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Biographical Essays. III. Miscellaneous Essays. IV. The Coesars. V. Life and Manners. Autobiography. VI. Literary Reminiscences. Vol. I. Autobiography. VII. " " Vol.11. " LIFE AND MANNERS ; FROM THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. BY THOMAS DE QUINCEY BOSTON: TICKNOR, REED, AND FIELDS MDCCCLI. C H » SSI v JUttX^Ck^ r TBURSTOX, rORRT, AND EMERSON, PRINTERS. 7 "7 CONTENTS. I. EARLY DAYS 9 II. LONDON 49 III. IRELAND 90 IV. THE IRISH BEBELLION 116 V. PREMATURE MANHOOD 150 VI. TRAVELLING . . . .. . . .167 VII. MY BROTHER 1ST VIII. OXFORD 225 IX. " 247 X. / 283 XI. GERMAN LITERATURE 312 LIFE AND MANNERS. CHAPTER I. EARLY DAYS. I was born in a situation the most favorable to hap- piness of any, perhaps, which can exist ; of parents neither too high nor too low; not very rich, which is too likely to be a snare ; not poor, which is oftentimes a greater. I might spend many pages, like the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, in telling over the bead-roll of all the advantages which belonged to my situation, or in making my separate acknowledgment to the several persons from whom I drew the means of improving these advantages, so far as I did improve them. And, in some instances, it would cost me a dissertation to prove that the accidents of my position in life, which I regard as advantages, really were such in a philosophic sense. Let the reader feel no alarm. Such a dissertation, and such a rehearsal, would be more painful to myself than they could be wearisome to him. For these things change their aspects according to the station from which they happen to be surveyed ; in prospect they are simply great blessings to be enjoyed ; in retrospect, great pledges to be redeemed. 10 LIFE AND MANNERS. Viewed in front, they form a golden dowery of hope ; viewed in the rear, a burthen of responsibility from which an apprehensive conscience will have reason too often to shrink in sadness. My father was a plain and unpretending man, who began life with what is considered in England (or was considered) a small fortune, viz., six thousand pounds. I once heard a young banker in Liverpool, with the general assent of those who heard him, fix upon that identical sum of six thousand pounds as exemplifying, for the standard of English life, the absolute ideal of a dangerous inheritance; just too little, as he said, to promise comfort or real independence, and yet large enough to operate as a temptation to indolence. Six thousand pounds, therefore, he considered in the light of a snare to a young man, and almost as a malicious bequest. On the other hand, Ludlow, the regicide, who, as the son of an English baronet, and as ex-commander- in-chief of the Parliament cavalry, &c, knew well what belonged to elegant and luxurious life, records it as his opinion of an Englishman who had sheltered him from state blood-hounds, that in possessing an annual revenue of <£100, he enjoyed all the solid comforts of this life, — neither himself rapacious of his neighbor's goods, nor rich enough in his own person to offer a mark to the rapacity of others. This was in 1660, when the expenses of living in England were not so widely removed, aquatis cequandis, from the common average of this day ; both scales being far below that of the long war-period which followed the French Revolution. "What in one man, however, is wise moderation, may happen in another, differently circumstanced, to be posi- tive injustice, or sordid inaptitude to aspire. At, or about, his 26th year, my father married ; and it is probable that EARLY DAYS. 11 the pretensions of my mother, which were, in some re- spects, more elevated than his own, might concur with his own activity of mind to break the temptation, if for him any temptation had ever existed, to a life of obscure repose. This small fortune, in a country so expensive as England, did not promise to his w T ife the style of living to which she had been accustomed. Every man wishes for his wife what, on his own account, he might readily dispense with. Partly, therefore, with a view to what he would consider as her reasonable expectations, he entered into trade as an Irish and a West Indian merchant. But there is no doubt that, even apart from consideration for his wife, the general tone of feeling in English society, which stamps a kind of disreputable- ness on the avowed intention to do nothing, would, at any rate, have sent him into some mode of active life. In saying that he was a West Indian merchant, I must be careful to acquit his memory of any connection with the slave trade, by which so many fortunes were made at that era in Liverpool, Glasgow, &c. Whatever may be thought of slavery itself as modified in the British colo- nies, or of the remedies attempted for that evil by modern statesmanship ; of the kidnapping, murdering slave-trade* there cannot be two opinions ; and my father, though connected with the West Indian trade in all honorable branches, was so far from lending himself even by a * The confusion of slavery with the slave-trade, at one time was universal. But now-a-days it is supposed by many to be a superfluous care, if one is sedulous to mark the distinction in a pointed way. Yet it was but last year that, happening to converse with a very respectable and well-iuformed surgeon in the north, I found him assuming, as a matter of course, that emancipation, &c. had been the express and im- mediate object of Wilberforce, Clarkson, &c, in their long crusade: nor could I satisfy him that, however ultimately contemplating that result, they had even found it necessary to disown it as a present object. 12 LIFE AND MANNERS. passive concurrence to this most memorable abomina- tion, that he was one of those conscientious protesters who, throughout England, for a long period after the first publication* of Clarkson's famous Essay, and the evidence delivered before the House of Commons, strictly abstained from the use of sugar in his own family. Meantime, as respected some paramount feelings of my after life, I drew from both parents, and the several aspects of their characters, great advantages. Each, in a different sense, was a high-toned moralist ; and my mother had a separate advantage, as compared with persons of that rank, in high-bred and polished manners. Every man has his own standard of a summum bonnm, as exemplified in the arrangements of life. For my own part, without troubling others as to my peculiar likings and dislikings, in points which illustrate nothing, — I shall acknowledge frankly, that, in every scheme of social happiness I could ever frame, the spirit of manners entered largely as an indispensable element. The Italian ideal of their own language, as a spoken one, is expressed thus — Lingua Toscana in bocca Romana : there must be two elements — the Florentine choice of words, and the Florentine idiom, concurring with the Roman pronunciation. Paro- dying this, I would express my conception of a society (suppose a household) entirely well constituted, and fitted to yield the greatest amount of lasting pleasure, in these terms, — The morals of the middle classes of England, * Writing where I have no books, like Salmasius, I make all my references to a forty years' course of reading, by memory. In every case, except where I make a formal citation marked as such, this is to be understood. My chronology on this particular subject is rather uncertain ; Clarkson's Essay, (originally Latin,) published, I think, in 1787, Anthony Benezet's book, Granville Sharpe's Trial of the Slave question in a court of justice — these were the openings : then came Wilberfore, Clarkson's second work, the Evidence before Parliament. EARLY DAYS. 13 combined with the manners of the highest ; or, more pointedly, by the morals of the gentry, with the manners of the nobility. Manners more noble, or more polished than the manners of the English nobility, I cannot imagine ; nor, on the other hand, a morality which is built less upon the mere amiableness of quick sensibilities, or more entirely upon massy substructions of principle and con- science, than the morality of the British middle classes. Rooks, literature, institutions of police, facts innumerable, within my own experience, and open to all the world, can be brought to bear with a world of evidence upon this subject. I am aware of the anger which I shall rouse in many minds by both doctrines ; but I am not disposed to concede any point of what to me appears the truth, either to general misanthropy and cynicism, to political preju- dices, or to anti-national feeling. Such notices as have occurred to me on these subjects, within my personal experience, I shall bring forward as they happen to arise. Let them be met and opposed as they shall deserve. Morals arc sturdy things, and not so much liable to erro- neous valuation. But the fugitive, volatile, imponderable essences which concern the spirit of manners, are really not susceptible of any just or intelligible treatment by mere words and distinctions, unless, in so far as they are assisted and interpreted by continual illustrations from absolute experience. Meantime, the reader will not accuse me of an aristocratic feeling, now that he understands what it is that I admire in the aristocracy, and with what limitation. It is my infirmity, if the reader chooses so to consider it, that I cannot frame an ideal of society, happily constituted, without including, as a foremost element, and possibly in an undue balance, certain refinements in the spirit of manners, which, to many excellent people, hardly exist at all as objects of conscious regard. In the same 14 LIFE AND MANNERS. spirit, but without acknowledging the least effeminacy, even in the excess to which I carry it, far better, and more cheerfully I could dispense with some part of the down- right necessaries of life, than with certain circumstances of elegance and propriety in the daily habits of using them. With these feelings, and, if the reader chooses, these infirmities, I was placed in a singularly fortunate position. My father, as I have said, had no brilliant qualities : but the moral integrity which I have attributed to his class, was so peculiarly expressed in him, that in my early life, and for many years after his death, I occasionally met strangers who would say to me, almost in the same form of words, (so essential was their harmony as to the thing,) 1 Sir, I knew your father: he was the most upright man I ever met with in my life.' Nobody, that I remember, praised him under the notion of a clever man, or a man of talent. Yet that he was so in some subordinate sense, is probable, both from his success as a man of business, and more unequivocally in other ways. He wrote a book : and though not a book of much pretension in its subject, yet in those days to have written a book at all, was cred- itable to a man's activity of mind, and to his strength of character, in acting without a precedent. In the execution, this book was really respectable. As to the subject, it was a sketch of a tour in the midland counties of England, in one octavo volume. The plan upon which it was con- structed, made it tolerably miscellaneous ; for throughout the tour a double purpose was kept before the reader — viz. of attention to the Fine Arts, in a general account of the paintings and statues in the principal mansions lying near the line of his route ; and, secondly, of attention to the mechanic arts, as displayed in the canals, manufacto- ries, &c. then rising everywhere into activity, and quick- EARLY DAYS. 15 ened into a hastier development, by Arkwrighl and the Peels, in one direction, and in another, by Brindiey, the engineer, under the patronage of the Duke of Bridgewater. This Duke, by the way, was guided by an accident of life, concurring with his own disposition, and his gloomy sensi- bility to the wrong, or the indignity he had suffered, into those ascetic habits, which left his income disposable for canals, and for the patronizing of Brindiey. He had been jilted : and in consequence he became a woman-hater — a misogynist — as bitter as Euripides. On seeing a woman approaching, he would l quarter,' and zig-zag to any extent, rather than face her. Being, by this accident of his life, released from the expenses of a ducal establishment, he was the better able to create that immense wealth which afterwards yielded vast estates to the then Marquis of Stafford, to the Earl of Bridgewater, &c. In its outline and conception, my father's book was exactly what is so much wanted at this time for the whole island, and was some years ago pointed out by the Quarterly Review as a desideratum not easily supplied — viz. a guide to the whole wealth of art, above ground and below, which, in this land of ours, every square mile, crowds upon the notice of strangers. In the style of its execution, and the alternate treatment of the mechanic arts and the fine arts, the work resembles the well-known tours of Arthur Young, which blended rural industry with picture galleries ; ex- cepting only, that in my father's I remember no politics, perhaps because it was written before the French Revolu- tion. Partly, perhaps, it might be a cause, and partly an effect, of this attention paid by my father to the galleries of art in the aristocratic mansions ; that throughout the principal rooms of his own house, there were scattered a small collection of paintings by old Italian masters. I mention this fact, not as a circumstance of exclusive ele- 16 LIFE AND MANNERS. gance belonging to my father's establishment, but for the very opposite reason, as belonging very generally to my father's class. Many of them possessed collections much finer than his ; and I remember that two of the few visits, on which, when a child, I was allowed to accompany my mother, were expressly to see a picture-gallery, belonging to a merchant, not much wealthier than my father. In reality, I cannot say anything more to the honor of this mercantile class than the fact, that, being a wealthy class, and living with a free and liberal expenditure, they applied a very considerable proportion of this expenditure to intel- lectual pleasures — to pictures, very commonly, as I have mentioned — to liberal society — and, in a large measure, to books. Yet, whilst the whole body of the meichants in this place lived in a style which, for its mixed liberality and elegance, resembled that of Venetian merchants, there w r as very little about themselves or their establishments of external splendor, that is, in any features which met the public eye. According to the manners of their country, the internal economy of their establishments erred by too much profusion. They had too many servants ; and those servants were maintained in a style of luxury and comfort, not often matched in the mansions of the nobility. Yet, on the other hand, none of these were kept for show or ostentation ; and, accordingly, it was not very common to find servants in livery. The women had their fixed and appropriate duties ; but the men acted in mixed capacities. Carriages were not very commonly kept ; even where from one to two thousand a year might be spent. There was in this town a good deal of society ; somewhat better in an intellectual sense than such as is merely literary ; for that is, of all society, the feeblest. From the clergyman, the medical body, and the merchants, was supported a Philo- sophical Society, who regularly published their transactions. EARLY DAYS. 17 And some of the members were of a rank in science to correspond with D'Alembert, and others of the leading Parisian wits and literati. Yet so little even here did mere outside splendor and imposing names avail against the palpable evidence of things — against mother-wit and nat- ural robustness of intellect, that the particular physician who chiefly corresponded with the Encyclopedists, spite of his BufTon, his Diderot, his D'Alembert, by whom, in fact, he swore, and whose frothy letters he kept like amu- lets in his pocket-book, ranked in general esteem as no better than one of the sons of the feeble ; and the treason went so far as sometimes to comprehend his correspond- ents — the great men of the Academy — in the same derogatory estimate ; and, in reality, their printed letters are evidences enough that no great wrong was done them — being generally vapid, and as much inferior to Gray's letters, recently made popular by Mason's life throughout England, as these again are, in spirit, and naivete — not to Cowper's only, but to many an unknown woman's in every night of the year — little thought of perhaps by her correspondent, and destined pretty certainly to oblivion. One word only I shall add, descriptive of my father's library ; because in describing his, I describe those of all his class. It was very extensive ; comprehending the whole general literature both of England and Scotland for the preceding generation. It was impossible to name a book in the classes of history, biography, voyages and travels, belles-lettres, or popular divinity, which was wanting. And to these was added a pretty complete body of local tours, (such as Pennant's,) and topography; many of which last, being illustrated extensively with plates, were fixed for ever in the recollections of children. But one thing was noticeable, — all the books were Eng- lish. There was no affectation cither in my father or 18 LIFE AND MANNERS. mother, of decorating their tables with foreign books, not better than thousands of corresponding books in their mother idiom ; or of painfully spelling out the contents, obscurely and doubtfully, as must always happen when people have not a familiar oral acquaintance with the whole force and value of a language. How often, upon the table of a modern litterateur, languid, perhaps, and dyspeptic, so as to be in no condition for enjoying any- thing, do we see books lying in six or eight different languages, not one of which he has mastered in a degree putting him really and unaffectedly in possession of its idiomatic wealth, or really, and seriously, in a condition to seek his unaffected pleasures in that language. Besides, what reason has any man looking only for enjoyment, to import exotic luxuries, until he has a little exhausted those which are native to the soil ? Are Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus, better indeed than all the waters of Israel ? True it is, there are different reasons for learning a language ; and with some I have here nothing to do. But where the luxuries of literature are the things sought, I can understand why a Dane should learn English ; because his native literature is not wide, nor very original ; and the best modern writers of his country have a trick of writing in German, with a view to a larger audience. Even a Spaniard, or a Portuguese, might, with much good sense, acquire at some pains the English or the German ; because his own literature, with a few splendid jewels, is not mounted in all departments equally well. But is it for those who have fed on the gifts of Ceres, to discard them for acorns ? This is to reverse the old mythological history of human progress. Now, for example, one of the richest departments in English literature happens to be its drama, from the reign of Elizabeth, to the Parliamentary war : such another exhi- EARLY DAYS. 19 bition of human life under a most picturesque form of manners, and a stage of society so rich in original portrai- ture, and in strength of character, has not existed else- where, nor is ever likely to revolve upon ourselves. The tragic drama of Greece is the only section of literature having a corresponding interest or value. Well ; few readers are now much acquainted with this section of lite- rature ; even the powerful sketches of Beaumont and Fletcher, who, in their comic delineations, approach to Shakspeare, lie covered with dust ; and yet, whilst these things are, some twenty years ago we all saw the arid sterilities of Alfieri promoted to a place in every young lady's boudoir. It is true that, in this particular instance, the undue honor paid to this lifeless painter of life, and this undramatic dramatist, was owing to the accident of his memoirs having been just then published ; and true also it is, that the insipid dramas, unable to sustain them- selves, have long since sunk back into oblivion. But other writers, not better, are still succeeding ; as must ever be the case, with readers not sufficiently masters of a lan- guage, to bring the true pretensions of a work to any test of feeling, and who are for ever mistaking for some pleas- ure conferred by the writer, what is in fact the pleasure * naturally attached to the sense of a difficulty overcome. Not only were there in my father's library no books except English ; but even amongst those there were none connected with the Black Letter literature ; none in fact, of any kind, which presupposed study and labor, for their enjoyment. It was a poor library, on this account, for a scholar or a man of research. Its use and purpose was mere enjoyment, instant amusement, without effort or * There can he no douht that this particular mistake has heen a chief cause of the vastly exaggerated appreciation of much that is mediocre in Greek literature. i 20 LIFE AND MANNERS. affectation ; but still liberal and intellectual. Living in the country, as most of his order did, my father could not look to a theatre for his evening pleasures — or to any public resort. To a theatre he went only when lie took his family ; and that might be once in five years. Books, gardens on a large scale, and a green-house, were the means generally relied on for daily pleasure. The last, in particular, was so commonly attached to a house, that it formed a principal room in the country-house, with the modest name of The Farm, in which I passed my in- fancy ; it was the principal room, as to dimensions, in a spacious house which my father built for himself; and was not wanting, on some scale or other, in any one house of those which I most visited when a school-boy. I may finish my portrait of my father and his class, by say- ing that Cowper was the poet whom they generally most valued ; that Dr. Johnson, who had only just ceased to be a living author, was looked up to with considerable rev- erence and interest, upon various mixed feelings ; partly for his courage, for his sturdy and uncomplying morality, according to his views, for his general love of truth ; and (as usual) for his diction, amongst all who loved the stately, the processional, the artificial, and even the in- flated, — with the usual dissent, on the part of all who were more open to the natural graces of mother English, and idiomatic liveliness. Finally, I may add, that there was too little music in those houses in those days ; and that the reverence paid to learning, to scholastic erudition, I mean, was disproportionate and excessive. Not having had the advantages of a college education themselves, my father and his class looked up with too much admiration to those who had ; ascribing to them, with a natural mod- esty, a superiority greatly beyond the fact ; and, not allowing themselves to see, that business, and the practice EARLY DAYS. 21 of life, had given to themselves countervailing advan- tages ; nor discerning, that too often the scholar had be- come dull and comatose over his books; whilst the activity of trade, and the strife of practical business, had sharp- ened their own judgments, set an edge upon their under- standings, and increased the mobility of their general powers. As to the general esteem for Cowper, that was inevitable : his picture of an English rural fire-side, with its long winter evening, the sofa wheeled round to the fire, the massy draperies depending from the windows, the tea- table with its ' bubbling and loud hissing urn,' the news- paper and the long debate, — Pitt and Fox ruling the senate, and Erskine the bar, — all this held up a mere mirror to that particular period, and their own particular houses ; whilst the character of his rural scenery was exactly the same in Cowper's experience of England, as in their own. So that, in all these features, they recog- nised their countryman and their contemporary, who saw things from the same station as themselves ; whilst his moral denunciations upon all great public questions then afloat, were cast in the very same mould of conscientious principle as their own. In saying that, I mean upon all questions where the moral bearings of the case, (as in the slave-trade, lettres de cachet, Sfc.) were open to no doubt. They all agreed in being very solicitous, in a point which evidently gives no concern at all to a Frenchman, viz., that in her public and foreign acts, their country should be in the right. In other respects, upon politics, there were great differences of opinion, especially throughout the American war, until the French Revolution began to change its first features of promise. After that, a great monotony of opinion prevailed for many years amongst all of that class. To pass from my father's house to myself, living in the 22 LIFE AND MANNERS. country, I was naturally first laid hold of by rural appear- ances or incidents. The very earliest feelings that I recall of a powerful character, were connected with some clusters of crocuses in the garden. Next, I felt the pas- sion of grief, in a profound degree, for the death of a beautiful bird, a king-fisher, which had been taken up in the garden with a fractured wing. This occurred before I was two years of age. Next, I felt no grief at all, but awe the most enduring, and a dawning sense of the in- finite, which brooded over me, more or less, after that time, upon the death of a sister, who must have been one year older than myself; I, that is to say, a few months more than two, she than three. At this time I was afflicted with ague, and suffered under it for two consecutive years. Arsenic was then never administered. The remedy chiefly employed with me was riding on horseback. I was placed before a man on a horse, whose white color and great size I still remember. But of all early remem- brances, in distinctness none rivals one connected with an illumination which took place on the King's recovery from his first attack of lunacy. At the date of that illumina- tion I must have been two and a half years old. It marks the general exultation of the people in that event, that my father, living in the country, should have illuminated his house at all ; for, of course, there was nobody to see it. Next, in the order of my remembrances, comes the death of another sister, which affected me equally with grief and awe ; so that, after this time, if not before, the stand- ing scenery of my thoughts was drawn from objects vast and dim — the grave, and the mysteries which lie beyond it. [My sister had died of hydrocephalus. It is well known that this complaint (which is now treated in its early stages much more successfully than at that time) disposes the intellect to a premature development. Ac- EABLY DAYS. 23 cordingly, my sister was noticed as a prodigy ; but her superiority did not, as usual, lie in vivacity and quickness ; the effect showed itself in an extraordinary expansion of the understanding ; her grasp of intellect was large and comprehensive, in a degree which astonished people in a child of eight years old ; otherwise she had the usual slowness of a melancholic child. Her head, it was deter- mined, should be opened : this was done by a surgeon of some celebrity, Mr. Charles White, once a pupil of John Hunter's, who made innumerable measurements of skulls, especially African, and wrote a large book to prove that the human being was connected by a regular series of links with the brute ; i. e. that the transition from the Af- rican skull to that of the ape, in some species or other, was not more abrupt than from the European to the Af- rican. Mr. White, after the operation, declared often that the child's brain was ; the most beautiful ' he had ever seen.] After her death, an habitual gravity (melancholy I cannot call it) and sense of some awful but indefinite presence fell over me ; and this I never lost. Had I been a sickly child, it would have produced gloom. As it was, being tolerably healthy, I was generally happy ; and the effect of my everlasting commerce with the subjects of death and the grave, showed itself simply in this, that I never played, — and that my mind was peopled with sol- emn imagery. In saying that I never played, I must make two reservations : with gunpowder, as a thing that seemed to me incapable of being stripped of its serious character, I had the common boyish pleasure ; and where it was unavoidable to play at something, gunpowder was always my resource, since that was interesting to all alike. I also invented a sport call Troja, as late as my 13th year. Else, and with these two exceptions, I may truly say that I never played in my life. In general, the inference from 24 LIFE AND MANNERS. such a fact would be, that a boy must be suffering in health who could so remarkably contradict the evident purposes of nature. But with me the case arose naturally enough out of my own solitariness, and the position I oc- cupied in my own family. Living always in the country, I had no companion but an elder brother ; and he, being five years older, at a time of life when five years was a groat matter in either life, naturally enough disdained me. I again, on the same principle, neglected my next brother. Thus I was left to myself : no creature had I to converse with, (generally speaking,) unless I could, on Lord Shafts- bury's plan, and in his phrase, become a ' self-dialogist : ' and a self-dialogist I did become ; perhaps the earliest that has existed. Subjects enough I had for solitary mus- ing in the great thoughts which had been awakened within me, by the reiteration and measured succession of deaths in the family. The ancients believed in a fascination called nympholepsy. It was that species of demoniac enthusiasm or possession incident to one who had accident- ally seen the nymphs. I, in some sense, was a nympho- lept : I had caught too early and too profound a glimpse of certain dread realities. Solitude, which I sought by choice, might be said to seek me by necessity ; for com- panions I had none of my own age ; I was not allowed ever to go near the servants. And books, which I soon passionately loved, aided all these tendencies. They were ratified by what followed, with respect to my father's last illness and death. It was during my infancy, that a house and suitable grounds, &c, were commenced by my father on a scale rather suited to the fortune which, by all accounts, he was rapidly approaching, than that which he actually possessed. This house, elegant but plain, and having nothing remark- able about it but the doors and windows of the superior EARLY DAYS. 25 rooms, which were made of mahogany, sent as a present from a foreign correspondent, was brought into a habitable state about my fifth year. Thither we removed : and the earliest event, I connect with it, was — standing with others on a summer evening listening for the sound of wheels. My mother had been summoned by an express to meet my father, who had broken a blood vessel. ' What did that mean ? ' It meant that a person was very ill and feeble. ■ And would he die ? ' Perhaps he would ; most people in cold climates did. The next incident I remem- ber, was many months afterwards ; my father had, in the interval, made extensive tours to warmer climates ; — he had visited Lisbon, next the Madeiras ; and finally St. Kitt's, all to no purpose. He was now returning home to die. For some weeks I remember being about him as he lay on a sofa surrounded with West India productions dis- played for my amusement. I was aware by something peculiar in the look and aspect of the house, a depression visible on all faces, and a quiet tread, that some speedy catastrophe was approaching : and at length one morning I saw signs which sufficiently indicated that it was then at hand. Dead silence reigned in the house : whispers only audible ; and I saw all the women of the family weeping. Soon after, all of us, being then four, able to understand such a scene, were carried into the bed-room in which my father was at that moment dying. Whether he had asked for us, I know not : if so, his senses had left him before we came. He was delirious, and talked at intervals — always on the same subject. He was ascending a moun- tain, and he had met with some great obstacle, which to him was insurmountable without help. This he called for from various people, naming them, and complaining of their desertion. The person who had gathered us together, raised my father's hand and laid it upon my head. We 3 26 LIFE AND MANNERS. left the room ; and in less than two minutes we heard it announced that all was over. My father's death made little or no change in the house- hold economy, except that my mother ever afterwards kept a carriage ; which my father, in effect, exacted upon his death-bed. My father's death occurred in 1792. His funeral, at which I and my elder brother were chief mourners, was the first I had attended. Then first it was that the solemn farewell of the English burial-service, ' Dust to dust, ashes to ashes,' and the great eloquence of St. Paul in that matchless chapter of his epistle to the Corinthians, fell upon my ear ; and, concurring with my whole previous feelings, for ever fixed that vast subject upon my mind. I was then nearly seven years old. In the next four years, during which we continued to live at the same house, nothing remarkable occurred, except the visit of a most eccentric young woman, who, about ten years after- wards, made a great noise in the world, and drew the eyes of all England upon herself, by her unprincipled conduct in an affair affecting the life of two young Scottish gentle- men. At this time she was about twenty-two, with a Grecian contour of face, elegant in person, and highly accomplished. In particular, she astonished every person by her performances on the organ, and by her powers of disputation. But these she applied entirely to attacks upon Christianity ; for she openly professed infidelity ; and at my mother's table, she certainly proved more than a match for all the clergymen of the neighboring towns, some of whom (as the most intellectual persons of that neighborhood) were daily invited to meet her. It was a mere accident which had introduced her to my mother's house. Happening to hear from my sister's governess that she and her pupil were going on a visit to an old Cath- EARLY DAYS. 27 olic family in the county of Durham, (the family of Mr. Swinburne, the traveller in Spain, &c.,) she, whose Cath- olic education, in a French convent, had introduced her extensively to the knowledge of Catholic families in Eng- land, and who had herself an invitation to the same place, upon that wrote to offer the use of her carriage to convey all three to Mr. Swinburne's. This naturally drew forth an invitation from my mother, and she came. She must certainly, by what I saw of her ten years after, at the Oxford assizes, have been at this time a most striking creature ; and her eloquence was astonishing. Even at that early age, she was already parted from her husband. On the imperial of her carriage, and elsewhere, she described herself as the Hon. Antonina Dashwood L -. But, in fact, as only the illegitimate daughter of Lord le D , she was not entitled to that designation. She had, however, received a large fortune from her father, not less than forty thousand pounds. At a very early age, she had married a young Oxonian, distinguished for nothing but a very handsome person : and from him she had speedily separated, on the agreement of dividing the fortune. My mother, agitated between the necessities of hospitality, on the one hand, and her horror, on the other hand, to meet a woman, for the first time in her life, openly professing infidelity, at length fell ill ; and this hastened Mrs. L.'s departure ; not, however, before I, a child of eight years old, had seen things which nobody else suspected. She admitted me to her bed-room ; and more than once her footman, ' a man of figure,' according to the London term for such persons, upon frivolous pretexts, came to her dressing-room, which adjoined ; more than once also I saw him snatch her hand, and kiss it — whilst she, on her part, blushed, and looked round in alarm. What this meant, I had not the least guess ; but having always been 28 LIFE AND MANNERS. accustomed to see my mother keep her servants at a dis- tance the most awful, I judged that it must be wrong, and I mentioned it to nobody. Afterwards, however, when the Oxford affair came on, I recollected the incident, and all became plain. Yet, when that also had passed over, and was forgotten, the lady published a book containing her views upon government ; which, from many quarters, I heard of as no common performance. But, at that early period, in 1794, her talents, her beauty efface and figure, her fine execution on the organ, her scenical skill in sus- taining through a short scene some grand dramatic char- acter, like that of Lady Macbeth, her powers of disputation, and, finally, her application of them to so unfeminine a purpose as that of undisguised assaults upon Christianity, combined to leave an impression, as of some great enchantress or Medea, upon all who had been admitted to witness her displays. Perhaps I may as well, at this point, anticipate the sequel of her history. In 1804, at the Lent Assizes for the county of Oxford, she appeared as principal witness against two brothers, L-ck-t G-d-n, and L-d-n G-d-n, on a capital charge of having forcibly carried her off from her own house in London, and afterwards of having, at some place in Oxfordshire, by collusion with each other and by terror, enabled one of the brothers to offer the last violence to her person. The accounts published at the time by the newspapers of the whole transaction, were of a nature to conciliate the public sympathy altogether to the prisoners ; and the general belief accorded with what was, no doubt, the truth — that the lady had been driven into a false accusation by the urgent remonstrances of her friends, joined, in this instance, by her husband, although legally separated from her, all of whom were willing to believe that advantage had been taken of her little ac- EARLY DAYS. 29 quaintance with English manners. I was present at the trial ; it began at eight o'clock in the morning, and went on, for some hours, occupied with preparatory evidence. At length Mrs. L. herself was summoned, and, with no little anxiety, I awaited the entrance of my early friend. Her beauty was yet visible, though affected greatly by the humiliating circumstances of her situation, and (as one would willingly hope) by the conflicts of her own con- science. However, she was not long exposed to the searching gaze of the court, and the trying embarrass- ments of her situation. A single question brought the whole investigation to an abrupt close. Mrs. L. had been sworn, of course. After a few questions, she was sud- denly asked whether she believed in the Christian religion ? Her answer was brief and peremptory, without distinction or circumlocution — No. Or, perhaps, not in God? Again she replied, sans phrase, No. Upon this the Judge interfered, and declared that he could not permit the trial to proceed. The jury had heard what the witness said ; she only could give evidence upon the capital part of the charge ; and she had openly incapacitated herself before the whole court. The jury instantly acquitted the prison- ers. I left my name at Mrs. L.'s lodgings in the course of the day, but her servant assured me that she was too much agitated to see anybody till the evening. At the hour assigned I called again. It was dusk, and the mob had assembled. At the moment I came up to the door, a lady was issuing, muffled up, and in some measure disguised. It was Mrs. L. At the corner of an adjacent street a post- chaise was drawn up. Towards this, under the protection of the attorney who had managed her case, she made her way as eagerly as possible. Before she could reach it, however, she was detected ; a savage howl was raised, and a rush made to seize her. Fortunately a body of gowns- 30 LIFE AND MANNERS. men delivered her, put her rapidly into the carriage, and then joining the mob in their hootings, sent off the horses at a gallop. Such was the mode of her exit from Oxford. The accused gentlemen, one of whom has since published interesting memoirs, had been students in Oxford, and had many friends in that place. Four years after my father's death, it began to be per- ceived that there w r as no purpose to be answered in any longer keeping up an expensive establishment. A head- gardener, besides laborers equal perhaps to two more, were required for the grounds and gardens. And no motive existed any longer for being near a great trading town, so long after the commercial connection with it had ceased. Bath seemed, on all accounts, the natural station for a person in my mother's situation ; and, thither, accord- ingly, she went. I, who from the year 1793 had been placed under the tuition of one of my guardians, remained some months longer under his care. I was then trans- ferred to Bath. During this interval, however, the sale of the house and grounds took place. It may illustrate the subject of guardianship, and the ordinary execution of its duties, to mention the result. The year 1796 was in itself a year of great depression, and every way unfavorable to such a transaction. However, the sale was settled. The night, for which it was fixed, turned out remarkably wet ; no attempt was made to postpone the sale, and it pro- ceeded. Originally the house and grounds had cost nearly c£6000. I have heard that only one offer was made, viz : of .£2500. Be that as it may, for the sum of <£*2500 it was sold ; and I have been often assured that by waiting a few years, four times that sum might have been obtained with ease. Meantime my guardians were all men of honor and integrity ; but their hands were filled with their own affairs. One (my tutor) was a clergyman, rector of EARLY DAYS. 31 a church, and having his parish, his large family, and three pupils to attend. He was besides a very sedentary and indolent man, loving books — hating business. An- other was a merchant. A third was a country magistrate, overladen with official business : him I never so much as saw. Finally, the fourth was a banker in a distant county ; having more knowledge of the world than all the rest united, but too remote to interfere effectually. Reflecting upon the evils which befel me, and the gross mismanagement, under my guardians, of my small for- tune, and that of my brothers and sisters, it has often occurred to me that so important an office, which, from the time of Demosthenes, has been ruinously adminis- tered, ought to be put upon a new footing, plainly guarded by a few obvious provisions. As under the Roman laws, for a long period, the guardian should be made responsible in law, and should give security from the first for the due performance of his duties. But, to give him a motive for doing this, of course he must be paid. With the new obligations and liabilities will commence commensurate emoluments. This is merely the outline : to fill up the whole scheme of the office and its functions would be a matter of time and skill. But some great change is im- peratively called for: no duty in the whole compass of human life being so scandalously neglected as this. At Bath, I, and one of my younger brothers, were placed at the grammar school, at the head of which was an Etonian. The most interesting occurrence during my stay at this school was the sudden escape of Sir Sidney Smith from the prison of the Temple in Paris. The mode of his escape was as striking as its time was critical and providential. Having accidentally thrown a ball over the wall in playing at tennis, or some such game, Sir Sid- ney was surprised to observe that the ball thrown back 32 LIFE AND MANNERS. was not the same. His presence of mind fortunately sug- gested the true interpretation. He retired, examined the ball, found it stuffed with letters ; and, in the same way, he subsequently conducted a long correspondence, and arranged the whole circumstances of his escape ; which, remarkably enough, was accomplished just eight days before the sailing of Napoleon with the Egyptian expe- dition ; so that Sir Sidney was just in time to confront, and utterly to defeat Napoleon in the breach of Acre. But for Sir Sidney, it is certain that Bonaparte would have overrun Syria. What would have followed from that event, it is difficult to say. Sir Sidney Smith, I must explain to readers of this generation, and Sir Edward Pellew, (afterwards Lord Exmouth,) were the two * Paladins of the first war with revolutionary France. These two names were never mentioned but in connection with some splendid and unequal contest. Hence the whole nation was saddened by the account of Sir Sidney's capture ; and this must be understood to make the joy of his sudden return perfectly intelligible. Not even a rumor of Sir Sidney's escape had or could have run before him ; for, his mother being at Bath, he had set off at the moment of reaching the coast of England with post horses to Bath. It was about dusk w r hen he arrived : the postilions were directed to the square in which his mother lived : in a few minutes he was in his mother's arms, and in twenty minutes more the news had flown to the remotest suburb of the city. The agitation of Bath on this occasion was indescribable. All the troops of the line then quartered in that city, and a * Sir Horatio Nelson being already an Admiral, was no longer looked to for insulated exploits of brilliant adventure: his name was now con- nected with larger and combined attacks, less dashing and adventurous, because including heavier responsibilities. EARLY DAYS. 33 whole regiment of volunteers, immediately got under arms, and marched to the quarter in which Sir Sidney- lived. The small square overflowed with the soldiery : Sir Sidney went out, and was immediately lost to us, who were watching for him, in the closing ranks of the troops. Next morning, however, I, my younger brother, and a school-fellow of my own age, called formally upon the naval hero. Why, I know not, we were admitted with- out question or demur ; and I may record it as an amiable trait in Sir Sidney, that he received us then with great kindness, and subsequently expressed his interest in all the members of that school to w T hich he had himself once belonged. He was at that time slender and thin ; having an appearance of extenuation and emaciation, as though he had suffered hardships, and ill-treatment, which however, I do not remember to have heard. Meantime, his appearance, connected with his recent history, made him a very interesting person to women. To this hour it remains a mystery with me, why and how it came about, that in every distribution of honors, Sir Sidney Smith w T as overlooked. In the Mediterranean he made many ene- mies ; especially amongst those of his own profession ; who used to speak of him as far too fine a gentleman, and above his calling. Certain it is, that he liked better to be doing business on shore, as at Acre. But however that may have been, surely the man whose name Napoleon could never pronounce without vexation, must have done good service. And, at that time, his connection, of what- soever nature, with the late Queen Caroline, had not occurred. And altogether, to me, his case is inexplica- ble. About this time I first saw a person, whom after- wards I came to know — one who interested me much more, and was indeed as interesting and extraordinary a man as any in my time — I mean the celebrated Walking Stewart. 34 LIFE AND MANNERS. From the Bath grammar school I was removed, in con- sequence of an accident, by which at first it was supposed that my skull had been fractured : and the able surgeon, Mr. Grant, who attended me, at one time talked of trepan- ning. This was an awful word : but I have always doubted whether in reality anything very serious had hap- pened. In fact I was always under a nervous panic for my head ; and certainly exaggerated my internal feelings without meaning to do so ; and this misled the medical attendants. During a long illness which succeeded, my mother read to me, in Hoole's translation, the whole of the Orlando Furioso : and from my own experience at that time I am disposed to think that the homeliness of this version is an advantage from not calling off the atten- tion at all from the narration to the narrator. At this time also I first read the Paradise Lost ; but oddly enough in the edition of Bentley, that great nanadioo6vjaig (or pseudo- restorator of the text). At the close of my illness, the head- master called upon my mother, as did a certain Colonel B., who had sons at the school, requesting, with many compliments to myself, that I might be suffered to remain. But it illustrates my mother's sincere moral severity, that she was shocked at my hearing compliments to my own merits, and was altogether disturbed at what doubtless these gentlemen expected to see received with maternal pride. She declined to let me continue at the Bath school ; and I went to another, in the county of Wilts, of which the recommendation lay in the religious character of the master. Here I had staid about a year, or not much more, when I received a letter from a young nobleman of my own age, Lord W., the son of an Irish Earl, inviting me to accom- pany him to Ireland for the ensuing summer and autumn. This invitation was repeated by his tutor ; and my mother after some consideration allowed me to accept it. EARLY DAYS. 35 In the spring of 1800 accordingly, I went up to Eton, for the purpose of joining my friend. Here I several times visited the gardens of the Queen's villa at Frog mo re ; and, privileged by my young friend's introduction, I had oppor- tunities of seeing and hearing the Queen and all the Princesses ; which at that time was a novelty in my life, naturally a good deal prized. My friend's mother had been, before her marriage, Lady Louisa H.,and intimately known to the Royal Family, who, on her account, took a continual and especial notice of her son. On one of these occasions I had the honor of a brief interview with the King. Madame de Campan mentions, as an amusing incident in her early life, though terrific at the time, and overwhelming to her sense of shame, that not long after her establishment at Versailles, in the service of some one amongst the daughters of Louis XV., having as yet never seen the King, she was one day suddenly introduced to his particular notice, under the following circumstances : — The time was morning ; the young lady was not fifteen ; her spirits were as the spirits of a fawn in May ; her tour of duty for the day was not come, or was gone ; and, finding herself alone in a spacious room, what more reasonable thing could she do than amuse herself with whirling round, according to that fashion known to young ladies both in France and England, and which, in both countries, is called making cheeses, viz., pirouetting until the petticoat is inflated like a balloon, and then sinking into a curtsy. Mademoiselle was very solemnly rising from one of these curtsies, in the centre of her collapsing petticoats, when a slight noise alarmed her. Jealous of intruding eyes, yet not dreading more than a servant at worst, she turned ; and, oh heavens ! whom should she behold but his most Christian Majesty advancing upon her, with a brilliant suite of gentlemen, 36 LIFE AND MANNERS. young and old, equipped for the chase, who had been all silent spectators of her performances. From the King to the last of the train, all bowed to her and all laughed without restraint as they passed the abashed amateur of cheese-making. But she, to speak Homerically, wished in that hour that the earth might gape and cover her con- fusion. Lord W. and I were about the age of Mademoi- selle, and not much more decorously engaged, when a turn brought us full in view of a royal party corning along one of the walks at Frogmore. We were, in fact, theorizing and practically commenting on the art of throwing stones. Boys have a peculiar contempt for female attempts in that way. Besides that girls fling wide of the mark, with a certainty that might have won the applause of Galerius,* there is a peculiar sling and rotary motion of the arm in launching a stone, which no girl ever can attain. From ancient practice I was somewhat of a proficient in this art, and was discussing the philosophy of female failures, illustrating my doctrines with pebbles, as the case hap- pened to demand ; whilst Lord W. was practising on the peculiar whirl of the wrist with a shilling ; when suddenly he turned the head of the coin towards me with a signifi- cant glance, and in a low voice he muttered some words, of which I caught c Grace of God? ' France f and Ireland? * ' Sir,' said that Emperor to a soldier, who had missed the target fifteen times in succession, 'allow me to offer my congratulations on the truly admirable skill you have shown in keeping clear of the mark. Not to have hit once in so many trials, argues the most splendid talents for missing.' t France was at that time among the royal titles, the act for altering the King's style and title not having then passed. As connected with this subject, I may here mention a project, (reported to have been can- vassed in Council at the time when that alteration did take place,) for changing the title from King to Emperor. What then occurred strik- ingly illustrates the general character of the British policy as to all external demonstrations of pomp and national pretension, and its strong EARLY DAYS. 37 '-Defender of the Faith,'* and so forth. This solemn reci- tation of the legend of the coin was meant as a joke by opposition to that of France under corresponding circumstances. The principle of esse quam videri, and the carelessness about names when the thing is unaffected, generally speaking, must command praise and respect. Yet, considering how often the reputation of power becomes, for international purposes, nothing less than power itself, and that words, in many relations of human life, are emphatically things, and sometimes are so to the exclusion of the most absolute things themselves, men of all qualities being often governed by names ; the policy of France seems the wiser, viz., sefaire valoir, even at the price of ostentation. But, at all events, no man is entitled to exercise that extreme candor, forbear- ance, and spirit of ready concession in re aliena, and, above all, in re politicd, which, on his own account, might be altogether honorable. On a public (or at least on a foreign) relation, it is the duty of a good citi- zen to be lofty, exacting, almost insolent. And, on this principle, when the ancient style of the kingdom fell under revision, if — as I do not deny — it was advisable to retrench all obsolete pretensions as so many memorials of a greatness that was now extinct, and therefore, pro tanto, rather presumptions of weakness than of strength ; yet, on the other hand, all countervailing pretensions which had since arisen, and had far more than equiponderated the declension in that one direction, should have been then adopted into the titular heraldry of the nation. It was neither wise nor just to insult foreign nations with assumptions which no longer stood upon any basis of reality. And on that ground Fi'ance was rightly omitted. But why, when the Crown w T as thus remoulded, and its jewellery unset, if this one pearl were to be restored as a stolen ornament, why, we may ask, were not the many and gorgeous jewels, achieved by the national wisdom and power in later times, adopted into the recomposed tiara? Upon what principle did the Romans, the wisest among the children of the world, leave so many inscriptions as records of their power or their triumphs, upon columns, arches, temples, basiliccc , or medals ? A national act, a solemn, and deliberate act, delivered to history, is a more imperishable monument than any made by hands : and the title, as revised, which ought to have expressed a change in the do- minion simply as to the mode and form of its expansion, now remains as a confession of absolute contraction : once we had A, B, and C ; now we have dwindled into A and B. On this argument, it was urged at the time in high quarters, that the new recast of the Crown and Sceptre should come out of the furnace equably improved ; as much for what they were authorized to claim, as for what they were compelled to disclaim. And, as one mode of effect- 38 LIFE AND MANNERS. way of discomposing my gravity at the moment of meet- ing the King ; Lord W. having himself lost somewhat of ing this, it was proposed that the King should become an Emperor. Some indeed alleged, that an Emperor, by its very idea, as received in the Chancery of Europe, implies a King paramount over vassal or tribu- tary Kings. But it is a sufficient answer to say, that an Emperor is a prince, uniting in his own person the thrones of several distinct king- doms : and in effect we adopt that view of the case in giving the title of Imperial to the Parliament, or common assembly of the three kingdoms. However, the title of the prince was a matter trivial in comparison of the title of his ditto, or extent of jurisdiction. This point admits of a striking illustration: in the Paradise Regained, Milton has given us, in close succession, three matchless pictures of civil grandeur, as exempli- fied in three different modes by three different stales. Availing himself of the brief Scriptural notice, — 'And the devil showed him all the kingdoms of the earth,' — he causes to pass, as in a solemn pageant before us, the two military empires then co-existing, of Parthia and Rome, and finally, (under another idea of political greatness,) the intel- lectual glories of Athens. From the picture of the Roman grandeur we extract, and beg the reader to weigh the following lines: — 'Thence to the gates cast round thine eye, and see What conflux issuing forth or entering in ; Praetors, proconsuls, to their provinces Hasting, or on return in robes of state ; Lictors and rods, the ensigns of their power ; Legions or cohorts, turms of horse and wings ; Or embassies from regions far remote, In various habits on the Appian road, Or on the Emilian ; some from farthest south, Syene, and where the shadow both way falls, Merae, Nilotic isle : and, more to west, The realm of Bocchus to the Blackmoor Sea ; From India and the Golden Chersonese, And utmost Indian Isle, Taprobane, — Dark faces with white silken turbans wreath'd ; From Gallia, Gades, and the British, west, Germans and Scythians and Sarmatians, north, Beyond Danubius to the Tauric pool.' With this superb picture, or abstraction of the Roman pomps and power, when ascending to their utmost altitude, confront the following representative sketch of a great English levee on some high solemnity, EARLY DAYS. 39 the awe natural to a young person in a first situation of this nature, through his frequent admissions to the royal suppose the King's birth-day: — 'Amongst the presentations to his majesty, we noticed Lord O. S., the Governor-General of India, on his departure for Bengal ; Mr. U. Z. with an Address from the Upper and Lower Canadas ; Sir. L. V. on his appointment as Commander of the Forces in Nova Scoiia ; General Sir , on his return from the Burmese war [" the Golden Chersonese;"] the Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean fleet; Mr. B. Z., on his appointment to the Chief- Justiceship at Madras; Sir R. G., the late Attorney-General at the Cape of Good Hope ; General Y. X. on taking leave for the Governor- ship of Ceylon [" The utmost Indian ?'s/e, Taprobane ; "] Lord F. M. the bearer of the last despatches from head-quarters in Spain ; Col. P. on going out as Captain-General of the forces in New Holland; Com- modore St. L. on his return from a voyage of discovery towards the North Pole; the King of Owhyhee, attended by Chieftains from the other islands of that cluster ; Col. M'P. on his return from the war in Ashantee, upon which occasion the gallant Colonel presented the treaty and tribute from that country ; Admiral , on his appointment to the Baltic fleet ; Captain O. N. with despatches from the Red Sea, advising the destruction of the piratical armament and settlements in that quar- ter, as also in the Persian Gulf; Sir T. O.'N., the late resident in Nepaul, to present his report of the war in that territory, and in adja- cent regions — names as yet unknown in Europe; the Governor of the Leeward Islands, on departing for the West Indies ; various deputations, with petitions, addresses, &c, from islands in remote quarters of the globe, amongst which we distinguished those from Prince Edward Island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, from the Mauritius, from Java, from the British settlement in Terra del Fuego, from the Christian Churches in the Society, Friendly, and Sandwich Islands — as well as other groups less known in the South Seas ; Admiral H. A., on assuming the com- mand of the Channel Fleet ; Major-Gen X. L. on resigning the Lieut. Governorship of Gibraltar ; Hon. G. F. on going out as secretary to the Governor of Malta, &c. &c. &c.' The sketch is founded upon a base of a very few years, i. e., we have, in one or two instances, placed in juxtaposition, as co-existences, events separated by a few years. But, if (like Milton's picture of the Roman grandeur) the abstraction had been made from a base of thirty years in extent, and had there been added to the picture (according to his prece- dent) the many and remote embassies to and from independent states, in all quarters of the earth ; with how many more groups, might the spectacle have been crowded, and especially of those who fall within that most picturesque delineation — 40 LIFE AND MANNERS. presence. For my part I was as yet a stranger to the King's person. I had, indeed, seen most or all the prin- cesses in the way I have mentioned above ; and on several occasions, in the streets of Windsor, the sudden disappear- ance of all hats from the heads of the passengers, had admonished me that some royal personage or other was then traversing or crossing the street ; but either his Majesty had never been of the party, or I had failed to distinguish him. Now, for the first time, I was meeting him nearly face to face ; for, though the walk we occupied was not that in which the royal party were moving, it ran so near it, and was connected by so many cross-walks at short intervals, that it was a matter of necessity for us, as we were now observed, to go and present ourselves. What passed was naturally very unimportant ; and I know not that it would have been worth reporting at all, but for one reflection which, in after years, it forcibly suggested to me. The King, having first spoken with great kindness to my companion, inquiring circumstantially about his mother 'Dark faces with white silken turbans wreathed! ' As it is, we have noticed hardly any places but such as lie absolutely within our jurisdiction. And yet, even under that limitation, how vastly more comprehensive is the chart of British dominion than of the Roman ! To this gorgeous empire, some corresponding style and title should have been adapted at the revision of the old title, and should yet be adapted ; for of this empire only it can be said, amongst all which have existed, not only that the sun never sets upon its territory, but almost, perhaps, that the sun is always rising and always setting, to some one in that endless succession of stations upon which the British flag is flying. Apropos of the proposed change in the King's title: Mr. Coleridge, on being assured that the new title of the King was to be Emperor of the British Islands and their dependencies, and on the coin Impcrator Bri- tanniarum, remarked, that, in this remanufactured form, the title might be said to he japanned; alluding to this fact, that amongst insular sovereigns, the only one known in Europe by the title of Emperor is the Sovereign of Japan. EARLY DAYS. 41 and grandmother as persons particularly well known to himself, then turned his eye upon me. What passed was pretty nearly as follows : — My name, it seems, from what followed, had been communicated to him as we were advancing ; he did not, therefore, inquire about that. Was I of Eton ? was his first question. I replied that 1 was not, but hoped I should be. Had I a father living ? I had not : my father had been dead about eight years. c But you have a mother ? ' I had. 'And she thinks of sending you to Eton? ' I answered that she had expressed such an intention in my hearing ; but I was not sure whether that might not be in order to waive an argument with the person to whom she spoke, who happened to have been an Etonian. ' Oh, but all people think highly of Eton ; everybody praises Eton ; your mother does right to in- quire ; there can be no harm in that ; but the more she inquires, the more she will be satisfied ; that I can answer for.' Next came a question which had been suggested by my name. Had my family come into England with the Huguenots at the revocation of the Edict of Nantz ? This was a tender point with me : of all things I could not endure to be supposed of French descent ; yet it was a vexation I had constantly to face, as most people supposed that my name argued a French origin. I replied with some haste, 6 Please your Majesty, the family has been in England since the Conquest."' It is probable that I colored, or show T ed some mark of discomposure, with which, how- ever, the King was not displeased, for he smiled, and said, c How do you know that ? ' Here I was at a loss for a moment how to answer : for I was sensible that it did not become me to occupy the King's attention with any long stories or traditions about a subject so unimportant as my own family ; and yet it was necessary that I should say 4 42 LIFE AND MANNERS. something, unless I would be thought to have denied my Huguenot descent upon no reason or authority. After a moment's hesitation I said in effect — that a family of my name had certainly been a great and leading one at the era of the Barons' Wars ; and that I had myself seen many notices of this family, not only in books of heraldry, &c, but in the very earliest of all English books. ' And what book was that ? ' c " Robert of Gloucester's Chronicle in Verse," which I understood, from internal evidence, to have been written about 1280.' The King smiled again, and said, c I know, I know.' But what it was that he knew, long afterwards puzzled me to conjecture. I now imagine, however, that he meant to say, that he knew the book I referred to — a thing which at that time I thought improb- able, supposing the King's acquaintance with literature was not very extensive, nor likely to have comprehended any knowledge at all of the black-letter period. But in this belief I was greatly mistaken, as I was afterwards fully convinced by the best evidence from various quarters. That library of 120,000 volumes, which George IV. pre- sented to the nation, and which has since gone to swell the collection at the British Museum, was formed, (as I have been assured by several persons to whom the whole history of the library, and its growth from small rudiments, was familiarly known,) under the direct personal superintend- ence of George III. It was a favorite and pet creation ; and his care extended even to the dressing of the books in appropriate bindings, and (as one man told me) to their health ; explaining himself to mean, that in any case where a book was worm-eaten, or touched however slightly with the worm, the King was anxious to prevent the injury from increasing, and still more to keep it from infecting others by close neighborhood ; for it is supposed by many that such injuries spread rapidly in favorable situations. EARLY DAYS. 43 One of my informants was a German bookbinder of great respectability, settled in London, and for many years em- ployed by the Admiralty as a confidential binder of records or journals containing secrets of office, &c. Through this connection he had been recommended to the service of his Majesty, whom he used to see continu- ally in the course of his attendance at Buckingham House, where the books were deposited. This bookbinder had, originally, in the way of his trade, become well acquainted with the money value of English books ; and that knowl- edge cannot be acquired without some concurrent knowl- edge of their subject and their kind of merit. Accordingly he was tolerably well qualified to estimate any man's attainments as a reading man ; and from him I received such circumstantial accounts of many conversations he had held with the King, evidently reported w T ith entire good faith and simplicity, that I cannot doubt the fact of his Majesty's very general acquaintance with English lite- rature. Not a day passed, whenever the King happened to be at Buckingham House, without his coming into the binding-room and minutely inspecting the progress of the binder and his allies — the gilders, toolers, &,c. From the outside of the book the transition was natural and pretty constant to its value in the scale of bibliography ; and in that way my informant had ascertained that the King was well acquainted, not only with Robert of Gloucester, but with all the other early chronicles, &c, published by Hearne, and in fact possessed that entire series which rose at one period to so enormous a price. From this person I learnt afterwards that the King prided himself especially upon his early folios of Shakspeare ; that is to say, not merely upon the excellence of the individual copies in a bibliographical sense, as i tall copies ' and having large margins, &c, but chiefly from their value in relation to 44 LIFE AND MANNERS. the most authentic basis for the text of the poet. And thus it appears, that at least two of our Kings, Charles I. and George III., have made it their pride to profess a rev- erential esteem for Shakspeare. This bookbinder added his attestation to the truth (or to the generally reputed truth) of a story which I had heard from higher authority — viz. that the librarian, or, if not officially the librarian, at least the chief director in every thing relating to the books, was an illegitimate son of Frederick, Prince of Wales, (son to George II.,) and therefore half-brother of the King. His own taste and inclinations, it seemed, concurred with his brother's wishes in keeping him in a subordinate rank and an obscure station ; in which, however, he enjoyed afflu- ence without anxiety, or trouble, or courtly envy — and the luxury, which he most valued, of a superb library. He lived and died, I have heard, as plain Mr. Barnard. At one time I disbelieved this story, (which possibly may have been long known to the public,) on the ground that even George III. would not have differed so widely from princes in general as to leave a brother of his own, how- ever unaspiring, wholly undistinguished by public honors. But having since ascertained that a naval officer, well- known to my own family, and to a naval brother of my own in particular, by assistance rendered to him repeatedly when a midshipman in changing his ship, was undoubtedly an illegitimate son of George III., and yet that he never rose higher than the rank of Post Captain, though privately acknowledged by his father and other members of the Royal Family, I found the insufficiency of that objection. The fact is, and it does honor to the King's memory — he reverenced the moral feelings of his country, which arc, in this and in all points of domestic morals, severe and high-toned, [I say it in defiance of writers, such as Lord Byron, Mr. Hazlitt, &c, who hated alike the just and the EARLY TAYS. 45 unjust pretensions of England,] in a degree absolutely incomprehensible to Southern Europe. He had his frail- ties like other children of Adam ; but he did not seek to court and fix the public attention upon them, after the fashion of Louis Quatorze, or our Charles II. There were living witnesses (more than one) of his aberrations as of theirs ; but he, with better feelings than they, did not choose, by placing these witnesses upon a pedestal of honor, surmounted by heraldic trophies, to emblazon his own transgressions to coming generations, and to force back the gaze of a remote posterity upon his own infirmi- <^Z ties. It was his ambition to be the father of his people in a sense not quite so literal. These were things, however, of which at that time I had not heard. During the whole dialogue, I did not even once remark that hesitation and iteration of words, generally attributed to George III. ; indeed, so generally, that it must often have existed ; but in this case, I suppose that the brevity of his sentences operated to deliver him from any em- barrassment of utterance, such as might have attended longer or more complex sentences, where an anxiety was natural to overtake the thoughts as they arose. When we observed that the King had paused in. his stream of ques- tions, which succeeded rapidly to each other, we under- stood it as a signal of dismissal ; and making a profound obeisance, we retired backwards a few steps ; his Majesty smiled in a very gracious manner, waved his hand towards us, and said something in a peculiarly kind accent which we did not distinctly hear ; he then turned round, and the whole party along with him ; which set us at liberty with- out impropriety to turn to the right about ourselves, and make our egress from the gardens. This incident, to me at my age, was very naturally one of considerable interest. But the reflection, to which I 46 LIFE AND MANNERS. alluded above, as one which, even at those years, it for- cibly impressed upon me, suggested itself often after- wards, and at the moment of recording it in a journal which I kept, or tried to keep, at that period. It was this : Was it possible that much truth of a general nature, bear- ing upon man and social interests, could ever reach the ear of a King, under the etiquette of a court, and under that one rule which seemed singly sufficient to foreclose all natural avenues to truth — the rule, I mean, by which it is forbidden to address a question to the King. I was well aware, before I saw him, that in the royal presence, like the dead soldier in Lucan, whom the mighty en- chantress tortures back into a momentary life, I must have no voice except for answers. 1 vox illi iinguaque tantum Responsura datur.' I was to originate nothing myself; and at my age, before so exalted a personage, the mere instincts of reverential demeanor would at any rate have dictated that rule. But what becomes of that man's general condition of mind in relation to all the great objects moving on the field of hu- man experience, where it is a law generally for almost all who approach him, that they shall confine themselves to replies, absolute responses, or at most to a prosecution or carrying forward of a proposition delivered by the pro- tagonist, or supreme leader of the conversation ? For it must be remembered that, generally speaking, the effect of putting no question, is to transfer into the other party's hands the entire originating movement of the dialogue ; and thus, in a musical metaphor, the great man is the sole modulator and determiner of the key in which the con- versation proceeds. It is true, that sometimes, by a little travelling beyond the question in your answer, you may EARLY DAYS. 47 enlarge the basis, so as to bring up the new train of thought which you wish to introduce ; and may suggest fresh matter as effectually, as if you had the liberty of more openly guiding the conversation either by way of question, or by direct origination of a topic ; but this depends on skill to improve an opening, or vigilance to seize it at the instant, and, after all, much upon accident : to say nothing of the crime, a sort of petty treason per- haps, or, what is it ? if you should be detected in your < improvements ' and c enlargements of basis.' Freedom of communication, unfettered movement of thought, there can be none under such a ritual, which tends violently to a Byzantine, or even to a Chinese result of freezing, as it were, all natural and healthy play of the faculties under the petrific mace of absolute ceremonial and fixed prece- dent. For it will hardly be objected that the privileged condition of a few official Councillors and Ministers of State, whose hurry and oppression of thought from public care will rarely allow them to speak on any other subject than business, can be a remedy large enough for so large an evil. True it is, that a peculiarly frank or jovial tem- perament in a sovereign may do much for a season to thaw this punctilious reserve and ungenial constraint ; but that is an accident, and personal to an individual. And, on the other hand, to balance even this, and for the mo- ment, I have remarked, that, in all noble and fashionable society, where there happens to be a pride in sustaining what is deemed a good tone in conversation, it is peculiarly aimed at (and even artificially managed), that no lingering or loitering upon one theme, no protracted discussion, shall be allowed. And, doubtless, as regards merely the treatment of convivial or purely social communication of ideas, (which also is a great art,) this practice is right. I admit willingly that an uncultured brute, who is detected 48 LIFE AND MANNERS. at an elegant table in the atrocity of absolute discussion or disputation, ought to be summarily removed by a police officer ; and possibly the law will warrant his being held to bail for one or two years, according to the enormity of his case. But men are not always enjoying or seeking to enjoy social pleasure ; they seek also, and have need to seek continually, both through books and men, intellectual growth, fresh power, fresh strength, fresh health, to keep themselves a-head or a-breast of this moving, surging, bil- lowing world of ours, in these modern times, when society, for reasons in part easily explained, revolves through so many new phases, and shifts its aspects with so much more velocity than in past ages. A King, especially of this country, needs, beyond most other men, to keep him- self in a continual state of communication, as it were by some vital and organic sympathy, with the most essential of these changes. And yet this punctilio of etiquette, like some vicious forms of law, or technical fictions grown too narrow for the age, which will not allow of cases coming before the Court in a shape, desired alike by the plaintiff and the defendant, is so framed as to defeat equally the wishes of a prince disposed to gather knowledge wherever he can find it, and of those who may be best fitted to give it. However, to leave dissertation behind me, and to re- sume the thread of my narrative, an incident, which about this period impressed me far more profoundly and more durably than my first introduction to a royal presence, was my first visit to London. CHAPTER II. LONDON. It was a most heavenly day in May of this year, (1800,) when I first beheld and first entered this mighty wilder- ness, as to me it was, the city — no! not the city, but the nation — of London. Often have I since then, at dis- tances of two and three hundred miles or more from this colossal emporium of men, wealth, arts, and intellectual power, felt the sublime expression of her enormous magni- tude in one simple form of ordinary occurrence, viz. in the vast droves of cattle, suppose upon the great north roads, all with their heads directed to London, and expound- ing the size of the attracting body, by the force of its attrac- tive power, as measured by the never-ending succession of the droves, and the remoteness from the capital of the lines upon which they were moving. A suction so pow- erful, felt along radii so vast, and a consciousness at the same time, that upon other radii still more vast, both by land and by sea, the same suction is operating night and day, summer and winter, and hurrying for ever into one centre the infinite means needed for her infinite purposes, and the endless tributes to the skill or to the luxury of her endless population, crowds the imagination with a pomp to which there is nothing corresponding upon this planet, either amongst the things that have been, or the things that 50 LIFE AND MANNERS. are, except in ancient Rome.* We, upon this occasion, were in an open carriage ; and, chiefly (as I imagine) to * Ancient Rome: — Vast, however, as the London is of this day, I am persuaded that it is far below the Rome of the Caesars. It has long been a settled opinion amongst scholars, that the computations of Lip- sius, on this point, were prodigiously overcharged ; and formerly I shared in that belief. But a closer study of the question, and a laborious colla- tion of the different data, (for any single record, independently consid- ered, can here establish nothing,) have satisfied me that Lipsius was nearer the truth than his critics ; and that the Roman population of every class, slaves, aliens, people of the suburbs, included, lay between five and six millions: in which case the London of 1833, which counts more than a million and a half, but less than two millions, may be taken, xara n).aTog } as lying between one-fourth and one-third of Rome. To discuss this question thoroughly, would require a separate memoir: meantime I will make this remark: — That the ordinary computations of a million, or a million and a quarter, derived from the surviving ac- counts of the different ' regions,' with their circumstantial enumerations of the private houses and public edifices, are erroneous in two capital points : firsts and chiefly, because these accounts apply to Rome within the Pomoerium, and are, therefore, no more valid for the total Rome of Trajan's time, stretching so many miles beyond it, than the bills of mor- tality for ' London within the walls,' can serve at this day as a base for estimating the population of that total London which we mean and pre- sume in our daily conversation. Secondly^ Even for the Rome within these limits, the computations are not commensurate, by not allowing for the prodigious height of the houses in Rome, which much transcended that of modern cities. On this last point, I shall translate a single and very remarkable sentence from the Greek Rhetorician Aristides ; it will be known to a few readers, but to many more it will be new and interesting : * And, as oftentimes we see that a man who greatly excels others in bulk and strength, is not content with any display, however ostentatious, of his powers, short of that where he is exhibited surmounting himself with a pyramid of other men, one set standing upon the shoulders of another ; so also this city, stretching her foundations over areas so vast, is yet not satisfied with those superficial dimensions; that contents her not; but upon one city rearing another of corresponding proportions, and upon that anoiher, pile resting upon pile, houses overlaying houses, in aerial succession ; in that way, she achieves a character of architecture justify- ing, as it were, the very promise of her name ; and with reference to that name, and its Grecian meaning, we may say, that here nothing meets our eyes in any direction, but mere Rome ! Rome!' (Note this LONDON. 51 avoid the dust, we approached London by rural lanes and roads comparatively quiet and shady, collateral to the main ones, where any such could be found. In that mode of approach, we missed some features of the sublimity belonging to any of the common approaches upon a main road; what I mean is, the whirl and uproar, the tumult word r Piour n on which the rhetorician plays, is the common Greek term for strength ) 'And hence I derive the following conclusion: that, if any one, decomposing this series of strata, were disposed to unshell, as it were, this existing Rome, from its present crowded and towering co-acervations ; and thus degrading these aerial Romes, were to plant them on the ground, side by side, in orderly succession ; according to all appearance, the whole vacant area of Italy would be filled with these dismantled storeys of Rome, and we should be presented with the spec- tacle of one continuous city, stretching its labyrinthine pomp to the shores of the Adriatic' This is so far from being meant as a piece of rhetoric, that on the very contrary, the whole purpose is to substitute for a vague and rhetorical expression of the Roman grandeur, one of a more definite character, by presenting its dimensions in a new form, and sup- posing the city to be uncrested, as it were, the upper tiers to be what sailors call unshipped, and the dethroned storeys, (or flats as they are called in Scotland,) to be all drawn up in rank and file upon the ground ; according to which assumption, he says, that the city would stretch about seventy or seventy-five miles. The fact is, as Casaubon remarked, upon occasion of a ridiculous blunder in estimating the largesses of a Roman Emperor, the error on. most questions of Roman policy or institutions, tends not, as usual, in the direction of excess, but of defect. All things were colossal there; and the probable, as estimated upon our modern scale, is not unfrequently the impossible, as regarded Roman habits. Lipsius certainly erred ex- travagantly at times, and was a rash speculator on many subjects ; wit- ness his book on the Roman amphitheatres ; but not on the magnitude of Rome, or the amount of its population. I shall add upon this sub- ject, that the whole political economy of the ancients, if we except Boeckh's accurate investigations, (Die Staatshaushaltxing der Athener,) which, properly speaking, are mere political arithmetic or statistics, is a mine into which scarce a single shaft has yet been sunk. Yet I must also add, that everything will depend upon collation of r acts, and the bringing of indirect notices into immediate juxtaposition, so as to throw light on each other. Direct and positive information there is little on these topics ; and that little has been gleaned. 52 LIFE AND MANNERS. and the agitation, which continually thicken and thicken throughout the last eight or ten miles before you reach the suburbs. Already at three stages' distance upon some of the greatest roads, the dim presentiment of some vast capital reaches you obscurely, and like a misgiving. This blind sympathy with a mighty but unseen object in your neighborhood, continues to increase, you know not how. Arrived at the last station for changing horses, Barnet suppose, on one of the north roads, or Hounslow on the western, you no longer think (as in all other places) of naming the next stage ; nobody says, on pulling up, 1 Horses on to London' — that would sound ludicrous; one mighty idea broods over all minds, making it impos- sible to suppose any other destination. Launched upon this final stage, you soon begin to feel yourself entering the stream as it were of a Norwegian maelstrom : and the stream at length becomes a rush. What is meant by the Latin word trepidatio ? Not anything peculiarly connect- ed with panic ; it belongs as much to the hurrying to and fro of a coming battle, as of a coming flight; agitation is the nearest English word. This trepidation increases both audibly and visibly at every half mile, pretty much as one may suppose the roar of Niagara ant3 the vibration of the ground to grow upon the ear in the last ten miles of approach, with the wind in its favor, until at length it would absorb and extinguish all other sounds whatsoever. Finally, for miles before you reach a 'suburb of London, such as Islington for instance, a last great sign and augury of the immensity which belongs to the coming metropolis, forces itself upon the dullest observer, in the growing sense of his own utter insignificance. Everywhere else in Eng- land, you yourself, horses, carriage, attendants (if you travel with any) are regarded with attention, perhaps even curiosity : at all events you are seen. But after passing LONDON. 53 the final post-house on every avenue to London, for the latter ten or twelve miles, you become aware that you are no longer noticed : nobody sees you ; nobody hears you ; nobody regards you ; you do not even regard yourself. In fact, how should you, at the moment of first ascertaining your own total unimportance in the sum of things — a poor shivering unit in the aggregate of human life ? Now, for the first time, whatever manner of man you were or seemed to be at starting, squire or ; squireen,' lord or lord- ling, and however related to that city, hamlet, or solitary house, from which yesterday or to-day you slipt your ca- ble, — beyond disguise you find yourself but one wave in a total Atlantic, one plant, (and a parasitical plant besides, needing alien props,) in a forest of America. These are feelings which do not belong by preference to thoughtful people — far less to people merely senti- mental. No man ever was left to himself for the first time in the streets, as. yet unknown, of London, but he must have been saddened and mortified, perhaps terrified, by the sense of desertion and utter loneliness which belong to his situation. No loneliness can be like that which weighs upon the heart in the centre of faces never- ending, without voice or utterance for him ; eyes innu- merable, that have ' no speculation ' in their orbs which he can understand ; and hurrying figures of men and women weaving to and fro, with no apparent purposes intelligible to a stranger, seeming like a masque of maniacs, or a pageant of shadowy illusions. The great length of the streets, in many quarters of London, the continual opening of transient glimpses into other vistas equally far-stretching, going off at angles to the one which you are traversing, and the murky atmosphere which, settling upon the remoter end of every long avenue, wraps its termination in gloom and uncertainty — 54 LIFE AND MANNERS. all these are circumstances aiding that sense of vastness and illimitable proportions, which for ever brood over the aspect of London in its interior. Much of the feeling which belongs to the outside of London, in its approaches for the last few miles, I had lost, in consequence of the stealthy route of bye-roads through which we crept into the suburbs. But for that reason, the more abrupt and startling had been the effect of emerging somewhere into the Edge ware road, and soon afterwards into the very streets of London itself ; — though what streets, or even what quarter of London, is now totally obliterated from my mind, having perhaps never been comprehended. All that I remember is, one monotonous awe and blind sense of mysterious grandeur and Babylonian confusion, which seemed to pursue and to invest the whole equipage of human life, as we moved for nearly two hours, through streets ; sometimes brought to anchor for ten minutes or more, by what is technically called a ' lock,' that is, a line of carriages of every description inextricably massed, and obstructing each other, far as the eye could stretch ; and then, as if under an enchanter's rod, the ' lock ' seemed to thaw, motion spread with the fluent race of light or sound, through the whole ice-bound mass, until the subtle influence reached us also ; who were again absorbed into the great rush of flying carriages ; or at times we turned off into some less tumultuous street, but of the same mile-long character ; and, finally, drew up about noon, and alighted at some place which is as little within my distinct remembrances as the route by which we reached it. For what had we come ? To see London. And what were the limits within which we proposed to crowd that little feat ? At five o'clock we were to dine at P , a seat of Lord VV 's grandfather; and, from the dis- LONDON. 55 tance, it was necessary that we should leave London at half- past three ; so that a little more than three hours were all we had. Our charioteer, my friend's tutor, was summoned away from us on business, until that hour ; and we were left, therefore, entirely to ourselves and to our own discretion in turning the time to the best account, for contriving (if such a thing were possible) to do some- thing or other which, by any fiction of courtesy, or constructively, so as to satisfy a lawyer, or in a sense sufficient to win a wager, might be taken and received for having ' seen London.' What could be done ? We sat down, I remember, in a mood of despondency, to consider. Not that there was any want of alluring and promising spectacles : on the contrary there were too many ; inopes nos copia fecit ; and the choice was distracted. But which of them all could be thought general or representative enough to stand for the universe of London ? We could not traverse the whole circumference of this mighty orb ; that was clear ; and, therefore, the next best thing was to place ourselves as much as possible in some relation to the spectacles of London, which might answer to the centre. Yet how ? That sounded well and metaphysical ; but what did it mean if acted upon ? Apparently that we should stay at our inn : for in that way we seemed best to distribute our presence equally amongst all, viz. by going to none in particular. Three times in my life I have had my taste, that is, my sense of proportions, memorably outraged. Once was, by a painting of Cape Horn, which seemed almost treasonably below its rank and office in the world, — as the terminal abutment of our mightiest continent, and also the hinge or point, as it were, of our greatest cir- cumnavigations, — of all, in fact, which can be called 56 LIFE AND MANNERS. our classical circumnavigations. To have ' doubled Cape Horn' — at one time, what a sound it had! — Yet how- ashamed we should be, if that Cape were ever to be seen from the moon ! A party of Englishmen, I have heard, went up Mount Etna, during the night, to be ready for sunrise, — a common practice with tourists, both in Switzerland, Wales, Cumberland, &c. ; but as all who take the trouble to reflect, not likely to repay the trouble ; and so thought, in the sequel, the Etna party. The sun, J^sXT indeed, rose visibly, and not more apparelled in clouds than was desirable : yet so disappointed were they with the whole effect, and so disgusted with the sun in par- ticular, that they unanimously hissed him ; though of course it was useless to cry 'off! off!' Here, however, the fault was in their own erroneous expectations, and not in the sun, who, doubtless, did his best. For, generally, \ ,a sunrise and a sunset, ought to be seen from the valley (Ktf* or horizontally,* — not, as the man of Kentuck expressed it, slantindicularly . But as to Cape Horn, that (by com- parison with its position and its functions) seems really a disgrace to the planet ; for, consider, it is not only the c specular mount,' keeping watch and ward over a sort of trinity of oceans, and, by all tradition, the gate of entrance to the Pacific, but also it is the temple of the god Terminus, for all the Americas. So that, in rela- * Hence it may be said, that nature regulates our position for such spectacles, without any intermeddling of ours. When, indeed, a moun- tain stands like Snowdon or Great Gavel, in Cumberland, in the centre of a mountainous region, it is not denied that, at some seasons when the early beams strike through great vistas in the hills, splendid effects of light and shade are sometimes produced; strange, however, rather than beautiful. But from an insuhted mountain, or one upon the outer rinsr of the hilly tract, such as Skiddaw, in Cumberland, the first effect is to translate the landscape from a picture into a map ; and the final result, as a celebrated author once said, is the infinity of littleness. A { LONDON. 57 tion to such dignities, it seemed to me, in the drawing, a make-shift, put up by a carpenter, until the true Cape Horn should be ready, or perhaps a drop scene from the Opera House. This was one case of disproportion : the others were, — the final and ceremonial valediction of Garrick, on retiring from his profession ; and the Pall Mall inauguration of George IV. on the day of his acces- sion * to the throne. The utter trrelation, in both cases, of the audience to the scene, (audience, I say, as say we must, for the sum of the spectators in the second instance, as well as of the auditors in the first,) threw upon each a ridicule not to be effaced. It is in any case impossible for an actor to say words of farewell to those for whom he really designs his farewell. He cannot bring his true object before himself. To whom is it that he would offer his last adieus ? We are told by one, — who, if he loved Garrick, certainly did not love Garrick's profession, nor would even, through him, have paid it any undue compliment, that the retirement of this great artist had ' eclipsed the gaiety of nations.' To nations then, to his own generation, it was that he owed his farewell : but of a generation, what organ is there which can sue or be sued, that can thank or be thanked ? Neither by fiction, * Accession was it, or his proclamation ? The case was this: — About the middle of the day, (whether in plain clothes, or wearing any official costume, I do not recollect,) the King came out into the portico of Carl- ton House, and addressing himself (addressing his gestures I mean) to the assemblage of people in Pall Mall, he bowed repeatedly to the right and to the left, and then retired. I mean no disrespect to that prince in recalling those circumstances: no doubt, he acted upon the suggestion of others, and perhaps also under a sincere emotion on witnessing the en- thusiasm of those outside: but that could not cure the original absurdity of recognising as a representative audience, cloihed with the national functions of recognising himself, a chance gathering in a single street, between whom and the mob, from his own stables and kitchens, there was no essential difference. 5 58 LIFE AND MANNERS. nor by delegation, can you bring their bodies into court. A king's audience, on the other hand, might be had as an authorized representative body. But, when we consider the composition of a casual and chance auditory, whether in a street or a theatre ; secondly, the small size of a modern audience, even in Drury Lane, (3000 at the most,) not by one eightieth part the complement of the Circus Maximus ; most of all, when we consider the want of symmetry, to any extended duration of time, in the acts of such an audience, which acts lie in the vanishing expressions of its vanishing emotions, — acts so essen- tially fugitive, even when organized into an art and a tactical system of imbrices and bombi, (as they were at Alexandria, and afterwards at the Neapolitan theatres and those of Rome,) they could not, by any art, protect them- selves from dying in the very moment of their birth ; — laying together ail these considerations, we see the incon- gruity of any audience, so constituted, to any purpose less evanescent than their own tenure of existence. Just such in disproportion as these cases had severally been, was our present problem in relation to our time or other means for accomplishing it. We were to see London, which, under what approximation were we to execute, unless, (like the student in Hierocles,) by bring- ing off a brick in our pockets ? In debating the matter we lost half an hour ; but at length we reduced the question to a choice between Westminster Abbey and St. Paul's Cathedral. I know not that we could have chosen better. The rival edifices, as we understood from the waiter, were about equidistant from our own station ; but being too remote from each other to allow of our seeing both, c we tossed up ' to settle the question between the elder lady and the younger. ' Heads ' came up, which stood for the Abbey. But, as LONDON. 59 neither of us was quite satisfied with this decision, we agreed to make another appeal to the wisdom of chance, second thoughts being best. This time the Cathedral turned up ; and so it happened that with us, the having seen London, meant having seen St. Paul's. The first view of St. Paul's, it may well be supposed, overwhelmed us with awe ; and I did not at that time imagine that the sense of magnitude could be more deeply impressed. One thing, however, though appar- ently a trifle, and really a trifle if otherwise managed, interrupted our pleasure a good deal. The superb objects of curiosity within the Cathedral were shown for separate fees. There were seven, I think ; and any one could be seen independently of the rest for a few pence. The w r hole amount w T as a trifle ; but we were followed by a sort of persecution — 'Would we not see the bell?' — - 1 Would we not see the model ? ' — c Surely we would not go away without visiting the Whispering Gallery r ' which troubled the silence and sanctity of the place, and must teaze others as it then teazed us, who wished to contem- plate in quiet a great monument of the national grandeur, and which was at that very time * beginning to take a station also in the land, as a depository for the dust of her heroes. What struck us most in the whole interior of the pile, was the view taken from the spot immediately under the dome, being, in fact, the very same which, five years afterwards, received the remains of Lord Nelson. In one of the aisles going off from this centre, we saw the flags of France, Spain, and Holland, the whole trophies of the war, in short, expanding their massy draperies, slowly and heavily, in the upper gloom, as they * Already monuments had been voted by the House of Commons in this cathedral, and were nea ly completed, I think, to two captains who had fallen at the Nile. 60 LIFE AND MANNERS. were swept at intervals by currents of air. Boys do not sentimentalize, or much express their feelings ; but they have feelings of a solemn nature, though easily giving way to trivial interruptions, no less than their seniors ; and we were provoked by the showman at our elbow, taking this moment for his vile iteration of ' Twopence, Gentlemen, no more than twopence for each ; ' and so on until we left the place. The same complaint has been often made as to Westminster Abbey ; and the sting of the complaint has been thrown into a shape which I could not, in justice, assent to without further inquiry. Where the wrong lies, or where it commences, I know not. Certainly I nor any man has a right to expect that the poor men who attended us should give up their time for nothing, or even to be angry with them for a sort of persecution, on the degree of which possibly might depend the comfort of their own families. Thoughts of famishing children at home, leave little room for nice regards of delicacy abroad. The individuals, therefore, might or might not be blameable. But in any case the system is palpably wrong. The nation is entitled to a free unmolested access to its own public monuments : not access merely, but to the use of them ; not free only in the sense of being gratuitous, but free also from the molestation of showmen, with their imperfect knowledge and vulgar sentiment. Yet. after all, what is this system of restriction and annoyance, compared with that which operates on the use of the national libraries ; or that again to the system of exclusion from some of these, where an absolute interdict lies upon any use at all of that which is confessed! v national property ? Books and MSS. which were collected originally and formally bequeathed to the public, under the generous and noble purpose of giving to future gen- LONDON. 61 orations advantages which the collector had himself not enjoyed, and liberating them from obstacles in the pursuit of knowledge, which experience had bitterly imprinted upon his own mind, are at this day locked up as absolutely against me, you, or anybody, as any collection confessedly private. Nay, far more so ; for all private collectors of eminence, as the late Mr. Heber, for instance, have been distinguished for liberality in lending the rarest of their books to those who knew how to use them with effect. But in the cases I now contemplate, the whole funds for supporting the proper offices attached to a library, libra- rians, sub-librarians, &c. which of themselves (and with- out the express verbal evidence of the founder's will) presume a public in the daily use of the books, else they are superfluous, have been applied to the creation of lazy sinecures, in behalf of persons expressly charged with the care of shutting out the public. Therefore, it is true, they are not sinecures : for that one care, vigilantly to keep out the public,* they do take upon themselves ; and * This place suggests the mention of another crying abuse connected with this subject. In the year 1811 or 1810, came under Parliamentary notice and revision the law of Copyright. In some excellent pamphlets drawn forth by the occasion, from Mr. Duppa, for instance, and several others, the whole subject was well probed, and many aspects, little noticed by the public, were exposed, of that extreme injustice attached to the law as it then stood. The several monopolies connected with books were noticed a little; and not a little notice was taken of the oppressive privilege with which certain public libraries were invested, of exacting, severally, a copy of each new book published. This down- right robbery was palliated by some members of the House in that day, under the notion of its being a sort of exchange, or quid pro quo in return for the relief obtained by the statute of Queen Anne — the first which recognised literary property. 'For,' argued they, ' previously to that statute, supposing your book pirated, at common law you could obtain redress only for each copy -proved to have been sold by the pirate ; and that might not be a thousandth part of the actual loss. Now, the statute of Queen Anne granting you a general redress, upon proof that 62 LIFE AND MANNERS. why ? A man loving books like myself, might suppose that their motive was the ungenerous one of keeping the a piracy had been committed, you. the party relieved, were bound to express your sense of this relief by a return made to the public ; and the pubiic is here represented by the great endowed libraries of the seven universities, the British Museum, &c. &c.' But prima facie, this was that selling- of justice which is expressly renounced in Magna Charta: and why were proprietors of copyright more than other proprietors, to make an 'acknowledgment' for their rights? But, supposing that just, why, especially, to the given public bodies ? Now, for my part, I think that this admits of an explanation : Nine-tenths of the authors in former days, lay amongst the class who had received a college education; and most of these, in their academic life, had benefited largely by old en- dowments. Giving up, therefore, a small tribute from their copyright, there was some color of justice in supposing that they were making a slight acknowledgment for past benefits received, and exactly for those benefits which enabled them to appear with any advantage as authors. So, I am convinced, the 'servitude' first arose, and under this construc- tion ; which, even for those days, was often a fiction, but now generally such. However, be the origin what it may, the ground, upon which the public mind in 1811 (that small part of it at least which the question attracted), reconciled itself to the abuse, was this. For a trivial wrong, (but it was then shown that the wrong was not always trivial,) one great good is achieved, viz., that all over the kingdom are dispersed eleven great depositories, in which all persons interested may, at all times, be sure of finding one copy of every book published That did seem a great advantage and a balance politically, (if none morally,) to the injustice upon which it grew. But now mark the degree in which this balancing advantage is made available. 1. The eleven bodies are not equally careful to exact their copies ; that can only be done by retaining an agent in London; and this agent is careless about books of slight money value. 2. Were it otherwise, of what final avail would a perfect set of the year's productions prove to a public not admitted freely to the eleven libraries? 3. But finally, if they were admitted, to what purpose, (as regards this particular advantage ) under the following custom, which, in some of these eleven libraries, (possibly iu all,) was I well knew, established: annually the principal librarian weeded the annual crop of all such books as displeased himself; upon which two questions arise. 1. Upon what principle? 2. With what result? I answer as to the first, in his lustration (to borrow a Roman idea) he went upon no principle at all, but his own caprice, or what he called his own discretion ; and accordingly it is a fact known to many as well as LONDON. 63 books to themselves. Far from it. In several instances they will as little use the books as suffer them to be used. And thus the whole plans and cares of the good (I will say, weighing his motives, of the pious) founder have ter- minated in locking up and sequestrating a large collection of books, some being great rarities, in situations where they cannot be opened. Had he bequeathed them to the catacombs of Paris or of Naples, he could not have better provided for their virtual extinction. I ask, does no action at common law lie against the promoters of such enor- mous abuses ? Oh, thou fervent reformer, whose tread he that puts his ear to the ground may hear at a distance coming onwards upon every road — if sometimes thou wilt work me and others suffering, from which I shall not myself, that a book, which some people (and certainly not the least meditative of this age) have pronounced the most original work of modern times, was actually amongst the books thus degraded ; it was one of those, as the phrase is, tossed ' into the basket ; ' and universally this fate is more likely to befall a work of original merit, which disturbs the previous way of thinking and feeling, than one of timid compliance with ordinary models. Secondly with what result? For the present, the degraded books, having been consigned to the basket, were forthwith consigned to a damp cellar. There, at any rate, they were in no condi- tion to be consulted by the public, being piled up in close bales, and in a place not publicly accessible. But there can be no doubt that, sooner or later, their mouldering condition would be made an argument for selling them. And such, when we trace the operation of this law to its final stage, such is the ultimate result of an infringement upon private rights, almost unexampled in any other part of our civil economy. That sole beneficial result, for the sake of which some legislators were willing to sanction a wrong, otherwise admitted to be indefensible, is so little pro- tected and secured to the public, that it is first of all placed at the mercy of an agent in London, whose negligence or indifference may defeat the provision altogether ; (I know a publisher of a splendid botanical work, who told me that by forbearing to attract notice to it within the statuta- ble time, he saved his eleven copies,) and again placed at the mercy of a librarian who, (or any one of whose successors,) may, upon a motive of malice to the author or an impulse of false taste, after all proscribe any part of the books thus objectionably acquired. 64 LIFE AND MANNERS. shrink, work also for me a little good, — this way turn the great hurricanes and levanters of thy wrath — winnow me this chaff; and let us see at last the gamers of pure wheat laid up in elder days for our use, and for two centuries closed against our use ! London we left in haste, to keep an engagement of some standing at the Earl of H 's, my friend's grand- father. This great admiral, who had filled so large a station in the public eye, being the earliest among the naval heroes of England in the first war of the Revolu- tion, and the only one of noble birth, I should have been delighted to see; St. Paul's, and its naval monuments to Captain Riou and Captain , together with its floating pageantries of conquered flags, having awakened within me, in a form of peculiar solemnity, those patriotic re- membrances of past glories, which all boys feel so much more vividly than men can do, in whom the sensibility to such impressions is blunted. Lord H., however, I was not destined to see. Of late years, he had generally been absent on public duties ; but, on this occasion, his absence was probably due to a reason which will make the reader smile : I believe, but am not perfectly certain, that he was dead ; and I have no peerage within my reach by which I could settle that point. The fact is, my knowledge of the family had been too slight and interrupted to have fixed in my memory any chronology of its history. And though I then knew the exact state of the facts, at present I have entirely forgotten everything beyond the mere act of his absence. A death, however, at any rate, there had been, and very recently, in the family, and under circumstances peculiarly startling ; and the spirits of the whole house were painfully depressed by that event, at the time of our visit. One of the daughters, a younger sister of my friend's mother, had been engaged for some LORD M TON. 65 time to a Scottish nobleman, the earl of M — ton, much esteemed by the Royal Family. The day was at length fixed for the marriage ; and about a fortnight before that day arrived, some particular dress or ornament was brought to P , in which it was designed that the bride should appear at the altar. The fashion as to this point has often varied ; but at that time the custom was for bridal parties to be in full dress. The lady, when the dress arrived, was, to all appearance, in good health ; but, by one of those unaccountable misgivings which are on record in many well-attested cases, (as that, for example, of Andrew MarvelPs father,) she said, after gazing for a minute or two at the beautiful dress, firmly and pointedly, c That, then, is my wedding dress ; and it is expected I shall wear it on Thursday the 17th ; but I shall not ; I shall never wear it. On Thursday the 17th, I shall be dressed in a shroud ! ' All present were shocked at such a declaration, which the solemnity of the lady's manner made it imposssible to receive as a jest. The old Count- ess, her mother, even reproved her with some severity for the words, as an expression of distrust in the goodness of God. The bride-elect made no answer, but sighed heavily. Within a fortnight all happened, to the letter, as she had predicted. She was taken suddenly ill : she died about three days before the marriage day ; and was finally dressed in her shroud, according to the natural course of the funeral arrangements, on her expected marriage morning. Lord M — ton, the nobleman thus suddenly and re- markably bereaved of his bride, was the only gentleman who appeared at the dinner-table. He took a particular interest in literature ; and it was, in fact, through his kind- ness that, for the first time in my life, I found myself somewhat in the situation of a i lionS The occasion of 66 LIFE AND MANNERS. Lord M.'s flattering notice was a particular copy of verses which had gained for me a puhlic distinction ; not, how- ever, I must own, a very brilliant one ; the prize awarded to me being not the first, nor even the second : it was simply the third : and that fact stated nakedly, might have left it doubtful whether I were to be considered in the light of one honored or of one stigmatized. However, the judges in this case, with more honesty, or more self- distrust, at least, than belongs to most adjudications of the kind, had printed the first three of the successful essays. Consequently, it was left open to each of the less successful candidates to benefit by any difference of taste amongst their several friends ; and my friends, in particular, with the single exception of my mother, who always thought her own children inferior to other people's, (partly, I believe, on a religious principle of repressing our vanity, and partly, also, in a spirit of unaffected modesty about everything connected with herself,) had generally assigned the palm to myself. Lord M. protested loudly that the case admitted of no doubt ; that gross in- justice had been done me ; and, as the ladies of the family were much influenced by his opinion, I thus came, not only to wear the laurel in their estimation, but also with the advantageous addition of having suffered some injustice. I was not only a victor, but a victor in mis- fortune. At this moment, looking back from- a distance of thirty and odd years upon those trifles, it may well be supposed that I do not attach importance enough to the subject of my fugitive honors, as to have any very decided opinion one way or the other upon my own proportion of merit. I do not even recollect the major part of the verses : that which I do recollect, inclines me to think that in the struc- ture of the metre, and in the choice of the expressions, I LORD M TON. 67 had some advantage over my competitors, though other- wise, perhaps, my verses were less finished ; Lord M. might, therefore, in a partial sense, have been just, as well as kind. But, little as that may seem likely, even then, and at the moment of reaping some advantage from my honors, which gave me a consideration with the family I was amongst, such as I could not else have had, most unaffectedly I doubted in my own mind whether I were really entitled to the praises which 1 received. My own verses had not at all satisfied myself; and though I felt elated by the notice they had gained me, and gratified by the generosity of the noble Scotchman in taking my part so warmly, I was so, much more in a spirit of sympathy with the kindness thus manifested in mv behalf, and with the consequent kindness which it procured me from others, than from any incitement or support which it gave to my intellectual pride. In fact, though proud as a fiend of those intellectual gifts which I believed or which I knew myself to possess, I made even in those days so far a just estimate of my pretensions as not to imagine my particu- lar vocation to lie in poetry. Well indeed I knew, and I know that — had I chosen to enlist amongst the soi-disant poets of the day, — amongst those I mean who, by mere force of talent and mimetic skill, contrive to sustain the part of poet in a scenical sense, and with a scenical effect — I also could have won such laurels as are won by such merit ; I also could have taken and sustained a place taliter qualiler amongst the poets of the time. Why not then ? Because I knew that me, as them, would await the certain destiny in reversion, of resigning that place, in the next generation, to some other candidate having equal or greater skill in appropriating the vague senti- ments, and old traditionary language of passion spread through books, and having the advantage of novelty, 68 LIFE AND MANNERS. and of a closer adaptation to the prevailing taste of the day. Even at that early age I was keenly alive, if not 50 keenly as at this moment, to the fact, that by far the larger proportion of what is received in every age for poetry, and for a season usurps that consecrated name, is not the spontaneous overflow of real unaffected passion, deep, and at the same time original, and also forced into public manifestation of itself from the necessity which cleaves to all passion alike of seeking external sympathy : this it is not ; but a counterfeit assumption of such pas- sion, according to the more or less accurate judgment of the writer, for distinguishing the key of passion suited to the particular case, and an assumption of the language of passion, according to his more or less skill in separating the spurious from the native and legitimate diction of real excitement. Rarely, indeed, are the reputed poets of any age men who groan, like prophets, under the bur- then of a message which they have to deliver, and must deliver, of a mission which they must discharge. Gen- erally, nay, with much fewer exceptions, perhaps, than would be readily believed, they are merely simulators of the part they sustain ; speaking not out of the abundance of their own hearts, but by skill and artifice assuming or acting emotions at second-hand ; and the whole is a business of talent, (sometimes even of great talent,) but not of original power, of genius,* or authentic inspira- tion. * The words genius and talent are frequently distinguished from each other by those who evidently misconstrue the true distinction entirely, and sometimes so grossly as to use them by way of expressions for a mere difference in degree. Thus, ' a man of great talent, absolutely a ge- nius,'' occurs in a very well written tale at this moment before me ; as if being a man of genius implied only a greater than ordinary degree of talent. Talent and genius are in no one point allied to each other, except FETE AT FROGMORE. 69 From P we returned to Eton. Her Majesty about this time gave some splendid fetes at Frogmore ; to one or two of which she had laid her commands upon a great officer of her household that we should be invited. The invitation was, of course, on my friend's account ; but her Majesty had condescended to direct that I, as his visiter, should be specially included. Lord W., young as he was, had become tolerably indifferent about such things ; but to me such a scene was a novelty ; and, on that ac- count, it was settled we should go. We did go : and 1 was not sorry to have made the sacrifice of a few hours, for the gratification of once, at least, witnessing the splen- dors of a royal party. But a sacrifice it certainly was : and, after the first edge of expectation was taken off — after the vague uncertainties of ignorance had given place to absolute realities, and the eye had become a little fa- miliar with the splendors of the dresses, &c, I began to suffer under the constraints incident to a young person in such a situation. The music, in fact, was all that con- tinued to delight me ; and, but for that, I believe, I should have had some difficulty in avoiding so monstrous an generically ; that both express modes of intellectual power. But the kinds of power are not merely different, they are in polar opposition to each other. Talent is intellectual power of every kind, which acts and manifests itself by and through the wUl t and the active forces. Genius, as the verbal origin implies, is that much rarer species of intellectual power which is derived from the genial nature — from the spirit of suf- fering and enjoying — from the spirit of pleasure and pain, as organized more or less perfectly ; and this is independent of the will. It is a function of the passive nature. Talent is conversant with the adaptation of means to ends. But genius is conversant only with ends. Talent has no sort of connection, not the most remote or shadowy, with the moral nature or temperament, — genius is steeped and saturated with this moral nature. Talent (to use an old distinction of the schoolmen of our elder English poets, Milton, for example, Paradise Lost, B. V. 1. 4S3. and also a revived distinction of Immanuel Kant's) is discursive : genius, like the angelic understanding, is inluitivc. 70 LIFE AND MANNERS. indecorum as yawning. The ball-room, a temporary erection, with something of the character of a pavilion about it, wore an elegant and festal air ; the part allotted to the dancers being fenced off by a gilded lattice-work, and ornamented beautifully from the upper part with drooping festoons of flowers. The dresses of the ladies were, as usual on such occasions, conspicuously rich : and in itself, of all the scenes which this world offers, none is to me so profoundly interesting, none (I say deliberately) so affecting, as the spectacle of men and women floating through the mazes of a dance ; under these conditions, however, that the music shall be rich and festal, the exe- cution of the dancers perfect, and the dance itself of a character to admit of free, fluent, and continuous motion. But this last condition will be sought in vain in the dis- gusting quadrilles, &c. which have for so many years banished the truly beautiful country -dances native to England. Those whose taste and sensibility were so defective as to substitute for the beautiful in dancing the merely difficult, were sure, in the end, to transfer the depravations of this art from the Opera House to the floors of private ball-rooms. The tendencies even then were in that direction ; but as yet they had not attained their final stage : and the English country-dance* was still in estima- * This word, I am well aware, grew out of the French word contre- danse; indicating the regular contraposition of male and female partners in the first arrangement of the dancers. The word country-dance was therefore originally a corruption; hut, having once arisen and taken root in the language, it is far hetter to retain it in its colloquial form : better, I mean, on the general principle concerned in such cases. For it is, in fact, by such corruptions, by offsets upon an old stock, arising through ignorance or mispronunciation originally, that every language is frequently enriched ; and new modifications of thought, unfolding them- selves in the progress of society, generate for themselves concurrently appropriate expressions. Many words in the Latin can be pointed out as having passed through this process. The English word properly, FETE AT FR0GM0RE. 71 tion at the courts of princes. Now of all dances, this is the only one, as a class, of which you can truly describe the motion to be continuous, that is, not interrupted, or fitful, but unfolding its fine mazes with the equability of light, in its diffusion through free space. And wherever the music happens to be not of a light, trivial character, but charged with the spirit of festal pleasure, and the per- formers in the dance so far skilful as to betray no awk- wardness verging on the ludicrous, I believe that many people feel as I feel in such circumstances, viz., derive from the spectacle the very grandest form of passionate sadness which can belong to any spectacle whatsoever. Sadness is not the exact word ; nor is there any word in arose (according to a great authority) in this way out of propriety ; i.-e. the Latin idea of proprietor, split off into a secondary sense, to which it had long tended ; whilst by a drawing back of accent from the second syllable to the first, and a melting of the two middle syllables into one, (forming proprety, finally euphonized into property,) this secondary sense, hitherto liable to an ambiguity from the too wide and generic meaning oCpropriety, thus gained a separate and specific word ; and the original stock, on which the corruption had arisen, at the same time became disposable for a more specific limitation of its meaning than before. Without dwelling, however, on this particular illustration, what I am here taking occasion to insist on, is the general principle, that in every language it must not be allowed to weigh against the validity of a word once fairly naturalized by use, that originally it crept in upon an abuse or a corruption. Prescription is as strong a ground of legitimation in a case of this nature as it is in law. And the old axiom is applicable — Fieri non debuit, factum valet. Were it otherwise, languages would be robbed of much of their wealth. And, universally, the class oipurists, in matters of language, are liable to grievous suspicion, as almost con- stantly proceeding on kalf knowledge, and on insufficient principles. For example, if I have read one, I have read twenty letters, addressed to newspapers, denouncing the name of a great quarter in London, Mary- le-boue, as ludicrously ungrammatical. The writers had learned, or were learning French ; and they had thus become aware, that neither the article nor the adjective were right. True : but, for want of black- letter French, they did not know that in our Chaucer's time both were right. Le was then the article feminine as well as masculine. 72 LIFE AND MANNERS. any language [because none in the finest languages] which exactly expresses the state ; since it is not a de- pressing, but a most elevating state to which I allude. And, certainly, people of the dullest minds can under- stand, that many states of pleasure, and in particular the highest, are the most of all removed from merriment, or from the ludicrous. The day on which a Roman tri- umphed was the most gladsome day of his existence ; it was the crown and consummation of his prosperity ; yet assuredly it was also to him the most solemn of his days. Festal music, of a rich and passionate character, is the most remote of any from vulgar hilarity. Its very glad- ness and pomp is impregnated with sadness ; but sadness of a grand and aspiring order. Let, for instance, (since without individual illustrations there is the greatest risk of being misunderstood,) any person of musical sensibility listen to the exquisite music composed by Beethoven, as an opening for Burger's Lenore, the running idea of which is the triumphal return of a crusading host, decorated with laurels and with palms, within the gates of their native city ; and then say whether the presiding feeling, in the midst of this tumultuous festivity, be not, by infinite de- grees, transcendent to any thing so vulgar as mere hilarity. In fact, laughter itself is of an equivocal nature ; — as the organ of the ludicrous, laughter is allied to the trivial and the ignoble — as the organ of joy, it is allied to the pas- sionate and the noble. From all which the reader may comprehend, if he should not happen experimentally to have felt, that a spectacle of young men and women, flowing through the mazes of an intricate dance under a full volume of music, taken with all the circumstantial adjuncts of such a scene in rich men's halls ; the blaze of lights and jewels, the life, the motion, the sea-like undula- tion of heads, the interweaving of the figures, the araxv- DANCING. 73 nlmctg or self- revolving, both of the dance and the music, ' never ending, still beginning,' and the continual regene- ration of order from a system of motions which seem for ever to approach the very brink of confusion ; that such a spectacle, with such circumstances, may happen to be capable of exciting and sustaining the very grandest emo- tions of philosophic melancholy to which the human spirit is open. The reason is, in part, that such a scene pre- sents a sort of masque of human life, with its whole equi- page of pomps and glories, its luxury of sight and sound, its hours of golden youth, and the interminable revolution of ages hurrying after ages, and one generation treading over the flying footsteps of another ; whilst all the while the overruling music attempers the mind to the spectacle, the subject (as a German would say) to the object, the beholder to the vision. And, although this is known to be but one phasis of life — of life culminating and in ascent, — yet the other, and repulsive phasis is concealed upon the hidden or averted side of the golden arras, known but not fel{ : or is seen but dimly in the rear, crowding into indistinct proportions. The effect of the music is, to place the mind in a state of elective attraction for everything in harmony with its own prevailing key. This pleasure, as always on similar occasions, I had at present ; and if I have spent rather more words than could have been requisite in describing a very obvious state of emotion, it is not because, in itself, it is either vague or doubtful, but because it is difficult, without calling upon a reader for a little reflection, to convince him that there is not something paradoxical in the assertion, that joy and festal pleasure, of. the highest kind, are liable to a natural combination with solemnity, or even melancholy the most profound. Yet to speak in the mere simplicity of truth so mysterious is human nature, and so little to be read by 6 74 LIFE AND MANNERS. him who runs, that almost every weighty aspect of truth upon that theme will be found at first sight startling, or sometimes paradoxical. And so little need is there for courting paradox, that, on the contrary, he who is faithful to his own experiences will find all his efforts little enough to keep down the paradoxical air of what yet he knows to be the truth. Xo man needs to search for paradox in this world of ours. Let him simply confine himself to the truth, and he will find paradox growing everywhere under his hands as rank as weeds. For new truths of impor- tance are rarely agreeable to any preconceived theories ; that is, cannot be explained by these theories : which are insufficient, therefore, even where they are true. And universally, it must be borne in mind — that not that is paradox which, seeming to be true, is upon examination false, but that which, seeming to be false, may upon ex- amination be found true.* The pleasure of which I have been speaking belongs to all such scenes ; but on this particular occasion there was also something more. To see persons in ; the body,' of whom you have been reading in newspapers from the very earliest of your reading days, — those, who have hitherto been great ideas in your childish thoughts, to see and to hear moving and talking as actual existences amongst other human beings, — had, for the first half hour or so, a singular and strange effect. But this naturally waned rapidly after it had once begun to wane. And when these first startling impressions of novelty had worn off, it must be confessed that the peculiar circumstances attaching to * And therefore it was with strict propriety that Boyle, anxious to fix public attention upon some truths of hydrostatics, published ihem avow- edly as paradoxes. They weie truths, indeed; but in the first annun- ciation they wore the air of falsehood. They contradicted men's pre- conceptions and first impressions. DANCING. 75 a royal ball, were not favorable to its joyousness or genial spirit of enjoyment. I am not going to repay her Maj- esty's condescension so ill, or so much to abuse the priv- ileges of a guest, as to draw upon my recollections of what passed, for the materials of an ill-natured critique. Everything was done, I doubt not, which court etiquette permitted, to thaw those ungenial restraints which gave to the whole too much of a ceremonious and official char- acter, and to each actor in the scene too much of the air belonging to one who is discharging a duty, and to the youngest even among the principal personages concerned, an apparent anxiety and jealousy of manner — jealousy, I mean, not of others, but a prudential jealousy of his own possible oversights or trespasses. In fact, a great person- age bearing a state character cannot be regarded with the perfect freedom which belongs to social intercourse, nor ought to be. It is not rank alone which is here con- cerned : that, as being his own, he might lay aside for an hour or two ; but he bears a representative character also. He has not his own rank only, but the rank of others to protect : he embodies and impersonates the majesty of a great people ; and this character, were you ever so much encouraged to do so, you neither could nor ought to dis- miss from your thoughts. Besides all which, it must be acknowledged, that to see brothers dancing with sisters, as too often occurred in those dances to which the Princesses were parties, disturbed the appropriate interest of the scene, being irreconcilable with the allusive meaning of dancing in general, and laid a weight upon its gaiety which no condescensions from the highest quarter could remove. This infelicitous arrangement forced the thoughts of all present upon the exalted rank of the parties which could dictate so unusual an assortment. And that rank again it presented to us under one of its least happy 76 LIFE AND MANNERS. aspects ; as insulating a blooming young woman amidst the choir of her coevals, and surrounding her with solitude amidst a vast crowd of the young, the brave, the beautiful, and the accomplished. Meantime, as respected my own humble pretensions, I had reason to be grateful : every kindness and attention were shown to me. My invitation I was sensible that I owed entirely to my noble friend. But, having been invited, I felt assured from what passed, that it was meant and pro- vided that I should not, by any possibility, be sufTered to think myself overlooked. Lord W. and I communicated our thoughts occasionally by means of a language, which we, in those days, found useful enough at times, and called by the name of Ziph. The language and the name were both derived from Winchester. Dr. Mapleton, a physician in Bath, who had attended me in concert with Mr. Grant, during the illness of my nondescript malady of the head, happened to have had three sons at Winchester ; and his reason for removing them is worth mentioning, as it illustrates the w r ell-known system of fagging. One or more of them showed to the quick, medical eye of Dr. M. symptoms of declining health ; and, upon cross-ques- tioning, he found that, being (as juniors) fags (such is the technical appellation) to appointed seniors, they were under the necessity of going out nightly into the town for the purpose of executing commissions ; but this was not easy, as all the regular outlets were closed at eight or nine o'clock. In such a dilemma, any route, that was merely practicable, at whatever risk, must be traversed by the loyal fag : and it so happened that none of any kind remained open or accessible, except one ; and this one communication happened to have escaped suspicion, simply because it lay through a succession of temples sacred to the goddess Cloacina. That of itself was not ZIPH LANGUAGE. 77 so extraordinary a fact : the wonder lay in the number — seventeen. Such were the actual amount of sacred ed- ifices, which, through all their mephitic morasses, these miserable vassals had to thread all but every night of the week. Dr. M. when he made this discovery, ceased to wonder at the medical symptoms ; and as j agger y was an abuse too venerable and sacred to be touched by profane hands, he lodged no idle complaints, but simply removed his sons to a school where the Serbonian bogs of the subter- raneous goddess might not intersect the nocturnal line of march so very often. One day, when the worthy Doctor was attempting to amuse me with this anecdote, and ask- ing me whether I thought Hannibal would have attempted his march over the Little St. Bernard, supposing that he and the elephant which he rode had been summoned to explore a route lying through seventeen similar nuisances — he went on to mention the one sole accomplishment which his sons had imported from Winchester. This was the Ziph language, communicated at Winchester to any aspirant for a fixed fee of one-half guinea, but which the Doctor then communicated to me, as I now to the reader — gratis. I might perhaps have passed it over without notice, had I not since then ascertained that it is undoubtedly a bequest of elder times. Two centuries at least it must have existed : perhaps it may be coeval with the Pyramids. For in the famous Essay on a Philosoph- ical Character, (I forget whether that is the exact title,) a large folio written by the ingenious Dr. Wilkins, Bishop of Chester,* and published early in the reign of Charles II., * This Dr. Wilkins was related by marriage to Cromwell, and is bet- ter known to the world perhaps by his Essay on the possibility of a passage, [or, as the famous author of the Pursuits of Literature said, by way of an Episcopal metaphor, the possibility of a translation,] lo the moon. 78 LIFE AND MANNERS. a folio which I in youthful days not only read but studied, this language is recorded and accurately described amongst many other modes of cryptical communication, oral and visual, spoken, written, or symbolic. And, as the bishop (writing before 1665) does not speak of it as at all a recent invention, it may probably at that time have been regarded as an antique device, for conducting a conversa- tion in secrecy amongst by-standers ; and this advantage it has, that it is applicable to all languages alike, nor can it possibly be penetrated by one not initiated in the mys- tery. The secret is this, repeat the vowel or diphthong of every syllable, prefixing to the vowel so repeated the letter G. Thus, for example : — Shall we go away in an hour ? Three hours we have already staid. This in Ziph be- comes : Shagall wege gogo agawagay igin agan hougour 1 Threegee hougours wege hagave agalreageadygy stagaid. It must not be supposed that Ziph proceeds slowly. A very little practice gives the greatest fluency ; so that even now, though certainly I cannot have practised it for thirty years, my power of speaking the Ziph remains unim- paired. I forget whether, in the Bishop of Chester's account of this cryptical language, the consonant inter- calated be G or not. Evidently any consonant will an- swer the purpose. F or L would be softer. In this learned tongue, it was that my friend and I communicated our feelings ; and having staid nearly four hours, a time quite sufficient to express a proper sense of the honor, we departed ; and, on emerging into the open high road, we threw up our hats and huzzaed, meaning no sort of disrespect, but from uncontrollable pleasure in recovered liberty. For a few minutes at this or at another of her Majesty's fetes, and twice on other occasions, before we finally quitted Eton, I again saw the King ; and always with THE KING. 79 renewed interest. He was kind to everybody — con- descending and affable in a degree which I am bound to remember with personal gratitude : and one thing I had heard of him, which even then, and much more as I became capable of deeper reflection, won my respect. I have always reverenced a man of whom it could be truly said, that he had once, and once only, been des- perately in love ; in love, that is to say, in a terrific excess, so as to dally, under suitable circumstances, with the thoughts of cutting his own throat, or even (as the case might be) the throat of her whom he loved above all this world. It will be understood that I am not justifying such enormities ; but it is evident that people in general feel pretty much as I do, from the extreme sympathy with which the public always pursue the fate of any criminal who has committed a murder of this class, even though tainted (as generally it is) with jealousy, which, in itself, is an ignoble passion.* Great passions, passions moving in a great orbit, and transcending little regards, are always arguments of some latent nobility. There are, indeed, but few T men and few women capable of great passions, or (properly speaking) of passions at all. Hartley, in his mechanism of the human mind, propagates the sensations by means of vibrations, and by miniature vibrations, w T hich, in a Roman form for such miniatures, he terms vibratiuncles. Now of * Accordingly, Mr. Coleridge has contended, and I think with truth, that the passion of Othello is not jealousy. So much I know by report, as the result of a lecture which he read at the Royal Institution. His arguments I did not hear. To me it is evident, that Othello's state of feeling was not that of a degrading, suspicious rivalship ; hut the state of perfect misery, arising out of this dilemma, the most afTecting, per- haps, to contemplate, of any which can exist, viz., the dire necessity of loving without limit one whom the heart pronounces to be unworthy and irretrievably sunk. 80 LIFE AND MANNERS. men and women generally, parodying that terminology, we ought to say — not that they are governed by passions, or are at all capable of passions, but of passinncles. And thence it is that few men go, or can go, beyond a little love-liking, as it is called ; and hence also, that, in a world where so little conformity takes place between the ideal speculations of men and the gross realities of life, where marriages are governed in so vast a proportion by conveni- ence, prudence, self-interest, - — anything, in short, rather than deep sympathy between the parties, we yet hear of so few tragic catastrophes on that account. The King, however, was certainly among the number of those who are susceptible of a deep passion, if everything be true that I have heard. All the world has heard that he was passionately devoted to the beautiful sister of the then Duke of Richmond. That was before his marriage : and I believe it is certain, that he not only wished, but sincere- ly meditated to have married her. So much is matter of notoriety. But other circumstances of the case have been sometimes reported, which imply great distraction of mind, and a truly profound possession of his heart by that early passion : which, in a prince whose feelings are liable so much to the dispersing and dissipating power of endless interruption from new objects and fresh claims on the attention, coupled also with the fact that he never, but in this one case, professed anything amounting to extrava- gant or frantic attachment, do seem to argue that the King was truly and passionately in love with Lady Sarah Lenox. He had a demon upon him, and, by some accounts, was under a real possession. If so, what a lively expression of the mixed condition of human fortunes, and not less of another truth equally affecting, viz., the dread conflicts with the will — the mighty agitations which silently and in darkness are convulsing many a heart, where, to the THE KING. 81 external eye, all is tranquil, — that this King, at the very- threshold of his public career, at the very moment when he was binding about his brows the golden circle of sove- reignty, — when Europe watched him with interest, and the kings of the earth with envy, no one of the vulgar titles to happiness being wanting — youth, health, a throne the most splendid on this planet, general popularity amongst a nation of freemen, and the hope which belongs to powers as yet almost untried, — that, even under these most flattering auspices, he should be called upon to make a sacrifice the most bitter of all to which human life is liable ! He made it : and he might have then said to his people — ; For you, and to my public duties, I have made a sacrifice, which none of you would have made for me.' In years long ago, I have heard a woman of rank recur- ring to the circumstances of Lady Sarah's first appearance at Court after the King's marriage. It was either a pre- sentation, or it occurred at a ball ; and, if I recollect right- ly, after that lady's own marriage with Sir Charles Bun- bury. Many eyes were upon both parties at that moment, — females eyes especially, — and the speaker did not dis- guise the excessive interest with which she herself observed them. The lady was not agitated, but the King teas. He seemed anxious, sensibly trembled, changed color, and at last shivered, as Lady S. B. drew near. But, to quote the one single eloquent sentiment, which I remember after a lapse of thirty years, in Monk Lewis's Romantic Tales — 1 In this world all things pass away ; blessed be Heaven, and the bitter pangs by which sometimes it is pleased to recall its wanderers, even our passions pass away ! ' And thus it happened that this storm also was laid asleep and forgotten, together with so many others of its kind, that have been, and that shall be again, so long as man is man, and woman woman. Meantime, in justification of a pas- 82 LIFE AND MANNERS. sion so profound, one would be glad to think highly of the lady who inspired it ; and, therefore, I heartily hope that the insults offered to her memory in the scandalous me- moirs of the Due de Lauzun, are mere calumnies, and records rather of his presumptuous wishes, than of any actual successes. That book, I am aware, is generally treated as a forgery ; but internal evidence, drawn from the tone and quality of the revelations there made, will not allow me to think it such. There is an abandon and carelessness in parts which mark its sincerity. Its authen- ticity I cannot doubt. But that proves nothing for the truth of the particular stories which it contains. * * A book of scandalous and defamatory stories, especially when the writer has had the baseness to betray the confidence reposed in his honor by women, and to boast of favors alleged to have been granted him, it is always fair to consider as ipso facto a tissue of falsehoods ; and on the following argument, that these are exposures which, even if true, none but the basest of men would have made. Being, therefore, on the hypo- thesis most favorable to himself, the basest of men, the author is self- denounced as vile enough to have forged the stories, and cannot com- plain if he should be roundly accused of doing that which he has taken pains to prove himself capable of doing. This way of arguing might he applied with fatal effect to the Due de Lauzun's Memoirs, supposing them written with a view to publication. But, by possibility, that was not the case. The Due de L. terminated his profligate life, as is well known, on the scaffold, during the storms of the French Revolution ; and nothing in his whole career won him so much credit, as the way in which he closed it ; for he went to his death with a romantic careless- ness, and even gaiety of demeanor. His Memoirs were not published by himself; the publication was posthumous ; and by whom authorized, or for what purpose, is not exactly known. Probably the manuscript fell into mercenary hands, and was published merely on a speculation of pecuniary gain. From some passages, however, I cannot but infer that the writer did not mean to bring it before the public, but wrote it rather as a series of private memoranda, to aid his own recollection of cir- cumstances and dates. The Due de Lauzun's account of his intrigue with Lady Sarah goes so far as to allege, that he rode down in disguise, from London to Sir Charles B.'s country-seat, agreeably to a previous assignation, and that he was admitted, by that Lady's confidential WALES. 83 Soon after this we left Eton for Ireland. Our first destination being Dublin, of course we went by Holyhead. The route at that time, except that it went round by Con- way, was pretty much the same as at present. One stage after leaving Shrewsbury it entered North Wales ; a stage farther brought us to the celebrated vale of Llangollen ; and on reaching the approach to this about sunset on a beautiful evening of June, I first found myself amongst mountains; a feature in natural scenery for which, from my earliest days, I might almost say that I had hun- gered and thirsted. In no one expectation of my life have I been less disappointed than in this ; and I may add, that no one enjoyment has less decayed or palled upon my continued experience. A mountainous region, with but few towns, and those of a simple pastoral character, and a slender population ; behold my conditions of a pleasant permanent dwelling-place ! The mountains of Wales range at about the same elevation as those of Northern Eng- land ; three thousand and a few odd hundreds of feet being the extreme limit which they reach. Generally speaking, their forms are less picturesque individually, and they are less happily grouped, than their English brethren. I have since also been made sensible by Mr. Wordsworth of one grievous defect in the structure of the Welch valleys ; too generally they take the basin shape. Of this, however, I was not aware at the time of first seeing Wales ; although the striking effect from the opposite form of the Cumber- land and Westmoreland valleys, which almost universally present a flat area at the base of the surrounding hills, level, to use Mr. Wordsworth's expression, t as thejloor of attendant, througli a back staircase, at a time when Sir Charles, (a sportsman, as all the world knows, but a man of the highest breeding,) was himself at home, and occupied in the duties of hospitality. 84 LIFE AND MANNERS. a temple? would, at any rate, have arrested my eye, from its impressive beauty. No faults, however, at that early age, struck me or disturbed my pleasure, except that after one whole day's travelling, (for so long it cost us between Llangollen and Holyhead,) the want of water struck me upon review as very remarkable. From Conway to Ban- gor we were in sight of the sea, but fresh water we had seen hardly any ; no lake, no stream much beyond a brook. This is certainly a conspicuous defect in North Wales, considered as a region of fine scenery. The few lakes I have since become acquainted with, as that near Bala, near Beddkelert, and beyond Machynleth, are not attractive either in their forms or in their accompaniments : the Bala lake being meagre and insipid : the others as it were unfinished, and unaccomplished with their furniture of wood. At the Head, (to call it by its common colloquial name,) we were detained a few days in those unsteaming times by foul winds. Our time, however, thanks to the hospitality of a certain Captain Skinner on that station, did not hang heavy on our hands, though we were imprisoned, as it were, on a dull rock ; for Holyhead itself is a little island of rock, and a dependency of Anglesea ; which, again, is a little dependency of North Wales. The packets on this station were lucrative commands ; and they were given (perhaps, are given ?) to post-captains in the navy. Cap- tain S. was celebrated for his convivial talents, and did the honors of the place in a hospitable style, daily asking us to dine with him. This answered one purpose, at least, of especial con- venience to us all at that moment : it kept us from any necessity of meeting together during the day, except under circumstances where we escaped the necessity of any familiar communication with each other. Why that should LORD W.'s TUTOR. 85 have become desirable, needs explanation : Upon the last day of our journey, Lord W 's tutor, who had accom- panied us thus far on our road, suddenly took offence at something we had said, done, or omitted, and never spoke one syllable to either of us again. Being both of us amiably disposed, and incapable of having seriously medi- tated either word or deed likely to wound any person's feelings, we were much hurt at the time, and often retraced the little incidents upon the road, to discover, if possible, what it was that had been open to any miscon- struction. But it remained to both of us a lasting mystery. This tutor was an Irishman ; and, I believe, of considerable pretensions as a scholar ; but, being reserved and haughty, or else presuming in us a knowledge of our offence, which we really had not, he gave us no opening for any expla- nation. To the last moment, however, he manifested a conscientious regard to the duties of his charge. He ac- companied us in our boat, on a dark and gusty night, to the packet, which lay a little out at sea. He saw us on board ; and then, standing up for one moment, he said, c Is all right on deck ? ' 6 All right, Sir,' sang out the ship's steward. c Have you, Lord W., got your boat-cloak with you?' c Yes, Sir.' 'Then, pull away, boatmen.' We listened for a time to the measured beat of his retreating oars, marvelling more and more at the atrocious nature of our crime, which could avail even to intercept his last adieus. I, for my part, never saw him again ; nor, as I have reason to think, Lord W. Neither did we ever unravel the mystery. As if to irritate our curiosity still more, Lord W. show- ed me a torn fragment of paper in his tutor's hand-writing, which, together with others, had been thrown (as he be- lieved) purposely in his way. If he was right in that belief, it appeared that he had missed the particular fragment 86 LIFE AND MANNERS. which was designed to raise the veil upon our guilt; for the one he produced contained exactly these words : — 6 With respect to your Ladyship's anxiety to know how far the acquaintance with Mr. X. Y. Z. is likely to be of ser- vice to your son, I think 1 may now venture to say that ' There the sibylline fragment ended; nor could we torture it into any further revelation. However, when we reached Dublin, we sate down, and addressed an ingen- uous account of our journey and our little mystery to my young friend's mother in England. For to her, it was clear, that the tutor had confided his wrongs. Her Lady- ship answered with kindness; but did not throw any light on the problem which exercised at once our memories, our skill in conjectural interpretation, and our sincere regrets. I mention this trifle, simply because, trifle as it is, it involv- ed a mystery, and furnishes an occasion for glancing at that topic. Mysteries as deep, with results a little more impor- tant, have occasionally crossed me in life ; one, in particu- lar, I recollect at this moment, known pretty extensively to the neighborhood in which it occurred. It was in the county of S . A lady married, and married well, as was thought. About twelve months afterwards, she return- ed alone in a post-chaise to her father's house ; paid and herself dismissed the postilion at the gate ; entered the house ; ascended to the room in which she had passed her youth, and known in the family by her name ; took pos- session of it again ; intimated by signs, and by one short letter at her first arrival, what she would require ; lived for nearly twenty years in this state of La Trappe seclusion and silence ; nor ever, to the hour of her death, explained what circumstances had dissolved the supposed happy connection she had formed, or what had become of her husband Her looks and gestures were of a nature to re- press all questions in the spirit of mere curiosity , and the AN ADVENTURE. 87 spirit of affection naturally respected a secret which was guarded so severely. This might be supposed a Spanish tale ; yet it happened in England, and in a pretty populous neighborhood. The romances which occur in real life are too often connected with circumstances of deep and lasting pain to the feelings of some among the parties concerned ; on that account, more than for any other, they are often suppressed ; else, judging by the number which have fallen within my own knowledge, I believe they are of more frequent occurrence, even in our modern unro- mantic mode of life, than is usually supposed. In par- ticular, I believe that, among such romances, those cases form an unusual proportion in which young, innocent, and high-minded persons have made a sudden discovery of some great profligacy or deep unworthiness in the person to whom they had surrendered their entire affec- tions. That shock, more than any other, is capable of blighting the whole after existence, and sometimes of at once overthrowing the balance either of life or of reason. Instances I know of both ; and such afflictions are the less open to any alleviation, that they are of a nature so deli- cate as to preclude all confidential communication of them to another. A sort of adventure occurred, and not of a kind pleas- ant to recall, even on this short voyage. The passage to Dublin from the Head is about sixty miles, I believe ; yet, from baffling winds, it cost us upwards of thirty hours. The next day, on going upon deck, we found that our only fellow-passenger of note was a woman of rank, celebrated for her beauty, and not undeservedly, for a lovely creature she was. The body of her travelling coach had been, as usual, unslung from the ' carriage,' (by which is technically meant the wheels and the perch,) and placed upon deck. This she used as a place of re- 88 LIFE AND MANNERS. treat from the sun during the day, and as a resting-place at night. For want of more interesting companions, she invited us, during the day, into her coach ; we taxed our abilities to do the agreeable, and made ourselves as enter- taining as we could ; and, on our parts, we were greatly fascinated by the lady's beauty. The second night proved very sultry ; and Lord W. and myself, suffering from the oppression of the cabin, left our berths, and lay, wrapped up in cloaks, upon deck. Having talked for some hours, we were both on the point of falling asleep, when a stealthy tread near our heads awoke us. It was starlight ; and we traced between ourselves and the sky the outline of a man's figure. Lying upon a mass of tarpaulins, we were ourselves undistinguishable ; and the figure moved in the direction of the coach. Our first thought was to raise an alarm, scarcely doubting that the purpose of the man was to rob the unprotected lady of her watch or purse. But to our astonishment, and I can add, to our real pain, we saw the coach door silently swing open under a touch from within. All was as silent as a dream ; the figure entered, the door closed, and we were left to interpret the case as we might. Strange it was that this lady could cal- culate upon absolute concealment in such circumstances. We recollected afterwards to have heard some indistinct rumor buzzed about the packet on the day preceding, that a gentleman, — and some even spoke of him by name as a Colonel , for some unknown purpose, was con- cealed in the steerage of the packet. And other appear- ances indicated that the affair was not entirely a secret even amongst the lady's servants. I recollected the story of Prince Cameralzaman (I believe it is) and his brother in the fc Arabian Nights.' But the impression there made was unfavorable to women generally ; whereas, with both of us, the story proclaimed only a moral already suffi- AN ADVENTURE. 89 ciently known — that women of the highest and the lowest rank are alike thrown too much into situations of danger and temptation. 1 might mention some additional circum- stances of aggravation in this lady's case ; but as they would tend to point out the real person to those acquainted with her history, I shall forbear. She has since made a noise in the world, and has maintained, I believe, a tole- rably fair reputation. Soon after sunrise the next morn- ing, a heavenly morning of June, we dropt our anchor in the famous bay of Dublin. There was a dead calm : the sea was like a lake ; and, as we were some miles from the Pigeon-House, a boat was manned to put us on shore. The lovely lady, unaware that we were parties to her guilty secret, went with us, accompanied by her numerous attendants, and looking as beautiful, and hardly less inno- cent, than an angel. Long afterwards, Lord W. and I met her, hanging upon the arm of her husband, a manly and good-natured man, of polished manners, to whom she introduced us:, for she voluntarily challenged us as her fellow-voyagers, and, I suppose, had no suspicions which pointed in our direction. She even joined her husband in cordially pressing us to visit them at their magnificent chateau. Landing about three miles from Dublin, we were not long in reaching Sackville Street, where my friend's father was anxiously awaiting his son, an only child. He re- ceived us both with a truly paternal kindness. From this time, for about the five months following, during which I resided with my noble friends in Ireland, I saw many of the scenes and most of the persons that were then partic- ularly interesting in that country. • CHAPTER III. IRELAND. Ireland was still smoking with the embers of rebellion ; and Lord Cornwallis, who had been sent expressly to extinguish it, and was said to have fulfilled his mission with energy and success, was then the Lieutenant, and was regarded at that moment with more interest than any other public man. Accordingly I was not sorry when, two mornings after our arrival, my friend's father said to us at breakfast, ; Now, if you wish to see what I call a great man, go with me this morning, and J will take you to see Lord Cornwallis ; for that man, who has given peace both to the East and to the West, I must consider in the light of a great man.' We willingly accompanied the Earl to the Phoenix Park, where the Lord Lieutenant was then residing, and were privately presented to him. I had seen an engraving (celebrated, I believe, in its day) of Lord Cornwallis receiving the young Mysore princes as hostages at Seringapatam ; and I knew the outline of his public services. This gave me an additional interest in seeing him : but I was disappointed to find no traces in his mstaner of the energy and activity I presumed him to possess ; he seemed, on the contrary, slow or even heavy, but kind and benevolent in a degree which won the confidence at once. Him we saw often ; for Lord A took us with him wherever and whenever we wished ; IRELAND. 91 and me in particular, it often gratified highly to see persons of historical names, — names, I mean, histori- cally connected with the great events of Elizabeth's or Cromwell's era, attending at the Phoenix Park. But the persons whom I remember most distinctly of all whom I was then in the habit of seeing, were Lord Clare, the Chancellor, the late Lord Londonderry, (then Castle- reagh,) at that time the Irish Chancellor of the Exche- quer, and the Speaker of the House of Commons, (since, I believe, created Lord Oriel.) With the Speaker, indeed, Lord A had more intimate connections than with any other public man ; both being devoted to the encourage- ment and personal superintendence of g&eat agricultural improvements. Both were bent on patronizing and pro- moting, by examples diffused extensively on their own estates, the introduction of English husbandry, — English improved breeds of cattle, — and, when it was possible, English capital and skill, into the rural economy of Ireland. Amongst the splendid spectacles I witnessed, as the most splendid I may mention an Installation of the Knights of St. Patrick. There were six knights installed on this occasion : one of the six was Lord A , my friend's father. He had no doubt received his ribbon as a reward for his parliamentary votes, and especially in the matter of the Union ; yet, from all his conversation upon that question, and the general conscientiousness of his private ltfe, I am convinced that he acted all along upon patriotic motives, and his real views (whether right or wrong) of the Irish interests. One chief reason, indeed, which detained us in Dublin, was the necessity of attending this particular Installation. At one time he designed to take his son and myself for the two esquires who attend the new made knight, according to the ritual of this ceremony ; but that plan was subsequently laid 92 LIFE AND MANNERS. aside, on learning that the other five knights were to be attended by adults : and thus, from being partakers as actors, my friend and I became simple spectators of this splendid scene, which took place in the cathedral of St. Patrick. So easily does mere external pomp slip out of the memory, as to all its circumstantial items, leaving behind nothing beyond the general impression, that at this moment I remember no one incident of the whole cere- monial, except that some foolish person laughed aloud as the knights went up with their offerings to the altar, apparently at Lord A , who happened to be lame : a singular instance of levity to exhibit within the walls of such a building, and at the most solemn part of the whole ceremony. Lord W. and I sat with Lord and Lady Castlereagh. They were then both young, and both wore an impressive appearance of youthful happiness; neither, fortunately for their peace of mind, able to pierce that cloud of years, not much more than twenty, which divided them from the day destined in one hour to wreck the happiness of both. We had met both, on other occasions ; and their conversation, through the course of that day's pomps, was the most interesting circumstance to me, and the one I remember with most distinctness, of all that belonged to the Installation. By the way, I remember that one morning at breakfast, on occasion of some conversation arising about Irish Bulls, I made an agreement with Lord A to note down in a memo- randum-book every thing throughout my stay in Ireland, which, to my feeling as an Englishman, should seem to be, or to approach to a bull. And this day, at dinner, I reported from Lady Castlereagh's conversation, what struck me as a bull. Lord A laughed, and said, My dear X. Y. Z., I am sorry that it should so happen : IRELAND. 93 your bull is certainly a bull : * but as certainly Lady C. is your countrywoman, and not an Irishwoman at all. This was a bad beginning certainly : but was Lord A quite accurate ? Lady C. was a daughter of Lord Buckinghamshire ; and "her maiden name was Lady E. Hobart. One other public scene there was about this time in Dublin, to the eye less captivating, but far more so in a moral sense. This was the final ratification of the Bill which united Ireland to Great Britain. I do not know that any one public act, or celebration, or solemnity, in my time, did, or could so much engage my profoundest sympathies. Wordsworth's fine sonnet on the extinction of the Venetian Republic had not then been published, else the last two lines would have expressed my feelings. After admitting that changes had taken place in Venice, which in a manner challenged and presumed this last and mortal change, the poet closes thus — 'Men are we, and must grieve when even the shade Of that which once was great has pass'd away.' But here the previous circumstances were far different from those of Venice, nay opposite. There we saw a superannuated and paralytic State, sinking at any rate * The idea of a Ball is even yet undefined ; which is most extraordi- nary, considering that Miss Edge worth has applied all her tact and illustrative power, to furnish the matter for such a definition; and Mr. Coleridge, all his philosophic subtlety, to furnish its form. But both have been too fastidious in their admission of bulls. Thus, for exam- ple, Miss Edgeworth rejects, as no true bull, the common Joe Miller story, that, upon two Irishmen reaching Barnet, and being told that it •vas still twelve miles to London, one of them replied, — ■ Ah ! just six miles apac\ ) This, says Miss E , is no bull, but a sentimental remark on the maxim, that friendship divides our pains. Nothing of the kind : Miss EM ge worth cannot have understood it. The bull is a true, perfect, and almost ideal specimen of the genus. 94 LIFE AND MANNERS. into the grave, and yielding, to the touch of military- violence, that only which a short lapse of years must inevitably have yielded to internal decay. Here, on the contrary, we saw a young eagle, rising into power, and robbed prematurely of her natural titles of honor, only because she did not comprehend their value, and because at this great crisis she had no champion. Ire- land, in a political sense, was surely then in her youth, considering the prodigious development she has since experienced in population, and in resources of all kinds. The day, the important day, had been long looked forward to by me : no doubt also by my young friend ; for he was a keen lover of Ireland, and jealous of what- ever appeared to touch her honor. But it was not for him to say anything which should seem to impeach his father's patriotism in voting for the Union, and promoting it through his borough influence. Yet oftentimes it seemed to me, when I introduced the subject, and sought to learn from Lord A the main grounds which had reconciled him and other men, anxious for the welfare of Ireland, to a measure which at least robbed her of some splendor, and, above all, robbed her of a name and place amongst the independent States of Europe, — that both father and son would not have been displeased, had some great popular violence put force upon the recorded will of Parliament, and compelled the two* Houses to perpetuate themselves. Dolorous they must of course have looked, in mere consistency ; but I fancied that internally they would have laughed. Lord A , I am certain, believed (as multitudes believed) that Ireland would be bettered by the commercial advantages conceded to her as an integral province of the empire, and would have benefits which, as an independent kingdom, she had not. I doubt not that this expectation was realized. But let us ask, Could IRELAND. 95 not a large part of these benefits have been secured to Ireland, remaining as she was ? were they, in any sense, dependent on the sacrifice of her separate Parliament ? For my part I believe that Mr. Pitt's motive for insisting on a legislative union was, in a small proportion perhaps, the somewhat elevated desire to connect his own name with the historical changes of the empire ; to have it stamped, not on events so fugitive as those of war and peace, liable to oblivion ; but on the permanent relations of its integral parts. In a still larger proportion I believe hi& motive to have been one of pure convenience, the wish to exonerate himself from the intolerable vexation of a double Cabinet and a double Parliament. In a gov- ernmeut such as ours, so care-laden at any rate, it is certainly most harassing to have the task of soliciting a measure by management and influence twice over, — and two refractory gangs to discipline, instead of one. It must also be conceded that, neither management nor treasury influence could always avail to prevent injurious collisions between acts of the Irish and the British Parlia- ments. In Dublin, as in London, the government must lay its account with being occasionally out-voted ; this would be likely to happen peculiarly upon Irish questions. And acts of favor or protection, would, at times, pass, on behalf of Irish interests, not only clashing with more general ones of the central government, but indirectly also, [from the virtual consolidation of the Irish territory with the larger island since the sera of steam,] opening endless means for evading British acts, even within their own acknowledged sphere of operation. On these con- siderations, even an Irishman must grant that public convenience called for the absorption of all local or provincial supremacies into the central supremacy. And there were two brief arguments which gave weight to 96 LIFE AND MANNERS. those considerations; first, that the evils likely to arise (and which in France have arisen) from what is termed, in modern politics, the principle of centralization, have been for us either evaded or neutralized. The provinces, to the very furthest nook of these ' nook-shotten ' islands, react upon London as powerfully as London acts upon them ; so that no counterpoise is required with us, as in France, to any inordinate influence at the centre. Secondly, the very pride and jealousy, which could dictate the retention of an independent parliament, would effectually preclude any modern ' Poyning's Act,' having, for its object, to prevent the collision of the local with the central government. Each would be supreme within its own sphere, and those spheres could not but clash. The separate Irish Parliament was originally no badge of honor or independence : it began in motives of conve- nience, or perhaps necessity, at a period when the com- munication was difficult, slow, and interrupted. A Parliament which arose on that footing, it was possible to guard by a Poyning's Act, making, in effect, all laws null, which should happen to contradict the supreme or central will. But no law, in a corresponding temper, could avail to limit the jurisdiction of a parliament which had been confessedly retained on a principle of national honor. Upon every consideration, therefore, of convenience, and for the public service generally, and for the quick despatch of business, the absorption of the local into the central parliament was now loudly called for ; and that Irishman only could consistently oppose the measure, who should take his stand upon principles transcending con- venience ; looking, in fact, singly to the honor and dignity of a country, which it was annually less absurd to suppose capable of an independent existence. Meantime, in those days, Ireland had no adequate IRELAND. 97 champion : the Hoods and the Grattans were not up to the mark. Refractory as they were, they moved within the paling of order and decorum ; they were not the Titans for a war against the heavens. When the public feeling beckoned and loudly supported them, they could follow a lead which they appeared to head ; but they could not create such a body of public feeling, nor lead and head where they seemed to follow. Consequently, that great opening for a turbulent son of thunder passed unimproved ; and the great day drew near without symptoms of tempest. At last it arrived ; and I remember nothing which indi- cated as much ill-temper in the public mind as I have seen on many hundreds of occasions, trivial by comparison, in London. My young friend and I were determined to lose no part of the scene, and we went down with Lord A to the House. It was about the middle of the day, and a great mob filled the whole space about the two houses. As Lord A 's coach drew up to the steps of the en- trance, we heard a prodigious hissing and hooting ; and I was really agitated to think that Lord A , whom I loved and respected, would have to make his way through a tempest of public wrath ; a situation more terrific to him than to others, from his embarrassed walking. I found, however, that I might have spared my anxiety ; the subject of commotion was, simply, that Major Sirr, or Major Swan, I forget which, so celebrated in those days for their energy, as leaders of the police, had detected a person in the act of mistaking some other man's pocket handkerchief for his own. No storm of any kind awaited us, and yet at that moment there was no other arrival to divide the public attention ; for in order that we might see everything from first to last, we were amongst the very earliest parties. Neither did our party escape under any mistake of the crowd ; silence had succeeded to the uproar caused by the 98 LIFE AND MANNERS. tender meeting between the thief and the Major ; and a man, who stood in a conspicuous situation, proclaimed aloud to those below him, the name or title of members as they entered. ' That,' said he, ' is the Earl of A ; the lame gentleman, I mean.' Perhaps, however, his knowledge did not extend so far as to the politics of a no- bleman who had taken no violent or factious part in public affairs. At least, the dreaded insults did not follow, or only in the very feeblest manifestations. We entered ; and, by way of seeing everything, we went even to the robing room. The man who presented his robes to Lord A , seemed to me, of all whom I saw on that day, the only one w T ho wore a face of grief : his voice and manner also marked a depression of spirits. But whether this indicated the loss of a lucrative situation, or was really disinterested sorrow ; and, if such, whether for a private loss, or out of a patriotic trouble, at the knowledge that he was now officiating for the last time, I cannot say. The House of Lords, decorated (if I remember) with hangings, representing the battle of the Boyne, was nearly empty when we entered. Lord A took this opportunity of explaining to us the whole course and arrangement of public business on ordinary occasions, and also of rehears- ing the chief circumstances in the coming ceremonial. Gradually the house filled : beautiful women sate inter- mingled amongst the Peers ; and, in one party of these, surrounded by a bevy of admirers, we saw our fair, but frail enchantress of the packet. She, on her part, saw and recognised us by an affable nod ; no stain upon her cheek, indicating that she suspected to what extent she was in- debted to our discretion ; for we had not so much as mentioned to Lord A the scene which chance had revealed to us. Then came a stir within the house, and an uproar resounding from without, which announced the IRELAND. 99 arrival of his Excellency. Entering the house, he also, like the other Peers, wheeled round to the throne, and made to the vacant scat a profound homage. Then com- menced the public business, in which, if I recollect, the Chancellor played the most conspicuous part, — that Chancellor, of whom it was affirmed in those days by a political opponent, that he might swim in the innocent blood which he had caused to be shed. Then were sum- moned to the bar — summoned for the last time — the gentlemen of the House of Commons ; in the van of whom, and drawing all eyes upon himself, stood Lord Castlereagh. Then came the recitation of many acts passed during the session, and the sounding ratification, the jovial 1 Annuit, et nutu totum tremefecit Olympiani.' contained in the Soit fait comme il est desire, or the more peremptory Le Roi le veut. At which point, in the order of succession, came the Royal assent to the Union Bill, I do not distinctly recollect. But this I do recollect — that no audible expression, no buzz, even, testified the feelings which, doubtless, lay concealed and rankling in many bosoms. Setting apart all public or patriotic considera- tions, even then I said to myself, as I surveyed the whole assemblage of ermined Peers — How is it, and by what unaccountable magic, that William Pitt can have prevailed on all these hereditary legislators and heads of patrician houses, to renounce so easily, with nothing worth the name of a struggle, and with no indemnification, the very bright- est jewel in their coronets ? This morning they all rose from their couches Peers of Parliament, individual pillars of the realm, indispensable parties to every law that is passed. To-morrow they will be nobody — men of straw — terra fdii. What madness has persuaded them to part 100 LIFE AND MANNERS. with their birthright, and to cashier themselves and their children for ever into mere titular Lords ? As to the Commoners at the bar, their case was different : they had no life estate at all events in their honors ; and they might have the same chance for entering the Imperial Parliament amongst the hundred Irish members, as for re-entering a native Parliament. Neither, again, amongst the Peers was the case at all equal. Several of the higher had English titles, which would, at any rate, open the central Parliament to their ambition. That privilege, I believe, attached to Lord A . And he, in any case, from his large prop- erty, was tolerably sure of finding his way thither — [as in fact for the rest of his life he always did] — amongst the twenty-eight representative Peers. The wonder was in the case of petty and obscure Lords, who had no weight, personally, and none in right of their estates. Of these men, as they were notoriously not enriched by Mr. Pitt, as the distribution of honors was not very large, and no honor could countervail the one they lost, — of these men I could not, and cannot fathom the policy. Thus much I am sure of, — that, had such a measure been proposed by a political speculator previously to Queen Anne's reign, he would have been scouted as a dreamer and a visionary, who calculated upon men being generally somewhat worse than Esau, viz., giving up their birth- rights, and icithout the mess of pottage, However, on this memorable day, the Union was ratified ; the Bill received the Royal assent, without a murmur, or a whis- per, one way or other. Perhaps there might be a little pause, — a silence like that which follows an earthquake ; but there was no plain-spoken Lord Belhaven, as on the corresponding occasion in Edinburgh, to fill up the silence with, ' So, there's an end of an auld sang ! ' All was, or looked courtly, and free from vulgar emotion. One person IRELAND. 101 only I remarked, whose features were suddenly illuminated by a smile, a sarcastic smile, as I felt it. It was Lord Castlereagh ; who, at the moment when the irrevocable words were pronounced, looked earnestly, and with a penetrating glance amongst a party of ladies. His own wife was one of the party ; but 1 did not discover the par- ticular object on whom his smile had settled. After this I had no leisure to be interested in anything which followed. ' You are all,' thought I to myself, 6 a pack of vagabonds henceforward, and interlopers, with no more right to be here than myself.' Apparently they thought so them- selves ; for soon after this solemn fiat of Jove had gone forth, their Lordships, having no farther title to their robes, (for which I could not help wishing that a party of Jewish old clothes-men w r ould at this moment have appeared, to bid a shum of moneysh,) made what haste they could to lay them aside for ever. The House dispersed much more rapidly than it had assembled. Major Sirr was found outside, just where we left him, laying down the law (as before) about pocket-handkerchiefs to old and young practitioners ; and all parties adjourned to find what consolation they might in the great evening event of dinner. Thus we were set at liberty from Dublin. Parliaments and installations, and masqued balls, with all other secon- dary splendors in celebration of original splendors, at length had ceased to shine upon the Irish metropolis. The c season,' as it is called in great cities, was over ; unfortu- nately the last season of all that were ever destined to illuminate the society, or to stimulate the domestic trade of Dublin. It began to be thought scandalous to be found in town : nobody, in fact, remained, except some two hundred thousand people, who never did, nor ever would, wear ermine ; and in all Ireland there remained nothing 102 LIFE AND MANNERS. at all to attract, except that which no King, and no two Houses can, by any conspiracy, abolish, viz., the beauty of her most verdant scenery. I speak of that part which chiefly it is that I know, — the scenery of the west, — Connaught, especially ; and in Connaught, especially Mayo. There it was, and in the county next adjoining, that Lord A 's large estates were situated ; the family mansion and beautiful park being in Mayo. Thither, as nothing else now remained to divert us from what, in fact, we had thirsted for throughout the heats of summer, and throughout the magnificences of the capital, at length we set off by slow and very circuitous movements. Making but short journeys on each day, and resting always at the house of some private friend, I thus obtained an opportu- nity of seeing the old Irish nobility and gentry more extensively, and on a more intimate footing than I had hoped for. No experience, in my whole life, so much interested, or so much surprised me. In a little work, not much known, of Suetonius, the most interesting record which survives of the early Roman literature, [De illus- tribus Grammaticis,~] it comes out incidentally that many books, many idioms, and verbal peculiarities belonging to the primitive ages of Roman culture, were to be found still lingering in the old Roman settlements, both Gaulish and Spanish, long after they had become obsolete (and sometimes unintelligible) in Rome. From the tardiness and the difficulty of communication, the want of newspa- pers, &c, it followed naturally enough that the distant provincial towns, though not without their literature and their literary professors, were always one or two genera- tions in the rear of the metropolis ; and thus it happened, that, about the time of Augustus, there were some gram- matici in Rome, answering to our black-letter critics, who sought the material of their researches in Boulogne [Ges- IRELAND. 103 soriacum,'] in Aries, [Are! at a,] or in Marseilles, [Mas- silia.] Now, the old Irish nobility — that part I mean which might be called the rural nobility — stood in the same relation to English manners and customs. Here might be found old rambling houses, in the style of antique English manorial chateaux, ill planned, as regarded con- venience and economy, with long rambling galleries, and 1 passages that lead to nothing,' windows innumerable, that evidently had never looked for that severe audit to which they were summoned by William Pitt ; not unfre- quently with a traditional haunted bed-chamber ; but displaying, in the dwelling-rooms, a comfort and c cozi- ness' not so effectually attained in modern times. Here were old libraries, old butlers, and old customs, that seemed all alike to belong to the era of Cromwell, or even an earlier era than his ; whilst the ancient names, to one who was tolerably familiar with the great events of Irish history, often strengthened the illusion. Not that I could pretend to be familiar with Irish history as Irish ; but as a con- spicuous chapter in the difficult policy of Queen Elizabeth, of Charles I., and of Cromwell, nobody who had read the English history could be a stranger to the O'Niells, the O'Donnels, the Ormonds, [i. e. the Butlers,] the Inchi- quins, or the De Burghs. I soon found in fact that the aristocracy of Ireland might be divided into two great sections — the native Irish — those who might be viewed as territorial fixtures ; and those who spent so much of their time and revenues at Bath, Cheltenham, Weymouth, London, &c, as to have become almost entirely English. It was the former whom we chiefly visited ; and I remarked that, in the midst of hospitality the most unbounded, and the amplest comfort, some of these were in the rear of the English commercial gentry, as to modern refinements of luxury. There was, at the same time, an apparent 104 LIFE AND MANNERS. strength of character, as if formed amidst turbulent scenes, and a raciness of manner, which interested me profoundly, and impressed themselves on my recollec- tion. In our road to Mayo, we were often upon ground ren- dered memorable not only by historical events, but more recently by the disastrous scenes of the rebellion, by its horrors or its calamities. On reaching W House, we found ourselves in situations and a neighborhood which had become the very centre of the final military opera- tions, which had succeeded to the main rebellion, and which, to the people of England, and still more to the people of the Continent, had offered a character of interest wanting to the inartificial movements of Father Roche and Bagenal Harvey. About two months after the great defeat and subsequent dispersion of the rebel army, amounting, perhaps, to 25,000 men, with a consid- erable though small artillery, at Vinegar Hill, a French force of about 900 men had landed on the western coast, and again stirred up the Irish to insurrection. Had the descent been in time to co-operate with the insurgents of Wexford, Kildare, and Wicklow, it would have organ- ized the powerful materials of revolt, in a way calculated to distress the Government, and to perplex it in a memor- able degree. There cannot be a doubt, considering the misconduct of the royal army, in all its branches, at that period of imperfect discipline, that' Ireland would have been lost for a time. Whether the French Government, considering the feebleness and insufficiency of the Direc- tory, would have improved the opportunity, is doubtful. It is also doubtful whether, under a government of greater energy, our naval vigilance would not have intercepted or overtaken any expedition upon a sufficient scale. But it is certain that, had the same opening presented itself to IRELAND. 105 the energy of Napoleon, it would have been followed up at whatever sacrifice of men, shipping, or stores. I was naturally led, by hearing on every side the con- versation reverting to the dangers and tragic incidents of the era, separated from us by not quite two years, to make inquiries of everybody who had personally partici- pated in the commotions. Records there were on every side, and memorials even in our bed-rooms, of the visit of the French ; for they had occupied W House in some strength. The largest town in our neighborhood was Castlebar, distant about eleven Irish miles. To this it was that the French addressed their very earliest efforts. Advancing rapidly, and with their usual style of affected confidence, they had obtained at first a degree of success which was almost surprising to their own insolent vanity, and which was long afterwards a subject of bitter mortifi- cation to our own army. Had there been at this point any energy at all corresponding to that of the enemy, or commensurate to the intrinsic superiority of our own troops as to real courage, the French would have been compelled to lay down their arms. The experience of those days, however, showed how deficient is the finest composition of an army, unless when its martial qualities have been developed by practice ; and how liable is all courage, when utterly inexperienced, to sudden panics. This gasconading advance, which would have foundered entirely against a single battalion of the troops which fought in 1812- 13 amongst the Pyrenees, was here com- pletely successful. The Bishop of this See, Dr. Stock, with his whole household, and, indeed, his whole pastoral charge, became on this occasion prisoners to the French. The head- quarters were fixed for a time in the Episcopal Palace : the French Commander-in-chief, General Humbert, and 8 106 LIFE AND MANNERS. his staff, lived in the house, and maintained a daily inter- course with the Bishop ; who thus became well fitted to record (which he soon afterwards did in an anonymous pamphlet) the leading circumstances of the French incur- sion, and the consequent insurrection in Connaught, as well as the most striking features in the character and deportment of the Republican officers. Riding over the scene of these transactions daily for some months, in company with the Dean of F , whose sacred character had not prevented him from taking that military part which seemed, in those difficult moments, a duty of ele- mentary patriotism laid upon all alike, — =1 enjoyed many opportunities for correcting or verifying the statements of the worthy Bishop, and of collecting anecdotes of interest. The small body of French troops, which undertook this remote service, had been detached in one-half from the army of the Rhine ; the other half had served under Napoleon in his first foreign campaign — the brilliant one of 1796, which accomplished the conquest of northern Italy. Those from Germany showed, by their looks and their meagre condition, how much they had suffered ; and some of them, in describing their hardships, told their Irish acquaintance that, during the siege of Mentz, which had occurred in the previous winter of 1797, they had slept in holes made four feet below the surface of the snow. One officer declared solemnly that he had not once undressed, further than by taking off his coat, for a period of twelve months. The private soldiers had all the essential qualities fitting them for a difficult and trying service : l intelligence, activity, temperance, patience to a surprising degree, together with the exactest discipline.' This is the statement of their truly candid and upright enemy. c Yet,' says the Bishop, with all these martial qualities, ' if you except the grenadiers, they had nothing IRELAND. 107 to catch the eye. Their stature, for the most part, was low, their complexion pale and yellow, their clothes much the worse for wear ; to a superficial observer, they would have appeared incapable of enduring any hardship. These were the men, however, of whom it was presently ob- served, that they could be well content to live on bread or potatoes, to drink water, to make the stones of the street their bed, and to sleep in their clothes, with no covering but the canopy of heaven.' It may well be imagined in what terror the families of Killala heard of a French invasion, and the necessity of immediately receiving a republican army. Sansculottes, as these men were, all over Europe they had the reputa- tion of pursuing a ferocious marauding policy ; in fact they were held little better than sanguinary brigands. In candor, it must be admitted that their conduct at Killala belied these reports ; though, on the other hand, an ob- vious interest obliged them to a more pacific demeanor in a land which they saluted as friendly and designed to raise into extensive insurrection. The French army, so much dreaded, at length arrived. The General and his staff entered the palace ; and the first act of one officer, on coming into the dining-room, was to advance to the sideboard, sweep all the plate into a basket, and deliver it to the Bishop's butler, with a charge to carry it off to a place of security. The French officers, with the detachment left under their orders by the Commander-in-chief, stayed about one month at Killala. This period allowed opportunities enough for observing individual differences of character^ and the general tone of their manners. These opportuni- ties were not thrown away upon the Bishop ; he noticed with a critical eye, and he recorded on the spot, whatever fell within his own experience. Had he, however, hap- 108 LIFE AND MANNERS. pened to be a political or courtier Bishop, his record would, perhaps, have been suppressed ; and at any rate it would have been colored by prejudice. As it was, I believe it to have been the perfectly honest testimony of an honest man ; and, considering the minute circumstan- tiality of its delineations, I do not believe that, throughout the whole revolutionary war, any one document was made public which throws so much light on the quality and composition of the French Republican armies. On this consideration I shall extract a few passages from the Bishop's personal sketches ; a thing which I should not have done but for two reasons ; first, that the original pamphlet is now forgotten, though so well worthy of preservation ; secondly, that my own information from the Hon. D B , and from the Dean of F , who both rode with his Majesty's cavalry during that service, and personally witnessed many of the most im- portant scenes in that local insurrection of Connaught, as well as in the furious and more national insurrection which had terminated in effect at Vinegar Hill, enabled me to check the Bishop's statements. It was upon the very estates of these gentlemen, or of their nearest rela- tives, that the French had planted their garrisons ; and the Deanery of F was not above six miles from Enniscorthy, close to which was the encampment of Vinegar Hill : so that both enjoyed unexampled opportu- nities for observing the most circumstantial features in each field of these two local wars. The Commander-in-chief of the French armament is thus delineated by the Bishop : — c Humbert, the leader of this singular body of men, was himself as extraordinary a personage as any in his army. Of a good height and shape, in the full vigor of life, prompt to decide, quick in execution, apparently IRELAND. 109 master of his art, you could not refuse him the praise of a good officer, while his physiognomy forbade you to like him as a man. His eye, which was small and sleepy, (the effect, perhaps, of much watching,) cast a sidelong glance of insidiousness and even of cruelty ; it was the eye of a cat preparing to spring upon her prey. His education and manners were indicative of a person sprung from the lower orders of society, though he knew how to assume, when it was convenient, the deportment of a gentleman. For learning, he had scarcely enough to enable him to write his name. His passions were furious ; and all his behavior seemed marked with the character of roughness and insolence. A narrower observation of him, however, seemed to discover that much of this roughness was the result of art, being assumed with the view of extorting by terror a ready compliance with his commands. Of this truth the Bishop himself was one of the first who had occasion to be made sensible.' The particular occasion here alluded to by the Bishop, arose out of the first attempts to effect the disembarkation of the military stores and equipments from the French shipping, as also to forward them when landed. The case was one of extreme urgency ; and proportionate allowance must be made for the French General. Every moment might bring the British cruisers in sight — two important expeditions had already been baffled in that way — and the absolute certainty, known to all parties alike, that delay, under these circumstances, was tanta- mount to ruin, that upon a difference of ten or fifteen minutes, this way or that, might happen to hinge the whole issue of the expedition ; — this consciousness, I say, gave, unavoidably to every demur at this critical moment, the color of treachery. Neither boats, nor carts, nor horses, could be obtained ; the owners most imprudently 110 LIFE AND MANNERS. and selfishly retiring from that service. Such being the extremity, the French General made the Bishop respon- sible for the execution of his orders : the Bishop had really no means to enforce his commission, and failed. Upon this General Humbert threatened to send his Lord- ship, together with his whole family, prisoners of war to France, and assumed the air of a man violently pro- voked. Here came the crisis for determining the Bishop's weight amongst his immediate flock, and his hold upon their affections. One great Bishop, not far off, would, on such a trial, have been exultingly consigned, to his fate : that I well know ; for Lord W. and I, merely as his visiters, were attacked so fiercely with stones, that we were obliged to forbear going out, unless in broad day- light. Luckily the Bishop of Killala had shown himself a Christian pastor, and now he reaped the fruits of his goodness. The public selfishness gave way, when the danger of the Bishop was made known. The boats, the carts, the horses, were now liberally brought in from their lurking places ; the artillery and stores were landed ; and the drivers of the carts, &c. were paid in drafts upon the Irish Directory, which (if it were an aerial coin) served at least to mark an unwillingness in the enemy to adopt violent modes of hostility, and ultimately became available in the very character assigned to them by the French General ; not, indeed, as drafts upon the Rebel, but as claims upon the equity of the English Government. The officer left n command at Killala, when the pres- ence of the Commander-in-chief was required elsewhere, bore the name of Charost. He was a lieutenant-colonel, aged forty-five years, the son of a Parisian watchmaker. Having been sent over at an early age, to the unhappy island of St. Domingo, with a view to some connections there by which he hoped to profit, he had been fortunate IRELAND. Ill enough to marry a young woman, who brought him a plantation for her dowry, which was reputed to have yielded him a revenue of =£2000 sterling per annum. But this, of course, all went to wreck in one day, upon that mad decree of the French Convention, which pro- claimed liberty, without distinction, without restrictions, and without gradations, to the unprepared and ferocious negroes. Even his wife and daughter would have per- ished simultaneously with his property, but for English protection, which delivered them from the black sabre, and transferred them to Jamaica. There, however, though safe, they were, as respected Colonel Charost, unavoidably captives ; and c his eyes w r ould fill,' says the Bishop, 4 when he told the family that he had not seen these dear relatives for six years past, nor even had tidings of them for the last three years.' On his return to France, find- ing that to have been a watchmaker's son was no longer a bar to the honors of the military profession, he had en- tered the army, and had risen by merit to the rank which he now r held. ' He had a plain, good understanding. He seemed careless or doubtful of revealed religion ; but said that he believed in God ; was inclined to think that there must be a future state ; and was very sure, that, while he lived in this world, it was his duty to do all the good to his fellow-creatures that he could. Yet what he did not exhibit in his own conduct he appeared to respect in others ; for he took care that no noise nor disturbance should be made in the castle {i. e. the Bishop's palace) on Sundays, while the family, and many Protestants from the town, were assembled in the library at their devotions. 4 Boudet, the next in command, was a captain of foot, twenty-eight years old. His father, he said, was still liv- ing, though sixty-seven years old when he was born. His height was six feet two inches. In person, complexion, 112 LIFE AND MANNERS. and gravity, he was no inadequate representation of the Knight of La Mancha, whose example he followed in a recital of his own prowess and wonderful exploits, de- livered in measured language, and an imposing serious- ness of aspect.' The Bishop represents him as vain and irritable, but distinguished by good feeling and principle. Another officer was Ponson, described as five feet six inches high, lively and animated in excess, volatile, noisy, and chattering, a Voutrance. ' He was hardy,' says the Bishop, l and patient to admiration of labor and want of rest.' And of this last quality the following wonderful illustration is given : — 'A continued watching of five days and nights together, when the rebels were growing desperate for prey and mischief, did not appear to sink Tiis spirits in the smallest degree? This particular sort of strength has nothing in common with strength of muscle : I shall have occasion to notice it again in some remarks,, which I may venture to style important, on the secret of happiness, so far as it depends upon physical means. The power of supporting long vigils is connected closely with diet. A few great truths on that subject, little known to men in general, are capable of making a revolution in human welfare. For it is undeniable that a sane state of the animal nature is the negative condition of happiness : that is to say, such a condition being present, happiness will not follow as the inevitable result; but, in the absence of such a condition, it is inevitable that there will be no happiness. Contrasting with the known and well-established ra- pacity of the French army in all its ranks, (not excepting those who have the decoration of the Legion of Honor,) the severe honesty of these particular officers, we must come to the conclusion that they had been selected for their tried qualities of abstinence and self-control. Of IRELAND. 113 this same Ponson, the last-described, the Bishop declares that ' he was strictly honest, and could not bear the ab- sence of this quality in others ; so that his patience was pretty well tried by his Irish allies.' At the same time, he expressed his contempt for religion, in a way which the Bishop saw reason for ascribing to vanity — ; the miserable affectation of appearing worse than he really was.' One officer there was, named True, whose brutal- ity recalled the impression, so disadvantageous to French republicanism, which else had been partially effaced by the manners and conduct of his comrades. To him the Bishop (and not the Bishop only, but every one of my own informants, to whom True had been familiarly known) ascribes ' a front of brass, an incessant fraudful smile, manners altogether vulgar, and in his dress and person a neglect of cleanliness, even beyond the affected negligence of republicans.' True, however, happily, was not leader ; and the prin- ciples or the policy of his superiors prevailed. To them, not merely in their own conduct, but also in their way of applying that influence which they held over their very bigoted allies, the Protestants of Connaught were under deep obligations. Speaking merely as to property, the honest Bishop renders the following justice to the enemy : — ' And here it would be an act of great injustice to the excellent discipline constantly maintained by these inva- ders while they remained in our town, — not to remark that, with every temptation to plunder, which the time and the number of valuable articles within their reach pre- sented to them in the Bishop's palace, from a sideboard of plate and glasses, a hall filled with hats, whips, and great- coats, as well of the guests as of the family, not a single particular of private property was found to have been carried away, when the owners, after the first fright, came 114 LIFE AND MANNERS. to look for their effects, which was not for a day or two after the landing.' Even in matters of delicacy the same forbearance was exhibited : — ; Beside the entire use of other apartments, during the stay of the French in Killala, the attic story, containing a library, and three bed-cham- bers, continued sacred to the Bishop and his family. And so scrupulous was the delicacy of the French, not to dis- turb the female part of the house, that not one of them was ever seen to go higher than the middle floor, except on the evening of the success at Castlebar, when two of- ficers begged leave to carry to the family the news of the battle ; and seemed a little mortified that the news was received with an air of dissatisfaction.'' These, however, were not the weightiest instances of that eminent service which the French had it in their power to render on this occasion. The Royal army behaved ill in every sense. Liable to continual panics in the field, panics which, but for the overwhelming force accumulated, and the dis- cretion of Lord Cornwallis, would have been fatal to the good cause, the Royal forces erred, as unthinkingly, in the abuse of any momentary triumph. Forgetting that the rebels held many hostages in their hands, they once recommenced the old system practised in Wexford and Kildare, of hanging and shooting without trial, and with- out a thought of the horrible reprisals that might be adopted. These reprisals, but for the fortunate influence of the French commanders, and but for their great energy in applying that influence according to the exigencies of time and place, would have been made : it cost the whole weight of the French power ; their influence was stretched almost to breaking, before they could accomplish the pur- pose of neutralizing the senseless cruelty of the Royalists, and of saving the trembling Protestants. Dreadful were the anxieties of those moments : and I myself heard per- IRELAND. 115 sons, at a distance of nearly two years, declare that their lives hung at that time by a thread ; and that, but for the hasty approach of the Lord Lieutenant by forced marches, that thread would have snapped. c We heard with panic,' said they, ' of the madness which characterized the pro- ceedings of our soi-disant friends : we looked for any chance of safety only to our nominal enemies, the staff of the French army.' CHAPTER IV. THE IRISH REBELLION. One story was still current, and very frequently re- peated, at the time of my own residence upon the scene of these transactions. It would not be fair to mention it without saying, at the same time, that the Bishop, whose discretion was so much impeached by the affair, had the candor to blame himself most heavily, and always ap- plauded the rebel for the lesson he had given him ; but still it serves to show the contagiousness of that blind spirit of aristocratic haughtiness which then animated the Royal party. The case was this : — Day after day the Royal forces had been accumulating upon military posts in the neighborhood of Killala, and could be descried from elevated stations in that town. Stories travelled simulta- neously to Killala, every hour, of the atrocities which marked their advance ; many, doubtless, being fictitious, either of blind hatred, or of that ferocious policy which sought to make the rebels desperate, by involving them in the last extremities of guilt and massacre ; but, unhappily, too much countenanced as to their general outline, by excesses on the Royal part, already proved, and undenia- ble. The ferment and the agitation increased every hour amongst the rebel occupants of Killala. The French had no power to protect, beyond the moral one of their in- THE IRISH REBELLION. 117 fluence as allies ; and in the very crisis of this alarming situation, a rebel came to the Bishop with the news that the Royal cavalry was at that moment advancing from Sligo, and could be traced along the country by the line of blazing houses which accompanied their march. The Bishop, of course, doubted, — could not believe, and so forth. 6 Come with me,' said the rebel. It was a matter of policy to yield, and his Lordship w r ent. They ascended together the Needle-tower-hill, from the summit of which the Bishop now discovered that the fierce rebel had spoken but too truly. A line of smoke and fire ran over the country in the rear of a strong patrol detached from the King's forces. The moment was critical ; the rebel's eye expressed the unsettled state of his feelings ; and, at that instant, the imprudent Bishop uttered a sentiment which, to his dying day he could not forget. fc They,' said he, meaning the ruined houses, 6 they are only wretched cabins.' The rebel mused, and for a few moments seemed in self-conflict : a dreadful interval to the Bishop, who became sensible of his own extreme imprudence the very moment after the words had escaped him. However, the man contented himself with saying, after a pause, — 'A poor man's cabin is to him as valuable as a palace.' It is probable that this retort was far from expressing the deep moral indignation at his heart, though his readiness of mind failed to furnish him with one more stinging. And in such cases all depends upon the first movement of vindictive feeling being broken. The Bishop, however, did not forget the lesson he had received, nor did he fail to blame himself most heavily, — not so much for his imprudence, as for his thoughtless adoption of a language expressing an aristocratic hauteur, which did not belong to his real character. There was indeed at that moment no need that fresh fuel should be applied to the irritation of 118 LIFE AND MANNERS. the rebels^ they had already declared their intention of plundering the town : and, as they added, ■ in spite of the French.' whom they now regarded and openly denounced as ■ abettors of the Protestants.' much more than as their own allies. Justice, however, must be done to the rebels as well as to their military associates. If they were disposed to plunder, they were found uniformly to shrink from blood- shed and cruelty : and yet from no want of energy or determination. l The peasantry never appeared to want animal courage,' says the Bishop, ' for they flocked to- gether to meet danger whenever it was expected. Had it pleased Heaven to be as liberal to them of brains as of hands, it is not easy to say to what length of mischief they might have proceeded ; but they were all along unpro- vided with leaders of any ability.' This is true : and yet it would be doing poor justice to the Connaught rebels, nor would it be drawing the moral truly as respects this aspect of the rebellion, if their abstinence from mischief, in its worst form, were to be explained out of this defect in their leaders. Nor is it possible to suppose this the Bishop's meaning, though his words seem to tend that way. For he himself elsewhere notices the absence of all wanton bloodshed, as a feature of this Connaught rebellion, most honorable in itself to the poor misguided rebels, and as distinguishing it very remarkably from the greater insur- rection so recently crushed in the centre and the east. ' It is a circumstance, 1 says he, 4 worthy of particular no- tice, that, during the whole time of this civil commotion, not a single drop of blood was shed by the Connaught rebels, except in the field of war. It is true the example and influence of the French went a great way to prevent sanguinary excesses. But it will not be deemed fair to ascribe to this cause alone the forbearance of which we THE IRISH REBELLION. 119 were witnesses, when it is considered what a range of country lay at the mercy of the rebels for several days after the French power was known to be at an end.' To what then are we to ascribe the forbearance of the Connaught men, so singularly contrasted with the hideous excesses of their brethren in the east ? Solely to the different complexion of the policy pursued by Government. In Wexford, Kildare, Meath, Dublin, &c, it had been judged advisable to adopt, as a sort of precautionary police, not for the punishment, but for the discovery of rebellious purposes, measures of the direst severity ; not merely free-quarterings of the soldiery, with liberty (or even an express commission) to commit outrages and insults upon all who were suspected, upon all who refused to countenance such measures, upon all who presumed to question their justice ; but, even under color of martial law, to inflict croppings and pitch-cappings, half-hangings, and the torture of the picketings ; to say nothing of houses burnt, and farms laid waste, things which were done daily and under military orders ; the purpose avowed being either vengeance for some known act of insurrection, or the determination to extort confessions. Too often, how- ever, as may well be supposed, in such utter disorganiza- tion of society, private malice, on account of old family feuds, was the true principle at work. And many were thus driven by mere frenzy of just indignation, or, per- haps, by mere desperation, into acts of rebellion which else they had not meditated. Now, in Connaught at this time, the same barbarous policy was no longer pursued ; and then it was seen, that, unless maddened by ill-usage, the peasantry were capable of the very fullest self-control. There was no repetition of the Enniscorthy massacres; and it was impossible to explain honestly why there was 120 LIFE AND MANNERS. none, without, at the same time, reflecting back upon that atrocity some color of palliation. These things duly considered, it must be granted that there was a spirit of unjustifiable violence in the Royal army on achieving their triumph. It is shocking, however, to observe the effect of panic, to excite and irritate the instincts of cruelty and sanguinary violence, even in the gentlest minds. I remember well, on occasion of the memorable tumults in Bristol, (autumn of 1831,) that I, for my part, could not read, without horror and indigna- tion, one statement made, I believe, officially at that time, which yet won the cordial approbation of some ladies who had participated in the panic. I allude to that part of the report which represents several of the dragoons as having dismounted, resigned the care of their horses to persons in the street, and pursued the unhappy fugitives from the mob, up stairs and down stairs, to the last nook of their retreat. The worst criminals could not be known as such; and, even allowing that they could, vengeance so hellish and so unrelenting was not justified by houses burned or by momentary panics raised. Scenes of the same de- scription were beheld upon the first triumph of the Royal cause in Connaught ; and but for Lord Cornwallis, equally firm before his success and modprate in its exercise, they would have prevailed more extensively. The poor rebels were pursued with a needless ferocity on the re-capture of Killala. So hotly, indeed, did some of the conquerors hang upon the footsteps of the fugitives, that both rushed almost simultaneously, pursuers and pursued, into the terror-stricken houses of Killala : and in some instances the ball meant for a rebel, told with mortal effect upon a loyalist. Here, indeed, as in other cases of this rebellion, in candor it should be mentioned, that the Royal army was composed chiefly of militia regiments. The Bishop THE IRISH REBELLION. 121 of Killala was assured by an intelligent officer of the King's army, that the victors were within a trifle of being beaten. I was myself told by a gentleman, who rode as a volunteer on that day, that, to the best of his belief, it was merely a mistaken order of the rebel chiefs, causing a false application of a select reserve at a very critical moment, which had saved his own party from a decisive repulse. It may be added, upon almost universal testi- mony, that the re-capture of Killala was abused, not only as respected the defeated rebels, but also as respected the loyalists of that town. ' The regiments that came to their assistance, being all militia, seemed to think that they had a right to take the property they had been the means of preserving, and to use it as their own whenever they stood in need of it. Their rapacity differed in no respect from that of the rebels, except that they seized upon things with less of ceremony and excuse, and that his Majesty's soldiers were incomparably superior to the Irish traitors in dexterity at stealing. In consequence, the town grew very weary of their guests, and were glad to see them march off to other quarters.' The military operations in this brief campaign were discreditable, in the last degree, to the energy, to the vigi- lance, and to the steadiness of the Orange army. Hum- bert had been a leader against the royalists of La Vendee, as well as on the Rhine ; consequently he was an ambidex- trous enemy — fitted equally for partisan warfare, and the tactics of regular armies. Keenly alive to the necessity under his circumstances of vigor and despatch, after occu- pying Killala on the evening of the 22d August, (the day of his disembarkation,) where the small garrison of 50 men, (yeomen and fencibles) had made a tolerable resist- ance ; and after other trifling affairs, on the 26th, he had inarched against Castlebar, with about 800 of his own men, 9 122 LIFE AND MANNERS. and 1500 or 1000 of the rebels. Here was the advanced post of the Royal army. General Lake, (the Lord Lake of India,) and Major General Hutchinson, (the Lord Hutchinson of Egypt,) had assembled upon this point a respectable force ; some say upwards of 4000, others not more than 1100; I heard from what may be considered respectable eye-witnesses, that the whole amount might be reckoned fairly at 2500. The disgraceful result is well known : the French, marching all night over mountain roads, and through one pass which was thought impreg- nable, if it had been occupied by a battalion, instead of a captain's guard, surprised Castlebar on the morning of the 27th. I say ; surprised,' for no word, short of that, can express the circumstances of the case. About two o'clock in the morning, a courier had brought intelligence of the French advance ; but from some unaccountable obstinacy at head -quarters, such as had proved fatal more than either once or twice in the Wexford campaign, his news was dis- believed ; yet, if disbelieved, why, therefore, neglected? Neglected, however it was ; and at seven, when the news was found to be true, the Royal army was drawn out in hurry and confusion to meet the enemy. The French, on their part, seeing our strength, looked for no better result for themselves than summary surrender, more especially as our artillery was well served, and soon began to tell upon their ranks. Better hopes first arose, as they after- wards declared, upon observing that many of the troops fired in a disorderly way, without waiting for the word of command ; upon this they took new measures : in a few minutes a panic arose ; and, in spite of all that could be done by the officers, the whole army ran. General Lake ordered a retreat ; and then the flight became irretrievable. The troops reached Tuam, thirty miles distant, on that same day ; and one small party of mounted men actually pushed THE IRISH REBELLION. 123 on the next morning to Athlone, which is above sixty miles from Castlebar. Fourteen pieces of artillery were lost on this occasion. However, it ought to be mentioned that some serious grounds appeared afterwards for sus- pecting treachery : most of those who had been reported 4 missing,' on this first battle, having been afterwards observed in the ranks of the enemy, — where it is remark- able enough, (or perhaps it argues that not being fully relied on by their new allies, they were put forward on the most dangerous services,) all of these deserters perished to a man. Meantime, the new Lord Lieutenant, having his foot constantly in the stirrup, marched from Dublin without a moment's delay. By means of the grand canal, he made a forced march of fifty-six English miles in two days ; which brought him to Kilbeggan on the 27th. Very early on the following morning he received the unpleasant news from Castlebar. Upon this he advanced to Athlone, meeting every indication of a routed and panic-struck army. Lord Lake was retreating upon that town, and thought himself so little secure, even at this distance from the enemy, that the road from Tuam was covered with strong patrols. Meantime, in ludicrous contrast to these demonstrations of alarm, the French had never stirred an inch from Castlebar. On the 4th of September, Lord Cornwallis was within fourteen miles of that place. Hum- bert, however, had previously dislodged towards the county of Longford. His motive for this movement was to co- operate with an insurrection in that quarter, which had just then broken out in strength. He was now, however, hemmed in by a large army of perhaps 25,000 men, advancing from all points, a few moves w T ere all that remained of the game, played with whatever skill. Colonel Vereker, with about 300 of the Limerick militia, first came up with him, and skirmished very creditably, 124 LIFE AND MANNERS. (September 6,) with part, or (as the Colonel always main- tained) with the whole of the French army. Other affairs of trivial importance followed ; and at length on the 6th of September, General Humbert surrendered with his whole army, now reduced to 844 men, of whom 96 were officers, having lost, since their landing at Killala, exactly 288 men. The rebels were not admitted to any terms ; they were pursued and cut down without mercy. How- ever, it is pleasant to know, that from their agility in escaping, this cruel policy was defeated : not much above 500 perished : and thus were secured to the Royal party the worst results of vengeance the fiercest, and clemency the most undistinguishing, without any one advantage of either. Some districts, as Laggan and Eris, were treated with martial rigor : the cabins being burned, and their unhappy tenants driven out into the mountains for the winter. Rigor, therefore, there was ; for the most humane politicians, erroneously as I conceive, believed it necessary for the army to leave behind some impressions of terror amongst the insurgents. It is certain, however, that under the counsels of Lord Cornwallis, the standards of public severity were very much lowered, as compared with the previous examples in Wexford. The tardiness and slovenly execution of the whole ser- vice, meantime, was well illustrated in what follows : — Killala was not delivered from rebel hands until the 23d of September, notwithstanding the general surrender had occurred on the 8th, and then only in consequence of an express from the Bishop to General Trench, hastening his march. The situation of the Protestants was indeed criti- cal. Humbert had left three French officers to protect the place, but their influence gradually had sunk to a mere shadow. And plans of pillage, with all its attendant hor- rors, were daily debated. Under these circumstances, the THE IRISH REBELLION. 125 French officers behaved honorably and courageously. c Yet,' says the Bishop, ' the poor commandant had no reason to be pleased with the treatment he had received immediately after the action. He had returned to the castle for his sabre, and advanced with it to the gate, in order to deliver it up to some English officer, when it was seized and forced from his hand by a common soldier of Fraser's. He came in, got another sword, which he sur- rendered to an officer, and turned to re-enter the hall. At this moment a second Highlander burst through the gate, in spite of the sentinel placed there by the General, and fired at the commandant with an aim that was near prov- ing fatal, for the ball passed under his arm, piercing a very thick door entirely through, and lodging in the jamb. Had we lost the worthy man by such an accident, his death would have spoiled the whole relish of our present enjoyment. He complained and received an apology for the soldier's behavior from his officer. Leave was im- mediately granted to the three French officers [left at Killala] to keep their swords, their effects, and even their bed-chambers in the house.' So terminated the Irish civil war of 1798; or, with reference to its local limitation, the Civil War of Con- naught. But in the year 1798, Ireland was the scene of two rebellions ; one in the autumn, confined to Connaught, — it is this which I have been circumstantially retrac- ing, — and another in the latter end of spring, which spent its rage upon the county of Wexford. These two had no immediate connection : that in Connaught was not the product of its predecessor; each, in fact, resting upon causes however ultimately the same, had its own separate occasions and immediate excitements ; and each had its own separate leaders and local agents. The one was a premature explosion of the great conspiracy conducted for 126 LIFE AND MANNERS, the last five years by the Society of United Irishmen : the other was an unpremeditated effort in support of an abrupt and ill-timed foreign invasion. The general predisposing causes to rebellion were doubtless the same in both cases : but the exciting causes of the moment were different in each. And, finally, they were divided by a complete interval of two months. One very remarkable feature there was, however, in which these two separate rebellions of 1798 coincided : that was — the narrow range, as to time, within which each ran its course. Neither of them outran the limits of one lunar month. It is a fact, however startling, that each, though a perfect civil war in all its proportions, frequent in warlike incident, and the former rich in tragedy, passed through all the stages of growth, maturity, and final extinction, within one single revolution of the moon. For all the rebel movements, subsequent to the morning of Vinegar Hill, are to be viewed not in the light of ma- noeuvres made in the spirit of military hope, but as mere efforts of desperation, in the spirit of self-preservation, with the single purpose of reaching some ground having elbow-room sufficient, and other advantages, for general dispersion. The Connaught campaign, — because I myself, by residence on its central positions, and by daily excursions, knew all its scenery and their exact limits, and because the alliance of a powerful nation raised it into more dis- tinction as a chapter in civilized warfare, — I have dwelt upon at some length. The other though, philosophically speaking, a much more interesting war, and worthy of a very minute investigation, I shall crowd into a single page ; taking my excuse from the fact that I know the ground imperfectly, and only as a hasty traveller; but, in reality, shrinking from a subject which caused me grief even at THE IRISH REBELLION. 127 that age, and which causes me humiliation even yet. For all parties were then deep delinquents : and the Govern- ment, that should have been so paternal and so willing to lead back its erring flock to the fold, as the first and the bloodiest in provocation, was the worst delinquent of all. Doubtless there are, as against such a government there ought to be, great calumnies afloat. But, when allowance has been made for all, there will still remain enough on record to establish this horrible fact, that the Government, in its immediate executive agents, seemed bent upon find- ing matter for punishment ; and to such an excess that, when these agents did not find it, they proceeded sys- tematically to create it by provocation, by irritation, by torture — not denied, but avowed, proclaimed, rewarded — and finally, for I reserve this as the consummation of the climax, by inflictions of personal degradation of a nature almost to justify rebellion. A few words will recapitulate this civil war, but each of these words may be taken as representing a chapter. The war of American separation it was which touched and quickened the dry bones that lay waiting as it were for life through every part of Christendom. The year 1782 brought that war to its winding up ; and the same year it was which called forth Grattan and the Irish volunteers. That Ireland saw her own case dimly reflected in that of America, and that such a reference was moving in the national mind, appears from a remarkable fact in the his- tory of the year which followed. In 17S3, a haughty petition was addressed to the throne on behalf of the Roman Catholics, by an association styling itself a Con- gress. No man could suppose that a designation so omi- nously significant, had been chosen by accident ; and by the Court of England it was received, as it was meant, for an insult and a menace. What came next ? The French 128 LIFE AND MANNERS. Revolution. All flesh moved under that inspiration ; and the seed sown for the last ten years in Ireland, now germi- nated too fast and too rankly for the policy of her situa- tion. Concealment or delay, compromise or temporizing, would not have been brooked, at this moment, by the fiery temperament of Ireland, but through the extraordinary composition, as well as extraordinary constitution of that secret society, into which the management of her affairs had now devolved. In the year 1792, as we are told, commenced, and in 1795 was finished, the famous associa- tion of United Irishmen. By these terms commenced and finished, we are to understand not the purposes, or the arrangements of their conspiracy against the existing gov- ernment, but the net-work of organization, delicate as lace and strong as harness, which now enmeshed almost every province of Ireland, and knit the strength of her peasantry into unity and disposable divisions. This, it seems, was completed in 1795. In a complete history of these times, no one chapter would deserve so ample an investigation as this subtle web of association, rising upon a large base, multiplied in proportion to the extent of the county, and by intermediate links ascending to some unknown apex ; all so graduated, and in such nice dependency, as to secure the instantaneous propagation upwards and downwards, laterally or obliquely, of any impulse ; and yet so effectu- ally shrouded, that nobody knew more than the two or three individual agents in immediate juxtaposition with himself, by whom he communicated with those above his head or below his feet. This organization, in fact, of the United Irishmen, combined the best features, as to skill, of the two most elaborate and most successful of all secret societies recorded in history ; one of which went before the Irish Society, and one followed it after an interval of five-and-twenty years. These two are the Fehm-Gericht, THE IK1SH REBELLION. 129 or court of ban and extermination, which having taken its rise in Westphalia, is usually called the secret Tribunal of Westphalia, and which reached its full development in the fourteenth century. The other is the Hetceria, [ r Erain,a,] a society which, passing for one of pure literary dilet- tanti, under the secret countenance of the late Capo d'lst- ria, (then a confidential minister of the Czar,) did actually succeed so far in hoaxing the Cabinets of Europe, that one-third of European Kings put down their names, and gave their aid, as conspirators against the Sultan of Tur- key, whilst credulously supposing themselves honorary correspondents of a learned body for reviving the arts and literature of Athens. These two I call the most successful of all secret societies ; because both were arrayed against the existing administrations throughout the entire lands upon which they sought to operate. The German Society disowned the legal authorities as too weak for the ends of justice, and succeeded in bringing the cognizance of crimes within their own secret yet consecrated usurpation. The Grecian Society made the existing powers the final object of their hostility ; lived unarmed amongst the very oppressors, whose throats they had dedicated to the sabre ; and, in a very few years, saw their purpose accomplished. The society of United Irishmen combined the best parts in the organization of both these secret fraternities, and obtained their advantages. The Society prospered in defiance of the Government ; nor would the Government, though armed with all the powers of the Dublin police, and of State thunder, have succeeded in mastering this Society ; but, on the contrary, the Society would assuredly have surprised and mastered the Government, had it not been undermined by the perfidy of a confidential brother. One instrument for dispersing knowledge, employed by the United Irishmen, is worth mentioning, as it is applica- — 130 LIFE AND MANNERS. ble to any cause, and may be used with much greater effect in an age when everybody is taught to read. They printed newspapers on a single side of the sheet, which were thus fitted for being placarded against the walls. The expedient had probably been suggested by Paris, where such newspapers were often placarded, and gen- erally for the bloodiest purposes. But Louvet, in his Memoirs, mentions one conducted by himself on better principles : it was printed at the public expense ; and sometimes more than twenty thousand copies of a single number were attached to the corners of streets. This was called the Centinel: and those who are acquainted with the Memoirs of Madame Roland, will remember that she cites Louvet's paper as a model for all of its class. The Union Star was the paper which the United Irishmen published upon this plan ; previous papers, on the ordinary plan, the Northen Star, and the Press, having been vio- lently put down by the Government. The Union Star, however, it must be acknowledged, did not seek much to elevate the people, by improving their understandings : it was merely a violent appeal to their passions, against all who had incurred the displeasure of the secret Society. The newspapers of every kind it was easy for the Govern- ment to suppress. But the secret Society annoyed and crippled the Government in other modes, which it was not easy to parry ; and all blows dealt in return were dealt in the dark, and against a shadow. The Society called upon Irishmen to abstain generally from ardent spirits, as a means of destroying the Excise ; and it is certain that the Society was obeyed, in a degree which astonished neutral observers, all over Ireland. The same Society, by a printed proclamation, called upon the people not to pur- chase the quit-rents of the Crown, which were then on sale ; and not to receive bank-notes in payment, because, THE IRISH REBELLION. 131 (as the proclamation told them,) a 'burst' was coming, when such paper, and the securities for such purchases, would fall to a ruinous discount. In this case, after much distress to the public service, Government obtained a par- tial triumph by the law which cancelled the debt on a refusal to receive the State paper, and which quartered soldiers upon all tradesmen who demurred to such a tender. But upon the whole, it was evident to all eyes, that in Ireland there were two Governments counteracting each other at every step ; and that the one which more generally had the upper hand in the struggle was the secret Society of the United Irishmen ; whose members and head-quarters were alike protected from the attacks of its rival, the State Government at the Castle, by a cloud of impenetrable darkness. That cloud was at last pierced. A treacherous or weak brother, high in the ranks of the Society, and deep in their counsels, happened, in travelling up to Dublin, in company with a loyalist, to have thrown out some hints of his confidential station, perhaps in ostentation. This weak man, Thomas Reynolds, a Roman Catholic gentleman, of Kilkea Castle, in Kildare, colonel of a regiment of United Irish, treasurer for Kildare, and in other confidential sta- tions for the secret Society, was prevailed on, by Mr. William Cope, a rich merchant of Dublin, who alarmed his imbecile mind, by pictures of the horrors attending a revolution, in the circumstances of Ireland, to betray all he knew to the Government. His treachery was first meditated in the last week of February, 1798 ; and, in consequence of his depositions, on March 12, at the house of OliverMBond, in Dublin, the Government suc- ceeded in arresting a large body of the leading conspira- tors. The whole committee of Leinster, amounting to thirteen members, was captured on this occasion ; but a 132 LIFE AND MANNERS, still more valuable prize was made in the persons of the arch-leaders and members of the Irish Directory, — Em- met, M'Nevin, Arthur O'Connor, and Oliver Bond. Their places were quickly filled up as far as names went ; and a hand-bill was issued, on the same day, to prevent the effects of despondency amongst the great body of the conspirators. But Emmet and O'Connor were not men to be effectually replaced : Government had struck a fatal blow, without being fully aware at first of their own good luck. On the 19th of May following, in consequence of a proclamation, (May 11,) offering a thousand pounds for his capture, Lord Edward Fitzgerald was apprehended at (flj^ti tne house of a"tMr. Nicholas Murphy, a merchant in > Dublin, after a very desperate resistance. The leader of the party, Major Swan, a magistrate, was wounded by Lord Edward ; and Ryan, one of the officers, so despe- rately, that he died within a fortnight. Lord Edward himself languished for some time, and died in great agony on the 3d of June, from a pistol shot, which took effect on his shoulder. Lord Edward Fitzgerald was an injured man. From the warm generosity of his temper, he had powerfully sympathized with the French republicans, at an early stage of their revolution ; and having, with great indiscretion, but an indiscretion pardonable in so young a man, and of so ardent a temperament, publicly avowed his sympathy, he was ignominiously dismissed from the army. That act made an enemy of a man who certainly was not to be despised ; for, though weak as respected the powers of self-control, Lord Edward was well qualified to make himself beloved : he had considera- ble talents; his name, alone, as a younger brother of the only ducal family in Ireland, was a spell and a word of command to the Irish peasantry ; and, finally, by his mar- riage with a natural daughter of the then Duke of Orleans, THE IRISH REBELLION. 133 he had obtained some important connections and openings to connections in France. The young lady whom he had married, was generally known by the name of Pamela ; and it has been frequently supposed that she is the person described by Miss Edgeworth, under the name of Virginia, in the latter part of her ' Belinda.' How that may be, I cannot pretend to say : Pamela was certainly led into some follies in this country ; in particular she was said to have gone to a ball without shoes or stockings ; which seems to argue the same sort of ignorance, and the same docility to any chance impressions, which characterize the Virginia of Miss Edgew r orth. She was a daughter, I believe, of the wretched Philippe Egalite, by the truly disgusting Madame de Genlis, who had been settled in that Prince's family, as governess to his children, especially to the sister of the present French King. Lord Edward's whole course had been marked by generosity and noble feeling of every kind. Far better to have pardoned such a man, and conciliated his support; but 'those were not times of conciliation.' Some days after this event, were arrested the two brothers, name? Shearer^ men of talent, who eventually, » . . c , , t suffered for treason. These discoveries were made by a treachery of a peculiar sort ; not from a treacherous brother, but a pretended brother, who had succeeded in passing himself off for a United Irishman. Government, without having penetrated to the heart of the mystery, had now discovered enough to guide them in their most ener- getic precautions ; and the conspirators, whose policy had hitherto been to wait for the co-operation of a French army, now began to fear that the ground would be cut from beneath their feet if they waited any longer. More was evidently risked by delay than by dispensing with foreign aid. It was resolved, therefore, to commence the 134 LIFE AND MANNERS. insurrection on the 23d of May ; and, in order to distract the Government, by simultaneous assaults upon all the military posts in the neighborhood of Dublin. This plan was discovered : but scarcely in time to prevent the effects of a surprise. On the 21st, late in the evening, the con- spiracy had been announced by the Lord Lieutenant's Secretary to the Lord Mayor; and, on the following day, by a message from his Excellency to both Houses of Parliament. The insurrection, however, began on the appointed day. The skirmishes were many, and in many places ; and, generally speaking, they were unfavorable in their results to the insurgents. The mail-coaches, agreeably to the preconcerted plan, had been all intercepted ; their non- arrival being everywhere understood as a negative signal that the war had commenced. Yet this summons to the more distant provinces had not been answered. The communication between the capital and the interior, almost completely interrupted at first, had been at length fully- restored ; and a few days saw the main strength (as it was supposed) of the insurrection suppressed without much bloodshed. Just at this moment, when all the world was disposed to think the whole affair quietly composed, the flame burst out with tenfold fury in a part of the country from which Government, with some reason, had turned away their anxieties and their preparations. This was the county of Wexford, which the Earl of Mountnorris had described to the Government as so entirely pacific in purpose, and so well-affected to the loyal cause, that he had pledged him- self for its good conduct. On the night before Whitsun- day, however, May 27, the standard of revolt was raised by John Murphy, a Catholic priest, well known in the THE IRISH REBELLION. 135 further progress of this insurrection, under the title of Father Murphy. The campaign opened inauspiciously for the royalists. The rebels had posted themselves on two eminences, — Kilthomas, about ten miles to the westward of Gorey, and the hill of Oulart, half way (t. e. about a dozen miles) be- tween Gorey and Wexford. They were attacked at each point on Whitsunday. From the first they were driven easily, and with considerable loss ; but at Oulart the suc- cess was very different. Father Murphy commanded here in person ; and finding that his men gave way in great confusion before a picked body of the North Cork militia, under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel Foote, he con- trived to persuade them that their flight was leading them right upon a body of Royal cavalry posted to intercept the retreat. This fear effectually halted them. The insur- gents, from inexperience, had always an unreasonable dread of cavalry. A second time, therefore, facing about to retreat from this imaginary enemy, they came, of necessity, full upon their pursuers, whom the intoxication of victory had by this time brought into the most careless disarray. These, almost to a man, the rebels annihilated : and immediately availing themselves of the universal con- sternation, Father Murphy led them to Ferns, and thence to the attack of Enniscorthy. The insurgents were now seven or eight thousand strong. Has the reader witnessed, or has he heard described, the sudden burst, — the explosion, one might almost say, — by which a Swedish winter passes into spring, and spring into summer ? The sceptre of winter does not then moulder away by just gradations : it is broken, it is shat- tered, in a day, in an hour ; and with a violence brought home to every sense. No second type of resurrection, so mighty or so affecting, is manifested by nature in southern — 136 LIFE AND MANNERS. climates. Such is the headlong tumult, such the ; torrent rapture,' by which life is let loose amongst the air, the earth, and the waters under the earth, that one might imagine the trumpet of the archangel to have sounded already for the second time, (Par. Lost, book xi, v. 75,) and the final victory to have swallowed up for ever the empire of Death. Not by way of saying something rhe- torical, but as an expression barely and poorly correspond- ing to my strong impressions of this memorable case, I would say, that, what a vernal resurrection in high lati- tudes is in manifestations of power and life, by compari- son with climates that have no winter, such, and marked with features as distinct, w r as this Irish insurrection, when suddenly surrendered to the whole contagion of the pas- sions then let loose, and to the frenzy of excitement, which mastered the popular mind at that era, by comparison with common military movements, and the pedantry of mere technical warfare. What a picture must Enniscor- thy have presented on the 27th of May ! Fugitives crowd- ing in from Ferns, announced the rapid advance of the rebels, now, at least, 7000 strong, elated with vic- tory, and maddened with vindictive fury. Soon after noon their advanced guard, considerably above 1000, and well armed w T ith muskets, (pillaged, by the by, from royal magazines, hastily deserted,) commenced a tumultu- ous assault. Less than 300 militia and yeomanry formed the garrison of the place, which had no sort of defences, except the natural one of the river Slaney. This, how- ever, was fordable, and that the assailants knew. The slaughter amongst the rebels, from the little caution they exhibited, and their total defect of military skill, was mur- derous. Spite of their immense numerical advantages, it is probable they would have been defeated. But in THE IRISH REBELLION. 137 Enniscorthy, (as where not?) treason from within was emboldened to show itself at the very crisis of suspense. Incendiaries were at work ; flames began to issue from many houses at once. Retreat, itself, became suddenly doubtful ; depending, as it did, altogether upon the state of the wind. At the right hand of every royalist stood a traitor ; in his own house were other traitors ; in the front, was the enemy ; in the rear, was a line of blazing streets. Three hours the battle had raged ; it was now four, p. m. ; and, at this moment, the garrison hastily gave way, and fled to Wexford. Now came a scene hardly matched for its variety of horrors, except in September, 1812, upon the line of the French advance to Moscow, through the blazing villages of Russia. All the loyalists of Enniscorthy, ail the gentry for miles around, who had congregated in that town, as a centre of security, were summoned at that moment, not to an orderly retreat, but to instant flight. At one end of the street were seen the rebel pikes and bayonets, and fierce faces, already gleaming through the smoke : at the other end, volumes of fire surging and billowing from the thatch- ed roofs, common in that country, and blazing rafters, beginning to block up the avenues of escape. Then began the agony, in the proper sense of that word, — that is, the strife and uttermost conflict, of what is worst and what is best in human nature. Then was to be seen the very delirium of fear, and the delirium of vindictive malice ; private and ignoble hatred, of ancient origin, shrouding itself in the mask of patriotic wrath ; the tiger glare of just vengeance, fresh from intolerable wrongs and the never- to-be-forgotten ignominy of stripes and personal degrada- tion ; panic, self-palsied by its own excess ; flight, eager or stealthy, according to the temper or the means ; volley- ing pursuit; the very frenzy of agitation, under every 10 138 LIFE AND MANNERS. mode of excitement ; and here and there, unappalled and self-sustained, the desperation of maternal love, victorious and supreme above all lower passions. I recapitulate and gather under general abstractions, many individual anec- dotes, reported by those who were on that day present in Enniscorthy ; for at Ferns, not far off, and deeply interested in all those transactions, I had private friends, intimate participators in the trials of that fierce hurricane, and joint sufferers with those who suffered most in prop- erty and in feeling. Ladies were then seen in crowds, hurrying on foot to Wexford, the nearest asylum, though fourteen miles distant, — many in slippers, bare-headed, and without any supporting arm ; for the flight of their defenders, having been determined by a sudden angular movement of the assailants, coinciding with the failure of their own ammunition after firing, had left no time to give warning ; and most fortunate it was for the unhappy fugi- tives, that the confusion of the burning streets, together w r ith the seductions of pillage, drew aside so many of the victors as to break the unity and perseverance of the pursuit. Wexford, however, was in no condition to promise more than a momentary shelter. Orders had been already issued to extinguish all domestic fires throughout the town, and to unroof all the thatched houses ; so great was the jealousy of internal treason. From without, the alarm was hourly increasing. On Tuesday, the 29th of May, the rebel army advanced from Enniscorthy to a post called Three Rocks, not much above two miles from Wexford. Their strength was now increased to at least 15,000 men. Never was there a case requiring more energy in the disposers of the military force ; never was there one which met with less, in the most responsible quarters. The nearest military station was the fort at THE IRISH REBELLION. 139 Duncannon, twenty-three miles distant. Thither, on the 29th, an express had been despatched by the Mayor of Wexford, reporting their situation, and calling for imme- diate aid. General Fawcet replied, that he would himself march that same evening with the 13th regiment, part of the Meath militia, and sufficient artillery. Relying upon these assurances, the small parties of militia and yeoman- ry then in Wexford gallantly threw themselves upon the most trying services in advance. Some companies of the Donegal militia, not mustering above 200 men, marched immediately to a position between the rebel camp and Wexford ; whilst others of the North Cork militia and the local yeomanry, with equal cheerfulness, undertook the defence of that town. Meantime, General Fawcet had consulted his personal comfort, by halting for the night, though aware of the dreadful emergency, at a station sixteen miles short of Wexford. A small detach- ment, however, with part of his artillery, he sent forward ; and these were the next morning intercepted by the rebels, at Three Rocks, [such was the activity and such the information of general officers in those days !] and massacred almost to a man. Two officers, who escaped the slaughter, carried the intelligence to the advanced post of the Donegals ; but they, so far from being dis- heartened, marched immediately against the rebel army, enormous as was the disproportion, with the purpose of recapturing the artillery. A singular contrast this to the conduct of General Fawcet, who retreated hastily to Dun- cannon upon the first intelligence of this disaster. Such a movement was so little anticipated by the gallant Done- gals, that they continued to advance against the enemy, until the precision with which the captured artillery was served against themselves, and the non-appearance of the promised aid, warned them to retire. At Wexford they 140 LIFE AND MANNERS. found all in confusion and the hurry of retreat. The flight, as it may be called, of General Fawcet was now- confirmed ; and, as the local position of Wexford made it indefensible against artillery, the whole body of loyalists, except those whom insufficient warning threw into the rear, now fled from the wrath of the rebels to Duncannon. It is a shocking illustration of the thoughtless ferocity which characterized too many of the Orange troops, that, along the whole line of this retreat, they continued to burn the cabins of Roman Catholics, and often to massacre, in cold blood, the unoffending inhabitants, totally forgetful of the many hostages whom the insurgents now held in their power, and careless of the dreadful provocations which they were thus throwing out to the bloodiest reprisals. Thus it was, and by such insufferable mismanagement, or base torpor, that on the 30th of May, not having raised their standard before the 26th, the rebels had already possessed themselves of the county of Wexford, in its whole southern division, — Ross and Duncannon only excepted ; of which the latter was not liable to capture by coup -de -main, and the other was saved by the procras- tination of the rebels. The northern division of the county was overrun pretty much in the same hasty style, and through the same unpardonable blunders in point of caution, and previous concert of plans. Upon first turning their views to the north, the rebels had taken up a position on the hill of Corrigrua, as a station from which they could march with advantage upon the town of Gorey, lying seven miles to the northward. On the 1st of June, a very brilliant affair had taken place between a mere handful of militia and yeomanry, from this town of Gorey, and a very strong detachment from the rebel camp. Many persons at the time regarded this as the best fought action in the whole war. The two parties had met about THE IRISH REBELLION. 141 two miles from Gorey ; and it is pretty certain that, if the yeoman cavalry, (who were seldom of any real use,) could have been prevailed on to charge at the proper time, the defeat would have been a most murderous one to the rebels. As it was, they escaped with considerable loss of honor. But even this they retrieved within a few days, in a remarkable way, and with circumstances of still greater scandal to the military discretion in high quarters, than had attended the movements of General Fawcet in the south. On the 4th of June, a little army of 1500 men, under the command of Major-General Loftus, had assembled at Gorey. The plan was — to march by two different roads upon the rebel encampment at Corrigrua ; and this plan was adopted. Meantime, on that same night, the rebel army had put themselves in motion for Gorey ; and of this counter-movement, full and timely information was given by a farmer at the royal head-quarters ; but such was the obstinate infatuation, that no officer of rank would condescend to give him a hearing. The consequences may be imagined. Colonel Walpole, an Englishman, full of courage, but presumptuously disdainful of the enemy, led a division upon one of the two roads, having no scouts, nor taking any sort of precaution. He was suddenly sur- prised, and faced : he refused to halt or to retire ; was shot through the head ; and a great part of the advanced detachment was slaughtered on the spot, and his artillery captured. General Loftus, advancing on the parallel road, heard the firing, and detached the grenadier com- pany of the Antrim militia, to the aid of Walpole. These, to the amount of seventy men, were cut off almost to a man ; and when the General, who could not cross over to the other road, through the enclosures, from the encum- brance of his artillery, had at length reached the scene of 142 LIFE AND MANNERS. action by a long circuit, he found himself in the following truly ludicrous position : — The rebels had pursued Colonel Walpole's division to Gorey, and possessed themselves of that place ; the General had thus lost his head-quarters, without having seen the army whom he had suffered to slip past him in the dark. He marched back disconso- lately to Gorey, took a look at the rebel posts which now occupied the town in strength, was saluted with a few rounds from his own cannon, and finally retreated out of the county. I have related this movement of General Loftus, and the previous one of General Fawcet, more circumstan- tially than might have been proper, because they both forcibly illustrate the puerile imbecility with which the Royal cause was then conducted. Both foundered in one hour, through surprises against which each was amply forewarned. Fortunately for the Government, the affairs of the rebels were managed even worse. Two sole en- terprises were undertaken by them after this, previously to their final and ruinous defeat at Vinegar Hill ; both of the very utmost importance to their interests, and both sure of success if they had been pushed forward in time. The first was the attack upon Ross, undertaken on the 29th of May, the day after the capture of Enniscorthy ; it must inevitably have succeeded, and would immediately have laid open to the rebels the important counties of Water- ford and Kilkenny. Being delayed until the 5th of June, the assault was repulsed with prodigious slaughter. The other was the attack upon Arklow, in the north. On the capture of Gorey, on the night of June 4, as the imme- diate consequence of Colonel Walpole's defeat, had the rebels advanced upon Arklow, they would have found it for some days totally undefended ; the whole garrison having retreated in panic, early in the morning of June 5, THE IRISH REBELLION. 143 to Wicklow. The capture of this important place would have laid open the whole road to the capital, would prob- ably have caused a rising in that great city, and, in any event, would have indefinitely prolonged the war, and multiplied the distractions of Government. Merely from sloth, and the spirit of procrastination, however, the rebel army halted at Gorey until the 9th, and then advanced with what seemed the overpowering force of 27,000 men. It is a striking lesson upon the subject of procrastination, that, precisely on that morning of June 9, the attempt had first become hopeless. Until then the place had been positively emptied of all inhabitants whatsoever. Exactly on the 9th, the old garrison had been ordered back from Wicklow, and reinforced by a crack English regiment, (the Durham Fencibles,) on whom chiefly the defence on this day devolved ; which was peculiarly arduous, from the vast numbers of the assailants, but brilliant and per- fectly successful. This obstinate and fiercely contested battle of Arklow was, by general consent, the hinge on which the rebellion turned. Nearly 30,000 men, all armed with pikes, and 5000 with muskets, and supported by some artillery, suf- ficiently well served to do considerable execution at a most important point in the line of defence, could not be defeated without a very trying struggle. And here again it is worthy of record, that General Needham, who com- manded on this day, would have followed the example of Generals Fawcet and Loftus, and have ordered a retreat, had he not been opposed by Colonel Sherret of the Dur- ham regiment. Such was the almost uniform imbecility, and the want of moral courage, on the part of the military leaders : for it would be unjust to impute any defect in animal courage to the feeblest of these leaders. General Needham, for example, exposed his person without reserve 144 LIFE AND MANNERS. throughout the whole of this difficult day. But he could not face a trying responsibility. From the defeat of Arklow, the rebels gradually retired, between the 9th and the 20th of June, to their main mili- tary position of Vinegar Hill, which lies immediately above the town of Enniscorthy, and had fallen into their hands on the 28th of May, when that place was captured. Here their whole forces, with the exception of per- haps 6000, who attacked General Moore, when march- ing on the 26th towards Wexford, were concentrated ; and hither the Royal army, 13,000 strong, with a respectable artillery, under the supreme command of General Lake, converged in four separate divisions, about the 19th and 20th of June. The great blow was to be struck on the 21st ; and the plan was, that the Royal forces, moving to the assault of the rebel position upon four opposite radii, should completely surround their en- campment and shut up every avenue to escape. On this plan, the field of battle would have been one vast slaugh- ter-house ; for quarter was not granted. But the ma- noeuvre, if it were ever seriously entertained, was entirely defeated by the failure of General Needham, who did not present himself with his division until nine o'clock, a full half-hour after the battle was over, and thus gained for himself the sobriquet of the late General Needham. Whether the failure were really in this officer, or (as was alleged by his apologists) in the inconsistent orders issued to him by General Lake, with the covert intention, as many believe, of mercifully counteracting his own scheme of wholesale butchery, to this day remains obscure. The effect of this delay, caused how it might, was for once such as must win everybody's applause. The action had commenced at seven o'clock in the morning. By half- past eight, the whole rebel army was in flight, and nat- THE IRISH REBELLION. 145 urally making for the only point left unguarded, it escaped with no great slaughter, (but leaving behind all its artil- lery and a good deal of valuable plunder,) through what was facetiously called ever afterwards Needlimn's gap. After this capital rout of Vinegar Hill, the rebel army daily mouldered away. A large body, however, of the fiercest and most desperate continued for some time to make flying marches in all directions, according to the positions of the King's forces, and the momentary favor of accidents. Once or twice they were brought to action by Sir James Duff and Sir Charles Asgill ; and, ludi- crously enough, once more they were suffered to escape by the eternal delays of the late General Needham. At length, however, after many skirmishes, and all varieties of local success, they finally dispersed upon a bog in the county of Dublin. Many desperadoes, however, took up their quarters for a long time in the dwarf woods of Kil- laughrim, near Enniscorthy, assuming the trade of marau- ders, but ludicrously designating themselves the Babes in the Wood. It is an explicable fact, that many deserters from the militia regiments, who had behaved well through- out the campaign, and adhered faithfully to their colors, now resorted to this confederation of the woods ; from which it cost some trouble to dislodge them. Another party in the woods and mountains of Wicklow, were found still more formidable, and continued to infest the adjacent country through the ensuing winter. These were not finally ejected from their lairs, until after one of their chiefs had been killed in a night skirmish by a young man defending his house, and the other, weary of his savage life, had surrendered himself to transportation. It diffused general satisfaction throughout Ireland, that, on the very day before the final engagement of Vinegar Hill. Lord Cornwall is made his cntrv into Dublin as the LIFE AXD XAXXERS. new Lord-Lieutenant ; and soon after Lord Camden de- parted. A proclamation, issued early in July, of general amnesty, to all who had shed no blood except on the field of battle, notified to the country the new spirit of policy which animated the Government, and doubtless worked marvels in healing the agitations of the land. Still it was _ thought necessary that severe justice should take hs course amongst the most conspicuous leaders or agents in the in- surrection. Martial law still prevailed; and, under that law. severe justice is often no justice at all. Many of those who had shown the greatest generosity, and with no slight risk to themselves, were now selected to suffer. Bagenal Harvey, a Protestant gentleman, who had held the supreme command of the rebel army for some time with infinite vexation to himself, and taxed with no one instance of cruelty or excess, was one of those doomed to execution. He had possessed an estate of nearly three thousand per annum : and at the same time with him was executed another gentleman, of more than three times that e, Cornelius Grogan. Singular it was, that men of this condition and property, men of feeling and refine- ment, who could not expect to be gainers by such revolu- tionary movements, should have staked their peace and the happiness of their families upon a contest so forlorn from the very first. Some there were, however, and pos- sibly these gentlemen, who could have explained their motives intelligibly enough : they had been forced by per- secution, and actually baited into the ranks of the rebels. One characteristic difference in the deaths of these two gentlemen was remarkable, as contrasted with their pre- vious habits. Grogan was constitutionally timid, and yet he faced the scaffold and the trying preparations of the executioner with fortitude. On the other hand, Bagenal Harvev, who had fought several duels with coolness, ex- THE IRISH REBELLION. 147 hibited considerable trepidation in his last moments. Per- haps in both, the difference might be due entirely to some physical accident of health, or momentary nervous de- rangement. Among the crowd, however, of persons superior in rank who suffered death at this disastrous era, there were two whom chiefly I regretted, and would have gone any dis- tance to have shaken hands with. One was a butcher, the other a seafaring man, both rebels. But they must have been truly generous, brave, and noble-minded men. For, during the occupation of Wexford by the rebel army, they were repeatedly the sole opponents, at great personal risk, to the general massacre then meditated by the Popish fanatics. And, finally, when all resistance seemed likely to be unavailing, they both insisted resolutely with the chief patron of this bloody proposal, that he should fight them with sword or pistol as he might prefer, and c prove himself a man,' (as they expressed it,) before he should be at liberty to sport in this wholesale way with innocent blood. One dreadful fact I shall state in taking leave of this subject ; and that, I believe, will be quite sufficient to sus- tain anything I have said in disparagement of the Govern- ment; by which, however, I mean, in justice, the local administration of Ireland. For, as to the supreme Gov- ernment in England, that body must be supposed, at the utmost, to have sanctioned the recommendations of the Irish cabinet, even when it interfered so far. In particu- lar, the scourgings and flagellations resorted to in Wexford and Kildare, &c, must have been originally suggested by minds familiar with the habits of the Irish aristocracy in the treatment of dependants. Candid Irishmen must admit that the habit of kicking, or threatening to kick, waiters in coffee-houses or other dependants, — a habit which, in 148 LIFE AND MANNERS. England, would be met instantly by defiance and menaces of action for assault and battery, — is not yet altogether obsolete in Ireland. Thirty years ago it was still more prevalent, and marked that spirit and temper in the treat- ment of menial dependants, with which doubtless origi- nated the measure of judicial flagellations. To return, however ; — that fact with which I proposed to close my recollections of this great tumult, and which I hold to be a sufficient guarantee for the very severest reflections on the spirit of the Government, is expressed significantly in the terms, memorable enough, but commonly used by Roman Catholic gentlemen, in prudential exculpation of them- selves, when threatened with inquiry for their conduct during these times of agitation : — 'I thank my God that no man can charge me justly with having saved the life of any Protestant, or his house from pillage, by my interces- sion with the rebel chiefs.' What did this mean ? Some Roman Catholics had pleaded, and pleaded truly, as a reason for special indulgence to themselves, that they had used anv influence, which might belong to them on the score of religion, or of private friendship with the rebel authorities, on behalf of persecuted Protestants ; either in delivering them altogether, or in softening their doom. But, to the surprise of everybody, this plea was so far from being entertained or allowed any weight by the courts of inquiry, that, on the contrary, an argument was uniformly built upon it, dangerous in the last degree to the pleader. i You admit, then,' it was retorted, c having had this very considerable influence upon the rebel councils; in that case we must suppose you to have been known privately as their friend and supporter.' Readily it may be supposed, that few would be likely to urge such a vindi- cation, when it became known in what way it was fated to operate. The Government itself had made it perilous to THE IRISH REBELLION. 149 profess humanity ; and every man henceforward gloried publicly in his callousness and insensibility, as the best safeguard to himself in a path so closely beset with rocks. In the latter end o£ October, I quitted Connaught with Lord W., and we returned slowly to Dublin. Thence, after some little stay, we crossed the Irish Channel ; and by the same route through North Wales, we travelled together to Birmingham. CHAPTER V. PREMATURE MANHOOD. It was at Birmingham, the great centre of travelling in England, where so many of the great roads converge, and which I, like myriads besides, have visited, therefore, many hundreds of times, without ever yet having gone thither as a terminus ad quern: — at Birmingham it was, that I parted w T ith my friend Lord W. His route lay through Oxford ; and stopping, therefore, no longer than was necessary to harness fresh horses, an operation, how- ever, which was seldom accomplished in less than half an hour at that era, he went on directly to Stratford. My own destination was yet doubtful. I had been directed, in Dublin, to inquire at the Birmingham Post-Office, for a let- ter which would guide my motions. There, accordingly, upon sending for it, lay the expected letter from my mother, from which I learned that my sister was visiting at L — xt — n, in Northamptonshire, a seat of Lord C — r- b — ry's, to which place I also had an invitation ; and that during my stay at that place some final resolution would be taken, and announced to me, as to the disposal of my time, for the two or three years before I could be supposed old enough, on the English system, for going to Oxford or Cambridge. This was the part of the letter which I read with the deepest interest. It is true, that I was yet the merest boy ; having, in fact, completed my fifteenth birth- PREMATURE MANHOOD. 151 day, about three months before, in Ireland ; but by learn- ing, by knowledge of the world, and by pride of heart, I had outgrown a school ; and, from these causes as well as my premature gravity, and (I may say it without vanity) premature dignity of mind, I could not easily humble myself to the idea of taking my station amongst ignorant boys, and under a master who had little chance of having half my own learning. I was glad, therefore, to find the evil day deferred at least ; and I had private reasons for rejoicing that the final decision was to be made at L — x- t — n. Meantime, my route lay through Stamford, to which I found that I could go by a stage-coach on the following day ; and of necessity I prepared to make the most of that day in gloomy, noisy, and, at that time, dirty Birming- ham. Be not offended, compatriot of Birmingham, that I salute your natal town with these disparaging epithets. It is not my habit to indulge rash impulses of contempt towards any man or body of men, wheresoever collected, far less towards a race of high-minded and most intelligent citizens, such as Birmingham has exhibited to the admi- ration of all Europe. But as to the noise and the gloom which I ascribe, those features of your town will illustrate what the Germans mean by a one-sided (ein-seitiger) judg- ment. There are, I can well believe, thousands to whom Birmingham is another name for domestic peace, and for a reasonable share of sunshine. But in my case, who have passed through Birmingham many hundred times, it always happened to rain, except once ; and that once the Shrewsbury mail carried me so rapidly away that I had not time to examine the sunshine, or see whether it might not be some gilt Birmingham counterfeit ; for you know, men of Birmingham, that you can counterfeit — such is your cleverness — all things in heaven and earth, from 152 LIFE AND MANNERS. Jove's thunderbolts down to a tailor's bodkin. Therefore, the gloom is to be charged to my bad luck. Then, as to the noise, never did I sleep at that enormous Hen and Chickens, to which usually my destiny brought me ; but I had reason to marvel that the discreet hen did not gather her vagrant flock to roost at less variable hours. Till two or three I was kept waking by those who were retiring ; and about three commenced the morning functions of the porter, or of ' boots,' or of ' under-boots,' who began their rounds to collect their several freights for the High- flyer, or the Tally-ho, or the Bang-up, to all points of the compass, and too often (as must happen in such immense establishments) blundered into my room, with that appall- ing, ; Now, Sir, the horses are coming out.' So that rarely indeed have I happened to sleep in Birmingham. But the dirt ! — that sticks a little with you, friend of Birmingham. How do I explain away that ? Know, then, reader, that at the time I speak of, and in the way I speak of, all England was dirty. The next day I crossed the country to Stamford, and thence, by a stage of nine miles, to L — xt — n. Here I passed an interval, the happiest of my childish life. I was again in the house of an Irish nobleman ; and my position, therefore, as regarded amusement and freedom of choice in disposing of my time, may be supposed to have been pretty much the same with that which I had just quitted in Ireland. In reality, however, it was very different. Lord C — rb — ry was what is commonly and somewhat con- temptuously called a fox-hunter. But fox-hunters, as a class, are not the contemptible persons one might suppose from satiric sketches ; at least in my own experience. [ have found them far otherwise. It is always beneficial to a man's temper, and does not interfere with any intellectual PREMATURE MANHOOD. 153 qualities he may have, to be placed in the way of hard and continual exercise. Nothing so effectually rids a man of bodily irritation, such as arises from sedentary habits ; and thus far, nothing is so well fitted to sustain a tone of genial spirits and good temper. As to any bad effects, it is difficult to see in what way the practice of hunting or hard riding should ally itself with one set of habits rather than another, except through the social connections which it promotes. Now, as to the probable quality of these connections, the reader must be shy of taking his present impressions from the ill-natured and false delineations of books. These are generally antiquated, and (where true at all) suited to a past age. The country gentlemen, indeed generally, of this island, are a class most malig- nantly traduced in books ; persons answering to the Squire Westerns, of Fielding, supposing them ever to have ex- isted, are now to be found only in novels. As to Lord C — rb — ry, connected by birth and political influence with the Irish county of Limerick, where he had a family seat, called Carass, he resorted to England, chiefly, I believe, on account of the hunting in Leicestershire and the adja- cent counties, and, in part, perhaps, with a view to London. But he was far from being an illiterate man, or without interest in literature. He was that Etonian whom I had alluded to in my interview with George III., as having urged my mother to place me at Eton. Having himself had a full Etonian training, and looking back with pleasure upon the manliness of the sports, and the republican equality established by the system of manners in that great seminary, he never allowed himself to suppose that any rational creature could hesitate in giving a preference to Eton, where the expense could be borne. That sole ground of demur he admitted as consistent with a man's sanity, but no other. And certainly some weight will be 11 154 LIFE AND MANNERS. allowed to that, when I mention the following anecdote : Dining with a gentleman about 1823, who had two sons at Eton, and three of a more advanced age, at Cambridge, 1 heard with astonishment that the two Etonians cost him annually as much (or nearly so) as the three cantabs : the boys cost c£300 per annum each, the young men about .£220. When, by what test, by what indication, does manhood commence ? Physically by one criterion, legally by another, morally by a third, mentally by a fourth, — and all indefinite. Equator, absolute equator, there is none. Between the two spheres of youth and age, perfect and imperfect manhood, as in all analogous cases, there is no strict line of bisection. The change is a large process accomplished within a large and corresponding space ; having, perhaps, some central or equatorial line, but lying, like that of our earth, between certain tropics, or limits widely separated. This tropical region may, and gene- rally does, cover a number of years ; and, therefore, it is hard to say, even for an assigned case, by any tolerable approximation, at what precise era it would be reasonable to describe the individual as having ceased to be a boy, and as having attained his inauguration as a man. Physi- cally, we know that there is a very large latitude of differ- ences, in the periods of human maturity, not merely between individual and individual, but also between nation and nation ; differences so great, that, in some southern regions of Asia, we hear of matrons at the aoe of twelve. And though, as Mr. Sadler rightly insisrs, a romance of exaggeration has been built upon the facts, enough remains behind of real marvel, to irritate the curiosity of the physi- ologist, as to its efficient, and, perhaps, of the philosopher, as to its final cause. Legally and politically, that is con- PREMATURE MANHOOD. 155 ventionally, the differences are even greater on a com- parison of nations and eras. In England we have seen senators of mark and authority, nay, even a Prime Minis- ter, the haughtiest, the most despotic, and the most irre- sponsible of his times, at an age, which, in many states, both ancient and modern, would have operated as a ground of absolute challenge to the candidate for offices the meanest. Intellectually speaking, again, a very large proportion of men never attain maturity. Nonage is their final destiny ; and manhood, in this respect, is for them a pure idea. Finally, as regards the moral development, by which I mean the whole system and economy of their love and hatred, of their admirations and contempts, the total organization of their pleasures and their pains, hardly any of our species ever attain manhood. It would be unphi- losophic to say, that intellects of the highest order were, or could be developed fully, without a corresponding development of the whole nature. But of such intellects there do not appear above two or three in a thousand years. It is a fact, forced upon one by the whole experi- ence of life, that almost all men are children, more or less, in their tastes and admirations. This needs little proof. Society is absolutely held together, under its present constitution, by the baby feelings to which I allude. Were there no admiration for wealth carried to accumulation far beyond what is practically disposable, of honors which are no honors, and of tinsel decorations, the foundations of society, as it is, would actually give way. Oh, man ! were it not for thy latent tendencies, — were it not for that imperishable grandeur, which exists by way of germ and ultimate possibility in thy nature, hidden as it is, and often all but effaced, — how unlimited would be my contempt for thy species ; and that misanthropy, which now I fight against when I find it stealing gradually 156 LIFE AND MANNERS. over my reluctant mind, would, but for the angelic ideal buried and embruted in thy sordid and grovelling race, become fixed, absolute, and deliberately cherished. But, to resume my question, how, under so variable a standard, both natural and conventional, of everything almost that can be received for a test or a presumption of manhood, shall we seize upon any characteristic feature, sufficiently universal to serve a practical use, as a criterion of the transition from the childish mind to the dignity (relative dignity at least) of that mind which belongs to conscious maturity ? One such criterion, and one only, as I believe, there is — all others are variable and uncer- tain. It lies in the reverential feeling, sometimes suddenly developed, towards woman, and the idea of woman. From that moment when women cease to be regarded with care- lessness, and when the ideal of womanhood, in its total pomp of loveliness and purity, dawns like some vast aurora upon the mind, boyhood has ended ; childish thoughts and inclinations have passed away for ever ; and the gravity of manhood, with the self-respecting views of manhood, have commenced. These feelings, no doubt, depend for their development in part upon physical causes ; but they are also determined by the many retard- ing or accelerating forces enveloped in circumstances of position, and sometimes in pure accident. For myself, I remember most distinctly the very day — the scene, and its accidents, when that mysterious awe fell upon me which belongs to woman in her ideal portrait : and from that hour a profounder gravity colored all my thoughts, and a l beauty, still more beauteous,' was lit up for me in this agitating world. My Irish friend and myself had been on a visit to a noble family about fifty miles from Dublin ; and we were returning from Tullamore by a public pas- sage-boat, on the splendid canal which connects that place PREMATURE MANHOOD. 157 with the metropolis. To avoid attracting an unpleasant attention to ourselves in public situations, I observed a rule of never addressing Lord W by his title : but it so happened that the canal carried us along the margin of an estate belonging to the Earl (now Marquis) of W — t- m — th ; and on turning an angle, we came suddenly in view of this nobleman's bulky person, taking his morning lounge in the sun. Somewhat loftily he reconnoitered the miscellaneous party of clean and unclean beasts, crowded on the deck of our ark, ourselves amongst the number, whom he challenged gaily as young acquaintances from Dublin ; and my friend he saluted more than once as c My Lord.' This accident made known to the assembled mob of our fellow-travellers Lord W.'s rank, and led to a scene rather too broadly exposing the spirit of this world. Herd- ing together on the deck, (or roof of that den denominated the ' s t at e-cab'mj) stood a party of young ladies, headed by their governess. In the cabin below was mamma, who as yet had not condescended to illuminate our circle, for she was an awful personage — a wit, a blue-stocking, and a leader of ton in Dublin and Belfast. The fact, however, that a young Lord, and one of great expectations, was on board, brought her up. A short cross-examination of Lord W.'s French valet, had confirmed the flying report, and at the same time, (I suppose,) put her in possession of my defect in all those advantages of title, fortune, and expec- tation, which so brilliantly distinguished my friend. Her admiration of him, and her contempt for myself, were equally undisguised. And in the ring which she soon cleared out for public exhibition, she made us both fully sensible of the very equitable stations which she assigned to us in her regard. She was neither very brilliant, nor altogether a pretender, but might be described as a showy woman, of slight, but popular accomplishments. Any 158 LIFE AND MANNERS. woman, however, has the advantage of possessing the ear of any company : and a woman of forty, with such tact and experience, as she will naturally have gathered in a talking practice of such duration, can find little difficulty in mortifying a boy, or sometimes, perhaps, in tempting him to unfortunate sallies of irritation. Me it was clear that she viewed in the light of a humble friend, or what is known in fashionable life by the humiliating name of a ' toad-eater.' Lord W., full of generosity in what regarded his own pretensions, and who never had violated the perfect equality which reigned in our deportment to each other, colored with as much confusion as myself at her coarse insinuations. And, in reality, our ages scarcely allowed of that relation which she supposed to exist between us. Possibly, she did not suppose it : but it is essential to the wit, and the display of some people, that it should have a foundation in malice. A victim, and a sac- rifice, are indispensable conditions in every exhibition. In such a case my natural sense of justice would generally have armed me a hundred-fold for retaliation ; but at present, chiefly perhaps because I had no effectual ally, and could count upon no sympathy in my audience, I was mortified beyond the pow r er of retort, and became a pas- sive butt to the lady's stinging contumely, and the arrowy sleet of her gay rhetoric. The narrow bounds of our deck made it not easy to get beyond 'talking range ; and thus it happened, that for two hours I stood the worst of this bright lady's feud. The tables turned. Two ladies appeared slowly ascending from the cabin, both in deepest mourning, but else as different in aspect as summer and winter. The elder was the Countess of Errol, then mourning an affliction which had laid her life desolate, and admitted of no human consolation. Heavier grief, — grief more self-occupied and deaf to all voice of sympa- PREMATURE MANHOOD. 159 thy, I have not happened to witness. She seemed scarcely- aware of our presence, except it were by placing herself as far as was possible from the annoyance of our odious conversation. The circumstances of her loss are now forgotten ; at that time they were known to a large circle in Bath and London ; and I violate no confidence in reviewing them. Lord Errol had been privately intrusted by Mr. Pitt with an official secret; — viz., the outline and principal details of a foreign expedition ; in which, accord- ing to Mr. Pitt's original purpose, his Lordship was to have had a high command. In a moment of intoxication the Earl confided this secret to some false friend, who published the communication and its author. Upon this, the unhappy nobleman, under too keen a sense of wounded honor, and perhaps with an exaggerated notion of the evils attached to his indiscretion, destroyed himself. Months had passed since that calamity, when we met his widow ; but time appeared to have done nothing in miti- gating her sorrow. The younger lady, on the other hand, who was Lady ErroPs sister, Heavens ! what a spirit of joy and festal pleasure radiated from her eyes, her step, her voice, her manner! She was Irish; and the very impersonation of innocent gaiety, such as we find oftener amongst Irish women than those of any other country. Mourning, I have said, she wore ; from sisterly consideration, the deepest mourning ; that sole expression there was about her of gloom or solemn feeling, — But all things else about her drawn, From May-time and the cheerful dawn. Odious blue-stocking of Belfast and Dublin ! how I hated you up to that moment ! half an hour after how grateful I felt for the hostility which had procured me such an alli- ance. One minute sufficed to put the quick-witted young 160 LIFE AND MANNERS. Irishwoman in possession of our little drama, and the sev- eral parts we were playing. To look was to understand, to wish was to execute, with this ardent child of nature. Like Spenser's Bradamant, with martial scorn, she couched her lance on the side of the party suffering wrong. Her rank, as sister-in-law to the Constable of Scotland, gave her some advantage for winning a favor- able audience ; and throwing her segis over me, she ex- tended that benefit to myself. Road was now made per force for me also ; my replies were no longer stifled in noise and laughter. Personalities were banished ; litera- ture was extensively discussed ; and that is a subject which, offering little room to argument, offers the widest to eloquent display. I had immense reading ; vast com- mand of words, which somewhat diminished as ideas and doubts multiplied ; and, speaking no longer to a deaf audience, but to a generous and indulgent protectress, I threw out, as from a cornucopia, my illustrative details and recollections ; trivial enough perhaps, as I might now think, but the more intelligible to my present circle. It might seem too much the case of a tempest as in matula, if I were to spend any words upon the revolution which ensued ; and even the word revolution is too pompous for the case. Suffice it, that I remained the lion of that company which had previously been most insultingly facetious at my expense ; and the intellectual lady finally declared the air of the deck unpleasant. Never, until this hour, had I thought of women as objects of a possible interest, or of a reverential love. I had known them either in their infirmities and their un- amiable aspects, or else in those sterner relations which made them objects of ungcnial and uncompanionable feel- ings. Now first it struck me that life might owe half its attractions and all its graces to female companionship. PREMATURE MANHOOD. 161 Gazing, perhaps, with too earnest an admiration at this generous and spirited young daughter of Ireland, and in that way making her those acknowledgments for her goodness which I could not properly clothe in words, I was roused to a sense of my indecorum by seeing her suddenly blush. I believe that Miss Bl interpreted my admiration rightly ; for she was not offended ; but, on the contrary, for the rest of the day, when not attending to her sister, conversed almost exclusively, and in a confidential way, with Lord W and myself. The whole, in fact, of this conversation must have convinced her that I, mere boy as I was, (not quite fifteen,) could not have presumed to direct my admiration to her, a fine young woman of twenty, in any other character than that of a generous champion, and a very adroit mistress in the dazzling fence of colloquial skirmish. My admiration had, in reality, been altogether addressed to her moral qualities, her enthusiasm, her spirit, and her wit. Yet that blush, evanescent as it was, — the mere possibility that I, so very a child, should have called up the most transitory sense of bashfulness or confusion upon any female cheek, first, and suddenly as with a flash of light- ning, penetrating some utter darkness, illuminated to my own startled consciousness, never again to be obscured, the pure and powerful ideal of womanhood and womanly ex- cellence. This was, in a proper sense, a revelation ; it fixed a great era of change in my life ; and this new-born idea, being agreeable to the uniform aspirations of my own nature — that is, lofty and sublime — it governed my life with great power, and with most salutary effects. Ever after, throughout the period of youth, I was jealous of my own demeanor, reserved, and awe-struck in the presence of women ; reverencing often not so much them fts my own ideal of woman latent in them, and seldom, 162 LIFE AND MANNERS. indeed, more than imperfectly developed. For I carried about with me the idea, to which rarely did I see an approximation, of A perfect woman, nobly planned, To warn, to comfort, to command. And from this day I was an altered creature, and never again was capable of the careless, irreflective mind of childhood. Great, doubtless, is the power of each sex over the other ; and greater in proportion to the original nobility of the nature. But I know not why the dominion of woman over man, so far as the contemplation of the reciprocal ideals is concerned, seems the more absolute. I know not why, also, because it contradicts what one might have supposed a priori, the female ideal, (by which much abused term I mean the philosophic maximum perfec- tionis) seems less earthly and gross, pointing to a possible alliance with some higher form of purity and sanctity. And yet, according to our scriptural mythus, she was the daughter of earth and heaven, whilst man drew his parentage directly from heaven. Whence the Miltonic address, ' Daughter of God and man, accomplished Eve.' And agreeably to this conception we a're told, by the same authentic oracle, that whilst man was ' formed for God only,' she, on the contrary, was formed ' for God in him.' He drew his irradiation directly from the Deity, she only by reflex communication with him. However these are curious refinements. But it is a truth of the largest value, that the dominion of woman is potent, exactly in that decree in which the nature of woman is exalted. That woman reigns despotically, never through her image as PREMATURE MANHOOD. 163 abstracted from her actual reality, but through her ideal, which is anterior to all actual existences ; that, if there were no other detection of the hollow and false basis upon which is built savage life and Mahometan life, than merely the low and abject ideal of woman essential to those forms of humanity, in that alone we should find a sufficient refutation of the shallow paradoxes devised for varnishing those hideous degenerations of man ; finally, that such as woman is will man for ever be ; the one sex being essen- tially the antipode and adequate antagonist of the other : woman cannot be other than depressed where man is not exalted. This last remark I make, that I may not, in paying my homage to the other sex, and in glorifying its possible power over ours, be confounded with those thoughtless and trivial rhetoricians, the soi-disant poets of this age, who flatter woman with a false worship ; and like Lord Byron's buccaneers, hold out to them a picture of their own empire, built only upon sensual or upon shadowy excellencies. We find continually a false en- thusiasm, a mere dithyrambic inebriation, on behalf of woman, put forth by modern verse-writers, expressly at the expense of the other sex, as though woman could be of porcelain whilst man was of common earthenware. Even the testimonies of Ledyard and Park are, in some sense, false, though amiable, tributes to female excel- lence ; at least they are merely one-sided truths — aspects of one phasis, and under a peculiar angle. For, though the sexes differ characteristically ; yet they never fail to reflect each other ; nor can they differ as to the general amount of development ; never yet was woman in one stage of elevation, and man (of the same community) in another. Thou, therefore, daughter of God and man, all potent woman ! reverence thy own ideal ; and, in the wildest of the homage which is paid to thee, as also in 164 LIFE AND MANNERS. the most real aspects of thy wide dominion, see no trophy of idle vanity, but a silent indication, whether designed or not, of the possible grandeur enshrined in thy nature ; which realize to the extent of thy power, 1 And show ns how divine a thing A woman may become.' Precisely at this stage of my advancement I was, and but just entered on that revolution which I have described, when, as I have said, 1 became a resident in the family of Lord C. Lady C. was a beautiful and still youthful woman, who acted upon me powerfully through the new- born feelings I have described, and would have done much more so, had she not been known to me from my childhood. A young Irish peeress, who was visiting at the same time in this family, aided Lady C.'s purposes in stimulating my ambition upon all the paths which interest the sympathies of woman. Lady C. was anxious that I should become a sort of Alcibiades, or Aristippus, of ambidexterous powers, and capable of shining equally in little things and in great. Accordingly, whilst I taught her Greek enough to read the Greek Testament, she took measures for my instruction in such accomplishments as were usually possessed by the men of her circle. In particular, she was anxious that I should become a good shot ; and, for this purpose, put me under the care of one of her husband's gamekeepers. Duly, for many weeks, I accompanied the zealous keeper into the L — xt — n woods, and did my best to improve. But my progress was slow indeed ; and at last my eyes opened clearly to the fact, that my destiny was not in that direction which could command the ordinary sympathies of this world or of woman, even though accomplished woman, moving under common and popular impul My sense of Lady C.'s kindness made me persevere in all PREMATURE MANHOOD. 165 the cxercisings and pursuits which she had originated, so long as I remained at L — xt — n. But, internally, I felt that my sphere was not exactly what she pointed out to my ambition, nor the prizes which glittered before my eyes exactly such as almost any woman could be expected to understand. Even then, in the depths of those Northamp- tonshire woods and ridings, oftentimes I exclaimed inter- nally, — that, if it were possible for me to work some great revolution for man, or to put in motion some great agency upon man's condition, equal, for example, in power and duration, to that wrought by Mahomet, I would set a value upon fame. But else, and as respected the little trivial baubles of literary or social honors ; — were these only at my disposal, whether it were through defect of power in myself, or defect of opportunity, — in that case, I would prefer to pass silently through life, by quiet paths, and without rousing any babbling echo to my foot- steps. Vulgar ambition was already dead within me. And living as I did at this time with two young matrons of rank, both emphatically fine young women, and one a cele- brated beauty, who had seen the first men of the day at her feet, and grateful in the liveliest degree, to persons of so much distinction, for the interest they condescended to show in my future fortunes, I grieved that it should be so. However, I dissembled, and lost no part of their regard. And, meantime, one great advantage incident to my present situation, I took good care to cultivate as much as was possible. Northamptonshire, partly from its ad- jacency to the finest sporting grounds in England, and partly from its relation to the capital, (the distance even at that day being easily accomplished between breakfast and dinner,) is crowded with a denser resort of the aristocracy than any other part of the island. Lord C. was absent at his Irish estates in Limerick : and perhaps her own taste 166 LIFE AND MANNERS. would have led Lady C. to stay much at home. But, with a view to the amusement of her young Irish friends, Lord and Lady M— sy, but chiefly the latter, she ac- cepted invitations almost daily. Lord M — sy was often called away to London or Ireland ; but I was the invari- able attendant of the two ladies ; and thus, under Lady C.'s protection, I came to see the English aristocracy, the great Houses of Belvoir, (pronounced Beevor,) Burleigh, &c, and the crowds of subordinate families, with their winter visiters, more extensively than ever I had seen the aristocracy of Ireland ; and this with a freedom of inter- course which would not have been conceded to me at a more advanced age. CHAPTER VI. TRAVELLING. The revolution in the system of travelling, naturally suggested by my position in Birmingham, and in the whole apparatus, means, machinery, and dependencies of that system — a revolution begun, carried through, and perfected within the period of my own personal experi- ence — merits a word or two of illustration in the most cursory memoirs that profess any attention at all to the shifting scenery of the age and the principles of motion at work, whether manifested in great effects or in little. And these particular effects, though little, when regarded in their separate details, are not little in their final amount. On the contrary, I have always maintained that in a rep- resentative government, where the great cities of the empire must naturally have the power, each in its pro- portion, of reacting upon the capital and the councils of the nation in so conspicuous a way, there is a result wait- ing on the final improvements of the arts of travelling, and of transmitting intelligence with velocity, such as cannot be properly appreciated in the absence of all historical experience. Conceive a state of communica- tion between the centre and the extremities of a great people, kept up with a uniformity of reciprocation so ex- quisite as to imitate the flowing and ebbing of the sea, or the systole and diastole of the human heart ; day and 168 LIFE AND MANNERS. night, waking and sleeping, not succeeding to each other with more absolute certainty than the acts of the metropo- lis and the controlling notice of the provinces, whether in the way of support or of resistance. Action and re- action from every point of the compass being thus perfect and instantaneous, we should then first begin to under- stand, in a practical sense, what is meant by the unity of a political body, and we should approach to a more ade- quate appreciation of the powers which are latent in organization. For it must be considered that hitherto, under the most complex organization, and that which has best attained its purposes, the national will has never been able to express itself upon one in a thousand of the public acts, simply because the national voice was lost in the distance, and could not collect itself through the time and the space rapidly enough to connect itself immediately with the evanescent measure of the moment. But as the system of intercourse is gradually expanding, these bars of space and time are in the same degree contracting, until finally we may expect them altogether to vanish : and then the whole empire, in every part, will react upon the whole through the central forces, with the power, life, and effect of immediate conference amongst parties brought face to face. Then first will be seen a political system truly organic — i. e. in which each acts upon all, and all react upon each : and a new earth will arise from the indirect agency of this merely physical revolution. The reader whose birth attaches him to this present generation, having known only Macadamized roads, can- not easily bring before his imagination the antique and almost aboriginal state of things which marked our travel- ling system down to the end of the eighteenth century, and nearly through the first decennium of the present. A very few lines will suffice for a few broad notices of TRAVELLING. 169 our condition, in this respect, through the last two cen- turies. In the Parliament war, (1642-46,) it is an inter- esting fact, but at the same time calculated to mislead the incautious reader, that many officers of distinction, on both sides, brought close carriages to head-quarters ; and sometimes they went even upon the field of battle in these carriages — not mounting on horseback until the prepa- rations were beginning for some important manoeuvre, or for a general movement. The same thing had been done throughout the thirty years' war, both by the Bavarian, Imperial, and afterwards by the Swedish officers of rank. And it marks the great diffusion of these luxuries about this era, that, on occasion of the reinstalment of two princes of Mecklenburg, who had been violently dispos- sessed by Wallenstein, upwards of eighty coaches mus- tered at a short notice, partly from the territorial nobility, partly from the camp. Precisely, however, at military head-quarters, and on the route of an army, carriages of this description were an available and a most useful means of transport. Cumbrous and unwieldy they were, as we know by pictures, and they could not have been other- wise — they were built to meet the roads. Carriages of our present light and reedy [almost, one might say, corky] construction, would, on the roads of Germany or of Eng- land, in that age, have foundered within the first two hours. To our ancestors such carriages would have seemed playthings for children. Cumbrous as they were, they could not be more so than artillery or baggage wag- ons : where these could go, coaches could go. fSo that, in the march of an army, there was a perpetual guarantee to those who had coaches for the possibility of their tran- sit. And hence, and not because the roads were at all better than they have been generally described in those days, we are to explain the fact — that both in the Royal 12 170 LIFE AND MANNERS. camp, in Lord Manchester's, and afterwards in Lord Fairfax's and Cromwell's, coaches were an ordinary part of the camp equipage. The roads, meantime, were as they have been described, viz. ditches, morasses, and sometimes channels for the course of small rivers. Nor did they improve, except for short reaches, and under peculiar local advantages, throughout that century. Spite of the roads, however, public carriages began to pierce England, in various lines, from the era of 1660. Circum- stantial notices of these may be found in Lord Auckland's large work on the Poor-Laws. That to York for example (200 miles) took a fortnight in the journey, or about four- teen miles a day. But Chamberlayne, who had a per- sonal knowledge of these public carriages, says enough to show that, if slow, they were cheap ; half a crown being the usual rate for fifteen miles, (i. e. 2d. a mile.) Public conveyances, multiplying rapidly, could not but diffuse a general call for improved roads ; improved both in dimen- sions as well as in the art of construction. For it is observable, that so early as Queen Elizabeth's days, England already presented to its inhabitants, the most equestrian of nations, a general system of decent bridle roads. Even at this day, it is doubtful whether any man, taking all hinderances into account, and having laid no previous relays of horses, could much exceed the exploit of Cary, (afterwards Lord Monmouth,) a younger son of the first Lord Hunsden, a cousin of Queen Elizabeth. This cavalier, basely enough, considering his near con- nection with the Queen, had, like a true courtier, promised to bring the Scottish King certain intelligence of his ac- cession to the English Crown ; and, being a good horse- man, he privately resolved to be the earliest, if his interest would not avail to make him the official bearer of the great intelligence. The Queen died on the last day (as TRAVELLING. 171 it was then considered) of 1602, i. e. on the 24th of March, 1603. Cary, though lying under the general embargo and interdict of the Privy Council, contrived to slip out of the palace, through the favor of his brother, a great officer of the Royal household. On the 1st day of 1603, that is (as we should now call it) on Lady-day, or March 25 of 1603, at ten o'clock in the morning, he mounted at London, and, on the following day, notwith- standing all delays, and that he was very seriously re- tarded both by public business on the Border, (where he held a great command,) and having been thrown violently from his horse, he contrived to reach the Scottish capital by the King's bed-time. Altogether he was not more than thirty-three or thirty-four hours in traversing a road, at that time not at all short of four hundred and fifty miles. This story we learn from Lord Monmouth's own memoirs. Yet we must not forget that the particular road concerned in this exploit was the Great North Road, (as it is still called by way of distinction,) lying through Doncaster and York, between the northern and southern capitals of the island. But roads less frequented were tolerable as bridle roads ; whilst all alike, having been originally laid down with no view to the broad and ample coaches, from 1570 to 1700, scratched the panels on each side as they crept along. Even in the nineteenth century I have known a case, but of course in a sequestered district of England, where a post-chaise, of the common narrow dimensions, was obliged to retrace its route of fourteen miles, on coming to a bridge built in some remote age, when, as yet, post-chaises were neither known nor an- ticipated, and, unfortunately, too narrow by three or four inches. In all the provinces of England, when the soil was deep and adhesive, a worse evil beset the stately equipage. An Italian of rank, who has left a record of 172 LIFE AND MANNERS. his perilous adventure, visited, or attempted to visit, Pet- worth, near London, (then a seat of the Percys, now of Lord Egremont,) about the year 1685. I forget how many times he was overturned within one particular stretch of five miles ; but I remember that it was a sub- ject of gratitude, (and, upon meditating a return by the same route, a subject of pleasing hope,) to dwell upon the soft lying which was to be found in that good-natured morass. Yet this was, doubtless, a pet road, (vile pun- ster ! dream not that I glance at Pe^worth,) and an im- proved road. Such as this, I have good reason to think, were most of the roads in England, unless upon the rocky strata which stretch northwards from Derbyshire to Cumberland and Northumberland. The public carriages were the first harbingers of a change for the better ; as these grew and prospered, slender lines of improvement began to vein and streak the map. And Parliament began to show their zeal, though not always a corresponding knowledge, by legislating backwards and forwards on the breadth of wagon wheel-tires, &,c. But not until our cotton system began to put forth blossoms — not until our trade and our steam engines began to stimulate the coal mines, which, in their turn, stimulated them, did any great energy apply itself to our roads. In my childhood, stand- ing with one or two of my brothers and sisters at the front windows of my mother's carriage, I remember one un- varying set of images before us. The postilion (for so were all carriages then driven) was employed, not by fits and starts, but always and eternally, in quartering, i. e. in crossing from side to side, according to the casualties of the ground. Before you stretched a wintry length of lane, with ruts deep enough to fracture the leg of a horse, filled to the brim with standing pools of rain water ; and the collateral chambers of these ruts kept from becoming TRAVELLING. 173 confluent by thin ridges, such as the Romans called lirce^ to maintain the footing upon which lirce, so as not to swerve, (or, as the Romans would say, delirare,) was a trial of some skill both for the horses and their postilion. It was, indeed, next to impossible for any horse, on such a narrow crust of separation, not to grow delirious in the Roman metaphor ; and the nervous anxiety which haunted me when a child, was much fed by this very image so often before my eye, and the sympathy with which I followed the motion of the docile creature's legs. Go to sleep at the beginning of a stage, and the last thing you saw was the line of wintry pools, the poor off- horse plant- ing his steps with care, and the cautious postilion gently applying his spur, whilst manoeuvring across his system of grooves with some sort of science that looked like a gipsy's palmistry ; so equally unintelligible to me were his motions, in what he sought and in what he avoided. Whilst reverting to these remembrances of my child- hood, I may add, by way of illustration, and at the risk of gossipping, a brief notice of my very first journey. I might be then seven years old. A young gentleman, the son of a wealthy banker, had to return home for the Christmas holidays to a town in Lincolnshire, distant from the public school, where he was pursuing his education, about a hundred miles. This school was in the neighbor- hood of G — nh — y, my father's house. There were at that time no coaches in that direction ; now there are many every day. The young gentleman advertised for a person to share the expense of a post-chaise. By accident, or chiefly, I believe, out of compliment to the gentleness of my manners, and the depth of my affections, I had an invita- tion of some standing to the same town, where I happened to have a female relation of mature age, besides some youth- ful cousins. The two travellers elect soon heard of each 174 LIFE AND MANNERS. other, and the arrangement was easily completed. It was my earliest migration from the paternal (or as I ought then to call it, the maternal) roof; and the anxieties of pleasure, too tumultuous, with some slight sense of unde- fined fears, combined to agitate my childish feelings. I had a vague slight apprehension of my fellow-traveller, whom I had never seen, and whom my nursery-maid, when dressing me, had described in no veiy amiable colors. But a good deal more I thought of Sherwood Forest, which, as I had been told, we should cross after the night set in. At six o'clock I descended, and not, as usual, to the children's room, but, on this special morning of my life, to a room called the breakfast-room ; where I found a blazing fire, candles lighted, and the whole breakfast equipage, as if for my mother, set out, to my astonishment, for no greater personage than myself. The scene being in England, and on a December morning, I need scarcely say that it rained ; the rain beat violently against the windows, the wind raved ; and an aged ser- vant, who did the honors of the breakfast table, pressed me urgently and often to eat. I need not say that I had no appetite : the fulness of my heart, both from busy anticipation, and from the parting which was at hand, had made me incapable of any other thought, or feeling, or attention, but such as pointed to the coming journey. All circumstances in travelling, all scenes and situations of a representative and recurring character, are indescribably affecting, connected, as they have been, in so many my- riads of minds, more especially in a land which is sending off for ever its flowers and blossoms to a clime so remote as that of India, with heart-rending separations, and with farewells never to be repeated. But amongst them all none cleaves to my own feelings so indelibly, from having repeatedly been concerned, either as witness, or as TRAVELLING. 175 a principal party in its little drama, as the early breakfast, on a wintry morning, long before the darkness has given way, when the golden blaze of the hearth, and the bright glitter of candles, with female ministrations of gentleness more touching than on common occasions, all conspire to rekindle, as it were for a farewell gleam, the holy memorials of household affections. And many have, doubtless, had my feelings ; for, I believe few readers will ever forget the beautiful manner in which Mrs. Inch- bald has treated such a scene in the winding-up of the first part of her ' Simple Story,' and the power with which she has invested it. Thirty-nine, or possibly, I believe, even forty years, have passed since that December morning in my own life to which I am now recurring, and yet, even to this mo- ment, I recollect the audible throbbing of heart, the leap and rushing of blood, with which, during a deep lull of the wind, the aged attendant said, without hurry or agitation, but with something of a solemn tone, * That is the sound of wheels. I hear the chaise. Mr. H — 11 will be here directly.' The road ran, for some distance, by a course pretty nearly equidistant from the house, so that the groaning of the wheels continued to catch the ear, as it swelled upon the wind, for some time without much alter- ation. At length a right-angled turn brought the road continually and rapidly nearer to the gates of the grounds, which had purposely been thrown open. At this point, however, a long career of raving arose ; all other sounds were lost ; and, for some time, I began to think we had been mistaken, when suddenly the loud trampling of horses' feet, as they whirled up the sweep below the win- dows, followed by a peal long and loud upon the bell, announced, beyond question, the summons for my depar- ture. The door being thrown open, steps were heard 176 LIFE AND MANNERS. loud and fast ; and in the next moment, ushered by a servant, stalked forward, booted and fully equipped, my travelling companion — if such a word can at all express the relation between the arrogant young blood, just fresh from assuming the toga virilis, and a modest child of profound sensibilities, but shy and reserved beyond even English reserve. The aged servant, with apparently con- strained civility, presented my mother's compliments to him, with a request that he would take breakfast. This he hastily and rather peremptorily declined. Me, how- ever, he condescended to notice with an approving nod, slightly inquiring if I were the young gentleman who shared his post-chaise. But, without allowing time for an answer, and striking his boot impatiently with a riding- whip, he hoped I was ready. c Not until he has gone up to my mistress,' replied my old protector, in a tone of some asperity. Thither I ascended. What counsels and directions I might happen to receive at the maternal toilet, naturally I have forgotten. The most memorable circum- stance to me was, that I, who had never till that time possessed the least or most contemptible coin, received, in a net-work purse, five glittering guineas, with instructions to put three immediately into Mr. H — ll's hands, and the rest when he should call for them. The rest of my mother's counsels, if deep, were not long ; she, who had always something of a Roman firm- ness, shed more milk of roses, I believe, upon my cheeks than tears ; and why not ? What should there be to her corresponding to an ignorant child's sense of pathos, in a little journey of about a hundred miles ? Outside her door, however, there awaited me some silly creatures, women of course, old and young, from the nursery and the kitchen, who gave and who received those fervent kisses, which wait only upon love without awe and with- TRAVELLING. 177 out disguise. Heavens ! what rosaries might be strung for the memory of sweet female kisses, given without check or art, before one is of an age to value them ! And again, how sweet is the touch of female hands as they array one for a journey ! If anything needs fastening, whether by pinning, tying, or any other contrivance, how perfect is one's confidence in female skill ; as if by mere virtue of her sex and feminine instinct, a woman could not possibly fail to know the best and readiest way of adjusting every case that could arise in dress. Mine was hastily completed amongst them ; each had a pin to draw from her bosom, in order to put something to rights about my throat or hands ; and a chorus of God bless hums' was arising, when, from below, young Mephistopheles murmured an impatient groan, and perhaps the horses snorted. I found myself lifted into the chaise : counsels about the night and the cold, flowing in upon me, to which Mephistopheles lis- tened with derision or astonishment. I and he had each our separate corner; and, except to request that I would draw up one of the glasses, I do not think he conde- scended to address one word to me until dusk, when we found ourselves rattling into Chesterfield, having barely accomplished four stages, or forty or forty-two miles, in about nine hours. This, except on the Bath or great north roads, may be taken as a standard amount of per- formance, in 1794, (the year I am recording,) and even ten years later. In these present hurrying and tumul- tuous days, whether time is really of more value, I cannot say ; but all people on the establishment of inns are required to suppose it of the most awful value. Now-a-days, no sooner have the horses stopped at the gateway of a posting-house, than a summons is passed down to the stables ; and in less than one minute, upon a great road, the horses next in rotation, always ready 178 LIFE AND MANNERS. harnessed, when expecting to come on duty, are heard trotting down the yard. « Putting to,' and transferring the luggage, (supposing your conveyance a common post- chaise,) once a work of at least twenty minutes, is now easily accomplished in three. And scarcely have you paid the ex-postilion before his successor has mounted ; the ostler is standing ready with the steps in his hands, to receive his invariable sixpence ; the door is closed ; the representative waiter bows his acknowledgment for the house, and you are off at a pace never less than ten miles an hour ; the total detention at each stage not averaging above four minutes. Then (i. e. at the latter end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century) half an hour was the minimum of time spent at each change of horses. Your arrival produced a great bustle of unloading and unharnessing ; as a matter of course, you alighted and went into the inn ; if you sallied out to report progress, after waiting twenty minutes, no signs appeared of any stir about the stables. The most choleric person could not much expedite preparations, which loitered not so much from any indolence in the attendants as from faulty arrangements and total defect of foresight. The pace was such as the roads of that day allowed ; never so much as six miles an hour, except upon a very great road ; and then only by extra payment to the driver. Yet even under this comparatively miser- able system, how superior was England, as a land for the traveller, to all the rest of the world, Sweden only ex- cepted. Bad as were the roads, and defective as were all the arrangements, still you had these advantages ; no town so insignificant, no posting-house so solitary, but that at all seasons, except a contested election, it could furnish horses without delay, and without license to distress the neighboring farmers. On the worst road, and on a win- TRAVELLING. 179 ter's day, with no more than a single pair of horses, you generally made out sixty miles ; even if it were necessary to travel through the night, you could continue to make way, although more slowly ; and finally, if you were of a temper to brook delay, and did not exact from all persons the haste or energy of Hotspurs, the whole system in those days was full of respectability and luxurious ease, and well fitted to renew the image of the home you had left, if not in its elegancies, yet in all its substantial com- forts. What cozy old parlors in those days ! low-roofed, glowing with ample fires, and fenced from the blasts of doors by screens, whose foldings were, or seemed to be, infinite ! What motherly landladies ! won, how readily, to kindness the most lavish, by the mere attractions of simplicity and youthful innocence, and finding so much interest in the bare circumstance of being a traveller at a childish age ! Then what blooming young handmaidens, how different from the knowing and worldly demireps of modern high roads ! And sometimes gray-headed faithful waiters, how sincere and how attentive, by comparison with their flippant successors, the eternal ' Coming, sir, Coming, sir,' of our improved generation. Such an honest, old butler-looking servant waited on us during dinner at Chesterfield, carving for me, and urging me to eat. Even Mephistopheles found his pride relax under the influence of wine ; and when loosened from this restraint, his kindness was not deficient. To me he showed it in pressing wine upon me, without stint or measure. The elegancies which he had observed in such part of my mother's establishment, as could be supposed to meet his eye on so hasty a visit, had impressed him perhaps favorably towards myself: and could I have a little altered my age, or dismissed my excessive reserve, I doubt not that he would have admitted me, in default of a 180 LIFE AND MANNERS. more suitable comrade, to his entire confidence for the rest of the road. Dinner finished, and myself at least, for the first time in my childish life, somewhat perhaps over- charged with wine, the bill was called for — the waiter paid in the lavish style of antique England — and we heard our chaise drawing up under the gateway — the invariable custom of those days, by which you were spared the trouble of going into the street, stepping from the hall of the inn, right into your carriage. I had been kept back for a minute or so by the landlady, and her attendant nymphs, to be dressed and kissed ; and, on seating myself in the chaise which was well lighted with lamps, I found my lordly young principal in conversation with the land- lord, first upon the price of oats, which youthful horsemen always affect to inquire after with interest, but secondly, upon a topic more immediately at his heart — viz., the reputation of the road. At that time of day, when gold had not yet disappeared from the circulation, no traveller carried any other sort of money about him ; and there was consequently a rich encouragement to highwaymen, which vanished almost entirely with Mr. Pitt's act of 1797, for restricting cash payments. Property which could be identified and traced, was a perilous sort of plunder ; and from that time the free-trade of the road almost perished as a regular occupation. At this period it did certainly maintain a languishing existence ; here and there it might have a casual run of success : and, as these local ebbs and flows were continually shifting, perhaps, after all, the trade might lie amongst a small number of hands. Uni- versally, however, the landlords showed some shrewdness, or even sagacity, in qualifying, according to the circum- stances of the inquirer, the sort of credit which they allowed to the exaggerated ill-fame of the roads. Return- ing on this very road, some months after, with a timid TRAVELLING. 181 female relation, who put her questions with undisguised and distressing alarm, the very same people, one and all, assured her that the danger was next to nothing. Not so at present : rightly presuming that a haughty cavalier of eighteen, flushed with wine and youthful blood, would listen with disgust to a picture too amiable and pacific of the roads before him, Mr. Spread-Eagle replied with the air of one who feared more than he altogether liked to tell, and looking suspiciously amongst the strange faces lit up by the light of the carriage lamps — c Why, Sir, there have been ugly stories afloat ; I cannot deny it : and some- times, you know, Sir,' winking sagaciously, to which a knowing nod of assent was returned, ' it may not be quite safe to tell all one knows. But you can understand me. The forest, you are well aware, Sir, is the forest : it never was much to be trusted, by all accounts, in my father's time, and I suppose will not be better in mine. But you must keep a sharp lookout: and, Tom,' speaking to the postilion, ' mind, when you pass the third gate, to go pretty smartly by the thicket.' Tom replied in a tone of importance to this professional appeal. General valedic- tions were exchanged, the landlord bowed, and we moved off for the forest. Mephistopheles had his travelling case of pistols. These he began now to examine ; for some- times, said he, I have known such a trick as drawing the charge whilst one happened to be taking a glass of wine. Wine had unlocked his heart — the prospect of the forest and the advancing night excited him — and even of such a child as myself, he was now disposed to make a con- fidant. 4 Did you observe,' said he, c that ill-looking fellow, as big as a camel, who stood on the landlord's left hand ? ' Was it the man, I asked timidly, who seemed by his dress to be a farmer ? l Farmer, you call him ? Ah ! my young friend, that shows your little knowledge of the 182 LIFE AND MANNERS. world. He is a scoundrel, the bloodiest of scoundrels. And so I trust to convince him before many hours are gone over our heads.' Whilst saying this, he employed himself in priming his pistols : then, after a pause, he went on thus : — ' No, my young friend, this alone shows his base purposes — his calling himself a farmer. Farmer, he is not, but a desperate highwayman, of which I have full proof. I watched his malicious glances, whilst the landlord was talking ; and I could swear to his traitorous intentions.' So speaking, he threw anxious glances on each side as we continued to advance : we were both somewhat excited; he by the spirit of adventure, I by sympathy with him — and both by wine. The wine, how- ever, soon applied a remedy to its own delusions : three miles from the town we had left, both of us were in a bad condition for resisting highwaymen with effect — we were fast asleep. Suddenly a most abrupt halt awoke us — Mephistopheles felt for his pistols — the door flew open, and the lights of the assembled group announced to us that we had reached Mansfield. That night we went on to Newark, at which place about forty miles of our journey remained. This distance we performed, of course, on the following day, between breakfast and dinner. But it serves strikingly to illustrate the state of roads in England, whenever your affairs led you into districts a little retired from the capital routes of the public travelling — that, for one twenty-mile stage, viz., from Newark to Sleaford, they refused to take us forward with less than four horses. This was neither a fraud, as our eyes soon convinced us, (for even four horses could scarcely extricate the chaise from the deep sloughs which occasionally seamed the road for tracts of two or three miles in succession,) nor was it an accident of the weather. In all seasons the same demand was enforced, as my female protectress found in TRAVELLING. 183 conducting me back at a fine season of the year, and had always found in traversing the same route. The England of that date (1794) exhibited many similar cases. At present there is but one stage in all England, where a traveller, without regard to weight, is called upon to take four horses ; and that is at Ambleside, in going by the direct road to Carlisle. The first stage to Patterdale lies over the mountain of Kirkstone, and the ascent is not only toilsome, (continuing for above three miles, with occa- sional intermissions,) but at times is carried over summits too steep for a road by all the rules of engineering, and yet too little frequented to offer any means of repaying the cost of smoothing the difficulties. It was not until after the year 1815 that the main improvement took place in the English travelling system, so far as regarded speed. It is, in reality, to Mr. M'Adam that we owe it. All the roads in England, within a few years, were remodelled, and upon principles of Roman science. From mere beds of torrents, and systems of ruts, they were raised universally to the condition and appearance of gravel walks in private parks or shrub- beries. The average rate of velocity was, in consequence, exactly doubled — -ten miles an hour being now generally accomplished, instead of five. And at the moment when all further improvement upon this system had become hopeless, a new prospect was suddenly opened to us by railroads ; which again, considering how much they have already exceeded the maximum of possibility, as laid down by all engineers during the progress of the Manchester and Liverpool line, may soon give way to new modes of locomotion still more astonishing to our preconcep- tions. One point of refinement, as regards the comfort of trav- ellers, remains to be mentioned, in which the improve- 184 LIFE AND MANNERS. merit began a good deal earlier, perhaps by ten years, than in the construction of the roads. Luxurious as was the system of English travelling at all periods, after the general establishment of post-chaises, it must be granted that, in the circumstance of cleanliness, there was far from being that attention, or that provision for the travel- ler's comfort, which might have been anticipated from the general habits of the country. I, at all periods of my life, a great traveller, was witness to the first steps and the whole struggle of this revolution. Marechal Saxe pro- fessed always to look under his bed, applying his caution chiefly to the attempts of robbers. Now, if at the greatest inns of England you had, in the days I speak of, adopted this Marechal's policy of reconnoitring, what w r ould you have seen ? Beyond a doubt you would have seen what, upon all principles of seniority, was entitled to your ven- eration, viz., a dense accumulation of dust far older than yourself. A foreign author made some experiments upon the deposition of dust, and the rate of its accumulation, in a room left wholly undisturbed. If I recollect, a century would produce a stratum about half an inch in depth. Upon this principle, I conjecture that much dust which I have seen in inns, during the first four or five years of the present century, must have belonged to the reign of George II. It was, however, upon travellers by coaches that the full oppression of the old vicious system operated. The elder Scaliger mentions, as a characteristic of the English in his day, a horror of ablution in cold water. Nowhere could he and his foreign companions obtain the luxury of cold water for washing their hands, either before or after dinner. One day he and his party dined with the Lord Chancellor ; and now, thought he, for very shame they will allow us some means of purification. Not at all : the Chancellor viewed this outlandish novelty with the same TRAVELLING. 185 jealousy as others. However, on the earnest petition of Scaliger, he made an order that a basin or other vessel of cold water should be produced. His household bowed to this judgment, and a slop basin was cautiously introduced. c What ! ' said Scaliger, 8 only one, and we so many ? ' Even that one contained but a tea-cup full of water ; but the great scholar soon found that he must be thankful for what he had got. It had cost the whole strength of the English Chancery to produce that single cup of water; and for that day, no man in his senses could look for a second. Pretty much the same struggle, and for the same cheap reform, commenced about the year 1805-6. Post- chaise travellers could, of course, have what they liked, and generally they asked for a bed-room. It is of coach travellers I speak. And the particular innovation in ques- tion commenced, as was natural, with the mail-coach, which, from the much higher scale of its fares, com- manded a much more select class of company. I was a party to the very earliest attempts at breaking ground in this alarming revolution. Well do I remember the aston- ishment of some waiters, the indignation of others, the sympathetic uproars which spread to the bar, to the kitchen, and even to the stables, at the first opening of our extravagant demands. Sometimes even the landlady thought the case worthy of her interference, and came forward to remonstrate with us upon our unheard-of con- duct. But gradually we made way. Like Scaliger, at first we got but one basin amongst us, and that one was brought into the break fast- room ; but scarcely had two years revolved before we began to see four, and all appur- tenances, arranged duly in correspondence to the number of inside passengers by the mail : and, as outside travelling was continually gaining ground amongst the wealthier classes, more comprehensive arrangements were often 13 186 LIFE AND MANNERS. made ; though, even to this day, so much influence sur- vives, from the original aristocratic principle upon which public carriages were constructed, that, on the mail- coaches there still prevails the most scandalous inattention to the comfort, and even to the security, of the outside passengers : a slippery glazed roof frequently makes the sitting a matter of effort and anxiety, whilst the little iron side-rail of four inches in height serves no one purpose but that of bruising the thigh. Concurrently with these reforms in the system of personal cleanliness, others were silently making way through all departments of the house- hold economy. Dust, from the reign of George II. , became scarcer ; gradually it came to bear an antiquarian value : basins and vases de nuit lost their grim appear- ance, and looked as clean as in gentlemen's houses. And at length the whole system was so thoroughly ventilated and purified, that all good inns, nay, generally speaking, even second-rate inns, at this day, reflect the best features, to cleanliness and neatness, of well-managed private establishments. CHAPTER VII. MY BROTHER The reader who may have accompanied me in these wandering memorials of my one life and casual experi- ences, will be aware that I have brought them forward with little regard to their exact order of succession. In reference to that particular object which governed me in bringing them forward at all — an object which I shall, perhaps, explain pointedly in my closing paper — it was of very little importance to consult the chronologies of the case, except in so far as sometimes it may have happen- ed that the precise dates of a transaction were of some negative * value towards its verification. Consequently, I have wandered backwards and forwards, obeying any momentary impulse, as accident or sometimes even as purely verbal suggestions might arise to guide me. But, in many cases, this neglect of chronological order is not merely permitted — it is in fact to some degree inevitable ; for there are cases which, as a whole, connect themselves with my own life, at so many different eras, that, upon * ' Negative! — why negative value ? ' I hear some young readers ex- claim. As it is always of importance to cultivate accuracy of think- ing, and as I never wish to use words (wrong or right otherwise) without a distinct meaning, I reply that the chronology has a negative value in this sense: being false, it would have upset the story — although, being true, it did not establish that story. 188 LIFE AND MANNERS. any chronological principle of position, it would have been difficult to assign them a proper place — backwards or forwards they must have leaped, in whatever place they had been introduced ; and in their entire compass, from first to last, never could have been represented as properly belonging to any one present time, whensoever that had been selected. In reality, as a man must be aware beforehand, that, amongst the incidents of any life connected with each other by no logical connection, there can be no logical transitions from one to the other, so also, upon examining any particular life, one of those admira- ble lives, for instance, by Dr. Johnson, he will find that, in fact, the mere incidents are not connected, nor could be, any more than the items in an auctioneer's catalogue. How, then, is it that any seeming connection is effected ? How is it, at the least, that they read with a sense of unbroken continuous fluency ? Simply thus — and here lies the main secret of good biography : a moral is drawn, a philosophic inference, from some particular incident ; this inference, for the very reason that it is philosophic, will be large and general ; it may therefore be so framed as to include, by anticipation, some kindred thought, that will apply as an introducing moral to the succeeding incident ; or it may be itself so large and comprehensive an idea, so ambidexter in its sense, as to bear a Janus-like application, one aspect pointing backwards to No. 1, one forwards to No. 2. Thus, to take a coarse, obvious illustration : a story, we will suppose, is told of riotous profusion ; and next — without any imaginable natural connection or sequence, so that, left to themselves, they would read like parts of a technical advertisement — there comes a story of some private brawl in a tavern, ending in murder. But these detached notices are fused into unity, by a philosophic regret that the subject of memoir MY BROTHER. 189 should have been led into aspirations after a kind of society which had tempted him equally (looking back- wards to No. 1) into disproportionate expenses, and (look- ing forward to No. 2) amongst pretensions in point of rank, issuing naturally into insults unendurable by a gene- rous nature. Such a remark, interposed between the two incidents, Nos. 1 and 2, connects them — brings them into relation to a common principle, and makes into parts of one whole, incidents that would else have been utterly disjointed. And thus it is, by the setting, and not by the jewels set, that the whole course of a life is woven into one texture.* In fact, the connections of a life, when they are not of the vulgar order — in this year he did thus, in the next year he did thus — must resolve them- selves into intellectual abstractions — into those meditative reflections upon the whirling motions of life which rise from them like a perpetual spray or atmosphere, such as is thrown off from a cataract, and which invests all surrounding objects. Thus, and it is noticeable, the re- flections which arise may be made, and in the hands of a great poet like Shakspeare, are made, to anticipate and mould the course of what is to follow. The reflections, or reflex thoughts, pure reverberations, as it were, of what has passed, are so treated as to become anticipations and pregnant sources of what is to follow. They seem to be mere passive results or products from the narration ; * There is an essay by Mr. Coleridge, in his revised edition of ' The Friend,' which contains elements of a deep philosophy, and which he himself (I believe) regarded as the profoundest effort of thought he had published to the world, illustrating principles pretty similar to those, but with a reference not to the art of biography so much (not at all, perhaps) as to the art of narration ; and most admirably it is illustrated, in particular from the narration of Hamlet to Horatio, with respect to his sea adventures with Rosincrantz and Guildenstern. I speak from a recollection of nineteen years. 190 LIFE AND MANNERS. but, properly managed, they assume the very opposite relation, and predetermine the course of that narration. Now, if chronology is thus incapable of furnishing that principle of connection amongst the facts of a life, which, on some principle or other, must be had, in order to give any unity to its parts, and to take away the distraction of a mere catalogue ; if, at any rate, something more than chronology must be resorted to, then it follows that chro- nology may be safely neglected in general; and, a for- tiori, may be neglected with respect to those cases which, belonging to every place alike, therefore belong, accord- ing to the proverb, to no place at aii, or, (reversing this proverb,) belonging to no place by preferable right, do, in fact, belong to every place. The incidents I am now going to relate come under this rule ; for they form part of a story which fell in with my own life at many different points. It is a story taken from the life of my own brother — and I dwell on it with the more willingness, because it furnishes an indirect les- son upon a great principle of social life, now and for many years back sub judice, and struggling for its just supremacy — the principle that all corporal punishments whatsoever, and upon whomsoever inflicted, are hateful, and an indignity to our common nature — enshrined in the person of the sufferer. I will not here add one word upon the general thesis, but go on to the facts of this case, which, if all its incidents could be now recovered, was perhaps as romantic as any that ever has been told. But its moral interest depends upon this — that, simply out of one brutal chastisement, arose naturally the entire series of events which so very nearly made shipwreck of all hope for one individual, and did in fact poison the tran- quillity of a whole family for seven years. My next brother, younger by about four years than myself, was a MY BROTHER. 191 boy of exquisite and delicate beauty — delicate, that is, in respect to its feminine elegance and bloom ; for else, (as regards constitution) he turned out remarkably robust. In such excess did his beauty flourish during childhood, that those, who remember him and myself at the public school of Bath, will also remember the ludicrous molesta- tion in the streets, (for to him it was molestation,) which it entailed upon him — ladies stopping continually to kiss him. The relation with whom we came to Bath from a remote quarter of the kingdom, occupied at first the very apartments on the North Parade, just quitted by Edmund Burke at the point of death. That circumstance, or the expectation of finding Burke still there, brought for some weeks crowds of inquirers, many of whom saw the child- ish Adonis, then scarcely seven years old, and inflicted upon him what he viewed as the martyrdom of their caresses. Thus began a persecution which continued as long as his years allowed it. The most brilliant com- plexion that could be imagined, the features of an Anti- nous, and perfect symmetry of figure at that period of his life (afterwards he lost it) made him the subject of never-ending admiration to the whole female population, gentle and simple, who passed him in the streets. In after days, he had the grace to regret his own perverse and scornful coyness — what Roman poets would have called his protervitas. But, at that time, so foolishly insensible was he to the honor, that he used to kick and struggle with all his might to liberate himself from the gentle violence which was continually offered, and he renewed the scene so elaborately painted by Shakspeare, of the conflicts between Venus and Adonis. For two years, this continued a subject of irritation the keenest on the one side, and of laughter on the other, between my brother and his uglier school-fellows, myself being amongst them. 192 LIFE AND MANNERS. Not that we had the slightest jealousy on the subject — far from it : it struck us all (as it generally does strike boys) in the light of an attaint upon the dignity of a male, that he should be subjected to the caressses of women, without leave asked : this was felt to be a badge of childhood, and a proof that the object of such fondling tenderness, so public and avowed, must be regarded in the light of a baby — not to mention that the very foundation of all this distinction, a beautiful face, is as a male distinction re- garded in a very questionable light by multitudes, and often by those most who are the possessors of that dis- tinction. Certainly that was the fact in my brother's case. Not one of us could feel so pointedly as himself the ridicule of his situation ; nor did he cease, when increas- ing years had liberated him from that practical expression of homage to his beauty, to regard the beauty itself as a degradation ; nor could he bear to be flattered upon it, though, in reality, it did him service in after distresses, when no other endowment whatsoever would have been availing. Often, in fact, do men's natures sternly con- tradict the promise of their features ; for no person would have believed that, under the blooming loveliness of a Narcissus, lay shrouded, as I firmly believe there did, the soul of a hero ; as much courage as a man could have, with a capacity of patient submission to hardship, and of wrestling with calamity, that ' is rarely found amongst the endowments of youth. I have reason, also, to think that the state of degradation in which he believed himself to have passed his childish years, from the sort of public petting which I have described, and his strong re- coil from it as an insult, went much deeper than was supposed, and had much to do in his subsequent conduct, and in nerving him to the strong resolutions he adopted. He seemed to resent as an original insult of Nature, the MY BROTHER. 193 having given him a false index of character in his fem- inine beauty, and to take a pleasure in contradicting it. Had it been in his power, I am sure he would have spoiled it. Certain it is, that from the time he reached his elev- enth birthday, he had begun already to withdraw himself from the society of all other boys — to fall into long fits of abstraction — and to throw himself upon his own resources in a way neither usual nor necessary. School- fellows of his own age and standing — those even who were the most amiable — he shunned ; and, many years after his disappearance, I found, in his handwriting, a col- lection of fragments, couched in a sort of wild lyrical verses, presenting, unquestionably, the most extraordinary evidences of a proud, self-sustained mind, consciously concentring his own hopes in himself and abjuring the rest of the world, that can ever have emanated from so young a person ; since, upon the largest concession, and supposing them to have been written on the eve of his quitting England, which, however, w r as hardly compatible with the situation where they were found — even in that case, they must have been written at the age of thirteen. I have often speculated on the subject of these mysterious compositions ; they were of a nature to have proceeded rather from some mystical quietist, such as Madame Guyon, if one can suppose the union with this rapt devo- tion of a rebellious spirit of worldly aspiration : passion- ate apostrophes there were, to nature and the powers of nature ; and what seemed strangest of all was — that, in style, not only were they free from all tumor and inflation which might have been looked for in so young a writer, but were even wilfully childish and colloquial in a pathetic degree — in fact, in point of tone, allowing for the differ- ence between a narrative poem and a lyrical, they some- 194 LIFE AND MANNERS. what resembled that very beautiful and little-known* poem of George Herbert, in which he describes symbol- ically to a friend, under the form of treacherous ill usage he had suspected, the religious processes by which a soul is weaned from the world. Taken as a whole, they most remind me of ■ Lewti,' a joint poem by Coleridge and Wordsworth. The most obvious solution of the mystery would be, to suppose these fragments to have been copied from some obscure author : but, besides that no author could have remained obscure in this age of elaborate re- search, who had been capable of sighs, (for such I may call them,) drawn up from such well-like recesses of feeling, and expressed with such dithyrambic fervor and exquisite simplicity of language — there was another testimony to their being the productions of him who owned the pen- manship ; which was, that some of the papers exhibited the whole process of creation and growth, such as era- sures, substitutions, doubts expressed as to this and that form of expression, together with references backwards and forwards. Xow, that the handwriting was my brother's, admitted of no doubt whatsoever. I now go on with his story. — In 1S00, my visit to Ireland, and visits to other places subsequently, separated me from him for above a year. In 1S01, we were at very different schools: I in the highest class of a great public school — he at a very sequestered parsonage in a northern county. This situation, probably, fed and cherished his melancholy habits ; for he had no society except that of a younger brother, who would give him no disturbance at all. The development of our national resources had not yet gone so far as absolutely to exterminate from the map of Eng- * This poem, from great admiration of its mother English, and to illustrate some ideas upon style, Mr. Coleridge republished in his Bio- grapkia Liter aria. MY BROTHER. 195 land everything like a heath, a breezy down, (such as gave so peculiar a character to the counties of Wilts, Somerset, Dorset, &c.,) or even a village common. Heaths were yet to be found in England, not so spacious, indeed, as the landes of France, but as wild and romantic. In such a situation my brother lived, and under the tuition of a clergyman, retired in his habits, and even ascetic, but gentle in his manners. (To that I can speak myself; for, in the winter of 1801, I dined with him, and I found that his yoke was, indeed, a mild one ; since, even to my youngest brother, a headstrong child of seven, he used no stronger remonstrance in urging him to some essential point of duty, than ' Do be persuaded, sirS) Here, there- fore was the best of all possible situations for my brother's wayward and haughty nature. The clergyman was learned, quiet, absorbed in his studies ; humble and mod- est beyond the proprieties of his situation ; and treating my brother in all points as a companion : whilst, on the other hand, my brother was not the person to forget the respect due, by a triple title, to a clergyman, a scholar, and his own preceptor — one, besides, who so little thought of exacting it. How happy might all parties have been — what suffering, what danger, what years of miserable anxiety might have been spared to all who were interested — had the guardians and executors of my father's will thought fit to ' let well alone ! ' But, ' per star meglio? * they chose to remove my brother from this gentle recluse to an active, bustling man of the world, the very anti-pole in character. What might be the pre- tensions of this gentleman to scholarship, I never had any means of judging ; and, considering that he must now, (if * The well-known Italian epitaph — { Statm bene: ma, per starmeglio, sto qui.' 196 LIFE AHS MANNERS. living at all,) at a distance of thirty-six years, be gray- headed, I shall respect his age so far as to suppress his name. He was of a class now annually declining (and I hope, rapidly) to extinction. Thanks be to God, in that point, at least, for the dignity of human nature, that, amongst the many, many cases of reform held by some of us, or destined, however, in defiance of all opinions, eventually to turn out chimerical, this one, at least, never can be defeated, injured, or eclipsed. As man grows more intellectual, the power of managing him by his in- tellect and his moral nature, in utter contempt of all appeals to his mere animal instincts of pain, must go on pari passu. And, if a ■ Te Deum,' or an ■ O, Jubilate ! ' were to be celebrated by all nations and languages for any one advance and absolute conquest over wrong and error won by human nature in our times — yes, not excepting 1 The bloody writing by all nations torn ? — the abolition of the commerce in slaves — to my thinking, that festival should be for the mighty progress made towards the suppression of brutal, bestial modes of pun- ishment. Nay, I may call them worse than bestial ; for a man of any goodness of nature does not willingly or needlessly resort to the spur or the lash with his horse or with his hound. But, with respect to man, if he will not be moved or won over by conciliatory means, by means that presuppose him a reasonable creature, then let him die, confounded in his own vileness : but let not me, let not the man (that is to say) who has him in his power, dishonor himself by inflicting punishments, violating that imaore of human nature which., not in anv vague rhetori- cal sense, but upon a religious principle of duty, (the human person is expressly exalted in Scripture, under MY BROTHER. 197 the notion that it is 4 the temple of the Holy Ghost,') ought to be a consecrated thing in the eyes of all good men ; and of this, we may be assured — this, which I am now going to say, is more sure than day or night — that, in proportion as man, as man, is honored, raised, exalted, trusted, in that proportion will he become more worthy of honor, of exaltation, of trust. Well, this schoolmaster had very different views of man and his nature. He not only thought that physical co- ercion was the one sole engine by which man could be managed, but — on the principle of that common maxim which declares that, when two schoolboys meet, with powers at all near to a balance, no peace can be expected between them until it is fairly put to the trial, and settled who is the master — on that same principle, he fancied that no pupil could adequately or proportionably reverence his master, until he had settled the precise proportion of superiority in animal powers by which his master was in advance of himself. Strength of blows only could ascer- tain that : and, as he was not very nice about creating his opportunities, as he plunged at once ' in medias res? and more especially when he saw or suspected any rebel- lious tendencies, he soon picked a quarrel with my un- fortunate brother. Not, be it observed, that he much cared for a well-looking or respectable quarrel. No. I have been assured that, even when the most fawning obsequiousness had appealed to his clemency, in the per- son of some timorous new-comer, appalled by the reports he had heard — even in such cases, (deeming it wise to impress, from the beginning, a salutary awe of his Jovian thunders,) he made a practice of doing thus : — He would speak loud, utter some order, not very clearly, perhaps, as respected the sound, but with perfect perplexity as regarded the sense, to the timid, sensitive boy upon 198 LIFE AND MANNERS. whom he intended to fix a charge of disobedience. ' Sir, if you please, what was it that you said ? ' — l What was it that I said ? What ! playing upon my words ? Chop- ping logic ? Strip, sir ; strip this instant.' Thencefor- ward this timid boy became a serviceable instrument in his equipage. Not only was he a proof, even without co-operation on the master's part, that extreme cases of submission could not insure mercy, but also he, this boy, in his own person, breathed forth, at intervals, a dim sense of awe and worship — the religion of fear — towards the grim Moloch of the scene. Hence, as by electrical con- ductors, was conveyed throughout every region of the establishment a tremulous sensibility that vibrated towards the centre. Different, O Rowland Hill ! are the laws of thy establishment ; far other are the echoes heard amid the ancient halls of Bruce. There it is possible for the timid child to be happy — for the child destined to an early grave to reap his brief harvest in peace. Where- fore were there no such asylums in those days ? Man flourished then, as now, in beauty and in power. Where- fore did he not put forth his power upon establishments that might cultivate happiness as well as knowledge ? Wherefore did no man cry aloud — 1 Give to the morn of youth its natural blessedness ? ' Well : why or wherefore it will never be made clear, but — so it was — these things were not ; or, if they were at all, in small local institutions, scarcely heard of beyond a few individuals, and comprehending, perhaps, no more aliens than that quiet family in which my two brothers were living — viz., exactly those two. Meantime, the elder of these two, in an evil hour, having quitted that most quiet of human sanctuaries, having forfeited that peace which possibly he was never to retrieve, fell (as I MY BROTHER. 199 have said) into the power of this Moloch. And this Moloch upon him illustrated the laws of his establishment : him also, the gentle, the beautiful, but also the proud, the arrogant, he beat — beat brutally — kicked, trampled on ! In two hours from that time, my brother was on the road to Liverpool. Painfully he made out his way to Liverpool, having not much money, and with a sense of total abandonment which made him feel that all he might have would prove little enough for his purposes. Not many weeks before this time, we had travelled together, we three brothers, over part of this very road, in a post- chaise from Chester to the point at which our roads diverged. Reaching the inn, we (that is, this brother and myself) sat down and wept : we were now to part. We wept ; and the youngest, who understood not our grief, wept also ; but we understood it well. We had no supe- riors who could or would enter into our wishes. Had we learned to feel sensibly the shortness of time, we might have cared little for this. Five years and a half to me, nine and a half to the elder of my two brothers, would bring us to the brink of our inheritance ; and then we might be happy, according to the mode of our choice. But to us these intervals were so long that we should have regarded them as sensible expressions of the infinite ; and, therefore, we did not think of them at all. We wept, because we feared impending changes which might justify our tears, and because, at our ages, we were help- less against injuries that might be meditated. We parted — it was about sunset ; each party entered a post-chaise at the same moment — my two brothers into one, I alone into the other. There we set off together : waved our hands to each other, as our roads diverged from the little town of Altrincham ; and never again did either party see the other, till ten long years were past. 200 LIFE AND MANNERS. My brother went to an inn, after his long, long journey- to Liverpool, foot-sore — (for he had walked through many days, and, from ignorance of the world, combined with excessive shyness — oh ! how shy do people become from pride ! — had not profited by those well-known in- cidents upon English high-roads — return post-chaises, stage-coaches, led horses, or wagons) — foot-sore and eager for sleep. Sleep, supper, breakfast in the morning — all these he had ; so far his slender finances reached ; and for these he paid the treacherous landlord : who then proposed to him that they should take a walk out together, by way of looking at the public buildings and the docks. It seems the man had noticed mv brother's beauty, some circumstances about his dress inconsistent with his mode of travelling, and also his style of conver- sation. Accordingly, he wiled him along from street to street, until they reached the Town Hall. ' Here seems to be a fine building,' said this Jesuitical knave, as if it had been some recent discovery — a sort of Luxor or Palmyra, that he had unexpectedly lit upon amongst the undiscovered parts of Liverpool — ' Here seems to be a fine building ; shall we go in and ask leave to look at it ? ' My brother thinking less of the spectacle than the specta- tor, whom, in a wilderness of man, naturally he wished to make his friend, consented readily. In they went ; and, by the merest accident, Mr. Mayor and the town-council were then sitting. The treacherous landlord communi- cated privately an account of his suspicions to his Wor- ship. He himself conducted my brother, under pretence of discovering the best station for picturesque purposes, to the particular box for prisoners at the bar. This was not suspected by the poor boy, not even when Mr. Mayor began to question him. He still thought it an accident, though doubtless he blushed excessively on being ques- MY BROTHER. 201 tioned, and questioned so impertinently, in public. The object of the Mayor and of other Liverpool gentlemen then present [this happened in 1802] was, to ascertain my brother's real rank and family : for he persisted in representing himself as a poor wandering boy. Various means were vainly tried to elicit this information ; until at length — like the wily Ulysses, who mixed with his pedler's budget of female ornaments and attire, a few arms, by way of tempting Achilles to a self-detection in the court of Lycomedes — one gentleman counselled the Mayor to send for a Greek Testament. This was done ; the Testament was presented open at St. John's Gospel to my brother, and he was requested to say whether he knew in what language that book was written ; or whether per- haps he could furnish them with a translation from the page before him. Human vanity in this situation was hardly proof against such an appeal. The poor boy fell into the snare : he construed a few verses ; and immedi- ately he was consigned to the care of a gentleman who won from him by kindness what he had refused to impor- tunities or menaces. His family he confessed at once, but not his school. An express was therefore forwarded from Liverpool to our nearest male relation — a military man, then by accident on leave of absence from a remote colony. He came over, took my brother back, (looking upon the whole as a boyish frolic of no permanent impor- tance,) made some stipulations in his behalf for indemnity from punishment, and immediately returned home. Left to himself, the grim tyrant of the school easily evaded the stipulations, and repeated his brutalities more fiercely than before — now acting in the double spirit of tyranny and revenge. In a few hours my brother was again on the road to Liv- erpool. But not on this occasion did he resort to any inn, 14 202 LIFE AND MANNERS. I or visit any treacherous hunter of the picturesque. He of- fered himself to no temptations now, nor to any risks. He went right onwards to the docks, addressed himself to a grave elder master of a trading vessel, bound upon a dis- tant voyage, and instantly procured an engagement. The skipper was a good and sensible man, and (as it turned out) a sailor accomplished in all parts of his profession. The ship which he commanded was a South Sea whaler belonging to Lord Grenville, whether lying at Liverpool or in the Thames at that moment, I am not sure. However, they soon afterwards sailed. For somewhat more than two years, my brother con- tinued under the care of this good man, who was won by his appearance, and by some resemblance which he fan- cied in his features to a son whom he had lost. Fortu- nate, indeed, for the poor boy, was this interval of fatherly superintendence ; for, under him, he was not only pre- served from the perils which afterwards besieged him, until his years had made him more capable of confronting them ; but also he had thus an opportunity, which he im- proved to the utmost, of making himself acquainted with the two separate branches of his profession — navigation and seamanship, qualifications which are not very often united. After the death of this captain, my brother ran through many wild adventures ; until at length, after a severe action fought off the coast of Peru, the armed merchant- man in which he then served was captured by pirates. Most of the crew were massacred. My brother, on account of the important services he could render, was spared ; and with these pirates, cruising under a black flag, and perpetrating unnumbered atrocities, he was obliged to sail for the next two years and a half; nor MY BROTHER. 203 could he in all that period find any opportunity for effect- ing his escape. During this long expatriation, let any thoughtful reader imagine the perils of every sort which besieged one so young, so inexperienced, so sensitive, and so haughty ; perils to his life, (but these it was the very expression of his unhappy situation, were those least to be mourned for ;) perils to his good name, going the length of abso- lute infamy — since, if the piratical ship had been cap- tured by a British man-of-war, he might have found it impossible to clear himself of a voluntary participation in the bloody actions of his shipmates; and, on the other hand, (a case equally probable in the regions which they frequented,) supposing him to have been captured by a Spanish guar da costa, he would scarcely have been able, from his ignorance of the Spanish language, to draw even a momentary attention to the special circumstances of his own situation ; he would have been involved in the gen- eral presumptions of the case, and would have been executed in a summary way, upon the prima facie evi- dence against him, that he did not appear to be in the condition of a prisoner ; and, if his name had ever again reached his country, it would have been in some sad list of ruffians, murderers, traitors to their country ; and even these titles, as if not enough in themselves, aggravated by the name of pirate, which at once includes them all, and surpasses them all. These were perils sufficiently dis- tressing at any rate ; but last of all, came others even more appalling — the perils of moral contamination, in that excess which might be looked for from such associates: not, be it recollected, a few wild notions or lawless prin- ciples adopted into his creed of practical ethics, but that brutal transfiguration of the entire character, which occurs, for instance, in the case of the young gipsy son of 204 LIFE AND MANNERS. Effie Deans ; a change, making it impossible to rely upon the very holiest instincts of the moral nature, and consign- ing its victim to hopeless reprobation. Murder itself might have lost its horrors to one who must have been but too familiar with the spectacle, if not forced into the per- petration w r ith his own youthful hands, of massacre by wholesale upon unresisting crews, upon passengers en- feebled by sickness, or upon sequestered villagers, roused from their slumbers by the glare of conflagration reflected from gleaming cutlasses, and from the faces of demons. This fear it w T as — a fear like this, as, I have often thought — which must, amidst her other woes, have been the Aaron woe that swallowed up all the rest to the unhappy Marie Antoinette. This must have been the sting of death to her maternal heart, the grief paramount, the 'crowning' grief — the prospect, namely, that her royal boy would not be dismissed from the horrors of royalty, to peace and humble innocence ; but that his fair cheek w r ould be ravished by vice as well as sorrow ; that he would be tempted into cursing, drinking, and every mode of moral pollution ; until, like poor Constance with her young Arthur, but for a sadder reason, even if it were possible that the royal mother should see her son in ' the courts of heaven,' she would not know again one so fear- fully transfigured. This prospect for the royal Constance of revolutionary France, was but too. painfully fulfilled ; as we are taught to guess, even from the faithful records of the Duchesse D'Angouleme. The young Dauphin, to the everlasting infamy of his keepers, was so trained as to become loathsome for coarse and vulgar brutality, as well as for habits of uncleanliness, to all who approached him — one purpose of his guilty tutors being to render royalty and august descent contemptible in his person. And, in fact, they were so far likely to succeed in this MY BROTHER. 205 purpose, for the moment, and to the extent of an indi- vidual case, that, upon that account alone, but still more for the sake of the poor child, the most welcome news with respect to him — him whose birth * had drawn anthems of exultation from twenty-five millions of men — was the news of his death. And what else can well be expected for children suddenly withdrawn from parental tenderness, and thrown upon their own guardianship at such an age as from ten to fourteen, an age combining the separate perils of childhood and raw manhood. But, in my brother's case, all the adverse chances, overwhelm- ing as they seemed, were turned aside by some good angel ; all had failed to harm him ; and he came out unsinged from the fiery furnace. I have said that he would not have appeared to any capturing ship as standing in the situation of prisoner amongst the pirates,, nor was he such in the sense of being confined. He moved about, when on board ship, in free- * To those who are open to the impression of omens, there is a most striking one on record with respect to the birth of this ill-fated Prince, not less so than the falling off of the head from the cane of Charles J. at his trial, or the same King's striking a medal, hearing the image of an oak tree, with this prophetic inscription, ' Seris nepotibus umbram. 1 At the very moment when, (according to immemorial usage) the birth, of a child was in the act of annunciation to the great officers of State assembled in the Queen's bed-chamber, and when a private signal from a lady had made known the glad tidings that it was a Dauphin, (the first child having been a princess, to the signal disappointment of the nation) the whole frame of carved wood-work at the back of the Queen's bed, representing the crown and other regalia of France, with the Bour- bon lilies, came rattling down in ruins. There is another and more direct ill-omen, connected, perhaps, with the birth of this prince; in fact, a distinct prophecy of his ruin — a prophecy that he should survive his father, and yet not reign — which seems so overladen with mystery, that one is perplexed in what light to view it ; and the more so that the King (Louis XVIII.) who records it, obviously confounds the first Dauphin with the second. 206 LIFE AND MANNERS. dom ; but he was watched, never trusted on shore, unless under very peculiar circumstances ; and tolerated at all only because one accomplishment made him indispensa- ble to the prosperity of the ship. Amongst the various parts of nautical skill communicated to my brother by his first fatherly captain, was the management of chronome- ters. Several had been captured, some of the highest value, in the many prizes, European or American. My brother happened to be perfect in the skill of managing them ; and, fortunately for him, no other person amongst them had that skill even in its lowest degree. To this one qualification, therefore, (and ultimately to this only,) he was indebted for both safety and freedom ; since, though he might have been spared, in the first moments of car- nage, from other considerations, there is little doubt that, in some one of the innumerable brawls which followed through the years of his captivity, he would have fallen a sacrifice to hasty impulses of anger or wantonness, had not his safety been made an object of interest and vigi- lance to those in command, and to all who assumed any care for the general welfare. Much, therefore, it was that he owed to this accomplishment. Still, there is no good thing without its alloy ; and this great blessing brought along with it something worse than a dull duty — the necessity, in fact, of facing fears and trials to which the sailor's heart is pre-eminently sensible. All sailors, it is notorious, are superstitious ; partly, I suppose, from look- ing out so much upon the wilderness of waves, empty of all human life ; for mighty solitudes are generally fear- haunted and fear-peopled ; such, for instance, as the soli- tudes of forests, where, in the absence of human forms and ordinary human sounds, are discerned forms more dusky and vague, not referred by the eye to any known type, and sounds imperfectly intelligible. And, therefore, MY BROTHER. 207 are all German coal-burners, wood-cutters, &c, super- stitious. Now the sea is often peopled, amidst its ravings, with what seem innumerable human voices — such voices, or as ominous, as what were heard by Kubla Khan — 1 ancestral voices prophesying war ; ' oftentimes laughter mixes, from a distance, (seeming to come also from dis- tant times, as well as distant places,) with the uproar of waters ; and doubtless shapes of fear, or shapes of beauty not less awful, are at times seen upon the waves by the diseased eye of the sailor, in other cases besides the some- what rare one of calenture. This vast solitude of the sea being taken, therefore, as one condition of the super- stitious fear found so commonly among sailors, a second may be the perilous insecurity of their own lives — or, (if the lives of sailors, after all, by means of large immunities from danger in other shapes, are not so insecure as is sup- posed, though, by the way, it is enough for this result that, to themselves, they seem so,) yet at all events the inse- curity of the ships in which they sail. In such a case, in the case of battle, and in others where the empire of chance seems absolute, there the temptation is greatest to dally with supernatural oracles and supernatural means of consulting them. Finally, the interruption habitually of all ordinary avenues to information about the fate of their dearest relatives ; the consequent agitation which must often possess those who are re-entering upon home waters ; and the sudden burst, upon stepping ashore, of heart- shaking news in long accumulated arrears — these are cir- cumstances which dispose the mind to look out for relief towards signs and omens as one way of breaking the shock by dim anticipations. Rats leaving a vessel des- tined to sink, although the political application of it as a name of reproach is purely modern, must be ranked among the oldest of omens ; and perhaps the most sober- 208 LIFE AND MANNERS. minded of men might have leave to be moved with any augury of an ancient traditional order, such as had won faith for centuries, applied to a fate so interesting as that of the ship to which he was on the point of committing himself. Other causes might be assigned, causative of nautical superstition, and tending to feed it. But enough. It is well known that the whole family of sailors is super- stitious. My brother, poor Pink, (this was an old house- hold name, which he retained amongst us from an incident of his childhood,) was so in an immoderate degree. Being a great reader, (in fact, he had read everything in his mother tongue that was of general interest,) he was pretty well aware how general was the ridicule attached in our times to the subject of ghosts. But this — nor the rever- ence he yielded otherwise to some of those writers who had joined in that ridicule — any more had unsettled his faith in their existence, than the submission of a sailor in a religious sense to his spiritual counsellor upon the false and fraudulent pleasures of luxury, can ever disturb his remembrance of the virtues lodged in rum or tobacco. His own unconquerable, unanswerable experience, the blank realities of pleasure and pain, put to flight all argu- ments whatsoever that anchored only in his understanding. Pink used, in arguing the case with me, to admit that ghosts might be questionable realities in our hemisphere ; but c it's a different thing to the suthard* of the line.' And then he would go on to tell me of his own fearful experi- ence ; in particular of one many times renewed, and investigated to no purpose by parties of men communi- cating from a distance upon a system of concerted signals, in one of the Gallapagos Islands. These islands, which were visited, and I think described, by Dampier — and therefore must have been a haunt of the Buccaneers and Flibustiers in the latter part of the seventeenth century — MY BROTHER. 209 were so still of their more desperate successors, the Pirates, at the beginning of the lttth ; and for the same reason — the facilities they offer (rare in those seas) for procuring wood and water. Hither, then, the black flag often resorted ; and here, amidst these romantic solitudes — islands untenanted by man — oftentimes it lay furled up for weeks together ; rapine and murder had rest for a season ; and the bloody cutlass slept within its scabbard. When this happened, and when it became known before- hand that it would happen, a tent was pitched on shore for my brother, and the chronometers were transported thither for the period of their stay. The island selected for this purpose, amongst the many equally open to their choice, might, according to circum- stances, be that which offered the best anchorage, or that from which the re-embarkation was easiest, or that which allowed the readiest access to wood and water. But for some, or all of these advantages, the particular island most generally honored by the piratical custom and ' good-will,' was one, known to American navigators as 1 The Wood-cutter's Island.' There was some old tra- dition — and I know not but it was a tradition dating from the times of Dampier — that a Spaniard or an In- dian settler in this island, (relying, perhaps, too entirely upon the protection of perfect solitude,) had been mur- dered in pure wantonness by some of the lawless rovers who frequented this solitary archipelago. Whether it were from some peculiar atrocity of bad faith in the act, or from the sanctity of the man, or the deep solitude of the island, or with a view to the peculiar edification of mariners in these semi-Christian seas — so however it was, and attested by generations of sea- vagabonds, (for most of the armed roamers in these ocean Zaaras at one time were of a suspicious order,) that every night, duly 210 LIFE AND MANNERS. as the sun went down, and the twilight began to prevail, a sound arose — audible to other islands, and to every ship lying quietly at anchor in that neighborhood — of a wood-cutter's axe. Sturdy were the blows, and steady the succession in which they followed : some even fan- cied they could hear that sort of groaning respiration which is made by men who use an axe, or by those who in towns ply the 'three-man beetle' of Falstaff, as pa- viors ; echoes they certainly heard of every sound, from the profound woods and the sylvan precipices on the margin of the shores ; which, however, should rather indicate that the sounds were not supernatural, since, if a visual object, falling under hyper-physical or cata-phy- sical laws, loses its shadow by parity of argument, an audible object, in the same circumstances, should lose its echo. But this was the story : and amongst sailors there is as little variety of versions in telling any true sea-story, as there is in a log-book, or in ' The Flying Dutchman : ' literatim fidelity is, with a sailor, a point at once of re- ligious faith and worldly honor. The close of the story was — that after, suppose, ten or twelve minutes of hack- ing and hewing, a horrid crash was heard, announcing that the tree, if tree it were, that never yet was made visible to daylight search, had yielded to the old wood- man's persecution. It was exactly the crash, so familiar to many ears on board the neighboring vessels, which expresses the harsh tearing asunder of the fibres, caused by the weight of the trunk in falling ; beginning slowly, increasing rapidly, and terminating in one rush of rend- ing. This over — one tree felled 'towards his winter store ' — there was an interval : man must have rest ; and the old woodman, after working for more than a century, must want repose. Time enough to begin again after a quarter of an hour's relaxation. Sure enough, in MY BROTHER. 211 that space of time, again began, in the words of Comus, 4 the wonted roar amid the woods.' Again the blows become quicker, as the catastrophe drew nearer ; again the final crash resounded ; and again the mighty echoes travelled through the solitary forests, and were taken up by all the islands near and far, like Joanna's laugh amongst the Westmoreland hills, to the astonishment of the silent ocean. Yet, wherefore should the ocean be astonished — he that had heard this nightly tumult, by all accounts, for more than a century ? My brother, how- ever, poor Pink, was astonished, in good earnest, being, in that respect, of the genus attonitorum ; and as often as the gentlemen pirates steered their course for the Gal- lapagos, he would sink in spirit before the trials he might be summoned to face. No second person was ever put on shore with Pink, lest poor Pink and he might become jovial over the liquor, and the chronometers be broken or neglected ; for a considerable quantity of spirits was necessarily landed, as well as of provisions, because sometimes a sudden change of weather, or the sudden appearance of a suspicious sail, might draw the ship off the island for a fortnight. My brother could have pleaded his fears without shame ; but he had a character to main- tain with the sailors : he was respected equally for his seamanship* and his shipmanship. By the way, when * ■ Seamanship and shipmanship.' These are two functions of a sailor seldom separated in the mind of a landsman. The conducting a ship (causing her to choose a right path) through the ocean — that is one thing. Then there is the management of the ship within herself, the trimming of her sails, &c, (causing her to keep the line chosen,) that is another thing. The first is called seamanship ; the second might be called shipmanship: hut is (I believe) called navigation. They are perfectly distinct; one man rarely has both in perfection. Both may be illustrated from the rudder. The question is, suppose at the Cape of Good Hope, to steer for India: trust the rudder to him, as a seaman, 212 LIFE AND MANNERS. it is considered, that one half of a sailor's professional science refers him to the stars, (though it is true the other half refers him to the sails and shrouds of a ship,) just as in geodesical operations, one part is referred to heaven, and one to earth — when this is considered, another argu- ment arises for the superstition of sailors, so far as it is astrological. They who know (but know the on with- out knowing the Sta ti) that the stars have much to do in guiding their own movements, which are yet so far from the stars, and, to all appearance, so little connected with them, may be excused for supposing that the stars are connected astrologically with human destinies. But this by the way. The sailors, looking to Pink's double skill, and to his experience on shore, (more astonishing than all beside, being experience gathered amongst ghosts,) expressed an admiration which, to one who was also a sailor, had too genial a sound to be sacrificed, if it could be maintained at any price. Therefore it was, that Pink still clung, in spite of his terrors, to his shore appointment. But hard was his trial ; and many a time has he described to me one effect of it, when too long continued, or com- bined with darkness too intense. The wood-cutter would begin his operations soon after the sun had set ; but, uni- formly, at that time, his noise was less. Three hours after sunset, it had increased ; and, generally, at mid- night it was greatest, but not always. Sometimes the case varied thus far : that it greatly increased towards three or four o'clock in the morning ; and, as the sound grew louder, and thereby seemed to draw nearer, poor Pink's ghostly panic grew insupportable ; and he abso- who knows the passage whether within or without Madagascar. The question is to avoid a sunk rock : trust the rudder to him, as a navigator, who understands the art of steering to a nicety. MY BROTHER. 213 lutely crept from his pavilion, and its luxurious comforts, to a point of rock — a promontory — about half a mile off, from which he could see the ship. The mere sight of a human abode, though an abode of ruffians, comforted his panic. With the approach of daylight, the mysterious sounds ceased. Cock-crow there happened to be none, in those islands of the Gallapagos, or none in that par- ticular island ; though many cocks are heard crowing in the woods of America, and these, perhaps might be caught by spiritual senses ; or the wood-cutter may be supposed, upon Hamlet's principle, either scenting the morning air, or catching the sounds of Christian matin-bells, from some dim convent, in the depth of American forests. How- ever, so it was; the wood-cutter's axe began to intermit about the earliest approach of dawn ; and, as ■ light thick- ened'' * it ceased entirely. At nine, ten, or eleven o'clock in the forenoon, the whole appeared to have been a delu- sion ; but towards sunset, it revived in credit ; during twilight it strengthened ; and very soon afterwards, super- stitious panic was again seated on her throne. Such were the fluctuations of the case. Meantime, Pink, sitting on his promontory in early dawn, and consoling his terrors, by looking away from the mighty woods to the tranquil ship, on board of which (in spite of her secret black flag) the whole crew, murderers and all, were sleeping peace- fully — he, a beautiful English boy, chased away to the Antipodes from one early home by his sense of wounded honor, and from his immediate home by superstitious fear, recalled to my mind an image and a situation that had been beautifully sketched by Miss Bannerman in c Basil,' one of the striking (though, to rapid readers, somewhat unintelligible) metrical tales published about the beginning * 'Lisrht thickens.' — Macbeth. 214 LIFE AND MANNERS. of this century, under the name of Tales of Superstition and Chivalry. Basil is a ' rude sea-boy,' desolate and neglected from infancy, but with feelings profound from nature and fed by solitude. He dwells alone in a rocky cave ; but, in consequence of some supernatural terrors connected with a murder, arising in some way, (not very clearly made out,) to trouble the repose of his home, he leaves it in horror, and rushes in the gray dawn to the sea-side rocks ; seated on which he draws a sort of con- solation for his terrors, or of sympathy with his wounded heart, from that mimicry of life which goes on for ever amongst the raving waves. From the Gallapagos, Pink went often to Juan, (or, as he chose to call it, after Dam pier and others, John) Fer- nandez. Very lately (December, 1837) the newspapers of Europe informed us, and the story was current for full nine days, that this fair island had been swallowed up by an earthquake ; or, at least, that, in some way or other, it had disappeared. Had that story proved true, one pleasant bower would have perished — raised by Pink as a memorial expression of his youthful feelings either towards De Foe, or his visionary creature Robin- son Crusoe — but rather, perhaps, towards the substantial Alexander Selkirk ; for it was raised on some spot known or reputed by tradition to have been one of those most occupied as a home by Selkirk. I s.ay l rather towards Alexander Selkirk;' for there is a difficnlty to the judg- ment in associating Robinson Crusoe with this lovely island of the Pacific, and a difficulty even to the fancy. Why, it is hard to guessy or through what perverse con- tradiction to the facts, De Foe chose to place the ship- wreck of Robinson Crusoe upon the eastern side of the American continent. Now, not only was this in direct opposition to the realities of the case upon which he built, MY BROTHER. 215 as first reported (I believe) by Woodes Rogers, from the log-book of the Duke and Duchess — (a privateer fitted out, to the best of my remembrance, by the Bristol mer- chants, two or three years before the Peace of Utrecht ;) and so far the mind of any man acquainted with these circumstances was staggered, in attempting to associate this eastern wreck with this western island ; but a worse obstacle than this, because a moral one, (and what, by analogy, to an error against time, which we call an ana- chronism, and, if against the spirit of time, a moral anachronism, we might here term a moral anatopism,) is this — that, by thus perversely transferring the scene from the Pacific to the Atlantic, De Foe has transferred it from a quiet and sequestered to a populous and troubled sea — the Fleet Street or Cheapside of the navigating world, the great thoroughfare of nations — and thus has prejudiced the moral sense and the fancy against his fiction still more inevitably than his judgment, and in a way that was perfectly needless ; for the change brought along with it no shadow of compensation. My brother's wild adventures amongst these desperate sea-rovers were afterwards communicated in long letters to a female relative ;. and, even as letters, apart from the fearful burthen of their contents, I can bear witness that they had very extraordinary merit. This, in fact, was the happy result of writing from his heart ; feeling pro- foundly what he communicated, and anticipating the profoundest sympathy with all that he uttered from her whom he addressed. A man of business, who opened some of these letters, in his character of agent for my brother's five guardians, and who had not any special interest in the affair, assured me that, throughout the whole course of his life, he had never read anything so affecting, from the facts they contained, and from the 216 LIFE .AND MANNERS. sentiments which they expressed : above all. the veaming for that England which he remembered as the land of his youthful pleasures, but also of his youthful degradations. Three of the guardians were present at the reading of these letters, and were all affected to tears, notwithstand- ing they had been irritated to the uttermost by the course which both myself and my brother had pursued : a course which seemed to argue some defect of judg- ment, or of reasonable kindness, in themselves. These letters, I hope, are still preserved ; though they have been long removed from my control. Thinking of them, and their extraordinary merit, I have often been led to believe that every post-town, and many times in the course of a month, carries out numbers of beautifully written letters, and more from woman than from men ; not that men are to be supposed less capable of writing good letters : and, in fact, amongst all the celebrated letter-writers of past or present times, a large overbalance happens to have been men ; but that more frequently women write from their hearts ; and the very same cause operates to make female letters good, which operated at one period to make the diction of Roman ladies more pure than that of orators or professional cultivators of the Roman language — and which, at another period, in the Byzantine Court, operated to preserve the purity of the mother idiom within the nurseries and the female drawing-rooms of the palace, whilst it was corrupted in the forensic standards, and the academic — in the standards of the pulpit and the throne. With respect to Pink's yearning for England, that had been partially gratified in some part of his long exile: twice, as we learned lung afterwards, he had landed in England ; but such was his haughty adherence to his purpose, and such his consequent terror of being discov- MY BROTHER. 217 ered and reclaimed by his guardians, that he never attempted to communicate with any of his brothers or sisters. There he was wrong ; me they should have cut to pieces before I would have betrayed him. I, like him, had been an obstinate recusant to what I viewed as unjust pretensions of authority ; and, having been the first to raise* the standard of revolt, had been taxed by my guardians with having seduced Pink by my example. But that was untrue ; Pink acted for himself. However, he could know little of all this ; and he traversed England twice, without making an overture towards any commu- nication with his friends. Two circumstances of these journeys he used to mention ; both were from the port of London (for he never contemplated London but as a port) to Liverpool ; or, thus far I may be wrong, that one of the two might be (in the return order) from Liverpool to London. On the first of these journeys his route lay through Coventry ; on the other, through Oxford and * And here may be a fit place for mentioning a case of equal obstinacy, more worthy to be admired than mine, because without a shadow of self-interest to support it. When I quitted school in the manner recorded in the ' Confessions of an English Opium Eater, ' I left a large trunk behind me. This, knowing that I had not time to send it off before me, I confided to the care of a boy one class below me ; but, by thoughtful- ness and premature dignity of manner, on a level with any class. Im- mediately after my elopement was made known, this trunk was reclaimed by my guardians. They were men of weight even in that large town. The carrier was alarmed ; resisted at first ; but soon afterwards, sus- pecting that all the energy and the purse would be on one side, he showed symptoms of wavering ; and, doubtless, would have declared against my poor claims. But — and to this hour, thirty-six years dis- tant, I feel gratitude — at that critical moment, stepped forward this boy — this G— b— t, not perhaps much (if anything) above sixteen years old. In the face of all the menaces, planted with the carrier, lodged there, and registered, this boy held the carrier to his duty — challenged, defied him to swerve from it. And the issue was — that the carrier knocked under — the boy triumphed — the trunk was sent — I was saved from despair. This boy has since been Vice-Chancellor of Oxford. 15 1 218 LIFE AND MANNERS. Birmingham. In neither case, had he started with much money ; and he was going to have retired from the coach as the place of supping on the first night, (the journey then occupying two entire days and two entire nights.) when the passengers insisted on paying for him : that was a tribute to his beauty — not yet extinct. He mentioned this part of his adventures somewhat shyly, whilst going over them with a sailor's literal accuracy ; though, as a record belonging to what he viewed as childish years, he had ceased to care about it. On the other journey his experience was different, but equally testified to the spirit of kindness that is everywhere abroad. He had no money, on this occasion, that could purchase even a momentary lift by a stage-coach : as a pedestrian, he had travelled down to Oxford, occupying two days in the fifty-four or fifty-six miles which then measured the road from London, and sleeping in a farmer's barn without leave asked. Wearied and depressed in spirits, he had reached Oxford, hopeless of any aid, and with a deadly shame at the thought of asking it. But, somewhere in the High Street, and according to his very accurate sailor's description of that noble street, it must have been about the entrance of All Souls' College, he met a gentle- man — a gownsman, who (at the very moment of turning into the college gate) looked at Pink earnestly, and then gave him a guinea; saying at the time — 'I know what it is to be in your situation. You are a schoolboy, and von have run away from your school. Well, I was once in your situation, and I pity you.' The kind gowns- man, who wore a velvet cap with a silk gown, and must therefore have been what in Oxford is called a gentleman commoner, gave him an address at some college or other, Magdalen, he fancied, in after years, where he instructed him to call before he quitted Oxford. Had Pink done MY BROTHER. 219 this, and had he frankly communicated his whole story, very probably he would have received, not assistance merely, but the best advice for guiding his future motions. His reason for not keeping the appointment, was simply, that he was nervously shy ; and, above all things, jealous of being entrapped by insidious kindness into revelations that might prove dangerously circumstantial. Oxford had a mayor ; Oxford had a corporation ; Oxford had Greek Testaments past all counting ; and so, remembering past experiences, Pink held it to be the wisest counsel that he should pursue his route on foot to Liverpool. That guinea, however, he used to say, saved him from despair. One circumstance affected me in this part of Pink's story. I was a student in Oxford at that time. By com- paring dates, there was no doubt whatever that I, who held my guardians in abhorrence, and above all things admired my brother for his conduct, might have rescued him at this point of his youthful trials, four years before the fortunate catastrophe of his case, from the calamities which awaited him. This is felt generally to be the most distressing form of human blindness — the case when accident brings two fraternal hearts, or any two persons whatsoever, deeply interested in effecting a reunion of hearts yearning for reunion, into almost touching neigh- borhood, and then in a moment after, by the difference, perhaps, of three inches in space, or three seconds in time, will separate them again, unconscious of their brief neighborhood, for many a year, or, it may be, for ever. Amongst the monstrocities and the frantic extravagances of Goethe, which have excluded, and for ever will exclude him from taking root in our literature, there is one drama, dull in its conduct and development beyond all precedent, but heart-rending in its plot, where this principle of pathos 220 LIFE AND MANNERS. forms the binge of the whole fable — the 'Eugenia 1 I mean — a drama in which (and apparently the fable has been suggested by some real case amongst the morgan or left-handed marriages of Germany) a prince loving better than light and day one heavenly girl, a grown-up daughter. Eugenia, is suddenly persuaded to believe, fof some purpose of intrigue, that she is dead. Well : the reader is led to feel that the man is happy, and thrice happy, who has no daughter ; because, for him. neither fear nor grief of this kind is possible. Meantime, the daughter, thus mourned for, and whom the prince would have redeemed with his own life a thousand tim what becomes of her ? She, with a wretched goveri bribed doubly, by money in the first place, and by a hollow promise of marriage in the second — is tur. adrift : believing herself to have been rejected by her father. She travels, unknown for what she is, to a - port town : everywhere treated with respect for her per- sonal merits : everywhere viewed as a poor wretched outcast, under the ban of government ; and not seldom standing a chance of being, in that character, thrown back upon her fat", 'a doring eyes. All chances, how- ever, are thrown away upon her who had been born to (fortune. Her father she sees no more : and the drama (finished only to the end of the first part) the -pect of her embarking for >ome distant land.* How this drama would have been terminated, had Goethe ch to terminate it, I do not know or gi* ». It ought not to ■ had a prosperous ending; and yet, for ti. f of heart, there should have bt when too l a happy reunion. In the present cast-, * In this slight abstract of the Eag-cnia. I must warn the reader that I speak from a v glance of it, which I took several years* ago, and at the time stans pede in uno. MY BROTHER. 221 however, it may be doubted, whether this unconscious rencontre and unconscious parting in Oxford ought to be viewed as a misfortune. Pink, it is true, endured years of suffering, four at least, that might have been saved by this seasonable rencontre ; but, on the other hand, by travelling through his misfortunes with unabated spirit, and to their natural end, he won experience and distinc- tions that else he would have missed. His further history was briefly this : — Somewhere in the river of Plate, he had effected his escape from the pirates ; and a long time after, in 1807, I believe, (I write without books to consult.) he joined the storming party of the English at Monte Video. Here he happened fortunately to fall under the eye of Sir Home Popham ; and Sir Home forthwith rated my brother as a midshipman on board his own ship, which was at that time, I think, a fifty gun ship — the Diadem. Thus, by merits of the most appropriate kind, and without one particle of interest, my brother passed into the royal navy. His nautical accomplishments were now of the utmost impor- tance to him ; and, as often as he shifted his ship, which (to say the truth) was far too often *-=- for his temper was fickle and delighting in change — so often these accom- plishments were made the basis of very earnest eulogy. I have read a vast heap of certificates vouching for Pink's qualifications as a sailor, in the highest terms, and from several of the most distinguished officers in the service. Early in his career as a midshipman, he suffered a morti- fying interruption of the active life which had now become essential to his comfort. He had contrived to get appoint- ed on board a fire-ship, the Prometheus, (chiefly with a wish to enlarge his experience by this variety of naval warfare,) at the time of the last Copenhagen expedition, and he obtained his wish ; for the Prometheus had a very 222 LIFE AND MANNERS. distinguished station assigned her on the great night of bombardment; and from her decks, I believe, was made almost the first effectual trial of the Congreve rockets. Soon after the Danish capital had fallen, and whilst the Prometheus was still cruising in the Baltic, Pink, in com- pany with the purser of his ship, landed on the coast of Jutland, for the purpose of a morning's sporting. It seems strange that this should have been allowed upon a hostile shore ; and, perhaps, it was not allowed, but might have been a thoughtless abuse of some other mission shore- wards. So it was, unfortunately ; and one at least of the two sailors had leisure to rue the sporting of that day for eighteen long months of captivity. They were perfectly unacquainted with the localities, but conceived themselves able at any time to make good their retreat to the boat, by means of fleet heels, and arms sufficient to deal with any opposition of the sort they apprehended. Venturing, how- ever, too far into the country, they became suddenly aware of certain sentinels, posted expressly for the benefit of chance English visiters. These men did not pursue, but they did worse, for they fired signal shots ; and, by the time our two thoughtless Jack tars had reached the shore, they saw a detachment of Danish cavalry trotting their horses pretty coolly down in a direction for the boat. Feeling confident of their power to keep ahead of the pursuit, the sailors amused themselves" with various sallies of nautical wit ; and Pink, in particular, was just telling them to present his dutiful respects to the Crown Prince, and assure him that, but for this lubberly interruption, lie trusted to have improved his royal dinner by a brace of birds — when, oh, sight of blank confusion ! — all at once, they became aware that between themselves and their boat lay a perfect net-work of streams, deep watery holes, requiring both time and local knowledge to unravel. The MY BROTHER. 223 purser hit upon a course which enabled him to regain the boat ; but I am not sure whether he also was not captured. Poor Pink was at all events: and, through seventeen or eighteen months, he bewailed this boyish imprudence. At the end of that time there was an exchange of prisoners ; and he was again serving on board various and splendid frigates. Wyborg in Jutland was the seat of his Danish captivity ; and such was the amiableness of the Danish character, that, except for the loss of his time, to one who was aspiring to distinction and professional honor, none of the prisoners who were on parole could have had much rea- son for complaint. The street mob, excusably irritated with England at that time — (for without entering on the ques- tion of right, or of expedience, as regarded that war, it is notorious that such arguments as we had for our unan- nounced hostilities, could not be pleaded openly by the English Cabinet, for fear of compromising our private friend and informant, the King of Sweden) — the mob, therefore, were rough in their treatment of the British prisoners ; at night, they would pelt them with stones ; and Jjere and there some honest burgher, who might have suffered grievously in his property, or in the person of his nearest friends, by the ruin inflicted upon the Danish com- mercial shipping, or by the dreadful havoc made in Zea- land, would show something of the same bitter spirit. But the great body of the richer and more educated inhab- itants, showed the most hospitable attention to all who justified that sort of notice by their conduct. And their remembrance of these English friendships was not fugi- tive ; for, through long years after my brother's death, I used to receive letters, written in the Danish, (a language which I had attained in the course of my studies, and which I have since endeavored to turn to account in a pub- lic journal for some useful purposes of research, both in 224 LIFE AND MANNERS. philology and in history.) from young men as well as women in Jutland ; letters couched in the most friendly terms, and recalling to his remembrance scenes and inci- dents which sufficiently proved the terms of intimacy, and even of fraternal affection, upon which he had lived amongst these public enemies ; and some of them I have preserved to this day, as memorials that do honor, on different considerations, to both parties alike. CHAPTER VIII. OXFORD. It was in winter, and in the wintry weather of the year 1803, that I first entered Oxford with a view to its vast means of education, or rather with a view to its vast ad- vantages for study. A ludicrous story is told of a young candidate for clerical orders — that, being asked by the Bishop's chaplain if he had ever ' been to Oxford,' as a colloquial expression for having had an academic educa- tion, he replied, ' No : but he had twice been to Abing- don : ' Abingdon being only seven miles distant. In the same sense I might say that once before I had been at Oxford : but that was as a transient visiter with Lord W , when we were both children. Now, on the con- trary, I approached these venerable towers in the char- acter of a student, and with the purpose of a long connection ; personally interested in the constitution of the University, and obscurely anticipating that in this city, or at least during the period of my nominal attach- ment to this academic body, the remoter parts of my future life would unfold before me. All hearts were at this time occupied with the public interests of the country. The ' sorrow of the time ' was ripening to a second har- vest. Napoleon had commenced his Vandal, or rather Hunnish war with Britain, in the spring of this year, about eight months before ; and profound public interest it was, 226 LIFE AND MANNERS. into which the very coldest hearts entered, that a little divided with me the else monopolizing awe attached to the solemn act of launching myself upon the world. That expression may seem too strong as applied to one who had already been for many months a houseless wanderer in Wales, and a solitary roamer in the streets of London. But in those situations, it must be remembered, I was an unknown, unacknowledged vagrant ; and without money I could hardly run much risk, except of breaking my neck. The perils, the pains, the pleasures, or the obligations of the world, scarcely exist in a proper sense for him who has no funds. Perfect weakness is often secure : it is by imperfect power, turned against its master, that men are snared and decoyed. Here in Oxford, I should be called upon to commence a sort of establishment upon the splen- did English scale ; here I should share in many duties and responsibilities, and should become henceforth an object of notice to a large society. Now first becoming separately and individually answerable for my conduct, and no longer absorbed into the general unit of a family, 1 felt myself, for the first time, burthened with the anxieties of a man, and a member of the world. Oxford, ancient Mother ! hoary with ancestral honors, time-honored, and, haply, it may be, time-shattered power — I owe thee nothing ! Of thy vast riches I took not a shilling, though living amongst multitudes who owed to thee their daily bread. Not the less I owe thee justice ; for that is a universal debt. And at this moment, when I see thee called to thy audit by unjust and malicious ac- cusers — men with the hearts of inquisitors and the purposes of Jobbers — I feel towards thee something of filial reverence and duty. However, I mean not to speak as an advocate, but as a conscientious witness in the OXFORD. 227 simplicity of truth ; feeling neither hope nor fear of a personal nature, without fee, and without favor. I have been assured from many quarters that the great body of the public are quite in the dark about the whole manner of living in our English Universities ; and that a considerable portion of that public, misled by the totally different constitution of Universities in Scotland, Ireland, and generally on the continent, as well as by the different arrangements of collegiate life in those institutions, are in a state worse than ignorant, (that is, more unfavorable to the truth) — starting, in fact, from prejudices, and absolute errors of fact, which operate most uncharitably upon their construction of those insulated statements, which are continually put forward by designing men. Hence, I can well believe, that it will be an acceptable service, at this particular moment, when the very constitution of the two English Universities, is under the unfriendly revision of Parliament, when some roving commission may be an- nually looked for, under a contingency which I will not utter in words, (for I reverence the doctrine of ivqa'junrftos,) far worse than Cromwellian, i. e. merely personal, and to winnow the existing corporation from disaffection to the state — a Henry the Eighth commission of sequestration, and levelled at the very integrity of the institution — under such prospects, I can well believe that a true account of Oxford as it ?s, (which will be valid also for Cambridge,) mast be welcome both to friend and foe. And instead of giving this account didactically, or accord- ing to a logical classification of the various items in the survey, I will give it historically, or according to the order in which the most important facts of the case opened themselves before myself, under the accidents of my own personal inquiry. No situation could be better adapted than my own for eliciting information ; for, whereas most 228 LIFE AND MANNERS. young men come to the University under circumstances of absolute determination as to the choice of their particular college, and have, therefore, no cause for search or in- quiry, I, on the contrary, came thither, in solitary, self- dependence, and in the loosest state of indetermination. Every single point of my future position and connection, to what college I would attach myself, and in which of the two orders, open to my admission, I would enrol my- self, was left absolutely to my own election. My coming at all, in this year, arose out of an accident of conversa- tion. In the latter half of 1803, I was living with my mother at the priory of St. J , a beautiful place, which she had in part planned, and built, but chiefly re- paired out of a very ancient Gothic monastery ; when my uncle, a military man, on a visit to England, after twenty- five years' absence in India, suddenly remarked, that in my case he should feel it shameful to be c tied to my mother's apron-string,' for was I not eighteen years old ? I answered that certainly I was : but what could I do ? My guardians had the power to control my expenditure until I should be twenty-one ; and they, it was certain, would never aid my purpose of going to Oxford, having quarrelled with me on that very point. My uncle, a man of restless activity, spoke to my mother immediately, I presume, for within one hour I was summoned to her presence. Among other questions, she put this to me, which is importantly connected with my future experience at Oxford, and my coming account of it : — c Your guar- dians,' she prefaced, 4 still continue to me your school allowance of .£100. To this, for the present, when your sisters cost me such heavy deductions from my own in- come, I cannot undertake to make any addition — that is, you are not to count upon any. But, of course, you will be free to spend your entire Oxford vacations, and as OXFORD. 229 much time besides as the rules of your college will dis- pense with your attendance, at my house, wherever that may be. On this understanding, are you willing to un- dertake an Oxford life, upon so small an allowance as <£100 per annum ? ' My answer was by a cheerful and prompt assent. For I felt satisfied, and said as much to my mother, that, although this might sound, and might really prove, on a common system of expenditure, ludi- crously below the demands of the place, yet in Oxford, no less than in other cities, it must be possible for a young man of firm mind, to live on a hundred pounds annually, if he pleased to do so ; and to live respectably. I guessed even then how the matter stood ; and so in my own expe- rience I found it. If a young man were known to be of trivial pursuits, with slight habits of study, and c strong book-mindedness,' naturally enough his college peers, who should happen to be idlers, would question his right to court solitude. They would demand a sight of his warrant of exemption from ordinary usages ; and finding none, they would see a plain argument of his poverty. And, doubtless, when this happens to be the sole char- acteristic point about a man, and is balanced by no form of personal respectability, it does so far lead to contempt as to make a man's situation mortifying and painful ; but not more so, I affirm, in Oxford than anywhere else. Mere defect of power, as such, and where circumstances force it into violent relief, cannot well be other than a degrading feature in any man's position. Now, in other cities, the man of c£100 a year never can be forced into such an invidious insulation — he finds many to keep him in countenance ; but in Oxford he is a sort of monster — he stands alone in the only class with which he can be compared. So that the pressure upon Oxford predispo- sitions to contempt is far stronger than elsewhere ; and, 230 LIFE AND MANNERS. consequently, there would be more allowance due, if the actual contempt were also stronger — which I deny. But, no doubt, in every climate, and under all meridians, it must be humiliating to be distinguished by pure defect. Now and for ever — to be weak, is in some sense to be miserable ; and simple poverty, without other qualification or adjunct, is merely defect of power. But, on the other hand, in Oxford, at least, as much as in any other place I ever knew, talents and severe habits of study are their own justification. And upon the strongest possible war- rant, viz., my own experience in a college, then recently emerging from habits of riotous dissipation, I can affirm that a man, who pleads known habits of study as his reason for secluding himself, and for declining the ordi- nary amusements and wine parties, will meet with neither molestation nor contempt. For my part, though neither giving nor accepting invi- tations for the first two years of my residence, never but once had I reason to complain of a sneer, or indeed any allusion whatever to habits, which might be understood to express poverty. Perhaps, even then, I had no reason to complain, for my own conduct in that instance was un- wise ; and the allusion, though a personality, and so far ill-bred, might be meant in real kindness. The case was this — I neglected my dress in one point habitually ; that is, I wore clothes until they were threadbare : partly in the belief that my gown would conceal their main defects, but much more from carelessness and indisposition to spend upon a tailor, what I had destined for a bookseller. At length, an official person, of some weight in the college, sent me a message on the subject through a friend. It was couched in these terms — That, let a man possess what talents or accomplishments he might, it was not pos- sible for him to maintain his proper station, in the public OXFORD. 231 respect, amongst so many servants and people, servile to external impressions, without some regard to the elegance of his dress. A reproof, so courteously prefaced, I could not take offence at ; and at that time I resolved to spend some cost upon decorating my person. But always it happened that some book, or set of books — that passion being absolutely endless, and inexorable as the grave — stepped between me and my intentions ; until one day, upon arranging my toilet hastily before dinner, I suddenly made the discovery that I had no waistcoat, [or vest, as it is now called through conceit or provincialism,] which was not torn or otherwise dilapidated ; whereupon, buttoning up my coat to the throat, and drawing my gown as close about me as possible, I went into the public ' hall,' [so is called in Oxford the public eating-room,] with no misgiving. How- ever, I was detected ; for a grave man, with a superla- tively grave countenance, who happened on that day to sit next me, but whom I did not personally know, address- ing his friend sitting opposite, begged to know if he had seen the last Gazette, because he understood that it con- tained an order in council laying an interdict upon the future use of waistcoats. His friend replied with the same perfect gravity, that it was a great satisfactiou to his mind that his Majesty's government should have issued so sensible an order ; which he trusted would be soon fol- lowed up by an interdict on breeches, they being still more disagreeable to pay for. This said, without the movement on either side of a single muscle, the two gen- tlemen passed to other subjects ; and I inferred, upon the whole, that having detected my manoeuvre, they wished to put me on my guard in the only way open to them. At any rate, this was the sole personality, or equivocal allu- sion of any sort which ever met my ear during the years 232 LIFE AND MANNERS. that I asserted my right to be as poor as I chose. And, certainly, my censors were right, whatever were the tem- per in which they spoke, kind or unkind ; for a little extra care in the use of clothes will always, under almost any extremity of poverty, pay for so much extra cost as is essential to neatness and decorum, if not even to ele- gance. They were right, and I was wrong, in a point which cannot be neglected with impunity. But to enter upon my own history, and my sketch of Oxford life. — Late on a winter's night, in the latter half of December, 1803, when a snow storm, and a heavy one, was already gathering in the air, a lazy Birmingham coach, moving at four and a half miles an hour, brought me through the long northern suburb of Oxford, to a shabby coach-inn, situated in the Corn Market. Business was out of the question at that hour. But the next day I assembled all the acquaintances I had in the University, or had to my own knowledge ; and to them, in council assembled, propounded my first question : What college would they, in their superior state of information, recom- mend to my choice ? This question leads to the first great characteristic of Oxford, as distinguished from most other universities. Before me at this moment lie several news- papers, reporting, at length, the installation in office (as Chancellor) of the Duke of Wellington. The original Oxford report having occasion to mention the particular college from which the official procession moved, had said, no doubt, that the gates of University, the halls of Uni- versity, &c, were at such a point of time thrown open. But most of the provincial editors, not at all comprehend- in"" that the reference was to an individual college, known by the name of University College, one of twenty-five such establishments in Oxford, had regularly corrected it into ' gates of the University,' &c. Here is the first OXFORD. 233 misconception of all strangers. And this feature of Oxford it is, which has drawn such exclamations of as- tonishment from foreigners. Lipsius, for example, pro- tested with fervor, on first seeing this vast establishment of Oxford, that one college of this University was greater in its power and splendor, that it glorified and illustrated the honors of literature more conspicuously by the pomps with which it invested the ministers and machinery of education, than any entire University of the continent. What is a university almost everywhere else ? It an- nounces little more, as respects the academic buildings, than that here is to be found the place of rendezvous — the exchange, as it were, or, under a different figure, the palcBstra of the various parties connected with the prose- cution of liberal studies. This is their ' House of Call,' their general place of muster and parade. Here it is that the professors and the students converge, with the certainty of meeting each other. Here, in short, are the lecture rooms in all the faculties. Well : thus far we see an arrangement of convenience — that is, of convenience for one of the parties, viz. the professors. To them it spares the disagreeable circumstances connected with a private reception of their students at their own rooms. But to the students it is a pure matter of indifference. In all this there is certainly no service done to the cause of good learning, which merits a State sanction, or the aid of national funds. Next, however, comes an academic library, sometimes a good one ; and here commences a real use in giving a national station to such institutions, because their durable and monumental existence, liable to no flux or decay from individual caprice, or accidents of life, and their authentic station, as expressions of the national grandeur, point them out to the bequests of patriotic citizens. They fall also under the benefit of 1G 234 LIFE AND MANNERS. another principle — the conservative feeling of amateur- ship. Several great collections have been bequeathed to the British Museum, for instance — not chiefly as a na- tional institution, and under feelings of nationality, but because, being such, it was also permanent ; and thus the painful labors of collecting were guaranteed from perish- ing. Independently of all this, I, for my part, willingly behold the surplus of national funds dedicated to the con- secration, as it were, of learning, by raising temples to its honor, even where they answer no purpose of direct use. Next, after the service of religion, I would have the service of learning externally embellished, recommended to the affections of men, and hallowed by the votive sculp- tures, as I may say, of that affection, gathering in amount from age to age. Magnificabo opostoJatum meum is a language almost as becoming to the missionaries and min- isters of knowledge, as to the ambassadors of religion. It is fit that by pompous architectural monuments, that a voice may for ever be sounding audibly in human ears, of homage to these powers, and that even alien feelings may be compelled into secret submission to their influence. Therefore, amongst the number of those who value such things, upon the scale of direct proximate utility, rank not me : that arithmetic a officina is in my years abomi- nable. But still I affirm, that, in our analysis of an ordi- nary university, or ■ college ' as it is .provincial!}* called, we have not yet arrived at any element of service ren- dered to knowledge or education, large enough to call for very extensive national aid. Honor has thus far been rendered to the good cause by a public attestation — and that is well : but no direct promotion has been given to that cause, no impulse communicated to its progress, such that it can be held out as a result commensurate to the name and pretensions of a University. As yet there is OXFORD. 235 nothing accomplished which is beyond the strength of any little commercial town. And as to the library in particu- lar, besides that in all essential departments it might be bought, to order, by one day's common subscription of Liverpool or Glasgow merchants, students very rarely indeed have admission to its free use. What other functions remain to a university ? For those which I have mentioned of furnishing a point of rendezvous to the great body of professors and students, and a point of concentration to the different establishments of implements and machinery for elaborate researches, [as, for instance, of books and MSS. in the first place ; secondly, of maps, charts, and globes ; and thirdly, per- haps of the costly apparatus required for such studies as Sideral astronomy, galvanic chemistry or physiology, &c. ;] all these are uses which cannot be regarded in a higher light than as conveniences merely incidental and collateral to the main views of the founders. There are, then, two much loftier and more commanding ends met by the idea and constitution of such institutions, and which first rise to a rank of dignity sufficient to occupy the views of a legis- lator, or to warrant a national interest. These ends are involved — 1st, in the practice of conferring degrees, that is, formal attestations and guarantees of competence to give advice, instruction, or aid in the three great branches of liberal knowledge applicable to human life ; 2d, in that appropriation of fixed funds to fixed professorships, by means of which the uninterrupted succession of public and authorized teachers is sustained in all the higher branches of knowledge, from generation to generation, and from century to century. By the latter result it is secured, that the great well-heads of liberal knowledge and of severe science shall never grow dry. By the former it is secured, that this unfailing fountain shall be continually applied to 236 LIFE AND MANNERS. the production and to the tasting of fresh labors in endless succession for the public service, and thus, in effect, that the great national fountain shall not be a stagnant reser- voir, but by an endless derivation, (to speak in a Roman metaphor !) applied to a system of national irrigation. These are the two great functions and qualifications of a collegiate incorporation : one providing to each separate generation its own separate rights of heirship to all the knowledge accumulated by its predecessors, and convert- ing a mere casual life-annuity into an estate of inheritance — a mere fleeting ayvninua into a tm^a is on i - 7 the other securing for this eternal dowry as wide a distribution as possible ; the one function regarding the dimension of length in the endless series of ages through which it prop- agates its gifts ; the other regarding the dimension of breadth in the large application throughout any one gene- ration of these gifts to the public service. Here are grand functions — high purposes ; but neither one nor the other demands any edifices of stone and marble ; neither one nor the other presupposes any edifice at all built with human hands. A collegiate incorporation, the church mil- itant of knowledge, in its everlasting struggle with dark- ness and error, is, in this respect, like the church of Christ — that is, it is always and essentially invisible to the fleshly eye. The pillars of this church are human cham- pions — its weapons are great truths so shaped as to meet the shifting forms of error — its armories are piled and mar- shalled in human memories — its cohesion lies in human zeal, in discipline, in childlike docility — and all its tri- umphs, its pomps, and glories, must for ever depend upon talent, upon the energies of the will, and upon the harmo- nious co-operation of its several divisions. Thus far, I say, there is no call made out for any intervention of the architect. OXFORD. 237 Let me apply all this to Oxford. Among the four func- tions commonly recognised by the founders of universities, which are — 1st, to find a set of halls or places of meet- ing ; 2d, to find the implements and accessaries of study ; 3d, to secure the succession of teachers and learners ; 4th, to secure the profitable application of their attainments to the public service. Of these four, the two highest need no buildings ; and the other two, which are mere collateral functions of convenience, need only a small one. Where- fore, then, and to what end, are the vast systems of build- ing, the palaces and towers of Oxford ? These are either altogether superfluous, mere badges of ostentation and luxurious wealth, or they point to some fifth function not so much as contemplated by other universities, and, at present, absolutely and chimerically beyond their means of attainment. Formerly we used to hear attacks upon the Oxford discipline as fitted to the true intellectual pur- poses of a modern education. Those attacks, weak and most uninstructed in facts, false as to all that they chal- lenged, and puerile as to what implicitly they propounded for homage, are silent. But, of late, the battery has been pointed against the Oxford discipline in its moral aspects, as fitted for the government and restraint of young men, or even as at all contemplating any such control. The Beverleys would have us suppose, not only that the great body of the students are a licentious crew, acknowledging no discipline or restraints, but that the grave elders of the university, and those who wield the nominal authority of the place, passively resign the very shows of power, and connive at general excesses, even when they do not abso- lutely authorize them in their personal examples. Now, when such representations are made, to what standard of a just discipline is it that these writers would be understood as appealing ? Is it to some ideal, or to some existing and 238 LIFE AND MANNERS. known reality ? Would they have England suppose that they are here comparing the actual Oxford with some pos- sible hypothetic or imaginable Oxford — with some ideal case, that is to say, about which great discussions would arise as to its feasibility ; or that they are comparing it with some known standard of discipline actually realized and sustained for generations, in Leipsic, suppose, or Ed- inburgh, or Leyden, or Salamanca ? This is the question of questions, to which we may demand an answer ; and, according to that answer, observe the dilemma into which these furciferous knaves must drop. If they are compar- ing Oxford simply with some ideal and better Oxford, in some ideal and better world, in that case all they have said — waiving its falsehoods of fact — is no more than a flourish of rhetoric, and the whole discussion may be referred to the shadowy combats of scholastic declama- tion-mongers — those mock gladiators, and umbratiles doctor es. But if, on the other hand, they pretend to take their station upon the known basis of some existing institution, — if they will pretend, that in this impeach- ment of Oxford, they are proceeding upon a silent com- parison with Edinburgh, Glasgow, Jena, Leipsic, Padua, &,c. — then are they self-exposed, as men not only with- out truth, but without shame. For now comes in, as a sudden revelation, and as a sort of deus ex machina, for the vindication of the truth, the simple answer to that ques- tion proposed above, — Wherefore, and to what end, are the vast edifices of Oxford ? A university, as universities are in general, needs not, I have shown, to be a visible body — a building raised with hands. Wherefore, then, is the visible Oxford? To what flfth end, refining upon the ordinary ends of such institutions, is the far-stretching system of Oxford hospitia, or monastic hotels, directed by their founders or applied by their present possessors r OXFORD. 239 Hearken, reader, to the answer: — These vast piles are applied to an end, absolutely indispensable to any even tolerable system of discipline, and yet absolutely unattain- able upon any commensurate scale in any other university of Europe. They are applied to the personal settle- ment and domestication of the students within the gates and walls of that college to whose discipline they are amenable. Everywhere else the young men live where they please and as they please ; necessarily distributed amongst the townspeople ; in any case, therefore, liable to no control or supervision whatever ; and in those cases where the university forms but a small part of a vast capi- tal city, as it does in Paris, Edinburgh, Madrid, Vienna, Berlin, and Petersburg, liable to every mode of positive temptation, and distraction, which besiege human life in high -viced and luxurious communities. Here, therefore, it is a mockery to talk of discipline : of a nonentity there can be no qualities ; and we need not ask for the descrip- tion of the discipline in situations where discipline there can be none. One slight anomaly I have heard of as varying pro tanto the uniform features of this picture. In Glasgow I have heard of an arrangement, by which young academicians are placed in the family of a Professor. Here, as members of a private household, and that house- hold under the presiding eye of a conscientious, paternal, and judicious scholar, doubtless they would enjoy as abso- lute a shelter from peril and worldly contagion as parents could wish : but not more absolute, I affirm, than belongs, unavoidably, to the monastic seclusion of an Oxford col- lege — the gates of which open to no egress after nine o'clock at night, nor after eleven to any ingress which is not regularly reported to a proper officer of the establish- ment. The two forms of restraint are, as respects the effectual amount of control, equal ; and were they equally 240 LIFE AND MANNERS. diffused, Glasgow and Oxford would, in this point, stand upon the same level of discipline. But it happens that the Glasgow case was a personal accident ; personal, both as regarded him who volunteered the exercise of this con- trol, and those who volunteered to appropriate its benefits ; whereas the Oxford case belongs to the very system, is co- extensive with the body of undergraduates, and, from the very arrangement of Oxford life, is liable to no decay or intermission. Here, then, the reader apprehends the first great char- acteristic distinction of Oxford — that distinction which extorted the rapturous admiration of Lipsius as an expo- nent of enormous wealth — but which I now mention as applying, with ruinous effect, to the late calumnies upon Oxford, as an inseparable exponent of her meritorious dis- cipline. She, most truly and severely an 'Alma Mater,' gathers all the juvenile part of her flock within her own fold, and beneath her own vigilant supervision. In Cam- bridge there is, so far, a laxer administration of this rule, that, when any college overflows, undergraduates are allowed to lodge at large in the town. But in Oxford this increase of peril and discretionary power is thrown by preference upon the senior graduates, who are seldom below the age of twenty-two or twenty-three ; and the college accommodations are reserved, in almost their whole extent, for the most youthful part of the society. This extent is prodigious. Even in my time, upwards of two thousand persons were lodged within the colleges ; none having fewer than two rooms, very many having three, and men of rank, or luxurious habits, having often large suites of rooms. But that was a time of war, which Oxford experience has shown to have operated most dis- proportionably as a drain upon the numbers disposable for liberal studies ; and the total capacity of the University OXFORD. 241 was far from being exhausted. There are now, I believe, between five and six thousand names upon the Oxford books ; and more than four thousand, I understand, of con- stant residents. So that Oxford is well able to lodge, and on a very sumptuous scale, a small army of men ; which expression of her great splendor, I now mention, (as I repeat,) purely as applying to the question of her machinery for enforcing discipline. This part of her machinery, it will be seen, is unique, and absolutely peculiar to herself. Other Universities, boasting no such enormous wealth, cannot be expected to act upon her sys- tem of seclusion. Certainly, I make it no reproach to other Universities, that, not possessing the means of sequestering their young men from worldly communion, they must abide by the evils of a laxer discipline. It is their misfortune and not their criminal neglect, which con- sents to so dismal a relaxation of academic habits. But let them not urge this misfortune in excuse at one time, and at another virtually disavow it. Never let them take up a stone to throw at Oxford, upon this element of a wise education : since in them, through that original vice in their constitution — the defect of all means for secluding and insulating their society, discipline is abolished by anticipation — being in fact an impossible thing : for the walls of the college are subservient to no purpose of life, but only to a purpose of convenience : they converge the students for the hour or two of what is called lecture ; which over, each undergraduate again becomes sui juris, is again absorbed into the crowds of the world, resorts to whatsoever haunts he chooses, and finally closes his day at if, in any sense, at home — at a home which is not merely removed from the supervision and control, but altogether from the bare knowledge of his academic superiors. How far this discipline is well administered in 242 LIFE AND MANNERS. other points at Oxford, will appear from the rest of my account. But thus far, at least, it must be conceded, that Oxford, by and through this one unexampled distinction — * her vast disposable fund of accommodations for junior members within her own private cloisters — possesses an advantage which she could not forfeit, if she would, towards an effectual knowledge of each man's daily habits, and a control over him, which is all but absolute. This knowledge, and this control, is much assisted and concentrated by the division of the University into sepa- rate colleges. Here comes another feature of the Oxford system. Elsewhere the University is a single college ; and this college is the University. But in Oxford the Uni- versity expresses, as it were, the army, and the colleges express the several brigades or regiments. To resume, therefore, my own thread of personal nar- ration. On the next morning after my arrival in Oxford, I assembled a small council of friends to assist me in determining at which of the various separate societies I should enter, and whether as a ' commoner,' or as a ' gentleman commoner.' Under the first question was couched the following latitude of choice : " I give the names of the colleges, and the numerical account of their numbers, as it stood in Jan. 1832 ; for this will express, as well as the list of that day, (which I do not accurately know,) the proportions of importance amongst them. Mem. 1. University College 207 2. Balliol " 257 3. Merton M 124 4. Exeter " 299 5. Oriel " 293 6. Queen's " 351 7. New " 157 8. Lincoln " 141 OXFORD. 243 Mem. 9. All Souls' College 98 10. Magdalene " 165 11. Brazennose u 418 12. Corpus Christi " . . . . . - .127 13. Christ Church » 949 14. Trinity " 259 15. St. John's " 218 16. Jesus " 167 17. Wadham " 217 18. Pembroke " 189 19. Worcester " . .... 231 Then, besides these colleges, five Halls, as they are technically called, (the term Hall implying chiefly that they are societies not endowed, or not endowed with fel- lowships as the colleges are,) viz. — Mem. 1. St. Mary Hall, 83 2. Magdalen " 178 3. New Iaa " 10 4. St. Alban " 41 5. St. Edmund " 96 Such being the names, and general proportions on the scale of local importance, attached to the different com- munities, next comes the very natural question, — What are the chief determining motives for guiding the selec- tion amongst them ? These I shall state. First of all, a man not otherwise interested in the several advantages of the colleges has, however, in all probability, some choice between a small society and a large one ; and thus far a mere ocular inspection of the list will serve to fix his preference. For my part, supposing other things equal, I greatly preferred the most populous college, as being that in which any single member, who might have reasons for standing aloof from the general habits of expense, of intervisiting, &c, would have the best chance of escaping 244 LIFE AND MANNERS. a jealous notice. However, amongst those ' other things ' which I presumed equal, one held a high place in my estimation, which a little inquiry showed to be very far from equal. All the colleges have chapels, but all have not organs ; nor, amongst those which have, is the same large use made of the organ. Some preserve the full cathedral service ; others do not. Christ Church mean- time fulfilled all conditions : for the chapel here happens to be the cathedral of the diocese ; the service, therefore, is full and ceremonial : the college, also, is far the most splendid, both in numbers, rank, wealth, and influence. Hither I resolved to go ; and immediately I prepared to call on the head. The c head,' as he is called generically, of an Oxford college, (his specif c appellation varies almost with every college — principal, provost, master, rector, warden, &c.) is a greater man than the uninitiated suppose. His situa- tion is generally felt as conferring a degree of rank not much less than episcopal ; and, in fact, the head of Bra- zennose at that time, who happened to be the Bishop of Bangor, was not held to rank much above his brothers in office. Such being the rank of heads generally, « for- tiori, that of Christ Church was to be had in reverence ; and this I knew. He is always, ex officio, dean of the diocese ; and, in his quality of college head, he only, of all deans that ever were heard of, is uniformly considered a greater man than his own diocesan. But it happened that the present dean had even higher titles to considera- tion. Dr. Cyril Jackson had been tutor to the Prince of Wales (George IV. ;) he had repeatedly refused a bish- opric ; and that, perhaps, is entitled to place a man one degree above him who has accepted one. He was also supposed to have made a bishop, and afterwards, at least, it is certain that he made his own brother a bishop. All OXFORD. 245 things weighed, Dr. Cyril Jackson seemed so very great a personage, that I now felt the value of my long intercourse with great dons in giving me confidence to face a lion of this magnitude. Those who know Oxford are aware of the peculiar feel- ings which have gathered about the name and pretensions of Christ Church ; feelings of superiority and leadership in the members of that college, and often enough of defi- ance and jealousy, on the part of other colleges. Hence it happens, that you rarely find yourself in a shop, or other place of public resort, with a Christ Church-man, but he takes occasion, if young and frivolous, to talk loudly of the Dean, as an indirect expression of his own connection with this splendid college ; the title of Dean being exclusively attached to the headship of Christ Church. The Dean, as may be supposed, partakes in this superior dignity of his c House ; ' he is officially brought into connection w T ith all orders of the British aris- tocracy — often with royal personages ; and with the younger branches of the aristocracy, his office places him in a relation of authority and guardianship — exercised, however, through inferior ministry, and seldom by direct personal interference. The reader must understand that, with rare exceptions, all the princes and nobles of Great Britain, who choose to benefit by an academic education, resort either to Christ Church College in Oxford, or to Trinity College in Cambridge : these are the alternatives. Naturally enough, my young friends were somewhat startled at my determination to call upon so great a man : a letter, they fancied, would be a better mode of applica- tion. I, however, who did not adopt the doctrine that no man is a hero to his valet, was of opinion, that very few men indeed are heroes to themselves. The cloud of external pomp, which invests them to the eyes of the 246 LIFE AND MANNERS. attoniti, cannot exist to their own : they do not, like Kehama, entering the eight gates of Padalon at once, meet and contemplate their own grandeurs; but, more or less, are conscious of acting a part. I did not therefore feel the tremor which was expected of a novice, on being ushered into so solemn a presence. CHAPTER IX. OXFORD. The Dean was sitting in a spacious library or study, elegantly, if not luxuriously furnished. Footmen, sta- tioned as repeaters, as if at some fashionable rout, gave a momentary importance to my unimportant self, by the thundering tone of their annunciations. All the machin- ery of aristocratic life seemed indeed to intrench this great Don's approaches ; and I was really surprised that so very great a man should condescend to rise on my entrance. But I soon found that, if the Dean's station and relation to the higher orders had made him lofty, those same relations had given a peculiar suavity to his manners. Here, indeed, as on other occasions, I noticed the essential misconception as to the demeanor of men of rank, which prevails amongst those who have no personal access to their presence. In the fabulous pictures of novels, (such novels as once abounded,) and in newspaper reports of conversations, real or pretended, between the King and inferior persons, we often find the writer ex- pressing his sense of aristocratic assumption, by making the King address people without their titles. The Duke of Wellington, for instance, or Lord Liverpool, figures usu- ally in such scenes, as 4 Wellington ' or c Arthur,' and as 1 Liverpool.' Now, as to the private talk of George IV. in such cases, I do not pretend to depose ; but, speaking 248 LIFE AND MANNERS. generally, I may say that the practice of the highest classes takes the very opposite course. Nowhere is a man so sure of his titles or official distinctions as amongst them ; for it is upon giving to every man the very extreme punctilio of his known or supposed claims, that they rely for the due observance of their own. Neglecting no form of courtesy suited to the case, they seek, in this way, to remind men unceasingly of what they expect ; and the result is what I represent — that people in the highest stations, and such as bring them continually into contact with inferiors, are, of all people, the least addicted to insolence or defect of courtesy. Uniform suavity of manner is indeed rarely found, except in men of high rank. Doubtless this may arise upon a motive of self- interest, jealous of giving the least opening or invitation to the retorts of ill-temper or low breeding. But, what- ever be its origin, such I believe to be the fact. In a very long conversation of a general nature upon the course of my studies, and the present direction of my reading, Dr. Cyril Jackson treated me just as he would have done his equal in station and in age. Coming at length to the particular purpose of my visit at this time to himself, he assumed a little more of his official stateliness. He con- descended to say, that it would have given him pleasure to reckon me amongst his flock ; ; But, sir,' he said, in a tone of some sharpness, l your guardians have acted im- properly. It was their duty to have given me at least one year's notice of their intention to place you at Christ Church. At present I have not a dog-kennel in my col- lege untenanted.' Upon this, I observed that nothing remained for me to do, but to apologize for having occu- pied so much of his time ; that, for myself, I now first heard of this preliminary application; and that, as to my guardians, I was bound to acquit them of all oversight in OXFORD. 249 this instance, they being no parties to my present scheme. The Dean expressed his astonishment at this statement. I, on my part, was just then making my parting bows, and had reached the door, when a gesture of the Dean's, courteously waving me back to the sofa I had quitted, invited me to resume my explanations ; and I had a con- viction at the moment, that the interview would have terminated in the Dean's suspending his standing rule in my favor. But, just at that moment, the thundering heralds of the Dean's hall announced some man of high rank : the sovereign of Christ Church seemed distressed for a moment ; but then recollecting himself, he bowed in a way to indicate that I was dismissed. And thus it happened that I did not become a member of Christ Church. A few days passed in thoughtless indecision. At the end of that time, a trivial difficulty arose to settle my determination. I had brought about fifty guineas to Ox- ford ; but the expenses of an Oxford inn, with almost daily entertainments to young friends, had made such inroads upon this sum, that, after allowing for the con- tingencies incident to a college initiation, enough would not remain to meet the usual demand for what is called c caution money.' This is a small sum, properly enough demanded of every student, when matriculated, as a pledge for meeting any loss from unsettled arrears, such as his sudden death or his unannounced departure might else continually be inflicting upon his college. By releas- ing the college, therefore, from all necessity for degrading vigilance or persecution, this demand does, in effect, ope- rate beneficially to the feelings of all parties. In most colleges it amounts to £25 : in one only it was consider- ably less. And this trifling consideration it was, concur- ring with a reputation at that time for relaxed discipline, 17 250 LIFE AND MANNERS. which finally determined me in preferring W College to all others. This college had the capital disadvantage, in my eyes, that its chapel possessed no organ, and no musical service. But any other choice would have driven me to an instant call for more money — a measure which, as too flagrantly in contradiction to the whole terms on which I had volunteered to undertake an Oxford life, I could not find nerves to face. At W College, therefore, I entered : and here arises the proper occasion for stating the true costs of an Oxford education. First comes the question of lodg- ing. This item varies, as may be supposed ; but my own case will place on record the two extremes of cost in one particular college, now-a-days differing, I believe, from the general standard. The first rooms assigned me being small and ill-lighted, as part of an old Gothic build- ing, were charged at four guineas a year. These I soon exchanged for others a little better, and for them I paid six guineas. Finally, by privilege of seniority, I obtained a handsome set of well-proportioned rooms, in a modern section of the college, charged at ten guineas a year. This set was composed of three rooms — viz., an airy bedroom, a study, and a spacious rooom for receiving visiters. This range of accommodation is pretty general in Oxford, and, upon the whole, may be taken perhaps as representing the average amount of luxury in this respect, and at the average amount of cost. The fur- niture and the fittings up of these rooms cost me about twenty-five guineas ; for the Oxford rule is, that, if you take the rooms, (which is at your own option.) in that case, you third the furniture and the embellishments — i. e. you succeed to the total cost diminished by one-third. You pay, therefore, two guineas out of each three to your immediate predecessor. But, as he also may have sue- OXFORD. 251 ceeded to the furniture upon the same terms, whenever there happens to have been a rapid succession of occu- pants, the original cost to a remote predecessor is some- times brought down, by this process of diminution, to a mere fraction of the true value ; and yet no individual occupant can complain of any heavy loss. Whilst upon this subject, I may observe, that, in the seventeenth cen- tury, in Milton's time, for example, (about 1624,) and for more than sixty years after that era, the practice of chumship prevailed : every set of chambers was possessed by two co-occupants ; they had generally the same bed- room, and a common study; and they were called chums. This practice, once all but universal, is now entirely extinct ; and the extinction serves to mark the advance of the country, not so much in luxury as in refinement. The next item which I shall notice, is that which in college bills is expressed by the word Tutorage. This is the same in all colleges, I believe — viz., ten guineas per annum. And this head suggests an explanation which is most important to the reputation of Oxford, and fitted to clear up a very extensive delusion. Some years ago, a most elaborate statement was circulated of the number and costly endowment of the Oxford Professorships. Some thirty or more there were, it was alleged, and five or six only which were not held as absolute sine- cures. Now, this is a charge which I am not here mean- ing to discuss. Whether defensible or not, I do not now inquire. It is the practical interpretation and construction of this charge which I here wish to rectify. In most universities, except those of England, the Professors are the body on whom devolves the whole duty and burthen of teaching: they compose the sole fountains of instruc- tion ; and if these fountains fail, the fair inference is, that the one great purpose of the institution is defeated. 252 LIFE AND MANNERS. But this inference, valid for all other places, is not so for Oxford and Cambridge. And here, again, the difference arises out of the peculiar distribution of these bodies into separate and independent colleges. Each college takes upon itself the regular instruction of its separate inmates — of these and of no others ; and for this office it appoints, after careful selection, trial, and probation, the best quali- fied amongst those of its senior members who choose to undertake a trust of such heavy responsibility. These officers are called tutors ; and they are connected by duties and by accountability — not with the university at all, but with their own private colleges. The Profes- sors, on the other hand, are public functionaries, not connected (as respects the exercise of their duties) with any college whatsoever — not even with their own — but altogether and exclusively with the whole university. Besides the public tutors appointed in each college, on the scale of one to each dozen or score of students, there are also tutors strictly private, who attend any students in search of special and extraordinary aid, on terms settled privately by themselves. Of these persons, or their ex- istence, the college takes no cognizance ; but, between the two classes of tutors, the most studious young men — those who would be most likely to avail themselves of the lectures read by the Professors — have their whole time pretty severely occupied : and the inference from all this is, not only that the course of Oxford education would suffer little if no Professors at all existed, but also that, if the existing Professors were ex abundanti to volunteer the most exemplary spirit of exertion, however much this spectacle of conscientious dealing might edify the University, it would contribute but little to the pro- motion of academic purposes. The establishment of Professors is, in fact, a thing of ornament and pomp. OXFORD. 253 Elsewhere, they are the working servants ; but, in Ox- ford, the ministers corresponding to them bear another name — they are called Tutors. These are the working agents in the Oxford system ; and the Professors, with salaries in many cases merely nominal, are persons sequestered, and properly sequestered, to the solitary cultivation and advancement of knowledge, which a dif- ferent order of men is appointed to communicate. Here let us pause for one moment, to notice another peculiarity in the Oxford system, upon the tendency of which I shall confidently make my appeal to the good sense of all unprejudiced readers. I have said that the Tutors of Oxford correspond to the Professors of other universities. But this correspondence, which is absolute and unquestionable as regards the point then at issue — viz , where we are to look for that limb of the establish- ment on which rests the main teaching agency — is liable to considerable qualification, when we examine the mode of their teaching. In both cases, this is conveyed by what is termed ' lecturing ; ' — but what is the meaning of a lecture in Oxford and elsewhere ? Elsewhere, it means a solemn dissertation, read, or sometimes histri- onically declaimed, by the professor. In Oxford, it means an exercise performed orally by the students, occasionally assisted by the tutor, and subject, in its whole course, to his corrections, and what may be called his scholia, or collateral suggestions and improvements. Now, differ as men may as to other features of the Oxford, compared with the hostile system, here I conceive that there is no room for doubt or demur. An Oxford lecture imposes a real bona fide task upon the student ; it will not suffer him to fall asleep, either literally or in the energies of his understanding ; it is a real drill, under the excitement, perhaps, of personal competition, and under the review 254 LIFE A^D MANNERS. of a superior scholar. But, in Germany, under the decla- mations of the Pro :he young men are often literally sleeping ; nor is it easy to see how the attention can be kept from wandering, on this plan, which subjects the auditor to no risk of sudden question or personal appeal. As to the prizes given for essays, vN:c. by the Professors, these have the effect of drawing forth latent talent, but they can yield no criterion of the attention paid to the Professor ; not to say that the competition for these pi is a matter of choice. Sometimes, it is true that exami- nations take place ; but the Oxford lecture is a daily examination: and, waving that, what chance is there (I would ask) for searching examinations, for examinations conducted with the requisite auctoritas. (or weight of influence, derived from personal qualities,) if — which may Heaven prevent! — the German tenure of profes- sorships were substituted for our British one : that is, if for independent and liberal teachers were substituted poor mercenary haberdashers of knowledge — cap in hand to opulent students — servile to their caprices — and, at one blow, degrading the science they profess, the teacher, and the pupil ? Yet I hear that such advice ivas given to a Royal Commission, sent to investigate one or more of the Scottish universities. In the German universities, every Professor holds his situation — not in his good behavior — but on the capricious pleasure of the young men who resort to his market. Fk ojjens a shop, in fact : others, without limit, generally men of no credit or kr. respectability, are allowed to open rival shops ; and the result is, sometimes, that the whole kennel of scoundrel Professors ruin one another ; each standing with his mouth open, to leap at any bone thrown amongst them, from the table of the ; Burschen ;' all hating, fighting, calumniating each other, until the land is sick of its base knowledge- OXFORD. 255 mongers, and would vomit the loathsome crew, were any natural channel open to their instincts of abhorrence. The most important of the Scottish Professorships- — those which are fundamentally morticed to the moral institutions of the land — are upon the footing of Oxford tutorships, as regards emoluments : that is, they are not suffered to keep up a precarious mendicant existence, upon the alms of the students, or upon their fickle admi- rations. It is made imperative upon a candidate for ad- mission into the ministry of the Scottish Kirk, that he shall show a certificate of attendance through a given number of seasons at given lectures. The next item in the quarterly (or, technically, the term) bills of Oxford is, for servants. This, in my col- lege, and, I believe, in all others, amounted nominally to two guineas a year. That sum, however, w 7 as paid to a principal servant, whom, perhaps, you seldom or never saw ; the actual attendance upon yourself being performed by one of his deputies; and to this deputy — who is, in effect, a factotum, combining in his single person all the functions of chambermaid, valet, waiter at meals, and porter or errand-boy — by the custom of the place and your own sense of propriety, you cannot but give something or other in the shape of perquisites. I was told, on entering, that half a guinea a quarter was the customary allowance — the same sum, in fact, as was levied by the college for his principal ; but I gave mine a guinea a quarter, thinking that little enough for the many services he performed ; and others, who were richer than myself, I dare say, often gave much more. Yet, sometimes, it struck me, from the gratitude which his looks testified, on my punctual payment of this guinea — for it was the only bill with regard to which I troubled myself to practise any severe punctuality — that perhaps 256 LIFE AND MANNERS. some thoughtless young man might give him less, or might even forget to give anything ; and, at all events, 1 have reason to believe that half the sum would have contented him. These minutiae I record purposely ; my immediate object being to give a rigorous statement of the real ex- penses incident to an English University education, partly as a guide to the calculations of parents, and partly as an answer to the somewhat libellous exaggerations which are current on this subject, in times like these, when even the truth itself, and received in a spirit of candor the most indulgent, may be all too little to defend these venerable seats of learning from the ruin which seems brooding over them. Yet, no ! Abominable is the language of despair even in a desperate situation. And, therefore, Oxford, ancient mother! and thou, Cambridge, twin-light of Eng- land ! be vigilant and erect, for the enemy stands at all your gates ! Two centuries almost have passed, since the boar was within your vineyards, laying waste and desolat- ing your heritage. Yet that storm was not final, nor that eclipse total ! May this also prove but a trial and a shadow of affliction ! which affliction, may it prove to you, mighty incorporations, what, sometimes, it is to us poor frail homunculi — a process of purification, a solemn and oracular warning ! And, when that cloud is overpast, then, rise, ancient powers, wiser and better — ready, like the lafin/»/, (or, rather, to the is father's house. The rest would, in these days, be the same, perhaps, everywhere. How much, then, shall w r e assume as the total charge on account of Oxford ? Candles, considering the quantity of long days amongst the thirty weeks, may be had for Is. 6d. a week ; for few students — unless they have lived in India,- after which a physical change occurs in the sensibility of the nostrils — are finical enough to burn wax-lights. This will amount to £2 5s. Coals, say sixpence a day ; for threepence a day will amply feed one grate in Edinburgh ; and there are many weeks in the thirty which will demand no fire at all. Groceries and wine, which are all that remain, I cannot calculate. But suppose we allow for the first a shilling a day, which will be exactly ten guineas for thirty weeks ; and for the second, nothing at all. Then the extras, in addition to the college bills, will stand thus : — 276 LIFE AND MANNERS. Washing for thirty weeks, at the privileged rate, £6 6 Candles, 2 5 Fire, 550 Groceries, 10 10 Total, £24 6 The college bills, therefore, will be £66 9s. ; the extras, not furnished by the college, will be about c£24 6s. — making a total amount of <£90 15s. And for this sum, annually, a man may defray every expense incident to an Oxford life, through a period of weeks (viz. 30) something more than he will be permitted to reside. It is true, that, for the Jirst year, there will be, in addition to this, his outfit ; and for every year, there will be his journeys. There will also be twenty-two weeks uncov- ered by this estimate : but for these it is not my business to provide, who deal only with Oxford. That this estimate is true, I know too feelingly. Would that it were not ! would that it were false ! Were it so, I might the better justify to myself that commerce with fraudulent Jews which led me so early to commence the dilapidation of my small fortune. It is true ; and true for a period (1804-6) far dearer than this. And to any man who questions its accuracy, I address this particular request — that he will lay his hand upon the special item which he disputes. I anticipate that he will answer thus : — C I dispute none: it is not by positive things that your estimate errs, but bv negations. It is the absence of all allowance for indispensable items that vitiates the calcula- tion.' Very well : but to this, as to other things, we may apply the words of Dr. Johnson — i Sir, the reason I drink no wine, is because I can practise abstinence, but not tem- perance.' Yes : in all things, abstinence is easier than temperance ; for a little enjoyment has invariably the effect of awaking the sense of enjoyment, irritating it, and OXFORD. 277 setting it on edge. I, therefore, recollecting my own case, have allowed for no wine parties. Let our friend, the abstraction we are speaking of, give breakfast parties, if he chooses to give any ; and certainly to give none at all, unless he were dedicated to study, would seem very churl- ish. Nobody can be less a friend than myself to monkish and ascetic seclusion, unless it were for twenty-three hours out of the twenty-four. But, however this be settled, let no mistake be made : nor let that be charged against the system which is due to the habits of individuals. Early in the last century, Dr. Newton, the head of a college in Oxford, wrote a large book against the Oxford system, as ruinously expensive. But then, as now, the real expense was due to no cause over which the colleges could exercise any effectual con- trol. It is due exclusively to the habits of social inter- course amongst the young men ; from which he may abstain who chooses. But for any academic authorities to interfere by sumptuary laws with the private expendi- ture of grown men, many of them, in a legal sense, of age, and all near it, must appear romantic and extravagant, for this (or, indeed, any) stage of society. A tutor being required, about 1810., to fix the amount of allowance for a young man of small fortune, nearly related to myself, pro- nounced ^320 little enough. He had this allowance, and was ruined, in consequence of the credit which it procured for him, and the society it connected him with. The majority have <£200 a year : but my estimate stands good for all that. Having stated, generally, the expenses of the Oxford system, I am bound, in candor, to mention one variety in the mode of carrying this system into effect, open to every man's adoption, which confers certain privileges, but, at the same time, (by what exact mode, I know not,) con- 278 LIFE AND MANNERS. siderably increases the cost, and in that degree disturbs my calculation. The great body of undergraduates, or students, are divided into two classes — Commoners, and Gentlemen Commoners. Perhaps nineteen out of twenty belong to the former class ; and it is for that class, as having been my own, that I have made my estimate. The other class of Gentlemen Commoners, (who, at Cambridge, bear the name of Fellow Commoners,) wear a peculiar dress, and have some privileges which naturally imply some corresponding increase of cost ; but why this in- crease should go to the extent of doubling the total expense, as it is generally thought to do, or how it can go to that extent, I am unable to explain. The differences which attach to the rank of c Gentleman Commoners,' are these : — At his entrance, he pays double ' caution money ' — that is, whilst Commoners in general pay about twenty-five guineas, he pays fifty ; but this can occur only once ; and, besides, in strict point of right, this sum is only a deposit, and is liable to be withdrawn on leaving the University, though it is commonly enough finally pre- sented to the college in the shape of plate. The next difference is, that, by comparison with the Commoner, he wears a much more costly dress. The Commoner's gown is made of what is called princess stuff ; and, together with the cap, costs about five guineas. But the Gentle- man Commoner has two gowns — an undress for the morning, and a full dress-gown for the evening ; both are made of silk, and the latter is very elaborately orna- mented. The cap also is more costly, being covered with velvet instead of cloth. At Cambridge, again, the tassel is made of gold fringe or bullion, which, in Oxford, is peculiar to the caps of noblemen ; and there are many other varieties in that University, where the dress for c pensioners,' (i. e. the Oxford 'Commoners,') is specially oxforu. 279 varied in almost every college ; the object being, perhaps, to give a ready means to the academic officers for ascer- taining, at a glance, not merely the general fact that such or such a delinquent is a gownsman, (which is all that can be ascertained at Oxford,) but also the particular college to which he belongs. Allowance being made for these two items of fi dress ' and i caution-money,' both of which apply only to the original outfit, I know of no others in which the expenditure of a Gentleman Com- moner ought to exceed, or could with propriety exceed, those of a Commoner. He has, indeed, a privilege as regards the choice of rooms ; he chooses first, and prob- ably chooses those rooms w r hich, being best, are dearest ; that is, they are on a level with the best ; but usually there are many sets almost equally good ; and of these the majority will be occupied by Commoners. So far, there is little opening for a difference. More often, again, it will happen that a man of this aristocratic class keeps a private servant ; yet this happens also to Commoners, and is, besides, no properly college expense. Tutorage is charged double to a Gentleman Commoner — viz., twenty guineas a year: this is done upon a fiction (as it sometimes turns out) of separate attention, or aid given in a private way to his scholastic pursuits. Finally, there arises natu- rally another and peculiar source of expense to the ' Gen- tleman Commoner,' from a fact implied in his Cambridge designation of c Fellow Commoner,' commensalis — viz., that he associates at meals with the c fellows ' and other authorities of the college. Yet this again expresses rather the particular shape which his expenditure assumes than any absolute increase in its amount. He subscribes to a regular mess, and pays, therefore, whether present or not ; but so, in a partial sense, does the Commoner, by his forfeits for c absent commons.' He subscribes also to a 280 LIFE AND MANNERS. regular fund for wine ; and, therefore, he does not enjoy that immunity from wine-drinking which is open to the Commoner. Yet, again, as the Commoner docs but rarely avail himself of this immunity, as he drinks no less wine than the Gentleman Commoner, and, generally speaking, wine not worse in quality, it is difficult to see any ground for a regular assumption of higher expendi- ture in the one class than the other. However, the universal impression favors that assumption. All people believe that the rank of Gentleman Commoner imposes an expensive burden, though few people ever ask why. As a matter of fact, I believe it to be true, that Gentlemen Commoners spend more by a third, or a half, than any equal number of Commoners, taken without selection. And the reason is obvious : those who become Gentlemen Commoners are usually determined to that course by the accident of having very large funds ; they are eldest sons, or only sons, or men already in possession of estates, or else (which is as common a case as all the rest put to- gether) they are the heirs of newly acquired wealth — sons of the nouveaux riches — a class which often requires a generation or two to rub off the insolence of a too con- scious superiority. I have called them an c aristocratic ' class ; but, in strictness, they are not such ; they form a privileged class indeed, but their privileges are few and trifling, not to add that these very privileges are connected with one or two burdens, more than outweighing them in the estimate of many ; and, upon the whole, the chief distinction they enjoy is that of advertising themselves to the public as men of great wealth or great expectations ; and, therefore, as subjects peculiarly adapted to fraudulent attempts. Accordingly, it is not found that the sons of the nobility are much inclined to enter this order : these, if they happen to be the eldest sons of Earls, or of any OXFORD. 281 Peers above the rank of Viscount, so as to enjoy a title themselves by the courtesy of England, have special privileges in both Universities as to length of residence, degrees, &,c. ; and their rank is ascertained by a special dress. These privileges it is not usual to forego ; though sometimes that happens, as in my time, in the instance of Lord George Grenville, (now Lord Nugent ;) he neither entered at the aristocratic college, (Christ Church,) nor wore the dress of a nobleman. Generally, however, an elder son appears in his true character of nobleman ; but the younger sons rarely enter the class of Gentlemen Commoners. They enter either as ■ Commoners,' or under some of those various designations ( ; scholars? 1 demies? ' students? ' junior fellows ') which imply that they stand upon the foundation of the college to w^iich they belong, and are aspirants for academic emoluments. Upon the whole, I am disposed to regard this order of Gentlemen Commoners as a standing temptation held out by authority to expensive habits, and a very unbecoming proclamation of honor paid to the aristocracy of wealth. And I know that many thoughtful men regard it in the same light with myself, and regret deeply that any such distribution of ranks should be authorized, as a stain upon the simplicity and general manliness of the English ac- ademic laws. It is an open profession of homage and indulgence to wealth, as wealth — to wealth disconnected from everything that might ally it to the ancestral honors and heraldries of the land. It is also an invitation, or rather a challenge, to profuse expenditure. Regularly, and by law, a Gentleman Commoner is liable to little heavier burdens than a Commoner ; but to meet the ex- pectations of those around him, and to act up to the part he has assumed, he' must spend more, and he must be more careless in controlling his expenditure, than a mod- 19 2S"2 LIFE AND MANNERS. erate and prudent Commoner. In every light, therefore, I condemn the institution, and give it up to the censures of the judicious. So much in candor I concede. But, to show equal candor on the other side, it must be remem- bered that this institution descends to us from ancient times, when wealth was not so often divided from territo- rial or civic honors, conferring a real precedency. CHAPTER X. OXFORD. There was one reason why I sought solitude at that early age, and sought it in a morbid excess, which must naturally have conferred upon my character some degree of that interest which belongs to all extremes. My eye had been couched into a secondary power of vision, by misery by solitude, by sympathy with life in all its modes, by experience too early won, and by the sense of danger critically escaped. Suppose the case of a man suspended by some colossal arm over an unfathomed abyss — sus- pended, but finally and slowly withdrawn — it is probable that he would not smile for years. That was my case : for I have not mentioned, in the c Opium Confessions,' a thousandth part of the sufferings I underwent in London and in Wales ; partly because the misery was too monot- onous, and in that respect unfitted for description ; but still more, because there is a mysterious sensibility con- nected with real suffering which recoils from circumstantial rehearsal or delineation, as from violation offered to some- thing sacred, and which is, or should be dedicated to privacy. Grief does not parade its pangs, nor the anguish of despairing hunger willingly count again its groans or its humiliations. Hence it was that Ledyard, the traveller, speaking of his Russian experiences, used to say that some of his miseries were such, that he never would 284 LIFE AND MANNERS. reveal them. Besides all which, I really was not at liberty to speak, without many reserves, on this chapter of my life, at a period (1821) not twenty years removed from the actual occurrences, unless I desired to court the risk of crossing at every step the existing law of libel, so full of snares and mantraps, to the careless, equally with the conscientious writer. This is a consideration which some of my critics have lost sight of in a degree which sur- prises me. One, for example, puts it to his readers whether any house such as I describe as the abode of rny money-lending friend, could exist i in Oxford Street;' and, at the same time he states, as circumstances drawn from my description, but, in fact, pure coinages of his own, certain romantic impossibilities, which doubtless could as little attach to a house in Oxford Street, as they could to a house in any other quarter of London. Mean- time, I had sufficiently indicated that, whatsoever street was concerned in that affair, Oxford Street was not ; and it is remarkable enough, as illustrating this amiable re- viewer's veracity, that no one street in London was abso- lutely excluded hut one ; and that one Oxford Street. For I happened to mention that, on such a day, (my birth-day,) I had turned aside from Oxford Street to look at the house in question. I will now add that this house was in Greek Street : so much it may be safe to say. But every candid reader will see. that both prudential restraints, and also disinterested regard to the feelings of possibly amiable descendants from a vicious man, would operate with any thoughtful writer in such a case, to impose reserve upon his pen. Had my guardians, had my money-lending friend of Jewry, and others concerned in my memoirs, been so many shadows, bodiless abstrac- tions, and without earthly connections, I might readily have given my own names to my own creations ; and OXFORD. 285 have treated them as unceremoniously as I pleased ; not so, under the real circumstances of the case. My chief guardian, for instance, though obstinate to a degree which risked the happiness and the life of his ward, was an upright man otherwise : and his children are entitled to value his memory. Again, my Greek Street TQantuW^c, the ' fcznerator Al- pheusS who delighted to reap where he had not sown, and too often (I fear) allowed himself in practices which not impossibly have long since been found to qualify him for distant climates and ' Botanic ' regions — even he, though I might truly describe him as a mere highwayman, when- ever he happened to be aware that I had received a friend- ly loan, yet, like other highwaymen of repute, and 4 gentle thieves,' was not inexorable to the petitions of his victim : he would sometimes toss back what was required for some instant necessity of the road ; and at his breakfast table it was, after all, as elsewhere recorded, that I contrived to support life ; barely indeed, and most slenderly, but still with the final result of escaping absolute starvation. With that recollection before me, I could not allow myself to probe his frailties too severely, had it even been certainly safe to do so. But enough : the reader will understand that a year spent either in the valleys of Wales, or upon the streets of London, a wanderer, too often houseless in both situations, might naturally have peopled the mind of one constitutionally disposed to solemn contemplations with memorials of human sorrow and strife too profound to pass away for years. Thus, then, it was — past experience of a very peculiar kind, the agitations of many lives crowded into the com- pass of a year or two, in combination with a peculiar structure of mind — offered one explanation of the very remarkable and unsocial habits which I adopted at college : 286 LIFE AND MANNERS. but there was another not less powerful and not less un- usual. In stating this, I shall seem, to some persons, covertly designing an affront to Oxford. But that is far from my intention. It is noways peculiar to Oxford ; but will, doubtless, be found in every university throughout the world — that the younger part of the members, the undergraduates, I mean, generally, whose chief business must have lain amongst the great writers of Greece and Rome, cannot have found leisure to cultivate extensively their own domestic literature. Not so much that time will have been wanting ; but that the whole energy of the mind, and the main course of the subsidiary studies and researches, will naturally have been directed to those difficult languages, amongst which lie their daily tasks. I make it no subject of complaint or scorn, therefore, but simply state it as a fact, that few or none of the Oxford undergraduates, with whom parity of standing threw me into collision at my first outset, knew anything at all of English literature. The Spectator seemed to me the only English book of a classical rank which they had read ; and even this less for its inimitable delicacy, humor, and refined pleasantry in dealing with manners and characters, than for its insipid and meagre essays, ethical or critical. This was no fault of theirs : they had been sent to the book chiefly as a subject for Latin trans- lations, or of other exercises ; and, in such a view, the vague generalities of superficial morality were more use- ful and more manageable than sketches of manner or character, steeped in national peculiarities. To translate the terms of Whig politics into classical Latin, would be as difficult as it might be for a Whig himself to give a consistent account of those politics from the year 1688. Natural, however, and excusable as this ignorance might be, to myself it was intolerable and incomprehensible. OXFORD. 287 Already, at fifteen, I had made myself familiar with the great English poets. About sixteen, or not long after, my interest in the story of Chatterton had carried me over the whole ground of the Rowley controversy ; and that controversy, by a necessary consequence, had so familia- rized me with the ■ Black Letter,' that I had begun to find an unaffected pleasure in the ancient English metrical romances ; and, in Chaucer, though acquainted as yet only with part of his works, I had perceived and had felt profoundly those divine qualities, w T hich, even at this day, are so languidly acknowledged by his unjust countrymen. With this knowledge, and this enthusiastic knowledge of the elder poets — of those most remote from easy access — I could not well be a stranger in other walks of our litera- ture, more on a level with the general taste, and nearer to modern diction, and, therefore, more extensively multi- plied by the press. Yet, after all, as one proof how much more commanding is that part of a literature which speaks to the elementary affections of men, than that which is founded on the mutable aspects of manners — it is a fact that, even in our elaborate system of society, where an undue value is unavoidably given to the whole science of social inter- course, and a continual irritation applied to the sensibilities which point in that direction ; still, under all these advan- tages, Pope himself is less read, less quoted, less thought of, than the* elder and graver section of our literature. It is a great calamity for an author such as Pope, that, generally speaking, it requires so much experience of life to enjoy his peculiar felicities, as must argue an age likely to have impaired the general capacity for enjoy- ment. For my part, I had myself a very slender ac- quaintance with this chapter of our literature ; and w T hat little I had was generally, at that period of my life, as, 288 LIFE AND MANNERS. with most men, it continues to be to the end of life, a reflex knowledge, acquired through those pleasant mis- cellanies, half gossip, half criticism — such as Warton's Essay on Pope, Boswell's Johnson, Mathias's Pursuits of Literature, and many scores beside of the same indeter- minate class ; a class, however, which do a real service to literature, by diffusing an indirect knowledge of fine writers in their most effective passages, where else, in a direct shape, it would often never extend. In some parts, then, having even a profound knowledge of our literature, in all parts having some, I felt it to be impossible that I should familiarly associate with those who had none at all ; not so much as a mere historical knowledge of the literature in its capital names and their chronological succession. Do I mention this in dispar- agement of Oxford ? By no means. Among the under- graduates of higher standing, and occasionally, perhaps, of my own, I have since learned that many might have been found eminently accomplished in this particular. But seniors do not seek after juniors ; they must be sought ; and, with my previous bias to solitude, a bias equally composed of impulses and motives, I had no dis- position to take trouble in seeking any man for any purpose. But, on this subject, a fact still remains to be told, of which I am justly proud ; and it will serve, beyond any- thing else that I can say, to measure the aVgree of my intellectual development. On coming to Oxford, I had taken up one position in advance of my age by full thirty years : that appreciation of Wordsworth, which it has taken full thirty years to establish amongst the public, I had already made, and had made* operative to my own intellectual culture in the same year when I clandestinely quitted school. Already, in 1802, 1 had addressed a letter OXFORD. 289 of fervent admiration to Mr. Wordsworth. I did not send it until the spring of 1803 ; and, from misdirection, it did not come into his hands for some months. But. I had an answer from Mr. Wordsworth before I was eighteen ; and that my letter was thought to express the homage of an enlightened admirer, may be inferred from the fact that his answer was long and full. On this anecdote, 1 do not mean to dwell : but I cannot allow the reader to overlook the circumstances of the case. At this day, it is true, no journal can be taken up which does not habitually speak of Mr. Wordsworth as of a great if not the great poet of the age. Mr. Bulwer, living in the intensest pressure of the world, and, though recoiling continually from the judgments of the world, yet never in any violent degree, ascribes to Mr. Wordsworth (in his England and the English, p. 308,) ' an influence of a more noble and purely intellectual character, than any writer of our age or nation has exercised.' Such is the opinion held of this great poet in 1835; but what were those of 1805-15, nay, of 1825 ? For twenty years after the date of that letter to Mr. Wordsworth above referred to, language was exhausted, ingenuity was put on the rack, in the search after images and expressions vile enough — insolent enough — to convey the unutterable contempt avowed for all that he had written by the fashionable critics. One critic — who still, I believe, edits a rather popular journal, and who belongs to that class, feeble, fluttering, ingenious, who make it their highest ambition not to lead, but, with a slave's adulation, to obey and to follow all the caprices of the public mind — described Mr. Wordsworth as re- sembling, in the quality of his mind, an old nurse babbling in her paralytic dotage to sucking babies. If this insult was peculiarly felt by Mr. Wordsworth, it was on a con- sideration of the unusual imbecility of him who offered it, 290 LIFE AND MANNERS. and not because in itself it was baser or more insolent than the language held by the majority of journalists who then echoed the public voice. Blackwood'' s Magazine (1817) first accustomed the public ear to the language of admiration coupled with the name of Wordsworth. This began with Professor Wilson; and well I remember — nay, the proofs are still easy to hunt up — that, for eight or ten years, this singularity of opinion, having no coun- tenance from other journals, was treated as a whim, a paradox, a bold extravagance of the Blackwood critics. Mr. Wordsworth's neighbors in Westmoreland, who had (generally speaking) a profound contempt for him, used to rebut the testimony of Blackwood by one constant reply — i Ay, Blackwood praises Wordsworth, but who else praises him ? ' In short, up to 1820, the name of Wordsworth was trampled under foot ; from 1820 to 1830 it was militant ; from 1830 to 1835 it has been trium- phant. In 1803, when I entered at Oxford, that name was absolutely unknown ; and the finger of scorn pointed at it in 1S02 by the first or second number of the Edinburgh Review, failed to reach its mark from absolute defect of knowledge in the public mind. Some fifty beside myself knew who was meant by ■ that poet who had cautioned his friend against growing double,' &c. ; to all others it was a profound secret. These things must be known and understood properly to value the prophetic eye and the intrepidity of two persons, like Professor Wilson and myself, who, in 1802-3, at- tached themselves to a banner not yet raised and planted ; who outran, in fact, their contemporaries by one entire generation ; and did that about 1S02 which the rest of the world are doing in chorus about 1532. Professor Wilson's period at Oxford exactly coincided with my own ; yet, in that large world, we never met. I OXFORD. 291 know, therefore, but little of his policy in regard to such opinions or feelings as tended to dissociate him from the mass of his coevals. This only I know, that he lived as it were in public ; and must, therefore, I presume, have practised a studied reserve as to his deepest admirations ; and, perhaps, at that day (1803-8) the occasions would be rare in which much dissimulation would be needed. Until Lord Byron had begun to pilfer from Wordsworth and to abuse him, allusions to Wordsworth were not fre- quent in conversation ; and it was chiefly on occasion of some question arising about poetry in general, or about the poets of the day, that it became difficult to dissemble. For my part, hating the necessity for dissimulation as much as the dissimulation itself, I drew from this pecu- liarity also of my own mind, a fresh reinforcement of my other motives for sequestering myself; and, for the first two years of my residence in Oxford, I compute that I did not utter one hundred words. I remember distinctly the first (which happened also to be the last) conversation that I ever held with my tutor. It consisted of three sentences, two of which fell to his share, one to mine. On a fine morning, he met me in the Quadrangle, and having then no guess of the nature of my pretensions, he determined (I suppose) to probe them. Accordingly, he asked me, c What I had been lately reading ? ' Now, the fact was, that I, at that time im- mersed in metaphysics, had really been reading and study- ing very closely the Parmenides, of which obscure work some Oxford men, early in the last century, published a separate edition. Yet, so profound was the benignity of my nature, that, in those days, I could not bear to witness, far less to cause, the least pain or mortification to any human being. I recoiled, indeed, from the society of most men, but not with any feelings of dislike. On the 292 LIFE AND MANNERS. contrary, in order that I might like all men, I wished to associate with none. Now, then, to have mentioned the Parvnenides to one who, fifty thousand to one, was a perfect stranger to its whole drift and purpose, looked too mechant, too like a trick of malice in an age when such reading was so very unusual. I felt that it would be taken for an express stratagem for stopping my tutor's mouth. All this passing rapidly through my mind, I replied with- out hesitation, that I had been reading Paley. My tutor's rejoinder I have never forgotten : l Ah ! an excellent author ; excellent for his matter ; only you must be on your guard as to his style ; he is very vicious there."* Such was the colloquy ; we bowed, parted, and never more (I apprehend) exchanged one word. Now, trivial and trite as this comment on Paley may appear to the reader, it struck me forcibly that more falsehood, or more absolute falsehood, or more direct inversion of the truth, could not, by any artifice of ingenuity, have been crowded into one short sentence. Paley, as a philosopher, is a jest, the disgrace of the age ; and, as regards the two Universities and the enormous responsibility they under- take for the books which they sanction by their official examinations for degrees, the name of Paley is their great opprobrium. But, on the other hand, for style, Paley is a master. Homely, racy, vernacular English, the rustic vigor of a style which intentionally foregoes the graces of polish on the one hand, and of scholastic precision on the other, that quality of merit has never been attained in a degree so eminent. This first interchange of thought upon a topic of literature did not tend to slacken my previous disposition to retreat into solitude ; a solitude, however, which at no time w r as tainted with either the moroseness or the pride of a cynic. Neither must the reader suppose, that, even in that day, OXFORD. 293 I belonged to the party who disparage the classical writers, or the classical training of the great English schools. The Greek drama I loved and revered. But, to deal frankly — because it is a subject which I shall hereafter bring before the public — I made great distinctions. I was not that indiscriminate admirer of Greek and Roman literature, which those too generally are who admire it at all. This protesting spirit, against a false and blind idola- try, was with me, at that time, a matter of enthusiasm — almost of bigotry. I was a bigot against bigots. Let us take the Greek oratory, for example: — What section of the Greek literature is more fanatically exalted, and studiously in depreciation of our own ? Let us judge of the sincerity at the base of these hollow affectations, by the downright facts and the producible records. To admire, in any sense which can give weight and value to your admiration, presupposes, I presume, some acquaint- ance with its object. As the earliest title to an opinion, one way or other, of the Greek eloquence, we ought to have studied some of its most distinguished artists ; or, say one, at least ; and this one, we may be sure, will be, as it ought to be, Demosthenes. Now, it is a fact, that all the copies of Demosthenes sold within the last hundred years would not meet the demand of one considerable town, were that orator a subject of study amongst even classical scholars. I doubt whether, at this day, there exist twenty men in Europe who can be said to have even once read Demosthenes ; and therefore it was that, when Mr. Mitford, in his ; History of Greece,' took a new view of this orator's political administration — a view which lowered his character for integrity — he found an unre- sisting acceder to his doctrines in a public having no previous opinion upon the subject, and, therefore, open to any casual impression of malice or rash judgment. Had 294 LIFE AND MANNERS. there been any acquaintance with the large remains which we still possess of this famous orator, no such wrong could have been done. I, from rny childhood, had been a reader, nay, a student of Demosthenes ; and, simply, for this reason, that, having meditated profoundly on the true laws and philosophy of diction, and of what is vaguely denominated style, and finding nothing of any value in modern writers upon this subject, and not much as regards the grounds and ultimate principles even in the ancient rhetoricians, I have been reduced to collect my opinions from the great artists and practitioners, rather than from the theorists ; and, among those artists, in the most plastic of languages, I hold Demosthenes to have been the greatest. The Greek is, beyond comparison, the most plastic of languages. It was a material which bent to the purposes of him who used it beyond the material of other lan- guages ; it was an instrument for a larger compass of modulations ; and it happens that the peculiar theme of an orator imposes the very largest which is consistent with a prose diction. One step farther in passion, and the orator would become a poet. An orator can exhaust the capacities of a language — an historian never. More- over, the age of Demosthenes was, in my judgment, the age of highest development for arts dependent upon social refinement. That generation had fixed and ascertained the use of words ; whereas, the previous generation of Thucydides, Xenophon, Plato, &c, was a transitional period : the language was still moving and tending to a meridian not yet attained ; and the public eye had been directed consciously upon language, as in and for itself an organ of intellectual delight, for too short a time, to have mastered the whole art of managing its resources. All these were reasons for studying Demosthenes, as OXFORD. 295 the one great model and standard of Attic prose ; and, studied him I had, more than any other prose writer what- ever. Pari passu, I had become sensible that others had not studied him. One monotonous song of applause I found raised on every side ; something about being c like a torrent, that carries everything before it.' This original image is all we get in the shape of criticism ; and never any attempt even at illustrating what is greatest in him, or characterizing what is most peculiar. The same persons who discovered that Lord Brougham was the modern Bacon, have also complimented him with the title of the English Demosthenes. Upon this hint, Lord Brougham, in his address to the Glasgow students, has deluged the great Athenian with wordy admiration. There is an obvi- ous prudence in lodging your praise upon an object from which you count upon a rebound to yourself. But here, as everywhere else, you look in vain for any marks or indications of a personal and direct acquaintance with the original orations. The praise is built rather upon the popular idea of Demosthenes, than upon the real Demos- thenes. And not only so, but even upon style itself, and upon the art of composition in abstracto, Lord Brougham does not seem to have formed any clear conceptions — principles he has none. Now, it is useless to judge of an artist until you have some principles on the art. The two capital secrets in the art of prose composition are these : — 1st, The philosophy of transition and connection, or the art by which one step in an evolution of thought is made to arise out of another : all fluent and effective composition depends on the connections ; — 2dly, The way in which sentences are made to modify each other ; for, the most powerful effects in written eloquence arise out of this reverberation, as it were, from each other in a rapid succession of sentences : and, because some limitation is 296 LIFE AND MANNERS. necessary to the length and complexity of sentences, in order to make this interdependency felt, hence it is that the Germans have no eloquence. The construction of German prose tends to such immoderate length of sen- tences, that no effect of intermodification can ever be apparent. Each sentence, stuffed with innumerable clauses .of restriction, and other parenthetical circum- stances, becomes a separate section — an independent whole. But, without insisting on Lord Brougham's over- sights, or errors of defect, I will digress a moment to one positive caution of his, which will measure the value of his philosophy on this subject. He lays it down for a rule of indefinite application, that the Saxon part of our English idiom is to be favored at the expense of that part which has so happily coalesced with the language from the Latin or Greek. This fancy, often patronized by other writers, and even acted upon, resembles that restraint which some metrical writers have imposed upon themselves — of writing a long copy of verses, from which some particular letter, or from each line of which some different letter should be carefully excluded. What followed ? Was the reader sensible, in the practical effect upon his ear, of any beauty attained ? By no means; all the difference, sensibly perceived, lay in the occasional constraints and affectations to which the writer had been driven by his self-imposed necessities. The same chimera exists in Germany ; and so much farther is it carried, that one great puritan in this heresy (Wolf) has published a vast dictionary, the rival of Ade- lung's, for the purpose of expelling every word of foreign origin and composition out of the language, by assigning some equivalent term spun out from pure native Teutonic materials. Bayonet, for example, is patriotically rejected, because a word may be readily compounded tantamount OXFORD. 297 to musket- dirk ; and this sort of composition thrives showily in the German, as a language running into composition with a fusibility only surpassed by the Greek. But what good purpose is attained by such caprices ? In three sentences the sum of the philosophy may be stated. It has been computed (see Duclos) that the Italian opera has not above six hundred words in its whole vocabulary : so narrow is the range of its emo- tions, and so little are those emotions disposed to expand themselves into any variety of thinking. The same remark applies to that class of simple, household, homely passion, which belongs to the early ballad poetry. Their passion is of a quality more venerable, it is true, and deeper than that of the opera, because more permanent and co-extensive with human life ; but it is not much wider in its sphere, nor more apt to coalesce with con- templative or philosophic thinking. Pass from these narrow fields of the intellect, where the relations of the objects are so few and simple, and the whole prospect so bounded, to the immeasurable and sea-like arena upon which Shakspeare careers — co-infinite with life itself — yes, and with something more than life. Here is the other pole, the opposite extreme. And what is the choice of diction ? What is the lexis ? Is it Saxon exclusively, or is it Saxon by preference ? So far from that, the Latinity is intense — not, indeed, in his construction, but in his choice of words ; and so continually are these Latin words used, with a critical respect to their earliest (and where that happens to have existed, to their unfigurative) meaning, that, upon this one argument, I would rely for upsetting the else impregnable thesis of Dr. Farmer as to Shakspeare's learning. Nay, I will affirm that, out of this regard to the Latin acceptation of Latin words, may be 20 298 LIFE AND MANNERS. absolutely explained the Shakspearian meaning of certain words, which has hitherto baffled all his critics. For instance, the word modern, of which Dr. Johnson pro- fesses himself unable to explain the rationale or principle regulating its Shakspearian use, though he felt its value, it is to be deduced thus : — First of all, change the pro- nunciation a little, by substituting for the short o, as we pronounce it in modern, the long o, as heard in modish, and you will then, perhaps, perceive the process of anal- ogy by which it passed into the Shakspearian use. The matter or substance of a thing is, usually, so much more important than its fashion or manner, that we have hence adopted, as one way for expressing what is important as opposed to what is trivial, the word material. Now, by parity of reason, we are entitled to invert this order, and to express what is unimportant by some word indicating the mere fashion or external manner of an object as opposed to its substance. This is effected by the word modal or modern, as the adjective from modus, a fashion or manner ; and, in that sense, Shakspeare employs the word. Thus, Cleopatra, undervaluing to Ca?.sar's agent the bijouterie which she has kept back from inventory, and which her treacherous steward had betrayed, de- scribes them as mere trifles — 1 Such gifts as we greet modern friends withal ; ' where all commentators have felt that modern must form the position, mean, slight, and inconsiderable, though perplexed to say how it came by such a meaning. A modern friend is, in the Shakspearian sense, with relation to a real and serviceable friend, that which the fashion of a thing is, by comparison with its substance. But a still better illustration may be taken from a common line, quoted every day, and ludicrously misinterpreted. In the OXFORD. 299 famous picture of life — c All the world's a stage ' — the justice of the piece is described as 1 Full of wise saws and modern instances ; ' which (liorrendum dictu !) has been explained, and, I verily believe, is generally understood to mean, full of wise sayings and modern illustrations. The true mean- ing is — full of proverbial maxims of conduct and of trivial arguments; i. e. of petty distinctions, or verbal disputes, such as never touch the point at issue. The word, modern, I have already deduced ; the word, in- stances, is equally Latin, and equally used by Shakspeare in its Latin sense. It is originally the word, instantia, which, by the monkish and scholastic writers, is uniformly used in the sense of an argument, and originally of an argument urged in objection to some previous argument.* I affirm, therefore, that Lord Brougham's counsel to the Glasgow students is not only bad counsel — and bad * I cannot for a moment believe that the original and most eloquent critic in Blackwood is himself the dupe of an argument, which he has alleged against this passage, under too open a hatred of Shakspeare, as though it involved a contradiction to common sense, by representing all human beings of such an age as schoolboys, all of such another age as soldiers, of such another as magistrates, &c. Evidently the logic of the famous passage is this — that whereas every age has its peculiar and appropriate temper, that profession or employment is selected for the exemplification which seems best fitted, in each case, to embody the characteristic or predominating quality. Thus, because impetuosity, self-esteem, and animal or irreflective courage, are qualities most intense in youth, next it is considered in what profession those qualities find their most unlimited range ; and, because that is obviously the military profession, therefore it is that the soldier is selected as the representative of young men. For the same reason, as best embodying the peculiar temper of garrulous old age, the magistrate comes forward as supporting the part of that age. Not that old men are not also soldiers : but that the military profession, so far from strengthening, moderates and tem- pers the characteristic temper of old age. 300 LIFE AND MANNERS. counsel for the result, as well as for the grounds, which are either capricious or nugatory — but also that, in the exact proportion in which the range of thought expands, it is an impossible counsel, an impracticable counsel — a counsel having for its purpose to embarrass and lay the mind in fetters, where even its utmost freedom, and its largest resources will be found all too little for the grow- ing necessities of the intellect. c Long-tail'd words in osity and ation ! ' what does that describe ? Exactly the Latin part of our language. Now, those very terminations speak for themselves: — All high abstractions end in ation, that is, they are Latin ; and, just in proportion as the abstracting power extends and widens, do the circles of thought widen, and the horizon or boundary (contra- dicting its own Grecian name) melts into the infinite. On this account it was that Coleridge (Biographia Liter aria) remarks on Wordsworth's philosophic poetry, that, in pro- portion as it goes into the profound of passion and of thought, do the words increase which are vulgarly called 1 dictionary words.' Now these words, these 'dictionary' words, what are they ? Simply words of Latin or Greek origin : no other words, no Saxon words, are ever called by illiterate persons dictionary words. And these dic- tionary words are indispensable to a writer, not only in the proportion by which he transcends other writers as to extent and as to subtility of thinking, but also as to ele- vation and sublimity. Milton was not an extensive or discursive thinker, as Shakspeare was ; for the motions of his mind were slow, solemn, sequacious, like those of the planets ; not agile and assimilative ; not attracting all things within its own sphere ; not multiform : repulsion w T as the law of his intellect — he moved in solitary gran- deur. Yet, merely from this quality of grandeur — unap- proachable grandeur — his intellect demanded a larger OXFORD. 301 infusion of Latinity into his diction. For the same reason (and, without such aids, he would have had no proper element in which to move his wings) he enriched his diction with Hellenisms and with Hebraisms ; * but never, * The diction of Milton is a case absolutely unique in literature: of many writers it has been said, but of him only with truth, that he created a peculiar language. The value must be tried by the result, not by inferences from d priori principles: such inferences might lead us to anticipate an unfortunate result : whereas, in fact, the diction of Milton is such that no other could have supported his majestic style of think- ing. The final result is a transcendent answer to all adverse criticism ; but still it is to be lamented that no man properly qualified, has under- taken the examination of the Miitonic diction as a separate problem. Listen to a popular author of this day, (Mr. Bulwer.) He, speaking on this subject, asserts, (England and the English, p. 329.) that ' 7 here is scarcely an English idiom which Milton has not violated, or a .foreign one which he has not borroxoedS Now, in answer to this extravagant assertion, I will venture to say that the two following are the sole cases of questionable idiom throughout Milton: — 1st, : Yet virgin of Proser- pine from Jove ; ' and, in this case, the same thing might be urged in apology which Aristotle urges in another argument, viz., that awnvuov to nuOog, the case is unprovided with any suitable expression. How would it be possible to convey in good English the circumstances here indicted — viz., that Ceres was yet in those days of maiden innocence, when she had borne no daughter to Jove ? 2d, I will cite a case which, so far as I remember, has been noticed by no commentator; and, prob- ably, because they have failed to understand it. The case occurs in the 'Paradise Regained;' but where I do not at this moment remember. 'Will they transact with God?' This is the passage; and a most flagrant instance it offers of pure Latinism. Transigere, in the lan- guage of the civil law, means to make a compromise ; and the word transact is here used in that sense — a sense utterly unknown to the English language. This is the worst case in Milton; and I do not know that it has been ever noticed. Yet even here it may be doubted whether Milton is not defensible ; asking if they proposed to terminate their difference with God after the fashion in use amongst courts of law, he points properly enough to these worldly settlements by the technical term which designated them. Thus, might a divine say — Will he arrest the judgments of God by a demurrer? Thus, again, Hamlet apostro- phizes the lawyer's skull by the technical terms used in actions for assault, &e. Besides, what proper term is there in English for express- 302 LIFE AND MANNERS. as could be easy to show, without a full justification in the result. Two things may be asserted of all his exotic idioms — 1st, That they express what could not have been expressed by any native idiom ; 2d, That they har- monize with the English language, and give a coloring of the antique, but not any sense of strangeness to the diction. Thus, in the double negative — l Not did they not perceive,' &c, which is classed as a Hebraism — if any man fancy that it expresses no more than the simple affirmative, he shows that he does not understand its force ; and, at the same time, it is a form of thought so natural and universal, that I have heard English people, under corresponding circumstances, spontaneously fall into it. In short, whether a man differ from others by greater profundity or by greater sublimity, and whether he write as a poet or as a philosopher, in any case, he feels, in due proportion to the necessities of his intellect, an increasing dependence upon the Latin section of the English language ; and the true reason why Lord Brougham failed to perceive this, or found the Saxon equal to his wants, is one which I shall not scruple to assign, inasmuch as it does not reflect personally on Lord Brougham, or, at least, on him exclusively, but on the whole body to which he belongs. That thing which he and ihey call by the pompous name of statesmanship, but which is, in fact, statescr^aft — the art of political intrigue — deals (like the opera) with ideas so few in number and so little adapted to associate themselves with other ideas, that, possibly, in the one case equally as in the other, six hundred words are sufficient to meet all their demands. ing a compromise? Edmund Burke, and other much older authors, express the idea by the word temperament ; but that word, though a good one, was atone time considered an exotic term — equally a Gal- licism and a Latinism. OXFORD. 303 I have used my privilege of discursiveness to step aside from Demosthenes to another subject, no otherwise con- nected with the attic orator than, first, by the common reference of both subjects to rhetoric ; but, secondly, by the accident of having been jointly discussed by Lord Brougham, in a paper, which (though now forgotten) ob- tained, at the moment, most undue celebrity. For it is one of the infirmities of the public mind with us — that whatever is said or done by a public man, any opinion given by a member of Parliament, however much out of his own proper jurisdiction and range of inquiry, com- mands an attention not conceded even to those who speak under the known privilege of professional knowl- edge. Thus, Cowper was not discovered to be a poet worthy of any general notice, until Charles Fox — a most slender critic — had vouchsafed to quote a few lines, and that, not so much with a view to the poetry, as to its party application. But now, returning to Demosthenes, I affirm that his case is the case of nearly all the classical writers, at least of all the prose writers. It is, I admit, an extreme one — that is, it is the general case in a more intense degree. Raised almost to divine honors, never mentioned but with affected rapture, the classics of Greece and Rome are seldom read — most of them never ; are they, indeed, the closet companions of any man ? Surely it is time that these follies were at an end ; that our practice were made to square a little better with our professions ; and that our pleasures were sincerely drawn from those sources in which we pretend that they lie. The Greek language, mastered in any eminent degree, is the very rarest of all acomplishments, and precisely because it is unspeakably the most difficult. Let not the reader dupe himself by popular cant. To be an ac- complished Grecian, demands a very peculiar quality of 304 LIFE AND MANNERS. talent ; and it is almost inevitable, that one who is such should be vain of a distinction which represents so much labor and difficulty overcome. For myself, having, as a schoolboy, attained to a very unusual mastery over this language, and (though as yet little familiar with the elaborate science of Greek metre) moving through all the obstacles and resistances of a Greek book with the same celerity and ease as through those of the French and Latin, I had, in vanquishing the difficulties of the lan- guage, lost the main stimulus to its cultivation. Still, I read Greek daily ; but any slight vanity which I might connect with a power so rarely attained, and which, under ordinary circumstances, so readily transmutes itself into a disproportionate admiration of the author, in me was ab- solutely swallowed up in the tremendous hold taken of my entire sensibilities at this time by our own literature. With what fury would I often exclaim — He who loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how shall he love God whom he hath not seen ? You, Mr. A, L, M, O, you who care not for Milton, and value not the dark sub- limities which rest ultimately (as we all feel) upon dread realities, how can you seriously thrill in sympathy with the spurious and fanciful sublimities of the classical poetry — with the nod of the Olympian Jove, or the seven-league strides of Neptune ? Flying Childers had the most pro- digious stride of any horse on record ; and at Newmarket that is justly held to be a great merit ; but it is hardly a qualification for a Pantheon. The parting of Hector and Andromache — that is tender, doubtless ; but how many passages of far deeper, far diviner tenderness are to be found in Chaucer ! Yet, in these cases, we give our antagonist the benefit of an appeal to what is really best and most effective in the ancient literature. For, if we should go to Pindar, and some other great names, what a OXFORD. 305 revelation of hypocrisy as respects the fade enthusiasts for the Greek poetry ! Still, in the Greek tragedy, however otherwise embit- tered against ancient literature by the dismal affectations current in the scenical poetry, at least, I felt the presence of a great and original power. It might be a power in- ferior, upon the whole, to that which presides in the English tragedy ; I believed that it was ; but it was equally genuine, and appealed equally to real and deep sensibilities in our nature. Yet, also, I felt that the two powers at work, in the two forms of the drama, were es- sentially different ; and without having read a line of German at that time, or knowing of any such controversy, I began to meditate on the elementary grounds of differ- ence between the Pagan and the Christian forms of poetry. The dispute has since been carried on extensively in France, not less than in Germany, as between the classical and the romantic. But I will venture to assert that not one step in advance has been made, up to this day. The shape into which I threw the question, it may be well to state ; because I am persuaded that out of that one idea, properly pursued, might be evolved the whole separate characteristics of the Christian and the antique : Why is it, I asked, that the Christian idea of sin is an idea utterly unknown to the Pagan mind ? The Greeks and Romans had a clear conception of a moral ideal, as we have ; but this they estimated by a reference to the will ; and they called it virtue, and the antithesis they called vice. The lachete or relaxed energy of the will, by which it yielded to the seductions of sensual pleasure, that was vice : and the braced-up tone by which it resisted these seductions, was virtue. But the idea of holiness and the antithetic idea of sin, as a violation of this awful and unimaginable sanctity, was so utterly undeveloped in 306 LIFE AND MANNERS. the Pagan mind, that no word exists in classical Greek or classical Latin, which approaches either pole of this syn- thesis ; neither the idea of holiness, nor of its correlate, sin, could be so expressed in Latin as at once to satisfy Cicero and a scientific Christian. Again, (but this was some years after.) I found Schiller and Goethe applauding the better taste of the ancients, in symbolizing the idea of death, by a beautiful youth, with a torch inverted, &c. as compared with the Christian types of a skeleton and hour glasses, 6cc. And much surprised I was to hear Mr. Cole- ridge approving of this German sentiment. Yet here again I felt the peculiar genius of Christianity was cov- ertly at work moving upon a different road, and under opposite ideas, to a just result, in which the harsh and austere expression yet pointed to a dark reality, whilst the beautiful Greek adumbration was, in fact, a veil and a disguise. The corruptions and the other ■ dishonors ' of the grave, and whatsoever composes the sting of death, in the Christian view, is traced up to sin as its ultimate cause. Hence, besides the expression of Christian humility, in thus nakedly exhibiting the wrecks and ruins made by sin, there is also a latent profession indicated of Christian hope. For the Christian contemplates steadfastly, though with trembling awe, the lowest point of his descent ; since, for him, that point, the last of his fall, is also the first of his re-ascent, and serves, besides, as an exponent of its infinity ; the infinite depth becoming, in the re- bound, a measure of the infinite re-ascent. Whereas, on the contrary, with the gloomy uncertainties of a Pagan on the question of his final restoration, and also (which must not be overlooked) with his utter perplexity as to the nature of his restoration, if any were by accident in reserve, whether in a condition tending downwards or up- wards, it was the natural resource to consult the general OXFORD. 307 feeling of anxiety and distrust, by throwing a thick cur- tain and a veil of beauty over the whole too painful subject. To place the horrors in high relief, coulu here have answered no purpose but that of wanton cruelty ; whereas, with the Christian hopes, the very saddest me- morials of the havocks made by death, are antagonist prefigurations of great victories in the rear. These speculations, at that time, I pursued earnestly ; and I then believed myself, as I yet do, to have ascer- tained the two great and opposite laws under which the Grecian and the English tragedy has each separately developed itself. Whether wrong or right in that belief, sure I am that those in Germany, w T ho have treated the case of Classical and Romantic, are not entitled to credit for any discovery at ali. The Schlegels, w T ho were the hollowest of men — the windiest and wordiest — (at least, Frederick was so) — pointed to the distinction ; barely indicated it ; and that was already some service done, because a presumption arose that the antique and the modern literatures, having clearly some essential differ- ences, might, perhaps, rest on foundations originally distinct, and obey different laws. And hence it occurred that many disputes,, as about the unities, &c, might originate in a confusion of these laws. This checks the presumption of the shallow criticism, and points to deeper investigations. Beyond this, neither the German nor the French disputers on the subject have talked to any profit- able purpose. I have mentioned Paley as accidentally connected with my debut in literary conversation : and I have taken occa- sion to say how much I admired his style and its unstudied graces — how profoundly I despised his philosophy. I shall here say a word or two more on that subject. As respects his style, though secretly despising the opinion avowed by 308 LIFE AND MANNERS. my tutor, (which was, however, a natural opinion for a stiff lover of the artificial and the pompous,) I would just as unwillingly be supposed to adopt the extravagant opin- ions, in the other extreme, of Dr. Parr and Mr. Coleridge. These two gentlemen, who privately hated Paley, and, perhaps, traduced him, have hung like bees over one par- ticular paragraph in his Evidences, as though it were a flower transplanted from Hymettus. Dr. Parr pronounced it the finest sentence in the English language. It is a period (i. e. a cluster of sentences) moderately well, but not too well constructed, as the German nurses are accus- tomed to say. Its felicity depends on a trick easily imi- tated — on a balance happily placed, (viz., 'in ivliich the wisest of mankind would rejoice to find an answer to their doubts, and rest to their inquiries.'') As a bravura or tour deforce, in the dazzling fence of rhetoric, it is sur- passed by many hundreds of passages which might be produced from rhetoricians ; or, to confine myself to Paley's contemporaries, it is very far surpassed by a par- ticular passage in Burke's letter upon the Duke of Bedford's base attack upon him in the House of Lords ; which pas- sage I shall elsewhere produce, because I happen to know, on the authority of Burke's executors, that Burke himself considered it the finest period which he had ever written. At present, I will only make one remark, viz., that it is always injudicious, in the highest degree, to cite for admi- ration, that which is not a representative specimen of the author's manner. In reading Lucian, I once stumbled on a passage of German pathos, and of German effect. Would it have been wise, or would it have been intellec- tually just, to quote this as the text of an eulogium on Lucian ? What false criticism it would have suggested to every reader! — what false anticipations ! To quote a formal and periodic pile of sentences, was to give the OXFORD. 309 feeling, that Paley was what the regular rhetorical artists designate as a periodic writer, when, in fact, no one con- ceivable character of style more pointedly contradicted the true description of his merits. But, leaving the style of Paley, I must confess that I agree with Mr. Buhver (England and the English) in thinking it shocking and almost damnatory to an English university, the great well-heads of creeds, moral and evangelical, that authors, such in respect of doctrine, as Paley, and Locke, should hold that high and influential station, as teachers, or rather oracles of truth, which has been conceded to them. As to Locke, I, when a boy, had made a discovery of one blunder full of laughter and of fun, which, had it been published and explained in Locke's lifetime, would have tainted his whole philosophy with suspicion. It relates to the Aristotelian doctrine of syllogism, which Locke undertook to ridicule : now, a flaw, a hideous flaw, in the soi-disant detecter of flaws — a ridicule in the exposer of the ridiculous — that is fatal ; and I am surprised that Lee, who wrote a folio against Locke in his lifetime, and other examiners, should have failed of detecting this. I shall expose it elsewhere ; and, perhaps, one or two other exposures of the same kind will give an impetus to the descent of this falling philosophy. With respect to Paley, and the naked prudentialism of his system, it is true, that, in a longish note, Paley dis- claims that consequence. But to this we may reply, with Cicero, Non qucero quid neget Epicurus, sed quid congru- enter neget. Meantime, waving all this as too notorious, and too frequently denounced, I wish to recur to this trite subject, by way of stating an objection made to the Pa- leyan morality in my seventeenth year, and which I have never since seen reason to withdraw. It is this : — I affirm that the whole work, from first to last, proceeds upon that 310 LIFE AND MANNERS. sort of error which the logicians call ignoratio elenchi, i. e., ignorance of the very question concerned — of the point at issue. For, mark, in the very vestibule of ethics, two questions arise — two different and disconnected ques- tions, A and B ; and Paley has answered the wrong one. Thinking that he was answering A, and meaning to answer A, he has, in fact , answered B. One question arises thus : — Justice is a virtue ; temperance is a virtue : and so forth. Now, what is the common principle which ranks these several species under the same genus ? What, in the language of logicians, is the common differential principle which determines these various aspects of moral obligation to a common genius ? Another question, and a more interesting question to men in general, is this : — What is the motive to virtue ? By what impulse, law, or motive am I impelled to be virtuous rather than vicious ? Whence is the motive derived which should impel me to one line of conduct in preference to the other ? This, which is a practical question, and, therefore, more inter- esting than the other, which is a pure question of specula- tion, was that which Paley believed himself to be answering. And his answer was — That utility, a perception of the resulting benefit, was the true determining motive. Mean- time, it was objected, that often the most obvious results from a virtuous action, were far otherwise than beneficial. Upon which Paley, in the long note referred to above, distinguished thus — That whereas actions have many re- sults, some proximate, some remote, just as a stone thrown into the water produces many concentric circles, be it known that he, Dr. Paley, in what he says of utility, con- templates only the final result, the very outermost circle ; inasmuch as he acknowledges a possibility that the first, second, third, including the penultimate circle, may all happen to clash with utility ; but then, says he, the outer- OXFORD. 311 most circle of all will never fail to coincide with the abso- lute maximum of utility. Hence, in the first place, it appears that you cannot apply this test of utility in a practical sense ; you cannot say, This is useful, ergo, it is virtuous ; but, in the inverse order, you must say, This is virtuous, ergo, it is useful. You do not rely on its useful- ness to satisfy yourself of its being virtuous ; but, on the contrary, you rely on its virtuousness, previously ascer- tained, in order to satisfy yourself of its usefulness. And thus the whole practical value of this test disappears, though in that view it was first introduced ; and a vicious circle arises in the argument ; as you must have ascer- tained the virtuousness of an act, in order to apply the test of its being virtuous. But, secondly, it now comes out that Paley was answering a very different question from that which he supposed himself answering. Not any practical question as to the motive or impelling force in being virtuous, rather than vicious — i. e., as to the sanc- tions of virtue — but a purely speculative question, as to the issue of virtue, or the common vinculum amongst the several modes or species of virtue, (justice, temperance, &c. ;) this was the real question which he was answering. I have often remarked that the largest and most subtle source of error in philosophic speculations, has been the confounding of the two great principles so much insisted on by the Leibnitzians, viz., the ratio cognoscendi, and the ratio essendi. Paley believed himself to be assigning — it was his full purpose to assign — the ratio cognoscendi ; but, instead of that, unconsciously and surreptitiously, he has actually assigned the ratio essendi : and, after all, a false and imaginary ratio essendi. CHAPTER XL GERMAN LITERATURE. Using a New Testament, of which (in the narrative parts at least) any one word being given will suggest most of what is most immediately consecutive, you evade the most irksome of the penalties annexed to the first breaking ground in a new language : you evade the necessity of hunting up and down a dictionary. Your own memory and the inevitable suggestions of the context furnish a dictionary pro hac vice. And afterwards, upon advancing to other books, where you are obliged to forego such aids, and to swim without corks, you find yourself already in possession of the particles for expressing addi- tion, succession, exception, inference — in short, of all the forms by which transition or connection is erTected, (if but, and, therefore, however, notwithstanding.) to- gether with all those adverbs for modifying or restraining the extent of a subject or a predicate, which in all lan- guages alike compose the essential framework or extra- linear machinery of human thought. The filling-up — the matter (in a scholastic sense) — may differ infinitely ; but the form, the periphery, the determining moulds into which this matter is fused — all this is the same for ever : and so wonderfullv limited in its extent is this frame- work, so narrow and rapidly revolving is the clock-work of connections among human thoughts, that a dozen GERMAN LITERATURE. 313 pages of almost any book suffice to exhaust all the tTtsa njsQotvTu* which express them. To have mastered these Insa TiTzQosvTa is in effect to have mastered seven-tenths, at the least, of any language ; and the benefit of using a New Testament, or the familiar parts of an Old Testa- ment, in this preliminary drill, is, that your own memory is thus made to operate as a perpetual dictionary or nomenclator. I have heard Mr. Southey say that, by carrying in his pocket a Dutch, Swedish, or other Testa- ment, on occasion of a long journey performed in 6 muggy ' weather, and in the inside of some venerable ' old heavy ' — such as used to bestow their tediousness upon our re- spectable fathers some thirty or forty years ago — he had more than once turned to so valuable an account the doziness or the dulness of his fellow-travellers, that where- as he had ' booked ' himself at the coach-office utterly avakyapijTog, unacquainted with the first rudiments of the given language, he had made his parting bows to his coach brethren, (secretly returning thanks to them for their stupidity,) in a condition for grappling with any common book in that dialect. One of the polyglot Old or * Errsa TTTsQosvra, literally winged words.- To explain the use and origin of this phrase to non-classical readers, it must be understood that, originally, it was used by Homer to express the few, rapid, and signifi- cant words which conveyed some hasty order, counsel, or notice, suited to any sudden occasion or emergency : e. g. ' To him flying from the field the hero addressed these winged words — " Stop, coward, or I will transfix thee with my spear.'" But by Home Tooke, the phrase was adopted on the title-page of his Diversions of Purley, as a pleasant symbolic expression for all the non-significant particles, the articuli or joints of language, which in his well-known theory are resolved into abbreviations or compendious forms, (and therefore rapid, flying, icinged forms,) substituted for significant forms of greater length. Thus, if is a non-significant particle, but it is an abbreviated form of an imperative in the second person — substituted for gif, or give, or grant the case — put the case that. All other particles are shown by Home Tooke to be equally short-hand (or winged) substitutions. 21 314 LIFE AND MANNERS. New Testaments published by Bagster, would be a perfect Encyclopaedia, or Panorganon, for such a scheme of coach discipline, upon dull roads and in dull company. As respects the German language in particular, I shall give one caution, from my own experience, to the self- instructor : it is a caution which applies to the German language exclusively, or to that more than to any other, because the embarrassment which it is meant to meet, grows out of a defect of taste characteristic of the German mind. It is this : elsewhere you would naturally, as a beginner, resort to prose authors, since the license and audacity of poetic thinking, and the large freedom of a poetic treatment, cannot fail to superadd difficulties of individual creation to the general difficulties of a strange dialect. But this rule, good for every other case, is not good for the literature of Germany. Difficulties there certainly are, and perhaps in more than the usual propor- tion, from the German peculiarities of poetic treatment ; but even these are overbalanced in the result, by the single advantage of being limited in the extent by the metre, or (as it may happen) by the particular stanza. To German poetry there is a known, fixed, calculable limit. Infinity, absolute infinity, is impracticable in any German metre. Not so with German prose. Style, in any sense, is an inconceivable idea to a German intellect. Take the word in the limited sense, of what the Greeks called 2w6taig drouarwv — i. 6., the construction of sen- tences — I affirm that a German (unless it were here and there a Lessing) cannot admit such an idea. Books there are in German, and, in other respects, very good books too, which consist of one or two enormous sentences. A German sentence describes an arch between the rising and the setting sun. Take Kant for illustration : he has actually been complimented by the cloud-spinner, Frederick GERMAN LITERATURE. 315 SchJegel, who is now in Hades, as a most original artist in the matter of style. c Original,' Heaven knows he was ! His idea of a sentence was as follows : We have all seen or read of an old family coach, and the process of pack- ing it for a journey to London some seventy or eighty years ago. Night and day, for a week at least, sate the housekeeper, the lady's maid, the butler, the gentlemen's gentleman, &c. packing the huge ark in all its recesses, its ' imperials,' its ' wills,' its ' Salisbury boots,' its ' sword- cases,' its front pockets, side pockets, rear pockets, its 4 hammer-cloth cellars,' (which a lady explains to me as a corruption from hamper-cloth, as originally a cloth for hiding a hamper stored with viaticum,) until all the uses and needs of man and of human life, savage or civilized, w T ere met with separate provision by the infinite chaos. Pretty nearly upon the model of such an old family coach packing, did Kant institute and pursue the packing and stuffing of one of his regular sentences. Everything that could ever be needed in the way of explanation, illustra- tion, restraint, inference, by-clauses, or indirect comment, was to be crammed, according to this German philoso- pher's taste, into the front pockets, side pockets, or rear pockets of the one- original sentence. Hence it is that a sentence will last in reading whilst a man ' Might reap an acre of his neighbor's corn.' Nor is this any peculiarity of Kant's. It is common to the whole family of prose writers of Germany, unless when they happen to have studied French models, who cultivate the opposite extreme. As a caution, therefore, practically applied to this particular anomaly in German prose writing, I advise all beginners to choose between two classes of composition — ballad poetry, or comedy — as their earliest school of exercise ; ballad poetry, because 316 LIFE AND MANNERS. the form of the stanza (usually a quatrain) prescribes a very narrow range to the sentences ; comedy, because the form of dialogue, and the imitation of daily life in its ordinary tone of conversation, and the spirit of comedy naturally suggesting a brisk interchange of speech, all tend to short sentences. These rules I soon drew from my own experience and observation. And the one sole purpose towards which I either sought or wished for aid, respected the pronunciation ; not so much for attaining a just one (which I was satisfied could not be realized out of Ger- many, or, at least, out of a daily intercourse with Germans) as for preventing the formation, unawares, of a radically false one. The guttural and palatine sounds of the c/i, and some other German peculiarities, cannot be acquired with- out constant practice. But the false Westphalian or Jewish pronunciation of the vowels, diphthongs, &c, may easily be forestalled, though the true delicacy of Meissen should happen to be missed. Thus much guidance 1 purchased, with a very few guineas, from my young Dresden tutor, who was most anxious for permission to extend his assist- ance ; but this I would not hear of: and, in the spirit of fierce (perhaps foolish) independence, which governed most of my actions at that time of life, I did all the rest for myself. 1 It was a banner broad unfurl'd, The picture of that western world.' These, or words like these, in which Wordsworth conveys the sudden apocalypse, as by an apparition, to an ardent and sympathizing spirit, of the stupendous world of America, rising, at once, like an exhalation, with all its shadowy forests, its endless savannas, and its pomp of solitary waters — well and truly might I have applied to my first launching upon that vast billowy ocean of the German literature. As a past literature, as a literature of GERMAN LITERATURE. 317 inheritance and tradition, the German was nothing. An- cestral titles it had none ; or none comparable to those of England, Spain, or even Italy; and there, also, it resem- bled America, as contrasted with the ancient world of Asia, Europe, and North Africa.* But, if its inheritance were nothing, its prospects, and the scale of its present development, were in the amplest style of American grandeur. Ten thousand new books, w r e are assured by Menzel, an author of high reputation — a literal myriad — is considerably below the number annually poured from all quarters of Germany, into the vast reservoir of Leipsic ; spawn infinite, no doubt, of crazy dotage, of dreaming imbecility, of wickedness, of frenzy, through every phasis of Babylonian confusion ; yet, also, teeming and heaving with life and the instincts of truth ; of truth hunting and chasing in the broad daylight, or of truth groping in the chambers of darkness ; sometimes seen as it displays its cornucopia of tropical fruitage ; sometimes heard dimly, and in promise, working its way through diamond mines. Not the tropics, not the ocean, not life itself, is such a type of variety, of infinite forms, or of creatire power, as the German literature, in its recent motions, (say for the last twenty years,) gathering, like the Danube, a fresh volume of power at every stage of its advance. A banner it was, indeed, to me of miraculous promise, and sud- denly unfurled. It seemed, in those days, an El Dorado as true and undeceiving as it was evidently inexhaustible. And the central object in this interminable wilderness of what then seemed imperishable bloom and verdure, * It has been rather too much forgotten, that Africa, from the northern margin of Bilidulgerid and the Great Desert, southwards — everywhere, in short, beyond Egypt, Cyrene, and the modern Barbary States — belongs, as much as America, to the New World — the world unknown to the ancients. 318 LIFE AND MANNERS. the very tree of knowledge in the midst of this Eden, was the new or transcendental philosophy of Immanuel Kant. I have described the gorgeousness of my expectations in those early days of my prelusive acquaintance with German literature. I have a little lingered in painting that glad aurora of my first pilgrimage to the fountains of the Rhine and of the Danube, in order adequately to shadow out the gloom and blight which soon afterwards settled upon the hopes of that golden dawn. In Kant, I had been taught to believe were the keys of a new and a creative philosophy. Either ; ejus diictuj or ' ejus au- spiciis'' — that is, either directly under his guidance, or indirectly under any influence remotely derived from his principles — I looked confidingly to seethe great vistas and avenues of truth laid open to the philosophic inquirer. Alas ! all w T as a dream. Six weeks' study was sufficient to close my hopes in that quarter for ever. The philos- ophy of Kant — so famous, so commanding in Germany, from about the period of the French Revolution — already, in 18C5, 1 had found to be a philosophy of destruction, and scarcely, in any one chapter, so much as tending to a philosophy of reconstruction. It destroys by wholesale, and it substitutes nothing. Perhaps in the whole history of man, it is an unexampled case, that such a scheme of speculation — which offers nothing seducing to human aspirations, nothing splendid to the human imagination, nothing even positive and affirmative to the human under- standing — should have been able to found an interest so broad and deep among thirty-five millions of cultivated men. The English reader who supposes this interest to have been confined to academic bowers, or the halls of philosophic societies, is most inadequately alive to the case. Sects, heresies, schisms, by hundreds, having arisen GERMAN LITERATURE. 319 out of this philosophy — many thousands of books have been written by way of teaching it, discussing it, extend- ing it, opposing it. And yet it is a fact, that all its doc- trines are negative — teaching, in no case, what we are, but simply what we are not to believe — and that all its truths are barren. Such being its unpopular character, I cannot but imagine that the German people have received it with so much ardor, from profound incomprehension of its meaning, and utter blindness to its drift — a solution which may seem extravagant, but is not so ; for, even amongst those who have expressly commented on this philosophy, not one of the many hundreds whom I have myself read, but has retracted from every attempt to ex- plain its dark places. In these dark places lies, indeed, the secret of its attraction. Were light poured into them, it would be seen that they are culs-de-sac, passages that lead to nothing; but, so long as they continue dark, it is not known whither they lead, how far, in what direction, and whether in fact, they may not issue into paths con- nected directly with the positive and the infinite. Were it known that upon every path a barrier faces you insur- mountable to human steps — like the barriers which fence in the Abyssinian valley of Rasselas — the popularity of this philosophy would expire at once ; for no popular in- terest can long be sustained by speculations which, in every aspect, are known to be essentially negative and essentially finite. Man's nature has something of infinity within itself, which requires a corresponding infinity in its objects. We are told, indeed, by Mr. Bulwer, that the Kantian system has ceased to be of any authority in Germany — that it is defunct, in fact — and that we have first begun to import it into England, after its root had withered, or begun to wither, in its native soil. But Mr. Bulwer is mistaken. The philosophy has never withered 320 LIFE AND MANNERS. in Germany. It cannot even be said that its fortunes have retrograded : they have oscillated : accidents of taste and ability in particular professors, or caprices of fashion, have given a momentary fluctuation to this or that new form of Kantianism, — an ascendancy, for a period, to various, and, in some respects, conflicting modifications of the transcen- dental system ; but all alike have derived their power mediately from Kant. No weapons, even if employed as hostile weapons, are now forged in any armory but that of Kant ; and, to repeat a Roman figure which I used above, all the modern polemic tactics of what is called metaphysics, are trained and made to move either ejus ductu or ejus auspiciis. Not one of the new systems affects to call back the Leibnitzian philosophy, the Carte- sian, or any other of earlier or later date, as adequate to the purposes of the intellect in this day, or as capable of yielding even a sufficient terminology. Let this last fact decide the question of Kant's vitality. Qui bene distin- guit bene docet. This is an old adage. Now, he who imposes new names upon all the acts, the functions, and the objects of the philosophic understanding, must be presumed to have distinguished most sharply, and to have ascertained with most precision, their general relations — so long as his terminology continues to be adopted. This test, applied to Kant, will show that his spirit yet survives in Germany. Frederick Schlegel, it is true, twenty years ago, in his lectures upon literature, assures us that even the disciples of the great philosopher have agreed to abandon his philosophic nomenclature. But the German philosophic literature, since that date, tells another tale. Mr. Bulwer is, therefore, wrong ; and, without going to Germany, looking only to France, he will see cause to revise his sentence. Cousin — the philosophic Cousin, the only great name in philosophy for modern France — GERMAN LITERATURE. 321 familiar as he is with North Germany, can hardly be presumed unacquainted with a fact so striking, if it were a fact, as the extinction of a system once so triumphantly supreme as that of Kant ; and yet Mr. Bulwer, admiring Cousin as he does, cannot but have noticed his efforts to naturalize Kant in France. Meantime, if it were even true that transcendentalism had lost its hold of the public mind in Germany, prima facie, this would prove little more than the fickleness of that public which must have been wrong in one of the two cases — either when adopt- ing the system, or when rejecting it. Whatever there may be of truth and value in the system, will remain unimpeached by such caprices, whether of an individual or of a great nation ; and England would still be in the right to import the philosophy, however late in the day, if it were true even (which 1 doubt greatly) that she is importing it. Both truth and value there certainly is in one part of the Kantian philosophy ; and that part is its foundation. I had intended, at this point, to introduce an outline of the transcendental philosophy — not, perhaps, as entering by logical claim of right into any biographical sketch, but as a very allowable -digression in the record of that man's life to whom, in the way of hope and of profound disap- pointment, it had been so memorable an object. For two or three years before I mastered the language of Kant,* it had been a pole-star to my hopes, and in hypothesi * I might have mastered the philosophy of Kant, without waiting for the German langage, in which all his capital works are written ; for there is a Latin version of the whole, by Born, and a most admirable digest of the cardinal work, (admirable for its fidelity and the skill by which that fidelity is attained,) in the same language, by Rhiseldek, a Danish professor. But this fact, such was the slight knowledge of all things connected with Kant in England, I did not learn for some years. 322 LIFE AND MANNERS. agreeably to the uncertain plans of uncertain knowledge, the luminous guide to my future life — as a life dedicated and set apart to philosophy. Such it i mmm years before I knew it : for, at least ten long years after I came into a condition of valuing its true pretensions and measuring its capacities, this same philosophy shed the gloom of something like misanthropy upon my views and f human nature ; for man was an abject animal, if the limitations which Kant assigned to the motions of his speculative reason were as absolute and hop: $, under his scheme of the understanding and his genesis of its powers, too evidently they were. I belouged to a reptile race, if the wings by which we had sometimes seemed to mount, and the bouyancy which had seemed to support our flight, were indeed the fan! delusions which he represented them. Such, and so deep and so abiding in its influence upon my life, having been the influence of this German philosophy, according to all logic of proportions, in selecting the objects of my no* I anight be excused for setting before the reader, in its full array, the analysis of its capital sections. However, in any memorial of a life which prof:— - bo keep in view (though but as a secondary purpose) any regard to popular , the logic of proportions must bend, after all, to the law of the occasion — to the proprieties of time and place. For the present, therefore, I shall restrict m to the few sentences in which it may be proper to gratify the curiosity of some readers, the two or three in a hun- dred, as to the peculiar distinctions of this philosophy. n to these two or three out of each hundred, I shall not venture to ascribe a larger curiosity than with to the most general i whereabouts ' of its position — from what point it starts — whence and from what aspect it surveys the ground — and by what links from this starting GERMAN LITERATURE. 323 point it contrives to connect itself with the main objects of philosophic inquiry. Immanuel Kant was originally a dogmatist in the school of Leibnitz and Wolf; that is, according to his trisection of all philosophy into dogmatic, sceptical, and critical, he was, upon all questions, disposed to a strong affirmative creed, without courting any particular examination into the grounds of this creed, or into its assailable points. From this slumber, as it is called by himself, he was suddenly aroused by the Humian doctrine of cause and effect. This celebrated essay on the nature of necessary connection — so thoroughly misapprehended at the date of its first publication to the world by its soi-disant opponents, Oswald, Beattie, &,c, and so imperfectly com- prehended since then by various soi-disant defenders — became in effect the c occasional cause " (in the phrase of the logicians) of the entire subsequent philosophic scheme of Kant — every section of which arose upon the acci- dental opening made to analogical trains of thought, by this memorable effort of scepticism, applied by Hume to one capital phenomenon among the necessities of the human understanding. What is the nature of Hume's scepticism as applied to this phenonenon ? What is the main thesis of his celebrated essay on cause and effect ? For few, indeed, are they who really know anything about it. If a man really understands it, a very few words will avail to explain the nodus. Let us try. It is a necessity of the human understanding (very probably not a necessity of a higher order of intelligences) to connect its experiences by means of the idea of cause and its correlate, effect : and when Beattie, Oswald, Reid, &c, w T ere exhausting themselves in proofs of the indispensableness of this idea, they were fighting with shadows ; for no man had ever questioned the practical 324 LIFE AND MANNERS. necessity for such an idea to the coherency of human thinking. Not the practical necessity, but the internal consistency of this notion, and the original right to such a notion, was the point of inquisition. For, attend, courteous reader, and three separate propositions will set before your eyes the difficulty. First Prop., which, for the sake of greater precision, permit me to throw into Latin : — Non datur aliquid [A] quo posito ponitur aliud [B] a priori ; that is, in other words, You cannot lay your hands upon that one object or phenomenon [A] in the whole circle of natural existences, which, being assumed, will entitle you to assume a priori, any other object whatsoever [B] as succeeding it. You could not, I say, of any object or phenomenon whatever, assume this succession a priori — that is, previously to experi- ence. Second Prop. But, if the succession of B to A be made known to you, not a priori, (by the involution of B in the idea of A,) but by experience, then you cannot ascribe necessity to the succession : the connection between them is not necessary but contingent. For the very widest experience — an experience which should stretch over all ages, from the beginning to the end of time — can never establish a nexus having the least approximation to necessity ; no more than a rope of sand could gain the cohesion of adamant, by repeating its links through a billion of successions. Third Prop. Hence, (i. e. from the two preceding propositions,) it appears that no instance or case of nexus, that ever can have been offered to the notice of any human understanding, has in it, or, by possibility, could have had anything of neces- sity. Had the nexus been necessary, you would have seen it beforehand ; whereas, by Prop. I. Non datur aliquid, quo posito ponitur aliud a priori. This being so, now comes the startling fact, that the notion of a cause GERMAN LITERATURE. 325 includes the notion of necessity. For, if A (the cause) be connected with B (the effect) only in a casual or accidental way, you do not feel warranted in calling it a cause. If heat, applied to ice (A) were sometimes followed by a tendency to liquefaction (B) and some- times not, you would not consider A connected with B as a cause, but only as some variable accompaniment of the true and unknown cause, which might allowably be present or be absent. This, then, is the startling and mysterious phenomenon of the human understanding — that, in a certain notion, which is indispensable to the coherency of our whole experience, indispensable to the establishing any nexus between the different parts and successions of our whole train of notices, we include an accessary notion of necessity, which yet has no justifica- tion or warrant, no assignable derivation from any known or possible case of human experience. We have one idea at least — viz. the idea of causation — which tran- scends our possible experience by one important element, the element of necessity, that never can have been derived from the only source of ideas recognised by the philosophy of this day. A Lockian never can find his way out of this dilemma. The experience (whether it be the experience of sensation or the experience of reflec- tion) which he adopts for his master-key, never will unlock this case ; for the sum total of human experience, collected from all ages, can avail only to tell us what is, but never what must he. The idea of necessity is abso- lutely transcendent to experience, per se, and must be derived from some other source. From what source ? Could Hume tell us ? No : he, who had started the game so acutely, (for with every allowance for the detec- tion made in Thomas Aquinas, of the original suggestion, as recorded in the Biographia Liter aria of Coleridge, 326 LIFE AND MANNERS. we must still allow great merit of a secondary kind to Hume for his modern revival and restatement of the doctrine,) this same acute philosopher broke down con- fessedly in his attempt to hunt the game down. His solution is worthless, Kant, however, having caught the original scent from Hume, was more fortunate. He saw, at a glance, that here was a test applied to the Lockian philosophy, which showed, at the very least, its insufficiency. If it were good even for so much as it explained — which Burke is disposed to receive as a sufficient warrant for the favora- ble reception of a new hypothesis — at any rate, it now appeared that there w 7 as something which it could not explain. But next, Kant took a large step in advance proprio morte. Reflecting upon the one idea adduced by Hume, as transcending the ordinary source of ideas, he began to ask himself, whether it were likely that this idea should stand alone ? Were there not other ideas in the same predicament ; other ideas including the same ele- ment of necessity, and, therefore, equally disowning the parentage assigned by Locke? Upon investigation, he found that there were : he found that there were eleven others in exactly the same circumstances. The entire twelve he denominated categories ; and the mode by which he ascertained their number — that there were so many and no more — is of itself so remarkable as to merit notice in the most superficial sketch. But, in fact, this one explanation will put the reader in possession of Kant's system, so far as he could understand it without an express and toilsome study. With this explanation, there- fore, of the famous categories, I shall close my slight sketch of the system. Has the reader ever considered the meaning of the term Category — a term so ancient and so venerable from its connection with the most GERMAN LITERATURE. 327 domineering philosophy that has yet appeared amongst men ? The doctrine of the Categories (or, in its Roman appellation, of the Predicaments,) is one of the few- wrecks from the Peripatetic philosophy which still sur- vives as a doctrine taught by public authority in the most ancient academic institutions of Europe. It continues to form a section in the code of public instruction ; and perhaps under favor of a pure accident. For though, strictly speaking, a metaphysical speculation, it has always been prefixed as a sort of preface to the Organon (or logical treatises) of Aristotle, and has thus accidentally shared in the immortality conceded to that most perfect of human works. Far enough were the Categories from meriting such distinction. Kant was well aware of this : he was aware that the Aristotelian Categories were a useless piece of scholastic lumber : unsound in their first conception ; and, though illustrated through long centuries by the schoolmen, and by still earlier Grecian philoso- phers, never in any one known instance turned to a profitable account. Why, then, being aware that even in idea they were false, besides being practically unsuitable, did Kant adopt or borrow a name laden with this super- fetation of reproach — all that is false in theory super- added to all that is useless in practice ? He did so for a remarkable reason : he felt, according to his own expla- nation, that Aristotle had been groping, [the German word expressive of his blind procedure is herumtappen,] — groping in the dark, but under a semi-conscious instinct of truth. Here is a most remarkable case or situation of the human intellect, happening alike to individuals and to entire generations — in the situation of yearning or craving, as it were, for a great idea as yet unknown, but dimly and uneasily prefigured. Sometimes the very brink, as it may be called, of such an idea is approached : 328 LIFE AND MANNERS. sometimes it is even imperfectly discovered ; but with marks in the very midst of its imperfections, which serve as indications to a person coming better armed for ascer- taining the sub-conscious thought, which had governed their tentative motions. As it stands in Aristotle's scheme, the idea of a category is a mere lifeless abstrac- tion. Rising through a succession of species to genera, and from these to still higher genera, you arrive finally at a highest genus — a naked abstraction, beyond which no further regress is possible. This highest genus, this genus general issimum, is, in peripatetic language, a category ; and no purpose or use has ever been assigned to any one of these categories, of which ten were enumerated at first, beyond that of classification — i. e. a purpose of mere convenience. Even for as trivial a purpose as this, it gave room for suspecting a failure, when it was afterwards found that the original ten cate- gories did not exhaust the possibilities of the case ; that other supplementary categories (post-pr