is no raising
her. You send her soup at dinner, and she begs to be helped after the
gentlemen. Mr. ---- requests the honor of taking wine with her; she
hesitates between port and Madeira, and chooses the former because he
does. She calls the servant _sir_, and insists on not troubling him to
hold her plate. The housekeeper patronizes her. The children's
governess takes upon her to correct her when she has mistaken the
piano for a harpsichord.
III
THE ORIGIN OF ROAST PIG[23]
Mankind, says a Chinese manuscript, which my friend M. was obliging
enough to read and explain to me, for the first seventy thousand ages
ate their meat raw, clawing or biting it from the living animal, just
as they do in Abyssinia to-day. This period is not obscurely hinted at
by their great Confucius in the second chapter of his Mundane
Mutations, where he designates a kind of golden age by the term
Cho-fang, literally the Cooks' Holiday. The manuscript goes on to say,
that the art of roasting, or rather broiling (which I take to be the
elder brother) was accidentally discovered in the manner following.
The swineherd Ho-ti, having gone out into the woods one morning, as
his manner was, to collect mast for his hogs, left his cottage in the
care of his eldest son, Bo-bo, a great lubberly boy, who being fond of
playing with fire, as younkers of his age commonly are, let some
sparks escape into a bundle of straw, which kindling quickly, spread
the conflagration over every part of their poor mansion, till it was
reduced to ashes. Together with the cottage (a sorry antediluvian
makeshift of a building, you may think it), what was of much more
importance, a fine litter of new-farrowed pigs, no less than nine in
number, perished.
China pigs have been esteemed a luxury all over the East, from the
remotest periods that we read of. Bo-bo was in the utmost
consternation, as you may think, not so much for the sake of the
tenement, which his father and he could easily build up again with a
few dry branches, and the labor of an hour or two, at any time, as for
the loss of the pigs. While he was thinking what he should say to his
father, and wringing his hands over the smoking remnants of one of
those untimely sufferers, an odor assailed his nostrils, unlike any
scent which he had before experienced. What could it proceed
from?--not from the burned cottage--he had smelt that smell
before--indeed this was by no means the first accident of the kind
which had occurred through the negligence of this unlucky young
firebrand. Much less did it resemble that of any known herb, weed or
flower. A premonitory moistening at the same time overflowed his
nether lip. He knew not what to think. He next stooped down to feel
the pig, if there were any signs of life in it. He burned his
fingers, and to cool them he applied them in his booby fashion to his
mouth. Some of the crumbs of the scorched skin had come away with his
fingers, and for the first time in his life (in the world's life,
indeed, for before him no man had known it) he tasted--_crackling_!
Again he felt and fumbled at the pig. It did not burn him so much now,
still he licked his fingers from a sort of habit.
The truth at length broke into his slow understanding that it was the
pig that smelt so, and the pig that tasted so delicious; and
surrendering himself up to the new-born pleasure, he fell to tearing
up whole handfuls of the scorched skin with the flesh next it, and was
cramming it down his throat in his beastly fashion, when his sire
entered amid the smoking rafters, armed with retributory cudgel, and
finding how affairs stood, began to rain blows upon the young rogue's
shoulders, as thick as hail stones, which Bo-bo heeded not any more
than if they had been flies. The tickling pleasure which he
experienced in his lower regions had rendered him quite callous to any
inconveniences he might feel in those remote quarters. His father
might lay on, but he could not beat him from his pig, till he had
fairly made an end of it, when, becoming a little more sensible of his
situation, something like the following dialog ensued.
"You graceless whelp, what have you got there devouring? Is it not
enough that you have burned me down three houses with your dog's
tricks, and be hanged to you! but you must be eating fire, and I know
not what--what have you got there, I say?"
"O father, the pig, the pig! do come and taste how nice the burned pig
eats."
The ears of Ho-ti tingled with horror. He curst his son, and he curst
himself that ever he should beget a son that should eat burned pig.
Bo-bo, whose scent was wonderfully sharpened since morning, soon raked
out another pig, and fairly rending it asunder, thrust the lesser half
by main force into the fists of Ho-ti, still shouting out, "Eat, eat,
eat the burned pig, father, only taste--O Lord"--with such like
barbarous ejaculations, cramming all the while as if he would choke.
Ho-ti trembled in every joint while he grasped the abominable thing,
wavering whether he should not put his son to death for an unnatural
young monster, when the crackling scorching his fingers, as it had
done his son's, and applying the same remedy to them, he in his turn
tasted some of its flavor, which, make what sour mouths he would for
pretense, proved not altogether displeasing to him. In conclusion (for
the manuscript here is a little tedious) both father and son fairly
sat down to the mess, and never left off till they had dispatched all
that remained of the litter.
Bo-bo was strictly enjoined not to let the secret escape, for the
neighbors would certainly have stoned them for a couple of abominable
wretches, who could think of improving upon the good meat which God
had sent them. Nevertheless strange stories got about. It was observed
that Ho-ti's cottage was burned down now more frequently than ever.
Nothing but fires from this time forward. Some would break out in
broad day, others in the night-time. As often as the sow farrowed, so
sure was the house of Ho-ti to be in a blaze; and Ho-ti himself, which
was the more remarkable, instead of chastising his son, seemed to grow
more indulgent to him than ever. At length they were watched, the
terrible mystery discovered, and father and son summoned to take their
trial at Peking, then an inconsiderable assize town. Evidence was
given, the obnoxious food itself produced in court, and verdict about
to be pronounced, when the foreman of the jury begged that some of the
burned pig, of which the culprits stood accused, might be handed into
the box. He handled it, and they all handled it; and burning their
fingers, as Bo-bo and his father had done before them, and nature
prompting each of them the same remedy, against the faces of all the
facts, and the clearest charge which judge had ever given--to the
surprize of the whole court, townsfolk, strangers, reporters, and all
present--without leaving the box, or any manner of consultation
whatever, they brought in a simultaneous verdict of Not Guilty.
The judge, who was a shrewd fellow, winked at the manifest iniquity of
the decision; and when the court was dismissed, went privily, and
bought up all the pigs that could be had for love or money. In a few
days his lordship's town-house was observed to be on fire. The thing
took wing, and now there was nothing to be seen but fire in every
direction. Fuel and pigs grew enormously dear all over the district.
The insurance offices one and all shut up shop. People built slighter
and slighter every day, until it was feared that the very science of
architecture would in no long time be lost to the world. Thus this
custom of firing houses continued, till in process of time, says my
manuscript, a sage arose, like our Locke, who made a discovery, that
the flesh of swine, or indeed of any other animal, might be cooked
(_burned_, as they call it) without the necessity of consuming a whole
house to dress it. Then first began the rude form of a gridiron.
Roasting by the string or spit came in a century or two later, I
forget in whose dynasty. By such slow degrees, concludes the
manuscript, do the most useful and seemingly the most obvious arts,
make their way among mankind.
Without placing too implicit faith in the account above given, it must
be agreed, that if a worthy pretext for so dangerous an experiment as
setting houses on fire (especially in these days) could be assigned in
favor of any culinary object, that pretext and excuse might be found
in ROAST PIG.
Of all the delicacies in the whole _mundus edibilis_, I will maintain
it to be the most delicate--_princeps obsoniorum_.
IV
THAT WE SHOULD RISE WITH THE LARK[24]
At what precise minute that little airy musician doffs his night gear,
and prepares to tune up his unseasonable matins, we are not
naturalists enough to determine. But for a mere human gentleman--that
has no orchestra business to call him from his warm bed to such
preposterous exercise--we take ten, or half after ten (eleven, of
course, during this Christmas solstice), to be the very earliest hour
at which he can begin to think of abandoning his pillow. To think of
it, we say; for to do it in earnest requires another half hour's good
consideration. Not but there are pretty sun-risings, as we are told,
and such like gauds abroad in the world in summer-time especially,
some hours before what we have assigned, which a gentleman may see, as
they say, only for getting up. But having been tempted once or twice,
in earlier life, to assist at those ceremonies, we confess our
curiosity abated. We are no longer ambitious of being the sun's
courtiers, to attend at his morning levees. We hold the good hours of
the dawn too sacred to waste them upon such observances; which have in
them, besides, something pagan and Persic. To say truth, we never
anticipated our usual hour, or got up with the sun (as 'tis called),
to go a journey, or upon a foolish whole day's pleasuring, but we
suffered for it all the long hours after in listlessness and
headaches; Nature herself sufficiently declaring her sense of our
presumption in aspiring to regulate our frail waking courses by the
measures of that celestial and sleepless traveler. We deny not that
there is something sprightly and vigorous, at the outset especially,
in these break-of-day excursions. It is flattering to get the start of
a lazy world, to conquer death by proxy in his image. But the seeds of
sleep and mortality are in us; and we pay usually, in strange qualms
before night falls, the penalty of the unnatural inversion.
Therefore, while the busy part of mankind are fast huddling on their
clothes, or are already up and about their occupations, content to
have swallowed their sleep by wholesale, we choose to linger abed, and
digest our dreams. It is the very time to recombine the wandering
images which night in a confused mass presented; to snatch them from
forgetfulness; to shape and mold them. Some people have no good of
their dreams. Like fast feeders, they gulp them too grossly to taste
them curiously. We love to chew the cud of a foregone vision; to
collect the scattered rays of a brighter phantasm, or act over again,
with firmer nerves, the sadder nocturnal tragedies; to drag into
daylight a struggling and half-vanishing nightmare; to handle and
examine the terrors or the airy solaces. We have too much respect for
these spiritual communications to let them go so lightly. We are not
so stupid or so careless as that imperial forgetter of his dreams,
that we should need a seer to remind us of the form of them. They seem
to us to have as much significance as our waking concerns; or rather
to import us more nearly, as more nearly we approach by years to the
shadowy world whither we are hastening. We have shaken hands with the
world's business; we have done with it; we have discharged ourselves
of it.
Why should we get up? We have neither suit to solicit, nor affairs to
manage. The drama has shut in upon us at the fourth act. We have
nothing here to expect but in a short time a sick-bed and a dismissal.
We delight to anticipate death by such shadows as night affords. We
are already half acquainted with ghosts. We were never much in the
world. Disappointment early struck a dark veil between us and its
dazzling illusions. Our spirits showed gray before our hairs. The
mighty changes of the world already appear as but the vain stuff out
of which dramas are composed. We have asked no more of life than what
the mimic images in playhouses present us with. Even those types have
waxed fainter. Our clock appears to have struck. We are superannuated.
In this dearth of mundane satisfaction, we contract politic alliances
with shadows. It is good to have friends at court. The abstracted
media of dreams seem no ill introduction to that spiritual presence,
upon which, in no long time, we expect to be thrown. We are trying to
know a little of the usages of that colony; to learn the language, and
the faces we shall meet with there, that we may be the less awkward at
our first coming among them. We willingly call a fantom our fellow, as
knowing we shall soon be of their dark companionship. Therefore we
cherish dreams. We try to spell in them the alphabet of the invisible
world, and think we know already how it shall be with us. Those
uncouth shapes, which, while we clung to flesh and blood, affrighted
us, have become familiar. We feel attached into their meager essences,
and have given the hand of half-way approach to incorporeal being. We
once thought life to be something, but it has unaccountably fallen
from us before its time. Therefore we choose to dally with visions.
The sun has no purposes of ours to light us to. Why should we get up?
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 21: From the "Essays of Elia."]
[Footnote 22: From the "Essays of Elia."]
[Footnote 23: From the "Essays of Elia."]
[Footnote 24: From the "Essays of Elia."]
WILLIAM HAZLITT
Born in 1778, died in 1880; an early friend of Lamb,
Coleridge, Southey, Moore and Leigh Hunt, with whom he
afterward quarreled, owing to differing political views and
his own peculiar temper; his writings mainly essays and
criticisms; wrote also a notable "Life of Napoleon,"
published in 1828.
HAMLET[25]
It is the one of Shakespeare's plays that we think of the oftenest,
because it sounds most in striking reflections on human life, and
because the distresses of Hamlet are transferred, by the turn of his
mind, to the general account of humanity. Whatever happens to him, we
apply to ourselves, because he applies it to himself as a means of
general reasoning. He is a great moralizer; and what makes him worth
attending to is that he moralizes on his own feelings and experience.
He is not a commonplace pedant. If Lear is distinguished by the
greatest depth of passion, Hamlet is the most remarkable for the
ingenuity, originality, and unstudied development of character.
Shakespeare had more magnanimity than any other poet, and he has shown
more of it in this play than in any other. There is no attempt to
force an interest: everything is left for time and circumstances to
unfold. The attention is excited without effort; the incidents succeed
each other as matters of course; the characters think, and speak, and
act just as they might do if left entirely to themselves. There is no
set purpose, no straining at a point. The observations are suggested
by the passing scene--the gusts of passion come and go like sounds of
music borne on the wind. The whole play is an exact transcript of what
might be supposed to have taken place at the court of Denmark at the
remote period of time fixt upon, before the modern refinements in
morals and manners were heard of. It would have been interesting
enough to have been admitted as a bystander in such a scene, at such a
time, to have heard and witnessed something of what was going on. But
here we are more than spectators. We have not only "the outward
pageants and the signs of grief," but "we have that within which
passes show." We read the thoughts of the heart, we catch the passions
living as they rise. Other dramatic writers give us very fine versions
and paraphrases of nature; but Shakespeare, together with his own
comments, gives us the original text, that we may judge for ourselves.
This is a very great advantage.
The character of Hamlet stands quite by itself. It is not a character
marked by strength of will or even of passion, but by refinement of
thought and sentiment. Hamlet is as little of the hero as a man can
well be; but he is a young and princely novice, full of high
enthusiasm and quick sensibility--the sport of circumstances,
questioning with fortune, and refining on his own feelings, and forced
from the natural bias of his disposition by the strangeness of his
situation. He seems incapable of deliberate action, and is only
hurried into extremities on the spur of the occasion, when he has no
time to reflect--as in the scene where he kills Polonius; and, again,
where he alters the letters which Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are
taking with them to England, purporting his death. At other times,
when he is most bound to act, he remains puzzled, undecided, and
skeptical; dallies with his purposes till the occasion is lost, and
finds out some pretense to relapse into indolence and thoughtfulness
again. For this reason he refuses to kill the king when he is at his
prayers; and, by a refinement in malice, which is in truth only an
excuse for his own want of resolution, defers his revenge to a more
fatal opportunity....
The moral perfection of this character has been called in question, we
think, by those who did not understand it. It is more interesting than
according to rules; amiable tho not faultless. The ethical
delineations of "that noble and liberal casuist"--as Shakespeare has
been well called--do not exhibit the drab-colored Quakerism of
morality. His plays are not copied either from "The Whole Duty of Man"
or from "The Academy of Compliments!" We confess we are a little
shocked at the want of refinement in those who are shocked at the want
of refinement in Hamlet. The neglect of punctilious exactness in his
behavior either partakes of the "license of the time," or else belongs
to the very excess of intellectual refinement in the character, which
makes the common rules of life, as well as his own purposes, sit loose
upon him. He may be said to be amenable only to the tribunal of his
own thoughts, and is too much taken up with the airy world of
contemplation, to lay as much stress as he ought on the practical
consequences of things. His habitual principles of action are unhinged
and out of joint with the time. His conduct to Ophelia is quite
natural in his circumstances. It is that of assumed severity only. It
is the effect of disappointed hope, of bitter regrets, of affection
suspended, not obliterated, by the distractions of the scene around
him! Amidst the natural and preternatural horrors of his situation, he
might be excused in delicacy from carrying on a regular courtship.
When "his father's spirit was in arms," it was not a time for the son
to make love in. He could neither marry Ophelia, nor wound her mind by
explaining the cause of his alienation, which he durst hardly trust
himself to think of. It would have taken him years to have come to a
direct explanation on the point. In the harassed state of his mind, he
could not have done much otherwise than he did. His conduct does not
contradict what he says when he sees her funeral:
I loved Ophelia; forty thousand brothers
Could not, with all their quantity of love,
Make up my sum.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 25: From the "Characters of Shakespeare's Plays."]
THOMAS DE QUINCEY
Born in 1785, died in 1859; son of a wealthy merchant;
studied at Oxford without taking a degree; settled at
Grasmere, near Coleridge and Wordsworth, about 1808; losing
his fortune, sought literary work in London in 1821;
contracted at Oxford the opium habit, under which at one
time he took 340 grains daily; made his opium experiences
the basis of an essay entitled "Confessions of an English
Opium Eater," published in 1821; wrote for many periodicals
and eventually settled in Edinburgh; his collected works
comprize many volumes.
I
DREAMS OF AN OPIUM-EATER[26]
_May 18._--The Malay has been a fearful enemy for months. Every night,
through his means, I have been transported into Asiatic scenery. I
know not whether others share in my feelings on this point, but I have
often thought that if I were compelled to forego England, and to live
in China, and among Chinese manners and modes of life and scenery, I
should go mad. The causes of my horror lie deep, and some of them must
be common to others. Southern Asia, in general, is the seat of awful
images and associations. As the cradle of the human race, it would
have a dim and reverential feeling connected with it. But there are
other reasons. No man can pretend that the wild, barbarous, and
capricious superstitions of Africa, or of savage tribes elsewhere,
affect in the way that he is affected by the ancient, monumental,
cruel, and elaborate religions of Hindustan, etc. The mere antiquity
of Asiatic things, of their institutions, history, modes of faith,
etc., is so impressive that to me the vast age of the race and name
overpowers the sense of youth in the individual. A young Chinese seems
to me an antediluvian man renewed. Even Englishmen, tho not bred in
any knowledge of such institutions, can not but shudder at the mystic
sublimity of castes that have flowed apart, and refused to mix,
through such immemorial tracts of time; nor can any man fail to be
awed by the names of the Ganges or the Euphrates. It contributes much
to these feelings, that southern Asia is, and has been for thousands
of years, the part of the earth most swarming with human life; the
great _officina gentium_. Man is a weed in those regions. The vast
empires, also, into which the enormous population of Asia has always
been cast, give a further sublimity to the feelings associated with
all Oriental names or images. In China, over and above what it has in
common with the rest of southern Asia, I am terrified by the modes of
life, by the manners, and the barrier of utter abhorrence and want of
sympathy placed between us by feelings deeper than I can analyze. I
could sooner live with lunatics or brute animals. All this, and much
more than I can say, or have time to say, the reader must enter into
before he can comprehend the unimaginable horror which these dreams of
Oriental imagery and mythological tortures imprest upon me. Under the
connecting feeling of tropical heat and vertical sunlights I brought
together all creatures, birds, beasts, reptiles, all trees and plants,
usages and appearances, that are to be found in all tropical regions,
and assembled them together in China or Hindustan. From kindred
feelings I soon brought Egypt and all her gods under the same law. I
was stared at, hooted at, grinned at, chattered at, by monkeys, by
parrakeets, by cockatoos. I ran into pagodas, and was fixt for
centuries at the summit, or in secret rooms; I was the idol; I was the
priest; I was worshiped; I was sacrificed. I fled from the wrath of
Brahma, through all the forests of Asia; Vishnu hated me; Seeva laid
wait for me. I came suddenly upon Isis and Osiris; I had done a deed,
they said, which the ibis and the crocodile trembled at. I was buried
for a thousand years, in stone coffins, with mummies and sphinxes, in
narrow chambers, at the heart of eternal pyramids. I was kissed, with
cancerous kisses, by crocodiles, and was laid, confounded with all
unutterable abortions, amongst reeds and Nilotic mud.
Some slight abstraction I thus attempt of my Oriental dreams, which
filled me always with such amazement at the monstrous scenery, that
horror seemed absorbed for a while in sheer astonishment. Sooner or
later came a reflux of feeling that swallowed up the astonishment, and
left me, not so much in terror, as in hatred and abomination of what I
saw. Over every form, and threat, and punishment, and dim sightless
incarceration, brooded a killing sense of eternity and infinity. Into
these dreams only it was, with one or two slight exceptions, that any
circumstances of physical horror entered. All before had been moral
and spiritual terrors. But here the main agents were ugly birds, or
snakes, or crocodiles, especially the last. The curst crocodile became
to me the object of more horror than all the rest. I was compelled to
live with him, and (as was always the case in my dreams) for
centuries. Sometimes I escaped, and found myself in Chinese houses.
All the feet of the tables, sofas, etc., soon became instinct with
life; the abominable head of the crocodile, and his leering eyes,
looked out at me, multiplied into ten thousand repetitions; and I
stood loathing and fascinated. So often did this hideous reptile haunt
my dreams, that many times the very same dream was broken up in the
very same way. I heard gentle voices speaking to me (I hear everything
when I am sleeping), and instantly I awake; it was broad noon, and my
children were standing, hand in hand, at my bedside, come to show me
their colored shoes, or new frocks, or to let me see them drest for
going out. No experience was so awful to me, and at the same time so
pathetic, as this abrupt translation from the darkness of the infinite
to the gaudy summer air of highest noon, and from the unutterable
abortions of mis-created gigantic vermin to the sight of infancy and
innocent human natures.
_June 1819._--I have had occasion to remark, at various periods of my
life, that the deaths of those whom we love, and, indeed, the
contemplation of death generally, is (_coeteris paribus_) more
affecting in summer than in any other season of the year. And the
reasons are these three, I think: first, that the visible heavens in
summer appear far higher, more distant, and (if such a solecism may
be excused) more infinite; the clouds by which chiefly the eye
expounds the distance of the blue pavilion stretched over our heads
are in summer more voluminous, more massed, and are accumulated in far
grander and more towering piles; secondly, the light and the
appearances of the declining and the setting sun are much more fitted
to be types and characters of the infinite; and thirdly (which is the
main reason), the exuberant and riotous prodigality of life naturally
forces the mind more powerfully upon the antagonist thought of death,
and the wintry sterility of the grave. For it may be observed
generally, that wherever two thoughts stand related to each other by a
law of antagonism, and exist, as it were by mutual repulsion, they are
apt to suggest each other. On these accounts it is that I find it
impossible to banish the thought of death when I am walking alone in
the endless days of summer; and any particular death, if not actually
more affecting, at least haunts my mind more obstinately and
besiegingly in that season. Perhaps this cause, and a slight incident
which I omit, might have been the immediate occasions of the following
dream, to which, however, a predisposition must always have existed in
my mind; but, having been once roused, it never left me, and split
into a thousand fantastic variations, which often suddenly recombined,
locked back into a startling unity, and restored the original dream.
I thought that it was a Sunday morning in May; that it was Easter
Sunday, and as yet very early in the morning. I was standing, as it
seemed to me, at the door of my own cottage. Right before me lay the
very scene which could really be commanded from that situation, but
exalted, as was usual, and solemnized by the power of dreams. There
were the same mountains, and the same lovely valley at their feet; but
the mountains were raised to more than Alpine height, and there was
interspace far larger between them of savannahs and forest lawns; the
hedges were rich with white roses; and no living creature was to be
seen, excepting that in the green churchyard there were cattle
tranquilly reposing upon the verdant graves, and particularly round
about the grave of a child whom I had once tenderly loved, just as I
had really beheld them, a little before sunrise, in the same summer
when that child died. I gazed upon the well-known scene, and I said to
myself: "It yet wants much of sunrise; and it is Easter Sunday; and
that is the day on which they celebrate the first-fruits of
Resurrection. I will walk abroad; old griefs shall be forgotten
to-day: for the air is cool and still, and the hills are high, and
stretch away to heaven; and the churchyard is as verdant as the forest
lawns, and the forest lawns are as quiet as the churchyard; and with
the dew I can wash the fever from my forehead; and then I shall be
unhappy no longer." I turned, as if to open my garden gate, and
immediately I saw upon the left a scene far different; but which yet
the power of dreams had reconciled into harmony. The scene was an
Oriental one; and there also it was Easter Sunday, and very early in
the morning. And at a vast distance were visible, as a stain upon the
horizon, the domes and cupolas of a great city--an image or faint
abstraction, caught perhaps in childhood from some picture of
Jerusalem. And not a bow-shot from me, upon a stone, shaded by Judean
palms, there sat a woman; and I looked, and it was--Ann! She fixt her
eyes upon me earnestly; and I said to her at length, "So, then, I have
found you at last." I waited; but she answered me not a word. Her face
was the same as when I saw it last; the same, and yet again how
different! Seventeen years ago, when the lamp-light of mighty London
fell upon her face, as for the last time I kissed her lips (lips, Ann,
that to me were not polluted!), her eyes were streaming with tears.
The tears were now no longer seen. Sometimes she seemed altered; yet
again sometimes _not_ altered; and hardly older. Her looks were
tranquil, but with unusual solemnity of expression, and I now gazed
upon her with some awe. Suddenly her countenance grew dim; and,
turning to the mountains, I perceived vapors rolling between us; in a
moment all had vanished; thick darkness came on; and in the twinkling
of an eye I was far away from mountains, and by lamp-light in London,
walking again with Ann--just as we had walked when both children,
eighteen years before, along the endless terraces at Oxford Street.
Then suddenly would come a dream of far different character--a
tumultuous dream--commencing with a music such as now I often heard in
sleep--music of preparation and of awakening suspense. The undulations
of fast-gathering tumults were like the opening of the Coronation
Anthem; and like _that_, gave the feeling of a multitudinous movement,
of infinite cavalcades filing off, and the tread of innumerable
armies. The morning was come of a mighty day--a day of crisis and an
ultimate hope for human nature, then suffering mysterious eclipse, and
laboring in some dread extremity. Somewhere, but I knew not
where--somehow, but I knew not how--by some beings, but I knew not by
whom--a battle, a strife, an agony, was traveling through all its
stages--was evolving itself, like the catastrophe of some mighty
drama, with which my sympathy was the more insupportable, from
deepening confusion as to its local scene, its cause, its nature, and
its undecipherable issue. I (as is usual in dreams, where of
necessity, we make ourselves central to every movement) had the power,
and yet had not the power, to decide it. I had the power, if I could
raise myself to will it; and yet again had not the power, for the
weight of twenty Atlantics was upon me, or the oppression of
inexpiable guilt. "Deeper than ever plummet sounded," I lay inactive.
Then, like a chorus, the passion deepened. Some greater interest was
at stake, some mightier cause, than ever yet the sword had pleaded, or
trumpet had proclaimed. Then came sudden alarms; hurryings to and fro,
trepidations of innumerable fugitives; I knew not whether from the
good cause or the bad; darkness and lights; tempest and human faces;
and at last, with the sense that all was lost, female forms, and the
features that were worth all the world to me: and but a moment
allowed--and clasped hands, with heartbreaking partings, and
then--everlasting farewells! and, with a sigh such as the caves of
hell sighed when the incestuous mother uttered the abhorred name of
Death, the sound was reverberated--everlasting farewells! And again,
and yet again reverberated--everlasting farewells!
And I awoke in struggles, and cried aloud, "I will sleep no more!"
II
JOAN OF ARC[27]
What is to be thought of _her_? What is to be thought of the poor
shepherd-girl from the hills and forests of Lorraine, that--like the
Hebrew shepherd-boy from the hills and forests of Judea--rose suddenly
out of the quiet, out of the safety, out of the religious inspiration,
rooted in deep pastoral solitudes, to a station in the van of armies,
and to the more perilous station at the right hand of kings? The
Hebrew boy inaugurated his patriotic mission by an _act_, by a
victorious _act_, such as no man could deny. But so did the girl of
Lorraine, if we read her story as it was read by those who saw her
nearest. Adverse armies bore witness to the boy as no pretender: but
so did they to the gentle girl. Judged by the voices of all who saw
them _from a station of good will_, both were found true and loyal to
any promises involved in their first acts. Enemies it was that made
the difference between their subsequent fortunes. The boy rose--to a
splendor and a noonday prosperity both personal and public, that rang
through the records of his people, and became a by-word amongst his
posterity for a thousand years, until the scepter was departing from
Judah. The poor forsaken girl, on the contrary, drank not herself from
that cup of rest which she had secured for France. She never sang
together with them the songs that rose in her native Domremy, as
echoes to the departing step of invaders. She mingled not in the
festal dances at Vaucouleurs which celebrated in rapture the
redemption of France. No! for her voice was then silent. No! for her
feet were dust. Pure, innocent, noble-hearted girl! whom, from
earliest youth, ever I believed in as full of truth and self-sacrifice
this was amongst the strongest pledges for _thy_ side, that never
once--no, not for a moment of weakness--didst thou revel in the vision
of coronets and honors from man. Coronets for thee! Oh no! Honors, if
they come when all is over, are for those that share thy blood.
Daughter of Domremy, when the gratitude of thy king shall awaken, thou
wilt be sleeping the sleep of the dead. Call her, King of France, but
she will not hear thee! Cite her by thy apparitors to come and receive
a robe of honor, but she will be found _en contumace_.
When the thunders of universal France, as even yet may happen, shall
proclaim the grandeur of the poor shepherd-girl that gave up all for her
country--thy ear, young shepherd-girl, will have been deaf for five
centuries. To suffer and to do, that was thy portion in this life; to
_do_--never for thyself, always for others; to _suffer_--never in the
persons of generous champions, always in thy own: that was thy destiny;
and not for a moment was it hidden from thyself. "Life," thou saidst,
"is short, and the sleep which is in the grave is long. Let me use that
life, so transitory, for the glory of those heavenly dreams destined to
comfort the sleep which is so long." This poor creature--pure from every
suspicion of even a visionary self-interest, even as she was pure in
senses more obvious--never once did this holy child, as regarded
herself, relax from her belief in the darkness that was traveling to
meet her. She might not prefigure the very manner of her death; she saw
not in vision, perhaps, the aerial altitude of the fiery scaffold, the
spectators without end on every road pouring into Rouen as to a
coronation, the surging smoke, the volleying flames, the hostile faces
all around, the pitying eye that lurked but here and there until nature
and imperishable truth broke loose from artificial restraints; these
might not be apparent through the mists of the hurrying future. But the
voice that called her to death, _that_ she heard forever.
Great was the throne of France even in those days, and great was he
that sat upon it; but well Joanna knew that not the throne, nor he
that sat upon it, was for _her_; but, on the contrary, that she was
for _them_; not she by them, but they by her, should rise from the
dust. Gorgeous were the lilies of France, and for centuries had the
privilege to spread their beauty over land and sea, until, in another
century, the wrath of God and man combined to wither them; but well
Joanna knew, early at Domremy she had read that bitter truth, that the
lilies of France would decorate no garland for her. Flower nor bud,
bell nor blossom, would ever bloom for her.
On the Wednesday after Trinity Sunday in 1431, being then about
nineteen years of age, the Maid of Arc underwent her martyrdom. She
was conducted before midday, guarded by eight hundred spearmen, to a
platform of prodigious height, constructed of wood billets supported
by hollow spaces in every direction, for the creation of air-currents.
"The pile struck terror," says M. Michelet, "by its height." ... There
would be a certainty of calumny arising against her--some people would
impute to her a willingness to recant. No innocence could escape that.
Now, had she really testified this willingness on the scaffold, it
would have argued nothing at all but the weakness of a genial nature
shrinking from the instant approach of torment. And those will often
pity that weakness most, who in their own persons would yield to it
least. Meantime there never was a calumny uttered that drew less
support from the recorded circumstances. It rests upon no positive
testimony, and it has a weight of contradicting testimony to stem....
What else but her meek, saintly demeanor won, from the enemies that
till now had believed her a witch, tears of rapturous admiration? "Ten
thousand men," says M. Michelet himself, "ten thousand men wept; and
of these ten thousand the majority were political enemies knitted
together by cords of superstition." What else was it but her
constancy, united with her angelic gentleness, that drove the fanatic
English soldier--who had sworn to throw a fagot on her scaffold as his
tribute of abhorrence, that did so, that fulfilled his vow--suddenly
to turn away a penitent for life, saying everywhere that he had seen a
dove rising upon wings to heaven from the ashes where she had stood?
What else drove the executioner to kneel at every shrine for pardon to
his share in the tragedy? And if all this were insufficient, then I
cite the closing act of her life as valid on her behalf, were all
other testimonies against her. The executioner had been directed to
apply his torch from below. He did so. The fiery smoke rose up in
billowy columns. A Dominican monk was then standing almost at her
side. Wrapt up in his sublime office, he saw not the danger, but still
persisted in his prayers. Even then when the last enemy was racing up
the fiery stairs to seize her, even at that moment did this noblest of
girls think only for him, the one friend that would not forsake her,
and not for herself; bidding him with her last breath to care for his
own preservation, but to leave her to God. That girl, whose latest
breath ascended in this sublime expression of self-oblivion, did not
utter the word recant either with her lips or in her heart. No, she
did not, tho one should rise from the dead to swear it.
III
CHARLES LAMB[28]
It sounds paradoxical, but is not so in a bad sense, to say that in
every literature of large compass some authors will be found to rest
much of the interest which surrounds them on their essential
non-popularity. They are good for the very reason that they are not in
conformity to the current taste. They interest because to the world
they are not interesting. They attract by means of their repulsion.
Not as tho it could separately furnish a reason for loving a book,
that the majority of men had found it repulsive. _Prima facie_, it
must suggest some presumption _against_ a book that it has failed to
gain public attention. To have roused hostility indeed, to have
kindled a feud against its own principles or its temper, may happen to
be a good sign. That argues power. Hatred may be promising. The
deepest revolutions of minds sometimes begin in hatred. But simply to
have left a reader unimprest is in itself a neutral result, from which
the inference is doubtful. Yet even that, even simple failure to
impress, may happen at times to be a result from positive powers in a
writer, from special originalities such as rarely reflect themselves
in the mirror of the ordinary understanding. It seems little to be
perceived, how much the great Scriptural idea of the worldly and the
unworldly is found to emerge in literature as well as in life.
In reality, the very same combinations of moral qualities, infinitely
varied, which compose the harsh physiognomy of what we call
worldliness in the living groups of life, must unavoidably present
themselves in books. A library divides into sections of worldly and
unworldly, even as a crowd of men divides into that same majority and
minority. The world has an instinct for recognizing its own, and
recoils from certain qualities when exemplified in books with the same
disgust or defective sympathy as would have governed it in real life.
From qualities, for instance, of childlike simplicity, of shy
profundity, or of inspired self-communion, the world does and must
turn away its face toward grosser, bolder, more determined, or more
intelligible expressions of character and intellect; and not otherwise
in literature, nor at all less in literature, than it does in the
realities of life.
Charles Lamb, if any ever was, is amongst the class here contemplated;
he, if any ever has, ranks amongst writers whose works are destined to
be forever unpopular, and yet forever interesting; interesting
moreover by means of those very qualities which guarantee their
non-popularity. The same qualities which will be found forbidding to
the worldly and the thoughtless, which will be found insipid to many
even amongst robust and powerful minds, are exactly those which will
continue to command a select audience in every generation. The prose
essays, under the signature of "Elia," form the most delightful
section amongst Lamb's works. They traverse a peculiar field of
observation, sequestered from general interest; and they are composed
in a spirit too delicate and unobtrusive to catch the ear of the noisy
crowd, clamoring for strong sensations. But this retiring delicacy
itself, the pensiveness checkered by gleams of the fanciful, and the
humor that is touched with cross-lights of pathos, together with the
picturesque quaintness of the objects casually described, whether men,
or things, or usages; and in the rear of all this, the constant
recurrence to ancient recollections and to decaying forms of household
life, as things retiring before the tumult of new and revolutionary
generations; these traits in combination communicate to the papers a
grace and strength of originality which nothing in any literature
approaches, whether for degree or kind of excellence, except the most
felicitous papers of Addison, such as those on Sir Roger de Coverley,
and some others in the same vein of composition. They resemble
Addison's papers also in the diction, which is natural and idiomatic
even to carelessness. They are equally faithful to the truth of
nature; and in this only they differ remarkably--that the sketches of
Elia reflect the stamp and impress of the writer's own character,
whereas in all those of Addison the personal peculiarities of the
delineator (tho known to the reader from the beginning through the
account of the club) are nearly quiescent. Now and then they are
recalled into a momentary notice, but they do not act, or at all
modify his pictures of Sir Roger or Will Wimble. They are amiably
eccentric; but the Spectator in describing them, takes the station of
an ordinary observer.
Everywhere, indeed, in the writings of Lamb, and not merely in his
"Elia," the character of the writer cooperates in an undercurrent to
make the effect of the thing written. To understand in the fullest
sense either the gaiety or the tenderness of a particular passage, you
must have some insight into the peculiar bias of the writer's mind,
whether native and original, or imprest gradually by the accidents of
situation; whether simply developed out of predispositions by the
action of life, or violently scorched into the constitution by some
fierce fever of calamity. There is in modern literature a whole class
of writers, tho not a large one, standing within the same category;
some marked originality of character in the writer becomes a
coefficient with what he says to a common result; you must sympathize
with this personality in the author before you can appreciate the most
significant parts of his views. In most books the writer figures as a
mere abstraction, without sex or age or local station, whom the reader
banishes from his thoughts. What is written seems to proceed from a
blank intellect, not from a man clothed with fleshly peculiarities and
differences. These peculiarities and differences neither do, nor
(generally speaking) could intermingle with the texture of the
thoughts so as to modify their force or their direction. In such
books--and they form the vast majority--there is nothing to be found
or to be looked for beyond the direct objective. (_Sit venia verbo!_)
But in a small section of books, the objective in the thought becomes
confluent with the subjective in the thinker--the two forces unite
for a joint product; and fully to enjoy the product, or fully to
apprehend either element, both must be known. It is singular and worth
inquiring into, for the reason that the Greek and Roman literature had
no such books. Timon of Athens, or Diogenes, one may conceive
qualified for this mode of authorship, had journalism existed to rouse
them in those days; their "articles" would no doubt have been
fearfully caustic. But as they failed to produce anything, and Lucian
in an after age is scarcely characteristic enough for the purpose,
perhaps we may pronounce Rabelais and Montaigne the earliest of
writers in the class described. In the century following theirs came
Sir Thomas
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