WHAT was it that suggested to Goldsmith raphers and commentators have pointed to more than one plausible model,—the 'Lettres Persanes' of Montesquieu, the 'Lettres d'une Péruvienne' of Madame de Graffigny, the 'Lettres Chinoises' of the Marquis d'Argens, the 'Asiatic' of Voltaire's 'Lettres Philosophiques.' But it is sometimes wise, especially in such hand-to-mouth work as journalism, which was all Goldsmith at first intended, to seek for origins in the immediate neighbourhood rather than in remoter places. In 1757 Horace Walpole published anonymously, in pamphlet form, a clever little squib upon Admiral Byng's 'The Citizen of the World'? Biogtrial in particular and English inconstancy in general, which he entitled 'A Letter from Xo Ho, a Chinese Philosopher at London, to his friend Lien Chi, at Peking.' This was briefly noticed in the May issue of the 'Monthly Review,' where Goldsmith was then acting as scribbler-general to Griffiths, the proprietor of the magazine (his reviews of Home's 'Douglas' and of Burke's 'Sublime and Beautiful' appeared in the same number), and it was described as in Montesquieu's manner. A year later Goldsmith is writing mysteriously to his friend Bob Bryan-ton, of Ballymulvey, in Ireland, about a 'Chinese whom he shall soon make talk like an Englishman;' and when at last his 'Chinese Letters,' as they were called at first, begin to appear in Newbury's 'Public Ledger,' he takes for the name of his Oriental, Lien Chi Altangi, one of Walpole's imaginary correspondents having been Lien Chi. This chain of association, if slight, is strong enough to justify some connection. The fundamental idea, no doubt, was far older than either Walpole or Goldsmith; but it is not too much to suppose that Walpole'sjeu d'espritsupplied just that opportune suggestion which produced the remarkable and now too-much-neglected series of letters afterwards reprinted under the general title of 'The Citizen of the World.'
'The metaphors and illusions,' says Goldsmith in one of those admirable prefaces of which he possessed the secret, 'are all drawn from the East;' and in another place he tells us that a certain apostrophe is wholly translated from Ambulaaohamed, a real (or fictitious) Arabian poet. To these ingenuities he no doubt attached the exaggerated importance habitually assigned to work which has cost its writer pains. But it is not the adroitness of his adaptations from Le Comte and Du Halde that most detains us now. The purely Oriental part of the work—although it includes the amusing story (an 'Ephesian Matron'à la Chinoise) of the widow who, in her haste to marry again, fans her late husband's grave to dry it quicker, and the apologue of Prince Bonbennin and the White Mouse—is practically dead wood. It is Goldsmith under the transparent disguise of Lien Chi—Goldsmith commenting, after the manner of Addison and Steele, upon Georgian England, that attracts and interests the modern reader. His Chinese Philosopher might well have wondered at the lazy puddle moving muddily along the ill-kept London streets, at the large feet and white teeth of the women, at the unwieldy signs with their nondescript devices, at the unaccountable fashion of lying-in-state; but it is Goldsmith, and Goldsmith only, who could have imagined the admirable humour of the dialogue on liberty between a prisoner (through his grating), a porter pausing from his burden to denounce slavery and the French, and a soldier who, with a tremendous oath, advocates, above all, the importance of religion. It is Goldsmith again—the Goldsmith of Green-Arbour-Court and Griffith's back-parlour—who draws, from a harder experience than could have been possible to Lien Chi, the satiric picture of the so-called republic of letters which forms his twentieth epistle. 'Each looks upon his fellow as a rival, not an assistant in the same pursuit. They calumniate, they injure, they despise, they ridicule each other: if one man writes a book that pleases, others shall write books to show that he might have given still greater pleasure, or should not have pleased. If one happens to hit on something new, there are numbers ready to assure the public that all this was no novelty to them or the learned; that Cardanus or Brunus, or some other author too dull to be generally read, had anticipated the discovery. Thus, instead of uniting like the members of a commonwealth, they are divided into almost as many factions as there are men; and their jarring constitution, instead of being styled a republic of letters, should be entitled an anarchy of literature.' One rubs one's eyes as one reads; one asks oneself under one's breath if it is of our day that the satirist is speaking. No; it is of the reign of the second of the Georges, before Grub Street was turned into Milton Street.
Literature, in its different aspects, plays not a small part in the lucubrations of Lien Chi. Two of the best letters are devoted to a whimsical description of the vagaries of some of its humbler professors, who hold a Saturday Club at the 'Broom' at Islington; others treat of the decay of poetry; of novels, and 'Tristram Shandy' in particular; of the necessity of intrigue or riches as a means to success. Nor are Art and the Drama neglected. The virtuoso, who afforded such a fund of amusement to Fielding and Smollett, receives his full share of attention; and in the papers upon acting and actors, Goldsmith once more displays that critical common-sense which he had shown so conspicuously in 'The Bee.' Travellers and their trivialities are freely ridiculed; there are papers on Newmarket, on the Marriage Act, on the coronation, on the courts of justice; on quacks, gaming, paint, mourning, and mad dogs. There is a letter on the irreverent behaviour of the congregation in St. Paul's; there is another on the iniquity of making shows of public monuments. Now and then a more serious note is touched, as when the author is stirred to unwonted gravity by the savage penal code of his day, which, 'cementing the laws with blood,' closed every avenue with a gibbet, and against which Johnson too lifted his sonorous voice.
'Scarce can our fields, such crowds at Tyburn die,
With hemp the gallows and the fleet supply,'—
he sang in 'London,' anticipating his later utterances in 'The Rambler.' Goldsmith, on the other hand, crystallized in his verse the raw material of which he made his Chinese philosopher the mouthpiece. Several of the best known passages of his two longest poems have their first form in the prose of Lien Chi. Indeed, one actual line of 'The Traveller,' 'A land of tyrants, and a den of slaves,' is simply a textual quotation from 'The Citizen of the World.'
But what in the Chinese letters is even more remarkable than their clever raillery of social incongruities and abuses, is their occasional indication of the author's innate but hitherto undisclosed gift for the delineation of humorous character. Up to this time he had exhibited no particular tendency in this direction. The little sketches of Jack Spindle and 'my cousin Hannah,' in 'The Bee,' go no farther than the corresponding personifications of particular qualities in the 'Spectator' and 'Tatler;' and they are not of the kind which, to employ a French figure, 'enter the skin' of the personality presented. But in the case of the eccentric philanthropist of 'The Citizen of the World,' whom he christens the 'Man in Black,' he comes nearer to such a definite embodiment as Addison's 'Will Wimble.' The 'Man in Black' is evidently a combination of some of those Goldsmith family traits which were afterwards so successfully recalled in Dr. Primrose, Mr. Hardcastle, and the clergyman of 'The Deserted Village.' The contrast between his credulous charity and his expressed distrust of human nature, between his simulated harshness and his real amiability, constitutes a type which has since been often used successfully in English literature; it is clear, too, that in the account of his life he borrows both from his author and his author's father. When he speaks of his unwillingness to take orders, of his dislike to wear a long wig when he preferred a short one, or a black coat when he dressed in brown, he is only giving expression to that incompatibility of temper which led to Goldsmith's rejection for ordination by the Bishop of Elphin; while in his picture of his father's house, with its simple, kindly prodigality, its little group of grateful parasites who laugh, like Mr. Hardcastle's servants, at the host's old jokes, and the careless paternal benevolence which makes the children 'mere machines of pity,' 'instructed in the art of giving away thousands before they were taught the more necessary qualifications of getting a farthing,' one recognizes the environment of that emphatically Irish household on the road from Ballymahon to Athlone, in which Goldsmith's own boyhood had been spent.
Excellent as he is, however, the 'Man in Black,' with his grudging generosity and his 'reluctant goodness,' is surpassed in completeness of characterization by the more finished portrait of Beau Tibbs. The poor little pinched pretender to fashion, with his tarnished finery and his reed-voiced, simpering helpmate,—with his coffee-house cackle of my Lord Mudler and the Duchess of Piccadilly, and his magnificent promises of turbot and ortolan, which issue pitifully in postponed ox-cheek and bitter beer,—approaches the dimensions of a masterpiece. Charles Lamb, one would think, must have rejoiced over the reckless assurance which expatiates on the charming view of the Thames from the garret of a back-street in the suburbs, which glorifies the 'paltry, unframed pictures' on its walls into essays in the manner of the celebrated Grisoni and transforms a surly Scotch hag-of-all-work into an old and privileged family-servant,—the gift 'of a friend of mine, a Parliament man from the Highlands.' Nor are there many pages in Dickens more perennially humorous than the scene in which the 'Man in Black,' hisinamoratathe pawnbroker's widow, and Mr. and Mrs. Tibbs, all make a party to the picturesque old Vauxhall Gardens of Jonathan Tyers. The inimitable sparring which ensues between the second-hand gentility of the beau's lady and the moneyed vulgarity of the tradesman's relict, their different and wholly irreconcilable views of the entertainment, and the tragic termination of the whole, by which the widow is balked of 'the waterworks' because good manners constrain her to sit out the wiredrawnrouladesand quavers of Mrs. Tibbs—these are things which age cannot wither nor custom stale. If Goldsmith had written nothing but this miniature trilogy of Beau Tibbs,—if Dr. Primrose were uninvented and Tony Lumpkin non-existent,—he would still have earned a perpetual place among English humourists.
Something of this, undoubtedly, he owed to the fortunate instinct which dictated his choice of his material. The forerunner of Dickens,—the disciple, although he knew it not, of Fielding,—he makes his capital by his disregard of the reigning models of his time. Declining to select his characters from the fashionable abstractions of Sentimental Comedy and the mechanical puppets of conventional High Life, he turns aside to the moving, various, many-coloured middle-classes, from whose ranks originality has not yet been banished, or nature cast out. Of these he had knowledge and experience; of those he had seen but little. Upon the other walk, his labours might have been as forgotten as the 'Henry' of Richard Cumberland or the 'Henrietta' of Mrs. Charlotte Lenox. But he took his own line; and in consequence, Beau Tibbs and the pawnbroker's widow (with her rings and her green damask) are as much alive to-day as Partridge or Mrs. Nickleby.
DEC. 22. Mr. John Newbery, of St. Paul's who knew him.' These words, copied from the 'Gentleman's Magazine' for 1767, record the death of one who, in his way, was an eighteenth century notability. He belonged to the good old 'Keep-your-Shop-and-your-Shop-will-keep-you' class of tradesmen, who lived without pretence near their places of business in the City, worked industriously during the week, marched off to St. Bride's or St. Dunstan's on Sunday morning with a crop-eared 'prentice in the rear to carry the great gilt Bible, and jogged away in crowded chaises of summer afternoons to eat tarts at Highgate or drink tea out of china in the Long churchyard, sincerely lamented by all.
In due time they made their 'plumbs;' sent their sons to St. Paul's or Merchant Taylors', sometimes even to Oxford or Cambridge; and finally left their portraits to posterity in the becoming and worshipful garb of Sheriffs or Common-councilmen. Unfortunately for this paper, there is no such limner's likeness of 'honest John Newbery.' Yet we are not wholly without details as to his character and personal appearance. That 'glorious pillar of unshaken orthodoxy,' Dr. Primrose, formerly of Wakefield, for whom, as all the world knows, he had published a pamphlet' 'against the Deuterogamists of the age,' describes him as a red-faced, good-natured little man, who was always in a hurry. 'He was no sooner alighted,' says the worthy Vicar, 'but he was in haste to be gone; for he was ever on business of the utmost importance.' 'Mr. Idler' confirms this indication. 'When he enters a house, his first declaration is, that he cannot sit down; and so short are his visits, that he seldom appears to have come for any other reason but to say, He must go.' It is not difficult to fill in the outline of Johnson and Goldsmith. 'The philanthropic bookseller in St. Paul's church-yard' was plainly a bustling, multifarious, and not unkindly personage, essentially commercial, essentially enterprising, rigorously exacting his money's worth of work, keeping prudent record of all casual cash advances, but, on the whole, not unbeneficent in his business fashion to the needy brethren of the pen by whom he was surrounded. Many of John Newbery's guineas passed to Johnson, to Goldsmith, to poor mad Christopher Smart, who married his step-daughter. As Johnson implies, it is not impossible that he finally fell a victim to that unreasoning mental activity which left him always struggling hopelessly with more schemes and proposals than one man could possibly manage. His wig must often have been awry, and his spectacles mislaid, in that perpetual journey from pillar to post which ultimately landed him, at the comparatively early age of fifty-four, in his grave at Waltham St. Lawrence.
It was at Waltham St. Lawrence, a quiet little Berkshire village, whose churchyard is dotted with the tombs of earlier Newberys, that he had been born. His father, a small farmer, destined him for his own calling. But, like Gay, it was not John Newbery's fate 'to brighten ploughshares in paternal land.' He passed early into the service of a 'merchant,' otherwise a printer and newspaper proprietor, at Reading, managing so well that, when his employer died, he was left a co-legatee in the business. Thereupon, being a resolute man, he did better still, and married his master's widow, who had three children. Even this succeeded; upon which, progressing always in prosperity, he began to think of starting in London. Before doing so, he made a tour in the provinces. Of this expedition there exists a curious record in the shape of an unprinted journal, throwing much light upon modes of travelling in those early coaching days, when the unfortunate outside passenger (like Pastor Moritz in a later paper *) had to choose between being jolted to death in the basket, or clinging like a fly to the slippery top of the vehicle.
* See-post, 'A German in England.'
The majority of the entries are merely matter of business,—titles for new books, recipes for diet-drinks, shrewd trade maxims, and the like. But here and there the writer intersperses notes of general interest,—on Dick Turpin the highwayman, on Lady Godiva and peeping Tom, and (more than once) upon that 'curious and very useful machine,' the Ducking-Stool for scolds, a 'plan of which instrument (he says) he shall procure and transplant to Berkshire for the good of his native county.' His business at Reading was as miscellaneous as his memorandum book, and he seems to have dealt in all kinds of goods. About 1744 he removed to London, opening a shop at the sign of the 'Bible and Crown,' near Devereux Court, without Temple Bar, together with a branch establishment at the Royal Exchange. To this Johnson probably refers when he says: 'He has one habitation near Bow Church, and another about a mile distant. By this ingenious distribution of himself between two houses, he has contrived to be found at neither.' From the 'Bible and Crown,' which had been his old Reading sign, he moved a year later to the 'Bible and Sun' in St. Paul's Churchyard. This continued to be his headquarters until his death. Gradually his indiscriminate activities narrowed themselves to two distinct branches of business, in these days incongruous enough,—the sale of books and the sale of patent medicines. While at Reading, he had become part owner, among other things, of Dr. Hooper's Female Pills; and soon after his settlement in London, he acquired the sole management of a more famous panacea, Dr. James's Fever Powders, which had in their time an extraordinary vogue. According to Mrs. Delany, the King dosed the Princess Elizabeth with them; Gray and Cowper both believed in their efficacy; and Horace Walpole, declared he should take them if the house were on fire. Fielding specially praises them in 'Amelia,' affirming that in almost any country but England they would have brought 'public Honours and Rewards' to his 'worthy and ingenious Friend Dr. James;' while Goldsmith may be said to have laid down his life for them. With the sale of these and kindred specifics, John Newbery alternated his unwearied speculations as a bookseller. He was at the back of Smollett's venture of the 'British Magazine;' it was for his 'Universal Chronicle' that Johnson wrote his 'Idler' and quizzed his proprietor as 'Jack Whirler;' he was the publisher of Goldsmith's 'Traveller' and 'Citizen of the World;' and lie probably found part of the historical sixty guineas which somebody paid for the 'Vicar of Wakefield.' He died at Canbury or Canonbury House, Islington, in the still-existent Tower of which he was an occasional resident. Indeed, it is more than probable that he was at one time the responsible landlord of that favourite retiring place for literary men,—a retiring place not without its exceptional advantages, if we* are to believe last-century advertisements, which, in addition to a natural cold bath, speak of 'a superlative Room, furnish'd for a single Person, or two Gentlemen, having a Prospect into five Counties ['longos prospicit agros!'], and the use of a good Garden and Summer-House.' Besides this there were traditions of Prior Bolton and Anne of Cleves, of Bacon and Elizabeth, of Sir John Spencer and William Fielding, Earl of Denbigh (the novelist's grand-uncle), which certainly have figured in any schedule of attractions, and must naturally have been interesting to the Smarts and Hills and Woodfalls and Goldsmiths who afterwards inhabited the old ivy-clad Tower.
Newbery's epitaph in the churchyard of his native village lays its main stress upon his connection with Dr. James's nostrum; and it was doubtless to this and the other patent medicines with which he was connected that he owed the material part of his prosperity. Yet it is not now upon the celebrated 'Arquebusade Water' (dear to Lady Mary Coke), or the far-famed 'Cephalic Snuff,' or the incomparable 'Beaume de Vie,' once so familiar in eighteenth-century advertisements, that he bases his individual claim to the gratitude of posterity. It is, to quote his biographer, Mr. Welsh, as 'the first bookseller who made the issue of books, specially intended for children, a business of any importance;' as the publisher of 'The Renowned History of Giles Gingerbread: a little Boy who lived upon Learning,' of 'Mrs. Margery Two-Shoes' (afterward Lady Jones), of the redoubtable 'Tommy Trip and his dog Jouler,' of the 'Lilliputian Magazine,' and of numbers of other tiny masterpieces in that flowered and gilt Dutch paper of which the art has been lost, that he is best remembered. Concerning these commendable little treatises, with their matter-of-fact title-pages and their artless appeal to all little Masters and Misses 'who are good, or intend to be good,' there are varying opinions. Dr. Johnson, according to Mrs. Thrale, thought them too childish for their purpose. He preferred the 'Seven Champions,' or 'Parisenus and Parismenus.' 'Babies,' he said in his legislative way, 'do not want to hear about babies. They like to be told of giants and castles, and of somewhat which can stretch and stimulate their little minds.' 'Remember always,' he added, 'that the parents buy the books, and that the children never read them.' Yet it is claimed for Robert Southey that in Newbery's 'delectable histories' he found just that very stimulus which made him a life-long book-lover; and it is characteristic of Charles Lamb (a better judge of children's literature than Johnson) that he puts forward these particular publications against the Bar-baulds and Trimmers ('those blights and blasts of all that is human in man and child'), as presenting the very quality which Johnson desired, the 'beautiful interest in wild tales, which made the child a man, while all the time he suspected himself to be no bigger than a child.' 'Think what you would have been now,' he writes to Coleridge of 'Goody Two-Shoes,' 'if instead of being fed with tales and old wives' fables in childhood, you had been crammed with geography and natural history!' The authorship of these 'classics of the nursery' is an old battle ground. Newbery, it is alleged, wrote some of them himself. He was (says Dr. Primrose when he met him) 'at that time actually compiling materials for the history of one Mr. Thomas Trip,' and if this can hardly be accepted as proof positive, it may be safely asserted that to Newbery's business instincts are due those ingenious references to his different wares and publications which crop up so unexpectedly in the course of the narrative. For example, in 'Goody Two-Shoes' we are told that the heroine's father 'died miserably' because he was 'seized with a violent Fever in a place where Dr. James's Powder was not to be had!' But who were Newbery's assistant authors? Giles and Griffith Jones, say some; Oliver Goldsmith, say others. With respect to the last-named no particular testimony seems to be forthcoming beyond his known relations to the publisher, and the so-called 'evidence of style.' In the absence of confirmatory details the former is worthless; and the latter is often entirely misleading. Without going back to the time-honoured case of Erasmus and Scaliger's oration, two modern instances of this may be cited. Mr. Thackeray, says Mr. Forster, claimed the 'Pleasant and Delightful History of Thomas Hickathrift' for Henry Fielding. But both Mr. Forster and Mr. Thackeray should have remembered that their common acquaintance, Mr. Isaac Bickerstaff, of the 'Tatler,' had written of Hickathrift as a chap-book when Fielding was a baby. In the same way 'Tommy Trip' has, by no mean judges, been attributed to Goldsmith upon the strength of the following quatrain:—
'Three children sliding on the ice
Upon a summer's day,
As it fell out they all fell in,
The rest they ran away.'
Alas! and alas! for the 'evidence of style.' Not only had these identical lines been turned into Latin in the 'Gentleman's Magazine' for July, 1754, when Goldsmith was still studying medicine at Leyden; but they are quoted at p. 30 of 'The Character of Richard St[ee]le,
Esq;' by 'Toby, Abel's Kinsman,' which was issued by 'J. Morphew, near Stationer's Hall,' as far back as the month of November, 1713. As a matter of fact, they are much older still, being affirmed by Chambers in his excellent 'Book of Days' to be, in their first form, part of a long and rambling story in doggerel rhyme dating from the early part of the Civil Wars, which is to be found at the end of a little old book entitled 'The Loves of Hero and Leander,' 12mo, London, 1653, and 1677.
AMONG Gray's papers was one inscribed 'Dialogue of Books.' The handwriting was that of his biographer Mason, but it was believed to be either by Gray or by West. There is a strong presumption that the author was Gray; and it is accordingly attributed to him in the Rev. D. C. Tovey's 'Gray and his Friends,' where for the first time it was printed. It shows us the little great man (if it is accurately dated 1742, it must have been in the year of his fullest poetical activity) sitting tranquilly in his study chair, when he is 'suddenly alarmd with a great hubbub of Tongues.' He listens; and finds that his books are talking to one another. Madame de Sévigné is being what Mrs. Gamp would call 'scroudged' by Aristotle, who replies to her compressed expostulations with all the brutality of a philosopher and a realist. Thereupon she appeals to her relative, the author of the 'Histoire amoureuse des Gaules.' But the gallant M. Bussy-Rabutin, himself pining for an interchange of compliments with a neighbouring Catullus, is hopelessly penned in by a hulking edition of Strabo, and cannot possibly arrive to the assistance of hisbelle Cousine. Elsewhere La Bruyère comments upon the strange companions with whom Fate has acquainted him; and Locke observes, with a touch of temper, thatheis associated with Ovid,—and Ray the Naturalist! * Virgil placidly quotes a line of his own poems; More, the Platonist, delivers himself of a neat little copybook sentiment in praise of theological speculation; and great fat Dr. Cheyne huskily mutters his own adage, 'Every man after forty is either a fool or a Physician.'
* Ray's 'Select Remains' with life by Derham, 1740, and manymarginal notes by Gray, was recently in a Londonbookseller's catalogue.
In another corner an ill-judged and irrelevant remark by Euclid, touching the dimensions of a point, brings down upon him the scorn both of Swift and Boileau, who clamour for the unconditional suppression of mathematics. (If there be nothing else, this in itself is almost sufficient to fix the authorship of the paper with Gray, whose hatred of mathematics was only equalled by that of Goldsmith.) Then a pert exclamation from a self-sufficientVade Mecumprovokes the owner of the library to so hearty an outburst of merriment that the startled tones at once shrink back into 'uncommunicating muteness.' Laughter, it would seem, is as fatal to books as it was of old to the Coquecigrues.
Whether Gray's library ever again broke silence, his biographers have not related. But if his books were pressed for space while in his possession, they have since enjoyed ample opportunities for change of air and scene. When he died he left them, with his manuscripts, to Mason, who in turn bequeathed them to the poet's friend Stonehewer, from whom they passed, in part, to a relative, Mr. Bright of Skeffington Hall. At Mr. Bright's death, being family property, they were sold by auction. In August, 1851, they were again offered for sale; and three years later a number of them, which had apparently been reserved or bought in, once more came under the hammer at Sotheby and Wilkinson's. We have before us the catalogue of the second sale, which is naturally much fuller than that of 1854. What strikes one first is the care with which the majority of the volumes had been preserved by their later possessors. Many of the Note-Books were cushioned on velvet in special cases, while the more precious manuscripts had been skilfully inlaid, and bound in olive morocco with leather joints and linings of crimson silk. Like Prior, Gray must have preserved almost everything, 'e'en from his boyish days.' Among the books is 'Plutarch's Lives,' with Dacier's notes, and the inscription, 'E libris Thomæ Gray, Scholæ Eton: Alumn. Januar. 22, 1733'—a year before he left for Cambridge; there is also his copy of Pope's 'Iliad,' with autograph date a year earlier; there is a still more youthful (though perhaps more suspicious) possession—namely, three volumes of Dryden's 'Virgil,' which were said to have actually belonged to Pope. 'Ex libris A. Pope, 1710,' was written at the back of the portrait, and the same inscription recurred in each volume, though in the others some Vandal, probably a classmate, by adding a tail to the 'P' and an 'r' at the end, had turned the 'Pope' into 'Roper.' Another of Gray's Eton books was a Waller, acquired in 1729, in which favourite poems and passages were underlined.
Of the classics he must have been a most unwearied and sedulous student. Euripides he read in the great folio of Joshua Barnes (Cantab. 1694), which is marked throughout by a special system of stars, inverted commas, and lines in red crayon; and his note-books bristle with extracts, neatly 'arranged and digested,' from all the best Greek authors—Sophocles, Thucydides, Xenophon, and even that Isocrates whom Goldsmith, from the critical altitudes of the 'Monthly Review,' recommended him to study. At other 'classics' he worked with equal diligence. His 'Decameron'—the Londonquartoof 1725—was filled withmarginaliaidentifying Boccaccio's sources of inspiration and principal imitators, while his Milton—the two-volumeduodecimoof 1730-8—was interleaved,and annotated profusely with parallel passages drawn from the Bible, Dante, Shakespeare, and 'the ancients.'' He had crowded Dugdale's 'Baronage' with corrections and additions; he had largely 'commented' the four folio volumes of Clarendon's 'Rebellion;' and he had followed everywhere, with remorseless rectifications, the vagrant utterances of gossiping Gilbert Burnet. His patience, accuracy, research, were not less extraordinary than his odd, out-of-the-way knowledge. In the 'Voyages de Bergeron' (quarto) that author says: 'Mango Cham fut noie.' No, comments Gray, decisively, 'Muncacâ or Mangu-Khanw was not drowned, but in reality slain in China at the siege of Hochew in 1258.' Which of us could oblige an inquisitive examiner with the biography of this Eastern potentate! Which of us would not be reduced to 'combining our information' (like the ingenious writer on Chinese Metaphysics) as to 'mangoes' and 'great Chams'!
But the two most interesting items of the Catalogue are yet unmentioned. One is the laborious collection of Manuscript Music that Gray compiled in Italy while frivolous Horace Walpole was eating iced fruits in a domino to the sound of a guitar. Zamperelli, Pergolesi, Arrigoni, Galuppi—he has ransacked them all, noting the school of the composer and the source of the piece selected—copying out religiously even the 'Regole per l'Accompagnamento.' The other, which we who write have seen, is the famous Linnaeus exhibited at Cambridge in 1885 by Mr. Ruskin. It is an interleaved copy of the 'Systema Naturae,' two volumes in three, covered as to their margins and added pages with wonderful minute notes in Latin, and illustrated by Gray himself with delicately finished pen-and-ink drawings of birds and insects. During the later part of his life these volumes, we are told, were continually on his table, and his absorbing love for natural history is everywhere manifested in his journals and pocket-books. When he is in the country, he classes the plants; when in town, he notes the skins of birds in shops; and when he eats whitebait at Greenwich, he straightway describes that dainty in the language of Tacitus.Nullus odor nisi Piscis; farina respersus, frixusque editur.
Among the manuscripts proper of this collection, the place of honour belongs to one which Mason had labelled 'Original Copy of the Elegy in a Country Church Yard.' In addition to other variations from the printed text, erased words in this MS. showed that Cato stood originally for Hampden, and Tully and Cæsar for Milton and Cromwell:
'Some mute inglorious Tully here may rest,
Some Cæsar guiltless of his country's blood.'
Here, too, were found those well-known but rejected 'additional' stanzas:
'The thoughtless World to Majesty may bow,
Exalt the brave, and idolize Success;
But more to Innocence their Safety owe
Than Pow'r and Genius e'er conspir'd to bless.
'And thou, who mindful of th' unhonour'd Dead,
Dost in these Notes their artless Tale relate,
By Night and lonely Contemplation led
To linger in the gloomy Walks of Fate:
'Hark! how the sacred Calm that broods around,
Bids ev'ry fierce tumultuous Passion cease;
In still small Accents whisp'ring from the Ground,
A grateful Earnest of eternal Peace.
'No more, with Reason and thyself at Strife,
Give anxious Cares and endless Wishes room;
But thro' the cool sequester'd Vale of Life
Pursue the silent Tenour of thy Doom.' *
* Another additional stanza, perhaps better known than the above, does not occur in the 'Original Copy' of the Elegy, but in a later MS. at Pembroke College:—
'There scatter'd oft, the earliest of the Year,
By Hands unseen, are Show'rs of Violets found:
The Red-breast loves to build, & warble there,
And little Footsteps lightly print the Ground.'
His bushy beard, and shoe-strings green,
His high-crown'd hat, and sattin-doublet,
Mov'd the stout heart of England's Queen,
Tho' Pope and Spaniard could not trouble it.'
Or again:
'Who prowl'd the country far and near,
Bewitch'd the children of the peasants,
Dried up the cows, and lam'd the deer,
And suck'd the eggs, and kill'd the pheasants.'
Another group of autographs in this volume had a special interest. The first was the notelet, or 'spell,' which Lady Schaub and Miss Speed left for Gray upon that first call when the nervous poet was 'not at home' to his unexpected visitors. Next to this came the poem which the note elicited—that charming 'Long Story,' with its echo of Matthew Prior, which has set their tune to so many later verse-spinners:
Does not one seem to catch in this the coming cadences of another haunter of the 'Poets' Walk' at Eton—of Winthrop Mackworth Praed; nay, an it be notlèse majesté, even of the lighter strains of Lord Tennyson himself! To the 'Long Story' followed Miss Speed's polite little acknowledgment with its invitation to dinner, and a few pages further on the verses beginning—
* Midst Beauty and Pleasure's gay Triumphs to languish,'
which Gray probably wrote for her—verses in which there is more of poetic ardour than genuine passion. Gray was not a marrying man. Yet one feels half sorry that he was never united to 'Your oblig'd & obedient Henrietta Jane Speed,' with her £30,000, her house in town, and her 'china and old japan infinite.' Still more to be resented is the freak of Fate which transformed the delightful Melissa of the 'Long Story' into the berouged French Baronne who, sixteen years later, in company with her lap-dogs, piping bullfinch, and cockatoo, arrived from the Hague as Madame de la Perrière, and 'Ministress at London.'
The largequartovolume containing the above poems also included the first sketch in red crayon of Gray's unfinished Latin Poem, 'De Principiis Cogitandi,' and a copy of the translation of the Ugolino episode from the 'Inferno,' first printed by Mr. Gosse in 1884. Of the volumes of miscellaneous MSS. (where was found the 'Dialogue of Books') it is impossible to speak here. But among the rest comes a copy of the 'Strawberry Hill' edition of the 'Odes by Mr. Gray'—those Odes which at first he had so obstinately refused to annotate. 'If a thing cannot be understood without notes,' he told Walpole, 'it had better not be understood at all.' He must, however, have subsequently recanted, since this copy is filled with carefully written explanations of the allusions, and with indications of the sources of information. This book and the Note-books of Travel and Reading, with their methodical arrangement, their scrupulous accuracy, their unwearied pains, all help us to understand that leisurely fastidiousness, that hesitating dilettanteism, that endless preluding to unachieved performance, which make of the most literary, exact, and polished of poets, at the same time the least copious of writers. In his bust in the Pembroke College, Mr. Hamo Thorny-croft has happily succeeded in accentuating these qualities of refinement and intellectual precision. For the rest, is not Gray wholly contained in the vignette of Rogers to Mitford?
Gray, he says, saw little society in London. He had 'a nice dinner from the Tavern brought to his lodgings, a glass or two of sweet wine, and [here is a delightful touch!] as he sippd it talked about great People.' It needs but to fill the room with those scarlet martagon-lilies and double stocks for which he trudged daily to Covent Garden, to spread a meteorological register upon the writing-table, to open Gavin Douglas his 'Palice of Honour' in the window-seat—and the picture is finished.
LORD CHESTERFIELD detested proverbs. For him they were not so much the wit of one man and the wisdom of many, as the cheap rhetoric of the vulgar, to which no person of condition could possibly condescend. Yet it is his Lordship's misfortune to suggest one of the homeliest. Nothing so well describes the state of his modern reputation as the familiar adage, 'Give a dog a bad name, and hang him.' Dr. Johnson, who had more or less valid reasons for antagonism, characterized the famous letters in one of those vigorous verdicts, the compactness of which has sometimes been allowed to condone injustice. They taught, he declared, 'the morals of a courtesan, * and the manners of a dancing-master.'
* Modern usage here requires the alteration of a word.
Cowper followed suit. Addressing the author in the 'Progress of Error' as Petronius, he informed him that the tears of the Muses would 'scald his memory;' and after apostrophizing him as a 'graybeard corrupter of our listening youth,' and a 'polish'd and high-finish'd foe to Truth,' adjured him finally (and rather fatuously) to send from the shades some message of recantation,—in all of which there is more of poetic phraseology than energy of reproach. With the novelists Lord Chesterfield has hardly fared better. Dickens, who drew upon him for Sir John Chester in 'Barnaby Rudge,' makes that personage declare enthusiastically that 'in every page of this enlightened writer, he finds some captivating hypocrisy which had never occurred to him before, or some superlative piece of selfishness to which he was utterly a stranger.' The picture in Thackeray's 'Virginians' is quieter and more lifelike. We are shown Lord Chesterfield at Tunbridge, when Harry Warrington makes hisdebutthere—'a little beetle-browed, hook-nosed, high-shouldered gentleman,' much like his portrait by Gainsborough, sitting over his wine at the White Horse with M. de Pollnitz, rallying and ironically complimenting that ambiguous adventurer, making magnificent apology to Mr. Warrington when he has unwittingly insulted him, and, at a later period, with his customary composure, losing six hundred pounds to him at cards. As to this last detail there may be doubts. Thackeray probably counted upon human frailty and the inveteracy of an ancient habit, but Lord Carnarvon says that Lord Chesterfield gave up play when he accepted office, and he had been Ambassador at the Hague and Viceroy in Ireland years before he met Colonel Esmond's grandson at M. Barbeau's much-frequented ordinary in the Wells.
Turning to the two quarto volumes which, in March, 1774, were sent forth from Golden Square by that not entirely discreet and certainly rapacious representative, his Lordship's daughter-in-law, one's first impression is that they have been more talked about in the light of Johnson's epigram than read by that of their own merits. No one, of course, would affirm, even allowing for the corrupt state of the society in which they were written, that their moral tone, in one respect especially, is defensible; nor can it be denied, even supposing them to emanate from a friend rather than a parent, that they contain passages which, to our modern taste, are more than unpleasant. But without in the least attempting to extenuate these objectionable features of the correspondence, it is but just to its author to remember that it was never intended either for the public instruction or for the public eye. When Mrs. Eugenia Stanhope trusted the letters would be of use 'to the Youth of these Kingdoms,' she was palpably overlooking this obvious fact. If Lord Chesterfield had published them himself, he would no doubt have considerably edited them; but it is extremely unlikely that he would ever have published them at all. The principles which he desired to instil into Philip Stanhope were the principles of the society in which Philip Stanhope was moving—they were those of his patron, Lord Albemarle, and his preceptress, Lady Hervey. They were intended not for the world at large, but for the narrower world of fashion.
The systematic dissimulation which they appear to inculcate has also been urged against them. But here again it seems to have been forgotten that young Stanhope was intended for a politician and statesman,—that what his father most desired for him was the successes of a court and the rewards of diplomacy. After all, thevolto scioltoandpensieri stretti, the 'looks loose' and 'thoughts close,' * which he so persistently enjoins, are no more than the unimpeachable Sir Henry Wotton impressed upon the equally unimpeachable John Milton.