NON
CIRCULATING

:
ARTES
1837
LIBRARY VERITAS
SCIENTIA
OF THE
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
US UNUT
TCEBOR
SI QUERIS PENINSULAM-AMŒNAM
CIRCUMSPICE

་
QUOD
FACIO
VALDE FACIO
Hugh Holmes.
T
1
1
MONOGRAPHS
1
In the press.
THE POETICAL WORKS
OF
RICHARD MONCKTON MILNES,
LORD
HOUGHTON.
In preparation.
MONOGRAPHS,
POLITICAL
AND
LITERARY.
BY LORD HOUGHTON.

P
SULEIMAN PASHA (COL. SELVES),
FROM A DRAWING BY M. GUDIN IN LORD HOUGHTON'S POSSESSION.
HYMPER

MONOGRAPHS
PERSONAL AND SOCIAL
Um
BY LORD HOUGHTON
WITH PORTRAITS
LONDON
JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET
1873
All rights
i
LONDON: PRINTED BY
SPOTTISWOODE
AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
AND PARLIAMENT STREET
DEDICATION.
TO
GEORGE STOVIN VENABLES, Q.C.
HISTORY is the summary of biographies, and I must
appeal to the indulgence of a forty years' friendship in
submitting these biographical sketches to the attention
of so complete an historian of the past, and so acute an
historical critic of present times.
But if you, for reasons of your own, have selected the
vehicle of the anonymous press for the communication
of your large and accurate knowledge and the exer-
cise of your vigorous and humorous judgment, it the
more becomes those who have long known and followed
your literary course, to remind your weekly and daily
readers to whom they owe so much solid learning, and
so much agreeable illustration.
The artistic form of biography, in which the per-
sonality of the portrait is made subservient to the skill
of the painter, and which from Tacitus to Johnson has
}
I
viii
DEDICATION.
charmed mankind, is now classed with romantic fiction,
and shares the fate of the old decorous history that has
fallen beneath the arms which Niebuhr forged for our
youth, which Carlyle and Lewis have wielded with gigantic
force, and with which men of the intellectual diversity
of Froude and Freeman are still contending against dear
tradition.
It is therefore difficult to determine in what shape it is
best to preserve to after-times the deeds and words of
best or better men. To throw before the public what in
a brute material sense may literally be called their Remains
is the easiest and most common process, and, whatever
may be gathered together by affectionate and discrimi-
nating hands, much is properly left to the vultures and
beasts of prey.
Yet it seems to me that a truthful impression may
be produced by a combination of general and personal
observation, which, while it leaves the characters in
the main to speak for themselves, aims at something like
a literary unity of design. And when, as in the greater
part of the following notices, this interest is cemented by
individual sympathy, there is a chance of the produc-
tion of a more than transitory record.
Although I am not aware that in these pages the
personality of the writer is unduly prominent, I am not
sorry to have this opportunity of vindicating the ad-
vantage of an intimate personal relation between the
describer and the described. It may indeed sometimes
:
DEDICATION.
ix
give to the reader the sense of a double purpose, which
damages the integrity of the work ; but far more is gained
by the consciousness of the sincerity of an affectionate
interest than is lost by the exhibition of any casual
vanity, which is often but the reflex of loyal admiration,
I am reminded by your own faithful and pathetic
memorials of those you have loved and regretted, how
much you could have added to one at least of these
monographs, but I have preferred strictly to adhere to my
own apprehensions of character and impressions of
words and things, so that I might remain solely respon-
sible for what is here related as having been said and
done.
1
HOUGHTON,
CONTENTS.
I. SULEIMAN PASHA (with Portrait)
+
II. ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT AT THE Court of
BERLIN
PAGE
I
19
III. CARDINAL WISEMAN
39
IV. WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR (with Portrait)
63
V. THE BERRYS
151
VI. HARRIET LADY ASHBURTON (with Portrait)
225
VII. THE REV. SYDNEY SMITH
257
VIII. THE LAST DAYS OF HEINRICH HEINE.
293
The Portrait of Charles Buller to face page 237.
Errata.
Page
"
>>
>
9, line 1 of note, for even read now
57,
I
4, for him read the Cardinal
75, line 19, for now read about this time
95,
"
""
"
IOI,
""
""
107,
lines
>>
15, for relating that he read relating, how I
17, for him read me, and for he read I
18, for his arm, he would read my arm, I should
6, for never read he never
3-5, the
should be in inverted commas
passage
114, line 21, for They read these
115, 3, dele any
""
2, for He read Hare
22, after Madonnas insert taken from his own wife
20, dele is
"
>>
116,
131,
134,
>>
")
154,
"
9, for this read that
199, 4, for is nearly read is as nearly
212,
"}
>>
2, for never read now
214, 21, for We read I
""
219,
>>
">
""
2, after biography insert nor was there in their society
242, 18, for those read they
""
268,,,
>>
""
272, ,,
290,
"
""
12, for country. read country.
24, for by read of
8, for power read force
302, 14, for year read years
"}
SULEIMAN PASHA.
WRITTEN IN 1846.
DURING that strange episode of the French Revo-
lution the siege of Lyons, a wealthy tradesman of
the name of Selves was one of the most active
defenders of the independence of his native city
against the tyranny of the Directory. His eldest
child, a boy of about seven years old, brought his
daily food to the ramparts, and grew inured to the
fierce game of war. When resistance became
useless, and the infuriated conquerors took posses-
sion of the devoted town, it was not probable that
Citizen Selves would escape a vengeance which
honoured no courage and respected no submission.
He was accordingly soon summoned before a
tribunal composed of the most savage partisans of
the central authority, and having been denounced
by an old acquaintance, was on the point of being
led to execution, when one of the judges, to whom
Citizen Selves had happened to have shown personal
B
2
SULEIMAN PASHA.
kindness, asked him whether his accuser did not
owe him some money. Selves asserted the fact to
be so, and the friendly judge contrived to represent
the accusation as a trick of the denouncer to avoid
payment of a just debt. The attempt succeeded—
yet, that the auto da fé of liberty might not be
cheated of a victim, the court substituted the
plaintiff for the defendant—and Selves at once
obtained his own freedom and ample satisfaction
on his prosecutor. But the boy who attended his
father on the walls well remembered the scene of
domestic anguish-while the mother, believing
herself a widow, sat weeping among her children,
and would not be comforted, till the well-known
knock at the door roused her in an ecstasy of
astonishment, and she fell into the arms of the
husband so miraculously rescued. And her dark
hair, blanched by those few hours of mental agony,
remained as one of the many tokens of that im-
partial tempest which spared neither the most
elevated nor the least obtrusive classes of society.
Thus early initiated in the severest realities of
life, the boy grew up, and soon desired to take his
share in the mighty battle which France was then
waging with the world. The profession of the
SULEIMAN PASHA.
3
navy was open to everyone who passed the
requisite examination, and young Selves was
admitted as aspirant de marine. In this capacity
he showed great intelligence and undaunted
courage, and was engaged in that conflict which
Napoleon announced to his council as the loss of
some vessels by the severity of the weather, after a
combat imprudently engaged in,' but which we
English remember as the Battle of Trafalgar.
was on board the vessel from which the shot was
fired that mingled a nation's sorrow with a nation's
triumph, and years afterwards he recounted the
circumstances of the death of Nelson to those who
escorted him, an honoured guest, over the battered
hulk of the Victory.'
(
He
A short time afterwards the midshipman Selves.
fought a superior officer in a duel, at Toulon, about
a lady, and had the misfortune to give a fatal wound
to his adversary. Fearing the consequences, he
determined not to return to his ship, but to try and
seek employment in the Army of Italy, then
flushed with triumph, but glad to receive young
and vigorous recruits. He passed several regiments
till he came to one of light cavalry which he
thought would suit him, saw the commander, and
B 2
4
SULEIMAN PASHA.
frankly told him the story of his desertion; his
former captain, when applied to, verified his state-
ment, and, what is more, interested himself to get
him formally transferred from the one service to
the other, which was effected without much diffi-
culty. Soon after his enrolment in the regiment
it became necessary to instruct the cavalry soldiers
in infantry practice, and young Selves' knowledge
of the exercise was of the greatest use and brought
him into general notice.
The incidents of a life which is all adventure are
rarely recorded, and though the old soldier would
gladly relate how his commission and his cross
were won, and though he has a tale of every
field and an illustration for every page of that
wild and varied volume of the world's work, it
is from his own lips they should come, narrated
with epic simplicity, and full of the hero-worship,
the self-sacrifice, and the unconsciousness of that
great pagan episode of modern history.
During the Russian campaign he acted as aide-
de-camp to Marshal Ney, and saved his own life in
the retreat by judiciously buying a fur pelisse from
a soldier at an enormous price.
After the occupation of Paris, in 1814, he sub-
SULEIMAN PASHA.
5
mitted unwillingly to remain in the army, but was
one of the first to join the standard of Napoleon
the following year. You should hear him tell the
story himself. He was quartered at Lyons, his
native town; the regiment was ordered out for
inspection; the commanding officer announced to
them the escape of the late Emperor from Elba,
depicted the evils that would ensue, and ener-
getically called on them to preserve their fidelity
to the Bourbons, and protect their country from
the desolating ambition which had brought it to
the brink of ruin. Nothing was said, but glances
were exchanged, and soon after Colonel Selves and
other officers found themselves on the road towards
Grenoble. There was a cloud of dust, and out of
it rode the well-known form, and the magic voice
uttered, 'Ah, Selves! je vous reconnais; est-ce
qu'on m'attend ?' 'Partout, Sire, partout!' and
Selves followed him to Waterloo. During that
fatal day he was on the staff of Grouchy, and
urgently represented to that general the propriety
of joining the main body of the army as soon as
the Prussians, whom he was sent to intercept, were
out of sight. Had this juncture been effected, it
would, indisputably, have greatly influenced, and a
6
SULEIMAN PASHA.
Frenchman may believe might have altered, the
event of the day.
*
On the second restoration of the Bourbons so
zealous an Imperialist was naturally set aside; and
finding himself, in company with a large body of
fellow-officers, in an equivocal and disagreeable
position, he proposed to the Government to give
them a ship, and allow them to form a colony in
some of the islands of Oceania; the charms of
Taiti having even then captivated the French
imagination. The proposal was rejected, and
then Selves set out alone, determined to find
fame and fortune in some less ordered and
civilised community than that which now hardly
owned him as a citizen. The name of Mehemet
Ali had already become known to Europe as that
of a successful proconsul who had not only by a
combination of subtlety and courage destroyed one
of the most regular and powerful military organisa-
tions that ever tyrannised over a subject country,
but was attempting, by the introduction of European
* Taiti has long been an Eldorado in France. Poor Camille
Desmoulins, writing to his wife the night before his execution,
reproaches himself for having mixed in these tumultuous scenes,
being far more fitted by nature to form a Taiti of peace and happi-
ness with those he loved.
SULEIMAN PASHA,
7
discipline and policy, to give a new value and cha-
racter to the land and people of Egypt. The
dynasties of Napoleon and Kleber had left behind
them that tradition of strength so grateful to
orientals, and, as a distinguished officer of the Great
Army, Colonel Selves received a hearty welcome,
and was at once offered high rank and sufficient
emoluments in the army of the Pasha, while the
tact he showed in allowing himself to be sent into
the deserts of Horeb and Sinai in search of gold
mines (for the easterns easily attribute to an
European the most diverse and inconsistent know-
ledges) raised him at once in general estima-
tion.
He soon informed the Pasha that if he wished to
possess a force fit for an European officer to com-
mand, it was still to be created, and having ob-
tained all he required to be placed at his disposal,
he repaired to Upper Egypt, and there passed
between two and three years, literally forming the
Egyptian army. The docile Arab, though as
blindly attached to his mud huts and palms beside
the Nile as ever the Swiss to his snow-topped
mountains, recognised the intelligent teaching,
consistent discipline, and calm forbearance of the
8
SULEIMAN PASHA.
French commander; and when Colonel Selves.
returned to Cairo, he presented Mehemet Ali with
an army of whose steadiness and skill the sovereign
of many an European state might be proud. Once
invested with this new instrument of strength,
Mehemet Ali lost no time in using it, and when
Arabia no longer offered a field for its exhibition,
and Greece had won its independence, a quarrel,
ingeniously contrived, with a hot-headed minister
of the Porte enabled him to meet the Turkish
army in fair battle, and to make himself master of
the whole of Syria. During these campaigns
Colonel Selves was the presiding genius, and the
title of Suleiman Pasha was the homage to his
success. The army was under the nominal com-
mand of Ibrahim, the eldest son of Mehemet Ali,
but it was clearly understood between them that
from the first shot that was fired Suleiman became
pasha, and Ibrahim his lieutenant. The battle of
Koniah especially brought out the strategic powers
of Suleiman, and showed him a worthy pupil of his
great master. It was won by a movement on the
flank of the enemy, and this difficult and delicate
manœuvre, in which the French had failed at
Rosbach, but in which Frederic the Great succeeded
SULEIMAN PASHA.
9
at Kolin, and Napoleon at Arcola and Austerlitz,*
ended in the total defeat of the Turkish army, and
opened to the Egyptians a clear road to Constan-
tinople. But in vain had Mehemet Ali triumphed
at Koniah and at Nezib; in vain had the troublous
and energetic population of the Mountain been, for
the first time in history, deprived of means of
resistance; in vain did the mosques of Damascus
resound with the name of Sultan Mehemet in place
of Sultan Mahmoud. Diplomacy had discovered
that this conflict could not continue without risk-
ing the peace of civilised Europe, and, by the inter-
position of European force, the Egyptian army was
arrested in its march of triumph, and the dreams of
Mehemet Ali's independent greatness were at an
end. Yet, while the English fleet was in the act of
bombarding the Syrian fortresses, the overland
mail from northern India and Persia, by Bagdad,
was intercepted by Suleiman he took out the con-
sular despatches which bore upon the war, read and
burnt them, and forwarded all the other letters to
Admiral Stopford under a flag of truce. The
return mail was expedited in the same way, and
:
* To these instances may even be added the decisive attack of the
Prince of Prussia at Sadowa,
10
SULEIMAN PASHA.
thus the generosity of Mehemet Ali to the great
mercantile interests of the world found its fit
complement in the courtesy of his lieutenant. Of
so much value was the presence of Suleiman Pasha
in the enemy's ranks estimated that, by the
Turkish Government, and through the English
admiral, offers the most gratifying to ambition and
avarice were made to induce him merely to retire
from the Egyptian service; the government of
Crete, accompanied by a very large sum of money,
was one of the inducements proposed and rejected.
After a painful retreat through the desert, en-
cumbered with a population of followers, for whose
wants Suleiman provided as if he had been com-
missariat-general, he arrived at Cairo, only to per-
ceive that the edifice of military power which he
had raised with such untiring patience and energy
had crumbled to pieces, and that he was left with
the reflection of what, under happier auspices, it
might have been. The versatile mind of the Pasha
took refuge in visions of indefinite industrial wealth,
which his successors, and especially the present Khe-
dive, have gone far to realise; the carefully trained
cavalry were sent up the country, and used for ordi-
nary agricultural purposes, while the soldiers became
SULEIMAN PASHA.
II
labourers of the lowest kinds of toil. The wealthy
repose enjoyed by Suleiman in his luxurious palace
on the banks of the Nile, and the general considera-
tion acquired by his skill, vigour, and beneficence,
were a poor compensation to him for a project
which would have changed the face of the earth,
and the destiny of millions of men-the foundation
of a great Arab empire, which should be within
the reach of all European civilisation, and act as
mediator between the eastern and western world.
Having mixed little in politics, even at the time
that his arms were deciding their course, he has
had still less inclination to do so now his especial
function has ceased; and by this prudent abstinence
he has kept clear of all the intrigue and deception
which are inseparable from eastern state-craft.
Contented with a position the right to which none
can dispute, he has no enemies, for he has no rivals,
and he can afford to succour the weak and protect
the oppressed. He has made out of his harem a
veritable home, and his wife is an object of un-
bounded envy to the Egyptian ladies for the respect
with which she is habitually treated. She was a
Greek of good family, taken prisoner at the siege
of Tripolizza. He purchased her from her captor,
12
SULEIMAN PASHA.
and found her a willing and useful servant, and she
him so indulgent and considerate a master, that
when the prisoners were liberated after the battle of
Navarino she preferred remaining with Suleiman
to returning to her family. He rewarded this
choice by making her his wife, and he has never
taken advantage of the legal permission to have
more than one.
To strangers generally, and especially to French
and English, the house of Suleiman Pasha is
opened with a cordial hospitality; and one who
brought away from it pleasant and grateful recollec-
tions has attempted in these pages to leave some
memorial of its interesting possessor.
He is, in truth, an admirable specimen of that
type of man so little known in this country, and
yet so worthy of observation, a real soldier of the
French Empire. The Restoration, like all other
periods of forced and unwelcome government,
degraded the vigour and tarnished the simplicity of
this phase of national character, and made rare
that spirit of unconscious devotion, of idolatrous
patriotism, to which France had been as much, and
Napoleon more, than ever were Rome and Cæsar
to the legions. This feeling, so distinct from
SULEIMAN PASHA.
13
national vanity and admiration of power, never
possessed a human breast more absolutely than
that of Suleiman Pasha; admitting no comparisons,
it requires no jealousy to defend it; refusing all
criticism, it implies no injurious deductions, no
perversion of right or blindness to wrong. This
idiosyncrasy requires to be seen to be understood,
at least by Englishmen, in whom the military spirit
is something accidental and alien, and who never
worship heartily either a man or an idea. The
feeling of the Irish towards O'Connell is the nearest
approach to it in our time; and in France it is only
to be found where the soldier of the Grand Army
has retired from active life and subsists upon his
memories. There was little of it to be detected in
the metropolitan crowd that received the ashes of
Napoleon; but I have seen it in remote villages,
where the old soldier has become again the peasant,
and, after having helped to change the face of the
world, recovers his little portion of patrimony, and
has no more selfish pride about what he has done
than an old crusader would have had for having
recovered Jerusalem. I remember seeing in a
Norman village a half-pay captain, who had fought
from Fleurus to Waterloo, enjoying his cider and
14
SULEIMAN PASHA.
cake of buck-wheat, as contented as an English
officer at the United Service Club.
This peculiarity certainly forms a great charm of
the society of Suleiman Pasha, but his shrewd
observation and practical sense would have made.
him distinguished in any class or time; while his
great benevolence and humanity are really astonish-
ing in a man who has gone through so many scenes
of strife and suffering. For he has preserved his
feelings so uncorrupted by all this contamination
that he invariably speaks of war with pain and
repugnance, and seems forgetful of none of its
horrors, though he has shared in all its glories. An
Austrian officer, of the name of Durand, tried to
cut off the supplies of food from the large and ir-
regular body of Egyptians, including hundreds of
women and children, with whom he was retreating
over the desert in 1840. If I had caught him,'
said Suleiman, 'I would have hung him before the
whole army; as if war was not horrible enough
without these infernal resources of diplomacy.'
In 1845 Suleiman accompanied Ibrahim Pasha
to France, and brought his son to be educated at
Paris. He might be a great man in the East,' said
his father, but I can make him nothing but a
SULEIMAN PASHA.
15
Frenchman.' When Ibrahim came to England
Suleiman accompanied him, and, during a short
visit, interested and delighted all the public person-
ages and men of letters with whom he became
acquainted.
There was one subject to which no one would, of
course, refer but himself—namely, his adoption of
the Mohammedan religion. He, however, does so
frequently and always apologetically, and prays his
hearers to remember what was the religion of the
Revolution and the Empire, and not to judge him as
one who had known the full truth of Christianity.
'Ah!' he would say, 'si vous saviez ce que c'était
la religion de l'armée dans ce temps-là, vous trou-
veriez que j'ai beaucoup gagné en devenant mussul-
man. Quand nous étions dans la Terre-Sainte, on
se demandait, "Pourquoi ce nom-là?" On n'avait
pas l'idée de l'histoire du pays.' To the eastern
Christians both in Egypt and in Syria he has been
of essential service, and, though bearing the name.
of a renegade, has been covered with the blessings
of the rayahs protected from pillage, violence, and
persecution.
The only parallel, I believe, in modern history
to the subject of this sketch is Count Bonneval,
16
SULEIMAN PASHA.
one of
Achmet Pasha. He, too, distinguished himself by
feats of arms in the war of the Spanish succession
and under Prince Eugene, and, having betaken
himself to Constantinople, was received by Moham-
med V. with great honour, and conformed to the
religion and institutions of Islam; but here the
resemblance ends: Bonneval's life was
flagrant profligacy, only relieved by dashing
bravery; he fought against his own country, and
tried to betray that which he had adopted: his
excesses drove him from France and made him a
State prisoner in Austria; and he only retreated to
the East when banished from Europe. He held,
indeed, high office in the Turkish service, but was
prevented from effecting the only object he at-
tempted the reformation of the artillery-by the
jealousy of those in power, and easily consoled
himself by a life of unbridled licence. There is
nothing in this description in common with the
entire loyalty, the unblemished honour, the chival-
rous zeal, the sagacious prudence, the simple habits,
and the generous disposition of Suleiman Pasha.
I have only to add to the above delineation of
a very interesting man that he came to England
SULEIMAN PASHA.
17
once again shortly after the commencement of
hostilities that led to the war in the Crimea. 'Vous
prendrez Sébastopol,' he said, 'mais il y aura des
œufs cassés.' He went by special invitation to the
Reviews at Boulogne, where he was received with
great distinction by the Emperor. It was not: the
first time that they had met. The portrait attached
to this memoir was drawn on the occasion of his first
visit, to this country by that eminent artist M.
Gudin at a picnic in Richmond Park, where Prince
Louis Napoleon made one of the party. I remem-
ber well the interest the Prince took in the Pasha's
narrative of his chequered life, and the invitation he
gave him to come and see him in France in happier
days—a prognostication wonderfully accomplished.
On my return to Egypt, as representative of the
Geographical Society, in 1869, at the opening of
the Suez Canal, I saw Shereef Pasha, the Minister
of the Interior, who had married one of Suleiman's.
daughters, and who spoke of the great considera-
tion in which the memory of his father-in-law was
still held.
C
AT THE COURT OF BERLIN.
19
II.
ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT AT THE
COURT OF BERLIN.
THE annoyance felt by men of scrupulous honour
in this country at the supposed breach of con-
fidence in the rapid publication of the correspon-
dence between Alexander von Humboldt and
Varnhagen von Ense, and the malicious character
of some extracts that have been largely circulated,
doubtless prevented many persons from finding in
that volume all it suggests and reveals.
Un-
Varnhagen von Ense was an indefatigable col-
lector of autograph letters, and he has left behind
him one of the largest collections on record.
like many other amateurs, he attached the main
importance to the characteristic or historic contents.
of the documents he amassed, and a considerable
portion of the work is taken up by contributions
received from Humboldt for this purpose.
appears, however, to have had some compunction as
He
C 2
20
ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT
to the retention of Humboldt's own letters to
himself as part of his treasure, and, however much
it might have afflicted him in his dilettante pursuit,
he would probably have destroyed these revelations.
of Humboldt's innermost life, had not the writer
himself distinctly expressed his notions on the
subject: 'Make yourself quite easy in the posses-
sion of my irreverences (Impietäten),' is the sense.
of Humboldt's letter of 1841; 'when I am gone,
which will not be long first, do exactly as you
please with them; they are your property.' Yet
on another occasion Humboldt complains of the
unjust historical impression which is conveyed by
accidental and transitory epistolary phrases, and
illustrates this in his own case by a passage in
which Schiller tells Körner that he, Humboldt, is
‘a man of very limited understanding, who, notwith-
standing his restless activity, will never attain any
eminence,' at the very time that their relations were
of the most intimate character, and after Schiller
had written to him in a former letter that he was
a far more gifted and higher-minded man than his
brother. Humboldt also quotes a letter from a
collection of autographs in Augsburg, in which a
friend writes, 'Alexander Humboldt again accom-
AT THE COURT OF BERLIN.
21
panies the King to the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle
in the capacity of bloodhound,' and adds, 'Such
are the representations on the stage of life
for the benefit of a credulous posterity!' He
therefore knew very well what he was doing when
he authorised Varnhagen to keep his letters,
although perhaps he never anticipated that they
would appear in any concrete form: he may rather
have expected that the facts and opinions contained
in them would come out incidentally at different
intervals, when the chief actors in the scene might
have passed away: but he was clearly willing to
take upon himself all the responsibility, without
anxiety as to any pain he might inflict or any
irritation he would excite.
It is therefore not Humboldt or the friends of
Humboldt who are injured by the publication, but
those persons of high social and literary station
who are roughly and often unjustly criticised.
With most of these judgments, however, it is
probable that Varnhagen heartily agreed, and his
representatives may possibly share his feelings,
and there is more literary discourtesy than breach
of confidence in any fault that has here been
committed. My concern, however, at this moment
22
ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT
is with the figure of Humboldt himself as the
writer of these petulant and discomfortable letters,
and as I saw him at the Court of Berlin in the
years 1845-6.
The position of Humboldt at that period was
the cause of sincere gratification to all those who
loved to see genius successful and rewarded, and
also the source of much envy on the part of all
whose merits had never been acknowledged either
by prince or people as they thought was deserved.
His intellectual eminence indeed was so unchal-
lenged, that when he passed from writing a chapter
of Cosmos to his daily reserved place at the royal
table opposite the King, there was no pretence
either of favouritism or of service-it was the fair
and honourable interchange of the highest social
station and the noblest mental powers; the patron-
age was on both sides. Who suspected the deep
discontent that lay at the bottom of that old
man's heart? Who believed that he was seeking
refuge from that courtly splendour, and even from
that royal friendship, in secret satire and con-
fidential depreciation of all about him poured into
the ear of a literary contemporary of whose com-
plete sympathy he was well assured ?
AT THE COURT OF BERLIN.
23
And yet there can be nothing in this very new
or surprising to those who really understood the
temperament and culture of Humboldt, and the
character of the society in which he moved.
'Under an appearance,' he writes, 'of outward
splendour, and in the enjoyment of the somewhat
fantastic preference of a high-minded prince, I live
in a moral and mental isolation.' Rahel had said
long before, 'Humboldt was a great man when he
came to Berlin, then he became an ordinary one.'
May not the meaning of these two paragraphs be,
that Humboldt at Berlin had always been the
Courtier and as such in a false position? In a
French novel called 'Barnave' (by the Bibliophile
Jacob) there is an excellent character of an old
German Baroness, who, having accompanied Marie
Antoinette to the Court of France, is at length
compelled by the menaces of the French Revolu-
tion to return home, and resume her former state
and dignity: to her son's congratulations on the
recovery of her independence she can only mourn-
fully reply, 'Comment vivre sans servir?' This
feeling is incredibly strong in a country where the
multiplicity of small courts has enfeebled the self-
reliance of the upper classes, and to few Germans
24
ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT
would it seem incompatible with any eminence of
literary or scientific attainment, or even with perfect
consciousness of moral power. There must have
been something of it latent in Humboldt himself,
or so large a portion of his life would not have
been spent in the formalities and requisitions of a
courtier's existence.
His royal intimacy indeed had begun with King
Frederic William III,; and his relations, both
with that sovereign and his court, were happier
and more natural than at the period of this cor-
respondence. He himself was younger, and more
in harmony with the events of his time. That
King, though far inferior to his son in accomplish-
ment and erudition, was a philosopher in his way,
and of a school which tended to results not far
different from those familiar to the thinkers of the
eighteenth century. This tone of mind naturally
extended itself to the household and frequenters
of the palace, and became habitual even in the
camp, combining itself curiously with the material
restrictions of a military régime. Thus Heinrich
Heine then sang, in a tone which recent German
events still make but too familiar to European
politics—
AT THE COURT OF BERLIN.
25
Handle the drumstick and care not for life,
Kiss, if you like her, the sutler's wife :
That is the science worth discerning,
That is the end of human learning.
Drum every citizen out of his bed,
Drum the réveillé into his head ;
Preaching and drumming as long as you can,
That is the end of the life of man.
That is Philosophy selon les règles,
That is the doctrine according to Hegel :
I understand it, whoever may come,
For I am a capital hand at the drum.
The liberty too of religious speculation which
Goethe has claimed as the ancestral privilege of
the German mind,
For here each soul for freedom pants,
We are the natural Pròtèst-ants.
was still congenial to good society; and although
in his later years the King had seemed inclined
to measures of violence in the enforcement of a
Lutheran state-religion, the latitude of opinion.
in the higher circles still savoured of the days
and thoughts of Frederic the Great.
For ex-
ample, I remember great disgust being excited
at some opera, in which there was a great deal
of prayer represented on the stage not with
any reprehension of a supposed profanity, but as
an exhibition of Pietismus.' In such an atmo-
sphere both Humboldt and Varnhagen von Ense
26
ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT
could breathe freely, and associate agreeably even
with men of reactionary politics and aristocratic
prejudices. It will astonish many to read the
specimens of the intimate correspondence between
Prince Metternich and а man whose political
opinions he must have regarded as dangerous and
detestable, but whose knowledge he could reve-
rence, and of whose friendship he was proud.
With the reign of Frederic William IV. came a
mode of thought and an estimate of men and
things to which it was difficult, if not impossible,
for the great minds which had battled through the
glories and the ruins of the French Revolution to
do justice. M. de Talleyrand used to say that only
those who had lived near the conclusion of the last
century could realise the worth of the world to
man; and we can fairly test the depth of those im-
pressions by their endurance to the very last in the
nobler spirits that had traversed the whole round of
disappointment, and to whom all faith might well
seem illusory and vain. In what condition do I
leave the world,' writes Humboldt in 1853, 'I who
remember 1789, and have shared in its emotions?
However, centuries are but seconds in the great
process of the development of advancing humanity.
AT THE COURT OF BERLIN.
27
Yet the rising curve has small bendings in it, and
it is very inconvenient to find oneself on such a
segment of its descending portion.' In the temper
of mind this sentence implies, neither Humboldt
nor Varnhagen could see anything but hypocrisy
or morbid sentiment in the religious medium
through which both philosophy and manners came
to be now regarded; and in the prevalent fashion
of increased moral earnestness they could discern
little besides affectation, prejudice, and wilful
ignorance. When the audacious neologisms of
Bruno Bauer shocked the Court, Humboldt merely
wrote, Bruno has found me pre-Adamitically
converted; when I was young, the Court clergy
held opinions much the same as his. The minister.
who confirmed me told me that the Evangelists
had made a variety of notes, out of which, in later.
times, biographies had been poetically constructed.'
There can be no better illustration of the in-
vincible repugnance of such men as these to the
intellectual tastes predominant in the King's
society, than their misapprehension of the cha-
racter and opinions of Chevalier Bunsen. It was
natural enough that a somewhat arrogant aristo-
cracy should resent the affectionate favour of the
28
ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT
King towards a self-made man of letters, and
should suspect him of designs dangerous to the
interests of their order, and involving social and
political change. But Humboldt and his corre-
spondent could not be affected by such motives;
indeed, the former was himself amenable to very
much the same accusations—so much so, that he
habitually absented himself from Court when the
Emperor Nicholas formed part of the circle, and
the King of Hanover so frankly expressed his con-
tempt that he told him at his own table, 'that
there were two kind of animals always to be had
for money, to any amount-those that live by
their persons or their pens' (Huren and Feder-
vieh.) It was mainly the Pietistic tendency in the
writings and supposed influences of Chevalier
Bunsen that made him an object almost of animo-
sity to Varnhagen, who personally knew him little,
if at all, and of occasional unfriendly sarcasm to
Humboldt, who ought to have known him better.
The visit of the King of Prussia to England on
the occasion of the baptism of the Prince of
Wales was represented by these parties as an act
of prostration on the part of Prussia at the feet of
the British Tories, who certainly never troubled
AT THE COURT OF BERLIN.
29
their heads with any such fancies, and the mutual
arrangements for a Protestant bishopric of Jeru-
salem, as the enthronement of an Episcopal
Bench at Berlin, an ecclesiastical constitution which
assuredly has not resulted from that very harmless
proceeding. By a singular fatality Bunsen was
looked upon in this country with much suspicion
and ill-will, as a latitudinarian and neologist, while
he was abused and persecuted as an evangelical
fanatic on the banks of the Spree. If, in fact, a
theological sympathy may have been a bond of
union between him and his sovereign, and a step-
ping-stone towards his advancement in life, I know
of no instance where this interference led either of
the parties to injustice or to intolerance, which un-
fortunately cannot be said of the religious counsels
that prevailed in the later years of the monarch who
deserved a happier destiny. When the day of trial
came which was to determine whether Chevalier
Bunsen as a public man stood on the side of abso-
lutism or constitutional liberty, of progress or of
reaction, he was not found wanting: and, by sur-
rendering without hesitation the highest and most
lucrative post of his profession, and a residence which
had become to him a happy and a honoured home,
30
ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT
rather than subserve a policy which he deemed
unworthy of his country and injurious to mankind,
he dispersed the clouds of calumny and prejudice
which had so long obscured his name. Why did
he not live to see his most ambitious dreams of
German Unity more than realised, and the politi-
cians who treated him as an impracticable dreamer
the foremost actors on the scene?
Humboldt himself could not have been an
active and earnest politician. The largeness of his
views, derived from such long and accurate obser-
vations of nature and of man, must have induced
that indifference to the immediate contingencies of
human affairs which is at once the penalty and the
consolation of the highest and the fullest minds;
otherwise it is difficult to conceive how he for so
many years endured the continual society of
public men whose principles and conduct he must
have regarded with animosity or disdain, and the
occurrence of daily events distressing to his feel-
ings and repulsive to his judgment. It was by
this abstinence that he probably retained an
influence which he could frequently exercise to
mitigate the severity of cases of individual oppres-
sion, and sometimes to sustain the really noble
AT THE COURT OF BERLIN.
31
and imaginative spirit of his royal master above
the sordid policy of expediency and of fear. In
these efforts he scorned no assistance that offered
itself, not even that of the wilful, witty, and bene-
volent Bettina von Arnim, whom the King treated
with the same kind of admiring indulgence that
Goethe had done before him, allowing her to say
and write whatever she pleased, and, it may be,
taking from her wayward wisdom advice that no
graver counsellor would have dared to offer.
How grateful must have been the sympathetic
expansion of unrestrained opinion with so congenial
a mind as Varnhagen von Ense's to one who was but
too conscious that he was looked upon by the
society in which he lived as a sort of moral Helot
—an example of what a man might come to, when
drunk with knowledge! No amount of diplomatic
reserve could have made him acceptable to his
fellow-courtiers, and it was only as a link between
the intellectual qualities of the sovereign and the
literature and science of the nation that he could
feel himself in any legitimate vocation. In the
various and remarkable creations of Art which
have elaborately decorated the least lively of
cities in the great geographical and antiquarian
32
ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT
explorations which Prussia has of late years under-
taken, some of them in connection with English
enterprise-in the composition and production of
costly works of national or general interest-in the
judicious and delicate relief of destitute men of
letters, the authority of Humboldt was continuously
and powerfully exercised without a suspicion of
favouritism or partiality. Those who have had
the good fortune to see him in the midst of that
assembly of notable men whom the King of
Prussia brings together on the festival of his
'Order of Merit,' will not forget with what ready
reverence he was greeted by all-Poets, Historians,
Painters, Sculptors, Geographers, Physicians, Phi-
losophers, Professors of all arts and learning, as
their intellectual chief, and how tranquilly he
rested on his great reputation with the free and
good will of all around.
Apart from these useful and honourable func-
tions, the question may well be asked whether the
connection of Baron Humboldt with the Court of
Prussia was one which can be regarded with
satisfaction relatively to the dignity of literature
and the worth of the human mind. And yet, if
not this, what position of any man of genius or the
AT THE COURT OF BERLIN.
33
highest erudition in the constant intimacy of any
court is desirable or even tenable? Enjoying the
entire esteem and real friendship of two sove-
reigns, one of them a man of grave intelligence,
proved by many severe vicissitudes of fortune and
a foremost figure in the catastrophes of modern
Europe, the other a most pleasant and accom-
plished gentleman, full of generous impulses, and
only deficient in the sterner purpose and more
explicit will that his times required, Humboldt
remains as unindulgent to the princely character as
if he were an outer democrat, and falls foul even
of our amiable and intellectual Prince Consort,
who approached him with a cordial admiration
which would have been very acceptable to any
English man of letters. What Philosopher at Court
can be expected to keep his judgment clear and his
temper cool, where the wise and kindly Humboldt
so failed?
The wide gulf which in our country separates
the men of thought from the men of action is
assuredly no small evil. In its effect on the
political and social character of the upper ranks
it maintains a low standard of mental labour,
D
34
ALEXANDEr von huMBOLDT
content with official aptitude, with adroit repre-
sentation, and with facility of speech, and dis-
parages the exercise of those spontaneous and
constructive faculties which should also give a
man the command of his fellows in a reflective
age; it encourages the consumption of a large
portion of life in amusements which become occu-
pations, serious frivolities only differing from vices
as barren ground differs from weeds, and really
perilous to the moral peace of the community, by
contrasting the continuous task of the working
thousand with the incessant pleasure of the
selected few. On the other hand, the isolation of
the literary class has not only deformed some of
our highest works of fiction by caricatures of
manners and motives with which the writers have
not been sufficiently familiar, but has also en-
gendered a sense of injustice which shows itself in
wrong susceptibilities, in idle vaunts, in unchari-
table interpretations, and in angry irony. These
painful feelings may rather increase than diminish
with the practical equality that is advancing upon
us with such rapid strides (but which the literary
class are so often unwilling themselves to concede
to others), and the imagined barrier may be all the
AT THE COURT OF BERLIN.
35
more formidable when it ceases to rest on the
palpable inequalities of fortune and the real dis-
similarity of daily existence.
Let, however, no displeasure at the separation
or even hostility of the two superiorities, either
here or elsewhere, blind us to the paramount
importance of the independence of the literary
character. So noble, indeed, was the nature of
Alexander von Humboldt, that it preserved, under
an almost life-long weight of patronage, the ele-
vation of his intellect and the integrity of his
heart. His indefatigable industry was unimpeded
by the constant round of small duties and vapid
amusements, and the luxurious security of his
official position never blunted his eager interest
in the new acquisitions of all science, and in the
fresh developments of literature. It was thus his
signal good fortune to retain to the last, not only
the wonderful stores of knowledge accumulated
through so many years, but also the art to re-
produce and dispose them for the delight and
edification of mankind. Some affectation in de-
meanour and expression was the inevitable con-
sequence of a factitious mode of life, but we would
attribute much of the hyperbolic tone that per-
D 2
36
ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT
vades a portion of his correspondence to the
traditional habits of a former generation, when
adulation was polite and the best friends were
ceremonious, rather than to any infection of dis-
ingenuous manners.
So notable an exception to
ordinary rules and expectations as the career of
Humboldt, should assuredly check the desire that
those who occupy the heights and pinnacles of
human mind' should be exposed to similar temp-
tations. No advantage, however great, should be
purchased at so costly a price as the sacrifice of
that which is the only sure sign of the progress of
nations, and the very core of civilisation itself, the
combination of moral strength with intellectual
culture. There is thus something satisfactory in
Humboldt's very dissatisfaction, in his criticism of
the great, in his consciousness of an incomplete
and jarring existence, in his struggle to escape
from a conventional world to the confidences of a
genial and undoubted friendship. Without these.
emotions, without this generous discontent, all the
learning and all the wit of the companion in
letters and mental counsellor of Frederic William,
might not have saved him from the servility and
its consequences which degraded the incensor of
AT THE COURT OF BERLIN.,
37
Frederic the Great-M. de Voltaire, Gentil-
homme du Roi,'-and from a relation to his accom-
plished master not without some analogy to that
which in ruder times was occupied by the Professor
of the Cap and Bells.
CARDINAL WISEMAN.
39
III.
CARDINAL WISEMAN.
IN the winter of 1830-31 the British Catholics
were represented at Rome by Cardinal Weld, of the
Welds of Lulworth Castle. His Eminence was an
English country-gentleman, of the simplest manners,
of no literary pretensions, of liberal politics, as were
indeed all his Catholic countrymen in those days,
and delighting to do the honours of the Eternal
City to persons in any way connected with his
family and home. It was to an intimacy of this
kind that I was indebted for my introduction to
the Collegio Inglese, at that time presided over by
Dr. Wiseman. Among the students under his care
was a young cousin of the name of Macarthy, with
whom I soon formed a lasting friendship, and thus
I was brought into frequent relations with the
rector of the College. These two men, Cardinal
Wiseman, Catholic Archbishop of Westminster,
and Sir Charles Macarthy, Governor of Ceylon
40
CARDINAL WISEMAN.
passed away within a few months of each other,
the younger going first; each having done, in his
separate walk of life, that which is a man's first
duty to use the talents given to his charge for
what he believes to be a right purpose, and honestly
to win the respect and regard of mankind.
There was then in the English College the fresh
recollection of the grateful jubilee that had been
held to celebrate the political emancipation of the
Catholics of Great Britain by the long efforts and
frequent sacrifices of the Liberal party in Parlia-
ment; and Dr. Wiseman was looked upon with
little good-will by those who were content to base
the spiritual and temporal government of the world
on a relation of absolute authority and obedience.
He had withdrawn his pupils from their attendance.
on the lectures at the Jesuit College; and it was
rumoured that Pope Gregory XVI. had by no
means maintained the amicable feelings which had
been manifested towards him by Pope Leo XII., his
fast friend and patron. However that might be, Dr.
Wiseman pursued an independent course of action,
and impressed on all who came within the more
intimate circle of his acquaintance his sincere desire
to reconcile the liberties of literature and science
CARDINAL WISEMAN.
41
with a respectful recognition of his ecclesiastical
position.
His life and education had been somewhat cos-
mopolitan. Some German translator of his 'Hora
Syriacæ' had described him in one many-syllabled
word as the 'from-an-Irish-family-descended-in-
Spain-born-in-England-educated-in-Italy - conse-
crated Syrian scholar,' but he showed no inclina-
tion to merge his British nationality in his sacerdotal
or scholastic character. His conversation ran
mainly on subjects of English literature, and his
greatest pleasure was to converse with his intellec-
tual fellow-countrymėn. He encouraged those
tastes and habits among his pupils, as far as was
consistent with the practices of a Catholic seminary.
The books which were read aloud, according to
conventual custom, during the noontide repast,
were usually our British classics; and I remember,
on more than one occasion of this kind, listening
to a novel of Walter Scott's. Dr. Cullen was at
that time the rector of the Irish College; but
although I have met the future Catholic Primate
of Ireland on high-days in the hall of the Collegio
Inglese, there was little intercourse between the
two establishments, and apparently no close inti-
42
CARDINAL WISEMAN.
macy between the heads. The two bodies always
walked separately in processions at great church
ceremonies; and I am not aware that any of my
English fellow-countrymen ever received such a
tribute of fervid admiration as was paid to their
Irish comrades while, in their due turn, they were
bearing aloft the Holy Father through the colon-
nades of St. Peter's at the festival of Corpus
Christi, when a young English lady, having ex-
claimed, 'Oh, papa! do look at those handsome
young priests; did you ever see such fine eyes?'
was dreadfully shocked by the answer of one of
them in an unmistakable accent-Thank you,
Miss, for the compliment.'
Another Irish ecclesiastic, however-Dr. McHale,
then Bishop of Killala-seemed more familiar with
the inmates of the Collegio Inglese; perhaps from
the very contrast of his character to that of the
scholarly and courteous Dr. Wiseman, who used to
watch the various demonstrations of his Hibernian
zeal with considerable interest and amusement.
That persistent nationality--which during his long
career as Archbishop of Tuam has not only alien-
ated Dr. McHale from all social intercourse with
the representatives of British power in Ireland, but
CARDINAL WISEMAN.
43
which has caused him to include in one sweeping
denunciation the fiercest acts of old oppressors
and the most benevolent efforts of modern legis-
lators the 'thorough' Strafford and the gentle
Carlisle has remained unaffected by the passive
political attitude which it has always been the habit
of the Roman Court to assume in Irish affairs, and
refused to surrender an iota of his rights of resist-
ance to any civil authority. It is only just to Arch-
bishop McHale to say that he has maintained during
the late General Council the same independent atti-
tude towards the Papal Curia, and was foremost in
such opposition, as ecclesiastical decorum permitted,
to the obnoxious doctrine. But in 1831 the example
of Poland, just then succumbing after an heroic
struggle to the colossus of the North, not only
without the active sympathy of the Papal power
but with the distinct injunction to her ecclesiastics
to submit humbly to the schismatic conqueror, was
not calculated to assure or appease the spirit of
the Celtic prelate, who might have anticipated a
period when British diplomacy might turn against
the Irish Catholic Church even her own spiritual
arms, and coerce her to obedience by ultramontane
aid—a result at that time by no means improb-
44
CARDINAL WISEMAN.
able; for who then dreamt of the political destiny
of Italy, which was quietly approaching to its dawn?
Who then cared to trouble the pleasant somnolence
of Art and Antiquity, in which the Princes and
Peoples between the Alps and the sea reposed, with
any more serious agitation than a commentary on
Dante, the merits of Santa Filomèna, or the re-
spective claims of the mature Pasta and the youth-
ful Grisi? Happy days those for the tourist, whom
no one troubled about his opinions or his religion-
for the archeologist, who looked on Italy as an
inexhaustible necropolis, and found it so-and for
the collector, to whom every day noble poverty
surrendered treasures of art and curiosities of
history at a moderate cost, with giallo antico not
exhausted and constitutions undiscovered!
Yet, although the Protestant visitors of the
English College were perfectly secure from any
intrusive proselytism, and the only influences of the
kind brought to bear were fair controversy when
challenged and amiable inducements to see all that
was best and most striking in the practice and
symbolic action of the Roman Church, there was
no concealment of the special interest attached to
the circumstances and conduct of recent British
converts. A Cornish baronet, far advanced in life,
CARDINAL WISEMAN.
45
had not only professed himself a Roman Catholic,
but, at his urgent desire, had been ordained.
a priest.*
The deepest anxiety was expressed
as to his first performance of his mystical office,
and it was hinted that a more than natural power
of retentive memory was vouchsafed to him on the
occasion. The son of Earl Spencer, who afterwards
became notorious as Brother Ignatius, was at that
time a resident in the College, and his first sermon
in the church set apart for the services of the
English Catholics excited an intense interest among
the students; and here, too, the success, though
not very apparent to us curious Protestants, was a
subject of much thankfulness. In all such matters
Dr. Wiseman's interest was always affectionate and
judicious, and never provoked any sense of extrava-
gance in the outsiders.
Soon after the French Revolution of 1830 a
remarkable company of Frenchmen arrived at
Rome. The Abbé Lamennais, whose previous and
future career I may assume to be generally known,
came to demand justice of the Chair of St. Peter
against the throne of the bourgeois Gallican king.
His enterprise of opening the public education of
* Sir Harry Trelawney, grandfather of the present consistent
Liberal member for East Cornwall,
46
CARDINAL WISEMAN.
France to the free competition of the Church had
been arrested by the law; and his young colleague,
the Comte de Montalembert, had just commenced
his strange and varied public life of distracted
opinion and irreconcilable tendencies, which has
lately closed amid the affectionate sympathies and
just recognition of the two countries he loved
with an equal filial duty, by an eloquent and
fruitless defence of the cause at the bar of the
Chambre des Pairs. These two remarkable men
were accompanied by the Abbé Lacordaire, the
future successor of Bossuet and Massillon, and by
M. Rio, now well known throughout Europe as
the graceful and pious historian of Christian
Art. Lamennais, like Dr. Wiseman, had received
Pope Leo XII.'s intellectual sympathy and
honourable protection, and the author of the 'Essai
sur l'Indifférence' was known to have been desig-
nated at that time for the highest dignities of the
Church; but another spirit now predominated in
the Roman Court, and he and his lieutenants were
received with more than coldness and disregard.
It did not, perhaps, become any non-Catholic to
judge the causes of this policy, yet it certainly ap-
peared to the casual observer that the dominant
CARDINAL WISEMAN.
47
motives of the actors in these scenes were the dis-
inclination to quarrel with the representatives of a
successful revolution in France, and an indistinct
dread of the large and popular basis on which the
Abbé Lamennais was content to rest the authority
and destiny of the Catholic Church. It is, however,
no doubt open for any believer to discern in this
repudiation of the future heretic and revolutionist a
superior prescience of the danger of giving trust or
favour to a lofty intelligence liable to serious aberra-
tion, and a mind too haughty to be steadfast in its
service to any external rule.
Be this as it may,
the immediate impression was eminently disagree-
able. You saw a man who had grown great in the
defence of the Church, now that he had pushed
forward some theories, which had the acceptance of
the more earnest Catholics in France, with an in-
convenient enthusiasm, not only left unsupported
in his struggle but regarded with aversion. He
had difficulty in even getting access to the Pope:
and one day, when he showed some little resent-
ment on this score, a Monsignore superciliously
observed that the Abbé surely did not come from
a country in which his order were treated with
especial respect. 'You are mistaken, sir,' said
48
CARDINAL WISEMAN.
Lamennais; in France no one despises a priest-
they reverence him, or they kill him,'-a remark
singularly corroborated by the successive violent
deaths of three Archbishops of Paris.
To these missionaries of a wider and braver
Catholicism Dr. Wiseman proffered a generous
hospitality, which was thankfully received. The
minute person and phthisical constitution of Lamen-
nais did not permit him to take any important part
in general society; but the charm and earnestness
of Montalembert--so French in his emotions and
so English in his thoughts-competed with the
simple, audacious spontaneity of his Breton col-
league Rio-a Christian in politics and an Artist in
religion-to make the conversation of the decorous
Seminary as bright and coloured as that of the
gayest Paris drawing-room. After the publication
of the Affaires de Rome' the breach between the
Abbé Lamennais and the Church probably pre-
cluded all future intercourse between the reformer
and the prelate the host of that table rose in
honourable gradation to the loftiest functions of his
profession; and of the guest I will only record
what a French artisan said to me in 1848, when I
asked whether he knew by chance where M.
C
CARDINAL WISEMAN.
49
Lamennais lodged? Dans cette maison-là très-
haute-tout près du ciel.'
C
This is not the place to praise or criticise the
lectures on the Connection between Science and
Revealed Religion,' which I heard delivered by
Dr. Wiseman in the apartments of Cardinal Weld
during the Lent of 1835. But it is well to re-
member that at that time the subject was compara-
tively new, and the knowledge imparted in a great
degree necessarily derived from original sources.
The matter was not then contained in popular
works, but had to be sought at first-hand. As the
teleological arguments which the Bridgewater
Treatises and their successors have urged to weari-
ness had not then familiarised the public mind with.
the connection between the truths of Science and
those of Natural Religion, so the abundant illustra-
tions which Scripture may derive from ethnology,
philology, and archæology were then confined to
the learned, and had not been made the staple of
endless lectures, essays, and dictionaries. Thus
these discourses were most interesting to all who
heard them, and though, perhaps, the wide range
they took created some distrust in the perfect
accuracy of the author, yet his acknowledged emi-
E
50
CARDINAL WISEMAN.
nence in one portion of Oriental philology fairly
suggested the inference that he would not run the
risk of careless assertions or inadequate knowledge
in other portions of his work. He did not give
these lectures to the public till after his settlement
in England, and even then with some hesitation, as
the preface avers. In announcing the publication
to myself, he wrote: 'In a moment of great
presumption I resolved to premise to them a sonnet
by way of dedication. I send it for your friendly
inspection, requesting not merely that you will
suggest any alteration, but that you will frankly
say, if you think so, that it will not do.
For I am
far from believing myself anything so great as a
poet.' This was the sonnet :-
Some dive for pearls to crown a mortal brow,
Some fondly garlands weave to dress the shrine
Of fading beauty so is my design,
Learning t'enchase that lay concealed till now,
And from known science pluck each greenest bough;
But not to deck the earthly, while divine
Beauty and majesty, supreme as thine,
Religion! shall my humble gift allow.
Thine was my childhood's path-lamp, and the oil
Of later watchings hath but fed the flame
While I, embroid'ring here with pleasant toil
My imaged traceries around thy name,
This banner weave, in part from hostile spoil,
And pay my fealty to thy highest claim.
CARDINAL WISEMAN.
51
In a postscript he added, 'Even if approved, I
do not think that I shall have courage to publish
it.' The friend thus appealed to may probably
have suggested that the lectures would be quite as
well without the 'verses dedicatory ;' and I am not
aware that they have ever appeared in print; but
they are now not without a touching interest of
their own, not only from the becoming diffidence
shown by a man who even then lived among much
to encourage vanity and self-confidence, but from
the simple sentiment they express, and which his
whole life illustrated. It has been stated that,
shortly before his death, the Cardinal assembled
the Chapter of his church around his bed, and
expressed to them his thankfulness that he had
never been troubled by any difficulties or mental
anxiety in matters of faith. These lectures con-
vey precisely that impression. If science can
make itself useful and ancillary to faith, so much
the better for science. As Lamennais himself
once wrote, 'Le monde matériel est Dieu mis en
doute gare à celui qui se laisse prendre!'
It was with no intention of leading a secluded
or scholastic life that Dr. Wiseman came to Eng-
land. He mixed freely in the interests and topics
E 2
52
CARDINAL WISEMAN.
of the time, and I have just laid my hand on a
letter in which he describes his attendance at a
great meeting for the Irish Protestant clergy.
'Heartily,' he writes, as I pity the individuals in
distress, and wish that the triumph which is achiev-
ing could be bought without inflicting the slightest
suffering on any human being, the tales which were
unfolded could not but excite in my mind a feeling
of self-congratulation and joy in thinking that I
was, perhaps, the only one in that assembled
multitude who saw therein a stroke of retributive
justice for injuries long inflicted under the pretence.
of religion. I have just come from Ireland, re-
member, from my first visit after twenty-five years,
and I have warmed my patriotism at my domestic
hearth, in the hall of my forefathers, who suffered
and died for their religion. But I am getting into.
Mr. M's vein-alias King Cambyses'. Mr.
M- was one of the speakers, and certainly very
eloquent, but ranting and scenic.'
Both at Oscott, where he superintended a college
founded in a wholesome spirit of rivalry to the
monopoly of Stonyhurst in the education of the
Catholic gentry of England, and in his offices of
Coadjutor and of Bishop of the London District,
CARDINAL WISEMAN.
53
Dr. Wiseman extended his society beyond his
co-religionists, and would in time have come to be
regarded as any other distinguished man of letters.
A decorous precedence was willingly given to him.
in Protestant houses, and he was becoming gradu-
ally esteemed as an author, although naturally his
books were received with more favour and less
criticism among those who sympathised with his
opinions and objects than by the general reader.
His style never became agreeable to ordinary
English taste; the foreign education of his young
manhood damaged the force and even the correct-
ness of his diction, and a certain natural taste for
richness of form and colour encumbered his writings
with superfluous epithets and imagery. These
defects would no doubt have been diminished by a
longer and more frequent intercourse with the best
instructed of his countrymen; but in the year
1850 he returned to Rome, with the intention, it
was reported, of taking up his abode there. I
remember indeed his saying to his cousin Macarthy,
who was then rising fast towards the highest grades.
of the Colonial Service, 'When you are tired of
governing in all parts of the world, come and visit
me in my terzo piano of some Roman palace
54
CARDINAL WISEMAN.
which he particularly liked-I think it was the
'Colonna.' But no such repose was in store for him.
He returned to England, the first Roman Cardinal
that had stood on British soil since Pole had died
amid the fires of Smithfield, with the missive from
the Flaminian gate in his hand, the agent of a
bloodless but not innocuous revolution.
The story of the so-called Papal Aggression
has yet to be written. The circumstances of the
affair were crowded with misapprehension on all
sides. There had been much to induce the belief,
on the part of the Catholics, that a Prince of the
Roman Church and Court would be received with-
out disfavour in England. The Government had
only lately passed an Act of Parliament author-
ising diplomatic relations with Rome; and in the
debate on Lord Eglintoun's clause, which limited
the selection of the Papal envoys to this country
to laymen, it had been distinctly stated in the
House of Lords, on the Liberal side, that there
would be no objection to the presence of a
Cardinal in England. Again, the extent and
power of the High Church party that had lately
developed itself at Oxford was extravagantly
exaggerated by the Catholics, both at home and
►
CARDINAL WISEMAN.
55
at Rome. The entirely intellectual character of
the movement, and the certainty of its indignant
repulse the moment it came into contact with the
habits, instincts, and traditions of the English
people, were not perceptible to Dr. Wiseman,
whose recent few years of residence in his native
land could not compensate for an early life of
foreign impressions. How far he may have been
encouraged in his notion of the improved feelings
of this country towards Roman Catholicism by
members of the Tractarian party I have no means
of knowing; but with some of them he had
friendly relations, and he had been one of the first
of the authorities of his Church to approach them
with a sympathetic interest, and to attract them
to what he believed the only safe conclusion by
a kindly appreciation of their doubts and diffi-
culties.
He had also had an interview and conversation
with Lord John Russell before he left England for
Italy, of which he always spoke as affording a
vindication of his future proceedings. Its con-
fidential and private nature, he said, prevented
him from appealing to it during his lifetime; but
he had written a record of it, which must, some
56
CARDINAL WISEMAN.
day, be generally known, and would seriously
affect the estimate of the imprudence of his con-
duct. If this is so, it is the more singular that
the first overt act declaratory of opinion in high
places, and premonitory of public indignation,
should have proceeded from Lord John Russell.
What was called 'the Durham letter' was no
doubt his personal production, and in no way
sanctioned by his Cabinet; but it had all the
effect of a political encyclic. Looking back on
the affair, after the lapse of years, the chief mis-
take seems to have been the simultaneity of the
new ecclesiastical arrangement and the advent of
the Cardinal Archbishop. Either the one or the
other by itself would have met with the usual
amount of popular criticism as an unwelcome
novelty, and have died away after a nine-days'
bluster. When the vivacity of public feeling then
aroused is remembered, it now seems fortunate for
the religious liberties of our country that the issue
was no worse than the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill,
which in its result, and probably in the intent,
exactly corresponded with the judgment of an
abus de pouvoir delivered by the French High
Court against the prelates who interfere too pro-
CARDINAL WISEMAN.
57
minently in political concerns. It was an official
censure, quantum valeat, and nothing more. An
eminent foreign statesman said to me that if we had
civilly conducted him to Dover with an escort, and
put him on board a ship, we should have acted in
strict accordance with the traditions of Catholic
Governments.
But on the minds of individual Catholics, espe-
cially those prominently engaged in the matter,
the Protestant demonstration produced a sense of
indignant surprise. There was so much to be said
in their favour on logical grounds, and the in-
ferences from arguments of religious freedom were
so patent, that the public condemnation struck
them as something beyond the ordinary condition
of public policy, and as tainted with personal ill-
feeling and special injustice. Thus the Cardinal
placed himself before his countrymen in the
attitude of constant reproach for a grave wrong
committed not only against his person and his
community, but against the liberal principles of
the men and the party with whom the Catholics of
England had been for so long connected. His posi-
tion among us must, in any case, have been some-
what anomalous and discomfortable. The social
58
CARDINAL WISEMAN.
rank of the Cardinalate had frequently formed the
subject of dispute with half the Courts of Christ-
endom. It had been asserted to be higher than
that of the members of the Royal Family itself in
any foreign country, inasmuch as every Cardinal
was not only a prince of the Roman State, but
particeps regni Romani, and as such notified his
accession to all Catholic sovereigns. And though
this assumption has been rarely, if ever, admitted,
yet it is difficult to imagine where that awful
tribunal the Board of Green Cloth' could have
decided to range the Cardinal, so as to be agree-
able to the feelings of the Papal Court, and even
to the custom of Catholic countries, and not to
shock the precise and historical gradations of rank
assigned to the subjects of the British Crown.
had, indeed, himself so little anticipated any
difficulty on this score, that he brought over with
him the curious mediæval trappings of the horses
that drew the cardinals' carriages in Rome on
state occasions; yet it turned out that even in the
various circles of private life the Cardinal was
much restricted by the dignity of his position.
He had to be treated as a Prince in a society
which dislikes ostentation and restraint, and which
He
CARDINAL WISEMAN,
59
becomes exclusive from its inclination to ease and
equality. He did not fare better in his indivi-
dual relations with the Protestant world; they
gradually became weaker even where they had
been the closest; and, except on such occasions as
his appearance as a lecturer at the Royal Institu-
tion, his last years were passed in the diligent
discharge of his episcopal duties, and in company
where his intellectual as well as his social supe-
riority remained unchallenged.
Apart from the advantages which the internal
administration of the Roman Catholic Church in
this country may have derived from the change, it
now appears very questionable whether the coming
of Cardinal Wiseman is not rather a subject of
regret than of happy retrospect to the Catholics
themselves. It began by driving out of public life
for the time some most estimable men, such as the
late Duke of Norfolk and Mr. Torrens M'Cullagh,
who led the hopeless opposition to the Ecclesiastical
Titles Bill; it made it next to impossible, for many
years to come, for any Catholic to represent an
English constituency; it embittered the fair dis-
cussion of questions in which the discipline and the
customs of the Roman Catholic Church come into
60
CARDINAL WISEMAN.
contact either with the moral prejudices or the
intellectual pretensions of their Protestant fellow-
countrymen; it reopened the ancient wounds of
Irish party animosity which the great common.
calamity of the famine had gone far to cauterise;
it dissociated the leading Catholics in England
from those liberal traditions which, if unbroken,
might now enable them to do a signal service to
their age and their religion, by making them the
mediators between the providential necessities of
the fruitful present and the deep-rooted associa-
tions of decaying systems. And now it has passed
away from
the statute-book almost without
notice, except from the curious fact that it was
the prelates of the Protestant Church of Ireland
who became, after their disestablishment, mainly
obnoxious to its provisions.
There was a large field of ecclesiastical useful-
ness open to Nicholas Wiseman, had not circum-
stances, rather than conduct, placed him in a
groove in which he was compelled to continue to
the end. The supposition which I have heard
expressed, even by the Roman Catholic clergy,
that he might have ascended the Chair of St. Peter,
after the demise of its present occupant, is extra-
CARDINAL WISEMAN.
6I
vagant. The Italian portion of the Conclave, as
long at least as any temporal power is throned in
the Vatican, will not relax the rule, established
centuries ago, to limit the selection of the Pope to
the prelatura of Italy; nor is it probable that
there would be ever such a concordance of opinion
in the representatives of other nations as to afford
any chance of breaking down this monopoly. But
even though he had never attained any of the
highest clerical dignities, Dr. Wiseman, in the
ordinary course of his profession, would have
exercised a very wide moral influence by the
general justice of his mind and the sweetness of
his disposition. If he had to be intolerant, it was
against the grain; and perhaps he gladly took
refuge in a somewhat pompous rhetoric from the
necessity of plainly expressing unpalatable truths
and harsh conclusions. Such at least is the
estimate of one who knew him intimately for
many years, and who will ever retain a pleasant
and affectionate memory of his talents and his
virtues.

WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR,
FROM A SKETCH BY ROBERT FAULKNER IN LORD HOUGHTON'S POSSESSION.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
63
IV.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
THERE were few visitors to Florence between the
years 1829 and 1835 whose attention had not in
some way been directed to an elderly English
gentleman, residing with his family in a commo-
dious villa on the pleasant slope of those Fiesolan
hills, full of the scenes and memories of Boccaccio
-with the cottage of Dante, the birthplace of
Michael Angelo, and the home of Machiavelli in
sight, and overlooking the Valdarno and Vallom-
brosa which Milton saw and sang. He had lived
previously for six years in the city, at the Palazzo
Medici, and for a short time in another campagna,
but had few acquaintances among his countrymen
except artists, and scarcely any among the natives
except picture-dealers. He had a stately and
agreeable presence, and the men-of-letters from
different countries who brought introductions to
64
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
him spoke of his affectionate reception, of his com-
plimentary old-world manners, and of his elegant
though simple hospitality. But it was his conver-
sation that left on them the most delightful and
permanent impression; so affluent, animated, and
coloured, so rich in knowledge and illustration, so
gay and yet so weighty--such bitter irony and
such lofty praise, uttered with a voice fibrous in all
its tones, whether gentle or fierce-it equalled, if
not surpassed, all that has been related of the
table-talk of men eminent for social speech. It
proceeded from a mind so glad of its own exercise,
and so joyous in its own humour, that in its most
extravagant notions and most exaggerated atti-
tudes it made argument difficult and criticism
superfluous. And when memory and fancy were
alike exhausted, there came a laughter so panto-
mimic, yet so genial, rising out of a momentary
silence into peals so cumulative and sonorous, that
all contradiction and possible affront were merged
for ever.
This was the author of the 'Imaginary Conversa-
tions,' who was esteemed by many high authorities.
in our own and in classical literature to be the great-
est living master of the Latin and English tongues.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
63
But it was not the speaker, real or fictitious, or the
writer, less or more meritorious, who had made so
wide a repute in that flowery town, not yet con-
scious of the burdens and honours of patriotism,
but sufficiently happy in its beauty and its insig-
nificance. His notoriety referred to a supposed
eccentricity of conduct and violence of demeanour
that exceeded the licence which our countrymen,
by no means original at home, are believed to
claim and require when travelling or resident
abroad. The strange notions and peculiar form of
these ebullitions had woven themselves into a sort
of legend. It was generally accepted that he had
been sent away from school after thrashing the
Head-master, who had ventured to differ from him
as to the quantity of a syllable in a Latin verse;
that he had been expelled from the University-
after shooting at a Fellow of a College, who took
the liberty of closing a window to exclude the
noise of his wine party; that he had been outlawed
from England for felling to the ground a barrister
who had had the audacity to subject him to a cross-
examination. His career on the Continent bore
an epical completeness. The poet Monti having
F
66
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
written a sonnet adulatory of Napoleon and offen-
sive to England, Mr. Landor replied in such out-
spoken Latinity that he was summoned by the
authorities of Como to answer to the charge of
libel; he proceeded to threaten the Regio Delegato
with a bella bastonata, and avoided being con-
ducted to Milan by a voluntary retirement to
Genoa, launching a Parthian epigram at Count
Strasoldo, the Austrian Governor, still more op-
probrious than the former verse. At Florence he
had been frequently on the point of expulsion, and
could expect little protection from the English
Embassy, having challenged the Secretary of the
Legation for whistling in the street when Mrs.
Landor passed, and having complained to the
Foreign Office of 'the wretches it employed
abroad.' Once he was positively banished and
sent to Lucca, the legend ran, for walking up a
Court of Justice, where the Judges were hearing a
complaint he had made against an Italian servant,
with a bag of dollars in his hand, and asking how
much was necessary to secure a favourable verdict,
-'not for his own sake, but for the protection of
his countrymen in the city.' Either in deprecation
of this sentence, or in the consolation of the thought
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
67
that he only shared the fate of the great Poet and
Exile of Florence, he wrote—
Oro
Ne, Florentia, me voces poetam :
Nam collem peragrare Fæsulanum,
Jucundum est mihi-nec lubenter hortos
Fontesque, aut nemorum algidos recessus,
Primo invisere mane vesperique
Exul desinerem : exulatque quisquis,
O Florentia! dixeris poetam.
At the time, however, to which we have alluded,
he was living in more than ordinary tranquillity,
and having vented his rage against all kings and
constituted authorities in his writings, he submitted
with common decorum to the ordinances of govern-
ment and society. But the demon of discord was
too strong within him, and ere a few years had
lapsed, he was once more in England, but more
than ever an exile, having left behind the home
of his choice, the young family of his caresses, the
pictures he had domesticated, the nature that had
grown a familiar friend. And by a strange relent-
lessness of destiny, he was at last driven forth once
more, back to a home that had become homeless, to
an alienated household, to a land that had for him
no longer any flowers but to grow over his grave.
Mr. Forster, in his interesting volumes, has
added to the tragic biographies of men of genius-
F 2
68
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
of Otway and of Savage, of Byron and of Keats.
He has performed a task, which his reverent friend-
ship of many years made most difficult and deli-
cate, with dignity and affection. Nothing is
concealed that is worth revealing, nothing is
lauded which is unjust, and nothing is left unre-
proved and unregretted which is wrong in moral
conception or unbecoming in the action of life. In
this conduct of his subject he has followed the
dictates of the highest prudence; he has shown that
if the temperament of his friend made him most
troublesome to the societies in which he lived,
made his acquaintance uneasy and his friendship
perilous, it was he himself who was the foremost
sufferer; that neither honourable birth, nor inde-
pendent fortune, nor sturdy health, nor a marriage
of free choice, nor a goodly family, nor rare talents,
nor fine tastes, nor appropriate culture, nor suffi-
cient fame, could ensure him a life of even
moderate happiness, while the events of the day
depended on the wild instincts of the moment,
while the undisciplined and thoughtless will over-
ruled all capacity of reflection and all suggestions
of experience. Not but that many wilful and
impatient men enjoy their domestic tyranny, and
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
69
make a good figure in public life, and possibly owe
much of their pleasure and success to the very
annoyance they inflict. 'I should have been no-
where without my temper,' said an uncomfortable
politician of the last generation, and those who
knew him best agreed with him. But in Landor's
idiosyncrasy there were two men, conscious of each
other's acts and feelings. By the side of, or rather
above, the impulsive, reckless creature, there was
the critical, humorous, nature, as well aware of its
own defect as any enemy could be, ever strong
enough to show and probe the wound, but im-
potent to heal it, and pathetically striving to
remedy, through the judgments of the intellect,
the faults and the miseries of the living actor.
Thus nowhere in the range of the English lan-
guage are the glory and happiness of moderation
of mind more nobly preached and powerfully illus-
trated than in the writings of this most intempe-
rate man; nowhere is the sacredness of the placid
life more hallowed and honoured than in the
utterances of this tossed and troubled spirit; no-
where are heroism and self-sacrifice and forgiveness
more eloquently adored than by this intense and
fierce individuality, which seemed unable to forget
70
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
for an instant its own claims, its own wrongs, its
own fancied superiority over all its fellow-men.
I am conscious that in mingling my reminiscences
with the details of this memoir, I am mainly consult-
ing my own satisfaction; yet it may be that I shall
give some enjoyment to a scholarly circle, to men
who value culture for its own sake, who care for
the appropriate quotation and love the ring of the
epigram, who take a pleasure in style analogous
to that derived from a musical perception, to
whom beautiful thoughts come with tenfold mean-
ing when beautifully said; a class visibly narrow-
ing about us, but to whom, nevertheless, this
country has owed a large amount of rational
happiness, and whom the aspirants after a more
rugged and sincere intellectual life may themselves.
not be the last to regret.
Landor was proud of a good descent: he wrote,
and would often say, 'To be well-born is the
greatest of all God's primary blessings, and there
are many well-born among the poor and needy.'
He was of an old Staffordshire race, said to be
originally, 'De la Laundes,' united, in the person
of his mother, with that of the Savages of War-
wickshire, from whom he inherited the estate of
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
71
Ipsley Court and Tachbrooke (the Tacæa, 'bright-
est-eyed of Avon's train,' of his tender farewell
song); while a smaller property in Buckingham-
shire, now in the possession of the first professed
man-of-letters who has risen to be Prime Minister
of this country, passed to younger children. The
boy went to Rugby School at the usual age; and
there began that magnetic attraction to Classical
Literature which grew till he was incorporated with
it as his mental self. The Head-master-repelled
or troubled by his peculiar nature, so self-contained
at that early age that he never would compete with
anyone for anything, but stood upon the work's
worth, whatever it might be,—with so nice sense of
justice, that he paid his fag for all service that he
rendered him-took neither sufficient pride nor
interest to conciliate the better or subdue the worse
within him. Thus after some years they quarrelled
-truly, and according to the legend, about the
quantity of a syllable, in which Landor was right;
not, however, so far as to come to blows, but to
words that made reconciliation impossible. Might
not a more appreciative and affectionate supervision
have done something to arrest the first growths of
this untoward temper, and have better accommo-
72
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
1
dated it to the exigencies of coming life? Surely
some such notion must have come across Landor's
own mind when, long after, he 'happened to think on
poor James,' and wrote, 'before I went to sleep'-
hostis olim tu mihi tibique ego,
Qui meque teque jam videntes crederent?
Ah! cur reductis abnuebas naribus
Spectans refrigeransque lævo lumine,
Cui primum amicus ingenuusque omnis puer
Et cui secundum esse ipse æmulus daret locum?
Sed hanc habebis, hanc habebo, gratiam,
Quum carmine istorum excidas, vives meo.
Nor again at Oxford, where he entered Trinity
College at eighteen years of age, in the memorable
year of 1793, did he find any head or heart strong
enough to guide him. He wrote better Latin
verses than any undergraduate or graduate in the
University; but no one cared for, or indeed saw,
them except a Rugby schoolmate, Walter Birch, a
cultivated Tory parson, who remained his friend
through life, and Cary, the future translator of
Dante. Outside of Oxford, he had already made.
the acquaintance, at Warwick, of a great scholar,
who seems to us to have had more influence over
his life and character, and not wholly in a favour-
In the
able sense, than any other man-Dr. Parr.
two men there was a close similarity, not only of
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
73
taste, but of disposition; it was certainly happy
for the confirmation of Landor in his peculiar work
as a representative of English scholarship, that he
found in Parr a congenial intelligence of the high-
est order of accomplishment; but it was not equally
well for him to have continually before him, in the
person he most venerated, the example of a tem-
perament almost as wilful and as insolent as his
own. Taking from Dr. Johnson the tradition of
evincing independence of thought by roughness of
manner, and of masking a kindly temperament
under a rude and sometimes malicious exterior,
Dr. Parr encouraged and vindicated the peculiari-
ties of his younger disciple. The fierce pleasantry
with which Parr flogged the boys the oftenest he
liked the best and from whom he expected the
most, had no analogy in Landor's disposition,
which had an instinctive horror of cruelty of all
kinds; and it is curious to find him sending from
Oxford to the sanguinary schoolmaster a small
disquisition on the doctrine of the Metempsychosis,
which he conceived Pythagoras to have invented
to induce savage natures to be humane even to
birds and insects for their own sakes, inasmuch as
their turn might come when they assumed similar
74
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
forms of life. This paper contained besides some
other matter, which he conceived Coleridge to have
appropriated, and to which he, many years after-
wards, grandly alluded to as 'estrays and waifs not
worth claiming by the Lord of the Manor. Cole-
ridge and Wordsworth are heartily welcome to a
day's sport over any of my woodlands and heaths.
I have no preserves.'
In the youthful sports of either place he took no
interest. At Rugby, fishing had pleased him by
its solitude, and he would say he remembered
liking sculling on the Isis, 'mainly because he could
not swim, which gave an excitement to the ex-
ercise.' He soon earned the then abhorred reputa-
tion of a Jacobin. The assumed ferocity which
made him in later life describe Robespierre as
'having some sins of commission to answer for-
more of omission,' and tell Mr. Willis, the Ameri-
can, that he kept a purse of a hundred sovereigns
ready for any one that should rid the world of
a tyrant, not excepting an American President,'
had a more practical meaning at the time.
when the approval of the French republic was a
contemporaneous opinion, manifesting itself in
such patent acts as wearing his hair unpowdered
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
75
and queue tied with black ribbon-enormities only
exceeded by that of a student of Balliol, who had
gone into Hall in flowing locks, of the name of
Robert Southey. Strange that these partners in re-
bellion, destined to the closest and longest of friend-
ships, there never met-Southey afterwards writ-
ing that 'he would have sought his acquaintance
from his Jacobinism, but was repelled by his eccen-
tricity.' As to his departure from Oxford, the
legend is only so far wrong, that he shot at a closed
shutter of a Fellow's room, not at the Fellow-
that he was rusticated not expelled; that his tutor,
'dear good Bennett,' cried at the sentence; and
that the President invited him to return in the
name of all the Fellows except one, who after-
wards, Landor wrote to Southey, 'proved for the
first time his honesty and justice by hanging him-
self.' The acceptance of this proposal was not
likely to be entertained; and now the grave ques-
tion arose, to what profession was this singular
youth to attach himself? In later years Landor
used to relate that he had been offered a commis-
sion in the Army on the preposterous terms 'that
he should keep his opinions to himself,' which he
naturally declined; that then his father proposed
76
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
to give him four hundred a year if he would read
for the bar, but he expressed his horror of Law and
Lawyers so plainly that that transaction was soon at
an end. It does not appear, however, that any of
these alternatives were seriously offered or refused.
It was too evident that young Landor, the heir to
a considerable entailed estate, was not likely to
settle down to any fixed course of professional
life. Mr. Forster seems to regret that the boy
had not been brought up with some such definite
intention; but it appears to me very doubtful
whether any such discipline would not have done
more harm than good. It is difficult to imagine
him successful in any career but that which he
voluntarily adopted. With his contempt for the
ordinary operations of society; with his candour
in hatred of all that differed from him; with his
reversed Utopia of an extinct world, where Phi-
losophers and Poets were, and where Kings and
Parliaments were not, and with his pride that no
success could satisfy, how could he have ever
become the fair competitor or just antagonist of
other men? Assuredly, even for his moral being,
he found the best place in the open field of
Literature, where, though he was fond of saying
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
77
'that the only use of study was the prevention
of idleness, otherwise the learning other people's
opinions only corrupts your own,' he nevertheless
developed a considerable amount of intellectual
sympathy, and formed solid attachments which.
clung to him through the troubles and accidents of
his wayward life.
The continuous and lonely study of the three
years which, with an occasional visit to Warwick,
he spent at Tenby and Swansea, formed his lite-
rary character. Years afterwards he used to dream
with delight of the sandy shore of Southern Wales,
with its dells and dingles covered with moss-roses
and golden snapdragons. The small allowance
he received from his family was fully sufficient for
the simplicity and thrift of that almost pastoral
mode of existence; and he often expressed his
gratitude to the vigilant wreckers of the West,
who kept him supplied with excellent claret from
the unfortunate French merchantmen that ran
upon the shore. There he matured his previous
knowledge by a complete review of the relics of the
old Roman world, and added to his familiarity
with Greek, of which, however, he never attained.
an entire mastery. There, too, he modified, by
78
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
j
application to the elder English classics, the admi-
ration which he had hitherto, by a congeniality of
taste, exclusively lavished on the writers of the
age of Anne. 'My prejudices in favour of ancient
literature,' he writes, 'began to wear away on
"Paradise Lost," and even the great hexameter
sounded to me tinkling, when I had recited aloud,
in my solitary walks on the sea-shore, the haughty
appeal of Satan and the repentance of Eve.' Mr.
Forster has unburied 'A Moral Epistle to Earl
Stanhope,' of which I regret that he has only
given some effective fragments. These and earlier
poems of Landor have a premature completeness,
which rather assimilates them to the Windsor
Forest' of Pope than to the fluent puerilities of
Byron or Shelley. They are quite good as far
as they go.
In his Satire he does not always.
adhere to that graceful definition of his later days,
that 'the smile is habitual to her countenance;
she has little to do with Philosophy, less with
Rhetoric, and nothing with the Furies:' but his
political censorship is mild for those times of
licentious speech and despotic repression. His
allusions to the humour of Sophocles singularly
anticipate the acute Essay of the present Bishop
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
79
of St. David's on the irony of that dramatist in
the 'Museum Philologicum,' and, in his application
of the lines-
ὅδ᾽ ἐστὶν ἡμῶν ναυκράτωρ ὁ παῖς, ὅσ᾽ ἂν
οὗτος λέγῃ σοι, τοῦτά σοι χἠμεῖς φαμέν
to the Boy-pilot 'who weathered the storm,' he
almost prefigures the future National Song. He
ends the dedication to the Radical peer by la-
menting that Fortune should have placed on his
brow the tinsel coronet instead of the civic wreath ;
-for himself, she had nothing to give, because
there was nothing he would ask he would rather
have an Executioner than a Patron.'
After the production of much social verse of
remarkable concinnity, he now for the first time.
set himself to write a serious and sustained poem,
and in 1798 published 'Gebir,' or 'Gebirus'-we
use the words indifferently, for so was the work
composed, in English or in Latin as the fancy
swayed him; and I do not know which was
finished first, though the Latin was given to the
public later. The design of the story is hardly
worth inquiring into, for story there is none; it is
a series of romantic pictures, wonderful in expres-
sion, and many of them beautiful in design. I
80
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
will not repeat, out of respect for Landor's ghost,
the passage of the "echoing sea-shell," the promi-
nence of which in popular remembrance always
seemed to him a sort of intimation of the oblivion
of the rest of the poem; but I would willingly
recall to the present generation, forgetful of their
great predecessors, such a sweep of Heroic Verse
as the Sixth Book, the aërial 'Nuptial Voyage of
the Morning,'-
pointed out by Fate
When an immortal maid and mortal man
Should share each other's nature, knit in bliss.
Still there was nothing in the work that could hope
to catch the popular ear. Even to the lovers
of the supernatural Eld the poem had little but
poetic attractions, and these require the corre-
sponding magnet. It had not the divine serenity
of Wordsworth's 'Laodamia,' nor the majestic
wail of Swinburne's 'Atalanta.' In the preface,
indeed, the author earnestly deprecated any vulgar
favour. 'If there are now in England ten men of
taste and genius who will applaud my poem, I
declare myself fully content. I will call for a
division. I shall count a majority.' The City was
saved—the Ten Just Men were found. 'Gebir' was
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
81
sent to Dr. Parr with a characteristic letter, sug-
gesting that, while Parr was examining his verse,
the writer would feel much like Polydorus, whose
tomb, once turfed and spruce and flourishing, was
plucked for a sacrifice to Æneas.' This note the
dogmatic Doctor superscribed, 'A most ingenious
man,' and wrote later on the title-page of " Gebirus,"
The work of a Scholar and a Poet.' Southey
<
wrote to Cottle, 'There is a poem called “ Gebir,"
of which I know not whether my review of it in
the "Critical" be yet printed; but in that review
you will find some of the most exquisite poetry in
the language. I would go a hundred miles to
see the (anonymous) author.' Again to Coleridge,
on starting for Lisbon: I take with me for the
voyage your poems-the "Lyrics," the "Lyrical
Ballads," and "Gebir."
These make all my
library. I like "Gebir
once more to Davy, 'The lucid passages of
“Gebir” are all palpable to the eye; they are the
master-touches of a painter. There is power in
them and passion and thought and knowledge.'
Coleridge seems to have been attracted at first, but
became annoyed at what he considered his friend's
over-praise. Though with this and other such.
Gebir" more and more.' And
G
82
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
select approbation Landor professed himself fully
satisfied, the inevitable yearning of a poet, how-
ever self-contented, for a larger sympathy was
clearly strong within him. Some time after he
alluded to the possibility of his having been a
successful writer in early life, and to the colour
that such a contingency might have given to his
whole existence, and gently confesses that there is
'a pleasure in the hum of summer insects.'
In answer to a somewhat contemptuous article
in the Monthly Review,' he planned a prose post-
script to 'Gebir,' which, somehow or other, was
suppressed as strong a piece of scornful and witty
writing as he ever uttered, to judge from the extracts
of it which Mr. Forster has given. In this essay he
remarks on the decline of the interest in poetry in
English society since the days when even such
poets as Parnell and Mallet were carefully read,
and when Johnson thought versifiers unworthy
the corner of a provincial newspaper fit objects
for his philosophical biography. Surely this
criterion will hardly seem just to those who
recall with wonder and envy the culture and
enjoyment of poetry in the upper classes mani-
fested in the early years of this century, when the
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
83
clubs resounded with Marmion,' and Rogers rose
to fashion on the 'Pleasures of Memory.' The
very acrimony with which the novel simplicity of
Wordsworth and the dim idealism of Coleridge
were then received was rather the antagonism of a
rival school than a proof of any neglect of the Art.
There is the same interpretation to be given to the
succeeding reputations of Shelley and Keats as
contrasted with those of Byron, Scott, Crabbe,
and Moore. The best poetry certainly was only
welcomed by a 'little clan,' and for awhile unheard,
Save of the quiet primrose, and the span
Of Heaven, and few ears;
but that too, made its way in due time, while the
verse that appealed to a wider range of sympathy
and passions was the daily sustenance and delight
even of the higher portion of good society which
did not lay claim to any especial intellectual dis-
tinction. In our day, by a strange diversion, these
tastes, like the concurrent interests of pictorial art,
find their recipients not in the leisurely class which
one would suppose to be especially educated in their
cultivation, but in the busy builders of the mercantile
and commercial wealth of the country and their own.
* Keats.
G 2
84
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
C
Gebir' was followed by other small volumes
of English and Latin verse, and separate pieces
printed in the quarto fashion of the day, of which
Mr. Rogers always spoke as a great defence
against loose and unstudied verse. 'Any man
becomes critical of his own writings when they
stand in large type before him.' But we soon
meet Landor in a very novel and uncongenial
character as a contributor to the public press.
The main instigator to this employment of his
talents was, no doubt, his friend Parr, and the
intermediary agent a stirring politician of the
time, whom this generation yet remembers as a
pleasant Whig veteran-Sir Robert Adair. Landor
and Adair meeting at Debrett's in Piccadilly, and
going down to the House of Commons—‘the
most costly exhibition in Europe,' as the young
poet stigmatised it—and the former having access
to the reporters' gallery to prepare himself for the
'Courier,' are as anomalous positions as can well
be imagined. The tone in which he meets his new
clients is about as conciliatory as that in which he
confronted his literary compeers.
I never court the vulgar,' he writes to Parr:
' and how immense a majority of every rank and
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
85
description this happy word comprises! Perhaps.
about thirty in the universe may be excepted, and
never more at a time. But I know how to value
the commendation you bestow on me; for though
I have not deserved it, nor so largely, yet it will
make me attempt to conquer my idleness, my dis-
gust, and to reach it some time or other. You
will find that I have taken courage to follow the
path you pointed out, in pursuing the Execrable.
(Pitt.) I subjoin my letter. At present I have
not sent it to the printer, though it has been
finished a fortnight. The reason is this: I wrote
a thousand times better than the present,
in which I aimed my whole force at a worse man
than P.—there are only two-and it was not W.
(Wyndham), and I sent it for insertion to the
"Courier." Now, such is my indifference, that
when once I have written anything, I never in-
quire for it afterwards; and this was the case in
I have not
respect to my letter.
seen the
"Courier" since, but I have some suspicion that it
was not inserted.'
one
Nor was he in better accord with the traditions
and the men of his party. Some of the Whigs,'
he used to say, 'are made honest men by their
86
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
interests. Tories are proud, Whigs insolent.' By
an especial crotchet he had in 'Gebir' made a
monster of the Whig Hero of 1688-
What tyrant with more insolence e'er claimed
Dominion? when from th' heart of Usury
Rose more intense the pale-flamed thirst for gold?
And called forsooth Deliverer! False or fools
Who praised the dull-eared miscreant, or who hoped
To soothe your folly and disgrace with praise—
and the great Liberal leader of his own time fell
so short of his ideal that he could not heartily
make a hero of him, and nothing less satisfied him
or checked the asperities of his criticism. To his
rival, indeed, he bore an absolute abhorrence,
which he retained to his last days, without any limit
or concession. When questioned as to Mr. Pitt's
oratory, he would say, 'It was a wonderful thing
to hear, but I have seen others more wonderful—
a fire-eater, and a man who eat live rats.' Of his
neglect of wealth, 'Few people have sixty millions
a year to spend he spent on himself just what he
chose, and gave away what he chose.' Pitt's nego-
tiations with the Irish for Emancipation he assumed.
to be a diabolical treachery, the minister being
assured of the Sovereign's determination not to
cede the point in question. The French war he de-
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
87
scribed as a plot to make England a waste, to
drive the gentry by war-taxes to taverns, and hells,
and clubs, and transfer their wealth and position to
the mercantile interest.' After Mr. Fox's death,
indeed, he was inclined to a milder judgment of
the Whig chief, and a 'Commentary' on Trotter's
'Memoirs' (printed 1812) contains perhaps more
fair and moderate political and literary judgments,
delivered in his own humour, than any work of his
earlier or maturer years. There seems no sufficient
reason, even in those susceptible days, why this essay
should have been suppressed; but it was in fact so
entirely wasted, (in the old printers' phrase) that I
believe I possess the only existing copy, which he sent
to Southey. It should be reprinted in any new edition
of his collected works. It contains many vigorous
passages applicable to the contests and difficulties
of our own day, though the style is far from the
perfection he attained in his later writings. In
vindicating a juster government of Ireland, irre-
spective of its religion, he inquires indignantly, and
with an amusing reference to India, 'Of what
consequence is it to us if the Irish choose to
worship a cow or a potato?' And adverting to
the question of Emancipation, 'If all the members
!
88
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
returned were Catholics, still what harm could
they do?' In the dedication to Washington there
is a passage that might be addressed to President
Grant :-
Your importance, your influence, and, I believe,
your wishes, rest entirely on the comforts and
happiness of your people. A declaration of hos-
tilities against Great Britain would much and
grievously diminish them, however popular it
might be in the commencement, however glorious
it might be in the result. My apprehension lest
this popularity should in any degree sway your
mind is the sole cause by which I am determined
in submitting to you these considerations. Popu-
larity in a free state like yours, where places are
not exposed to traffic, nor dignities to accident, is
a legitimate and noble desire; and the prospects.
of territory are to nations growing rich and power-
ful what the hopes of progeny are to individuals
of rank and station. A war between America and
England would at all times be a civil war. Our
origin, our language, our interests are the same.
Would it not be deplorable-would it not be
intolerable to reason and humanity-that the lan-
guage of a Locke and a Milton should convey and
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
89
retort the sentiments of a Bonaparte and a Robes-
pierre ? ›
So say we to-day; though the thought has
sometimes come across public men whether our
relations with the United States would not be
more stable and more happy if we did not speak.
the same language, if we did not understand and
attend to everything disagreeable and untoward
that is said or written on either side, if we had not
all the accompaniments and conditions of family
ties, in the sense in which Mr. Rogers answered
some one who spoke of a distinguished literary
fraternity as being 'like brothers,' I had heard
they were not well together, but did not know it
was so bad as that.'
With all his harsh and rash condemnations
Landor had a constant tenderness for amiable
people. He often repeated, 'No man is thoroughly
bad unless he is unkind.' Thus side by side with
such assaults on Mr. Fox as-
'To the principles of a Frenchman he added the
habits of a Malay, in idleness, drunkenness, and
gaming; in middle life he was precisely the oppo-
site of whoever was in power, until he could spring
forward to the same station. Whenever Mr. Pitt
was wrong, Mr. Fox was right, and then only '-
90
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
stand such sentences as-
'Mr. Fox in private life was a most sincere and
amiable man; if he suppressed in society a part of
his indignant feelings, as a man so well bred would
do, he never affected a tone of cordiality towards
those whom he reprobated or despised.'
Again, in a letter to the 'Examiner,' in 1850, he
writes of him, 'He had more and warmer friends
than any statesman on record; he was ingenuous,
liberal, learned, philosophical; he was the delight
of social life, the ornament of domestic.'
In the Epitaphium C. Foxii' this double feel-
ing has a charming expression:--
Torrens eloquio inque præpotentes
Iracundus et acer, et feroci
Vultu vinculaque et cruces minatus,
Placandus tamen ut catellus æger
Qui morsu digitum petit protervum
Et lambit decies: tuis amicis
Tantum carior in dies et horas
Quantum deciperes magis magisque :
O Foxi lepide, o miselle Foxi,
Ut totus penitusque deperisti!
Tu nec fallere nec potes jocari,
Tu nec ludere, mane vesperive;
Quà nemo cubitum quatit, quiescis,
Jacta est alea: conticet fritillus.
I will conclude my extracts from the 'Commentary'
with a passage in which the transition from irony
to solemnity seems to me remarkably effective :
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
91
'I have nothing to say on any man's religion;
and, indeed, where a man is malignant in his words
or actions his creed is unimportant to others and
unavailing to himself. But I grieve whenever a kind
heart loses any portion of its comforts; and Dr. Parr,
I am certain, felt the deepest sorrow that Mr. Fox
wanted any that Christianity could give. Whether
in the Established Church the last consolations of
religion are quite so impressive and efficacious;
whether they always are administered with the
same earnestness and tenderness as the parent
Church administers them, is a question which
I should deem it irreverent to discuss. Cer-
tainly he is happiest in his death, whose fortitude
is most confiding and most peaceful: whose
composure rests not merely on the suppression
of doubts and fears: whose pillow is raised
up, whose bosom is lightened, whose mortality
is loosened from him, by an assemblage of all
consolatory hopes, indescribable, indistinguish-
able, indefinite, yet surer than ever were the
senses.'
It is agreeable to turn to the rare gleams of
satisfaction and approbation in Landor's political
controversy. Of Lord Rockingham he was wont
92
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
to speak with invariable respect; but it is for the
memory of Sir Samuel Romilly that he preserved
the most reverent affection; he made him the in-
terlocutor in two admirable dialogues, and wrote of
him, in one mention out of many :-
<
He went into public life with temperate and
healthy aspirations; Providence having blessed
him with domestic peace, withheld him from
political animosities. He knew that the soundest
fruits grew near the ground, and he waited for the
higher to fall into his bosom, without an effort or a
wish to seize on them. No man whosoever in our
parliamentary history has united, in more perfect.
accordance and constancy, pure virtue and lofty
wisdom.'
He loved to compare Romilly and Phocion, and
composed a pathetic inscription, which might well
be placed upon his tomb.
One injustice, now remedied in the person of his
distinguished son, is pleasantly recorded :-
'No one ever thought of raising Romilly to the
peerage, although never was a gentleman of his pro-
fession respected more highly or more universally.
The reason could not be that already too
many of it had entered the House of Lords; since
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
93
every wind of every day had blown bellying silk-
gowns to that quarter, and under the highest walls
of Westminster was moored a long galley of law-
yers, chained by the leg to their Administrations;
some designated by the names of fishing-towns and
bathing-machines they had never entered, and
others of hamlets and farms they had recently
invaded.'
In these notices I have somewhat anticipated
the course of Landor's life. On the death of his
father in 1805 he came into a good property, and
took up his residence at Bath, where he lived some-
what ostentatiously and beyond his means, moving
a good deal in society, but singularly annoyed by
the inferiority of his dancing. He told his son he
had lost more pleasure by being a bad dancer than
anything else;' and it is intelligible that any grace
which he could not realise must have been a trouble
to him. But this conventional existence was in-
terrupted by a resolve to join the British army in
Spain in 1808. Not only had he partaken of the
passionate delight of Wordsworth and Coleridge
and Southey in those days when—
Bliss was it in the dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very Heaven,
94
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
but his hopes had then a centre in the young Hero
in whom he thought he saw the embodied Revolu-
tion. In 'Gebir' he had represented him as OɛóтOKOS,
A mortal man above all mortal praise;
and afterwards, when, instead of the liberator of the
world, the restorer of order developed himself in all
the unscrupulous ambition of which the history of M.
Lanfrey is at this moment giving the most recent
and faithful portraiture, the revulsion of feeling in
Landor's mind was as absolute as might be
expected. He soon came to believe that Bonaparte
'had the fewest virtues and the faintest semblances
of them of any man that had risen by his own
efforts to supreme power;' and, though he continu-
ally rejoiced in his work of destruction of the old
governments, yet he never lost sight of the moral ob-
liquity of the agent. That supernatural intellectual
activity, that multitudinousness of ideas, which the
publication of his 'Correspondence' has revealed,
was then so little appreciated even by his adulators,
that it is no discredit to Landor to have under-
rated his faculties; and he was too happy to find
in its supreme head a vindication of his indomit-
able hatred of the French nation, which had 'spoiled
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
95
*
everything it had touched, even Liberty,—' where
everything was ugly, Men, Women, Dogs, even the
Sky,'-'a set of mischievous children whom you
may beat as you will one day, and they will forget
and deny it the next.' There was no personal
atrocity, indeed, of which he did not think Na-
poleon capable; he had no doubt of the murder
of Captain Wright in the prisons of Paris, nor
of that of Colonel Bathurst in the fortress of
Magdeburg. But his anxiety to see the Man,
and still more the 'spolia opima' of art in Paris,
took him to Paris in 1802. Mr. Forster's accounts
of the occasions on which he saw the First Consul
are hard to reconcile with an incident he was
fond of relating that he met Bonaparte walk-
ing in the Tuileries garden, and the fellow looked at
him so insolently that, if he had not had a lady on
his arm, he would have knocked him down.' This
may well have been a romance of memory, for he
persuaded himself that he had seen the fugitive
Emperor at Tours in 1815 in the person of a
wearied horseman dismounting in the courtyard of
* Colonel Bathurst, son of the Bishop of Norwich, British envoy
to Vienna, disappeared unaccountably in the forest of Boitzenburg
in the neighbourhood of Hamburg, during the war, and was never
heard of again.
96
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
the Préfet's house, the door of which was suddenly
closed on him, the day he was supposed to have
traversed that city. Thus, when the invasion of
Spain had provoked the English intervention which
resulted in the fall of the conqueror, less enthusi-
astic natures than Landor's were excited to share
its perils and its glories. When Mr. Graham (the
future Lord Lynedoch) led forth his clansmen from
Scotland and Sir Watkin Wynn his tenants
from Wales, there was nothing surprising in a
poet and political writer with an independent
fortune joining the British forces as a volunteer.
At first all went well; he presented 10,000 reals to
the burnt and pillaged town of Venturada, and set
about enrolling a troop of a thousand Spaniards
to join the army of General Blake. For this he
received from the Central Junta the honorary
rank of Colonel; but Landor's temperament
was not likely to be proof against the contingen-
cies of any disciplined service. The English Envoy,
Sir Charles Stuart, said something affronting about
somebody, which Landor interpreted against him-
self, and wrote a furious letter, and printed it in
both languages, before any reply was possible.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
97
Then came the Convention of Cintra, one of those
political compromises which imaginative men were
sure to abhor; and he retired in a passion of dis-
gust. Can we never be disgraced,' he writes to
Southey, 'but the only good people in the world
must witness it?' and the gentle Southey answers,
'Break the terms, and deliver up the wretch who
signed it (Sir Hew Dalrymple) to the French with
a rope round his neck: this is what Oliver Crom-
well would have done.' The only useful outcome.
of this adventure to Landor was his Tragedy of
Count Julian,' a more complete work than any he
had yet produced, and of which there has been no
truer criticism than that of De Quincey, who, after
describing Landor as dilating like Satan into
Teneriffe or Atlas, when he sees before him an
antagonist worthy of his prowess, concludes: 'That
sublimity of penitential grief, which cannot accept
consolation from man, cannot bear external re-
proach, cannot condescend to notice insult, cannot so
much as see the curiosity of bystanders; that awful
carelessness of all but the troubled deep within his
own heart, and of God's spirit brooding upon their
surface and searching their abysses-never was so
H
98
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
6
majestically described.' Two lines of the closing
scene dwell on the memory :—
'Of all who pass us in Life's drear descent
We grieve the most for those who wished to die.'
This Tragedy the house of Longman declined even
to print at the author's expense!
imagine the effect of this refusal.
Little did they
Landor threw
another poem into the fire and renounced the
literary career for ever. He writes to Southey,
You cannot imagine how I feel relieved at laying
down its burden and abandoning this tissue of
humiliations.' An unexpected deliverer appeared
in the hostile camp of the 'Quarterly Review,' and
Mr. Murray accepted the poem, which, however, no
more touched the popular taste than its prede-
cessors.
The project of marriage was not unfamiliar to
Landor's mind. In 1808 he wrote to Southey :
I should have been a good and happy man if I
had married. My heart is tender. I am fond of
children and of talking childishly. I hate even to
travel two stages. Never without a pang do I leave
I do not say
the house where I was born.
I shall never be happy; I shall be often so if I live;
but I shall never be at rest. My evil genius dogs
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
99
me through existence, against the current of my
best inclinations. I have practised self-denial,
because it gives me a momentary and false idea
that I am firm; and I have done other things not
amiss in compliance with my heart: but my most
virtuous hopes and sentiments have uniformly led
to misery, and I have never been happy, but in
consequence of some weakness or vice.'
His feeling for female beauty was intense. 'Wo-
men,' he would say, 'pay dearly for expression :
English women have no expression; they are there-
fore so beautiful.' Thus no wonder that in 1811 he
announces to his friend that the evening of be-
ginning to transcribe his tragedy he 'fell in love
with a girl without a sixpence, and with few ac-
complishments; she is pretty, graceful, and good-
tempered, three things indispensable to my happi-
ness;' and he assures his mother, 'she has no
pretensions of any kind, and her want of fortune
was the very thing which determined me to marry
her.' The lady's name was Thuillier,* of an ancient
Swiss family. He sent Parr some Alcaics on the
occasion, and the veteran returned an ardent
The family are now represented by the distinguished artillery
officer Col. R. E. Landor Thuillier, F.R.S., Surveyor-General of
India.
H 2
100
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
congratulation, and a Latin poem against the Go-
vernment.
By this time Landor had become a resident
Squire. He had sold the old family properties,
and bought, at the time when land was dearest,
a ruined abbey in the northern angle of Mon-
mouthshire, at the cost of some 60,000l. Colonel
Wood had fitted up the southern tower as
a shooting-box, and this was the only residence
when Landor established himself there in 1809. In
his own words, Llanthony was a noble estate, eight
miles long, and produced everything but herbage,
corn, and money.' He planted a million trees
(among them a wood of cedars of Lebanon), of
which a small tithe are still visible. The valley in
which the abbey stood had been celebrated in
Drayton's 'Polyolbion' as one
(
'Which in it such a shape of solitude doth bear
As Nature at the first appointed it for prayer ;'
For
-not a promising situation to build a country-house
in and bring a young wife to. Under the most
fortunate circumstances it is difficult to imagine
Landor a comfortable Country Gentleman.
field sports, in which the unoccupied upper classes
of this country expend harmlessly so much of the
superfluous energy and occasional savagery of their
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
ΙΟΙ
dispositions, he had no taste. In his youth he had
shot a partridge one winter afternoon, and found
the bird alive the next morning, after a night of
exceptional bitterness. 'What that bird must
have suffered !' he exclaimed. I often think of its
look,' and never took gun in hand again.' For the
pastoral pleasure of farming he was much too im-
petuous, and had to depend entirely on others for
the management of the estate. In this he was
characteristically unlucky. He went to Southey
for advice as to a tenant, and took one whom the
more practical brother poet knew to be totally unfit
—a petty officer of the East Indian service, with-
out capital and entirely ignorant of agriculture.
The family are immortalised in a letter of Charles.
Lamb's:-'I know all your Welsh annoyances-
the measureless B---S. I know a quarter of a
mile of them-seventeen brothers and sixteen
sisters, as they appear to me in memory. There
was one of them that used to fix his long legs on
my fender and tell a story of a shark every night,
endless, immortal. How have I grudged the salt-
ravener not having had his gorge of him!' It
was this family of land-sharks who set upon Landor
and turned him out of house and home.
As a
sea
102
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
landlord he seems to have been generous, even
lavish, and when driven to law for the payment of
rent was foiled by the low ingenuities of country.
practice, till he wrote-
Hinc nempe tantum ponderis leges habent
Quam natione barbara degentibus.
Est noxa nulla præter innocentiam ;
Tutisque vivitur omnibus præter probos.
The damage to his trees through carelessness or
malice affected him deeply. 'We recover from
illness,' he writes, 'we build palaces, we retain
or change the features of the earth at pleasure, ex-
cepting that only the whole of human life cannot
replace one bough.' In the midst of this turmoil,
when he looked on himself as food for the spoiler,
the Duke of Beaufort declined to make him a
magistrate. This was hardly surprising after his
behaviour on the Grand Jury at the previous.
sessions, when he personally presented to the Judge
a bill that his colleagues had ignored; but when
he politely desired the appointment of some person
of more information than himself for the protec-
tion of the neighbourhood, his application should
hardly have remained unanswered. He then had re-
course to the Lord Chancellor,with the same issue. I
do not understand whether a second letter, which
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
103
Mr. Forster gives, was actually sent, but it is so
clever and so inappropriate a composition, that it
may have been taken as a complete vindication of
the Duke's refusal. Then, or later, Landor hung
up for posterity his effigy of Lord Eldon:
Officiosus. erga . omnes. potentes. præter. Deum.
Quem satis. ei . erat . adjurare.
•
I have never heard any authentic account of the
immediate cause of Landor's abandonment of his
country. Mention has been made of his knocking
down in court a barrister who seemed to doubt his
word; and some question of outlawry occurs with
regard to a frivolous suit, of which, however, no
further notice seems to have been taken. Landor
certainly thought his own and his wife's persons in
danger at Llanthony, and his embarrassments were
such as to make a temporary removal expedient ;
but the Court of Exchequer decided finally in his
favour against his defaulting tenants, and the
estate in competent hands would soon have given,
and indeed did give him, a fair income. He cer-
tainly detested our climate. 'You may live in
England,' he said, 'if you are rich enough to have a
solar system of your own, not without.' However,
in May 1814, he passed over to Jersey, where Mrs.
104
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
Landor joined him with one of her sisters. There
occurred the first open breach in his matrimonial
reiations. After some imprudent words on her
side, he rose early, walked across the island, and
embarked alone in an oyster-boat for France.
Hence he wrote to Southey that he reserved to
himself 160l. per annum, and left his wife the rest
of his fortune. He tells him of 'the content and
moderation which she had always preserved in the
midst of penury and seclusion,' but adds that
' every kind and tender sentiment is rooted up from
his heart for ever.' There is a terrible conscious-
ness of his own infirmity in the conclusion: 'She
gave me my first headache, which every irritation
renews. It is an affection of the brain only, and it
announces to me that my end will be the most
miserable and humiliating.' I will place this
sentence by the side of one of the very latest of
his poems, with a sense of its impressive reality.
In November 1863, when his last volume (Heroic
Idylls') was in the press, he sent the following
pathetic lines to be inserted, but the volume
was already made-up: and they did not appear in
print.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
105
TO ONE ILL-MATED.
We all wish many things undone
Which now the heart lies heavy on.
You should indeed have longer tarried
On the roadside before you married,
And other flowers have picked or past
Before you singled out your last.
Many have left the search with sighs
Who sought for hearts and found but eyes.
The brightest stars are not the best
To follow in the way to rest.
It is small reproach to any woman that she
did not possess a sufficient union of charm, tact,
and intelligence to suit Landor as a wife. He
demanded beauty in woman as imperatively as
honesty in men, yet was hardly submissive to its
influence; just as, while he was intolerant to folly,
he would have been impatient of any competing
ability. Therefore, eloquent as is his pleading in
the following passage, and just as is the general
observation, it must be taken only as the partial
aspect of his own domestic calamity :-
'It often happens that if a man unhappy in the
married state were to describe the manifold causes
of his uneasiness, it would be found by those who
were beyond their influence to be of such a nature
as rather to excite derision than sympathy. The
106
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
waters of bitterness do not fall on his head in a
cataract, but through a colander-one, however,
like the vases of the Danaïdes, perforated only for
replenishment. We know scarcely the vestibule of
a house of which we fancy we have perforated all
the corners. We know not how grievously a man
may have suffered, long before the calumnies of
the world befell him, as he reluctantly left his
house-door. There are women from whom inces-
sant tears of anger swell forth at imaginary wrongs ;
but of contrition for their own delinquencies not one.'
A reconciliation followed on the present occa-
sion which seems to have been as complete as cir-
cumstances and temper made possible. After they
had settled at Como, the birth of his first child.
gave him infinite pleasure. He called him Arnold
Savage, after the second Speaker of the House of
Commons, whom he somewhere read to have.
declared 'that grievances should be redressed before
money should be granted,' and with whom he
claimed what was probably a problematical relation-
ship. I have been told that when the question
of the decoration of the Houses of Parliament
was first started, he informed Lord John Russell of
his expectation that his illustrious ancestor should
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
107
receive due recognition, and that he received an
answer to the effect that Lord John had not yet
obtained any assurance that the patriotic devotion
of his own relative William Lord Russell would be
recorded on the walls of the Palace of Westminster.
(
The Princess of Wales resided at this time at the
Villa d'Este, where her conduct was so flagrant that
Landor was surprised that her husband did not
sue for a divorce. When, at a later period, his
name was brought forward in connection with the
evidence he could give on the trial, he wrote to the
'Times' The secrets of the bedchamber and of
the escritoire have never been the subjects of my
investigation. During my residence on the Lake
of Como my time was totally occupied in literary
pursuits; and I believe no man of that character
was ever thought worthy of employment by the
present Administration. Added to which I was
insulted by an Italian domestic of the Queen, and
I demanded from her in vain the punishment of
the aggressor; this alone, which might create and
keep alive the most active resentment in many
others, would impose eternal silence on me.' He
one day confirmed this in conversation, concluding
in his grand manner, If I had known anything.
108
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
good of her after her behaviour to me, I should of
course have been bound to go to England at my
own expense and state it on her trial.'
•
I have already alluded to his subsequent ejec-
tion from Lombardy; no unlikely event when we
remember what was then the Austrian rule, and
that he always designated the Emperor as the
man who had betrayed his own patriot Hofer into
the hands of the French, and sold his own daughter
to a Corsican robber.' He would say, 'Men who,
like Francis, have no sympathies with their kin,
should be put to live with hyenas.'
At Pisa a girl was born to him, and he wrote
a touching letter to his mother asking her to be
sponsor :-
The misery of not being able to see you is
by far the greatest I have ever suffered. Never
shall I forget the thousand acts of kindness and
affection I have received from you from my earliest
to my latest days. . . . As, perhaps, I may never
have another, I shall call my little Julia by the
name of Julia Elizabeth Savage Landor, and, with
your permission, will engage some one of Julia's
English friends to represent you. This is the first
time I was ever a whole day without seeing Arnold.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
109
I wonder what his thoughts are on the occasion.
Mine are a great deal more about him than about
the house I most look for. He is of all living
creatures the most engaging, and already repeats
ten of the most beautiful pieces of Italian poetry.
The honest priest, his master, says he is a miracle
and a marvel, and exceeds in abilities all he ever
saw or heard of. What a pity it is that such
divine creatures should ever be men, and subject
to regrets and sorrows!'
This is written from Florence, where he soon
fixed himself in the Palazzo Medici, and where the
great literary enterprise which had for some time
possessed his thoughts was undertaken and ac-
complished. The one continuous link with his
native country, that had remained unbroken
through these wandering years, had been his cor-
respondence with Southey. That friendship be-
tween natures apparently so incompatible had
been hardly affected, and certainly not lessened in
the main, by the extremest divergence of opinion.
This relation between the writer of the Vision of
Judgment' and the open advocate of regicide, be-
tween the author of the Book of the Church' and
the adorer of the old Gods, between the diffuse ro-
6
--
110
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
mantic poet and the close Roman epigrammatist,
between the decorous moralist and the apologist of
the Cæsars, is a signal and instructive example of
the happy intimacy and mutual comfort that may
exist between men of genius, who are drawn together
by heartfelt admiration and enjoyment of each
other's powers, and a determination to find out, and
hold by, all possible points of sympathy and com-
mon interest, letting the rest drop out of sight and
all that is not congenial be forgotten. The tender
intimacy that existed in later days between
Landor and the reverent, fervent, spirit of
Julius Hare, was a further illustration of the
capacities of intellectual sympathy; and I should
be content to refer those who have been wont
to look on Landor as an ill-conditioned mis-
anthrope to Southey, after almost every name
had passed from his perception, repeating softly to
himself, 'Landor, my Landor;' and to Arch-
deacon Hare, two days before his death, murmur-
ing, 'Dear Landor, I hope we shall meet once
more.' It had been Southey's habit for many
years to add to the literary toils of his ill-requited
profession the careful transcription in his dainty
hand-writing of his poems as he composed them,
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
III
canto after canto, for Landor's perusal and criti-
cism. He also kept him duly informed of the
course of his prose writings, and had told him of
his proposed dialogues on 'The Condition of
Society,' the plan of which had originally grown
out of 'Boethius.' These' Conversations' were en-
tirely consecutive, and the only interlocutors were.
himself and Sir Thomas More, 'who recognises in
me,' Southey writes, 'some dis-pathies, but more
points of agreement.' The notion had clearly
touched Landor's imagination, and it is evident
how much there was in this form of composition
which was cognate to both his intellectual and
moral peculiarities. His dominant self-assertion
seized with delight a form in which it could con-
stantly reproduce itself in the most diverse shapes,
in which every paradox could be freely stated and
every platitude boldly contradicted-in which,
under the names he most loved and most ab-
horred, he could express his admiration and his
hatred-in which exaggeration was legitimate, and
accuracy superfluous. The literary character of
the plan has never been better drawn than in Mr.
Forster's language:-
'All the leading shapes of the past, the most
112
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
familiar and the most august, were to be called
up again. Modes of thinking the most various,
and events the most distant, were proposed
for his theme. Beside the fires of the present,
the ashes of the past were to be rekindled and
to shoot again into warmth and brightness. The
Scene was to be shifting as life, but continuous
as time. Down it were to pass successions of
statesmen, lawyers, and churchmen; wits and men
of letters; party men, soldiers, and kings; the
most tender, delicate, and noble women; figures
fresh from the schools of Athens and the courts of
Rome; philosophers philosophising, and politi-
cians discussing questions of state; poets talking
of poetry, men of the world of matters worldly,
and English, Italians, and French of their re-
spective literatures and manners. . . . The requi-
sites for it were such as no other existing writer
possessed in the same degree as he did. Nothing
had been indifferent to him that affected humanity.
Poetry and history had delivered up to him their
treasures, and the secrets of antiquity were his.'
About the time when the first Income Tax was
imposed, Landor had written one 'Conversation'
between Lord Grenville and Burke, and another
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
113
C
between Henry IV. and Sir Arnold Savage; the
first he had offered to the Morning Chronicle,'
but it was refused as too personal. Now, in March
1822 he had written fifteen new ones, having re-
jected one between Swift and Sir William Temple
as too democratical (what must it have been ?), and
another between Addison and Lord Somers as too
maliciously critical of the supposed purist's in-
elegancies and inaccuracies of style, the number
of which surpasses belief.' These, when aug-
mented to twenty-three, formed the MS. trans-
mitted through Captain Vyner to the House of
Messrs. Longman, which entirely declined their
publication; but the kind activity of Mr. Julius
Hare, with whom Landor had become acquainted
through his brother Francis, actually forced Mr.
Taylor, the publisher of the London Magazine,'
to undertake the work.
The brothers Hare were all men of mark.
The elder, Francis, well known as a man about.
town by the sobriquet of the Hare of many
Friends,' had been brought up in Italy under
the care of Professor (afterwards Cardinal) Mezzo-
fanti, and had acquired in some degree the lin-
guistic powers of his preceptor. He could talk to
I
114
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
every Italian in his own dialect, and knew the ap-
propriate saints to adjure in every Italian village.
In his own language, though he wrote little, if any-
thing, besides some contributions to the 'Edinburgh
Review,' he displayed a facility of expression as
various and as monopolising as that of Coleridge
or Macaulay. Landor, with a tender humour, in-
corporates this peculiarity into the eulogy of his
friend :-
Who held mute the joyous and the wise
With wit and eloquence—whose tomb, afar
From all his friends and all his countrymen,
Saddens the bright Palermo.
The younger brothers, Julius and Augustus, though
each in their different styles important contributors
to English divinity, and now familiar to the
English public in their relative's admirable 'Me-
morials of a Quiet Life,' live mainly in the little
volumes which all the present abundance of frag-
mentary literature and aphoristic reflection will not
overlay, the 'Guesses at Truth.' They remain a
most interesting production of the Coleridgian era
of English thought as exhibited in two very original
minds, so full of sound knowledge and deep wit, that
we can forgive such oddities as the junction of the
names of Landor, Bacon, and Jacob Boehme being
dresented as proper objects of our admiration.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
115
Julius became indeed to Landor's mature life all
that Southey had been to his youth, and never
permitted any the wildest overflow of opinion or
extravagance of conduct to diminish his reverence
and affection. On this occasion he performed his
editorial functions so scrupulously, that when the
prohibition or the retention of one word was said
by the publisher to make a difference of two hun-
dred and fifty copies in the sale, he replied he had
no alternative but to leave it there; in the col-
lected edition of 1846 Landor expunged it himself.
But the very antagonism of Hare's nature to the
lawlessness of Landor's mind enabled him to render
him a service of peculiar value in the reception of
the book. He knew well the temper of the time,
which, by assuming that all genius was the natural
enemy of public order, did a great deal to make it
so ; and which, having pilloried indiscriminately the
decorous Wordsworth and the licentious Byron,—
Hazlitt, living too much in the senses, and Shelley
too much out of them, the grand simplicities of
Keats, and the sweet concinnities of Leigh Hunt,—
and not only these men themselves, but all their
friends,collaterals, and favourers,—had already fixed
its attention on Landor as a revolutionary poet,
I 2
г16.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
and was well prepared with its materials, not of
defence, but of demolition. He therefore wrote a
double-faced review in the 'London Magazine' of
1829, which ought to form part of the appendix of
any collected edition of Landor's works. It is a
dialogue on the Dialogues, in which the adverse
case is put with so much force and ingenuity, as
an imitation of the Landorian manner, that it quite
took the sting out of the subsequent article in the
Tory 'Quarterly.' On the other hand, the charac-
teristic merits and charms of the work are portrayed
in such passages as the following, where Hare de-
scribes his own feeling on the first perusal :-
'It was as if the influence of a mightier spring
had been breathing through the intellectual world,
loosening the chains, and thawing the ice-bound
obstruction of death; as if it had been granted to
the prayers of Genius that all her favourite children
should be permitted for a while to revisit the,
earth. They came wielding all the faculties of
their minds, with the mastery they had acquired
by the discipline and experience, by the exercise
and combats of their lives, and arraying their
thoughts in a rich, and elastic, and graceful elo-
quence, from which the dewy light of the opening
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
117
blossom had not yet passed away. I resigned
myself altogether to the impressions which thronged
in upon me from everything that I heard; for not
a word was idle, not a syllable but had its due
place and meaning; if at any moment the pleasure
was not unmingled, at least it was very greatly
predominant throughout. If there was a good
deal questionable and some things offensive in the
matter, the manner was always admirable; and
whenever a stone, against which I might have
stumbled, lay in my path, I stepped over it, or
aside from it, and would not allow myself to feel
disgust or to be irritated and stung into resist-
ance.'
How much additional pleasure would be derived
from good literature if it was approached in this
wise and generous spirit! Hazlitt's article in the
Edinburgh Review' shows that he had not at-
tained it it is appreciative of much of the literary
merit of the work, but critical of defects too evi-
dent and contradictions too flagrant to be worth
serious notice or objection. In truth, the Con-
versations' are Landor's own-dialogues with his
own mind.
From the moment he formed the
design, he precluded himself from any visionary
118
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
reproduction of the personages he introduced. He
carefully restricted himself from letting any of his
actors say anything they were recorded to have
said, or placing them in any of the attitudes that
would have suggested themselves to the historical
painter. And herein lie the wonderful skill and
grace of the composition. The reader is quite
conscious that the writer has chosen the dramatic
individuality to exhibit his own opinions, instead
of the ordinary process of trying to divine what
the character might or would have said; yet the
sense of incongruity is rare and the impression of
artificial contrivance exceptional. All fictitious
dialogue is open to the objection that the book is
made an instrument on which the author plays for
his own diversion,-complicating, unravelling the
chords as he pleases, and hardly allowing to the
reader the echoes of his own judgment or dis-
cretion. He would probably like to answer the
arguments adduced, or point out defects and as-
sumptions in a very different way from the ima-
ginary speaker, for the most honest controversial-
ist will not always exhibit the joints of his own
I never argue with anyone except on
paper,' he said, ' where there is no one to answer me.'
armour.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR,
119
Yet even there his 'Conversations' are not usually
argumentative: the interlocutors rather sympathise
than dispute, and seem to strive more to enlarge
and illustrate one another's meaning than to elicit
a conclusion by controversy. Landor hardly con-
descends to reason with himself any more than
with others.
The moral relation of an author to his writings.
is a frequent subject of literary dispute: is there
the same man at the core if we could only find him?
Which is the better or the worse, the lesser or the
greater? I incline to believe that a man's writings,
if of any worth at all, are his works indeed, and
that the best destiny he can have is to be judged
by them.
Rousseau was teaching the mothers of
France to nurse their own infants, while he was
sending his own, or at least his reputed, children
to the Foundling Hospital. While Landor's wil-
ful temper was making himself and all about him
unhappy, the innermost man, as reflected in his
books, was yearning for a condition of things where
all was courtesy and peace. No one could see him
in high and refined society without being impressed
by a dignified grace, which is just what a student
of his writings would have expected from his style.
120
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
In his Dialogues the interlocutors, however violent
in their language and savage in their judgments,
preserve towards each other a noble and respectful
demeanour such as Landor would himself have
done, or strove to do, if confronted with the objects
of his fiercest denunciation. Though he would
assert that to stand at the end of a crowded street
made him burn with indignation at being a man,'-
'that he could only enjoy a theatrical representation
if he were himself the audience,'-' that when he left
the gates of his London home, he felt as a badger
would do if turned out in Cheapside,'-it was
surely the truer man who wrote as follows :—
'I have never avoided the intercourse of those
distinguished by virtue or genius-of genius be-
cause it warmed me and invigorated me by my
trying to keep pace with it; of virtue, that if I
had any of my own, it might be called forth by
such vicinity. Among all men elevated in station
who have made a noise in the world (admirable
expression!) I never saw any in whose presence I
felt inferiority excepting Kosciusko. But how
many in the lower paths of life have exerted both
virtues and abilities which I never exerted and
never possessed! What strength, and courage,
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
121
and perseverance in some; in others, what endur-
ance and moderation! At this very moment
when most, beside yourself, catching up half my
words, would call and employ against me, in its
ordinary signification, what ought to convey the
most honorific, the term self-sufficiency, I bow my
head before the humble, with greatly more than
their humiliation.'
The extravagance of Landor's political actions,
whenever he came into contact with the governing
portion of the world, gave the impression of a revo-
lutionary recklessness hardly compatible with
general sanity in so cultivated a mind. The open
advocacy of tyrannicide as a civic duty, the indis-
criminating censure of public personages, the rage
against men who had raised themselves to power
as well as against those born to it, the apparent
hatred of law as a restraint on will, would, without
his writings, have confounded him with some of
the weakest and wickedest of mankind. For
although they abound with passages of fierce judg-
ments and strong denunciations, it becomes clear
that, so far from abhorring power or even absolut-
ism for its own sake, the true motives of his indig-
nation are the malice and ignorance which render
122
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
hurtful or useless to humanity those influences that
ought to tend to its happiness or its development.
'What King or Prince,' he said, 'can we now ad-
dress as Pliny in his Dedication did Vespasian-
Fucundissime Vespasiane?' Before true Kingship
he 'felt his mind, his very limbs, unsteady with
admiration" and somewhere' bursts forth in these
fine lines-
((
When shall such kings adorn the throne again?
When the same love of what Heaven made most lovely
Enters their hearts; when genius shines above them,
And not beneath their feet.
It was the Courts and Cabinets, and the ordinary
incidents of Monarchy that provoked him into
such words as these:-'Kings still more bar-
barously educated than other barbarians, seek-
ing their mirth alternately from vice and folly-
guided in their first steps of duplicity and flattery—
whatever they do but decently is worthy of applause,
whatever they do virtuously, of admiration.' His
special hatred of Bonaparte came from the thought
that he might have given the French Revolution
its true crown and consummation, have accom-
plished and projected its ideas, instead of merging it
in the vanities and vulgarities of common despotism.
Thus the invasion of Spain and the occupation of
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
123
the Tyrol were to him especially horrible. There
is in the Conversations a trumpet-call of Liberty
over the grave of the peasant-hero which sums up
his sense of what Napoleon was and did :—
'He was urged by no necessity, he was prompted
by no policy; his impatience of courage in an
enemy, his hatred of patriotism and integrity, in
all of which he had no idea himself and saw no
image in those about him, outstripped his blind
passion for fame, and left him nothing but power
and celebrity.'
And so too with his estimate of Aristocracy. It
was the deficiency and decline of the system, not
the system itself, that annoyed him.
When Englishmen were gentlemen the whole
world seemed strewn with flowers.'
'There is no such thing now as a young
gentleman.'
'When men left off wearing ruffles it looked as
if their hands were cut off.'
'The English gentlemen have only the French
form, like English cookery.'
'One polished man is worth a dozen wise ones;
you see so much more of him.'
These and such as these were his constant ex-
124
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
pressions, and his own bearing in society carried
them out. 'I should not bear to live if I forgot
a man's name in his presence.' With much irony
he said, 'It is now a degradation to high rank
to know anything, and to impart what you know is
terrible. ' How he loved the old manners he
illustrated by his admiration of the Turks, whom
he spoke of with constant respect.
'They are the only good people in Europe, far
honester than others individually, and lying about
as much politically. Coming from Turkey to
France is like passing from lions to lap-dogs: they
alone of all nations have known how to manage
the two only real means of happiness, energy and
repose.'
And, in accordance with this feeling, he la-
mented continually the issue of the conflicts on
the Loire, commonly called the Battle of Tours, as
the greatest misfortune of the European world.
'The Saracens would have occupied France, have
crossed to England, and even we English should have
been gentlemen.' And thus, although the Republic
was his ideal, in the whole range of his poems and
'Conversations' there is not one word of apology
for democratic licence, nor one whit less condemna-
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
12
tion of the injustice or folly of the ruled than of the
rulers; it is his judgment of popular applause
that
The People never give such hearty shouts
Saving for kings and blunders.
'Liberals,' he said, 'were Republicans as curs are
dogs,' and 'the discovery that everybody who had
made money was discontented cured me of Radical-
ism.' 'Tom Paine once said to me: "The day will
come when you will have as little reason to like Eng-
land as I have, perhaps less, as you will have more
to lose."
In the matter of the affections there is less dis-
crepancy between his writings and his life. If a
woman could have forborne, and swayed herself
according to the vacillations of his temper, his
whole character might have been modified, and his
happiness saved in his own despite. It was a kind
of pride with him that all children loved him. In
his demeanour to his own his tenderness was ex-
cessive. That his boy of thirteen had not ceased
to caress him, is spoken of as a delight he could
not forego by sending him to England even under
the care of the scholar he most respected, Dr.
Arnold-unmindful of his own fine words :-
126
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
The worst
Of orphanage, the cruellest of frauds,
Stint of his education, while he played
Nor fancied he would want it.
He was always drawing analogies between children
and flowers; and there was no mere fancy in the
well-known lines-
And 'tis and ever was my wish and way
To let all flowers live freely, and all die
Whene'er their genius bids their soul depart,
Among their kindred in their native place.
I never pluck the rose; the violet's head
Hath shaken with my breath upon its bank
And not reproached me; the ever-sacred cup
Of the pure lily hath between my hands
Felt safe, unsoiled, nor lost one grain of gold.
In his garden he would bend over the flowers
with a sort of worship, but rarely touched one of
them.
'I remember,' he wrote to Southey in 1811, ‘a
little privet which I planted when I was about six
years old, and which I considered the next of kin
to me after my mother and elder sister. When-
ever I returned from school or college, for the
attachment was not stifled in that sink, I felt
something like uneasiness till I had seen and
measured it.'
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
127
The form which the notoriety of this sentiment
took in the Florentine legend was that he had one
day, after an imperfect dinner, thrown the cook
out of the window, and, while the man was writhing
with a broken limb, ejaculated, 'Good God! I for-
got the violets.'
I fully agree with Mr. Forster in regarding those
latter years of his residence at Florence as the
brightest, at any rate the least clouded, of his life.
It was at that time (in 1833) that our acquaint-
ance began, through an introduction from Mr.
Julius Hare, my tutor at Cambridge. I was seized
with the fever of the country, and Mr. Landor took
me into his villa, where I spent several most
happy weeks in a daily enjoyment of his rich mind
and high discourse. The diligent exercise of com-
position had been most useful to his mental tem-
perament, and his physical health was excellent.
I have no ailments,' he said to me; 'but why
should I? I have eaten well-prepared food; I
have drunk light subacid wines and three glasses
instead of ten; I have liked modest better than
immodest women, and I have never tried to make
a shilling in the world.' He professed to care for
no compliment and to be molested by no criticism,
128
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
yet it evidently pleased him that his writings were
loved by the men whose opinions he most esteemed,
and enjoyed by a small but competent audience
beyond. At that time his domesticity, though not
cheerful, was not angry; his children were still in
bud and flower; his few relations with residents
in the city friendly without familiarity; and the
pilgrimage of literary sight-seers sufficient for the
variety of life without any unseemly intrusion. His
house was sufficiently spacious for the climate, and
all the more so from the absence in the rooms of
all that he called 'carpentry,' which he especially
disliked. The English notion of comfort was odious
to him. There is something,' he said, 'smothering
in the very word-it takes the air from about one.'
Even mirrors and lustres he eschewed as only fit
for inns, if not magnificent. On the other hand the
decorations of Art were abundant, and it was the
habit of the place to look on him as the victim of
the ingenious imposture which fills so many
English galleries with the fictions of great pictorial
No doubt his overweening positiveness.
served him as ill here as elsewhere, and he would
refer anyone who doubted his 'Raphael' or his
'Correggio' rather to the Hospital of St. Luke in
names.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
129
London than to the Academy of San Luca at
Bologna. But it is to be remembered that Italy at
that time had not been so thoroughly ransacked as
now, and that Landor anticipated the public taste
in the admiration of the painters of the early
Italian schools. Thus, amid some pretenders to
high birth and dignity, his walls presented a
genuine and most goodly company of such masters
as Masaccio, Ghirlandajo, Gozzoli, Filippo Lippi,
and, native to the place, Fra Angelico. I wrote
some verses on this subject about that time, which
he pleasantly acknowledged, saying-'They show
you have been in Greece after being in Germany.'
I insert them here rather as a memorial of our
intercourse than for any merit of their own.
TO WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
AGED NINE YEARS.
Sweet, serious child,—strange boy! I fain would know
Why, when I fondly talk and sport with thee,
I never miss th' exuberant heart-flow
Which is the especial charm of infancy :
Thou art so wise, so sober,-nothing wild,-
I hardly think, yet feel, thou art a child.
For had th' unnatural bondage of a school
Checked the fair freedom of thy vernal years,
Encumbered thy light wings with vulgar rule,
And dimmed the blossoms in thy cheeks with tears,-
Thou mightst have been as grave, as still, as now,
But not with that calm smile, that placid brow.
K
130
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
Nor has the knowledge of dull manly things,
And intellect grown ripe before its time,
Defiled thy being's freshly-salient springs,
And made thee conscious of a world of crime ;-
With all thy earnest looks, as spirit-free
As ever infant dancing down the lea.
Is it not that within thee, as a shrine,
The power of uncommunicable Art
Is working out its ministry divine,
Silently moulding thy all-virgin heart
To its own solemn ends? Thus dost thou wear
That priestly aspect,—that religious air.
And every circumstance of outward life
Tends this sublime ordainment to unfold;
Is not each chamber of thy dwelling rife
With miracles of purest painters old,-
The Saints and Patriarchs of Art,-who knew
How best to make the Beautiful the True?
Thou hast them all for teachers ;-He is there,
The limner cowled, who never moved his hand
Till he had steeped his inmost soul in prayer:
Him thou art bound to in a special band,
For he was born, and fed his heart, as thou
On storied Fiesole's fair-folded brow.
There thou canst read, with deeper reverence still
Rare lessons from the later monk, who took
The world with awe of his inspired skill,
*
To which the Apostle leaning on his book,
And those three marvels in old Lucca shown,
Bear witness, in the days we call our own.
There too Masaccio's grandly plain design,-
Quaint Ghirlandajo,—and the mighty pair,
Master and pupil, who must ever shine
Consociate Sovereigns-thy preceptors are ;
Nor pass him by, who with grave lines looks down
Upon thee, Michel of the triple crown.
* Fra Bartolomeo.
&
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
131
Thou hast a Sire, whose full-experienced eye
Keeps harmony with an unerring heart,—
Who, of that glorified society,
To thy young sense can every depth impart.
How dare I then deny thy perfect joy?
How dare I judge thee, thou unearthly Boy?
Looking forward to his later years, it is worth
notice that a sale of his pictures which took place
at Manchester, and the contents of which were
severely criticised, in no way represented the value
of his collection. It comprised a large number of
inferior pieces, such as he was continually picking
up for his own amusement, and many of which
he distributed among his friends; several, no doubt,
baptized with higher names than they deserved.
The fine works of which he was justly proud, and
in the contemplation of which he found constant
delight, still remain in the possession of his family.
Who that heard can forget the amusing and in-
structive comments with which he exhibited his
treasures? for instance :—
'Look at Andrea's truculent-faced Madonnas.
and Holy Children that seem ready to fly at you.'
'Velasquez not only painted better horses than
anyone else, but made his men ride better.'
K 2
132
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
'See there the pictorial grace quite independent
of the gracefulness of the forms represented.'
'The Bolognese school are glorious in landscape
-what a pity they tried anything else.'
His dearest companion, however, was always
his Dog-a love which lasted till the very last.
His desolation at the loss of 'Pomero, mi Pomero,'
the 'caro figlio' with which he used in his old age
almost to gambol down Catherine Place in Bath,
making it ring with bark and laughter, is recorded
in lines which will be inscribed on many garden-
tombs of departed favourites.
O urna nunquam sis tuo eruta hortulo :
Hoc intus est fidele-nam cor est canis.
Vale, hortule! æternumque, Pomero, vale.
Sed, si datur, nostri memor.
I do not remember which was the 'Pomero' at
that particular time, but it was a daily pastime to
take him between his knees and converse with him
in such language as, 'Ah! if Lord Grey (or any
other notoriety of the hour) had a thousandth part
of your sense, how different would be things in
England!' He scouted the notion of fear of dogs,
saying, When a dog flies at you, reason with it,'
and remember how well-behaved the Molossian
dogs were when Ulysses sat down in the midst of
them as an equal.'
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
133
His repugnance to common relations with man-
kind showed itself in a peculiar way with respect
to the pleasures of the table, in which he took an
unreserved enjoyment; his highest luxury was
dining alone, and with little light, and he would
often resort to Florence for that purpose. He
said 'a spider was a gentleman-he eat his fly in
secret.' But this dislike to conviviality did not at
all prevent him from performing agreeably the
duties of host, and the repast was ever seasoned
with valuable talk. He liked open discussion,
but within decorous limits. 'I enjoy no society,' he
said, 'that makes too free with God or the ladies.'
His trenchant opinions on subjects of literature
were always explicable by some reference to his
own habits of thought and lines of knowledge.
Latin was so thoroughly familiar to him that his
judgments on the classics were like those of a con-
temporary. With Ovid he was completely content,
but there was something that displeased him in
both Virgil and Horace; 'they were excellent,' he
said, for school-boys and school-masters:' but
they did not write Latin. I suppose he meant his
ideal of what the language ought to have been.
When a style really captivated him, there was no
134
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
exaggeration too large for its praise -Herodotus,
Demosthenes, and Catullus in the old world,
Voltaire and La Fontaine in the modern, were.
the only perfect masters, 'but there is something
above perfection-such as Shakspeare.'
Of our
own popular writers he was rarely laudatory.
'Roscoe's works are one feather-bed of words;'
'Gibbon is an old dressed-up fop, keeping up the
same sneering grin from one end of his history to
the other with incredible fixity;' 'Young, in his
snip-snap verse, is as sure to destroy a poetical
thought he has got hold of as a child a butterfly ;'
6
In Hallam you may light on a small cake of fine
flour, but the rest is chaff, chaff.' 'Walter Scott's
verse is not to be sung or danced-it is to be jumped.'
But in a letter to Mr. Crabb Robinson, he designates
Southey, Coleridge, and Wordsworth as three
turrets, none of which could fall without injuring
the others.' Again, 'Southey's translation of the
"Cid" is all written in words sanctified, not cor-
roded, by Time'-was one of many praises of his
friend's various productions. He rarely persisted in
his harsher judgments. Of Byron, in an early' Con-
versation,' he had drawn a clever fictitious portrait
'strong as poison, and original as sin;' and he
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
135
never liked him till after his heroic death, for so we
may call it in spite of Goethe's solemn judgment—
'Till, from all earthly fetters free,
He strove to win the Hero's lot;
But Fate decreed that must not be,
(
And murmured Thou hast earned it not.' *
Shelley he had refused to know from some private
reasons, which he afterwards passionately re-
gretted, and always wrote and spoke of him with
infinite respect. Of Keats he felt that time only
was wanting to complete a poet who already sur-
passed all his contemporaries in this country in
the poet's most subtle attributes.' To Walter Scott
he was more than specially harsh, calling him a
great ale-house writer;' but in later days he fell
back on the Novels with more than enjoyment,
and wondered that Englishmen did not glory in
them more: 'The Germans would, and so should
we, if hatred of our neighbour were not the religion
of authors, and warfare the practice of borderers.'
Of the Brothers Smith he candidly avowed, 'I
ought especially to hate Bobus and Sydney for
licking me out and out, Bobus in Latin poetry and
* VideEuphorion's Song' in the second part of Faust.
136
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
:
Sydney in English prose; but Bobus has had no
rival in Latin this 1800 years.' (Lord Dudley
ranked the Latin poets--Lucretius, Bobus, Virgil.)
I could give many examples of the rare and
generous delight with which Landor ever wel-
comed the apparition of Genius; it was as a fresh
metal to the mineralogist, as a new planet to the
astronomer; the ardour was sometimes excessive,
but often more than justified by the event, and
those who are now received with the trumpets and
shawms of popularity look back with deeper grati-
tude to the prescient praise of the young-hearted
veteran who decorated them from the laurels and
myrtles of his own classic garden. So was it to
the very last to the Boy-poet, who shortly before
his death,'
came as one whose thoughts half linger,
Half run before-
The youngest to the oldest singer
That England bore,-
and took away the affectionate benediction of his
predecessor in the noble art of keeping alive in
high British culture the form and spirit of ancient
song.*
* Vide Swinburne's Poems and Ballads.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
137
Landor moved little from Florence; once to
Rome with Julius Hare, once to Naples with Lord
Blessington, and in 1832 to England. One can
well picture him in the Vatican before the silent
presences of history, uttering:
Vos nudo capite atque vos saluto,
Qui saltem estis imagines proborum,
Ne, multis patria procul diebus,
Oblitus male moris usitati,
Viso quolibet aut probo aut amico,
Dicar rusticus ad meos reversus.
At Naples he met his old competitor in politics
and learning, now relaxing himself in Italian com-
position, the author of the once famous, now for-
gotten, 'Pursuits of Literature;' and on a sultry
day, with the Pifferari blowing under the window,
thus greeted him :—
The Piper's music fills the street,
The Piper's music makes the heat
Hotter by ten degrees:
Hand us a Sonnet, dear Mathias,
Hand us a Sonnet, cool and dry as
Your very best, and we shall freeze.
•
!
In England he had a most courteous reception,
not only from fashionable people turned radicals,
which amused him highly, but from Charles Lamb
at Enfield, Coleridge at Highgate, and 'dear Julius
}
138
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
Hare' at Cambridge. The last he saw for the first
time, and their three days' intercourse made an
epoch in each existence. Then to the Lakes, and
to Southey, his devotee, and with a passing
visit to Wordsworth (who, he thought, meant to
hit him a double blow, by a remark, 'That Prose
will bear a great deal more of Poetry than Poetry
will of Prose') to his friends at Warwick. That
once great town, he found, was joining its own
noises to those of Leamington, which, he remarks,
'is almost all built on a property that I only
escaped the encumbrance of by a single life.'
Julius Hare and Dr. Worsley, the present Master of
Downing College, accompanied him on his return
to the Villa Gherardesca. There is an interesting.
passage connected with this journey in the Memo-
rials of the Hare family, in which Augustus replies
to some objection made to Julius' companionship
with his heterogeneous friend: 'I cannot regret that
he should travel with Landor, though I do regret
the abuse I hear of the latter. I wish that I could
speak publicly in defence of a man whose heart I
know to be so large and overflowing; though much
of the water, from not having the branch which
Moses would have shown him thrown into it, has
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
139
unhappily been made bitter by circumstances.
But when the stream gushes forth from his natural
affections, it is sweet and plentiful, and as strong
almost as a mill-stream. For his love partakes of
the violence of his character; and when he gives it
a free course, there is enough of it to fill a dozen
such hearts as belong to the ordinary man of plea-
sure, and man of money, and man of philosophy,
and to set the upper and nether mill-stones in
them a-working.'
I need not detail the miserable domestic tumults
that ended in his self-banishment in 1835. Before
that period he had written the 'Examination of
Shakspeare,' of which Charles Lamb said, 'That
only two men could have written it-he who did
write it, and the man it was written on.' There is
no gentler verse in the language than the 'Scrap
found in Willy's Pocket,'-no grander counsel
than this ever given to the young, rich and poor :—
'Young gentlemen, let not the highest of you
who hear me this evening be led into the delusion,
for such it is, that the founder of his family was
originally a greater or better man than the lowest
here. He willed it and became it; he must have
stood low; he must have worked hard, and with

Riegl, Alois, 1858-1905.
Historische Grammatik der bildenden Künste. Aus dem
Nachlass hrsg. von Karl M. Swoboda und Otto Pächt.
Fig. Graz, Köln, Böhlau, 1966.
317 p. 24 cm. S 158-
Mit
1. Art-Hist. 2. Art-Philosophy.
1889-
ed. I. Pächt, Otto, 1902-
ed.
N5303.R5 1966
709
Library of Congress
13₁
(Au 66-14-79)
I. Swoboda, Karl Maria,
II. Title.
66-66982
140
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
A
*
tools, moreover, of his own invention and fashion-
ing; he warned and whistled off ten thousand
strong and importunate temptations-he dashed
the dice-box from the jewelled hand of Chance, the
cup from Pleasure's, and trod under foot the sor-
ceries of each; he ascended steadily the precipices
of Danger, and looked down with intrepidity from
the summit; he overcame Arrogance with Sedate-
ness, he seized by the horn and overleaped low
Violence, and he fairly swung Fortune round. The
very high cannot rise much higher; the very low
may the truly great must have done it. This is
not the doctrine of the silkenly and lawnly reli-
gious: it wears the coarse texture of the fisherman,
and walks uprightly and straightforward under it.'
The story too of the Youth who failed at college,
and died broken-hearted on the banks of the Cher-
well-literarum quæsivit gloriam, invenit Dei,' is
unsurpassed in the beauty of pathos. This was
followed by the letters of Pericles and Aspasia, a
book well described by an American critic as one
'that we are frequently forced to drop, and sur-
render ourselves to the musings and memories, soft
or sad, which its words awaken and cause to pass
before the mind.' Its pages take you to the theatre
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
141
where 'Prometheus' is played, to the house where
Socrates and Aristophanes meet, to the promise of
the youth Thucydides, and to the Statesman who
dies, 'remembering in the fulness of my heart, that
Athens confided her glory and Aspasia her happi-
ness to me.'
These 'Epistles' are a treasure-house of fine
apothegms: one, on the duty of the historian as
distinguished from that of the archæologist, is worth
recording in reference to the novel treatment of the
matter in our days :-
'We might as well in a drama place the actors
behind the scenes as in a history put valiant men
back, and protrude ourselves with husky disputa-
tions. Show me rather how great projects were
executed, great advantages gained, and great
calamities averted. Show me the generals and the
statesmen who stood foremost, that I may bend to
them in reverence-tell me their names that I may
repeat them to my children. Teach me whence
laws were introduced, upon what foundation laid,
by what custody guarded, in what inner keep pre-
served. Let the books of the Treasury lie closed.
as religiously as the Sibyl's: leave Weights and
Measures in the market-place, Commerce in the
142
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
harbour, the Arts in the light they love, Philosophy
in the shade; place History on her rightful throne,
and, at the sides of her, Eloquence and War.'
Goethe somewhere says 'that the monument of a
man should be always his own image,' and Landor,
enlarging on this theme, insists that it should be
only a bust and a name. If the name alone is in-
sufficient to illustrate the bust, let them both perish.'
Yet no one more than Landor has shown, by his
own incisive epitaphs, the power and the duty of
fit memorial inscriptions: they are in truth the best
securities for historical fame, and even in their vul-
garer forms transmit to the gratitude of posterity
services and examples which it is too much to ex-
pect the mere name to suggest and record. Latin
is no doubt the fit lapidary language, but when in
English can be composed such inscriptions as that
of Lord Macaulay on Sir Thomas Metcalfe, or that
of Landor on Southey, it may well be the vehicle
for the commemoration even of the greatest men.
Landor's exile in England, for such it strictly
may be termed, was passed chiefly at Bath, the
scene of his wilful and wayward youth; he loved
that graceful town and was fond of comparing it
with Florence. In the hospitable and intelligent
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
143
society of Gore House he had a London home, and
a constant literary activity occupied his time and
sustained his spirits. The 'Dialogues on Dante,'
which he entitled the Pentameron,' were criticised
in the 'British and Foreign Review;' and in Landor's
unpublished 'Reply,' written under the false impres-
sion that Mr. Hallam was the author of the article,
there is an interesting summary of his estimate of
his own literary worth, and a curious deprecation of
the common judgment of the foibles and limitations.
of his genius. Perhaps as years had gone by and
carried with them the choice adherents of his
name and fame, he had fallen back on some hopes
of a broader though lower level of recognition. So
certainly it became with the intimacies of his private
life; the circle of his acquaintances was no longer
confined to those who knew how to manage and
elude, or who for love's sake endured, the suscepti-
bilities of his peculiar temperament. Hence strong
likings suddenly changed into hatred and disgust;
hence uncontrollable passion at deceptions and
self-deceptions; hence wild literary revenge for
supposed social injuries; hence the acts which the
indiscriminating judgment of Law might not excuse,
but which the Press and Public might have regarded
144
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
with some consideration for a life so honest and a
heart so high.
He
Of the sad six years of his final return to Italy
there is one bright portion in the summer he passed
at Siena in a cottage hired for him by Mr. Robert
Browning-'the kind friend,' he writes, 'whom I
had seen only three or four times in my life, yet
who made me the voluntary offer of what money I
wanted, and who insists on managing my affairs here
and paying for my lodgings and sustenance.'
also resided in the family of Mr. Story, the eminent
American sculptor, who declares, as Mr. Browning
records, 'that his visit has been one unalloyed
delight to them, and this quite as much from his
gentlemanliness and simple habits, and evident
readiness to be pleased with the least attention, as
from his conversation, which would be attractive
under any circumstances. He may be managed with
the greatest ease by civility alone.' To some en-
quiry respecting his deficient sleep he replied, 'I
ought not to complain. I shall very soon sleep
twenty-four hours out of the twenty-four.'
Landor continued his composition in verse
almost to the very end. In the last Conversation'
he wrote, Andrew Marvel felicitates Henry Marten
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
145
with having met with Oliver Cromwell and con-
versed with John Milton: 'Believe me, it is some-
what to have lived in fellowship with the truly
great and to have eschewed the falsely.' This
Landor had ever done, and if Antipathy had been
the presiding genius of his life, the reason assuredly
was, that he demanded from all men his own nobility
of mind, in addition to all the qualities of temper
and wisdom which he never forgave himself for not
possessing.
Happy, indeed, should I be to extend in any
degree the knowledge and use of Landor's writ-
ings; I say advisedly the use, because though
often surprised that they are not more the objects.
of literary delectation and amusement, I still more
regret the neglect of their obvious utility as ex-
amples of English composition.
His style is so
natural an outgrowth of a rich imaginative mind,
and so clear a representation of thought, that its
study is not likely to lead to any servile imitation,
while it conveys the most distinct impression of the
charm and power of Form. Abounding in strong,
even passionate diction, it is never vague or con-
vulsive; magniloquent as declamation can de-
mand, it is never pompous or turgid; humorous
L
146
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
throughout, it avoids contortion and abhors carica-
ture. In strange contradiction to the temper of
the writer, its chief characteristic is self-command,
and it bears a weight of paradox with as much
ease and dignity as ordinary writing its lightest
commonplace. Though not alien to the treatment
of modern life, it is undoubtedly most at home.
in the old world; and in such Conversations'
as those of Lucullus and Cæsar, Epictetus and
Seneca, Epicurus and the Grecian maidens, Mar-
cus Tullius and Quinctus Cicero, and in the
'Epistles' of Pericles and Aspasia, there is a sense
of fitness of language that suggests the desire
to see them restored, as it were, to the original
tongues. Not only, indeed, would passages from
these works be the best conceivable objects
of translation in any classical examination, but
versions of them, by competent scholars, might
well be applied, as has been proposed with the
'Dialogues of Erasmus,' to the purpose of early
instruction in Latin, and alleviate the difficulty in
which all teachers of schools, at any rate, are
placed by the absence of any original writings in
that language which combine interest of subject
with the facility of construction and purity of style
required in an instrument of linguistic education.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
147
For the greater part of his English verse I can-
not expect more than the sympathy and admira-
tion of poets. The imagination of the reader is
too often necessary to supplement that of the
writer to make his poems popular even with those
who are capable of appreciating their sentiment
and imagery. But what may be pressed upon the
public judiciously and with every hope of success
by the lovers of Landor's fame, are such smaller
pieces as were inserted in the first issue of Mr.
Locker's pleasant little volume of 'Lyra Eleganti-
arum,' and unfortunately suppressed as an infringe-
ment of copyright. They are the very perfection
of poetic epigram-real flowers of harmonious
thoughts. They dwell on the memory like com-
binations of certain notes of music with circum-
stances of life, and seem to me to be the equals in
that form of literature best treated by Goethe and
Voltaire.
It is certain that Landor prided himself on his
Latin more than on his English writings; and I
am glad to append some remarks on his style and
diction by the most venerated of living English
scholars.
(
Landor undoubtedly possessed a command of
L 2
148
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
the Latin language which enabled him to use it for
every purpose, and to adapt it to every theme,
from the fables of Greek mythology to the inci-
dents and characters of his own day. It is not
easy to convey a notion either of the merits or of
the faults of his Latin poetry to those who cannot
judge of it for themselves. Its character cannot
be illustrated by a comparison with any other
Latin poetry, ancient or modern. Its style is not
that of either the golden or the silver, or of any
earlier or later age of Latinity. It is the style of
Landor, and it is marked with the stamp not only
of his intellect, but of his personal idiosyncrasy.
This is the cause of that obscurity which must be
felt, even by scholars, to mar to some extent the
enjoyment of his Latin poetry. He was perfectly
able to write in a style transparent as that of Ovid.
But such was not his pleasure. He despised popu-
larity; he disdained imitation; he abhorred all
that savoured of mannerism, convenționality, and
commonplace. He aimed at independence, origi-
nality; at the quality for which Mr. Matthew
Arnold has endeavoured to naturalise, in English
literature, the French word distinction; and thus
it happened that when he might have clothed his
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
149
thoughts in clear, simple, and natural language, he
preferred forms of expression in which the stone is
often too hard for common readers to get at the
kernel. Nevertheless there are in these poems
passages of exquisite tenderness and pathos, and
others which display an extraordinary power of
word-painting. No doubt the author's poetical
faculty is more largely developed in the longer
compositions; but the shorter are more deeply
impressed with the signature of the man; not,
indeed, always in the most winning aspect, or the
gentlest mood of inspiration. Now and then
harmlessly playful, but much oftener instinct with
the bitterest sarcasm; keen and poisoned shafts,
levelled sometimes at the objects of his poli-
tical animosity, sometimes at persons from whom
he believed himself to have suffered a private
wrong. If it may be said that he set any model
before himself, it must have been Catullus. But
neither the Idyllia Heroica, nor Gebirus, nor
Ulysses in Argiripa, approach the Atys or the
Epithalamium. The Hendecasyllabi recall not
unfrequently the poet of Sermio.'
I have engraved the portrait by Mr. Robert
Faulkner, preferring it to the frontispieces in Mr.
150
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
Forster's volumes. The first, indeed, is interesting,
as indicating in the boy the unboyish contempla-
tion and premature self-absorption that developed
itself so fatally to his happiness; but there is no
trace of the sweetness and humour of the mouth
which redeemed the anti-social character of the
upper features. The second is as unsatisfactory as
engravings not of, but from, paintings usually are,
and Mr. Boxall's work is seen at a great disad-
vantage. Mr. Landor died in September 1864,
aged eighty-nine, in his favourite Florence, but
not upon that famous Hill to which his name has
given one more illustration. His family still re-
side in the Villa of his love, which many a future
pilgrim of letters will visit with reverence and grati-
tude.
THE BERRYS.
151
V.
THE BERRYS.
THE question of the man-about-town: 'Who are
those Miss Berrys who have been running all over
Europe ever since the time of Louis Quatorze?'
has been fully answered in the three portly volumes
compiled from the diaries, letters, and memoranda
left by Miss Mary Berry to the care of the late
Sir Frankland Lewis, to be used by him for bio-
graphical and literary purposes, as he might think
fit. He died without any such publication, and
they came into the hands of Sir George Cornewall
Lewis, the scholar, critic, and statesman, whose loss
friends and country have deeply deplored. His
well-instructed and accomplished widow, Lady
Theresa Lewis, undertook the vicarious work, and
within a few weeks of its appearance she too passed
away, soon followed by her brother Lord Claren-
don, leaving Mr. Charles Villiers at the present
time the only living representative of a numerous
152
THE BERRYS.
generation of an historic and intellectual race. This
record of busy death stands strangely side by side
with the one long life, of which Lady Theresa's
book is the narrative, a life that nearly lasted its
century, and which included within its observation
as memorable a period of our world's history as the
sun's light has ever shone upon. There is something
in these occasional long spaces of individual exist-
ence which seems to make them especially favour-
able vehicles for biographical narrative; the one
figure standing by the protracted course of the
stream of time concentrates round itself the images
and interests of the past, and acquires an integral
value which at any one moment of its being it
would hardly have seemed to have possessed it
becomes identified with even more than its own
experiences, and is judged not so much by what
it was as by what it might have been.
:
Memoirs therefore such as these do not require
the justification of any rare superiority of talent or
character, and will be read with pleasure by many
on whom the personage whose name they bear
leaves little or no impression. There are others,
on the contrary, who might desire a more distinct
representation of Miss Berry's personality; but
THE BERRYS.
153
they may remember that Biography is no easier
than Life; and that, while every one has attempted
to contemplate his own mortal existence and that
of others, each as a co-ordinate whole, with its
special character, its individual meaning, its excep-
tional moral, he has been constantly foiled by his
inability to comprehend all the fragments before
him, and compelled to content himself either with
a vague delineation which he leaves to be filled up
by other thoughts and other experiences, or by a
work of art which he knows to be the child and
creature of his own imagination. When Plutarch
placed in noble array for the contemplation of ages.
to come his images of heroes and sages, or when
Dr. Johnson drew that gallery of poets, so many of
whom only survive in his portraiture, the writers
must have been conscious how little of the real
men lay behind those strong or graceful represen-
tations, how much that was even faithfully re-
corded may convey a false impression, how much
was inevitably omitted which might contradict
every deduction and alter every estimate. Thus,
in these latter days of literature, while we are more
and more thirsting for what is most true in hu-
manity, and ever widening our interests in the
154
THE BERRYS,
adventures and vicissitudes of mankind, we receive
unwillingly those biographies in which the artist is
predominant, even when agreeably and skilfully
executed; and we are very indulgent with any
congeries of materials out of which we can our-
selves embody some living personality, which,
either for its own sake or by its contingencies and
surroundings, challenges our attention or regard.
Yet I should like, from the motley contents of this
book, as well as from my own recollections and some
private sources, to draw a more or less living
portraiture of the lady whom our generation mainly
remembers as the centre of a most pleasant social
circle, and to trace by what combination of circum-
stances and character she came to live an almost
public life without forfeiting or infringing the con-
ditions of a simple and unostentatious existence,
and to die amid the affectionate regrets of the fore-
most men of our own day, after having been
courted by Horace Walpole and having refused
to be introduced to Dr. Johnson. There always
seems something patriarchal in relation to ourselves
in persons who have lived to the present generation
from before the French Revolution. That deluge
has left a strait behind it, separating the historical
THE BERRYS.
155
worlds, and those who have been on the other
side of it seem to have enjoyed a double life.
Miss Berry's youth witnessed the great century of
common sense, and chief era of the liberation of
the human mind, closing in an auto-da-fè of political
fanaticism, which still affects the imagination of
mankind she was the living tradition of a world
of shattered hopes, dispersed illusions, and drifted
philosophies.
The personal circumstances of her girlhood were
singularly unpropitious. To the daily troubles of
genteel poverty was added the continuous gloom
of a domestic disappointment, her father having
been at one time the supposed heir of a wealthy
Scotch uncle, and afterwards supplanted by a more
active and less scrupulous brother. Of her mother
she had one glimmering infantine recollection, a
pale figure in a green dress, who had left little
other remembrance in the family than that she had
often prayed that her children might be endowed
with a vigorous character, an aspiration which in
Mary's case was undoubtedly accomplished. The
father could not impart to this desolate home
either useful occupation or pleasant companionship;
and the young ladies do not seem to have enjoyed
156
THE BERRYS.
any advantages of instruction beyond the most
ordinary teaching of their class in that not very
intellectual time. When Mr. Berry first settled in
Yorkshire, Lady Percy, who lived at the neighbour-
ing great house at Stanwick, formed a kind of
friendship with his wife; but this was not continued
to the daughters, nor would it have been of much
use if it had been, for the lady was
soon after
divorced on account of her intimacy with a Mr. Bird.
Occasional visits to their cousins, the Cayleys, a
family which for many generations has borne, and
still bears, a stamp of much talent and originality,
seem to have been the only opportunities either for
cultivation of intellect or development of character
afforded to them; and yet, by the time when an
increase of income, consequent on the uncle's death,
enabled them to make a tour on the Continent, they
were not only sufficiently well-informed to enjoy
fully all the novelties and associations of travel, but
so distinguished by their manners and conversation,
combined with much personal beauty, that they were
at once admitted to the best company, wherever
they might find themselves, and laid the foun-
dation of the social popularity they were destined
THE BERRYS.
157
to enjoy so long. A sufficient command of the Latin
classics to give a scholarly turn to their knowledge,
without a taint of pedantry; a familiarity with
the French tongue, which throughout life made the
society of foreigners as easy to them as that of their
countrymen; a thorough understanding of their own
language and literature, as exhibited in its best
and purest models, which shone in all their conver-
sation, and enabled them in mature years to ex-
press themselves on paper in a forcible, judicious,
and graceful style; an adequate study of the prin-
ciples of Art, combined with a fair facility of practice
-these were the results of the self-culture which
the Misses Berry acquired in a remote provincial
home, and which they might well have regarded
through the long vista of years, not with the bitter
remembrances of toil, effort, and privation, but
with a legitimate pride in the conquests of talents
and will over adverse fortunes, and with a grateful
consciousness of the mental faculties that could do
so much for themselves, and needed so little obli-
gation to others.
The journal of this her first foreign tour, in 1783,
which such a young woman might write, must
158
THE BERRYS.
naturally be intended for her own pleasure and
reference, or, at most, for the perusal of intimate
friends; and the reproduction of it, at something.
more than eighty years' interval, has just the
interest of the distance of time and nothing more.
There are names there fresh which this generation
can just remember,-such as M. de Staël consulting
her on his marriage with Mdlle. Necker; there are
incidents of hard travel over paths now level or
familiar-such as the journey to Chamouni on
four planks under a canvas roof; there are some
few traces of old-world manners-such as the bal-
lets at the Neapolitan theatre, where the Queen
appeared on the stage in the character of Ceres
and the Kings of Naples and Sweden as Lap-
land hunters pursuing their courtiers disguised as
bears-which are curious to recall: but, on the
whole, it will hardly hold out its place even in
that not altogether unamusing literature-Old
Travels.
Two years after their return to England the
Berry family took a house on Twickenham Common
-a most important incident in their destiny-for
in the autumn of 1788, at the house of Lady
Herries, wife of the banker in St. James's Street,
THE BERRYS.
159
they were introduced to Mr. Horace Walpole, the
finest of fine gentlemen and fine writers, the prince
and patriarch of Dilettanti, the reviver of supposed
Gothic architecture, and the lineal representative of
one of the greatest of English names. The first
night he met them he avoided their acquaintance
with a characteristic reserve: he had heard so much
in their praise, that he concluded they must be all
pretence; but the second time, in a very small
company, he sat by Mary, and found her an angel
inside and out.' He soon did not know which
sister he liked best, except that Mary's face was
formed for a sentimental novel, but ten times fitter
for a fifty times better thing-genteel comedy.'
He could give her no higher praise-Genteel
Comedy was the ideal of his life; and from that
day to the close of it he acted the part of the
veteran friend and paternal lover to both, with tact,
with tenderness, and with fidelity.
It is impossible to overrate the value of this
association to the Misses Berry's social position,
though its influence on their character and pursuits
may have been exaggerated. It established and
fixed them as personages of the best English
society; it gave them all his numerous circle of
160
THE BERRYS.
acquaintances out of which to make their friends,
and by its very delicacy and difficulty it exercised
and made manifest those sterling qualities of
generosity and discretion which underlaid their
more prominent attractions.
To Horace Walpole himself this relation was at
once a true intellectual pleasure, and the familiarity
of these ladies with Continental literature and
manners made their intimacy especially agreeable
to the correspondent of Sir Horace Mann and the
adorer of Madame du Deffand, while their peculiar
freedom from petty prejudice or feminine folly en-
abled him to repeat to youth and beauty the com-
pliment he loved to address to the blind and aged
object of his affectionate admiration. Sit down
there, Good Sense!' Miss Berry evidently shared
many of his literary prejudices, as for example, his
dislike of Dr. Johnson, whom she would not know.
'He would have said something disagreeable of
my friends, and we should have insulted each
other.' He found, too, in this sisterhood an
ingenious means of expressing the warmth of his
attachment, which saved him from the position
of an aged wooer, and either lady from the im-
putation of an interested connection. They were
THE BERRYS.
161
his 'twin wives.' 'I pique myself,' he writes, on
the day of their departure for the Continent in 1790,
on no other philosophy but what a long use and
knowledge of the world has given me the philo-
sophy of indifference to most persons and events.
I do pique myself on not being ridiculous at this
very late period of my life; but when there is not
a grain of passion in my affection for you two, and
when you both have the good sense not to be dis-
pleased at my telling you so (though I hope you
would have despised me for the contrary), I am not
ashamed to say that your loss is heavy to me.' Not
that the suspicions of a scandalous public were
altogether eluded, for a newspaper paragraph, soon
after his succession to the earldom and an additional
estate, having ill-naturedly connected his name
with that of his protégée, aroused an amount of
indignation hardly commensurate with the offence.
In an eloquent letter (October 1791) Miss Berry's
pride reverts to the hereditary injustice which cast
its shade over her early life, and she candidly tells
him that If our seeking your society is supposed
by those ignorant of its value to be with some view
beyond its enjoyment, and our situation represented
as one which will aid the belief of this to a mean
M
162
THE BERRYS.
and interested world, I shall think we have per-
petual reason to regret the only circumstance in
our lives that could be called fortunate.' These
expressions, and the whole tenour of Miss Berry's
conduct, combined with a circumstance to which we
will presently allude, seem to negative the notion
prevalent amongst her friends-that she voluntarily
declined the advantages of fortune and position
which she might have enjoyed as Lord Orford's
wife; although there was a prevalent story that
the Duchess of Gloucester frequently asked him,
'When am I to call Miss Berry my aunt?' and that
his invariable answer was, 'Whenever Miss Berry
pleases.' There is no trace in her papers of any
proposal of the kind, and there was in him a sensi-
tive dislike of all rash and exceptional behaviour,
and an absence of all sturdy independence of the
opinion of the world in which he moved, that would
have naturally disinclined him to such a step, except
as an alternative of some great annoyance.
If the
question had been before him, whether he would
lose altogether the society of these dear young
women or try to obtain one of them as his wife, he
would probably have hesitated; but this supposi-
tion in itself implies some state of circumstances
THE BERRYS.
163
which never existed, and a change of character on
the part of either of the sisters, which would have
destroyed their moral identity. With all his
courtesy and kindness to Agnes, it is impossible
not to see that Lord Orford beheld her with a re-
flected light, and it is no disparagement to her
memory that, by herself, she was not likely to have
acted on his imagination or fixed his affections as
Mary did, and, in a lesser degree, Agnes through
Mary. And Mary, before she had known Horace
Walpole, had already met with the man who had
inspired her with a profound and lasting passion,
whom she idealised with a womanly desire that
belied her wonted sense and led astray her sober
judgment, and whose infidelity and desertion were
almost more than even her proud and firm nature
could sustain.
From an isolated sentence in Miss Berry's diary
of the year 1818, it appears that some passages of
affection had taken place between her and the Lord
Fitzwilliam who bequeathed his noble collections
to the University of Cambridge. When visiting
the Museum she recognised his old valet, who told.
her that his master had frequently spoken of her to
him, and she adds, 'What a difference in our two
M 2
164
THE BERRYS.
fates had they been united! It seems to me that
he might, perhaps, have gained as much as I should;
but who knows?' With this exception, there is no
allusion in the whole of her journals to the question.
of marriage, except in the one romance of her life
—her engagement to General O'Hara. This name
occurs in the first part of her expeditions to Italy,
May 30, 1789. 'With M. Ronconi, M. Conway,
and General O'Hara, to the upper parts of St.
Peter's.' During the next twelve years, as far as
these records go, we know nothing of the relation
between them, except from some slight allusion in
Lord Orford's letters. He tells her in 1790 that
some one is appointed Lieutenant-Governor of
Gibraltar in the place of her friend, General
O'Hara, and adds, he shall be sorry if he is morti-
fied, and she consequently. In the same strain the
next year he writes, ‘O'Hara is come to town,
you will love him better than ever; he persuaded
the captain of the ship, whom you will love for
being persuaded, to stop at Lisbon, that he might
see Mrs. Damer. He has been shockingly treated.'
And again, ‘I have seen O'Hara, with his face as
ruddy and black and his teeth as white as ever,
and as fond of you too, and as grieved at your fall
and
THE BERRYS.
165
as anybody—but I. He has joined a better regi-
ment.' In 1793, 'Our friend O'Hara is recently
made Governor of Toulon ;' and late in the same
year, 'O'Hara is arrived at Toulon, and, if it can
be preserved, he will keep it.' He was then wounded
and taken prisoner, and on his liberation in 1795
he joined the Berrys at Cheltenham, and Lord
Orford writes, 'I am delighted that you have got
O'Hara. How he must feel his felicity in being at
liberty to rove about as much as he likes: still, I
shall not admire his volatility if he quits you soon;'
adding at another date, 'Yes, here is your letter,
and I like all it tells me, that you have chained
your General to your car;' language which almost.
sounds as if he was fully aware of what was going
on then between them, for about that time General
O'Hara and Miss Berry were formally engaged.
In the following year O'Hara was appointed
Governor of Gibraltar, and proposed an immediate
marriage, in order that she might accompany him ;
but she conceived it to be her duty to decline this
offer out of consideration for others. In submitting
to this choice,' she wrote, 'I think I am doing right.
I am sure I am consulting the peace and happiness
of those about me, and not my own.' It is believed
166
THE BERRYS.
that this self-sacrifice was made in relation to an
attachment which had sprung up between her sister
Agnes and Mr. Ferguson, of Raith, the son of the
man in whose favour her father had been dis-
inherited, and which it was feared might receive a
check by the change in Mary's condition. If this
is so, the issue was doubly painful. General O'Hara,
under other influences, which, it is said, accompanied
him to his post, broke off the engagement he had
contracted, and after some years the affections of the
younger sister were blighted by a similar destiny.
This was the event of her life, against the effects
of which she was ever striving with a brave spirit,
but which lasted to the very end. In the June of
1796 she writes to an intimate friend :
'Do not suppose this long period of mental and
bodily suffering has been lost upon me. I have
communed much with myself in my own chamber,
I have reflected, and seriously reflected, that, how-
ever little I have hitherto enjoyed and much I have
suffered in life from the circumstances in which I
have been placed being quite inappropriate to my
situation, still that a being endowed by nature with
a sound understanding, possessing a cultivated
mind, and a warmly affectionate heart, cannot be
THE BERRYS.
167
intended for unhappiness,-nay, can never be per-
manently unhappy but for its own fault; and that,
with a conscience as clear as mine, it will indeed be
my own fault if I do not make my future life less
uncomfortable than my past.'
Again, in December :--
'After a twelvemonth passed in the most painful,
agitating, and unavoidable suspense, I find myself
not only totally disappointed in a plan of happiness,
founded on the most moderate desires, and pursued.
by the most rational means, but obliged to change
my opinion of one of the characters in the world
of which I had ever thought the highest, and in
whose known truth and affection I have even had
the most entire confidence and the sincerest satis-
faction long before I considered him in any other
light than that of a friend. I shall not dwell on
the effect which you will easily guess all this must
have had on a heart as warm and as little generally
confiding as mine, but a heart which, when once it
trusts, trusts so implicitly.'
But when his character is attacked by some one
else, with a charming feminine inconsistency and
latent passion, she writes:-
'Mr. L., you say, observes that my affections
168
THE BERRYS.
have been more deeply engaged than I was aware
of, and Mrs. D. has repeatedly intimated the same
to you. Needed you any intimation that my affec-
tions must have been deeply engaged before I re-
solved, or even thought of marrying? Had I even
chosen to think of making what is called a prudent
marriage, did you suppose, that I, in common with
all my sex, might not have done it? or could
you suppose this a prudent marriage? Did my
silence on this subject deceive you? And did you
really believe me capable of the platitude of talking
in raptures, or enlarging on the character and per-
fections of the man whom I considered as my
husband? Now that he no longer stands in that
position, it is not my having reason to complain of
him that shall prevent my doing him justice. I
know not where you have taken your reports of his
character, but I know that a character "universally
highly thought of" is the last I should choose for
any intimate connexion, for (except in early youth)
nothing but mediocrity can possibly attain it. I
have heard O. H. called too exigeant and worriting
by idle officers under his command, and too bold
by the ministerial people here, after the failure at
Toulon; but in my life I never heard an allegation
THE BERRYS.
169
against either his heart or his understanding; and
if I had, I should not have believed it, because in
a long acquaintance I have myself known and seen
repeated proofs of the excellence of both. Instead
of not knowing "any real virtues he possesses" until
this unfortunate affair, in which I am still convinced
his head and not his heart is to blame, I know
nobody whose character united so many manly
virtues. It was this, joined to a knowledge of his
conduct in all the relations of life in which he then
stood, that entitled him to the "approbation and
love of such a heart" as mine, and I felt and know
he decidedly "suited me as a friend," because to an
excellent understanding, great natural quickness,
and much knowledge of the world, he joined an
affectionate tenderness of heart which had always
inspired me with a degree of confidence and inti-
macy you have often heard me say I hardly ever
felt with any other person. I still believe that
had this separation never taken place, I should.
never have had to complain of him, nor he to doubt
me.'
•
It is impossible not to feel some interest in the
career and character of the man who inspired this
passion and earned this regard, and we have in
170
THE BERRY.
the excellent novel entitled 'Cyril Thornton,' by
Colonel Hamilton, the portrait of him in his later
years, vividly sketched by an eyewitness, and, it
would seem, his personal friend. He is described
as being then at the age of sixty-seven remarkably
handsome, and giving the impression of a man who
had been distinguished both in camp and court :—
'He was a bachelor, and had always been noted.
as a gay man-too gay a man, perhaps, to have
ever thought of narrowing his liberty by the im-
position of the trammels of wedlock; notwithstand-
ing an office of considerable emolument which he
held, I believe, in the Royal Household, he had
dissipated his private fortune and become deeply
involved in his circumstances. He was a bon vivant,
an amiable boon companion-one to whom society
was as necessary as the air he breathed; at his
own table, in nothing distinguished from those
around him, except by being undoubtedly the gay-
est and most agreeable person in the company.
Anecdote-telling was at once his forte and his
foible-his forte, because he did it well-his foible,
for, sooth to say, he was sometimes given to carry
it into something of excess. He would entertain
his friends by the hour with the scandalous tittle-
THE BERRYS.
171
tattle that had been circulated at Court or in the
clubhouses some thirty years before, and did more
than hint at his own bonnes fortunes among the
celebrated beauties of the British Court, and the bona-
robas of France, Italy, and Spain. I have seldom
heard a finer voice or one more skilfully managed.'
From this sketch it is not difficult to imagine a
reverse of the medal equally true. There were
friends of Miss Berry who thought she had had a
good escape from a noisy roystering Irishman, with
little taste in literature, and who probably would
have ended as a domestic martinet and a social
bore. But it was not for her to understand this;
and when, in 1802, some one entering the opera-
box of Lady Stuart, at Paris, mentioned that the
Governor of Gibraltar was dead, Miss Berry fell
motionless to the floor. Death held sacred the
memory that life had cherished, and thus she writes
to Mrs. Cholmley, in 1805-
I must tell you that yesterday driving
out with Lady Douglas I told her my whole story.
She had often expressed such a wish to be informed
of some particular chapters, as she called them, be-
fore she began reading my Life, that I thought it
unfriendly, indeed had no wish, to withhold it.
172
THE BERRYS.
Luckily I spoke to a person disposed to enter into
my views, and my sentiments for the subject of my
tale. She had heard much of him from the Duchess
of Buccleuch, with whose brother, Lord Mount-
shannon, he was particularly intimate. She had seen
him once or twice with Lady Pembroke, was de-
lighted with him herself, and so was everybody she
knew. Nobody could enter more into my feelings,
think higher of my conduct, or be more astonished
at his, which I could only end by saying, remained
to this day as inexplicable to you and to me as it
could be to her. She had heard something of it
indistinctly before from Lady Louisa Stuart; and
the other day, at dinner here, a gentleman happen-
ing to mention a now intended attack upon Cadiz
from Gibraltar, which he said had been proposed
by O'Hara, and was always his plan, the effect she
saw it had upon me, made her feel herself growing
red and pale every instant from fright that he
should again mention the subject. I was not quite
well, and the mention of that plan brought forcibly
to my mind the flattering idea with which O'Hara
accompanied it, when he first mentioned to me
having proposed such a plan to Government, that,
after a brilliant success in an action of éclat, I
THE BERRYS.
173
should be the less blamed for becoming his!
Though I had no pain, but rather satisfaction in
talking over all this yesterday with Lady Douglas,
yet it brought all the circumstances, all the scenes,
all the feelings of that twelvemonth so strongly
before me, that I have been living ever since in
reverie with him and with you. Where else, alas!
can I ever meet with company so exactly suited
to my head and my heart!'
Again, to Mrs. Damer in 1811-
'I was at Park Place yesterday. It had rained
much in the night, and was a gray, damp, melan-
choly day, suiting well with the feelings I carried
to it.
Never did I see a place which, without
being much altered, is so perfectly changed, so
triste, so comfortless! Everything is neglected:
the seats all falling to pieces, the trees overgrown
in some places, and in others dead and left stand-
ing, the poor little flower-garden with its fountain
dry and its borders flowerless, its little arcades
overgrown and broken and the thorn-tree in the
middle let to spread over the whole space. Oh,
how every step of it affected me! I saw you and
O'Hara sitting under this thorn-tree in its trim
days, and myself having left you merely to enjoy
174
THE BERRYS.
the delicious sensation of knowing you were ex-
pressing for me every sentiment that I could wish
to inspire. I saw him following me into the laurel
walk, and in giving me a letter (which I had acci-
dentally dropped) in a joking manner, first con-
vincing me of the seriousness of the sentiment I
had inspired. I sat down at the end of the library,
and saw your form at the bottom, on a ladder,
arranging the new-placed books, and the look you
gave and recalled, when you found us sitting at
the other end of the room, just where you had left
us when you returned again to your work. . . I
am so glad I have seen Park Place once, in spite of
all the melancholy it inspired, but I should be sorry
to see more of it.'
Once more, forty-eight years after the breach of
his plighted faith, Miss Berry reopened the packet
of letters that had passed between them, and, as
Lady Theresa Lewis well expresses it, 'attached
to it the following touching little record of the dis-
appointed hopes and blighted affection that
deepened the natural turn of sadness in her cha-
racter':
'His parcel of letters relates to the six happiest
months of my long and insignificant existence,
THE BERRYS.
175
These
although these six months were accompanied by
fatiguing and unavoidable uncertainty, and by the
absence of everything that could constitute present
enjoyment. But I looked forward to a future exist-
ence which I had felt, for the first time, would
have called out all the powers of my mind and all
the warmest feelings of my heart, and should have
been supported by one who, but for the cruel
absence which separated us, would never have for
a moment doubted that we should have materially
contributed to each other's happiness.
prospects served even to pass cheerfully a long
winter of delays and uncertainty, by keeping my
mind firmly riveted on their accomplishment. A
concatenation of unfortunate circumstances-the
political state of Europe making absence a neces-
sity, and even frequent communication impos-
sible, letters lost and delayed, all certainty of
meeting more difficult, questions unanswered, doubts
unsatisfied. All these circumstances combined in
the most unlucky manner crushed the fair fabric of
my happiness, not at one fell shock, but by the
slow mining misery of loss of confidence, of un-
merited complaints, of finding by degrees mis-
understandings, and the firm rock of mutual con-
176
THE BERRYS.
fidence crumbling under my feet, while my bosom.
for long could not banish a hope that all might yet
be set right. And so it would, had we even met
for twenty-four hours. But he remained at his
government at Gibraltar till his death, in 1802.
And I, forty-two years afterwards, on opening
these papers, which had been sealed up ever since,
receive the conviction that some feelings are indel-
ible.'-M. B., October 1844.
In the year following this great desertion the
Misses Berry lost their distinguished friend, and
whom in the classic sense they would have gladly
In Mary's
named patron-Horace Walpole.
journal these words only, underlined, record the
loss-Lord Orford dies. Henceforward the two
sisters had to face life together and alone. Their
kindly father almost inverted the due relation be-
tween them, and was a real encumbrance on, though
an interest in, their existence. Their favourite.
distraction, travel, was no longer possible—they
were shut up within the four seas. In 1798 Miss
Berry writes:—
'Most thoroughly do I begin to feel the want
of that shake out of English ways, English whims,
and English prejudices, which nothing but leaving
THE BERRYS.
177
England gives one.
five years we all begin to forget the existence of
the continent of Europe, till we touch it again with
our feet. The whole world to me, that is to say,
the whole circle of my ideas, begins to be confined
between North Audley Street and Twickenham.
I know no great men but Pitt and Fox, no King
and Queen but George and Charlotte, no town but
London. All the other Cities, and Courts, and
great men of the world may be very good sorts of
places and of people for aught we know or care;
except they are coming to invade us we think no
more of them than of the inhabitants of another
planet. We should like, indeed, just to know
what is become of Buonaparte, because we are
afraid of our settlements in India, and because we
are all great newsmongers and politicians, though
more ignorant, more incapable of any general view
upon these subjects, than any other people with
whom I ever conversed, the French of ten years.
ago only excepted.'
After a residence of four or
No wonder, then, that she was eager to avail
herself of the negotiations at Amiens, and one of
her first remarks is the great improvement of the
country in cultivation and apparent prosperity
N
178
THE BERRYS.
since her former visit. The Revolution, indeed,
fell with very unequal severity on different portions.
of France, and the cooler temperament of the
Northern population not only checked the vio-
lences of political fanaticism, but enabled them to
use the advantages which the destruction of the
old order of things placed within their grasp.
This journal is the best description I have seen of
the short truce which Western Europe then en-
joyed, and the sketches of social life in Paris are
distinct and interesting. Towards the First
Consul himself Miss Berry was far from feeling
that odd mixture of contempt and terror that
possessed the English mind for so long in their
estimation of a character that still exercises the
conflicting judgments of mankind. Not that she
thought otherwise than the ordinary society
of her day of the French people and their
Revolution, though she may have protested
against her friend Walpole coupling Tom Paine
and Dr. Priestley-the 'trull Sillery' and the
'virago Barbauld'-in a common condemnation.
But in the beginning of 1800 she had written,
'What think you of the man Buonaparte, absolute
King of France, quietly established in the Tui-
THE BERRYS.
179
leries! For my part I admire him, and think, if
he can keep his place, he does his country a service.
. . . Now that an absolutely aristocratical govern-
ment is established, what is it to us whether Louis
Capet or Louis Buonaparte' (a prophetic slip of
the pen, indeed!) is at its head. If the nation is
once in a state to maintain the relations of peace
and the conditions of treaties, what have we, what
ought we to have to do with the means?'
The first time she beheld Napoleon was at a
grand review, where she only notices his good seat
on horseback, his sallow complexion, his very serious
countenance and cropped hair. When she saw him
nearer, the man of the Court Circle seemed very
different from the man of the Parade: he appeared
taller, and with an uncommon sweetness in his look,
his whole countenance giving rather the impression
of complacence and quiet intelligence than of any
decided penetration or strong expression whatever.
His eyes seemed light grey, and he looked full in
the face the person to whom he was speaking.
It may be in reference to this appearance that
there occurs in the diary an elaborate analysis of
the connection between the colour of the eyes and
mental character, commencing, 'Pale grey eyes
N 2
180
THE BERRYS.
with dark hair belong to all the very extra-
ordinary characters I have seen-Buonaparte,
Byron, &c.; while dark eyes with the greenish
cast imply the first rank with regard to the qualities
of the heart and the second with regard to intellect ;
while dark eyes with the reddish cast, however fine,
with dark hair, indicate no superiority either of the
mind or the affections.' Madame de Staël received
her in a loose spencer with a bare neck; and no signs
appear of the earnest friendship which afterwards
grew up between them. She was, of course, de-
lighted with the treasures of the Louvre, but
remarks with justice how much many of them had
suffered from those restorations of which every
traveller to Madrid now sees the painful effects in
the Perla and the Spasimo. In the Pantheon she
speaks of seeing the 'tomb, or rather the cenotaph '
of Voltaire. It would be curious to know on what
authority she makes the distinction, the discovery
of the absence of the bones, which had been trans-
ferred there with so much pomp during the Revo-
lution, having caused, within the last few years,
much inquiry and controversy.
Returning to England after this singular visit,
the Berrys crossed the Channel again in October
THE BERRYS.
181
for a lengthened tour, described in the same clear-
sighted way as the sojourn at Paris, and with some
amusing personal adventure, but, on the whole,
not so well worth recording. There is one passage
detailing all the discomfort of a night passed at
Tourves, a village between Aix and Nice, and the
strange way in which all that was painful in the
recollection was dissipated and overcome by the
delight of an early morning walk on the rocky
edge of the Mediterranean, in the mild freshness of
the southern winter air, with the sun rising out of
the glorious sea, and the vivid green of the pines
on the nearer hills, that will forcibly remind the
reader of that beautiful page of Miss Martineau's
'Life in the Sick-room,' in which, leaving the bed
and sickroom that seemed full of pain, she looks
through the window-curtain on the flood of rays
flashing over the waters, strewing them with
diamonds, then gilding the green down below, then
lighting up the yellow sands of the opposite shore
to Tynemouth harbour, with the garden below
glittering with dew, and buzzing with
with early
bees and butterflies. I was suffering too much,'
adds the invalid, 'to enjoy this picture at the
moment; but how was it at the end of the year?
182
THE BERRYS.
The pains of all these hours were annihilated—as
completely vanished as if they had never been-
while the momentary peep behind the window-
curtain made me possessor of this radiant picture
for evermore.'
Miss Berry was struck with the unfavourable
effect of the French Revolution and French inter-
course on the Swiss character: 'The peasants, I
believe, have really gained by the abolition of the
feudal and seigneurial rights; but the inhabitants of
the towns, who were formerly an industrious, sober,
and (for the age they lived in) simple set of people,
are grown at once idle, insolent, and corrupted,
which sits infinitely worse upon the dull grossiereté
of the Swiss character than upon the pert légèreté
of the French.' The party, indeed, had soon after
to make their escape from Switzerland on the re-
newal of hostilities, which they did with difficulty,
not knowing how far the rigorous detention of
English travellers by the French Government
might extend, -the French influence at that time
being so dominant in that country that Miss Berry
speaks of the annexation of the Pays de Vaud to
France as a political certainty. She found little
gratification in returning to Lausanne, after an
THE BERRYS.
183
absence of nearly nineteen years, which, she writes,
she had 'left while in the heyday of life, with a
thousand brilliant prospects, hopes, and ideas before
one, all cruelly failed in a manquée existence, and
which at sober forty can never be revived.' It was
in this spirit that, in the following year, which was
additionally saddened by the final failure of
Agnes's engagement with Mr. Fergusson, which,
besides the personal attachment, would have re-
habilitated the sisterhood, as it were, in the family
possession of which they always fancied themselves
defrauded, she wrote an imaginary epitaph on
herself, little thinking that forty-eight years would
elapse before she laid down to her final rest :—
Beneath this stone is deposited
The dust of one whom,
Remarkable for personal beauty,
Considerable superiority of intellect,
Singular quickness of the senses,
And the noblest endowments of the heart,
Neither distinguished, served, nor
Rendered happy.
She was
Admired and neglected,
Beloved and mistaken,
Respected and insignificant.
She endured years of a useless existence,
Of which the happiest moment was that
In which her spirit returned to the bosom
Of an Almighty and Merciful
Creator.
184
THE BERRYS.
This sad summary of life and character will seem
to many so incongruous with the successful woman
of society, the cheerful host, the welcome guest, the
friend and correspondent of so many important
literary and political personages, and the intelligent
observer of the fortunes of mankind, that they may
attribute many of its expressions to a morbid sensi-
tiveness or womanly affectation. But to those who
knew her well it will appear just and true. Its mourn-
fulness might indeed, in some degree, be attributed
to a physical depression, to which she was subject
to an extent that the published portions of her
'Journal' do not adequately represent, and to
what is called a melancholy disposition; but the
spirit of it is in accordance with all the graver
moments of her life, and the temperament can
hardly be called melancholy, which avoided no
occasion of gaiety and no opportunities of healthy
excitement. Nor was there a trait of sentimen-
tality about her: it was the habit of the time in
which she lived to treat emotions of that kind as very
well for the artistic conceptions of Florian, Gessner,
or Sterne, but as incompatible with the dignified
transactions of life and ridiculous in its manifesta-
tion. Indeed, the impression which Miss Berry
THE BERRYS.
185
made on some of her acquaintances was that of
a rather hard than tender nature; and Lady
Charlotte Bury, in her amusing and unscrupulous
'Diary,' accuses her of want of sympathy, and
sacrificing her gentler feelings to her love of the
world—though, she adds, 'it must be said to her
honour that that sacrifice is never of kindness of
heart or integrity of character.' *
to
It was in truth the serious consideration of the
vague and fragmentary conditions of human life,
under its best aspects, that gave to her mind at
once its gloom and its solidity. One chief dis-
appointment naturally gathered round itself the
floating atoms of dissatisfaction, and she imaged
them as its consequence and production-but no
circumstances would have altered her view of the
world, unless indeed some uncongenial companion-
ship had degraded her perceptions and damaged
her intelligence. Her relations to General O'Hara
had perhaps more of female instincts about them
than she avowed to herself, and though, when
their novelty was past, she might have enjoyed a
deeper personal happiness and contentment than
* Vide Diary, vol. i. p. 88.
186
THE BERRYS.
it was her lot to obtain, she would never have been
light in her judgments, or frivolous in her estimates
of mankind.
And it was the same with the feeling of her own
unimportance. It is with no mere vanity that she
writes-
'Nobody ever suffered insignificance more un-
willingly than myself. Nobody ever took more
pains by every honourable means compatible with
a proud mind to avoid it. But it has been thrust
upon me by inevitable circumstances, and all I
have for it is to endeavour to forget myself and
make others remember how little I deserve it.'
This sense of injustice she would have resented
in the case of any other person as intensely as in
her own. Hence, without any vituperation of the
wrongs of women, she more than once betrays her
earnest consciousness of what she would have been
and done, with the liberties and opportunities of
manhood, and to her latest years she certainly
showed something masculine in her demeanour.
She never gave up the useful and sensible fashion
of distinguishing her male friends from her ac-
quaintance by using their surnames, a custom now
nearly extinct in the higher circles of society, and
THE BERRYS.
187
there was an occasional vigour in her expressions
of indignation which a puritan or purist might object
to, but which had an antique flavour of sincerity
about it that quite compensated for the incon-
gruity of the speaker and the phrase. Her com-
plaints of the subordinate position of her sex were
of no fanciful character. That their education (if
education it can be called) is nearly ended at the
very time when their minds first open and are
eager for information and that the education of
men begins; that their reading is desultory and
heterogeneous; that the endowments of what is
called a woman-of-business are those which would
not distinguish a lawyer's clerk, and which every
woman should be ashamed of not having acquired
—these seemed to her just grounds for discontent;
and when she adds that, with these disadvantages,
'it is a wonder that they are not more ignorant,
more perverse, and weaker than they are, and that
the wrongs and neglects which women of superior
intellect almost invariably receive from men are
revenged by the various evils which men suffer
from the faults and frailties of their wives and
female friends,' few thinkers of our day will dis-
agree with her.
188
THE BERRYS.
It must also be remembered that much self-
regret and secret disappointment find a vent and
consolation in the speculative modes of thought
and various views of the external and internal
world that now occupy the attention of reflective
and educated persons. The femme incomprise of
our time, as well as the unappreciated man of
genius, have their metaphysical comforts, which
the hard realists of the eighteenth century knew
nothing about, or which, when they tried to use
them, they converted, like Rousseau, into poisons
and enchantments. When people were mystical
in those days they gave themselves up to devotion,
and made no attempt to mix up their imaginative-
ness with public life; when they were philan-
thropic they established foundling hospitals, or
taught the deaf and dumb to communicate with
the world; but they did not trouble themselves
with the elevation of the lower orders of society,
or the salvation of the whole human race. When
women wished to exert power or obtain wealth,
they ministered to the pleasures of the other
sex, and made capital out of their foibles and
their vanities; and the career of any one who
wished to gratify at once her ambition and her
THE BERRYS.
189
.
virtue was by no means easy. It was, however,
very possible to retain by a certain prestige much
that they had won, when the means of acquirement
had themselves passed away, and such personages
as Madame Geoffrin and Madame du Deffand, at a
very advanced age, had more social authority and
political influence than youth, beauty, and talent
together would command in this country. True,
as one of the thousand historians of the Revolution
has said, the vicille femme had been so completely
guillotined that she never appeared afterwards;'
and Napoleon Bonaparte called Madame de Staël a
phraseuse, and sent her out of the country; but yet
Miss Berry felt conscious that she was of more
significance when in France than in England, and
her familiarity with foreign manners and literature
had thus a decided tendency to encourage both
distaste of a station that must have appeared
admirable and enviable to many less successful
courtiers and purveyors of society, and her aspira-
tions after something higher and more permanent
than the daily gratifications of a fashionable ex-
istence or even the cordial intimacies of its most
worthy members. In the intensity of this feeling
she sometimes rises even above the practical good
•
190
THE BERRYS.
sense and generous intuitions which were the habits
of her mind, and approaches a philosophy very
different from that familiar to her age and personal
surroundings. That she should value and expound
the political economy of Malthus with a prophetic
spirit that would have done honour to any states-
man; that the Canonico Bandini should write that
he never doubted 'quin lectissima et literarum
amantissima puella Maria Berry memoriam mei
quamvis absens firmam animo suo retineret;' that
Professor Playfair should correspond with her on
the merits of Condorcet; that Sir Uvedale Price
should consult her on the 'Theory of Visible
Beauty;' that Madame de Staël should have
thought her by far the cleverest woman in
England,'—these all are the natural concomitants
of the femme forte of the beginning of our century,
but rarely do we meet with such a sentence as this,
written by her in a foreign tongue, perhaps from a
sense of the secret solemnity of the thought :-
'Je touche quelquefois, en méditant le bout de
l'aile de quelques grandes principes fondamentales,
de quelques idées lumineuses que je me sens in-
capable de débrouiller, mais qu'il me semble une
autre existence me révélera. Elles sont suggérées
THE BERRYS.
191
souvent par des livres dont les auteurs sont cepen-
dant cent piques au-dessus de les avoir conçues.'
When staying at Guy's Cliff in 1807 with her
accomplished friend Mr. Greathead, Miss Berry
was so gratified with the perusal of his journal,
that she determined to keep one regularly herself.
She had hitherto avoided doing so, because she
felt ashamed of the use, or rather the no use,
she made of her time, and of the miserable
minute duties and vexations which at once occu-
pied and corroded her mind. 'But now,' she
writes,' that no future remains to me, perhaps I
may be encouraged to make the most of the
present by marking its rapid passage, and setting
before my eyes the folly of letting a day escape
without endeavouring at least to make the best I
can of it, and, above all, without making impossible
attempts to mend or alter anybody but myself.'
If this project had been carefully worked out we
should have had a record of almost historical value
from this acute and conscientious observer; but
though many volumes of notes remain, they rarely
form a continuous diary for any considerable time
together. Many of the notices seem dotted
down merely for personal remembrance, and re-
192
THE BERRYS.
marks of any real interest are few and far between.
I give these pathetic extracts as an interesting train
of thought spreading over many years.
The stream of time seems now to carry me
along so rapidly, that I already approach the brink
of the great Ocean of Eternity into which that
stream is hurrying to lose itself. I feel so near
disappearing with it that I fain would catch at
some idle weeds as my bark glides by, to mark my
passage. Thus I wrote and felt five years ago, in
October 1804. It was the last fainting struggle
at exertion. The following is the record I find of
the state of my mind on the same subject last
year, October 1808. How heartily do I and my
friends shake hands when we meet alone at night,
after an evening passed in any sort of company-
now alas! however agreeable that company may
be, to have been in it is now, to me, much more
enjoyable than being in it.'
'Solitude broken by a book, and reverie when I
can indulge in it, are my real enjoyments. The
rest is merely desirable to give a zest to these—
and so life glides by me. I no longer make an
attempt to mark its course, and aware of the ex-
treme rapidity with which it passes, feel the
THE BERRYS.
193
consolation of knowing that I shall not long be
oppressed even by the painful sense of my own
insignificance.'
The period between the Peace of Amiens and
the termination of the war was very favourable to
good society in London. The best English had
nowhere else to go to. There were no railroads to
promote perpetual motion, and no penny-post to
destroy the pleasures of correspondence. The
Whigs, excluded from office, except during Mr.
Fox's short reign, strove to find in social prepon-
derance a compensation for political dignity. The
Tories might dominate in certain apartments at
Westminster, but the London Houses were theirs.
In their societies there was all that luxurious life
could add to the pleasures of considerable aristo-
cratic culture, and to the excitement of an Opposi-
tion headed for a considerable period by the heir
to the Crown. There was, besides, an Opposition
Court at Kensington, where the Princess of Wales
collected all the wits-whose interests did not lie in
another direction-and all the fashion she could
persuade to patronise her. The table-talk of such a
time, accurately rendered, would of itself be interest-
ing and, commented upon by such an intelligence
194
THE BERRYS.
as Miss Berry's, most instructive. For in all these
circles she and her sister had acquaintances, and,
in some of them, friends. An accidental meeting
with Lady Georgiana Cavendish in 1799 resulted
in a life-long intimacy, and connected her by many
ties of kindness and affection with the genial
families of Cavendish and Howard, from the gene-
ration of the celebrated Duchess of Devonshire, to
that of the amiable Lord Carlisle, who has prema-
turely closed his generous, blameless, and honour-
able career.
The first, and disagreeable, impression which Caro-
line Princess of Wales made on MissBerry turned to a
deep pity for a person, who she says, 'in conversation
was so lively, odd, and clever, but who was without
a grain of common sense, or an ounce of ballast, to
prevent high spirits and a coarse mind, without any
degree of moral taste, from running away with her.'
She was, besides, thrown a good deal into the
Princess's company by the liking she contracted
for Lady Charlotte Lindsay, Sir W. Gell, and Mr.
Keppel Craven, who formed part of the Royal
household. The picture here given of this poor
woman's scatter-brained cleverness, her comical.
diction (she swore she would never be anybody's
'cats-paw,' and to the last she always spoke of' The
THE BERRYS.
195
Bill of Pains and Spikalties'), and her flagrant im-
prudence of demeanour, leaves the conviction on
the mind of the reader that, under the most
favourable circumstances, her position in this
country must have been false and miserable.
Neither the public commiseration for her strange
destiny, nor the disrepute and ill-favour of her
enemies, nor her own many kindly and liberal
qualities, availed anything against her want of
dignity, decorum, and self-respect. She was said
to be the only friend the Prince had; for she vin-
dicated his conduct by her presence wherever she
showed herself. She had, however, sense enough
to feel the value of such a friend and adviser as
Miss Berry, and, till her last departure from this
country, she treated her with much respect, and
with all the affection of which her poor nature was
capable. There is a touching glimpse too of the
Princess Charlotte at fifteen, with her face damaged
by small-pox to an extent rarely seen at the time
among the higher classes, but with an open, lively
countenance, and well-cut, expressive features,
saying, 'she was afraid of dark and dismal
stories,' and telling a good one herself-knowing all
about, Miss Berry with a royal readiness-telling Sir
02
196
THE BERRYS.
W. Drummond to go on with what he was saying,
'for she liked nothing so much as politics,'—and
leaving the impression of an undirected intelligence
and an undisciplined will. How far the influence of
so sagacious a partner in life as Prince Leopold
would have modified her character must be a
matter for conjecture, but the Princess Lieven, in
those interesting memoirs of her time which it is
to be hoped will not be entirely lost to the world,
mentions that the Regent had said to her that
'the death of his daughter had been a most fortu-
nate event for this country: she would have made
a very bad Queen.'
The friends whom Miss Berry found or made in
this circle are prominent figures in her Memoirs and
in her life. She outlived them all, Lady Charlotte.
Lindsay only preceding her by three years. This
lady has left a most agreeable remembrance on all
who knew her. She was of the noble family of
which Lord North is the political representative,
and whom nature favoured rather in their talents
than in their external appearance. She may, in-
deed, have been the very personage of the well-
known anecdote of the luckless interrogator who
tried to remedy the unconscious incivility of his re-
THE BERRYS.
197
marks on the statesman's wife by still ruder stric-
tures on the daughter. When she said a good thing
-and she said many-her features crumpled into an
expression of irresistible humour. She used to give
an amusing account of her marriage, which took
place, like most nuptials in high life in those days,
in the drawing-room of her father's house:
the clergyman brought no prayer-book, thinking
there would be no difficulty in supplying him
with one, but no such article was forthcoming in
the house, and the only way of getting over the
difficulty was to perform the marriage by memory:
the clergyman, confused with the novelty of the
situation, came frequently to a dead stop, and
could only continue by the fragmentary reminis-
cences of the company; Somehow or other,' said
Lady Charlotte, 'I do not think that I was ever
rightly married at all.'—She said, she had 'sprained
her ankle so often, and been always told that it
was worse than breaking her leg, that she said,
she had come to look on a broken leg as a positive
advantage.'-In her later days when once com-
plimented on looking very well, she replied, 'I
dare say it's true, the bloom of ugliness is past.'—
Her jeux-de-mots were felicitous. On the elevation
198
THE BERRYS.
of some childless personage to the Peerage, she
remarked that he was 'of the new Order, which
seemed the popular one, not the Barons, but the
Barrens.'—One day, coming late to dinner in the
country, she excused herself by the 'macadamnable'
state of the roads.-When the question happened
to be asked whether 'Yes' or 'No' was the more
important word? "No," of course,' she said, 'for it
often means "Yes," but "
Yes," but "Yes" never means "No."
-Her graphic letters and journal give a very fair
account of the Queen's trial and the evidence on
both sides, and are not, on the whole, very favour-
able to her Royal Mistress; but they clear up the
current story to which Dr. Lushington's speech
gave rise, that her husband had sold her letters to
Sir John Copley, who brandished them in her face
during her examination: she merely said, 'he cross-
questioned her like a murderer at the Old Bailey.'
Sir William Gell and Mr. Keppel Craven
belonged to that class of scholarly dillettanti which
will soon be a subject for archæology in English so-
ciety. M. About suggests somewhere that 'What
was a salon?' will shortly be a proper question for a
competitive examination in History; and the com-
bination of the pleasant play of intellect on trivial
THE BERRYS.
199
subjects with a sound and accurate scholastic
knowledge, of the wit of the moment with the
study of a life, of the enjoyment of letters as a
luxury with its encouragement as a duty, is nearly
extinct among us. Put Sir William Gell's
'Handbook of the Morea'-the matter-of-fact of
the driest traveller-side by side with his letters.
rampant with nonsense and glowing with fun, and
you have a chimera of character which we should
hardly venture to portray in a novel. Things and
men must now be all and each in their proper
places; but it may happen that if we are desirous
of banishing Humour from all the walks of life
where we think him superfluous or intrusive, and
telling him to go home, he
word more strictly than we
lose sight of him altogether.
and travel, Sir William Gell found in Italy an
asylum for his talents, his tastes, and his gout.
The Via Gellia of Rome and the Villa Gellia of
Naples will mingle his name with the historical
associations of the ancient past, while, at the latter
city, his contemporaries, towards whom he acted
as a sort of classic Consul of the place, and the
natives, down to the donkey-boys who carried him
may take us at our
intend, and we may
After a life of events
200
THE BERRYS.
in a sort of palanquin through his Pompeian re-
searches, and who occasionally let him fall from
laughter at his jokes, will often recall his cheering
voice among the noisy memories of Southern
Italy.
Of Mr. Jekyll the wit there is a curious notice
in the following note written in 1813, confirming
Miss Berry's strong sense of her early personal at-
tractions and of the waste she had made of them.
A passion of two hours and a half's duration (we
will not say how many years ago) cannot possibly
hope that its vestigia will help your memory to a
sort of promise you gave the other day to come
on Sunday evening round to North Audley Street.
This then is meant to refresh that memory. Would
it could do as much for the charms that silenced
you for two hours and a half of the last century!'
After a short visit to England came another and
longer tour, of which the main incident is the death
of Mr. Berry at Genoa. By the side of his coffin
she exclaims, ‘What a strange thing is this human
life, when one can neither enjoy it nor wish to quit
it!' She writes to Madame de Staël, 'This death
leaves us without a duty to fulfil towards the living
generation, nor have we any tie with that which is
THE BERRYS.
201
to come.' They returned to England in the
autumn of each year, but left it again the following
summer.
These frequent sojourns abroad and abundant
social intercourse had not prevented Miss Berry
from at least attempting to make some figure in
literature. Heinrich Heine says, every woman
writes with one eye on her manuscript and with
the other on some favourite man; but her first
effort was one of gratitude and devotion to the
memory of the friend she had lost. Her trans-
lation of a preface to the letters of Madame du
Deffand was a generous vindication of a connection
which had been the object of much comment and
ridicule, and which she did her best to place in a
reasonable and amiable light. This she was in a
great degree enabled to do by her knowledge of
the peculiar and personal elements of the French
society of that period, in which she took almost a
cognate interest, while at the same time she never
lost sight of a higher standard of morality or
attempted to palliate what was really vicious and
sensual about it. It is the more important to keep
this in mind, because in her comedy of 'Fashionable
Friends,' which was acted with success in private,
202
THE BERRYS.
(
but which failed on the stage, and still more in the
'Characters,' which she wrote after the manner of
'La Bruyère,' there is an undeniable coarseness of
manners and a very easy treatment of the moral-
ities of life. A discrepancy in the handling of such
an imaginary subject which strikingly illustrates the
truth of Charles Lamb's Essay on the Artificial
Comedy of the last Century,' where he asserts.
that Comedy has just as much right to a dramatic
interest, apart from moral deductions, as Tragedy,
and that you might as well be supposed to approve
of the murders of Macbeth or Othello, as of the
unreal imbroglios and elaborate seductions of the
Fainalls and the Mirabels, the Dorimants, and Lady
Touchwoods, the heartless fops, the faithless wives,
the rascally valets and the swindling chamber-
maids, because you enjoy the poetry of the one and
the wit of the other. It was indeed a character-
istic of the time in which Miss Berry lived, that a
lady of unblemished life and untainted mind should
take pleasure in such an exercise of her faculties, and
her best friends probably did not regret the public
failure of her dramatic enterprise, although it
received the direct sanction of a respectable Scotch
professor, who augured its brilliant success.
I
THE BERRYS.
203
have spoken of the 'Characters' which Miss Berry
amused herself in portraying, according to a
literary fashion then prevalent. No specimen
of these is given in Lady Theresa Lewis's memoir,
and some refer to personages whose relatives
are still upon the scene. The following judgment
of the now historical Duchess of Gordon must be
read with the same qualifications which we have
applied to the Comedy, and it is curious as an
illustration of manners, besides its own wit and
liveliness.
'Flavia was intended for a woman of gallantry.
Circumstances have settled her in the country, the
wife of a dull husband and the mother of a dozen
children. Her constitution and her conscience are
eternally at war and will continue so, till age
delivers her up to devotion and robs both of the
victory. As a woman of gallantry she would have
had every virtue but one, and all the others would
have been easy to her. As a sober matron the
practice of that one is so painful as to rob her of
all satisfaction from any of the others. Made for
pleasure, she would have had just enough senti-
ment to enhance her favours, and too much con-
stitution to allow her sentiment to tire any one
204
THE BERRYS.
with her constancy. True to one lover whilst he
possessed her, if he contrived to throw another in
her way, he might be always sure to get rid of her
with only just as much distress as would flatter his
vanity and interest the next man to whom she
became attached. Too much occupied with
herself and her desires to think much of other
people, she would have been satisfied and benevo-
lent to all the world except her rival, and the
moment this rival ceased to offend her in that
capacity, she would have been capable of making
her her bosom friend. Her confessor would have
cleared her conscience of all her daily transgres-
sions, with less trouble than he now has to quiet
her doubts about past wanderings and her regret
at present mortification. Her naturally warm
feeling would have repented on her knees to God
with hardly less transport than she would have re-
turned to sin in the arms of her lover. As a woman
of gallantry she would have been the best of her
tribe, and her vices would have been natural to
her. As a matron, her faults only belonged to
her, and her virtues are so little her own that they
punish instead of making her happy.'
The following sketch of Lord Brougham in his
THE BERRYS.
205
younger days will be interesting to those who now
can judge how far its anticipations are correct.
He had evidently in his rise in life come to take.
less notice of his former friends and they were
making the best of it. It is dated 1808.
'I do more justice to Brougham than you imagine.
I am aware that his present manner and habits do
not proceed from his character but from circum-
stances—from his not being naturally placed in
the situation which his ambition, his feelings, and
his taste, equally make necessary to him, and
which his intellect tells him is his due. His whole
mind is so set on securing the means necessary for
this purpose that everything and everybody who
cannot in some manner help him, are neglected,
or unnoticed, or indifferent to him. Above the
mean arts of actual adulation to those he despises,
he selects the best he can among those most fitted
for his purpose, and consoles himself for the
weaknesses his quickness must see, and his pru-
dence not notice in their characters, by being
doubly severe on the characters of others. When
he shall have secured the independence and dis-
tinction to which his abilities in this country must
soon raise him we shall see him more generally
206
THE BERRYS.
attentive to merit, less severe to the want of it,
judging of persons as they really are, and not as they
can or may be useful to him, and, above all, getting
rid of a certain sort of affected reserve in his con-
versation, and of childish gravity in his behaviour.
We shall see him acquiring an unaffected popular
manner which may better make his superior
talents be forgiven by the trifling and the dull.
Playfair and Lord Webb Seymour both agree that
he has had two or three different manners since he
first appeared in the world, and the present is far
the worst.'
Miss Berry's only serious literary production
was the 'Comparative View of Social Life in
France and England;' a book which has perhaps
been superseded by the abundance of memoirs and
résumés with which the press of late years has
teemed, but which, taken in relation to the
English information of that time on such subjects,
exhibits much research and power of arrangement.
Of the many and various judgments it contains,
some are erroneous, and even superficial, but there
is a discrimination and fairness in estimating the
peculiarities and excellencies of the two countries,
which produced as much effect in France as in
THE BERRYS.
207
England. Benjamin Constant said of the first
volume, 'On vit avec les individus: ce n'est pas
une lecture, mais une société dans laquelle on
entre,' and he calls on her to complete her object
(as she did in a certain degree in her second
volume), by describing that new French nation,
which at once overthrew and occupied the old
social existence.
of life, it
After the
In this work, in her letters, in her journal, in her
fragments, Miss Berry ever asserts her sense of the
importance and value of Good Society for the
happiness and civilisation of mankind. To her it
was no mere pleasure or even grace
assumed all the dimensions of a duty.
decease of Mr. Berry, the ladies, though perhaps
not more really independent, entered on a more
distinct social position, remaining more habitually
at home, and receiving their friends more regularly.
The custom of entertaining your friends with
nothing but tea and conversation had by this time
become frequent and popular. The first lady of
fashion who attempted it was Lady Galway, with
the assistance of her daughter, the 'lively Miss
Monckton' of Boswell (afterwards the celebrated
Lady Cork), who used to boast that with nothing
208
THE BERRYS.
but Good Company she beat the Faro-table of
Albinia Lady Buckinghamshire. Contempora-
neous with Miss Berry were the salons of Miss
White, whose social spirit fought against the con-
tinual presence of a terrible malady, and of Lady
Davy, who came to London with the prestige of
having ruled over the Modern Athens. All these
passed away, but year after year the Miss Berrys
remained in the full stream of London life, only as
time advanced they went out less and less, till
there were few evenings before the first of May
(when they always let their town-house and took
one in the suburbs) in which the lighted windows
did not beckon in the passing friend. No serious
incident broke in on, or checked, this regular life of
sensible entertainment till the death of their cousin
Mr. Fergusson, whose generosity and hospitality
were almost all to them that the possession of
Raith would have been. After that sorrow, their
society became more limited to intimates, and, with
a trait of manners that recalled the old régime,
they never wore rouge again. In the later years
the entries in the Diary become rarer and more
Her
¹ Lady Galway was the second wife of the first Viscount.
daughter Mary, born in 1750 and married in 1786 to the seventh
Earl of Cork, only died in 1840.
THE BERRYS.
209
occasional; for long lapses of time they cease
altogether; every now and then there is a spasm
of the old regrets at not having been and having
done more in life, and we light on words pathetic
as these :-
'But why recall all this now, at my latest hour?
when, had all happened differently-had I been
called to show all that I myself am capable of, I
should be now, neither better nor worse. Perhaps
much worse than the poor, old, feeble soul, now
dictating these lines and blessing God for every day
that passes, with an absence of all acute pain of
body, and for every day that allows of that calm of
mind which ought to accompany a nearly approach-
ing departure to another state of existence, under the
pitying eye of an all merciful and all just Creator.'
My last extract will be strange in its serious
imaginativeness, and a strong instance how one
sorrow re-acts upon others.
A DREAM.
I THOUGHT that in one of the finest summer
evenings of the South of Europe, after having been
driving in an open carriage as far as a road over-
looking the Mediterranean allowed, on our return
P
210
THE BERRYS.
towards the lines of the fortress we got out to
walk, while such a moon as is only to be seen in
the South of Europe was rising in the clear blue
heavens. After a few steps I exclaimed, 'What an
exquisite scene! and how exquisitely is my mind
attuned to enjoy it? For you must be aware, my
dear soul, said I, pressing the arm of her on whom
I leant, that all your intentions, all your plans for
my happiness, have more than succeeded. That
I am more gratified, more happy, more satisfied
with his passion for me than I could have imagined
-more proud of the change of opinion I have
given him of my sex, and of the entire confidence
he now has in me. Let me add too, more pleased
with my situation and the duties it entails on me.
I need not say that the comfort, the support, the
repose, the increase of easy enjoyment that I re-
ceive from your friendship, leaves not a chink of
my heart unoccupied. I have now only to pray
that I may be removed from the world, before this
beautiful vision of life fades, as fade it must, from
my senses. I sometimes see his lively counten-
ance and gay mind, looking with a sort of anxiety
at my grave composure, and your enquiring eye
cast on me. But happiness is a serious thing, and
THE BERRYS.
2IF
mine, (as Champfort says) 'ne s'appuie pas sur
l'illusion, mais repose sur la vérité.' I have some-
times fancied within this last month, that I might
be going to give him a child. I want not this new
interest, every chink of my heart, as I have said,
is filled up. But perhaps a child of mine might
be an interest to you in your later life and a
support to him in old age. If so, it shall be
welcome, provided that then I may be allowed to
depart. I can in all confidence leave my child in
his and your protection, and shall die convinced
that I have exhausted everything that can make
life desirable.'
Here I awoke with my eyes suffused with tears,
to find myself a poor, feeble, old soul never having
possessed either husband or child, and having long
survived that friend who my waking, as well as my
sleeping thoughts, always recall to me, as the
comfort and support of nearly thirty years of my
sadly insignificant existence.
That this should have been written in 1840, about
the time I was most familiar with the social circle
in Curzon Street, and when I should have in-
stanced Miss Berry as a model of brilliant and
P 2
212
THE BERRYS.
blithe old age is humiliating to my penetration, but
nothing new to psychology. Indeed, I never well
understand her saying to me what surprised me at
the time, 'Every woman should run the risks of
marriage who could do so: the dusty highway of
life is the right road after all.'
It only remains to me to close these views of
the worth of these ladies, and their career by a
few general observations on the social character-
istics of the country and generation in which their
lot was cast, and the relations to them in which
they stood. When Madame de Chevreuse said
she had no disinclination to die, parce qu'elle allait
causer avec tous ses amis en l'autre monde, when
Count Pozzo di Borgo in some English house
drew a newly-arrived foreigner into a corner, with
the eager request, Viens donc causer, je n'ai pas
causé pour quinze jours.'-they expressed that csprit
de sociabilité, which, Madame de Staël said,
existed in France from the highest to the lowest,
and which in this country is so rare, that it
not only gives to those who exhibit it a peculiar
and foreign manner, but easily subjects them to
the imputation of frivolity or impertinence. The
universal reticence of all men in high political
THE BERRYS.
213
station with us, quite justifies the remark of a
traveller that 'an Englishman refuses to speak just
in proportion as he has anything to say;' and
there is, no doubt, more adventure related and
more mutual interest excited in any French café
militaire than in the United Service Club, where
there is hardly a man present, who has not been the
witness of, or the actor in, some of the historical
events or memorable circumstances of our age.
Neither our language nor our temperament favour
that sympathetic intercourse, where the feature
and the gesture are as active as the voice, and in
which the pleasure does not so much consist in the
thing communicated as in the act of communication;
and still less are we inclined to value and cultivate
that true Art of Conversation, that rapid counter-
play and vivid exercise of combined intelligences,
which bears to the best ordinary speech the relation
that serious Whist bears to 'playing cards,' and
which pre-supposes, not previous study, but the long
and due preparation of the imagination and the
intellect.
It follows that with us the conversationist is
rather looked upon with curiosity and interest as a
man endowed with a special gift, than accepted as
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THE BERRYS.
an acquisition to the social commerce of life. In
listening to the philosophical monologues of
Coleridge, the illustrated anecdotes and fanciful
sallies of Sydney Smith, the rich outpourings of
Lord Macaulay's infinite knowledge, or the pic-
turesque and prophetic utterances of Mr. Carlyle,
we have been conscious that we were rather en-
joying a substitute for good conversation than
additions to the common stock. The monopoly of
attention which was required, was, in most cases,
willingly conceded; but even the wonderful intel-
lectual exhibition did not make up for the de-
ficiency in that sympathy between the speaker and
the hearers which gives a relish to very ordinary
parlance and very inferior wit, and which heightens
tenfold the enjoyment of the communication of
brighter and loftier ideas.
It is noticeable that certain English persons, not-
withstanding the impediments of the language,
produce more effect in conversation with foreigners
than with their own countrymen. We suspect this
must, to some extent, have been the case with Miss
Berry, to have elicited such warm expressions of
admiration from Madame de Staël, who attached
special importance to that faculty, and to have
THE BERRYS.
215
made all visitors from the Continent so thoroughly
at home in her salon. Good nature and good
sense were really all that could be predicated
of the substance of her usual talk, but in the
manner of it there was a cheerful appreciation of all
that was said or done, which gave encouragement
to the shiest an appeal to any wit or wisdom
the room might hold to come out and show itself,
which was rarely unheard,—and a simplicity which
dispersed by its contact all insolence or assumption.
Add to this the knowledge and the interest.
acquired by an acute observation, and a retentive
memory through this unusually long and varied
life, and you have a combination all the more
agreeable from its absence of the marvellous or
the sublime. The greater part of the frequenters
of Miss Berry's society might think themselves at
least as clever and well-read as she was; and,
though they were probably mistaken, they did not
go away with less self-satisfaction. The conversation
at Lydia White's might have been more literary,
and at Lady Davy's more scientific, but at the Miss
Berry's it had a flavour of fashion about it, which
is not distasteful even to the most philosophic or
matter-of-fact Englishman, and kept itself totally
216
THE BERRYS.
free from any speciality which could be made an
object of ridicule or ground of offence. By its very
familiarity and kindliness, this society was liable
to the invasion of the garrulous and the tiresome;
but even the specimens of that inevitable species
which were found there were more tolerable than
in houses of greater pretence, and became inspired
by the genius of the place with some sense of
mercy or of shame.
From the multitudinous shape which London
society is now assuming, two consequences are
imminent; first the difficulty of large re-unions,
agreeable because in so vast a multitude there must
be somebody whom you wish to meet, from the un-
fitness or inability of our houses to contain the whole
of one's acquaintance, and secondly, the retirement
within a very limited circle of relatives and private
friends of those persons who would have been willing
in the old time to have contributed their fair share
to the social enjoyment of others. With the excuse
of real discomfort abroad, joined to an Englishman's
natural inclinations to stay at home; with the
difficulty of meeting the few he likes, added to the
certainty of encountering a crowd he abhors; with
the increasing severity of the duties and respon-
THE BERRYS.
217
sibilities of public life, and the diminution of the
external respect and importance it imparts, there
is every inducement to our wealthier, and nobler,
and more fastidious countrymen to retain an
exclusiveness of habits and an isolation of life,
which can be indulged in with impunity by Legiti-
mists in Paris or Men-of-letters in Boston, but
which, if systematically persisted in, will here
seriously impair the due relation of classes, and alter
the political structure of our civil existence. The
great can no longer remain in an empyrean of their
own, even if that atmosphere be purer, wiser, and
better than the world below; but, as unfortunately
it is the tendency of all exclusiveness of this kind to
generate a very different kind of atmosphere, there
is the double peril of the injury to the order and
the damage to the individuals. It is, therefore, no
exaggeration to say, that such a society as the
Misses Berry established and maintained for nearly
half a century-bringing together on a common
ground of female intercourse, not only men illus-
trious in different walks of life, but what might
aptly be called the men of the day-men who had
won and men who were winning, men who wished
to learn and men ready to teach, restrained and
218
THE BERRYS.
softened by a womanly influence that never de-
generated into the social police which a less
skilful hostess often finds necessary to impose-had
its moral and political bearings, besides its personal
and superficial influences.
This then is the real meaning and right of such
persons to respect and remembrance. Inex-
plicable sympathies underlie all human association,
and are the foundation of the civil order of the
world. That men should care for one another at
all, thought Mohammed, is always a mystery; and
it is just in proportion that they care for one
another, so as to take an interest in one another's
daily life, that society is harmonised, and, beyond
Mohammed, christianised. Honour, then, to the
good old ladies, who helped on this good work!
They will soon be only personally remembered by
those to whom the streets of London have become
a range of inhabited tombs; yet the day may be
distant before social tradition forgets the house in
Curzon-Street where dwelt the Berrys.
In these pages I have spoken almost indifferently
of these sisters in the singular and the plural. And
this is, in truth, a fair representation of their rela-
tion to one another. It was said that after Mary's
THE BERRYS.
219
i
unhappy engagement their friendship was lessened;
but there is no sign of it in the biography. They
appear on the scene sometimes single, sometimes
double, owing to the sororal condition perhaps
more than the elder and the abler would willingly
have accepted. Agnes, it is clear, would have been
nothing above an amiable, cheery, pretty, woman,
but for Mary's superiority; yet it is undeniable
that her liveliness was a most necessary compliment
to Miss Berry's graver disposition, and that it was
hard to say which was the greater gainer by the
faculties of the other. During an illness, in which
Mary was supposed to be seriously attacked, I was
present when Mr. Rogers came to see her, not
having visited the house for many years previous.
She received him with great kindness, but, after
some strong expressions of sympathy, Agnes,
bearing no longer what she, I think wrongly,
believed to be a false and barren exhibition of
feeling, burst out, 'You might have been, and you
were not, anything to us when we were living, and
you now come and insult us with your civilities
when we are nigh dead.' This was a specimen of
the more passionate, and, it may be, one-sided
220
THE BERRYS.
nature, which Agnes never concealed, and which
time did not subdue.
Agnes died first, and Mary Berry went on for a
short time bravely enduring life. But within the
year the sisters lay together in the pleasant grave-
yard of Petersham, close to the scenes which they
had inspired with so many happy associations. To
few it is given, as to these, to retain in extreme old
age not only the clearness of the head but the
brightness of the heart-to leave in those about
them no sense of relief from the wayward second-
childishness which so sadly rounds the life of man,
but a pure regret that these almost patriarchal
lives could not have lasted still longer.
The following lines, which appeared in the
'Times' the day after the funeral, embody in
verse the thoughts and feelings of which their life
was the expression:-
Two friends within one grave we place,
United in our tears,
Sisters, scarce parted for the space
Of more than eighty years :
And she, whose bier is borne to-day
The one the last to go,
Bears with her thoughts that force their way
Above the moment's woe:
THE BERRYS.
22I
Thoughts of the varied human life
Spread o'er that field of time,
The toil, the passion, and the strife,
The virtue and the crime:
Yet 'mid the long tumultuous scene,
The image on our mind
Of these dear women rests serene
In happy bounds confined.
Within one undisturbed abode
Their presence seems to dwell,
From which continual pleasures flowed,
And countless graces fell;
Not unbecoming this our age
Of decorative forms,
Yet simple as the hermitage
Exposed to Nature's storms.
Our English grandeur on the shelf
Deposed its decant gloom :
And every pride unloosed itself
Within that modest room;
Where none were sad and few were dull,
And each one said his best,
And beauty was most beautiful
With vanity at rest.
Brightly the day's discourse rolled on,
Still casting on the shore
Memorial pearls of times by-gone
And worthies now no more.
And little tales of long ago,
Took meaning from those lips,
Wise chroniclers of joy and woe,
And eyes without eclipse.
222
THE BERRYS.
No taunt or scoff obscured the wit
That there rejoiced to reign;
They never would have laughed at it
If it had carried pain.
There needless scandal, e'en though true,
Provoked no bitter smile,
And even men-of-fashion grew
Benignant for awhile.
Not that there lacked the nervous scor
At every public wrong,
Not that a friend was left forlorn
When victim of the strong;
Free words expressing generous blood
No nice punctilio weighed,
For deep an earnest womanhood
Their reason underlaid.
As generations onward came,
They loved from all to win
Revival of the sacred flame
That glowed their hearts within ;
While others in time's greedy mesh
The faded garlands flung,
Their hearts went out and gathered fresh
Affections from the young.
Farewell, dear Ladies! in your loss
We feel the past recede,
The gap, our hands could almost cross,
Is now a gulf indeed.
Ye, and the days in which your claims.
And charms were early known,
Lose substance, and ye stand as names
That Hist'ry makes it own.
THE BERRYS.
223
Farewell the pleasant social page
Is read; but ye remain
Examples of ennobled age,
Long life without a stain ;
A lesson to be scorned by none,
Least by the wise and brave,
Delightful as the winter sun
That gilds this open grave.

HARRIET LADY ASHBURTON,
FROM A DRAWING BY SAM. LAURENCE IN THE POSSESSION OF LORD HOUGHTON.
HARRIET LADY ASHBURTON,
225
VI.
HARRIET LADY ASHBURTON.
WHEN the successful Orator, Actor, Journalist, and
Pamphleteer, must be content, in the main, with the
fame and the work of their own short day, from the
inability of any record or biography to reproduce
their impression on mankind, how are the social
celebrities of any time to live even here beyond
the shifting-scene, in which they have played their
part? And yet the world (more grateful perhaps
for having been pleased than for having been in-
structed) is not unwilling to invest them with a
personal interest and sympathy that the important
figures of the part rarely obtain, and to give even
to insignificant facts and pointless gossip connected
with their place in life the airs and attitudes of
'History.' The fairest claimants to this distinction
are, no doubt, women like Mrs. Elizabeth Montague
or Miss Berry, whose lives have lapped over genera-
Q
226
HARRIET LADY ASHBURTON.
tions of mankind, and who accumulate by the mere
lapse of time a multitude of small associations with
intellectual and political celebrities around their
names. But I am here desirous to continue the
recollection of a lady, whose sphere of action was
limited, both in extent and in duration; and whose
peculiar characteristics rather impeded than pro-
moted her position in an order of society where any
strong individuality is both rare and unwelcome.
It is hard to conjecture what would have been
the destiny of so complex a character in the ordi-
nary struggle for existence: whether its nobler
qualities would have made their way above the wil-
fulness and self-assertion that isolated and encumbe-
red it? whether the wonderful humour that relieved
by its insight, and elevated by its imagination, the
natural rudeness of her temperament and despotism
of her disposition, might not have degenerated into
cynicism and hatred? Enough that here for once
the accidents of birth and wealth resulted in giving
liberty of thought and action to an ingenuous spirit,
and at the same time placed it under the controul, not
of manners alone, but of the sense of high state
and large responsibility. She was an instance in
which aristocracy gave of its best and showed at
its best: although she may have owed little to the
HARRIET LADY ASHBURTON.
227
qualities she inherited from an irascible race, and
to an unaffectionate education. She often alluded
to the hard repression of her childhood, and its
effects. 'I was constantly punished for my im-
pertinence, and you see the result. I think I have
made up for it since.'
For many years before the husband of Lady
Harriet Baring succeeded to his father's title and
estates, Bath House and The Grange had been
centres of a most agreeable and diversified society.
The first Lord Ashburton combined great know-
ledge, experience, and discrimination, with a rare
benignity of character and simplicity of manner.
During his long career in the House of Commons
the general moderation and breadth of his opinions
had had the usual result of failing to command an
Assembly that prefers any resolute error to judicious
ambiguity; but, at the same time, these qualities
had secured to him the personal esteem of the lead-
ing men of both parties. Thus his house was long a
neutral ground for political intercourse, the preva-
lent tone being Tory, but of that aspect of Toryism
which was fast lapsing into the Conservative
Liberalism of Sir Robert Peel and Lord Aberdeen.
The vast monetary negotiations in which Lord
Q 2
228
HARRIET LADY ASHBURTON.
Ashburton had been engaged in various parts of
the world-from the time when, almost as a boy,
he transacted the sale of Louisiana to the United
States, to the conclusion of the long Continental
War, brought to his table every remarkable foreign
personage who visited this country, and with the
most distinguished of whom-King Leopold, for
instance he had close personal relations. The
House of Baring, by marriage and community of
interests, was as much American as British, and
offered its hospitality to every eminent citizen of
the United States. The cordial reception of artists
was the natural concomitant of the taste and
wealth that illuminated the walls with the rarest
and most delightful examples of ancient and
modern Art, now, with few exceptions, lost to his
family and the world for ever, by one of those
lamentable accidents which no individual care, and
no mechanical appliance, seem adequate to pre-
vent or to remedy. Nor was the literary element
wanting, though it generally found access through
some channel of political or personal intimacy. In
such company-in which a young woman even of
high social or intellectual claims might well have
passed unobserved-Lady Harriet at once took a
HARRIET LADY ASHBURTON.
229
high and independent position, while towards her
husband's family and connections she assumed a de-
meanour of superiority that at the time gave just
offence, and which later efforts and regrets never
wholly obliterated. I am inclined to attribute this
defect of conduct rather to a wilful repugnance
towards any associations that seemed fixed upon
her by circumstances or obligation, and not of her
own free choice-a feeling which manifested itself
just as decidedly towards her own relatives—rather
than to any pride of birth, or even haughtiness of
disposition. I remember her saying, 'The worst of
being very ill is that one is left to the care of
one's relations, and one has no remedy at law,
whatever they may be.' On the other hand, we
may well recollect the scathing irony with which she.
treated excessive genealogical pretensions, especi-
ally among her own connections; while she never
concealed her sense of the peculiar national im-
portance and commercial dignity of the 'Barings.'
'They are everywhere,' she said, 'they get every-
thing. The only check upon them is, that they
are all members of the Church of England; other-
wise there is no saying what they would do.'
It was the natural effect of this independence of
230
HARRIET LADY ASHBURTON.
any domestic circle, or even of any society of
which she was not herself the centre and the chief,
which induced Lady Harriet Baring to collect
around her a small body of friends, of which her
own singular talent was the inspiring spirit. Thus
when, in the course of events, she became the head
of the family, she was at once able, not only to
sustain the social repute of the former generation,
but to stamp it with a special distinction. I do
not know how I can better describe this faculty
than as the fullest and freest exercise of an
intellectual gaiety, that presented the most agree-
able and amusing pictures in few and varied words;
making high comedy out of daily life, and re-
lieving sound sense and serious observation with
imaginative contrasts and delicate surprises. It is un-
necessary to say that this power, combined with such
a temperament as I have described, was eminently
dangerous, and could not but occasionally descend
into burlesque and caricature; and, in the personal
talk with which English society abounds, it could
not keep altogether clear of satirical injustice. But
to those who had the opportunity of watching
its play, and tracing its motives, there was an entire
absence of that ill-nature which makes ridicule
HARRIET LADY ASHBURTON.
231
easy; and even when apparently cruel, it was
rather the outburst of a judicial severity than of a
wanton unkindness. In the conversational combats
thus provoked, the woman no doubt frequently
took the woman's advantage, and attacked where
no defence was decorously possible; but the
impulse was always to measure herself with the
strong—not to triumph over the weak.
But while persons cognisant of the art, and
appreciative of her rapidity of movement and
dexterity of fence, were fully sympathetic with
Princess Lieven's judgment, Qu'il vaudrait
bien s'abonner pour entendre causer cette femme,
there were many estimable people to whom the
electric transition from grave to gay was thoroughly
distasteful; and there were others who, distanced
in the race of thought and expression, went away
with a sense of humiliation or little inclination to
return. Many who would not have cared for a quiet
defeat, shrank from the merriment of her victory.
I remember one of them saying: 'I do not mind
being knocked down, but I can't stand being danced
upon afterwards.' It was in truth a joyous.
sincerity that no conventionalities, high or low,
could restrain-a festive nature flowering through
the artificial soil of elevated life.
232
HARRIET LADY ASHBURTON.
There could be no better guarantee of these
qualities than the constant friendship that existed
between Lady Ashburton and Mr. Carlyle-on her
part one of filial respect and duteous admiration.
The frequent presence of the great moralist of itself
gave to the life of Bath House and The Grange a
reality that made the most ordinary worldly com-
ponent parts of it more human and worthy than
elsewhere. The very contact of a conversation
which was always bright, and never frivolous,
brought out the best elements of individual
character, reconciled formal politicians with free
men of letters and men of pleasure with those
that bear the burden of the day. 'Ask me to
meet your printers,' was the often-quoted speech
of a lady of fashion. Of course there are barriers in
our social life which no individual will or power can
throw down. You cannot bring into close sympa-
thetic communion the operative poor and the in-
operative rich any more in intellectual than in
physical relations, but all that was possible was
here done. Patronage was neither given nor taken :
if the person suited the society, and showed by his
contribution or his enjoyment that he did so, he
might be quite sure of its continuance; otherwise
HARRIET LADY ASHBURTON.
233
he left it, without much notice taken on one side
or the other. That this was not always so, an
amusing passage between Mr. Thackeray and Lady
Ashburton illustrates. Having been most kindly
received, he took umbrage at some hard rallying,
perhaps rather of others than of himself, and not
only declined her invitations, but spoke of her with
discourtesy and personal dislike. After some
months, when the angry feeling on his part had
had time to die out, he received from her a card
of invitation to dinner. He returned it, with an
admirable drawing on the back, representing him-
self kneeling at her feet with his hair all aflame
from the hot coals she was energetically pouring on
his head out of an ornamental brazier. This act of
contrition was followed by a complete reconcilia-
tion, and much friendship on her part towards him
and his family.
But although such men were admitted to her
intimacy, and all men-of-letters or promising
aspirants were welcomed to her larger assemblies,
the chief intimates of the house were men of public
life, either in Parliament or the Press, with no ex-
clusion of party, but with an inclination towards
the politics which her husband supported. As Mr.
234
HARRIET LADY ASHBURTON.
Bingham Baring he had formed part of the adminis-
tration of Sir Robert Peel in 1835, and had all the
mind and thought of a statesman, but was deficient
in those aptitudes which enable a man to make the
most of his talents, and present them with effect
to others. He had that shyness which often
belongs to Englishmen of great capacity and
knowledge, and to which those faculties themselves,
in a certain degree, contribute. By the very power
of appreciation of the breadth and gravity of affairs,
by the very insight into the merits of men and things,
by their very sense of the moral and intellectual
defects of those to whom the world accords favour
and honour, such men give an impression of
mental weakness, and even of moral inferiority;
whereas they have within them all the real elements
of governing force, and on a right occasion will
frequently exhibit them. When such qualities are
combined, as they were in Lord Ashburton, with
the noblest and purest purpose, with an entirely
unselfish and truthful disposition, and with a
determination to fulfil every duty of his station,
from the lowest to the highest, they may excite
in them that know and love them best a sense of
the deep injustice done to them by public opinion,
HARRIET LADY ASHBURTON.
235
and an ardent desire to remedy it. Thus Lady
Ashburton lost no opportunity to stimulate her
husband's ambition, and was anxious above all
things to make her own great social position
subservient to his public fortunes; and yet, by one
of the mischances which attend the combinations of
human character, her very eminence damaged his
consideration, and his affection and admiration for
her were the instruments of his comparative insig-
nificance. There was something offensive to the
sense of English independence in the constant
enjoyment he took in the display of her genius and
effervescence of her gaiety. It was in truth a
concurrence of lover-like delight and intellectual
wonder, and those who saw in it a slavish submis-
sion were unconscious of the quiet authority he
assumed in all the serious concerns of life, and the
gradual moulding of the violent and angular parts
of her nature, under the correction of his moral
elevation and the experience of his gentle wisdom.
Nor indeed was there any want of his influence
even in the field of ordinary society. He had an un-
quenchable thirst for information, and brought about
him every special capacity and all sound learn-
ing. I never knew anyone with a keener sense of
236
HARRIET LADY ASHBURTON.
imposture or a shrewder detection of superficial
knowledge. In this his intellect was but the
reflection of his moral self, which had so entire an
abhorrence of falsehood that I have often thought
it was saved from a pedantry of veracity by the
humoristic atmosphere with which it was sur-
rounded. But though thus in a certain degree rc-
conciled to the common transactions of political and
social life, yet it always maintained a certain isola-
tion which prevented him from becoming the ready
comrade of ordinary practical men, or the handy
colleague of any Government.
I have no intention of painting a group of The
Grange, but there was one member of this goodly
company so constant and so conspicuous, so
united to it by ties of intellectual sympathy, that
I may well profit by the introduction of his
name to satisfy my own feelings of gratitude
and affection. Mr. Bingham Baring had made the
acquaintance of Mr. Charles Buller in Madeira,
where he had accompanied a dying brother. The
opportunities which so often bring Englishmen
together in close relations in a foreign country,
resulted in an earnest friendship between the young
men, which was afterwards cemented by an intro-

MU
CHARLES BULLER,
DRAWN BY DUPPA.
HARRIET LADY ASHBURTON.
237
duction to Mr. Buller's family, and its remarkable
society, that included Mr. (now Sir) Henry Taylor,
Mr. John Sterling, and Mr. Thomas Carlyle. Lady
Harriet fully shared her husband's esteem for Mr.
Buller and enjoyment of his social qualities. Now
that death has swept off with such a strange rapidity
the public men who began their career about the time.
of the first Reform Bill, and who for the most part
became the pupils and followers of Sir Robert Peel,
it must not be forgotten that there sat on the oppo-
site bench one for whom the House of Commons
predicted as brilliant a success as for any member
of the other party. Mr. Buller had been fortunate
in identifying himself with a question now trite
cnough, but then pregnant with interest to masses of
men and the destinies of the world. To replace the
quarrelsome relations between the British Colonies
and the Home Government (then personified in Sir
James Stephen, who bore the sobriquet of 'Mother-
country') by a system which would at once de-
velope the faculties of the Anglo-Saxon race, and
relieve England from its weight of pauperism by
systematic emigration, was a project of high
practical purpose and beneficial hope. With him, as
comrades in the cause, were the present Lord Grey
238
HARRIET LADY ASHBURTON.
and the late Sir William Molesworth, who, taken
away in the prime of life, but not without having
attained high political office, holds his place among
the statesmen of his country. Mr. Buller had the
important advantage of having been employed in
the pacification of Canada, as Secretary to Lord
Durham, and had had the credit of drawing up the
Report, which was generally approved, without
sharing the discomfiture that fell on some of the
official conductors of the negotiation. The Colonial
policy thus initiated has since run its full course, and
though not attended with all the magnificent effects
then anticipated, and at the present moment rather
veering in its direction, has nevertheless left its mark
on the history of the world, and offers in its
integrity the only possible solution of the problem
of the future migrations of the British race.
My own relations with Charles Buller dated
from Cambridge; and when I entered the House of
Commons, he had won the ear of the House not only
on his special question, but on all the great agita-
tions of the day. During many years I found in him
an affectionate friend and judicious counsellor, not
less when we belonged to different parties than when
the conversion of Sir Robert Peel to the policy of
HARRIET LADY ASHBURTON.
239
Free Trade in corn broke up the Government, and
sent his followers to make new combinations, as
best suited the opinions they had acquired or
maintained.
As an episode in our intimacy, I am glad to re-
member a jeu d'esprit which we concocted on the
occasion of the Queen's first Fancy Ball, where the
chief characters of the court and times of King
Edward the Third were represented. This was a
supposed debate in the French Chamber of Depu-
ties on the preceding day, reported 'by express' in
the 'Morning Chronicle:' originating in an inter-
pellation of M. Berryer, to the effect-'Whether
the French Ambassador in England had been
invited to the bal masqué which is to be given
by the haughty descendant of the Plantagenets for
the purpose of awakening the long-buried griefs of
France in the disasters of Cressy and Poictiers
and the loss of Calais.' This speech, by Buller,
is an excellent imitation of the great orator's
manner, though I remember protesting against
the grotesqueness of the demand 'Whether M.
de St. Aulaire was going with his attaches, with
bare feet and halters round their necks, represent-
ing the unfortunate Burgesses?' It concluded with
240
HARRIET LADY ASHBURTON.
the declamation 'It is on the banks of the
Rhine that the cannon of France ought to ac-
company the dancers of St. James's.
It is by
taking the Balearic Isles that we should efface the
recollections of Agincourt.' I followed in the name
of M. de Lamartine, reproving the speaker with
talking of the 'vilification of France,' and saying
France could well afford to leave to each people its
own historical traditions.-'Ah! let them have their
splendid guinguette-that people at once so grave
and frivolous. Let them dance as they please, as
long as the great mind of France calmly and nobly
traverses the world.' Lamartine was answered by
M. de Tocqueville (also mine), finding fault with the
ball chiefly as a repudiation of the democratic idea,
and a mournful reaction against the spirit of the
times; saying, with a sad and grave impartiality,
'We too have erred-we too have danced and
costumed the heirs of the throne of July have
sanctioned this frivolity, but there was no quadrille
of the Heroes of Fontenoy!' M. Guizot (Buller)
closed the discussion by stating that Lord Aber-
deen had given the most satisfactory explanations
-that the Queen of England desired to educate
her people by a series of archæological enter-
HARRIET LADY ASHBURTON.
241
tainments; but that, in deference to the susceptibili-
ties of France, M. de St. Aulaire would represent
the Virgin of Domremy-he would go as 'Joan of
Arc.' It seems incredible that what we meant for a
political squib should have turned out a successful
hoax. It was discussed with gravity in the clubs;
and, at the ball itself, Sir Robert Peel told me,
with great satisfaction, that Sir James Graham had
rushed into his private room in Whitehall Gardens
with the paper in his hand, exclaiming, 'There is
the devil to pay in France about this foolish ball.'
But the Press was the most deluded victim: the
'Irish Pilot' remarked that 'the fact of so slight an
occasion having given rise to so grave a discussion
is the strongest evidence of the state of feeling in
France towards this country.' The Dumfries
Courier' commented at much length on this as
one of the most erratic and ridiculous scenes that
ever lowered the dignity of a deliberative assembly.'
The 'Sémaphore de Marsailles' translated the article
into French as a faithful report, and the 'Commerce '
indignantly protested against the taste for a masque-
rade going so far as 'to allow the panoply of a
woman so cruelly sacrificed to British pride to be
worn on such an occasion.' Others formally denied
R
242
HARRIET LADY ASHBURTON.
that the genuine armour had ever been sent from
Paris. It is only fair to remark that at the
time France had been violently excited by Lord
Palmerston's Syrian policy, and that England was
believed capable of anything that might degrade
or injure her.
to
A short time afterwards Buller added
our political Facetia a Latin letter, addressed
by the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford to the members of
the Senate, urging them to vote for the abrogation
of the Statute passed in 1836 against Dr. Hampden,
and which is proudly announced as 'not written in
the language of the Papal schism.' An extract is
worth preserving as a specimen of its sound humour,
and in its exposition of the clerical politics of the
time reminding the historical reader of the 'Epistolæ
Obscurorum Virorum,' and the ecclesiastics of their
day. Even those were not without believers in
their authenticity! One writer (1515) expresses
his wonder why such great men should be called
"obscure."
'Radicales sunt penitus eversi: Peelus est in
potentiâ. Peelus autem in potentiâ est res totaliter
differens Peelo in oppositione. Si tutò possemus
subvertere illum, non singulum momentum in officio
HARRIET LADY ASHBURTON.
243
maneret, quia nobis videtur facere omnia ea quibus
alii tantum loquebantur de. Videte autem, fratres
carissimi! in quâ lamentabili positione ponuntur
Ecclesia, amicique Ecclesiæ ! Si subvertimus
Peelum, mortuæ certitudini habebimus Fohannulum.
Hæc est res non singulo momento contemplanda.
Necesse est igitur ut faciamus quodcunque vult
Peelus. Peelus vult pretendere esse liberalis ; necesse
igitur est ut nos etiam liberales esse pretenderemus.
Et ut condemnatio Doctoris Hampden opus suum
omnino peregit, sine ullo damno possumus liberalem
cursum incipere revocando illam.'
These reminiscences of Charles Buller's special
intellectual characteristic will suggest the con-
sideration whether, though accompanied as it was
with strong common sense and a clear intuition into
political theories and conditions, it would not have
seriously affected and probably have endangered
his political career had he lived to pursue it to its
legitimate end. Experience in the House of Com-
mons teaches that while wit is an invaluable
element in parliamentary discussion, humour is
worthless or detrimental. Images and arguments
that in the mind of the humoristic speaker in no way
derogate from the dignity of his subject, seem ir-
R 2
244
HARRIET LADY ASHBURTON.
relevant or degrading to those who are without the
apprehensive faculty. This effect probably applies
to any large and mixed audience, where the majority
must always be deficient in the finer perceptions. It
is, therefore, doubtful whether Charles Buller could
have so restrained his grotesque fancy as to have
avoided an impression of flippancy and insincerity,
and conformed himself to the traditions of official
demeanour which the English people approve in
their governors.
He died very unexpectedly after a slight opera-
tion, showing great weakness of natural constitution.
A fortnight before he had been the life of a large
party at The Grange, where his place was never
filled again. An accident in infancy had seriously
damaged his good looks, but certainly did not
authorise the impression of cynicism and satiric
obliquity which some persons, strangers to his
most amiable disposition, professed to find in his
countenance. Those indeed who knew him well
could see a certain tender and even pathetic grace
beneath the deformity, which Mr. Weekes has
rendered with great skill in the bust in Westminster
Abbey. This work of art is the more admirable,
as the sculptor had to compose it out of posthumous
materials. I remember when I went, by Lord and
HARRIET LADY ASHBURTON
245
Lady Ashburton's desire, to Dr. Buckland, then
Dean of Westminster, to take his pleasure as to
the erection of the monument, he not only received
the request with hearty concurrence, but himself
selected the position-close to that of Horner;
remarking that they would stand well together
from the similarity of their early distinction and
premature deaths.' I give the Epitaph I had the
privilege to compose as the best summary of my
estimate of his moral and intellectual attributes.
HERE, AMIDST THE MEMORIALS OF MATURER GREATNESS,
THIS TRIBUTE OF PRIVATE AFFECTION AND PUBLIC HONOUR
RECORDS THE TALENTS, VIRTUES, AND EARLY DEATH OF
THE RIGHT HONOURABLE CHARLES BULLER:
WHO, AS AN INDEPENDENT MEMBER OF PARLIAMENT,
AND IN THE DISCHARGE OF IMPORTANT OFFICES OF STATE,
UNITED THE DEEPEST HUMAN SYMPATHIES
WITH WIDE AND PHILOSOPHIC VIEWS OF GOVERNMENT
AND MANKIND,
AND PURSUED THE NOBLEST POLITICAL AND SOCIAL OBJECTS,
ABOVE PARTY SPIRIT AND WITHOUT AN ENEMY.
HIS CHARACTER WAS DISTINGUISHED BY SINCERITY AND RESOLUTION,
HIS MIND BY VIVACITY AND CLEARNESS OF COMPREHENSION;
WHILE THE VIGOUR OF EXPRESSION AND SINGULAR WIT,
THAT MADE HIM EMINENT IN DEBATE AND DELIGHTFUL IN SOCIETY,
WERE TEMPERED BY A MOST GENTLE AND GENEROUS DISPOSITION,
EARNEST IN FRIENDSHIP AND DELIGHTFUL TO ALL.
THE BRITISH COLONIES WILL NOT FORGET THE STATESMAN
WHO SO WELL APPRECIATED THEIR DESIRES AND THEIR DESTINIES,
AND HIS COUNTRY, RECALLING WHAT HE WAS, DEPLORES
THE VANISHED HOPE OF ALL HE MIGHT HAVE BECOME.
HE DIED NOVEMBER 29, 1848.
HE WAS BORN AUGUST 6, 1806.
246
HARRIET LADY ASHBURTON.
The manner of life at The Grange did not differ
The
from that of our best country-houses.
comforts and appliances incidental to the condi-
tion were there without notice or apparent care : and
there was that highest luxury which the wealthi-
est so rarely enjoy-the ease of riches. Lady
Ashburton met her guests at breakfast, but was
recommended by her medical advisers to dine early
in her own room. This arrangement enabled her
to initiate and direct the conversation at dinner
with no other distraction, and to combine the
fullest exercise of her own faculty with the skilful
observation and exhibition of the powers of all
around the table. There was no avoidance of
and the false
special or professional topics; and
delicacy which so often induces modern talk to
shun the very channels into which it can run the
most naturally and the fullest, would have no place,
where every man felt that he would be respected
and admired for what he really was, and for what
he knew the best, and where all pretensions fell
before the liberty and equality of Humour. At the
same time there was a decided restraint, by no
means agreeable to those accustomed to the looser
treatment of delicate subjects permitted in many
HARRIET LADY ASHBURTON.
247
refined circles, and who were annoyed at the cool
reception given even to brilliant talk on equivocal
matter.
It was with no disregard of her sex that Lady
Ashburton preferred the society of men. Having
lost her only child by a sad mischance, she shrank
from the sympathies of family life, and avoided topics
that might suggest useless regrets. Nearly the
whole of her female companions were in the same
domestic position as herself, and yet to children
generally, and especially to those of her intimates,
she was kind and even affectionate. In young
women of personal attractions she took a deep
interest, and I know no better summary of the
place and circumstances than that of one who still.
adorns the world, who, I remember, in answer to
some question as to her stay there, replied, 'I never
count days at The Grange: I only know that it is
morning when I come, and night when I go away.'
I will now place within this slight framework
some reminiscences of Lady Ashburton's thoughts
and expressions-faint but faithful echoes of
living speech. They must not be regarded as con-
sidered apothegms, or even fixed opinions, but as
the rapid and almost interjectional utterances of
248
HARRIET LADY ASHBURTON,
dialogue, replying, interrupting, anticipating, with
a magnetic prescience, the coming words, check-
ing and often crushing any rising contradiction.
They will seem, I doubt not, in many points hardly
reconcilable with the outline of character that I
have drawn-almost ironical negatives of the very
qualities I have ascribed to her-but yet they are
thoroughly true in relation to her deeper self, and
though paradoxes in part, they do not only shut the
door on commonplace, but let in some clearer and
wider light.
(Of Herself):
How fortunate that I am not married to King
. Leopold! He said to his French wife, 'Pas de
propos légers. I suppose he meant No jokes.'
Now I like nothing else—I should wish to be
accountable for nothing I said, and to contradict
myself every minute.
It is dreadful for me to have no domestic duties.
I always envy the German women.
'cuisinière incomprise.'
I am a
(In London)-You say it is a fine day, and wish
me to go out. How can I go out? Ordering one's
carriage, and waiting for it, and getting into it: that
HARRIET LADY ASHBURTON.
249
is not 'going out.' If I were a shopkeeper's
wife I would go out when and where and how I
pleased.
If I am to go into London society, and sit for
hours by Lord all I say is, I shall be carried
out.
I always feel a kind of average between myself
and any other person I am talking with-between
us two, I mean: so that when I am talking to
Spedding—I am unutterably foolish-beyond per-
mission.¹
Can I do everything at once? Am I Briareus ?
I like you to say the civil things, and then I can
do the contrary.
What with the cold water in which I am plunged
in the morning, and the cold water thrown upon me
in the day, life in England is intolerable.
In one's youth one doubts whether one has a
body, and when one gets old whether one has a
soul; but the body asserts itself so much the
stronger of the two.
I have not only never written a book, but I know
nobody whose book I should like to have written.
¹ Lady Ashburton called her intimate friends by their surnames,
when speaking of or to them, after the useful fashion of an older
time.
250
HARRIET LADY ASHBURTON.
I remember when a child telling everybody I was
present at mamma's marriage. I was whipped for
it, but I believed it all the same.
(Would it not be the death of you to live a year
with ?). No; I should not die. I should kill.
When I passed by Bennett's church in the morn-
ing, all dressed in my diamonds and flowers, to be
drawn by Swinton, the beadle in full costume
bowed low to me, taking me for an altar-piece or
something to be reverenced.
When I am with High-Church people, my op-
position to them makes me feel no church at all—
hardly bare walls with doors and windows.
I forget everything, except injuries.
(Of Morals and Men):
I should like exactly to know the difference
between money and morality.
I have no objection to the canvas of a man's
mind being good if it is entirely hidden under the
worsted and floss, and so on.
Public men in England are so fenced in by the
cactus-hedge of petty conventionality which they
call practical life, that everything good and humane
is invisible to them. Add to this the absence of
humour, and you see all their wretchedness. I have
HARRIET LADY ASHBURTON.
251
never known but two men above this-Buller and
Peel.,
Coming back to the society of Carlyle after the
dons at Oxford is like returning from some con-
ventional world to the human race.
A bore cannot be a good man: for the better a
man is, the greater bore he will be, and the more
hateful he will make goodness.
I am sure you find nine persons out of ten, what
at first you assume them to be.
(To the remark that liars generally speak good-
naturedly of others), Why, if you don't speak a
word of truth, it is not so difficult to speak well of
your neighbour.
has only two ideas, and they are his legs,
and they are spindle-shanked.
(Don't speak so hard of
; he lives on your
good graces.) That accounts for his being so
thin.
(Of an Indian official): What can you expect of a
man who has been always waited on by Zemindars
and lived with Zemindees?
When
speaks in public you have a different
feeling from that of hearing most persons; you wish
he was doing it better.
252
HARRIET LADY ASHBURTON.
(To Mr. Carlyle): How are you to-day? 'Battling
with Chaos!' 'In this house you might have said
Cosmos.' (Again to Mr. Carlyle's denunciation,)
'Send him to Chaos.' 'You can't.'-'Why?' 'It's
full.'
has nothing truly human about him; he
cannot even yawn like a man.
(Of Marriage and Friendship):
When one sees what marriage generally is, I quite
wonder that women do not give up the profession.
You seem to think that married people always
want events to talk about: I wonder what news
Adam used to bring to Eve of an afternoon.
Your notion of a wife is evidently a Strasbourg
goose whom you will always find by the fireside
when you come home from amusing yourself.
Of course there will be slavery in the world as
long as there is a black and a white—a man and a
woman.
I am strongly in favour of Polygamy. I should
like to go out, and the other wife to stay at home
and take care of things, and hear all I had to tell
her when I came back.
cruelty.
looks all a woman wants-strength and
HARRIET LADY ASHBURTON.
253
The most dreadful thing against women is the
character of the men that praise them.
However bad
up. 'J'ai mes devoirs.
may be, I will not give him
I like men to be men; you cannot get round
them without.
Friendship has no doubt great advantages; you
know a man so much better and can laugh at him
so much more.
If I were to begin life again, I would go on the
turf, merely to get friends: they seem to me the
only people who really hold close together. I don't
know why it may be that each man knows some-
thing that might hang the other; but the effect is
delightful and most peculiar.
I never want friends if I have sun-or at most
one who does not speak.
Now that you have picked my dearest friend to
the bone, let me say of him . . .
(Of Society and Conversation):
To have a really agreeable house, you must be
divorced; you would then have the pleasantest
men, and no women but those who are really
affectionate and interested about you, and who are
kept in continual good-humour by the consciousness
254
HARRIET LADY ASHBURTON.
of a benevolent patronage. I often think of divorc-
ing myself from B. B. and marrying him again.
My 'printers,' as they call them, have become a
sort of Order of the Garter. I dare not talk to
these knights as I could do to fine ladies and
gentlemen.
She never speaks to any one, which is of course
a great advantage to any one.
He mentioned that 'his son was deaf,' and we
could do no more than say that we preferred the
deaf people to all others, except the dumb.
There is no rebound about her it is like talking
into a soft surface.
Is
the man who has padded the walls of his
bedroom to be ready when he goes mad?
Talking to is like playing long whist.
What is the most melancholy song you can
sing?
How high-bred that rhymed conversation of the
French classic comedy sounds! I could fancy
always talking in that way.
There is as much fun in
that gold and lace and powder.
as can live in all
English society is destroyed by domestic life out
of place. You meet eight people at dinner-four
HARRIET LADY ASHBURTON.
255
couples, each of whom sees as much as they wish
of one another elsewhere, and each member of which
is embarrassed and afraid in the other's presence.
The imperfect health against which Lady Ash-
burton had long struggled with so much magnani-
mity resulted in a serious illness at Nice in 1857, and
she died with resignation and composure at Paris,
on her way to England. She was buried in the
quiet churchyard, near to the home her presence
had gladdened and elevated. The funeral service
was read by the present Archbishop of Dublin, for
many years incumbent of the family living of
Itchinstoke, and worthy friend of the house.
Around the vault stood an assembly of men fore-
most in the political and literary history of their
time, who felt that there ended for all of them much
of the charm of English society, and for many the
enjoyment of a noble friendship. In his bitter
sorrow, Lord Ashburton did not forget, to use his
own words, 'the singular felicity that had been
accorded to him in more than thirty years of un-
clouded happiness in the companionship of this
gifted woman.'
THE REV. SYDNEY SMITH.
257
VII.
THE REV. SYDNEY SMITH.
WHEN Lady Holland, the wife of the eminent
physician and natural philosopher, undertook the
biography of her father, she applied to me and
others for any reminiscences we might happen to
have retained of his familiar life and conversation.
The greater part of the material I supplied to her
is incorporated in her admirable and accessible
volumes, and I am unwilling to repeat it here.
But something remains which I do not think has
been given to the public, and there are aspects
of the character of my old friend and social com-
panion which have not been made as prominent
as they deserve.
As a Yorkshireman I had heard much of the in-
spiring effects of his wit and gaiety in provincial
life, and his residences among the breezy wolds
S
258
THE REV. SYDNEY SMITH.
of the East Riding are still pointed out with
respectful interest. In that country, which still re-
tains its pastoral character, and where the simple
habits of a sparse and scattered population offer a
striking contrast to the fume and tumult of their
Western neighbours, there had been erected during
the last and former centuries, by a strange accident
of aristocratic possession, and at a cost which
the difficulties of transport and the facility of labour
at the time of their construction must have ren-
dered enormous, some of the noblest and most
decorated of English mansions. The inhabitants
of these isolated palaces, of which Castle Howard
is the most notable, welcomed with delight the
unexpected vicinage of a mighty Edinburgh Re-
viewer in the disguise of a village parson, and
competed for his society with the not distant city
of York, over the church of which Archbishop
Harcourt, the last of the Cardinal Prelates of our
Establishment, so long presided.
This intercourse not only relieved what would
have been a sad change from the genial hospital-
ities and frequent festivities of his former city
life, but increased that familiar and friendly
association with the representatives of a higher
THE REV. SYDNEY SMITH.
259
station in society which alone made it agreeable,
or even tolerable, to his independent nature. He
demanded equality, at least, in every company he
entered, and generally got something more.
I have heard that it took some time for his
professional brethren to accommodate themselves to
what would have been indeed a startling apparition
in their retired and monotonous existence, but that
his active interest in parochial matters, however
insignificant, his entire simplicity of demeanour,
his cheerful endurance and ingenious remedies in
all the little discomforts of his position, quite won
their hearts, and that he became as popular with them
as ever he was among his cognate wits and intellec-
tual fellows. He willingly assisted his neighbours
in their clerical duties, and an anecdote of one of
these occasions is still current in the district, for the
authenticity of which I will not vouch, but which
seems to me good enough to be true. He dined
with the incumbent on the preceding Saturday, and
the evening passed in great hilarity, the squire, by
name Kershaw, being conspicuous for his loud en-
joyment of the stranger's jokes. I am very glad
that I have amused you,' said Mr. Sydney Smith
at parting, 'but you must not laugh at my sermon
S 2
260
THE REV. SYDNEY SMITH.
to-morrow.' 'I should hope I know the difference.
between being here or at church,' remarked the
gentleman with some sharpness. I am not so
sure of that,' replied the visitor; 'I'll bet you a
guinea on it,' said the squire. Take you,' replied
the divine. The preacher ascended the steps of the
pulpit apparently suffering from a severe cold, with
his handkerchief to his face, and at once sneezed out
the name 'Ker-shaw' several times in various intona-
tions. This ingenious assumption of the readiness
with which a man would recognise his own name
in sounds imperceptible to the ears of others, proved
accurate. The poor gentleman burst into a guffaw,
to the scandal of the congregation; and the minister,
after looking at him with stern reproach, proceeded
with his discourse and won the bet.
Though in appearance less brilliant and important,
I suspect that this must have been the happiest
period of Mr. Sydney Smith's career. He had full
health, talents employed, domestic comforts, great
hopes of eminence in his profession, and abundant
amusement without the inevitable frivolities that
wait on large companies of men, or the moral and
întellectual condescensions which great popularity in
the social, as well as in the political, world demands.
The luxurious Somersetshire rectory to which
THE REV. SYDNEY SMITH.
261
he was soon transferred had many superior
attractions to his rough Yorkshire home, but he
never ceased to regret the fresh atmosphere and
shrewd energy of the North. 'What with the
long torpor of the cider, and the heated air of the
west,' he said, 'they all become boozy, the squires
grow blind, the labourers come drunk to work, and
the maids pin their mistresses' gowns awry.
In his own phrase he 'eviscerated' the house
and made it most commodious, and every
wall glistened with books. But the great merit
of Combe Florey was that, as he said, 'It
bound up so well with London; and when, on
Lord Grey's accession to power, he was appointed
to a Canonry of St. Paul's, he was able to oscil-
late agreeably between the two functions and
to get the most out of Town and Country. It
was a great delight to him to induce his London
friends to visit him, and Lady Holland's work
abounds with his devices and mystifications for their
diversion. When Poodle Byng comes here,' he
said, 'all the hedge-rows smell like Piccadilly;" but
The Hon. Frederick Byng, a well-known Londoner whose long
social life has lately closed-Page of Honour at the marriage of one
Prince of Wales in 1796, and Gentleman Usher at the marriage
262
THE REV. SYDNEY SMITH.
he could not always hope for this result. The
first time he invited me was in these terms:
'If you have really any intention of paying me a
Visit, I must describe the "locale." We live six miles
from Taunton on the Minehead road. You must
give me good notice, and await my answer, for we
are often full and often sick. It is but fair to add
that nothing can be more melancholy and stupid.
than Combe Florey-that we have no other neigh-
bours than the Parsonism of the county, and that
in the country I hybernate and lick my paws.
Having stated these distressing truths, and assur-
ing you that (as you like to lay out your life to the
best advantage) it is not worth your while to come,
I have only to add that we shall be very glad to
see you.'
There was, as might be expected, much exag-
geration in these melancholy prognostics, and I do
not know that he was ever more interesting than
when seen in the common round of small and
familiar occupations which he invested with his own
jocularity. The appropriate nicknames, the new
significance given to local anecdote or personal
of another in 1863, - 'nommé,' according to a French commentator on
London society, 'à cause de sa fidélité, Poodle.'
THE REV. SYDNEY SMITH.
263
peculiarity, the singular mixture of grin and
reverence with which he was greeted by his rustic
friends, and the serious converse to which the en-
forced leisure was favourable, made a visit to
Combe Florey not only a pleasant but useful inci-
dent in life.
But his love of London it was impossible to
overrate. The old Marquis who never approached
the town without the ejaculation 'Those blessed
lamps!' was far outstripped by his eloquent fancy.
I remember his vision of an immense Square with
the trees flowering with flambeaux, with gas for
grass, and every window illuminated by countless
chandeliers, and voices reiterating for ever and for
ever, 'Mr. Sydney Smith coming up stairs!' The
parallelogram between Hyde Park and Regent
Street, Oxford Street and Piccadilly, within which
he dwelt, contained, in his belief, more wisdom,
wit, and wealth than all the rest of the inhabited
globe. It was to him a magazine and repository of
what was deepest and most real in human life. 'If
a messenger from heaven,' he used to say,' were on
a sudden to annihilate the love of power, the love of
wealth, the love of esteem, in the hearts of men, the
streets of London would be as empty and silent at
264
THE REV. SYDNEY SMITH.
noon as they are now in the middle of the night.'
His nature demanded for its satisfaction the fresh
interests of every hour; he defined the country—' a
place with only one post a day.' The little expecta-
tions and trivial disappointments, the notes and the
responses, the news and the contradictions, the gossip
and the refutation, were to him sources of infinite
amusement; and the immense social popularity
which made his presence at a dinner-table a house-
hold event, was satisfactory to his pleasure-loving and
pleasure-giving temperament, even if it sometimes
annoyed him in its indiscriminating exigency. The
very diversity and, it may be, the frequent inferiority
of the company in which he found himself was not
distasteful to him, for while his cheerfulness made
his own portion of the entertainment its own satis-
faction, he had acquired, when I knew him, the
habit of direction and mastery in almost every
society where he found himself. He would allow,
what indeed he could not prevent, the brilliant
monologue of Mr. Macaulay, and was content to
avenge himself with the pleasantry, That he
not only overflowed with learning, but stood in the
slop.' He yielded to the philosophy and erudition
of such men as Dean Milman, and Mr. Grote, with
THE REV. SYDNEY SMITH.
265
an
he
occasional deprecatory comment, but
admitted no competition or encounter in his own
field. On this point he was strangely unjust. When
some enterprising entertainer brought him and Mr.
Theodore Hook together, the failure was complete ;
Mr. Sydney Smith could see nothing but buffoon-
ery in the gay, dramatic, faculty and wonderful
extempore invention of the novelist, just as he
either could, or would not, see any merit in those
masterpieces of comic verse, the works of one of his
own fellow-administrators of the cathedral of St.
Paul's, the 'Ingoldsby Legends.'
Not that, in the common phrase, he monopolised
the conversation; it rather monopolised him, as
was expressed by the young lady, who responded
by a fit of laughter to his grace after dinner, ex-
claiming: 'You are always so amusing.'
There was, in truth, little inclination to talk in
his presence, except for the purpose of directing
him to topics on which he would be likely to be
most salient; and he willingly followed the lead,
instead of insisting on his own line of thought,
regardless whether the subject was of interest to his
audience or not-a defect which no brilliancy of
speech or power of argument can remedy, and
266
THE REV. SYDNEY SMITH.
which rendered all the acuteness and fluency of
Archbishop Whately comparatively unattractive.
Mr. Sydney Smith, on the contrary, was inspired
by the sympathy of his hearers, and even interrup-
tions, which showed an intelligent appreciation,
were not disagreeable to him. The strongest phrase
of approbation of the talent in others I ever heard.
from him was applied to a young man starting in
London life: 'He will do ; he knows how to trump,
but it will take him five years to play his own game.'
Those who happened to meet him continuously
would observe the growth of any subject that struck
his fancy; it would begin with some ludicrous ob-
servation, next rise into a picture, and accumulate
incidents by the very telling, till it rose into a full
imaginative anecdote. For example, when certain
members of the Athenæum entertained M. Guizot,
in his double rank of French Ambassador and man
of letters, the story began with his reception by Mr.
Murray and Mr. Longman with white staves, then
his passing through Messrs. Rees, Orme and
Brown and so on, every day adding some fresh ma-
terial of comic association till it culminated in the
French cook bursting into tears: Mon pauvre maître,
je ne le reverrai plus!
THE REV. SYDNEY SMITH.
267
He has written depreciatingly of all playing
upon words, but his rapid apprehension could not
altogether exclude a kind of wit which in its best.
forms takes fast hold of the memory, besides the
momentary amusement it excites. His objection
to the superiority of a City feast: 'I cannot
wholly value a dinner by the test you do ;'—
his proposal to settle the question of the wood-
pavement round St. Paul's: 'Let the Canons once
lay their heads together, and the thing will be
done;' his pretty compliment to his friends,
Mrs. Tighe and Mrs. Cuffe: 'Ah! there you are:
the cuff that every one would wear, the tie that no
one would loose'-may be cited as perfect in their
way. His salutation to a friend who had grown
stouter, 'I did not half see you when you were in
town last year,' is perhaps rather a play on thoughts
than on words.
The irrepressible humour sometimes forced its
way in a singular manner through serious obser-
vations. He was speaking of the accusations of
nepotism brought against a statesman to whom he
was much attached, and which he thought su-
premely unjust: 'Such a disposition of patronage
was one of the legitimate inducements to a man of
268
THE REV. SYDNEY SMITH.
high rank and large fortune to abandon the comforts
of private life for the turmoils and disappointments
of a political career. Nor did the country suffer
by it; on the contrary, a man was much more
likely to be able to judge of the real competence of
his relatives whom he knew well for any office than
he could from second-hand or documentary infor-
mation; indeed, he felt this so strongly that, if by
any inconceivable freak of fortune he himself were
placed in the position, he should think himself not
only authorised, but compelled, to give a competent
post to every man of his own name in the country.
Again, in the course of an argument on the sub-
ject of the interference of this country in foreign
wars, and the necessity of keeping up our national
prestige on the Continent, after some sound reason-
ing he concluded: 'I have spent enough and fought
enough for other nations. I must think a little of
myself I want to sit under my own bramble and
sloe-tree with my own great-coat and umbrella.
No war for me short of Piccadilly; there, indeed, in
front of Grange's shop, I will meet Luttrell, and
Rogers, and Wilmot and other knights; I will combat
to the death for Fortnum and Mason's next door,
and fall in defence of the sauces of my country.'
THE REV. SYDNEY SMITH.
269
While his main delight was in intellectual inter-
course, and, during his more active life, in intel-
lectual exertion, he could hardly be called a student
of literature. He thought it no more necessary
for a man to remember the different books that had
made him wise than the different dinners that had
made him healthy: he looked for the result of good
feeding in a powerful body, and for that of good
reading in a full strong mind. Thus his pleasure
in the acquaintance of authors was rather in the
men and women themselves than in the merit of this
or that production. To those who rose into sudden
notoriety this was especially agreeable; they found
in him not so much an admirer of their writings
as a considerate and useful friend, and his good-
humoured satire was often directed to cure what
struck him as faults or misunderstanding of their
position, as when to Miss Martineau, excusing her-
self from returning visits by her want of leisure and
a carriage, he suggested that she should send an
inferior authoress with her ear-trumpet in a hackney
coach, to leave her cards about the town.
He was,
indeed, not given to severe censure, but could convey
it under light words when he chose; thus when he
checked the strong old-fashioned freedom of speech in
270
THE REV. SYDNEY SMITH.
Lord Melbourne by suggesting that 'they should
assume everybody and everything to be damned,
and come to the subject.' Mr. Rogers' curiously
unworthy repugnance to being regarded as a man in
business, provoked him to many a sharp bye-blow:
looking one morning into a large display of royal
invitations over the chimney-piece, he asked the
company in a loud 'aside,' 'Does it not look as if
the Bank had been accommodating the Duchess of
Kent?' But by nature and by habit he was as
tolerant of the faults of others as his keen perception.
permitted. I remember his saying with unusual
earnestness: 'What a mystery is the folly and
stupidity of the good!'
I have mentioned the independence of character
which secured him from moral injury in a society
where the natural arrogance of aristocracy is
fostered and encouraged by continual pressure
and intrusion from without. He always showed
the consciousness that he fully repaid any courtesy
or condescension that he might receive by raising
the coarser frivolity of high life to a level of some-
thing like intellectual enjoyment. Yet he could
not altogether conceal his sense of the inevitable
defects of idle opulence and rank without personal
THE REV. SYDNEY SMITH.
271
merit. I remember complaining to him one day
of the insolence of some fine lady, and receiving
a smart reproof for caring about such nonsense.
'You should remember that they are poodles fed
upon cream and muffins, and the wonder is that
they retain either temper or digestion.' For the
active pursuit of wealth he had a far different
estimate; he thought no man could be better
employed than in making honest money: he said,
' he felt warmed by the very contact of such men
as the great bankers and merchants of his time.'
He liked to bring home this satisfaction to his
own personal position. 'What a blessing to have been
born in this country, where three men, like my
brothers and myself, starting from the common.
level of life, could, by the mere exercise of their
own talents and industry, be what we are, with every
material comfort and every requisite consideration.'
Speaking of one of these, Mr. Robert Smith, the
fine classic and distinguished Indian official, he
burst forth: 'What a glorious possession for Eng-
land that India is! My brother Bobus comes to
me one morning when I am in bed, and says he is
going there, and wishes me good-bye. I turn
round, go to sleep for some time, and when I wake,
272
THE REV. SYDNEY SMITH.
there he is again, standing by me, hardly at all
altered, with a huge fortune.' His brother Cour-
teney also returned from India with great wealth;
Sydney always spoke of him as a man of at least
equal ability with himself. There was a current
story that when some one alluded to the magnifi-
cent administration of Lord Hastings in India, he
responded: 'Macnificent you mean.'
I am inclined to dwell somewhat on the clerical
position of Mr. Sydney Smith, from the misap-
prehension concerning it that existed and still
exists in the judgments of many estimable men.
There can be no greater anachronism than to
confound the estimates of the sacerdotal character
as it has come to be regarded by public opinion in the
first half of the nineteenth century, with the ancient
standard that prevailed up to that period. The
ministers of the Church of England, taken as a
whole, were serious, not austere pious, not
devout-literary, not learned. Its prelates were,
many of them, good scholars rather than theolo-
gians, and they rose to the Bench as often by an
edition of a Greek play as by a commentary on the
Scriptures. It is related by one, by no means the
least eminent, that he dismissed his candidates for
THE REV. SYDNEY SMITH.
273
ordination with the injunction 'to improve their
Greek, and not waste their time in visiting the
poor.' His profession Mr. Sydney Smith went
into young, without any notion of special aptitude,
without any pretence of a spiritual vocation. He
undertook to perform its duties in the different
spheres in which they might be presented to him,
to form his life on a certain basis of belief, to
submit to its recognised restrictions, and to defer
to its constituted authorities. If, besides these
negative functions, he adorned the profession with
learning or wit, if he strengthened its political con-
stitution or advanced its intellectual interests, if,
in a word, besides being a respectable clergyman,
he became a man of mark in literature, or science,
in social development or philanthropic work, he
demanded that he should have his share of the
dignities and wealth of the corporation to which
he belonged, and rise, if favoured by fortune and
sanctioned by desert, to the highest conditions of
the realm. In this view of the ecclesiastical life.
there was nothing strange or new; in fact, it was
strange and new to think otherwise. The Church
of England, as the Church of Rome before it, par-
ticipated in all the intellectual as well as spiritual
*T
274
THE REV. SYDNEY SMITH.
movements of mankind, and did not shrink from
rights of interference in the government and policy
of the State. It thought it no derogation to be a
valuable branch of the civil service, to guard the
morality and guide the education of the people. Its
most earnest philanthropists were men of the world,
and its reformers aimed at gradual and reasonable
changes not incongruous with the wealth and dignity
that made it attractive to men of high birth and
costly education. Nor did it attempt to divest itself
of political objects and party bias. It prided itself
on its judicial attitude amid the passions of religious
controversy, and if it had ejected the Noncon-
formists it had cut itself off from the Nonjurors.
But in pure politics it was essentially Tory, and
ecclesiastical advocates of change and novelty
were few and far between. Mr. Sydney Smith
is therefore fully justified in asserting the entire.
disinterestedness with which he joined the liberal
camp, and in saying that 'it would be indeed
absurd to suppose that, in doing so, he had
any thought or prospect of promotion in his profes-
sion.' But when, after many years of work and
success in the advocacy of those opinions, and
intimate connection with its political leaders,
his party became predominant in the State, the
THE REV. SYDNEY SMITH.
275
apparent neglect of his services was at once a
private wound and a public injury.
The Episcopate in this country brings with it not
only a lofty social station, but an opportunity of
that employment of the faculties which is most con-
genial to the mind of an intellectual Englishman
-political distinction; and for this Mr. Sydney
Smith justly believed himself apt by nature and
education. The peculiar combination of wit and
good sense made his arguments accessible to every
sincere mind-the lively enjoyed the one, and the
dull were impressed with the other. But instead of
being welcomed as a useful ally, and advanced to
the posts in which he could wield his arms of clear
conception, acute criticism, brilliant illustration,
and searching satire, with power and satisfaction, he
was treated as inconvenient if not superfluous.
Lady Holland, indeed, recites, on some unknown
authority, that Lord Grey, on taking possession
of Downing Street, exclaimed: Now I can do
something for Sydney Smith!' but if there ever
was such an utterance, it ought rather to have been,
'Now I can find Sydney Smith something to do.'
But it is difficult to understand how, with one
sentiment or the other, so little was done for him.
(
T 2
276
THE REV. SYDNEY SMITH.
In 1831, he was appointed to a Canonry of St.
Paul's, and in the hierarchy he rose no higher. I
heard Lord Melbourne say, 'Sydney Smith had
done more for the Whigs than all the clergy put
together, and our not making him a bishop was
mere cowardice.'
It was a natural feeling on the part of the
daughter to represent her father as treating the
neglect with dignified indifference, but neither his
conduct nor his language have left me with that
impression. Lord Brougham, indeed, told me that
when the Whig Government was formed, Mr.
Sydney Smith wrote to him to the effect that, as
for a Bishopric, it would not suit his friends to give
it him or him to receive it, but that he should be
glad of any other preferment,-—and that he (Lord
Brougham) had answered him that 'in those ex-
pressions he had shown, as usual, his complete
common sense,' adding: 'Leave the fastnesses
of the Church to others; keep the snugnesses for
yourself.' I have no doubt Lord Brougham re-
ported his own words correctly; I am not so sure
about those of Sydney Smith.
It is probable, however, that his own feelings on
the matter swayed and changed with the temper of
THE REV. SYDNEY SMITH.
277
the moment.
There were times, no doubt, when
the sense of the comfort of the modest duties
allotted to him was agreeable, as I remember in
his salutation to a young Archdeacon, now, perhaps,
the foremost Prelate in the Church: You have got
your first honour in your profession-the first drip-
pings of the coming shower. I have everything I
want, a Canonry with excellent pasture, a charming
parish and residence, and-what I will tell you
privately, but it must not go any farther—an ex-
cellent living I never see.' This was Halliburton,
near Exeter, which had been attached to his stall
at Bristol. In the same state of mind he once ex-
pressed to me his feelings respecting the death of
his eldest son at Oxford, in the full promise of the
highest distinction: 'It was terrible at the time,
but it has been best for me since; it has been bad
enough in life to have been ambitious for myself,
it would have been dreadful to have been ambitious
for another.'
The subject of his exclusion rarely occurs in his
letters, but in one to Mrs. Grote (Dec. 1840), an-
nouncing the news of a batch of baronets, he anti-
cipates the honour for Mr. Grote (who, by the by,
afterwards refused a peerage), and adds: If he is
278
THE REV. SYDNEY SMITH.
not, I will: the Ministers who would not make me a
bishop can't refuse to make me a baronet.' But
the real proof of the depth of injury inflicted by this
deprivation of the great privileges and powers of
his profession was his continual allusion and sharp,
though not malignant, satire against the Order. So
many instances crowd on the memory that selection
is not easy. I will mention those that first recur
to me, which are not already included in Lady
Holland's 'Life.'
'I delight in a stage-coach and four, and how
could I have gone by one as a Bishop? I might
have found myself alone with a young lady of
strong dissenting principles, who would have called
for help, to disgrace the Church, or with an Atheist,
who told me what he had said in his heart, and
when I had taken refuge on the outside, I might
have found an Unitarian in the basket, or, if I
got on the box, the coachman might have told
me "he was once one of those rascally parsons,
but had now taken to a better and an honester
trade."
'Why don't the thieves dress with aprons-so
convenient for storing any stolen goods? You
would see the Archbishop of York taken off at
THE REV. SYDNEY SMITH.
279
every race-course, and not a prize-fight without an
archdeacon in the paws of the police.'
'The Bishop of St. David's has been studying
Welsh all the summer; it is a difficult language,
and I hope he will be careful-it is so easy for
him to take up the Funeral-Service, and read it
over the next wedding-party, or to make a mistake
in a tense in a Confirmation, and the children will
have renounced their godfathers and godmothers,
and got nothing in their place.'
They now speak of the peculiar difficulties and
restrictions of the Episcopal Office. I only read in
Scripture of two inhibitions-boxing and poly-
gamy.'
He was not likely to have much sympathy for
the novel demand for the extension of Episcopacy
in the colonies, which he called 'Colonial mitrophi-
lism.' 'There soon will not be a rock in the sea
on which a cormorant can perch, but they will put
a Bishop beside it. Heligoland is already nomi-
nated.'
It will of course appear to many that the levity
with which he would thus treat the dignitaries of
his profession would of itself have unfitted him for
its highest offices, and certainly with the present
280
THE REV. SYDNEY SMITH.
emotional and historical development of religious
feeling in the Church, there would be much truth in
the opinion. But this was not, and could not have
been, his aspect of a hierarchy in which Swift had
been a Dean and Sterne a Canon, not only without
scandal but with popular admiration and national
pride, and the objections to his elevation really
apply quite as strongly to his status as a minister
of the Church at all. The question may fairly be
asked, why should he not have made quite as good
a Bishop as he was a parish Priest and Canon of St.
Paul's. The temperament which, in his own words,
'made him always live in the Present and the Future,
and look on the Past as so much dirty linen,' was
eminently favourable to his fit understanding and
full accomplishment of whatever work he had to
do. There has been no word of adverse criticism
on his parochial administration, and he has left
the best recollections of the diligence and scru-
pulous care with which he fulfilled his duties in
connection with the Cathedral of St. Paul's.
He often spoke with much bitterness of the
growing belief in three Sexes of Humanity—Men,
Women, and Clergymen ; but, for his part, he would
not surrender his rightful share of interference in
THE REV. SYDNEY SMITH.
281
Had he
all the great human interests of his time.'
attained a seat on the Bench of Bishops, he would
assuredly have been considerate to his clergy, in-
telligent and active in all works of beneficence,
eminent in the work of education, and, what
is so rare in his profession, an excellent man
of business in all the temporal affairs of his diocese.
To the House of Lords, his union of lively percep-
tion and vigorous judgment would have been very
acceptable, and he would have arrested that
current of prejudiced opinion which would confine
the influence and interference of the members of
that Assembly, who have especially won their way
to its distinctions by their own various abilities,
to the discussion of purely professional topics.
But the development, as our century advanced,
of an ideal of the Church of England, in which first
the imaginative and spiritual elements, and later
the mystically-historical, came to supersede the
old moral, intellectual, and political order, not only
has tended to the exclusion from the hierarchy of
the very men who in the former time would have
been selected for its offices, but, during the latter
years of Mr. Sydney Smith's life, had so far taken
hold of the public mind that it was not uncommon
282
THE REV. SYDNEY SMITH.
to hear, even from fair-judging men, à regret that
he had selected the clerical profession at all, and a
secret repugnance to the fusion between what
seemed to them the sacred and profane in his
thoughts and language. The exclusion of the
clergy from the ordinary amusements of English
life was already gradually tending to their rarer ap-
pearance in general society, and the frequent pre-
sence of one of the body as a brilliant diner-out was
becoming something anomalous. The constant
growth of this feeling to the present time renders it
difficult to many to understand how modern it was,
and how rapid the change from the old-fashioned esti-
mate of the manners and proprieties of clerical life.
When Mr. Sydney Smith came to Yorkshire, he must
still have found the sporting parson--a character
now only lingering in the far-west of England-in full
vigour ; but it seems to have been distasteful to him,
for when asked by Archbishop Harcourt (who had
himself considerable sympathywith those diversions)
whether he objected to seeing the clergy on horse-
back? he answered: 'Certainly not, provided they
turn out their toes.' It is not uncharitable to
attribute this special rigour in some degree to the
entire absence of the sporting instinct in himself,
THE REV. SYDNEY SMITH.
283
which led him to regard 'being kicked up and down
Pall Mall as a more reasonable exercise than riding
a high-trotting horse,' and to confess that' when he
took a gun in hand he was sure that the safest
position the pheasant could assume was just opposite
its muzzle.'
It needs no argument to prove that susceptibili-
ties on the score of irreverence increase in propor-
tion to the prevalence of doubt and scepticism.
When essential facts cease to be incontrovertible
they are no longer safe from the humour of
contrasts and analogies. It is thus that the secu-
lar use of scriptural allusion was more frequent
in the days of simple belief in inspiration than
in our times of linguistic and historical criticism.
Phrases and figures were then taken as freely
out of sacred as out of classical literature, and even
characters as gross and ludicrous as some of Field-
ing's clergy were not looked upon as satire against
the Church. Thus when Sydney Smith illustrated
his objections to always living in the country by
saying that 'he was in the position of the person-
age who, when he entered a village, straightway he
found an ass,'-or described the future condition of
Mr. Croker as 'disputing with the recording Angel
284
THE REV. SYDNEY SMITH.
as to the dates of his sins,'--or drew a picture of Sir
George Cornewall Lewis in Hades, 'for ever and
ever book-less, essay-less, pamphlet-less, grammar-
less, in vain imploring the Bishop of London, seated
aloft, for one little treatise on the Greek article—
one smallest dissertation on the verb in μ,'--it
never occurred to him that he was doing anything
more than taking the most vivid and familiar images
as vehicles of his humour. How little impropriety
he could have attached to these playfulnesses, is
evident from a striking passage in the Essay on
Wit,' which formed part of the series of Lectures he
delivered at the Royal Institution, and which he
was fond of describing 'as the most successfu
swindle of the season.'
(
'It is a beautiful thing to observe the boundaries
which Nature has affixed to the ridiculous,
and to notice how soon it is swallowed up by
the more illustrious feelings of our nature;' and
after various powerful illustrations of this impres-
sion, he thus concludes :-'Who ever thinks of
turning into ridicule our great and ardent hope of
a world to come? Whenever the man of humour
meddles with these things, he is astonished to find
that in all the great feelings of their nature the
THE REV. SYDNEY SMITH.
285
mass of mankind always think and act alike;
that they are ready enough to laugh, but that they
are quite as ready to drive away with indignation
and contempt the light fool who comes with the
feather of wit to crumble the bulwarks of truth and
to beat down the temples of God.'¹
There was another cause which at that time con-
tributed to liberty on such points among serious
men-the absence of all religious controversy or
discussion in good society. When, in the decline
of his life, Mr. Luttrell took a tour of country-houses,
he told his friends on his return that he had found
himself quite put out by the theological talk that
prevailed in every house he had visited-except in
that perfect gentleman's, the Bishop of 's, where
the subject never occurred. This was in truth no
great exaggeration of the change that had taken
place in the public use of such topics, and would of
itself explain how Mr. Sydney Smith might to some
have appeared irreverent, while in fact the irrever-
ence must to him have appeared all on the other
side. One of the main repugnancies of the church-
The most notorious, perhaps, of the scriptural allusions attributed
to Mr. Sydney Smith-the reply to Landseer's proposal to draw his
portrait: 'Is thy servant a dog, that he should do this thing?' was
really said by Mr. Lockhart.
286
THE REV. SYDNEY SMITH.
men of the early part of our century to what they
called Methodism '-that is, the great develop-
ment of evangelical sentiment in English religion—
was the introduction into the open air of the world
of an order of thought and feeling which custom
had relegated to certain times and places, and
which it was neither good taste nor good sense to
make general and familiar. It was the boast and
tradition of the Church of England to take a ' Via
media' in manner as in doctrine, which should keep
clear of lightness and of solemnity, of preciseness
and of passion. 'How beautiful it is,' I heard
Sydney Smith preach at Combe Florey, ' to see the
good man wearing the mantle of piety over the
dress of daily life-walking gaily among men, the
secret servant of God.' In this chance expression,
it seemed to me, lay his main theory of religion.
In one of his admirable sermons ('On the Character
and Genius of the Christian Religion'), he says
emphatically: 'The Gospel has no enthusiasm—
it pursues always the same calm tenor of language,
and the same practical view, in what it enjoins. .
There is no other faith which is not degraded
by its ceremonies, its fables, its sensuality, or its
violence; the Gospel only is natural, simple, correct,
THE REV. SYDNEY SMITH.
287
and mild.' Another discourse has for its title, 'The
Pleasures of Religion,' on which he dilates with an
earnest conviction that it is not only possible to
make the best of both worlds, but that it is rather
for the daily contentment than for the extraordinary
solaces of life that Christianity has been given to
mankind.
There is no doubt that his secular repute
diminished to some extent the consideration that
his powers as a preacher would otherwise have
obtained. Though perhaps less carefully composed
than his other writings, his Sermons abound with
what is so rare in that form of literature-real
interest; and while the subject-matter is level with
an educated intelligence, the form adapts them to
any mixed audience not solicitous for emotion or
surprise. They are perhaps the foremost in that
class of discourses, so difficult to find, which are
suitable for a body of hearers neither private nor
public enough for vivid appeals to the feelings or
subtle demands on the understanding. His de-
livery was animated without being dramatic, and
would recall to those familiar with his writings
the sharp animadversion in one of his earliest
productions—the small volumes printed in 1801,
288
THE REV. SYDNEY SMITH.
on the monotonous and conventional treatment
of sacred subjects in the pulpit, but which, some-
how or other, has had no place in his collected
works-how undeservedly the following extracts
would suffice to show:
'Why are we natural everywhere but in the pulpit?
No man expresses warm and animated feelings any-
where else with his mouth close, but with his whole
body; he articulates with every limb, and talks from
head to foot with a thousand voices. Why this
holoplexia on sacred occasions alone? Why call
in the aid of paralysis to piety? Is it a rule of
oratory to balance the style against the subject,
and to handle the most sublime truths in the
dullest language and the driest manner? Is sin
to be taken from men, as Eve was from Adam,
by casting them into a deep slumber? ... We
have cherished contempt for centuries, and per-
severed in dignified tameness so long, that while
we are freezing common sense for large salaries in
stately churches, amidst whole acres and furlongs
of empty pews, the crowd are feasting on ungram-
matical fervour and illiterate animation in the
crumbling hovels of the Methodists.'
In considering the relation of Mr. Sydney
THE REV. SYDNEY SMITH.
289
Smith's other works to his living reputation, it
seems difficult for the one to sustain and continue
the other unless by some combination of interest
in their subjects and their forms, and on this point.
he shares the destiny and the difficulties of the
most eminent names in the history of British
letters. Should, indeed, a complete English educa-
tion ever become an object of serious study in this
country, a great advantage and facility will be
recognised in the circumstance that our
writers are more or less political.
our best
I do not allude
to professed historians, or even to those who
describe, attack, or defend the public affairs in
which they have been personally engaged—such
as Bacon, Milton, Clarendon, or Bolingbroke-
but to the specially literary classes-the novelists
and the divines-who have not been content to
deal either with abstractions or theories, but have
come down among their fellow-citizens to contend
for any common cause that is agitating the nation.
Hence there often seems a ludicrous disproportion
between what seems the importance of the defence
or attack and the weight of the defender or assail-
ant. We might gladly commit the apology of the
House of Hanover to the pellucid English of
U
290
THE REV. SYDNEY SMITH.
Addison's Freeholder,' or the less important party.
struggles of the Dukes of Grafton and Bedford.
to the rhetoric of the long-mysterious Junius;
but we grudge the gigantic satire of Swift evoked
by Wood's copper half-pence, and even the time
of Walter Scott, devoted to the one-pound note
of his country.
of power or not, it seems to be so necessary a
product of our character and our institutions,
that when any powerful writer has the taste and
temperament of a politician, it is a wonder if he
be anything else. Thus it is fortunate that the
questions in which Mr. Sydney Smith lavished his
wit were not only the topics of the day, but had
their roots in serious and permanent interests.
But whether this be a waste
The Irish Church, which he so boldly satirised,
is abolished; the Ballot, which he ridiculed, is
established; the Ecclesiastical Commisson, which
he was ready to oppose 'even to the loss of a por-
tion of his own income and the whole of Dr. Spry's,'
is now the sole depository of the temporalities of
the Church, the Colonial' freedom he so early
advocated is complete; and if the Game-laws be
still on the statute-book, it is not from want of
criticism or objection. Thus whether his advocacy
THE REV. SYDNEY SMITH.
291
succeeded or failed, it must not be forgotten that
these were matters which deeply agitated the
public mind of the England in which he lived, and
full account should be taken of the influence which
such a statesman of the study, armed with so
rare and well-tempered a glaive of wit, must have
exercised. But besides and beyond this marvellous
faculty, let no one despise the admirable vehicle of
language in which it is conveyed, or decline to join.
in the adjuration he solemnly uttered: 'God pre-
serve us the purity of style which from our earliest
days we have endeavoured to gather in the great
schools of ancient learning.'
U 2

THE LAST DAYS OF HEINRICH HEINE. 293
VIII.
THE LAST DAYS OF HEINRICH HEINE.
THERE is no necessity to suppose any determined
hostility, or the existence of either envy or
malignity, in the repulsion with which ordinary
minds shrink from the humouristic character. If
to studious men it seems shallow, if to severe men
it seems indifferent, if to pious men it seems irre-
verent, these are the inevitable consequences of
their mental vision being brought to bear on
objects it is not fitted to contemplate. The con-
trasts, the inconsistencies, the incongruities, which
provoke and exercise the faculty of humour, are
really invisible to most persons, or, when perceived,
arouse a totally distinct order of ideas and associa-
tions. It must seem to them at best a mischievous
inclination to find a source of mirth in the suffer-
ings, and struggles, and troubles of others; and
when the humourist extends this practice to him-
self, and discovers a certain satisfaction in his own
294
THE LAST DAYS OF
weaknesses and miseries, introverting the very
sensations of pleasure and pain, he not only checks
the sympathy he might otherwise have won, but his
very courage is interpreted into an unnatural
audacity, alike defiant of the will of Heaven and
of the aid of man. The deep consolations of this
faculty in the trials and extremities of life are
altogether unknown to them; and it is only when
such a man as Heinrich Heine has passed away—
when the bold handling of men and things by the
implacable humourist can offend no more-that a
merciful judgment can be expected for a character
which contained many elements of moral greatness,
and for a just appreciation of those rare talents which
gave glory to his youth, and did not desert him in
the bitterest sufferings of his maturity.
Never, indeed, did a volume of verse receive a
more general and immediate welcome than did the
'Buch der Lieder' in Germany. The most con-
ventional classes were not proof against the charm
of its simplicity and truth; old statesmen, like
Gentz, who in the abstract would have liked to
have shut up the young republican in a fortress,
spoke of the book as giving them an ‘Indian
summer of pleasure and passion;' philosophers, to
HEINRICH HEINE.
295
whom such doctrine as they found there seemed
wholly sensuous, and theologians to whom some light
treatment of serious matter was naturally painful,
were subdued by the grace of the youth who stood
ready to take the throne the ancient Goethe was
about to leave, and were glad to attribute the
errors they lamented to the circumstances of his
family life and to the effervescence of his fresh
imagination.
Between those productions and his last work lay
many eventful years, but less difference in the
characteristics of the author than he himself was
wont to imagine. He frequently spoke of his early
writings with a regretful tenderness, as of a happy
world now lost to view; but the critic may remark
that there is no stamp of mind so indelible as that
of the poetic humourist, and that where those powers
once vigorously coexist no changes or chances can
divorce them altogether. There may be no palpable
humour in Thomas Hood's 'Song of the Shirt,' or
'Bridge of Sighs,' and yet we feel that these poems
are the expression of the gay common sense of his
earlier mind refined into the most solemn pathos.
by the contemplation of the sorrows of humanity.
Thus, too, in the retrospect of Heine's inner
296
THE LAST DAYS OF
self, the voice that comes from the bed of long
sickness and approaching death is the very same
that trolled out those delightful melodies that every
boy and woman in Germany knows by heart.
Above all literary characters of our time, Heine
had throughout the calamity of a false position.
With so acute a sense of classical forms and antique
grace as to make him often well content to live
A Pagan suckled in a creed out-worn,
he was regarded as a chief of the Romantic school;
with a genial and pleasure-loving temperament, he
was mortified by physical infirmity and moral dis-
appointment into a harsh and sometimes cruel
satirist; with a deep religious sentiment, and even
narrow theological system, he was thrust into the
chair of an apostle of scepticism; with no clear
political convictions or care for theories of govern-
ment, he had to bear all the pains and penalties of
political exile, the exclusion from the commerce of
the society he best enjoyed, and the inclusion
among men from whom he shrank with an in-
stinctive dislike. The immediate cause of his
banishment from Germany has never been clearly
stated. He does not seem to have been the object
of any particular prosecution, but he had made
HEINRICH HEINE.
297
himself sufficiently obnoxious to the authorities to
make his existence in Germany insecure. When
questioned in France as to his nationality, he used
to call himself Prussien libéré, and he writes that
he had been haunted with unpleasant visions, 'had
seen himself in the attitude of Prometheus, and had
fancied the sun turned into a Prussian cockade.' A
high legal functionary had also told him 'that
Spandau was very cold in winter; that no oysters
came there, so far from the sea; and that the
inhabitants caught no game, except the flies which
fell into the soup;' so on May 1, 1831, he betook
himself to the fatherland of Champagne and the
Marseillaise. From this time forward, we see him
doing all he can to make himself a Frenchman, but
without success. There is always an old-German
-we would say, notwithstanding all his anti-
Anglicanism, English humour-which stands be-
tween him and the French mind with its clear wit
and its hard logic. But the ingenuity, the readi-
ness, above all the gaiety, of the Parisians, seemed
to him almost a necessity of existence, for which
his temperament had hitherto yearned in vain: it
was not the old Greek life, but it was something
like it, in its open-air liveliness, its alert passage
298
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from thought to thought, its keen relish of sensual
pleasure.
In contrast to this, therefore, his impressions of
England, which he visited shortly after, were pro-
portionably disagreeable. London struck him
mightily 'like the stroke of a cudgel over his
shoulders;' and he found in the astonishment of
the waiter at the Piazza Coffee-house, when he
asked him to bring him for breakfast one of the
fine cauliflowers he saw below him, a type of the
horror with which we regard any deviation from our
national manners. He called us a country 'where
all the machines moved like men, and all the men
so like machines, that he was continually looking
to discover where they were wound up ;' and even in
his latter days, when calmer judgment and some rela-
tions of personal affection had made him recant
much of his distaste to us, he still suggested that
'Bria, or Britinia, the White Island of Scandinavian
mythology, to which the souls of the heroes were
transported after death, was nothing more nor less
than that Albion which even now looks so very
dead-alive to all strangers.' '
An historical incident of the Bonaparte dynasty,
'He said to me in 1840 'I must revisit England, if only to judge
and understand you better.'
HEINRICH HEINE.
299
in connection with his private life, had singularly
affected his boyish fancy. The Grand-Duchy of
Berg, of which Dusseldorf (his birthplace) was the
capital, passed from the possession of the Elector
Palatine to that of Bavaria, and thence was uncere-
moniously transferred to the dominion of General
Murat in exchange for the Bavarian Tyrol,
which Napoleon had wrested from the empire of
Austria. But in those days advancement was
rapid, and the Grand-Duke of Berg becoming king
of Naples, abdicated his duchy in favour of the
eldest son of Louis king of Holland. 'Thus,'
writes Heine in 1854, 'Louis Napoleon, who never
abdicated, is my legitimate sovereign.'
(
It was there the boy saw Him-the Emperor.'
The Emperor, with his cortége, rode straight
down the avenue of the Hofgarten at Dusseldorf,
notwithstanding the police regulations that no one
should ride down the avenue under the penalty of
a fine of five dollars. The Emperor, in his in-
visible green uniform, and his little world-renowned
hat, sat on his white charger, carelessly, almost
lazily, holding the rein with one hand, and with
the other good-naturedly patting the neck of
the horse. It was a sunny marble hand, one of the
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two which had bound fast the many-headed
monster of anarchy to pacify the war of races, and
it good-naturedly patted the neck of the horse.
The face, too, of the hue which we find in the
marble busts of Greeks and Romans, the features
as finely proportioned as in antiques, and a smile
on the lips warming and tranquillising every heart,
while we knew that those lips had but to whistle et
la Prusse n'existait plus, and to whistle again and
all the Holy Roman Empire would have danced
before him. The brow was not so clear, for the
spectres of future conflicts were cowering here;
and there were the creative thoughts, the huge
seven-mile-boot thoughts, in which the spirit of the
Emperor strode invisibly over the world, every one
of which thoughts would have given a German
author full materials to write about all the rest of
his natural life.'
Though these phrases now read as a weird
irony of romance, yet, if the enthusiasm of Heine
had been confined to pleasant images like these,
he would only have asserted a poet's privilege ; but
there is too much ill-will to others mixed up with
this hero-worship to allow it to be so simply vindi-
cated. His relation to that marvellous people-of
HEINRICH HEINE.
301
whom Goethe has somewhere said, that 'Providence
committed to their care the moral law of the
world, not because they were better or wiser than
others, but because they were more obstinate and
persistent-' not only alienated him from the national
cause of Germany, but gave him a vindictive grati-
fication in its discomfiture: he enjoyed the very
tempest which had brought down the pride of
German States almost to a level with the depend-
ence and insignificance of his own race, just as in
later years he directed his bitterest irony against
'the slaves who had been let loose in the peril of
the storm to work the pumps, and draw the cables
and risk their lives, but who, when the good ship
floated safe once more, were turned back into the
hold and chained nicely down again in political
darkness.' Thus, the poem of Deutschland' is
the one of his works where his humour runs over
into the coarsest satire, and the malice can only be
excused by the remembrance that he too had been
exposed to some of the evil influences of a servile
condition.
Among these, no doubt, may be reckoned the
position of a man of commercial origin and literary
occupation in his relation to the upper order of
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THE LAST DAYS OF
society in the northern parts of Germany. There
the high mental cultivation and reflective character
of the youth of the middle and lower classes con-
trasts dangerously with the almost exclusive mili-
tary tastes of the nobility. The arrogance en-
gendered by the continual exercise of Man as a
mere mechanical agent, and by the habit of regard-
ing physical force as the main legitimate instru-
ment of authority, is there unsupported by that
predominant wealth and ancient territorial pos-
session which give the strength of prescription
even to a questionable assumption of command.
Here there remained, and after all the events
of the last year there still remains, sufficient
element of discontent to justify the recorded ex-
pression of a philosophic German statesman, ‘that
in Prussia the war of classes had still to be " fought
out.' And this in truth was the mainspring of
Heine's radicalism. This made him delight even
in the system which preached equality under the
sword, and in which every peasant felt that though
not a freeman he might become a king. This it
was which made him unable to comprehend the
far different condition and popular associations of
British aristocracy, and made him write that he
HEINRICH HEINE.
303
grudged not the eighteen-pence he paid to see
Westminster Abbey, 'for he saw there that the
great of the earth were not immortal, and told the
verger he was delighted with his exhibition, but
would willingly have paid as much again if he
could have seen that collection complete; for as
long as the aristocrats of England are not gathered
to their fathers, as long as the collection at West-
minster is not complete, so long remains undecided
the battle between Birth and the People, and the
alliance between England and French citizenship
unstable and insecure.'
And yet it was in the Parliamentary Govern-
ment of France that Heine found the only real
political satisfaction expressed in his writings.
The two last volumes of his Miscellaneous Works
contain the letters he furnished to the Augsburg
Gazette' from 1840 to 1844, in the character of
'our own correspondent.' This kind of republica-
tion is rarely interesting, whatever amount of
ability it displays. The best periodical writing,
from its nature, is bound up with the interests and
passions of the hour and ought to occupy itself
with the future little, if at all; and if by chance
such a book falls into our hands, we usually read
it with a mournful, and it may be a malicious,
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gratification at the exaggeration of its suppositions,
the falsity of its predictions, the now-revealed folly
of much of the sententious wisdom it enunciates.
The salt, therefore, that keeps productions of this
nature fresh must indeed be genuine, and the
justice of Heine's views is sufficiently established
by subsequent events to entitle the political
opinions of their author, though a poet and a wit,
to some respect, and to except this revival from
the ordinary rules of decent literary interment.
For although gift of prevision in public matters is,
perhaps, but the perfection of common sense, yet,
somehow or other, it is the quality least apparent
in men holding high political station. It seems to
be a sad necessity that the so-called practical men
are limited to the knowledge of the time that is
slipping away beneath their feet, and that the
man who sees far a-head is rarely permitted to
provide against the coming evil or to improve the
nascent good. Thus it may be nothing but a
singular coincidence that the Duke of Orleans in
February 1840 appeared to Heine to have the
aspect of a man anticipating a terrible catastrophe
and earnestly desiring a war that he might rather
perish in the clear waters of the Rhine, than in the
HEINRICH HEINE.
305
gutters of Paris; but there is something more in
the foresight which, in December 1841, denounced
in France the dissolution of the ties of common
thought and principle, that extinction of esprit de
corps which constitutes the moral death of a
people, that absorption of material interests, which
one fine day would permit a second 18th Brumaire
to overthrow the bourgeoisie, a second Directory,
and to establish the government of the sword with
its din of glory, its stench of dying lamps, its
rounds of cannon en permanence. Thus again, in
1842, he discerns in the coming time a mixed
odour of blood and Russia-leather, which makes
him express a hope that the next generation may
come into the world with backs strong enough to
bear all that Fate prepares for them.
But there is one image of the future which
exercises over him a terrible fascination, disturbing
the clearness of his vision, as it has done that of so
many others. When he speaks of Communism,
he is as panic-stricken as were the authors of the
'Esclave Vindex,' and the Sceptre rouge,' and
as still are the higher and middle classes of France
after their terrible experience, and thus cannot get
out of his head that the Socialists are the Masters
X
<
306
THE LAST DAYS OF
of the approaching world. With horror he looks
forward to the rule of those sombre iconoclasts,
'whose horny hands will break to pieces the idols.
of beauty he loves so well, will tear down all the
pleasant frivolities of art, and pluck up the laurel-
trees to plant potatoes in their stead.' He mourns
'for the lilies that neither toiled nor spun and yet
were dressed so gloriously, and who now will be torn
from the ground; for the roses, the leisurely lovers.
of the nightingales, those unprofitable singers who
cannot be allowed any longer to occupy time or
space;' and above all for the 'Book of Songs,' 'which
now only the grocer will use to hold the coffee and
the snuff of the ancient females of the years to be ;'
and he attempts in vain to console himself by the
reflection that the old society must perish because
it is a whited sepulchre, and that those good old
women will then have the aforesaid luxuries, which
That this
our present institutions deny them.
logical conclusion is a poor satisfaction continually
breaks out, especially in the sincerity of his verse,
where it is apparent how distasteful to him is that
equality from below which he imperatively requires
from above. In truth Heine was no sincere demo-
crat, as the colleagues of his political youth found
out and bitterly resented. The quarrel deepened
HEINRICH HEINE.
307
on both sides; Börne and the German Republicans
denounced him as an apostate, and he retaliated
by fierce ridicule and disclosures of confidential
relations and private affairs which no party differ-
ences can justify. In verses, too, such as these, he
insolently sank his imagined recantation :
Alas! for the moth that has burnt his wings,
And sunk to the rank of creeping things;
In foreign dust with creatures to crawl,
That smell so strong, tho' they be so small;
The vermin-comrades that I must swallow,
Because in the selfsame mire I wallow:
As Virgil's Scholar of old knew well,
The Poet of Exile-the Poet of Hell.
With agony I review the time
When I hummed at home my wingèd rhyme,
And swung on the edge of a broad sun-flower
In the air and smoke of a German bower.
Roses were not too good for me,
I sipped them like the genteelest bee,
And high-born butterflies shared my lot,
And the Artist-the grasshopper-shunned me not.
But my wings are scorched-and I murmur in vain,
I shall see my Fatherland never again;
A worm I live, and a worm I die
In the far-away filth of a foreign sty.
I would to God I had never met
That water-fly-that blue coquette,
With her winning ways and wanton taille,
The fair, the fair-the false Canaille.
X 2
308
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4
Another graver poem represents a more whole-
some state of mind, and sums up with a manly
sorrow those feelings which, I fear, are common
to all men of poetic sensibility who deal with the
coarser motives and meaner objects that influence
public affairs.
In Freedom's War, of 'Thirty years' and more,
A lonely outpost have I held-in vain :
With no triumphant hope or prize in store,
Without a thought to see my home again.
I watched both day and night: I could not sleep
Like my well-tented comrades far behind,
Though near enough to let their snoring keep
A friend awake, if e'er to doze inclined.
And thus, when solitude my spirits shook,
Or fear-for all but fools know fear sometimes-
To rouse myself and them, I piped and took
A gay revenge in all my wanton rhymes.
Yes there I stood-my musket always ready,
And when some sneaking rascal showed his head,
My eye was vigilant, my aim was steady,
And gave his brains an extra dose of lead.
But war and justice have far different laws,
And worthless acts are often done right well
The rascals' shots were better than their cause,
And I was hit-and hit again, and fell!
That outpost is abandoned: while the one
Lies in the dust, the rest in troops depart;
Unconquered-I have done what could be done,
With sword unbroken, and with broken heart.
;
HEINRICH HEINE.
309
When the palaces of Louis-Philippe were plun-
dered in the Revolution of 1848, the names of
persons who received pensions from the civil list
were published, and among others Heine was set
down for two hundred pounds per annum. It may
be imagined with what glee this intelligence was
received by the enemies of Heine. His reaction
was thus explained: he had been all along the
paid advocate of the Orleans Government, and his
retirement from the world about this time, from
quite another cause, was attributed to his sense
of the disgrace. But in truth there was nothing
in the revelation to injure the character of the
recipient or of the donor. M. Thiers was much
attracted by the literary German, who was more
lively and witty than the Frenchmen who sur-
rounded him, and Heine was delighted with the
Frenchman, in comparison with whose vivacity
and agility of mind all other Frenchmen seemed
to him little better than clumsy Germans. Heine
took the money, which enabled him at his ease
to defend the cause he approved and the men he
liked, and contrived to combine fidelity to his
friends with independence of spirit.
By the side of the political conflict that was ever
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THE LAST DAYS OF
going on in the mind of Heine was one of a deeper
and more important character, to which I have
already alluded. Speaking of Shakspeare in one
of his earlier works, he describes him as being at
once both Greek and Hebrew, and admires how in
him the spiritual and the artistic faculties are so
thoroughly amalgamated as to produce the com-
pletest development of the human nature. In
making this observation, he was no doubt con-
scious of the unceasing warfare of those moral
elements within himself, and of his difficulty to
combine or reconcile them. He must have seen,
too, as clearly as those about him, how these im-
pressions were affected by his temperament and
circumstances. In his gay health and pleasant
Parisian days the old gods haunted and enchanted
him, like the legendary Tannhauser in the Venus-
Mountain, while in his hours of depression, and
above all in the miserable sufferings of his later
life, the true religious feeling of his hereditary
faith mastered, awed, and yet consoled him.
The singular charm which the old Hellenic
mythology exercises over certain minds is some-
thing quite separate from antiquarian interest or
even classical learning. The little Latin and the
HEINRICH HEINE.
311
no Greek which our poet Keats acquired at his
Enfield seminary and in his study of Lemprière,
seem a very inadequate source for the vivid, almost
personal, affection with which gods and god-
desses,
Not yet dead,
But in old marbles ever beautiful,
inspired the author of Endymion and Hyperion.
The sentiment, indeed, which produced and sus-
tained the ancient religion was something very
different from the modern reproduction; yet such
examples as Keats and Heine attest the power of
the appeal which Grecian genius made once and
for ever to the sensuous imaginations of mankind,
and which all the influences of our positive and
demure civilisation protest against in vain. But
while the English poet yearned for that happy
supernatural society with all the ardour of boyish
passion, with Heine the feeling is rather that of a
regretful tenderness, mourning over a delightful
phase of human superstition, which he knows can
never return, but which in his mind is ever con-
trasting itself with the gravity of the religion of
sorrow and with piety divorced from pleasure.
Like the entranced traveller of Italian story, he
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continually saw the exiled Olympians pass by him
in divine distress, the milk-white oxen garlanded
with withered leaves, and the children running with
extinguished torches.
The intellectual disposition of Heine was so
averse to that habit of philosophical speculation.
which has occupied, and even contented, the cul-
tivated Germans under their disastrous politics
and the deficiencies of their social system, that
there may be little to regret in the loss of the
work on Hegel, which Heine asserts that he sacri-
ficed to his growing sense of personal religion ;
nor is it easy to represent to one's self the picture
of Heine at twenty-two, sentimentally contempla-
ting the stars as the abodes of the blest, and of
Hegel scornfully depicting them as 'spots on the
face of heaven.' But in February 1848-in the
very paroxysm of France Heine was struck
down by a fatal malady, during which the more
serious elements of his character were necessarily
brought to view. While in all but constant dark-
ness, he thought, and listened, and dictated, pre-
serving to the last his clearness of intellect, his
precision of diction, and his invincible humour.
I had made his acquaintance in 1840, when
HEINRICH HEINE.
313
he was apparently in robust health and a brilliant
member of the society of Frondeurs against the
Government of King Louis-Philippe, of which the
intellectual leader was George Sand, and the
political the Abbé Lamennais. It was at that
time that the latter was imprudently prosecuted
for the tract 'De l'Esclavage moderne,' which would
have been regarded with us as a very harmless
diatribe, and sentenced to several months' imprison-
ment. I remember Heine expressing to the con-
demned politician the fear that the confinement.
might be injurious to his health, and the Abbé's
reply, 'Mon enfant, il manque toujours quelque
chose à la belle vie, qui ne finit pas sur le champ
de bataille, sur l'échafaud, ou en prison.'
would it have been for the Poet if any such destiny
had awaited him as attends the soldier or the
martyr! He had long ago drawn a picture of the
old age he aspired to attain,-age retaining the
virtues of youth, its unselfish zeal, its unselfish
tears. 'Let me become an old man, still loving
youth, still, in spite of the feebleness of years,
sharing in its gambols and in its dangers; let my
voice tremble and weaken as it may, while the
sense of the words it utters remains fresh with
Happy
314
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hope, and unpalsied by fear.' Piteously different
was this vision from the reality which found its true
expression in the following apologue, and in the
poems which form the best illustration of the
power of genius to draw up treasure from the
deepest abysses of human calamity.
'I will cite you a passage from the Chronicle of
Limburg. This chronicle is very interesting for
those who desire information about the manners
and customs of the Middle Ages in Germany. It
describes, like a Journal des Modes, the costumes.
both of men and women as they came out at the
time. It gives also notices of the songs which
were piped and sung about each year, and the
first lines of many a love-ditty of the day are
there preserved. Thus, in speaking of A.D. 1480,
it mentions that in that year through the whole
of Germany songs were piped and sung, sweeter
and lovelier than all the measures hitherto known
in German lands, and that young and old-
especially the ladies-went so mad about them,
that they were heard to sing them from morning
to night. Now these songs, the chronicle goes on
to say, were written by a young clerk, who was
affected by leprosy, and who dwelt in a secret
HEINRICH HEINE.
315
hermitage apart from all the world. You know,
dear reader, assuredly what an awful malady in
the Middle Ages this leprosy was; and how the
poor creatures who fell under this incurable cala-
mity were driven out of all civil society, and
allowed to come near no human being. Dead-
alive, they wandered forth wrapt up from head to
foot, the hood drawn over the face, and carrying in
the hand a kind of rattle called the Lazarus-
clapper, by which they announced their pre-
sence, so that everyone might get out of their
way in time. This poor clerk, of whose fame
as poet and songster this Chronicle of Limburg
has spoken, was just such a leper, and he sat
desolate, in the solitude of his sorrow, while all
Germany, joyful and jubilant, sang and piped his
songs.
<
Many a time in the mournful visions of my
nights, I think I see before me the poor clerk of
the Chronicle of Limburg, my brother in Apollo,
and his sad, suffering eyes stare strangely at me
from under his hood; but at the same moment he
seems to vanish, and clanging through the distance,
like the echo of a dream, I hear the sharp rattle of
the Lazarus-clapper.'
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And, as it were in the person of this unfortu-
nate being, he entitles the following poems 'Laza-
rus.'
I
Leave those sacred parables,
Leave those views of true devotion,
Show me kernels in the shells,
Show me truth within the notion.
Show me why the Holiest one
Sinks by man's insane resentment,
While the vile centurion
Prances on in proud contentment.
Where the fault? By whom was sent
The evil no one can relieve?
Jehovah not omnipotent !
Ah! that I never will believe.
And so we go on asking, till
One fine morning lumps of clay
Stop our mouths for good or ill
That's no answer-still I say.
II
My one love is the Dark Ladie;
Oh she has loved me long and well;
Her tears, when last she wept o'er me,
Turned my hair grey, where'er they fell.
She kissed my eyes, and all was black,
Embraced my knees, and both were lame,
Clung to my neck, and from my back
The marrow to her kisses came.
HEINRICH HEINE.
317
i
My body is a carcass, where
The spirit suffers prison-bound :
Sometimes it tosses in despair,
And rages like a crazy hound.
Unmeaning curses! oath on oath
Cannot destroy a single fly :
Bear what God sends you-nothing loth
To pray for better by and by.
111
Old Time is lame and halt,
The snail can barely crawl:
But how should I find fault,
Who cannot move at all!
No gleam of cheerful sun!
No hope my life to save!
I have two rooms, the one
I die in and the grave.
May be, I've long been dead,
May be, a giddy train
Of phantoms fills my head,
And haunts what was my brain.
These dear old gods or devils,
Who see me stiff and dull,
May like to dance their revels
In a dead Poet's skull.
Their rage of weird delight
Is luscious pain to me :
And my bony fingers write
What daylight must not see.
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IV
What lovely blossoms on each side
Of my youth's journey shone neglected;
Left by my indolence or pride
To waste unheeded or respected!
Now, when I scent the coming grave,
Here, where I linger sick to death,
There flowers ironically wave
And breathe a cruel luscious breath.
One violet burns with purple fire,
And sends its perfume to my brain :
To think I had but to desire,
And on my breast the prize had lain!
O Lethe
Lethe! thanks to Heaven,
That your black waves for ever flow;
Thou best of balsams! freely given
To all our folly and our woe.
V
I saw them smile, I heard them prattle,-
I watched them pass away:
Their tears, life-struggle, and death-rattle,
Scarcely disturbed my day.
I followed coffin after coffin,
In different moods of mind,
Sometimes regretting, sometimes scoffing,
And then went home and dined.
Now sudden passionate remembrance
Flames up within heart;-
my
The dead are dead, but from their semblance
I cannot bear to part.
HEINRICH HEINE.
319
And most one tearful recollection
Besets me, till it grows
Far wilder than the old affection
From whose decay it rose.
A colourless, a ghastly blossom,
She haunts my fevered nights,
And seems to ask my panting bosom
For posthumous delights.
Dear phantom! closer, closer, press me:
Let dead and dying meet :
Hold by me,―utterly possess me,
And make extinction sweet.
VI
You were a fair young lady, with an air
Gentle, refined, discreet and debonair ;-
I watched, and watched in vain, to see when first
The passion-flower from your young heart would burst :-
Burst into consciousness of loftier things
Than reason reckons or reflection brings,-
Things that the prosy world lets run to seed,
But for which women weep and brave men bleed.
Can you remember when we strolled together,
Through the Rhine vineyards, in gay summer weather?
Outlaughed the sun, and every genial flower
Shared the serene emotion of the hour.
In many a hue the roses blushed to please,
The thick carnations kissed the morning breeze ;
The very daisies' unpretending show
Seemed into rich ideal life to blow.
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While you in quiet grace walked by my side,
Dressed in white satin, that might suit a bride,
But like some little maid of Netscher's limning,
Your untried heart well hid beneath the trimming.
VII
My cause at Reason's bar was heard,—
'Your fame is clear as noonday's sun'-
The sentence ran,-‘by deed or word
The fair accused no ill has done.'
Yes! while my soul was passion-torn,
She dumb and motionless stood by ;
She did not scoff, she did not scorn,
Yet 'guilty, guilty,' still I cry.
For an accusing Voice is heard,
When night is still and thought is dim,
Saying, 'It was not deed or word,
But her bad heart, that ruined him.'
Then come the witnesses and proofs,
And documents of priceless cost;
But when the dawn has touched the roofs,
All vanish, and my cause is lost :
And in my being's darkest deep
The plaintiff seeks the shame to hide :
One sense-one memory-will not sleep-
That I am utterly destroyed!
VIII
My fathomless despair to show
By certain signs, your letter came :
A lightning-flash, whose sudden flame
Lit up the' abyss that yawned below.
HEINRICH HEINE.
321
What! you by sympathies controlled !
You, who in all my life's confusion,
Stood by me, in your self-seclusion,
As fair as marble, and as cold.
O God! how wretched I must be !
When even she begins to speak;
When tears run down that icy cheek,
The very stones can pity me.
There's something shocks me in her woe:
But if that rigid heart is rent,
May not the Omnipotent relent,
And let this poor existence go?
IX
The Sphynx was all a Woman: proof
I cannot give you, but I know it ;
The lion's body, tail, and hoof,
Are but the nonsense of the poet.
And this real Sphynx, to madden us,
Goes on propounding her enigma,
Just as she tortured Edipus
With all his sad domestic stigma.
How fortunate she does not know
Herself her secret's mystic thunder!
If once she spoke the word, the blow
Would split the world itself asunder.
X
Three hags on a seat
Where the cross-roads meet !
They mumble and grin,
They sigh and they spin:
Υ
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THE LAST DAYS OF
Great ladies they be,
Though frightful to see.
One moistens the thread
In her pendulous mouth,
And the distaff is fed
Though her lip has the drought.
One dances the spindle
In fanciful ways,
Till the sparks from it kindle
Her eyes to a blaze.
The third holds the shears
The discussion to close :
While with voice hard and dreary
She sings 'Miserere,
And the rheum of her tears
Makes warts on her nose.
Sweet Fate! prithee answer
My love with your knife ;—
And cut out this cancer
Of damnable life.
XI
I long not for Elysian fields
Or Paradise, or lands of bliss,
No fairer forms that region yields
Than, in my time, I've known in this.
No Angel with the softest wing
Can be to me the wife I lose,
And on the clouds to sit and sing
Is not a pastime I should choose.
HEINRICH HEINE.
323
Dear Lord! how I should bless thy name
If Thou, instead of heaven, wouldst please
To mend this body's ragged frame,
And give just gold enough for ease.
I know that sin and vice abound,-
But it has been my wont for years
To pace unharmed this naughty ground
And loiter through this vale of tears.
Little I heed the noisy town ;
;
Seldom I pass my humble door;
In slippers and in dressing-gown
I rest, and ask for nothing more-
Except my wife; whene'er she speaks,
My soul no other music needs;
And in her honest eye it seeks
The secret of all noble deeds.
A little health, a little wealth,
Are all I pray for; let us go
Through a long life of happy stealth,
I and my wife in statu quo.
During these years of misery I had no oppor-
tunity of visiting Heine, but soon after his death
I received a letter from a lady to whom I applied
for information concerning him, and which seems.
to me so faithful and pathetic a picture of this
great agony that I am grateful to be permitted
by her representatives to insert it here. I would
not have done so were she still living, for, with
Y 2
324
THE LAST DAYS OF
all the talent of expression which has already
made many of her personal experiences on matters
of interest to others known to the world, she
would have been seriously annoyed at any public
reference to the noble and delightful qualities
which have left so deep an impression on all who
knew her.
'My husband tells me that you wish to have
my recollections of poor Heine when I last saw
him.
I had known him above twenty years ago
as a child of eleven or twelve at
I sat next him at a table d'hôte.
Boulogne, where
He was then a
with a sensual
fat, short man-shortsighted, and
mouth. He heard me speak German to my
mother, and soon began to talk to me, and then
said, "When you go to England you can tell your
friends that you have seen Heinrich Heine." I
replied, "And who is Heinrich Heine?" He
laughed heartily, and took no offence at my
ignorance, and we used to lounge on the end of
the pier together, where he told me stories in
which fish, mermaids, watersprites, and a very
funny old French fiddler with a poodle, who was
diligently taking three sea baths a day, were
mixed up in the most fanciful manner, sometimes
HEINRICH HEINE.
325
humorous, and very often pathetic, especially
when the watersprites brought him German greet-
ings from the "Nord See."
He since told me that the poem-
Wenn ich an deinem Hause
Am Morgen vorüber geh,
So freut's mich, du liebe Kleine,
Wenn ich dich am Fenster seh, &c.
was meant for me and my "braune Augen."
He was at Boulogne a month or two, and
I saw him often then, and always remembered
with great tenderness the poet who had told me
the beautiful stories, and been so kind to me, and
so sarcastic to everyone else.
'I never saw him again till I went to Paris three
years ago, when I heard that he was dying and
very poor. I sent my name, and a message that
if he chanced to remember the little girl to whom
he told “Mährchen" years ago at Boulogne, I
should like to see him. He sent for me directly,
remembered every little incident, and all the
people who were in the same inn; a ballad I had
sung, which recounted the tragical fate of Ladye
Alice and her humble lover, Giles Collins, and
ended by Ladye Alice taking only one spoonful
326
THE LAST DAYS OF
of the gruel, "With sugar and spices so rich,"
while after her decease, "The parson licked up
the rest." This diverted Heine extremely, and he
asked after the parson who drank the gruel
directly.
'I for my part could hardly speak to him, so
shocked was I by his appearance. He lay on a
pile of mattresses, his body wasted so that it
seemed no bigger than a child under the sheet
which covered him-the eyes closed, and the
face altogether like the most painful and wasted.
"Ecce Homo" ever painted by some old German
painter.
'His voice was very weak and I was astonished
at the animation with which he talked-evidently
his mind had wholly survived his body. He
raised his powerless eyelids with his thin white
fingers, and exclaimed, “Gott! die kleine Lucie ist
gross geworden und hat einen Mann; das ist eigen!"
He then earnestly asked if I was happy and con-
tented, and begged me to bring my husband to
see him. He said again he hoped I was happy
now, as I had always been such a merry child. I
answered that I was no longer so merry as the
"kleine Lucie" had been, but very happy and con-
HEINRICH HEINE.
327
tented, and he said, "Das ist schön; es bekommt
Einem gut eine Frau zu sehen, die kein wundes.
Herz herum trägt, um es von allerlei Männern
ausbessern zu lassen, wie die Weiber hier zu Lande,
die es am Ende nicht merken, dass was ihnen
eigentlich fehlt ist gerade dass sie gar keine
Herzen haben." I took my husband to see him,
and we bid him good-bye. He said that he hoped
to see me again-ill as he was, he should not die
yet.
'Last September I went to Paris again, and
found Heine removed, and living in the same
street as myself in the Champs-Élysées; I sent
him word I was come, and soon received a note
painfully written in pencil by him as follows :—
"Hoch geehrte grossbritannische Göttinn Lucie!
-Ich liess durch den Bedienten zurückmelden,
dass ich mit Ausnahme des letzten Mitwochs alle
Tage und zu jeder beliebigen Stunde bereit sey,
your Godship bey mir zu empfangen. Aber ich
habe bis heute vergebens auf solcher himmlischen
Erscheinung gewartet. Ne tardez plus de venir !
Venez aujourd'hui, venez demain, venez souvent.
Vous demeurez si près de moi, dem armen Schatten
in den Elisäischen Feldern!
328
THE LAST DAYS OF
"Lassen Sie mich nicht zu lange warten. Anbey
schicke ich Ihnen die 4 ersten Bände der franzö-
sischen Ausgabe meiner unglückseligen Werke.
"Unterdessen verharre ich Ihrer Göttlichkeit
"Unterthänigster und ergebenster Anbeter,
“HEINRICH HEINE.
"P.S. The parson drank the gruel water."
'I went immediately, and climbed up five stories.
to a small room, where I found him still on the
same pile of mattresses on which I had left him
three years before; more ill he could not look, for
he looked dead already, and wasted to a shadow.
When I kissed him, his beard felt like swandown or
a baby's hair, so weak had it grown, and his face
seemed to me to have gained a certain beauty from
pain and suffering. He was very affectionate to me
and said, “Ich habe jetzt mit der ganzen Welt Frie-
den gemacht, und endlich auch mit dem lieben
Gott, der schickt mir dich nun als schöner Todes-
engel; gewiss sterb' ich bald." I said, "Armer Dich-
ter, bleiben Ihnen noch immer so viele herrliche
Illusionen, dass Sie eine reisende Engländerin für
Azrael ansehen können? Das war sonst nicht der
Fall, Sie konnten uns ja nicht leiden." He
HEINRICH HEINE.
329
answered, “Ja, mein Gott, ich weiss doch gar nicht
was ich gegen die Engländer hatte, dass ich immer
so boshaft gegen sie war, es war aber wahrlich nur
Muthwillen, eigentlich hasste ich sie nie, und ich
habe sie auch nie gekannt. Ich war einmal in
England vor langen Jahren, kannte aber Niemand,
und fand London recht traurig und die Leute auf
der Strasse kamen mir unausstehlich vor. Aber
England hat sich schön gerächt, sie schickte mir
ganz vorzügliche Freunde-dich, und Milnes-der
gute Milnes, und noch mehrere."
'I saw him two or three times a week during a
two months' stay in Paris, and found him always
full of lively conversation and interest in every-
thing, and of his old undisguised vanity, pleased to
receive bad translations of his works, and anxious
beyond measure to be well translated into English.
He offered me the copyright of all his works as a
gift, and said he would give me carte-blanche to
cut out all I thought necessary on my own account
or that of the English public-and made out lists of
how I had better arrange them, which he gave me.
'He sent me all his books, and was boyishly
eager that I should set to work and read him some
in English, especially a prose translation of his
330
THE LAST DAYS OF
songs, which he pressed me to undertake with the
greatest vehemence, against my opinion as to its
practicability.
'He talked a great deal about politics in the
same tone as in his later writings-a tone of
vigorous protest and disgust of mob-tyranny, past,
present, and future; told me a vast number of
stories about people of all sorts, which I should not
choose to repeat; and expressed the greatest wish
that it were possible to get well enough to come.
over to visit me and effect a reconciliation with
England.
On the whole, I never saw a man bear such
horrible pain and misery in so perfectly unaffected
a manner. He complained of his sufferings, and was
pleased to see tears in my eyes, and then at once
set to work to make me laugh heartily, which
pleased him just as much. He neither paraded
his anguish nor tried to conceal it or to put on any
stoical airs; I also thought him far less sarcastic,
more hearty, more indulgent, and altogether
pleasanter than ever. After a few weeks he begged
me not to tell him when I was going, for that he
could not bear to say, "Lebewohl auf ewig," or to
"ein
hear it, and repeated that I had come as
HEINRICH HEINE.
331
<<
schöner gütiger Todesengel," to bring him greetings
from youth and from Germany, and to dispel all
the "bösen französischen Gedanken." When he
spoke German to me he called me Du," and used
the familiar expressions and turns of language
which Germans use to a child; in French I was
"Madame" and "vous." It was evident that I
of life to his memory,
recalled some happy time
and that it was a great relief to him to talk
German and to consider me still as a child. He
said that what he liked so much was, that I laughed
so heartily, which the French could not do. I
defended the "vieille gaieté française," but he said,
"Oui, c'est vrai, cela existait autrefois, mais avouez,
ma chère, que c'était une gaieté un peu bête." He
had so little feeling for what I liked most in the
French character that I could see he must have
lived only with those of that nation who "sit in
the scorner's seat;" whereas, while he laughed at
Germany it was with "des larmes dans la voix."
He also talked a good deal about his religious
feelings, much displeased at the reports that he had
turned Catholic.
'What he said about his own belief and hope and
trust would not be understood in England, nor
332
THE LAST DAYS OF
ought I, I think, to betray the deeper feelings of a
dying man.
'The impression he made on me was so deep that
I had great difficulty to restrain my tears till I
had left the room the last few times I saw him,
and shall never forget the sad pale face and the
eager manner of poor Heine.'
Shortly before the end he wrote this last
summary of the struggle of faith which had, as it
were, possessed him during his existence, and never,
I believe, in the strange tale of the poetic life has
there been so wonderful a maintenance of imagina-
tive power and intellectual integrity through long
years of physical anguish up to the very gates of
death.
Full fell the summer moonlight in my dream
On the wild shrubs that marked an ancient pleasaunce,
And richly sculptured stonework that might seem
Fine relics of the time of the Renaissance.'
Fragments of porches, gurgoyles, gable-ends,
From that half-Christian and half-Pagan era,
As the mixed shape of man and beast portends,
Centaur and Sphynx, and Satyr and Chimæra.
Still here and there some Doric capitals,
Topping the lofty thicket, make you wonder
How straight they rise when all about them falls,
Gazing on Heaven as if they mocked its thunder !
HEINRICH HEINE.
333
But one sarcophagus without decay,
And white as on the Roman's funeral's morrow,
Contained a coffin, wherein perfect lay
A manly corse, wasted with pain and sorrow.
This was upheld by Caryatides
With outstretched necks and ever weary faces,
While bas-reliefs unfolded by degrees
Scenes that filled up the marble's smallest spaces.
There the old powers that on Olympus dwelt
Sunned their gay godships in unconscious beauty;
There our first parents reverently knelt,
Attired in fig-leaves from a sense of duty.
There was the tragic tale of burning Troy,
Sweet Helen, and the shepherd who caressed her
There Aaron priest-great Moses, man and boy-
Judith and Holofernes-Haman-Esther.
There the god Amor, ever fair to see,
Phoebus Apollo-Vulcan-Lady Venus,
Pluto, Proserpina, and Mercury,
The garden-god, with Bacchus and Silenus.
Near them were Balaam, and his ass that got
The power to talk like other human asses;
And Abraham's horrid sacrifice, and Lot,
Whose tipsy deed the very gods surpasses.
There too Herodias trippingly brought in
The Baptist, or at least his head without him;
And Hell flared out with Satan's hideous grin,
And Peter bore the keys of Heaven about him.
Then, following round the sculptures as they ran,
You saw the work of Jupiter's loose hours;
Leda delighted with the downy swan,
And Danae, revelling in the golden showers.
;
334
THE LAST DAYS OF
There wild Diana and her high-girt troop
Chased the swift stag through open ground and shady,
And Hercules, forgetting his war-whoop,
Sat spinning like a decent Grecian lady.
Then rose Mount Sinai, round whose sandy peak
Its flocks and herds the pilgrim Israel gathers;
Then stood the Child his mother went to seek,
And found disputing with the grim old fathers.
Thus the sharp contrasts of the sculptor's plan
Showed the two primal paths our race has trod;
Hellas, the nurse of man, complete as man,
Judea pregnant with the living God.
The ivy arabesques of green and gloom
Hid all the rest; when strangely up I started,
Conscious that that lone figure in the tomb
Was I myself, worn out, and broken-hearted.
There at the head of my last couch was set
A plant that grows in holy ground unbidden;
Its leaves unburnished gold and violet,
And a rare love-charm in its blossom hidden.
The simple people call it passion-flower,
And in tradition's botany we find
It sprang from earth on Calvary, the hour
That Christ's dear blood was shed to save mankind.
And for its own unchallenged evidence,
Each bloom within its marvellous recesses
Bears symbols potent to the humblest sense
Of all the martyrdom that word expresses.
Nature with dainty miniatures adorns
Each calyx here in terrible remembrance-
The cross, the cords, the scourge, the crown of thorns,
Cup, nails, and hammer, each retains its semblance.
HEINRICH HEINE.
335
Such was the plant my fancy deemed to stand
Beside my open tomb; with vain endeavour
Touching my silent head, my useless hand,
Kissing the eyelids that are closed for ever.
O witchcraft of the visionary life!
That flower, by some internal grace transmuted,
Became thyself, my darling and my wife,
Deep in the centre of my being rooted.
What odorous ichor can thy tears excel?
What sun-fed blooms can realise thy kisses?
That passion-flower was all the world's as well,
But thou art all mine own, thou bliss of blisses!
Through my shut eyes I feel the gracious boon
Of thy divine compassion bending o'er me;
And clothed in ghostly lustre by the moon,
Thy features glimmer solemnly before me.
We could not speak, and yet my spirit heard
The thoughts and feelings welling in thy bosom :
There's something shameless in the uttered word,
Silence is Love's most pure and holy blossom.
So all varieties of mental sound,
From speechless gossip up to noiseless thunder,
Filled up the night's too transitory round-
That summer night of rapture, pain, and wonder.
Oh! never ask us what our dumbness said—
Ask the mild glow-worm what it burns and simpers,
Ask the wild brook what's running in its head,
Ask the soft zephyr what it breathes and whimpers;
Ask what the diamond to the ruby gleams,
What the night-violets murmur to the roses,
But ask not what the Flower of Sorrow dreams
To him who in the moonlit grave reposes.
336
THE LAST DAYS OF
Alas! my luscious ecstasy of peace,
My cool sarcophagus, my mellow glory,
Were but a specious, incomplete decease,
And not the finis of my vital story;
Not death-that only perfect happiness,
By whose sublime tranquillity we measure
This life which blunders while it tries to bless
With aching passion or with tickling pleasure.
And now, it seemed, outside my tomb arose
A storm that all but mortal slumber banished-
Sounds like the meeting of ancestral foes,
At which my passion-flower affrighted vanished.
The forms the sculptor's fancy had devised
Acquired a supernatural existence,
And mid the rage, I thought I recognised
Familiar voices, cries of old resistance.
From the dry stone breaks out the war of creeds,
The bas-reliefs dispose themselves for battle;
Pan's dying wail the pagan ardour feeds,
And Moses blasts his foe like Pharaoh's cattle.
Ay ! evermore must this keen strife go on,
Beauty and Truth, alas! there's no uniting;
For while each power retains its garrison,
Greeks and Barbarians ever will be fighting.
What curses! what abuse! too long to tell;
What dogmas, more obscure the more one searches!
When Balaam's ass set up one hideous yell
That drowned the cries of gods and prayers of churches.
Hee-haw! hee-haw! the foolish beast outbrayed,
Opening his jaws so wide as to provoke me,
Till, by an angry imitation swayed,
I brayed responsive—and the effort woke me.
HEINRICH HEINE.
337
He
These poems, this temperament of mind, even this
noble endurance, must not be judged by a Christian
standard. Although Heine had received his primary
education from the Roman Catholic clergy who
directed the public schools at Dusseldorf under the
French occupation, and though he was after-
wards formally received into the Lutheran Com-
munion, probably for some political object,
Heine never seems seriously to have assumed
even the profession of the Christian life.
remained essentially a Hebrew, and was no incon-
siderable example of the forms which the ancient
genius has in modern times assumed. Israel
sitting holy under his fig-tree and singing the
praise of the invisible God, and exercising mercy
and justice amid the bloody and dissolute rites of
Babylon and Nineveh and Sidon and Tyre, was
the highest image that his mind would contemplate;
and in the institution of the Jubilee he finds an
apology for the very Socialists whose advent he
expects with terror. For him, it is the Jews who
preserved the Sacred Writings through the bank-
ruptcy of the Roman Empire; and the Reformers
who revealed, and the perfidious British monopolists
of commerce who are diffusing them throughout
Z
338
THE LAST DAYS OF
mankind, are but the unconscious founders of a
world-wide Palestine. There is no more earnest
passage in the whole of his writings than that in
his volume on Börne, where he observes on the
embarrassment of the old Greek grammarians who
attempted to define, according to recognised notions
of art, the beauties of the Bible-Longinus, talking
of its sublimity,' just as aesthetic moderns of its
'simplicity'—' Vain words, vain tests of all human
judgment. It is God's work, like a tree, like a
flower, like the sea, like Man himself,-it is the
Word of God, that, and no more.' We have seen
something among ourselves of this enduring senti-
ment of religious patriotism with interest and not
without respect. In Heine it was the saving element
of reverence which incurred the wrath of what he
calls the High Church of German Infidelity'—of
Bruno Bauer, of Daumer, and of Feuerbach-'who
did me too much and too little honour in entitling
me their Brother in the Spirit-of Voltaire.' That
he undoubtedly never was; the wit of thoughts.
preserved him from the tyranny of the wit of words.
The humour which abounded within him flowed
over the whole surface of nature, and left no place
for arid ridicule and barren scorn; it fertilised all
(
HEINRICH HEINE.
339
;
it touched with its inherent poetry, and the produc-
tive sympathy of mankind manifests itself in the
large crop of his imitators who have sprung up, not
only in Germany, but other countries. Many a
page of modern political satire rests upon a phrase
of Heine; many a stanza, many a poem, germinates
from a single line of his verses. The forms of wit
which he invented are used by those who never
heard his name, and yet that name already belongs
to the literature of Europe. The personal tragedy
of his last years adds a solemn chapter to the
chronicle of the disasters of genius, and the recol-
lection of the afflictions of the living Shade of the
Champs Élysées' will mitigate the judgment of
censorious criticism, and tinge with melancholy
associations the brightest and liveliest of his
works.
(
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