Eighteenth Century Vignettes

XV. GOLDSMITH'S LIBRARY

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 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-hilted

ditto

,' 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 – was

not

 a genuine

amateur 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 the

ana

– '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.

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28

  Racine was in similar case. In the inventory of his effects, discovered some time since, there is not a single copy 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.'

29

29

  Published by Macmillan in 1890. The sketch forms the tailpiece 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' . 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 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.'

XVI. IN COWPER'S ARBOUR

AMONG its many drawbacks controversy has this in particular, that it sometimes embroils us with our closest friends. Writing recently of Lord Chesterfield,

30

30

  See ante, p. 192.

 we found occasion to comment upon certain couplets which the poet of the 'Progress of Error' addressed to his Lordship concerning his celebrated 'Letters.'

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,

31

31

  A writing-cap worn by Cowper, his watch, a seal-ring given to him by his eousin Theodora (his first love), and a ball of worsted which he wound for Mrs. Unwin, were among the relics exhibited in the South Gallery of the Guelph Exhibition of 1891. The exhibitors were the Rev. W. Cowper Johnson, and the Rev. W. Cowper Johnson, jun.

 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-fashioned

octavo

 which supplies the pretexts for a palinode in prose.

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 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 (not

the

 poplars 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.

'the sound of cheerful bells .

Just undulates upon the list'ning ear;'

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,

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32

  Since this paper was first written, the summer-house, the garden, and the 'Guinea Orchard' – a strip of field which came between Cowper's garden and that of the Parsonage – have been sold by auction, the purchaser being a local butcher.

  The sale took place in February, 1896.

 it has been stated, is still standing.

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 little

lusus 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.'

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  Wright's 'Cowper,' 1892, pp. 311, 312. Wilson was a man of considerable intelligence, and a local 'character.' When in 1781 he joined the Baptists, he declined to dress Lady Austen's hair on Sundays. Consequently she was obliged to call him in on Saturday evenings, and more than once had to sit up all night to prevent the disarrangement of her 'head.'

Cowper has been styled by a recent editor the best of English letter-writers, a term which Scott applied to Walpole, and it has been applied to others. Criticism loses its balance in these superlatives. To be the best – to use a schoolboy illustration – is to have the highest marks all round. For epistolary vigour, for vivacity, for wit, for humour, for ease, for simplicity, for subject – can you give Cowper the highest marks? The answer obviously must be 'no.' Other writers excel him in subject, in wit, in vigour. But you can certainly give him high marks for humour; and you can give him very high marks for simplicity and unaffectedness. He is one of the most unfeigned, most easy, most natural of English letter-writers. In the art of shedding a sedate playfulness over the least promising themes, in magnifying the incidents of his 'set gray life' into occurrences worthy of record, in communicating to his page all the variations of mood that sweep across him as he writes, he is unrivalled. Mandeville christened Addison a parson in a tye-wig; Cowper (at his best) is a humourist in a nightcap. It would be easy to select from his correspondence passages that show him in all these aspects – morbid and gloomy to Newton, genial and friendly to Hill and Unwin, confidential and caressing to Lady Austen and Lady Hesketh. But it is not uncommon for him to vary his tone to each of these, for which reason we close with an epistle to that austere friend and monitor who has perhaps been credited with a more baleful influence over his hypochondriac correspondent than is strictly borne out by the evidence. The reader may be told, since he must speedily discover it, that the following letter from Cowper to John Newton, like the title-page of Lowell's 'Fable for Critics,' is in rhymed prose:

My very dear Friend, – I am going to send, what when you have read, you may scratch your head, and say, I suppose, there's nobody knows whether what I have got be verse or not; – by the tune and the time, it ought to be rhyme, but if it be, did you ever see, of late or of yore, such a ditty before?

I have writ 'Charity,' not for popularity, but as well as I could, in hopes to do good; and if the Reviewer should say 'to be sure the gentleman's Muse wears Methodist shoes, you may know by her pace and talk about grace, that she and her bard have little regard for the taste and fashions, and ruling passions, and hoidening play, of the modern day; and though she assume a borrowed plume, and now and then wear a tittering air,'tis only her plan to catch, if she can, the giddy and gay, as they go that way, by a production on a new construction: she has baited her trap, and hopes to snap all that may come with a sugar plum.' – His opinion in this will not be amiss;'tis what I intend, my principal end, and, if I succeed, and folks should read, till a few are brought to a serious thought, I shall think I am paid for all I have said and all I have done, though I have run many a time, after a rhyme, as far as from hence to the end of my sense, and by hook or crook, write another book, if I live and am here, another year.

I have heard before of a room with a floor laid upon springs, and such like things, with so much art in every part, that when you went in you was forced to begin a minuet pace, with an air and a grace, swimming about, now in and now out, with a deal of state, in a figure of eight, without pipe, or string, or any such thing; and now I have writ, in a rhyming fit, what will make you dance, and, as you advance, will keep you still, though against your wil