Chapter IV: Part 4

His carelessness of appearances extended to his rooms, which looked like small sections from the primeval chaos. The book-shelves were of unpainted wood, knocked together in the rudest fashion, and the books were many of them tattered and without backs. A case containing foreign birds was used also as a wardrobe, and all of his rare possessions in natural history were mixed up with a most motley collection of books and papers,--these latter consisting of all sorts of scraps, of which no one else could have made anything. He always seemed to be able to find them when wanted, even in the worst confusion; but how he did it was a mystery to his friends. "Here and there, in the interstices between books, were stuffed what appeared to be dingy, crumpled bits of paper, but they were in reality bank-notes, his class fees; which he never carried in a purse, but stuffed away wherever it seemed most convenient at the moment." He never, even in the coldest weather, had a fire in his room.

No account of Kit North would be complete that left out entirely the convivialities of the table, though we should make a great mistake if we took the humorous caricatures of the "Noctes Ambrosianae" for accounts of literal feats in that line. This has sometimes been done, and he is frequently represented as a glutton and a drunkard. He was neither, although he did perform some remarkable feats both of eating and drinking in his day. His life of constant out-of-door exercise gave him a keen appetite, and a perfect digestion, and he loved the hilarity of the table as well as any man of his day. But in his later life he became a _teetotaller_. Even in his earlier days it was often the excitement of company which quickened all of his powers to their utmost tension, when the effect was attributed to wine. So fond was he of all sorts and kinds of out-of-the-way company, that he was at one time in the habit of going at midnight to the Angel Inn, where many of the up and down London coaches met, and there to preside at the passengers' supper, carving for them, inquiring all about their respective journeys, and astonishing them with his wit and pleasantry. He would also linger about with coachmen and guards, and was present at, and took a hand in, many a street row, unknown by those with whom he mingled.

He is said to have remained for three months in the back room of a Highland blacksmith, strolling daily about the hills, and performing some of his prodigious pedestrian feats, to the great surprise of the rustics. He is also said to have followed the lady who became his wife all over the lake country of Scotland in the disguise of a waiter, serving her at table wherever the party happened to be, until the suspicions of her father were aroused by seeing the same waiter at every inn. Wilson then made himself known, declared his admiration for the lady, and finally became her accepted suitor. After their marriage he took her with him all over the Highlands on foot, assuring her that only so could she become really acquainted with their beauties. No man perhaps ever loved the Highlands as Christopher North loved them,--with the possible exception of Walter Scott.--and we can truly envy his young bride to be thus escorted through their deepest labyrinths, and introduced to their most delicate and hidden beauties. Here he introduced his beloved also to the cottages of the peasants, and made her acquainted with the poetry of that life which has inspired some of the finest of modern literature. He knew as well as Hogg, or Scott, or Lockhart, that the characteristic romance of a people like the Scotch is to be sought chiefly in the cottages of the poor, and that the finest poetry of such a people has for the most part a like inspiration. And these same peasants showed to their best advantage always when Christopher was around. They loved him instinctively, although they knew him only as a sportsman, or in some cases, perhaps, as a naturalist. But his large heart always shone forth in his intercourse with the poor, and he seemed conscious of no superiority to them, meeting them always on the common ground of humanity, and sympathizing, in his hearty and genial way, in all their joys and sorrows. They _took to him_ just as dogs and children did.

And his descriptions of their cramped and narrow lives, enlivened by his characteristic humor, are among the best pictures the world has cherished of Scottish rural life. He did not spare their vices, but gave many dramatic pictures of the darker sides of peasant life, with which he gained a close acquaintance during those long foot-journeys which he was so fond of making, living really what we would call the life of a tramp, for long periods. Sometimes he camped with gypsies for weeks, and at all times was intimate with all of the so-called lower classes. Tinkers, cairds, poachers, were his familiar roadside acquaintances, and he extracted great amusement from their peculiarities. Sometimes he had to win the respect of these worthies by knocking them down in the beginning of the acquaintance, but after that they usually stood by him to the end. He usually figured as the champion of the weak in these games at fisticuffs, but sometimes he managed things on his own account.

Although he loved to wander in the Highlands, he made his home among the lakes at Elleray. This home was a rambling, mossy-roofed cottage, of very picturesque appearance, overhung by a giant sycamore.

"Never," he says, "in this well-wooded world, not even in the days
of the Druids, could there have been such another tree. It would be
easier to suppose two Shakspeares. Oh, sweetest and shadiest of
sycamores, we love thee beyond all other trees."

And he thus discourses of the lakes amid which he lived,--and about whose borders he wandered so continually:--

"Each lake hath its promontories, that every step you walk, every
stroke you row, undergo miraculous metamorphoses, accordant to the
change that comes o'er the spirit of your dream, as your
imagination glances again over the transfigured mountains. Each
lake hath its bays of bliss, where might ride at her moorings, made
of the stalks of water-lilies, the fairy bark of a spiritual life.
Each lake hath its hanging terraces of immortal green, that along
her shores run glimmering far down beneath the superficial
sunshine, where the poet in his becalmed canoe, among the lustre,
could fondly swear by all that is most beautiful on earth, and air,
and water, that these three are one, blended as they are by the
interfusing spirit of heavenly peace."

Lover of beauty as he was, yet he was well content with what he could find in Scotland; he cared little for England, and nothing for the Continent. There was enough to exhaust the seeing possibilities of a lifetime in his own little land, with its rocks and lakes and heathery hills. This was because he really had the poet's eye and heart. Such do not need to traverse the whole wide world to find enough of beauty; it is only the mediocre and the commonplace who care to gaze superficially at the landscapes of two continents. But Wilson knew his land not only with the eye of a poet, but also with that of a naturalist. His favorite pastime was ornithology, and he made fine collections of specimens in this line.

He was a great sportsman, and a story is told by his daughter, Mrs. Gordon, of his travelling seventy miles in one day, to fish in a certain favorite loch among the braes of Glenarchy, called Loch Toila. He was also a good shot, and very enthusiastic in sport even to old age. Boating was another favorite pastime; and engaged in one or another of these out-of-door pursuits, he passed a very large portion of his whole life. When he did write, he did it with great rapidity, composing one of the "Noctes" at a sitting. His love for the animal creation was very deep, and he would never submit to seeing any creature abused. He one day saw a man cruelly beating his horse, which was overloaded with coals, and could not move. He remonstrated with the driver, who, exasperated at the interference, took up the whip in a threatening way, as if with intent to strike the professor. In one instant the well-nerved hand of Wilson, not new to these encounters, twisted the whip from the coarse fist of the driver, and walking up to the cart, he unfastened the _trams_ and hurled the whole weight of the coals into the street. He then took the horse and led it away, depositing it in the hands of the authorities, with injunctions to see that the beast was better treated in future.

He made great pets of game-birds, the aristocracy of the species, with their delicate heads and exquisite plumage, and kept at one time no less than sixty-two in the back yard of his house. The noise was simply unendurable to all but Wilson, who was never annoyed by it in the least. He kept one lame sparrow for eleven years, caring for it with the tenderest solicitude.

He was always well known in the houses of the poor, and he never gave up one of his humble friends. He was tender and gentle always to these, as to the members of his own household, where it was said the very strength of his hand was softened, that he might caress the infant, or play with the little ones at his feet. With all children he was a prime favorite, and in his declining years his grandchildren were his daily playmates. Noah's ark, trumpets, drums, pencils, puzzles, dolls, were all supposed by them to possess interest in his eyes equal to their own.

He was thrown much upon these children for his pleasures near the close of his life. That frame of gigantic build and of gigantic strength became almost helpless from paralysis, and he was cared for till death by his daughter, the mother of these favored little ones. Oh, it is sad to think of it! Poor Christopher,--the active, the alert, the keen-sighted, the fleet-footed, the gay and rollicking sportsman, the famous angler, the champion boxer, too, upon occasions,--laid low, and propped helpless upon pillows within walls, which he had always hated so sincerely. He writes:--

"Our spirit burns within us, but our limbs are palsied, and our
feet must brush the heather no more. Lo, how beautifully those
fast-travelling pointers do their work on that black mountain's
breast; intersecting it into parallelograms and squares and
circles, and now all a-stoop on a sudden, as if frozen to death.
Higher up among the rocks and cliffs and stones, we see a stripling
whose ambition it is to strike the sky with his forehead, and wet
his hair in the misty cloud, pursuing the ptarmigan. . . . Never
shall eld deaden our sympathies with the pastimes of our
fellow-men, any more than with their highest raptures, their
profoundest griefs."

It is safe to say that he kept his word, and was to the last, the same genial, warm-hearted, impulsive, wayward man who had by these and other engaging qualities made for himself so large a place in the heart of his countrymen, during the long years he had wandered over her moors and hills, seeing all her beauties, and describing them as no other had done.

He was almost the last of that band of strong men who cast such lustre over the beginning of this century. Coleridge had gone before, and Wordsworth, Byron, and Campbell, Shelley, and Canning, and Peel, and Jeffrey, and Moore, and he lingered on in a solitude made greater by that last stroke of calamity which deprived him of motion for a time that was weary and heart-breaking to him, and over which the world yet sheds its sympathizing tears. He died at the age of sixty-eight.

LORD BYRON.

So many volumes have been written about the domestic life and the loves of Lord Byron, that it would be a hopeless undertaking to attempt to say anything new about them. But the story of Byron's life will never lose its fascination, and to every new generation of readers the romance will be fresh. Marvellously beautiful, wonderfully gifted, unfortunately constituted man; wronged by his birth, wronged by his education, wronged most of all by himself, the world will never cease to wonder and to weep when his tragic story is told. While the language remains his words will live. Immortal poetry for youth!--new generations will learn it by heart, when the older generations are forgetting; and long after all memory of his waywardness and folly has faded from the world, his deathless songs will still sing on.

In any attempt to understand Byron, his ancestry must be much considered. It will never do to compare him with cool-headed, calm-blooded, matter-of-fact people. He was the peculiar product of a peculiar race. Coming through generations of hot, turbulent blood, which was never once mastered or tamed by its possessors, he entered the world with a temperament and disposition which made it simply impossible that he should lead the ordinary life of the British Philistine of his day.

As far back as they have been traced, the family were violent, passionate, high-spirited, but unrestrained in the indulgence of their desires by any of the cardinal principles of morality. Byron's father, one of Byron's biographers tells us, had outraged in his previous family life not only the principles of religion, but also the laws of society; and when, in 1783, he married Catherine Gordon, the wealthy heiress of Gight, Aberdeenshire, it was chiefly for the purpose of paying off his debts with her fortune. Within two years after the marriage the heiress of Gight was reduced to a pittance of one hundred and fifty pounds a year. In 1790, for economy's sake, they removed from London to Aberdeen, but soon separated.

Even after this, Captain Byron was mean-spirited enough to solicit money from his wife, and she had not the heart to refuse him. With a small supply thus obtained he crossed the channel, and in 1791 died in Valenciennes, in the North of France. Of the violent temper of Byron's mother many stories are told, and of her heartless treatment of him in his early years; so that upon neither side can we find much upon which we could expect to build a very noble or well-balanced character, and the fact seems to be that the eccentricities of the Byron family were so great as to be dangerously near the point called insanity.

A youth inheriting such blood as this, and brought up without even a pretence of moral or religious training, could hardly be expected to develop many of the domestic virtues. Neither could high-mindedness or lofty principle be predicted of him. And in truth, Byron possessed neither of these things. With this fiery Norman blood flowing in his veins, restlessness was the habitual condition of his existence, such restlessness as drove him to seek excitement at whatever cost,--quiet, as he expressed it, to the quick bosom being hell. This restlessness led him into all sorts of folly and excess, in the pursuit of new excitements. Then he was cursed with an exaggerated sensibility, which, while it gave him many rare delights in life, inflicted upon him also the keenest tortures. His massive egotism was the cause, doubtless, of many of his most marked eccentricities. He was so anxious to have the world's gaze fixed upon him that he said and did things continually for the mere purpose of holding its attention. In this way he frequently made himself appear worse than he really was. Society was held willingly in the thrall of his personality. A dull world likes to have laid bare for its inspection the pulses of a vivid existence. Byron may have been no worse than many other men of his day, for it was a time of general immorality, but he never concealed even his worst vices. While hypocrisy is a national vice in England, Byron, though essentially English in most things, never possessed this marked characteristic of his countrymen. He flaunted his vices in the light of day; and the world took a speedy revenge upon him for his audacity. The little episode of his love for Mary Chaworth occurred at so early an age that it seems scarcely probable that it affected him as seriously as he claimed; yet he was a very precocious child, and his account of the strength of his passion, and its disappointment, may not be wholly an affectation. It is difficult, too, to arrive at his real feeling toward Miss Milbank, there was so much of contradiction both in his words and in his conduct. Miss Milbank probably loved him but feared to marry him, having heard of the irregularities of his life. And certainly the sort of life which Byron had led was a very poor preparation for happiness at the fireside, and if all other causes of unhappiness had been wanting would doubtless have wrecked his union with Miss Milbank. But there were not wanting numberless other sources of misery to this ill-mated couple, first among which was the complete incompatibility of their tastes, feelings, characters. That she was a noble, intelligent, and high-principled woman, none have ever denied. The wonder was, not that she would not live with such a man as Byron, but that she could ever have married him. In charity we must decide that she was ignorant of the unspeakable degradation of such an act. That he was a famous man of genius, the most wonderfully gifted poet of his time, might have been a temptation, but it was no excuse, if she entered into the contract with her eyes open. But aside from the question of vice or virtue, there was nothing in common between them. She felt that she had fallen from the unalterable serenity and dignity of her existence, into chaos. Her natural reserve and his natural frankness were the occasion of continual clashings. Her formality and his bluntness caused constant unrest. Accustomed to the regularity of a well-ordered English household, she was miserable at the utter demoralization of their home,--of which the bailiff had possession nine times during the short year they occupied it. Formed for a calm, domestic life, she would probably have been a most admirable wife to a man suited to her virtuous tastes, but her very virtues irritated Byron.

Lady Caroline Lamb, who had loved him so madly, and on whom he had expended a temporary passion, was in her ardent nature and erratic genius much better suited to his tastes; and yet it had not taken him long to tire of her, beautiful as she had been. And were ever such bitter and cruel words addressed to a wronged woman, even though she had herself been fearfully to blame in the matter, as those sent by Byron to this poor creature, who had sent him a last touching appeal to remember her? He wrote:--

"Remember you! remember you! Until the waters of Lethe have flowed
over the burning torrent of your existence, shame and remorse will
cry in your ears, and pursue you with the delirium of fever.
Remember you! Do not doubt it, I will remember. And your husband
will also remember you. Neither of us can ever forget you. To him
you have been an unfaithful wife, and to me--a devil!"

Terrible words, which apparently changed her love to hate, for she was his relentless enemy for many years. But one day the great poet died, in Greece, the death of a hero. His body was taken back to England for burial, and Caroline Lamb stood at her window and saw the procession go by. The coffin was followed by a dog, howling piteously. Caroline uttered a heartrending cry, and sunk to the floor insensible. They raised her and placed her in her bed, from which she never rose; she was borne from it to her grave.

Such was the devotion which his fatal beauty and fascination won from women, from many women, in his brief life. It is not probable that his wife ever loved him in this way, but had she done so it seems very unlikely that they could have lived a happy life together.

For one reason, he had no faith in women. "False as a woman or an epitaph" expressed his deliberate opinion of the sex; and it must be confessed that the sort of women with whom he had best acquaintance were not calculated to give him high ideas upon the subject. This low estimate of women would have stood in the way of domestic happiness under any circumstances.

He was not ignorant of this, and in "Childe Harold" states the case thus:--

"For he through sin's long labyrinth had run,
Nor made atonement when he did amiss;
Had sighed to many, though he loved but one,
And that loved one, alas! could ne'er be his.
Ah, happy she! to 'scape from him whose kiss
Had been pollution unto aught so chaste!
Who soon had left her charms for vulgar bliss,
And spoiled her goodly lands to gild his waste,
Nor calm domestic bliss had ever deigned to taste."

It has been thought by some that had Byron had the good fortune to meet his latest love, the Countess Guiccioli, in his youth, all his stormy life might have been changed and redeemed. However this may be, she seems, so far as we can judge of her, to have been more likely to be a poet's one great love than any of the others who for a time held his wandering fancy. Beautiful as a poet's wildest dream, young, ardent, gifted, and passionately devoted to him, what more could even his exacting nature demand?--

"Educated in the gloom of the convent, the notes of the organ, the
clouds of incense, the waxen tapers burning at the feet of the
Virgin, the litanies of the nuns,--all this had filled her mind
with the poetry of the cloister, and with that mystic and
indefinable love which at the first contact with the world was
ready to change into a violent passion when it should meet with an
object upon which to fix itself."

Married as soon as she left the convent to a man selected by her parents, whom she had barely seen, and who was old enough to be her father, she was at the time Byron first saw her a melancholy and unhappy woman, much given to the reading of poetry and of the immoral novels of that time and place.

That she should love Byron at first sight was inevitable, and that which followed was almost as inevitable. She herself thus describes her first acquaintance with him:--

"His noble and exquisitely beautiful countenance, the tone of his
voice, his manners, the thousand enchantments that surrounded him,
rendered him so different and so superior a being to any by whom I
was surrounded or had hitherto seen that it was impossible he
should not have left the most profound impression upon me. From
that evening, during the whole of my subsequent stay at Venice, we
met every day."

Almost the only glimpses of quiet happiness which Byron ever enjoyed came from this association. The lovers seemed to be admirably adapted to each other, and their love knew no diminution during the short remainder of his life. And she cherished his memory with the utmost fondness throughout a long life, writing of him with unbounded enthusiasm, in her own account of her acquaintance with him, many years after his death. Byron has probably exaggerated his own unhappiness, yet there can be no doubt that much of what he describes was very real. The nobler elements of his character were constantly at war with the lower, and although he did not have sufficient strength of character to lead the noble life of which he had frequent visions, he had enough innate nobility to despise himself for the life he did lead. Doubtless there was much of truth in what he wrote in his journal in Switzerland:--

"But in all, the recollections of bitterness, and more especially
of recent and more home desolation, which must accompany one
through life, have preyed upon me here; and neither the music of
the shepherd, the crashing of the avalanche, or the torrent, the
mountain, the glacier, the forest, or the cloud, have for one
moment lightened the weight upon my heart, or enabled me to lose my
own wretched identity in the majesty, and the power, and the glory
around, above, and beneath me."

The close of Byron's life, in Greece, seems to have been one of peculiar desolation. There is something really tragic in the utter loneliness of such a death-bed. Years before, he had written concerning his death:--

"When time or soon or late shall bring
The dreamless sleep that lulls the dead,
Oblivion! may thy languid wing
Wave gently o'er my dying bed.

"No band of friends or heirs be there
To weep, or wish the coming blow;
No maiden with dishevelled hair
To feel, or feign, decorous woe.

"But silent let me sink to earth,
With no officious mourners near;
I would not mar one hour of rest
Or startle friendship with a tear."

Never was wish more literally fulfilled than this. There were none but servants about him in his last hours:--

"In all these attendants," says Parry, "there was an
over-officiousness of zeal; but as they could not understand each
other's language their zeal only added to the confusion. This
circumstance, and the want of common necessaries, made Byron's
apartment such a picture at distress and even anguish during the
last two or three days of his life as never before beheld, and have
no wish to witness again."

His remains were taken to England and interred in the family vault in the Church of Hucknall. His poems are his imperishable monument.

SHELLEY.

The beautiful face of Shelley is one that is familiar to all students of literary biography, and contends with that of Byron for the distinction of being the handsomest among the men of letters of his day. Burns was also a picture of manly beauty, whose features have long been familiar in engravings; but Byron and Shelley look the ideal poet far more than their sturdier Scottish brother. The face of Schiller was also one of great charm, and Tennyson and Longfellow in their youth were also beautiful; but the world is more familiar with the representations of their later years, and has almost forgotten the alluring eyes and the flowing locks of the youthful bards.

Shelley always had a girlish look, caused perhaps by a feeble constitution, and he suffered much from poor health, which added to the delicacy of his face. But there was a wonderful charm about his countenance even in childhood, and his eyes seemed like wells into which one might fall. There was rare sweetness in his smile, too. He was a tall man and very slender, with a certain squareness of shoulder, and great bodily litheness and activity. He had an oval face and delicate features. His forehead was high. His fine dark-brown hair disposed itself in beautiful curls over his brow and around the back of his neck. The eyes were brown, and the coloring of his face as soft as that of a girl's, in youth, though he bronzed somewhat during his life in Italy.

His countenance changed with every passing emotion; his usual look was earnest, but when joyful he was very bright and animated in expression. When sad there was something peculiarly touching in his face, and there was sometimes expressed in his look a mournful weariness of everything. But there was something noble and commanding in his aspect through all changes, something hinting of his high and noble birth, as well as of his genius. He had a peculiar voice, not powerful, but musical and expressive, and fine agreeable manners when once the shyness of youth had worn off.

That youth was a period of great unhappiness in many ways. He was irritable and sensitive, and much given to reading and brooding, at which the other children--or, as he called them "the little fiends--scoffed incessantly." He had thoughts beyond his years, and found in these his greatest happiness. He was impatient and full of impulse, with a strong dash of egotism, like most men of genius.

That he was eccentric beyond the usual eccentricities of genius is known to all the world. That he set out fully determined to live the ideal life and to reform the world, is as well known; also, that he failed in both these attempts,--partly through the limitations of his own nature, and partly that the contract was too large, even for a man of his undoubted genius.

Shelley was born in the County of Sussex, on the 4th of August, 1792. His most characteristic childish amusement seems to have been the making of chemical experiments; and his brothers and sisters were often terrified at the experiments in electricity which he tried upon them. He was also fond of making the children personate spirits or fiends, while he burned some inflammable liquid.

He was full of cheerful fun, and had all the comic vein so agreeable in a household. His benevolent impulses displayed themselves in his earliest childhood in his wish to educate some child; and he talked seriously of purchasing a little girl for that purpose, and actually entered into negotiations to that effect with a tumbler who came to the back door. His hatred of tyranny also showed itself at the earliest age, in rebellion against the rule of the old schoolmistress who educated his sisters.

He was exceedingly precocious, and was thus sent to Eton at an age much younger than other boys. He was perhaps a little proud of his birth and breeding; but it was probably more from his inborn hatred of tyranny than from the former reason, that he utterly refused to "fag" for the older boys, and in this way got himself at once into trouble in the school. Neither the cruel vituperation of his fellows nor menaces of punishment upon the part of his superiors could bend his will to an obedience which could only be yielded at the expense of self-respect. He was soon withdrawn from Eton, and was afterwards sent to Oxford. Here his first great enthusiasm was for chemistry; and the appearance of his room is thus described by a fellow-student:--

"Books, boots, papers, shoes, philosophical instruments, clothes,
pistols, linen, crockery, ammunition, and phials innumerable, with
money, stockings, paints, crucibles, bags, and boxes, were
scattered on the floor and in every place; as if the young chemist,
in order to analyze the mystery of creation, had endeavored first
to reconstruct the primeval chaos. The tables, and especially the
carpet, were already stained with large spots of various hues,
which frequently proclaimed the agency of fire. An electrical
machine, an air-pump, the galvanic trough, a solar microscope, and
large glass jars were conspicuous amidst the mass of matter. More
than one hole in the carpet could elucidate the ultimate phenomena
of combustion,--especially a formidable aperture in the middle of
the room, where the floor had also been burned by spontaneous
combustion; and the horrible wound was speedily enlarged by
rents,--for the philosopher as he hastily crossed the room in
pursuit of truth, was frequently caught in it by the foot."

No student ever read more assiduously than he; and one of his chums said to him, after he had literally read all day:--

"If I read as long as you read, Shelley, my hair and my teeth would
be strewed about on the floor, and my eyes would slip down into my
waistcoat pockets."

It was only by attracting his attention by some extravagance that he could be drawn away from his books. He seldom stopped to take a regular meal, but would have his pockets stuffed with bread, from which he ate from time to time, anywhere he chanced to be. When he was walking in London he would suddenly run into a baker's shop, purchase a supply, and breaking a loaf, offer half of it to his companion; if it was refused he would wonder that his friend did not like bread, and could scarcely appreciate the joke when they laughed at him for devouring two or three pounds of dry bread in the streets.

Very early in life he began to have decided opinions upon religious topics; and for some of his so-called atheistic tendencies, embodied in his writings, he was expelled from Oxford at the age of seventeen, without a word of friendly remonstrance upon the part of the authorities, or any attempt whatever to counteract the errors which he had imbibed from the reading of French philosophy. We can scarcely believe it at this day, but it was true.

"At seventeen," says Mrs. Shelley, "fragile in health and frame, of
the purest habits in morals, full of devoted generosity and
universal kindness, glowing with ardor to attain wisdom, resolved
at every personal sacrifice to do right, burning with a desire for
affection and sympathy, he was treated as a reprobate, cast forth
as a criminal."

Even his father cast him off on account of his impious opinions, and added his curse; and had he been in the way of procuring a _lettre de cachet_, like Mirabeau's father, he would certainly have sent him to Newgate and kept him there. As it was, all his friends deserted him, and he lived in lodgings in London, in a very irregular manner, for some time. Even his cousin Harriet Grove, with whom he had been in love in his boyish way for a long time, gave him up, and soon after married another. The affair was not a serious one upon the part of either; but it cost Shelley some tears at the time. He soon consoled himself, however, with a schoolmate of his sisters whom he sometimes met when he went to visit them. Harriet Westbrook was empowered by his sisters to convey to Percy such sums of money as they could gather for him; for his father had refused to assist him, and he was in absolute want at this time. She appeared to Shelley in the guise of a ministering angel, and his imagination at once took fire. She was a comely, pleasing, amiable, ordinary girl, who felt herself oppressed because obliged to go to school, and excited Shelley's sympathy by appearing unhappy. He soon became entangled with her and her sister, who was older, and who is accused of furthering the intrigue out of ambition, thinking that the son of a baronet must be a great match. He writes to a friend in May, 1811:--

"You will perhaps see me before you can answer this; perhaps not;
Heaven knows. I shall certainly come to York, but Harriet Westbrook
will decide whether now or in three weeks. Her father has
persecuted her in a most horrible way by endeavoring to compel her
to go to school. She asked my advice; resistance was the
answer,--at the same time that I essayed to mollify Mr. W. in vain.
And in consequence of my advice, _she_ has thrown herself upon _my_
protection."

The whole history of Shelley's courtship of Harriet--or of her courtship of him, as many of his friends put it--will probably never be written. It seems to have been promoted by others quite as much as by themselves. That her father was not averse to her marriage with the eldest son of a baronet may be taken for granted, and Shelley was the very man to be duped by designing parties; of this there can be no doubt. He was but nineteen years old, and she but sixteen, when they eloped,--of which proceeding there does not seem to have been any especial need,--and proceeded to Edinburgh, where they were married. By the time they reached Edinburgh their money was gone, and Shelley laid the case before his landlord, and asked him to advance money enough so that they might be married. To this the landlord consented, and the ceremony was performed. But the landlord, it appears, presumed somewhat upon the aid he had rendered, and in the evening, when Shelley and his bride were alone together, he knocked at the door and told them it was customary there for the guests to come in, in the middle of the night, and wash the bride with whiskey.

"I immediately," says Shelley, "caught up my brace of pistols, and
pointing them both at him, said to him, 'I have had enough of your
impertinence; if you give me any more of it I will blow your brains
out;' on which he ran or rather tumbled downstairs, and I bolted
the doors."

Even before the honeymoon was over, Harriet's sister Eliza, the evil genius of the pair, appeared upon the scene. The friend who was with them at the time thus describes her advent:--

"The house lay, as it were, under an interdict; all our accustomed
occupations were suspended; study was forbidden; reading was
injurious; to read aloud might terminate fatally. To go abroad was
death; to stay at home the grave. Bysshe became nothing; I of
course much less than nothing,--a negative quantity of a very high
figure."

That Harriet already had peculiar notions of her own was soon evident. The same friend writes:--

"'What do you think of suicide?' said Harriet one day. 'Did you
ever think of destroying yourself?' It was a puzzling question, for
indeed the thought had never entered my head. 'What do you think of
matricide, of high treason, of rick-burning? Did you ever think of
killing any one? of murdering your mother? or setting rick-yards on
fire?' I replied."

But Harriet often discoursed at great length, in a calm, resolute manner, of her purpose of killing herself some day or other. Of their after-housekeeping in London lodgings Hogg writes:--

"Our dinners therefore were constructive, a dumb show, a mere empty
idle ceremony; our only resource against absolute starvation was
tea. Penny-buns were our assured resource. The survivors of those
days of peril and hardship are indebted for their existence to the
humane interposition and succor of penny-buns. A shilling's worth
of penny-buns for tea. If the purchase was intrusted to the maid,
she got such buns as none could believe to have been made on earth,
proving thereby incontestably that the girl had some direct
communication with the infernal regions, where they alone could
have been procured."

The married life was on the whole, when not a roaring farce, almost a tragedy. Harriet's sister was, like the poor, always with them. Shelley grew to hate her, and tried in every way to be delivered from her presence, but in vain. Harriet would not live without her, and paid little attention to anybody else when she was present. Two children were born to them, but even the children Shelley was not permitted to enjoy without the constant supervision of Eliza. He became nearly frantic from the constant annoyance, and finally a separation came about between the ill-mated pair. The women themselves became tired of the moping and inefficient youth, who still remained poor and unsettled, with a father desperately healthy and inexorable. They grew tired and went away,--the wife, like Lady Byron, refusing to go back to such an aimless, rhapsodizing husband. And in truth, the hardship of living with such a man as Shelley, for a woman like Harriet, must have been very great. It is easy to understand how a limited nature like hers should be worn out by the exaction and impracticability of one like Shelley; for to her, most impracticable would seem his lofty and ideal requirements. The parting was not unfriendly, and Shelley always spoke of her with deep kindness and pity, and she continued to write to him for some time after he had formed his connection with Mary Godwin, of which she did not seem to disapprove. He had found a sort of comfort in his intercourse with Mary from his first acquaintance with her, and she was probably the first woman he had ever known who in any way understood or appreciated him. Some lines have been given in the "Relics," written to her at this time, which run thus:--

"Upon my heart thy accents sweet
Of peace and pity fell like dew
On flowers half-dead. . . .

"We are not happy, sweet! our state
Is strange and full of doubt and fear;
More need of words that ills abate;--
Reserve or censure come not near
Our sacred friendship, lest there be
No solace left for thee or me."

Shelley and Mary seem to have been very happy with each other from the first, although they felt the keenest sorrow at his being deprived by the Court of Chancery of the guardianship of his children, on the alleged grounds of his atheism, and although they were inexpressibly pained and shocked at the suicide of Harriet, which occurred about two years after the separation.

Her death seems to have had no immediate connection with any act of Shelley's, but he mourned over it with great bitterness to the end of his life. He married Mary in a legal manner soon after Harriet's death, and of course a most violent storm of detraction and denunciation burst upon his head. He soon retired to Italy, where he first met Byron, and he passed nearly all the rest of his life there. Poor Harriet was only twenty-two at the time of her tragic death. Whatever may have been the errors of her life, she had suffered much in their expiation. After her return to her father's house it appears that she was treated with unkindness, and fell into some irregularities of life,--how great, remains still a disputed point. But no one charges anything against her up to the time of her separation from Shelley, except that she was almost as foolish and impracticable as himself.

Shelley's fancy for her was that of a mere boy, and his friend Mr. Peacock thus describes the conflict of his feelings after meeting Mary Godwin:--

"Between his old feelings towards Harriet, from whom he was not
then separated, and his new passion for Mary, he showed in his
looks, in his gestures, in his speech, the state of a mind
suffering, like a little kingdom, the nature of an insurrection.
His eyes were bloodshot, his hair and dress disordered. He
frequently repeated the lines from Sophocles,--

'Man's happiest lot is not to be;
And when we tread life's thorny steep,
Most blest are they who, earliest free,
Descend to death's eternal sleep.'"

Godwin, it appears, tried hard to re-unite Shelley and Harriet, and disapproved entirely of the new connection. Mary was but seventeen years old, very beautiful, and possessed of genius; and her father, moral considerations entirely aside, did not look upon Shelley as a suitable husband for her. But Shelley had conceived for her the one violent, uncontrollable passion of his life, and she was very easily brought under his influence, in spite of the disapproval of her father. Mary had not been brought up with conventional ideas upon the subject of marriage (her own mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, having had very unusual opinions upon that subject), and she fell an easy victim to Shelley's impassioned eloquence, when he urged her to flee with him from an uncongenial home. Shelley appeared to Mary as almost a divine being, and her worshipful love never waned, even during her long widowhood of thirty years' duration. For Shelley, in the whole matter, there seems to be no valid excuse. He deliberately defied the world and the world's ways, and even his memory must bear the fatal consequences. If we allow his genius to excuse his acts, we are setting up a precedent which we have only to imagine universally carried out to produce not only moral revolution but chaos throughout the social world. He sinned like an ordinary mortal, he suffered also in the same wise, and in the memory of man he must be held to the same responsibility as his fellows. But his unworldliness may well be taken into the account. He lived in a sort of dreamworld of his own, and the thoughts and opinions and feelings of ordinary men upon matters of life and conduct were so different from his that he could hardly comprehend the value they had in the eyes of their possessors. Born to rank and wealth, he desired to induce every rich man to despoil himself of superfluity, and to create a brotherhood of property and service, and was ready to be the first one to lay down the advantages of his birth. Born with the most fanatical love of liberty, he looked upon all the conventionalities of the world as tyranny, and defied all restraints of authority from his earliest youth. He believed the opinions he entertained to be true, and he loved truth with a martyr's love; he was ready to sacrifice station and fortune and his dearest affections at her shrine. With the rashness of youth he proclaimed all the wildest of his opinions, and upheld them with uncompromising zeal. In his acts he rushed into the face of the world in the same defiant manner; and the world did not fail to take her revenge upon him. But posterity will do him justice; it will see him, noble, kind, passionate, generous, tender, brave, with an unbounded and unquestioning love for his fellow-men, with a holy and fervid hope in their ultimate virtue and happiness, and an intense and passionate scorn for all baseness and oppression.

Already about his grave in a foreign land there gather many pilgrims, not only from his own country, but from beyond the sea; and as they read the inscription there,--

"Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea change into something rich and strange,"--

they think that the misconceptions which hung over him during life are gradually suffering such a change, and they thank God amid their tears.

WASHINGTON IRVING.

It is a little over one hundred years since Washington Irving was born; and it is nearly thirty years since he ceased to charm the reading world by the work of his genial and graceful pen. For fifty long and fruitful years he was our pride and boast, and his memory will for many a long year yet be green in the hearts of his countrymen. He was our first and best humorist. Before his advent, what little writing had been done in this country was mostly of the sentimental and tearful sort. And for many years after he began to write, it was much the same. Weeping poetesses filled whole columns with their tears, and in every local sheet new Werthers were trying to tell of the worthlessness of life and the beauties of dying. Young bards were inditing odes to melancholy, and everybody was chanting in chorus, if not the words, at least the sentiment of, "how sublime a thing it is to suffer and be strong." There was no laughter in the land.

Could a collection of these mournful melodies have been made, and these lorn lyrists have been induced to glance over it, it seems to us that they must have received it with inextinguishable laughter. Each delicate little wail when taken by itself was not so bad, but the united wail of this band of broken-hearted singers would have produced, instead of tears, laughter both long and deep. This doleful period lasted long after Irving had begun to write in a different vein, and has lasted in too large a measure even to this day; but he began the corrective process, and has had more influence for good in that direction than any of our other writers. At a later day Dr. Holmes began to write almost, if not quite, "as funny as he could." Charles G. Leland, in his "Sunshine-in-Thought" series, in the old "Knickerbocker," ridiculed the prevailing weakness so forcibly and effectually that some stopped groaning through sheer shame. Charles Dudley Warner sent a smile over the set features of the nation when he wrote of his "Summer in a Garden;" and Willis told in his "Fun Jottings" about some of the laughs he had taken a pen to. But none of these had the magic touch of Irving, although each in his own way was inimitable; and during these later years, when the professional humorist has become one of our established institutions, no writer has arisen to wear the mantle which fell from the shoulders of Washington Irving. Bret Harte, doubtless, made us laugh more. Irving could by no possibility ever have written the "Heathen Chinee," or those other bits of compressed humor called Poems; but Bret Harte is not exactly a lineal descendant of Irving. Mark Twain also can produce a roar, a thing which Irving never did. But, though it has been a good thing for the American people to roar with Mark Twain, we are all desirous to see some writer arise who, with as keen an eye as his for the humorous side of life, shall have a delicacy of touch which he lacks, and a refinement of expression to which he is a stranger.

Washington Irving was born in the city of New York in 1783, the youngest of eleven children born to his parents. At that time New York was a rural city of twenty-three thousand inhabitants clustered about the Battery. The Irvings were descendants of the old Scotch Covenanters, and were strict Presbyterians. The home rule was one of austerity and repression. The children were brought up on the catechism and the Thirty-Nine Articles. As they grew older all were repelled from the church of the father by the severity of its dogmas, and all except one attached themselves to the Episcopal Church. Washington, we are told by Mr. Warner, "in order to make sure of his escape and feel safe, while he was still constrained to attend his father's church, went stealthily to Trinity Church at an early age and received the rite of confirmation." He was of a joyous and genial temperament, full of life and vivacity, and not at all inclined to religious seriousness. He was born with a passion for music, and was also a great lover of the theatre. These things, in the eyes of his father, were serious evils, and he felt great anxiety for the son's spiritual welfare. The gladsomeness and sportiveness of the boy's nature were things which he could not understand, and he feared that they were of the Evil One. There was no room in the darkness of his religions creed for anything that was simply bright and joyous. To save one's soul was the business of life; all things else were secondary and of small importance. Of course, he worried much over this handsome, dashing, susceptible, music-loving, laughter-loving son, and doubtless shed many tears over his waywardness. Yet there was nothing wild about the boy. The writing of plays seems to have been his worst boyish offence. His first published writings were audacious satires upon the theatre, the actors, and the local audiences. They had some promise, and attracted some attention in the poverty of those times.

At the age of twenty-one he was in such delicate health that a voyage to Europe was looked upon as the only means of saving his life. He accordingly embarked for Bordeaux and made an extended tour of Europe, loitering in many places for weeks at a time, and laying up a store of memories which gave him pleasure throughout life. In Rome he came across Washington Allston, then unknown to fame. He was about three years older than Irving, and just establishing himself as a painter. Irving was completely captivated with the young Southerner, and they formed a very romantic friendship for each other.

Irving even dreamed of remaining in Rome and turning artist himself, that he might always be near his friend. He had a great dread of returning to the New World and settling down to the uncongenial work of the law, and he fancied he had some talent for art. He certainly had one essential qualification,--a passionate love of color, and an eye for its harmonies. This love was a great source of pleasure to him throughout life. He always thought that he might have succeeded as a landscape painter. However this might be, the gift of color-loving is in itself a rich endowment to any mind. There are few purer and higher sources of enjoyment in this life than this love of color, and it is a possession which ought to be cultivated in every child.

But the art scheme was soon abandoned, and he went on to London, where he began his literary work. His name of Washington attracted considerable attention there, and he was frequently asked if he was a relative of General Washington. A few years later, after he had written the "Sketch Book," two women were overheard in conversation near the bust of Washington in a large gallery. "Mother, who was Washington?" "Why, my dear, don't you know?" was the reply, "he wrote the 'Sketch Book.'"