Friends of the friendless, hail, ye generous band!
she cries, in warm enthusiasm for the devoted cause.
Horace Walpole nicknamed her Deborah, called her the Virago Barbauld, and speaks of her with utter rudeness and intolerant spite. But whether or not Horace Walpole approved, it is certain that Mrs. Barbauld possessed to a full and generous degree a quality which is now less common than it was in her day.
Not very many years ago I was struck on one occasion when a noble old lady, now gone to her rest, exclaimed in my hearing that people of this generation had all sorts of merits and charitable intentions, but that there was one thing she missed which had certainly existed in her youth, and which no longer seemed to be of the same account: that public spirit which used to animate the young as well as the old.
It is possible that philanthropy, and the love of the beautiful, and the gratuitous diffusion of wall-papers may be the modern rendering of the good old-fashioned sentiment. Mrs. Barbauld lived in very stirring days, when private people shared in the excitements and catastrophes of public affairs. To her the fortunes of England, its loyalty, its success, were a part of her daily bread. By her early associations she belonged to a party representing opposition, and for that very reason she was the more keenly struck by the differences of the conduct of affairs and the opinions of those she trusted. Her friend Dr. Priestley had emigrated to America for his convictions' sake; Howard was giving his noble life for his work; Wakefield had gone to prison. Now the very questions are forgotten for which they struggled and suffered, or the answers have come while the questions are forgotten, in this their future which is our present, and to which some unborn historian may point back with a moral finger.
Dr. Aikin, whose estimate of his sister was very different from Horace Walpole's, occasionally reproached her for not writing more constantly. He wrote a copy of verses on this theme:—
Thus speaks the Muse, and bends her brows severe:Did I, Lætitia, lend my choicest lays,And crown thy youthful head with freshest bays,That all the expectance of thy full-grown year,Should lie inert and fruitless? O revereThose sacred gifts whose meed is deathless praise,Whose potent charm the enraptured soul can raiseFar from the vapours of this earthly sphere,Seize, seize the lyre, resume the lofty strain.
She seems to have willingly left the lyre for Dr. Aikin's use. A few hymns, some graceful odes, and stanzas, andjeux d'esprit, a certain number of well-written and original essays, and several political pamphlets, represent the best of her work. Her more ambitious poems are those by which she is the least remembered. It was at Hampstead that Mrs. Barbauld wrote her contributions to her brother's volume of 'Evenings at Home,' among which the transmigrations of Indur may be quoted as a model of style and delightful matter. One of the best of herjeux d'espritis the 'Groans of the Tankard,' which was written in early days, with much spirit and real humour. It begins with a classic incantation, and then goes on:—
'Twas at the solemn silent noontide hourWhen hunger rages with despotic power,When the lean student quits his Hebrew rootsFor the gross nourishment of English fruits,And throws unfinished airy systems byFor solid pudding and substantial pie.
The tankard now,
Replenished to the brink,With the cool beverage blue-eyed maidens drink,
but, accustomed to very different libations, is endowed with voice and utters its bitter reproaches:—
Unblest the day, and luckless was the hourWhich doomed me to a Presbyterian's power,Fated to serve a Puritanic race,Whose slender meal is shorter than their grace.
VI.
VI.
Thumbkin, of fairy celebrity, used to mark his way by flinging crumbs of bread and scattering stones as he went along; and in like manner authors trace the course of their life's peregrinations by the pamphlets and articles they cast down as they go. Sometimes they throw stones, sometimes they throw bread. In '92 and '93 Mrs. Barbauld must have been occupied with party polemics and with the political miseries of the time. A pamphlet on Gilbert Wakefield's views, and another on 'Sins of the Government and Sins of the People,' show in what direction her thoughts were bent. Then came a period of comparative calm again and of literary work and interest. She seems to have turned to Akenside and Collins, and each had an essay to himself. These were followed by certain selections from theSpectator,Tatler, &c., preceded by one of those admirable essays for which she is really remarkable. She also published a memoir of Richardson prefixed to his correspondence. Sir James Mackintosh, writing at a later and sadder time of her life, says of her observations on the moral of Clarissa that they are as fine a piece of mitigated and rational stoicism as our language can boast of.
In 1802 another congregation seems to have made signs from Stoke Newington, and Mrs. Barbauld persuaded her husband to leave his flock at Hampstead and to buy a house near her brother's at Stoke Newington. This was her last migration, and here she remained until her death in 1825. One of her letters to Mrs. Kenrick gives a description of what might have been a happy home:—'We have a pretty little back parlour that looks into our little spot of a garden,' she says, 'and catches every gleam of sunshine. We have pulled down the ivy, except what covers the coach-house We have planted a vine and a passion-flower, with abundance of jessamine against the window, and we have scattered roses and honeysuckle all over the garden. You may smile at me for parading so over my house and domains.' In May she writes a pleasant letter, in good spirits, comparing her correspondence with her friend to the flower of an aloe, which sleeps for a hundred years, and on a sudden pushes out when least expected. 'But take notice, the life is in the aloe all the while, and sorry should I be if the life were not in our friendship all the while, though it so rarely diffuses itself over a sheet of paper.'
She seems to have been no less sociable and friendly at Stoke Newington than at Hampstead. People used to come up to see her from London. Her letters, quiet and intimate as they are, give glimpses of most of the literary people of the day, not in memoirs then, but alive and drinking tea at one another's houses, or walking all the way to Stoke Newington to pay their respects to the old lady.
Charles Lamb used to talk of his twobaldauthoresses, Mrs. Barbauld being one and Mrs. Inchbald being the other. Crabb Robinson and Rogers were two faithful links with the outer world. 'Crabb Robinson corresponds with Madame de Staël, is quite intimate,' she writes, 'has received I don't know how many letters,' she adds, not without some slight amusement. Miss Lucy Aikin tells a pretty story of Scott meeting Mrs. Barbauld at dinner, and telling her that it was to her that he owed his poetic gift. Some translations of Bürger by Mr. Taylor, of Norwich, which she had read out at Edinburgh, had struck him so much that they had determined him to try his own powers in that line.
She often had inmates under her roof. One of them was a beautiful and charming young girl, the daughter of Mrs. Fletcher, of Edinburgh, whose early death is recorded in her mother's life. Besides company at home, Mrs. Barbauld went to visit her friends from time to time—the Estlins at Bristol, the Edgeworths, whose acquaintance Mr. and Mrs. Barbauld made about this time, and who seem to have been invaluable friends, bringing as they did a bright new element of interest and cheerful friendship into her sad anddimminglife. A man must have extraordinarily good spirits to embark upon four matrimonial ventures as Mr. Edgeworth did; and as for Miss Edgeworth, appreciative, effusive, and warm-hearted, she seems to have more than returned Mrs. Barbauld's sympathy.
Miss Lucy Aikin, Dr. Aikin's daughter, was now also making her own mark in the literary world, and had inherited the bright intelligence and interest for which her family was so remarkable. Much of Miss Aikin's work is more sustained than her aunt's desultory productions, but it lacks that touch of nature which has preserved Mrs. Barbauld's memory where more important people are forgotten.
Our authoress seems to have had a natural affection for sister authoresses. Hannah More and Mrs. Montague were both her friends, so were Madame d'Arblay and Mrs. Chapone in a different degree; she must have known Mrs. Opie; she loved Joanna Baillie. The latter is described by her as the young lady at Hampstead who came to Mr. Barbauld's meeting with as demure a face as if she had never written a line. And Miss Aikin, in her memoirs, describes in Johnsonian language how the two Miss Baillies came to call one morning upon Mrs. Barbauld:—'My aunt immediately introduced the topic of the anonymous tragedies, and gave utterance to her admiration with the generous delight in the manifestation of kindred genius which distinguished her.' But it seems that Miss Baillie sat, nothing moved, and did not betray herself. Mrs. Barbauld herself gives a pretty description of the sisters in their home, in that old house on Windmill Hill, which stands untouched, with its green windows looking out upon so much of sky and heath and sun, with the wainscoted parlours where Walter Scott used to come, and the low wooden staircase leading to the old rooms above. It is in one of her letters to Mrs. Kenrick that Mrs. Barbauld gives a pleasant glimpse of the poetess Walter Scott admired. 'I have not been abroad since I was at Norwich, except a day or two at Hampstead with the Miss Baillies. One should be, as I was, beneath their roof to know all their merit. Their house is one of the best ordered I know. They have all manner of attentions for their friends, and not only Miss B., but Joanna, is as clever in furnishing a room or in arranging a party as in writing plays, of which, by the way, she has a volume ready for the press, but she will not give it to the public till next winter. The subject is to be the passion of fear. I do not know what sort of a hero that passion can afford!' Fear was, indeed, a passion alien to her nature, and she did not know the meaning of the word.
Mrs. Barbauld's description of Hannah More and her sisters living on their special hill-top was written after Mr. Barbauld's death, and thirty years after Miss More's verses which are quoted by Mrs. Ellis in her excellent memoir of Mrs. Barbauld:—
Nor, Barbauld, shall my glowing heart refuseA tribute to thy virtues or thy muse;This humble merit shall at least be mine,The poet's chaplet for thy brows to twine;My verse thy talents to the world shall teach,And praise the graces it despairs to reach.
Then, after philosophically questioning the power of genius to confer true happiness, she concludes:—
Can all the boasted powers of wit and songOf life one pang remove, one hour prolong?Fallacious hope which daily truths deride—For you, alas! have wept and Garrick died.
Meanwhile, whatever genius might not be able to achieve, the five Miss Mores had been living on peacefully together in the very comfortable cottage which had been raised and thatched by the poetess's earnings.
'Barley Wood is equally the seat of taste and hospitality,' says Mrs. Barbauld to a friend.
'Nothing could be more friendly than their reception,' she writes to her brother, 'and nothing more charming than their situation. An extensive view over the Mendip Hills is in front of their house, with a pretty view of Wrington. Their home—cottage, because it is thatched—stands on the declivity of a rising ground, which they have planted and made quite a little paradise. The five sisters, all good old maids, have lived together these fifty years. Hannah More is a good deal broken, but possesses fully her powers of conversation, and her vivacity. We exchanged riddles like the wise men of old; I was given to understand she was writing something.'
There is another allusion to Mrs. Hannah More in a sensible letter from Mrs. Barbauld, written to Miss Edgeworth about this time, declining to join in an alarming enterprise suggested by the vivacious Mr. Edgeworth, 'aFeminiad, a literary paper to be entirely contributed to by ladies, and where all articles are to be accepted.' 'There is no bond of union,' Mrs. Barbauld says, 'among literary women any more than among literary men; different sentiments and connections separate them much more than the joint interest of their sex would unite them. Mrs. Hannah More would not write along with you or me, and we should possibly hesitate at joining Miss Hays or—if she were living—Mrs. Godwin.' Then she suggests the names of Miss Baillie, Mrs. Opie, her own niece Miss Lucy Aikin, and Mr. S. Rogers, who would not, she thinks, be averse to joining the scheme.
VII.
VII.
How strangely unnatural it seems when Fate's heavy hand falls upon quiet and common-place lives, changing the tranquil routine of every day into the solemnities and excitements of terror and tragedy! It was after their removal to Stoke Newington that the saddest of all blows fell upon this true-hearted woman. Her husband's hypochondria deepened and changed, and the attacks became so serious that her brother and his family urged her anxiously to leave him to other care than her own. It was no longer safe for poor Mr. Barbauld to remain alone with his wife, and her life, says Mrs. Le Breton, was more than once in peril. But, at first, she would not hear of leaving him; although on more than one occasion she had to fly for protection to her brother close by.
There is something very touching in the patient fidelity with which Mrs. Barbauld tried to soothe the later sad disastrous years of her husband's life. She must have been a woman of singular nerve and courage to endure as she did the excitement and cruel aberrations of her once gentle and devoted companion. She only gave in after long resistance.
'An alienation from me has taken possession of his mind,' she says, in a letter to Mrs. Kenrick; 'my presence seems to irritate him, and I must resign myself to a separation from him who has been for thirty years the partner of my heart, my faithful friend, my inseparable companion.' With her habitual reticence, she dwells no more on that painful topic, but goes on to make plans for them both, asks her old friend to come and cheer her in her loneliness; and the faithful Betsy, now a widow with grown-up step-children, ill herself, troubled by deafness and other infirmities, responds with a warm heart, and promises to come, bringing the comfort with her of old companionship and familiar sympathy. There is something very affecting in the loyalty of the two aged women stretching out their hands to each other across a whole lifetime. After her visit Mrs. Barbauld writes again:—
'He is now at Norwich, and I hear very favourable accounts of his health and spirits; he seems to enjoy himself very much amongst his old friends there, and converses among them with his usual animation. There are no symptoms of violence or of depression; so far is favourable; but this cruel alienation from me, in which my brother is included, still remains deep-rooted, and whether he will ever change in this point Heaven only knows. The medical men fear he will not: if so, my dear friend, what remains for me but to resign myself to the will of Heaven, and to think with pleasure that every day brings me nearer a period which naturally cannot be very far off, and at which this as well as every temporal affliction must terminate?
'"Anything but this!" is the cry of weak mortals when afflicted; and sometimes I own I am inclined to make it mine; but I will check myself.'
But while she was hoping still, a fresh outbreak of the malady occurred. He, poor soul, weary of his existence, put an end to his sufferings: he was found lifeless in the New River. Lucy Aikin quotes a Dirge found among her aunt's papers after her death:—
Pure Spirit, O where art thou now?O whisper to my soul,O let some soothening thought of theeThis bitter grief control.'Tis not for thee the tears I shed,Thy sufferings now are o'er.The sea is calm, the tempest past,On that eternal shore.No more the storms that wrecked thy peaceShall tear that gentle breast,Nor summer's rage, nor winter's coldThat poor, poor frame molest.****Farewell! With honour, peace, and love,Be that dear memory blest,Thou hast no tears for me to shed,When I too am at rest.
But her time of rest was not yet come, and she lived for seventeen years after her husband. She was very brave, she did not turn from the sympathy of her friends, she endured her loneliness with courage, she worked to distract her mind. Here is a touching letter addressed to Mrs. Taylor, of Norwich, in which she says:—'A thousand thanks for your kind letter, still more for the very short visit that preceded it. Though short—too short—it has left indelible impressions on my mind. My heart has truly had communion with yours; your sympathy has been balm to it; and I feel that there isnowno one on earth to whom I could pour out that heart more readily…. I am now sitting alone again, and feel like a person who has been sitting by a cheerful fire, not sensible at the time of the temperature of the air; but the fire removed, he finds the season is still winter. Day after day passes, and I do not know what to do with my time; my mind has no energy nor power of application.'
How much she felt her loneliness appears again and again from one passage and another. Then she struggled against discouragement; she took to her pen again. To Mrs. Kenrick she writes:—'I intend to pay my letter debts; not much troubling my head whether I have anything to say or not; yet to you my heart has always something to say: it always recognises you as among the dearest of its friends; and while it feels that new impressions are made with difficulty and early effaced, retains, and ever will retain, I trust beyond this world, those of our early and long-tried affection.'
She set to work again, trying to forget her heavy trials. It was during the first years of her widowhood that she published her edition of the British novelists in some fifty volumes. There is an opening chapter to this edition upon novels and novel-writing, which is an admirable and most interesting essay upon fiction, beginning from the very earliest times.
In 1811 she wrote her poem on the King's illness, and also the longer poem which provoked such indignant comments at the time. It describes Britain's rise and luxury, warns her of the dangers of her unbounded ambition and unjustifiable wars:—
Arts, arms, and wealth destroy the fruits they bring;Commerce, like beauty, knows no second spring.
Her ingenuous youth from Ontario's shore who visits the ruins of London is one of the many claimants to the honour of having suggested Lord Macaulay's celebrated New Zealander:—
Pensive and thoughtful shall the wanderers greetEach splendid square and still untrodden street,Or of some crumbling turret, mined by time,The broken stairs with perilous step shall climb,Thence stretch their view the wide horizon round,By scattered hamlets trace its ancient bound,And, choked no more with fleets, fair Thames surveyThrough reeds and sedge pursue his idle way.
It is impossible not to admire the poem, though it is stilted and not to the present taste. The description of Britain as it now is and as it once was is very ingenious:—
Where once Bonduca whirled the scythèd car,And the fierce matrons raised the shriek of war,Light forms beneath transparent muslin float,And tutor'd voices swell the artful note;Light-leaved acacias, and the shady plane,And spreading cedars grace the woodland reign.
The poem is forgotten now, though it was scouted at the time and violently attacked, Southey himself falling upon the poor old lady, and devouring her, spectacles and all. She felt these attacks very much, and could not be consoled, though Miss Edgeworth wrote a warm-hearted letter of indignant sympathy. But Mrs. Barbauld had something in her too genuine to be crushed, even by sarcastic criticism. She published no more, but it was after her poem of '1811' that she wrote the beautiful ode by which she is best known and best remembered,—the ode that Wordsworth used to repeat and say he envied, that Tennyson has called 'sweet verses,' of which the lines ring their tender hopeful chime like sweet church bells on a summer evening.
Madame d'Arblay, in her old age, told Crabb Robinson that every night she said the verses over to herself as she went to her rest. To the writer they are almost sacred. The hand that patiently pointed out to her, one by one, the syllables of Mrs. Barbauld's hymns for children, that tended our childhood, as it had tended our father's, marked these verses one night, when it blessed us for the last time.
Life, we've been long together,Through pleasant and through cloudy weather;'Tis hard to part when friends are dear;Perhaps 'twill cost a sigh or tear,Then steal away, give little warning,Choose thine own time.Say not good-night, but in some brighter clime,Bid me 'Good morning.'
Mrs. Barbauld was over seventy when she wrote this ode. A poem, called 'Octogenary Reflections,' is also very touching:—
Say ye, who through this round of eighty yearsHave proved its joys and sorrows, hopes and fears;Say what is life, ye veterans who have trod,Step following steps, its flowery thorny road?Enough of good to kindle strong desire;Enough of ill to damp the rising fire;Enough of love and fancy, joy and hope,To fan desire and give the passions scope;Enough of disappointment, sorrow, pain,To seal the wise man's sentence—'All is vain.'
There is another fragment of hers in which she likens herself to a schoolboy left of all the train, who hears no sound of wheels to bear him to his father's bosom home. 'Thus I look to the hour when I shall follow those that are at rest before me.' And then at last the time came for which she longed. Her brother died, her faithful Mrs. Kenrick died, and Mrs. Taylor, whom she loved most of all. She had consented to give up her solitary home to spend the remaining years of her life in the home of her adopted son Charles, now married, and a father; but it was while she was on a little visit to her sister-in-law, Mrs. Aikin, that the summons came, very swiftly and peacefully, as she sat in her chair one day. Her nephew transcribed these, the last lines she ever wrote:—
'Who are you?''Do you not know me? have you not expected me?''Whither do you carry me?''Come with me and you shall know.''The way is dark.''It is well trodden.''Yes, in the forward track.''Come along.''Oh! shall I there see my beloved ones? Will they welcome me, and will they know me? Oh, tell me, tell me; thou canst tell me.''Yes, but thou must come first.''Stop a little; keep thy hand off till thou hast told me.''I never wait.''Oh! shall I see the warm sun again in my cold grave?''Nothing is there that can feel the sun.''Oh, where then?''Come, I say.'
'Who are you?''Do you not know me? have you not expected me?''Whither do you carry me?''Come with me and you shall know.''The way is dark.''It is well trodden.''Yes, in the forward track.''Come along.''Oh! shall I there see my beloved ones? Will they welcome me, and will they know me? Oh, tell me, tell me; thou canst tell me.''Yes, but thou must come first.''Stop a little; keep thy hand off till thou hast told me.''I never wait.''Oh! shall I see the warm sun again in my cold grave?''Nothing is there that can feel the sun.''Oh, where then?''Come, I say.'
One may acknowledge the great progress which people have made since Mrs. Barbauld's day in the practice of writing prose and poetry, in the art of expressing upon paper the thoughts which are in most people's minds. It is (to use a friend's simile) like playing upon the piano—everybody now learns to play upon the piano, and it is certain that the modest performances of the ladies of Mrs. Barbauld's time would scarcely meet with the attention now, which they then received. But all the same, the stock of true feeling, of real poetry, is not increased by the increased volubility of our pens; and so when something comes to us that is real, that is complete in pathos or in wisdom, we still acknowledge the gift, and are grateful for it.
1767-1849.
1767-1849.
'Exceeding wise, fairspoken, and persuading.'—Hen. VIII.Early Days.I.
Few authoresses in these days can have enjoyed the ovations and attentions which seem to have been considered the due of many of the ladies distinguished at the end of the last century and the beginning of this one. To read the accounts of the receptions and compliments which fell to their lot may well fill later and lesser luminaries with envy. Crowds opened to admit them, banquets spread themselves out before them, lights were lighted up and flowers were scattered at their feet. Dukes, editors, prime ministers, waited their convenience on their staircases; whole theatres rose upen masseto greet the gifted creatures of this and that immortal tragedy. The authoresses themselves, to do them justice, seem to have been very little dazzled by all this excitement. Hannah More contentedly retires with her maiden sisters to the Parnassus on the Mendip Hills, where they sew and chat and make tea, and teach the village children. Dear Joanna Baillie, modest and beloved, lives on to peaceful age in her pretty old house at Hampstead, looking through tree-tops and sunshine and clouds towards distant London. 'Out there where all the storms are,' I heard the children saying yesterday as they watched the overhanging gloom of smoke which, veils the city of metropolitan thunders and lightning. Maria Edgeworth's apparitions as a literary lioness in the rush of London and of Paris society were but interludes in her existence, and her real life was one of constant exertion and industry spent far away in an Irish home among her own kindred and occupations and interests. We may realise what these were when we read that Mr. Edgeworth had no less than four wives, who all left children, and that Maria was the eldest daughter of the whole family. Besides this, we must also remember that the father whom she idolised was himself a man of extraordinary powers, brilliant in conversation (so I have been told), full of animation, of interest, of plans for his country, his family, for education and literature, for mechanics and scientific discoveries; that he was a gentleman widely connected, hospitably inclined, with a large estate and many tenants to overlook, with correspondence and acquaintances all over the world; and besides all this, with various schemes in his brain, to be eventually realised by others of which velocipedes, tramways, and telegraphs were but a few of the items.
One could imagine that under these circumstances the hurry and excitement of London life must have sometimes seemed tranquillity itself compared with the many and absorbing interests of such a family. What these interests were may be gathered from the pages of a very interesting memoir from which the writer of this essay has been allowed to quote. It is a book privately printed and written for the use of her children by the widow of Richard Lovell Edgeworth, and is a record, among other things, of a faithful and most touching friendship between Maria and her father's wife—'a friendship lasting for over fifty years, and unbroken by a single cloud of difference or mistrust.' Mrs. Edgeworth, who was Miss Beaufort before her marriage, and about the same age as Miss Edgeworth, unconsciously reveals her own most charming and unselfish nature as she tells her stepdaughter's story.
When the writer looks back upon her own childhood, it seems to her that she lived in company with a delightful host of little playmates, bright, busy, clever children, whose cheerful presence remains more vividly in her mind than that of many of the real little boys and girls who used to appear and disappear disconnectedly as children do in childhood, when friendship and companionship depend almost entirely upon the convenience of grown-up people. Now and again came little cousins or friends to share our games, but day by day, constant and unchanging, ever to be relied upon, smiled our most lovable and friendly companions—simple Susan, lame Jervas, Talbot, the dear Little Merchants, Jem the widow's son with his arms round old Lightfoot's neck, the generous Ben, with his whipcord and his useful proverb of 'waste not, want not'—all of these were there in the window corner waiting our pleasure. After Parents' Assistant, to which familiar words we attached no meaning whatever, came Popular Tales in big brown volumes off a shelf in the lumber-room of an apartment in an old house in Paris, and as we opened the books, lo! creation widened to our view. England, Ireland, America, Turkey, the mines of Golconda, the streets of Bagdad, thieves, travellers, governesses, natural philosophy, and fashionable life, were all laid under contribution, and brought interest and adventure to our humdrum nursery corner. All Mr. Edgeworth's varied teaching and experience, all his daughter's genius of observation, came to interest and delight our play-time, and that of a thousand other little children in different parts of the world. People justly praise Miss Edgeworth's admirable stories and novels, but from prejudice and early association these beloved childish histories seem unequalled still, and it is chiefly as a writer for children that we venture to consider her here. Some of the stories are indeed little idylls in their way. Walter Scott, who best knew how to write for the young so as to charm grandfathers as well as Hugh Littlejohn, Esq., and all the grandchildren, is said to have wiped his kind eyes as he put down 'Simple Susan.' A child's book, says a reviewer of those days defining in the 'Quarterly Review,' should be 'not merely less dry, less difficult, than a book for grown-up people; but more rich in interest, more true to nature, more exquisite in art, more abundant in every quality that replies to childhood's keener and fresher perception.' Children like facts, they like short vivid sentences that tell the story: as they listen intently, so they read; every word has its value for them. It has been a real surprise to the writer to find, on re-reading some of these descriptions of scenery and adventure which she had not looked at since her childhood, that the details which she had imagined spread over much space are contained in a few sentences at the beginning of a page. These sentences, however, show the true art of the writer.
It would be difficult to imagine anything better suited to the mind of a very young person than these pleasant stories, so complete in themselves, so interesting, so varied. The description of Jervas's escape from the mine where the miners had plotted his destruction, almost rises to poetry in its simple diction. Lame Jervas has warned his master of the miners' plot, and showed him the vein of ore which they have concealed. The miners have sworn vengeance against him, and his life is in danger. His master helps him to get away, and comes into the room before daybreak, bidding him rise and put on the clothes which he has brought. 'I followed him out of the house before anybody else was awake, and he took me across the fields towards the high road. At this place we waited till we heard the tinkling of the bells of a team of horses. "Here comes the waggon," said he, "in which you are to go. So fare you well, Jervas. I shall hear how you go on; and I only hope you will serve your next master, whoever he may be, as faithfully as you have served me." "I shall never find so good a master," was all I could say for the soul of me; I was quite overcome by his goodness and sorrow at parting with him, as I then thought, for ever.' The description of the journey is very pretty. 'The morning clouds began to clear away; I could see my master at some distance, and I kept looking after him as the waggon went on slowly, and he walked fast away over the fields.' Then the sun begins to rise. The waggoner goes on whistling, but lame Jervas, to whom the rising sun was a spectacle wholly surprising, starts up, exclaiming in wonder and admiration. The waggoner bursts into a loud laugh. 'Lud a marcy,' says he, 'to hear un' and look at un' a body would think the oaf had never seen the sun rise afore;' upon which Jervas remembers that he is still in Cornwall, and must not betray himself, and prudently hides behind some parcels, only just in time, for they meet a party of miners, and he hears his enemies' voice hailing the waggoner. All the rest of the day he sits within, and amuses himself by listening to the bells of the team, which jingle continually. 'On our second day's journey, however, I ventured out of my hiding-place. I walked with the waggoner up and down the hills, enjoying the fresh air, the singing of the birds, and the delightful smell of the honeysuckles and the dog-roses in the hedges. All the wild flowers and even the weeds on the banks by the wayside were to me matters of wonder and admiration. At almost every step I paused to observe something that was new to me, and I could not help feeling surprised at the insensibility of my fellow-traveller, who plodded along, and seldom interrupted his whistling except to cry 'Gee, Blackbird, aw woa,' or 'How now, Smiler?' Then Jervas is lost in admiration before a plant 'whose stem was about two feet high, and which had a round shining purple beautiful flower,' and the waggoner with a look of scorn exclaims, 'Help thee, lad, dost not thou know 'tis a common thistle?' After this he looks upon Jervas as very nearly an idiot. 'In truth I believe I was a droll figure, for my hat was stuck full of weeds and of all sorts of wild flowers, and both my coat and waistcoat pockets were stuffed out with pebbles and funguses.' Then comes Plymouth Harbour: Jervas ventures to ask some questions about the vessels, to which the waggoner answers 'They be nothing in life but the boats and ships, man;' so he turned away and went on chewing a straw, and seemed not a whit more moved to admiration than he had been at the sight of the thistle. 'I conceived a high admiration of a man who had seen so much that he could admire nothing,' says Jervas, with a touch of real humour.
Another most charming little idyll is that of Simple Susan, who was a real maiden living in the neighbourhood of Edgeworthstown. The story seems to have been mislaid for a time in the stirring events of the first Irish rebellion, and overlooked, like some little daisy by a battlefield. Few among us will not have shared Mr. Edgeworth's partiality for the charming little tale. The children fling their garlands and tie up their violets. Susan bakes her cottage loaves and gathers marigolds for broth, and tends her mother to the distant tune of Philip's pipe coming across the fields. As we read the story again it seems as if we could almost scent the fragrance of the primroses and the double violets, and hear the music sounding above the children's voices, and the bleatings of the lamb, so simply and delightfully is the whole story constructed. Among all Miss Edgeworth's characters few are more familiar to the world than that of Susan's pretty pet lamb.
II.
II.
No sketch of Maria Edgeworth's life, however slight, would be complete without a few words about certain persons coming a generation before her (and belonging still to the age of periwigs), who were her father's associates and her own earliest friends. Notwithstanding all that has been said of Mr. Edgeworth's bewildering versatility of nature, he seems to have been singularly faithful in his friendships. He might take up new ties, but he clung pertinaciously to those which had once existed. His daughter inherited that same steadiness of affection. In his life of Erasmus Darwin, his grandfather, Mr. Charles Darwin, writing of these very people, has said, 'There is, perhaps, no safer test of a man's real character than that of his long-continued friendship with good and able men.' He then goes on to quote an instance of a long-continued affection and intimacy only broken by death between a certain set of distinguished friends, giving the names of Keir, Day, Small, Boulton, Watt, Wedgwood, and Darwin, and adding to them the names of Edgeworth himself and of the Galtons.
Mr. Edgeworth first came to Lichfield to make Dr. Darwin's acquaintance. His second visit was to his friend Mr. Day, the author of 'Sandford and Merton,' who had taken a house in the valley of Stow, and who invited him one Christmas on a visit. 'About the year 1765,' says Miss Seward, 'came to Lichfield, from the neighbourhood of Reading, the young and gay philosopher, Mr. Edgeworth; a man of fortune, and recently married to a Miss Elers, of Oxfordshire. The fame of Dr. Darwin's various talents allured Mr. E. to the city they graced.' And the lady goes on to describe Mr. Edgeworth himself:—'Scarcely two-and-twenty, with an exterior yet more juvenile, having mathematic science, mechanic ingenuity, and a competent portion of classical learning, with the possession of the modern languages…. He danced, he fenced, he winged his arrows with more than philosophic skill,' continues the lady, herself a person of no little celebrity in her time and place. Mr. Edgeworth, in his Memoirs, pays a respectful tribute to Miss Seward's charms, to her agreeable conversation, her beauty, her flowing tresses, her sprightliness and address. Such moderate expressions fail, however, to do justice to this lady's powers, to her enthusiasm, her poetry, her partisanship. The portrait prefixed to her letters is that of a dignified person with an oval face and dark eyes, the thick brown tresses are twined with pearls, her graceful figure is robed in the softest furs and draperies of the period. In her very first letter she thus poetically describes her surroundings:—'The autumnal glory of this day puts to shame the summer's sullenness. I sit writing upon this dear green terrace, feeding at intervals my little golden-breasted songsters. The embosomed vale of Stow glows sunny through the Claude-Lorraine tint which is spread over the scene like the blue mist over a plum.'
In this Claude-Lorraine-plum-tinted valley stood the house which Mr. Day had taken, and where Mr. Edgeworth had come on an eventful visit. Miss Seward herself lived with her parents in the Bishop's palace at Lichfield. There was also a younger sister, 'Miss Sally,' who died as a girl, and another very beautiful young lady their friend, by name Honora Sneyd, placed under Mrs. Seward's care. She was the heroine of Major André's unhappy romance. He too lived at Lichfield with his mother, and his hopeless love gives a tragic reality to this by-gone holiday of youth and merry-making. As one reads the old letters and memoirs the echoes of laughter reach us. One can almost see the young folks all coming together out of the Cathedral Close, where so much of their time was passed; the beautiful Honora, surrounded by friends and adorers, chaperoned by the graceful Muse her senior, also much admired, and much made of. Thomas Day is perhaps striding after them in silence with keen critical glances; his long black locks flow unpowdered down his back. In contrast to him comes his brilliant and dressy companion, Mr. Edgeworth, who talks so agreeably. I can imagine little Sabrina, Day's adopted foundling, of whom so many stories have been told, following shyly at her guardian's side in her simple dress and childish beauty, and André's young handsome face turned towards Miss Sneyd. So they pass on happy and contented in each other's company, Honora in the midst, beautiful, stately, reserved: she too was one of those not destined to be old.
Miss Seward seems to have loved this friend with a very sincere and admiring affection, and to have bitterly mourned her early death. Her letters abound in apostrophes to the lost Honora. But perhaps the poor Muse expected almost too much from friendship, too much from life. She expected, as we all do at times, that her friends should be not themselves but her, that they should lead not their lives but her own. So much at least one may gather from the various phases of her style and correspondence, and her complaints of Honora's estrangement and subsequent coldness. Perhaps, also, Miss Seward's many vagaries and sentiments may have frozen Honora's sympathies. Miss Seward was all asterisks and notes of exclamation. Honora seems to have forced feeling down to its most scrupulous expression. She never lived to be softened by experience, to suit herself to others by degrees: with great love she also inspired awe and a sort of surprise. One can imagine her pointing the moral of the purple jar, as it was told long afterwards by her stepdaughter, then a little girl playing at her own mother's knee in her nursery by the river.
People in the days of shilling postage were better correspondents than they are now when we have to be content with pennyworths of news and of affectionate intercourse. Their descriptions and many details bring all the chief characters vividly before us, and carry us into the hearts and the pocket-books of the little society at Lichfield as it then was. The town must have been an agreeable sojourn in those days for people of some pretension and small performance. The inhabitants of Lichfield seem actually to have read each other's verses, and having done so to have taken the trouble to sit down and write out their raptures. They were a pleasant lively company living round about the old cathedral towers, meeting in the Close or the adjacent gardens or the hospitable Palace itself. Here the company would sip tea, talk mild literature of their own and good criticism at second hand, quoting Dr. Johnson to one another with the familiarity of townsfolk. From Erasmus Darwin, too, they must have gained something of vigour and originality.
With all her absurdities Miss Seward had some real critical power and appreciation; and some of her lines are very pretty.1An 'Ode to the Sun' is only what might have been expected from this Lichfield Corinne. Her best known productions are an 'Elegy on Captain Cook,' a 'Monody on Major André,' whom she had known from her early youth; and there is a poem, 'Louisa,' of which she herself speaks very highly. But even more than her poetry did she pique herself upon her epistolary correspondence. It must have been well worth while writing letters when they were not only prized by the writer and the recipients, but commented on by their friends in after years. 'Court Dewes, Esq.,' writes, after five years, for copies of Miss Seward's epistles to Miss Rogers and Miss Weston, of which the latter begins:—'Soothing and welcome to me, dear Sophia, is the regret you express for our separation! Pleasant were the weeks we have recently passed together in this ancient and embowered mansion! I had strongly felt the silence and vacancy of the depriving day on which you vanished. How prone are our hearts perversely to quarrel with the friendly coercion of employment at the very instant in which it is clearing the torpid and injurious mists of unavailing melancholy!' Then follows a sprightly attack before which Johnson may have quailed indeed. 'Is the Fe-fa-fum of literature that snuffs afar the fame of his brother authors, and thirsts for its destruction, to be allowed to gallop unmolested over the fields of criticism? A few pebbles from the well-springs of truth and eloquence are all that is wanted to bring the might of his envy low.' This celebrated letter, which may stand as a specimen of the whole six volumes, concludes with the following apostrophe:—'Virtuous friendship, how pure, how sacred are thy delights! Sophia, thy mind is capable of tasting them in all their poignance: against how many of life's incidents may that capacity be considered as a counterpoise!'
There were constant rubs, which are not to be wondered at, between Miss Seward and Dr. Darwin, who, though a poet, was also a singularly witty, downright man, outspoken and humorous. The lady admires his genius, bitterly resents his sarcasms; of his celebrated work, the 'Botanic Garden,' she says, 'It is a string of poetic brilliants, and they are of the first water, but the eye will be apt to want the intersticial black velvet to give effect to their lustre.' In later days, notwithstanding her 'elegant language,' as Mr. Charles Darwin calls it, she said several spiteful things of her old friend, but they seem more prompted by private pique than malice.
If Miss Seward was the Minerva and Dr. Darwin the Jupiter of the Lichfield society, its philosopher was Thomas Day, of whom Miss Seward's description is so good that I cannot help one more quotation:—
'Powder and fine clothes were at that time the appendages of gentlemen; Mr. Day wore not either. He was tall and stooped in the shoulders, full made but not corpulent, and in his meditative and melancholy air a degree of awkwardness and dignity were blended.' She then compares him with his guest, Mr. Edgeworth. 'Less graceful, less amusing, less brilliant than Mr. E., but more highly imaginative, more classical, and a deeper reasoner; strict integrity, energetic friendship, open-handed generosity, and diffusive charity, greatly overbalanced on the side of virtue, the tincture of misanthropic gloom and proud contempt of common life society.' Wright, of Derby, painted a full-length picture of Mr. Day in 1770. 'Mr. Day looks upward enthusiastically, meditating on the contents of a book held in his dropped right hand … a flash of lightning plays in his hair and illuminates the contents of the volume.' 'Dr. Darwin,' adds Miss Seward, 'sat to Mr. Wright about the same period—thatwas a simply contemplative portrait of the most perfect resemblance.'