Part 3

Clarendon quietly indicts Sir John Danvers as a “proud, formal, weak man,” such as Cromwell “employed and contemned at once.” George Bate gives him a harder character, saying that he “proved his brother to be a delinquent in the Rump Parliament, whereby he might overthrow his will, and so compass the estate himself. He sided with the sectarian party, was one of the King’s judges, and lived afterwards some years in his sin, without repentance.” But the same accuser adds the saving fact that Dr. Thomas Fuller, like Aubrey, was Sir John’s friend, and, by his desire, preached many times at Chelsea, “where, I am sure, he was instructed to repent of his misguided and wicked consultations in having to do with the murther of that just man.” One half surmises that had the preliminaries of the great struggle occurred in her time Magdalen Herbert’s rather austere and advanced standards of right would have stood it out, despite her traditions, for the Commons against _Carolus Agnus_.[18] But that would have been a very different matter from sharing the feelings of the crude advocates of revolution and regicide. What a misconception of her spotless motives must she have borne, had others found her in agreement with her vagabond lord, who treated politics as he treated the sacrament of matrimony, purely as a makeshift and a speculation!

He was no raw-head-and-bloody-bones, this Roderigo-like Briton who won the approval of Lord Bacon, and whom George Wither thanks for “those pleasurable refreshments often vouchsafed”; and whom very different men, such as George Herbert and Walton[19] and peaceable Fuller loved. He was a comely creature of some parts, a luckless worldling anxious to feather his own nest, and driven by timidity and the desire of gain into treacheries against himself. His short, thin, and “fayre bodie,” common, as George Herbert would have us imply, to all who bore his name, his elegance, his hospitality, and his devotedness to his elderly wife, carried him off handsomely in the eyes of her jealous circle. His house in Chelsea, commemorated now by Danvers Street, adjoined that which had been Sir Thomas More’s, and was presumably a part of the same estate. All around it, and due to its master’s genuine enthusiasm, lay the first Italian garden planted in England; and there, rolling towards the Thames, were the long glowing flower-beds and green orchard-alleys, which were also the “_horti deliciæ dominæ_” recalled thrice in the music of filial sorrow. This home of Magdalen Danvers was pulled down, and built over, in 1716. Within its unfallen walls, where she spent her serene married life, and where she died, she had time to think, nevertheless, that she stood, towards evening, in the ways of folly, and that hers was one of those little incipient domestic tragedies which must always look amusing, even to a friend.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Walton confuses this Edward Herbert with a namesake entered at Queen’s College; and he follows the erring dates of the _Autobiography of Lord Herbert of Cherbury_. The boy’s age is correctly given as fourteen in the college registers.

[2] Donne had been in residence at both Universities, but took no degree at either, as he had scruples against accepting the conditions imposed. He was at that time, and until about 1593, like his parents, a Catholic. His father was of Welsh descent: a fact which may have borne its share in attracting him towards the Herberts.

[3] Anne Donne, it may be remarked, was also the name of Cowper’s mother.

[4] Sir Richard Baker’s _Chronicle_, 1684, mentions Dr. Donne as one of his “heroic Grecians,” and adds, in the same breath, that he was “a great visitor of ladies.”

[5] Dr. Donne’s conceit about the ages of his friends is better handled in the young Cartwright’s

“Chloe, why wish you that your years,”

a little later. It is not impossible that Cartwright, an Oxonian and an observer, may have drawn upon Donne’s report of this very wedding for his charming and ingenious lyric.

[6] This august personage was one of the Spencers of Althorp. At this time she had been for six years the wife of her second husband, the Lord Keeper Egerton, although retaining the magnificent title of her widowhood. At their estate of Harefield in Middlesex, Milton’s _Arcades_ was afterwards given, and it will be remembered what fine compliments to the then aged countess-dowager figure in its opening verses. Spenser’s _Teares of the Muses_ had been dedicated to her, in her prime, and she was the Amaryllis “highest in degree” of his _Colin Clout’s Come Home Again_.

[7] Sir James Sandelyn, Sandalo, or Sandilands (who cuts his finest figure as Jacobus Sandilandius in _The Muses’ Welcome_) was appointed Maistre d’Hostel to the beloved and beautiful Princess Elizabeth on her marriage to Frederic, Count Palatine of the Rhine, afterwards King of Bohemia, in 1612. As Sir James’s name is down on the lists of the Exchequer for a gift in 1615, and as his little son Richard was baptized in Deptford Church two months after the date of Lady Danvers’s letter, we may conclude that he came back to England just when the “ambassatore” expected him.

[8] Edward Herbert served as a volunteer in the campaign of 1614-15 in the Netherlands, under the Prince of Orange. Richard Herbert, here mentioned, was his eldest son, a future Cavalier and captain of a troop of horse in the Civil Wars; Edward was the baby, and “Bettye” the child Beatrice, destined, like her sister, to a short life.

[9] This 1614-15 was an eccentric and un-English year throughout. The winter signalized itself by the Great Snow; “_frigus intensum_,” as Camden says, “_et nix copiosissima_.”

[10] Lord Bacon dedicated to Edward Herbert, “the father of English deists,” his very flat translation of the Psalms! George wrote three Latin poems in his honor, one being upon the occasion of his death.

[11] He was, in July of 1626, ordained deacon, and prebendary of Layton Ecclesia in Huntingdonshire. Readers of Walton will remember how his dear mother invited him to commit simony on that occasion.

[12] The standing marble figure in a winding-sheet which Dr. King had modelled upon this strange painting on wood, may yet be seen in the south ambulatory of the choir of St. Paul’s; almost the only relic saved from the old cathedral which perished in the Great Fire of 1666. It is not only of unique interest, but of considerable artistic beauty, and “seems to breathe faintly,” as Sir Henry Wotton said of it.

[13] Dr. Donne’s papers were bequeathed to Dr. Henry King, the poet-Bishop of Chichester, then residentiary of St. Paul’s. The “find” were a precious one, if they yet survive.

[14] The half-romantic reference, which occurs more than once in Donne’s poems, to his own long-dead arm which still shall keep

“The bracelet of bright hair about the bone,”—

has it nothing to do with this blond head? _Honi soit qui mal y pense._ The internal evidences in _The Relic_, with its mention of St. Mary Magdalen, and its boast of purest friendship, and the roguery of the closing line in _The Funeral_, are somewhat strong, nevertheless.

[15] The famous _Autobiography_, indeed, boldly assures posterity that Lady Herbert, after 1597, “continued unmarried,” and, in brief, “was the woman Dr. Donne hath described her.” The acknowledgment of the accuracy of that funeral sermon, containing, as it does, its very specific Danvers passages, is in our fearless philosopher’s best style.

[16] There was afterwards, in France, a Gentleman of the Bedchamber who had other notions. “Gratitude,” said Thierry to his executioner in the court-yard of the Abbaye—“gratitude has no opinions. I am leal to my master.”

[17] An elder Charles, son of the Lady Elizabeth Danvers, was baptized in 1632, and must have died early.

[18] Edward Herbert sided eventually with the Parliament, which indemnified him for the burning and sacking of Montgomery Castle.

[19] The six very innocent, cheerful, pious ten-syllable stanzas, attributed in _The Complete Angler_ to “another angler, Jo. Davors, Esq.,” are not, it is hardly necessary to add, from our scapegrace’s pen. He ceased to be “Jo. Davors, Esq.,” when Walton was fourteen years old.

II

HENRY VAUGHAN

1621-1695

IN his own person, Henry Vaughan left no trace in society. His life seemed to slip by like the running water on which he was forever gazing and moralizing, and his memory met early with the fate which he hardly foresaw. Descended from the royal chiefs of southern Wales whom Tacitus mentions, and whose abode, in the day of Roman domination, was in the district called Siluria,[20] he called himself the Silurist upon his title-pages; and he keeps the distinctive name in the humblest of epitaphs, close by his home in the glorious valley of the Usk and the little Honddu, under the shadow of Tretower, the ruined castle of his race, and of Pen-y-Fan and his kindred peaks. What we know of him is a sort of pastoral: how he was born, the son of a poor gentleman, in 1621, at Newton St. Bridget, in the old house yet asleep on the road between Brecon and Crickhowel; how he went up to Oxford, Laud’s Oxford, with Thomas, his twin, as a boy of sixteen, to be entered at Jesus College;[21] how he took his degree (just where and when no one can discover), and came back, after a London revel, to be the village physician, though he was meant for the law, in what had become his brother’s parish of Llansantffraed; to write books full of sequestered beauty, to watch the most tragic of wars, to look into the faces of love and loss, and to spend his thoughtful age on the bowery banks of the river he had always known, his _Isca parens florum_, to which he consecrated many a sweet English line. And the ripple of the not unthankful Usk was “distinctly audible over its pebbles,” as was the Tweed to the failing sense of Sir Walter, in the room where Henry Vaughan drew his last breath, on St. George’s day, April 23, 1695. He died exactly seventy-nine years after Shakespeare, exactly one hundred and fifty-five years before Wordsworth.

Circumstances had their way with him, as with most poets. He knew the touch of disappointment and renunciation, not only in life, but in his civic hopes and in his art. He broke his career in twain, and began over, before he had passed thirty; and he showed great æsthetic discretion, as well as disinterestedness, in replacing his graceful early verses by the deep dedications of his prime. Religious faith and meditation seem so much part of his innermost nature, it is a little difficult to remember that Vaughan considered himself a brand snatched from the burning, a lawless Cavalier brought by the best of chances to the quiet life, and the feet of the moral Muse. He suffered most of the time between 1643 and 1651 from a sorely protracted and nearly fatal illness; and during its progress his wife and his dearest friends were taken from him. Nor was the execution of the King a light event to so sensitive a poet and so passionate a partisan. Meanwhile Vaughan read George Herbert, and his theory of proportional values began to change. It was a season of transition and silent crises, when men bared their breasts to great issues, and when it was easy for a childlike soul,

“Weary of her vain search below, above, In the first Fair to find the immortal Love.”[22]

Vaughan, in his new fervor, did his best to suppress the numbers written in his youth, thus clearing the field for what he afterwards called his “hagiography”; and a critic may wonder what he found in his first tiny volume of 1646, or in _Olor Iscanus_, to regret or cancel. Every unbaptized song is “bright only in its own innocence, and kindles nothing but a generous thought”; and one of them, at least, has a manly postlude of love and resolve worthy of the free lyres of Lovelace and Montrose. Vaughan, unlike other ardent spirits of his class, had nothing very gross to be sorry for; if he was, indeed, one of his own

“feverish souls, Sick with a scarf or glove,”

he had none but noble ravings. Happily, his very last verses, _Thalia Rediviva_, breaking as it were by accident a silence of twenty-three years, indorse with cheerful gallantry the accents of his youth. The turn in his life which brought him lasting peace, in a world rocking between the cant of the Parliament and resurgent audacity and riot, achieved for us a body of work which, small as it is, has rare interest, and an out-of-door beauty, as of the natural dusk, “breathless with adoration,” which is almost without parallel. Eternity has been known to spoil a poet for time, but not in this instance. Never did religion and art interchange a more fortunate service, outside Italian studios. Once he had shaken off secular ambitions, Vaughan’s voice grew at once freer and more forceful. In him a marked intellectual gain sprang from an apparently slight spiritual readjustment, even as it did, three centuries later, in one greater than he, John Henry Newman.

Vaughan’s work is thickly sown with personalities, but they are so delicate and involved that there is little profit in detaching them. What record he made at the University is not apparent; nor is it at all sure that so independent and speculative a mind applied itself gracefully to the curriculum. He was, in the only liberal sense, a learned man, full of life-long curiosity for the fruit of the Eden Tree. His lines beginning

“Quite spent with thought I left my cell”

show the acutest thirst for hidden knowledge; he would “most gladly die,” if death might buy him intellectual growth. He looks forward to eternity as to the unsealing and disclosing of mysteries. He makes the soul sing joyously to the body:

“I that here saw darkly, in a glass, But mists and shadows pass, And by their own weak shine did search the springs And source of things, Shall, with inlighted rays, Pierce all their ways!”

With an imperious query, he encounters the host of midnight stars:

“Who circled in Corruption with this glorious ring?”

What Vaughan does know is nothing to him; when he salutes the Bodleian from his heart, he is thinking how little honey he has gathered from that vast hive, and how little it contains, when measured with what there is to learn from living and dying. He had small respect for the sinister sciences among which the studies of his beloved brother, a Neo-Platonist, lay. Though he was no pedant, he dearly loved to get in a slap against the ignorant whom we have always with us. At twenty-five, he printed a good adaptation of the Tenth of Juvenal, and flourished his wit, in the preface, at the expense of some possible gentle reader of the parliamentary persuasion who would “quarrel with antiquitie.” “These, indeed, may think that they have slept out so many centuries in this Satire, and are now awaked; which had it been still Latin, perhaps their nap had been everlasting!”

He was an optimist, proven through much personal trial; he had sympathy with the lower animals, and preserved a humorous deference towards all things alive, even the leviathan of Holy Writ, which he affectionately exalts into “the shipmen’s fear” and “the comely spacious whale”! Vaughan adored his friends; he had a unique veneration for childhood; his adjective for the admirable and beautiful, whether material or immaterial, is “dear”; and his mind dwelt with habitual fondness on what Sir Thomas Browne (a man after his own heart) calls “incomprehensibles, and thoughts of things which thoughts do but tenderly touch.”

His occupation as a resident physician must have fostered his fine eye and ear for the green earth, and furnished him, day by day, with musings in sylvan solitudes, and rides abroad over the fresh hill-paths. The breath of the mountains is about his books. An early riser, he uttered a constant invocation to whomever would listen, that

“Manna was not good After sun-rising; far-day sullies flowers.”

He was hospitable on a limited income.[23] His verses of invitation _To his Retired Friend_, which are not without their thrusts at passing events, have a classic jollity fit to remind the reader of Randolph’s ringing ode to Master Anthony Stafford. Again and again Vaughan reiterates the Socratic and Horatian song of content: that he has enough lands and money, that there are a thousand things he does not want, that he is blessed in what he has. All this does not prevent him from recording the phenomenal ebb-tides of his purse, and from whimsically synthesizing on “the threadbare, goldless genealogie” of bards! No sour zealot in anything, he enjoyed an evening now and then at the Globe Tavern in London, where he consumed his sack with relish, that he might be “possessor of more soul,” and “after full cups have dreams poetical.” But he was no lover of the town. Country life was his joy and pride; the only thing which seemed, in his own most vivid phrase, to “fill his breast with home.”

“Here something still like Eden looks! Honey in woods, juleps in brooks.”

A literary acquaintance, one unrecognized N. W., congratulates Vaughan that he is able to “give his Muse the swing in an hereditary shade.” He translated with great gusto _The Old Man of Verona_, out of Claudian, and Guevara’s _Happiness of Country Life_; and he notes with satisfaction that Abraham was of his rural mind, in “Mamre’s holy grove.” Vaughan was an angler, need it be added? Nay, the autocrat of anglers: he was a salmon-catcher.

With “the charity which thinketh no evil,” he loved almost everything, except the Jesuits, and his ogres the Puritans. For Vaughan knew where he stood, and his opinion of Puritanism never varied. He kept his snarls and satires, for the most part, hedged within his prose, the proper ground of the animosities. When he put on his singing-robes, he tried to forget, not always with success, his spites and bigotries. For his life, he could not help sidelong glances, stings, strictures between his teeth, thistle-down hints cast abroad in the neatest of generalities:

“Who saint themselves, they are no saints!”

The introduction to his _Mount of Olives_ (whose pages have a soft billowy music like Jeremy Taylor’s) is nominally inscribed to “the peaceful, humble, and pious reader.” That functionary must have found it a trial to preserve his peaceful and pious abstraction, while the peaceful and pious author proceeded to flout the existing government, in a towering rage, and in very elegant caustic English. Vaughan was none too godly to be a thorough hater. He was genially disposed to the pretensions of every human creature; he refused to consider his ancestry and nurture by themselves, as any guarantee of the justice of his views or of his superior insight into affairs. Yet in spite of his enforced Quaker attitude during the clash of arms, he nursed in that gentle bosom the heartiest loathing of democracy, and shared the tastes of a certain clerk of the Temple “who never could be brought to write Oliver with a great O.” It is fortunate that he did not spoil himself, as Wither did, upon the wheels of party, for politics were his most vehement concern. Had he been richer, as he tells us in a playful passage, nothing on earth would have kept him from meddling with national issues.

The poets, save the greatest, Milton, his friend Andrew Marvell, and Wither, rallied in a bright group under the royal standard. Those among them who did not fight were commonly supposed, as was Drummond of Hawthornden, to redeem their reputation by dying of grief at the overthrow of the King. Yet Vaughan did not fight, and Vaughan did not die of grief. It is so sure that he suffered some privation, and it may be imprisonment, for his allegiance, that shrewd guessers, before now, have equipped him and placed him in the ranks of the losing cause, where he might have had choice company. His generous erratic brother (a writer of some note, an alchemist, an Orientalist, a Rosicrucian, who was ejected from his vicarage in 1654, and died either of the plague, or of inhaling the fumes of a caldron, at Albury, in 1665, while the court was at Oxford)[24] had been a recruit, and a brave one. But Henry Vaughan explicitly tells us, in his _Ad Posteros_, and in a prayer in the second part of _Silex Scintillans_, that he had no personal share in the constitutional struggle, that he shed no blood. Again he cries, in a third lyric,

“O accept Of his vowed heart, whom Thou hast kept From bloody men!”

This painstaking record of a fact by one so loyal as he goes far to prove, to an inductive mind not thoroughly familiar with his circumstances, that he considered war the worst of current evils, and was willing, for this first principle of his philosophy, to lay himself open to the charge, not indeed of cowardice (was he not a Vaughan?), but of lack of appreciation for the one romantic opportunity of his life. His withdrawal from the turmoil which so became his colleagues may seem to harmonize with his known moral courage and right sentiment; and fancy is ready to fasten on him the sad neutrality, and the passionate “ingemination” for “peace, peace,” which “took his sleep from him, and would shortly break his heart,” such as Clarendon tells us of in his beautiful passage touching the young Lord Falkland. But it is greatly to be feared that Vaughan, despite all the abstract reasoning which arrays itself against so babyish and barbarous a thing as a battle, would have swung himself into a saddle as readily as any, had not “God’s finger touched him.” A comparison of dates will show that he was bedridden, while his hot heart was afield with the shouting gentlemen whom Mr. Browning heard in a vision:

“King Charles! and who’ll do him right, now? King Charles! and who’s ripe for fight, now? Give a rouse: here’s in Hell’s despite now, King Charles!”

This is the secret of Vaughan’s blood-guiltlessness. Of course he thanked Heaven, after, that he was kept clean of carnage; he would have thanked Heaven for anything that happened to him. It was providential that we of posterity lost a soldier in the Silurist, and gained a poet. As the great confusion cleared, his spirit cleared too, and the Vaughan we know,

“Delicious, lusty, amiable, fair,”

comes in, like a protesting angel, with the Commonwealth. Perhaps he lived long enough to sum up the vanity of statecraft and the instability of public choice, driven from tyranny to license, from absolute monarchy to absolute anarchy; and to turn once more to his “loud brook’s incessant fall” as an object much worthier of a rational man’s regard. Born while James I. was vain-gloriously reigning, Henry Vaughan survived the Civil War, the two Protectorates, the orgies of the Restoration (which he did not fail to satirize), and the Revolution of “Meenie the daughter,” as the old Scots song slyly calls her. He had seen the Stuarts in and out, in and out again, and his seventy-four years, on-lookers at a tragedy, were not forced to sit through the dull Georgian farce which began almost as soon as his grave was green.

Moreover, he was thoroughly out of touch with his surroundings. While all the world was either devil-may-care or Calvin-colored, he had for his characteristic a rapt, inexhaustible joy, buoying him up and sweeping him away. He might well have said, like Dr. Henry More, his twin’s rival and challenger in metaphysics, that he was “most of his time mad with pleasure.” While

“every burgess foots The mortal pavement in eternal boots,”

Vaughan lay indolently along a bank, like a shepherd swain, pondering upon the brood of “green-heads” who denied miracles to have been or to be, and wishing the noisy passengers on the highways of life could be taught the value of

“A sweet self-privacy in a right soul.”