MISCELLANEOUS RECOLLECTIONS A SUPPLEMENTARY CHAPTER BEGUN IN 1826 (continued 2)

He was, I think, the only person eminent in literature, with whom I became acquainted in my first journey through Spain in 1793. I might, indeed, except the Abbé Cavanilles,⁠[393] a botanist and topographical writer of some fame, who was a protégé of the House of Infantado, a man of prepossessing manners, and a native of the Kingdom of Valencia, of which he published a description.

Lord St. Helens,⁠[394] then Ambassador of Madrid, though of more refined taste and cultivated mind than was common at that time in the ranks of English diplomacy, never had his curiosity awakened to Spanish literature, nor was at the pains to open his house to such writers, scholars, or artists, as the country would have afforded. In Italy, however, where I spent the two next years, I frequented many societies where connoisseurs, scholars, and antiquaries abounded, who

and however unpropitious that season of stormy politics was to the growth or cultivation of letters, I found many in different provinces of art, science, and literature.

In art, indeed, there were but few natives of Italy, and, if I except Canova,⁠[395] not one who had either then or has since that time attained great celebrity. He was a man of simple, engaging manners, with all that gentleness which characterises Venetians, and with enough of the enthusiasm of an artist to give animation to his countenance and conversation. It would be tedious to enumerate artists, not Italians, though subsequent success may have implied merit in many of them. The list would be long. With the exception, however, of Fabre⁠[396]⁠—a successful pupil of David, but as furious an anti-revolutionary, as his master was a revolutionary politician, and better known as the lover, some say the third husband, of Madame D’Albany,⁠[397] than as a painter—those I was acquainted with were chiefly English students.

Flaxman,⁠[398] indeed, visited Italy while I was there. I am afraid I was more struck with the deformity of his person, the sanctity of his primitive manners, and the visionary turn of his opinions, than with his works or conversation; but the Italians had more sagacity than his countrymen, and discerned early the grand originality of his conceptions, his just ideas of beauty, and the real simplicity of his character. His sketches and models were studied as works of established excellence even then at Rome. He was, in truth, as Lord Egremont comically designated him, a prodigy of deformity and genius. If unequal, from bodily infirmity, to complete any great chef d’œuvre in sculpture, he contrived to enlighten his contemporaries and followers, and did more by his example and his drawings to improve art than any Englishman, Sir Joshua, in the sister branch, always excepted.

Natural philosophy, however, was the passion of the day, and geology, chemistry, and electricity the fashionable topics of conversation. I was myself far too ignorant to judge of the professors or proficients in such studies: I never saw Spallanzani,⁠[399] nor was I acquainted with Galvani,⁠[400] whom I have met at Bologna. But of Fontana,⁠[401] whose contemporary reputation was greater than the works he has left will maintain, I can speak from personal intercourse amounting almost to intimacy.

He was as remarkable for the boldness of his opinions as for the energy, eloquence, and ingenuity, with which he defended them. There had long existed in Tuscany a school of very free, not to say irreligious, philosophy. Cocchi was, if not the founder, a leading disciple in it. He had co-operated with the Grand Duke Leopold in suppressing both Jesuits and Inquisition, and in reducing the number, power, and wealth of the monastic institutions. Fontana, who, when young, had frequented Baron Holbach’s society in Paris, was a professed materialist after the system of Helvetius. He naturally assumed the ascendancy among the free-thinkers of Florence, and, no doubt, more covertly favoured the political principles which Condorcet and other Frenchmen of the Encyclopédie had adopted. He was positive, vehement, and dogmatic, but far from unpleasant, in conversation; more remarkable, I suspect, for the natural vigour of his understanding than for the extent or accuracy of his knowledge in science or literature, over the whole range of which he somewhat presumptuously was wont to assert his dominion. He was well with the Grand Duke and his Minister, Manfredini. It was generally whispered in Florence, always the città maldicente that Dante describes, that he made an ungenerous use of his influence, that he checked rather than promoted the reward of others, and that he did not scruple to appropriate to himself their labours and discoveries.

Thus the anatomical man, composed of many thousand pieces of wood accurately representing parts of the human body in wood, was said to be the work of Fabroni,⁠[402] the Sub-Director; although Fontana, the Director, was in the habit of exhibiting, explaining, and extolling it as his own. He had patronised Fabroni when very young, and introduced him into the institution from the stage, where he was, if not actually a dancer, connected with the ballet. But when the proficiency of the disciple attracted notice, the master was suspected of repressing him, from jealousy of attainments which were more than equal to his own; though in natural understanding, as well as Court favour, Fontana unquestionably maintained his superiority.

Fabroni was a Tuscan; Fontana, a native of Reveredo. Manfredini, who came from the latter place, also might have some prepossession in favour of Fontana; but his Tuscan origin could not fail to give his rising rival corresponding advantages in a society so narrowly national as that of Florence. Fontana had a brother, a monk and a professor at Pavia, where I saw him. He had the appearance as well as name of a man of genius; but, suspected of republican principles, he was compelled to remove the aspersion by publications in the opposite extreme, and to consign his character to posterity as the strenuous and even acrimonious advocate of systems religious, moral, and political, which he loathed and abhorred. Hard is the lot of genius under arbitrary governments. Accordingly, the faculties best suited to the improvement of mankind are more desirous, on such soils, to withdraw than to force themselves into notice.

Parini,⁠[403] the first poet and one of the most amiable men of that period, I never met. Monti⁠[404] had not yet acquired such celebrity as was likely to attract a young traveller. The only literary man, within the Austrian dominions, whom I visited in 1795, was the Spanish ex-Jesuit Andrès,⁠[405] more distinguished for laborious and impartial compilation than for critical acumen or original thought. He lived unmolested, but little known, in Mantua, and preferred publishing his works in Italian, though the subjects of which they treat and the good taste they inculcate would have been more useful and more novel to Spanish readers than to those who were familiar with Tiraboschi.⁠[406]⁠

There were, no doubt, many more men of letters in Venice and its dependencies, but I had not the advantage of knowing any but Cesarotti.⁠[407] He was in appearance a grave, heavy, old-fashioned professor, and his large tye wig resembled that which, in ridicule of his translation of Homer, a caricaturist had placed on the bust of that poet. Cesarotti had, indeed, the audacity to paraphrase and alter the Iliad and Odyssey! There was less presumption and more success in bestowing some Italian graces on the Ossian of Macpherson. He reconciled many southern readers, and among them Napoleon Bonaparte himself, to the equivocal bard of the north.

It was in 1796 that the English public, saturated with political disquisition and party invectives, were recalled to a sense of the sweets of literature and poetry, and especially to a taste for the Italian writers, by the publication of a book, whose merit, after all, is scarcely equal to its success, and whose success is mainly to be attributed to the fortunate period of its appearance. This was The Life [of] Lorenzo of Medici, by Mr. Roscoe,⁠[408] an attorney and afterwards merchant and banker at Liverpool. After the horrors and wars, plus quam civilia, which revolutionary fanaticism in France, and the real or affected dread of it elsewhere, had diffused pretty generally throughout Europe, a languor succeeded; a strong desire for such enjoyments, as the calmer pursuits of poetry and criticism afford, bespoke a favourable reception for Mr. Roscoe’s book, which was more easy and spirited in those parts which related to the revival of arts and literature, than in such as professed but failed to explain the changes and institutions of Florence under the Medici.

There was something piquant (to use a French term) in the appearance of a history of Florence written at Liverpool. Mr. Roscoe was a man of no great scope of genius. Yet when the nature and extent of his attainments is contrasted with his slender means of acquiring them, he becomes a sort of prodigy. He was the lad or waiter at a coffee house, and even that humble occupation had been a step from his original condition, for when a boy he was accustomed to bring potatoes with his father to market. His assiduity, cleanliness, and honesty recommended him, and some of the guests articled him as a clerk to a thriving solicitor. His passion for letters was inextinguishable and his application unwearied. It was accidentally directed to Italian; and a friend (the Rev. Dr. Clarke, I think) being settled for some years in Tuscany, he collected through him various materials and dedicated himself to the composition of a work which immediately placed him on the line of the most successful authors of the day.

Lord Orford,⁠[409] who had hailed Robertson and Gibbon, but not, I think, Hume, on the first appearance of their works, lived to offer similar incense in particles of epigrammatic antithesis to the biographer of Lorenzo de Medici. Mr. Fox, overlooking a style which he could not approve, through his delight at passages of Italian poetry not inelegantly rendered in the course of the work, greeted the publication and the author with encouragement. To the praise of Mr. Roscoe be it said, that neither this burst into sudden blaze nor his subsequent success in public life ever turned his head or disfigured the simplicity of his manners. He spoke in Parliament with judgment and effect, but in a short time, upon elections and other occurrences, there appeared some unequivocal symptoms of that indecision which disqualifies a man from public life more irretrievably than vulgarity or affectation or even than ignorance and incapacity. He confined himself afterwards to his literary pursuits, and to establishing a taste for arts in his native town not unworthy of his celebrated Florence; and Liverpool bids fair to give to its architecture, public works, amusements, and society, a refinement not usual in communities so rapidly enriched by commercial enterprise alone.

In this task Dr. Currie,⁠[410] the physician and the biographer of Burns, was his most active coadjutor. He had a stronger understanding, but less correct taste, than his friend. In his own profession he was distinguished for a new, bold, and successful application of cold water in certain stages of fever; and on matters of politics, science, and philosophy he had acquired great provincial authority. Some popular letters on the effect of the war upon trade, printed with the name of Jaspar Wilson, were with justice attributed to him, and added not a little to his reputation.

Roscoe, after shrinking from a contested election at Liverpool during the No-Popery cry, engaged in trade and was unfortunate. A body of his literary friends, led by Dr. Shepherd,⁠[411] handsomely relieved him from many of the consequences, and alleviated the chagrin at his failure. Mr. Coke, of Norfolk, with much delicacy and generosity, employed him in classing his MSS. at Holkham, of which the curious library of Justus Lipsius forms a part. Roscoe, broken by misfortunes and somewhat impaired by age, did not show all the discernment expected from him; but he had the merit of being the first guest at Holkham who drew the attention of his host and directed his own to those philological treasures. Many men of learning and taste had been in the habit of visiting Mr. Coke; but all (according to Mr. Roger Wilbraham’s malicious remark), including Dr. Parr, most delicately and politely caught the spirit of the place, and preferred the pleasures of the field and of the table to the intellectual labours of classical research. Roscoe and the literary society in Liverpool were not singular in their profession of liberal principles in politics and religion; almost all provincial literati at the close of the seventeenth century (Whitaker and some clergymen excepted) were averse to the war and the system with which it was studiously interwoven. They were, accordingly, more or less stigmatised as visionary speculatists or disaffected Jacobins. The rebound from this contumely and repression was sensibly felt afterwards. It contributed with other causes to the successive and alternate reforms which have ensued.

Perhaps the insensibility to all intellectual merit which pervaded the Court of George III., and the yet more unaccountable indifference to the progress of literature of a man so capable of relishing and judging of genius as Mr. Pitt, estranged the whole republic of letters from their politics. Possibly the selection of “savans” in France for the direction of human affairs (no very successful experiment, it must be acknowledged) engaged the ardent spirits of the time in the cause of democracy. In aid of such propensities, a passion, or at least a curiosity, for German literature suddenly seized the reading part of the community. Young authors educated in Germany gratified this appetite for foreign novelties by plays, novels, and poems, translated from the German originals. Whatever might be their motives, they were practically labourers in the same vineyard. The fruits of their studies had all a tang or smack of philosophy very opposite to that which it was the endeavour of our Government, as well [as] of our Church, to disseminate.

Among these, my college friend, Mr. M. G. Lewis,⁠[412] commonly known by the name of his first novel, The Monk, deserves to be recorded; for, though a Member of Parliament, he supported the Minister and the French war. He inculcated in his writings opinions which led to a directly opposite conclusion. He had a clear and even a strong understanding, imagination amounting almost to genius, and indefatigable industry. As a poet he was endowed with an excellent ear and a command of elegant language. But his mind was vitiated with a mystical, though irreligious, philosophy; his taste in reading, writing, and thinking, corrupted by paradox; and his conversation disfigured by captious perverseness in controversy or sickly affectation in sentiment. His efforts at pleasantry, which were continual, were very unsuccessful. He had no talent for humour. He was sincere, affectionate, and generous; but his vanity was inordinate and more troublesome than diverting.

As he advanced in life he grew exceedingly tedious, especially upon all that related to himself; so that contrary to the usual course of things, the peculiarities and egotism which had been in some degree pardoned to his genius and youth, when poor became quite intolerable, and were, in fact, not tolerated in society when he succeeded to a large property in Jamaica. He went thither, and was nearly as prolix in his exhortations to his negroes as in his reports of their condition and treatment. It is but just to add he very earnestly endeavoured to the best of his judgment to improve the latter. He died on board ship in his return from his second visit to Jamaica. His obstinacy and paradox may be said to have brought him to that untimely end; for he persisted, against the prohibition of the only medical man in the vessel, to take emetics for sea sickness, and, weakened as he had been by a previous fever on shore, actually died of inanition and exhaustion.

The poetry, plays, and essays of a herd of male and female followers, of whom Dr. Darwin⁠[413] was the chief, though in character and taste very different from Lewis’, had a similar tendency to reconcile men’s minds to approaching changes and to shake the received manner of thinking on religion and politics. Darwin himself, though a versifier rather than a poet, was a remarkable man. His medical practice, singular and startling, was not unsuccessful. His fame in Derbyshire and the adjacent counties was extensive, and not confined to the ignorant or the credulous. With an unwieldy person, uncouth manner, and large tongue, his appearance and conversation captivated strangers, and his more solid qualities attached a numerous body of friends. He was surrounded by admiring disciples. They imbibed, together with a taste for minute and curious observation in physical philosophy, great intrepidity in the search of truth, and not less zeal in diffusing it.

In London there had started up, soon after the French Revolution, a yet more fearless sect, who, mingling the dogmas of materialism with certain visionary notions of the perfectibility of the human species, assailed without disguise all the received opinions upon which the duties of individuals or the institutions of the State had been hitherto founded or defended. These doctrines were not confined to metaphysical works; they were purposely and studiously insinuated in novels, plays, and productions of imagination.

Mr. Godwin⁠[414] was in some sense the father of that school. If known at all to posterity, it will in all probability be as the writer of Caleb Williams, not as the author of Political Justice, which is already nearly forgotten. He was himself a strange compound of simplicity and of design, of talent and of folly. He plotted against the whole frame of society, but was the easy dupe of his own affections or the professions of his pupils. After a short season of equivocal celebrity, he sank into a hacking writer and concealed partner of the booksellers. The good little books in which our masters and misses were taught the rudiments of profane and sacred history, under the name of Baldwin, were really the composition of Godwin, branded as an atheist by those who unwittingly purchased, recommended, and taught his elementary lessons. Lord Grey (I write in 1834) has recently, by an act of good-nature, relieved this man of genius from penury and drudgery, and bestowed on him some small place under Government.

The strange and disgusting story of his marriage with Mrs. Wollstonecraft, together with the adventures and death of that wild but extraordinary woman, is in print and accessible to all the world. Soon after her death Godwin consulted Curran⁠[415] about marrying again, and Curran warned him against making youth and beauty the chief object, and earnestly exhorted him to select a “woman with something.” Curran, on his return from Ireland some years afterwards, visited his friend, and found that he had married a widow. “Well, and has she anything?” was his first question. “Aye, indeed has she!” replied Godwin. “She has eight children!”

Holcroft,⁠[416] one of his least successful disciples, though cursed with the vice of mediocrity which, even in his plays, novels, or travels, a love of paradox could not animate, has left one book which is a great exception to such a censure, and of a nature to render all further notice of him unnecessary. This is his own life—the most curious picture of self-education in an authentic shape which our language possesses. It affords abundant proof of the enjoyment which an access of knowledge can afford to the humblest orders of society, and is a practical exposure of the error as well as selfishness of that philosophy which would confine it to the opulent. This Holcroft was one of the reformers singled out for prosecution and punishment by the proceedings of 1794. He married, I believe, the widow of Mercier, author of the Tableau de Paris, and their daughter married Mr. Kenney,⁠[417] an author of some interesting melodramas and lively farces.

There was at the period of which I am now speaking another knot of yet younger enthusiasts. They were soon afterwards generally designated by the name of “the Lake Poets,” because several of them settled in the romantic districts of Cumberland and Westmoreland. They were, at their outset, scarcely less extravagant in their principles, and much more so in their projects, than the materialists of Godwin’s school, though they had the good-fortune to escape all legal persecution. Southey, the destined champion of the Church and Poet Laureate of three successive Sovereigns; Wordsworth, in time the protégé and supporter of Toryism in the North and the pattern, in the judgment of many, of purity both in language and thought; Coleridge, the hireling of every illiberal publication in its turn—were one and all, together with a host of young comrades and admirers, smitten with visionary notions of impracticable liberty, busy in translating or imitating the mystic philosophy and poetry of the Germans, and actually preparing to colonise on the Back Settlements of America for the purpose of establishing an entire exemption from all religious restraints or ceremonies, an equal division of property, and a community of wives. The press, in the meanwhile, teemed with their productions, all inculcating the wildest maxims of German metaphysics, and all combating the principles upon which the institutions of property, as well as the distribution of political power, are founded in society. They escaped, as I have observed, the Crown Lawyer’s prosecutions, but they fell under the more appropriate lash of the ridicule of The Anti-Jacobin.⁠[418] The Sapphics of Southey were parodied in a poem entitled The Needy Knife-grinder, and Mr. Frere and his coadjutors in their happiest vein exposed the sickly sentimentality and real immorality of the whole school, in a supposed German play, which combined nearly all their absurdities.

Mr. Southey⁠[419] was the nephew of Mr. Hill, long chaplain to the factory at Lisbon, and afterwards rector of Streatham. In one of his visits to England he found his nephew, scarce twenty years of age, on the eve of marrying a girl without a halfpenny. To rescue him from such imprudence his uncle offered to take him through Spain to Portugal for a year, in the hopes that absence might cool his passion. Southey accepted the proposal; but, to defeat the real object of it, he secretly married the very day before he set off on his travels. The tour was not only gratis, but lucrative to him, for the sale of his lively and flippant account of it replenished his purse, and he embarked on a career of authorship and politics which, though desultory and tortuous, has always been directed to some profitable haven or another. His habits were those of an author by trade. Stated hours set apart for his various studies. Poetry and prose, divinity and wit, had each their distinct periods of each day allotted to them. His handwriting was wonderfully neat, minute, and legible, and he told me that he saved no inconsiderable sum each year by this accomplishment, so numerous were his writings.

His vanity was inoffensive and diverting, and his enthusiasm, real or affected, about his literary pursuits pleasant and amiable. His confidence in his own powers was, indeed, preposterous, and his appetite for flattery, of which his family and friends served him with a constant and plentiful supply, was inordinate; yet, in spite of research and ardour, a sprightly imagination, and great raciness and accuracy in his English, he was not only a credulous and almost silly historian, but a weak reasoner and tiresome poet, and neither in prose nor in verse captivated or warmed his reader, though he might occasionally divert and surprise him. His egotism was excessive. He would fain have been arrogant; but his scorn and indignation, in spite of himself, assumed the character of flippancy and impertinence rather than of insolence or pride.

He was a schoolfellow and friend of Mr. Charles W. Wynne, and that gentleman procured him some small favour or pension in 1806. The touch of Treasury gold seems to have entirely altered the character of the man. From that time forth all his predilections have been for power, and, in its most odious form, exclusion and monopoly; and, what was yet more strange, most of his associates have accompanied him in this sudden and violent apostasy from his early principles. Possibly some little resentment, mingled with self-interest, deepened the tinge which he and the other Lake poets received soon after Mr. Perceval’s accession to power. The Edinburgh Review had censured the peculiarities of Southey’s and Wordsworth’s school. The sentence of that popular but stern tribunal of literature was sensibly felt in the sale of the works. Southey openly lamented that a man like Jeffrey,⁠[420] who, in his self-complacency, he said, “in physical stature did not reach his shoulder, nor in intellectual dimensions his ankle,” should yet have it in his power to kick away the harvest due to his industry and genius. The Edinburgh Review had, during the first years of its publication, acted up to the stern maxim adopted for its motto,

But surely it may be doubted whether the mortification and exposure of sundry pretenders to literary merit does as much service to the republic of letters as the lavish use of ridicule and invective does mischief, by deterring many modest but ingenious men from encountering their strictures.⁠[421]⁠

That formidable journal first appeared in 1802. The notion of it was suggested, in a small lodging or flat up four pair of stairs, by Sydney Smith to Mr. Jeffrey, Lord Webb Seymour, Mr. Horner, Mr. T. Thomson, and, I think, Mr. John Murray. Sydney proposed, with allusion to the diet of the country, to assume for their motto,

“We study the Muses on oatmeal”: a suggestion which he says his Northern coadjutors vociferously rejected, though no bad specimen of the playful humour with which he enlivened some one article of every number for several years. Brougham was not one of the original projectors; Sydney Smith objected to his admission. His contributions, he said, would be too long, too many, and too political. Those of Sydney himself, often devoted to the exposure and ridicule of bad sermons and theological works, were ignorantly cited by parsons in England as singular proofs of the acrimony which still distinguished the Kirk of Scotland, and led them to satirise the writers of an Episcopal Church. Brougham, when admitted, verified one portion of Sydney’s prediction. He overwhelmed the review with politics; but few of his fellow-labourers were by that time disposed to lament such an innovation, and the increasing sale produced by the introduction of such topics might have reconciled them to the change, had they retained more scruples about it.

An article upon Cobbett and the public journals, undertaken some eight or ten years after the commencement of the Review, and against the better judgment of Mr. Horner, by Mr. Jeffrey, at the suggestion of Brougham, stamped its character as a political publication irrevocably. Till then several persons quite unconnected with politics, and some absolutely adverse to the Whigs, had occasionally contributed papers—Wilberforce, Walter Scott, Richard Payne Knight,⁠[423] Mr. Bartholomew Frere,⁠[424] and many others. The number of the contributors, the facility with which contributions were admitted, and the secrecy often enjoined and generally observed, led to many false conjectures, and those conjectures to consequences, literary and political, that had influence on the opinions and conduct of individuals.

Cobbett exhibited a proof that demagogues, like Princes, when they act on bare suspicion, lose their sagacity. He was nettled at the unexpected exposure of his shameless tergiversation on the article above alluded to; he accordingly directed all his resentment against Mr. Horner, who was the only reviewer that had earnestly protested against it.⁠[425]⁠

Lord Strangford imagined that a severe stricture on his poetry,⁠[426] written, in truth, by a fellow diplomat of anti-Jacobin and Tory propensities, was composed or instigated by me; and though assiduous enough in his correspondence with me while the Grenville Administration lasted, he scarcely concealed his resentment to me—and to all Whigs, soon afterwards. A more important personage, Lord Byron himself, was swayed in his conduct for some time from a misconception that the flippant review of his first poems, written, in truth, by Mr. Brougham, was the composition of George Lamb⁠[427] at my instigation, whereas I never saw the poems, nor did I know of the existence of the author (for I thought the title extinct) till I read the review and expressed to some of the reviewers my surprise and regret at the unmerited and bitter severity of the article.⁠[428]⁠

Lord Strangford had not been less severely handled, but he had deserved it by the personal conceit of his egotism and the great infidelity of his translations. Invention, however, is more pardonable in a poem, and even a translation, than in an official letter. His verses from the Portuguese are creditable to his taste and ear, though they represent Camoëns as unfaithfully as his dispatches the events on the Tagus or the communications of the Sublime Porte. He has not, perhaps, met with the success he had reason to expect as an author or an orator. His facility in composing verse and prose is considerable, and his inferiority as a speaker, though undeniable, proceeds from no deficiency in utterance, language, or logic.

In London his acquaintance has never been much courted, either in literary or fashionable society, nor his conversation, though not wanting in knowledge, vivacity, or good breeding, much relished. His father had been expelled, by a very unusual Act of Parliament, from the Irish House of Lords, for a corrupt vote in a judicial proceeding. At his entrance in life, moreover, the disadvantage of that recollection was aggravated by extreme poverty, and there was nothing to counterbalance it but distant relationship with the Percies and Lord Egremont. To the latter, I believe, he was chiefly indebted for his first employment under Government, and to both, for the education which rendered him capable of discharging it. Success in his diplomatic career entitles him to a niche in the political rather than literary monuments of the day; but as he will not appear in any of my raising in that department to much advantage, it is fair to observe here that he dedicated the gains of the profession he embraced, in the first instance, to his mother and sisters, and showed in that particular a kindness of heart and a liberality of conduct which I much fear will not easily be inferred from other passages of his life.