[Sidenote: 1757—Plot and counterplot]
For six long months, for a fantastical half-year, Surajah Dowlah revelled in the crazy dream of his own omnipotence. Then came retribution, swift, successive, comprehensive. Clive was upon him—Clive the unconquerable, sacking his towns, putting his garrisons to the sword, recapturing those places from which Surajah Dowlah had imagined that he had banished the Englishman forever. The news of the tragedy of the Blackhole, and of the capture of Calcutta and Fort William, had reached Madras in August, and the warlike community had resolved upon prompt and speedy revenge. But it took time to raise the expedition, took time to despatch the expedition. In October the army of two thousand four hundred men, {269} of which nine hundred were European troops, and fifteen hundred Sepoys, sailed for the Hoogly, under Clive as military, and Admiral Watson as naval, commander. Hostile winds delayed the armament until December, but when it did reach its destination it carried all before it. The luck which always attended upon Clive was still faithful to him. The Nabob, at the head of his vast hordes, was soon as eager to come to terms with Clive at the head of his little handful of men as he had before been eager to obliterate the recollection of the Englishmen from the soil of Bengal. He offered to treat with Clive; he was ready to make terms which from a military point of view were satisfactory; he was evidently convinced that he had underrated the power of England, and he was prepared to pay a heavy penalty for his blunder.
We are now approaching that chapter of Clive's career which has served his enemies with their readiest weapon, and has filled his admirers with the deepest regret. The negotiations between Clive and Surajah Dowlah were conducted on the part of all the Orientals concerned, from Surajah Dowlah to Omichund, the wealthy Bengalee who played the part of go-between, with an amount of treachery that has not been surpassed even in the tortuous records of Oriental treachery. But unhappily the treachery was not confined to the Oriental negotiators; not confined to the wretched despot on the throne; not confined to Meer Jaffier, the principal commander of his troops, who wanted the throne for himself; not confined to the unscrupulous Omichund, who plotted with his left hand against Surajah Dowlah, and with his right hand against the English. Treachery as audacious, treachery more ingenious, treachery more successful, was deliberately practised by Clive. The brilliant and gallant soldier of fortune showed himself to be more than a match for Oriental cunning in all the worst vices of a vicious Oriental diplomacy. If Surajah Dowlah was unable to make up his miserable mind, if he alternately promised and denied, cajoled and threatened, Clive, on his side, while affecting to treat {270} with Surajah Dowlah, was deliberately supporting the powerful conspiracy against Surajah Dowlah, the object of which was to place Meer Jaffier on the throne. If Omichund, with the keys of the conspiracy in his hand, threatened to betray all to Surajah Dowlah unless he was promised the heaviest hush-money, Clive on his side was perfectly ready to promise without the remotest intention of paying. If Omichund, wary and suspicious, was determined to have his bond in writing, Clive was quite ready to meet him with a false and fraudulent bond. Clive professed to be perfectly willing that in the secret treaty which was being drawn up between the English and Meer Jaffier a clause should be inserted promising the fulfilment of all Omichund's claims. But as Clive had not the remotest intention of satisfying those claims, he composedly prepared two treaties. One—the one by which he and Meer Jaffier were to be bound—was written on white paper, and contained no allusion to the avaricious Omichund. [Sidenote: 1757—The Red Treaty] Another, on red paper, which was to be disregarded by the parties to the swindle, contained a paragraph according to Omichund's heart's desire. Thus bad begins, but worse remains behind. Clive, to his great astonishment, found that Admiral Watson entertained different views from his about the honor of an English soldier and gentleman. However convenient it might be to bamboozle Omichund with a sham treaty, Admiral Watson declined to be a party to the trick by signing his name to the fraudulent document. Yet Admiral Watson's name was essential to the success of the Red Treaty, and Clive showed that he was not a man to stick at trifles. He wanted Admiral Watson's signature; he knew that Omichund would want Admiral Watson's signature; he satisfied himself, and he satisfied Omichund, by forging Admiral Watson's signature at the bottom of the Red Treaty.
It is simply impossible to imagine any defence of Clive's conduct in this most disgraceful business. The best that can be said for him is that the whole process of the {271} treason was so infamous, the fabrication of the Red Treaty so revolting a piece of duplicity, that the forging of Admiral Watson's name does not materially add to the darkness of the complete transaction. Nothing can palliate Clive's conduct. It may, indeed, be said that as civilized troops after long engagements in petty wars with savage races lose that morale and discipline which come from contests with their military peers, so minds steeped in the degrading atmosphere of Oriental diplomacy become inevitably corrupted, and lose the fine distinction between right and wrong. But so specious a piece of special pleading cannot serve Clive's turn. English diplomacy at home and abroad has always, with the rarest exceptions, plumed itself on its truthfulness, and has often been successful by reason of that very truthfulness. The practically unanimous condemnation which Clive's countrymen then and since have passed upon his action with regard to the Red Treaty is the best answer to all such pitiful prevarications.
However, Clive did prepare a sham treaty, did forge Admiral Watson's name, did fool Omichund to the top of his bent. Omichund being thus cunningly bought over, Clive prepared for action, flung defiance at Surajah Dowlah, and marched against him. On June 23, 1757, the fate of England in India was decided by the famous battle of Plassey, or, as it should be more correctly called, Palasi.
Plassey was a great victory. Yet, in the words of the conspirator in Ben Jonson's "Catiline," it was but "a cast at dice in Fortune's hand" that it might have been a great defeat, Clive was astonishingly, grotesquely out-numbered. The legendary deeds of chivalrous paladins who at the head of a little body of knights sweep away whole hosts of paynims at Saragossa or Roncesvalles were rivalled by Clive's audacity in opposing his few regiments to the swollen armament of the Nabob. Moreover, Meer Jaffier, whose alliance with the English, whose treason to Surajah Dowlah, was an important part of the scheme, {272} was not to be counted upon. He hesitated, unwilling to fling his fortunes into the English scale before he was convinced that the English were certain of success, although he was himself one of the most important factors in the possibility of that success. But the greatest danger that threatened the English arms was, curiously enough, due to Clive himself. On the eve of Plassey he held a council of war at which it was discussed whether they should fight at once or postpone fighting to what might seem a more seasonable opportunity. Clive at this council departed from his usual custom. He gave his own vote first, and he voted against taking any immediate action. Naturally enough, the majority of the council of war voted with Clive, in spite of the strenuous opposition of Major Eyre Coote and a small minority. By a majority of thirteen to seven it was resolved not to fight.
It is needless to speculate on what would have been the fortunes of the English in Bengal if that vote had settled the question. Luckily, Clive was a man of genius, and was not either afraid to admit that he had made a mistake, or to change his mind. A short period of solitary reflection convinced him that he and the majority were wrong, and that Eyre Coote and the minority were right. He informed Eyre Coote of his new decision, gave the necessary orders, and the next day the battle of Plassey was fought and won.
It is not necessary here to go into the details of that momentous day. The desperate courage, daring, and skill of the English troops carried all before them; their cannonade scattered death and confusion into the Nabob's ranks. Within an hour an army of sixty thousand men was defeated, with astonishingly slight loss to the victors; Surajah Dowlah, abandoned at the judicious moment by one traitor, Meer Jaffier, was flying for his life in obedience to the insidious counsels of another traitor, Rajah Dulab Ram. From that hour Bengal became part of the English empire.
{273}
The fate of the different actors on the Indian side was soon decided.Meer Jaffier was duly invested with the Nabob's authority over Bengal,Behar, and Orissa; Omichund, on learning the shameful trick of the RedTreaty, went mad and died mad; Surajah Dowlah was soon captured andpromptly killed by Meer Jaffier: the Blackhole was avenged.
[Sidenote: 1757—The conqueror returns]
Clive had now reached the pinnacle of his greatness. Victor of Plassey, Governor of Bengal, he remained in India for three more resplendent years; he added to the number of his conquests by defeating the great enterprise of Shah Alum against Meer Jaffier, and shattered the Dutch descent upon the Hoogly—a descent secretly favored by the ever-treacherous Meer Jaffier—both on land and sea. Then, with laurel victory upon his sword, and smooth success strewn before his feet, Clive resolved to return again to England. He sailed from India, full of honors, in 1760, the year in which George the Second died. When he arrived in England George the Third was king. Here for the moment we must leave him, the greatest living soldier of his country, with a career of practically unbroken glory behind him. He had reached his apogee. We shall meet with him again under less happy conditions, when the sun of Plassey had begun to set.
{274}
[Sidenote: 1751—"Give us back our eleven days"]
Meanwhile some changes were taking place in political affairs at home which were full of importance to the coming time. William Pitt had taken office; not, indeed, an office important enough for his genius, but still one which gave him an opportunity of making his power felt. The King still detested him; all the more, perhaps, because it was now becoming more and more evident that the King would have to reckon with him as Prime-minister before very long. The stately form of Pitt was, indeed, already throwing a gigantic shadow before it. Henry Fox, too, was beginning to show himself an administrator and a debater, and, it may be added, a political intriguer, of all but consummate ability. Murray was beginning to be recognized as a great advocate, and even a great man. Lyttelton was still making brilliant way in politics, but was even yet hovering somewhat uncertain between politics and literature, destined in the end to become another illustration of the career marred for both fields by the effort to work in both fields. On the other hand, Chesterfield had given up office. He had had a dispute with his colleagues when he was strongly in favor of making a peace, and they would not have it, and he left them to go their own way. He refused the title of duke which the King offered him. He withdrew for the remainder of his years to private life, saying: "I have been behind the scenes both of pleasure and business; I have seen all the coarse pulleys and dirty ropes which exhibit and move all the gaudy machines; and I have seen and smelt the tallow candles which illuminate the whole {275} decoration to the astonishment and admiration of the ignorant multitude." He seldom spoke in Parliament afterwards; he was growing deaf and weary. In 1751 he broke silence, and with success, when he delivered his celebrated speech on the reform of the calendar. He was "coached," as we should say now, by two able mathematicians, the Earl of Macclesfield and Mr. Bradley. The ignorant portion of the public were greatly excited by what they considered the loss of eleven days, and were strongly opposed to the whole scheme. Years later, when Mr. Bradley was sinking under mortal disease, many people ascribed his sufferings to a judgment from Heaven for having taken part in that "impious undertaking."
The "impious undertaking" was a very needed scientific reform in the calendar, which had long before been adopted in some other countries. Julius Caesar was the first great regulator of the calendar; his work in that way was not the least wonderful of his achievements. The calculations of his astronomers, however, were discovered in much later times to be "out" by eleven minutes in each year. When Pope Gregory the Thirteenth came to the throne of the papacy, in 1572, he found that the eleven minutes had grown by mere process of time to eleven days. He started a new reform of the calendar, which was adopted at once in Italy, Spain, and Portugal. It gradually commended itself to France and Germany, and it was adopted by Denmark and Sweden in 1700. England only came into line with the reform of the calendar in 1751. The Act of Parliament which sanctioned the change brought in the use of the words "new style" and "old style." Only Russia and Greece now of European countries cling to the old style. But the new style, as we have said, was bitterly resented by the mob in England, and every one remembers Hogarth's picture of the patriot drunk in the gutter with his banner near him bearing the inscription, "Give us back our eleven days."
Chesterfield laughed at the success of his speech on the {276} reform of the calendar, and made little of it. Perhaps he helped thus to explain the comparative failure of his whole career. Life was to him too much of a gibe and a sarcasm, and life will not be taken on those terms.
Lord Chesterfield was then out of the running, and Lord Granville's active career had closed. The men of the older school had had their day; the new men had pushed them from their stools. The age of Walpole is closed. The age of Chatham is about to open.
[Sidenote: 1751—Fred's epitaphs]
Early in the year 1751 death removed one of the elements of discord from the family circle of George the Second. The end had come for Frederick, Prince of Wales. The long, unnatural struggle was brought very suddenly to a close. On the 12th of March, 1751, the prince, who had been suffering from pleurisy, went to the House of Lords, and caught a chill which brought on a relapse. "Je sens la mort," he cried out on the 20th of March, and the princess, hearing the cry, ran towards him, and found that he was indeed dead. The general feeling of the country was perhaps not unfairly represented in the famous epigram which became the talk of the town:
"Here lies Fred,Who was alive and is dead.Had it been his father,I had much rather;Had it been his brother,Still better than another;Had it been his sister,No one would have missed her;Had it been the whole generation,Still better for the nation.But since it is only Fred,Who was alive and is dead,There's no more to be said."
It is curious to contrast this grim suggestion for an epitaph on the dead prince with the stately volume which the University of Oxford issued from the Clarendon Press: "Epicedia Oxoniensia in obitum celsissimi et desideratissimi Frederici Principis Walliae." Here an {277} obsequious vice-chancellor displayed all the splendors of a tinsel Latinity in the affectation of offering a despairing king and father such consolations for his loss as the Oxonian Muses might offer. Here Lord Viscount Stormont, in desperate imitation of Milton, did his best to teach
"The mimic Nymph that haunts the winding VergeAnd oozy current of Parisian Seine"
to weep for Frederick.
"For well was Fred'rick loved and well deserv'd,His voice was ever sweet, and on his lipsAttended ever the alluring graceOf gentle lowliness and social zeal."
The hind who labored was to weep for him, and the artificer to ply his varied woof in sullen sadness, and the mariner,
"Who many moonsHas counted, beating still the foamy Surge,And treads at last the wish'd-for beach, shall standAppall'd at the sad tale."
Here all the learned languages, and not the learned languages alone, contributed their syllables of simulated despair. Many scholastic gentlemen mourned in Greek; James Stillingfleet found vent in Hebrew; Mr. Betts concealed his tears under the cloak of the Syriac speech; George Costard sorrowed in Arabic that might have amazed Abu l'Atahiyeh; Mr. Swinton's learned sock stirred him to Phoenician and Etruscan; and Mr. Evans, full of national fire and the traditions of the bards, delivered himself, and at great length too, in Welsh. The wail of this "Welsh fairy" is the fine flower of this funeral wreath of pedantic and unconscious irony.
Poor Frederick had played a little with literature in his idle time. He had amused himself with letters as he had amused himself with literary men, and sometimes with rallying a bevy of the maids of honor to the bombardment of a pasteboard citadel and a cannonade of sugar-plums. {278} He had written verses; among the rest, a love tribute to his wife, full of rapture and enriched with the most outspoken description of her various charms of person, which, however, he assures us, were nothing to her charms of mind. Probably he was very fond of his wife; we have already said that it is likely he carried on his amours with other women chiefly because he thought it one of the duties of his princely station. Perhaps we may assume that he must have had some good qualities of his own; he certainly got little teaching or example of goodness from most of those who surrounded him in the days when he could yet have been taught.
The new heir to the throne was George, Frederick's eldest son, who was born in London on June 4, 1738, and was now, therefore, in his thirteenth year. Frederick's wife had already given birth to eight children, and was expected very soon to bring forth another. George was a seven-months' child. His health was so miserably delicate that it was believed he could not live. It was doubted at first whether it would be physically possible to rear him; and it would not have been possible if the ordinary Court customs were to be followed. But the infant George was wisely handed over to the charge of a robust and healthy young peasant woman, a gardener's wife, who took fondest care of him and adored him, and by whose early nursing he lived to be George the Third.
[Sidenote: 1753—The last of Bolingbroke]
The year 1751, which may be said to have opened with the death of poor Frederick, closed with the death of a man greater by far than any prince of the House of Hanover. On December 12th Bolingbroke passed away. He had settled himself quietly down in his old home at Battersea, and there he died. He had outlived his closest friends and his keenest enemies. The wife—the second wife—to whom, with all his faults, he had been much devoted—was long dead. Pope and Gay, and Arbuthnot, and "Matt" Prior and Swift were dead. Walpole, his great opponent, was dead. All chance of a return to public life had faded years before. New conditions and {279} new men had arisen. He was old—was in his seventy-fourth year; there was not much left to him to live for. There had been a good deal of the spirit of the classic philosopher about him—the school of Epictetus, not the school of Aristotle or Plato. He was a Georgian Epictetus with a dash of Gallicized grace about him. He made the most out of everything as it came, and probably got some comfort out of disappointment as well as out of success. Life had been for him one long dramatic performance, and he played it out consistently to the end. He had long believed himself a formidable enemy to Christianity—at least to revealed religion. He made arrangements by his will for the publication, among other writings, of certain essays which were designed to give Christianity its death-blow, and, having satisfactorily settled that business and disposed in advance of the faith of coming ages, he turned his face to the wall and died.
The reign of George the Second was not a great era of reform; but there was accomplished about this time a measure of reform which we cannot omit to mention. This was the Marriage Act, brought in and passed by Lord Hardwicke, the Lord Chancellor, in 1753. The Marriage Act provided that no marriage should be legal in England unless the banns had been put up in the parish church for three successive Sundays previously, or a special license had been obtained from the archbishop, and unless the marriage were celebrated in the parish church. The Bill provided that any clergyman celebrating a marriage without these formalities should be liable to penal servitude for seven years. This piece of legislation put a stop to some of the most shocking and disgraceful abuses in certain classes of English social life. With other abuses went the infamous Fleet marriages—marriages performed by broken-down and disreputable clergymen whose headquarters were very commonly the Fleet prison—"couple-beggars" who would perform the marriage ceremony between any man and woman without asking questions, sometimes not even asking their names, provided {280} they got a fee for the performance. Men of this class, a scandal to their order, and still more to the system of law which allowed them to flourish, were to be found at almost every pothouse in the populous neighborhoods, ready to ply their trade at any moment. Perhaps a drunken young lad was brought up to be married in a half unconscious state to some elderly prostitute, perhaps some rich young woman was carried off against her will to be married forcibly to some man who wanted her money. The Fleet parson asked no questions, did his work, and pocketed his fee—and the marriage was legal. Lord Hardwicke's Act stopped the business and relegated the Fleet parson to the pages of romance.
[Sidenote: 1759—England's control in North America]
Years went on—years of quiet at home, save for little ministerial wrangles—years of almost uninterrupted war abroad. The peace that was patched up at Aix-la-Chapelle was evidently a peace that could not last—that was not meant to last. If no other European power would have broken it, England herself probably would, for the arrangements were believed at home to be very much to her disadvantage, and were highly unpopular. But there was no need for England to begin. The Family Compact was in full force. The Bourbons of France were determined to gain more than they had got; the Bourbons of Spain were eager to recover what they had lost. The genius and daring of Frederick of Prussia were not likely to remain inactive. As we have seen, the war between England and France raged on in India without regard to treaties and truces on the European continent. There was, in fact, a great trial of strength going on, and it had to be fought out. England and France had yet another stage to struggle on as well as Europe and India. They had the continent of North America. There were always some disputes about boundaries going on there; and a dispute concerning a boundary between two States which are mistrustful of one another is like a flickering flame close to a train of gunpowder. The renewal of war on the Continent gave for the first time its full chance to the {281} genius of William Pitt as a great war minister. The breaking out of war in North America established England as the controlling power there, and settled forever the pretensions of France and of Spain. It is not necessary for us in this history to follow the course of the continental wars. The great results of these to England were worked out on other soil.
{282}
[Sidenote: 1756—The struggle for Canada]
We have seen that, when the young Duke of Cumberland, after the battle of Culloden, was earning his right to the title of "Butcher," one English officer at least had the courage to protest by his actions against the atrocities of the English general. That soldier was James Wolfe, then a young lieutenant-colonel, who had served his apprenticeship to arms in the Low Countries in the war of the Austrian Succession, and earned by his courage and his abilities an honorable name. He was destined to make that name famous by the part he was to play in the events that were taking place in Canada. The red-haired, unattractive soldier, whose cold and almost repellent manner concealed some of the highest qualities, was fated to do as much for the glory of the English Empire in one part of the world as Clive in another. But there could hardly be two men more different than Clive and Wolfe. The one was always an adventurer—a gentleman adventurer, indeed, and a brilliant specimen of the class, but an adventurer still, and with some of the worst vices of his kind. Wolfe, on the contrary, resembled more the better men among those Puritan soldiers who rallied around the name of Cromwell and battled beneath the standards of Monk. He cherished an austere ideal of public and private virtue. The sweet, simple gravity of the man's nature lives for us very vividly in the portrait Thackeray draws of him in the pages of "The Virginians," where so many of the famous figures of the crowded last century world seem to take bodily shape again and live and move around us.
{283}
From the end of the fifteenth century, when John and Sebastian Cabot discovered Canada, France considered that portion of the New World as her own. Early in the sixteenth century a French expedition under Verazzani formed a settlement named New France, and eleven years later the Breton Jacques Cartier ascended the St. Lawrence as far as the site of Montreal. The first permanent settlement was made in 1608, when Quebec was founded. From that time Quebec seems like the prize for which English and French arms are to strive. Canada was taken by the English in 1629, only to be restored in 1632; but when more than a century later France and England were newly at war, the serious and final struggle for the possession of Canada took place.
The French settlements in America were called Canada and Louisiana. The one comprehended the basin of the St. Lawrence River and the Great Lakes, with a vast extent of territory west and north to the Pacific and Arctic oceans. It was, as has been happily said, a convenient maxim in those days of our colonization, that whoever possessed the coast had a right to all the inland territory as far as from sea to sea. While this gave England its boundaries from north to south, it left from east to west open to French fancy and French ambition. Louisiana was a term which covered in English eyes only the Mississippi mouths and a few stations along the Mississippi and Ohio valleys; in French minds the term extended to all the territory bounded to the north by Canada and to the south by Mexico, and stretching from the Alleghanies to the Pacific.
The French settlements in Canada were administered very much upon the same happy-go-lucky system as that which prevailed in France at home under the beneficent influence of the Old Order, and which at home was slowly and surely preparing the way for the French Revolution. The ministers in Paris governed the colonies through governors who were supreme in their own districts, but who possessed no power whatever of initiating any laws for the people they swayed.
{284}
The English colonies were very different from those of the French. Founded in the early days of religious persecution by men too strong-minded to accept tyranny or to make composition with their consciences, the new colonies of Englishmen in America had thriven in accordance with the antique spirit of independence which had called them into existence. The colonists were a hardy, a stubborn, and a high-minded people, well fitted to battle with the elements and the Indians, and to preserve, under new conditions, the austere standard of morality which led them to look for liberty across the sea. The creed which they professed endowed them with a capacity for self-government, and taught them the arts of administration and the polity of free States. The English colonies, as they throve and extended, were not without their faults. The faith which their founders professed was a gloomy faith, and left its mark in gloom upon the characters of the people and the tenor of their laws. The Ironside quality of their creed showed itself in the cruelties with which they visited the Indians; the severity of their tenets was felt by all who could not readily adapt themselves to the adamantine ethics of men of the type of Endicott and Mather. There was not wanting, too, a spirit of lawlessness in the English America, curiously in contrast with the law-abiding character of the Non-conformist colonizations. Along the seaboard wild pirates nestled, skimmers of the seas of the most daring type, worthy brethren of the Kidds, the Blackbeards, and the Teaches, terrors of the merchantman and the well-disposed emigrant. But in spite of the sternness of the law-abiding, and the savageness of the lawless portions of the English settlements, they contrasted favorably in every way with the settlements which were nominally French and the centres of colonization which hoisted the French flag.
[Sidenote: 1754—Young Mr. Washington]
After a long stretch of threatened hostilities, the pinch came at last in 1753, when the two nations met on the banks of the Ohio. The meeting meant one of the greatest and most momentous series of wars in the century. {285} French soldiers invaded all the settlements of the Ohio company and drove the settlers out. The Governor of Virginia sent an ambassador to the French officer commanding on the Ohio, and chose as his ambassador a young Virginian gentleman then absolutely unknown except to the small circle of his personal friends, but destined to become one of the most famous, and most deservedly famous, men in history. Young Mr. George Washington bore Governor Dinwiddie's message over 500 miles through the wilderness at the peril of his life. That expedition, says Irving, "may be considered the foundation of his fortunes. From that moment he was the rising hope of Virginia." The French commander informed the young envoy that he proposed to hold Ohio and drive the English out. Back went George Washington through the wilderness again with this discouraging reply. After that hostilities were inevitable. The next year Washington, then lieutenant-colonel, led a small force to the frontier, and fired the first shot against the enemy. It is curious to think of all the results that followed from that first shot. The fall of the French colonies in America, the establishment of the American Republic, the French Revolution—all may, by the simplest process of causation, be traced back to the first shot fired by Washington's command against a petty officer on the frontier. That shot echoes on the Plains of Abraham, at Lexington and Bunker's Hill, at the taking of the Bastille, and with the "whiff of grape-shot"; we may hear it at Waterloo and in the autumn horrors of the Coup d'État.
France had long been ambitious of extending the domain of her colonial empire in America. Her aim was to secure for herself the Mississippi and Ohio valleys. Securing these meant many things to France. It meant the connection of her Mexican colonies with Canada, but it meant much more than this; it meant serious annoyance to England, serious limitation to English commerce. It would make the Alleghany mountains the western limits of the English colonies, hamper the English trade with {286} the Indians, and expose to French attack the English on the north, south, and west. In this year 1754, therefore, she deliberately drove the English out of West Pennsylvania, and set up her staff there by building Fort Duquesne to command the Ohio Valley. At that time the chief British commander in America was General Braddock, a joyous, rollicking soldier of the old-fashioned type, rather popular in London as a good companion and good fellow, who loved his glass with a more than merely convivial enthusiasm. But he was not the sort of man who was fitted to fight the French just then and there. In the open field and under ordinary conditions he might have done well enough, but the war with France in the American colonies was not pursued under ordinary conditions. It was fought on the lines of Indian warfare, with murderous Indian allies, against whom the jolly general of the London tables and the St. James's clubs was wholly unfitted to cope. Though he had been warned by Sir P. K. Halkett, who knew the danger, Braddock actually insisted upon advancing with astonishing recklessness against Fort Duquesne as if he were marching at the head of an invincible force to the easiest possible success. The result of his heedlessness is one of the grimmest spots in English colonial history.
[Sidenote: 1759—James Wolfe]
Braddock's forces were cut to pieces: very few of his stout thousand escaped to spread horror through the English colonies by the news of their misfortunes. The banner of the Leopard had gone down indeed before the white coats and the Silver Lilies of France and the painted fantasies of Indian braves and sachems. The fair hair of English soldiers graced the wigwams of the wild and remorseless Red Man, and it seemed for the moment as if the fighting power of England had gone. But, indeed, English fighting power was made of sterner stuff. The fact is, perhaps, never more happily exemplified than in this very story of the dying Braddock himself. As he was carried away, bleeding, to his death, from that fatal ambuscade, something of the hero animated and exalted {287} the spirit of that drink-hardy and foolhardy soldier. "I must do better another time," he is reported to have said; and it would not be easy to say with what gallanter words a stout soldier could go to his account. Against such a spirit as that which animated the dying Braddock the soldiers of France were not destined to triumph. "The last of the Gracchi," said Mirabeau, "when dying, flung dust to heaven, and from that dust sprang Marias." Braddock, promising himself to do better next time, spoke not indeed for himself, but for his nation. The next time came in its due season, but the man who "did better," who carried that "banner of the Leopard" high over the Lilies, was not Braddock, but James Wolfe.
England thirsted for revenge. The years came and the years went, and at last they brought the hour and the men. An elaborate campaign in 1759 had been prepared, by which Amherst, coming by Lake George, Ticonderoga, and Lake Champlain; Prideaux and Johnson coming by Fort Niagara, Lake Ontario, and Montreal; and Wolfe coming by the St. Lawrence River, were to unite in attacking Quebec. But the first two divisions of the whole force were unable to make the connection in the due time, and to Wolfe's command alone was given the honor of assailing Quebec. He advanced up the St. Lawrence with some 7000 men and the fleet under Admiral Saunders, and encamped on the Island of St. Orleans in the St. Lawrence River, some eight miles from Quebec. The whole world, perhaps, hardly holds a scene more picturesque, whether looked at from above or from below, from the rock or from the river, than that which is given by the city of Quebec. At some places the bold mass of rock and clay descends almost sheer to the lower level and the river-shore. One can see that splendid heap of rock and clay from the distant Falls of Montmorency, standing out as the Acropolis of Athens or as Acrocorinth may be seen from some far-off point of view. The newer part of the city and the fortifications are perched high upon the great mound or mass of clay and rock, which looks over the {288} confluence of a mighty river and a great stream. The lower and older town creeps and straggles along the base of the rock and by the edges of the river. Here are the old market-places, the quaint old streets, the ancient wharfs, the crumbling houses, the narrow lanes, the curious inlets, of past generations, and the crude shanties of yesterday and the day before yesterday. From this lower level broad roads now wind up to what would be called the better part of the city—the region of the hotels, and the clubs, and the official buildings, and the fashionable residences. But until lately these roads passed under the ancient gate-ways of the city—gate-ways that reminded one of the Gate of Calais, and brought back suggestions of Hogarth's famous picture. In more recent years, however, the restless spirit of modern improvement has invaded even Quebec, and all, or nearly all, the ancient gate-ways, the gate-ways of the days of Wolfe, have bowed to the fate of Temple Bar. Yet even to-day the traveller in Canada who stands upon that height may vividly recall the scene that lay before the eyes of Wolfe during that memorable campaign.
Wolfe made an attempt to carry a battery above the Montmorency mouth, but failed, and was repulsed with considerable loss. He then cast about him if it were possible to attack the town from the Heights of Abraham on the southern side. It seemed on the face of it an impossibility. How was it possible for the attacking force to make its way unseen by the French up the precipitous cliffs to the Heights of Abraham? Luckily, there was a young man in Wolfe's army, a Lieutenant McCulloch, who had been held prisoner in Quebec in 1756. With a view to future possibilities, he employed his time in surveying the cliffs, and he thought that he had discovered a particular spot where the steep hills might be successfully scaled by an attacking force. He now communicated this to Wolfe. Indeed, the idea of attack in this way seems to have been suggested by him, and on the memorable September night the attempt was made.
{289}
[Sidenote: 1759—Wolfe's tribute to literature]
Who has not heard—who has not been touched and thrilled by the story of Wolfe, while being rowed across the spreading waters of the St. Lawrence to the cove where the attempt was to be made, repeating in low tones to his officers near him Gray's "Elegy in a Country Church-yard"? Who does not remember Wolfe's famous saying that he would rather have written the Elegy than take Quebec? It is a fine saying, akin to that of Caesar when he swore that he would rather be the first man in an obscure Italian village than the second man in Rome. We may perhaps take the liberty of questioning the absolute accuracy of either saying. In Caesar's case he was, no doubt, sufficiently conscious that he was going to be the first man in Rome. In Wolfe's case we may well believe that his exquisite tribute to literature, and to the most charming work of one of the most charming men of letters then alive, was not meant very seriously. He was a soldier; Quebec was his duty; Quebec was to be his fame. But it is one of those sayings that live forever, and the mere thought of it at once calls up two widely different pictures, pictures of places in two widely different parts of the world. One shows the shining, swelling St. Lawrence River and the dead hour of night, and those slowly moving boats of hushed heroes creeping across the waters to where the mighty Quebec hills gloomed hugely out. The other is of that quiet church-yard in England, at Stoke Pogis, near Slough, where pilgrims from many parts of the world still wander through the pleasant Buckinghamshire fields to stand where Gray conceived his Elegy.
Wolfe carried out his plan to perfection. Day was dawning as the majority of his forces formed upon the Heights of Abraham. It was six in the morning before Montcalm's irregulars were upon the field, and nine o'clock before the French army was in position for action. At ten o'clock the battle began. It did not last very long. Whether the French were utterly disheartened or not by the appearance so unexpectedly of the {290} English on the ground, which they had deemed unassailable, certain is it that they made a poor fight of it. Though the French forces amounted to nearly double the English strength, the whole battle, from the first French advance to their utter rout and flight, did not last a quarter of an hour. It was one of the sharpest and the strangest battles in history. Both sides lost their generals. Montcalm was killed; Wolfe, charging gallantly at the head of his men, fell mortally wounded. The wild cry, "They run!" echoed in his dying ears. He seemed to recover a kind of alertness at the sound, and shaking himself from his deadly stupor, asked, "Who run?" We can imagine the momentary trepidation in that gallant heart: could it be his outnumbered followers? In a moment he was reassured; it was the enemy who fled; with his last breath he gave some strategical orders, and then fell back. "God be praised, I die in peace," he said, and so passed away. The time may, perhaps, come when the great game of war will no longer stir the pulses, and men will no longer feel that they die in peace after the bloody defeat of their enemies. But so long as the pulses of men's hearts do answer to any martial music, so long men will say of Wolfe that he died well as became a soldier, a hero, and a gentleman. He sleeps in Greenwich Church.
[Sidenote: 1759—An old French province]
The pride of England's colonial empire might find new stimulus in the way in which the memory of one of the most brilliant scenes in the story of England's career is kept green in Quebec. The traveller, standing on Dufferin Terrace to-day, may in his mind's eye see Wolfe crossing the stream on his perilous expedition, may in his mind's ear hear him reciting to his officers those lines from Gray's Elegy, and telling them that he would rather have written such verses than be sure of taking Quebec. His monument is near to the promenade on Dufferin Terrace—his monument which, a rare event in war, is the monument also of his rival, the French commander, Montcalm, killed in the hour of defeat, as Wolfe was at the moment of victory. Quebec itself seems to illustrate in {291} its own progress and its own history the moral of that common monument. Quebec is as loyal to the British Crown as Victoria or as the Channel Islands. But it is still in great part an old-fashioned French city. The France that survives there and all through the province is not the France of to-day, but the France of before the great Revolution. The stranger seeking his way through the streets had better, in most cases, question the first crossing-sweeper he meets in French, and not in English. The English residents are all expected to speak French. But the English residents and the French live on terms of the most cordial fraternity. Little quarrels, local quarrels of race and sect, do unquestionably spring up here and there now and again, but they are only like the disputes of Churchmen and Dissenters in an English city, and they threaten no organic controversy. England has great reason to be proud of Quebec. The English flag has a home on those heights which we have already said may challenge the world for bold picturesqueness and beauty.
{292}
[Sidenote: 1684-1753—Berkeley]
In the early days of the year 1753 literature and philosophy lost a great man by the death of Bishop Berkeley.
George Berkeley was born on March 12, 1684, by the Nore, in the county Kilkenny. His father was an Irishman of English descent, William Berkeley. In the first year of the eighteenth century George Berkeley went, a lad of fifteen, to the University of Dublin, to Trinity College. In Trinity College he remained for thirteen years, studying, thinking, dreaming, bewildering most of the collegians, his colleagues, who seemed to have been unable to make up their minds whether he was a genius or a blockhead. Within the walls of Trinity he worked, gradually and laboriously piecing together and thoughtfully shaping out his theory of the metaphysical conception of the material world about him; poring over Locke and Plato, breathing an atmosphere saturated with Cartesianism, his active mind eagerly investigating, exploring, inquiring in all directions, and his hand recording day by day the notes and stages of his mental development.
His early philosophical writings rapidly earned him a reputation in the great world of London, to which at that time the eyes of all men—divines, wits, statesmen, philosophers, and poets—turned. It is not necessary here to dwell upon the nature of those philosophical writings, or to enter into any study of the great theory of idealism in which he affirmed that there is no proof of the existence of matter anywhere save in our own perceptions. Byron, in his light-hearted way, more than two generations later, dismissed Bishop Berkeley and his theory in the famous couplet—
{293}
"When Bishop Berkeley said there is no matter,It clearly was no matter what he said"
—a smart saying which Byron did not intend to put forth, and which nobody would be likely to regard, as a serious summing up of the mental work of Berkeley.
Berkeley came to London in the first winter month of 1713, and made the acquaintance of his great countryman Swift. The Dean was a great patron of Berkeley's in those early London days. Swift took Berkeley to Court, and introduced him or spoke of him to all the great ministers, and pushed his fortunes by all the ways—and they were many—in his power. Berkeley, with the aid of Swift, was soon made free of that wonderful republic of letters which then held sway in London, and which numbered among its members such men as Steele and Addison, Bolingbroke and Harley, Gay and Arbuthnot, and Pope. Berkeley was in Addison's box at the first performance of "Cato," and tasted of the author's champagne and burgundy there, and listened with curious delight to the mingled applause and hisses that greeted Mr. Pope's prologue. A little later Berkeley went to Italy as the travelling tutor, the bear-leader, of the son of Ashe, Bishop of Clogher. In Italy he passed some four enchanted years.
Berkeley came back to England in 1720 to find all England writhing in the welter and chaos of the South Sea crash. The shame and misery of the time appear to have inspired him with a kind of horror of the hollow civilization of the age, and to have given him his first promptings towards that ideal community in the remote Atlantic to which his mind turned so strongly a little later. He left England speedily, and came home again to Ireland after an absence of eight years. It was in Ireland that a strange windfall came to him and amazed him. On that fatal afternoon when Swift, with a legion of wild passions tearing at his heartstrings, rode over to Marley Abbey to fling back at Vanessa's feet the letter she had written to Stella, Hester Vanhomrigh received {294} her death-blow. But she lived long enough to inflict a curious little piece of vengeance, the only vengeance in her power, except the nobler revenge of forgiveness, upon the false Cadenus. She had left by will all the property she possessed to the man she had so madly worshipped. With the hand of Death upon her, with the raging eyes of the Dean still burning upon her brain, she performed the one little pitiful act of retaliation which is the saddest spot in all her sad history; she altered her will, and disinherited her idol. For the name of Jonathan Swift, Dean of St. Patrick's, she substituted the name of another great Irishman, another great Churchman, another great thinker and teacher, the name of George Berkeley, Dean—only nominally so, indeed—of Dromore. Berkeley's first idea on receiving this unexpected windfall was to employ the money thus almost miraculously placed at his disposal in carrying out a scheme which had long been dear to his heart. This scheme was that he should emigrate to Bermuda, should settle there, and devote the rest of his life to "the reformation of manners among the English in our Western plantations, and the propagation of the Gospel among the American savages." He was nobly convinced of the nobility of his dream, and, which was more remarkable, he succeeded in awaking a latent nobility in unexpected places, and in arousing an enthusiasm for this dream of a Bermudan Utopia even in callous hearts and unsympathetic bosoms.
[Sidenote: 1728—Berkeley's aspirations]
Bermuda became for a while the fashion in the marvellous medley of London society over which the first of the Georges reigned. People talked Bermuda, thought Bermuda, wrote Bermuda. He was indeed a remarkable man whose missionary zeal and eloquence could make Bermuda popular in London with the voice of religion. He was indeed a remarkable man who could impress for a moment the cynical nature of Bolingbroke with something of the fire of his own enthusiasm; who could induce Walpole to swell from his own pocket the subscription-list that was raised to further Berkeley's schemes; {295} who actually succeeded in touching the callous organism which the Elector of Hanover and King of England called a heart; and whose one joy on hearing of the Vanessa legacy was at the aid it afforded to his voyage and his pure, unselfish aspirations. Bermuda ever remained a vision for him; but in 1728 he set sail for Rhode Island in the company of his young wife, Miss Anne Forster, whom, as he quaintly tells us, he chose "for her qualities of mind and her unaffected inclination to books." For more than three years he dwelt in America a simple, happy, earnest life. But the mission was a failure. To Robert Walpole, Berkeley's plans and hopes would naturally seem about as deserving of the attention and aid of practical men as the ambitions of Don Quixote. The grant promised by the Government was never sent out, and in 1731 Berkeley came back to England. How many of those who are familiar with the line, "Westward the course of empire takes its way," which has been accepted as the motto for one of the best and best-known frescos that adorn the Capitol in Washington, know that it comes from the last verse of a poem which Berkeley wrote as he was striving to realize a New Atlantis in Rhode Island?
"Westward the course of empire takes its way;The first four acts already past,A fifth shall close the drama with the day;Time's noblest offspring is the last."
Two years of literary and philosophic life in London succeeded to the Rhode Island idyl. In 1734 he returned to Ireland for the last time, and dwelt for eighteen years in his bishopric of Cloyne in studious seclusion with his family, wandering among the myrtle-hedges his own hand planted, reading Plato and Hooker, teaching his cherished daughter, suffering from domestic losses, and proclaiming to an astounded world that tar-water was a panacea for all human ills. Berkeley's genius and his eloquent prose made tar-water as popular as both had {296} made Bermuda some twenty years earlier. The later years of his life at Cloyne are tinged with melancholy. His mind began to be agitated anew with the dream of an academic retreat by other streams than the Blackwater and the Leo, and in 1752 he journeyed again to England and set up his tent for the last time beneath the shadow of the Oxford spires. It was mellow autumn when he came to the City of Scholars. In the chill January weather of the following year he died suddenly and peacefully in the midst of his family. He was a great and a good man. The serene purity of his life, his lofty purposes, his nobility of nature, cause him to stand out very conspicuously in the strange, cynical, cruel world of English life and English thought during the first half of the eighteenth century. He was in that world, but he was never of it. His friends were either noble of life and mind, or else he saw in them only their nobler qualities, and took no thought of or no harm from the rest. He seems to have been most happy—and the fact is characteristic of the man—in the society of the sweet, simple, and studious woman who made him a loving wife, and of the children whom he loved with an affection for the excess of which he sometimes reproached himself. All his contemporaries, says Sir James Mackintosh, agreed with Pope in ascribing
"To Berkeley every virtue under heaven."
In 1754 Henry Pelham died. The important consequence of his death was the fact that it gave Pitt at last an opportunity of coming to the front. The Duke of Newcastle, Henry Pelham's brother, became leader of the administration, with Henry Fox for Secretary at War, Pitt for Paymaster-general of the Forces, and Murray, afterwards to be famous as Lord Mansfield, for Attorney-general. There was some difficulty about the leadership of the House of Commons. Pitt was still too much disliked by the King to be available for the position. Fox for a while refused to accept it, and Murray was unwilling {297} to do anything which might be likely to withdraw him from the professional path along which he was to move to such distinction. An attempt was made to get on with a Sir Thomas Robinson, a man of no capacity for such a position, and the attempt was soon an evident failure. Then Fox consented to take the position on Newcastle's own terms, which were those of absolute submission to the dictates of Newcastle. Later still he was content to descend to a subordinate office which did not even give him a place in the Cabinet. Fox never recovered the damage which his reputation and his influence suffered by this amazing act; the only explanation for which was found in the fact that he loved money better than anything in the world, and that the office of Paymaster-general gave almost limitless opportunities to a rapacious and unscrupulous man.
[Sidenote: 1757—Admiral Byng]
The Duke of Newcastle's Ministry soon fell. Newcastle was not a man who had the slightest capacity for controlling or directing a policy of war; and the great struggle known as the Seven Years' War had now broken out. One lamentable event in the war has to be recorded, although it was but of minor importance. This was the capture of Minorca by the French under the romantic, gallant, and profligate Duc de Richelieu. The event is memorable chiefly, or only, because it was followed by the trial and execution of the unfortunate Admiral Byng. Admiral Byng, the son of a famous sailor, was sent in command of a small and a very poorly furnished squadron to the Mediterranean to relieve Minorca. When he readied Gibraltar he found that a French fleet much superior in numbers to his own was blockading the island he was sent to relieve. Byng called a council of war, and the council decided that, as they had no instructions from home how to act in the event of their finding themselves face to face with a superior force, they had better not interfere with the doings of the enemy. Still Byng made for Minorca, and tried unsuccessfully to open communications with the garrison. He had a slight engagement {298} with the French, and then he brought his squadron away. The news created such an outburst of passion in England that the Duke of Newcastle made up his mind at once to sacrifice Byng to the popular fury. Byng was tried at Spithead, found guilty of having failed in his duty, and shot on March 14, 1757. He died like a brave man. It went heavily against Newcastle in later days that he was believed to have promised the sacrifice of Byng before the trial had even begun. No one now believes that Byng was a coward; and nothing but a miracle could have enabled him with such a force to save Minorca. But he failed sadly in his duty, whether from stupidity or irresolution, and probably he would not have cared to outlive his degradation. The punishment was stern and harsh indeed, but it was a time to excuse sternness on the part of a government on whom had fallen the conduct of a great war. Pitt did his best to induce the King to mitigate the penalty in accordance with the unanimous recommendation of the court-martial; but George was inflexible, and reminded Pitt that he had himself taught the Sovereign to seek outside the House of Commons for the judgment of the English people. It was to the execution of Byng that Voltaire applied the famous epigram, "In England it is thought necessary to kill an admiral from time to time to encourage the others"—"pour encourager les autres." Voltaire tried hard to save Byng, and even induced the Duc de Richelieu to write a letter bearing his personal testimony to the unfortunate admiral's courage.
The Duke of Newcastle resigned office, and for a short time the Duke of Devonshire was at the head of a coalition Ministry which included Pitt. The King, however, did not stand this long, and one day suddenly turned them all out of office. Then a coalition of another kind was formed, which included Newcastle and Pitt, with Henry Fox in the subordinate position of paymaster. Pitt now for the first time had it all his own way. He ruled everything in the House of Commons. He flung himself with passionate and patriotic energy into the {299} alliance with that great Frederick whose genius and daring were like his own. Pitt was a heaven-born war-minister. His courage and his resources changed the whole fortunes of the war. He seemed a statesman to organize victory. He stirred up the languishing patriotism of the hour, and filled it with new and noble inspiration. It was true what George had said to him—that he had taught, or tried to teach, the Sovereign to seek outside the House of Commons for the voice of the English people. But this was to the honor of Pitt, and not to his discredit. Pitt saw that a legislature returned on such a representation could be no spokesman of the English people. He knew that intelligence and education were beginning to spread with increased wealth through large unrepresented classes, and even communities. While he had the people behind him he cared little for the Sovereign, and still less for the House of Commons. His pride was as great as his patriotism; he might be broken, but he could not bend. At last he had found his true place—at the head of a great nation and during a grand national crisis.
[Sidenote: 1757—Sterne]
The closing years of George's reign were honored by some literary triumphs in which George himself could have taken but little interest. In 1755 appeared, in two volumes folio, the English Dictionary by Samuel Johnson. We shall meet with Samuel Johnson a good deal in the future course of this history, and have now only to mention as a fact the publication of the work on which he himself believed his fame was to rest. Another work of a very different kind and by a very different sort of man appeared in 1759—the first and second volume of "Tristram Shandy," by Laurence Sterne.
Seldom, perhaps, has an author experienced a stranger bringing up than that which fell to the lot of Sterne. His father, Roger Sterne, was one of those luckless persons who seem to be the especial sport of a malicious destiny, in whose hands nothing prospers, from whose hands thievish Fortune filches all opportunities. Roger Sterne was a gentleman of good family and narrow means, who {300} had adopted arms as his profession and had not prospered therein. He had married a wife who was herself a sutler's widow, and who blessed Ensign Sterne with a swift and steady succession of offspring, of whom Laurence was the second. It was chance, acting through the impulses of the War Office, which caused little Laurence to see the light on Irish soil; but though he was born in the melodiously named Valley of Honey, there was little of honeyed sweetness, and much bitterness as of gall and coloquintida, in his early boyhood. Poverty and the eccentric evolutions of a marching regiment contributed to make his a most unenviable childhood. The record, as we can read it in his own account, is disastrous and dreary enough. The regiment to which Roger Sterne belonged was perpetually on the move; the births and deaths of Mrs. Sterne's children succeeded each other with painful rapidity; again and again was little Laurence in imminent peril of shipwreck on the stormiest seas; he experienced in his earliest years all that was worst and most disagreeable in the life of camp-followers. Some account must necessarily be taken of this by those who review Sterne's writings. A child brought up under such conditions is not likely to have a very keen appreciation of the finer phases of life, and must inevitably have a precocious and most unfortunate familiarity with the seamy side of existence. What is commonly called knowledge of the world, which means knowledge of what is worst in the world, as "seeing life" generally means seeing its dirtiest places, undoubtedly Sterne got in plenty, and the future divine was not improved by the education of the camp.
The misfortunes that had attended so persistently upon the career of Roger Sterne culminated at last most tragically, yet at the same time most ludicrously, as if Destiny had determined to the end to make the luckless ensign her sport. At Gibraltar a quarrel with another officer "about a goose" resulted in a duel. Roger Sterne was run through the body. He never recovered from the wound, and though in this harsh world he drew his breath {301} in pain a little longer, he died in Jamaica of fever, which found his enfeebled frame a ready victim. One of the few pleasing characteristics in Laurence Sterne's nature is his affectionate memory of his father; one of the most pleasing passages of all his writings is that in which he describes him. "My father was a little, smart man, active to the last degree in all exercises, most patient of fatigue and disappointment, of which it had pleased God to give him full measure. He was, in his temper, somewhat rapid and hasty"—hence, no doubt, the speaking of hot words and the spilling of hot blood over that ill-omened goose—"but of a kindly, sweet disposition, void of all design, and so innocent in his intentions that he suspected no one, so that you might have cheated him ten times a day if nine had not been sufficient for your purpose."
[Sidenote: 1713-1768—"Tristram Shandy"]
Through Halifax School and Cambridge sizarship Laurence Sterne passed, by the patronage of his pluralist uncle, Jacques Sterne, into holy orders and the living of Sutton-on-the-Forest, and so into twenty years of almost complete obscurity. We know that he married, that he preached, played the fiddle, fished, hunted, and read, and that is about all we know. Then quite suddenly, in 1759, the lazy, lounging, most eccentric, and ill-chosen clergyman enraptured London by the publication of the first two volumes of "Tristram Shandy."
The author of "Tristram Shandy" came to town, and was received with more than Roman triumph. Wealth, wit, genius, nobility, thronged his door, sought his friendship, proffered favors. Sterne revelled in this new life. London offered him a cup of the most intoxicating quality, and he drank and drank again of its sparkling fountain without ever quenching his thirst for popularity, for flattery, for success. Flattery, popularity, success—all three he had in plenty for eight resplendent years. Volume after volume of "Tristram Shandy" wooed and won public applause. Sterne travelled abroad and found the same adulation in other capitals of Europe that he had enjoyed in London. When the popularity of "Shandy" {302} appeared to be on the wane, and the fame of its author to be dwindling, he whipped it up again with the "Sentimental Journey." We may finish his story by anticipation. He died one of the most tragic deaths recorded in the necrology of genius. He died in London on March 18, 1768, and he died alone. The wish he had expressed of expiring at an inn untroubled by the presence of mourning friends was grimly gratified. In lonely lodgings, beneath the speculative gaze of a memoir-writing footman and the care of hired hands, Sterne gasped out the words, "Now it is come!" and so died. He was buried almost unattended, and his body was stolen from its new-made grave by resurrectionists, and recognized, when half-dissected, on an anatomist's table by a horrified friend. So the story goes—not, indeed, absolutely authentic, but certainly not absolutely without credit—the melancholy conclusion of an ill-spent life and a splendid, ill-used intellect.
For his conduct to his wife his memory has been scourged by Thackeray and by his latest biographer, Mr. H. D. Traill. It cannot be too severely scourged. He took her youth, he took her money, and he tired of her, and was untrue to her, and spoke against her in the dastardly letters he wrote to his friends and in which he has gibbeted himself to all time as a hideous warning, a sort of sentimental scarecrow. "As to the nature of Sterne's love affairs," says Mr. Traill, "I have come, though not without hesitation, to the conclusion that they were most, if not all of them, what is called, somewhat absurdly, platonic. . . . But as I am not one of those who hold that the conventionally 'innocent' is the equivalent of the morally harmless in this matter, I cannot regard the question as worth any very minute investigation. I am not sure that the habitual male flirt, who neglects his wife to sit continually languishing at the feet of some other woman, gives much less pain and scandal to others or does much less mischief to himself and the objects of his adoration than the thorough-going profligate."
One of the greatest of German writers, Jean Paul Richter, {303} declares more than once that he regards Sterne as his master. The statement is amazing. Jean Paul Richter, Jean Paul the Only One, as he was fondly called, was immeasurably sincerer than his master. All that was sham, tinsel, and tawdry in the writings of Yorick was genuine, heart-felt, and soul-inspiring in Jean Paul. Yorick's sentiment was pinchbeck; Jean Paul's was pure gold. All that Richter ever wrote is animated with the deepest religious feeling, the tenderest sympathy, the gentlest and bravest pity. Yorick, in the black and white of his sacred calling's gown and bands, grins and leers like a disguised satyr. His morality is a mummer's mask; his pathos is pretence; the only thing truly Irish about him is his humor, his ceaseless wit, the unfailing sparkle of his fancy.
[Sidenote: 1760—A levée under difficulties]
Quite suddenly the ghastly tragicomedy of the King's life came to an end. There was, we are told, a strange affectation of an incapacity to be sick that ran through the whole royal family, which they carried so far that few of them were more willing to own any other member of the family ill than to acknowledge themselves to be so. "I have known the King," says Hervey, "get out of his bed choking with a sore throat, and in a high fever, only to dress and have a levée, and in five minutes undress and return to his bed till the same ridiculous farce of health was to be presented the next day at the same hour." It must be owned, however, that George made a stout fight against ill-health, and if he shammed being well, he kept up the sham for a good long time. He came into the world more than a dozen years before Lord Hervey was born, and he contrived to keep his place in it for some seventeen years after Lord Hervey had died. Time had nearly come round with George as with Shakespeare's Cassius; his death fell very near to his birthday. George was born on October 30, 1683, and on October 25, 1760, he was on the verge of completing his seventy-seventh year. On October 25, 1760, he woke early, as was his custom, drank his chocolate, inquired as to the quarter whence the wind came, and talked of a walk in the {304} garden. That walk in the garden was never taken. The page who attended on the King had left the room. He heard a groan and the sound of a fall. [Sidenote: 1727-1760—Passed away] He came back, and found the King a helpless heap upon the floor. "Call Amelia," the dying man gasped; but before Amelia could be called he was dead. Amelia, when she came, being a little deaf, did not grasp at once the full extent of what had happened, and bent over her father only to learn in the most startling and shocking manner that her father was dead. The Countess of Walmoden, too, was sent for. It would seem as if the ample charms of the Countess of Walmoden, which had delighted George so much while he lived, might have some power to conjure him back from the common doom of kings. But George the Second was dead beyond the power of all the fat and painted women in the world to help. "Friends," says Thackeray in his Essay, "he was your fathers' king as well as mine; let us drop a respectful tear over his grave." But indeed it is very hard to drop a respectful tear over the grave of George the Second. Seldom has any man been a king with fewer kingly qualities. He had courage, undoubtedly—courage enough to be habitually described by the Jacobites as "the Captain," but his courage was the courage of a captain and not of a king. He was obstinate, he was narrow-minded, he was selfish, he was repulsively and even ridiculously incontinent. The usual quantity of base and servile adulation was poured over the Royal coffin. The same abject creatures—they or their kind—that had rhymed their lying verses over the dead Prince of Wales who had hated his father, now rhymed their lying verses over the dead king who had hated his son. If George the Second had been a more common man, instead of being Elector of Hanover and King of England, one might have said of him frankly enough that he was a person about as little to be admired as a man well could be who was not a coward or in the ordinary sense of the term a criminal. But because he was a crowned king, it was regarded as a patriotic duty then to make much of the {305} departed monarch, and to talk of him in the strain which would have been appropriate if he had been a Marcus Aurelius. The best, perhaps, that can be said of him is that, on the whole, all things considered, he might have been worse. It would be unfair to a George who has, at a long interval, to succeed him, to say that George the Second was actually the worst of his line and name; but he was so little, so very little, worthy, that the fulsome pens must have labored in his praise. If many people rejoiced at his removal, it would be hard to say who grieved with the exception of a few, a select few, of his family and the hangers-on of the Walmoden type, to whom his existence was the essential figure in their own existence. To the vast bulk of the English people the matter was of no moment whatever. All that they knew was that a second George, who was Elector of Hanover, had passed away from the English throne, and that a third George, who was Elector of Hanover, had mounted into the vacant seat.
Never was a king better served than George the Second; never had so ignoble a sovereign such men to make his kingdom strong and his reign famous. He began his time of royalty under the protection of the sturdy figure of Walpole; he closed it under the protection of the stately form of Pitt.