* A more popular rendering of this useful maxim is the'heyes hopen and mouth shut' of Thomas the footman in 'TheNewcomes,' eh. xlvii.
Lord Chesterfield puts his points coldly and cynically; but by his excellent sermon on thesuaviter in modoand thefortiter in re, he preaches in reality little beyond that necessary conciliation of the feelings of others which is inculcated by almost every manual of ethics. Again, if he harps somewhat wearisomely upon 'les manières, les bienséances, les agrémens, it is precisely because these were the weak points of his pupil, who, master at twenty of Latin, Greek, and political history, speaking readily German, French, and Italian, having a remarkable memory and a laudable curiosity, still retained an awkwardness of address which neither Marcel nor Desnoyers could wholly overcome, * and a defective enunciation which would have resisted all the pebbles of Demosthenes.
* Desnoyers was the fashionable English dancing-master;Marcel, the French one.
For the rest, Lord Chesterfield's teaching is, in great measure, unexceptionable. Its worst fault, in addition to those already mentioned, is that it too frequently confuses being with seeming, and the assumption of a virtue with the actual possession of it. But many of its injunctions are most praiseworthy, and even admirable as aphorisms; and those to whom their note of worldly wisdom is distasteful must blame not so much the writer, as Horace and Cicero, Bolingbroke and La Bruyère, De Retz and La Rochefoucault, from whom he had compiled his rules for conduct, and shaped his scheme of life.
When Philip Stanhope died at six-and-thirty, neither 'paitri [sic] de graces' as Lord Chesterfield hoped, nor particularly distinguished in statecraft (he was simply Envoy at Dresden), it was discovered that he had so far adopted the policy of 'pensieri strettias to have been married privately for some years. Probably the shock of this discovery was softened to his father (who nevertheless behaved liberally to the widow) by the fact that, in the failure of his plans for his son, he had already begun to interest himself in the training of another member of his family, a little boy who was destined to be his successor in the earldom. Seven years before Philip Stanhope's death he had opened a new series of letters with a godchild, also Philip Stanhope, and the son of Mr. Arthur Stanhope, of Mansfield, in Nottinghamshire. Beginning when the boy was five and a half, the correspondence was continued for nine years, following him from 'Mr. Robert's boarding School at Marybone by London' to the house in Southampton Row of his tutor, the notorious Dr. Dodd. When the first letter was written, Lord Chesterfield was sixty-seven, and the last was penned only three years before his death. This is the collection which, after being mislaid for a long period, was published in 1889 by the late Lord Carnarvon, to whom it had been presented by his father-in-law, the sixth Earl of Chesterfield. It contributes not a little to the revision of the popular idea formed of the writer,—an idea, it may be added, which, upon re-examination of the earlier correspondence, had already been considerably modified by such critics as Mr. Abraham Hayward and M. Sainte-Beuve. Superficially, the letters resemble their predecessors, and the outline of education is much the same. Little Philip was to be 'perfectly master' of that French which his godfather loved so dearly, and in which he wrote so often and so well; he was to be thoroughly grounded in History, Geography, Dancing, Italian, German; he was to be proficient in Greek and Latin, and he was to complete his studies in the 'well-regulated republic' of Geneva, the salutary austerity of which was then usefully tempered by the presence of Voltaire and the French refugees. Many of the new letters reproduce the old precepts; there are even similarities of thought and phraseology; and though thevolto scioltois not obtruded, thesuaviter in modois still persistently advocated. But age has brought its softening influences—the moral tone is ostensibly higher, and the old worldlysavoir-fairehas lost much of its ancient cynicism. Some of the axioms which Lord Carnarvon quotes are remarkable for their accent of earnestness; others, as he observes, are 'almost theological' in tone. Saint Augustine, for example, could hardly say more than this: 'Si je pouvois empêcher qu'il n'y eut un seul malheureux sur la Terre, j'y sacrifierois avec plaisir mon bien, mes soins, et même ma santé. C'est le grand devoir de l'homme, surtout de l'homme chrétien.' The next is nearer to the elder manner: 'Ayez une grande Charité pour l'amour de Dieu et une extrême politesse pour l'amour de vous même.' And here is a graver utterance than either: 'God has been so good as to write in all our hearts the duty that He expects from us, which is adoration and thanksgiving and doing all the good we can to our fellow creatures.'
It is extraordingry to note what an infinity of trouble Lord Chesterfield took to arouse and amuse his little pupil. Sometimes the letter is an anecdote, biographical or historical; sometimes a cunningly contrived French vocabulary, one of which,inter alia, comprehensively defines 'Les Graces' as 'Something gracefull, genteel, and engaging in the air and figure.' Others (like the admirable papers in 'The World') denounce the prevailing vice of drunkenness. 'Fuyez le vin, car c'est un poison lent, mais sur.' Occasionally a little diagram aids the exposition, as when a rude circle, with a tiny figure at top, stands for 'le petit Stanhope' and 'ses antipodes;' in other cases, the course of instruction in politeness and public speaking is diversified by definitions of similes and metaphors, epigrams, anagrams, andlogogriphes. Finally, there is a complete treatise, in fourteen epistles, on the 'Art of Pleasing,' from which we extract the following on wit and satire:
'When wit exerts itself in satyr it is a most malignant distemper; wit it is true may be shown in satyr, but satyr does not constitute wit, as most fools imagine it does. A man of real wit will find a thousand better occasions of showing it. Abstain therefore most carefully from satyr, which though it fall upon no particular person in company, and momentarily from the malignity of the human heart, pleases all; upon reflexion it frightens all too, they think it may be their turn next, and will hate you for what they find you could say of them more, than be obliged to you for what you do not say. Fear and hatred are next door neighbours. The more wit you have the more good nature and politeness you must show, to induce people to pardon your superiority, for that is no easy matter.'
Alas! and alas! that so much labour and patience should have been lost. For Philip the Second, though he made no secret marriage, was not a much greater success than Philip the First. He turned out a commonplace country gentleman, amiable, methodical, agricultural, but wholly overshadowed and obliterated by the fame of the accomplished statesman and orator who had directed his studies.
'The bows of eloquence are buried with the Archers.' It is impossible, even with the aid of the phonograph, to recapture the magnetic personality, the fervour of gesture that winged the words and carried conviction to the hearer. Equally impossible is it, in this age of egotisms and eccentricities that pass for character, to realize the fascination of those splendid manners for which Lord Chesterfield was celebrated.
The finished elegance, the watchful urbanity, the perfect ease and self-possession, which Fielding commended, and Johnson could not contest, are things too foreign to our restless overconsciousness to be easily intelligible. But we can at least call up—not without compassionate admiration—the pathetic picture of the deaf old gentleman who had been the rival of 'silver-tongued Murray' and the correspondent of Montesquieu, sitting down at seventy in his solitary study at Babiole * to write, in that wonderful hand of which Lord Carnarvon gives a facsimile, his periodical letter of advice to apetit bout d'hommeat Parson Dodd's in Southampton Row, concerning whose career in life he had formed the fondest—and the vainest—expectations.
* Babiole was His Lordship's country-house at Blackheath, soentitled in imitation of Bagatelle, the seat near Paris ofhis friend Madame la Marquise de Monconseil. It was also thename of a house of Madame de Pompadour.
TO the rigorous exactitudes of modern realism it may seem an almost hopeless task to revive the details of a day in a Twickenham Villa when George the Third was King. And yet, with the aid of Horace Walpole's letters, of the 'Walpoliana' of Pinkerton, and, above all, of the catalogue of Strawberry Hill printed by its owner in 1774, there is no insurmountable difficulty in deciding what must probably have been the customary course of events. Nothing is needed at the outset but to assume that you had arrived, late on the previous night, at the embattled Gothic building on the Teddington Road, and that the fatigues of your journey had left you little more than a vague notion of your host, and a fixed idea that the breakfast hour was nine. Then, after carrying with you into the chintz curtains of the Red Bedchamber an indistinct recollection of Richardson's drawings of Pope and his mother, and of Bermingham's 'owl cut in paper,' which you dimly make out with your candle on the walls, you would be waked at eight next morning by Colomb, the Swiss valet (as great a tyrant over his master as his compatriot Canton in the 'Clandestine Marriage'), and in due time would repair to the blue-papered and blue-furnished Breakfast Room, looking pleasantly on the Thames. Here, coasting leisurely round the apartment, you would probably pause before M. de Carmontel's double picture of your host's dead friend, Madame du Deffand, and her relative the Duchesse de Choiseul, or you would peer curiously at the view of Madame de Sevigné's hotel in the 'Rue Coulture St. Catherine.' Presently would come a patter of tiny feet, and a fat, and not very sociable, little dog, which had once belonged to the said Madame du Deffand, would precede its master, whom you would hear walking, with the stiff tread of an infirm person, from his bedroom on the floor above. Shortly afterwards would enter a tall, slim, frail-looking figure in a morning-gown, with a high, pallid forehead, dark brilliant eyes under drooping lids, and a friendly, but forced and rather unprepossessing smile. Tonton (as the little dog was called), after being cajoled into a semblance of cordiality, would be lifted upon a small sofa at his master's side, the teakettle and heater would arrive, and tea would be served in cups of fine old white embossed Japanese china. And then, the customary salutations exchanged and over, would gradually begin, in a slightly affected fashion, to which you speedily grow accustomed, that wonderful flow of talk which (like Praed's Vicar's)
'Slipped from politics to puns,
And passed from Mahomet to Moses,'—
that endless stream of admirably told stories, of recollections graphic and humorous, of sallies andbons mots, of which Horace Walpole's extraordinary correspondence is thecooledexpression, but of the vivacity and variety of which, enhanced as they were by the changes in the speaker's voice and look, and emphasized by his semi-French gesticulation, it is impossible to give any adequate idea. A glance across the river would suggest an anecdote of her Grace the Duchess of Queensberry: a falling spoon, amotby Lady Townshend. Upon yesterday's execution at Tyburn would follow a vivid picture of the deaths of Balmerino and Kilmarnock; or a reference to your ride from London of the night before, would usher in a full and particular account how the voluble and fascinating gentleman before you, with the great chalk stones in his fingers, was once all but shot through the head by the highwayman James Maclean.
Breakfast over, and a liberal bowl of bread-and-milk tossed out of window to the troops of squirrels that come flocking in from the high trees round the lawn, your host would invite you to make the tour of the grounds, adding (if it were May) that his favourite lilacs were well worth the effort. He would astonish you by going out in his slippers and without a hat; and, in reply to your ill-concealed astonishment, would laughingly compare himself to the Indian in the 'Spectator' who said he was 'all face.' Passing by the Abbot's garden, with its bright parterres, he would lead you to the pretty cottage he had built on the site of the old residence of his deceased tenant Richard Francklin, once printer of that scurrilous 'Craftsman' in which Pulteney and Bolingbroke had so persistently assailed his father. In its sunny, print-hung tea-room, with the 'Little Library' at the side, he would show you the picture of his friend Lady Hervey, once the 'beautiful Molly Lepel' of Pulteney and Chesterfield's ballad, and would tell you that the frame was carved by the same Grinling Gibbons to whom we owe the bronze statue of King James the Second in the Privy Garden at Whitehall. Thence you would pass to the chapel in the wood, with its stained-glass pictures of Henry the Third and his Queen from Bexhill Church, and its shrine from Santa Maria Maggiore at Rome; and he would explain that the roof was designed by that unimpeachable authority in Gothic, Mr. Chute of the Vyne, in Hampshire; that George Augustus Selwyn had given him the great earthen pot at the door; and that the carved bench in the ante-chapel had been contrived by no less a person than the son of the famous 'Ricardus Aristarchus,' Master of Trinity, the—
'mighty Scholiast, whose unwearied pains
Made Horace dull, and humbled Milton's strains—'
as he would quote from the 'Dunciad' of the late lamented Mr. Pope. Richard Bentley the younger, he would remind you, had also drawn some excellent illustrations to Gray (the originals of which he will show you later in the library); and meanwhile he invites your attention at the end of the winding walk to another masterpiece from the same ingenious brain—a huge oaken seat shaped like a shell, in which once sat together three of the handsomest women in England—the Duchess of Hamilton, the Duchess of Richmond, and the Countess of Ailesbury. If you were still intelligently interested, and your host still unfatigued (for he is capricious and easily tired), you would pass from the garden to the private printing-press, the 'Officina Arbuteana' as he christens it, next the neighbouring farmyard. Here you would be introduced to the superintendent and occasional secretary, Mr. Thomas Kirgate, who, if so minded, would exhibit to you a proof of Miss Hannah More's poem of 'Bishop Bonner's Ghost' (which his patron is kindly setting up for her), or then and there strike you off a piping-hot 'pull' of the latest quatrain to those charming Miss Berrys who are now inhabiting 'Little Strawberry' hard by, once tenanted by red-faced, good-humoured Mrs. Clive. As you return at last to the house, your guide would almost certainly pause in the Little Cloister at the entrance beside the blue and white china tub for goldfish in which was drowned that favourite cat whose fate was immortalized by Gray; and, lifting the label, he would read the poet's words:
''T was on this lofty Vase's side,
Where China's gayest Art has dy'd
The azure Flow'rs, that blow,
Demurest of the tabby kind,
The pensive Selima reclin'd,
Gaz'd on the Lake below.' *
* There is one of these labels in the Dyce Collection atSouth Kensington.
Once more under Bentley's japanned tin lantern in the gloomy little hall, your host, pending the scribbling of half-a-dozen pressing letters' to Lady Ossory, Mr. Pinkerton, or one or other of his many correspondents, would beg you to await him in the Picture Gallery. Here, long before you had exhausted your admiration of the Emperor Vespasian in basalt, or the incomparable Greek Eagle from the baths of Caracalla, he would resume his post ofcicerone, leading you almost at once to the portraits of his three beautiful nieces, Edward Walpole's daughters, one of whom, painted by Reynolds, had been fortunate enough to marry King George's own brother, William Henry, Duke of Gloucester (a fact of which her uncle Horace is ill-disguisedly proud). From the Gallery you would pass to the Round Drawing-Room, whose chief glory was Vasari's 'Bianca Capello;' and thence to the adjoining Tribune, a curious yellow-lit chamber, with semicircular recesses, in which were accumulated most of the choicest treasures of Strawberry,—miniatures by Cooper and the Olivers, enamels by Petitot and Zincke, gems from Italy, bas-reliefs in ivory, coins and seal-rings and reliquaries and filigree work, in the dispersed profusion of which you would afterwards dimly recall such items as a silver bell carved with masks and insects by Benvenuto Cellini, a missal attributed to Raphael, a bronze Caligula with silver eyes, and a white snuff-box with a portrait purporting to be a gift from Madame de Sévigné in the Elysian Fields, but sent in reality by the faithful Madame du Deffand. Each object would bring its train of associations and traditions; and the fading of the 'all-golden afternoon' would find your companion still promising fresh marvels in the yet unexplored rooms beyond, where are the speculum of cannel coal once used by the notorious starmonger, Dr. John Dee; the red hat of his Eminence Cardinal Wolsey; and the very spurs worn by King William the Third, of immortal memory, at the ever-glorious Battle of the Boyne.
With four o'clock would come dinner, eaten probably in the Refectory, a room consecrated chiefly to the family portraits, conspicuous among which, in blue velvet, was your host by Richardson. The repast was 'of Attic taste,' but with very little wine, as Walpole himself drank nothing but iced water, and 'coffee upstairs' was ordered with such promptitude as to afford the visitor but scanty leisure for lingering over the bottle. About five you migrated to the Round Drawing-Room, where your entertainer, after recommending you to replenish your box with Fribourg's snuff from a canister of which the hiding-place was an ancient marble urn in the window-seat, would take up his station on the sofa, and resume his inexhaustible flood of memories and reflections, always bright, often striking, and never wearisome. Once, perhaps, he would rise to exhibit the closet he had built for Lady Di. Beauclerk's seven drawings in soot-water to his own tragedy of the 'Mysterious Mother;' or he would adjourn for an hour to the Library, to turn over his unrivalled collection of Hogarth's prints; or to show you Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's 'Milton,' or the identical 'Iliad' and 'Odyssey' from which Pope made his translations, or the long row of books printed at the 'Officina Arbuteana.' But he would gravitate sooner or later to his old vantage-ground on the sofa, whence, unhasting, unresting, he would discourse most excellent anecdote into the small hours, when the chintz curtains of the Red Bedchamber would again receive his bewitched and bewildered, but still unsatiated, visitor. And so would end your day at Horace Walpole's Gothic Castle of Strawberry Hill.
AN auctioneer's catalogue—and particularly an auctioneer's catalogue more than a hundred years old—is not, at first sight, the most suggestive of subjects. And yet that issued in July, 1774, by Mr. Good, of 121 Fleet Street, still possesses considerable interest. For it is nothing less than an account, bald, indeed, and only moderately literary, of the 'Household [sic] Furniture, with the Select Collection of Scarce, Curious and Valuable Books, in English, Latin, Greek, French, Italian and other Languages, late the Library of Dr. Goldsmith, Deceased.' As one runs over the items, one seems to realize the circumstances. One seems almost to see Mr. Good's unemotional assistants, with their pens behind their ears, and their ink-bottles 'upon the excise principle' dangling from their button-holes, as they peer about the dingy Chambers at Brick Court, with the dark little closet of a bedroom at the back where the poor Doctor lay and died. We can imagine them sniffing superciliously at the chief pictorial adornment, 'The Tragic Muse, in a gold frame;' or drawing from its sheath, with an air of 'prentice connoisseurship, 'the steel-hilted sword, inlaid with gold,' or 'the black-hiltedditto,' not without speculations as to how those weapons would adorn their own ungainly persons in a holiday jaunt to White Conduit House or Marybone Gardens. We see them professionally prodding the faded mahogany sofa 'covered with blue morine' which had so often vibrated under the nervous twitchings of Johnson; appraising the 'compass card-tables' over which Boswell had dealt trumps to Reynolds; or critically weighing the teapot in which the 'Jessamy Bride' had more than once made tea. Their sordid commercial figures must have crossed and re-crossed before 'the very large dressing-glass' with 'mahogany frame,' which only a few weeks past had reflected the 'blue velvet,' and the 'straw-coloured' and 'silver-grey tamboured waistcoats' for which honest Mr. William Filby, at the sign of the Harrow in Water Lane, was never now to see the money. No doubt, too, they desecrated, with their Fleet Street mud, that famous Wilton carpet which had looked so sumptuous when it was first laid down but half-a-dozen years ago; and, if they were at all like their brethren of these days, they must have pished generally over the rest of those modest properties which, in the golden epoch when the 'Good Natur'd Man' seemed to promise perpetual prosperity, had excited so much awe and admiration among Goldsmith's humbler friends. 'Not much to tot up here, Docket!'—says Mr. Good's young man to his fellow. And we may fancy Mr. Docket assenting with a contemptuous extension of his under lip, enforced by the supplementary proposition that they should at once moisten their unpromising labours by adjourning to a pot of 'Parsons' Black Champagne' at the Tavern by the Temple Gates.
As for the books, the 'Select Collection' that the unsympathetic stock-takers turned over so irreverently with their feet as they lay in dusty ranges on the floor, it must be feared that worthy Mr. Good's description of them as 'Scarce, Curious and Valuable' is more creditable to his business traditions than his literary insight. Goldsmith was scarcely a book-lover in the sense in which that term is now used. The man who, as Hawkins relates, could tear half-a-dozen leaves out of a volume to save himself the trouble of transcription,—the man who underscored objectionable passages with his thumb-nail, as he once did to a new poem that belonged to Reynolds—wasnota genuineamateur du livre. They were a 'speculative lot' in all probability, the 'Brick Court Library;' and no doubt bore about them visibly the bumps and bruises of their transit 'in two returned post chaises' to the remote farm at Hyde, where their owner laboured at his vast 'Animated Nature.' Many of them had manifestly been collected to that end. Hill's 'Fossils,' 1748; Pliny's 'Historia Naturalis,' 1752; Gessner and Aldrovandus 'De Quadrupedibus;' Gouan's 'Histoire des Poissons,' 1770; Bohadsch's 'De Animalibus Marinis,' 1761; De Geer's 'Histoire des Insectes,' 1771, must all plainly have belonged to that series of purchases for the nonce which, he says in his preface, had so severely taxed his overburdened resources. In the classics he was fairly well equipped; and, as might be expected, he had many of the British poets, not to mention two copies of that indispensable manual, Mr. Edward Bysshe his treatise of the rhyming art.
But it is in French literature generally, and in French minstrels and playwrights in particular, that his store is richest. He has the 'Encyclopédie,' the 'Dictionnaire' and 'Recueil d'Anecdotes,' the 'Dictionnaire Littéraire,' the 'Dictionnaire Critique, Pittoresque et Sentencieux,' the 'Dictionnaire Gentilhomme;' he has many of theana—'Parrhasiana,' 'Ducatiana,' 'Nau-deana,' 'Patiniana,' although, oddly enough, there is no copy of the 'Ménagiana,' which not only supplied him with that ancient ballad of 'Monsieur de la Palice' out of which grew 'Madam Blaize,' but also with the little poem of Bernard de la Monnoye, which he paraphrased so brightly in the well-known stanzas beginning:
'Say, cruel Iris, pretty rake,
Dear mercenary beauty,
What annual offering shall I make,
Expressive of my duty?'
He has the works of Voltaire, Diderot, Fontenelle, Marmontel, Voiture; he has the plays of Brueys, La Chaussée, Dancourt, Destouches; he has many of the madrigalists and minor verse-men,—all of which possessions tend to corroborate that suspected close study of Gallic authors from which, as many hold, he derived not a little of the unfailing perspicuity of his prose, and most of the brightness and vivacity of his more familiar verse. Of his own works—and the fact is curious when one remembers some of his traditional characteristics—there are practically no examples, at least there is none catalogued. Their sole representative is an imperfect set of the 'History of the Earth and Animated Nature,' which had only recently been completed, and was published posthumously. Not a single copy of 'The Vicar,' of 'She Stoops to Conquer,' of 'The Citizen of the World,' of 'The Deserted Village'! Not even a copy of that rarest of rarities, the privately printed version of 'Edwin and Angelina,' which its author told his friend Cradock 'could not be amended'—although he was always amending it! Of course it is possible that his own writings had been withdrawn from Mr. Good's catalogue, or that they are included in the 'and others' of unspecified lots. But this is scarcely likely, and it may be accepted as a noteworthy fact that one of the most popular authors of his day did not, at his death, possess any of his own performances, with the exception of an incomplete specimen of his most laborious compilation.*
* Racine was in similar case. In the inventory of hiseffects, discovered some time since, there is not a singlecopy of his works.
Besides this, the only volumes that bear indirectly upon his work are the 'Memoirs' of the Cardinal de Retz, which he had used in 'The Bee,' the 'Lettres Persanes' of Montesquieu, which perhaps prompted 'The Citizen of the World,' and the 'Roman Comique' of M. Paul Scarron, which he had been translating in the latter months of its life—an accident which has left its mark in his last poem, the admirable 'Retaliation':
'Of old, when Scarron his companions invited,
Each guest brought his dish, and the feast was united.'
It may be that he had intended to prefix a biographical sketch or memoir to his version of the 'Comic Romance,' since the reference here is plainly to those famous picnic suppers in the Marais, to which, according to Scarron's biographer, M. Charles Baumet, came as guests—but * 'chacun apportant son plat'—the pink of dames, of courtiers, and of men of letters.
Where did they go, these books and household goods of 'Dr. Goldsmith, deceased'? It is to be presumed that he did not boast a book-plate, for none, to our knowledge, has ever been advertised, nor is there any record of one in the late Lord de Tabley's well-known 'Handbook,' so that the existing possessors of those precious volumes, in the absence of any autograph inscription, must entertain their treasures unawares. Of his miscellaneous belongings, the only specimens now well-known do not seem to have passed under the hammer of the Fleet Street auctioneer. His favourite chair, a dark, hollow-seated, and somewhat penitential looking piece of furniture, is preserved at South Kensington, where, not many years since, it was sketched, in company with his cane—perhaps the very cane that once crossed the back of Evans the bookseller—by Mr. Hugh Thomson, the clever young Irish artist to whom we are indebted for the most successful of recent illustrated editions of the | Vicar of Wakefield.' *
* Published by Macmillan in 1890. The sketch forms the tail-piece to the Preface, p. xxi.
Neither chair nor cane is in the Good Catalogue, nor does it make any mention of the worn old wooden writing-desk which was presented to Sir Henry Cole's museum by Lady Hawes. Her husband, Sir Benjamin Hawes, once Under Secretary at War, was the grandson of William Hawes, the 'surgeon apothecary' in the Strand, who was called in, late on that Friday night in March, when the poor Doctor was first stricken down with the illness which a few days later terminated fatally. William Hawes, a worthy and an able man, who subsequently obtained a physician's degree, and helped to found the Humane Society, was the author of the little pamphlet, now daily growing rarer, entitled 'An Account of the late Dr. Goldsmith's Illness, so far as relates to the Exhibition of Dr. James's Powders, etc., 1774' [April]. He dedicated it to Burke and Reynolds; and he published it (he says) partly to satisfy curiosity as to the circumstances of Goldsmith's death, partly to vindicate his own professional conduct in the matter. His narrative, in which discussion of the popular nostrum upon which Goldsmith so obstinately relied not unnaturally occupies a considerable part, is too familiar for repetition; and his remarks on Goldsmith as a writer are of the sign-post order. But his personal testimony to the character of 'his late respected and ingenious friend' may fitly close this paper: 'His [Goldsmith's] humanity and generosity greatly exceeded the narrow limits of his fortune; and those who were no judges of the literary merit of the Author, could not but love the Man for that benevolence by which he was so strongly characterized.'
AMONG its many drawbacks controversy has this in particular, that it sometimes embroils us with our closest friends. Writing recently of Lord Chesterfield, * we found occasion to comment upon certain couplets which the poet of the 'Progress of Error' addressed to his Lordship concerning his celebrated 'Letters.'
* See ante, p. 192.
What was said amounted to no more than that Cowper, in this instance at least, had not proved himself a Juvenal,—a sentiment which, seeing that his accredited biographer, Mr. Goldwin Smith, accuses him, as a satirist, of brandishing a whip without a lash, could scarcely be regarded as extravagant condemnation. Not the less, it has lain sorely upon our conscience. Of all the lettered figures of the eighteenth century, none is more dear to us than the gentle recluse of the sleepy little town by the Ouse. What!—the captivating letter-writer, the inventor of the immortal 'John Gilpin,' the delightful 'diva-gator' of the 'Task' and the tea-urn, the kindly proprietor of those 'canonized pets of literature,' Puss and Bess and Tiney—how, upon such a theme, could one excusably utter things harsh or censorious! It is impossible to picture him, when the curtains had fallen over those two windows, that looked upon the three-cornered market-place at Olney,—his head decorated (it may be) with the gaily ribboned cap which had been worked for him by his cousin Lady Hesketh, * his eyes milder than they seem in Romney's famous portrait, and placidly reading the 'Public Advertiser' to the click-click of Mrs. Unwin's stocking-needles,—without being smitten by a feeling of remorse. And opportunity for the expression of such remorse arrives pleasantly with an old-fashionedoctavowhich supplies the pretexts for a palinode in prose.
* A writing-cap worn by Cowper, his watch, a seal-ring givento him by his eousin Theodora (his first love), and a ballof worsted which he wound for Mrs. Unwin, were among therelics exhibited in the South Gallery of the GuelphExhibition of 1891. The exhibitors were the Rev. W. CowperJohnson, and the Rev. W. Cowper Johnson, jun.
Its title, 'writ large,' is 'Cowper, illustrated by a Series of Views, in, or near, the Park of Weston-Underwood, Bucks;' and it is lavishly 4 embellished' with those mellow old plates which denote that steel had not yet supplanted copper. The artists and engravers were James Storer and John Greig, topographical chalcographers of some repute in the days of conventional foregrounds, and trees that look like pressed-out patterns in seaweed. But the 'picturesque' designs give us a good idea of the landscape that Cowper saw when he walked from Silver End at Olney to his friends the Throckmortons (the 'Mr. and Mrs. Frog' of his letters) at Weston House. Here is the long bridge of 'The Task,'
'That with its wearisome, but needful length,
Bestrides the wintry flood'
between Olney and Emberton; here, bosomed in its embowering trees, the little farmhouse called the 'Peasant's Nest.' Here, again, in the valley, and framed between the feathery branches of the shrubbery, is the spire of Olney Church, from which one may almost fancy that
'the sound of cheerful bells .
Just undulates upon the list'ning ear;'
here, standing out whitely from the yews and evergreens of The Wilderness, the urn with the epitaph of Neptune. Farther on (a lovely little landscape) is the clump of poplars by the water (notthepoplars of the poem: those were already felled) which the poet mistook for elms; and here, lastly, is Cowper's own cottage at Weston, which, with its dormer windows, and its vines and jasmines, might have served as a model for Randolph Caldecott or Kate Greenaway. And, behold! ('blest be the art that can immortalize!') here is Mrs. Unwin in a high waist entering at the gate, while Cowper bids her welcome from the doorway.
Of Olney itself there are not many glimpses in the little volume. But the vignette on the title-page shows the tiny 'boudoir' or summerhouse, 'not much bigger than a sedan chair,' which stood—nay, stands yet—about midway between the red-brick house on the market-place and what was once John Xewton's vicarage. It is still, say the latest accounts, kept up by its present owner, and its walls and ceiling are covered with the autographs of pious pilgrims. In Storer's plate you look in at the open door, catching, through the window on the opposite side, part of the parsonage and of the wall in which was constructed the gate that enabled Cowper at all times to communicate with his clerical friend. Its exact dimensions are given as six feet nine by five feet five; and he must have been right in telling Lady Hesketh that if she came to see him they should be 'as close-pack'd as two wax figures in an old-fashioned picture-frame.' A trap-door or loose board in the floor covered a receptacle in which the previous tenant, an apothecary, had stored his bottles; and here, 'in the deep-delved earth,' one of Cowper's wisest counsellors, the Rev. William Bull of Newport Pagnell, the 'Carissimus Taurorum' of the letters, the
'smoke-inhaling Bull,
Always filling, never full,'
was wont to deposit his pipes and his tobacco. 'Having furnished it with a table and two chairs,' says Cowper, * here I write all that I write in summer time, whether to my friends or the public. It is secure from all noise, and a refuge from all intrusion, for intruders sometimes trouble me in the winter evenings at Olney, but (thanks to my boudoir!) I can now hide myself from them.'
The summer-house, * it has been stated, is still standing.
* Since this paper was first written, the summer-house, thegarden, and the 'Guinea Orchard'—a strip of field whichcame between Cowper's garden and that of the Parsonage—havebeen sold by auction, the purchaser being a local butcher.The sale took place in February, 1896.
But of another favourite haunt of Cowper, which preceded and co-existed with it, there are now no traces. This was the greenhouse.
''T is a bower of Arcadian sweets,
Where Flora is still in her prime,
A fortress to which she retreats
From the cruel assaults of the clime'—
he writes in his favourite rocking-horse metre, and most conventional language, bidding his Mary remark the beauty of the pinks which it has preserved through the frosts; and in mid-July, when the floor was carpeted, and the sun was excluded by an awning of mats, it became 'the pleasantest retreat in Olney.' 'We eat, drink, and sleep, where we always did,' he says to Newton; 'but here we spend all the rest of our time, and find that the sound of the wind in the trees, and the singing of birds, are much more agreeable to our ears than the incessant barking of dogs and screaming of children,' from both of which, it may be observed, they suffered considerably in the front of the house. Two years later he tells Mr. Unwin that 'our severest winter, commonly called the spring, is now over, and I find myself seated in my favourite recess, the greenhouse. In such a situation, so silent, so shady, where no human foot is heard, and where only my myrtles presume to peep in at the window, you may suppose I have no interruption to complain of, and that my thoughts are perfectly at my command. But the beauties of the spot are themselves an interruption, my attention being called upon by those very myrtles, by a double row of grass pinks, just beginning to blossom, and by a bed of beans already in bloom; and you are to consider it, if you please, as no small proof of my regard, that, though you have so many powerful rivals, I disengage myself from them all, and devote this hour entirely to you.'
Later still—a year later—he writes to Newton: 'My greenhouse is never so pleasant as when we are just upon the point of being turned out of it. The gentleness of the autumnal suns, and the calmness of this latter season, make it a much more agreeable retreat than we ever find it in the summer; when, the winds being generally brisk, we cannot cool it by admitting a sufficient quantity of air, without being at the same time incommoded by it. But now I sit with all the windows and the door wide open, and am regaled with the scent of every flower, in a garden as full of flowers as I have known how to make it. We keep no bees, but if I lived in a hive, I should hardly hear more of their music. All the bees in the neighbourhood resort to a bed of mignonette, opposite to the window, and pay me for the honey they get out of it by a hum, which, though rather monotonous, is as agreeable to my ear as the whistling of my linnets. All the sounds that Nature utters are delightful, at least in this country.' But he goes on, nevertheless, to except the braying of an ass; and from another letter it seems that the serene quietude of his bower was at times invaded by the noise of a quadruped of this kind (inimical to poets!) which belonged to a neighbour.
It was in passing from the greenhouse to the barn that Cowper encountered the viper, whose prompt taking off gives motive and point to that admirable littlelusus poeticus,—as Mr. Grimshawe condescendingly calls it,—the 'Colubriad,' and other memories cluster about this fragment paradise. Here 'lived happy prisoners' the two goldfinches celebrated in 'The Faithful Bird;' here he wrote 'The Task,' and, according to Mr. Thomas Wright, of Olney, it is to the stimulating environment of its myrtles and mignonette that we owe, if not the germ, at least the evolution, of 'John Gilpin.' Every one knows how, in the current story, Lady Austen's diverting narrative of the way in which a certain citizen 'of famous London town' rode out to celebrate the anniversary of his marriage, gradually seduced her listener from the moody melancholy which was fast overclouding him 'into a loud and hearty peal of laughter.' It 'made such an impression on his mind that at night he could not sleep; and his thoughts having taken the form of rhyme, he sprang from bed, and committed them to paper, and in the morning brought down to Mrs. Unwin the crude outline of "John Gilpin." All that day and for several days he secluded himself in the greenhouse, and went on with the task of polishing and improving what he had written. As he filled his slips of paper he sent them across the Market-place to Mr. Wilson, to the great delight and merriment of that jocular barber, who on several other occasions had been favoured with the first sight of some of Cowper's smaller poems. This version of the origin of "John Gilpin" differs, we are aware, from the one generally received, which represents the famous ballad as having been commenced and finished in a night; but that the facts here stated are accurate we have the authority of Mrs. Wilson; moreover, it has always been said in Olney that "John Gilpin" was written in the "greenhouse," and that the first person who saw the complete poem, and consequently the forerunner of that noble army who made merry over its drolleries, was William Wilson the barber.' *