Chapter III: Part 3

I believe him—to use the language of a mighty hunter—to be a meticulous prevaricator. If the tale be true, and I should like to have Mr. William Carew Hazlitt under cross-examination for a while, it only shows that there may be a few vandals in the tribe of autograph collectors, but no true collector would ever be guilty of such a wanton crime. Bagford tore out title-pages, but that affords no evidence that book-lovers are habitually given to the folly of tearing out title-pages. As for the case being “one of many”, I deny it; if he had known of another instance he would have gloried in the description of it. But he never knew law, logic or truth, and upon his indictment for silliness it would be necessary only to offer in evidence his books,—and rest.

But why should I get so very cross about poor old Hazlitt? The wisest thing I can do is to recite to him the touching verses of “You are old, Father William” and remonstrate gently with him in regard to his pernicious habit of incessantly standing upon his head. It will be a good plan to return to the favorite corner and soothe my ruffled spirits by reading Percy Greg’s comical “History of the United States”, or better still, the dear little story which Roswell Field wrote about “The Bondage of Ballinger”.

Whether so famous a poem as Young’s _Night Thoughts_ is entitled to the privileges of the pit of Acheron, may be matter for dispute; but as Goldsmith said of those gloomy lucubrations, a reader speaks of them with exaggerated applause or contempt as his disposition “is either turned to mirth or melancholy”. We have preserved “tired nature’s sweet restorer, balmy sleep”, and “procrastination is the thief of time,” but we know that the didactic parson’s famous poem is “hardly ever read now except under compulsion.” My chief grievance against the man who was compelled to

“Torture his invention
To flatter knaves or lose his pension,”

is not, however, founded upon his lugubrious pentameters.

The man who turns down the corner of the leaf of a book is not only fit for treason, stratagems and spoils, but is well qualified to commit any mean crime in the calendar. If his memory is so poor that he cannot remember page or passage, let him make a small pencil note on the margin. Such a note may readily be removed by an eraser, but a “dog’s ear” can never be wholly removed. Its blight continues during the life of the book. Now Boswell records this sickening fact: “I have seen volumes of Dr. Young’s copy of _The Rambler_, in which he has marked the passages which he thought particularly excellent, by folding down a corner of the page, and such as he rated in a supereminent degree are marked by double folds. I am sorry that some of the volumes are lost.” I do not share in this sorrow; it is well that the testimony of such brutality should be effaced. Double folds! Insatiate archer, would not one suffice? Perhaps Johnson himself, Virginius-like, destroyed his offspring thus shamelessly violated.

It is often difficult to get out of corners; but before I escape, let me give to the dog’s-earing, nocturnally reflecting Young full credit for a single utterance—“Joy flies monopolists,”—which proves that it was not wholly in vain that he burned the midnight oil; for although he speaks in the present tense, it is manifest that the spirit of prophecy was strong within him. He looked ahead for more than a century and foresaw the day when “grafters” might be glorified and exalted, debauchees acclaimed us apostles of the people, and murderers feasted and honored, but monopolists hated, shunned and abhorred as miscreants whose sins can never be forgiven. Joyless indeed are those who dare to deprive their fellow beings of the inborn right to equality in everything; for we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created free and equal,—that is to say, with the right to do just as they please, to till the soil, to mine the earth, to invent the telegraph and the telephone, to manufacture steel, and to construct railways, but not to do it so well as to prevent any of the great people from doing the same thing. The abandoned wretch who, by his despicable brains, his virtuous life, and his pernicious industry, seeks to impair those rights in any degree, however trifling, must be prepared to bid farewell to happiness and contentment. If he is able to avoid the jail, it will be well for him to seek refuge in some secluded spot; let us say, in a peaceful library corner.

OF THE OLD FASHION

Speaking appreciatively a few nights ago at the club, concerning a recent magazine article on “Prescott, the Man,” I was reminded by a youthful university graduate of only twenty-five years standing, that “Prescott is an old-fashioned historian.”

There is much that is amusing in the attitude of the self-sufficient present towards the things of the past and there is also an element of the pathetic. I am often called an “old fogy,” an epithet whose origin and derivation are uncertain, but whose meaning is reasonably plain. Nobody who ever had the name applied to him was oppressed by any doubt about its signification. Some authorities tell us that it comes from the Swedish _fogde_—one who has charge of a garrison,—but I question it despite the confident assertion of the _Century Dictionary_. It is not altogether inappropriate, because old fogies are compelled to hold the fort against all manner of abominations. They are the brakes on the electric cars of modern pseudo-progress. Thackeray speaks of “old Livermore, old Soy, old Chutney the East India director, old Cutler the surgeon,—that society of old fogies, in fine, who give each other dinners sound and round and dine for the mere purpose of guttling.”

So the term is always associated with the stupid and the ridiculous, used with regard to “elderly persons who have no sympathy with the amusements and pursuits of the young.” Nobody ever refers to a young fogy, although most of us know many exceedingly dull-witted young people who have no sympathy with the amusements and pursuits of the aged or even of the middle-aged. One class is no more worthy of contempt than the other. The adolescents who find their highest form of entertainment in “bridge” are at least as deserving of pity as the semi-centenarian who prefers to pass his evenings among his books and his pictures or to devote them to Shakespeare and the musical glasses. There are some delights about the library fireside which compare favorably with those of the corridors of our most popular hostelry.

Certain kindly critics have insisted that my own literary tastes were acquired in the year 1850. I am not sure that the despised tastes formed in those commonplace, mid-century days are to be esteemed more highly than the tastes of our own self-satisfied times, but a good deal may be said in their favor. Perhaps the past is not always inferior to the present. There are varying opinions on the subject, from the familiar saying of Alfonso of Aragon, quoted by Melchior, immortalized by Bacon, and paraphrased by Goldsmith—that saying about old wood, old wine, old friends, and old authors—to the dogmatic declaration of Whittier that “still the new transcends the old.” It may occur to antiquated minds that there are some elements of excellence about old plays compared with the dramatic works of this careless, _insouciant_ time; that Wordsworth has some merits which are superior to those of the worthy gentleman who now fills the office of Laureate, and that possibly the poetry of the last few years is not entitled to boast itself greatly beside that of the early nineteenth century—the poetry of Scott, of Byron, of Shelley and of Keats. But we have the telephone and the trolley-car, the automobile, the aeroplane, and the operation for appendicitis; and we admire our progress, the wonderful growth of the material, the mechanical, and the million-airy, while a few may pause to ask whether good taste and good manners have grown as greatly. Some of our older buildings for example are assuredly far better to look at than the lofty structures of steel which tower in lower New York and make of our streets darksome canons where the light of day scarcely penetrates and where the winds of winter roar wildly about our devoted heads as we struggle, hat-clutching, to our office doorways. May we not cite the City Hall and the Assay Office as honorable specimens of dignified architecture? There was something impressive too about the old “Tombs,”—replaced not long ago by a monstrosity;—a structure which a lady recently told me was once referred to by an English friend who had never been in New York, as “the Westminster Abbey of America.”

It is delightful to be young and to indulge in the illusions of youth—a truism which it is safe to utter, for nobody will dispute it. “Youth is a blunder, manhood a struggle, old age a regret,” said the strange, semi-oriental personage, an enigma in politics and a problem in literature, Benjamin Disraeli. Everybody knows the rude saying of old George Chapman, which it is almost an impertinence to quote, but every one does not remember whence it came—that young men think the old men are fools but old men know young men are fools. It is certain that we have cherished that idea in our minds for many centuries. Pope, in his epigrammatic way, remarked that “in youth and beauty wisdom is but rare,” but we cannot give him credit for originality in the utterance. We will go on with our regrets, our reproofs and our hesitancies, and in the course of time those who sneer at us now as cumbersome relics, _laudatores temporis acti_, mere maunderers enamored of an effete past, will take their turn, fill our places, and endure the pitying and condescending smiles of the succeeding generation. There is nothing new under the sun, and the man of to-day may well pause in his arrogant career to remember that he will quickly pass into the category of the obsolete.

Some of us who are beginning to descend that downward slope of life which soon becomes sadly precipitous, but who retain a vivid recollection of the long ago, are fond of recalling a period of New York which in this era of lavish expenditures, indiscriminating profuseness, and careless prodigality seems strangely simple. Those were the days when in sedate Second Avenue and Stuyvesant Square were the homes of dignified wealth, whose owners rather looked down upon Fifth Avenue as _parvenu_; and Forty-second Street was almost an outpost of civilization. We revelled in the delights of the ancient Philharmonic concerts and believed that Carl Bergmann was the last evolution of a conductor; later we recognized Theodore Thomas as the man who did more to develop a taste for good orchestral music in this country than any other one man who ever lived. We thronged the stalls of old Wallack’s, with its most excellent of stock-companies—something which has wholly disappeared—and we rejoiced in Dion Boucicault and Agnes Robertson. A little later we haunted the upper gallery of the Academy of Music in Fourteenth Street,—at least _I_ did, because of a confirmed stringency in the money market,—and cheered the magical top-notes of the ponderous but melodious Wachtel and the generous tones of that most inspiring of singers, the splendid Parepa-Rosa. We hailed with loud acclaims the manly and dignified Santley—more in his element in oratorio than in opera—and the royal contralto, Adelaide Phillips, long since forgotten except by the Old Guard who afterwards transferred their allegiance to Annie Louise Cary. It may have been a provincial time, but we did not think so; it was a good time, and we enjoyed it.

It seems but yesterday when all over the land flashed the news of Lincoln’s death, and the black draperies suddenly shrouded the streets while the triumphant note of Easter Sunday died away in a cry of lamentation. I was in old St. Bartholomew’s in Lafayette Place that Sunday, and the recollection of it will never be lost. Nor shall I forget the grief and alarm of a small band of Southerners, secessionists of the strongest type, domiciled in the same house with me, as they lamented that in the death of Abraham Lincoln the South had been deprived of its best friend, the man who would have made reconstruction a blessing instead of an affliction. They had been rebels, it is true, but they were conscious of the loftiness of the soul of that noble citizen who, with faults which are often the accompaniments of greatness, stood for all that was just and magnanimous in our national life.

Some of us have a clear recollection of the camping of soldiers in City Hall Park, the cheering of the multitude as the regiments of volunteers swung down Broadway on their march to Virginia, when we were striving to preserve the republic and the horror of civil war was present with us every hour. We were less cynical, less ambitious, less strenuous in those days, and I think we were more serene and sincere. We had serious imperfections, but we did not carry ourselves quite as mightily, and on the whole we had some creditable characteristics. There is no good reason why we should be ashamed of ourselves.

Were we so very stupid in the fifties? Was there not some true and honorable life in our social and literary world of that generation? Surely our newspapers were as worthy of respect as some of our contemporary journals with their blazing capitals, their columns of crime, their pages of the sensational, and their provoking condensed headlines which exasperate me by their airy flippancy. I sometimes wonder that nobody except myself utters a protest against those dreadful headlines. They reduce almost everything to vulgarity, and the affection of condensation is distinctly irritating. Most objectionable of all are the headlines followed by interrogation points, because they are misleading. If, for example, they say in capitals “Mr. Smith strikes his mother?” the average reader—and there is more of that sort than of any other—glancing over the pages misses the query and goes to his grave with the firm conviction that poor Smith was the most unmanly of brutes. I am not sure that the interrogation mark protects the proprietors against a libel suit.

It is true that in the fifties our art may have been of the tame and tidy sort, timorously clinging to the conventional; our financial enterprises were conducted on so small a scale that a million was a sum which made the banker’s heart palpitate with apprehensive emotion; our politics were concerned chiefly with the colored man and his relations to the State; in architecture our awful brown stone fronts were oppressing in a domineering way all the town in and above Fourteenth Street. But there was a certain dignity about it all, an absence of tawdriness, a savor of respectability.

Fourteenth Street! It must be difficult for the New Yorkers of to-day who have not passed the half-century mark to realize that only fifty years ago it was really “up-town.” It is easier to imagine the present Thomas Street as it was in 1815, a spot to be reached only after a bucolic journey through country lanes which my grandfather used to traverse on his way to the New York Hospital where he studied medicine. We think of that condition of things in about the same state of mind as that in which we contemplate the Roman Forum or the stony avenues of Pompeii. It amuses me to recall the period of the fifties and early sixties when the Hudson River Railroad had its terminus in Thirtieth Street near Tenth Avenue, but sent its cars, horse-drawn, to Chambers Streets and College Place just opposite old Ridley’s, whose pictures were on those familiar inverted cones of never-to-be-forgotten candies, the virtues whereof have been proclaimed sonorously on railway trains from time immemorial, and that Chambers Street station will always live in the memory of old-fashioned people who used to “go to town” from rural neighborhoods. My aforesaid grandfather took me often, much to my joy, to visit his son in West Nineteenth Street, and the conservative old gentleman, who served as a surgeon under Commodore Charles Stewart on the good ship “Franklin,” always went to Chambers Street and thence by the Sixth Avenue horse-railway to Nineteenth Street, which caused the pilgrimage to be unduly protracted, but we always reached our destination sooner or later—generally later. I remember that an idiotic notion possessed me that we were confined to traveling on West Broadway because country people were not allowed to encumber the real, the glorious Broadway, of whose omnibus-crowded splendors I caught but furtive glimpses by peering up the cross-streets. Another gentleman of the old school, whom I loved sincerely, invariably proceeded from Thirtieth Street—and after the genesis of the Grand Central Station, from Forty-second Street—to the Astor House, from which venerable house of cheer he wended his way serenely to Union Square, or to Madison Square, or to any quarter where his business or his pleasure led him, however remote it might be from City Hall Park. To him the Astor House was practically the hub of the metropolis. These details may seem to be trivial, but they are characteristic of the old-fashioned men of half a century ago who still clung to the swallow-tailed coat as a garment to be worn by daylight. It never occurred to them to “take a cab,” possibly because there was no cab which a decent person would willingly occupy unless it had been ordered in advance from a livery stable. There are many reasons why this land of freedom—modified freedom—is preferable to any other land; but when we come to cabs, we must, in all fairness, admit the superiority of the London hansom over a New York “growler,” the hansoms now vanishing, we learn, before the all-conquering horde of motor-cars.

The old-fashioned magazines—how few ever turn their pages now, and yet how much in them is of interest, even to a casual reader. Far be it from me to whisper the slightest word of disparagement about our gorgeous and innumerable “monthlies,” with their pomp and pride of illustration, extending from text to the copious advertisements, those soul-stirring and lucrative adjuncts to a magazine of the present. Do not tell me that a man who buys the thick, paper-covered book does not read the advertisements; he pretends that he does not, but he does. According to my experience he follows them from soap to steam-yachts, from refrigerators to railway routes, but he would rather die than confess it. Much as I admire these products of our later civilization, I nevertheless maintain that there is more charm in an ancient number of any worthy periodical than is to be found in the latest issue. Time seems to add a mellow flavor to the good things of the past. There is not much to say in praise of the solemn _Whig Review_ or of O’Sullivan’s portentous _Democratic Review_, but take from the shelf a shabbily bound volume of _Graham’s Magazine of Literature and Art_, published in the forties, and there will be discovered a wilderness of delights. The fashion-plates alone are dreams of comical beauty, and the steel plates of “The Shepherd’s Love,” “The Proffered Kiss,” and “Lace Pattern with Embossed View” far surpass—in a sense—the boasted work of Pyle and of Abbey. What soul will decline to be thrilled at the lovely skit entitled “Born to Love Pigs and Chickens” by that butterfly of literature, Nathaniel Parker Willis, which you will find in the number of February, 1843. Consider the portrait of Charles Fenno Hoffman, with his exquisite coatlet, his wonderful legs attired in what appear to be tights, and his mild but intellectual countenance beaming upon us as he sits, bare-headed, upon a convenient stage rock, holding in one hand an object which may be a pie, a boxing-glove or a hat, according to the imagination of the beholder. Contemplate the list of contributors, including Bryant, Cooper, Longfellow, Lowell, and “Edgar A. Poe, Esq.,” the “Esq.” adding a delicious dignity to each of the illustrious names. It was only “sixty years since,” but can any magazine of to-day rival that catalogue? Almost every one knows that Poe was editor of _Graham_ for a year and that _The Murders in the Rue Morgue_ as well as Longfellow’s _Spanish Student_ first appeared in that magazine. Coming to a later day, recall the _Harper_ of the fifties. No pleasure of the present can equal that which we felt when we revelled in Abbott’s Napoleon, which turned us lads into enthusiastic admirers of the great Emperor; or when we enjoyed the jovial Porte Crayon, whose drawing was consistently as bad as Thackeray’s, but whose fascinating humor had a quality peculiarly its own. Not long ago Mr. Janvier, to the gratification of the surviving members of the brotherhood of early _Harper_ readers, gave to Strother the tribute of his judicious praise.

One may not gossip lightly about the _Atlantic_, but the _Knickerbocker_ is distinctly old-fashioned. Longfellow’s _Psalm of Life_ first saw the light in its pages; immortal, even if Barrett Wendell does truthfully say that it is full not only of outworn metaphor but of superficial literary allusion. Old New York, adds Professor Wendell, expressed itself in our first school of renascent writing, which withered away with the _Knickerbocker Magazine_. But there was a Knickerbocker school, and the brothers Willis and Gaylord Clark helped to sustain its glories. The magazine began in 1832, faded in 1857 and died in 1864; and out of it sprang many of the authors whose names are inseparably associated with a golden period of our literature.

It was only a short time ago that one of the men of those by-gone times departed this life, and the scanty mention of him in the public press compelled a sad recognition of the familiar truth that in order to retain popular attraction one must pose perpetually under the lime-light. Parke Godwin, who belonged to the order of scholarly, high-minded Americans, had outlived his fame, except among the Centurions of West Forty-third Street and a few old people of the same class. Perhaps he did not concentrate his powers sufficiently. Editor, writer of political essays, author of _Vala, a Mythological Tale_, biographer of his father-in-law, William Cullen Bryant, and by virtue of his _History of France_, historian,—but he published only one volume more than forty years ago and then abandoned the task—he had that broad culture which sometimes disperses itself and fails to win for its possessor the highest place in the literary hierarchy. He was a delightful example of what we now regard as the old-fashioned, and his address on the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Century Club is a mine of good things for one who is interested in the past of New York. “I have stood once more” said he “beside the easel of Cole as he poured his ideal visions of the Voyage of Life and the Course of Empire in gorgeous colors upon the canvas. I have seen the boyish Kensett trying to infuse his own refinement and sweetness into the wild woods of the wold. I have watched the stately Gifford as he brought the City of the Sea out of its waters, in a style that Cavaletto and Ziem would envy and with a brilliancy of color that outshone even its native Italian skies. I have stood beside the burly Leutze as he portrayed our Washington among the ice of the Delaware, or depicted the multitudinous tramp of immigrants making their western way through the wilderness to the shores of the Oregon, that ‘hears no sound save its own dashings.’ All have come back for a moment, but they are gone, oh whither? Into the silent land, says Von Salis; yet how silent it is! We speak to them, but they answer us not again.” He brought back to us the beginning of things, when he told us of the incipient conditions of the Academy of Design. “They took a room—was it suggestive?—in the old Alms House in the Park, and they worked under a wick dipped in whale-oil which gave out more smoke than light.” He spoke of Halleck, of Gulian Verplanck, of Bryant, of Charles Fenno Hoffman, of Robert C. Sands, and of old Tristam Burges, “who had swallowed Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary;” and he closed with a brief flight of eloquence such as in these days of new-fashioned chilliness it is seldom vouchsafed to us to hear.

Of the same order was William Allen Butler, the friend of Halleck and of Duyckinck, of Andrew Jackson and of Martin Van Buren, who knew Samuel Rogers and visited him in London. He was nine years the junior of Godwin. He might have won the highest eminence in the world of books if he had not made the law his chief occupation and literature only his recreation. The bar does not among its rewards number that of enduring fame, unless occasionally some great political or criminal trial perpetuates the name of the advocate chiefly concerned in it. Of course, Mr. Butler’s early essay in verse, “Nothing to Wear,” will never be entirely forgotten. A humorous skit as it was, its enduring merit is shown by the fact that in spite of the old-fashioned terms descriptive of woman’s dress and of the fashionable life of fifty years ago, in its general tone it is curiously contemporaneous. Scarcely less witty and amusing were his poems, “General Average” and “The Sexton and the Thermometer,” the former being more highly esteemed by many than its popular predecessor. I suppose that he left it out of the later collection of his poems because, with his gentle and kindly nature, he feared that a few of its passages might give offense to some of his friends of the Jewish faith whom he esteemed and respected. His translations of Uhland are marked by graceful and poetic fervor, and his prose style was lucidity itself. His humor, always attractive and appropriate, lightened even his most serious work, from an address on Statutory Law to an argument in the Supreme Court in Washington City. It was well said of him by a jurist now living, that “no man of his time, either in England or America, held an equally high rank both as a lawyer and a literary man.”

Another of the old-fashioned literary men, who was, however, considerably the senior of both Godwin and Butler, was George Perkins Morris, who died in 1864. He was at once a general of militia, an editor, a favorite song-writer, and the composer of an opera libretto. His title to immortality rests mainly upon the sentimental verses known as “Woodman, Spare that Tree,” which had a flavor about them very dear to our grandparents. To look at his manly countenance in the portrait engraved by Hollyer (who at the present writing is still extant and vigorous) after the Elliott painting, we can scarcely imagine him as the author of such lines as “Near the Lake Where Drooped the Willow,” “We Were Boys Together,” “Land-Ho,” “Long Time Ago” and “Whip-poor-will.” But James Grant Wilson says that for above a score of years he could, any day, exchange one of his songs unread for a fifty dollar cheque, when some of _literati_ of New York (possibly Poe) could not sell anything for the one-fifth part of that sum. In the presence of Morris, I confess I cannot quite give myself up to adoring admiration of the taste of our predecessors. This stanza indicates his ordinary quality:

The star of love now shines above,
Cool zephyrs crisp the sea;
Among the leaves, the wind-harp weaves
Its serenade for thee.

Notwithstanding this rather trifling vein, admirably satirized by Orpheus C. Kerr, and a certain tone of commonplace, Morris had a genuine lyrical quality in his verse, although it was devoid of startling bursts of inspiration, and English literature affords many examples of less deserving poesy. Morris was an industrious editor, appreciative of others, and he had a personal charm which endeared him to those who had the good fortune to come within the pale of his friendship, and particularly to those who were permitted to enjoy the generous hospitality of his sweet and dignified home at Undercliff opposite West Point. Smile as we may at his little conceits and his obvious rhymes, we must recognize the sincere and genial nature of the kindly General, so long conspicuous in the social and literary life of old New York.

These men, it may be said, do not prove the permanent value of the literature of the fifties. Godwin and Morris were editors and Butler a busy lawyer, none of them able to give their undivided attention to authorship. I suppose that Irving and Emerson, Bryant, Longfellow, Hawthorne and Bayard Taylor were more distinctly the ornaments of the time, and there are other names which more judicious and discriminating men might substitute for some of those I have chosen. Bayard Taylor’s greatest work was done in later years, but he had already won his first fame—not a giant, but a poet with “the spontaneity of a born singer,” as Stedman said. Irving, the most charming and amiable of writers, had not the most forceful intellect, but he was calm and graceful, with a gentle and bewitching humor and a strong appreciation of the beautiful—a good man, beloved and honored at home and abroad. His fame is paler now than it was forty years gone by, but he has the immortality of a classic. Emerson had a powerful influence over the minds of men, but, viewed in the perspective of time, he does not loom so largely now. I am not competent to venture far into the territory of criticism, having only the equipment of a general reader who timidly expresses his personal feelings and leaves to trained and experienced judges the task of scientific analysis; but we general readers are the jury, after all.

As time slips by there is a tendency to merge the decades of the past, and to the young people of 1909 the period of 1850–1860 is every bit as remote as the period of 1830–1840. The university undergraduate does not differentiate between the alumnus of 1870 and him of 1855, as I know by experience. A melancholy illustration of this well-known fact was afforded of late in a popular play, the scene of which was laid in a time supposed to be exceedingly far distant, and the programme announced it as “the early eighties.” The representation was enlivened by such antiquated melodies as “Old Zip Coon,” “Maryland, My Maryland,” and “Old Dan Tucker,” as well as “Pretty as a Picture,” “Ye Merry Birds,” and “How Fair Art Thou,” all as appropriate to the early eighties as Dr. Arne’s “Where the Bee Sucks” and “Rule Britannia.” It was almost as abominably anachronistic as the naive declaration of a pseudo-Princetonian who asserted a membership in the Class of 1879 and assured me that he had been, while in college, a devoted disciple of Doctor Eliphalet Nott. If I have mingled my old-fashioned decades unduly, it has been because of that tendency to merger which no Sherman Act can suppress.

Few there are who cling with affection to the memory of the old-fashioned. Most of us prefer to spin with the world down the ringing grooves of change, to borrow the shadow of a phrase which has itself become old-fashioned. The flaming sword of the Civil War severed the latest century of America in two unequal parts, and its fiery blade divided the old and the new as surely and as cleanly as the guillotine cleft apart the France of the old monarchy from the France of modern days. To stray back in recollection to the land of fifty years ago is almost like treading the streets of some mediæval town. But for some of us there is a melancholy pleasure in the retrospect and a lingering fondness for the life which we thought so earnest and so vigorous then, but which now seems so placid and so drowsy.

WILLIAM HARRISON AINSWORTH

Reviewers, critics and students of literature are inclined to resent the assertion with respect to a writer once eminent, that he is substantially forgotten. But it is safe to say that if we regard the millions of readers in this country whose literary nutriment is made up chiefly of works of fiction or of biography of the lighter sort, as “the reading public of America”, the name of William Harrison Ainsworth is by no means familiar in the United States. There are many book-owners who keep his “Works” upon their shelves, and know the backs of the volumes, and some of the omnivorous have doubtless read “Jack Sheppard”, “Crichton”, “The Tower of London”, and perhaps “Rookwood”; yet thousands who are well acquainted with their Scott, their Dickens and their Thackeray would be sorely puzzled if they were asked to tell us who Ainsworth was, and exactly when he lived, or to give a synopsis of the plot of a single one of his numerous stories; and he has been dead not quite thirty years.

Allibone gives him but fourteen lines of biography, mostly bitter censure, with a few words of qualified praise for such historical tales as “St. Paul’s” and “The Tower”. The indifference to him is not limited to general readers or to America. Chamber’s _Encyclopædia of English Literature_ begrudges him twenty-nine lines of depreciative comment, conceding to him dramatic art and power, but denying to him “originality or felicity of humor or character”. He is not even mentioned in Mr. Edmund Gosse’s _Modern English Literature_, and Taine does not condescend to give his name. In the _History_ of Nicoll and Seccombe no reference to him can be found. In the pretentious volumes of the _History of English Literature_ edited by Garnett and Gosse a portrait of him is given with a rough draft of a Cruikshank drawing; and this is what is said of him: “A very popular exponent of the grotesque and the sensational in historical romance was William Harrison Ainsworth (1805–1882), a Manchester solicitor, who wrote _Rookwood_, 1834, _Jack Sheppard_, 1839, and _The Tower of London_, 1840. He was a sort of Cruikshank of the pen, delighting in violent and lurid scenes, crowded with animated figures”. This is rather an absurd mess of misinformation. One would scarcely believe that there was a time when he was esteemed to be a worthy rival of Charles Dickens, and when in the eyes of the critics and of the public he far outshone Edward Lytton Bulwer.

In a note to the sketch in the _Dictionary of National Biography_, Mr. W. E. A. Axon says that “no biography of Ainsworth has appeared or is likely to be published.” The fact is correctly stated, but the prediction may not be fulfilled. In 1902, Mr. Axon himself expanded the _Dictionary_ article and made it into an excellent memoir of forty-three pages, but only a few copies were printed. It contains five portraits. A devoted admirer of Ainsworth has been for some years engaged in the preparation of an extended biography. I do not give his name, for he probably prefers to make the announcement at his own time and in his own way. A few years ago I became the possessor of a considerable number of autographic relics of Ainsworth, including a memorandum book and a manuscript volume containing an account of his travels in Italy in 1830, dedicated to his wife, with a poem; some letters to him from Cruikshank; thirty-six pages of the draft of “Jack Sheppard”, and more than two hundred of his own letters. It is gratifying to know that my friend who is at work on the “Life” has been aided by this little collection.

The only published records of Ainsworth’s life, other than those to which I have referred, are, as far as I have been able to discover, a brief memoir by Laman Blanchard which appeared in the _Mirror_ in 1842 and was reproduced in later editions of “Rookwood”; a chapter in Madden’s _Life of Lady Blessington_; a sketch by James Crossley contributed to the Routledge edition of the _Ballads_ in 1855; and an account of him by William Bates, accompanying a semi-caricature portrait in the _Maclise Portrait Gallery_.

Ainsworth was born in his father’s house on King Street, Manchester, February 4, 1805. His family was “respectable” in the English sense, for his grandfather on his mother’s side was a Unitarian minister, and his father a prosperous solicitor. It was from the mother that he inherited in 1842 some “landed property” to use another distinctively English phrase, and it is amusing to observe the pride of Madden when he boasts that Ainsworth’s name appears in _Burke’s Landed Gentry_. He attended the Free Grammar School in Manchester, where it is said that he was proficient in Latin and Greek, and as he was expected to succeed to his father’s practice, he became an articled clerk in the office of Mr. Alexander Kay, at the age of sixteen. He was a handsome boy, full of ambition, but his ambition did not lead him in the dull and dusty paths which solicitors tread. He had already written a drama, for private production, which was printed in _Arliss’s Magazine_, and a number of sketches, translations and minor papers for a serial called _The Manchester Iris_, and he subsequently conducted a periodical styled _The Boeotian_, which had a short existence of six months. Before he was nineteen, he was a regular contributor to the _London Magazine_ and the _Edinburgh Magazine_. Some of these youthful efforts were collected in “December Tales” (1823), which also contained sketches by James Crossley and John Partington Aston. In 1822 he issued a pamphlet of “Poems, by Cheviot Tichborn”, which as Mr. Axon informs us, is quite distinct from another pamphlet called “The Works of Cheviot Tichborn”, printed in 1825, apparently for private circulation.

The Tichborn book of verses was dedicated to Charles Lamb. The author was a devoted admirer of Elia, and as early as 1822 Lamb had lent him a copy of Cyril Tourneur’s play or plays. On May 7, 1822, Lamb wrote to him a letter, (printed in _The Lambs_, by William Carew Hazlitt, 1897) referring to the book and saying, among other things, “I have read your poetry with pleasure. The tales are pretty and prettily told. It is only sometimes a little careless, I mean as to redundancy.” The letter mentions the proposed dedication deprecatingly and modestly.

Talfourd, Canon Ainger and Fitzgerald in their collections give two other letters, written respectively on December 9 and December 29, 1823, one thanking Ainsworth for “books and compliments,” and the other giving Lamb-like excuses for not leaving beloved London to pay a visit to Manchester.[6] It was something of an honor for a lad of seventeen to receive the praise of Charles Lamb, who appears to have discovered one of his young correspondent’s besetting sins—redundancy. But it may not have meant much, for in those days they exchanged compliments more profusely than is customary at the present time.

All these excursions in the field of authorship were fatal to the grave study of the law, for which he had no taste, and although when his father died in 1824 he went to London to finish his term with Mr. Jacob Phillips of the Inner Temple, it was a foregone conclusion that, whatever his career might be, it would not be that of a solicitor. About 1826, one John Ebers, a publisher in Bond Street, and also manager of the Opera House, brought out a novel called “Sir John Chiverton,” which received the favor of Sir Walter Scott, who said of it in his diary (October 17, 1826), that he had read it with interest, and that it was “a clever book,” at the same time asserting that he himself was the originator of the style in which it was written. For many years it was supposed that Ainsworth was its sole author, but it was claimed in 1877 by Mr. John Partington Aston, a lawyer, who had been a fellow-clerk of Ainsworth’s in Mr. Kay’s office, and the book was probably the result of collaboration. The dedicatory verses are supposed to have been addressed to Anne Frances Ebers, John Ebers’ daughter, whom Ainsworth married on October 11, 1826. Soon afterwards he seems to have been occupied in editing one of those absurd “Annuals” so common in those days, for we find Tom Moore recording in his journal in 1827, that he had been asked to edit the _Forget-Me-Not_ to begin with the second number, “as the present editor is Mr. Ainsworth (I think), the son-in-law of Ebers.” The compensation offered to Moore was £500, which indicates that such work was paid for liberally, but it is not likely that Ainsworth received as much. A year or so after the marriage—within a year in fact—he followed his father-in-law’s advice and became himself a publisher and a bookseller; but at the end of eighteen months he decided to abandon the business.

If we may judge by one of the letters in my collection, it is not surprising that he was not overwhelmingly successful. He writes to Thomas Hill for a notice in the _Chronicle_ of a book the copyright of which he had recently purchased, adding, “the work is really a most scientific one—indeed the only distinct treatise on Confectionery extant.” Perhaps this was the work of Ude, the cook, whose publisher he was; but he also “brought out” Caroline Norton as an author, of whom he writes to Charles Ollier, in his graceful, rather lady-like chirography:

“Is it not possible [to] get me a short notice of the enclosed into the new Monthly? By so doing you will infinitely oblige one of the most beautiful women in the world—the Hon. Mrs. Norton, the granddaughter of Richard Brinsley Sheridan.”

In 1827 he published for Thomas Hood two volumes of “National Tales,” which are said to be the poorest books written by Hood. Christopher North said of them: “I am glad to see that they are published by Mr. Ainsworth to whom I wish all success in his new profession. He is himself a young gentleman of talents, and his Sir John Chiverton is a spirited and romantic performance.”[7]

It was for an annual issued by him that Sir Walter Scott wrote the “Bonnets of Bonnie Dundee,” and the story is told by Mr. Axon that Sir Walter received twenty guineas for it, but laughingly handed them over to the little daughter of Lockhart, at whose house he and Ainsworth met. He wrote some fragmentary and miscellaneous prose and verse, not of much importance; and in 1828 he travelled through Belgium and up the Rhine, going to Switzerland and Italy in 1830. The manuscript note-books which lie before me, the paper foxed and the ink faded, comprise a diary of the Italian part of the journey. I have toiled over the one hundred and sixty-eight pages, not always easily decipherable, but have found little which exceeds in value the ordinary guide-book of our own time. It was, we must remember, written only for his wife—whom he considerately left at home—and the dedicatory poem to her, consisting of fifty-eight unrhymed lines, written in Venice in September, 1830, is quite as commonplace as might be expected from a man of twenty-five, with little poetic inspiration but endowed with much verbal fluency, who was not writing for publication.

Soon after his return from the Continent, Ainsworth began the work from which he was to derive his chief title to fame—the composing of novels. It has been said that he was inspired by Mrs. Radcliffe, whose gloomy mysteries, weird scenes, and supernatural machinery once made her a favorite with fiction-lovers, and that he sought to adapt old legends to English soil. Others have ascribed his impulse to the influence of the French dramatic romancers, Eugène Sue, Victor Hugo, and Alexandre Dumas. I question whether he owed his inspiration to any particular source, although all these writers may have affected his temperament. Perhaps he unconsciously divined the needs of the reading public, of which his editorial experience may have taught him much. The inane, fashionable novel had become tiresome. Moreover, it was a time, in the early thirties, when the nation of England was absorbed in the growth of her material prosperity, and when a country is engrossed in commerce and manufactures, in the production of wealth, tales of adventure seem necessary to stimulate flagging imagination. We have seen the evidence of it in our own land during the past ten years, when casting aside the metaphysical, the psychological, the long drawn-out analyses of character, the public eagerly devoured story after story of fights and wars, and daring deeds, whose lucky authors bore off rewards of fabulous amount and grew rich upon the royalties earned by their hundreds of thousands of copies.

We are told by Mr. Axon that “the inspiration came to him when on a visit to Chesterfield in 1831”. He had visited Cuckfield Place, thought by Shelley to be “like bits of Mrs. Radcliffe”, and it occurred to Ainsworth that he might make something of an English story constructed upon similar lines. Begun in 1831, his “Rookwood” was published in 1834. It has generally been considered by critics to be a powerful but uneven story, and it leaped at once into popularity, carrying with it the youthful author. “The Romany Chant” and “Dick Turpin’s Ride to York” were the chief features; but the Ride was the thing, like the chariot race in _Ben-Hur_. It was actually dashed off in the glow of enthusiasm, the white heat of imagination. It was, says George Augustus Sala, “a piece of word painting rarely if ever surpassed in the prose of the Victorian Era,”[8] and he said this sixty years after the novel appeared. Ainsworth has told us the circumstances. “I wrote it” he said “in twenty-four hours of continuous work. I had previously arranged the meeting at Kilburn Wells, and the death of Tom King—a work of some little time—but from the moment I got Turpin on the high road, I wrote on and on till I landed him at York. I performed this literary feat, as you are pleased to call it, without the slightest sense of effort. I began in the morning, wrote all day, and as night wore on, my subject had completely mastered me, and I had no power to leave Turpin on the high road. I was swept away by the curious excitement and novelty of the situation; and being personally a good horseman, passionately fond of horses, and possessed moreover of accurate knowledge of a great part of the country, I was thoroughly at home with my work, and galloped on with my pet highwayman merrily enough. I must, however, confess that when my work was in proof, I went over the ground between London and York to verify the distances and localities, and was not a little surprised at my accuracy.” This _tour de force_—the composition of a hundred novel pages in so short a time, was performed at “The Elms,” a house at Kilburn where he was then living. It brings to mind the familiar story of Beckford, writing _Vathek_ in French, in a single sitting of three days and two nights, which is more or less apocryphal.

It is a proof of the merit and of the success of this chapter that, like many other successful literary efforts, it was “claimed” by some one else. Mr. Bates refers rather indignantly to an assertion of R. Shelton Mackenzie, made upon the authority of Dr. Kenealy, and contained in the fifth volume of an American edition of the _Noctes Ambrosianæ_, that Doctor William Maginn, of convivial fame, wrote the “Ride” as well as all the slang songs in “Rookwood.” But Maginn was seldom sober and doubtless he bragged in his cups. Kenealy believed in Arthur Orton, the Tichborne “claimant,” and was capable of believing in any claimant, particularly if he was an Irishman; while Mackenzie was not celebrated for acumen or accuracy. Sala says of the absurd tale: “As to the truth or falsehood of this allegation I am wholly incompetent to pronounce; but looking at Ainsworth’s striking and powerful pictures of the Plague and the Fire in his ‘Old St. Paul’s,’ and the numerous studies of Tudor life in his ‘Tower of London,’ I should say that ‘Turpin’s Ride to York’ was a performance altogether within the compass of his capacity.”

In the light of later years, it is interesting to observe the comparisons made between Bulwer and Ainsworth. In _Fraser’s Magazine_ for June, 1834, there is a review of “Rookwood” in which the author is praised far beyond the writer of _Eugene Aram_ and _Paul Clifford_. Bulwer, according to Sala, was fated “to be beaten on his own ground by another writer of fiction very much his inferior in genius; but who was nevertheless endowed with a considerable amount of melodramatic power, and who had acquired a conspicuous facility for dramatic description.” It may be that the defeat drove Bulwer to those other fields in which he won the reputation which has preserved his name while that of his conqueror of seventy years ago has faded sadly.

It was erroneously believed by many that Ainsworth must have had some personal acquaintance with low life in London because of the ease with which he dealt with the thieves’ jargon, but his knowledge of it was but second-hand for he obtained it from the autobiography of James Hardy Vaux.[9] A second edition of “Rookwood” illustrated by George Cruikshank, appeared in 1836.

Ainsworth was now a conspicuous man, and his celebrity as an author, combined with his personal attractions, made him a welcome guest at many houses, notably at Gore House, where Lady Blessington so long held sway—“jolly old girl”, he calls her in one of my letters, written in 1836. The beauty at forty-seven was as fascinating as ever. “Everybody goes to Lady Blessington’s”, says Haydon in his _Diary_. The effervescent Sala tells of meeting Ainsworth there in a later time. “I think”, he says, “that on the evening in question there were present, among others, Daniel Maclise, the painter, and Ainsworth, the novelist. The author of “Jack Sheppard” was then a young man of about thirty, very handsome, but somewhat of the curled and oiled and glossy-whiskered D’Orsay type”. The D’Orsay type was by no means distasteful to my lady. Sala relates at second-hand the anecdote about Lady Blessington placing herself between D’Orsay and Ainsworth, and saying that she had for supporters the two handsomest men in London.

He was a favorite contributor to _Fraser’s Magazine_, and his portrait appears among “The Fraserians”, indeed a goodly company, for there are Coleridge, Southey, James Hogg, Lockhart, D’Orsay, Thackeray, Carlyle, Washington Irving, Sir David Brewster, and Theodore Hook, with many others. In the letter-press which accompanied the portrait,—supposed to have been written by Maginn—the Magazine says: “May he turn out many novels better, none worse, than ‘Rookwood’; may he, as far as is consistent with the frailty of humanity, penetrate puffery, and avoid the three insatiables of Solomon, King of Israel.”

In 1837, “Crichton” was published, the hero being James Crichton, the “Admirable”, about whose name has grown so much that is fabulous, but who was nevertheless a real person. The story was illustrated by Hablôt K. Browne. It was fairly successful; some regard it as in many respects his best novel; but while it did not add materially to his fame, it did not diminish it. It was well done; the author spared no pains and as usual with him was careful in his researches. In the introductory essay and in the appendices, which Sidney Lee pronounces “very interesting”, he reprinted, with translations in verse, Crichton’s Elegy on Borromeo and the eulogy on Visconti. Madden intimates that D’Orsay occasionally figured as the model of the accomplished hero. The author received £350 for the book—more than for “Rookwood”. He had become a figure in the literary world and his name was something with which to conjure.

In January, 1837, Richard Bentley began the publication of _Bentley’s Miscellany_ under the editorship of Charles Dickens. There is a familiar story that the name originally proposed was “The Wit’s Miscellany,” and that when the change was mentioned in the presence of “Ingoldsby” Barham (not Douglus Jerrold, as often supposed), he remarked “Why go to the other extreme?” In January, 1839, Dickens turned over the office of editor to Ainsworth, with “a familiar epistle from a parent to his child”.[10] _Oliver Twist_ had just been the feature of the _Miscellany_, and now Ainsworth made his second and most celebrated venture in what Sala calls “felonious fiction”—the immortal “Jack Sheppard.”