Chapter II: Part 2

De Quincey hints that both Lord Altamount and his son, ‘who had an Irish heart,’ would have been glad if at the very last moment the populace had stepped in between Mr. Pitt and the Irish peers and commoners and compelled the two Houses to perpetuate themselves. Internally, says De Quincey, they would have laughed. But it was written otherwise in Heaven’s Chancery, and ‘the Bill received the Royal assent without a muttering or a whispering or the protesting echo of a sigh.... One person only I remarked whose features were suddenly illuminated by a smile--a sarcastic smile, as I read it--which, however, might be all fancy. It was Lord Castlereagh.’ Can it possibly be that this was the very moment when it occurred to his lordship’s mind that Mr. Knox was the man to be the historian of the event thus concluded?

The new edition of De Quincey’s writings has naturally provoked many critics to attempt to do for him what he was fond enough of doing for others, often to their dismay--to give some account, that is, of the author and the man. De Quincey does not lend himself to this familiar treatment. He eludes analysis and baffles description. His great fault as an author is best described, in the decayed language of the equity draughtsman, as multifariousness. His style lacks the charm of economy, and his workmanship the dignity of concentration.

A literary spendthrift is, however, a very endurable sinner in these stingy days. Mr. Mill speaks somewhere (I think in his ‘Political Economy’) almost sorrowfully of De Quincey’s strange habit of scattering fine thoughts up and down his merely miscellaneous writings. The habit has ceased to afflict the reader. The fine maxim ‘Waste not, want not,’ is now inscribed over the desks of our miscellaneous writers. Such extravagance as De Quincey’s, as it is not likely to be repeated, need not be too severely reprobated.

De Quincey’s magnificence, the apparent boundlessness of his information, the liberties he takes, relying upon his mastery of language, his sportiveness and freakish fancies, make him the idol of all hobbledehoys of a literary turn. By them his sixteen volumes are greedily devoured. Happy the country, one is tempted to exclaim, that has such reading to offer its young men and maidens!

The discovery that De Quincey wrote something else besides the ‘Opium Eater’ marks a red-letter day in many a young life. The papers on ‘The Twelve Cæsars’; on the ‘Essenes and Secret Societies’; on ‘Judas Iscariot,’ ‘Cicero,’ and ‘Richard Bentley’; ‘The Spanish Nun,’ the ‘Female Infidel,’ the ‘Tartars,’ seemed the very climax of literary well-doing, and to unite the learning of the schools with all the fancy of the poets and the wit of the world.

As one grows older, one grows sterner--with others.

‘Prune thou thy words, the thoughts control
That o’er thee swell and throng;
They will condense within thy soul,
And change to purpose strong.’

The lines have a literary as well as a moral value.

But though paradox may cease to charm, and a tutored intellect seem to sober age a better guide than a lawless fancy, and a chastened style a more comfortable thing than impassioned prose and pages of _bravura_, still, after all, ‘the days of our youth are the days of our glory,’ and for a reader who is both young and eager the Selections Grave and Gay of Thomas de Quincey will always be above criticism, and belong to the realm of rapture.

HANNAH MORE.

An ingenious friend of mine, who has collected a library in which every book is either a masterpiece of wit or a miracle of rarity, found great fault with me the other day for adding to my motley heap the writings of Mrs. Hannah More. In vain I pleaded I had given but eight shillings and sixpence for the nineteen volumes, neatly bound and lettered on the back. He was not thinking, so he protested, of my purse, but of my taste, and he went away, spurning the gravel under his feet, irritated that there should be such men as I.

I, however, am prepared to brazen it out. I freely admit that the celebrated Mrs. Hannah More is one of the most detestable writers that ever held a pen. She flounders like a huge conger-eel in an ocean of dingy morality. She may have been a wit in her youth, though I am not aware of any evidence of it--certainly her poem, ‘Bas Bleu,’ is none--but for all the rest of her days, and they were many, she was an encyclopædia of all literary vices. You may search her nineteen volumes through without lighting upon one original thought, one happy phrase. Her religion lacks reality. Not a single expression of genuine piety, of heart-felt emotion, ever escapes her lips. She is never pathetic, never terrible. Her creed is powerless either to attract the well-disposed or make the guilty tremble. No naughty child ever read ‘The Fairchild Family’ or ‘Stories from the Church Catechism’ without quaking and quivering like a short-haired puppy after a ducking; but, then, Mrs. Sherwood was a woman of genius, whilst Mrs. Hannah More was a pompous failure.

Still, she has a merit of her own, just enough to enable a middle-aged man to chew the cud of reflection as he hastily turns her endless pages. She is an explanatory author, helping you to understand how sundry people who were old when you were young came to be the folk they were, and to have the books upon their shelves they had.

Hannah More was the first, and I trust the worst, of a large class--‘the ugliest of her daughters Hannah,’ if I may parody a poet she affected to admire. This class may be imperfectly described as ‘the well-to-do Christian.’ It inhabited snug places in the country, and kept an excellent, if not dainty, table. The money it saved in a ball-room it spent upon a greenhouse. Its horses were fat, and its coachman invariably present at family prayers. Its pet virtue was Church twice on Sunday, and its peculiar horrors theatrical entertainments, dancing, and threepenny points. Outside its garden wall lived the poor who, if virtuous, were for ever curtsying to the ground or wearing neat uniforms, except when expiring upon truckle-beds beseeching God to bless the young ladies of The Grange or the Manor House, as the case might be.

As a book ‘Cœlebs in Search of a Wife’ is as odious as it is absurd--yet for the reason already assigned it may be read with a certain curiosity--but as it would be cruelty to attempt to make good my point by quotation, I must leave it as it is.

It is characteristic of the unreality of Hannah More that she prefers Akenside to Cowper, despite the latter’s superior piety. Cowper’s sincerity and pungent satire frightened her; the verbosity of Akenside was much to her mind:

‘Sir John is a passionate lover of poetry, in which he has a fine taste. He read it [a passage from Akenside’s “Pleasures of Imagination”] with much spirit and feeling, especially these truly classical lines:

‘“_Mind--mind_ alone; bear witness, earth and heaven,
The living fountains in itself contains
Of Beauteous and Sublime; here hand in hand
Sit paramount the graces; here enthroned
Celestial Venus, with divinest airs,
Invites the soul to never-fading joy.”

‘“The reputation of this exquisite passage,” said he, laying down the book, “is established by the consenting suffrage of all men of taste, though, by the critical countenance you are beginning to put on you look as if you had a mind to attack it.”

‘“So far from it,” said I [Cœlebs], “_that I know nothing more splendid in the whole mass of our poetry_.”’

Miss More had an odd life before she underwent what she calls a ‘revolution in her sentiments,’ a revolution, however, which I fear left her heart of hearts unchanged. She consorted with wits, though always, be it fairly admitted, on terms of decorum. She wrote three tragedies, which were not rejected as they deserved to be, but duly appeared on the boards of London and Bath with prologues and epilogues by Garrick and by Sheridan. She dined and supped and made merry. She had a prodigious flirtation with Dr. Johnson, who called her a saucy girl, albeit she was thirty-seven; and once, for there was no end to his waggery, lamented she had not married Chatterton, ‘that posterity might have seen a propagation of poets.’ The good doctor, however, sickened of her flattery, and one of the rudest speeches even he ever made was addressed to her.

After Johnson’s death Hannah met Boswell, full of his intended book which she did her best to spoil with her oily fatuity. Said she to Boswell, ‘I beseech your tenderness for our virtuous and most revered departed friend; I beg you will mitigate some of his asperities,’ to which diabolical counsel the Inimitable replied roughly, ‘He would not cut off his claws nor make a tiger a cat to please anybody.’

The most moving incident in Hannah More’s life occurred near its close, and when she was a lone, lorn woman--her sisters Mary, Betty, Sally, and Patty having all predeceased her. She and they had long lived in a nice house or ‘place’ called Barley Wood, in the neighbourhood of Bristol, and here her sisters one after another died, leaving poor Hannah in solitary grandeur to the tender mercies of Mrs. Susan, the housekeeper; Miss Teddy, the lady’s-maid; Mrs. Rebecca, the housemaid; Mrs. Jane, the cook; Miss Sally, the scullion; Mr. Timothy, the coachman; Mr. John, the gardener; and Mr. Tom, the gardener’s man. Eight servants and one aged pilgrim--of such was the household of Barley Wood!

Outwardly decorum reigned. Poor Miss More fondly imagined her domestics doted on her, and that they joyfully obeyed her laws. It was the practice at family prayer for each of the servants to repeat a text. Visitors were much impressed, and went away delighted. But like so many other things on this round world, it was all hollow. These menials were not what they seemed.

After Miss More had heard them say their texts and had gone to bed, their day began. They gave parties to the servants and tradespeople of the vicinity (pleasing word), and at last, in mere superfluity of naughtiness, hired a large room a mile off and issued invitations to a great ball. This undid them. There happened to be at Barley Wood on the very night of the dance a vigilant visitor who had her suspicions, and who accordingly kept watch and ward. She heard the texts, but she did not go to bed, and from her window she saw the whole household, under cover of night, steal off to their promiscuous friskings, leaving behind them poor Miss Sally only, whose sad duty it was to let them in the next morning, which she duly performed.

Friends were called in, and grave consultations held, and in the end Miss More was told how she had been wounded in her own household. It was sore news; she bore it well, wisely determined to quit Barley Wood once and for ever, and live, as a decent old lady should, in a terrace in Clifton. The wicked servants were not told of this resolve until the actual moment of departure had arrived, when they were summoned into the drawing-room, where they found their mistress, and a company of friends. In feeling tones Miss Hannah More upbraided them for their unfaithfulness. ‘You have driven me,’ said she, ‘from my own home, and forced me to seek a refuge among strangers.’ So saying, she stepped into her carriage and was driven away. There is surely something Miltonic about this scene, which is, at all events, better than anything in Akenside’s ‘Pleasures of Imagination.’

The old lady was of course much happier at No. 4, Windsor Terrace, Clifton, than she had been at Barley Wood. She was eighty-three years of age when she took up house there, and eighty-nine when she died, which she did on the 1st of September, 1833. I am indebted for these melancholy--and, I believe, veracious--particulars to that amusing book of Joseph Cottle’s called ‘Early Recollections, chiefly relating to the late Samuel Taylor Coleridge during his long residence in Bristol.’

I still maintain that Hannah More’s works in nineteen volumes are worth eight shillings and sixpence.

MARIE BASHKIRTSEFF.

Miss Mathilde Blind, in the introduction to her animated and admirable translation of the now notorious ‘Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff,’ asks an exceedingly relevant question--namely, ‘Is it well or is it ill done to make the world our father confessor?’ Miss Blind does not answer her own question, but passes on her way content with the observation that, be it well or ill done, it is supremely interesting. Translators have, indeed, no occasion to worry about such inquiries. It is hard enough for them to make their author speak another language than his own, without stopping to ask whether he ought to have spoken at all. Their business is to make their author known. As for the author himself, he, of course, has a responsibility; but, as a rule, he is only thinking of himself, and only anxious to excite interest in that subject. If he succeeds in doing this, he is indifferent to everything else. And in this he is encouraged by the world.

Burns, in his exuberant generosity, was sure that it could afford small pleasure

‘Even to a deil
To skelp and scaud poor dogs like me,
And hear us squeal;’

but whatever may be the devil’s taste, there is nothing the reading public like better than to hear the squeal of some self-torturing atom of humanity. And, as the atoms have found this out, a good deal of squealing may be confidently anticipated.

The eclipse of faith has not proved fatal by any means to the instinct of confession. There is a noticeable desire to make humanity or the reading public our residuary legatee, to endow it with our experiences, to enrich it with our egotisms, to strip ourselves bare in the market-place--if not for the edification, at all events for the amusement, of man. All this is accomplished by autobiography. We then become interesting, probably for the first time, as, to employ Mlle. Bashkirtseff’s language, ‘documents of human nature.’

The metaphor carries us far. To falsify documents by addition, or to garble them by omission, is an offence of grave character, though of frequent occurrence. Is there, then, to be no reticence in autobiography? Are the documents of human nature to be printed at length?

These are questions which each autobiographer must settle for himself. If what is published is interesting for any reason whatsoever, be it the work of pious sincerity or diseased self-consciousness, the world will read it, and either applaud the piety or ridicule the absurdity of the author. If it is not interesting it will not be read.

Therefore, to consider the ethics of autobiography is to condemn yourself to the academy. ‘Rousseau’s Confessions’ ought never to have been written; but written they were, and read they will ever be. But as a pastime moralizing has a rare charm. We cannot always be reading immoral masterpieces. A time comes when inaction is pleasant, and when it is soothing to hear mild accents murmuring ‘Thou shalt not.’ For a moment, then, let the point remain under consideration.

The ethics of autobiography are, in my judgment, admirably summed up by George Eliot, in a passage in ‘Theophrastus Such,’ a book which, we were once assured, well-nigh destroyed the reputation of its author, but which would certainly have established that of most living writers upon a surer foundation than they at present occupy. George Eliot says:

‘In all autobiography there is, nay, ought to be, an incompleteness which may have the effect of falsity. We are each of us bound to reticence by the piety we owe to those who have been nearest to us, and have had a mingled influence over our lives--by the fellow-feeling which should restrain us from turning our volunteered and picked confessions into an act of accusation against others who have no chance of vindicating themselves, and, most of all, by that reverence for the higher efforts of our common nature which commands us to bury its lowest faculties, its invincible remnants of the brute, its most agonizing struggle with temptation, in unbroken silence.’

All this is surely sound morality and good manners, but it is not the morality or the manners of Mlle. Marie Bashkirtseff, who was always ready to barter everything for something she called Fame.

‘If I don’t win fame,’ says she over and over again, ‘I will kill myself.’

Miss Blind is, no doubt, correct in her assertion that, as a painter, Mlle. Bashkirtseff’s strong point was expression. Certainly, she had a great gift that way with her pen. Amidst a mass of greedy utterances, esurient longings, commonplace ejaculations, and unlovely revelations, passages occur in this journal which bid us hold. For all her boastings, her sincerity is not always obvious, but it speaks plainly through each one of the following words:

‘What is there in us, that, in spite of plausible arguments--in
spite of the consciousness that all leads to _nothing_--we should
still grumble? I know that, like everyone else, I am going on
towards death and nothingness. I weigh the circumstances of life,
and, whatever they may be, they appear to me miserably vain, and,
for all that, I cannot resign myself. Then, it must be a force; it
must be a _something_--not merely “a passage,” a certain period
of time, which matters little whether it is spent in a palace or
in a cellar; there is, then, something stronger, truer, than our
foolish phrases about it all. It is life, in short; not merely a
passage--an unprofitable misery--but life, all that we hold most
dear, all that we call ours, in short.

‘People say it is nothing, because we do not possess eternity.
Ah! the fools. Life is ourselves, it is ours, it is all that we
possess; how, then, is it possible to say that it is _nothing_? If
this is _nothing_, show me _something_.’

To deride life is indeed foolish. Prosperous people are apt to do so, whether their prosperity be of this world or anticipated in the next. The rich man bids the poor man lead an abstemious life in his youth, and scorn delights, in order that he may have the wherewithal to spend a dull old age; but the poor man replies:

‘Your arrangements have left me nothing but my youth. I will enjoy that, and _you_ shall support me in a dull old age.’

To deride life, I repeat, is foolish; but to pity yourself for having to die is to carry egotism rather too far. This is what Mlle. Bashkirtseff does.

‘I am touched myself when I think of my end. No, it seems impossible! Nice, fifteen years, the three Graces, Rome, the follies of Naples, painting, ambition, unheard-of hopes--to end in a coffin, without having had anything, not even love.’

Impossible, indeed! There is not much use for that word in the human comedy.

Never, surely, before was there a lady so penetrated with her own personality as the writer of these journals. Her arms and legs, hips and shoulders, hopes and fears, pictures and future glory, are all alike scanned, admired, stroked, and pondered over. She reduces everything to one vast common denominator--herself. She gives two francs to a starving family.

‘It was a sight to see the joy, the surprise of these poor creatures. I hid myself behind the trees. Heaven has never treated me so well; heaven has never had any of these beneficent fancies.’

Heaven had, at all events, never heard the like of this before. Here is a human creature brought up in what is called the lap of luxury, wearing purple and fine linen, and fur cloaks worth 2,000 francs, eating and drinking to repletion, and indulging herself in every fancy; she divides a handful of coppers amongst five starving persons, and then retires behind a tree, and calls God to witness that no such kindness had ever been extended to her.

When Mlle. Elsnitz, her long-suffering companion--‘young, only nineteen, unfortunate, in a strange house without a friend’--at last, after suffering many things, leaves the service, it is recorded:

‘I could not speak for fear of crying, and I affected a careless look, but I hope she may have seen.’

Seen what? Why, that the carelessness was unreal. A quite sufficient reparation for months of insolence, in the opinion of Miss Marie.

It is said that Mlle. Bashkirtseff had a great faculty of enjoyment. If so, except in the case of books, she hardly makes it felt. Reading evidently gave her great pleasure; but, though there is a good deal of rapture about Nature in her journals, it is of an uneasy character.

‘The silence that is in the starry sky,
The sleep that is amongst the lonely hills,’

do not pass into the souls of those whose ambition it is to be greeted with loud cheers by the whole wide world.

Whoever is deeply interested in himself always invents a God whom he can apostrophize on suitable occasions. The existence of this deity feeds his creator’s vanity. When the world turns a deaf ear to his broken cries he besieges heaven. The Almighty, so he flatters himself, cannot escape him. When there is no one else to have recourse to, when all other means fail, there still remains--God. When your father, and your mother, and your aunt, and your companion, and your maid, are all wearied to death by your exhaustless vanity, you have still another string to your bow. Sometimes, indeed, the strings may get entangled.

‘Just now, I spoke harshly to my aunt, but I could not help it. She came in just when I was weeping with my hands over my face, and was summoning God to attend to me a little.’

A book like this makes one wonder what power, human or divine, can exorcise such a demon of vanity as that which possessed the soul of this most unhappy girl. Carlyle strove with great energy in ‘Sartor Resartus’ to compose a spell which should cleave this devil in three. For a time it worked well and did some mischief, but now the magician’s wand seems broken. Religion, indeed, can still show her conquests, and, when we are considering a question like this, seems a fresher thing than it does when we are reading ‘Lux Mundi.’

‘Do you want,’ wrote General Gordon in his journal, ‘to be loved, respected, and trusted? Then ignore the likes and dislikes of man in regard to your actions; leave their love for God’s, taking Him only. You will find that as you do so men will like you; they may despise some things in you, but they will lean on you, and trust you, and He will give you the spirit of comforting them. But try to please men and ignore God, and you will fail miserably and get nothing but disappointment.’

All those who have not yet read these journals, and prefer doing so in English, should get Miss Blind’s volumes. There they will find this ‘human document’ most vigorously translated into their native tongue. It, perhaps, sounds better in French.

One remembers George Eliot’s tale of the lady who tried to repeat in English the pathetic story of a French mendicant--‘J’ai vu le sang de mon père’--but failed to excite sympathy, owing to the hopeless realism of Saxon speech. But though better in French, the journal is interesting in English. Whether, like the dreadful Dean, you regard man as an odious race of vermin, or agree with an erecter spirit that he is a being of infinite capacity, you will find food for your philosophy, and texts for your sermons, in the ‘Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff.’

SIR JOHN VANBRUGH.

Jeremy Collier begins his famous and witty, though dreadfully overdone, ‘Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage’ with the following spirited words:

‘The business of Plays is to recommend Virtue and discountenance Vice; to show the Uncertainty of Human Greatness, the sudden turns of Fate, and the unhappy conclusions of Violence and Injustice; ’tis to expose the singularities of Pride and Fancy, to make Folly and Falsehood contemptible, and to bring everything that is ill under Infamy and Neglect.’

He then adds: ‘This design has been oddly pursued by the English Stage;’ and so he launches his case.

Sir John Vanbrugh, who fared very badly at the doctor’s hands, replied--and, on the whole, with great spirit and considerable success--in a pamphlet entitled ‘A Short Vindication of “The Relapse” and “The Provok’d Wife” from Immorality and Profaneness.’ In this reply he strikes out this bold apophthegm:

‘The business of Comedy is to show people what they should do, by representing them upon the stage, doing what they should not.’

He continues with much good sense:

‘Nor is there any necessity a philosopher should stand by, like
an interpreter at a puppet-show, to explain the moral to the
audience. The mystery is seldom so deep but the pit and boxes
can dive into it, and ’tis their example out of the playhouse
that chiefly influences the galleries. The stage is a glass for
the world to view itself in; people ought, therefore, to see
themselves as they are; if it makes their faces too fair, they
won’t know they are dirty, and, by consequence, will neglect to
wash them. If, therefore, I have showed “Constant” upon the stage
what generally the thing called a fine gentleman is off it, I
think I have done what I should do. I have laid open his vices
as well as his virtues; ’tis the business of the audience to
observe where his flaws lessen his value, and, by considering the
deformity of his blemishes, become sensible how much a finer thing
he would be without them.’

It is impossible to improve upon these instructions; they are admirable. The only pity is that, as, naturally enough, Sir John wrote his plays first, and defended them afterwards, he had not bestowed a thought upon the subject until the angry parson gave him check. Vanbrugh, like most dramatists of his calibre, wrote to please the town, without any thought of doing good or harm. The two things he wanted were money and a reputation for wit. To lecture and scold him as if he had degraded some high and holy office was ridiculous. Collier had an excellent case, for there can be no doubt that the dramatists he squinted at were worse than they had any need to be. But it is impossible to read Collier’s two small books without a good many pishes and pshaws! He was a clericalist of an aggressive type. You cannot withhold your sympathy from Vanbrugh’s remark:

‘The reader may here be pleased to take notice what this gentleman would construe profaneness if he were once in the saddle with a good pair of spurs upon his heels.’

Now that Evangelicalism has gone out of fashion, we no longer hear denunciations of stage-plays. High Church parsons crowd the Lyceum, and lead the laughter in less dignified if more amusing resorts. But, for all that, there is a case to be made against the cheerful playhouse, but not by me.

As for Sir John Vanbrugh, his two well-known plays, ‘The Relapse’ and ‘The Provok’d Wife,’ are most excellent reading, Jeremy Collier notwithstanding. They must be read with the easy tolerance, the amused benignity, the scornful philosophy of a Christian of the Dr. Johnson type. You must not probe your laughter deep; you must forget for awhile your probationary state, and remember that, after all, the thing is but a play. Sir John has a great deal of wit of that genuine kind which is free from modishness. He reads freshly. He also has ideas. In ‘The Provok’d Wife,’ which was acted for the first time in the early part of 1697, there appears the Philosophy of Clothes (thus forestalling Swift), and also an early conception of Carlyle’s stupendous image of a naked House of Lords. This occurs in a conversation between Heartfree and Constant, which concludes thus:

_Heartfree._ Then for her outside--I consider it merely as an
outside--she has a thin, tiffany covering over just such stuff as
you and I are made on. As for her motion, her mien, her air, and
all those tricks, I know they affect you mightily. If you should
see your mistress at a coronation, dragging her peacock’s train,
with all her state and insolence, about her, ’twould strike you
with all the awful thoughts that heaven itself could pretend
to from you; whereas, I turn the whole matter into a jest, and
suppose her strutting in the selfsame stately manner, with nothing
on but her stays and her under, scanty-quilted petticoat.

_Constant._ Hold thy profane tongue! for I’ll hear no more.

‘The Relapse’ must, I think, be pronounced Vanbrugh’s best comedy. Lord Foppington is a humorous conception, and the whole dialogue is animated and to the point. One sees where Sheridan got his style. There are more brains, if less sparkle, in Vanbrugh’s repartees than in Sheridan’s.

_Berenthia._ I have had so much discourse with her, that I
believe, were she once cured of her fondness to her husband, the
fortress of her virtue would not be so impregnable as she fancies.

_Worthy._ What! she runs, I’ll warrant you, into that common
mistake of fond wives, who conclude themselves virtuous because
they can refuse a man they don’t like when they have got one they
do.

_Berenthia._ True; and, therefore, I think ’tis a presumptuous
thing in a woman to assume the name of virtuous till she has
heartily hated her husband and been soundly in love with somebody
else.

A handsome edition of Vanbrugh’s Plays has recently appeared, edited by Mr. W. C. Ward (Lawrence and Bullen), who has prepared an excellent Life of his author.

Vanbrugh was, as all the world knows, the architect of Blenheim Palace, as he also was of Castle Howard. He became Comptroller of Works in the reign of Queen Anne, and was appointed by King George Surveyor of the Works at Greenwich Hospital, in the neighbourhood of which he had property of his own. His name is still familiar in the ears of the respectable inhabitants of Blackheath. But what is mysterious is how and where he acquired such skill as he possessed in his profession. His father, Giles Vanbrugh, had nineteen children, of whom thirteen appear to have lived for some length of time, and of John’s education nothing precise is known. When nineteen he went into France, where he remained some years.

During this period, observes Mr. Ward, ‘it may be presumed he laid the foundation of that skill in architecture he afterwards so eminently displayed; at least, there is no subsequent period of his life to which we can, with equal probability, ascribe his studies in that art.’

Later on, Mr. Ward says:

‘The year 1702 presents our author in a new character. Of his
architectural studies we know absolutely nothing, unless we may
accept Swift’s account, who pretends that Vanbrugh acquired the
rudiments of the art by watching children building houses of cards
or clay. But this was probably ironical. However he came by his
skill, in 1702 he stepped into sudden fame as the architect of
Castle Howard.’

It is indeed extraordinary that a man should have undertaken such big jobs as Castle Howard and Blenheim without leaving any trace whatever of the means by which he became credited with the power to execute them. Mr. Pecksniff got an occasional pupil and premium, but, so far as I know, he never designed so much as a parish pump. Blenheim is exposed to a good deal of criticism, but nobody can afford to despise either it or Castle Howard, and it seems certain that the original plans and elevations of both structures were prepared by the author of ‘The Relapse’ and ‘The Provok’d Wife’ himself. Of course, there may have been a ghost, but if there had been, the Duchess of Marlborough, who was soon at loggerheads with her architect, would probably have dragged it into the light of day.

The wits made great fun of their distinguished colleague’s feats in brick and mortar. It was not usually permissible for a literary gentleman to be anything else, unless, indeed, a divine like Dr. Swift, whose satirical verses on the small house Vanbrugh built for himself in Whitehall are well known. They led to a coolness, and no one need wonder. After the architect’s death the divine apologized and expressed regret.

The well-known epigram--

‘Under this stone, reader, survey
Dead Sir John Vanbrugh’s house of clay
Lie heavy on him, Earth, for he
Laid many heavy loads on thee’--

is the composition of another doctor of divinity--Dr. Abel Evans--and was probably prompted by envy.

Amongst other things, Vanbrugh was a Herald, and in that capacity visited Hanover in 1706, and helped to invest the Electoral Prince, afterwards George II., with the Order of the Garter. Vanbrugh’s personality is not clearly revealed to us anywhere, but he appears to have been a pleasant companion and witty talker. He married late in life, and of three children only one survived, to be killed at Fontenoy. He himself died in 1726, in his sixty-third year, of a quinsy. His widow survived him half a century, thus affording another proof, if proof be needed, that no man is indispensable.

JOHN GAY.

The first half of the eighteenth century was in England the poet’s playground. These rhyming gentry had then a status, a claim upon private munificence and the public purse which has long since been hopelessly barred. A measure of wit, a tincture of taste, and a perseverance in demand would in those days secure for the puling Muse slices of solid pudding whilst in the flesh, and (frequently) sepulture in the Abbey when all was over.

What silk-mercer’s apprentice in these hard times, finding a place behind Messrs. Marshall and Snelgrove’s counter not jumping with his genius, dare hope by the easy expedient of publishing a pamphlet on ‘The Present State of Wit’ to become domestic steward to a semi-royal Duchess, and the friend of Mr. Lewis Morris and Mr. Lecky, who are, I suppose, our nineteenth-century equivalents for Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift? Yet such was the happy fate of Gay, who, after an idle life of undeserved good-fortune and much unmanly repining, died of an inflammation, in spite of the skilled care of Arbuthnot and the unwearying solicitude of the Duchess of Queensberry, and was interred like a peer of the realm in Westminster Abbey, having for his pall-bearers the Earl of Chesterfield, Viscount Cornbury, the Hon. Mr. Berkeley, General Dormer, Mr. Gore, and Mr. Pope. Such a recognition of the author of ‘Fables’ and ‘The Beggars’ Opera’ must make Mr. Besant’s mouth water. Nor did Gay, despite heavy losses in the South Sea Company, die a pauper; he left £6,000 behind him, which, as he was wise enough to die intestate, was divided equally between his two surviving sisters.

Gay’s good luck has never forsaken him. He enjoys, if, indeed, the word be not the hollowest of mockeries, an eternity of fame. It is true he is not read much, but he is always read a little. He has been dead more than a century and a half, so it seems likely that a hundred and fifty years hence he will be read as much as he is now, and, like a cork, will be observed bobbing on the surface of men’s memories. Better men and better poets than he have been, and will be, entirely submerged; but he was happy in his hour, happy even in his name (which lent itself to rhyme), happy in his nature; and so (such at least is our prognostication) new editions of Gay’s slender remains will at long intervals continue to appear and to attract a moment’s attention, even as Mr. Underhill’s admirable edition of the poems has lately done; new anthologies will contain his name, the biographical dictionaries will never quite forget him, his tomb in the Abbey will be stared at by impressionable youngsters, Pope’s striking epitaph will invite the fault-finding of the critical, and his own jesting couplet incur the censure of the moralist, until the day dawns when men cease to forget themselves in trifles. As soon as they do this, Gay will be forgotten once and for ever.

Gay’s one real achievement was ‘The Beggars’ Opera,’ which sprang from a sprout of Swift’s great brain. A ‘Newgate pastoral might make an odd, pretty sort of thing,’ so the Dean once remarked to Gay; and as Mr. Underhill, in his admirable Life of our poet, reminds us, Swift repeated the suggestion in a letter to Pope: ‘What think you of a Newgate pastoral among the whores and thieves there?’ But Swift’s ‘Beggars’ Opera’ would not have hit the public taste between wind and water as did Gay’s. It would have been much too tremendous a thing--its sincerity would have damned it past redemption. Even in Gay’s light hands the thing was risky--a speculation in the public fancy which could not but be dangerous. Gay knew this well enough, hence his quotation from Martial (afterwards adopted by the Tennysons as the motto for ‘Poems by Two Brothers’), _Nos hæc novimus esse nihil_. Congreve, resting on his laurels, declared it would either take greatly, or be damned confoundedly. It took, and, indeed, we cannot wonder. There was a foretaste of Gilbert about it quite enough to make its fortune in any century. Furthermore, it drove out of England, so writes an early editor, ‘for that season, the Italian opera, which had carried all before it for several years.’ It was a triumph for the home-bred article, and therefore dear to the souls of all true patriots.

The piece, though as wholly without sincerity as a pastoral by Ambrose Philips, a thing merely of the footlights, entirely shorn of a single one of the rays which glorify lawlessness in Burns’s ‘Jolly Beggars,’ yet manages through the medium of the songs to convey a pleasing though absurd sentimentality; and there is, perhaps, noticeable throughout a slight--a very slight--flavour of what is cantingly but conveniently called ‘the Revolution,’ which imparts a slender interest.

‘The Beggars’ Opera’ startled the propriety of that strange institution, the Church of England--a seminary of true religion which had left the task of protesting against the foulness of Dryden and Wycherley and the unscrupulous wit of Congreve and Vanbrugh to the hands of non-jurors like Collier and Law, but which, speaking, we suppose, in the interests of property, raised a warning voice when a comic opera made fun, not of marriage vows, but of highway robbery. Dr. Herring, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury, plucked up courage to preach against ‘The Beggars’ Opera’ before the Court, but the Head of the Church paid no attention to the divine, and, with the Queen and all the princesses, attended the twenty-first representation. The piece brought good luck all round. ‘Everybody,’ so Mr. Underhill assures us, ‘connected with the theatre (Lincoln’s Inn Fields), from the principal performer down to the box-keepers, got a benefit,’ and Miss Lavinia Fenton, who played Polly Peachum, lived to become Duchess of Bolton; whilst Hogarth painted no less than three pictures of the celebrated scene, ‘How happy could I be with either--were t’other dear charmer away.’

Dr. Johnson, in his ‘Life of Gay,’ deals scornfully with the absurd notion that robbers were multiplied by the popularity of ‘The Beggars’ Opera.’ ‘It is not likely to do good,’ says the Doctor, ‘nor can it be conceived, without more speculation than life requires or admits, to be productive of much evil.’ The Church of England might as well have held its tongue.

Gay, flushed with success, was not long in producing a sequel called ‘Polly,’ which, however, as it was supposed to offend, not against morality, which it undoubtedly did, but against Sir Robert Walpole, was prohibited. ‘Polly’ was printed, and, being prohibited, had a great sale. It is an exceedingly nasty piece, not unworthy of one of the three authors who between them produced that stupidest of farces, ‘Three Hours after Marriage.’

Gay’s third opera, ‘Achilles,’ was produced at Covent Garden after his death. One does not need to be a classical purist to be offended at the sight of ‘Achilles’ upon a stage, singing doggerel verses to the tune of ‘Butter’d Pease,’ or at hearing Ajax exclaim:

‘Honour called me to the task,
No matter for explaining,
’Tis a fresh affront to ask
A man of honour’s meaning.’

This vulgar and idiotic stuff ran twenty nights.

Gay’s best-known poetical pieces are his ‘Fables,’ and his undoubtedly interesting, though intrinsically dull ‘Trivia; or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London,’ though for our own part we would as lief read his ‘Shepherds’ Week’ as anything else Gay has ever written.

The ‘Fables’ are light and lively, and might safely be recommended to all who are fond of an easy quotation. To lay them down is never difficult, and if, after having done so, Swift’s ‘Confession of the Beasts’ is taken up, how vast the difference! There are, we know, those in whose nature there is too much of the milk of human kindness to enable them to enjoy Swift when he shows his teeth; but however this may be, we confess, if we are to read at all, we must prefer Swift’s ‘Beasts’ Confession’ to all the sixty-five fables of Gay put together.

‘The Swine with contrite heart allow’d
His shape and beauty made him proud
In diet was perhaps too nice,
But gluttony was ne’er his vice;
In every turn of life content
And meekly took what fortune sent.
Inquire through all the parish round,
A better neighbour ne’er was found.
His vigilance might some displease;
’Tis true he hated sloth like pease.

‘The Chaplain vows he cannot fawn,
Though it would raise him to the lawn.
He passed his hours among his books,
You find it in his meagre looks.
He might if he were worldly wise
Preferment get and spare his eyes;
But owns he has a stubborn spirit
That made him trust alone to merit;
Would rise by merit to promotion.
Alas! a mere chimeric notion.’

Gay was found pleasing by his friends, and had, we must believe, a kind heart. Swift, who was a nice observer in such matters, in his famous poem on his own death, assigns Gay a week in which to grieve:

‘Poor Pope would grieve a month, and Gay
A week, and Arbuthnot a day;
St. John himself will scarce forbear
To bite his pen and drop a tear;
The rest will give a shrug and cry,
“I’m sorry, but we all must die.”’

It is a matter of notoriety that Gay was very fat and fond of eating. He is, as we have already said, buried in Westminster Abbey, over against Chaucer. When all the rubbish is carted away from the Abbey to make room for the great men and women of the twentieth century, Gay will probably be accounted just good enough to remain where he is. He always was a lucky fellow, though he had not the grace to think so.

ROGER NORTH’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY.

The Cambridge wit who some vast amount of years ago sang of Bohn’s publications, ‘so useful to the student of Latin and Greek,’ hit with unerring precision the main characteristic of those very numerous volumes. Utility was the badge of all that tribe, save, indeed, of those woeful ‘Extra Volumes’ which are as much out of place amongst their grave brethren as John Knox at a ballet. There was something in the binding of Messrs. Bohn’s books which was austere, and even forbidding; their excellence, their authority, could not be denied by even a youthful desperado, but reading them always wore the stern aspect of duty. The binding had undoubtedly a good deal to do with this. It has now been discarded by Messrs. George Bell and Sons, the present proprietors, in favour of brighter colours. The difference thus effected is enormous. The old binding is kept in stock because, so we are told, ‘it is endeared to many book-lovers by association.’ The piety of Messrs. Bell has misled them. No book-lover, we feel certain, ever held one of Messrs. Bohn’s publications in his hands except to read it.

A valuable addition has lately been made to the ‘Standard Library’ by the publication--in three bright and cheerful volumes--of Roger North’s well-known ‘Lives of the Norths,’ and also--and this practically for the first time--of Roger North’s Autobiography, a book unknown to Macaulay, and which he would have read with fierce interest, bludgeon in hand, having no love for the family.

Dr. Jessopp, who edits the volumes with his accustomed skill, mentions in the Preface how the manuscript of the Autobiography belonged to the late Mr. Crossley, of Manchester, and was sold after the death of that bibliophile, in 1883, and four years later printed for private circulation. It now comes before the general public. It is not long, and deserves attention. The style is gritty and the story far from exciting, but the book is interesting, particularly for lawyers, a deserving class of readers for whose special entertainment small care is usually taken.

Roger North was born at Tostock, in Suffolk, in 1653--the youngest of his brothers. Never was man more of a younger brother than he. This book of his might be called ‘The Autobiography of a Younger Brother.’ The elder brother was, of course, Francis, afterwards Lord Guilford, a well-hated man, both in his own day and after it, but who at all events looked well after Roger, who was some sixteen years his junior.

In 1669 Roger North was admitted a student of the Middle Temple, Francis being then a Bencher of that learned society. Roger had chambers on the west side of Middle Temple Lane, and £10 wherewith to furnish them and buy a gown, and other necessaries. He says it was not enough, but that he managed to make it serve. His excellent mother, though she had some ten children and a difficult husband, produced £30, with which he bought law books. His father allowed him £40 a year, and he had his big brother at hand to help him out of debt now and again.

He was, we feel as we read, a little uneasy under his brother’s eye. The elder North had a disagreeable fashion of putting ‘little contempts upon his brother,’ and a way of raising his own character by depressing Roger’s, which was hard to bear. But Roger North bore it bravely; he meant sticking to his brother, and stick he did. In five years he saw Francis become King’s Counsel, Solicitor, and Attorney-General. ‘If he should die, writes Roger, ‘I am lost.’ But Francis did not die, which was as well, for he was much better suited for this world than the next.

Roger North was no great student of the law. He was fond of mathematics, optics, mechanics, architecture, music, and of sailing a small yacht--given him by Mr. Windham, of Felbrigge--on the Thames; and he gives in his Autobiography interesting accounts of these pastimes. He was very anxious indeed to get on and make money, but he relied more upon his brother than upon either his own brains or his own industry.

In 1674 Francis North became Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, succeeding Sir John Vaughan, the friend of Selden; and Roger at once got himself called to the Bar, and thenceforward, so far as possible, whenever Francis was on the Bench, there was Roger pleading before him. Indeed, it went much further than this. ‘I kept so closely to him that I can safely say I saw him abed every night without intermission for divers years together, which enables me to contradict the malicious report a relation raised of him, that he kept a mistress as the mode of that time was.’ The morals of a Chief Justice two centuries after his death having no personal concern for this generation, I feel free to confess that I am rather sorry for Francis with Roger ever by his side in this unpleasantly pertinacious fashion. The younger North, so he tells us, always drove down to Westminster with the Chief Justice, and he frankly admits that his chief _appui_ was his brother’s character, fame, and interest. Not being a Serjeant, Roger could not actually practise in the Common Pleas, but on various circuits, at the Guildhall, at the Treasury, and wherever else he could lawfully go before the Chief Justice, there Roger went and got a business together. He also made money, sometimes as much as £9 a day, from court-keeping--that is, attending manor courts. This was a device of his elder brother’s, who used to practise it before he was called to the Bar. It savours of pettifogging. However, it seems in Roger’s case to have led to his obtaining the patent office of Temporal Steward to the See of Canterbury, to which he had the courage to stick after the deprivation of Archbishop Sancroft. This dogged devotion to the Church redeems North’s life from a commonplacedness which would otherwise be hopeless. The Archbishop left his faithful steward £20 for a ring, but North preferred, like a wise man, to buy books, which he had bound in the Archbishop’s manner.

In 1682 Roger North ‘took silk,’ as the phrase now goes, and became one of the Attorney-General’s devils, in which capacity his name is to be found in the reports of the trial of Lord William Russell. What he says about that trial in the Autobiography is just what might be expected from an Attorney-General’s devil--that is, that never before was a State trial conducted with such candour and fairness. He admits that this is not the judgment of the world; but then, says he, ‘the world never did nor will understand its true good, or reward, encourage, or endure its true patriots and friends.’

At the end of 1683 Francis North came home one night with no less remarkable a companion in his coach than the Great Seal. Roger instantly transposed himself to the Court of Chancery, where he began coining money. ‘My whole study,’ he says, ‘is causes and motions.’ He found it hard work, but he buckled to, and boasts--like so many of his brethren, alive as well as dead--that he, at all events, always read his briefs. In the first year his fees amounted to £4,000, in the second to nearly as much, but in the third there was a falling off, owing to a smaller quantity of business in the Court. A new Lord Keeper was always the occasion of the rehearing of old causes. The defeated litigants wished to try their luck before the new man.

North was at first astonished with the size of the fees he was offered; he even refused them, thinking them bribes: ‘but my fellow-practisers’ conversation soon cured me of that nicety.’ And yet the biggest fee he ever got was twenty guineas. Ten guineas was the usual fee on a ‘huge’ brief, and five ‘in the better sort of causes.’ In ordinary cases Roger North would take two or three guineas, and one guinea for motions and defences.

In the Long Vacations Roger still stuck to his brother, who, no doubt, found him useful. Thus when the Mayor, Aldermen, and Council of Banbury came over to Wroxton to pay their respects to the Lord Keeper, they were handed over to the charge of Roger, who walked them all over the house to show the rooms, and then made them drunk at dinner ‘and dismissed them to their lodgings in ditches homeward bound.’ But the effort was too much for him, and no sooner were they gone than he had to lie down, all on fire, upon the ground, from which he rose very sick and scarce recovered in some days. As a rule he was a most temperate man, and hated the custom and extravagance of drinking. He had not enough understanding to obfuscate it by drink.

All went well with the brothers until the death of Charles II. Then the horizon grew troubled--but still Roger was being talked of as a Baron of the Exchequer, when the Lord Keeper died on September 5, 1685. With him ended the public life of his younger brother. Roger North was only thirty-two. He was a King’s Counsel, and in considerable practice, but he had not the will--perhaps he had not the force--to stand alone. At the Revolution he became a non-juror, and retired into the country. His Autobiography also ceases with his brother’s death.

He had much private family business to transact, and in 1690 he bought the Rougham estate in Norfolk, where he carried on building and planting on a considerable scale. He married and had children, bought books, restored the parish church, and finally died on March 1, 1734, in his eighty-first year.

Dr. Jessopp tells us very little is left of Roger North--his house has been pulled down, his trees pulled up, and his books dispersed. But his Lives of his three brothers, and now his own Autobiography, will keep his memory green. There is something about him one rather likes, though were we asked what it is, we should have no answer ready.

BOOKS OLD AND NEW.