Chapter XXI (4)

As already hinted, we attach considerable importance to his clear and orderly mind. He was an excellent teacher. At a glance he saw every thing which could simplify his subject, and he had self-denial sufficient to forego those good things which would only encumber it. Hence, like his college lectures, his sermons were continuous and straightforward, and his hearers had the comfort of accompanying him to a goal which they and he constantly kept in view. It was his plan not only to divide his discourses, but to enunciate the divisions again and again, till they were fully imprinted on the memory; and although such a method would impart a fatal stiffness to many compositions, in his manipulation it only added clearness to his meaning, and precision to his proofs. Dr. Doddridge's was not the simplicity of happy illustration. In his writings you meet few of those apt allusions which play over every line of Bunyan, like the slant beams of evening on the winking lids of the ocean; nor can you gather out of his writings such anecdotes as, like garnet in some Highland mountain, sparkle in every page of Brooks and Flavel. Nor was it the simplicity of homely language. It was not the terse and self-commending Saxon, of which Latimer in one age, and Swift in another, and Cobbett in our own, have been the mighty masters, and through it the masters of their English fellows. But it was the simplicity of clear conception and orderly arrangement. A text or topic may be compared to a goodly apartment still empty; and which will be very differently garnished according as you move into it piece by piece the furniture from a similar chamber, or pour in pell-mell the contents of a lumber attic. Most minds can appreciate order, and to the majority of hearers it is a greater treat than ministers always imagine, to get some obscure matter made plain, or some confused subject cleared up. With this treat Doddridge's readers and hearers were constantly indulged. Whether they were things new or old, from the orderly compartments of his memory he fetched the argument or the quotation which the moment wanted. He knew his own mind, and told it in his own way, and was always natural, arresting, instructive. And even if, in giving them forth, they should cancel the ticket-marks--the numerals by which they identify and arrange their own materials, authors and orators who wish to convince and to edify must strive in the first place to be orderly. To this must be added a certain pathetic affectionateness, by which all his productions are pervaded.

Leaving the tutor, the pastor, the author, it is time that we return to the man; and might we draw a full-length portrait, our readers would share our affection. That may not be, and therefore we shall only indicate a few features. His industry, as has been inferred, was enormous; in the end it became an excess, and crushed a feeble constitution into an early grave. His letters alone were an extensive authorship. With such friends as Bishop Warburton and Archbishop Secker, with Isaac Watts and Nathaniel Lardner, with his spiritual father, the venerable Clarke, and with his fervent and tender-hearted brother, Barker, it was worth while to maintain a frequent correspondence; but many of his epistolizers had little right to tax a man like Doddridge. Those were the cruel days of dear posts and "private opportunities;" and a letter needed to contain matter enough to fill a little pamphlet; and when some cosy country clergyman, who could sleep twelve hours in the twenty-four, or some self-contained dowager, who had no charge but her maid and her lap-dog, insisted on long missives from the busiest and greatest of their friends, they forgot that a sermon had to be laid aside, or a chapter of the Exposition suspended in their favor; or that a man, who had seldom leisure to talk to his children, must sit up an extra hour to talk to them. And yet, amidst the pressure of overwhelming toil, his vivacity seldom flagged, and his politeness never. Perhaps the severest thing he ever said was an impromptu on a shallow-pated student who was unfolding a scheme for flying to the moon:--

And will Volatio leave this world so soon,
To fly to his own native seat, the moon?
'Twill stand, however, in some little stead,
That he sets out with such an empty head.

But his wit was usually as mild as his dispositions; and it was seldom that he answered a fool according to his folly. His very essence was his kindness and charity; and one of the worst faults laid to his charge is a perilous sort of catholicity. The dissenters never liked his dealings with the Church of England; and both Episcopalians and Presbyterians have regretted his intimacy with avowed or suspected Arians. Bishop Warburton reproached him for editing Hervey's Meditations, and Nathaniel Neal warned him of the contempt he was incurring amongst many by associating with "honest crazy Whitefield;" whilst the "rational dissenters," represented by Dr. Kippis, have regretted that his superior intelligence was never cast into the Socinian scale. Judging from his early letters, this latter consummation was at one time far from unlikely; but the older and more earnest he grew, the more definite became his creed, and the more intense his affinity for spiritual Christianity. In ecclesiastical polity he never was a partisan, and for piety his attraction was always more powerful than for mere theology. But in that essential element of vital Christianity, a profound and adoring attachment to the Saviour of men, the orthodoxy of Doddridge was never gainsaid. Had any one intercepted a packet of his letters, and found one addressed to Whitefield and another to Wesley; one to the Archbishop of Canterbury and another to Dr. Webster of Edinburgh; one to Henry Baker, F.R.S., describing a five-legged limb and similar prodigies; and another to the Countess of Huntingdon or Joseph Williams, the Kidderminster manufacturer, on some rare phasis of spiritual experience; he might have been at a loss to devise a sufficient theory for such a miscellaneous man. And yet he had a theory. As he writes to his wife, "I do not merely talk of it, but I feel it at my heart, that the only important end of life, and the greatest happiness to be expected in it, consists in seeking in all things to please God, attempting all the good we can." And from the post-office could the querist have returned to the great house at the top of the town, and spent a day in the study, the parlor, and the lecture-room, he would have found that after all there was a true unity amidst these several forthgoings. Like Northampton itself, which marches with more counties than any other shire in England, his tastes were various and his heart was large, and consequently his borderline was long. And yet Northampton has a surface and a solid content, as well as a circumference; and amidst all his complaisance and all his versatility, Doddridge had a mind and a calling of his own.

The heart of Doddridge was just recovering from the wound which the faithless Kitty had inflicted, when he formed the acquaintance of Mercy Maris. Come of gentle blood, her dark eyes and raven hair and brunette complexion were true to their Norman pedigree; and her refined and vivacious mind was only too well betokened in the mantling cheek, and the brilliant expression, and the light movements of a delicate and sensitive frame. When one so fascinating was good and gifted besides, what wonder that Doddridge fell in love? and what wonder that he deemed the twenty-second of December (1730) the brightest of days, when it gave him such a help-meet? Neither of them had ever cause to rue it; and it is fine to read the correspondence which passed between them, showing them youthful lovers to the last. When away from home the good doctor had to write constantly to apprise Mercy that he was still "pure well;" and in these epistles he records with Pepysian minuteness every incident which was likely to be important at home; how Mr. Scawen had taken him to see the House of Commons, and how Lady Abney carried him out in her coach to Newington; how soon his wrist-bands got soiled in the smoke of London, and how his horse had fallen into Mr. Coward's well at Walthamstow; and how he had gone a fishing "with extraordinary success, for he had pulled a minnow out of the water, though it made shift to get away." They also contain sundry consultations and references on the subject of fans and damasks, white and blue. And from one of them we are comforted to find that the Northampton carrier was conveying a "harlequin dog" as a present from Kitty's husband to the wife of Kitty's old admirer--showing, as is abundantly evinced in other ways, how good an after-crop of friendship may grow on the stubble fields where love was long since shorn. But our pages are not worthy that we should transfer into them the better things with which these letters abound. Nor must we stop to sketch the domestic group which soon gathered round the paternal table--the son and three daughters who were destined, along with their mother, to survive for nearly half a century their bright Northampton home, and, along with the fond father's image, to recall his first and darling child--the little Tetsy whom "every body loved, because Tetsy loved every body."

SIR JAMES STONEHOUSE.

The family physician was Dr. Stonehouse. He had come to Northampton an infidel, and had written an attack on the Christian evidence, which was sufficiently clever to run through three editions, when the perusal of Dr. Doddridge's "Christianity Founded on Argument" revolutionized all his opinions. He not only retracted his skeptical publication, but became an ornament to the faith which once he destroyed. To the liberal mind of Doddridge it was no mortification, at least he never showed it, that his son in the faith preferred the Church of England, and waited on another ministry. The pious and accomplished physician became more and more the bosom friend of the magnanimous and unselfish divine, and, in conjunction, they planned and executed many works of usefulness, of which the greatest was the Northampton Infirmary. At last Dr. Stonehouse exchanged his profession for the Christian ministry, and became the rector of Great and Little Cheverell, in Wiltshire. Belonging to a good family, and possessing superior powers, his preaching attracted many hearers in his own domain of Bath and Bristol, and, like his once popular publications, was productive of much good. He used to tell two lessons of elocution which he had one day received from Garrick, at the close of the service. "What particular business had you to do to-day when the duty was over?" asked the actor. "None." "Why," said Garrick, "I thought you must from the hurry in which you entered the desk. Nothing can be more indecent than to see a clergyman set about sacred service as if he were a tradesman, and wanted to get through it as soon as possible. But what books might those be which you had in the desk before you?" "Only the Bible and Prayer-Book," replied the preacher. "_Only_ the Bible and Prayer-Book," rejoined the player. "Why, you tossed them about, and turned the leaves as carelessly as if they were a day-book and ledger." And by the reproof of the British Roscius the doctor greatly profited; for, even among the pump-room exquisites, he was admired for the perfect grace and propriety of his pulpit manner. Perhaps he studied it too carefully, at least he studied it till he became aware of it, and talked too much about it. His old age was rather egotistical. He had become rich and a baronet, and, as the friend of Hannah More, a star in the constellation "Virgo." And he loved to transcribe the laudatory notes in which dignitaries acknowledged presentation copies of his three-penny tracts. And he gave forth oracles which would have been more impressive had they been less querulous. But with all these foibles, Sir James was a man of undoubted piety, and it may well excuse a little communicativeness when we remember that of the generation he had served so well, few survived to speak his praise. At all events, there was one benefactor whom he never forgot; and the chirrup of the old Cicada softened into something very soft and tender every time he mentioned the name of Doddridge.

COLONEL GARDINER.

Amongst the visitors at their father's house, at first to the children more formidable than the doctor, and by and by the most revered all, was a Scotch cavalry officer. With his Hessian boots, and their tremendous spurs, sustaining the grandeur of his scarlet coat and powdered queue, there was something to youthful imaginations very awful in the tall and stately hussar; and that awe was nowise abated when they got courage to look on his high forehead which overhung gray eyes and weather-beaten cheeks, and when they marked his firm and dauntless air. And then it was terrible to think how many battles he had fought, and how in one of them a bullet had gone quite through his neck, and he had lain a whole night among the slain. But there was a deeper mystery still. He had been a very bad man once, it would appear, and now he was very good; and he had seen a vision; and altogether, with his strong Scotch voice, and his sword, and his wonderful story, the most solemn visitant was this grave and lofty soldier. But they saw how their father loved him, and they saw how he loved their father. As he sat so erect in the square corner-seat of the chapel, they could notice how his stern look would soften, and how his firm lip would quiver, and how a happy tear would roll down his deep-lined face; and they heard him as he sang so joyfully the closing hymn, and they came to feel that the colonel must indeed be very good. At last, after a long absence, he came to see their father, and staid three days, and he was looking very sick and very old. And the last night, before he went away their father preached a sermon in the house, and his text was, "I will be with him in trouble; I will deliver him and honour him." And the colonel went away, and their father went with him, and gave him a long convoy; and many letters went and came. But at last there was war in Scotland. There was a rebellion, and there were battles; and then the gloomy news arrived. There had been a battle close to the very house of Bankton, and the king's soldiers had run away, and the brave Colonel Gardiner would not run, but fought to the very last, and alas for the Lady Frances!--he was stricken down and slain, scarce a mile from his own mansion door.

JAMES HERVEY.

Near Northampton stands the little parish church of Weston Favel. Its young minister was one of Doddridge's dearest friends. He was a tall and spectral-looking man, dying daily; and, like so many in that district, was a debtor to his distinguished neighbor. After he became minister of his hereditary parish, and when he was preaching with more earnestness than light, he was one day acting on a favorite medical prescription of that period, and accompanying a ploughman along the furrow in order to smell the fresh earth. The ploughman was a pious man, and attended the Castle-Hill Meeting; and the young parish minister asked him, "What do you think the hardest thing in religion?" The ploughman respectfully returned the question, excusing himself, as an ignorant man; and the minister said, "I think the hardest thing in religion is to deny sinful self;" and, expatiating some time on its difficulties, asked if any thing could be harder? "No, sir, except it be to deny righteous self." At the moment the minister thought his parishioner a strange fellow, or a fool; but he never forgot the answer, and was soon a convert to the ploughman's creed. James Hervey had a mind of uncommon gorgeousness. His thoughts all marched to a stately music, and were arrayed in the richest superlatives. Nor was it affectation. It was the necessity of his ideal nature, and was a merciful compensation for his scanty powers of outward enjoyment. As he sat in his little parlor watching the saucepan, in which his dinner of gruel was simmering, and filled up the moments with his microscope, or a page of the Astro-Theology, in his tour of the universe he soon forgot the pains and miseries of his corporeal residence. To him "Nature was Christian;" and after his own soul had drunk in all the joy of the Gospel, it became his favorite employment to read in the fields and the firmament. One product of these researches was his famous "Meditations." They were in fact a sort of Astro and Physico-Evangelism, and, as their popularity was amazing, they must have contributed extensively to the cause of Christianity. They were followed by "Theron and Aspasio"--a series of Dialogues and Letters on the most important points of personal religion, in which, after the example of Cicero, solid instruction is conveyed amidst the charms of landscape, and the amenities of friendly intercourse. This latter work is memorable as one of the first attempts to popularize systematic divinity; and it should undeceive those who deem dulness the test of truth, when they find the theology of Vitringa and Witsius enshrined in one of our finest prose poems. It was hailed with especial rapture by the Seceders of Scotland, who recognized "the Marrow" in this lordly dish, and were justly proud of their unexpected apostle. Many of them, that is, many of the few who achieved the feat of a London journey, arranged to take Weston on their way, and eschewing the Ram Inn and the adjacent Academy, they turned in to Aspasio's lowly parsonage. Here they found a "reed shaking in the wind:"--a panting invalid nursed by his tender mother and sister; and when the Sabbath came, James Erskine, or Dr. Pattison, or whoever the pilgrim might be, saw a great contrast to his own teeming meeting-house in the little flock that assembled in the little church of Weston Favel. But that flock hung with up-looking affection on the moveless attitude and faint accents of their emaciated pastor, and with Scotch-like alacrity turned up and marked in their Bibles every text which he quoted; and though they could not report the usual accessories of clerical fame--the melodious voice, and graceful elocution, and gazing throng--the visitors carried away "a thread of the mantle," and long cherished as a sacred remembrance, the hours spent with this Elijah before he went over Jordan. Others paid him the compliment of copying his style; and both among the Evangelical preachers of the Scotch Establishment and its Secession, the "Meditations" became a frequent model. A few imitators were very successful; for their spirit and genius were kindred; but the tendency of most of them was to make the world despise themselves, and weary of their unoffending idol. Little children prefer red sugar-plums to white, and always think it the best "content" which is drunk from a painted cup; but when the dispensation of content and sugar-plums has yielded to maturer age, the man takes his coffee and his cracknel without observing the pattern of the pottery. And, unfortunately, it was to this that the Herveyites directed their chief attention, and hungry people have long since tired of their flowery truisms and mellifluous inanities; and, partly from impatience of the copyists, the reading republic has nearly ostracized the glowing and gifted original.

OTHER FRIENDS.

Gladly would we introduce the reader to a few others of Dr. Doddridge's friends; such as Dr. Clarke, his constant adviser and considerate friend, whose work on "The Promises" still holds its place in our religious literature; Gilbert West, whose catholic piety and elegant taste found in Doddridge a congenial friend; Dr. Watts, who so shortly preceded him to that better country, of which on earth they were among the brightest citizens; Bishop Warburton, who in a life-long correspondence with so mild a friend, carefully cushioned his formidable claws, and became the lion playing with the lamb; and William Coward, Esq., with cramps in his legs, and crotchets in his head--the rich London merchant who was constantly changing his will, but who at last, by what Robert Baillie would have termed the "canny conveyance" of Watts and Doddridge, did bequeath twenty thousand pounds towards founding a dissenting college. At each of these and several others we would have wished to glance; for we hold that biography is only like a cabinet specimen when it merely presents the man himself, and that to know him truly he must be seen _in situ_ and surrounded with his friends; especially a man like Doddridge, whose affectionate and absorptive nature imbibed so much from those around him. But perhaps enough has been already said to aid the reader's fancy.

The sole survivor of twenty children, and with such a weakly frame, the wonder is that, amidst incessant toil, Doddridge held out so long. Temperance, elasticity of spirits, and the hand of God upheld him. At last, in December, 1750, preaching the funeral sermon of Dr. Clarke, at St. Albans, he caught a cold which he could never cure. Visits to London and the waters of Bristol had no beneficial effect; and, in the fall of the following year, he was advised to try a voyage to Lisbon. His kind friend, Bishop Warburton, here interfered, and procured for his dissenting brother a favor which deserves to be held in lasting memorial. He applied at the London Post-office, and, through his influence, it was arranged that the captain's room in the packet should be put at the invalid's disposal. Accordingly, on the thirtieth of September, accompanied by his anxious wife and a servant, he sailed from Falmouth; and, revived by the soft breezes and the ship's stormless progress, he sat in his easy-chair in the cabin, enjoying the brightest thoughts of all his life. "Such transporting views of the heavenly world is my Father now indulging me with, as no words can express," was his frequent exclamation to the tender partner of his voyage. And when the ship was gliding up the Tagus, and Lisbon with its groves and gardens and sunny towers stood before them, so animating was the spectacle, that affection hoped he might yet recover. The hope was an illusion. Bad symptoms soon came on; and the chief advantage of the change was, that it perhaps rendered dissolution more easy. On the twenty-sixth of October, 1751, he ceased from his labors, and soon after was laid in the burying-ground of the English factory. The Lisbon earthquake soon followed; but his grave remains to this day, and, like Henry Martyn's at Tocat, is to the Christian traveller a little spot of holy ground.

A hundred years have passed away since then; but there is much of Doddridge still on earth. The "Life of Colonel Gardiner" is still one of the best-known biographies; and, with Dr. Brown, we incline to think that, as a manual for ministers, there has yet appeared no memoir superior to his own. The Family Expositor has undergone that disintegrating process to which all bulky books are liable, and many of its happiest illustrations now circulate as things of course in the current popular criticism; and though his memory does not receive the due acknowledgment, the church derives the benefit. The singers of the Scotch Paraphrases and of other hymn collections are often unwitting singers of the words of Doddridge; and the thousands who quote the lines--

Live while you live, the epicure would say, &c.,

are repeating the epigram which Philip Doddridge wrote, and which Samuel Johnson pronounced the happiest in our language. And if the "Rise and Progress" shall ever be superseded by a modern work, we can only wish its successor equal usefulness; however great its merits we can scarcely promise that it will keep as far ahead of all competitors for a hundred years as the original work has done. Had Doddridge lived a little longer, missionary movements would have been sooner originated by the British churches; but he lived long enough to be the father of the Book Society. And though Coward College is now absorbed in a more extensive erection, the founders of St. John's Wood College should rear a statue to Doddridge, as the man who gave the mightiest impulse to the work of rearing an educated Nonconformist ministry in England.

From Leigh Hunt's Journal.

LORD THURLOW, AND HIS TERRIBLE SWEARING.

Lord Thurlow, once Lord High Chancellor of England, Keeper of the Conscience of George the Third, &c., was a tall, dark, harsh-featured, deep-voiced, beetle-browed man, of strong natural abilities, little conscience, and no delicacy. Having discovered, in the outset of life, that the generality of the world were more affected by manner than matter, he indulged a natural inclination to huffing and arrogance, by acting systematically upon it to that end; and, in a worldly point of view, he succeeded to perfection; with this drawback--which always accompanies false pretensions of the kind--that, knowing to what extent they were false, his mind was kept in a proportionate state of irritability and dissatisfaction; so that his success, after all, was only that of a man who prospers by parading an infirmity. With good intention as a judge in ordinary cases, he had sufficient patience neither to study nor to listen. As a statesman, he was actuated wholly by personal feelings of ambition and rivalry; and as keeper of the Royal Conscience, he presented an aspect of ludicrous inconsistency, discreditable to both parties; for he openly kept a mistress, while his master professed to be a pattern of chastity and decorum. But he had face for any thing. Seeing that airs of independence would turn to good account, even in the royal closet, provided he was servile at heart, he sometimes, with great cunning, huffed the King himself; and he did as much with the Prince of Wales, and with the like success. What he really could have done best, had his industry equalled his acuteness, and his ambition been less towards the side of pomp and power, would have been something in literary and metaphysical criticism, as may be seen in his letters to Cowper and others. What he became most famous for doing, was swearing.

We must here advertise our fair readers (in case any of them should be doing us the honor of reading this article aloud), that we are going to give some specimens of the swearing of this solemn and illustrious person; so that, if they do not regard the words in the same childish, meaningless, and nonsensical light that we do ourselves (for reasons that we shall give presently), and therefore cannot comfortably frame their lovely and innocent lips to utter them (which, indeed, custom will hardly allow us to expect), they had better hand over the passages to the nearest male friend that happens to be with them, and get him to read or to _initialize_ them instead. As to ourselves (for reasons also to be presently given), we shall write the words at full length, out of sheer sense of their nothingness; only premising, that such was not the opinion entertained of them by this tremendous Lord Chancellor, or by the age in which he lived; otherwise he would not have resorted to them as clenches for his thunderbolts, neither would his contemporaries have given them to the reading world under those mitigated and whispering forms of initials and hyphens, which have come down to our own times, and which are intended to impress their audacity by intimating their guilt.

"_Damns_ have had their day," says the man in the "Rivals." So they have; and so we would have the reader think, and treat them accordingly; that is to say, as things of no account, one way or the other. But such was not the case when the dramatist wrote; and therefore Lord Thurlow was renowned as a swearer, even in a swearing age. It was his ambition to be considered a swearer. He took to it, as a lad does, who wishes to show that he has arrived at man's estate. Every thing with the judge was "damned bad" or "damned good," damned hot or cold, damned stupid, &c. It was his epithet, his adjective, his participle, his sign of positive and superlative, his argument, his judgment. He could not have got on without it. To deprive Thurlow of his "damn" would have been to shave his eyebrows, or to turn his growl to a whisper.

"Lamenting," says Lord Campbell, "the great difficulty he had in disposing of a high legal situation, he described himself as long hesitating between the intemperance of A. and the corruption of B., but finally preferring the man of bad temper. Afraid lest he should have been supposed to have admitted the existence of pure moral worth, he added, 'Not but that there was a d----d deal of corruption in A.'s intemperance.' Happening to be at the British Museum, viewing the Townley Marbles, when a person came in and announced the death of Mr. Pitt, Thurlow was heard to say, 'a d----d good hand at turning a period!' and no more.

"The following anecdote (continues his lordship) was related by Lord Eldon:--

"After dinner, one day, when nobody was present but Lord Kenyon and myself, Lord Thurlow said, 'Taffy,[P] I decided a cause this morning, and I saw from Scott's face he doubted whether I was right.' Thurlow then stated his view of the case, and Kenyon instantly said, 'Your decision was quite right.' 'What say you to that?' asked the Chancellor. I said, 'I did not presume to form a judgment upon a case in which they both agreed. But I think a fact has not been mentioned, which may be material.' I was about to state the fact, and my reasons. Kenyon, however, broke in upon me, and, with some warmth, stated that I was always so obstinate, there was no dealing with me. 'Nay,' interposed Thurlow, 'that's not fair. You, Taffy, are obstinate, and give no reasons; you, Jack Scott, are obstinate, too; but then you give your reasons, and d----d bad ones they are!'"

* * * * *

"In Thurlow's time, the habit of profane swearing was unhappily so common, that Bishop Horsley, and other right reverend prelates, are said not to have been entirely exempt from it; but Thurlow indulged in it to a degree that admits of no excuse. I have been told by an old gentleman, who was standing behind the woolsack at the time that Sir Ilay Campbell, then Lord Advocate, arguing a Scotch appeal to the bar in a very tedious manner, said, 'I will noo, my lords, proceed to my seevent pownt.' 'I'll be d----d if you do,' cried Lord Thurlow, so as to be heard by all present; 'this house is adjourned till Monday next,' and off he scampered. Sir James Mansfield, Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, used to relate that, while he and several other legal characters were dining with Lord Chancellor Thurlow, his lordship happening to swear at his Swiss valet, when retiring from the room, the man returned, just put his head in, and exclaimed, 'I von't be d----d for you, Milor;' which caused the noble host and all his guests to burst out into a roar of laughter. From another valet he received a still more cutting retort. Having scolded this meek man for some time without receiving any answer, he concluded by saying, 'I wish you were in hell.' The terrified valet at last exclaimed, 'I wish I was, my lord! I wish I was!'

"Sir Thomas Davenport, a great _nisi prius_ leader, had been intimate with Thurlow, and long flattered himself with the hopes of succeeding to some valuable appointment in the law; but, several good things passing by, he lost his patience and temper along with them. At last he addressed this laconic application to his patron: 'The Chief Justiceship of Chester is vacant; am I to have it?' and received the following laconic answer--'No! by God! Kenyon shall have it.'

"Having once got into a dispute with a bishop respecting a living, of which the Great Seal had the alternate presentation, the bishop's secretary called upon him, and said, 'My lord of ---- sends his compliments to your lordship, and believes that the next turn to present to ---- belongs to his lordship.' _Chancellor._--'Give my compliments to his lordship, and tell him that I will see him d----d first before he shall present.' _Secretary._--'This, my lord, is a very unpleasant message to deliver to a bishop.' 'You are right, it is so, therefore tell the bishop that _I_ will be damned first before he shall present.'"[Q]

Lord Campbell concludes his records of the Chancellor's _jusjuration_ (if we may coin a word for a precedent so extraordinary), by frankly extracting into his pages the whole of a long damnatory ode, which was put into the judge's mouth by the authors of the once-famous collection of libels called _Criticisms on the Rolliad_, and _Probationary Odes for the Laureateship_,--the precursor, and very witty precursor, though flagrantly coarse and personal, of the _Anti-Jacobin Magazine_ and the _Rejected Addresses_. They were on the Whig side of politics, and are understood to have been the production of Dr. Lawrence, a civilian, and George Ellis, the author of several elegant works connected with poetry and romance. We shall notice the book further when we come to speak of Mr. Ellis himself. Lord Thurlow is made to contribute one of the Probationary Odes; and he does it in so abundant and complete a style, that bold as our "innocence" makes us in this particular, yet not having the legal warrant of the biographer, we really have not the courage to bring it in as evidence. The reader, however, may guess of what sort of stuff it is composed, when he hears that it begins with the comprehensive line,

"Damnation seize ye all;"

and ends with the following pleasing and particular couplet:--

"Damn them beyond what mortal tongue can tell;
Confound, sink, plunge them all, to deepest, blackest hell."

After this, it will hardly be a climax to add, that Peter Pindar said of this Keeper of the King's Conscience, with great felicity, that he "swore his prayers."

We have been thus particular on the subject of Lord Thurlow's swearing, partly because it is the main point of his lordship's character with posterity, but chiefly that we might show what has already been intimated; namely, what a nothing such talk has become, and what high time it is to treat it as it deserves, and give it no longer in typography those implied awful significances, those under-breaths and intensifications of initials and hyphens, which make it pretend to have a meaning, and are the main cause why it survives. The word _damned_ in Lord Thurlow's mouth, for all its emphasis and effect, had as little meaning as the word _blest_, or the word _conscience_. It has equally little meaning in any body's. It no more signifies what it was originally intended to signify, than the word "cursed" means _anathematized_, or the word "pontificate" means _bridge-making_. This is the natural death of oaths in any tremendous sense of the words, or in any sense at all. They become things of "sound and fury, signifying nothing." Who that utters the word "zounds," imagines that he is speaking of such awful and inconceivable things as "God's wounds," though literally he is doing so? Or what honest farmer, who ejaculates "Please the pigs" (such extraordinary things do reform and vicissitude bring together!) supposes that his Protestant soul is propitiating the _Pyx_, or Holy Sacrament box, of the Roman Catholic Church? Yet time was, when the innocent word "zounds" was written with the same culpatory dashes and hyphens as the "damns that have had their day;" and "pigs," we suppose, were exenterated in like manner: suggested only by their heads and tails,--the first letter and the last. We happen to be no swearers ourselves, so that we are speaking a good word for no custom of our own; though, we confess, that when we come to an oath as a trait of character, in biography or in fiction, we are no more in the habit of balking it, than we are of ignoring any other harmless ejaculation; and therefore, by reason of its very nonsense and nothingness, we like to see it written plainly out as if it _were_ nothing, instead of being mystified into a more nonsensical importance. We have known better men than ourselves who have sworn; and we have known worse; but with none of them had the word any meaning, nor has it any, ever, except in the pulpit; where it is a pity (as many an excellent clergyman has thought) that it is heard at all. Treat it lightly elsewhere, as an expletive and a mere way of speaking, and it will come to nothing as it deserves, and follow the obsolete "plagues" and "murrains" of our ancestors.

The only persons who profess to swear to any purpose, are the Roman Catholics; and they, indeed, may well be said to swear "terribly"--or rather they would do so, if any poor set of human creatures, fallible by the necessity of their natures, could of a surety know what is infallible, and be commissioned by a writing on the sun or moon to let us hear it. Lord Thurlow, with all his damns, and his big voice, and his power of imprisonment to boot, was a babe of grace compared with the Roman Catholic Bishop of Rochester who thundered forth the famous excommunication which the Protestant chapter-clerk of that city gave to the author of _Tristram Shandy_ to put in his book; to the immortal honor of said Protestant, and disgrace of the unalterable and infallible Roman Catholic Churchmen; who, when delivered from their bonds, and complimented on partaking of the progress and civilization common to the rest of the world, take the first opportunity for showing us we are mistaken, and crying damnation to their deliverers.

We shall not repeat the document alluded to, lest we should be thought to give the light matter of which we have been treating, a tone of too much importance. Suffice it to say, that when all the powers, and angels, and very virgins of heaven are called upon by the excommunication to "curse" and "damn" the object of it limb by limb (literally so), his eyes, his brains, and his heart (how unlike fair human readers, who doubt whether the very word "damn" should be uttered), good Uncle Toby interposes one of those world-famous pleasantries which have shaken the old Vatican beyond recovery.

"'Our armies swore terribly in Flanders,' cried my Uncle Toby; 'but nothing to this. For my own part, I could not have the heart to curse my dog so.'"

FOOTNOTES:

[P] Thurlow politely calls Kenyon _Taffy_, because the latter was a Welshman. _Scott_ is Lord Eldon himself.

[Q] _Lives of the Chancellors._ Second Series. Vol. v. pp. 644, 664.

From Chambers' Edinbourgh Journal.

THE LAST OF THE FIDDLERS.

A VILLAGE TALE.

BY BERTHOLD AUERBACH.

The midnight silence of the village is broken by unusual clattering sounds--a horse comes galloping along at the top of his speed, his rider crying aloud, "Fire--fire! Help, ho! Fire!" Away he rides straight to the church, and presently the alarm-bell is heard pealing from the steeple.

It is no easy matter to arouse the harvest folks, after a hard day's work, from their first sound sleep: there they lie, stretched as unconsciously as the corn in the fields which they have reaped in the sweat of their brow. But wake they must--there is no help for it. The stable-boys are the first on the alert--every one anxious to win the reward which, time out of mind, has been given to the person, who, on the occasion of a fire, is the first to reach the engine-house with harnessed horses. Here and there a light is seen at a cottage lattice--a window is opened--the men come running out of doors with their coats half drawn on, or in their shirt sleeves. The villagers all collect about the market-house, and the cry is heard on all sides, "Where is it? Where is the fire?"

"In Eibingen."

Question and answer were alike unneeded, for in the distance, behind the dark pine-forest, the whole sky was illumined with a bright-red glow, in the stillness of the night, like the glow of the setting sun; while every now and then a shower of sparks rose into the air, as if shot out from a blast-furnace.

The night was still and calm, and the stars shone peacefully on the silent earth.

The horses are speedily put to the fire-engine, the buckets placed in a row, a couple of torches lighted, and the torch-bearers stand ready on either side holding on to the engine, which is instantly covered with men.

"Quick! out with another pair of horses! two can't draw such a load!"--"Down with the torches!"--"No, no; they're all right--'tis the old way!"--"Drive off, for Heaven's sake--quick!"

Such-like exclamations resounded on all sides. Let us follow the crowd.

The engine, with its heavy load, now rolls out of the village, and through the peaceful fields and meadows: the fruit-trees by the roadside seem to dance past in the flickering light; and soon the crowd hurry, helter-skelter, through the forest. The birds are awakened from sleep, and fly about in affright, and can scarcely find their way back to their warm nests. The forest is at length passed, and down below, in the valley, lies the hamlet, brightly illumined as at noon-day, while shrieks and the alarm-bell are heard, as if the flames had found a voice.

See! what is yonder white, ghost-like form, in a fluttering dress, on the skirts of the forest? The wheels creak, and rattle along the stony road--no sounds can be distinguished in the confusion. Away! help! away!

The folks are now seen flying from the village with their goods and chattels--children in their bare shirts and with naked feet--carrying off beds and chairs, pots and pans. Has the fire spread so fearfully, or is this all the effect of fright?

"Where's the fire?"

"At Hans the Fiddler's."

And the driver lashed his horses, and every man seemed to press forward with increased ardor to fly to the succor.

As they approached the spot, it was clearly impossible to save the burning cottage; and all efforts were therefore directed to prevent the flames extending to the adjoining houses. Just then every body was busied in trying to save a horse and two cows from the shed; but the animals, terrified by the fire, would not quit the spot, until their eyes were bandaged, and they were driven out by force.

"Where's old Hans?" was the cry on all sides.

"Burnt in his bed to a certainty," said some. Others declared that he had escaped. Nobody knew the truth.

The old fiddler had neither child nor kinsfolk, and yet all the people grieved for him; and those who had come from the villages round about reproached the inhabitants for not having looked after the fate of the poor fellow. Presently it was reported that he had been seen in Urban the smith's barn; another said that he was sitting up in the church crying and moaning--the first time he had been there without his fiddle. But neither in the barn nor in the church was old Hans to be found, and again it was declared that he had been burnt to death in his house, and that his groans had actually been heard; but, it was added, all too late to save him, for the flames had already burst through the roof, and the glass of the windows was sent flying across the road.

The day was just beginning to dawn when all danger of the fire spreading was past; and leaving the smouldering ruins, the folks from a distance set out on their return.

A strange apparition was now seen coming down the mountain-side, as if out of the gray mists of morning. In a cart drawn by two oxen sat a haggard figure, dressed in his bare shirt, and his shoulders wrapped in a horse-cloth. The morning breeze played in the long white locks of the old man, whose wan features were framed, as it were, by a short, bristly, snow-white beard. In his hands he clutched a fiddle and fiddlestick. It was old Hans, the village fiddler. Some of the lads had found him at the edge of the forest, on the spot where we had caught a glimpse of him, looking like a ghostly apparition, as we rattled past with the engine. There he was found standing in his shirt, and holding his fiddle in both his hands pressed tightly to his breast.

As they drew near the village, he took his fiddle and played his favorite waltz. Every eye was turned on the strange-looking man, and all welcomed his return, as if he had risen from the grave.

"Give me a drink!" he exclaimed to the first person who held out a hand to him. "I'm burnt up with thirst!"

A glass of water was brought him.

"Bah!" cried the old man; "'twere a sin to quench such a thirst as mine with water; bring me some wine! Or has the horrid red cock drunk up all my wine too?"

And again he fell to fiddling lustily, until they arrived at the spot of the fire. He got down from the cart, and entered a neighbor's cottage. All the folks pressed up to the old fiddler, tendering words of comfort, and promising that they would all help him to rebuild his cottage.

"No, no!" replied Hans; "'tis all well. I have no home--I'm one of the cuckoo tribe that has no resting-place of its own, and only now and then slips into the swallow's nest. For the short time I have to live, I shall have no trouble in finding quarters wherever I go. I can now climb up into a tree again, and look down upon the world in which I have no longer any thing to call my own. Ay, ay, 'twas wrong in me ever to have had any thing of my own except my precious little fiddle here!"

No objection was raised to the reasoning of the strange old man, and the country-folks from a distance went their ways home with the satisfaction of knowing that the old fiddler was still alive and well. Hans properly belonged to the whole country round about: his loss would have been a public one: much as if the old linden-tree on the Landeck Hill close by had been thrown down unexpectedly in the night Hans was as merry as a grig when Caspar the smith gave him an old shirt, the carpenter Joseph a pair of breeches--and so on. "Well, to be sure, folks may now say that I carry the whole village on my back!" said he; and he gave to each article of dress the name of the donor. "A coat indeed like this, which a friend has worn nicely smooth for one, fits to a T. I was never at my ease in a new coat; and you know I used always to go to the church, and rub the sleeves in the wax that dropped from the holy tapers, to make them comfortable and fit for wear. But this time I'm saved the trouble, and I'm for all the world like a new-born babe who is fitted with clothes without measuring. Ay, ay, you may laugh; but 'tis a fact--I'm new-born."

And in truth it quite seemed so with the old man: the wild merriment of former years, which had slumbered for a while, all burst out anew.

A fellow just now entered who had been active in extinguishing the fire, and having his hand in the work, had been at the same time no less actively engaged in quenching a certain internal fire--and in truth, as was plain to be seen, more than was needed. On seeing him, the old fiddler cried out, "By Jove, how I envy the fellow's jollity!" All the folks laughed; but presently the merriment was interrupted by the entrance of the magistrate with his notary, come to investigate the cause of the fire, and take an inventory of the damage.

Old Hans openly confessed his fault. He had the odd peculiarity of carrying about him, in all his pockets, a little box of lucifer matches, in order never to be at a loss when he wanted to light his pipe. Whenever any one called on him, and wherever he went, his fingers were almost unconsciously playing with the matches. Often and often he was heard to exclaim, "Provoking enough! that these matches should come into fashion just as I am going off the stage. Look! a light in the twinkling of an eye! Only think of all the time I've lost in the course of my life in striking a light with the old flint and steel,--days, weeks, ay, years!"

The fire had, to all appearances, originated with this child's play of the old man, and the magistrate said with regret that he must inflict the legal penalty for his carelessness. "However, at all events 'tis well 'tis no worse," he added; "you are in truth the last of the fiddlers; in our dull, plodding times, you are a relic of the past--of a merry, careless age. 'Twould have been a grievous thing if you had come to such a miserable end."

"Look ye, your worship, I ought to have been a parson," said Hans; "and I should have preached to the folks after this fashion:--'Don't set too much store on life, and it can't hurt you; look on every thing as foolery, and then you'll be cleverer than all the rest. If the world was always merry--if folks did nothing but work and dance, there would be no need of schoolmasters--no need of learning to write and read--no parsons--and (by your worship's pardon) no magistrates. The whole world is a big fiddle--the strings are tuned--Fortune plays upon them; but some one is wanted to be constantly screwing up the strings; and this is a job for the parson and magistrate. There's nothing but turning and screwing, and turning and scraping, and the dance never begins.'"

The fiddler's tongue went running on in this way, until his worship at length took a friendly leave of him. We shall, however, remain, and tell the reader something of the history of this strange character.

It is now nearly thirty years since the old man first made his appearance in the village, just at the time when the new church was consecrated. When he first came among the villagers, he played for three days and three nights almost incessantly the maddest tunes. Superstitious folks muttered one to another that it must be Old Nick himself who could draw such spirit and life from the instrument, as never to let any one have rest or quiet any more than he seemed to require it himself. During the whole of this time he scarcely ate a morsel, and only drank--but in potent draughts--during the pauses. Often it seemed as if he did not stir a finger, but merely laid the fiddlestick on the strings, and magic sounds instantly came out of them, while the fiddle-bow hopped up and down of itself.

Hey-day! there was a merrymaking and piece of work in the large dancing-room of the "Sun." Once, during a pause, the hostess, a buxom portly widow, cried out, "Hold hard, fiddler; do stop--the cattle are all quarrelling with you, and will starve if you don't let the lads and girls go home and feed them. If you've no pity on us folks, do for goodness' sake stop your fiddling for the sake of the poor dumb creatures."

"Just so!" cried the fiddler; "here you can see how man is the noblest animal on the face of the earth; man alone can dance--ay, dance in couples. Hark ye, hostess, if you'll dance a turn with me, I'll stop my fiddlestick for a whole hour."

The musician jumped off the table. All the by-standers pressed the hostess, till at length she consented to dance. She clasped her partner tight round the waist, whilst he kept hold of his fiddle, drawing from it sounds never before heard; and in this comical manner, playing and dancing, they performed their evolutions in the circle of spectators; and at length, with a brilliant scrape of his bow, he concluded, embraced the hostess, and gave her a bouncing kiss, receiving in return a no less hearty box on the ear. Both were given and taken in fun and good temper.