Chapter VII

For many a page now we have spoken intermittently of that extraordinary man and poet—full of power and full of passion, both uncontrolled—whose surroundings we found in that pleasantly undulating Nottingham country where Newstead Abbey piled above its lawn and its silent tarns—half a ruin, and half a home.[80] Nor did Byron ever know a home which showed no ruin—nor ever know a ruin, into which his verse did not nestle as into a home.

We traced him from the keeping of that passionate mother—who smote him through and through with her own wrathful spirit—to the days when he uttered the “Idle” songs—coined in the courts of Cambridge—and to those quick succeeding days, when his mad verse maddened English bards and Scotch reviewers. Then came the passages of love—with Mary Chaworth, which was real and vain; with a Milbanke, which was a mockery and ended in worse than mockery; all these experiences whetting the edge of that sword of song with which he carved a road of romance for thousands of after journeymen to travel, through the old Iberian Peninsula, and the vales of Thessaly. Then there was the turning away, in rage, from the shores of England, the episode with the Shelley household on the borders of Lake Leman, with its record of “crag-splitting” storms and sunny siestas; and such enduring memorials as the ghastly Frankenstein of Mrs. Shelley, the Third Canto of Childe Harold, and the child-name of—Allegra.

Next came Venice, where the waves lapped murmurously upon the door-steps of the palaces which “Mi-lord” made noisy with his audacious revelry. To this succeeded the long stay at Ravenna, with its pacifying and lingering, reposeful reach of an attachment, which was beautiful in its sincerity, but as lawless as his life. After Ravenna came Pisa with its Hunt-Lanfranchi coruscations of spleen, and its weird interlude of the burning of the body of his poor friend Shelley upon the Mediterranean shores. Song, and drama, and tender verselets, and bagnio-tainted pictures of Don Juan, gleamed with fervid intensity through the interstices of this Italian life; but they all came to a sudden stay when he sailed for Greece, and with a generosity as strong as his wilder passions, flung away his fortune and his life in that vortex of Suliote strifes and deadly miasmas, which was centred amid the swamplands of Missolonghi.

The Cretans of to-day (1897), and the men of Thessaly, and of the Morea, and Albanians all, may find a lift of their ambitions and a spur to their courage in Byron’s sacrifice to their old struggle for liberty, and in his magnificent outburst of patriotic song. So, too, those who love real poetry will never cease to admire his subtle turns of thought, and his superb command of all the resources of language. But the households are few in which his name will be revered as an apostle of those cheering altitudes of thought which encourage high endeavor, or of those tenderer humanities which spur to kindly deeds, and give their glow to the atmosphere of homes.

King William’s Time.

The last figure that we dealt with among England’s kings was that bluff, vulgar-toned sailor, William IV., whom even the street-folk criticise, because he spat from his carriage window when driving on some State ceremonial.[81] Nor was this the worst of his coarsenesses; he swore—with great ease and pungency. He forgot his dignity; he insulted his ministers; he gave to Queen Adelaide, who survived him many years as dowager, many most uncomfortable half-hours; and if he read the new sea-stories of Captain Marryat—though he read very little—I suspect he loved more the spicier condiments of Peregrine Pickle and of Tom Jones.

Yet during the period of his short reign—scarce seven years—events happened—some through his slow helpfulness, and none suffering grievously from his obstructiveness—which gave new and brighter color to the political development and to the literary growth of England. There was, for instance, the passage of the Reform Bill of 1832 (of which I have already spoken, in connection with Sydney Smith)—not indeed accomplishing all its friends had hoped; not inaugurating a political millennium; not doing away with the harsh frictions of state-craft; no reforms ever do or can; but broadening the outlook and range of all publicists, and stirring quiet thinkers into aggressive and kindling and hopeful speech. Very shortly after this followed the establishment of that old society for the “Diffusion of Useful Knowledge” which came soon to the out-put—under the editorship of Charles Knight—of the Penny Cyclopædia and the Penny Magazine.[82]

I recall distinctly the delight with which—as boys—we lingered over the pictured pages of that magazine—the great forerunner of all of our illustrated monthlies.

To the same period belong those Tracts for the Times, in which John Keble, the honored author of the Christian Year, came to new notice, while his associates, Dr. Pusey and Cardinal Newman, gave utterance to speech which is not without reverberating echoes, even now. Nor was it long after this date that British journalism received a great lift, and a great broadening of its forces, by a reduction of the stamp-tax—largely due to the efforts of Bulwer Lytton—whereby British newspapers increased their circulation, within two years, by 20,000,000 annually.[83]

All these things had come about in the reign of William IV.; but to none of them had he given any enthusiastic approval, or any such urgence of attention as would have dislocated a single one of his royal dinners.

In 1837 he died—not very largely sighed over; least of all by that sister-in-law, the Duchess of Kent, whom he had hated for her starched proprieties, whom he had insulted again and again, and who now, in her palace of Kensington, prepared her daughter Victoria for her entrance upon the sovereignty.

Her Majesty Victoria.

The girl was only eighteen—well taught, discreet, and modest. Greville tells us that she was consumed with blushes when her uncles of Sussex and of Cumberland came, with the royal council, to kneel before her, and to kiss her hand in token of the new allegiance.

The old king had died at two o’clock of the morning; and by eleven o’clock on the same day the duties of royalty had begun for the young queen, in receiving the great officers of state. Among the others she meets on that first regal day in Kensington Palace, are Lansdowne, the fidgety Lord Brougham, the courtly Sir Robert Peel, and the spare, trim-looking old Duke of Wellington, who is charmed by her gracious manner, and by her self-control and dignity. He said he could not have been more proud of her if she had been his own daughter.

Nearer to the young queen than all these—by old ties of friendship, that always remained unshaken—was the suave and accomplished Lord Melbourne—First Minister—who has prepared the queen’s little speech for her, which she reads with charming self-possession; to him, too, she looks for approval and instruction in all her progress through the new ceremonials of Court, and the ordering of a royal household. And Melbourne is admirably suited to that task; he was not a great statesman; was never an orator, but possessed of all the arts of conciliation—adroit and full of tact, yet kindly, sympathetic, and winning. Not by any means a man beyond reproach in his private life, but bringing to those new offices of political guardianship to the young queen only the soundest good-sense and the wisest of advice—thus inspiring in her a trust that was never forfeited.

Indeed, it was under Melbourne’s encouragements, and his stimulative commendation (if stimulus were needed), that the young princess formed shortly after that marriage relation which proved altogether a happy one—giving to England and to the world shining proof that righteous domesticities were not altogether clean gone from royal houses. And if the good motherly rulings have not had their best issues with some of the male members of the family, can we not match these wry tendencies with those fastening upon the boys of well-ordered households all around us? It is not in royal circles only that his satanic majesty makes friends of nice boys, when the girls escape him—or seem to!

Well, I have gone back to that old palace of Kensington, which still, with its mossy brick walls, in the west of London, baffles the years, and the fogs—the same palace where we went to find William III. dying, and the gracious Queen Anne too; and where now the Marquis of Lorne and the Princess Louise have their home. I have taken you again there to see how the young Victoria bore herself at the news of her accession—with the great councillors of the kingdom about her—not alone because those whom we shall bring to the front, in this closing chapter, have wrought during her reign; but because, furthermore, she with her household have been encouragers and patrons of both letters and of art in many most helpful ways; and yet, again, because this queen, who has within this twelve-month (1897) made her new speech to Parliament—sixty years after that first little speech at Kensington—is herself, in virtue of certain modest book-making, to be enrolled with all courtesy in the Guild of Letters. And though the high-stepping critics may be inclined to question the literary judgment or the scrupulous finish of her book-work, we cannot, I think, deny to it a thoroughly humane tone, and a tender realism. We greet her not only by reason of her queenship proper, but for that larger sovereignty of womanhood and of motherhood which she has always dignified and adorned.

I once caught such glimpse of her—as strangers may—in the flush of her early wedded life; not beautiful surely, but comely, kindly, and radiant, in the enjoyment of—what is so rare with sovereigns—a happy home-life; and again I came upon other sight of her eight years later, when the prince was a rollicking boy, and the princess a blooming maiden; these and lesser rosy-cheeked ones were taking the air on the terrace at Windsor, almost in the shadow of the great keep, which has frowned there since the days of Edward III.

Macaulay.

In the early days of Queen Victoria’s reign—when Sir Robert Peel was winning his way to the proud position he later held—when American and English politicians were getting into the toils of the “Maine Boundary” dispute (afterward settled by Ashburton and Webster), and when the Countess of Blessington was making “Gore House” lively with her little suppers, and the banker Rogers entertaining all beaux esprits at his home near the Green Park, there may have been found as guest at one of the banker’s famous breakfasts—somewhere we will say in the year 1838—a man, well-preserved, still under forty—with a shaggy brow, with clothes very likely ill-adjusted and ill-fitting, and with gloves which are never buttoned—who has just come back from India, where he has held lucrative official position. He is cogitating, it is said, a history of England, and his talk has a fulness and richness that seem inexhaustible.

You know to whom I must refer—Thomas Babington Macaulay[84]—not a new man at Rogers’s table, not a new man to bookish people; for he had won his honors in literature, especially by a first paper on Milton, published in the year 1825 in the Edinburgh Review. This bore a new stamp and had qualities that could not be overlooked. There are scores of us who read that paper for the first time in the impressionable days of youth, who are carried back now by the mere mention of it to the times of the old Puritan poet.

“We can almost fancy that we are visiting him in his small lodging; that we see him sitting at the old organ beneath the faded green hangings; that we can catch the quick twinkle of his eyes, rolling in vain to find the day; that we are reading in the lines of his noble countenance the proud and mournful history of his glory and his affliction!”

Macaulay came of good old Scotch stock—his forefathers counting up patriarchal families in Coll and Inverary; but his father, Zachary Macaulay, well known for his anti-slavery action and influence, and for his association with Wilberforce, married an English Quaker girl from Bristol—said to have been a protégée of our old friend, Mistress Hannah More. Of this marriage was born, in 1800, at the charming country house of an aunt, named Babington, in the pleasant county of Leicestershire, the future historian.

The father’s first London home was near by Lombard Street, where he managed an African agency under the firm name of Macaulay & Babington; and the baby Macaulay used to be wheeled into an open square near by, for the enjoyment of such winter’s sunshine as fell there at far-away intervals. His boyish memories, however, belonged to a later home at Clapham, then a suburban village. There, was his first schooling, and there he budded out—to the wonderment of all his father’s guests—into young poems and the drollest of precocious talk. His pleasant biographer (Trevelyan) tells of a visit the bright boy made at Strawberry Hill—Walpole’s old showplace. There was a spilling of hot drink of some sort, during the visitation, which came near to scalding the lad; and when the sympathizing hostess asked after his suffering: “Thank you, madam,” said he, “the agony is abated!” The story is delightfully credible; and so are other pleasant ones of his reciting some of his doggerel verses to Hannah More and getting a gracious and approving nod of her gray curls and of her mob-cap.

At Cambridge, where he went at the usual student age, he studied what he would, and discarded what he would—as he did all through his life. For mathematics he had a distinguished repugnance, then and always; and if brought to task by them in those student days—trying hard to twist their certainties into probabilities, and so make them subject to that world of “ifs and buts” which he loved to start buzzing about the ears of those who loved the exact sciences better than he. He missed thus some of the University honors, it is true; yet, up and down in those Cambridge coteries he was a man looked for, and listened to, eagerly and bravely applauded. Certain scholastic honors, too, he did reap, in spite of his lunges outside the traces; there was a medal for his poem of Pompeii; and a Fellowship, at last, which gave him a needed, though small income—his father’s Afric business having proved a failure, and no home moneys coming to him thereafter.

The first writings of Macaulay which had public issue were printed in Knight’s Quarterly Magazine—among them were criticisms on Italian writers, a remarkable imaginary conversation between “Cowley and Milton,” and the glittering, jingling battle verses about the War of the League and stout “Henry of Navarre”—full to the brim of that rush and martial splendor which he loved all his life, and which he brought in later years to his famous re-heralding of the Lays of Ancient Rome. A few lines are cited:—

On the year after this “Battle of Ivry” had sparkled into print appeared the paper on Milton, to which I have alluded, and which straightway set London doors open to the freshly fledged student-at-law. Crabb Robinson, in his diary of those days, speaks patronizingly of a “young gentleman of six or seven and twenty, who has emerged upon the dinner-giving public,” and is astounding old habitués by his fulness and brilliancy of talk. He had not, to be sure, those lighter and sportive graces of conversation which floated shortly thereafter out from the open windows of Gore House, and had burgeoned under the beaming smiles of Lady Blessington. But he came to be a table match for Sydney Smith, and was honored by the invitations of Lady Holland,[85] who allowed no new find of so brilliant feather to escape her.

In Politics and Verse.

Macaulay’s alliance with the Scottish Reviewers, and his known liberalism, make him a pet of the great Whigs; and through Lansdowne, with a helping hand from Melbourne, he found his way into Parliament: there were those who prophesied his failure in that field; I think Brougham in those days, with not a little of jealousy in his make up, was disposed to count him a mere essayist. But his speeches in favor of the Reform bill belied all such auguries. Sir Robert Peel declared them to be wonderful in their grasp and eloquence; they certainly had great weight in furthering reform; and his parliamentary work won presently for him the offer from Government of a place in India. No Oriental glamour allured him, but the new position was worth £10,000 per annum. He counted upon saving the half of this, and returning after five years with a moderate fortune. He did better, however—shortening his period of exile by nearly a twelve-month, and bringing back £30,000.

His sister (who later became Lady Trevelyan) went with him as the mistress of his Calcutta household; and his affectionate and most tender relations with this, as well as with his younger sister, are beautifully set forth in the charming biography by his nephew, Otto Trevelyan. It is a biography that everybody should read; and none can read it, I am sure, without coming to a kindlier estimate of its subject. The home-letters with which it abounds run over with affectionate playfulness. We are brought to no ugly post mortem in the book, and no opening of old sores. It is modest, courteous, discreet, and full.

Macaulay did monumental work in India upon the Penal Code. He also kept up there his voracious habits of reading and study. Listen for a moment to his story of this:

“During the last thirteen months I have read Eschylus, twice; Sophocles, twice; Euripides, once; Pindar, twice; Callimachus, Apollonius Rhodius, Theocritus, twice; Herodotus, Thucydides, almost all of Xenophon’s works, almost all of Plato, Aristotle’s Politics, and a good deal of his Organon; the whole of Plutarch’s Lives; half of Lucian; two or three books of Athenæus; Plautus, twice; Terence, twice; Lucretius, twice; Catullus, Propertius, Lucan, Statius, Silius Italicus, Livy, Velleius Paterculus, Sallust, Cæsar, and lastly, Cicero.”

This is his classical list. Of his modern reading he does not tell; yet he was plotting the History of England, and the bouncing balladry of the Lays of Rome was even then taking shape in the intervals of his study.

His father died while Macaulay was upon his voyage home from India—a father wholly unlike the son, in his rigidities and his Calvinistic asperities; but always venerated by him, and in the latter years of the old gentleman’s life treated with a noble and beautiful generosity.

A short visit to Italy was made after the return from India; and it was in Rome itself that he put some of the last touches to the Lays—staying the work until he could confirm by personal observation the relative sites of the bridge across the Tiber and the home of Horatius upon the Palatine.

You remember the words perhaps; if not, ’twere well you should,—

This does not sound like those verses of Shelley, which we lately encountered. Those went through the empyrean of song like Aurora’s chariot of the morning, with cherubs, and garlands, and flashing torches. This, in the comparison, is like some well-appointed dump-cart, with sleek, well-groomed Percheron horses—up to their work, and accomplishing what they are set to do absolutely well.

It was not until 1842, a year or two after the Italian visit, that Macaulay ventured to publish that solitary book of his verse; he very much doubted the wisdom of putting his literary reputation in peril by such overture in rhyme. It extorted, however, extravagant praise from that muscular critic Christopher North; while the fastidious Hunt writes to him (begging a little money—as was his wont), and regretting that the book did not show more of the poetic aroma which breathes from the Faerie Queene. But say what we may of its lack—there is no weakly maundering; it is the work of a man full-grown, with all his wits active, and his vision clear, and who loved plain sirloins better than the fricandeaux and ragoûts of the artists.

There is also a scholarly handling, with high, historic air blowing through—as if he liked his Homer better than his Spenser; his prosody is up to the rules; the longs and shorts are split to a hair’s breadth—jingling and merry where the sense calls for it; and sober and resonant where meaning is weighty; flashing, too, where need is—with sword play and spear-heads that glitter and waver over marching men; but nowhere—I think it must be said—the tremulous poetic susurrus, that falters, and touches, and detains by its mystic sounds—tempting one into dim border-lands where higher and more inspired singers find their way. Christabel is not of his school, nor the star-shaped shadow of Wordsworth’s Daisy.

Parliamentarian and Historian.

Meantime occasional papers from Macaulay’s hand found their way into the pages of the great Northern Review—but by no means so many as the Whig managers could have wished; he had himself grown to think lightly of such work; the History was calling for his best powers, and there were parliamentary duties devolving upon him as member for Edinboro’.

I remember catching sight of him somewhere between 1844 and 1846—in his place in the House of Commons, and of listening to his brilliant castigation of Sir Robert Peel, in the matter, I think, of the Maynooth grant. He was well toward fifty then, but sturdy—with the firm tread of a man who could do his three or four leagues of walking—if need were; beetle-browed; his clothes ill-adjusted; his neck bundled in a big swathing of cravat. There was silence when he rose; there was nothing orator-like in his bearing; rather awkward in his pose; having scorn, too, as would seem, for any of the graces of elocution. But he was clear, emphatic, direct, with a great swift river of words all bearing toward definite aim. Tory critics used to say he wrote his speeches and committed them to memory. There was no need for that. Words tripped to his tongue as easily as to his pen. But there were no delicate modulations of voice; no art of pantomime; no conscious or unconscious assumption of graceful attitudes; and when subject-matter enfevered and kindled him—as it did on that occasion—there was the hurry and the over-strained voice of extreme earnestness.

It was not very long after this that he met with a notable repulse from his old political supporters in Edinboro’ that touched him grievously. But there were certain arts of the politician he could not, and would not learn; he could not truckle; he could not hobnob with clients who made vulgar claims upon him. He could not make domiciliary visits, to kiss the babies—whether of patrons, or of editors; he could not listen to twaddle from visiting committees, without breaking into a righteous wrath that hurt his chances. Edinboro’, afterward, however, cleared the record, by giving him before his death a triumphant return to Parliament.

Meantime that wonderful History had been written, and its roll of magniloquent periods made echo in every quarter of the literary world. Its success was phenomenal. After the issue of its second couplet of volumes the publishers sent to the author a check for £20,000 on account. Such checks passing between publisher and author were then uncommon; and—without straining a point—I think I may say they are now. With its Macaulay endorsement, it makes a unique autograph, now in the possession of the Messrs. Longmans—but destined to find place eventually among the manuscript treasures of the British Museum.

The great history is a partisan history, but it is the work of a bold and out-spoken and manly partisan. The colors that he uses are intense and glaring; but they are blended in the making of his great panorama of King William’s times, with a marvellous art. We are told that he was an advocate and not a philosopher; that he was a rhetorician and not a poet. We may grant all this, and we may grant more—and yet I think we shall continue to cherish his work. Men of greater critical acumen and nicer exploration may sap the grounds of some of his judgments; cooler writers, and those of more self-restraint, may draw the fires by which his indignations are kindled; but it will be very long before the world will cease to find high intellectual refreshment in the crackle of his epigrams, in his artful deployment of testimony, in his picturesque array of great historic characters and in the roll of his sonorous periods.

Yet he is the wrong man to copy; his exaltations make an unsafe model. He exaggerates—but he knows how to exaggerate. He paints a truth in colors that flow all round the truth, and enlarge it. Such outreach of rhetoric wants corresponding capacity of brain, and pen-strokes that never swerve or tremble. Smallish men should beware how they copy methods which want fulness of power and the besom of enthusiasm to fill out their compass. Homer can make all his sea-waves iridescent and multitudinous—all his women high-bosomed or blue-eyed—and all his mountains sweep the skies: but we should be modest and simple.

It was not until Macaulay had done his last work upon the book (still incomplete) which he counted his monument, that he moved away from his bachelor quarters in the Albany (Piccadilly) and established himself at Holly Lodge, which, under the new name (he gave it) of Oirlie Lodge, may be found upon a winding lane in that labyrinth of city roads that lies between Kensington Gardens and Holland House. There was a bit of green lawn attached, which he came to love in those last days of his; though he had been without strong rural proclivities. Like Gibbon, he never hunted, never fished, rarely rode. But now and then—among the thorn-trees reddening into bloom and the rhododendrons bursting their buds, the May mornings were “delicious” to him. He enjoyed, too, overmuch, the modest hospitalities he could show in a home of his own. There are joyfully turned notes—in his journal or in his familiar letters—of “a goose for Michaelmas,” and of “a chine and oysters for Christmas eve,” and “excellent audit ale” on Lord Mayor’s day. There, too, at Holly Lodge, comes to him in August, 1857, when he was very sad about India (as all the world were), an offer of a peerage. He accepts it, as he had accepted all the good things of life—cheerily and squarely, and was thenceforward Baron Macaulay of Rothley. He appears from time to time on the benches of the Upper House, but never spoke there. His speaking days were over. A little unwonted fluttering of the heart warned him that the end was not far off.

A visit to the English lakes and to Scotland in 1859 did not—as was hoped—give him access of strength. He was much disturbed, too (at this crisis), by the prospect of a long separation from his sister, Lady Trevelyan—whose husband had just now been appointed Governor of Madras. “This prolonged parting,” he says, “this slow sipping of the vinegar and the gall is terrible!” And the parting came earlier than he thought, and easier; for on a day of December in the same year he died in his library chair. His nephew and biographer had left him in the morning—sitting with his head bent forward on his chest—an attitude not unusual for him—in a languid and drowsy reverie. In the evening, a little before seven, Lady Trevelyan was summoned, and the biographer says:—“As we drove up to the porch of my uncle’s house, the maids ran crying into the darkness to meet us; and we knew that all was over.”

He was not an old man—only fifty-nine. The stone which marks his grave in Westminster Abbey is very near to the statue of Addison.

In estimating our indebtedness to Macaulay as a historian—where his fame and execution were largest—we must remember that his method of close detail forbade wide outlook or grasp of long periods of time. If he had extended the same microscopic examination and dramatic exhibit of important personages to those succeeding reigns, which he originally intended to cover—coming down to the days of William IV.—he would have required fifty volumes; and if he had attempted, in the same spirit, a reach like that of Green or Hume, his rhetorical periods must have overflowed more than two hundred bulky quartos! No ordinary man could read such; and—thank Heaven!—no extraordinary man could write so many.

Some Tory Critics.

Among those who sought with a delightsome pertinacity for flaws in the historic work of Macaulay, in his own time, was John Wilson Croker, to whom I have already alluded.[86] He was an older man than the historian; Irish by birth, handsome, well-allied by marriage, plausible, fawning on the great (who were of his party) wearing easily and boastfully his familiarity with Wellington, Lansdowne and Cumberland, airing daintily his literary qualities at the tables of Holland or Peel; proud of his place in Parliament, where he loved to show a satiric grace of speech, and the curled lips of one used to more elegant encounters. In short, he was the very man to light up the blazing contempt of such another as Macaulay; more than all since Croker was identified with the worst form of Toryism, and the other always his political antagonist.

Such being the animus of the parties, one can imagine the delight of Croker in detecting a blunder of Macaulay, and the delight of Macaulay when he was able to pounce upon the blunders in Croker’s edition of Boswell’s Johnson. This was on many counts an excellent work and—with its emendations—holds its ground now; but I think the slaps, and the scourgings, and the derisive mockery which the critic dealt out to the self-poised and elegant Croker have made a highly appetizing sauce piquante for the book these many a year. For my own part, I never enjoy it half so much as when I think of Macaulay’s rod of discipline “starting the dust out of the varlet’s [editor’s] jacket.”

It is not a question if Croker deserved this excoriation; we are so taken up with the dexterity and effectiveness with which the critical professor uses the surgeon’s knife, that we watch the operation, and the exceeding grace and ease with which he lays bare nerve after nerve, without once inquiring if the patient is really in need of such heroic treatment.

The Croker Papers[87]—two ponderous volumes of letters and diary which have been published in these latter years—have good bits in them; but they are rare bits, to be dredged for out from quagmires of rubbish. The papers are interesting, furthermore, as showing how a cleverish man, with considerable gifts of presence and of brain, with his re-actionary Toryism dominant, and made a fetich of, can still keep a good digestion and go in a respectable fashion through a long life—backwards, instead of “face to the front.”

In this connection it is difficult to keep out of mind that other Toryish administrator of the Quarterly bombardments of reform and of Liberalists—I mean Lockhart (to whom reference has already been made in the present volume), and who, with all of Croker’s personal gifts, added to these a still larger scorn than that of his elder associate in the Quarterly conclaves, for those whose social disabilities disqualified them for breathing the rarefied air which circulated about Albemarle Street and the courts of Mr. Murray. Even Mr. Lang in his apologetic but very interesting story of Lockhart’s life,[88] cannot forbear quiet reprehensive allusions to that critic’s odious way of making caustic allusion to “the social rank” of political opponents; although much of this he avers “is said in wrath.” Yet it is an unworthy wrath, always and everywhere, which runs in those directions. Lockhart, though an acute critic, and a very clever translator, was a supreme worshipper of “conditions,” rather than of qualities. He never forgave Americans for being Americans, and never preter-mitted his wrathy exposition of their ‘low-lived antecedents’ socially. The baronetcy of his father-in-law, Sir Walter Scott, was I think, a perpetual and beneficent regalement to him.

Two Gone-by Story Tellers.

Must it be said that the jolly story-teller of the sea and of the sea-ports, who wrote for our uncles and aunts, and elder brothers, the brisk, rollicking tales about Midshipman Easy, and Japhet in Search of a Father, is indeed gone by?

His name was Frederick Marryat,[89] the son of a well-to-do London gentleman, who had served the little Borough of Sandwich as member of Parliament (and was also author of some verses and political tractates), but who did not wean his boy from an inborn love of the sea. To gratify this love the boy had sundry adventurous escapades; but when arrived at the mature age of fourteen, he entered as midshipman in the Royal Navy—his first service, and a very active one, being with that brave and belligerent Lord Cochrane, who later won renown on the west coast of South America. Adventures of most hazardous and romantic qualities were not wanting under such an officer, all of which were stored in the retentive memory of the enthusiastic and observant midshipman, and thereafter, for years succeeding, were strewn with a free hand over his tales of the sea. These break a good many of the rules of rhetoric—and so do sailors; they have to do with the breakage of nearly all the commandments—and so do sailors. But they are breezy; they are always pushing forward; spars and sails are all ship-shape; and so are the sailors’ oaths, and the rattle of the chain-cables, and the slatting of the gaskets, and the smell of the stews from the cook’s galley.

There is also a liberal and quasi democratic coloring of the links and interludes of his novels. The trials of Peter Simple grow largely out of the cruel action of the British laws of primogeniture; nor does the jolly midshipman—grandson, or nephew—forego his satiric raps at my lord “Privilege.” Yet Marryat shows no special admiration for such evolutions of the democratic problem as he encounters in America.[90]

Upon the whole, one finds no large or fine literary quality in his books; but the fun in them is positive, and catching—as our aunts and uncles used to find it; but it is the fun of the tap-room, and of the for’castle, rather than of the salon, or the library. For all this, scores and scores of excellent old people were shaking their sides—in the early part of this century—over the pages of Captain Marryat—in the days when other readers with sighs were bemoaning the loss of the “Great Magician’s” power in the dreary story of Count Robert of Paris, or kindling into a new worship as they followed Ainsworth’s[91] vivid narrative of Dick Turpin’s daring gallop from London to York.

A nearer name to us, and one perhaps more familiar, is that of G. P. R. James,[92] an excellent, industrious man, who drove his trade of novel-making—as our engineers drive wells—with steam, and pistons, and borings, and everlasting clatter.

Yet,—is this sharp, irreverent mention, wholly fair to the old gentleman, upon whose confections, and pastries, so many of us have feasted in times past? What a delight it was—not only for youngsters, but for white-haired judges, and country lawyers—to listen for the jingle of the spurs, when one of Mr. James’s swarthy knights—“with a grace induced by habits of martial exercise”—came dashing into old country quietudes, with his visor up; or, perhaps in “a Genoa bonnet of black velvet, round which his rich chestnut hair coiled in profusion”—making the welkin ring with his—“How now, Sir Villain!”

I caught sight of this great necromancer of “miniver furs,” and mantua-making chivalry—in youngish days, in the city of New York—where he was making a little over-ocean escape from the multitudinous work that flowed from him at home; a well-preserved man, of scarce fifty years, stout, erect, gray-haired, and with countenance blooming with mild uses of mild English ale—kindly, unctuous—showing no signs of deep thoughtfulness or of harassing toil. I looked him over, in boyish way, for traces of the court splendors I had gazed upon, under his ministrations, but saw none; nor anything of the “manly beauty of features, rendered scarcely less by a deep scar upon the forehead,”—nor “of the gray cloth doublets slashed with purple;” a stanch, honest, amiable, well-dressed Englishman—that was all.

And yet, what delights he had conjured for us! Shall we be ashamed to name them, or to confess it all? Shall the modern show of new flowerets of fiction, and of lilies—forced to the front in January—make us forget utterly the old cinnamon roses, and the homely but fragrant pinks, which once regaled and delighted us, in the April and May of our age?

What incomparable siestas those were, when, from between half-closed eyelids, we watched for the advent of the two horsemen—one in corselet of shining silver, inlaid with gold, and the other with hauberk of bright steel rings—slowly riding down the distant declivity, under the rays of a warm, red sunset! Then, there were abundance of gray castle-walls—ever so high, the ivy hanging deliciously about them; and there were clanging chains of draw-bridges, that rattled when a good knight galloped over; and there were stalwart gypsies lying under hedges, with charmingest of little ones with flaxen hair (who are not gypsies at all, but only stolen); and there is clash of arms; and there are bad men, who get punched with spear heads—which is good for them; and there are jolly old burghers who drink beer, and “troll songs”; and assassins who lurk in the shadows of long corridors—where the moonbeams shine upon their daggers; and there are dark-haired young women, who look out of casements and kiss their hands and wave white kerchiefs,—and somebody sees it in the convenient edge of the wood, and salutes in return, and steals away; and the assassin escapes, and the gypsies are captured in the bush, and some bad king is killed, and an old parchment is found, and the stars come out, and the rivulet murmurs, and the good knight comes back; and the dark tresses are at the casement, and she smiles, and the marriage bells ring, and they are happy. And the school bell (for supper) rings, and we are happy!

As I close this book with these last shadowy glimpses of story-tellers, who have told their pleasant tales, and have lived out their time, and gone to rest, I see lifting over that fair British horizon, where Victoria shows her queenly presence—the modest Mr. Pickwick, with his gaiters and bland expanse of figure; Thackeray, too, with his stalwart form and spectacled eyes is peering out searchingly upon all he encounters; the refined face of Ruskin is also in evidence, and his easy magniloquence is covering one phase of British art with new robes. A woman’s Dantesque profile shows the striking qualities which are fairly mated by the striking passages in Adam Bede and Daniel Deronda; one catches sight, too, of the shaggy, keen visage of the quarrel-loving Carlyle, and of those great twin-brethren of poesy—Browning and Tennyson—the Angelo and the Raphael of latter images in verse. Surely these make up a wonderful grouping of names—not unworthy of comparison with those others whom we found many generations ago, grouped around another great queen of England, who blazed in her royal court, and flaunted her silken robes, and—is gone.