Chapter 21

"As to the defects of the character of Hayley, perhaps the most prominent feature was a pertinacity of determination with regard to his modes of action, which has been seldom exemplified to the same extent in the case of others. When, in the contemplation of supposed advantage, whether to himself or his friends, he had once matured his purpose, it was an attempt of no ordinary difficulty to divert him from the pursuit of it. To this may, perhaps, be attributed the perpetual disappointments with which his life was chequered. Certain it is, that his matrimonial infelicities may be traced to this source. His first adventure of the kind alluded to, had the warning voice of his surviving parent against it, and it may naturally be supposed, the dissuasive arguments of all his thinking and judicious friends. And as to the similar connexion he formed in the decline of life, he must have overcome obstacles both numerous and weighty, with respect to his own situation and habits in accomplishing that object of his wishes. Instead of entering into a detail of these, however, it will be more profitable to secure the good effect that may arise from the contemplation of the former part of his character, from the danger of being neutralized by the present exhibition of it. This may, perhaps, be accomplished by reminding the reader of that principle of our lapsed nature, which inclines us, too often, to confound evil with good. The good, in Hayley's case, appears to have been the viewing, through his native cheerfulness, every _dispensation of Providence_ on its bright side; and the evil, his applying this rule to what might be not improperly designated _the dispensation of his own will_. There can be no doubt that his example in the first instance and his mistake in the last, are equally to be followed and avoided.

"Another failing observable in the character of Hayley, was the little attention he paid to public opinion, in regard to his modes and habits of life. During his long residence in his paternal seat of Eartham, though he occasionally received friends from a distance, and especially the votaries of literature and the fine arts, yet to the families in his vicinity he was not easily accessible. He seems, indeed, to have been almost an insulated mortal among them; and one who, discharging himself from the obligation of what is commonly called _etiquette_, made it impossible to maintain with him the reciprocities of intercourse. It is true, indeed, that the attention of the possessor of Eartham was considerably engrossed by meditation and study; but this increased rather than lessened his adaptation to society, and made the effect of his seclusion the more to be lamented." Hayley's Memoirs, vol. ii. p. 220.

As Hayley was too much extolled at the beginning of his poetical course, so was he undeservedly neglected or ridiculed at the close of it. The excessive admiration he at first met with, joined to that flattering self-opinion which a solitary life is apt to engender, made him too easily satisfied with what he had done. Perhaps he wrote worse after his acquaintance with Cowper; for, aiming at a simplicity which he had not power to support, he became flat and insipid. He had at no time much force of conception or language. Yet if he never elevates he frequently amuses his reader. His chief attraction consists in setting off some plain and natural thought or observation, by a sparkling and ingenious similitude, such as we commonly find in the Persian poets. To this may be added a certain sweetness of numbers peculiar to himself, without the spirit and edge of Pope, or the boldness of Dryden, and fashioned as I think to his own recitation, which though musical, was somewhat too pompous and monotonous. He was desirous that all his rhymes should be exact; but they are sometimes so only according to his own manner of pronouncing them. He holds about the same rank among our poets that Bertaut does among the French; but differs from him in this; that, whereas Bertaut was the earliest of a race analogous to the school of Dryden and Pope, so Hayley was the latest of the correspondent class amongst ourselves.

In one respect he is deserving of most honourable notice. During the course of a long literary life, I doubt whether he was ever provoked to use a single word of asperity or sarcasm towards any of his contemporaries. This was praise which alone ought to have exempted him from the harsh and unmerited censure of Porson, by whom he was called Criticorum et Poetarum pessimus. He sometimes on the other hand, indulged himself too much in a lavish and indiscriminate commendation of contemporary writers. But from whatever might appear like flattery of the great, he scrupulously abstained. When the Princess Charlotte visited him at Felpham, he would not present some verses he had written on her, lest he should be thought capable of that meanness.

His Essays on Painting, History, and Poetry, contain much information that may be useful to young artists and students. That on Sculpture is very inferior to the rest; as the Triumph of Music is to the Triumphs of Temper. The last of these is a poem that still continues to interest a class of readers, whose studies are intimately connected with the happiness and well being of society. The design of it, which is to shew the advantages of self-control to the mind of a well-educated girl, is much to be commended. The machinery though it required no great effort in the production, yet suffices to give some relief to the story. It has been remarked that the trials of the Heroine are too insignificant. But of one of them, at least, the calumny in the newspaper, this cannot properly be said. Nor would the purpose of the writer have been so well answered, if he had been more serious, and had uttered his oracles from behind a graver mask.

The taste which has been lately excited amongst us for Spanish and Italian literature, after having slept nearly since the age of Elizabeth, may be attributed in a great measure to the influence of his example. Gray, Hurd, and the two Wartons, had done something towards awakening it, but the spell was completed by him. The decisive impulse was given by the copious extracts from the great poets in those languages, which he inserted in the notes to his Essay on Epic Poetry, and which he accompanied by spirited translations. Lord Holland, the best informed and most elegant of our writers on the subject of the Spanish theatre, declared that he had been induced to learn that language by what Hayley had written concerning the poet Ercilla.

I have heard his Greek scholarship questioned in consequence of an error which, in his Epistles on History, he has made in the quantity of the word Olorus, the name of the father of Thucydides; but from a casual mistake of this sort, no decisive inference can be drawn.

There is little knowledge of human life and character to be gained from his writings. He had seen mankind chiefly through the medium of books, and those such as did not represent them very faithfully to him, that is, in ordinary plays and novels. Indeed he appeared to consider the real affairs of life in which he was concerned much in the light of a romance, and himself and his friends as so many personages acting in it, all meeting with marvellous adventures at every turn, and all endowed with admirable qualities, to which their petty frailties served only as foils. It is impossible in reading his memoirs to avoid smiling at the importance he attaches to very ordinary occurrences. I am not sure whether it was not this propensity that led him to magnify his own distresses in living with his first wife. That lady I well recollect to have been lively and elegant in her manners, and much addicted to literary pursuits, of which she gave a proof in translating Madame de Lambert's Essay on Friendship. Her excessive zeal for her husband's reputation as an author, he has bantered with some humour in the play of the Mausoleum, where Mrs. Rumble, the wife of a poet is introduced:

Who crows o'er her husband's poetical eggs.

The character of Rumble in the same play appeared so evidently designed for Johnson, though the author disclaimed that intention, that Boswell, when he read it on its first coming out, at Anna Seward's, exclaimed, "It is we. It is we." Trope, who

Talks in a high strutting style of the stars, Of the eagle of Jove, and the chariot of Mars,

was meant for Mason; and by Facil,

Whose verse is the thread of tenuity, A fellow distinguish'd by flippant fatuity, Who nonsense and rhyme can incessantly mingle, A poet--if poetry's only a jingle,

he intended to represent himself.

The name of Facil was but too appropriate. The slender thread of his verse was hastily and slightly spun.

His comedies are adapted to the entertainment of those readers only who have formed their taste on the French drama. His tragedies are some of the most endurable we have in what a lively modern critic[4] has termed the rhetorical style. Yet he had some skill in moving compassion.

His diction, both in poetry and prose, is vitiated by the frequent recurrence of certain hyperbolical expressions, which he applies on almost all occasions.

He was particularly fond of composing epitaphs, of which, as I remember, he shewed me a manuscript book full. One of these on Henry Hammond, the parish clerk at Eartham, is among the best in the language. It is inserted in the Memoirs which Hayley wrote of his son.

An active spirit in a little frame, This honest man the path of duty trod; Toil'd while he could, and, when death's darkness came, Sought in calm hope his recompense from God. His sons, who loved him, to his merit just, Raised this plain stone to guard their parent's dust.

FOOTNOTES [1] Nichols's Illustrations of Literature, vol. iv. p. 742. [2] In a similar sketch from the pen of the Rev. Samuel Greatheed, referring to an earlier period, it is stated that "he usually rose and took a dish of coffee at four A.M.," and that "while dressing, he most frequently composed a few stanzas of a devotional turn." This practice of early rising he continued many years after the Editor became acquainted with him, walking in his garden, even in winter, and when the ground was covered with snow, with a lantern in his hand, some hours before daylight; and repeatedly throwing up the sash of his friend's sleeping room, on the ground floor, to give him the benefit of the morning air. _Note by Doctor Johnson_. [3] To the best of his recollection, the Editor never saw him abroad without an umbrella; which in fine weather he used as a parasol, to preserve his eyes. He even rode with it on horseback, a very awkward operation, considering the high-spirited animals that composed his stud, and the constitutional malady in his hip-joint, which, in addition to his weight (for he was a remarkably strong-built man), and his never riding without military spurs, reduced his danger of falling almost to a certainty, when he opened his umbrella without due precaution. But he was a stranger to fear in equestrian matters, and always mounted his horse again, as soon as he could be caught. The Editor was once riding gently by his side, on the stony beach of Bognor, when the wind suddenly reversing his umbrella, as he unfolded it, his horse, with a sudden but desperate plunge, pitched him on his head in an instant. Providentially he received no hurt, and some fishermen being at hand, the plunging steed was stopped at a gate, and being once more subjected to his rider, took him home in safety. On another occasion, in the same visit of the Editor, he was tost into the air on the Downs, at the precise moment when an interesting friend, whom they had just left, being apprehensive of what would happen, was anxiously viewing him from her window through a telescope.

These anecdotes may serve to illustrate that _determined_ feature of his character, which has been already noticed, and which impelled him, contrary to the advice of his friends, to persevere in a favourite, though perilous exercise, even at the manifest hazard of his life. At length, however, they prevailed; and for some years before he died, he gave up riding on horseback altogether. _Note by Dr. Johnson_. [4] My friend Mr. Darley, _MS. addition_.--ED.

* * * * *

SIR WILLIAM JONES.

The life of Sir William Jones has been written by his friend Lord Teignmouth with that minuteness which the character of so illustrious and extraordinary a man deserved. He was born in London, on the twenty-eighth of September, 1746. His father, whose Christian name he bore, although sprung immediately from a race of yeomen in Anglesea, could yet, like many a Cambro-Briton beside, have traced his descent, at least in a maternal line, from the ancient princes of Wales. But what distinguished him much more was, that he had attained so great a proficiency in the study of mathematics as to become a teacher of that branch of science in the English metropolis, under the patronage of Sir Isaac Newton, and rose to such reputation by his writings, that he attracted the notice and esteem of the powerful and the learned, and was admitted to the intimacy of the Earls of Hardwicke, and Macclesfield; Lord Parker, President of the Royal Society; Halley; Mead; and Samuel Johnson. By his wife, Mary, the daughter of a cabinet-maker in London, he had two sons, one of whom died an infant, and a daughter. In three years after the birth of the remaining son, the father himself died, and left the two children to the protection of their mother. An extraordinary mark of her presence of mind, sufficiently indicated how capable this mother was of executing the difficult duty imposed on her by his decease. Dr. Mead had pronounced his case, which was a polypus on the heart, to be a hopeless one; and her anxious precautions to hinder the fatal intelligence from reaching him were on the point of being defeated by the arrival of a letter of condolence and consolation from an injudicious but well-meaning friend, when, on discovering its purport, she had sufficient address to substitute the lively dictates of her own invention for the real contents of the epistle, and by this affectionate delusion not merely to satisfy the curiosity but to cheer the spirits of her dying husband.

So great was her solicitude for the improvement of her son, that she declined the pressing instances of the Countess of Macclesfield to reside under her roof, lest she should be hindered from attending exclusively to that which was now become her main concern. To the many inquiries which the early vivacity of the boy prompted him to put to her, the invariable answer she returned was, _read and you will know_. This assurance, added to the other means of instruction, from which her fondness, or more probably her discernment, induced her to exclude every species of severity, were so efficacious that in his fourth year he was able to read at sight any book in his own language. Two accidents occurred to hinder this rapid advancement from proceeding. Once he narrowly escaped being consumed by flames from having fallen into the fire, while endeavouring to scrape down some soot from the chimney of a room in which he had been left alone; and was rescued only in consequence of the alarm given to the servants by his shrieks. At another time, his eye was nearly put out by one of the hooks of his dress, as he was struggling under the hands of the domestic who was putting on his clothes. From the effects of this injury his sight never completely recovered.

In his fifth year he received a strong impression from reading the twentieth chapter of the Apocalypse. The man must have a cold imagination who would deny that this casual influence might have first disclosed not only the lofty and ardent spirit, but even that insatiable love of learning, by which he was afterwards distinguished above all his contemporaries. Amidst the general proscription of reading adapted to excite wonder, that germ of knowledge, in the minds of our children, it is lucky that the Bible is still left them.

At the end of his seventh year he was placed under the tuition of Dr. Thackeray, the master of Harrow school; but had not been there two years before a fracture of his thigh bone, that happened in a scramble among his play-fellows, occasioned another suspension of his studies. During the twelvemonth which he now passed at home with his mother, he became so conversant with several writers in his own language, especially Dryden and Pope, that he set himself about making imitations of them.

On his return to Harrow, no allowance was made for the inevitable consequences of this interruption; he was replaced in the class with those boys whose classical learning had been progressive while his was stationary, or rather retrograde, and unmerited chastisement was inflicted on him for his inferiority to those with whom he had wanted the means of maintaining an equality. Impelled either by fear, by shame, or by emulation, he laboured hard in private to repair his losses: of his own accord recurred to the rudiments of the grammar; and was so diligent that he speedily outstripped all his juvenile competitors.

In his twelfth year he entered into a scheme for representing a play in conjunction with his schoolfellows; but instead of seeking his Dramatis Personae among the heroes of Homer, as Pope had done in his boyhood, Jones, by a remarkable effort of memory, committed to paper what he retained of Shakspeare's Tempest, which he had read at his mother's; and himself sustained the part of Prospero in that Comedy. Meanwhile, his poetical faculty did not lie dormant. He turned into English verse all Virgil's Eclogues and several of Ovid's Epistles; and wrote a Tragedy on the fable of Meleager, which was acted during the holidays by himself and his comrades, and in which he sustained the character of the hero. A short specimen of the drama is preserved. The language brings to our recollection that of the Mock Tragedy in Hamlet.

When the other boys were at their sports, Jones continued to linger over his book, or, if he mingled in their diversions, his favourite objects were still uppermost in his thoughts; he directed his playmates to divide the fields into compartments to which he gave the names of the several Grecian republics; allotted to each their political station; and "wielding at will the fierce democracies," arranged the complicated concerns of peace and war, attack and defence, councils, harangues, and negociations. Dr. Thackeray was compelled to own that "if his pupil were left naked and friendless on Salisbury plain, he would yet find his way to fame and riches."

On the resignation of that master, the management of the school devolved on Dr. Sumner, by whom Jones, then in his fifteenth year, was particularly distinguished. Such was his zeal, that he devoted whole nights to study; and not contented with applying himself at school to the classical languages, and during the vacations to the Italian and French, he attained Hebrew enough to enable him to read the Psalms in the original, and made himself acquainted with the Arabic character. Strangers, who visited Harrow, frequently inquired for him by the appellation of the great scholar.

Some of his compositions from this time to his twentieth year, which he collected and entitled Limon,[1] in imitation of the ancients, are printed among his works. A young scholar who should now glance his eye over the first chapter, containing speeches from Shakspeare and Addison's Cato translated into Greek iambics on the model of the Three Tragedians, would put aside the remainder with a smile of complacency at the improvement which has since been made in this species of task under the auspices of Porson.

His mother was urged by several of the legal profession, who interested themselves in his welfare, to place him in the office of a special pleader: but considerations of prudence, which represented to her that the course of education necessary to qualify him for the practice of the law was exceedingly expensive and the advantages remote, hindered her from acquiescing in their recommendation; at the same time that his own inclination and the earnest wishes of his master concurred in favour of prosecuting his studies at college. Which of the two universities should have the credit of perfecting instruction thus auspiciously commenced was the next subject of debate. But the advice of Dr. Glasse, then a private tutor at Harrow, prevailing over that of the head master, who, by a natural partiality for the place of his own education would have given the preference to Cambridge, he was in 1764 admitted of University College in Oxford, whither his mother determined to remove her residence, either for the purpose of superintending his health and morals, or of enjoying the society of so excellent a son.

Before quitting school he presented to his friend Parnell, nephew of the poet, and afterwards Chancellor of the Exchequer in Ireland, a manuscript volume of English verses, consisting, among other pieces, of that essay which some years after he moulded into his Arcadia; and of translations from Sophocles, Theocritus, and Horace. If the encouragement of Dr. Sumner had not been overruled by the dissuasion of his more cautious friends, he would have committed to the press his Greek and Latin compositions, among which was a Comedy in imitation of the style of Aristophanes, entitled Mormo. Like many other lads whose talents have unfolded in all their luxuriance under the kindness of an indulgent master, he experienced a sudden chill at his first transplantation into academic soil. His reason was perplexed amid the intricacies of the school logic, and his taste revolted by the barbarous language that enveloped it.

On the 31st of October he was unanimously elected to one of the four scholarships founded by Sir Simon Bennet. But as he had three seniors, his prospect of a fellowship was distant; and he was anxious to free his mother from the inconvenience of contributing to his support. His disgust for the University, however, was fortunately not of long continuance. The college tutors relieved him from an useless and irksome attendance on their lectures, and judiciously left the employment of his time at his own disposal. He turned it to a good account in perusing the principal Greek historians and poets, together with the whole of Lucian and of Plato; writing notes, and exercising himself in imitations of his favourite authors as he went on. In order to facilitate his acquisition of the Arabic tongue, more particularly with regard to its pronunciation, he engaged a native of Aleppo, named Mirza, whom he met with in London, to accompany him to Oxford, and employed him in re-translating the Arabian Nights' Entertainments into their original language, whilst he wrote out the version himself as the other dictated, and corrected the inaccuracies by the help of a grammar and lexicon. The affinity which he discovered between this language and the modern Persian, induced him to extend his researches to the latter dialect; and he thus laid the foundation of his extraordinary knowledge in oriental literature.

During the vacations he usually resorted to London, where he was assiduous in his attendance on the schools of Angelo, for the sake of accomplishing himself in the manly exercises of fencing and riding; and, at home, directed his attention to modern languages; and familiarised himself with the best writers in Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese: "thus," he observed, "with the fortune of a peasant, he gave himself the education of a prince."