CHAPTER IV.

We have wandered much in our two last chapters beyond what may be reckoned strictly English lands, into that pleasant region lying between the Tweed and the Firth of Forth; and it was north of the heights of Lammermuir and of the Pentland Hills, and in that delightful old city which is dominated by the lesser heights of the Salisbury crags, the Castle Rock, and Calton Hill, that we found the builders of that great _Review_, which in its livery of buff and blue still carries its original name. I traced the several careers of Sydney Smith, Lord Brougham, and Judge Jeffrey; the first of these, from a humble village curacy, coming to be one of the most respected literary men of England, and an important official of St. Paul’s Cathedral; if his wit had been less lively he might have risen to a bishopric. Brougham was, first, essayist, then advocate, then Parliamentary orator, then Reformer, then Lord High Chancellor--purging the courts of much legal trumpery--always a scold and quarreller, and gaining in the first year of William IV. his barony of Brougham and Vaux: hence the little squib of verse, which will help to keep his exact title in mind:

“Why is Lord Brougham like a sweeping man That close by the pavement walks? Because when he’s done all the sweep that he can He takes up his _Broom_ and _Valks_!”

As for Jeffrey, he became by his resolute industry and his literary graces and aptitudes one of the most admired and honored critics of Great Britain.

_Gifford and His Quarterly._

Our start-point to-day is on the Thames--in that devouring city of London, which very early in the century was laying its tentacles of growth on all the greenness that lay between Blackwall and Bayswater, and which--athwart the Thames shores--strode blightingly from Clapham to Hackney.

It was, I believe, in the year 1809 that Mr. John Murray, the great publisher of London--stirred, perhaps, by some incentive talk of Walter Scott, or of other good Tory penmen, and emulous of the success which had attended Jeffrey’s _Review_ in the north, established a rival one--called simply _The Quarterly_--intended to represent the Tory interests as unflinchingly and aggressively as the _Edinburgh_ had done Whig interests. The first editor was a William Gifford[40] (a name worth remembering among those of British critics), who was born in Devonshire. He was the son of a dissolute house-painter, and went to sea in his young days, but was afterwards apprenticed to a shoemaker. Some piquant rhymes he made in those days attracting the attention of benevolent gentlemen, he was put in the way of schooling, and at Oxford, where he studied. It was while there he meditated, and perhaps executed, some of those clever translations from Persius and Juvenal, which he published somewhat later. He edited Ben Jonson’s works in a clumsy and disputatious way, and in some of his earlier, crude, satirical rhymes (_Baviad_) paid his respects to Madame Thrale in this fashion:

“See Thrale’s gay widow with a satchel roam, And bring in pomp laborious nothings home.”

Again he pounces upon the biographer of Dr. Johnson thus-wise:

“Boswell, aping with preposterous pride, Johnson’s worst frailties, rolls from side to side, His heavy head from hour to hour erects, Affects the fool, and is what he affects.”

These lines afford a very good measure of his poetic grace and aptitude; but they give only a remote idea of his wonderful capacity for abusing people who did not think as he thought. He had a genius in this direction, which could not have discredited an editorial room in New York--or elsewhere. Walter Scott--a warm political friend--speaks of him as “a little man, dumpled up together, and so ill-made as to seem almost deformed;” and I think that kindly gentleman was disposed to attribute much of the critic’s rancor to his invalidism; but if we measure his printed bile in this way, there must be credited him not only his usual rheumatic twinges, but a pretty constant dyspepsia, if not a chronic neuralgia. Of a certainty he was a most malignant type of British party critics; and it is curious how the savors of its first bitterness do still linger about the pages of the _Quarterly Review_.

John Wilson Croker[41] will be best known to our readers as the editor of that edition of Boswell’s “Johnson,” to which I have alluded. Within the last ten years, however, his memoirs and correspondence, in two bulky volumes, have excited a certain languid interest, and given entertainment to those who are curious in respect to the political wire-pullings of the early part of this century in London. He was an ardent co-worker with Gifford in the early history of the _Quarterly Review_. He loved a lord every whit as well as Gifford, and by dint of a gentlemanly manner and gentlemanly associations was not limited to the “back-stairs way” of Mr. Gifford in courting those in authority. His correspondence with dukes and earls--to all of whom he is a “dear Croker”--abound; and his account of interviews with the Prince Regent, and of dinners at the Pavilion in Brighton, are quite Boswellian in their particularity and in their atmosphere of worship. There is also long account in the book to which I have called attention, of a private discourse by George IV., of which Mr. Croker was sole auditor; and it is hard to determine whether Croker is more elated by having the discourse to record, or Mr. Jennings by having such a record to edit.

_A Prince Regent._

This royal mention brings us once more, for a little space, to our background of kings. Of the old monarch, George III., we have had frequent and full glimpses. We wish to know something now of that new prince (whom we saw in our Scott chapter), but who in 1810, when his father’s faculties failed altogether, became Regent; and we wish to learn what qualities are in him and under what training they developed.

The old father had a substructure of good, hard sense that showed itself through all his obstinacies; for instance, when Dr. Markham, who was appointed tutor to his two oldest sons--Prince of Wales and Duke of York--asked how he should treat them, the old king said: “Treat them? Why, to be sure, as you would any gentleman’s sons! If they need the birch, give them the birch, as you would have done at Westminster.” But when they had advanced a bit, and a certain Dr. Arnold (a later tutor) undertook the same regimen, the two princes put their forces together and gave the doctor such a drubbing that he never tried birch again. But it was always a very close life the princes led in their young days; the old king was very rigorous in respect of hours and being out at night. By reason of which George IV. looked sharply after his opportunities, when they did come, and made up for that early cloisterhood by a large laxity of regimen.[42] Indeed, he opened upon a very glittering career of dissipations--the old father groaning and grumbling and squabbling against it vainly.

It was somewhere about 1788 or 1789, just when the French Revolution was beginning to throw its bloody foam over the tops of the Bastille, that temporary insanity in the old King George III. did for a very brief space bring the Prince into consequence as Regent. Of the happening of this, and of the gloom in the palace, there is story in the diary of Madame D’Arblay,[43] who was herself in attendance upon the Queen. If, indeed, George III. had stayed mad from that date, and the Prince--then in his fullest vigor, and a great friend of Fox and other Liberal leaders--had come to the full and uninterrupted responsibility of the Regency, his career might have been very different. But the old king rallied, and for twenty years thereafter put his obstinacies and Tory caution in the way of the Prince, who, with no political royalties to engage him, and no important official duties (though he tried hard to secure military command), ran riot in the old way. He lavishes money on Carlton House; builds a palace for Mrs. Fitzherbert; coquets with Lady Jersey; affects the fine gentleman. No man in London was prouder of his walk, his cane, his club nonchalance, his taste in meats, his knowledge of wines, ragoûts, indelicate songs, and arts of the toilette. Withal, he is well-made, tall, of most graceful address, a capital story-teller, too; an indefatigable diner-out; a very fashion-plate in dress--corsetted, puffed out in the chest like a pouter pigeon; all the while running vigorously and scandalously in debt, while the father is setting himself squarely against any further parliamentary grant in his favor. There are, however--or will be--relentings in the old King’s mind, if “Wales” will promise to settle down in life and marry his cousin, Caroline of Brunswick--if, indeed, he be not already married to Mrs. Fitzherbert, which some avow and some deny. It does not appear that the Prince is very positive in his declarations on this point--yes or no. So he filially yields and accedes to a marriage, which by the conditions of the bargain is to bring him £70,000 to pay his debts withal. She is twenty-seven--a good-looking, spirited Brunswicker woman, who sets herself to speaking English--nips in the bud some love-passages she has at home, and comes over to conquer the Prince’s affections--which she finds it a very hard thing to do. He is polite, however; is agreeably disposed to the marriage scheme, which finds exploitation with a great flourish of trumpets in the Chapel Royal of St. James. The old King is delighted with his niece; the old Queen is a little cool, knowing that the Prince does not care a penny for the bride, and believing that she ought to have found that out.

She does find it out, however, in good time; and finds out about Mrs. Fitzherbert and her fine house; and does give her Prince some very severe curtain lectures--beginning early in that branch of wifely duty. The Prince takes it in dudgeon; and the dudgeon grows bigger and bigger on both sides (as such things will); finally, a year or more later--after the birth of her daughter, the Princess Charlotte--proposals for separation are passed between them (with a great flourish of diplomacy and golden sticks), and accepted with exceeding cordiality on both sides.

Thereafter, the Prince becomes again a man about town--very much about town indeed. Everybody in London knows his great bulk, his fine waistcoats, his horses, his hats and his wonderful bows, which are made with a grace that seems in itself to confer knighthood. For very many years his domestic life,--what little there was of it,--passed without weighty distractions. His Regency when established (1811) was held through a very important period of British history; those great waves of Continental war which ended in Waterloo belonged to it; so did the American war of 1812; so did grave disaffection and discontent at home. He did not quarrel with his cabinets, or impede their action; he learned how to yield, and how to conciliate. Were it only for this, ’tis hardly fair to count him a mere posture-master and a dandy.

He loved, too, and always respected his old mother, the Queen of George III.;[44] loved too,--in a way--and more than any other creature in the world except himself, that darling daughter of his, the Princess Charlotte, who at seventeen became the bride of Leopold, afterward King of Belgium,--she surviving the marriage only a year. Her memory is kept alive by the gorgeous marble cenotaph you will see in St. George’s Chapel, Windsor.

It was only when George IV. actually ascended the throne in 1820 that his separated wife put in a disturbing appearance again; she had been living very independently for some years on the Continent; and it occurred to her--now that George was actually King--that it would be a good thing, and not impinge on the old domestic frigidities, to share in some of the drawing-room splendors and royalties of the British capital. To George IV. it seemed very awkward; so it did to his cabinet. Hence came about those measures for a divorce, and the famous trial of Queen Caroline, in which Brougham won oratorical fame by his brilliant plea for the Queen. This was so far successful as to make the ministerial divorce scheme a failure; but the poor Queen came out of the trial very much bedraggled; whether her Continental life had indeed its criminalities or not, we shall never positively know. Surely no poor creature was ever more sinned against than she, in being wheedled into a match with such an unregenerate partaker in all deviltries as George IV. But she was not of the order of women out of which are made martyrs for conscience’s sake. It was in the year 1821 that death came to her relief, and her shroud at last whitened a memory that had stains.

_A Scholar and Poet._

We freshen the air now with quite another presence. Yet I am to speak of a man whose life was full of tumult, and whose work was full of learning and power--sometimes touched with infinite delicacy.

He was born four years after Sydney Smith and Walter Scott--both of whom he survived many years; indeed he lacked only eleven years of completing a century when he died in Florence, where most of his active--or rather inactive--life was passed. I allude to the poet and essayist, Walter Savage Landor.[45] He is not what is called a favorite author; he never was; he never will be. In fact, he had such scorn of popular applause, that if it had ever happened to him in moments of dalliance with the Muses, and of frolic with rhythmic language, to set such music afloat as the world would have repeated and loved to repeat, I think he would have torn the music out in disdain for the approval of a multitude. Hear what he says, in one of his later poetic utterances:--

“Never was I impatient to receive What _any_ man could give me. When a friend Gave me my due, I took it, and no more, Serenely glad, because that friend was pleased. I seek not many; many seek not me. If there are few now seated at my board, I pull no children’s hair because they munch Gilt gingerbread, the figured and the sweet, Or wallow in the innocence of whey; Give _me_ wild boar, the buck’s broad haunch give _me_, And wine that time has mellowed, even as time Mellows the warrior hermit in his cell.”[46]

Such verse does not invite a large following, nor did the man. Pugnacious, tyrannic, loud-mouthed, setting the world’s and the Church’s rubrics at defiance; yet weighing language to the last jot and tittle of its significance, and--odd-whiles--putting little tendernesses of thought and far-reaching poetic aspirations into such cinctures of polished verse--so jewelled, so compact, so classic, so fine--that their music will last and be admired as long, I think, as English speech lasts. Apart from all this man wrote, there is a strange, half-tragic interest in his life, which will warrant me in telling you more of him than I have told of many whose books are more prized by you.

He was the son of a Dr. Landor, of Warwick, in middle England, who by reason of two adroit marriages was a man of fortune, and so secured eventually a very full purse to the poet, who if he had depended only on the sale of his literary wares, would have starved. Language was always young Landor’s hobby; and he came, by dint of good schooling, to such dexterity in the use of Latin, as to write it in verse or prose with nearly the same ease as English. He loved out-of-door pursuits in boyhood and all his life; was greatly accomplished, his biographer says, in fishing--especially with a cast-net; and of the prey that sometimes came into such net there is this frolicsome record:

“In youth ’twas there I used to scare A whirring bird, or scampering hare, And leave my book within a nook Where alders lean above the brook, To walk beyond the third mill-pond And meet a maiden fair and fond Expecting me beneath a tree Of shade for two, but not for three. Ah, my old Yew, far out of view, Why must I bid you both adieu?”[47]

At Oxford he was a marked man for his cleverness and for his audacities; these last brought him to grief there, and going home upon his rustication, he quarrelled with his father. Thereafter we find him in London, where he publishes his first little booklet of poems (1795); only twenty then; counted a fierce radical; detesting old George III. with his whole heart; admiring the rebel George Washington and declaring it; loving the French, too, with their liberty and fraternity song, until it was silenced by the cannonading of Napoleon; thenceforward, he counts that people a nation of “monkeys, fit only to be chained.”

But Landor never loved London. We find him presently wandering by the shores of Wales, and among its mountains. Doubtless he takes his cast-net with him; the names of Ianthé and Ioné decorate occasional verses; a certain Rose Aylmer he encounters, too, who loans him a book (by Clara Reeve), from a sketch in which he takes hint for his wild, weird poem of _Gebir_, his first long poem--known to very few--perhaps not worth the knowing. It is blind in its drift; war and pomp and passion in it--ending with a poisoned cup; and contrasting with these, such rural beatitudes as may be conjured under Afric skies, with tender love-breezes, ending in other beatitudes in coral palaces beneath the sea. This, at any rate, is the phantasmic outline which a reading leaves upon my own memory. Perhaps another reader may be happier.

That shadowy Rose Aylmer, through whom the suggestion for the poem came, was the real daughter of Lord Aylmer, of the near Welsh country; what Landor’s intimacy with her may have been, in its promise or its reach, we do not know; but we do know that when she died, somewhat later and in a far country, the poet gave her name embalmment in those wonderful little verses, which poor Charles Lamb, it is said, in his later days, would repeat over and over and over, never tiring of the melody and the pathos. Here they are:--

“Ah, what avails the sceptred race, Ah, what the form divine! What--every virtue, every grace! Rose Aylmer, all were thine. Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes May weep, but never see, A night of memories and of sighs I consecrate to thee!”

Meantime, growing into a tempestuous love for the wild Welsh country, he bargains for a great estate, far up in a valley which opens down upon the larger valley in which lies Abergavenny; and being rich now by reason of his father’s death, parts with his beautiful ancestral properties in the Warwickshire region, lavishing a large portion of the sales-money upon the savagery of the new estate in Wales. He plants, he builds, he plays the monarch in those solitudes. He marries, too, while this mountain passion is on him, a young girl of French or Swiss extraction--led like a lamb into the lion’s grasp. But the first Welsh quarrel of this poet-monarch--who was severely classic, and who fed himself all his life through on the thunder-bolts of Jupiter--was with his neighbors; next with his workmen; then with his tenants; then the magistrates; last with everybody; and in a passion of disgust, he throws down his walls, turns astray his cattle, lets loose his mountain tarns, and leaving behind him the weltering wreck of his half-built home, goes over with his wife to Jersey, off the coast of Normandy. There she, poor, tired, frighted, worried bird--maybe with a little of the falcon in her--would stay; _he_ would not. So he dashes on incontinently--deserting her, and planting himself in mid-France at the old city of Tours, where he devotes himself to study.

This first family tiff, however, gets its healing, and--his wife joining him--they go to Como, where Southey (1817) paid them a visit; this poet had been one of the first and few admirers of _Gebir_, which fact softened the way to very much of mutual and somewhat over-strained praises between these two.[48] From Como Landor went to Pisa--afterward to Florence, his home thenceforth for very many years; first in the town proper and then in a villa at Fiesole from which is seen that wondrous view--none can forget who have beheld it--of the valley, which seems a plain--of the nestling city, with its great Brunelleschi dome, its arrow-straight belfry of Giotto, its quaint tower of the Palazzo Vecchio, its cypress sentinels on the Boboli heights, its River Arno shining and winding, and stealing away seaward from the amphitheatre of hills--on whose slopes are dotted white convents, sleeping in the sun, and villas peeping out from their cloakings of verdure, and the gray shimmer of olive orchards.

_Landor in Italy._

It was in Florence that Landor wrote the greater part of those _Imaginary Conversations_ which have given him his chief fame; but which, very possibly, may be outlived in the popular mind by the wonderful finish and the Saxon force which belong to many of his verselets.

The conversations are just what their name implies--the talk of learned, or distinguished men, on such topics as they were supposed to be most familiar with; all _imagined_, and set forth by the brain of Landor, who took a strange delight in thus playing with the souls of other men and making them the puppets of his will. One meets in his pages Roger Ascham and Lady Jane Grey, Milton and Andrew Marvel, and Achilles and Helena; then we are transported from Mount Ida to the scene of a homely colloquy between Washington and Franklin--about monarchy and Republicanism. Again we have Leofric and Godiva telling their old story with a touching dramatic interest; and can listen--if we will--to long and dullish dispute between Dr. Johnson and Horne Tooke, about Language and its Laws; from this--in which Landor was always much interested--we slip to the Philo-Russianism of a talk between Peter the Great and Alexis. There are seven great volumes of it all--which must belong to all considerable libraries, private or other, and which are apt to keep very fresh and uncut. Of course there is no logical continuity--no full exposition of a creed, or a faith, or a philosophy. It is a great, wide, eloquent, homely jumble; one bounces from rock to rock, or from puddle to puddle (for there are puddles) at the will of this great giant driver of the chariot of imaginary talk.[49] There are beauties of expression that fascinate one; there are sentences so big with meaning as to bring you to sudden pause; there are wearisome chapters about the balance of French verselets, in which he sets up the poor Abbé Delille on rhetorical stilts--only to pelt him down; there are page-long blotches of crude humor, and irrelevant muddy tales, that you wish were out. As sample of his manner, I give one or two passages at random. Speaking of Boileau, he says:--

“In Boileau there is really more of diffuseness than of brevity [he loves thus to slap a popular belief straight in the face]; few observe this, because [Boileau] abounds in short sentences; and few are aware that sentences may be very short, and the writer very prolix; as half a dozen stones rising out of a brook give the passenger more trouble than a plank across it.” [He abounds in short, pert similes of this sort which seem almost to carry an argument in them.]

[Again] “Caligula spoke justly and admirably when he compared the sentences of Seneca _to sand without lime_.”

[And once more] “He must be a bad writer, or, however, a very indifferent one, to whom there are no inequalities. The plants of such table-land are diminutive and never worth gathering.… The vigorous mind has mountains to climb and valleys to repose in. Is there any sea without its shoal? On that which the poet navigates, he rises intrepidly as the waves riot around him, and sits composedly as they subside.…”

“Level the Alps one with another, and where is their sublimity? Raise up the Vale of Tempe to the downs above, and where are those sylvan creeks and harbors in which the imagination watches while the soul reposes, those recesses in which the gods partook of the weaknesses of mortals, and mortals the enjoyments of the gods.”

The great learning of Landor and his vast information, taken in connection with his habits of self-indulgence (often of indolence), assure us that he must have had the rare talent, and the valuable one, of riddling books--that is, of skimming over them--with such wonderfully quick exercise of wit and judgment as to segregate the valuable from the valueless parts. ’Tis not a bad quality; nor is it necessarily (as many suppose) attended by superficiality. The superficial man does indeed skim things; but he pounces as squarely and surely upon the bad as upon the good; he works by mechanical process and progression--here a sentence and there a sentence; but the man who can race through a book well (as did Dr. Johnson and Landor), carries to the work--in his own genius for observation and quick discernment--a chemical mordant that bites and shows warning effervescence, and a signal to stay, only where there is something strong to bite.

_Landor’s Domesticities._

Meanwhile, we have a sorry story to tell of Landor’s home belongings. There is a storm brewing in that beautiful villa of Fiesole. Children have been born to the house, and he pets them, fondles them--seems to love them absorbingly. Little notelets which pass when they are away, at Naples, at Rome, are full of pleasantest paternal banter and yearning. But those children have run wild and are as vagrant as the winds.

The home compass has no fixed bearings and points all awry--the mother, never having sympathy with the work which had tasked Landor in those latter years, has, too, her own outside vanities and a persistent petulance, which breaks out into rasping speech when Jupiter flings his thunder-bolts. So Landor, in a strong rage of determination, breaks away: turns his back on wife and children--providing for them, however, generously--and goes to live again at Bath, in England.

For twenty-three years he stays there, away from his family (remembering, perhaps, in self-exculpating way, how Shakespeare had once done much the same), rambling over his old haunts, writing new verse, revamping old books, petting his Pomeranian dog, entertaining admiring guests, fuming and raving when crossed. He was more dangerously loud, too, than of old; and at last is driven away, to escape punishment for some scathing libels into which a storm of what he counted righteous rage has betrayed him. It must have been a pitiful thing to see this old, white-haired man--past eighty now--homeless, as good as childless, skulking, as it were, in London, just before sailing for the Continent,--appearing suddenly at Forster’s house, seated upon his bed there, with Dickens in presence, mumbling about Latin poetry and its flavors!

He finds his way to Genoa, then to Florence, then to the Fiesole Villa once more; but it would seem as if there were no glad greetings on either side; and in a few days estrangement comes again, and he returns to Florence. Twice or thrice more those visits to Fiesole are repeated, in the vague hope, it would seem, floating in the old man’s mind, that by some miracle of heaven, aspects would change there--or perhaps in him--and black grow white, and gloom sail away under some new blessed gale from Araby. But it does never come; nor ever the muddied waters of that home upon the Florentine hills flow pure and bright again.

_Final Exile and Death._

He goes back--eighty-five now--toothless, and trembling under weight of years and wranglings, to the Via Nunziatina, in Florence; he has no means now--having despoiled himself for the benefit of those living at his Villa of Fiesole, who will not live with him, or he with them; he is largely dependent upon a brother in England. He passes a summer, in these times, with the American sculptor Story. He receives occasional wandering friends; has a new pet of a dog to fondle.

There is always a trail of worshipping women and poetasters about him to the very last; but the bad odor of his Bath troubles has followed him; Normanby, the British Minister, will give him no recognition; but there is no bending, no flinching in this great, astute, imperious, headstrong, ill-balanced creature. Indeed, he carries now under his shock of white hair, and in his tottering figure, a stock of that coarse virility which has distinguished him always--which for so many has its charm, and which it is hard to reconcile with the tender things of which he was capable;--for instance, that interview of Agamemnon and Iphigenia--so cunningly, delicately, and so feelingly told--as if the story were all his own, and had no Greek root--other than what found hold in the greensward of English Warwickshire. And I close our talk of Landor, by citing this: Iphigenia has heard her doom (you know the story); she must die by the hands of the priest--or, the ships, on which her father’s hopes and his fortunes rest, cannot sail. Yet, she pleads;--there may have been mistakes in interpreting the cruel oracle,--there may be hope still,--

“The Father placed his cheek upon her head And tears dropt down it; but, the king of men Replied not: Then the maiden spoke once more,-- ‘O, Father, says’t thou nothing? Hear’st thou not _Me_, whom thou ever hast, until this hour, Listened to--fondly; and awakened me To hear my voice amid the voice of birds When it was inarticulate as theirs, And the down deadened it within the nest.’ He moved her gently from him, silent still: And this, and this alone, brought tears from her Although she saw fate nearer: then, with sighs,-- ‘I thought to have laid down my hair before Benignant Artemis, and not have dimmed Her polisht altar with my virgin blood; I thought to have selected the white flowers To please the Nymphs, and to have asked of each By name, and with no sorrowful regret, Whether, since both my parents willed the change, I might at Hymen’s feet bend my clipt brow, And--(after those who mind us girls the most) Adore our own Athena, that she would Regard me mildly with her azure eyes; But--Father! to see you no more, and see Your love, O Father! go, ere I am gone.’ Gently he moved her off, and drew her back, Bending his lofty head far over hers, And the dark depths of nature heaved and burst: He turned away: not far, but silent still: She now first shuddered; for in him--so nigh, So long a silence seemed the approach of death And like it. Once again, she raised her voice,-- ‘O Father! if the ships are now detained And all your vows move not the Gods above When the knife strikes me, there will be one prayer The less to them; and, purer can there be Any, or more fervent, than the daughter’s prayer For her dear father’s safety and success?’ A groan that shook him, shook not his Resolve. An aged man now entered, and without One word, stept slowly on, and took the wrist Of the pale maiden. She looked up and saw The fillet of the priest, and calm cold eyes: Then turned she, where her parent stood and cried,-- ‘O, Father! grieve no more! the ships can sail!’”

When we think of Landor, let us forget his wrangles--forget his wild impetuosities--forget his coarsenesses, and his sad, lonely death; and--instead--keep in mind, if we can, that sweet picture I have given you.

_Prose of Leigh Hunt._

It was some two years before George IV. came to the Regency, and at nearly the same date with the establishment of Murray’s _Quarterly_, that Mr. Leigh Hunt,[50] in company with his brother John Hunt, set up a paper called the _Examiner_--associated in later days with the strong names of Fonblanque and Forster. This paper was of a stiffly Whiggish and radical sort, and very out-spoken--so that when George IV., as Regent, seemed to turn his back on old Whig friends, and show favors to the Tories (as he did), Mr. Leigh Hunt wrote such sneering and abusive articles about the Regent that he was prosecuted, fined, and clapped into prison, where he stayed two years. They were lucky two years for him--making reputation for his paper and for himself; his friends and family dressed up his prison room with flowers (he loved overmuch little luxuries of that sort); Byron, Moore, Godwin, and the rest all came to see him; and there he caught the first faint breezes of that popular applause which blew upon him in a desultory and rather languid way for a good many years afterward--not wholly forsaking him when he had grown white-haired, and had brought his delicate, fine, but somewhat feeble pen into the modern courts of criticism.

I do not suppose that anybody in our day goes into raptures over the writings of Leigh Hunt; nevertheless, we must bring him upon our record--all the more since there was American blood in him. His father, Isaac Hunt, was born in the Barbadoes, and studied in Philadelphia; in the latter city, Dr. Franklin and Tom Paine used to be visitors at his grandfather’s house. At the outbreak of the Revolution, Hunt’s father, who--notwithstanding his Philadelphia wife--was a bitter loyalist, went to England--his departure very much quickened by some threats of punishing his aggressive Toryism. He appears in England as a clergyman--ultimately wedded to Unitarian doctrines; finding his way sometimes to the studio of Benjamin West--talking over Pennsylvania affairs with that famous artist, and encountering there, as it chanced, John Trumbull, a student in painting--who in after years bequeathed an art-gallery to Yale College. It happens, too, that this Colonel Trumbull, in 1812, when the American war was in progress, was suspected as a spy, and escaped grief mainly by the intervention of Isaac Hunt.

The young Hunt began early to write--finding his way into journalism of all sorts; his name associated sooner or later with _The News_, and dramatic critiques; with the _Examiner_, the _Reflector_, the _Indicator_, the _Companion_, and the _Liberal_--for which latter he dragged his family down into Italy at the instance of Byron or Shelley, or both. That _Liberal_ was intended to astonish people and make the welkin ring; but the Italian muddle was a bad one, the _Liberal_ going under, and an ugly quarrel setting in; Hunt revenging himself afterward by writing _Lord Byron and his Contemporaries_,--a book he ultimately regretted: he was never strong enough to make his bitterness respected. Honeyed words became him better; and these he dealt out--wave upon wave--on all sorts of unimportant themes. Thus, he writes upon “Sticks”; and again upon “Maid-servants”; again on “Bees and Butterflies” (which is indeed very pretty); and again “Upon getting up of a cold morning”--in which he compassionates those who are haled out of their beds by “harpy-footed furies”--discourses on his own experience and sees his own breath rolling forth like smoke from a chimney, and the windows frosted over.

“Then the servant comes in: ‘It is very cold this morning, is it not?’ ‘Very cold, sir.’ ‘Very cold, indeed, isn’t it?’ ‘Very cold, indeed, sir.’ ‘More than usually so, isn’t it, even for this weather?’ ‘Why, sir, I think it _is_, sir.’… And then the hot water comes: ‘And is it quite hot? And isn’t it too hot?’ And what ‘an unnecessary and villainous custom this is of shaving.’”

Whereupon he glides off, in words that flow as easily as water from a roof--into a disquisition upon flowing beards--instancing Cardinal Bembo and Michelangelo, Plato and the Turks. Listen again to what he has to say in his _Indicator_ upon “A Coach”:--

“It is full of cushions and comfort; elegantly colored inside and out; rich yet neat; light and rapid, yet substantial. The horses seem proud to draw it. The fat and fair-wigged coachman lends his sounding lash, his arm only in action, and that but little; his body well set with its own weight. The footman, in the pride of his nonchalance, holding by the straps behind, and glancing down sideways betwixt his cocked hat and neckcloth, standing swinging from East to West upon his springy toes. The horses rush along amidst their glancing harness. Spotted dogs leap about them, barking with a princely superfluity of noise. The hammer cloth trembles through all its fringe. The paint flashes in the sun.”

Nothing can be finer--if one likes that sort of fineness. We follow such a writer with no sense of his having addressed our intellectual nature, but rather with a sense of pleasurable regalement to our nostrils by some high wordy perfume.

Hawthorne, in _Our Old Home_, I think, tells us that even to extreme age, the boyishness of the man’s nature shone through and made Hunt’s speech like the chirp of a bird; he never tired of gathering his pretty roses of words. It is hard to think of such a man doing serious service in the role of radical journalist--as if he _could_ speak dangerous things! And yet, who can tell? They say Robespierre delighted in satin facings to his coat, and was never without his _boutonnière_.

We all know the figure of Harold Skimpole, in Dickens’s _Bleak House_, with traits so true to Leigh Hunt’s, that the latter’s friends held up a warning finger, and said: “For shame!” to the novelist. Indeed, I think Dickens felt relentings in his later years, and would have retouched the portrait; but a man who paints with flesh and blood pigments cannot retouch.

Certain it is that the household of Hunt was of a ram-shackle sort, and he and his always very much out at ends. Even Carlyle, who was a neighbor at Chelsea, was taken aback at the easy way in which Hunt confronted the butcher-and-baker side of life; and the kindly Mrs. Carlyle drops a half-querulous mention of her shortened larder and the periodic borrowings of the excellent Mrs. Hunt.

_Hunt’s Verse._

But over all this we stretch a veil now, woven out of the little poems that he has left. He wrote no great poems, to be sure; for here, as in his prose, he is earnestly bent on carving little baskets out of cherry-stones--little figures on cherry-stones--dainty hieroglyphics, but always on cherry-stones!

His “Rimini,” embodying that old Dantesque story about Giovanni and Paolo and Francesca, is his longest poem. There are exceedingly pretty and delicate passages in it; I quote one or two:

“For leafy was the road with tall array On either side of mulberry and bay, And distant snatches of blue hills between; And there the alder was, with its bright green, And the broad chestnut, and the poplar’s shoot That, like a feather, waves from head to foot; With ever and anon majestic pines; And still, from tree to tree, the early vines Hung, garlanding the way in amber lines. … And then perhaps you entered upon shades, Pillowed with dells and uplands ’twixt the glades Through which the distant palace, now and then, Looked forth with many windowed ken-- A land of trees which, reaching round about, In shady blessing stretched their old arms out With spots of sunny opening, and with nooks To lie and read in--sloping into brooks, Where at her drink you started the slim deer, Retreating lightly with a lovely fear. And all about the birds kept leafy house, And sung and sparkled in and out the boughs, And all about a lovely sky of blue Clearly was felt, or down the leaves laughed through.”

And so on--executed with ever so much of delicacy--but not a sign or a symbol of the grave and melancholy tone which should equip, even to the utmost hem of its descriptive passages, that tragic story of Dante.

Those deft, little feathery touches--about deer, and birds, and leafy houses, are not scored with the seriousness which in every line and pause should be married with the intensity of the story. The painting of Mr. Watts, of the dead Francesca--ghastly though it be--has more in it to float one out into the awful current of Dante’s story than a world of the happy wordy meshes of Mr. Hunt. A greater master would have brought in, maybe, all those natural beauties of the landscape--the woods, the fountains, the clear heaven--but they would all have been toned down to the low, tragic movement, which threatens, and creeps on and on, and which dims even the blue sky with forecast of its controlling gloom.

There is no such inaptness or inadequacy where Leigh Hunt writes of crickets and grasshoppers and musical boxes. In his version of the old classic story of “Hero and Leander,” however, the impertinence (if I may be pardoned the language) of his dainty wordy dexterities is even more strikingly apparent. _His_ Hero, waiting for her Leander, beside the Hellespont,

“Tries some work, forgets it, and thinks on, Wishing with perfect love the time were gone, And lost to the green trees with their sweet singers, Taps on the casement-ledge with idle fingers.”

No--this is not a Greek maiden listening for the surge of the water before the stalwart swimmer of Abydos; it is a London girl, whom the poet has seen in a second-story back window, meditating what color she shall put to the trimming of her Sunday gown!

Far better and more beautiful is this fathoming of the very souls of the flowers:

“We are the sweet Flowers, Born of sunny showers, Think, whene’er you see us, what our beauty saith: Utterance mute and bright, Of some unknown delight, We feel the air with pleasure, by our simple breath; All who see us, love us; We befit all places; Unto sorrow we give smiles; and unto graces, graces.

“Mark our ways--how noiseless All, and sweetly voiceless, Though the March winds pipe to make our passage clear; Not a whisper tells Where our small seed dwells, Nor is known the moment green, when our tips appear. We tread the earth in silence, In silence build our bowers, And leaf by leaf in silence show, ’till we laugh atop, sweet Flowers!

…

“Who shall say that flowers Dress not Heaven’s own bowers? Who its love, without them, can fancy--or sweet floor? Who shall even dare To say we sprang not there, And came not down that Love might bring one piece of heav’n the more? Oh, pray believe that angels From those blue Dominions Brought us in their white laps down, ’twixt their golden pinions.”

No poet of this--or many a generation past--has said a sweeter or more haunting word for the flowers.

We will not forget the “Abou-ben-Adhem;” nor shall its commonness forbid our setting this charmingly treated Oriental fable, at the end of our mention of Hunt--a memorial banderole of verse:--

“Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!) Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace, And saw within the moonlight in his room, Making it rich and like a lily in bloom, An Angel, writing in a book of gold. Exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold; And to the presence in the room, he said,-- ‘What writest thou?’ The Vision raised its head, And with a look made of all sweet accord Answered, ‘The names of those who love the Lord.’ ‘And is mine one?’ said Abou. ‘Nay, not so;’ Replied the Angel. Abou spoke more low, But cheerly still; and said, ‘I pray thee, then, Write me as one that loves his fellow-men.’ The Angel wrote and vanished. The next night It came again, with a great wakening light, And showed the names whom love of God had blessed, And lo!--Ben Adhem’s name led all the rest!”

_An Irish Poet._

Among those who paid their visits of condolence to Leigh Hunt in the days of his prisonhood, was Moore[51] the author of _Lalla Rookh_ and of _The Loves of the Angels_. He was not used to paying visits in such quarters, for he had an instinctive dislike for all uncanny things and disagreeable places; nor was he ever a great friend of Hunt; but he must have had a good deal of sympathy with him in that attack upon the Prince Regent which brought about Hunt’s conviction. Moore, too, had his gibes at the Prince--thinking that great gentleman had been altogether too neglectful of the dignities of his high estate; but he was very careful that his gibes should be so modulated as not to put their author in danger.

_Lalla Rookh_ may be little read nowadays; but not many years have passed since this poem and others of the author’s used to get into the finest of bindings, and have great currency for bridal and birthday gifts. Indeed, there is a witching melody in Moore’s Eastern tales, and a delightful shimmer and glitter of language, which none but the most cunning of our present craft-masters in verse could reach.

Moore was born in Dublin, his father having kept a wine-shop there; and his mother (he tells us) was always anxious about the quality of his companions, and eager to build up his social standing--an anxiety which was grafted upon the poet himself, and which made him one of the wariest, and most coy and successful of society-seekers--all his life.

He was at the Dublin University--took easily to languages, and began spinning off some of _Anacreon’s_ numbers into graceful English, even before he went up to London--on his old mother’s savings--to study law at the Temple. He was charmingly presentable in those days; very small, to be sure, but natty, courteous, with a pretty modesty, and a voice that bubbled over into music whenever he recited one of his engaging snatches of melody. He has letters to Lords, too, and the most winning of tender speeches and smiles for great ladies. He comes to an early interview with the Prince of Wales--who rather likes the graceful Irish singer, and flatters him by accepting the dedication of _Anacreon_ with smiles of condescension--which Mr. Moore perhaps counted too largely upon. Never had a young literary fellow of humble birth a better launch upon London society. His Lords’ letters, and his pretty conciliatory ways, get him a place of value (when scarce twenty-four) in Bermuda. But he is not the man to lose his hold on London; so he goes over seas only to put a deputy in place, and then, with a swift run through our Atlantic cities, is back again. It is rather interesting to read now what the young poet says of us in those green days:--In Philadelphia, it appears, the people quite ran after him:

“I was much caressed while there.… and two or three little poems, of a very flattering kind, some of their choicest men addressed to me.” [And again.] “Philadelphia is the only place in America which can boast any literary society.” [Boston people, I believe, never admired Moore overmuch.]

Here again is a bit from his diary at Ballston--which was the Saratoga of that day:--

“There were about four hundred people--all stowed in a miserable boarding-house. They were astonished at our asking for basons and towels in our rooms; and thought we might condescend to come down to the Public Wash, with the other gentlemen, in the morning.”

Poor, dainty, Moore! But he is all right when he comes back to London, and gives himself to old occupations of drawing-room service, and to the coining of new, and certainly very sweet and tender, Irish melodies. He loved to be tapped on the shoulder by great Dowagers, sparkling in diamonds, and to be entreated--“Now, dear Mr. Moore, _do_ sing us one more song.”

And it was pretty sure to come: he delighted in giving his very feeling and musical voice range over the heads of fine-feathered women. The peacock’s plumes, the shiver of the crystal, the glitter of Babylon, always charmed him.

Nor was it all only tinkling sound that he gave back. For proof I cite one or two bits:--

“Then I sing the wild song, ’twas once such a pleasure to hear, When our voices commingling breathed, like one, on the ear; And, as Echo far off thro’ the vale, my sad orison rolls, I think, O my love! ’tis thy voice from the Kingdom of Souls Faintly answering still the notes that once were so dear.”

And again:--

“Dear Harp of my Country! farewell to thy numbers, This sweet wreath of song is the last we shall twine. Go sleep, with the Sunshine of Fame on thy slumbers, Till touched by some hand less unworthy than mine.

“If the pulse of the patriot, soldier, or lover Have throbbed at our lay, ’tis thy glory alone; I was _but_ as the wind, passing heedlessly over, And all the wild sweetness I wak’d was thy own.”

This is better than dynamite to stir Ireland’s best pulses, even now.

_Lalla Rookh._

Mr. Moore had his little country vacations--among them, that notable stay up in the lovely county of Derbyshire, near to Ashbourne and Dovedale, and the old fishing grounds of Walton and of Cotton--where he wrote the larger part of his first considerable poem, _Lalla Rookh_--which had amazing success, and brought to its author the sum of £3,000. But I do not think that what inspiration is in it came to him from the hollows or the heights of Derbyshire; I should rather trace its pretty Oriental confusion of sound and scenes to the jingle of London chandeliers. Yet the web, the gossamer, the veils and the flying feet do not seem to touch ground anywhere in England, but shift and change and grow out of his Eastern readings and dreams.

Moore married at thirty-two--after he was known for the Irish melodies, but before the publication of _Lalla Rookh_; and in his _Letters and Diary_ (if you read them--though they make an enormous mass to read, and frighten most people away by their bulk), you will come upon very frequent, and very tender mention of “Dear Bessie”--the wife. It is true, there were rumors that he wofully neglected her, but hardly well founded. Doubtless there was many a day and many a week when she was guarding the cottage and the children at Sloperton; and he bowing and pirouetting his way amongst the trailing robes of their ladyships who loved music and literature in London; but how should he refuse the invitations of his Lordship this or that? Or how should she--who has no robes that will stand alone--bring her pretty home gowns into that blazon of the salons? Always, too (if his letters may be trusted), he is eager to make his escape between whiles--wearied of this _tintamarre_--and to rush away to his cottage at Sloperton[52] for a little slippered ease, and a romp with the children. Poor children--they all drop away, one by one--two only reaching maturity--then dying. The pathetic stories of the sickening, the danger and the hush, come poignantly into his Diary, and it does seem that the winning clatter of the world gets a hold upon his wrenched heart over-quickly again. But what right have you or I to judge in such matters?

There are chirrupy little men--and women, too,--on whom grief does not seem to take a hard grip; all the better for them! Moore, I think, was such a one, and was braced up always and everywhere by his own healthy pulses, and, perhaps, by a sense of his own sufficiency. His vanities are not only elastic, but--by his own bland and child-like admissions--they seem sometimes almost monumental. He writes in his _Diary_, “Shiel (that’s an Irish friend) says I am the first poet of the day, and join the beauty of the Bird-of-Paradise’s plumes to the strength of the eagle’s wing.” Fancy a man copying that sort of thing into his own _Diary_, and regaling himself with it!

Yet he is full of good feeling--does not cherish resentments--lets who will pat him on the shoulder (though he prefers a lord’s pat). Then he forgives injuries or slights grandly; was once so out with Jeffrey that a duel nearly came of it; but afterward was his hail-fellow and good friend for years. Sometimes he shows a magnanimous strain--far more than his artificialities of make-up would seem to promise. Thus, being at issue with the publisher, John Murray (a long-dated difference), he determines on good advisement to be away with it; and so goes smack into the den of the great publisher and gives him his hand: such action balances a great deal of namby-pambyism.

But what surprises more than all about Moore, is the very great reputation that he had in his day. We, in these latter times, have come to reckon him (rather rashly, perhaps) only an arch gossipper of letters--a butterfly of those metropolitan gardens--easy, affable, witty, full of smiles, full of good feeling, full of pretty little rhythmical utterances--singing songs as easy as a sky-lark (and leaving the sky thereafter as empty); planting nothing that lifts great growth, or tells larger tale than lies in his own lively tintinnabulation of words.

Yet Byron said of him: “There is nothing Moore may not do, if he sets about it.” Sydney Smith called him “A gentleman of small stature, but full of genius, and a steady friend of all that is honorable.” Leigh Hunt says: “I never received a visit from him, but I felt as if I had been talking with Prior or Sir Charles Sedley.” It is certain that he must have been a most charming companion. Walter Scott says: “It would be a delightful addition to life if Thomas Moore had a cottage within two miles of me.” Indeed, he was always quick to scent anything that might amuse, and to store it up. His diaries overflow with these bright specks and bits of talk, which may kindle a laugh, but do not nestle in the memory.

But considered as a poet whose longish work ought to live and charm the coming generations, his reputation certainly does not hold to the old illuminated heights. Poems of half a century ago, which _Lalla Rookh_ easily outshone, have now put the pretty orientalisms into shade. Nor can we understand how so many did, and do, put such twain of verse-makers as Byron and Moore into one leash, as if they were fellows in power. In the comparison the author of the _Loves of the Angels_ seems to me only a little important-looking, kindly pug--nicely combed, with ribbons about the neck--in an embroidered blanket, with jingling bells at its corners; and Byron--beside him--a lithe, supple leopard, with a tread that threatens and a dangerous glitter in the eye. Milk diet might sate that other; but this one, if occasion served, would lap blood.

In the pages that follow we shall, among others, more or less notable, encounter again that lithe leopard in some of his wanton leaps--into verse, into marriage, into exile, and into the pit of death at Missolonghi.