Gifford and His Quarterly.

“Why is Lord Brougham like a sweeping manThat close by the pavement walks?Because when he’s done all the sweep that he canHe takes up hisBroomandValks!”

“Why is Lord Brougham like a sweeping man

That close by the pavement walks?

Because when he’s done all the sweep that he can

He takes up hisBroomandValks!”

As for Jeffrey, he became by his resolute industry and his literary graces and aptitudes one of the most admired and honored critics of Great Britain.

Our start-point to-day is on the Thames—in that devouring city of London, which very early in the century was laying its tentacles of growth on all the greenness that lay between Blackwall and Bayswater, and which—athwart the Thamesshores—strode blightingly from Clapham to Hackney.

It was, I believe, in the year 1809 that Mr. John Murray, the great publisher of London—stirred, perhaps, by some incentive talk of Walter Scott, or of other good Tory penmen, and emulous of the success which had attended Jeffrey’sReviewin the north, established a rival one—called simplyThe Quarterly—intended to represent the Tory interests as unflinchingly and aggressively as theEdinburghhad done Whig interests. The first editor was a William Gifford[40](a name worth remembering among those of British critics), who was born in Devonshire. He was the son of a dissolute house-painter, and went to sea in his youngdays, but was afterwards apprenticed to a shoemaker. Some piquant rhymes he made in those days attracting the attention of benevolent gentlemen, he was put in the way of schooling, and at Oxford, where he studied. It was while there he meditated, and perhaps executed, some of those clever translations from Persius and Juvenal, which he published somewhat later. He edited Ben Jonson’s works in a clumsy and disputatious way, and in some of his earlier, crude, satirical rhymes (Baviad) paid his respects to Madame Thrale in this fashion:

“See Thrale’s gay widow with a satchel roam,And bring in pomp laborious nothings home.”

“See Thrale’s gay widow with a satchel roam,

And bring in pomp laborious nothings home.”

Again he pounces upon the biographer of Dr. Johnson thus-wise:

“Boswell, aping with preposterous pride,Johnson’s worst frailties, rolls from side to side,His heavy head from hour to hour erects,Affects the fool, and is what he affects.”

“Boswell, aping with preposterous pride,

Johnson’s worst frailties, rolls from side to side,

His heavy head from hour to hour erects,

Affects the fool, and is what he affects.”

These lines afford a very good measure of his poetic grace and aptitude; but they give only aremote idea of his wonderful capacity for abusing people who did not think as he thought. He had a genius in this direction, which could not have discredited an editorial room in New York—or elsewhere. Walter Scott—a warm political friend—speaks of him as “a little man, dumpled up together, and so ill-made as to seem almost deformed;” and I think that kindly gentleman was disposed to attribute much of the critic’s rancor to his invalidism; but if we measure his printed bile in this way, there must be credited him not only his usual rheumatic twinges, but a pretty constant dyspepsia, if not a chronic neuralgia. Of a certainty he was a most malignant type of British party critics; and it is curious how the savors of its first bitterness do still linger about the pages of theQuarterly Review.

John Wilson Croker[41]will be best known to our readers as the editor of that edition of Boswell’s“Johnson,” to which I have alluded. Within the last ten years, however, his memoirs and correspondence, in two bulky volumes, have excited a certain languid interest, and given entertainment to those who are curious in respect to the political wire-pullings of the early part of this century in London. He was an ardent co-worker with Gifford in the early history of theQuarterly Review. He loved a lord every whit as well as Gifford, and by dint of a gentlemanly manner and gentlemanly associations was not limited to the “back-stairs way” of Mr. Gifford in courting those in authority. His correspondence with dukes and earls—to all of whom he is a “dear Croker”—abound; and his account of interviews with the Prince Regent, and of dinners at the Pavilion in Brighton, are quite Boswellian in their particularity and in their atmosphere of worship. There is also long account in the book to which I have called attention, of a private discourse by George IV., of which Mr. Croker was sole auditor; and it is hard to determine whether Croker is more elated by having the discourse to record, or Mr. Jennings by having such a record to edit.

This royal mention brings us once more, for a little space, to our background of kings. Of the old monarch, George III., we have had frequent and full glimpses. We wish to know something now of that new prince (whom we saw in our Scott chapter), but who in 1810, when his father’s faculties failed altogether, became Regent; and we wish to learn what qualities are in him and under what training they developed.

The old father had a substructure of good, hard sense that showed itself through all his obstinacies; for instance, when Dr. Markham, who was appointed tutor to his two oldest sons—Prince of Wales and Duke of York—asked how he should treat them, the old king said: “Treat them? Why, to be sure, as you would any gentleman’s sons! If they need the birch, give them the birch, as you would have done at Westminster.” But when they had advanced a bit, and a certain Dr. Arnold (a later tutor) undertook the same regimen, the two princes put their forces togetherand gave the doctor such a drubbing that he never tried birch again. But it was always a very close life the princes led in their young days; the old king was very rigorous in respect of hours and being out at night. By reason of which George IV. looked sharply after his opportunities, when they did come, and made up for that early cloisterhood by a large laxity of regimen.[42]Indeed, he opened upon a very glittering career of dissipations—the old father groaning and grumbling and squabbling against it vainly.

It was somewhere about 1788 or 1789, just when the French Revolution was beginning to throw its bloody foam over the tops of the Bastille, that temporary insanity in the old King George III. did for a very brief space bring the Prince into consequence as Regent. Of the happening of this, and of the gloom in the palace, there is story in the diary of Madame D’Arblay,[43]who was herselfin attendance upon the Queen. If, indeed, George III. had stayed mad from that date, and the Prince—then in his fullest vigor, and a great friend of Fox and other Liberal leaders—had come to the full and uninterrupted responsibility of the Regency, his career might have been very different. But the old king rallied, and for twenty years thereafter put his obstinacies and Tory caution in the way of the Prince, who, with no political royalties to engage him, and no important official duties (though he tried hard to secure military command), ran riot in the old way. He lavishes money on Carlton House; builds a palace for Mrs. Fitzherbert; coquets with Lady Jersey; affects the fine gentleman. No man in London was prouder of his walk, his cane, his club nonchalance, his taste in meats, his knowledge of wines, ragoûts, indelicate songs, and arts of the toilette. Withal, he is well-made, tall, of most graceful address, a capital story-teller, too; an indefatigable diner-out; a very fashion-plate in dress—corsetted, puffed out in the chest like a pouter pigeon; all the while running vigorously and scandalously in debt, while thefather is setting himself squarely against any further parliamentary grant in his favor. There are, however—or will be—relentings in the old King’s mind, if “Wales” will promise to settle down in life and marry his cousin, Caroline of Brunswick—if, indeed, he be not already married to Mrs. Fitzherbert, which some avow and some deny. It does not appear that the Prince is very positive in his declarations on this point—yes or no. So he filially yields and accedes to a marriage, which by the conditions of the bargain is to bring him £70,000 to pay his debts withal. She is twenty-seven—a good-looking, spirited Brunswicker woman, who sets herself to speaking English—nips in the bud some love-passages she has at home, and comes over to conquer the Prince’s affections—which she finds it a very hard thing to do. He is polite, however; is agreeably disposed to the marriage scheme, which finds exploitation with a great flourish of trumpets in the Chapel Royal of St. James. The old King is delighted with his niece; the old Queen is a little cool, knowing that the Prince does not care a penny for the bride,and believing that she ought to have found that out.

She does find it out, however, in good time; and finds out about Mrs. Fitzherbert and her fine house; and does give her Prince some very severe curtain lectures—beginning early in that branch of wifely duty. The Prince takes it in dudgeon; and the dudgeon grows bigger and bigger on both sides (as such things will); finally, a year or more later—after the birth of her daughter, the Princess Charlotte—proposals for separation are passed between them (with a great flourish of diplomacy and golden sticks), and accepted with exceeding cordiality on both sides.

Thereafter, the Prince becomes again a man about town—very much about town indeed. Everybody in London knows his great bulk, his fine waistcoats, his horses, his hats and his wonderful bows, which are made with a grace that seems in itself to confer knighthood. For very many years his domestic life,—what little there was of it,—passed without weighty distractions. His Regency when established (1811) was held through a very important period of Britishhistory; those great waves of Continental war which ended in Waterloo belonged to it; so did the American war of 1812; so did grave disaffection and discontent at home. He did not quarrel with his cabinets, or impede their action; he learned how to yield, and how to conciliate. Were it only for this, ’tis hardly fair to count him a mere posture-master and a dandy.

He loved, too, and always respected his old mother, the Queen of George III.;[44]loved too,—in a way—and more than any other creature in the world except himself, that darling daughter of his, the Princess Charlotte, who at seventeen became the bride of Leopold, afterward King of Belgium,—she surviving the marriage only a year. Her memory is kept alive by the gorgeous marble cenotaph you will see in St. George’s Chapel, Windsor.

It was only when George IV. actually ascended the throne in 1820 that his separated wife put in a disturbing appearance again; she had been living very independently for some years on the Continent;and it occurred to her—now that George was actually King—that it would be a good thing, and not impinge on the old domestic frigidities, to share in some of the drawing-room splendors and royalties of the British capital. To George IV. it seemed very awkward; so it did to his cabinet. Hence came about those measures for a divorce, and the famous trial of Queen Caroline, in which Brougham won oratorical fame by his brilliant plea for the Queen. This was so far successful as to make the ministerial divorce scheme a failure; but the poor Queen came out of the trial very much bedraggled; whether her Continental life had indeed its criminalities or not, we shall never positively know. Surely no poor creature was ever more sinned against than she, in being wheedled into a match with such an unregenerate partaker in all deviltries as George IV. But she was not of the order of women out of which are made martyrs for conscience’s sake. It was in the year 1821 that death came to her relief, and her shroud at last whitened a memory that had stains.

We freshen the air now with quite another presence. Yet I am to speak of a man whose life was full of tumult, and whose work was full of learning and power—sometimes touched with infinite delicacy.

He was born four years after Sydney Smith and Walter Scott—both of whom he survived many years; indeed he lacked only eleven years of completing a century when he died in Florence, where most of his active—or rather inactive—life was passed. I allude to the poet and essayist, Walter Savage Landor.[45]He is not what is called a favorite author; he never was; he never will be. In fact, he had such scorn of popular applause, that if it had ever happened to him in moments of dalliance with the Muses, and of frolic with rhythmic language, to set such music afloat as the world would have repeated and loved to repeat, I think he would have torn the music out in disdain forthe approval of a multitude. Hear what he says, in one of his later poetic utterances:—

“Never was I impatient to receiveWhatanyman could give me. When a friendGave me my due, I took it, and no more,Serenely glad, because that friend was pleased.I seek not many; many seek not me.If there are few now seated at my board,I pull no children’s hair because they munchGilt gingerbread, the figured and the sweet,Or wallow in the innocence of whey;Givemewild boar, the buck’s broad haunch giveme,And wine that time has mellowed, even as timeMellows the warrior hermit in his cell.”[46]

“Never was I impatient to receive

Whatanyman could give me. When a friend

Gave me my due, I took it, and no more,

Serenely glad, because that friend was pleased.

I seek not many; many seek not me.

If there are few now seated at my board,

I pull no children’s hair because they munch

Gilt gingerbread, the figured and the sweet,

Or wallow in the innocence of whey;

Givemewild boar, the buck’s broad haunch giveme,

And wine that time has mellowed, even as time

Mellows the warrior hermit in his cell.”[46]

Such verse does not invite a large following, nor did the man. Pugnacious, tyrannic, loud-mouthed, setting the world’s and the Church’s rubrics at defiance; yet weighing language to the last jot and tittle of its significance, and—odd-whiles—putting little tendernesses of thought and far-reaching poetic aspirations into such cinctures of polished verse—so jewelled, so compact, so classic, so fine—that their music will last and be admired as long, I think, as English speechlasts. Apart from all this man wrote, there is a strange, half-tragic interest in his life, which will warrant me in telling you more of him than I have told of many whose books are more prized by you.

He was the son of a Dr. Landor, of Warwick, in middle England, who by reason of two adroit marriages was a man of fortune, and so secured eventually a very full purse to the poet, who if he had depended only on the sale of his literary wares, would have starved. Language was always young Landor’s hobby; and he came, by dint of good schooling, to such dexterity in the use of Latin, as to write it in verse or prose with nearly the same ease as English. He loved out-of-door pursuits in boyhood and all his life; was greatly accomplished, his biographer says, in fishing—especially with a cast-net; and of the prey that sometimes came into such net there is this frolicsome record:

“In youth ’twas there I used to scareA whirring bird, or scampering hare,And leave my book within a nookWhere alders lean above the brook,To walk beyond the third mill-pondAnd meet a maiden fair and fondExpecting me beneath a treeOf shade for two, but not for three.Ah, my old Yew, far out of view,Why must I bid you both adieu?”[47]

“In youth ’twas there I used to scare

A whirring bird, or scampering hare,

And leave my book within a nook

Where alders lean above the brook,

To walk beyond the third mill-pond

And meet a maiden fair and fond

Expecting me beneath a tree

Of shade for two, but not for three.

Ah, my old Yew, far out of view,

Why must I bid you both adieu?”[47]

At Oxford he was a marked man for his cleverness and for his audacities; these last brought him to grief there, and going home upon his rustication, he quarrelled with his father. Thereafter we find him in London, where he publishes his first little booklet of poems (1795); only twenty then; counted a fierce radical; detesting old George III. with his whole heart; admiring the rebel George Washington and declaring it; loving the French, too, with their liberty and fraternity song, until it was silenced by the cannonading of Napoleon; thenceforward, he counts that people a nation of “monkeys, fit only to be chained.”

But Landor never loved London. We find him presently wandering by the shores of Wales, and among its mountains. Doubtless he takes hiscast-net with him; the names of Ianthé and Ioné decorate occasional verses; a certain Rose Aylmer he encounters, too, who loans him a book (by Clara Reeve), from a sketch in which he takes hint for his wild, weird poem ofGebir, his first long poem—known to very few—perhaps not worth the knowing. It is blind in its drift; war and pomp and passion in it—ending with a poisoned cup; and contrasting with these, such rural beatitudes as may be conjured under Afric skies, with tender love-breezes, ending in other beatitudes in coral palaces beneath the sea. This, at any rate, is the phantasmic outline which a reading leaves upon my own memory. Perhaps another reader may be happier.

That shadowy Rose Aylmer, through whom the suggestion for the poem came, was the real daughter of Lord Aylmer, of the near Welsh country; what Landor’s intimacy with her may have been, in its promise or its reach, we do not know; but we do know that when she died, somewhat later and in a far country, the poet gave her name embalmment in those wonderful little verses, which poor Charles Lamb, it is said, in his later days, wouldrepeat over and over and over, never tiring of the melody and the pathos. Here they are:—

“Ah, what avails the sceptred race,Ah, what the form divine!What—every virtue, every grace!Rose Aylmer, all were thine.Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyesMay weep, but never see,A night of memories and of sighsI consecrate to thee!”

“Ah, what avails the sceptred race,

Ah, what the form divine!

What—every virtue, every grace!

Rose Aylmer, all were thine.

Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes

May weep, but never see,

A night of memories and of sighs

I consecrate to thee!”

Meantime, growing into a tempestuous love for the wild Welsh country, he bargains for a great estate, far up in a valley which opens down upon the larger valley in which lies Abergavenny; and being rich now by reason of his father’s death, parts with his beautiful ancestral properties in the Warwickshire region, lavishing a large portion of the sales-money upon the savagery of the new estate in Wales. He plants, he builds, he plays the monarch in those solitudes. He marries, too, while this mountain passion is on him, a young girl of French or Swiss extraction—led like a lamb into the lion’s grasp. But the first Welsh quarrel of this poet-monarch—who was severelyclassic, and who fed himself all his life through on the thunder-bolts of Jupiter—was with his neighbors; next with his workmen; then with his tenants; then the magistrates; last with everybody; and in a passion of disgust, he throws down his walls, turns astray his cattle, lets loose his mountain tarns, and leaving behind him the weltering wreck of his half-built home, goes over with his wife to Jersey, off the coast of Normandy. There she, poor, tired, frighted, worried bird—maybe with a little of the falcon in her—would stay;hewould not. So he dashes on incontinently—deserting her, and planting himself in mid-France at the old city of Tours, where he devotes himself to study.

This first family tiff, however, gets its healing, and—his wife joining him—they go to Como, where Southey (1817) paid them a visit; this poet had been one of the first and few admirers ofGebir, which fact softened the way to very much of mutual and somewhat over-strained praises between these two.[48]From Como Landor went toPisa—afterward to Florence, his home thenceforth for very many years; first in the town proper and then in a villa at Fiesole from which is seen that wondrous view—none can forget who have beheld it—of the valley, which seems a plain—of the nestling city, with its great Brunelleschi dome, its arrow-straight belfry of Giotto, its quaint tower of the Palazzo Vecchio, its cypress sentinels on the Boboli heights, its River Arno shining and winding, and stealing away seaward from the amphitheatre of hills—on whose slopes are dotted white convents, sleeping in the sun, and villas peeping out from their cloakings of verdure, and the gray shimmer of olive orchards.

It was in Florence that Landor wrote the greater part of thoseImaginary Conversationswhich have given him his chief fame; but which, very possibly, may be outlived in the popular mind by the wonderful finish and the Saxon force which belong to many of his verselets.

The conversations are just what their name implies—the talk of learned, or distinguished men, on such topics as they were supposed to be most familiar with; allimagined, and set forth by the brain of Landor, who took a strange delight in thus playing with the souls of other men and making them the puppets of his will. One meets in his pages Roger Ascham and Lady Jane Grey, Milton and Andrew Marvel, and Achilles and Helena; then we are transported from Mount Ida to the scene of a homely colloquy between Washington and Franklin—about monarchy and Republicanism. Again we have Leofric and Godiva telling their old story with a touching dramatic interest; and can listen—if we will—to long and dullish dispute between Dr. Johnson and Horne Tooke, about Language and its Laws; from this—in which Landor was always much interested—we slip to the Philo-Russianism of a talk between Peter the Great and Alexis. There are seven great volumes of it all—which must belong to all considerable libraries, private or other, and which are apt to keep very fresh and uncut. Of course there is no logical continuity—nofull exposition of a creed, or a faith, or a philosophy. It is a great, wide, eloquent, homely jumble; one bounces from rock to rock, or from puddle to puddle (for there are puddles) at the will of this great giant driver of the chariot of imaginary talk.[49]There are beauties of expression that fascinate one; there are sentences so big with meaning as to bring you to sudden pause; there are wearisome chapters about the balance of French verselets, in which he sets up the poor Abbé Delille on rhetorical stilts—only to pelt him down; there are page-long blotches of crude humor, and irrelevant muddy tales, that you wish were out. As sample of his manner, I give one or two passages at random. Speaking of Boileau, he says:—

“In Boileau there is really more of diffuseness than of brevity [he loves thus to slap a popular belief straight in the face]; few observe this, because [Boileau] abounds in short sentences; and few are aware that sentences may be very short, and the writer very prolix; as half a dozenstones rising out of a brook give the passenger more trouble than a plank across it.” [He abounds in short, pert similes of this sort which seem almost to carry an argument in them.][Again] “Caligula spoke justly and admirably when he compared the sentences of Senecato sand without lime.”[And once more] “He must be a bad writer, or, however, a very indifferent one, to whom there are no inequalities. The plants of such table-land are diminutive and never worth gathering.… The vigorous mind has mountains to climb and valleys to repose in. Is there any sea without its shoal? On that which the poet navigates, he rises intrepidly as the waves riot around him, and sits composedly as they subside.…”“Level the Alps one with another, and where is their sublimity? Raise up the Vale of Tempe to the downs above, and where are those sylvan creeks and harbors in which the imagination watches while the soul reposes, those recesses in which the gods partook of the weaknesses of mortals, and mortals the enjoyments of the gods.”

[Again] “Caligula spoke justly and admirably when he compared the sentences of Senecato sand without lime.”

[And once more] “He must be a bad writer, or, however, a very indifferent one, to whom there are no inequalities. The plants of such table-land are diminutive and never worth gathering.… The vigorous mind has mountains to climb and valleys to repose in. Is there any sea without its shoal? On that which the poet navigates, he rises intrepidly as the waves riot around him, and sits composedly as they subside.…”

“Level the Alps one with another, and where is their sublimity? Raise up the Vale of Tempe to the downs above, and where are those sylvan creeks and harbors in which the imagination watches while the soul reposes, those recesses in which the gods partook of the weaknesses of mortals, and mortals the enjoyments of the gods.”

The great learning of Landor and his vast information, taken in connection with his habits of self-indulgence (often of indolence), assure us that he must have had the rare talent, and the valuable one, of riddling books—that is, of skimming over them—with such wonderfully quick exercise of wit and judgment as to segregate the valuable from the valueless parts. ’Tis not a badquality; nor is it necessarily (as many suppose) attended by superficiality. The superficial man does indeed skim things; but he pounces as squarely and surely upon the bad as upon the good; he works by mechanical process and progression—here a sentence and there a sentence; but the man who can race through a book well (as did Dr. Johnson and Landor), carries to the work—in his own genius for observation and quick discernment—a chemical mordant that bites and shows warning effervescence, and a signal to stay, only where there is something strong to bite.

Meanwhile, we have a sorry story to tell of Landor’s home belongings. There is a storm brewing in that beautiful villa of Fiesole. Children have been born to the house, and he pets them, fondles them—seems to love them absorbingly. Little notelets which pass when they are away, at Naples, at Rome, are full of pleasantest paternal banter and yearning. But those children have run wild and are as vagrant as the winds.

The home compass has no fixed bearings andpoints all awry—the mother, never having sympathy with the work which had tasked Landor in those latter years, has, too, her own outside vanities and a persistent petulance, which breaks out into rasping speech when Jupiter flings his thunder-bolts. So Landor, in a strong rage of determination, breaks away: turns his back on wife and children—providing for them, however, generously—and goes to live again at Bath, in England.

For twenty-three years he stays there, away from his family (remembering, perhaps, in self-exculpating way, how Shakespeare had once done much the same), rambling over his old haunts, writing new verse, revamping old books, petting his Pomeranian dog, entertaining admiring guests, fuming and raving when crossed. He was more dangerously loud, too, than of old; and at last is driven away, to escape punishment for some scathing libels into which a storm of what he counted righteous rage has betrayed him. It must have been a pitiful thing to see this old, white-haired man—past eighty now—homeless, as good as childless, skulking, as it were, in London, justbefore sailing for the Continent,—appearing suddenly at Forster’s house, seated upon his bed there, with Dickens in presence, mumbling about Latin poetry and its flavors!

He finds his way to Genoa, then to Florence, then to the Fiesole Villa once more; but it would seem as if there were no glad greetings on either side; and in a few days estrangement comes again, and he returns to Florence. Twice or thrice more those visits to Fiesole are repeated, in the vague hope, it would seem, floating in the old man’s mind, that by some miracle of heaven, aspects would change there—or perhaps in him—and black grow white, and gloom sail away under some new blessed gale from Araby. But it does never come; nor ever the muddied waters of that home upon the Florentine hills flow pure and bright again.

He goes back—eighty-five now—toothless, and trembling under weight of years and wranglings, to the Via Nunziatina, in Florence; he has no means now—having despoiled himself for thebenefit of those living at his Villa of Fiesole, who will not live with him, or he with them; he is largely dependent upon a brother in England. He passes a summer, in these times, with the American sculptor Story. He receives occasional wandering friends; has a new pet of a dog to fondle.

There is always a trail of worshipping women and poetasters about him to the very last; but the bad odor of his Bath troubles has followed him; Normanby, the British Minister, will give him no recognition; but there is no bending, no flinching in this great, astute, imperious, headstrong, ill-balanced creature. Indeed, he carries now under his shock of white hair, and in his tottering figure, a stock of that coarse virility which has distinguished him always—which for so many has its charm, and which it is hard to reconcile with the tender things of which he was capable;—for instance, that interview of Agamemnon and Iphigenia—so cunningly, delicately, and so feelingly told—as if the story were all his own, and had no Greek root—other than what found hold in the greensward of English Warwickshire. And Iclose our talk of Landor, by citing this: Iphigenia has heard her doom (you know the story); she must die by the hands of the priest—or, the ships, on which her father’s hopes and his fortunes rest, cannot sail. Yet, she pleads;—there may have been mistakes in interpreting the cruel oracle,—there may be hope still,—

“The Father placed his cheek upon her headAnd tears dropt down it; but, the king of menReplied not: Then the maiden spoke once more,—‘O, Father, says’t thou nothing? Hear’st thou notMe, whom thou ever hast, until this hour,Listened to—fondly; and awakened meTo hear my voice amid the voice of birdsWhen it was inarticulate as theirs,And the down deadened it within the nest.’He moved her gently from him, silent still:And this, and this alone, brought tears from herAlthough she saw fate nearer: then, with sighs,—‘I thought to have laid down my hair beforeBenignant Artemis, and not have dimmedHer polisht altar with my virgin blood;I thought to have selected the white flowersTo please the Nymphs, and to have asked of eachBy name, and with no sorrowful regret,Whether, since both my parents willed the change,I might at Hymen’s feet bend my clipt brow,And—(after those who mind us girls the most)Adore our own Athena, that she wouldRegard me mildly with her azure eyes;But—Father! to see you no more, and seeYour love, O Father! go, ere I am gone.’Gently he moved her off, and drew her back,Bending his lofty head far over hers,And the dark depths of nature heaved and burst:He turned away: not far, but silent still:She now first shuddered; for in him—so nigh,So long a silence seemed the approach of deathAnd like it. Once again, she raised her voice,—‘O Father! if the ships are now detainedAnd all your vows move not the Gods aboveWhen the knife strikes me, there will be one prayerThe less to them; and, purer can there beAny, or more fervent, than the daughter’s prayerFor her dear father’s safety and success?’A groan that shook him, shook not his Resolve.An aged man now entered, and withoutOne word, stept slowly on, and took the wristOf the pale maiden. She looked up and sawThe fillet of the priest, and calm cold eyes:Then turned she, where her parent stood and cried,—‘O, Father! grieve no more! the ships can sail!’”

“The Father placed his cheek upon her head

And tears dropt down it; but, the king of men

Replied not: Then the maiden spoke once more,—

‘O, Father, says’t thou nothing? Hear’st thou not

Me, whom thou ever hast, until this hour,

Listened to—fondly; and awakened me

To hear my voice amid the voice of birds

When it was inarticulate as theirs,

And the down deadened it within the nest.’

He moved her gently from him, silent still:

And this, and this alone, brought tears from her

Although she saw fate nearer: then, with sighs,—

‘I thought to have laid down my hair before

Benignant Artemis, and not have dimmed

Her polisht altar with my virgin blood;

I thought to have selected the white flowers

To please the Nymphs, and to have asked of each

By name, and with no sorrowful regret,

Whether, since both my parents willed the change,

I might at Hymen’s feet bend my clipt brow,

And—(after those who mind us girls the most)

Adore our own Athena, that she would

Regard me mildly with her azure eyes;

But—Father! to see you no more, and see

Your love, O Father! go, ere I am gone.’

Gently he moved her off, and drew her back,

Bending his lofty head far over hers,

And the dark depths of nature heaved and burst:

He turned away: not far, but silent still:

She now first shuddered; for in him—so nigh,

So long a silence seemed the approach of death

And like it. Once again, she raised her voice,—

‘O Father! if the ships are now detained

And all your vows move not the Gods above

When the knife strikes me, there will be one prayer

The less to them; and, purer can there be

Any, or more fervent, than the daughter’s prayer

For her dear father’s safety and success?’

A groan that shook him, shook not his Resolve.

An aged man now entered, and without

One word, stept slowly on, and took the wrist

Of the pale maiden. She looked up and saw

The fillet of the priest, and calm cold eyes:

Then turned she, where her parent stood and cried,—

‘O, Father! grieve no more! the ships can sail!’”

When we think of Landor, let us forget his wrangles—forget his wild impetuosities—forget his coarsenesses, and his sad, lonely death; and—instead—keep in mind, if we can, that sweet picture I have given you.

It was some two years before George IV. came to the Regency, and at nearly the same date with the establishment of Murray’sQuarterly, that Mr. Leigh Hunt,[50]in company with his brother John Hunt, set up a paper called theExaminer—associated in later days with the strong names of Fonblanque and Forster. This paper was of a stiffly Whiggish and radical sort, and very out-spoken—so that when George IV., as Regent, seemed to turn his back on old Whig friends, and show favors to the Tories (as he did), Mr. Leigh Hunt wrote such sneering and abusive articles about the Regent that he was prosecuted, fined, and clapped into prison, where he stayed two years. They were lucky two years for him—making reputation for his paper and for himself; his friends and family dressed up his prison room with flowers (he loved overmuchlittle luxuries of that sort); Byron, Moore, Godwin, and the rest all came to see him; and there he caught the first faint breezes of that popular applause which blew upon him in a desultory and rather languid way for a good many years afterward—not wholly forsaking him when he had grown white-haired, and had brought his delicate, fine, but somewhat feeble pen into the modern courts of criticism.

I do not suppose that anybody in our day goes into raptures over the writings of Leigh Hunt; nevertheless, we must bring him upon our record—all the more since there was American blood in him. His father, Isaac Hunt, was born in the Barbadoes, and studied in Philadelphia; in the latter city, Dr. Franklin and Tom Paine used to be visitors at his grandfather’s house. At the outbreak of the Revolution, Hunt’s father, who—notwithstanding his Philadelphia wife—was a bitter loyalist, went to England—his departure very much quickened by some threats of punishing his aggressive Toryism. He appears in England as a clergyman—ultimately wedded to Unitarian doctrines; finding his way sometimesto the studio of Benjamin West—talking over Pennsylvania affairs with that famous artist, and encountering there, as it chanced, John Trumbull, a student in painting—who in after years bequeathed an art-gallery to Yale College. It happens, too, that this Colonel Trumbull, in 1812, when the American war was in progress, was suspected as a spy, and escaped grief mainly by the intervention of Isaac Hunt.

The young Hunt began early to write—finding his way into journalism of all sorts; his name associated sooner or later withThe News, and dramatic critiques; with theExaminer, theReflector, theIndicator, theCompanion, and theLiberal—for which latter he dragged his family down into Italy at the instance of Byron or Shelley, or both. ThatLiberalwas intended to astonish people and make the welkin ring; but the Italian muddle was a bad one, theLiberalgoing under, and an ugly quarrel setting in; Hunt revenging himself afterward by writingLord Byron and his Contemporaries,—a book he ultimately regretted: he was never strong enough to make his bitterness respected. Honeyed words became himbetter; and these he dealt out—wave upon wave—on all sorts of unimportant themes. Thus, he writes upon “Sticks”; and again upon “Maid-servants”; again on “Bees and Butterflies” (which is indeed very pretty); and again “Upon getting up of a cold morning”—in which he compassionates those who are haled out of their beds by “harpy-footed furies”—discourses on his own experience and sees his own breath rolling forth like smoke from a chimney, and the windows frosted over.

“Then the servant comes in: ‘It is very cold this morning, is it not?’ ‘Very cold, sir.’ ‘Very cold, indeed, isn’t it?’ ‘Very cold, indeed, sir.’ ‘More than usually so, isn’t it, even for this weather?’ ‘Why, sir, I think itis, sir.’… And then the hot water comes: ‘And is it quite hot? And isn’t it too hot?’ And what ‘an unnecessary and villainous custom this is of shaving.’”

Whereupon he glides off, in words that flow as easily as water from a roof—into a disquisition upon flowing beards—instancing Cardinal Bembo and Michelangelo, Plato and the Turks. Listen again to what he has to say in hisIndicatorupon “A Coach”:—

“It is full of cushions and comfort; elegantly colored inside and out; rich yet neat; light and rapid, yet substantial. The horses seem proud to draw it. The fat and fair-wigged coachman lends his sounding lash, his arm only in action, and that but little; his body well set with its own weight. The footman, in the pride of his nonchalance, holding by the straps behind, and glancing down sideways betwixt his cocked hat and neckcloth, standing swinging from East to West upon his springy toes. The horses rush along amidst their glancing harness. Spotted dogs leap about them, barking with a princely superfluity of noise. The hammer cloth trembles through all its fringe. The paint flashes in the sun.”

Nothing can be finer—if one likes that sort of fineness. We follow such a writer with no sense of his having addressed our intellectual nature, but rather with a sense of pleasurable regalement to our nostrils by some high wordy perfume.

Hawthorne, inOur Old Home, I think, tells us that even to extreme age, the boyishness of the man’s nature shone through and made Hunt’s speech like the chirp of a bird; he never tired of gathering his pretty roses of words. It is hard to think of such a man doing serious service in the role of radical journalist—as if hecouldspeak dangerous things! And yet, who can tell? Theysay Robespierre delighted in satin facings to his coat, and was never without hisboutonnière.

We all know the figure of Harold Skimpole, in Dickens’sBleak House, with traits so true to Leigh Hunt’s, that the latter’s friends held up a warning finger, and said: “For shame!” to the novelist. Indeed, I think Dickens felt relentings in his later years, and would have retouched the portrait; but a man who paints with flesh and blood pigments cannot retouch.

Certain it is that the household of Hunt was of a ram-shackle sort, and he and his always very much out at ends. Even Carlyle, who was a neighbor at Chelsea, was taken aback at the easy way in which Hunt confronted the butcher-and-baker side of life; and the kindly Mrs. Carlyle drops a half-querulous mention of her shortened larder and the periodic borrowings of the excellent Mrs. Hunt.

But over all this we stretch a veil now, woven out of the little poems that he has left. He wrote no great poems, to be sure; for here, as inhis prose, he is earnestly bent on carving little baskets out of cherry-stones—little figures on cherry-stones—dainty hieroglyphics, but always on cherry-stones!

His “Rimini,” embodying that old Dantesque story about Giovanni and Paolo and Francesca, is his longest poem. There are exceedingly pretty and delicate passages in it; I quote one or two:

“For leafy was the road with tall arrayOn either side of mulberry and bay,And distant snatches of blue hills between;And there the alder was, with its bright green,And the broad chestnut, and the poplar’s shootThat, like a feather, waves from head to foot;With ever and anon majestic pines;And still, from tree to tree, the early vinesHung, garlanding the way in amber lines.…And then perhaps you entered upon shades,Pillowed with dells and uplands ’twixt the gladesThrough which the distant palace, now and then,Looked forth with many windowed ken—A land of trees which, reaching round about,In shady blessing stretched their old arms outWith spots of sunny opening, and with nooksTo lie and read in—sloping into brooks,Where at her drink you started the slim deer,Retreating lightly with a lovely fear.And all about the birds kept leafy house,And sung and sparkled in and out the boughs,And all about a lovely sky of blueClearly was felt, or down the leaves laughed through.”

“For leafy was the road with tall array

On either side of mulberry and bay,

And distant snatches of blue hills between;

And there the alder was, with its bright green,

And the broad chestnut, and the poplar’s shoot

That, like a feather, waves from head to foot;

With ever and anon majestic pines;

And still, from tree to tree, the early vines

Hung, garlanding the way in amber lines.

…

And then perhaps you entered upon shades,

Pillowed with dells and uplands ’twixt the glades

Through which the distant palace, now and then,

Looked forth with many windowed ken—

A land of trees which, reaching round about,

In shady blessing stretched their old arms out

With spots of sunny opening, and with nooks

To lie and read in—sloping into brooks,

Where at her drink you started the slim deer,

Retreating lightly with a lovely fear.

And all about the birds kept leafy house,

And sung and sparkled in and out the boughs,

And all about a lovely sky of blue

Clearly was felt, or down the leaves laughed through.”

And so on—executed with ever so much of delicacy—but not a sign or a symbol of the grave and melancholy tone which should equip, even to the utmost hem of its descriptive passages, that tragic story of Dante.

Those deft, little feathery touches—about deer, and birds, and leafy houses, are not scored with the seriousness which in every line and pause should be married with the intensity of the story. The painting of Mr. Watts, of the dead Francesca—ghastly though it be—has more in it to float one out into the awful current of Dante’s story than a world of the happy wordy meshes of Mr. Hunt. A greater master would have brought in, maybe, all those natural beauties of the landscape—the woods, the fountains, the clear heaven—but they would all have been toned down to the low, tragic movement, which threatens, and creeps on and on, and which dims even the blue sky with forecast of its controlling gloom.

There is no such inaptness or inadequacy where Leigh Hunt writes of crickets and grasshoppers and musical boxes. In his version of the old classic story of “Hero and Leander,” however, the impertinence (if I may be pardoned the language) of his dainty wordy dexterities is even more strikingly apparent.HisHero, waiting for her Leander, beside the Hellespont,

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