Chapter I: A Manchester Swedenborgian and a Liverpool Literary Coterie21

It was in the year 1801, whilst yet at school, that I made my first literary acquaintance. This was with a gentleman now dead, and little, at any time, known in the literary world; indeed, not at all; for his authorship was confined to a department of religious literature as obscure and as narrow in its influence as any that can be named--viz. Swedenborgianism.

Already, on the bare mention of that word, a presumption arises against any man, that, writing much (or writing at all) for a body of doctrines so apparently crazy as those of Mr. Swedenborg, a man must have bid adieu to all good sense and manliness of mind. Indeed, this is so much of a settled case, that even to have written _against_ Mr. Swedenborg would be generally viewed as a suspicious act, requiring explanation, and not very easily admitting of it. _Mr._ Swedenborg I call him, because I understand that his title to call himself "Baron" is imaginary; or rather he never _did_ call himself by any title of honour--that mistake having originated amongst his followers in this country, who have chosen to designate him as the "Honourable" and as the "Baron" Swedenborg, by way of translating, to the ear of England, some one or other of those irrepresentable distinctions, _Legations-Rath_, _Hofrath_, _&c._, which are tossed about with so much profusion in the courts of continental Europe, on both sides the Baltic. For myself, I cannot think myself qualified to speak of any man's writings without a regular examination of some one or two among those which his admirers regard as his best performances. Yet, as any happened to fall in my way, I have looked into them; and the impression left upon my mind was certainly not favourable to their author. They laboured, to my feeling, with two opposite qualities of annoyance, but which I believe not uncommonly found united in lunatics--excessive dulness or matter-of-factness in the execution, with excessive extravagance in the conceptions. The result, at least, was most unhappy: for, of all writers, Swedenborg is the only one I ever heard of who has contrived to strip even the shadowy world beyond the grave of all its mystery and all its awe. From the very heaven of heavens, he has rent away the veil; no need for seraphs to "tremble while they gaze"; for the familiarity with which all objects are invested makes it impossible that even poor mortals should find any reason to tremble. Until I saw this book, I had not conceived it possible to carry an atmosphere so earthy, and steaming with the vapours of earth, into regions which, by early connexion in our infant thoughts with the sanctities of death, have a hold upon the reverential affections such as they rarely lose. In this view, I should conceive that Swedenborg, if it were at all possible for him to become a popular author, would, at the same time, become immensely mischievous. He would dereligionize men beyond all other authors whatsoever.

Little could this character of Swedenborg's writings--this, indeed, least of all--have been suspected from the temper, mind, or manners of my new friend. He was the most spiritual-looking, the most saintly in outward aspect, of all human beings whom I have known throughout life. He was rather tall, pale, and thin; the most unfleshly, the most of a sublimated spirit dwelling already more than half in some purer world, that a poet could have imagined. He was already aged when I first knew him, a clergyman of the Church of England; which may seem strange in connexion with his Swedenborgianism; but he was, however, so. He was rector of a large parish in a large town, the more active duties of which parish were discharged by his curate; but much of the duties within the church were still discharged by himself, and with such exemplary zeal that his parishioners, afterwards celebrating the fiftieth anniversary, or _golden_ jubilee of his appointment to the living (the twenty-fifth anniversary is called in German the silver--the fiftieth, the golden jubilee), went farther than is usual in giving a public expression and a permanent shape to their sentiments of love and veneration. I am surprised, on reflection, that this venerable clergyman should have been unvexed by Episcopal censures. He might, and I dare say would, keep back the grosser parts of Swedenborg's views from a public display; but, in one point, it would not be easy for a man so conscientious to make a compromise between his ecclesiastical duty and his private belief; for I have since found, though I did not then know it, that Swedenborg held a very peculiar creed on the article of atonement. From the slight pamphlet which let me into this secret I could not accurately collect the exact distinctions of his creed; but it was very different from that of the English Church.

However, my friend continued unvexed for a good deal more than fifty years, enjoying that peace, external as well as internal, which, by so eminent a title, belonged to a spirit so evangelically meek and dovelike. I mention him chiefly for the sake of describing his interesting house and household, so different from all which belong to this troubled age, and his impressive style of living. The house seemed almost monastic; and yet it stood in the centre of one of the largest, busiest, noisiest towns in England; and the whole household seemed to have stepped out of their places in some Vandyke, or even some Titian, picture, from a forgotten century and another climate. On knocking at the door, which of itself seemed an outrage to the spirit of quietness which brooded over the place, you were received by an ancient manservant in the sober livery which belonged traditionally to Mr. ----'s[22] family; for he was of a gentleman's descent, and had had the most finished education of a gentleman. This venerable old butler put me in mind always, by his noiseless steps, of the Castle of Indolence, where the porter or usher walked about in shoes that were shod with felt, lest any rude echoes might be roused. An ancient housekeeper was equally venerable, equally gentle in her deportment, quiet in her movements, and inaudible in her tread. One or other of these upper domestics,--for the others rarely crossed my path,--ushered me always into some room expressing by its furniture, its pictures, and its coloured windows, the solemn tranquillity which, for half a century, had reigned in that mansion. Among the pictures were more than one of St. John, the beloved apostle, by Italian masters. Neither the features nor the expression were very wide of Mr. Clowes's own countenance; and, had it been possible to forget the gross character of Swedenborg's reveries, or to substitute for these fleshly dreams the awful visions of the Apocalypse, one might have imagined easily that the pure, saintly, and childlike evangelist had been once again recalled to this earth, and that this most quiet of mansions was some cell in the island of Patmos. Whence came the stained glass of the windows I know not, and whether it were stained or painted. The revolutions of that art are known from Horace Walpole's account; and, nine years after this period, I found that, in Birmingham, where the art of staining glass was chiefly practised, no trifling sum was charged even for a vulgar lacing of no great breadth round a few drawing-room windows, which one of my friends thought fit to introduce as an embellishment. These windows, however, of my clerical friend were really "_storied_ windows," having Scriptural histories represented upon them. A crowning ornament to the library or principal room was a sweet-toned organ, ancient, and elaborately carved in its wood-work, at which my venerable friend readily sate down, and performed the music of anthems as often as I asked him, sometimes accompanying it with his voice, which was tremulous from old age, but neither originally unmusical, nor (as might be perceived) untrained.

[22] As De Quincey has divulged the name of this clergyman in his
Autobiography (see vol. i. pp. 136-138), there is no need for
concealing it here. He was the Rev. John Clowes, Rector of St.
John's Church, Manchester, and we shall substitute the full name
for the blank in the sequel.--M.

Often, from the storms and uproars of this world, I have looked back upon this most quiet and, I believe, most innocent abode (had I said saintly I should hardly have erred), conneacting it in thought with _Little Gidding_, the famous mansion (in Huntingdonshire, I believe) of the Farrers, an interesting family in the reigns of James I. and Charles I. Of the Farrers there is a long and circumstantial biographical account, and of the conventual discipline maintained at Little Gidding. For many years it was the rule at Gidding--and it was the wish of the Farrers to have transmitted that practice through succeeding centuries--that a musical or cathedral service should be going on at every hour of night and day in the chapel of the mansion. Let the traveller, at what hour he would, morning or evening, summer or winter, and in what generation or century soever, happen to knock at the gate of Little Gidding, it was the purpose of Nicholas Farrer--a sublime purpose--that always he should hear the blare of the organ, sending upwards its surging volumes of melody, God's worship for ever proceeding, anthems of praise for ever ascending, and _jubilates_ echoing without end or known beginning. One stream of music, in fact, never intermitting, one vestal fire of devotional praise and thanksgiving, was to connect the beginnings with the ends of generations, and to link one century into another. Allowing for the sterner asceticism of N. Farrer--partly arising out of the times, partly out of personal character, and partly, perhaps, out of his travels in Spain--my aged friend's arrangement of the day, and the training of his household, might seem to have been modelled on the plans of Mr. Farrer; whom, however, he might never have heard of. There was also, in each house, the same union of religion with some cultivation of the ornamental arts, or some expression of respect for them. In each case, a monastic severity, that might, under other circumstances, have terminated in the gloom of a La Trappe, had been softened by English sociality, and by the habits of a gentleman's education, into a devotional pomp, reconcilable with Protestant views. When, however, remembering this last fact in Mr. Clowes's case (the fact I mean of his liberal education), I have endeavoured to explain the possibility of one so much adorned by all the accomplishments of a high-bred gentleman, and one so truly pious, falling into the grossness, almost the sensuality, which appears to besiege the visions of Swedenborg, I fancy that the whole may be explained out of the same cause which occasionally may be descried, through a distance of two complete centuries, as weighing heavily upon the Farrers--viz. the dire monotony of daily life, when visited by no irritations either of hope or fear--no hopes from ambition, no fears from poverty.

Nearly (if not quite) sixty years did my venerable friend inhabit that same parsonage house, without any incident more personally interesting to himself than a cold or a sore throat. And I suppose that he resorted to Swedenborg--reluctantly, perhaps, at the first--as to a book of fairy tales connected with his professional studies. And one thing I am bound to add in candour, which may have had its weight with him, that more than once, on casually turning over a volume of Swedenborg, I have certainly found most curious and felicitous passages of comment--passages which extracted a brilliant meaning from numbers, circumstances, or trivial accidents, apparently without significance or object, and gave to things, without a place or a habitation in the critic's regard, a value as hieroglyphics or cryptical ciphers, which struck me as elaborately ingenious. This acknowledgment I make not so much in praise of Swedenborg, whom I must still continue to think a madman, as in excuse for Mr. Clowes. It may easily be supposed that a person of Mr. Clowes's consideration and authority was not regarded with indifference by the general body of the Swedenborgians. At his motion it was, I believe, that a society was formed for procuring and encouraging a translation into English of Swedenborg's entire works, most of which are written in Latin. Several of these translations are understood to have been executed personally by Mr. Clowes; and in this obscure way, for anything I know, he may have been an extensive author. But it shows the upright character of the man that never, in one instance, did he seek to bias my opinions in this direction. Upon every other subject, he trusted me confidentially--and, notwithstanding my boyish years (15-16), as his equal. His regard for me, when thrown by accident in his way, had arisen upon his notice of my fervent simplicity, and my unusual thoughtfulness. Upon these merits, I had gained the honourable distinction of a general invitation to his house, without exception as to days and hours, when few others could boast of any admission at all. The common ground on which we met was literature--more especially the Greek and Roman literature; and much he exerted himself, in a spirit of the purest courtesy, to meet my animation upon these themes. But the interest on his part was too evidently a secondary interest in _me_, for whom he talked, and not in the subject: he spoke much from memory, as it were of things that he had once felt, and little from immediate sympathy with the author; and his animation was artificial, though his courtesy, which prompted the effort, was the truest and most unaffected possible.

The connexion between us must have been interesting to an observer; for, though I cannot say with Wordsworth, of old Daniel and his grandson, that there were "ninety good years of fair and foul weather" between us, there were, however, sixty, I imagine, at the least; whilst as a bond of connexion there was nothing at all that I know of beyond a common tendency to reverie, which is a bad link for a _social_ connexion. The little ardour, meantime, with which he had, for many years, participated in the interests of this world, or all that it inherits, was now rapidly departing. Daily and consciously he was loosening all ties which bound him to earlier recollections; and, in particular, I remember--because the instance was connected with my last farewell visit, as it proved--that for some time he was engaged daily in renouncing with solemnity (though often enough in cheerful words) book after book of classical literature in which he had once taken particular delight. Several of these, after taking his final glance at a few passages to which a pencil reference in the margin pointed his eye, he delivered to me as memorials in time to come of himself. The last of the books given to me under these circumstances was a Greek "Odyssey," in Clarke's edition. "This," said he, "is nearly the sole book remaining to me of my classical library--which, for some years, I have been dispersing amongst my friends. Homer I retained to the last, and the 'Odyssey,' by preference to the 'Iliad,' both in compliance with my own taste, and because this very copy was my chosen companion for evening amusement during my freshman's term at Trinity College, Cambridge--whither I went early in the spring of 1743. Your own favourite Grecian is Euripides; but still you must value--we must all value--Homer. I, even as old as I am, could still read him with delight; and, as long as any merely human composition ought to occupy my time, I should have made an exception in behalf of this solitary author. But I am a soldier of Christ; the enemy, the last enemy, cannot be far off; _sarcinas colligere_ is, at my age, the watchword for every faithful sentinel, hourly to keep watch and ward, to wait and to be vigilant. This very day I have taken my farewell glance at Homer, for I must no more be found seeking my pleasure amongst the works of man; and, that I may not be tempted to break my resolution, I make over this my last book to you."

Words to this effect, uttered with his usual solemnity, accompanied his gift; and, at the same time, he added, without any separate comment, a little pocket Virgil--the one edited by Alexander Cunningham, the bitter antagonist of Bentley--with a few annotations placed at the end. The act was in itself a solemn one; something like taking the veil for a nun--a final abjuration of the world's giddy agitations. And yet to him--already and for so long a time linked so feebly to anything that could be called the world, and living in a seclusion so profound--it was but as if an anchorite should retire from his outer to his inner cell. Me, however, it impressed powerfully in after years; because this act of self-dedication to the next world, and of parting from the intellectual luxuries of this, was also, in fact, though neither of us at the time knew it to be such, the scene of his final parting with myself. Immediately after his solemn speech, on presenting me with the "Odyssey," he sat down to the organ, sang a hymn or two, then chanted part of the liturgy, and, finally, at my request, performed the anthem so well known in the English Church service--the collect for the seventh Sunday after Trinity--(_Lord of all power and might, &c._) It was summer--about half after nine in the evening; the light of day was still lingering, and just strong enough to illuminate the Crucifixion, the Stoning of the Protomartyr, and other grand emblazonries of the Christian faith, which adorned the rich windows of his library. Knowing the early hours of his household, I now received his usual fervent adieus--which, without the words, had the sound and effect of a benediction--felt the warm pressure of his hand, saw dimly the outline of his venerable figure, more dimly his saintly countenance, and quitted that gracious presence, which, in this world, I was destined no more to revisit. The night was one in the first half of July 1802; in the second half of which, or very early in August, I quitted school clandestinely, and consequently the neighbourhood of Mr. Clowes. Some years after, I saw his death announced in all the public journals, as having occurred at Leamington Spa, then in the springtime of its medicinal reputation. Farewell, early friend! holiest of men whom it has been my lot to meet! Yes, I repeat, thirty-five years are past since then, and I have yet seen few men approaching to this venerable clergyman in paternal benignity--none certainly in child-like purity, apostolic holiness, or in perfect alienation of heart from the spirit of this fleshly world.

I have delineated the habits and character of Mr. Clowes at some length, chiefly because a connexion is rare and interesting between parties so widely asunder in point of age--one a schoolboy, and the other almost an octogenarian, to quote a stanza from one of the most spiritual sketches of Wordsworth--

"We talked with open heart and tongue,
Affectionate and free--
A pair of friends, though I was young,
And Matthew seventy-three."

I have stated a second reason for this record, in the fact that Mr. Clowes was the first of my friends who had any connexion with the press. At one time I have reason to believe that this connexion was pretty extensive, though not publicly avowed, and so far from being lucrative that at first I believe it to have been expensive to him, and whatever profits might afterwards arise were applied, as much of his regular income, to the benefit of others.[23] Here, again, it seems surprising that a spirit so beneficent and, in the amplest sense, charitable, could coalesce in any views with Swedenborg, who, in some senses, was not charitable. Swedenborg had been scandalized by a notion which, it seems, he found prevalent amongst the poor of the Continent--viz., that, if riches were a drag and a negative force on the road to religious perfection, poverty must be positive title _per se_ to the favour of Heaven. Grievously offended with this error, he came almost to hate poverty as a presumptive indication of this offensive heresy; scarcely would he allow it an indirect value, as removing in many cases the occasions or incitements of evil. No: being in itself neutral and indifferent, he argued that it had become erroneously a ground of presumptuous hope; whilst the rich man, aware of his danger, was, in some degree, armed against it by fear and humility. And, in this course of arguing and of corresponding feeling, Mr. Swedenborg had come to hate the very name of a poor candidate for Heaven, as bitterly as a sharking attorney hates the applications of a pauper client. Yet so entirely is it true that "to the pure, all things are pure," and that perfect charity "thinketh no ill," but is gifted with a power to transmute all things into its own resemblance--so entirely is all this true, that this most spiritual, and, as it were, disembodied of men, could find delight in the dreams of the very "fleshliest incubus" that has intruded amongst heavenly objects; and, secondly, this benignest of men found his own pure feelings not outraged by one who threw a withering scowl over the far larger half of his fellow-creatures.

[23] In a recent [1889] catalogue of a Manchester book-sale I find
this entry:--"Clowes (John, of Manchester, the Church of England
Swedenborgian). Sermons, Translations, etc., with a Life of him by
Theo. Crompton, principally published in Manchester from 1799 to
1850. 17 vols."--M.

* * * * *

Concurrently with this acquaintance, so impressive and so elevating to me, from the unusual sanctity of Mr. Clowes's character, I formed another with a well-known coterie, more avowedly, and in a more general sense, literary, resident at Liverpool or its neighbourhood. In my sixteenth year [1801] I had accompanied my mother and family on a summer's excursion to Everton, a well-known village upon the heights immediately above Liverpool; though by this time I believe it has thrown out so many fibres of connexion as to have become a mere quarter or suburban "process" (to speak by anatomical phrase) of the great town below it. In those days, however, distant by one third of a century from ours, Everton was still a distinct village (for a mile of ascent is worth three of level ground in the way of effectual separation); it was delightfully refreshed by marine breezes, though raised above the sea so far that its thunders could be heard only under favourable circumstances. There we had a cottage for some months; and the nearest of our neighbours happened to be that Mr. Clarke, the banker, to whom acknowledgments are made in the _Lorenzo the Magnificent_, for aid in procuring MSS. and information from Italy. This gentleman called on my mother, merely in the general view of offering neighbourly attentions to a family of strangers. I, as the eldest of my brothers, and already with strong literary propensities, had received a general invitation to his house. Thither I went, indeed, early and late; and there I met Mr. Roscoe, Dr. Currie (who had just at that time published his Life and Edition of Burns), and Mr. Shepherd of Gatacre, the author of some works on Italian literature (particularly a Life of _Poggio Bracciolini_), and, since then, well known to all England by his Reform politics.

There were other members of this society--some, like myself, visitors merely to that neighbourhood; but those I have mentioned were the chief. Here I had an early opportunity of observing the natural character and tendencies of merely literary society--by which society I mean all such as, having no strong distinctions in power of thinking or in native force of character, are yet raised into circles of pretension and mark by the fact of having written a book, or of holding a notorious connexion with some department or other of the periodical press. No society is so vapid and uninteresting in its natural quality, none so cheerless and petrific in its influence upon others. Ordinary people, in such company, are in general repressed from uttering with cordiality the natural expression of their own minds or temperaments, under a vague feeling of some peculiar homage due, or at least customarily paid, to those lions: such people are no longer at their ease, or masters of their own natural motions in their own natural freedom; whilst indemnification of any sort is least of all to be looked for from the literary dons who have diffused this unpleasant atmosphere of constraint. They disable others, and yet do nothing themselves to fill up the void they have created. One and all--unless by accident people of unusual originality, power, and also nerve, so as to be able without trepidation to face the expectations of men--the literary class labour under two opposite disqualifications for a good tone of conversation. From causes visibly explained, they are either spoiled by the vices of reserve, and of over-consciousness directed upon themselves--this is one extreme; or, where manliness of mind has prevented this, beyond others of equal or inferior natural power, they are apt to be desperately commonplace. The first defect is an accident arising out of the rarity of literary pretensions, and would rapidly subside as the proportion became larger of practising literati to the mass of educated people. But the other is an adjunct scarcely separable from the ordinary prosecution of a literary career, and growing in fact out of literature _per se_, as literature is generally understood. That same day, says Homer, which makes a man a slave robs him of half his value. That same hour which first awakens a child to the consciousness of being observed, and to the sense of admiration, strips it of its freedom and unpremeditated graces of motion. Awkwardness at the least--and too probably, as a consequence of _that_, affectation and conceit--follow hard upon the consciousness of special notice or admiration. The very attempt to disguise embarrassment too often issues in a secondary and more marked embarrassment.

Another mode of reserve arises with some literary men, who believe themselves to be in possession of novel ideas. Cordiality of communication, or ardour of dispute, might betray them into a revelation of those golden thoughts, sometimes into a necessity of revealing them, since, without such aid, it might be impossible to maintain theirs in the discussion. On this principle it was--a principle of deliberate unsocial reserve--that Adam Smith is said to have governed his conversation; he professed to put a bridle on his words, lest by accident a pearl should drop out of his lips amongst the vigilant bystanders. And in no case would he have allowed himself to be engaged in a disputation, because both the passions of dispute and the necessities of dispute are alike apt to throw men off their guard. A most unamiable reason it certainly is, which places a man in one constant attitude of self-protection against petty larceny. And yet, humiliating as that may be to human nature, the furtive propensities or instincts of petty larceny are diffused most extensively through all ranks--directed, too, upon a sort of property far more tangible and more ignoble, as respects the possible motives of the purloiner, than any property in subjects purely intellectual. Rather more than ten years ago, a literary man of the name of Alton published, some little time before his own death, a very searching essay upon this chapter of human integrity--arraying a large list of common cases (cases of hats, gloves, umbrellas, books, newspapers, &c.) where the claim of ownership, left to itself and unsupported by accidents of shame and exposure, appeared to be weak indeed amongst classes of society prescriptively "respectable." And yet, for a double reason, literary larceny is even more to be feared; both because it is countenanced by a less ignoble quality of temptation, and because it is far more easy of achievement--so easy, indeed, that it may be practised without any clear accompanying consciousness.

I have myself witnessed or been a party to a case of the following kind:--A new truth--suppose for example, a new doctrine or a new theory--was communicated to a very able man in the course of conversation, not _didactically_, or directly _as_ a new truth, but _polemically_,--communicated as an argument in the current of a dispute. What followed? Necessarily it followed that a very able man would not be purely _passive_ in receiving this new truth; that he would _co-operate_ with the communicator in many ways--as by raising objections, by half dissipating his own objections, and in a variety of other co-agencies. In such cases, a very clever man does in effect half-generate the new idea for himself, but then he does this entirely under your leading; you stand ready at each point of possible deviation, to warn him away from the wrong turn--from the turn which leads nowhither or the turn which leads astray. Yet the final result has been that the _catechumen_, under the full consciousness of _self_-exertion, has so far confounded his just and true belief of having contributed to the evolution of the doctrine, _quoad_ his own apprehension of it, with the far different case of having evolved the truth itself into light, as to go off with the firm impression that the doctrine had been a product of his own.[24] There is therefore ground enough for the jealousy of Adam Smith, since a robbery may be committed unconsciously; though, by the way, it is not a peril peculiarly applicable to himself, who has not so much succeeded in discovering new truths as in establishing a logical connexion amongst old ones.

[24] For a similar passage, see _ante_, pp. 96, 97.--M.

On the other hand, it is not by reserve, whether of affectation or of Smithian jealousy, that the majority of literary people offend--at least not by the latter; for, so far from having much novelty to protect against pirates, the most general effect of literary pursuits is to tame down all points of originality to one standard of insipid monotony. I shall not go into the reasons for this. I make my appeal to the matter of fact. Try a Parisian populace, very many of whom are highly cultivated by reading, against a body of illiterate rustics. Mr. Scott of Aberdeen,[25] in his "Second Tour to Paris" (1815), tells us that, on looking over the shoulder of poor stall women selling trifles in the street, he usually found them reading Voltaire, Rousseau, or even (as I think he adds) Montesquieu; but, notwithstanding the polish which such reading both presumes as a previous condition and produces as a natural effect, yet no people could be more lifeless in their minds, or more barren of observing faculties, than they; and so he describes them. Words! words! nothing but words! On the other hand, listen to the conversation of a few scandalous village dames collected at a tea-table. Vulgar as the spirit may be which possesses them, and not seldom malicious, still how full of animation and of keen perception it will generally be found, and of a learned spirit of connoisseurship in human character, by comparison with the _fade_ generalities and barren recollections of mere literati!

[25] He was first editor of the _London Magazine_, and was killed
in an unfortunate duel in February 1821.--M.

All this was partially illustrated in the circle to which I was now presented. Mr. Clarke was not an author, and he was by much the most interesting person of the whole. He had travelled, and, particularly, he had travelled in Italy--then an aristocratic distinction; had a small, but interesting, picture gallery; and, at this time, amused himself by studying Greek, for which purpose he and myself met at sunrise every morning through the summer, and read Æschylus together. These meetings, at which we sometimes had the company of any stranger who might happen to be an amateur in Greek, were pleasant enough to my schoolboy vanity--placing me in the position of teacher and guide to men old enough to be my grandfathers. But the dinner parties, at which the literati sometimes assembled in force, were far from being equally amusing. Mr. Roscoe[26] was simple and manly in his demeanour; but there was the feebleness of a mere _belle-lettrist_, a mere man of _virtù_, in the style of his sentiments on most subjects. Yet he was a politician, and took an ardent interest in politics, and wrote upon politics--all which are facts usually presuming some vigour of mind. And he wrote, moreover, on the popular side, and with a boldness which, in that day, when such politics were absolutely disreputable, seemed undeniably to argue great moral courage. But these were accidents arising out of his connexion with the Whig party, or (to speak more accurately) with the _Opposition_ party in Parliament; by whom he was greatly caressed. Mr. Fox, the Duchess of Devonshire, Mr. Sheridan, and all the _powers_ on that side of the question, showed him the most marked attention in a great variety of forms; and this it was, not any native propensity for such speculations, which drove him into pamphleteering upon political questions. Mr. Fox (himself the very feeblest of party writers) was probably sincere in his admiration of Mr. Roscoe's pamphlets; and did seriously think him, as I know that he described him in private letters, an antagonist well matched against Burke; and _that_ he afterwards became in form. The rest of the world wondered at his presumption, or at his gross miscalculation of his own peculiar powers. An eminent person, in after years (about 1815), speaking to me of Mr. Roscoe's political writings, especially those which had connected his name with Burke, declared that he always felt of him in that relation not so much as of a feeble man, but absolutely as of a _Sporus_ (that was his very expression), or a man emasculated. Right or wrong in his views, he showed the most painful defect of good sense and prudence in confronting his own understanding, so plain and homely, with the Machiavelian Briareus of a hundred arms--the Titan whom he found in Burke; all the advantages of a living antagonist over a dead one could not compensate odds so fearful in original power.

[26] William Roscoe (1753-1831), author of _Life of Lorenzo de'
Medici_, _Life and Pontificate of Leo X_, and other works, was a
native of Liverpool, and spent the main part of his life as a
banker in that town.--M.

It was a striking illustration of the impotence of mere literature against natural power and mother wit that the only man who was considered indispensable in these parties, for giving life and impulse to their vivacity, was a tailor; and not, I was often assured, a person deriving a designation from the craft of those whose labours he supported as a capitalist, but one who drew his own honest daily bread from his own honest needle, except when he laid it aside for the benefit of drooping literati, who needed to be watered with his wit. Wit, perhaps, in a proper sense, he had not--it was rather drollery, and sometimes even buffoonery.

These, in the lamentable absence of the tailor, could be furnished of an inferior quality by Mr. Shepherd,[27] who (as may be imagined from this fact) had but little dignity in private life. I know not how far he might alter in these respects; but certainly, at the time (1801-2), he was decidedly, or could be, a buffoon, and seemed even ambitious of the title, by courting notice for his grotesque manner and coarse stories, more than was altogether compatible with the pretensions of a scholar and a clergyman. I must have leave to think that such a man could not have emerged from any great University, or from any but a sectarian training. Indeed, about Poggio himself there were circumstances which would have indisposed any regular clergyman of the Church of England, or of the Scottish Kirk, to usher him into the literature of his country. With what coarseness and low buffoonery have I heard this Mr. Shepherd in those days run down the bishops then upon the bench, but especially those of any public pretensions or reputation, as Horsley and Porteus, and, in connexion with them, the pious Mrs. Hannah More! Her he could not endure.

[27] The Rev. William Shepherd, author of a _Life of Poggio
Bracciolini_ (Liverpool, 1802) and _Paris in 1802 and 1814_
(London, 1814), and joint author of a work in two volumes called
_Systematic Education, or Elementary Instruction in the various
Departments of Literature and Science_ (London, 1815).--M.

Of this gentleman, having said something disparaging, I am bound to go on and add, that I believe him to have been at least a truly upright man--talking often wildly, but incapable of doing a conscious wrong to any man, be his party what it might; and, in the midst of fun or even buffoonery, a real, and, upon occasion, a stern patriot, Mr. Canning and others he opposed to the teeth upon the Liverpool hustings, and would take no bribe, as others did, from literary feelings of sympathy, or (which is so hard for an amiable mind to resist) from personal applications of courtesy and respect. Amusing it is to look back upon any political work of Mr. Shepherd's, as upon his "Tour to France," published in 1815, and to know that the pale pink of his Radicalism was then accounted deep, deep scarlet.

Nothing can better serve to expound the general force of intellect amongst the Liverpool coterie than the quality of their poetry, and the general standard which they set up in poetry. Not that even in their errors, as regarded poetry, they were of a magnitude to establish any standard or authority in their own persons. Imitable or seducing there could be nothing in persons who wrote verses occasionally, and as a [Greek: parergon] or by-labour, and were themselves the most timid of imitators. But to me, who, in that year, 1801, already knew of a grand renovation of poetic power--of a new birth in poetry, interesting not so much to England as to the human mind--it was secretly amusing to contrast the little artificial usages of their petty traditional knack with the natural forms of a divine art--the difference being pretty much as between an American lake, Ontario, or Superior, and a carp pond or a tench preserve. Mr. Roscoe had just about this time published a translation from the _Balia_ of Luigi Tansillo--a series of dullish lines, with the moral purpose of persuading young women to suckle their own children. The brilliant young Duchess of Devonshire, some half century ago, had, for a frolic--a great lady's caprice--set a precedent in this way; against which, however, in that rank, medical men know that there is a good deal to be said; and in ranks more extensive than those of the Duchess it must be something of an Irish bull to suppose any _general_ neglect of this duty, since, upon so large a scale, whence could come the vicarious nurses? There is, therefore, no great sense in the fundamental idea of the poem, because the abuse denounced cannot be large enough; but the prefatory sonnet, addressed to the translator's wife, as one at whose maternal breast "six sons successive" had hung in infancy--this is about the one sole bold, natural thought, or natural expression of feeling, to which Mr. Roscoe had committed himself in verse. Everywhere else, the most timid and blind servility to the narrowest of conventional usages, conventional ways of viewing things, conventional forms of expression, marks the style. For example, Italy is always _Italia_, Scotland _Scotia_, France _Gallia_; so inveterately had the mind, in this school of feeling, been trained, alike in the highest things and in the lowest, to a horror of throwing itself boldly upon the great _realities_ of life: even names must be fictions for _their_ taste. Yet what comparison between "_France_, an Ode," and "_Gallia_, an Ode"?

Dr. Currie was so much occupied with his professional duties that of him I saw but little. His edition of Burns was just then published (I think in that very month), and in everybody's hands. At that time, he was considered not unjust to the memory of the man, and (however constitutionally phlegmatic, or with little enthusiasm, at least in external show) not much below the mark in his appreciation of the poet.[28]

[28] Dr. James Currie, born 1756, a native of Dumfriesshire,
settled in Liverpool, in medical practice, in 1781. His edition of
Burns, with memoir and criticism, published in 1800, was for the
benefit of the widow and children of the poet, and realised £1400.
Currie died in 1805.--M.

So stood matters some twelve or fourteen years; after which period a "craze" arose on the subject of Burns, which allowed no voice to be heard but that of zealotry and violent partisanship. The first impulse to this arose out of an oblique collision between Lord Jeffrey and Mr. Wordsworth; the former having written a disparaging critique upon Burns's pretensions--a little, perhaps, too much coloured by the fastidiousness of long practice in the world, but, in the main, speaking some plain truths on the quality of Burns's understanding, as expressed in his epistolary compositions. Upon which, in his celebrated letter to Mr. James Gray, the friend of Burns, himself a poet, and then a master in the High School of Edinburgh, Mr. Wordsworth commented with severity, proportioned rather to his personal resentments towards Lord Jeffrey than to the quantity of wrong inflicted upon Burns. Mr. Wordsworth's letter, in so far as it was a record of embittered feeling, might have perished; but, as it happened to embody some profound criticisms, applied to the art of biography, and especially to the delicate task of following a man of original genius through his personal infirmities or his constitutional aberrations--this fact, and its relation to Burns and the author's name, have all combined to embalm it.[29] Its momentary effect, in conjunction with Lord Jeffrey's article, was to revive the interest (which for some time had languished under the oppression of Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron) in all that related to Burns. Fresh Lives appeared in a continued succession, until, upon the death of Lord Byron in 1824, Mr. Allan Cunningham, who had personally known Burns, so far as a boy _could_ know a mature man, gave a new impulse to the interest, by an impressive paper in which he contrasted the circumstances of Burns's death with those of Lord Byron's, and also the two funerals--both of which, one altogether, and the other in part, Mr. Cunningham had personally witnessed. A man of genius, like Mr. Cunningham, throws a new quality of interest upon all which he touches; and, having since brought fresh research and the illustrative power of the arts to bear upon the subject, and all this having gone on concurrently with the great modern revolution in literature--that is, the great extension of a _popular_ interest, through the astonishing reductions of price--the result is, that Burns has, at length, become a national, and, therefore, in a certain sense, a privileged subject; which, in a perfect sense, he was _not_, until the controversial management of his reputation had irritated the public attention. Dr. Currie did not address the same alert condition of the public feeling, nor, by many hundred degrees, so _diffused_ a condition of any feeling which might imperfectly exist, as a man must consciously address in these days, whether as the biographer or the critic of Burns. The lower-toned enthusiasm of the public was not of a quality to irritate any little enthusiasm which the worthy Doctor might have felt. The public of that day felt with regard to Burns exactly as with regard to Bloomfield--not that the quality of his poems was then the staple of the interest, but the extraordinary fact that a ploughman or a lady's shoemaker should have written any poems at all. The sole difference in the two cases, as regarded by the public of that day, was that Burns's case was terminated by a premature, and, for the public, a very sudden death: this gave a personal interest to his case which was wanting in the other; and a direct result of this was that his executors were able to lay before the world a series of his letters recording his opinions upon a considerable variety of authors, and his feelings under many ordinary occasions of life.

[29] Wordsworth's publication was in 1816, under the title _A
Letter to a Friend of Robert Burns, occasioned by an intended
Republication of the Account of the Life of Burns by Dr. Currie_.
_By William Wordsworth._--M.

Dr. Currie, therefore, if phlegmatic, as he certainly was, must be looked upon as upon a level with the public of his own day--a public how different, different by how many centuries, from the world of this present 1837! One thing I remember which powerfully illustrates the difference. Burns, as we all know, with his peculiarly wild and almost ferocious spirit of independence, came a generation too soon. In this day, he would have been forced to do that, clamorously called upon to do that, and would have found his pecuniary interest in doing that, which in his own generation merely to attempt doing loaded him with the reproach of Jacobinism. It must be remembered that the society of Liverpool wits on whom my retrospect is now glancing were all Whigs--all, indeed, fraternizers with French Republicanism. Yet so it was that--not once, not twice, but daily almost, in the numerous conversations naturally elicited by this Liverpool monument to Burns's memory--I heard every one, clerk or layman, heartily agreeing to tax Burns with ingratitude and with pride falsely directed, because he sate uneasily or restively under the bridle-hand of his noble self-called "_patrons_." Aristocracy, then, the essential spirit of aristocracy--this I found was not less erect and clamorous amongst partisan democrats--democrats who were such merely in a party sense of supporting his Majesty's Opposition against his Majesty's Servants--than it was or could be among the most bigoted of the professed feudal aristocrats. For my part, at this moment, when all the world was reading Currie's monument to the memory of Burns and the support of his family, I felt and avowed my feeling most loudly--that Burns was wronged, was deeply, memorably wronged. A £10 bank note, by way of subscription for a few copies of an early edition of his poems--this is the outside that I could ever see proof given of Burns having received anything in the way of _patronage_; and doubtless this would have been gladly returned, but from the dire necessity of dissembling.

Lord Glencairn is the "patron" for whom Burns appears to have felt the most sincere respect. Yet even he--did he give him more than a seat at his dinner table? Lord Buchan again, whose liberalities are by this time pretty well appreciated in Scotland, exhorts Burns, in a tone of one preaching upon a primary duty of life, to exemplary gratitude towards a person who had given him absolutely nothing at all. The man has not yet lived to whose happiness it was more essential that he should live unencumbered by the sense of obligation; and, on the other hand, the man has not lived upon whose independence as professing benefactors so many people practised, or who found so many others ready to ratify and give value to their pretences.[30] Him, whom beyond most men nature had created with the necessity of conscious independence, all men besieged with the assurance that he was, must be, ought to be dependent; nay, that it was his primary duty to be grateful for his dependence. I have not looked into any edition of Burns, except once for a quotation, since this year 1801--when I read the whole of Currie's edition, and had opportunities of meeting the editor--and once subsequently, upon occasion of a fifth or supplementary volume being published. I know not, therefore, how this matter has been managed by succeeding editors, such as Allan Cunningham, far more capable of understanding Burns's situation, from the previous struggles of their own honourable lives, and Burns's feelings, from something of congenial power.

[30] Jacobinism--although the seminal principle of all political
evil in all ages alike of advanced civilization--is natural to the
heart of man, and, in a qualified sense, may be meritorious. A
good man, a high-minded man, in certain circumstances, _must_ be a
Jacobin in a certain sense. The aspect under which Burns's
Jacobinism appears is striking: there is a thought which an
observing reader will find often recurring, which expresses its
peculiar bitterness. It is this: the necessity which in old
countries exists for the labourer humbly to beg _permission_ that
he may labour. To eat in the sweat of a man's brow--that is bad;
and that is a curse, and pronounced such by God. But, when _that_
is all, the labourer is by comparison happy. The second curse
makes _that_ a jest: he must sue, he must sneak, he must fawn like
an Oriental slave, in order to win his fellow-man, in Burns's
indignant words, "to give him _leave_ to toil." That was the
scorpion thought that was for ever shooting its sting into Burns's
meditations, whether forward-looking or backward-looking; and,
that considered, there arises a world of allowance for that vulgar
bluster of independence which Lord Jeffrey, with so much apparent
reason charges upon his prose writings.

I, in this year, 1801, when in the company of Dr. Currie, did not forget, and, with some pride I say that I stood alone in remembering, the very remarkable position of Burns: not merely that, with his genius, and with the intellectual pretensions generally of his family, he should have been called to a life of early labour, and of labour unhappily not prosperous, but also that he, by accident about the proudest of human spirits, should have been by accident summoned, beyond all others, to eternal recognitions of some mysterious gratitude which he owed to some mysterious patrons little and great, whilst yet, of all men, perhaps, he reaped the least obvious or known benefit from any patronage that has ever been put on record. Most men, if they reap little from patronage, are liberated from the claims of patronage, or, if they are summoned to a galling dependency, have at least the fruits of their dependency. But it was this man's unhappy fate--with an early and previous irritability on this very point--to find himself saddled, by his literary correspondents, with all that was odious in dependency, whilst he had every hardship to face that is most painful in unbefriended poverty.

On this view of the case, I talked, then, being a schoolboy, with and against the first editor of Burns:--I did not, and I do not, profess to admire the letters (that is, the prose), all or any, of Burns. I felt that they were liable to the charges of Lord Jeffrey, and to others beside; that they do not even express the natural vigour of Burns's mind, but are at once vulgar, tawdry, coarse, and commonplace; neither was I a person to affect any profound sympathy with the general character and temperament of Burns, which has often been described as "of the earth, earthy"--unspiritual--animal--beyond those of most men equally intellectual. But still I comprehended his situation; I had for ever ringing in my ears, during that summer of 1801, those groans which ascended to heaven from his over-burthened heart--those harrowing words, "_To give him leave to toil_," which record almost a reproach to the ordinances of God--and I felt that upon him, amongst all the children of labour, the primal curse had fallen heaviest and sunk deepest. Feelings such as these I had the courage to express: a personal compliment, or so, I might now and then hear; but all were against me on the _matter_. Dr. Currie said--"Poor Burns! such notions had been his ruin"; Mr. Shepherd continued to draw from the subject some scoff or growl at Mr. Pitt and the Excise; the laughing tailor told us a good story of some proud beggar; Mr. Clarke proposed that I should write a Greek inscription for a cenotaph which he was to erect in his garden to the memory of Burns;--and so passed away the solitary protestation on behalf of Burns's jacobinism, together with the wine and the roses, and the sea-breezes of that same Everton, in that same summer of 1801. Mr. Roscoe is dead, and has found time since then to be half forgotten; Dr. Currie, the physician, has been found "unable to heal himself"; Mr. Shepherd of Gatacre is a name and a shadow; Mr. Clarke is a shadow without a name; the tailor, who set the table in a roar, is dust and ashes; and three men at the most remain of all who in those convivial meetings held it right to look down upon Burns as upon one whose spirit was rebellious overmuch against the institutions of man, and jacobinical in a sense which "men of property" and master manufacturers will never brook, albeit democrats by profession.[31]

[31] De Quincey's strictures in this paper of 1837 on the
Liverpool literary coterie of 1801 gave great offence in that
town. The Liverpool papers attacked him for it; and Dr. Shepherd
of Gatacre, apparently then the sole survivor of the coterie,
addressed a letter of remonstrance to the editor of _Tait's
Magazine_. It appeared in the number of the magazine for May 1837,
with some editorial comments. "The question of which I have to
treat," wrote Dr. Shepherd, "is a question of accuracy of
recollection; and I am constrained to remark that, as, from the
appellation by which, with an extraordinary kind of taste, Mr. De
Quincey chooses to designate himself in his literary character, he
seems to have been at one period of his life the slave of a
deleterious drug, which shakes the nerves, and, inflaming the
brain, impairs the memory, whilst _I_ have avoided that poison
even in its medical application, therefore _my_ recollection is
more likely to be correct that his." The letter proceeds to
vindicate Dr. Currie, Mr. Roscoe, and the writer himself, from the
charge of defective appreciation of the manly demeanour of Burns
in his relations with the Scottish aristocracy and lairds; after
which come some words of special self-defence of the writer in the
matters of his political consistency and his jests at Hannah More.
The letter altogether is destitute of effective point; and the
editor of _Tait_ was quite justified in standing by De Quincey.
This is done in every particular of the offending paper, with this
included sting: "It may tempt a smile from the few who are likely
to trouble themselves about this foolish affair to find that,
though solemnly assuming the office of advocate-general for the
other members of the extinct coterie, Dr. Shepherd, as well as the
newspaper writers, has entirely overlooked the vivacious tailor
celebrated by Mr. De Quincey, of whom we think none of his
literary friends have the least reason to be ashamed."----The main
matter of interest now in this little controversy of 1837 respects
De Quincey's own estimate of Burns. Although he had taken up the
cudgels for Burns in that particular in which he thought Dr.
Currie and the rest of the Liverpool coterie of 1801, professed
democrats though they were, had done Burns injustice,--viz. his
spirit of manly independence and superiority to considerations of
mere worldly rank,--it remains true that De Quincey's own estimate
of Burns all in all fell woefully beneath the proper mark. There
are evidences of this in the present paper, and there are other
evidences at different points of De Quincey's life. Wordsworth in
this respect differed immensely from his friend De Quincey, and
might have taught him better. In that letter of Wordsworth's which
is referred to by De Quincey (_ante_, p. 131) precisely because it
had deprecated the republication in 1816 of Dr. Currie's _Life of
Burns_ in 1800, how enthusiastic was the feeling for Burns and his
memory compared with anything that De Quincey seems ever to have
permitted himself! And, as long before as 1803, had not
Wordsworth, in his lines _At the Grave of Burns_, given expression
to the same feeling in more personal shape? Who can forget that
deathless stanza in which, remembering that Burns had died so
recently, and that, though they had never met, they had been near
neighbours by their places of habitation, the new poet of England
had confessed his own indebtedness to the example of the Scottish
ploughman bard?--

"I mourned with thousands, but as one
More deeply grieved; for He was gone
Whose light I hailed, when first it shone
And showed my youth
How verse may build a princely throne
On humble truth."

In connexion with the fact of De Quincey's defective appreciation of
Burns even so late as 1837, it is additionally significant that, though
he refers in the present paper, with modified approbation, to Jeffrey's
somewhat captious article on Burns in the _Edinburgh Review_ for
January 1809, he does not mention the compensation which had appeared,
with Jeffrey's own editorial sanction, in the shape of Carlyle's essay
on Burns in the same _Review_ for December 1828.--M.