Chapter XII: Part 12

Sir Thomas More with his flashes of playfulness, or Charles with his solemn 'Remember,' could scarcely play their parts more gallantly than Colonel Turner, and they had the advantage of a belief in the goodness of their cause. Perhaps it is illogical to sympathise all the more with poor Colonel Turner, because we know that his courage had not the adventitious aid of a good conscience. But surely he was a very prince of burglars! We turn a page and come to a very different question of casuistry. Law and morality are at a deadlock. Instead of the florid, swaggering cavalier, we have a pair of Quakers, Margaret Fell, and the famous George Fox, arguing with the most irritating calmness and logic against the imposition of an oath. 'Give me the book in my hand,' says Fox; and they are all gazing in hopes that he is about to swear. Then he holds up the Bible and exclaims, 'This book commands me not to swear.' To which dramatic argument (the report, it is to be observed, comes from Fox's side) there is no possible reply but to 'pluck the book forth of his hand again,' and send him back to prison. The Quakers vanish in their invincible passiveness; and in the next page we find ourselves at Bury St. Edmunds. The venerated Sir Matthew Hale is on the bench, and the learned and eloquent Sir Thomas Browne appears in the witness-box. They listen to a wretched story of two poor old women accused of bewitching children. The children swear that they have been tormented by imps, in the shape of flies, which flew into their mouths with crooked pins—the said imps being presumably the diabolical emissaries of the witches. Then Sir Thomas Browne gravely delivers his opinion; he quotes a case of witchcraft in Denmark, and decides, after due talk about 'superabundant humours' and judicious balancing of conflicting considerations, that the fits into which the children fell were strictly natural, but 'heightened to a great excess by the subtlety of the devil co-operating with the malice of the witches.' An 'ingenious person,' however, suggests an experiment. The child who had sworn that the touch of the witch threw her into fits, was blindfolded and touched by another person passed off as the witch. The young sinner fell into the same fits, and the 'ingenious person' pronounced the whole affair to be an imposture. However, a more ingenious person gets up and proves by dexterous logic, curiously like that of a detected 'medium' of to-day, that, on the contrary, it confirms the evidence.[10] Whereupon the witches were found guilty, the judge and all the court being fully satisfied with the verdict, and were hanged accordingly, though absolutely refusing to confess.

Our ancestors' justice strikes us as rather heavy-handed and dull-eyed on these occasions. In another class of trials we see the opposite phase—the manifestation of that curious tenderness which has shown itself in so many forms since the days when highway robbery appeared to be a graceful accomplishment if practised by a wild Prince and Poins. Things were made delightfully easy in the race which flourished after the Restoration. Every Peer, by the amazing privilege of the 'benefit of clergy,' had a right to commit one manslaughter. Like a schoolboy, he was allowed to plead 'first fault;' and a good many Peers took advantage of the system.

Lord Morley, for example, has a quarrel 'about half-a-crown.' A Mr. Hastings, against whom he has some previous grudge, contemptuously throws down four half-crowns. Therefore Lord Morley and an attendant bully insult Hastings, assault him repeatedly, and at last fall upon him 'just under the arch in Lincoln's Inn Fields,' and there Lord Morley stabs him to death, 'with a desperate imprecation.' The Attorney-General argues that this shows malice, and urges that Mr. Hastings, too, was a man of good family. But the Peers only find their fellow guilty of manslaughter. He claims his privilege, and is dismissed with a benevolent admonition not to do it again. Elsewhere, we have Lord Cornwallis and a friend coming out of Whitehall in the early morning, drunk and using the foulest language. After trying in vain to quarrel with a sentinel, they swear that they will kill somebody before going home. An unlucky youth comes home to his lodgings close by, and after some abuse from the Peer and his friend, the lad is somehow tumbled downstairs and killed on the spot. As it seems not to be clear whether Lord Cornwallis gave the fatal kick, he is honourably acquitted. Then we have a free fight at a tavern, where Lord Pembroke is drinking with a lot of friends. One of them says that he is as good a gentleman as Lord Pembroke. The witnesses were all too drunk to remember how and why anything happened; but after a time one of them is kicked out of the tavern; another, a Mr. Cony, is knocked down and trampled, and swears that he has received what turned out some days later to be mortal injuries from the boots of Lord Pembroke. The case is indeed, doubtful; for the doctor who was called in refused to make a post-mortem examination on the ground that it might lead him into 'a troublesome matter;' and another was disposed to attribute the death to poor Mr. Cony's inordinate love of 'cold small beer.' He drank three whole tankards the night before his death; and when actually dying, declined 'white wine posset drink,' suggested by the doctor, and 'swore a great oath he would have small beer.' And so he died, whether by boots or beer; and the Lord High Steward in due time had to inform Lord Pembroke that his lordship was guilty of manslaughter but, being entitled to his clergy, was to be discharged on paying his fees. The most sinister figure amongst these wild gallants is the Lord Mohun, who killed, and was killed by, the Duke of Hamilton, as all the readers of the 'Journals' of Swift or of 'Colonel Esmond' remember. He appears twice in the collection. On December 9, 1690, Mohun and his friend Colonel Hill came swaggering into the play-house, and got from the pit upon the stage. An attendant asks them to pay for their places; whereupon Lord Mohun nobly refuses, saying, 'If you bring any of your masters I will slit their noses.' The pair have a coach-and-six waiting in the street to carry off Mrs. Bracegirdle, to whom Hill has been making love. As she is going home to supper, they try to force her into it with the help of half-a-dozen soldiers. The bystanders prevent this; but the pair insist upon seeing Mrs. Bracegirdle to her house, and mount guard outside with their swords drawn. Mrs. Bracegirdle and her friends stand listening at the door, and hear them vowing vengeance against Mountford, of whom Hill was jealous. Presently the watch appears—the constable and the beadle, and a man in front with a lantern. The constable asks why are the swords drawn. Mrs. Bracegirdle through the door hears Mohun reply, 'I am a Peer of England, touch me if you dare.' 'God bless your honour,' replies the constable, 'I know not what you are, but I hope you are doing no harm.' 'No,' said he. 'You may knock me down, if you please,' adds Colonel Hill. 'Nay, said I' (the lantern-bearer), 'we never use to knock gentlemen down unless there be occasion.' And the judicious watch retire to a tavern in the next street, in order, as they say, 'to examine what they (Mohun and Hill) were, and what they were doing.' There was, as the constable explains, 'a drawer there, who had formerly lived over against him,' and might throw some light upon the proceedings of these polite gentlemen. But, alas! 'in the meantime the murder was done.' For as another witness tells us, Mr. Mountford came up the street and was speaking coolly to Mohun, when Hill came up behind and gave him a box on the ear. 'Saith Mr. Mountford, what's that for? And with that he (Hill) whipped out his sword and made a pass at him, and I turned about and cried murder!' Mountford was instantly killed; but witnesses peeping through doors, and looking out of windows, gave conflicting accounts of the scuffle in the dim street, and Lord Mohun, after much argument as to the law, was acquitted. Five years later, he appears in the case reported by Esmond, with little more than a change in the names. An insensate tavern-brawl is followed by an adjournment to Leicester Fields; six noblemen and gentlemen in chairs; Mr. Coote, the chief actor in the quarrel, urging his chairman by threatening to goad him with his sword. The gentlemen get over the railings and vanish into the 'dark wet' night, whilst the chairmen philosophically light their pipes. The pipes are scarcely alight, when there is a cry for help. Somehow a chair is hoisted over the rails, and poor Mr. Coote is found prostrate in a pool of blood. The chairmen strongly object to spoiling their chairs by putting a 'bloody man' into them. They are pacified by a promise of 100_l._ security; but the chair is somehow broken, and the watch will not come to help, because it is out of their ward; 'and I staid half-an-hour,' says the chief witness pathetically, 'with my chair broken, and afterwards I was laid hold upon, both I and my partner, and kept till next night at eleven o'clock; and that is all the satisfaction I have had for my chair and everything.' This damage to the chair was clearly the chief point of interest for poor Robert Browne, the chairman, and it may be feared that his account is still unsettled. Mohun escaped upon this occasion, and, indeed, Esmond is unjust in giving to him a principal part in the tragedy.

Such were the sights to be seen occasionally in London by the watchman's lantern or the candle glimmering across the narrow alley, or some occasional lamp swinging across the street; for it was by such a lamp that a girl looked into the hackney coach and saw the face of a man who had sent for Dr. Clench ostensibly to visit a patient, but really in order to strangle the poor doctor on the way. These are strange illuminations on the margin of the pompous page of official history; and the incidental details give form and colour to the incidents in Pepys' 'Journals' or Grammont's 'Memoirs.' We have kept at a distance from the more dignified records of the famous constitutional struggles which fill the greatest number of pages. Yet those pages are not barren for the lover of the picturesque. And here I must put in a word for one much reviled character. If ever I were to try my hand at the historical amusement of whitewashing, I should be tempted to take for my hero the infamous Jeffreys. He was, I dare say, as bad as he is painted; so perhaps were Nero and Richard III., and other much-abused persons; but no miscreant of them all could be more amusing. Wherever the name of Jeffreys appears we may be certain of good sport. With all his inexpressible brutality, his buffoonery, his baseness, we can see that he was a man of remarkable talent. We think of him generally as he appeared when bullying Baxter; when 'he snorted and squeaked, blew his nose and clenched his hands, and lifted up his eyes, mimicking their (the Nonconformists') manner, and running on furiously, as he said they used to pray;' and we may regard him as his victims must have regarded him, as a kind of demoniacal baboon placed on the bench in robes and wig, in hideous caricature of justice. But the vigour and skill of the man when he has to worry the truth out of a stubborn witness is also amazing. When a knavish witness produced a forged deed in support of the claim of a certain Lady Ity to a great part of Shadwell, Jeffreys is in his element. He is perhaps a little too exuberant. 'Ask him what questions you will,' he breaks out, 'but if he should swear as long as Sir John Falstaff fought' (the Chief Justice can quote Shakespeare), 'I would never believe a word he says.' His lordship may be too violent, but he is substantially doing justice; and shows himself a dead hand at unmasking a cheat. The most striking proof of Jeffreys' power is in the dramatic trial of Lady Lisle. The poor lady was accused of harbouring one Hicks, a Dissenting preacher, after Sedgemoor. It was clear that a certain James Dunne had guided Hicks to Lady Lisle's house. The difficulty was to prove that Lady Lisle knew Hicks to be a traitor. Dunne had talked to her in presence of another witness, and it was suggested that he had given her the fatal information. But Dunne tried hard in telling his story to sink this vital fact. The effort of Jeffreys to twist it out of poor Dunne, and Dunne's futile and prolonged wriggling to escape the confession, are reported at full, and form one of the most striking passages in the 'State Trials.' Jeffreys shouts at him; dilates in most edifying terms upon the bottomless lake of fire and brimstone which awaits all perjurers; snatches at any slip; pins the witness down; fastens inconsistencies upon him through page after page; but poor Dunne desperately clutches the secret in spite of the tremendous strain. He almost seems to have escaped, when the other witness establishes the fact that some conversation took place. Armed with this new thumbscrew, Jeffreys leaps upon poor Dunne again. The storm of objurgations, appeals, confutations, bursts forth with increased force; poor Dunne slips into a fatal admission; he has admitted some talk, but cannot explain what it was. He tries dogged silence. The torture of Jeffreys' tongue urges him to fresh blundering. A candle is held up to his nose that the court 'may see his brazen face.' At last he exclaims, the candle 'still nearer to his nose,' and feeling himself the very focus of all attention, 'I am quite cluttered out of my senses; I do not know what I say.' The wretched creature is allowed to reflect for a time, and then at last declares that he will tell the truth. He tells enough in fact for the purpose, though he feebly tries to keep back the most damning words. Enough has been wrenched out of him to send poor Lady Lisle to the scaffold. The figure of the poor old lady falling asleep, as it is said, while Jeffreys' thunder and lightning was raging in this terrific fashion round the feeble defence of Dunne's reticence, is so pathetic, and her fate so piteous and disgraceful, that we have little sense for anything but Jeffreys' brutality. But if the power of worming the truth out of a grudging witness were the sole test of a judge's excellence, we must admit the amazing efficiency of Jeffreys' method. He is the ideal cross-examiner, and we may overlook the cruelty to victims who have so long ceased to suffer.

In the post-revolutionary period the world becomes more merciful and duller. Lawyers speak at greater length; and even the victims of '45, the strange Lord Lovat himself, give little sport at the respectable bar of the House of Lords. But the domestic trials become perhaps more interesting, if only by way of commentary upon 'Tom Jones' or 'Roderick Random.' Novelists indeed have occasionally sought to turn these records to account. The great Annesley case has been used by Mr. Charles Reade, and Scott took some hints from it in one of the very best of his performances, the inimitable 'Guy Mannering.' Scott's adaptation should, indeed, be rather a warning than a precedent; for the surpassing merit of his great novel consists in the display of character, in Meg Merrilies and Dandie Dinmont and Counsellor Pleydell, and certainly not in the rather childish plot with the long-lost heir business. He falls into the common error of supposing that the actual occurrence of events must be a sufficient guarantee for employing them in fiction. The Annesley case is almost the only one in the collection in which facts descend to the level of romance. The claimant's case was clearly established up to a certain point. There was no doubt that he had passed for Lord Annesley's son in his childhood; that he had for that reason been spirited away by his uncle, and sold as a slave in America; and, further, that, when he returned to make his claim and killed a man by accident (an incident used by Scott)—his uncle did his best to have him convicted for murder. The more difficult point was to prove that he was the legitimate son of the deceased lord by his wife, who was also dead. A servant of the supposed mother gave evidence which, if true, conclusively disproved this assumption; and though young Annesley won his first trial, he afterwards failed to convict this witness of perjury. The case may therefore be still doubtful, though the weight of evidence seems decidedly against the claimant. The case—the 'longest ever known' at that time—lasted fifteen days, and gives some queer illustrations of the domestic life of a disreputable Irish nobleman of the period. Perhaps, however, the most curious piece of evidence is given by the attorney who was employed to prosecute the claimant for a murder of which he was clearly innocent. 'What was the intention of the prosecution?' he is asked. 'To put this man out of the way that he (Lord Anglesea, the uncle) might enjoy the estate easy and quiet.' 'You understood, then, that Lord Anglesea would give 10,000_l._ to get the plaintiff hanged!' 'I did.' 'Did you not apprehend that to be a most wicked crime?' 'I did.' 'If so, how could you engage in that project, without making any objection to it?' 'I may as well ask you,' is the reply, 'how you came to be engaged in this suit.' He is afterwards asked whether any honest man would do such an action. 'Yes, I believe they would, or else I would not have carried it on.' This is one of the prettiest instances on record of that ingenious adaptation of the conscience, which allows a man to think himself thoroughly honest for committing a most wicked crime in his professional capacity. The novelist who wishes rather to display character than to amuse us with intricacies of plot, will find more matter in less ambitious narratives. A most pathetic romance, which may remind us of more famous fictions, underlies the great murder case in which Cowper, the poet's grandfather, was defendant. Sarah Stout, the daughter of a Quaker at Hertford, fell desperately in love with Cowper, who was a barrister, and sometimes lodged at her father's house when on circuit. She wrote passionate letters to him of the 'Eloisa to Abelard' kind, which Cowper was ultimately forced to produce in evidence. He therefore had a final interview with her, explained to her the folly of her passion, there being already a Mrs. Cowper, and left her late in the evening to go to his lodgings elsewhere. Poor Sarah Stout rushed out in despair and threw herself into the Priory river. There she was found dead next morning, when the miller came to pull up his sluices. All the gossips of Hertford came immediately to look at the body and make moral or judicial reflections upon the facts. Wiseacres suggested that Cowper was the last man seen in her company, and it came out that two or three other men attending the assizes had gossiped about her on the previous evening, and one of them had, strange to relate, left a cord close by his trunk. These facts, transfigured by the Hertford imagination, became the nucleus of a theory, set forth in delicious legal verbosity, that the said Cowper, John Masson, and others 'a certain rope of no value about the neck of the said Sarah, then and there feloniously, voluntarily, and of malice aforethought did put, place, fix, and bind; and the neck and throat of the said Sarah, then and there with the hands of you, the said Cowper, Masson, Stephens, and Rogers, feloniously, voluntarily, and of your malice aforethought, did hold, squeeze, and gripe.' By the said squeezing and griping, to abbreviate a little, Sarah Stout was choked and strangled; and being choked and strangled instantly died, and was then secretly and maliciously put and cast into the river. The evidence, it is plain, required a little straining, but then Cowper belonged to the great Whig family of the town, and Sarah Stout was a Quaker. Tories thought it would be well to get a Cowper hanged, and Quakers wished to escape the imputation that one of their sect had committed suicide. The trial lasted so long that the poor judge became faint and confessed that he could not sum up properly. The whole strength of the case, however, such as it was, depended upon an ingenious theory set up by the prosecution, to the effect that the bodies of the drowned always sink, whereas Miss Stout was found floating, and must therefore have been dead before she was put in the river. The chief witness was a sailor, who swore that this doctrine as to sinking and swimming was universal in the navy. He had seen the shipwreck of the 'Coronation' in 1691. 'We saw the ship sink down,' he says, 'and they swam up and down like a shoal of fish one over another, and I see them hover one upon another, and see them drop away by scores at a time;' some nine escaped, 'but there were no more saved out of the ship's complement, which was between 500 and 600, and the rest I saw sinking downright, twenty at a time.' He has a clinching argument, though a less graphic instance, to prove that men already dead do not sink. 'Otherwise, why should Government be at that vast charge to allow threescore or fourscore weight of iron to sink every man, but only that their swimming about should not be a discouragement to others?' Cowper's scientific witnesses, some of the medical bigwigs of the day, had very little trouble in confuting this evidence; but the letters which he at last produced, and the evidence that poor Miss Stout had been talking of suicide, should have made the whole story clear even to the bemuddled judges. The novelist would throw into the background this crowd of gossiping and malicious _quidnuncs_ of Hertford; but we must be content to catch glimpses of her previous history from these absurdly irrelevant twaddlings, as in actual life we catch sight of tragedies below the surface of social small-talk. Sarah Stout was clearly a Maggie Tulliver, a potential heroine, unable to be happy amidst the broad-brimmed, drab-coated respectabilities of quiet little Hertford. Her rebellion was rasher than Maggie's, but perhaps in a more characteristic fashion. The case suggests the wish that Mr. Stephen Guest might have been hanged on some such suspicion as was nearly fatal to Cowper.

Half a century later our ancestors were in a state of intense excitement about another tragedy of a darker kind. Mary Blandy, the only daughter of a gentleman at Henley, made acquaintance with a Captain Cranstoun, who was recruiting in the town. The father objected to a marriage from a suspicion, apparently well founded, that Cranstoun was already married in Scotland. Thereupon Mary Blandy administered to her father certain powders sent to her by Cranstoun. According to her own account, she intended them as a kind of charm to act upon her father's affections. As they were, in fact, composed of arsenic, they soon put an end to her father altogether, and it is too clear that she really knew what she was doing. It was sworn that she used brutal and unfeeling language about the poor old man's sufferings, for the poison was given at intervals during some months. But the pathetic touch which moved the sympathies of contemporaries was the behaviour of the father. In the last day or two of his life, he was told that his daughter had been the cause of his fatal illness. His comment was: 'Poor love-sick girl! What will not a woman do for the man she loves!' When she came to his room his only thought was apparently to comfort her. His most reproachful phrase was: 'Thee should have considered better than to have attempted anything against thy father.' The daughter went down on her knees and begged him not to curse her. 'I curse thee!' he exclaimed. 'My dear, how couldst thou think I should curse thee? No, I bless thee, and hope God will bless thee and amend thy life.' And then he added, 'Do, my dear, go out of the room and say no more, lest thou shouldst say anything to thy prejudice; go to thy uncle Stevens, take him for thy friend; poor man, I am sorry for him.' The tragedy behind these homely words is almost too pathetic and painful for dramatic purposes; and it is not strange that our ancestors were affected. The sympathy, however, took the queer illogical twist which perhaps, who can tell? it might do at the present day. Miss Blandy became a sort of _quasi_ saint, the tenderness due to the murdered man extended itself to his murderer, and her penitence profoundly edified all observers. Crowds of people flocked to see her in chapel, and she accepted the homage gracefully. She was extremely shocked, we are told, by one insinuation made by uncharitable persons; namely, that her intimacy with Cranstoun, who was supposed to be a freethinker, might justify doubts upon her orthodoxy. She declared that he had always talked to her 'perfectly in the style of a Christian,' and she had read the works of some of our most celebrated divines. In spite of her moving conduct, however, the 'prejudices she had to struggle with had taken too deep root in some men's minds' to allow of her getting a pardon. And so, 5,000 people saw poor Miss Blandy mount the ladder in 'a black bombazine, short sack and petticoat,' on an April morning at Oxford, and many, 'particularly several gentlemen of the University,' were observed to shed tears. She left a declaration of innocence which, in spite of its solemnity, must have been a lie; and which contained an allusion from which it appears that Miss Blandy, like other prisoners, was suspected of previous crimes.

'It is shocking to think,' says Horace Walpole, in noticing Miss Blandy's case, 'what a shambles this country has become. Seventeen were executed this morning, after having murdered the turnkey on Friday night, and almost forced open Newgate.' Another woman was hanged in the same year for murdering her uncle at Walthamstow; and the public could talk about nothing but the marriage of the Miss Gunnings and the hanging of two murderesses. Fielding, then approaching the end of his career, was moved by this and other atrocities to publish a queer collection of instances of the providential punishment of murderers. Another famous author of the day was commonly said to have turned a famous murder to account in a different fashion. Foote, it is said, was introduced at a club in the words, 'This is the nephew of the gentleman who was lately hung in chains for murdering his brother;' and it is added that Foote's first pamphlet was an account of this disagreeable domestic incident. A more serious author might have found in it materials for a striking narrative. Captain Goodere commanded his Majesty's ship 'Ruby,' lying in the King's Road off Bristol. He had a quarrel with his brother Sir John Goodere, about a certain estate. The family solicitor arranged a meeting in his house, where the two brothers appeared to be reconciled. But Sir John had scarcely left the house, when he was seized in broad daylight by a set of sailors who had been drinking in a public-house, and carried down forcibly to the Captain's barge. The Captain himself followed and rowed off with his brother to the ship. There Sir John was confined in a cabin, a suggestion being thrown out to the crew that he was a madman. A few hours later, one Mahony, who played the part of 'hairy-faced Dick' to Hamilton Tighe, strangled the unfortunate man, with an accomplice called White. Attention had been aroused amongst the crew by ominous sounds, groans, and scufflings heard in the dead of the night, and next morning, the lieutenant, after a talk with the surgeon, resolved to seize their captain for murder. A more outrageous and reckless proceeding, indeed, could scarcely have been imagined, even in the days when a pressgang was a familiar sight, and the captain of a ship at sea was as absolute as an Eastern despot. Every detail seemed to be arranged with an express view to publicity. One piece of evidence, however, was required to bring the matter home to the captain; and it is of ghastly picturesqueness. The ship's cooper and his wife were sleeping in the cabin next to the scene of the murder. The cooper had heard the poor man exclaim that he was going to be murdered, and praying that the murder might come to light. This, however, seemed to be the wandering of a madman, and the cooper went to sleep. Presently his wife called him up: 'I believe they are murdering the gentleman.' He heard broken words and saw a light glimmering through a crevice in the partition. Peeping through he could distinguish the two ruffians, standing with a candle over the dead body and taking a watch from a pocket. And then, through the gloom, he made out a hand upon the throat of the victim. The owner of the hand was invisible; but it was whiter than that of a common sailor. 'I have often seen Mahony's and White's hands,' he added, 'and I thought the hand was whiter than either of theirs.' The trembling cooper wanted to leave the cabin, but his wife held him back, as, indeed, with three murderers in the dark passage outside, it required some courage to move. So they watched trembling, till he heard a sentinel outside, and thought himself safe at last: he roused the doctor, peeped at the dead body through a 'scuttle' which opened into the cabin; and then urged the lieutenant to seize the captain. The captain was deservedly hanged, bequeathing to us that ghastly Rembrandt-like picture of the white hand seen through the crevice by the trembling cooper on the throat of the murdered man. There is no touch which appeals so forcibly to the imagination in De Quincey's famous narrative of the Mar murders.

I have made but a random selection from the long gallery of grim and grotesque portraiture of the less reputable of our ancestry. It must be confessed that a first impression tends to reconcile us to the comfortable creed of progress. The eighteenth century had some little defects which have been frequently expounded; but it can certainly afford to show courts of justice against its predecessor. The old judicial murder of the Popish Plot variety has become extinct; if the judges try to strain the law of libel, for example, the prisoner has every chance of making a good fight; for which the readers of Horne Tooke's gallant defences, and of some of Erskine's speeches, may be duly grateful. The ancient brag of fair play has become something of a reality. And the character of the crimes has changed in a noticeable way. There are hideous crimes enough. A brutal murder by smugglers near the case of Mary Blandy surpasses in its barbarity the worst of modern agrarian outrages; though it is not clear that in number of horrors the present century is unable to match its predecessor. When the wild blood of the Byrons shows itself in the last of the old tavern brawls à la Mohun, we feel that it is a case (in modern slang) of a 'survival.' The poet's granduncle, the wicked Lord Byron, got into a quarrel with Mr. Chaworth about the game laws at a dinner of country gentlemen at the Star and Garter; whereupon, in an ambiguous affair, half-scuffle and half-duel, Byron sent his sword through Chaworth's body, and then politely requested Mr. Chaworth to admit that he (Byron) was as brave a man as any in the Kingdom. But this little ebullition required Byronic impulsiveness, and was not a recognised part of a gentleman's conduct. Lord Ferrers, a short time before, was hanged, to the admiration of all men, like a common felon, for shooting his own steward; whereas in our day, he would almost certainly have escaped on the plea of insanity. Other cases mark the advent of the meddlesome, but perhaps on the whole useful person, the social reformer. Momentary gleams of light, for example, are thrown upon the scandals which ruined the trade of the parsons of the Fleet. Poor Miss Pleasant Rawlins is arrested for an imaginary debt, carried to a sponging-house, and there persuaded (she was only seventeen or thereabouts) that she could obtain her liberty by an immediate marriage to an adventurer who had scraped acquaintance with her and taken a liking to her fortune. The famous (he was once famous) Beau Feilding falls into a trap unworthy of an experienced man of the world. He is persuaded that a lady of fortune has fallen in love with him on seeing him walking in her grounds at a distance. A lady, by no means of fortune, comes to his lodgings, and passes herself off as this susceptible person. Hereupon Feilding sends off for a priest of one of the foreign embassies, gets himself married at his lodgings the same evening, and discovers a few days afterwards that he is married to the wrong person. It is exactly a comedy of the period performed by real flesh and blood actors. The catastrophe is painful. Mr. Feilding ventures to grant himself a divorce, and to marry the wretched old Duchess of Cleveland; and in due time the Duchess finds it very convenient to have him tried for bigamy. It did not take more than half a century or so of such scandals to get an improvement in the marriage law, which implies, on the whole, a creditable rate of progress. Another set of cases illustrates a grievance familiar to novel-readers. In 'Amelia' the atrocities of bailiffs, sponging-houses and debtors' prisons are drawn with startling realism. We may easily convince ourselves that Fielding was not speaking without book. The bailiff who has arrested Captain Booth gives a 'wipe or two with his hanger,' as he pleasantly expresses it, to an unlucky wretch who gives trouble, and delivers an admirable discourse upon the ethics of killing in such cases. It might have come from the mouth of one Tranter, a bailiff, who, a few years before, had stabbed poor Captain Luttrell, for objecting to leave his wife in a delicate state of health. Soon after, we find a society of philanthropists headed by Oglethorpe of 'strong benevolence of soul,' endeavouring to expose the horrors of the Fleet and the Marshalsea. A series of trials, ordered by the House of Commons, had the ending too characteristic of all such movements. Witnesses swore to atrocities enough to make one's blood run cold—of men guilty only of impecuniosity, half-starved, thrust naked into loathsome and pestiferous dungeons, beaten and chained, and persecuted to death. But then arise another set of unimpeachable witnesses, who swear with equal vigour that the unfortunate debtors were treated with every consideration; that they were made as comfortable as their mutinous spirit would allow; that they were discharged in good health and died months afterwards from entirely different causes; that the accused were not the responsible authorities; that they had never interfered except from kindness, and that they were the humanest and best of mankind. Nothing remained but an acquittal; though the investigation did something towards letting daylight into abodes of horror which Mr. Pickwick found capable of improvement a century later.

Other cases might show how in various ways the strange power called Public Opinion was beginning to increase its capricious and desultory influence. The strange case of Elizabeth Canning (1753) is one of the most picturesque in the collection. Miss Canning was a maid-servant, who disappeared for a month, and coming home told how she had been kidnapped by a gipsy and finally escaped. Officious neighbours rushed in, and by judicious leading questions managed to help her to manufacture evidence against a poor old gipsy woman, preternaturally hideous, who sat smoking her pipe in blank wonder as the crowd of virtuous avengers of innocence rushed into her kitchen. Mary Squires, the gipsy, was sentenced to be hanged, and doubtless at an earlier period she would have been turned off without delay. But in that delicious calm in the middle of the last century, when wars, and rebellions, and constitutional agitations were quiet for the moment, and people had time to read their modest newspapers without spoiling their digestions and their nerves, the case aroused the popular interest. If the news did not flash through the country as rapidly as that of the Lefroy murder, it slowly dribbled along the post-roads and set people gossiping in alehouses far away in quiet country villages. A whole host of witnesses appeared and proved an _alibi_ by giving a diary of a gipsy's tour. We follow the party to village dances; we hear the venerable piece of scandal about the schoolmaster who 'got fuddled' with the gipsies; and what the gipsies had for dinner on January 1, 1753, and how they paid their bill; we have a glimpse of the little flirtation carried on by the gipsy's daughter, and the poor trembling little letter is produced, which she managed to write to her lover, and which cost her sevenpence; threepence being charged for it from Basingstoke to London, and fourpence from London to Dorchester. After more than a week spent in overhauling this and other evidence, proving amongst other things that the scene of the girl's supposed confinement was really tenanted the whole time by a man strangely and most inappropriately named Fortune Natus, the jury decided that the accuser was guilty of perjury, but boggled characteristically as to its being 'wilful and corrupt.' However, Elizabeth Canning got her deserts and was transported to New England, still sticking to the truth of her story. Her guilt is plain enough, if anybody could care about it, but the little details of English country life a century ago are as fresh as the doings of the rustics in one of Mr. Hardy's novels.

It all happened a long time ago, but we cannot hope with the old lady who made that consolatory remark about other historical narratives that 'it ain't none of it true.' On the contrary such vivid little pictures flash out upon us as we read that we have a difficulty in supposing that they were not taken yesterday. Abundance of morals may be drawn by historians and others who deal in that kind of ware; it is enough here to have indicated, as well as we can, what pleasant reading may be found in the dusty old volumes which are too often left to repose undisturbed on the repulsive shelves of a lawyer's library.

FOOTNOTES:

[9] In the trial of Horne Tooke in 1794 it was decided by the judges that an adjournment might take place in case of 'physical necessity,' but the only previous case of an adjournment cited was that of Canning (in 1753).

[10] This case was in 1665. It is curious that in the case of Hathaway, in 1702, a precisely similar experiment convinced everybody that the accuser was an impostor; and got him a whipping and a place in the pillory.

_COLERIDGE_[11]

In the period which intervened between the Great War and the first Reform Bill, there were two centres of intellectual light in England. Jeremy Bentham, in his cheerful old age, reached his eightieth birthday in 1828, still, as he phrased it, codifying like any dragon, solving all problems by the application of his famous formula about the greatest happiness of the greatest number, and adding day by day to the vast piles of manuscript which were to embody the principles of all future legislation. To his hermitage in Westminster were admitted a little group of chosen disciples, the stern political economists, rigid utilitarians, and energetic reformers, some of whom were in the coming years to assume the title of philosophical radicals. Another band of enthusiasts sought a different shrine. They listened to an oracle which taught them that utilitarianism was 'moral anarchy,' political economy a 'solemn humbug,' radicalism the direct road to ruin, and true wisdom only to be found in regions of contemplation which Bentham could never enter—for a reason analogous to that which forbids pachydermatous quadrupeds to soar into the empyrean. We know pretty well what was the manner of man at whose feet these disciples sat. The keenest of contemporary observers has left a picture which must be laid under contribution for every description of Coleridge. Carlyle saw an old man—though in point of actual years he was Bentham's junior by nearly a quarter of a century—with the brow of a philosopher and the eye of a poet, but with the irresolute flabby mouth of a sensuous dreamer of dreams, consuming cups of tea, lukewarm but better than he deserved, or strolling, corkscrew fashion, along both sides of a garden path, unable to make up his mind to either. You put him a question; he replied by accumulating 'formidable apparatus, logical swim-bladders, transcendental life-preservers, and other precautionary and vehiculatory gear for setting out;' but rambled into the universe at large, treated you 'as a mere passive bucket, to be pumped into' (fancy a Carlyle for a passive bucket!), and finally left you 'swimming and fluttering in the mistiest wide unintelligible deluge of things, for the most part in a rather profitless uncomfortable manner.' Yet, at times, we are told, 'balmy sunny islets, islets of the blest and intelligible,' would rise out of the haze; and upon these islets the enthusiastic Sterling and others would try to cast anchor. Had they reached the solid foundation of creation, or had they, like Milton's pilot of the small night-foundered skiff, mistaken some metaphysical Kraken for the permanent framework of things?

That question may be answered dogmatically by any one who pleases. Immovable limits of time and capacity forbid me from attempting to answer it now. My excuse for venturing to say something of Coleridge—certainly one of the most fascinating and most perplexing figures in our literary history—is simply this: I have been forced to investigate with some care the details of his career; and I ought to be able not to answer the question, but to provide a little 'vehiculatory gear' towards answering it. Coleridge's philosophy must of course be judged by considerations extraneous to his personal history. Yet I think, as a professional biographer is in duty bound to think, that philosophy is, more often than philosophers admit, the outcome of personal experience; and Coleridge's singular history may throw some light upon his teaching. Here we meet the hagiologist and the iconoclast, the twin plagues of the humble biographer. The hagiologist burns incense before his idol till it is difficult to distinguish any fixed outline through the clouds of gorgeously-tinted vapour. Coleridge thought himself to have certain failings. His relations fully agreed with him. His worshippers regard these meek confessions as mere illustrations of the good man's humility, and even manage to endow the poet and philosopher with all the homely virtues of the respectable and the solvent. To put forward such claims is to challenge the iconoclast. He, a person endowed by nature with a fine stock of virtuous indignation, has very little trouble in picturing the poet-philosopher as a shambling, unreliable, indolent voluptuary, to whom an action became impossible so soon as it presented itself as a duty, and who, even as a man of genius, must be condemned as unfaithful to his high calling. And so we raise the usual edifying discussion as to the privileges of genius. Do they include superiority to the Ten Commandments? Can you expect a poet to confine himself to one wife? May a man neglect his children because he has written the 'Ancient Mariner' and 'Christabel'?—points of casuistry, of which, with your leave, I will postpone the consideration to a future occasion.

For my purpose it is enough to ascertain the facts. I have not to decide whether Coleridge should receive excommunication or canonisation; whether he deserved to go straight to heaven or to pass a period—and, if so, how long a period—in purgatory. It is difficult to settle such questions satisfactorily. I desiderate an accurate diagnosis, not a judicial sentence. Coleridge sinned and repented. I take note of sin and of repentance as indications of character. I do not pretend to say whether in the eye of Heaven the repentance would be an adequate set-off for the sin. But I premise one apology for anything that may sound iconoclastic, and which I think is worth the consideration of the amiable persons who undertake to rehabilitate soiled reputations. A man's weakness can rarely be overlooked without underestimating his strength. If Coleridge's intellect were, as De Quincey said in his magniloquent way, 'the greatest and most spacious, the subtlest and most comprehensive, that has yet existed among men' (what a philosopher one must be to pronounce such a judgment!) why were the results so small? Because the ethereal soul was chained to a fleshly carcase. To deny this is to force us to assume that what he did was all that he could do. You must either exaggerate his actual achievements beyond all possible limits, or save your belief in his potential achievements by admitting that his intellect never had fair play.

Let us consider the antecedents of the prophet of Highgate Hill. Was there ever a young man fuller of intellectual promise or of personal charm than the youth of twenty-five, who, in 1797, rambled through the Quantocks discussing and composing poetry with Wordsworth? Circumstances apparently unfavourable had only served to stimulate his intellectual growth. Separated from his family in infancy, to become one of the victims of our public school system—ill-fed, ill-nursed, and ill-taught at Christ's Hospital; urged upon the treadmill of a sound classical education by a rigid schoolmaster, he had assimilated with singular aptitude whatever intellectual food had drifted within his reach. He had caught glimpses of high metaphysical secrets; he had peered into the mysteries of medical practice; he had bolted a miscellaneous library whole; he had been infected with poetical enthusiasm by the study of that minute day-star, W. L. Bowles; and he had completed his training by falling desperately in love with the inevitable sister of a schoolfellow. It is a comfort to reflect that the best regulated systems of education break down somewhere. Coleridge, it would have seemed, ran every risk of being driven sheep-like along the dull high road of Latin grammar. Nature had prompted him to leap the fences, to expatiate in the wide fields of intellectual and imaginative pasture, and to derive a keener zest for his nourishment from the knowledge that the indulgence was illegitimate. Cambridge, the mother of poets, received him with the kindness she had so often shown to her children. We—I speak as a Cambridge man—we flogged (or nearly flogged) Milton into republicanism; we disgusted Dryden into an anomalous and monstrous preference for Oxford; we bored Gray till, half stifled with academic dulness, he sought more cheerful surroundings in a country churchyard; we left Byron to the congenial society of his bear; we did nothing for Wordsworth, except, indeed, that we took him to Milton's rooms, and there for once (it must really have done him some good) induced him to take a glass too much; and we, as nearly as possible, converted Coleridge into a heavy dragoon. We ordered him to bow the knee to Euclid, and to Newton's 'Principia,' the only idols whose merits were altogether beyond his powers of appreciation, and by such kindness in disguise induced him to plunge into a precocious breach with the proprieties. A fellowship might have converted him into a solid Church and State don, an oracle of the Combination Room, and a sound judge of port wine. We sternly withheld the temptation. A reformer has to start in life as a rebel. Coleridge sympathised with the rebellious William Frend, who was being banished from Cambridge for excessive liberalism. He offered his youthful incense to Priestley, the 'patriot and saint and sage'—so the young enthusiast called him—who was soon to be expelled by the exuberant loyalty of Birmingham from an ungrateful country. Though never a Jacobin, he became what, in some form or other, a young man ought to become—an enthusiast for the newest lights, a partisan of the ideas struggling to remould the ancient order and raise the aspirations of mankind. The Master of the College shook his reverend head, kindly enough at times, at the lad's vagaries, and forgave him even for that preposterous attempt to become a trooper which never enabled him, with all his subtlety of distinction, to form any clear conception of the difference between a horse's head and its tail. But he could not run in the regular track. He was thrown into the chaotic world to sink or swim by his unassisted abilities. No man had, in some ways, a better floating apparatus. The poetic vein, soon to manifest itself in his best work, was indeed still turbid with the alloy of didactic twaddle. But already he had the versatility, the inherent vitality of intellect, the power of embodying philosophic thoughts in poetic imagery, which made him unrivalled in monologue. He talked better, I am apt to think, with his chum, Charles Lamb, at the 'Cat and Salutation,' than he ever talked to his worshippers at Highgate Hill. A man is at his best before he is recognised. Coleridge's early letters and essays show the fulness and intellectual vigour, without the too elaborate and slightly sanctimonious circumgyrations, of his later effusions. And his genius was such as implied a double portion of the power of making friends, which, with most of us, wanes so lamentably as the years go by. Lamb, his earliest and latest friend, was already devoted to this brilliant schoolfellow; and if Lamb was an easy conquest, men of less conspicuously tender nature were equally attracted. He had only to meet Southey at Oxford to swear at once an eternal friendship—a friendship to be cemented by a regeneration of the world.

Coleridge was to be the Plato of a new society to be founded in the wilds of America. There a short and healthy space of daily toil was to provide all that was necessary for a band of poets and philosophers, too benevolent to care for separate property, and worthy founders of an Arcadia of perfect simplicity, refinement, and equality. As for the Eves of the Paradise, were there not three Miss Frickers? Coleridge repelled for a time the too obvious foreboding that Pantisocracy was but a province of dreamland. Dreamland was his reality. For the demands of butchers and bakers he had still a lordly indifference. He had the voice which could charm even a publisher. The prim and priggish Cottle was at once annexed by Coleridge, and all the natural caution of a tradesman did not withhold him from promising a guinea for every hundred lines to be produced by a still untried new poet. What were one hundred lines to the genius which could turn off an act of a tragedy in a morning, and which soon afterwards could build the shadowy palace of Kubla Khan in a dream? Coleridge was justified, in point of bare prudence, in marrying at once on the prospect. Somehow the poetry did not come so fast as the bills. But Coleridge had other strings to his bow. He set up as a lecturer and journalist. His marvellous eloquence condescended for the nonce to wile promises of subscription even from dealers in tallow; and the philosopher—not without a humorous sense of his own absurdity—became a successful commercial traveller. The newspaper of course collapsed almost on the spot. All the arrangements were absurd, and Coleridge's eloquence proved to be somehow uncongenial to the tallow-dealing interest. But meanwhile, in the course of his journey, Coleridge had incidentally and, as it were, by the mere side glance of his eye, swept up Charles Lloyd, son of a rich banker, who, fascinated and enthralled, left the bank to become an inmate of his teacher's house, and, no doubt, a contributor to its expenses. Poole, a most public-spirited and intelligent man, offered him an asylum at Nether Stowey. The Unitarians, to whom he more or less belonged, were ready to open their pulpit to a preacher whose eloquence promised to rival even the most splendid traditions of the age of Leighton and Jeremy Taylor.