Read the book: «Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches — Volume 3»

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA

FRANCIS ATTERBURY. (December 1853.)

Francis Atterbury, a man who holds a conspicuous place in the political, ecclesiastical, and literary history of England, was born in the year 1662, at Middleton in Buckinghamshire, a parish of which his father was rector. Francis was educated at Westminster School, and carried thence to Christchurch a stock of learning which, though really scanty, he through life exhibited with such judicious ostentation that superficial observers believed his attainments to be immense. At Oxford, his parts, his taste, and his bold, contemptuous, and imperious spirit, soon made him conspicuous. Here he published at twenty, his first work, a translation of the noble poem of Absalom and Achitophel into Latin verse. Neither the style nor the versification of the young scholar was that of the Augustan age. In English composition he succeeded much better. In 1687 he distinguished himself among many able men who wrote in defence of the Church of England, then persecuted by James II., and calumniated by apostates who had for lucre quitted her communion. Among these apostates none was more active or malignant than Obadiah Walker, who was master of University College, and who had set up there, under the royal patronage, a press for printing tracts against the established religion. In one of these tracts, written apparently by Walker himself, many aspersions were thrown on Martin Luther. Atterbury undertook to defend the great Saxon Reformer, and performed that task in a manner singularly characteristic. Whoever examines his reply to Walker will be struck by the contrast between the feebleness of those parts which are argumentative and defensive, and the vigour of those parts which are rhetorical and aggressive. The Papists were so much galled by the sarcasms and invectives of the young polemic that they raised a cry of treason, and accused him of having, by implication, called King James a Judas.

After the Revolution, Atterbury, though bred in the doctrines of non-resistance and passive obedience, readily swore fealty to the new government. In no long time he took holy orders. He occasionally preached in London with an eloquence which raised his reputation, and soon had the honour of being appointed one of the royal chaplains. But he ordinarily resided at Oxford, where he took an active part in academical business, directed the classical studies of the undergraduates of his college, and was the chief adviser and assistant of Dean Aldrich, a divine now chiefly remembered by his catches, but renowned among his contemporaries as a scholar, a Tory, and a high-churchman. It was the practice, not a very judicious practice, of Aldrich to employ the most promising youths of his college in editing Greek and Latin books. Among the studious and well-disposed lads who were, unfortunately for themselves, induced to become teachers of philology when they should have been content to be learners, was Charles Boyle, son of the Earl of Orrery, and nephew of Robert Boyle, the great experimental philosopher. The task assigned to Charles Boyle was to prepare a new edition of one of the most worthless books in existence. It was a fashion, among those Greeks and Romans who cultivated rhetoric as an art, to compose epistles and harangues in the names of eminent men. Some of these counterfeits are fabricated with such exquisite taste and skill that it is the highest achievement of criticism to distinguish them from originals. Others are so feebly and rudely executed that they can hardly impose on an intelligent schoolboy. The best specimen which has come down to us is perhaps the oration for Marcellus, such an imitation of Tully's eloquence as Tully would himself have read with wonder and delight. The worst specimen is perhaps a collection of letters purporting to have been written by that Phalaris who governed Agrigentum more than 500 years before the Christian era. The evidence, both internal and external, against the genuineness of these letters is overwhelming. When, in the fifteenth century, they emerged, in company with much that was far more valuable, from their obscurity, they were pronounced spurious by Politian, the greatest scholar of Italy, and by Erasmus, the greatest scholar on our side of the Alps. In truth, it would be as easy to persuade an educated Englishman that one of Johnson's Ramblers was the work of William Wallace as to persuade a man like Erasmus that a pedantic exercise, composed in the trim and artificial Attic of the time of Julian, was a despatch written by a crafty and ferocious Dorian, who roasted people alive many years before there existed a volume of prose in the Greek language. But, though Christchurch could boast of many good Latinists, of many good English writers, and of a greater number of clever and fashionable men of the world than belonged to any other academic body, there was not then in the college a single man capable of distinguishing between the infancy and the dotage of Greek literature. So superficial indeed was the learning of the rulers of this celebrated society that they were charmed by an essay which Sir William Temple published in praise of the ancient writers. It now seems strange that even the eminent public services, the deserved popularity, and the graceful style of Temple should have saved so silly a performance from universal contempt. Of the books which he most vehemently eulogised his eulogies proved that he knew nothing. In fact, he could not read a line of the language in which they were written. Among many other foolish things, he said that the letters of Phalaris were the oldest letters and also the best in the world. Whatever Temple wrote attracted notice. People who had never heard of the Epistles of Phalaris began to inquire about them. Aldrich, who knew very little Greek, took the word of Temple who knew none, and desired Boyle to prepare a new edition of these admirable compositions which, having long slept in obscurity, had become on a sudden objects of general interest.

The edition was prepared with the help of Atterbury, who was Boyle's tutor, and of some other members of the college. It was an edition such as might be expected from people who would stoop to edite such a book. The notes were worthy of the text; the Latin version worthy of the Greek original. The volume would have been forgotten in a month, had not a misunderstanding about a manuscript arisen between the young editor and the greatest scholar that had appeared in Europe since the revival of letters, Richard Bentley. The manuscript was in Bentley's keeping. Boyle wished it to be collated. A mischief-making bookseller informed him that Bentley had refused to lend it, which was false, and also that Bentley had spoken contemptuously of the letters attributed to Phalaris, and of the critics who were taken in by such counterfeits, which was perfectly true. Boyle, much provoked, paid, in his preface, a bitterly ironical compliment to Bentley's courtesy. Bentley revenged himself by a short dissertation, in which he proved that the epistles were spurious, and the new edition of them worthless: but he treated Boyle personally with civility as a young gentleman of great hopes, whose love of learning was highly commendable, and who deserved to have had better instructors.

Few things in literary history are more extraordinary than the storm which this little dissertation raised. Bentley had treated Boyle with forbearance; but he had treated Christchurch with contempt; and the Christchurch-men, wherever dispersed, were as much attached to their college as a Scotchman to his country, or a Jesuit to his order. Their influence was great. They were dominant at Oxford, powerful in the Inns of Court and in the College of Physicians, conspicuous in Parliament and in the literary and fashionable circles of London. Their unanimous cry was, that the honour of the college must be vindicated, that the insolent Cambridge pedant must be put down. Poor Boyle was unequal to the task, and disinclined to it. It was, therefore, assigned to his tutor, Atterbury.

The answer to Bentley, which bears the name of Boyle, but which was, in truth, no more the work of Boyle than the letters to which the controversy related were the work of Phalaris, is now read only by the curious, and will in all probability never be reprinted again. But it had its day of noisy popularity. It was to be found, not only in the studies of men of letters, but on the tables of the most brilliant drawing-rooms of Soho Square and Covent Garden. Even the beaus and coquettes of that age, the Wildairs and the Lady Lurewells, the Mirabells and the Millaments, congratulated each other on the way in which the gay young gentleman, whose erudition sate so easily upon him, and who wrote with so much pleasantry and good breeding about the Attic dialect and the anapaestic measure, Sicilian talents and Thericlean cups, had bantered the queer prig of a doctor. Nor was the applause of the multitude undeserved. The book is, indeed, Atterbury's masterpiece, and gives a higher notion of his powers than any of those works to which he put his name. That he was altogether in the wrong on the main question, and on all the collateral questions springing out of it, that his knowledge of the language, the literature, and the history of Greece was not equal to what many freshmen now bring up every year to Cambridge and Oxford, and that some of his blunders seem rather to deserve a flogging than a refutation, is true; and therefore it is that his performance is, in the highest degree, interesting and valuable to a judicious reader. It is good by reason of its exceeding badness. It is the most extraordinary instance that exists of the art of making much show with little substance. There is no difficulty, says the steward of Moliere's miser, in giving a fine dinner with plenty of money: the really great cook is he who can set out a banquet with no money at all. That Bentley should have written excellently on ancient chronology and geography, on the development of the Greek language, and the origin of the Greek drama, is not strange. But that Atterbury should, during some years, have been thought to have treated these subjects much better than Bentley is strange indeed. It is true that the champion of Christchurch had all the help which the most celebrated members of that society could give him. Smalridge contributed some very good wit; Friend and others some very bad archaeology and philology. But the greater part of the volume was entirely Atterbury's: what was not his own was revised and retouched by him: and the whole bears the mark of his mind, a mind inexhaustibly rich in all the resources of controversy, and familiar with all the artifices which make falsehood look like truth, and ignorance like knowledge. He had little gold; but he beat that little out to the very thinnest leaf, and spread it over so vast a surface that to those who judged by a glance, and who did not resort to balances and tests, the glittering heap of worthless matter which he produced seemed to be an inestimable treasure of massy bullion. Such arguments as he had he placed in the clearest light. Where he had no arguments, he resorted to personalities, sometimes serious, generally ludicrous, always clever and cutting. But, whether he was grave or merry, whether he reasoned or sneered, his style was always pure, polished, and easy.

Party spirit then ran high; yet, though Bentley ranked among Whigs, and Christchurch was a stronghold of Toryism, Whigs joined with Tories in applauding Atterbury's volume. Garth insulted Bentley, and extolled Boyle in lines which are now never quoted except to be laughed at. Swift, in his "Battle of the Books," introduced with much pleasantry Boyle, clad in armour, the gift of all the gods, and directed by Apollo in the form of a human friend, for whose name a blank is left which may easily be filled up. The youth, so accoutred, and so assisted, gains an easy victory over his uncourteous and boastful antagonist. Bentley, meanwhile, was supported by the consciousness of an immeasurable superiority, and encouraged by the voices of the few who were really competent to judge the combat. "No man," he said, justly and nobly, "was ever written down but by himself." He spent two years in preparing a reply, which will never cease to be read and prized while the literature of ancient Greece is studied in any part of the world. This reply proved, not only that the letters ascribed to Phalaris were spurious, but that Atterbury, with all his wit, his eloquence, his skill in controversial fence, was the most audacious pretender that ever wrote about what he did not understand. But to Atterbury this exposure was matter of indifference. He was now engaged in a dispute about matters far more important and exciting than the laws of Zaleucus and the laws of Charondas. The rage of religious factions was extreme. High church and Low church divided the nation. The great majority of the clergy were on the high-church side; the majority of King William's bishops were inclined to latitudinarianism. A dispute arose between the two parties touching the extent of the powers of the Lower House of Convocation. Atterbury thrust himself eagerly into the front rank of the high-churchmen. Those who take a comprehensive and impartial view of his whole career will not be disposed to give him credit for religious zeal. But it was his nature to be vehement and pugnacious in the cause of every fraternity of which he was a member. He had defended the genuineness of a spurious book simply because Christchurch had put forth an edition of that book; he now stood up for the clergy against the civil power, simply because he was a clergyman, and for the priests against the episcopal order, simply because he was as yet only a priest. He asserted the pretensions of the class to which he belonged in several treatises written with much wit, ingenuity, audacity, and acrimony. In this, as in his first controversy, he was opposed to antagonists whose knowledge of the subject in dispute was far superior to his; but in this, as in his first controversy, he imposed on the multitude by bold assertion, by sarcasm, by declamation, and, above all, by his peculiar knack of exhibiting a little erudition in such a manner as to make it look like a great deal. Having passed himself off on the world as a greater master of classical learning than Bentley, he now passed himself off as a greater master of ecclesiastical learning than Wake or Gibson. By the great body of the clergy he was regarded as the ablest and most intrepid tribune that had ever defended their rights against the oligarchy of prelates. The lower House of Convocation voted him thanks for his services; the University of Oxford created him a doctor of divinity; and soon after the accession of Anne, while the Tories still had the chief weight in the government, he was promoted to the deanery of Carlisle.

Soon after he had obtained this preferment, the Whig party rose to ascendency in the state. From that party he could expect no favour. Six years elapsed before a change of fortune took place. At length, in the year 1710, the prosecution of Sacheverell produced a formidable explosion of high-church fanaticism. At such a moment Atterbury could not fail to be conspicuous. His inordinate zeal for the body to which he belonged, his turbulent and aspiring temper, his rare talents for agitation and for controversy, were again signally displayed. He bore a chief part in framing that artful and eloquent speech which the accused divine pronounced at the bar of the Lords, and which presents a singular contrast to the absurd and scurrilous sermon which had very unwisely been honoured with impeachment. During the troubled and anxious months which followed the trial, Atterbury was among the most active of those pamphleteers who inflamed the nation against the Whig ministry and the Whig parliament. When the ministry had been changed and the parliament dissolved, rewards were showered upon him. The Lower House of Convocation elected him prolocutor. The Queen appointed him Dean of Christchurch on the death of his old friend and patron Aldrich. The college would have preferred a gentler ruler. Nevertheless, the new head was received with every mark of honour. A congratulatory oration in Latin was addressed to him in the magnificent vestibule of the hall; and he in reply professed the warmest attachment to the venerable house in which he had been educated, and paid many gracious compliments to those over whom he was to preside. But it was not in his nature to be a mild or an equitable governor. He had left the chapter of Carlisle distracted by quarrels. He found Christchurch at peace; but in three months his despotic and contentious temper did at Christchurch what it had done at Carlisle. He was succeeded in both his deaneries by the humane and accomplished Smalridge, who gently complained of the state in which both had been left. "Atterbury goes before, and sets everything on fire. I come after him with a bucket of water." It was said by Atterbury's enemies that he was made a bishop because he was so bad a dean. Under his administration Christchurch was in confusion, scandalous altercations took place, opprobrious words were exchanged; and there was reason to fear that the great Tory college would be ruined by the tyranny of the great Tory doctor. He was soon removed to the bishopric of Rochester, which was then always united with the deanery of Westminster. Still higher dignities seemed to be before him. For, though there were many able men on the episcopal bench, there was none who equalled or approached him in parliamentary talents. Had his party continued in power, it is not improbable that he would have been raised to the archbishopric of Canterbury. The more splendid his prospects, the more reason he had to dread the accession of a family which was well-known to be partial to the Whigs. There is every reason to believe that he was one of those politicians who hoped that they might be able, during the life of Anne, to prepare matters in such a way that at her decease there might be little difficulty in setting aside the Act of Settlement and placing the Pretender on the throne. Her sudden death confounded the projects of these conspirators. Atterbury, who wanted no kind of courage, implored his confederates to proclaim James III., and offered to accompany the heralds in lawn sleeves. But he found even the bravest soldiers of his party irresolute, and exclaimed, not, it is said, without interjections which ill became the mouth of a father of the church, that the best of all causes and the most precious of all moments had been pusillanimously thrown away. He acquiesced in what he could not prevent, took the oaths to the House of Hanover, and at the coronation officiated with the outward show of zeal, and did his best to ingratiate himself with the royal family. But his servility was requited with cold contempt. No creature is so revengeful as a proud man who has humbled himself in vain. Atterbury became the most factious and pertinacious of all the opponents of the government. In the House of Lords his oratory, lucid, pointed, lively, and set off with every grace of pronunciation and of gesture, extorted the attention and admiration even of a hostile majority. Some of the most remarkable protests which appear in the journals of the peers were drawn up by him; and in some of the bitterest of those pamphlets which called on the English to stand up for their country against the aliens who had come from beyond the seas to oppress and plunder her, critics easily detected his style. When the rebellion of 1715 broke out, he refused to sign the paper in which the bishops of the province of Canterbury declared their attachment to the Protestant succession. He busied himself in electioneering, especially at Westminster, where, as dean, he possessed great influence; and was, indeed, strongly suspected of having once set on a riotous mob to prevent his Whig fellow-citizens from polling.

After having been long in indirect communication with the exiled family, he, in 1717, began to correspond directly with the Pretender. The first letter of the correspondence is extant. In that letter Atterbury boasts of having, during many years past, neglected no opportunity of serving the Jacobite cause. "My daily prayer," he says, "is that you may have success. May I live to see that day, and live no longer than I do what is in my power to forward it." It is to be remembered that he who wrote thus was a man bound to set to the church of which he was overseer an example of strict probity; that he had repeatedly sworn allegiance to the House of Brunswick; that he had assisted in placing the crown on the head of George I., and that he had abjured James III., "without equivocation or mental reservation, on the true faith of a Christian."

It is agreeable to turn from his public to his private life. His turbulent spirit, wearied with faction and treason, now and then required repose, and found it in domestic endearments, and in the society of the most illustrious of the living and of the dead. Of his wife little is known: but between him and his daughter there was an affection singularly close and tender. The gentleness of his manners when he was in the company of a few friends was such as seemed hardly credible to those who knew him only by his writings and speeches. The charm of his "softer hour" has been commemorated by one of those friends in imperishable verse. Though Atterbury's classical attainments were not great, his taste in English literature was excellent; and his admiration of genius was so strong that it overpowered even his political and religious antipathies. His fondness for Milton, the mortal enemy of the Stuarts and of the church, was such as to many Tories seemed a crime. On the sad night on which Addison was laid in the chapel of Henry VII., the Westminster boys remarked that Atterbury read the funeral service with a peculiar tenderness and solemnity. The favourite companions, however, of the great Tory prelate were, as might have been expected, men whose politics had at least a tinge of Toryism. He lived on friendly terms with Swift, Arbuthnot, and Gay. With Prior he had a close intimacy, which some misunderstanding about public affairs at last dissolved. Pope found in Atterbury, not only a warm admirer, but a most faithful, fearless, and judicious adviser. The poet was a frequent guest at the episcopal palace among the elms of Bromley, and entertained not the slightest suspicion that his host, now declining in years, confined to an easy chair by gout, and apparently devoted to literature, was deeply concerned in criminal and perilous designs against the government.

The spirit of the Jacobites had been cowed by the events of 1715. It revived in 1721. The failure of the South Sea project, the panic in the money market, the downfall of great commercial houses, the distress from which no part of the kingdom was exempt, had produced general discontent. It seemed not improbable that at such a moment an insurrection might be successful. An insurrection was planned. The streets of London were to be barricaded; the Tower and the Bank were to be surprised; King George, his family, and his chief captains and councillors, were to be arrested; and King James was to be proclaimed. The design became known to the Duke of Orleans, regent of France, who was on terms of friendship with the House of Hanover. He put the English government on its guard. Some of the chief malecontents were committed to prison; and among them was Atterbury. No bishop of the Church of England had been taken into custody since that memorable day when the applauses and prayers of all London had followed the seven bishops to the gate of the Tower. The Opposition entertained some hope that it might be possible to excite among the people an enthusiasm resembling that of their fathers, who rushed into the waters of the Thames to implore the blessing of Sancroft. Pictures of the heroic confessor in his cell were exhibited at the shop windows. Verses in his praise were sung about the streets. The restraints by which he was prevented from communicating with his accomplices were represented as cruelties worthy of the dungeons of the Inquisition. Strong appeals were made to the priesthood. Would they tamely permit so gross an insult to be offered to their cloth? Would they suffer the ablest, the most eloquent member of their profession, the man who had so often stood up for their rights against the civil power, to be treated like the vilest of mankind? There was considerable excitement; but it was allayed by a temperate and artful letter to the clergy, the work, in all probability, of Bishop Gibson, who stood high in the favour of Walpole, and shortly after became minister for ecclesiastical affairs.

Atterbury remained in close confinement during some months. He had carried on his correspondence with the exiled family so cautiously that the circumstantial proofs of his guilt, though sufficient to produce entire moral conviction, were not sufficient to justify legal conviction. He could be reached only by a bill of pains and penalties. Such a bill the Whig party, then decidedly predominant in both houses, was quite prepared to support. Many hot-headed members of that party were eager to follow the precedent which had been set in the case of Sir John Fenwick, and to pass an act for cutting off the bishop's head. Cadogan, who commanded the army, a brave soldier, but a headstrong politician, is said to have exclaimed with great vehemence: "Fling him to the lions in the Tower." But the wiser and more humane Walpole was always unwilling to shed blood; and his influence prevailed. When Parliament met, the evidence against the bishop was laid before committees of both houses. Those committees reported that his guilt was proved. In the Commons a resolution, pronouncing him a traitor, was carried by nearly two to one. A bill was then introduced which provided that he should be deprived of his spiritual dignities, that he should be banished for life, and that no British subject should hold any intercourse with him except by the royal permission.

This bill passed the Commons with little difficulty. For the bishop, though invited to defend himself, chose to reserve his defence for the assembly of which he was a member. In the Lords the contest was sharp. The young Duke of Wharton, distinguished by his parts, his dissoluteness, and his versatility, spoke for Atterbury with great effect; and Atterbury's own voice was heard for the last time by that unfriendly audience which had so often listened to him with mingled aversion and delight. He produced few witnesses; nor did those witnesses say much that could be of service to him. Among them was Pope. He was called to prove that, while he was an inmate of the palace at Bromley, the bishop's time was completely occupied by literary and domestic matters, and that no leisure was left for plotting. But Pope, who was quite unaccustomed to speak in public, lost his head, and, as he afterwards owned, though he had only ten words to say, made two or three blunders.

The bill finally passed the Lords by eighty-three votes to forty-three. The bishops, with a single exception, were in the majority. Their conduct drew on them a sharp taunt from Lord Bathurst, a warm friend of Atterbury and a zealous Tory. "The wild Indians," he said, "give no quarter, because they believe that they shall inherit the skill and prowess of every adversary whom they destroy. Perhaps the animosity of the right reverend prelates to their brother may be explained in the same way."

Atterbury took leave of those whom he loved with a dignity and tenderness worthy of a better man. Three fine lines of his favourite poet were often in his mouth:—

 
     "Some natural tears he dropped, but wiped them soon:
     The world was all before him, where to chuse
     His place of rest, and Providence his guide."
 

At parting he presented Pope with a Bible, and said, with a disingenuousness of which no man who had studied the Bible to much purpose would have been guilty: "If ever you learn that I have any dealings with the Pretender, I give you leave to say that my punishment is just." Pope at this time really believed the bishop to be an injured man. Arbuthnot seems to have been of the same opinion. Swift, a few months later, ridiculed with great bitterness, in the "Voyage to Laputa," the evidence which had satisfied the two Houses of Parliament. Soon, however, the most partial friends of the banished prelate ceased to assert his innocence, and contented themselves with lamenting and excusing what they could not defend. After a short stay at Brussels, he had taken up his abode at Paris, and had become the leading man among the Jacobite refugees who were assembled there. He was invited to Rome by the Pretender, who then held his mock court under the immediate protection of the Pope. But Atterbury felt that a bishop of the Church of England would be strangely out of place at the Vatican, and declined the invitation. During some months, however, he might flatter himself that he stood high in the good graces of James. The correspondence between the master and the servant was constant. Atterbury's merits were warmly acknowledged; his advice was respectfully received; and he was, as Bolingbroke had been before him, the prime minister of a king without a kingdom. But the new favourite found, as Bolingbroke had found before him, that it was quite as hard to keep the shadow of power under a vagrant and mendicant prince as to keep the reality of power at Westminster. Though James had neither territories nor revenues, neither army nor navy, there was more faction and more intrigue among his courtiers than among those of his successful rival. Atterbury soon perceived that his counsels were disregarded, if not distrusted. His proud spirit was deeply wounded. He quitted Paris, fixed his residence at Montpellier, gave up politics, and devoted himself entirely to letters. In the sixth year of his exile he had so severe an illness that his daughter, herself in very delicate health, determined to run all risks that she might see him once more. Having obtained a licence from the English Government, she went by sea to Bordeaux, but landed there in such a state that she could travel only by boat or in a litter. Her father, in spite of his infirmities, set out from Montpellier to meet her; and she, with the impatience which is often the sign of approaching death, hastened towards him. Those who were about her in vain implored her to travel slowly. She said that every hour was precious, that she only wished to see her papa and to die. She met him at Toulouse, embraced him, received from his hand the sacred bread and wine, and thanked God that they had passed one day in each other's society before they parted forever. She died that night.

It was some time before even the strong mind of Atterbury recovered from this cruel blow. As soon as he was himself again he became eager for action and conflict; for grief, which disposes gentle natures to retirement, to inaction, and to meditation, only makes restless spirits more restless. The Pretender, dull and bigoted as he was, had found out that he had not acted wisely in parting with one who, though a heretic, was, in abilities and accomplishments, the foremost man of the Jacobite party. The bishop was courted back, and was without much difficulty induced to return to Paris and to become once more the phantom minister of a phantom monarchy. But his long and troubled life was drawing to a close. To the last, however, his intellect retained all its keenness and vigour. He learned, in the ninth year of his banishment, that he had been accused by Oldmixon, as dishonest and malignant a scribbler as any that has been saved from oblivion by the Dunciad, of having, in concert with other Christchurchmen, garbled Clarendon's History of the Rebellion. The charge, as respected Atterbury, had not the slightest foundation: for he was not one of the editors of the History, and never saw it till it was printed. He published a short vindication of himself, which is a model in its kind, luminous, temperate, and dignified. A copy of this little work he sent to the Pretender, with a letter singularly eloquent and graceful. It was impossible, the old man said, that he should write anything on such a subject without being reminded of the resemblance between his own fate and that of Clarendon. They were the only two English subjects that had ever been banished from their country and debarred from all communication with their friends by act of parliament. But here the resemblance ended. One of the exiles had been so happy as to bear a chief part in the restoration of the Royal house. All that the other could now do was to die asserting the rights of that house to the last. A few weeks after this letter was written Atterbury died. He had just completed his seventieth year.

His body was brought to England, and laid, with great privacy, under the nave of Westminster Abbey. Only three mourners followed the coffin. No inscription marks the grave. That the epitaph with which Pope honoured the memory of his friend does not appear on the walls of the great national cemetery is no subject of regret: for nothing worse was ever written by Colley Cibber.

Those who wish for more complete information about Atterbury may easily collect it from his sermons and his controversial writings, from the report of the parliamentary proceedings against him, which will be found in the State Trials, from the five volumes of his correspondence, edited by Mr Nichols, and from the first volume of the Stuart papers, edited by Mr Glover. A very indulgent but a very interesting account of the bishop's political career will be found in Lord Mahon's valuable History of England.

JOHN BUNYAN. (May 1854.)

John Bunyan, the most popular religious writer in the English language, was born at Elstow, about a mile from Bedford, in the year 1628. He may be said to have been born a tinker. The tinkers then formed an hereditary caste, which was held in no high estimation. They were generally vagrants and pilferers, and were often confounded with the gipsies, whom in truth they nearly resembled. Bunyan's father was more respectable than most of the tribe. He had a fixed residence, and was able to send his son to a village school where reading and writing were taught.

The years of John's boyhood were those during which the puritan spirit was in the highest vigour all over England; and nowhere had that spirit more influence than in Bedfordshire. It is not wonderful, therefore, that a lad to whom nature had given a powerful imagination, and sensibility which amounted to a disease, should have been early haunted by religious terrors. Before he was ten, his sports were interrupted by fits of remorse and despair; and his sleep was disturbed by dreams of fiends trying to fly away with him. As he grew older, his mental conflicts became still more violent. The strong language in which he described them has strangely misled all his biographers except Mr Southey. It has long been an ordinary practice with pious writers to cite Bunyan as an instance of the supernatural power of divine grace to rescue the human soul from the lowest depths of wickedness. He is called in one book the most notorious of profligates; in another, the brand plucked from the burning. He is designated in Mr Ivimey's History of the Baptists as the depraved Bunyan, the wicked tinker of Elstow. Mr Ryland, a man once of great note among the Dissenters, breaks out into the following rhapsody:—"No man of common sense and common integrity can deny that Bunyan was a practical atheist, a worthless contemptible infidel, a vile rebel to God and goodness, a common profligate, a soul-despising, a soul-murdering, a soul-damning, thoughtless wretch as could exist on the face of the earth. Now be astonished, O heavens, to eternity! and wonder, O earth and hell! while time endures. Behold this very man become a miracle of mercy, a mirror of wisdom, goodness, holiness, truth, and love." But whoever takes the trouble to examine the evidence will find that the good men who wrote this had been deceived by a phraseology which, as they had been hearing it and using it all their lives, they ought to have understood better. There cannot be a greater mistake than to infer, from the strong expressions in which a devout man bemoans his exceeding sinfulness, that he has led a worse life than his neighbours. Many excellent persons, whose moral character from boyhood to old age has been free from any stain discernible to their fellow-creatures, have, in their autobiographies and diaries, applied to themselves, and doubtless with sincerity, epithets as severe as could be applied to Titus Oates or Mrs Brownrigg. It is quite certain that Bunyan was, at eighteen, what, in any but the most austerely puritanical circles, would have been considered as a young man of singular gravity and innocence. Indeed, it may be remarked that he, like many other penitents who, in general terms, acknowledged themselves to have been the worst of mankind, fired up and stood vigorously on his defence, whenever any particular charge was brought against him by others. He declares, it is true, that he had let loose the reins on the neck of his lusts, that he had delighted in all transgressions against the divine law, and that he had been the ringleader of the youth of Elstow in all manner of vice. But, when those who wished him ill accused him of licentious amours, he called on God and the angels to attest his purity. No woman, he said, in heaven, earth, or hell, could charge him with having ever made any improper advances to her. Not only had he been strictly faithful to his wife; but he had even before his marriage, been perfectly spotless. It does not appear from his own confessions, or from the railings of his enemies, that he ever was drunk in his life. One bad habit he contracted, that of using profane language; but he tells us that a single reproof cured him so effectually that he never offended again. The worst that can be laid to the charge of this poor youth, whom it has been the fashion to represent as the most desperate of reprobates, as a village Rochester, is that he had a great liking for some diversions, quite harmless in themselves, but condemned by the rigid precisians among whom he lived, and for whose opinion he had a great respect. The four chief sins of which he was guilty were dancing, ringing the bells of the parish church, playing at tipcat, and reading the history of Sir Bevis of Southampton. A rector of the school of Laud would have held such a young man up to the whole parish as a model. But Bunyan's notions of good and evil had been learned in a very different school; and he was made miserable by the conflict between his tastes and his scruples.

When he was about seventeen, the ordinary course of his life was interrupted by an event which gave a lasting colour to his thoughts. He enlisted in the parliamentary army, and served during the decisive campaign of 1645. All that we know of his military career is that, at the siege of Leicester, one of his comrades, who had taken his post, was killed by a shot from the town. Bunyan ever after considered himself as having been saved from death by the special interference of Providence. It may be observed that his imagination was strongly impressed by the glimpse which he had caught of the pomp of war. To the last he loved to draw his illustrations of sacred things from camps and fortresses, from guns, drums, trumpets, flags of truce, and regiments arrayed, each under its own banner. His Greatheart, his Captain Boanerges, and his Captain Credence, are evidently portraits, of which the originals were among those martial saints who fought and expounded in Fairfax's army.

In a few months Bunyan returned home and married. His wife had some pious relations, and brought him as her only portion some pious books. And now his mind, excitable by nature, very imperfectly disciplined by education, and exposed, without any protection, to the infectious virulence of the enthusiasm which was then epidemic in England, began to be fearfully disordered. In outward things he soon became a strict Pharisee. He was constant in attendance at prayers and sermons. His favourite amusements were one after another relinquished, though not without many painful struggles. In the middle of a game at tipcat he paused, and stood staring wildly upwards with his stick in his hand. He had heard a voice asking him whether he would leave his sins and go to heaven, or keep his sins and go to hell; and he had seen an awful countenance frowning on him from the sky. The odious vice of bellringing he renounced; but he still for a time ventured to go to the church tower and look on while others pulled the ropes. But soon the thought struck him that, if he persisted in such wickedness, the steeple would fall on his head; and he fled in terror from the accursed place. To give up dancing on the village green was still harder; and some months elapsed before he had the fortitude to part with this darling sin. When this last sacrifice had been made, he was, even when tried by the maxims of that austere time, faultless. All Elstow talked of him as an eminently pious youth. But his own mind was more unquiet than ever. Having nothing more to do in the way of visible reformation, yet finding in religion no pleasures to supply the place of the juvenile amusements which he had relinquished, he began to apprehend that he lay under some special malediction; and he was tormented by a succession of fantasies which seemed likely to drive him to suicide or to Bedlam.

At one time he took it into his head that all persons of Israelite blood would be saved, and tried to make out that he partook of that blood; but his hopes were speedily destroyed by his father, who seems to have had no ambition to be regarded as a Jew.

At another time Bunyan was disturbed by a strange dilemma: "If I have not faith, I am lost; if I have faith, I can work miracles." He was tempted to cry to the puddles between Elstow and Bedford, "Be ye dry," and to stake his eternal hopes on the event.

Then he took up a notion that the day of grace for Bedford and the neighbouring villages was past: that all who were to be saved in that part of England were already converted; and that he had begun to pray and strive some months too late.

Then he was harassed by doubts whether the Turks were not in the right, and the Christians in the wrong. Then he was troubled by a maniacal impulse which prompted him to pray to the trees, to a broom-stick, to the parish bull. As yet, however, he was only entering the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Soon the darkness grew thicker. Hideous forms floated before him. Sounds of cursing and wailing were in his ears. His way ran through stench and fire, close to the mouth of the bottomless pit. He began to be haunted by a strange curiosity about the unpardonable sin, and by a morbid longing to commit it. But the most frightful of all the forms which his disease took was a propensity to utter blasphemy, and especially to renounce his share in the benefits of the redemption. Night and day, in bed, at table, at work, evil spirits, as he imagined, were repeating close to his ear the words, "Sell him, sell him." He struck at the hobgoblins; he pushed them from him; but still they were ever at his side. He cried out in answer to them, hour after hour: "Never, never; not for thousands of worlds, not for thousands." At length, worn out by this long agony, he suffered the fatal words to escape him, "Let him go, if he will." Then his misery became more fearful than ever. He had done what could not be forgiven. He had forfeited his part of the great sacrifice. Like Esau, he had sold his birthright; and there was no longer any place for repentance. "None," he afterwards wrote, "knows the terrors of those days but myself." He has described his sufferings with singular energy, simplicity, and pathos. He envied the brutes; he envied the very stones in the street, and the tiles on the houses. The sun seemed to withhold its light and warmth from him. His body, though cast in a sturdy mould, and though still in the highest vigour of youth, trembled whole days together with the fear of death and judgment. He fancied that this trembling was the sign set on the worst reprobates, the sign which God had put on Cain. The unhappy man's emotion destroyed his power of digestion. He had such pains that he expected to burst asunder like Judas, whom he regarded as his prototype.

Neither the books which Bunyan read, nor the advisers whom he consulted, were likely to do much good in a case like his. His small library had received a most unseasonable addition, the account of the lamentable end of Francis Spira. One ancient man of high repute for piety, whom the sufferer consulted, gave an opinion which might well have produced fatal consequences. "I am afraid," said Bunyan, "that I have committed the sin against the Holy Ghost." "Indeed," said the old fanatic, "I am afraid that you have."

At length the clouds broke; the light became clearer and clearer; and the enthusiast, who had imagined that he was branded with the mark of the first murderer, and destined to the end of the arch traitor, enjoyed peace and a cheerful confidence in the mercy of God. Years elapsed, however, before his nerves, which had been so perilously overstrained, recovered their tone. When he had joined a Baptist society at Bedford, and was for the first time admitted to partake of the Eucharist, it was with difficulty that he could refrain from imprecating destruction on his brethren while the cup was passing from hand to hand. After he had been some time a member of the congregation, he began to preach; and his sermons produced a powerful effect. He was indeed illiterate; but he spoke to illiterate men. The severe training through which he had passed had given him such an experimental knowledge of all the modes of religious melancholy as he could never have gathered from books; and his vigorous genius, animated by a fervent spirit of devotion, enabled him, not only to exercise a great influence over the vulgar, but even to extort the half contemptuous admiration of scholars. Yet it was long before he ceased to be tormented by an impulse which urged him to utter words of horrible impiety in the pulpit.

Counter-irritants are of as great use in moral as in physical diseases. It should seem that Bunyan was finally relieved from the internal sufferings which had embittered his life by sharp persecution from without. He had been five years a preacher, when the Restoration put it in the power of the Cavalier gentlemen and clergymen all over the country to oppress the Dissenters; and of all the Dissenters whose history is known to us, he was perhaps the most hardly treated. In November 1660, he was flung into Bedford gaol; and there he remained, with some intervals of partial and precarious liberty, during twelve years. His persecutors tried to extort from him a promise that he would abstain from preaching; but he was convinced that he was divinely set apart and commissioned to be a teacher of righteousness; and he was fully determined to obey God rather than man. He was brought before several tribunals, laughed at, caressed, reviled, menaced, but in vain. He was facetiously told that he was quite right in thinking that he ought not to hide his gift; but that his real gift was skill in repairing old kettles. He was compared to Alexander the coppersmith. He was told that, if he would give up preaching, he should be instantly liberated. He was warned that, if he persisted in disobeying the law, he would be liable to banishment, and that, if he were found in England after a certain time his neck would be stretched. His answer was, "If you let me out to-day, I will preach again to-morrow." Year after year he lay patiently in a dungeon, compared with which the worse prison now to be found in the island is a palace. His fortitude is the more extraordinary, because his domestic feelings were unusually strong. Indeed, he was considered by his stern brethren as somewhat too fond and indulgent a parent. He had several small children, and among them a daughter who was blind, and whom he loved with peculiar tenderness. He could not, he said, bear even to let the wind blow on her; and now she must suffer cold and hunger; she must beg; she must be beaten; "yet," he added, "I must, I must do it." While he lay in prison he could do nothing in the way of his old trade for the support of his family. He determined, therefore, to take up a new trade. He learned to make long tagged thread laces; and many thousands of these articles were furnished by him to the hawkers. While his hands were thus busied, he had other employment for his mind and his lips. He gave religious instruction to his fellow-captives, and formed from among them a little flock, of which he was himself the pastor. He studied indefatigably the few books which he possessed. His two chief companions were the Bible and Fox's Book of Martyrs. His knowledge of the Bible was such that he might have been called a living concordance; and on the margin of his copy of the Book of Martyrs are still legible the ill spelt lines of doggrel in which he expressed his reverence for the brave sufferers, and his implacable enmity to the mystical Babylon.

At length he began to write; and though it was some time before he discovered where his strength lay, his writings were not unsuccessful. They were coarse, indeed; but they showed a keen mother wit, a great command of the homely mother tongue, an intimate knowledge of the English Bible, and a vast and dearly-bought spiritual experience. They therefore, when the corrector of the press had improved the syntax and the spelling, were well received by the humbler class of Dissenters.

Much of Bunyan's time was spent in controversy. He wrote sharply against the Quakers, whom he seems always to have held in utter abhorrence. It is, however, a remarkable fact that he adopted one of their peculiar fashions: his practice was to write, not November or December, but eleventh month and twelfth month.

He wrote against the liturgy of the Church of England. No two things, according to him, had less affinity than the form of prayer and the spirit of prayer. Those, he said with much point, who have most of the spirit of prayer are all to be found in gaol; and those who have most zeal for the form of prayer are all to be found at the alehouse. The doctrinal articles, on the other hand, he warmly praised, and defended against some Arminian clergymen who had signed them. The most acrimonious of all his works is his answer to Edward Fowler, afterwards Bishop of Gloucester, an excellent man, but not free from the taint of Pelagianism.

Bunyan had also a dispute with some of the chiefs of the sect to which he belonged. He doubtless held with perfect sincerity the distinguishing tenet of that sect; but he did not consider that tenet as one of high importance, and willingly joined in communion with quiet Presbyterians and Independents. The sterner Baptists, therefore, loudly pronounced him a false brother. A controversy arose which long survived the original combatants. In our own time the cause which Bunyan had defended with rude logic and rhetoric against Kiffin and Danvers was pleaded by Robert Hall with an ingenuity and eloquence such as no polemical writer has ever surpassed.

During the years which immediately followed the Restoration, Bunyan's confinement seems to have been strict. But, as the passions of 1660 cooled, as the hatred with which the Puritans had been regarded while their reign was recent gave place to pity, he was less and less harshly treated. The distress of his family, and his own patience, courage, and piety softened the hearts of his persecutors. Like his own Christian in the cage, he found protectors even among the crowd of Vanity Fair. The bishop of the Diocese, Dr Barlow, is said to have interceded for him. At length the prisoner was suffered to pass most of his time beyond the walls of the gaol, on condition, as it should seem, that he remained within the town of Bedford.

He owed his complete liberation to one of the worst acts of one of the worst governments that England has ever seen. In 1671 the Cabal was in power. Charles II. had concluded the treaty by which he bound himself to set up the Roman Catholic religion in England. The first step which he took towards that end was to annul, by an unconstitutional exercise of his prerogative, all the penal statutes against the Roman Catholics; and, in order to disguise his real design, he annulled at the same time the penal statutes against Protestant nonconformists. Bunyan was consequently set at large. In the first warmth of his gratitude he published a tract in which he compared Charles to that humane and generous Persian king who, though not himself blest with the light of the true religion, favoured the chosen people, and permitted them after years of captivity, to rebuild their beloved temple. To candid men, who consider how much Bunyan had suffered, and how little he could guess the secret designs of the court, the unsuspicious thankfulness with which he accepted the precious boon of freedom will not appear to require any apology.

Before he left his prison he had begun the book which has made his name immortal. The history of that book is remarkable. The author was, as he tells us, writing a treatise, in which he had occasion to speak of the stages of the Christian progress. He compared that progress, as many others had compared it, to a pilgrimage. Soon his quick wit discovered innumerable points of similarity which had escaped his predecessors. Images came crowding on his mind faster than he could put them into words, quagmires and pits, steep hills, dark and horrible glens, soft vales, sunny pastures, a gloomy castle of which the courtyard was strewn with the skulls and bones of murdered prisoners, a town all bustle and splendour, like London on the Lord Mayor's Day, and the narrow path, straight as a rule could make it, running on up hill and down hill, through city and through wilderness, to the Black River and the Shining Gate. He had found out, as most people would have said, by accident, as he would doubtless have said, by the guidance of Providence, where his powers lay. He had no suspicion, indeed, that he was producing a masterpiece. He could not guess what place his allegory would occupy in English literature; for of English literature he knew nothing. Those who suppose him to have studied the Fairy Queen might easily be confuted, if this were the proper place for a detailed examination of the passages in which the two allegories have been thought to resemble each other. The only work of fiction, in all probability, with which he could compare his Pilgrim, was his old favourite, the legend of Sir Bevis of Southampton. He would have thought it a sin to borrow any time from the serious business of his life, from his expositions, his controversies, and his lace tags, for the purpose of amusing himself with what he considered merely as a trifle. It was only, he assures us, at spare moments that he returned to the House Beautiful, the Delectable Mountains, and the Enchanted Ground. He had no assistance. Nobody but himself saw a line, till the whole was complete. He then consulted his pious friends. Some were pleased. Others were much scandalised. It was a vain story, a mere romance, about giants, and lions, and goblins, and warriors, sometimes fighting with monsters and sometimes regaled by fair ladies in stately palaces. The loose atheistical wits at Will's might write such stuff to divert the painted Jezebels of the court: but did it become a minister of the gospel to copy the evil fashions of the world? There had been a time when the cant of such fools would have made Bunyan miserable. But that time was passed; and his mind was now in a firm and healthy state. He saw that, in employing fiction to make truth clear and goodness attractive, he was only following the example which every Christian ought to propose to himself; and he determined to print.

The "Pilgrim's Progress" stole silently into the world. Not a single copy of the first edition is known to be in existence. The year of publication has not been ascertained. It is probable that, during some months, the little volume circulated only among poor and obscure sectaries. But soon the irresistible charm of a book which gratified the imagination of the reader with all the action and scenery of a fairy tale, which exercised his ingenuity by setting him to discover a multitude of curious analogies, which interested his feelings for human beings, frail like himself, and struggling with temptations from within and from without, which every moment drew a smile from him by some stroke of quaint yet simple pleasantry, and nevertheless left on his mind a sentiment of reverence for God and of sympathy for man, began to produce its effect. In puritanical circles, from which plays and novels were strictly excluded, that effect was such as no work of genius, though it were superior to the Iliad, to Don Quixote, or to Othello, can ever produce on a mind accustomed to indulge in literary luxury. In 1678 came forth a second edition with additions; and then the demand became immense. In the four following years the book was reprinted six times. The eighth edition, which contains the last improvements made by the author, was published in 1682, the ninth in 1684, the tenth in 1685. The help of the engraver had early been called in; and tens of thousands of children looked with terror and delight on execrable copper plates, which represented Christian thrusting his sword into Apollyon, or writhing in the grasp of Giant Despair. In Scotland, and in some of the colonies, the Pilgrim was even more popular than in his native country. Bunyan has told us, with very pardonable vanity, that in New England his dream was the daily subject of the conversation of thousands, and was thought worthy to appear in the most superb binding. He had numerous admirers in Holland, and among the Huguenots of France. With the pleasures, however, he experienced some of the pains of eminence. Knavish booksellers put forth volumes of trash under his name; and envious scribblers maintained it to be impossible that the poor ignorant tinker should really be the author of the book which was called his.

He took the best way to confound both those who counterfeited him and those who slandered him. He continued to work the gold-field which he had discovered, and to draw from it new treasures, not indeed with quite such ease and in quite such abundance as when the precious soil was still virgin, but yet with success which left all competition far behind. In 1684 appeared the second part of the "Pilgrim's Progress." It was soon followed by the "Holy War," which, if the "Pilgrim's Progress" did not exist, would be the best allegory that ever was written.

Bunyan's place in society was now very different from what it had been. There had been a time when many Dissenting ministers, who could talk Latin and read Greek, had affected to treat him with scorn. But his fame and influence now far exceeded theirs. He had so great an authority among the Baptists that he was popularly called Bishop Bunyan. His episcopal visitations were annual. From Bedford he rode every year to London, and preached there to large and attentive congregations. From London he went his circuit through the country, animating the zeal of his brethren, collecting and distributing alms, and making up quarrels. The magistrates seem in general to have given him little trouble. But there is reason to believe that, in the year 1685, he was in some danger of again occupying his old quarters in Bedford gaol. In that year the rash and wicked enterprise of Monmouth gave the Government a pretext for persecuting the Nonconformists; and scarcely one eminent divine of the Presbyterian, Independent, or Baptist persuasion remained unmolested. Baxter was in prison: Howe was driven into exile: Henry was arrested. Two eminent Baptists, with whom Bunyan had been engaged in controversy, were in great peril and distress. Danvers was in danger of being hanged; and Kiffin's grandsons were actually hanged. The tradition is that, during those evil days, Bunyan was forced to disguise himself as a waggoner, and that he preached to his congregation at Bedford in a smoke-frock, with a cart-whip in his hand. But soon a great change took place. James the Second was at open war with the Church, and found it necessary to court the Dissenters. Some of the creatures of the government tried to secure the aid of Bunyan. They probably knew that he had written in praise of the indulgence of 1672, and therefore hoped that he might be equally pleased with the indulgence of 1687. But fifteen years of thought, observation, and commerce with the world had made him wiser. Nor were the cases exactly parallel. Charles was a professed Protestant: James was a professed Papist. The object of Charles's indulgence was disguised; the object of James's indulgence was patent. Bunyan was not deceived. He exhorted his hearers to prepare themselves by fasting and prayer for the danger which menaced their civil and religious liberties, and refused even to speak to the courtier who came down to remodel the corporation of Bedford, and who, as was supposed, had it in charge to offer some municipal dignity to the Bishop of the Baptists.

Bunyan did not live to see the Revolution. In the summer of 1688 he undertook to plead the cause of a son with an angry father, and at length prevailed on the old man not to disinherit the young one. This good work cost the benevolent intercessor his life. He had to ride through heavy rain. He came drenched to his lodgings on Snow Hill, was seized with a violent fever, and died in a few days. He was buried in Bunhill Fields; and the spot where he lies is still regarded by the Nonconformists with a feeling which seems scarcely in harmony with the stern spirit of their theology. Many Puritans, to whom the respect paid by Roman Catholics to the reliques and tombs of saints seemed childish or sinful, are said to have begged with their dying breath that their coffins might be placed as near as possible to the office of the author of the "Pilgrim's Progress."

The fame of Bunyan during his life, and during the century which followed his death, was indeed great, but was almost entirely confined to religious families of the middle and lower classes. Very seldom was he during that time mentioned with respect by any writer of great literary eminence. Young coupled his prose with the poetry of the wretched D'Urfey. In the Spiritual Quixote, the adventures of Christian are ranked with those of Jack the Giant-Killer and John Hickathrift. Cowper ventured to praise the great allegorist, but did not venture to name him. It is a significant circumstance that, till a recent period, all the numerous editions of the "Pilgrim's Progress" were evidently meant for the cottage and the servants' hall. The paper, the printing, the plates, were all of the meanest description. In general, when the educated minority and the common people differ about the merit of a book, the opinion of the educated minority finally prevails. The "Pilgrim's Progress" is perhaps the only book about which, after the lapse of a hundred years, the educated minority has come over to the opinion of the common people.

The attempts which have been made to improve and to imitate this book are not to be numbered. It has been done into verse: it has been done into modern English. "The Pilgrimage of Tender Conscience," "The Pilgrimage of Good Intent," "The Pilgrimage of Seek Truth," "The Pilgrimage of Theophilus," "The Infant Pilgrim," "The Hindoo Pilgrim," are among the many feeble copies of the great original. But the peculiar glory of Bunyan is that those who most hated his doctrines have tried to borrow the help of his genius. A Catholic version of his parable may be seen with the head of the Virgin in the title-page. On the other hand, those Antinomians for whom his Calvinism is not strong enough may study the pilgrimage of Hephzibah, in which nothing will be found which can be construed into an admission of free agency and universal redemption. But the most extraordinary of all the acts of Vandalism by which a fine work of art was ever defaced was committed so late as the year 1853. It was determined to transform the "Pilgrim's Progress" into a Tractarian book. The task was not easy: for it was necessary to make the two sacraments the most prominent objects in the allegory; and of all Christian theologians, avowed Quakers excepted, Bunyan was the one in whose system the sacraments held the least prominent place. However, the Wicket Gate became a type of Baptism, and the House Beautiful of the Eucharist. The effect of this change is such as assuredly the ingenious person who made it never contemplated. For, as not a single pilgrim passes through the Wicket Gate in infancy, and as Faithful hurries past the House Beautiful without stopping, the lesson which the fable in its altered shape teaches, is that none but adults ought to be baptised, and that the Eucharist may safely be neglected. Nobody would have discovered from the original "Pilgrim's Progress" that the author was not a Paedobaptist. To turn his book into a book against Paedobaptism was an achievement reserved for an Anglo-Catholic divine. Such blunders must necessarily be committed by every man who mutilates parts of a great work, without taking a comprehensive view of the whole.

OLIVER GOLDSMITH. (February 1856.)

Oliver Goldsmith, one of the most pleasing English writers of the eighteenth century. He was of a Protestant and Saxon family which had been long settled in Ireland, and which had, like most other Protestant and Saxon families, been, in troubled times, harassed and put in fear by the native population. His father, Charles Goldsmith, studied in the reign of Queen Anne at the diocesan school of Elphin, became attached to the daughter of the schoolmaster, married her, took orders, and settled at a place called Pallas in the county of Longford. There he with difficulty supported his wife and children on what he could earn, partly as a curate and partly as a farmer.

At Pallas Oliver Goldsmith was born in November 1728. That spot was then, for all practical purposes, almost as remote from the busy and splendid capital in which his later years were passed, as any clearing in Upper Canada or any sheep-walk in Australasia now is. Even at this day those enthusiasts who venture to make a pilgrimage to the birthplace of the poet are forced to perform the latter part of their journey on foot. The hamlet lies far from any high road, on a dreary plain which, in wet weather, is often a lake. The lanes would break any jaunting car to pieces; and there are ruts and sloughs through which the most strongly built wheels cannot be dragged.

While Oliver was still a child, his father was presented to a living worth about 200 pounds a year, in the county of Westmeath. The family accordingly quitted their cottage in the wilderness for a spacious house on a frequented road, near the village of Lissoy. Here the boy was taught his letters by a maid-servant, and was sent in his seventh year to a village school kept by an old quartermaster on half-pay, who professed to teach nothing but reading, writing, and arithmetic, but who had an inexhaustible fund of stories about ghosts, banshees, and fairies, about the great Rapparee chiefs, Baldearg O'Donnell and galloping Hogan, and about the exploits of Peterborough and Stanhope, the surprise of Monjuich, and the glorious disaster of Brihuega. This man must have been of the Protestant religion; but he was of the aboriginal race, and not only spoke the Irish language, but could pour forth unpremeditated Irish verses. Oliver early became, and through life continued to be, a passionate admirer of the Irish music, and especially of the compositions of Carolan, some of the last notes of whose harp he heard. It ought to be added that Oliver, though by birth one of the Englishry, and though connected by numerous ties with the Established Church, never showed the least sign of that contemptuous antipathy with which, in his days, the ruling minority in Ireland too generally regarded the subject majority. So far indeed was he from sharing in the opinions and feelings of the caste to which he belonged, that he conceived an aversion to the Glorious and Immortal Memory, and, even when George the Third was on the throne, maintained that nothing but the restoration of the banished dynasty could save the country.

From the humble academy kept by the old soldier Goldsmith was removed in his ninth year. He went to several grammar schools, and acquired some knowledge of the ancient languages. His life at this time seems to have been far from happy. He had, as appears from the admirable portrait of him at Knowle, features harsh even to ugliness. The small-pox had set its mark on him with more than usual severity. His stature was small, and his limbs ill put together. Among boys little tenderness is shown to personal defects; and the ridicule excited by poor Oliver's appearance was heightened by a peculiar simplicity and a disposition to blunder which he retained to the last. He became the common butt of boys and masters, was pointed at as a fright in the play-ground, and flogged as a dunce in the school-room. When he had risen to eminence, those who had once derided him ransacked their memory for the events of his early years, and recited repartees and couplets which had dropped from him, and which, though little noticed at the time, were supposed, a quarter of a century later, to indicate the powers which produced the "Vicar of Wakefield" and the "Deserted Village."

In his seventeenth year Oliver went up to Trinity College, Dublin, as a sizar. The sizars paid nothing for food and tuition, and very little for lodging; but they had to perform some menial services from which they have long been relieved. They swept the court: they carried up the dinner to the fellows' table, and changed the plates and poured out the ale of the rulers of the society. Goldsmith was quartered, not alone, in a garret, on the window of which his name, scrawled by himself, is still read with interest. (The glass on which the name is written has, as we are informed by a writer in "Notes and Queries" (2d. S. ix. p. 91), been inclosed in a frame and deposited in the Manuscript Room of the College Library, where it is still to be seen.) From such garrets many men of less parts than his have made their way to the woolsack or to the episcopal bench. But Goldsmith, while he suffered all the humiliations, threw away all the advantages, of his situation. He neglected the studies of the place, stood low at the examinations, was turned down to the bottom of his class for playing the buffoon in the lecture-room, was severely reprimanded for pumping on a constable, and was caned by a brutal tutor for giving a ball in the attic story of the college to some gay youths and damsels from the city.

While Oliver was leading at Dublin a life divided between squalid distress and squalid dissipation, his father died, leaving a mere pittance. The youth obtained his bachelor's degree, and left the university. During some time the humble dwelling to which his widowed mother had retired was his home. He was now in his twenty-first year; it was necessary that he should do something; and his education seemed to have fitted him to do nothing but to dress himself in gaudy colours, of which he was as fond as a magpie, to take a hand at cards, to sing Irish airs, to play the flute, to angle in summer, and to tell ghost stories by the fire in winter. He tried five or six professions in turn without success. He applied for ordination; but, as he applied in scarlet clothes, he was speedily turned out of the episcopal palace. He then became tutor in an opulent family, but soon quitted his situation in consequence of a dispute about play. Then he determined to emigrate to America. His relations, with much satisfaction, saw him set out for Cork on a good horse with thirty pounds in his pocket. But in six weeks he came back on a miserable hack, without a penny, and informed his mother that the ship in which he had taken his passage, having got a fair wind while he was at a party of pleasure, had sailed without him. Then he resolved to study the law. A generous kinsman advanced fifty pounds. With this sum Goldsmith went to Dublin, was enticed into a gaming house, and lost every shilling. He then thought of medicine. A small purse was made up; and in his twenty-fourth year he was sent to Edinburgh. At Edinburgh he passed eighteen months in nominal attendance on lectures, and picked up some superficial information about chemistry and natural history. Thence he went to Leyden, still pretending to study physic. He left that celebrated university, the third university at which he had resided, in his twenty-seventh year, without a degree, with the merest smattering of medical knowledge, and with no property but his clothes and his flute. His flute, however, proved a useful friend. He rambled on foot through Flanders, France, and Switzerland, playing tunes which everywhere set the peasantry dancing, and which often procured for him a supper and a bed. He wandered as far as Italy. His musical performances, indeed, were not to the taste of the Italians; but he contrived to live on the alms which he obtained at the gates of the convents. It should, however, be observed that the stories which he told about this part of his life ought to be received with great caution; for strict veracity was never one of his virtues; and a man who is ordinarily inaccurate in narration is likely to be more than ordinarily inaccurate when he talks about his own travels. Goldsmith, indeed, was so regardless of truth as to assert in print that he was present at a most interesting conversation between Voltaire and Fontenelle, and that this conversation took place at Paris. Now it is certain that Voltaire never was within a hundred leagues of Paris during the whole time which Goldsmith passed on the Continent.

In 1756 the wanderer landed at Dover, without a shilling, without a friend, and without a calling. He had, indeed, if his own unsupported evidence may be trusted, obtained from the University of Padua a doctor's degree; but this dignity proved utterly useless to him. In England his flute was not in request: there were no convents; and he was forced to have recourse to a series of desperate expedients. He turned strolling player; but his face and figure were ill suited to the boards even of the humblest theatre. He pounded drugs and ran about London with phials for charitable chemists. He joined a swarm of beggars, which made its nest in Axe Yard. He was for a time usher of a school, and felt the miseries and humiliations of this situation so keenly that he thought it a promotion to be permitted to earn his bread as a bookseller's hack; but he soon found the new yoke more galling than the old one, and was glad to become an usher again. He obtained a medical appointment in the service of the East India Company; but the appointment was speedily revoked. Why it was revoked we are not told. The subject was one on which he never liked to talk. It is probable that he was incompetent to perform the duties of the place. Then he presented himself at Surgeon's Hall for examination, as mate to a naval hospital. Even to so humble a post he was found unequal. By this time the schoolmaster whom he had served for a morsel of food and the third part of a bed was no more. Nothing remained but to return to the lowest drudgery of literature. Goldsmith took a garret in a miserable court, to which he had to climb from the brink of Fleet Ditch by a dizzy ladder of flagstones called Breakneck Steps. The court and the ascent have long disappeared; but old Londoners will remember both. (A gentleman, who states that he has known the neighbourhood for thirty years, corrects this account, and informs the present publisher that the Breakneck Steps, thirty-two in number, divided into two flights, are still in existence, and that, according to tradition, Goldsmith's house was not on the steps, but was the first house at the head of the court, on the left hand, going from the Old Bailey. See "Notes and Queries" (2d. S. ix. 280).) Here, at thirty, the unlucky adventurer sat down to toil like a galley slave.

In the succeeding six years he sent to the press some things which have survived and many which have perished. He produced articles for reviews, magazines, and newspapers; children's books which, bound in gilt paper and adorned with hideous woodcuts, appeared in the window of the once far-famed shop at the corner of Saint Paul's Churchyard; "An Inquiry into the State of Polite Learning in Europe," which, though of little or no value, is still reprinted among his works; a "Life of Beau Nash," which is not reprinted, though it well deserves to be so (Mr Black has pointed out that this is inaccurate: the life of Nash has been twice reprinted; once in Mr Prior's edition (vol. iii. p. 249), and once in Mr Cunningham's edition (vol. iv. p. 35).); a superficial and incorrect, but very readable, "History of England," in a series of letters purporting to be addressed by a nobleman to his son; and some very lively and amusing "Sketches of London Society," in a series of letters purporting to be addressed by a Chinese traveller to his friends. All these works were anonymous; but some of them were well-known to be Goldsmith's; and he gradually rose in the estimation of the booksellers for whom he drudged. He was, indeed, emphatically a popular writer. For accurate research or grave disquisition he was not well qualified by nature or by education. He knew nothing accurately: his reading had been desultory; nor had he meditated deeply on what he had read. He had seen much of the world; but he had noticed and retained little more of what he had seen than some grotesque incidents and characters which had happened to strike his fancy. But, though his mind was very scantily stored with materials, he used what materials he had in such a way as to produce a wonderful effect. There have been many greater writers; but perhaps no writer was ever more uniformly agreeable. His style was always pure and easy, and, on proper occasions, pointed and energetic. His narratives were always amusing, his descriptions always picturesque, his humour rich and joyous, yet not without an occasional tinge of amiable sadness. About everything that he wrote, serious or sportive, there was a certain natural grace and decorum, hardly to be expected from a man a great part of whose life had been passed among thieves and beggars, street-walkers and merry andrews, in those squalid dens which are the reproach of great capitals.

As his name gradually became known, the circle of his acquaintance widened. He was introduced to Johnson, who was then considered as the first of living English writers; to Reynolds, the first of English painters; and to Burke, who had not yet entered parliament, but had distinguished himself greatly by his writings and by the eloquence of his conversation. With these eminent men Goldsmith became intimate. In 1763 he was one of the nine original members of that celebrated fraternity which has sometimes been called the Literary Club, but which has always disclaimed that epithet, and still glories in the simple name of The Club.

By this time Goldsmith had quitted his miserable dwelling at the top of Breakneck Steps, and had taken chambers in the more civilised region of the Inns of Court. But he was still often reduced to pitiable shifts. Towards the close of 1764 his rent was so long in arrear that his landlady one morning called in the help of a sheriff's officer. The debtor, in great perplexity, despatched a messenger to Johnson; and Johnson, always friendly, though often surly, sent back the messenger with a guinea, and promised to follow speedily. He came, and found that Goldsmith had changed the guinea, and was railing at the landlady over a bottle of Madeira. Johnson put the cork into the bottle, and entreated his friend to consider calmly how money was to be procured. Goldsmith said that he had a novel ready for the press. Johnson glanced at the manuscript, saw that there were good things in it, took it to a bookseller, sold it for 60 pounds, and soon returned with the money. The rent was paid; and the sheriff's officer withdrew. According to one story, Goldsmith gave his landlady a sharp reprimand for her treatment of him; according to another, he insisted on her joining him in a bowl of punch. Both stories are probably true. The novel which was thus ushered into the world was the "Vicar of Wakefield."

But, before the "Vicar of Wakefield" appeared in print, came the great crisis of Goldsmith's literary life. In Christmas week, 1764, he published a poem, entitled the "Traveller." It was the first work to which he had put his name; and it at once raised him to the rank of a legitimate English classic. The opinion of the most skilful critics was, that nothing finer had appeared in verse since the fourth book of the "Dunciad." In one respect the "Traveller" differs from all Goldsmith's other writings. In general his designs were bad, and his execution good. In the "Traveller," the execution, though deserving of much praise, is far inferior to the design. No philosophical poem, ancient or modern, has a plan so noble, and at the same time so simple. An English wanderer, seated on a crag among the Alps, near the point where three great countries meet, looks down on the boundless prospect, reviews his long pilgrimage, recalls the varieties of scenery, of climate, of government, of religion, of national character, which he has observed, and comes to the conclusion just or unjust, that our happiness depends little on political institutions, and much on the temper and regulation of our own minds.

While the fourth edition of the "Traveller" was on the counters of the booksellers, the "Vicar of Wakefield" appeared, and rapidly obtained a popularity which has lasted down to our own time, and which is likely to last as long as our language. The fable is indeed one of the worst that ever was constructed. It wants, not merely that probability which ought to be found in a tale of common English life, but that consistency which ought to be found even in the wildest fiction about witches, giants, and fairies. But the earlier chapters have all the sweetness of pastoral poetry, together with all the vivacity of comedy. Moses and his spectacles, the vicar and his monogamy, the sharper and his cosmogony, the squire proving from Aristotle that relatives are related, Olivia preparing herself for the arduous task of converting a rakish lover by studying the controversy between Robinson Crusoe and Friday, the great ladies with their scandal about Sir Tomkyn's amours and Dr Burdock's verses, and Mr Burchell with his "Fudge," have caused as much harmless mirth as has ever been caused by matter packed into so small a number of pages. The latter part of the tale is unworthy of the beginning. As we approach the catastrophe, the absurdities lie thicker and thicker; and the gleams of pleasantry become rarer and rarer.

The success which had attended Goldsmith as a novelist emboldened him to try his fortune as a dramatist. He wrote the "Goodnatured Man," a piece which had a worse fate than it deserved. Garrick refused to produce it at Drury Lane. It was acted at Covent Garden in 1768, but was coldly received. The author, however, cleared by his benefit nights, and by the sale of the copyright, no less than 500 pounds, five times as much as he had made by the "Traveller" and the "Vicar of Wakefield" together. The plot of the "Goodnatured Man" is, like almost all Goldsmith's plots, very ill constructed. But some passages are exquisitely ludicrous; much more ludicrous, indeed, than suited the taste of the town at that time. A canting, mawkish play, entitled "False Delicacy," had just had an immense run. Sentimentality was all the mode. During some years, more tears were shed at comedies than at tragedies; and a pleasantry which moved the audience to anything more than a grave smile was reprobated as low. It is not strange, therefore, that the very best scene in the "Goodnatured Man," that in which Miss Richland finds her lover attended by the bailiff and the bailiff's follower in full court dresses, should have been mercilessly hissed, and should have been omitted after the first night.

In 1770 appeared the "Deserted Village." In mere diction and versification this celebrated poem is fully equal, perhaps superior, to the "Traveller;" and it is generally preferred to the "Traveller" by that large class of readers who think, with Bayes in the "Rehearsal," that the only use of a plan is to bring in fine things. More discerning judges, however, while they admire the beauty of the details, are shocked by one unpardonable fault which pervades the whole. The fault we mean is not that theory about wealth and luxury which has so often been censured by political economists. The theory is indeed false: but the poem, considered merely as a poem, is not necessarily the worse on that account. The finest poem in the Latin language, indeed the finest didactic poem in any language, was written in defence of the silliest and meanest of all systems of natural and moral philosophy. A poet may easily be pardoned for reasoning ill; but he cannot be pardoned for describing ill, for observing the world in which he lives so carelessly that his portraits bear no resemblance to the originals, for exhibiting as copies from real life monstrous combinations of things which never were and never could be found together. What would be thought of a painter who should mix August and January in one landscape, who should introduce a frozen river into a harvest scene? Would it be a sufficient defence of such a picture to say that every part was exquisitely coloured, that the green hedges, the apple-trees loaded with fruit, the waggons reeling under the yellow sheaves, and the sun-burned reapers wiping their foreheads, were very fine, and that the ice and the boys sliding were also very fine? To such a picture the "Deserted Village" bears a great resemblance. It is made up of incongruous parts. The village in its happy days is a true English village. The village in its decay is an Irish village. The felicity and the misery which Goldsmith has brought close together belong to two different countries; and to two different stages in the progress of society. He had assuredly never seen in his native island such a rural paradise, such a seat of plenty, content, and tranquillity, as his "Auburn." He had assuredly never seen in England all the inhabitants of such a paradise turned out of their homes in one day and forced to emigrate in a body to America. The hamlet he had probably seen in Kent; the ejectment he had probably seen in Munster: but, by joining the two, he has produced something which never was and never will be seen in any part of the world.

In 1773 Goldsmith tried his chance at Covent Garden with a second play, "She Stoops to Conquer." The manager was not without great difficulty induced to bring this piece out. The sentimental comedy still reigned; and Goldsmith's comedies were not sentimental. The "Goodnatured Man" had been too funny to succeed; yet the mirth of the "Goodnatured Man" was sober when compared with the rich drollery of "She Stoops to Conquer," which is, in truth, an incomparable farce in five acts. On this occasion, however, genius triumphed. Pit, boxes, and galleries, were in a constant roar of laughter. If any bigoted admirer of Kelly and Cumberland ventured to hiss or groan, he was speedily silenced by a general cry of "turn him out," or "throw him over." Two generations have since confirmed the verdict which was pronounced on that night.

While Goldsmith was writing the "Deserted Village," and "She Stoops to Conquer," he was employed on works of a very different kind, works from which he derived little reputation but much profit. He compiled for the use of schools a "History of Rome," by which he made 300 pounds, a "History of England," by which he made 600 pounds, a "History of Greece," for which he received 250 pounds, a "Natural History," for which the booksellers covenanted to pay him 800 guineas. These works he produced without any elaborate research, by merely selecting, abridging, and translating into his own clear, pure, and flowing language what he found in books well-known to the world, but too bulky or too dry for boys and girls. He committed some strange blunders; for he knew nothing with accuracy. Thus in his "History of England," he tells us that Naseby is in Yorkshire; nor did he correct this mistake when the book was reprinted. He was very nearly hoaxed into putting into the "History of Greece" an account of the battle between Alexander the Great and Montezuma. In his "Animated Nature" he relates, with faith and with perfect gravity, all the most absurd lies which he could find in books of travels about gigantic Patagonians, monkeys that preach sermons, nightingales that repeat long conversations. "If he can tell a horse from a cow," said Johnson, "that is the extent of his knowledge of zoology." How little Goldsmith was qualified to write about the physical sciences is sufficiently proved by two anecdotes. He on one occasion denied that the sun is longer in the northern than in the southern signs. It was vain to cite the authority of Maupertuis. "Maupertuis!" he cried, "I understand those matters better than Maupertuis." On another occasion he, in defiance of the evidence of his own senses, maintained obstinately, and even angrily, that he chewed his dinner by moving his upper jaw.

Yet, ignorant as Goldsmith was, few writers have done more to make the first steps in the laborious road to knowledge easy and pleasant. His compilations are widely distinguished from the compilations of ordinary book-makers. He was a great, perhaps an unequalled, master of the arts of selection and condensation. In these respects his histories of Rome and of England, and still more his own abridgements of these histories, well deserve to be studied. In general nothing is less attractive than an epitome: but the epitomes of Goldsmith, even when most concise, are always amusing; and to read them is considered by intelligent children, not as a task, but as a pleasure.

Goldsmith might now be considered as a prosperous man. He had the means of living in comfort, and even in what to one who had so often slept in barns and on bulks must have been luxury. His fame was great and was constantly rising. He lived in what was intellectually far the best society of the kingdom, in a society in which no talent or accomplishment was wanting, and in which the art of conversation was cultivated with splendid success. There probably were never four talkers more admirable in four different ways than Johnson, Burke, Beauclerk, and Garrick; and Goldsmith was on terms of intimacy with all the four. He aspired to share in their colloquial renown; but never was ambition more unfortunate. It may seem strange that a man who wrote with so much perspicuity, vivacity, and grace, should have been, whenever he took a part in conversation, an empty, noisy, blundering rattle. But on this point the evidence is overwhelming. So extraordinary was the contrast between Goldsmith's published works and the silly things which he said, that Horace Walpole described him as an inspired idiot. "Noll," said Garrick, "wrote like an angel, and talked like poor Poll." Chamier declared that it was a hard exercise of faith to believe that so foolish a chatterer could have really written the "Traveller." Even Boswell could say, with contemptuous compassion, that he liked very well to hear honest Goldsmith run on. "Yes, sir," said Johnson, "but he should not like to hear himself." Minds differ as rivers differ. There are transparent and sparkling rivers from which it is delightful to drink as they flow; to such rivers the minds of such men as Burke and Johnson may be compared. But there are rivers of which the water when first drawn is turbid and noisome, but becomes pellucid as crystal, and delicious to the taste, if it be suffered to stand till it has deposited a sediment; and such a river is a type of the mind of Goldsmith. His first thoughts on every subject were confused even to absurdity; but they required only a little time to work themselves clear. When he wrote they had that time; and therefore his readers pronounced him a man of genius: but when he talked he talked nonsense, and made himself the laughing-stock of his hearers. He was painfully sensible of his inferiority in conversation; he felt every failure keenly; yet he had not sufficient judgment and self-command to hold his tongue. His animal spirits and vanity were always impelling him to try to do the one thing which he could not do. After every attempt he felt that he had exposed himself, and writhed with shame and vexation; yet the next moment he began again.

His associates seem to have regarded him with kindness, which, in spite of their admiration of his writings, was not unmixed with contempt. In truth, there was in his character much to love, but very little to respect. His heart was soft even to weakness: he was so generous that he quite forgot to be just: he forgave injuries so readily that he might be said to invite them; and was so liberal to beggars that he had nothing left for his tailor and his butcher. He was vain, sensual, frivolous, profuse, improvident. One vice of a darker shade was imputed to him, envy. But there is not the least reason to believe that this bad passion, though it sometimes made him wince and utter fretful exclamations, ever impelled him to injure by wicked arts the reputation of any of his rivals. The truth probably is, that he was not more envious, but merely less prudent, than his neighbours. His heart was on his lips. All those small jealousies, which are but too common among men of letters, but which a man of letters who is also a man of the world does his best to conceal, Goldsmith avowed with the simplicity of a child. When he was envious, instead of affecting indifference, instead of damning with faint praise, instead of doing injuries slily and in the dark, he told everybody that he was envious. "Do not, pray, do not talk of Johnson in such terms," he said to Boswell; "you harrow up my very soul." George Steevens and Cumberland were men far too cunning to say such a thing. They would have echoed the praises of the man whom they envied, and then have sent to the newspapers anonymous libels upon him. Both what was good and what was bad in Goldsmith's character was to his associates a perfect security that he would never commit such villany. He was neither ill natured enough, nor long headed enough, to be guilty of any malicious act which required contrivance and disguise.

Goldsmith has sometimes been represented as a man of genius, cruelly treated by the world, and doomed to struggle with difficulties which at last broke his heart. But no representation can be more remote from the truth. He did, indeed, go through much sharp misery before he had done anything considerable in literature. But, after his name had appeared on the title-page of the "Traveller," he had none but himself to blame for his distresses. His average income, during the last seven years of his life, certainly exceeded 400 pounds a year; and 400 pounds a year ranked, among the incomes of that day, at least as high as 800 pounds a year would rank at present. A single man living in the Temple with 400 pounds a year might then be called opulent. Not one in ten of the young gentlemen of good families who were studying the law there had so much. But all the wealth which Lord Clive had brought from Bengal, and Sir Lawrence Dundas from Germany, joined together, would not have sufficed for Goldsmith. He spent twice as much as he had. He wore fine clothes, gave dinners of several courses, paid court to venal beauties. He had also, it should be remembered, to the honour of his heart, though not of his head, a guinea, or five or ten, according to the state of his purse, ready for any tale of distress, true or false. But it was not in dress or feasting, in promiscuous amours or promiscuous charities, that his chief expense lay. He had been from boyhood a gambler, and at once the most sanguine and the most unskilful of gamblers. For a time he put off the day of inevitable ruin by temporary expedients. He obtained advances from booksellers, by promising to execute works which he never began. But at length this source of supply failed. He owed more than 2000 pounds; and he saw no hope of extrication from his embarrassments. His spirits and health gave way. He was attacked by a nervous fever, which he thought himself competent to treat. It would have been happy for him if his medical skill had been appreciated as justly by himself as by others. Notwithstanding the degree which he pretended to have received at Padua, he could procure no patients. "I do not practise," he once said; "I make it a rule to prescribe only for my friends." "Pray, dear Doctor," said Beauclerk, "alter your rule; and prescribe only for your enemies." Goldsmith now, in spite of this excellent advice, prescribed for himself. The remedy aggravated the malady. The sick man was induced to call in real physicians; and they at one time imagined that they had cured the disease. Still his weakness and restlessness continued. He could get no sleep. He could take no food. "You are worse," said one of his medical attendants, "than you should be from the degree of fever which you have. Is your mind at ease?" "No, it is not," were the last recorded words of Oliver Goldsmith. He died on the third of April 1774, in his forty-sixth year. He was laid in the churchyard of the Temple; but the spot was not marked by any inscription, and is now forgotten. The coffin was followed by Burke and Reynolds. Both these great men were sincere mourners. Burke, when he heard of Goldsmith's death, had burst into a flood of tears. Reynolds had been so much moved by the news that he had flung aside his brush and palette for the day.

A short time after Goldsmith's death, a little poem appeared, which will, as long as our language lasts, associate the names of his two illustrious friends with his own. It has already been mentioned that he sometimes felt keenly the sarcasm which his wild blundering talk brought upon him. He was, not long before his last illness, provoked into retaliating. He wisely betook himself to his pen; and at that weapon he proved himself a match for all his assailants together. Within a small compass he drew with a singularly easy and vigorous pencil the characters of nine or ten of his intimate associates. Though this little work did not receive his last touches, it must always be regarded as a masterpiece. It is impossible, however, not to wish that four or five likenesses which have no interest for posterity were wanting to that noble gallery; and that their places were supplied by sketches of Johnson and Gibbon, as happy and vivid as the sketches of Burke and Garrick.

Some of Goldsmith's friends and admirers honoured him with a cenotaph in Westminster Abbey. Nollekens was the sculptor; and Johnson wrote the inscription. It is much to be lamented that Johnson did not leave to posterity a more durable and a more valuable memorial of his friend. A life of Goldsmith would have been an inestimable addition to the Lives of the Poets. No man appreciated Goldsmith's writings more justly than Johnson; no man was better acquainted with Goldsmith's character and habits; and no man was more competent to delineate with truth and spirit the peculiarities of a mind in which great powers were found in company with great weaknesses. But the lists of poets to whose works Johnson was requested by the booksellers to furnish prefaces ended with Lyttleton, who died in 1773. The line seems to have been drawn expressly for the purpose of excluding the person whose portrait would have most fitly closed the series. Goldsmith, however, has been fortunate in his biographers. Within a few years his life has been written by Mr Prior, by Mr Washington Irving, and by Mr Forster. The diligence of Mr Prior deserves great praise; the style of Mr Washington Irving is always pleasing; but the highest place must, in justice, be assigned to the eminently interesting work of Mr Forster.

SAMUEL JOHNSON. (December 1856.)

Samuel Johnson, one of the most eminent English writers of the eighteenth century, was the son of Michael Johnson, who was, at the beginning of that century, a magistrate of Lichfield, and a bookseller of great note in the midland counties. Michael's abilities and attainments seem to have been considerable. He was so well acquainted with the contents of the volumes which he exposed to sale, that the country rectors of Staffordshire and Worcestershire thought him an oracle on points of learning. Between him and the clergy, indeed, there was a strong religious and political sympathy. He was a zealous churchman, and, though he had qualified himself for municipal office by taking the oaths to the sovereigns in possession, was to the last a Jacobite in heart. At his house, a house which is still pointed out to every traveller who visits Lichfield, Samuel was born on the 18th of September 1709. In the child, the physical, intellectual, and moral peculiarities which afterwards distinguished the man were plainly discernible; great muscular strength accompanied by much awkwardness and many infirmities; great quickness of parts, with a morbid propensity to sloth and procrastination; a kind and generous heart, with a gloomy and irritable temper. He had inherited from his ancestors a scrofulous taint, which it was beyond the power of medicine to remove. His parents were weak enough to believe that the royal touch was a specific for this malady. In his third year he was taken up to London, inspected by the court surgeon, prayed over by the court chaplains, and stroked and presented with a piece of gold by Queen Anne. One of his earliest recollections was that of a stately lady in a diamond stomacher and a long black hood. Her hand was applied in vain. The boy's features, which were originally noble and not irregular, were distorted by his malady. His cheeks were deeply scarred. He lost for a time the sight of one eye; and he saw but very imperfectly with the other. But the force of his mind overcame every impediment. Indolent as he was, he acquired knowledge with such ease and rapidity that at every school to which he was sent he was soon the best scholar. From sixteen to eighteen he resided at home, and was left to his own devices. He learned much at this time, though his studies were without guidance and without plan. He ransacked his father's shelves, dipped into a multitude of books, read what was interesting, and passed over what was dull. An ordinary lad would have acquired little or no useful knowledge in such a way: but much that was dull to ordinary lads was interesting to Samuel. He read little Greek: for his proficiency in that language was not such that he could take much pleasure in the masters of Attic poetry and eloquence. But he had left school a good Latinist; and he soon acquired, in the large and miscellaneous library of which he now had the command, an extensive knowledge of Latin literature. That Augustan delicacy of taste which is the boast of the great public schools of England he never possessed. But he was early familiar with some classical writers who were quite unknown to the best scholars in the sixth form at Eton. He was peculiarly attracted by the works of the great restorers of learning. Once, while searching for some apples, he found a huge folio volume of Petrarch's works. The name excited his curiosity; and he eagerly devoured hundreds of pages. Indeed, the diction and versification of his own Latin compositions show that he had paid at least as much attention to modern copies from the antique as to the original models.

While he was thus irregularly educating himself, his family was sinking into hopeless poverty. Old Michael Johnson was much better qualified to pore upon books, and to talk about them, than to trade in them. His business declined; his debts increased; it was with difficulty that the daily expenses of his household were defrayed. It was out of his power to support his son at either university; but a wealthy neighbour offered assistance; and, in reliance on promises which proved to be of very little value, Samuel was entered at Pembroke College, Oxford. When the young scholar presented himself to the rulers of that society, they were amazed not more by his ungainly figure and eccentric manners than by the quantity of extensive and curious information which he had picked up during many months of desultory but not unprofitable study. On the first day of his residence he surprised his teachers by quoting Macrobius; and one of the most learned among them declared that he had never known a freshman of equal attainments.

At Oxford, Johnson resided during about three years. He was poor, even to raggedness; and his appearance excited a mirth and a pity which were equally intolerable to his haughty spirit. He was driven from the quadrangle of Christ Church by the sneering looks which the members of that aristocratical society cast at the holes in his shoes. Some charitable person placed a new pair at his door; but he spurned them away in a fury. Distress made him, not servile, but reckless and ungovernable. No opulent gentleman commoner, panting for one-and-twenty, could have treated the academical authorities with more gross disrespect. The needy scholar was generally to be seen under the gate of Pembroke, a gate now adorned with his effigy, haranguing a circle of lads, over whom, in spite of his tattered gown and dirty linen, his wit and audacity gave him an undisputed ascendency. In every mutiny against the discipline of the college he was the ringleader. Much was pardoned, however, to a youth so highly distinguished by abilities and acquirements. He had early made himself known by turning Pope's Messiah into Latin verse. The style and rhythm, indeed, were not exactly Virgilian; but the translation found many admirers, and was read with pleasure by Pope himself.

The time drew near at which Johnson would, in the ordinary course of things, have become a Bachelor of Arts: but he was at the end of his resources. Those promises of support on which he had relied had not been kept. His family could do nothing for him. His debts to Oxford tradesmen were small indeed, yet larger than he could pay. In the autumn of 1731, he was under the necessity of quitting the university without a degree. In the following winter his father died. The old man left but a pittance; and of that pittance almost the whole was appropriated to the support of his widow. The property to which Samuel succeeded amounted to no more than twenty pounds.

His life, during the thirty years which followed, was one hard struggle with poverty. The misery of that struggle needed no aggravation, but was aggravated by the sufferings of an unsound body and an unsound mind. Before the young man left the university, his hereditary malady had broken forth in a singularly cruel form. He had become an incurable hypochondriac. He said long after that he had been mad all his life, or at least not perfectly sane; and, in truth, eccentricities less strange than his have often been thought grounds sufficient for absolving felons, and for setting aside wills. His grimaces, his gestures, his mutterings, sometimes diverted and sometimes terrified people who did not know him. At a dinner table he would, in a fit of absence, stoop down and twitch off a lady's shoe. He would amaze a drawing-room by suddenly ejaculating a clause of the Lord's Prayer. He would conceive an unintelligible aversion to a particular alley, and perform a great circuit rather than see the hateful place. He would set his heart on touching every post in the streets through which he walked. If by any chance he missed a post, he would go back a hundred yards and repair the omission. Under the influence of his disease, his senses became morbidly torpid, and his imagination morbidly active. At one time he would stand poring on the town clock without being able to tell the hour. At another, he would distinctly hear his mother, who was many miles off, calling him by his name. But this was not the worst. A deep melancholy took possession of him, and gave a dark tinge to all his views of human nature and of human destiny. Such wretchedness as he endured has driven many men to shoot themselves or drown themselves. But he was under no temptation to commit suicide. He was sick of life; but he was afraid of death; and he shuddered at every sight or sound which reminded him of the inevitable hour. In religion he found but little comfort during his long and frequent fits of dejection; for his religion partook of his own character. The light from heaven shone on him indeed, but not in a direct line, or with its own pure splendour. The rays had to struggle through a disturbing medium; they reached him refracted, dulled and discoloured by the thick gloom which had settled on his soul; and, though they might be sufficiently clear to guide him, were too dim to cheer him.

With such infirmities of body and mind, this celebrated man was left, at two-and-twenty, to fight his way through the world. He remained during about five years in the midland counties. At Lichfield, his birthplace and his early home, he had inherited some friends and acquired others. He was kindly noticed by Henry Hervey, a gay officer of noble family, who happened to be quartered there. Gilbert Walmesley, registrar of the ecclesiastical court of the diocese, a man of distinguished parts, learning, and knowledge of the world, did himself honour by patronising the young adventurer, whose repulsive person, unpolished manners, and squalid garb moved many of the petty aristocracy of the neighbourhood to laughter or to disgust. At Lichfield, however, Johnson could find no way of earning a livelihood. He became usher of a grammar school in Leicestershire; he resided as a humble companion in the house of a country gentleman; but a life of dependence was insupportable to his haughty spirit. He repaired to Birmingham, and there earned a few guineas by literary drudgery. In that town he printed a translation, little noticed at the time, and long forgotten, of a Latin book about Abyssinia. He then put forth proposals for publishing by subscription the poems of Politian, with notes containing a history of modern Latin verse: but subscriptions did not come in; and the volume never appeared.

While leading this vagrant and miserable life, Johnson fell in love. The object of his passion was Mrs Elizabeth Porter, a widow who had children as old as himself. To ordinary spectators, the lady appeared to be a short, fat, coarse woman, painted half an inch thick, dressed in gaudy colours, and fond of exhibiting provincial airs and graces which were not exactly those of the Queensberrys and Lepels. To Johnson, however, whose passions were strong, whose eyesight was too weak to distinguish ceruse from natural bloom, and who had seldom or never been in the same room with a woman of real fashion, his Titty, as he called her, was the most beautiful, graceful, and accomplished of her sex. That his admiration was unfeigned cannot be doubted; for she was as poor as himself. She accepted, with a readiness which did her little honour, the addresses of a suitor who might have been her son. The marriage, however, in spite of occasional wranglings, proved happier than might have been expected. The lover continued to be under the illusions of the wedding-day till the lady died in her sixty-fourth year. On her monument he placed an inscription extolling the charms of her person and of her manners; and when, long after her decease, he had occasion to mention her, he exclaimed, with a tenderness half ludicrous, half pathetic, "Pretty creature!"

His marriage made it necessary for him to exert himself more strenuously than he had hitherto done. He took a house in the neighbourhood of his native town, and advertised for pupils. But eighteen months passed away; and only three pupils came to his academy. Indeed, his appearance was so strange, and his temper so violent, that his schoolroom must have resembled an ogre's den. Nor was the tawdry painted grandmother whom he called his Titty well qualified to make provision for the comfort of young gentlemen. David Garrick, who was one of the pupils, used, many years later, to throw the best company of London into convulsions of laughter by mimicking the endearments of this extraordinary pair.

At length Johnson, in the twenty-eighth year of his age, determined to seek his fortune in the capital as a literary adventurer. He set out with a few guineas, three acts of the tragedy of Irene in manuscript, and two or three letters of introduction from his friend Walmesley.

Never, since literature became a calling in England, had it been a less gainful calling than at the time when Johnson took up his residence in London. In the preceding generation a writer of eminent merit was sure to be munificently rewarded by the government. The least that he could expect was a pension or a sinecure place; and, if he showed any aptitude for politics, he might hope to be a member of parliament, a lord of the treasury, an ambassador, a secretary of state. It would be easy, on the other hand, to name several writers of the nineteenth century of whom the least successful has received forty thousand pounds from the booksellers. But Johnson entered on his vocation in the most dreary part of the dreary interval which separated two ages of prosperity. Literature had ceased to flourish under the patronage of the great, and had not begun to flourish under the patronage of the public. One man of letters, indeed, Pope, had acquired by his pen what was then considered as a handsome fortune, and lived on a footing of equality with nobles and ministers of state. But this was a solitary exception. Even an author whose reputation was established, and whose works were popular, such an author as Thomson, whose Seasons were in every library, such an author as Fielding, whose Pasquin had had a greater run than any drama since The Beggar's Opera, was sometimes glad to obtain, by pawning his best coat, the means of dining on tripe at a cookshop underground, where he could wipe his hands, after his greasy meal, on the back of a Newfoundland dog. It is easy, therefore, to imagine what humiliations and privations must have awaited the novice who had still to earn a name. One of the publishers to whom Johnson applied for employment measured with a scornful eye that athletic though uncouth frame, and exclaimed, "You had better get a porter's knot, and carry trunks." Nor was the advice bad; for a porter was likely to be as plentifully fed, and as comfortably lodged, as a poet.

Some time appears to have elapsed before Johnson was able to form any literary connection from which he could expect more than bread for the day which was passing over him. He never forgot the generosity with which Hervey, who was now residing in London, relieved his wants during this time of trial. "Harry Hervey," said the old philosopher many years later, "was a vicious man; but he was very kind to me. If you call a dog Hervey I shall love him." At Hervey's table Johnson sometimes enjoyed feasts which were made more agreeable by contrast. But in general he dined, and thought that he dined well, on sixpenny worth of meat, and a pennyworth of bread, at an alehouse near Drury Lane.

The effect of the privations and sufferings which he endured at this time was discernible to the last in his temper and his deportment. His manners had never been courtly. They now became almost savage. Being frequently under the necessity of wearing shabby coats and dirty shirts, he became a confirmed sloven. Being often very hungry when he sat down to his meals, he contracted a habit of eating with ravenous greediness. Even to the end of his life, and even at the tables of the great, the sight of food affected him as it affects wild beasts and birds of prey. His taste in cookery, formed in subterranean ordinaries and alamode beefshops, was far from delicate. Whenever he was so fortunate as to have near him a hare that had been kept too long, or a meat pie made with rancid butter, he gorged himself with such violence that his veins swelled, and the moisture broke out on his forehead. The affronts which his poverty emboldened stupid and low-minded men to offer to him would have broken a mean spirit into sycophancy, but made him rude even to ferocity. Unhappily the insolence which, while it was defensive, was pardonable, and in some sense respectable, accompanied him into societies where he was treated with courtesy and kindness. He was repeatedly provoked into striking those who had taken liberties with him. All the sufferers, however, were wise enough to abstain from talking about their beatings, except Osborne, the most rapacious and brutal of booksellers, who proclaimed everywhere that he had been knocked down by the huge fellow whom he had hired to puff the Harleian Library.

About a year after Johnson had begun to reside in London, he was fortunate enough to obtain regular employment from Cave, an enterprising and intelligent bookseller, who was proprietor and editor of the "Gentleman's Magazine." That journal, just entering on the ninth year of its long existence, was the only periodical work in the kingdom which then had what would now be called a large circulation. It was, indeed, the chief source of parliamentary intelligence. It was not then safe, even during a recess, to publish an account of the proceedings of either House without some disguise. Cave, however, ventured to entertain his readers with what he called "Reports of the Debates of the Senate of Lilliput." France was Blefuscu; London was Mildendo: pounds were sprugs: the Duke of Newcastle was the Nardac secretary of State: Lord Hardwicke was the Hurgo Hickrad: and William Pulteney was Wingul Pulnub. To write the speeches was, during several years, the business of Johnson. He was generally furnished with notes, meagre indeed, and inaccurate, of what had been said; but sometimes he had to find arguments and eloquence both for the ministry and for the opposition. He was himself a Tory, not from rational conviction—for his serious opinion was that one form of government was just as good or as bad as another—but from mere passion, such as inflamed the Capulets against the Montagues, or the Blues of the Roman circus against the Greens. In his infancy he had heard so much talk about the villanies of the Whigs, and the dangers of the Church, that he had become a furious partisan when he could scarcely speak. Before he was three he had insisted on being taken to hear Sacheverell preach at Lichfield Cathedral, and had listened to the sermon with as much respect, and probably with as much intelligence, as any Staffordshire squire in the congregation. The work which had been begun in the nursery had been completed by the university. Oxford, when Johnson resided there, was the most Jacobitical place in England; and Pembroke was one of the most Jacobital colleges in Oxford. The prejudices which he brought up to London were scarcely less absurd than those of his own Tom Tempest. Charles II. and James II. were two of the best kings that ever reigned. Laud, a poor creature who never did, said, or wrote anything indicating more than the ordinary capacity of an old woman, was a prodigy of parts and learning over whose tomb Art and Genius still continued to weep. Hampden deserved no more honourable name than that of "the zealot of rebellion." Even the ship money, condemned not less decidedly by Falkland and Clarendon than by the bitterest Roundheads, Johnson would not pronounce to have been an unconstitutional impost. Under a government, the mildest that had ever been known in the world—under a government, which allowed to the people an unprecedented liberty of speech and action—he fancied that he was a slave; he assailed the ministry with obloquy which refuted itself, and regretted the lost freedom and happiness of those golden days in which a writer who had taken but one-tenth part of the license allowed to him would have been pilloried, mangled with the shears, whipped at the cart's tail, and flung into a noisome dungeon to die. He hated dissenters and stockjobbers, the excise and the army, septennial parliaments, and continental connections. He long had an aversion to the Scotch, an aversion of which he could not remember the commencement, but which, he owned, had probably originated in his abhorrence of the conduct of the nation during the Great Rebellion. It is easy to guess in what manner debates on great party questions were likely to be reported by a man whose judgment was so much disordered by party spirit. A show of fairness was indeed necessary to the prosperity of the Magazine. But Johnson long afterwards owned that, though he had saved appearances, he had taken care that the Whig dogs should not have the best of it; and, in fact, every passage which has lived, every passage which bears the marks of his higher faculties, is put into the mouth of some member of the opposition.

A few weeks after Johnson had entered on these obscure labours, he published a work which at once placed him high among the writers of his age. It is probable that what he had suffered during his first year in London had often reminded him of some parts of that noble poem in which Juvenal had described the misery and degradation of a needy man of letters, lodged among the pigeons' nests in the tottering garrets which overhung the streets of Rome. Pope's admirable imitations of Horace's Satires and Epistles had recently appeared, were in every hand, and were by many readers thought superior to the originals. What Pope had done for Horace, Johnson aspired to do for Juvenal. The enterprise was bold and yet judicious. For between Johnson and Juvenal there was much in common, much more certainly than between Pope and Horace.

Johnson's London appeared without his name in May 1738. He received only ten guineas for this stately and vigorous poem; but the sale was rapid, and the success complete. A second edition was required within a week. Those small critics who are always desirous to lower established reputations ran about proclaiming that the anonymous satirist was superior to Pope in Pope's own peculiar department of literature. It ought to be remembered, to the honour of Pope, that he joined heartily in the applause with which the appearance of a rival genius was welcomed. He made inquiries about the author of London. Such a man, he said, could not long be concealed. The name was soon discovered; and Pope with great kindness, exerted himself to obtain an academical degree and the mastership of a grammar school for the poor young poet. The attempt failed; and Johnson remained a bookseller's hack.

WILLIAM PITT. (January 1859.)

William Pitt, the second son of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, and of Lady Hester Granville, daughter of Hester Countess Temple, was born on the 28th of May 1759. The child inherited a name which, at the time of his birth, was the most illustrious in the civilised world, and was pronounced by every Englishman with pride, and by every enemy of England with mingled admiration and terror. During the first year of his life, every month had its illuminations and bonfires, and every wind brought some messenger charged with joyful tidings and hostile standards. In Westphalia the English infantry won a great battle which arrested the armies of Louis the Fifteenth in the midst of a career of conquest; Boscawen defeated one French fleet on the coast of Portugal; Hawke put to flight another in the Bay of Biscay; Johnson took Niagara; Amherst took Ticonderoga; Wolfe died by the most enviable of deaths under the walls of Quebec; Clive destroyed a Dutch armament in the Hooghly, and established the English supremacy in Bengal; Coote routed Lally at Wandewash, and established the English supremacy in the Carnatic. The nation, while loudly applauding the successful warriors, considered them all, on sea and on land, in Europe, in America, and in Asia, merely as instruments which received their direction from one superior mind. It was the great William Pitt, the great commoner, who had vanquished French marshals in Germany, and French admirals on the Atlantic; who had conquered for his country one great empire on the frozen shores of Ontario, and another under the tropical sun near the mouths of the Ganges. It was not in the nature of things that popularity such as he at this time enjoyed should be permanent. That popularity had lost its gloss before his children were old enough to understand that their father was a great man. He was at length placed in situations in which neither his talents for administration nor his talents for debate appeared to the best advantage. The energy and decision which had eminently fitted him for the direction of war were not needed in time of peace. The lofty and spirit-stirring eloquence which had made him supreme in the House of Commons often fell dead on the House of Lords. A cruel malady racked his joints, and left his joints only to fall on his nerves and on his brain. During the closing years of his life, he was odious to the court, and yet was not on cordial terms with the great body of the opposition. Chatham was only the ruin of Pitt, but an awful and majestic ruin, not to be contemplated by any man of sense and feeling without emotions resembling those which are excited by the remains of the Parthenon and of the Coliseum. In one respect the old statesman was eminently happy. Whatever might be the vicissitudes of his public life, he never failed to find peace and love by his own hearth. He loved all his children, and was loved by them; and, of all his children, the one of whom he was fondest and proudest was his second son.

The child's genius and ambition displayed themselves with a rare and almost unnatural precocity. At seven, the interest which he took in grave subjects, the ardour with which he pursued his studies, and the sense and vivacity of his remarks on books and on events, amazed his parents and instructors. One of his sayings of this date was reported to his mother by his tutor. In August 1766, when the world was agitated by the news that Mr Pitt had become Earl of Chatham, little William exclaimed, "I am glad that I am not the eldest son. I want to speak in the House of Commons like papa." A letter is extant in which Lady Chatham, a woman of considerable abilities, remarked to her lord, that their younger son at twelve had left far behind him his elder brother, who was fifteen. "The fineness," she wrote, "of William's mind makes him enjoy with the greatest pleasure what would be above the reach of any other creature of his small age." At fourteen the lad was in intellect a man. Hayley, who met him at Lyme in the summer of 1773, was astonished, delighted, and somewhat overawed, by hearing wit and wisdom from so young a mouth. The poet, indeed, was afterwards sorry that his shyness had prevented him from submitting the plan of an extensive literary work, which he was then meditating, to the judgment of this extraordinary boy. The boy, indeed, had already written a tragedy, bad of course, but not worse than the tragedies of his friend. This piece is still preserved at Chevening, and is in some respects highly curious. There is no love. The whole plot is political; and it is remarkable that the interest, such as it is, turns on a contest about a regency. On one side is a faithful servant of the Crown, on the other an ambitious and unprincipled conspirator. At length the King, who had been missing, reappears, resumes his power, and rewards the faithful defender of his rights. A reader who should judge only by internal evidence would have no hesitation in pronouncing that the play was written by some Pittite poetaster at the time of the rejoicings for the recovery of George the Third in 1789.

The pleasure with which William's parents observed the rapid development of his intellectual powers was alloyed by apprehensions about his health. He shot up alarmingly fast; he was often ill, and always weak; and it was feared that it would be impossible to rear a stripling so tall, so slender, and so feeble. Port wine was prescribed by his medical advisers: and it is said that he was, at fourteen, accustomed to take this agreeable physic in quantities which would, in our abstemious age, be thought much more than sufficient for any full-grown man. This regimen, though it would probably have killed ninety-nine boys out of a hundred, seems to have been well suited to the peculiarities of William's constitution; for at fifteen he ceased to be molested by disease, and, though never a strong man, continued, during many years of labour and anxiety, of nights passed in debate and of summers passed in London, to be a tolerably healthy one. It was probably on account of the delicacy of his frame that he was not educated like other boys of the same rank. Almost all the eminent English statesmen and orators to whom he was afterwards opposed or allied, North, Fox, Shelburne, Windham, Grey, Wellesley, Grenville, Sheridan, Canning, went through the training of great public schools. Lord Chatham had himself been a distinguished Etonian: and it is seldom that a distinguished Etonian forgets his obligations to Eton. But William's infirmities required a vigilance and tenderness such as could be found only at home. He was therefore bred under the paternal roof. His studies were superintended by a clergyman named Wilson; and those studies, though often interrupted by illness, were prosecuted with extraordinary success. Before the lad had completed his fifteenth year, his knowledge both of the ancient languages and of mathematics was such as very few men of eighteen then carried up to college. He was therefore sent, towards the close of the year 1773, to Pembroke Hall, in the university of Cambridge. So young a student required much more than the ordinary care which a college tutor bestows on undergraduates. The governor, to whom the direction of William's academical life was confided, was a bachelor of arts named Pretyman, who had been senior wrangler in the preceding year, and who, though not a man of prepossessing appearance or brilliant parts, was eminently acute and laborious, a sound scholar, and an excellent geometrician. At Cambridge, Pretyman was, during more than two years, the inseparable companion, and indeed almost the only companion of his pupil. A close and lasting friendship sprang up between the pair. The disciple was able, before he completed his twenty-eighth year, to make his preceptor Bishop of Lincoln and Dean of St Paul's; and the preceptor showed his gratitude by writing a life of the disciple, which enjoys the distinction of being the worst biographical work of its size in the world.

Pitt, till he graduated, had scarcely one acquaintance, attended chapel regularly morning and evening, dined every day in hall, and never went to a single evening party. At seventeen, he was admitted, after the bad fashion of those times, by right of birth, without any examination, to the degree of the Master of Arts. But he continued during some years to reside at college, and to apply himself vigorously, under Pretyman's direction, to the studies of the place, while mixing freely in the best academic society.

The stock of learning which Pitt laid in during this part of his life was certainly very extraordinary. In fact, it was all that he ever possessed; for he very early became too busy to have any spare time for books. The work in which he took the greatest delight was Newton's Principia. His liking for mathematics, indeed, amounted to a passion, which, in the opinion of his instructors, themselves distinguished mathematicians, required to be checked rather than encouraged. The acuteness and readiness with which he solved problems was pronounced by one of the ablest of the moderators, who in those days presided over the disputations in the schools, and conducted the examinations of the Senate House, to be unrivalled in the university. Nor was the youth's proficiency in classical learning less remarkable. In one respect, indeed, he appeared to disadvantage when compared with even second-rate and third-rate men from public schools. He had never, while under Wilson's care, been in the habit of composing in the ancient languages: and he therefore never acquired that knack of versification which is sometimes possessed by clever boys whose knowledge of the language and literature of Greece and Rome is very superficial. It would have been utterly out of his power to produce such charming elegiac lines as those in which Wellesley bade farewell to Eton, or such Virgilian hexameters as those in which Canning described the pilgrimage to Mecca. But it may be doubted whether any scholar has ever, at twenty, had a more solid and profound knowledge of the two great tongues of the old civilised world. The facility with which he penetrated the meaning of the most intricate sentences in the Attic writers astonished veteran critics. He had set his heart on being intimately acquainted with all the extant poetry of Greece, and was not satisfied till he had mastered Lycophron's Cassandra, the most obscure work in the whole range of ancient literature. This strange rhapsody, the difficulties of which have perplexed and repelled many excellent scholars, "he read," says his preceptor, "with an ease at first sight, which, if I had not witnessed it, I should have thought beyond the compass of human intellect."

To modern literature Pitt paid comparatively little attention. He knew no living language except French; and French he knew very imperfectly. With a few of the best English writers he was intimate, particularly with Shakspeare and Milton. The debate in Pandemonium was, as it well deserved to be, one of his favourite passages; and his early friends used to talk, long after his death, of the just emphasis and the melodious cadence with which they had heard him recite the incomparable speech of Belial. He had indeed been carefully trained from infancy in the art of managing his voice, a voice naturally clear and deep-toned. His father, whose oratory owed no small part of its effect to that art, had been a most skilful and judicious instructor. At a later period, the wits of Brookes's, irritated by observing, night after night, how powerfully Pitt's sonorous elocution fascinated the rows of country gentlemen, reproached him with having been "taught by his dad on a stool."

His education, indeed, was well adapted to form a great parliamentary speaker. One argument often urged against those classical studies which occupy so large apart of the early life of every gentleman bred in the south of our island is, that they prevent him from acquiring a command of his mother tongue, and that it is not unusual to meet with a youth of excellent parts, who writes Ciceronian Latin prose and Horatian Latin Alcaics, but who would find it impossible to express his thoughts in pure, perspicuous, and forcible English. There may perhaps be some truth in this observation. But the classical studies of Pitt were carried on in a peculiar manner, and had the effect of enriching his English vocabulary, and of making him wonderfully expert in the art of constructing correct English sentences. His practice was to look over a page or two of a Greek or Latin author, to make himself master of the meaning, and then to read the passage straightforward into his own language. This practice, begun under his first teacher Wilson, was continued under Pretyman. It is not strange that a young man of great abilities, who had been exercised daily in this way during ten years, should have acquired an almost unrivalled power of putting his thoughts, without premeditation, into words well selected and well arranged.

Of all the remains of antiquity, the orations were those on which he bestowed the most minute examination. His favourite employment was to compare harangues on opposite sides of the same question, to analyse them, and to observe which of the arguments of the first speaker were refuted by the second, which were evaded, and which were left untouched. Nor was it only in books that he at this time studied the art of parliamentary fencing. When he was at home, he had frequent opportunities of hearing important debates at Westminster; and he heard them, not only with interest and enjoyment, but with a close scientific attention resembling that with which a diligent pupil at Guy's Hospital watches every turn of the hand of a great surgeon through a difficult operation. On one of these occasions, Pitt, a youth whose abilities were as yet known only to his own family and to a small knot of college friends, was introduced on the steps of the throne in the House of Lords to Fox, who was his senior by eleven years, and who was already the greatest debater, and one of the greatest orators, that had appeared in England. Fox used afterwards to relate that, as the discussion proceeded, Pitt repeatedly turned to him, and said, "But surely, Mr Fox, that might be met thus;" or, "Yes; but he lays himself open to this retort." What the particular criticisms were Fox had forgotten; but he said that he was much struck at the time by the precocity of the lad who, through the whole sitting, seemed to be thinking only how all the speeches on both sides could be answered.

One of the young man's visits to the House of Lords was a sad and memorable era in his life. He had not quite completed his nineteenth year, when, on the 7th of April 1778, he attended his father to Westminster. A great debate was expected. It was known that France had recognised the independence of the United States. The Duke of Richmond was about to declare his opinion that all thought of subjugating those states ought to be relinquished. Chatham had always maintained that the resistance of the colonies to the mother country was justifiable. But he conceived, very erroneously, that on the day on which their independence should be acknowledged the greatness of England would be at an end. Though sinking under the weight of years and infirmities, he determined, in spite of the entreaties of his family, to be in his place. His son supported him to a seat. The excitement and exertion were too much for the old man. In the very act of addressing the peers, he fell back in convulsions. A few weeks later his corpse was borne, with gloomy pomp, from the Painted Chamber to the Abbey. The favourite child and namesake of the deceased statesman followed the coffin as chief mourner, and saw it deposited in the transept where his own was destined to lie.

His elder brother, now Earl of Chatham, had means sufficient, and barely sufficient, to support the dignity of the peerage. The other members of the family were poorly provided for. William had little more than three hundred a year. It was necessary for him to follow a profession. He had already begun to eat his terms. In the spring of 1780 he came of age. He then quitted Cambridge, was called to the bar, took chambers in Lincoln's Inn, and joined the western circuit. In the autumn of that year a general election took place; and he offered himself as a candidate for the university; but he was at the bottom of the poll. It is said that the grave doctors, who then sate robed in scarlet, on the benches of Golgotha, thought it great presumption in so young a man to solicit so high a distinction. He was, however, at the request of a hereditary friend, the Duke of Rutland, brought into Parliament by Sir James Lowther for the borough of Appleby.

The dangers of the country were at that time such as might well have disturbed even a constant mind. Army after army had been sent in vain against the rebellious colonists of North America. On pitched fields of battle the advantage had been with the disciplined troops of the mother country. But it was not on pitched fields of battle that the event of such a contest could be decided. An armed nation, with hunger and the Atlantic for auxiliaries, was not to be subjugated. Meanwhile the House of Bourbon, humbled to the dust a few years before by the genius and vigour of Chatham, had seized the opportunity of revenge. France and Spain were united against us, and had recently been joined by Holland. The command of the Mediterranean had been for a time lost. The British flag had been scarcely able to maintain itself in the British Channel. The northern powers professed neutrality; but their neutrality had a menacing aspect. In the East, Hyder had descended on the Carnatic, had destroyed the little army of Baillie, and had spread terror even to the ramparts of Fort Saint George. The discontents of Ireland threatened nothing less than civil war. In England the authority of the government had sunk to the lowest point. The King and the House of Commons were alike unpopular. The cry for parliamentary reform was scarcely less loud and vehement than in the autumn of 1830. Formidable associations, headed, not by ordinary demagogues, but by men of high rank, stainless character, and distinguished ability, demanded a revision of the representative system. The populace, emboldened by the impotence and irresolution of the government, had recently broken loose from all restraint, besieged the chambers of the legislature, hustled peers, hunted bishops, attacked the residences of ambassadors, opened prisons, burned and pulled down houses. London had presented during some days the aspect of a city taken by storm; and it had been necessary to form a camp among the trees of Saint James's Park.

In spite of dangers and difficulties abroad and at home, George the Third, with a firmness which had little affinity with virtue or with wisdom, persisted in his determination to put down the American rebels by force of arms; and his ministers submitted their judgment to his. Some of them were probably actuated merely by selfish cupidity; but their chief, Lord North, a man of high honour, amiable temper, winning manners, lively wit, and excellent talents both for business and for debate, must be acquitted of all sordid motives. He remained at a post from which he had long wished and had repeatedly tried to escape, only because he had not sufficient fortitude to resist the entreaties and reproaches of the King, who silenced all arguments by passionately asking whether any gentleman, any man of spirit, could have the heart to desert a kind master in the hour of extremity.

The opposition consisted of two parties which had once been hostile to each other, and which had been very slowly, and, as it soon appeared, very imperfectly reconciled, but which at this conjuncture seemed to act together with cordiality. The larger of these parties consisted of the great body of the Whig aristocracy. Its head was Charles, Marquess of Rockingham, a man of sense and virtue, and in wealth and parliamentary interest equalled by very few of the English nobles, but afflicted with a nervous timidity which prevented him from taking a prominent part in debate. In the House of Commons, the adherents of Rockingham were led by Fox, whose dissipated habits and ruined fortunes were the talk of the whole town, but whose commanding genius, and whose sweet, generous, and affectionate disposition, extorted the admiration and love of those who most lamented the errors of his private life. Burke, superior to Fox in largeness of comprehension, in extent of knowledge, and in splendour of imagination, but less skilled in that kind of logic and in that kind of rhetoric which convince and persuade great assemblies, was willing to be the lieutenant of a young chief who might have been his son.

A smaller section of the opposition was composed of the old followers of Chatham. At their head was William, Earl of Shelburne, distinguished both as a statesman and as a lover of science and letters. With him were leagued Lord Camden, who had formerly held the Great Seal, and whose integrity, ability, and constitutional knowledge commanded the public respect; Barre, an eloquent and acrimonious declaimer; and Dunning, who had long held the first place at the English bar. It was to this party that Pitt was naturally attracted.

On the 26th of February 1781, he made his first speech, in favour of Burke's plan of economical reform. Fox stood up at the same moment, but instantly gave way. The lofty yet animated deportment of the young member, his perfect self-possession, the readiness with which he replied to the orators who had preceded him, the silver tones of his voice, the perfect structure of his unpremeditated sentences, astonished and delighted his hearers. Burke, moved even to tears, exclaimed, "It is not a chip of the old block; it is the old block itself." "Pitt will be one of the first men in Parliament," said a member of the opposition to Fox. "He is so already," answered Fox, in whose nature envy had no place. It is a curious fact, well remembered by some who were very recently living, that soon after this debate Pitt's name was put up by Fox at Brookes's.

On two subsequent occasions during that session Pitt addressed the House, and on both fully sustained the reputation which he had acquired on his first appearance. In the summer, after the prorogation, he again went the western circuit, held several briefs, and acquitted himself in such a manner that he was highly complimented by Buller from the bench, and by Dunning at the bar.

On the 27th of November the Parliament reassembled. Only forty-eight hours before had arrived tidings of the surrender of Cornwallis and his army; and it had consequently been necessary to rewrite the royal speech. Every man in the kingdom, except the King, was now convinced that it was mere madness to think of conquering the United States. In the debate on the report of the address, Pitt spoke with even more energy and brilliancy than on any former occasion. He was warmly applauded by his allies; but it was remarked that no person on his own side of the house was so loud in eulogy as Henry Dundas, the Lord Advocate of Scotland, who spoke from the ministerial ranks. That able and versatile politician distinctly foresaw the approaching downfall of the government with which he was connected, and was preparing to make his own escape from the ruin. From that night dates his connection with Pitt, a connection which soon became a close intimacy, and which lasted till it was dissolved by death.

About a fortnight later, Pitt spoke in the committee of supply on the army estimates. Symptoms of dissension had begun to appear on the Treasury bench. Lord George Germaine, the Secretary of State, who was especially charged with the direction of the war in America, had held language not easily to be reconciled with declarations made by the First Lord of the Treasury. Pitt noticed the discrepancy with much force and keenness. Lord George and Lord North began to whisper together; and Welbore Ellis, an ancient placeman who had been drawing salary almost every quarter since the days of Henry Pelham, bent down between them to put in a word. Such interruptions sometimes discompose veteran speakers. Pitt stopped, and, looking at the group, said, with admirable readiness, "I shall wait till Nestor has composed the dispute between Agamemnon and Achilles."

After several defeats, or victories hardly to be distinguished from defeats, the ministry resigned. The King, reluctantly and ungraciously, consented to accept Rockingham as first minister. Fox and Shelburne became Secretaries of State. Lord John Cavendish, one of the most upright and honourable of men, was made Chancellor of the Exchequer. Thurlow, whose abilities and force of character had made him the dictator of the House of Lords, continued to hold the great seal.

To Pitt was offered, through Shelburne, the Vice-Treasurership of Ireland, one of the easiest and most highly paid places in the gift of the crown; but the offer was, without hesitation, declined. The young statesman had resolved to accept no post which did not entitle him to a seat in the cabinet: and, in a few days later, he announced that resolution in the House of Commons. It must be remembered that the cabinet was then a much smaller and more select body than at present. We have seen cabinets of sixteen. In the time of our grandfathers a cabinet of ten or eleven was thought inconveniently large. Seven was an usual number. Even Burke, who had taken the lucrative office of paymaster, was not in the cabinet. Many therefore thought Pitt's declaration indecent. He himself was sorry that he had made it. The words, he said in private, had escaped him in the heat of speaking; and he had no sooner uttered them than he would have given the world to recall them. They, however, did him no harm with the public. The second William Pitt, it was said, had shown that he had inherited the spirit, as well as the genius, of the first. In the son, as in the father, there might perhaps be too much pride; but there was nothing low or sordid. It might be called arrogance in a young barrister, living in chambers on three hundred a year, to refuse a salary of five thousand a year, merely because he did not choose to bind himself to speak or vote for plans which he had no share in framing; but surely such arrogance was not very far removed from virtue.

Pitt gave a general support to the administration of Rockingham, but omitted, in the meantime, no opportunity of courting that Ultra-Whig party which the persecution of Wilkes and the Middlesex election had called into existence, and which the disastrous events of the war, and the triumph of republican principles in America, had made formidable both in numbers and in temper. He supported a motion for shortening the duration of Parliaments. He made a motion for a committee to examine into the state of the representation, and, in the speech, by which that motion was introduced, avowed himself the enemy of the close boroughs, the strongholds of that corruption to which he attributed all the calamities of the nation, and which, as he phrased it in one of those exact and sonorous sentences of which he had a boundless command, had grown with the growth of England and strengthened with her strength, but had not diminished with her diminution or decayed with her decay. On this occasion he was supported by Fox. The motion was lost by only twenty votes in a house of more than three hundred members. The reformers never again had so good a division till the year 1831.

The new administration was strong in abilities, and was more popular than any administration which had held office since the first year of George the Third, but was hated by the King, hesitatingly supported by the Parliament, and torn by internal dissensions. The Chancellor was disliked and distrusted by almost all his colleagues. The two Secretaries of State regarded each other with no friendly feeling. The line between their departments had not been traced with precision; and there were consequently jealousies, encroachments, and complaints. It was all that Rockingham could do to keep the peace in his cabinet; and, before the cabinet had existed three months, Rockingham died.

In an instant all was confusion. The adherents of the deceased statesman looked on the Duke of Portland as their chief. The King placed Shelburne at the head of the Treasury. Fox, Lord John Cavendish, and Burke, immediately resigned their offices; and the new prime minister was left to constitute a government out of very defective materials. His own parliamentary talents were great; but he could not be in the place where parliamentary talents were most needed. It was necessary to find some member of the House of Commons who could confront the great orators of the opposition; and Pitt alone had the eloquence and the courage which were required. He was offered the great place of Chancellor of the Exchequer; and he accepted it. He had scarcely completed his twenty-third year.

The Parliament was speedily prorogued. During the recess, a negotiation for peace which had been commenced under Rockingham was brought to a successful termination. England acknowledged the independence of her revolted colonies; and she ceded to her European enemies some places in the Mediterranean and in the Gulf of Mexico. But the terms which she obtained were quite as advantageous and honourable as the events of the war entitled her to expect, or as she was likely to obtain by persevering in a contest against immense odds. All her vital parts, all the real sources of her power, remained uninjured. She preserved even her dignity: for she ceded to the House of Bourbon only part of what she had won from that House in previous wars. She retained her Indian empire undiminished; and, in spite of the mightiest efforts of two great monarchies, her flag still waved on the rock of Gibraltar. There is not the slightest reason to believe that Fox, if he had remained in office, would have hesitated one moment about concluding a treaty on such conditions. Unhappily that great and most amiable man was, at this crisis, hurried by his passions into an error which made his genius and his virtues, during a long course of years, almost useless to his country.

Such was the inauspicious manner in which Pitt entered on his second administration. The whole history of that administration was of a piece with the commencement. Almost every month brought some new disaster or disgrace. To the war with France was soon added a war with Spain. The opponents of the minister were numerous, able, and active. His most useful coadjutors he soon lost. Sickness deprived him of the help of Lord Harrowby. It was discovered that Lord Melville had been guilty of highly culpable laxity in transactions relating to public money. He was censured by the House of Commons, driven from office, ejected from the Privy Council, and impeached of high crimes and misdemeanours. The blow fell heavy on Pitt. It gave him, he said in Parliament, a deep pang; and, as he uttered the word pang, his lip quivered, his voice shook, he paused, and his hearers thought that he was about to burst into tears. Such tears shed by Eldon would have moved nothing but laughter. Shed by the warm-hearted and open-hearted Fox, they would have moved sympathy, but would have caused no surprise. But a tear from Pitt would have been something portentous. He suppressed his emotion, however, and proceeded with his usual majestic self-possession.

His difficulties compelled him to resort to various expedients. At one time Addington was persuaded to accept office with a peerage; but he brought no additional strength to the government. Though he went through the form of reconciliation, it was impossible for him to forget the past. While he remained in place he was jealous and punctilious; and he soon retired again. At another time Pitt renewed his efforts to overcome his master's aversion to Fox; and it was rumoured that the King's obstinacy was gradually giving way. But, meanwhile, it was impossible for the minister to conceal from the public eye the decay of his health, and the constant anxiety which gnawed at his heart. His sleep was broken. His food ceased to nourish him. All who passed him in the Park, all who had interviews with him in Downing Street, saw misery written in his face. The peculiar look which he wore during the last months of his life was often pathetically described by Wilberforce, who used to call it the Austerlitz look.

Still the vigour of Pitt's intellectual faculties, and the intrepid haughtiness of his spirit, remained unaltered. He had staked everything on a great venture. He had succeeded in forming another mighty coalition against the French ascendency. The united forces of Austria, Russia, and England might, he hoped, oppose an insurmountable barrier to the ambition of the common enemy. But the genius and energy of Napoleon prevailed. While the English troops were preparing to embark for Germany, while the Russian troops were slowly coming up from Poland, he, with rapidity unprecedented in modern war, moved a hundred thousand men from the shores of the Ocean to the Black Forest, and compelled a great Austrian army to surrender at Ulm. To the first faint rumours of this calamity Pitt would give no credit. He was irritated by the alarms of those around him. "Do not believe a word of it," he said: "It is all a fiction." The next day he received a Dutch newspaper containing the capitulation. He knew no Dutch. It was Sunday; and the public offices were shut. He carried the paper to Lord Malmesbury, who had been minister in Holland; and Lord Malmesbury translated it. Pitt tried to bear up; but the shock was too great; and he went away with death in his face.

The news of the battle of Trafalgar arrived four days later, and seemed for a moment to revive him. Forty-eight hours after that most glorious and most mournful of victories had been announced to the country came the Lord Mayor's day; and Pitt dined at Guildhall. His popularity had declined. But on this occasion the multitude, greatly excited by the recent tidings, welcomed him enthusiastically, took off his horses in Cheapside, and drew his carriage up King Street. When his health was drunk, he returned thanks in two or three of those stately sentences of which he had a boundless command. Several of those who heard him laid up his words in their hearts; for they were the last words that he ever uttered in public: "Let us hope that England, having saved herself by her energy, may save Europe by her example."

This was but a momentary rally. Austerlitz soon completed what Ulm had begun. Early in December Pitt had retired to Bath, in the hope that he might there gather strength for the approaching session. While he was languishing there on his sofa arrived the news that a decisive battle had been fought and lost in Moravia, that the coalition was dissolved, that the Continent was at the feet of France. He sank down under the blow. Ten days later he was so emaciated that his most intimate friends hardly knew him. He came up from Bath by slow journeys, and, on the 11th of January 1806, reached his villa at Putney. Parliament was to meet on the 21st. On the 20th was to be the parliamentary dinner at the house of the First Lord of the Treasury in Downing Street; and the cards were already issued. But the days of the great minister were numbered. The only chance for his life, and that a very slight chance, was that he should resign his office, and pass some months in profound repose. His colleagues paid him very short visits, and carefully avoided political conversation. But his spirit, long accustomed to dominion, could not, even in that extremity, relinquish hopes which everybody but himself perceived to be vain. On the day on which he was carried into his bedroom at Putney, the Marquess Wellesley, whom he had long loved, whom he had sent to govern India, and whose administration had been eminently able, energetic, and successful, arrived in London after an absence of eight years. The friends saw each other once more. There was an affectionate meeting, and a last parting. That it was a last parting Pitt did not seem to be aware. He fancied himself to be recovering, talked on various subjects cheerfully, and with an unclouded mind, and pronounced a warm and discerning eulogium on the Marquess's brother Arthur. "I never," he said, "met with any military man with whom it was so satisfactory to converse." The excitement and exertion of this interview were too much for the sick man. He fainted away; and Lord Wellesley left the house, convinced that the close was fast approaching.

And now members of Parliament were fast coming up to London. The chiefs of the opposition met for the purpose of considering the course to be taken on the first day of the session. It was easy to guess what would be the language of the King's speech, and of the address which would be moved in answer to that speech. An amendment condemning the policy of the government had been prepared, and was to have been proposed in the House of Commons by Lord Henry Petty, a young nobleman who had already won for himself that place in the esteem of his country which, after the lapse of more than half a century, he still retains. He was unwilling, however, to come forward as the accuser of one who was incapable of defending himself. Lord Grenville, who had been informed of Pitt's state by Lord Wellesley, and had been deeply affected by it, earnestly recommended forbearance; and Fox, with characteristic generosity and good nature, gave his voice against attacking his now helpless rival. "Sunt lacrymae rerum," he said, "et mentem mortalia tangunt." On the first day, therefore, there was no debate. It was rumoured that evening that Pitt was better. But on the following morning his physicians pronounced that there were no hopes. The commanding faculties of which he had been too proud were beginning to fail. His old tutor and friend, the Bishop of Lincoln, informed him of his danger, and gave such religious advice and consolation as a confused and obscured mind could receive. Stories were told of devout sentiments fervently uttered by the dying man. But these stories found no credit with anybody who knew him. Wilberforce pronounced it impossible that they could be true. "Pitt," he added, "was a man who always said less than he thought on such topics." It was asserted in many after-dinner speeches, Grub Street elegies, and academic prize poems and prize declamations, that the great minister died exclaiming, "Oh my country!" This is a fable; but it is true that the last words which he uttered, while he knew what he said, were broken exclamations about the alarming state of public affairs. He ceased to breathe on the morning of the 23rd of January, 1806, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the day on which he first took his seat in Parliament. He was in his forty-seventh year, and had been, during near nineteen years, First Lord of the Treasury, and undisputed chief of the administration. Since parliamentary government was established in England, no English statesman has held supreme power so long. Walpole, it is true, was First Lord of the Treasury during more than twenty years: but it was not till Walpole had been some time First Lord of the Treasury that he could be properly called Prime Minister.

It was moved in the House of Commons that Pitt should be honoured with a public funeral and a monument. The motion was opposed by Fox in a speech which deserves to be studied as a model of good taste and good feeling. The task was the most invidious that ever an orator undertook: but it was performed with a humanity and delicacy which were warmly acknowledged by the mourning friends of him who was gone. The motion was carried by 288 votes to 89.

The 22d of February was fixed for the funeral. The corpse having lain in state during two days in the Painted Chamber, was borne with great pomp to the northern transept of the Abbey. A splendid train of princes, nobles, bishops, and privy councillors followed. The grave of Pitt had been made near to the spot where his great father lay, near also to the spot where his great rival was soon to lie. The sadness of the assistants was beyond that of ordinary mourners. For he whom they were committing to the dust had died of sorrows and anxieties of which none of the survivors could be altogether without a share. Wilberforce, who carried the banner before the hearse, described the awful ceremony with deep feeling. As the coffin descended into the earth, he said, the eagle face of Chatham from above seemed to look down with consternation into the dark house which was receiving all that remained of so much power and glory.

All parties in the House of Commons readily concurred in voting forty thousand pounds to satisfy the demands of Pitt's creditors. Some of his admirers seemed to consider the magnitude of his embarrassments as a circumstance highly honourable to him; but men of sense will probably be of a different opinion. It is far better, no doubt, that a great minister should carry his contempt of money to excess than that he should contaminate his hands with unlawful gain. But it is neither right nor becoming in a man to whom the public has given an income more than sufficient for his comfort and dignity to bequeath to that public a great debt, the effect of mere negligence and profusion. As first Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer, Pitt never had less than six thousand a year, besides an excellent house. In 1792 he was forced by his royal master's friendly importunity to accept for life the office of Warden of the Cinque Ports, with near four thousand a year more. He had neither wife nor child; he had no needy relations: he had no expensive tastes: he had no long election bills. Had he given but a quarter of an hour a week to the regulation of his household, he would have kept his expenditure within bounds. Or, if he could not spare even a quarter of an hour a week for that purpose, he had numerous friends, excellent men of business, who would have been proud to act as his stewards. One of those friends, the chief of a great commercial house in the city, made an attempt to put the establishment in Downing Street to rights; but in vain. He found that the waste of the servants' hall was almost fabulous. The quantity of butcher's meat charged in the bills was nine hundredweight a week. The consumption of poultry, of fish, and of tea was in proportion. The character of Pitt would have stood higher if with the disinterestedness of Pericles and of De Witt, he had united their dignified frugality.

The memory of Pitt has been assailed, times innumerable, often justly, often unjustly; but it has suffered much less from his assailants than from his eulogists. For, during many years, his name was the rallying cry of a class of men with whom, at one of those terrible conjunctures which confound all ordinary distinctions, he was accidentally and temporarily connected, but to whom, on almost all great questions of principle, he was diametrically opposed. The haters of parliamentary reform called themselves Pittites, not choosing to remember that Pitt made three motions for parliamentary reform, and that, though he thought that such a reform could not safely be made while the passions excited by the French revolution were raging, he never uttered a word indicating that he should not be prepared at a more convenient season to bring the question forward a fourth time. The toast of Protestant ascendency was drunk on Pitt's birthday by a set of Pittites who could not but be aware that Pitt had resigned his office because he could not carry Catholic emancipation. The defenders of the Test Act called themselves Pittites, though they could not be ignorant that Pitt had laid before George the Third unanswerable reasons for abolishing the Test Act. The enemies of free trade called themselves Pittites, though Pitt was far more deeply imbued with the doctrines of Adam Smith than either Fox or Grey. The very negro-drivers invoked the name of Pitt, whose eloquence was never more conspicuously displayed than when he spoke of the wrongs of the negro. This mythical Pitt, who resembles the genuine Pitt as little as Charlemagne of Ariosto resembles the Charlemagne of Eginhard, has had his day. History will vindicate the real man from calumny disguised under the semblance of adulation, and will exhibit him as what he was, a minister of great talents, honest intentions, and liberal opinions, pre-eminently qualified, intellectually and morally, for the part of a parliamentary leader, and capable of administering with prudence and moderation the government of a prosperous and tranquil country, but unequal to surprising and terrible emergencies, and liable, in such emergencies, to err grievously, both on the side of weakness and on the side of violence.

MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, INSCRIPTIONS, ETC

EPITAPH ON HENRY MARTYN. (1812.)

 
     Here Martyn lies.  In Manhood's early bloom
     The Christian Hero finds a Pagan tomb.
     Religion, sorrowing o'er her favourite son,
     Points to the glorious trophies that he won.
     Eternal trophies! not with carnage red,
     Not stained with tears by hapless captives shed,
     But trophies of the Cross! for that dear name,
     Through every form of danger, death, and shame,
     Onward he journeyed to a happier shore,
     Where danger, death, and shame assault no more.
 

LINES TO THE MEMORY OF PITT. (1813.)

 
    Oh Britain! dear Isle, when the annals of story
    Shall tell of the deeds that thy children have done,
    When the strains of each poet shall sing of their glory,
    And the triumphs their skill and their valour have won.
 
 
    When the olive and palm in thy chaplet are blended,
    When thy arts, and thy fame, and thy commerce increase,
    When thy arms through the uttermost coasts are extended,
    And thy war is triumphant, and happy thy peace;
 
 
    When the ocean, whose waves like a rampart flow round thee,
    Conveying thy mandates to every shore,
    And the empire of nature no longer can bound thee,
    And the world be the scene of thy conquests no more:
 
 
    Remember the man who in sorrow and danger,
    When thy glory was set, and thy spirit was low,
    When thy hopes were o'erturned by the arms of the stranger,
    And thy banners displayed in the halls of the foe,
 
 
    Stood forth in the tempest of doubt and disaster,
    Unaided, and single, the danger to brave.
    Asserted thy claims, and the rights of his master,
    Preserved thee to conquer, and saved thee to save.
 

A RADICAL WAR SONG. (1820.)

 
     Awake, arise, the hour is come,
     For rows and revolutions;
     There's no receipt like pike and drum
     For crazy constitutions.
     Close, close the shop!  Break, break the loom,
     Desert your hearths and furrows,
     And throng in arms to seal the doom
     Of England's rotten boroughs.
 
 
     We'll stretch that tort'ring Castlereagh
     On his own Dublin rack, sir;
     We'll drown the King in Eau de vie,
     The Laureate in his sack, sir,
     Old Eldon and his sordid hag
     In molten gold we'll smother,
     And stifle in his own green bag
     The Doctor and his brother.
 
 
     In chains we'll hang in fair Guildhall
     The City's famed recorder,
     And next on proud St Stephen's fall,
     Though Wynne should squeak to order.
     In vain our tyrants then shall try
     To 'scape our martial law, sir;
     In vain the trembling Speaker cry
     That "Strangers must withdraw," sir.
 
 
     Copley to hang offends no text;
     A rat is not a man, sir:
     With schedules, and with tax bills next
     We'll bury pious Van, sir.
     The slaves who loved the income Tax,
     We'll crush by scores, like mites, sir,
     And him, the wretch who freed the blacks,
     And more enslaved the whites, sir.
 
 
     The peer shall dangle from his gate,
     The bishop from his steeple,
     Till all recanting, own, the State
     Means nothing but the People.
     We'll fix the church's revenues
     On Apostolic basis,
     One coat, one scrip, one pair of shoes
     Shall pay their strange grimaces.
 
 
     We'll strap the bar's deluding train
     In their own darling halter,
     And with his big church bible brain
     The parson at the altar.
     Hail glorious hour, when fair Reform
     Shall bless our longing nation,
     And Hunt receive commands to form
     A new administration.
 
 
     Carlisle shall sit enthroned, where sat
     Our Cranmer and our Secker;
     And Watson show his snow-white hat
     In England's rich Exchequer.
     The breast of Thistlewood shall wear
     Our Wellesley's star and sash, man:
     And many a mausoleum fair
     Shall rise to honest Cashman.
 
 
     Then, then beneath the nine-tailed cat
     Shall they who used it writhe, sir;
     And curates lean, and rectors fat,
     Shall dig the ground they tithe, sir.
     Down with your Bayleys, and your Bests,
     Your Giffords, and your Gurneys:
     We'll clear the island of the pests,
     Which mortals name attorneys.
 
 
     Down with your sheriffs, and your mayors,
     Your registrars, and proctors,
     We'll live without the lawyer's cares,
     And die without the doctor's.
     No discontented fair shall pout
     To see her spouse so stupid;
     We'll tread the torch of Hymen out,
     And live content with Cupid.
 
 
     Then, when the high-born and the great
     Are humbled to our level,
     On all the wealth of Church and State,
     Like aldermen, we'll revel.
     We'll live when hushed the battle's din,
     In smoking and in cards, sir,
     In drinking unexcised gin,
     And wooing fair Poissardes, sir.
 

THE BATTLE OF MONCONTOUR. (1824.)

 
     Oh, weep for Moncontour!  Oh! weep for the hour,
     When the children of darkness and evil had power,
     When the horsemen of Valois triumphantly trod
     On the bosoms that bled for their rights and their God.
 
 
     Oh, weep for Moncontour!  Oh! weep for the slain,
     Who for faith and for freedom lay slaughtered in vain;
     Oh, weep for the living, who linger to bear
     The renegade's shame, or the exile's despair.
 
 
     One look, one last look, to our cots and our towers,
     To the rows of our vines, and the beds of our flowers,
     To the church where the bones of our fathers decayed,
     Where we fondly had deemed that our own would be laid.
 
 
     Alas! we must leave thee, dear desolate home,
     To the spearmen of Uri, the shavelings of Rome,
     To the serpent of Florence, the vulture of Spain,
     To the pride of Anjou, and the guile of Lorraine.
 
 
     Farewell to thy fountains, farewell to thy shades,
     To the song of thy youths, and the dance of thy maids,
     To the breath of thy gardens, the hum of thy bees,
     And the long waving line of the blue Pyrenees.
 
 
     Farewell, and for ever.  The priest and the slave
     May rule in the halls of the free and the brave.
     Our hearths we abandon; our lands we resign;
     But, Father, we kneel to no altar but thine.
 

THE BATTLE OF NASEBY, (1824.)

BY OBADIAH BIND-THEIR-KINGS-IN-CHAINS-AND-THEIR-NOBLES-WITH-LINKS-OF-IRON,

SERJEANT IN IRETON'S REGIMENT

 
  Oh! wherefore come ye forth, in triumph from the North,
  With your hands, and your feet, and your raiment all red?
  And wherefore doth your rout send forth a joyous shout?
  And whence be the grapes of the wine-press which ye tread?
 
 
  Oh evil was the root, and bitter was the fruit,
  And crimson was the juice of the vintage that we trod;
  For we trampled on the throng of the haughty and the strong,
  Who sate in the high places, and slew the saints of God.
 
 
  It was about the noon of a glorious day of June,
  That we saw their banners dance, and their cuirasses shine,
  And the Man of Blood was there, with his long essenced hair,
  And Astley, and Sir Marmaduke, and Rupert of the Rhine.
 
 
  Like a servant of the Lord, with his Bible and his sword,
  The General rode along us to form us to the fight,
  When a murmuring sound broke out, and swell'd into a shout,
  Among the godless horsemen upon the tyrant's right.
 
 
  And hark! like the roar of the billows on the shore,
  The cry of battle rises along their charging line!
  For God! for the Cause! for the Church! for the Laws!
  For Charles King of England and Rupert of the Rhine!
 
 
  The furious German comes, with his clarions and his drums,
  His bravoes of Alsatia, and pages of Whitehall;
  They are bursting on our flanks.  Grasp your pikes, close your
  ranks;
  For Rupert never comes but to conquer or to fall.
 
 
  They are here!  They rush on!  We are broken!  We are gone!
  Our left is borne before them like stubble on the blast.
  O Lord, put forth thy might!  O Lord, defend the right!
  Stand back to back, in God's name, and fight it to the last.
 
 
  Stout Skippon hath a wound; the centre hath given ground:
  Hark! hark!—What means the trampling of horsemen on our rear?
  Whose banner do I see, boys?  'Tis he, thank God, 'tis he, boys,
  Bear up another minute:  brave Oliver is here.
 
 
  Their heads all stooping low, their points all in a row,
  Like a whirlwind on the trees, like a deluge on the dykes,
  Our cuirassiers have burst on the ranks of the Accurst,
  And at a shock have scattered the forest of his pikes.
 
 
  Fast, fast, the gallants ride, in some safe nook to hide
  Their coward heads, predestined to rot on Temple Bar;
  And he—he turns, he flies:—shame on those cruel eyes
  That bore to look on torture, and dare not look on war.
 
 
  Ho! comrades, scour the plain; and, ere ye strip the slain,
  First give another stab to make your search secure,
  Then shake from sleeves and pockets their broad-pieces and
  lockets,
  The tokens of the wanton, the plunder of the poor.
 
 
  Fools! your doublets shone with gold, and your hearts were gay
  and bold,
  When you kissed your lily hands to your lemans to-day;
  And to-morrow shall the fox, from her chambers in the rocks,
  Lead forth her tawny cubs to howl above the prey.
 
 
  Where be your tongues that late mocked at heaven and hell and
  fate,
  And the fingers that once were so busy with your blades,
  Your perfum'd satin clothes, your catches and your oaths,
  Your stage-plays and your sonnets, your diamonds and your spades?
 
 
  Down, down, for ever down with the mitre and the crown,
  With the Belial of the Court and the Mammon of the Pope;
  There is woe in Oxford halls:  there is wail in Durham's Stalls:
  The Jesuit smites his bosom:  the Bishop rends his cope.
 
 
  And She of the seven hills shall mourn her children's ills,
  And tremble when she thinks on the edge of England's sword;
  And the Kings of earth in fear shall shudder when they hear
  What the hand of God hath wrought for the Houses and the Word.
 

SERMON IN A CHURCHYARD. (1825.)

 
     Let pious Damon take his seat,
     With mincing step and languid smile,
     And scatter from his 'kerchief sweet,
     Sabaean odours o'er the aisle;
     And spread his little jewelled hand,
     And smile round all the parish beauties,
     And pat his curls, and smooth his band,
     Meet prelude to his saintly duties.
 
 
     Let the thronged audience press and stare,
     Let stifled maidens ply the fan,
     Admire his doctrines, and his hair,
     And whisper, "What a good young man!"
     While he explains what seems most clear,
     So clearly that it seems perplexed,
     I'll stay and read my sermon here;
     And skulls, and bones, shall be the text.
 
 
     Art thou the jilted dupe of fame?
     Dost thou with jealous anger pine
     Whene'er she sounds some other name,
     With fonder emphasis than thine?
     To thee I preach; draw near; attend!
     Look on these bones, thou fool, and see
     Where all her scorns and favours end,
     What Byron is, and thou must be.
 
 
     Dost thou revere, or praise, or trust
     Some clod like those that here we spurn;
     Some thing that sprang like thee from dust,
     And shall like thee to dust return?
     Dost thou rate statesmen, heroes, wits,
     At one sear leaf, or wandering feather?
     Behold the black, damp narrow pits,
     Where they and thou must lie together.
 
 
     Dost thou beneath the smile or frown
     Of some vain woman bend thy knee?
     Here take thy stand, and trample down
     Things that were once as fair as she.
     Here rave of her ten thousand graces,
     Bosom, and lip, and eye, and chin,
     While, as in scorn, the fleshless faces
     Of Hamiltons and Waldegraves grin.
 
 
     Whate'er thy losses or thy gains,
     Whate'er thy projects or thy fears,
     Whate'er the joys, whate'er the pains,
     That prompt thy baby smiles and tears;
     Come to my school, and thou shalt learn,
     In one short hour of placid thought,
     A stoicism, more deep, more stern,
     Than ever Zeno's porch hath taught.
 
 
     The plots and feats of those that press
     To seize on titles, wealth, or power,
     Shall seem to thee a game of chess,
     Devised to pass a tedious hour.
     What matters it to him who fights
     For shows of unsubstantial good,
     Whether his Kings, and Queens, and Knights,
     Be things of flesh, or things of wood?
 
 
     We check, and take; exult, and fret;
     Our plans extend, our passions rise,
     Till in our ardour we forget
     How worthless is the victor's prize.
     Soon fades the spell, soon comes the night:
     Say will it not be then the same,
     Whether we played the black or white,
     Whether we lost or won the game?
 
 
     Dost thou among these hillocks stray,
     O'er some dear idol's tomb to moan?
     Know that thy foot is on the clay
     Of hearts once wretched as thy own.
     How many a father's anxious schemes,
     How many rapturous thoughts of lovers,
     How many a mother's cherished dreams,
     The swelling turf before thee covers!
 
 
     Here for the living, and the dead,
     The weepers and the friends they weep,
     Hath been ordained the same cold bed,
     The same dark night, the same long sleep;
     Why shouldest thou writhe, and sob, and rave
     O'er those with whom thou soon must be?
     Death his own sting shall cure—the grave
     Shall vanquish its own victory.
 
 
     Here learn that all the griefs and joys,
     Which now torment, which now beguile,
     Are children's hurts, and children's toys,
     Scarce worthy of one bitter smile.
     Here learn that pulpit, throne, and press,
     Sword, sceptre, lyre, alike are frail,
     That science is a blind man's guess,
     And History a nurse's tale.
 
 
     Here learn that glory and disgrace,
     Wisdom and folly, pass away,
     That mirth hath its appointed space,
     That sorrow is but for a day;
     That all we love, and all we hate,
     That all we hope, and all we fear,
     Each mood of mind, each turn of fate,
     Must end in dust and silence here.
 

TRANSLATION FROM A.V. ARNAULT. (1826.)

"Fables": Livre v. "Fable" 16

 
     Thou poor leaf, so sear and frail,
     Sport of every wanton gale,
     Whence, and whither, dost thou fly,
     Through this bleak autumnal sky?
     On a noble oak I grew,
     Green, and broad, and fair to view;
     But the Monarch of the shade
     By the tempest low was laid.
     From that time, I wander o'er
     Wood, and valley, hill, and moor,
     Wheresoe'er the wind is blowing,
     Nothing caring, nothing knowing:
     Thither go I, whither goes,
     Glory's laurel, Beauty's rose.
 
 
     —De ta tige detachee,
     Pauvre feuille dessechee
     Ou vas tu?—Je n'en sais rien.
     L'orage a frappe le chene
     Qui seul etait mon soutien.
     De son inconstante haleine,
     Le zephyr ou l'aquilon
     Depuis ce jour me promene
     De la foret a la plaine,
     De la montagne au vallon.
     Je vais ou le vent me mene,
     Sans me plaindre ou m'effrayer,
     Je vais ou va toute chose
     Ou va la feuille de rose
     Et la feuille de laurier.
 

DIES IRAE. (1826.)

 
     On that great, that awful day,
     This vain world shall pass away.
     Thus the sibyl sang of old,
     Thus hath holy David told.
     There shall be a deadly fear
     When the Avenger shall appear,
     And unveiled before his eye
     All the works of man shall lie.
     Hark! to the great trumpet's tones
     Pealing o'er the place of bones:
     Hark! it waketh from their bed
     All the nations of the dead,—
     In a countless throng to meet,
     At the eternal judgment seat.
     Nature sickens with dismay,
     Death may not retain its prey;
     And before the Maker stand
     All the creatures of his hand.
     The great book shall be unfurled,
     Whereby God shall judge the world;
     What was distant shall be near,
     What was hidden shall be clear.
     To what shelter shall I fly?
     To what guardian shall I cry?
     Oh, in that destroying hour,
     Source of goodness, Source of power,
     Show thou, of thine own free grace,
     Help unto a helpless race.
     Though I plead not at thy throne
     Aught that I for thee have done,
     Do not thou unmindful be,
     Of what thou hast borne for me:
     Of the wandering, of the scorn,
     Of the scourge, and of the thorn.
     JESUS, hast THOU borne the pain,
     And hath all been borne in vain?
     Shall thy vengeance smite the head
     For whose ransom thou hast bled?
     Thou, whose dying blessing gave
     Glory to a guilty slave:
     Thou, who from the crew unclean
     Didst release the Magdalene:
     Shall not mercy vast and free,
     Evermore be found in thee?
     Father, turn on me thine eyes,
     See my blushes, hear my cries;
     Faint though be the cries I make,
     Save me for thy mercy's sake,
     From the worm, and from the fire,
     From the torments of thine ire.
     Fold me with the sheep that stand
     Pure and safe at thy right hand.
     Hear thy guilty child implore thee,
     Rolling in the dust before thee.
     Oh the horrors of that day!
     When this frame of sinful clay,
     Starting from its burial place,
     Must behold thee face to face.
     Hear and pity, hear and aid,
     Spare the creatures thou hast made.
     Mercy, mercy, save, forgive,
     Oh, who shall look on thee and live?
 

THE MARRIAGE OF TIRZAH AND AHIRAD. (1827.)

GENESIS VI. 3

 
     It is the dead of night:
     Yet more than noonday light
     Beams far and wide from many a gorgeous hall.
     Unnumbered harps are tinkling,
     Unnumbered lamps are twinkling,
     In the great city of the fourfold wall.
     By the brazen castle's moat,
     The sentry hums a livelier note.
     The ship-boy chaunts a shriller lay
     From the galleys in the bay.
     Shout, and laugh, and hurrying feet
     Sound from mart and square and street,
     From the breezy laurel shades,
     From the granite colonnades,
     From the golden statue's base,
     From the stately market-place,
     Where, upreared by captive hands,
     The great Tower of Triumph stands,
     All its pillars in a blaze
     With the many-coloured rays,
     Which lanthorns of ten thousand dyes
     Shed on ten thousand panoplies.
     But closest is the throng,
     And loudest is the song,
     In that sweet garden by the river side,
     The abyss of myrtle bowers,
     The wilderness of flowers,
     Where Cain hath built the palace of his pride.
     Such palace ne'er shall be again
     Among the dwindling race of men.
     From all its threescore gates the light
     Of gold and steel afar was thrown;
     Two hundred cubits rose in height
     The outer wall of polished stone.
     On the top was ample space
     For a gallant chariot race,
     Near either parapet a bed
     Of the richest mould was spread,
     Where amidst flowers of every scent and hue
     Rich orange trees, and palms, and giant cedars grew.
 
 
     In the mansion's public court
     All is revel, song, and sport;
     For there, till morn shall tint the east,
     Menials and guards prolong the feast.
     The boards with painted vessels shine;
     The marble cisterns foam with wine.
     A hundred dancing girls are there
     With zoneless waists and streaming hair;
     And countless eyes with ardour gaze,
     And countless hands the measure beat,
     As mix and part in amorous maze
     Those floating arms and bounding feet.
     But none of all the race of Cain,
     Save those whom he hath deigned to grace
     With yellow robe and sapphire chain,
     May pass beyond that outer space.
     For now within the painted hall
     The Firstborn keeps high festival.
     Before the glittering valves all night
     Their post the chosen captains hold.
     Above the portal's stately height
     The legend flames in lamps of gold:
     "In life united and in death
     "May Tirzah and Ahirad be,
     "The bravest he of all the sons of Seth,
     "Of all the house of Cain the loveliest she."
 
 
     Through all the climates of the earth
     This night is given to festal mirth.
     The long continued war is ended.
     The long divided lines are blended.
     Ahirad's bow shall now no more
     Make fat the wolves with kindred gore.
     The vultures shall expect in vain
     Their banquet from the sword of Cain.
     Without a guard the herds and flocks
     Along the frontier moors and rocks
     From eve to morn may roam:
     Nor shriek, nor shout, nor reddened sky,
     Shall warn the startled hind to fly
     From his beloved home.
     Nor to the pier shall burghers crowd
     With straining necks and faces pale,
     And think that in each flitting cloud
     They see a hostile sail.
     The peasant without fear shall guide
     Down smooth canal or river wide
     His painted bark of cane,
     Fraught, for some proud bazaar's arcades,
     With chestnuts from his native shades,
     And wine, and milk, and grain.
     Search round the peopled globe to-night,
     Explore each continent and isle,
     There is no door without a light,
     No face without a smile.
     The noblest chiefs of either race,
     From north and south, from west and east,
     Crowd to the painted hall to grace
     The pomp of that atoning feast.
     With widening eyes and labouring breath
     Stand the fair-haired sons of Seth,
     As bursts upon their dazzled sight
     The endless avenue of light,
     The bowers of tulip, rose, and palm,
     The thousand cressets fed with balm,
     The silken vests, the boards piled high
     With amber, gold, and ivory,
     The crystal founts whence sparkling flow
     The richest wines o'er beds of snow,
     The walls where blaze in living dyes
     The king's three hundred victories.
     The heralds point the fitting seat
     To every guest in order meet,
     And place the highest in degree
     Nearest th' imperial canopy.
     Beneath its broad and gorgeous fold,
     With naked swords and shields of gold,
     Stood the seven princes of the tribes of Nod.
     Upon an ermine carpet lay
     Two tiger cubs in furious play,
     Beneath the emerald throne where sat the signed of God.
 
 
     Over that ample forehead white
     The thousandth year returneth.
     Still, on its commanding height,
     With a fierce and blood-red light,
     The fiery token burneth.
     Wheresoe'er that mystic star
     Blazeth in the van of war,
     Back recoil before its ray
     Shield and banner, bow and spear,
     Maddened horses break away
     From the trembling charioteer.
     The fear of that stern king doth lie
     On all that live beneath the sky:
     All shrink before the mark of his despair,
     The seal of that great curse which he alone can bear.
     Blazing in pearls and diamonds' sheen.
     Tirzah, the young Ahirad's bride,
     Of humankind the destined queen,
     Sits by her great forefather's side.
     The jetty curls, the forehead high,
     The swan like neck, the eagle face,
     The glowing cheek, the rich dark eye,
     Proclaim her of the elder race.
     With flowing locks of auburn hue,
     And features smooth, and eye of blue,
     Timid in love as brave in arms,
     The gentle heir of Seth askance
     Snatches a bashful, ardent glance
     At her majestic charms;
     Blest when across that brow high musing flashes
     A deeper tint of rose,
     Thrice blest when from beneath the silken lashes
     Of her proud eye she throws
     The smile of blended fondness and disdain
     Which marks the daughters of the house of Cain.
 
 
     All hearts are light around the hall
     Save his who is the lord of all.
     The painted roofs, the attendant train,
     The lights, the banquet, all are vain.
     He sees them not.  His fancy strays
     To other scenes and other days.
     A cot by a lone forest's edge,
     A fountain murmuring through the trees,
     A garden with a wildflower hedge,
     Whence sounds the music of the bees,
     A little flock of sheep at rest
     Upon a mountain's swarthy breast.
     On his rude spade he seems to lean
     Beside the well remembered stone,
     Rejoicing o'er the promised green
     Of the first harvest man hath sown.
     He sees his mother's tears;
     His father's voice he hears,
     Kind as when first it praised his youthful skill.
     And soon a seraph-child,
     In boyish rapture wild,
     With a light crook comes bounding from the hill,
     Kisses his hands, and strokes his face,
     And nestles close in his embrace.
     In his adamantine eye
     None might discern his agony;
     But they who had grown hoary next his side,
     And read his stern dark face with deepest skill,
     Could trace strange meanings in that lip of pride,
     Which for one moment quivered and was still.
     No time for them to mark or him to feel
     Those inward stings; for clarion, flute, and lyre,
     And the rich voices of a countless quire,
     Burst on the ear in one triumphant peal.
     In breathless transport sits the admiring throng,
     As sink and swell the notes of Jubal's lofty song.
 
 
     "Sound the timbrel, strike the lyre,
     Wake the trumpet's blast of fire,
     Till the gilded arches ring.
     Empire, victory, and fame,
     Be ascribed unto the name
     Of our father and our king.
     Of the deeds which he hath done,
     Of the spoils which he hath won,
     Let his grateful children sing.
     When the deadly fight was fought,
     When the great revenge was wrought,
     When on the slaughtered victims lay
     The minion stiff and cold as they,
     Doomed to exile, sealed with flame,
     From the west the wanderer came.
     Six score years and six he strayed
     A hunter through the forest shade.
     The lion's shaggy jaws he tore,
     To earth he smote the foaming boar,
     He crushed the dragon's fiery crest,
     And scaled the condor's dizzy nest;
     Till hardy sons and daughters fair
     Increased around his woodland lair.
     Then his victorious bow unstrung
     On the great bison's horn he hung.
     Giraffe and elk he left to hold
     The wilderness of boughs in peace,
     And trained his youth to pen the fold,
     To press the cream, and weave the fleece.
     As shrunk the streamlet in its bed,
     As black and scant the herbage grew,
     O'er endless plains his flocks he led
     Still to new brooks and postures new.
     So strayed he till the white pavilions
     Of his camp were told by millions,
     Till his children's households seven
     Were numerous as the stars of heaven.
     Then he bade us rove no more;
     And in the place that pleased him best,
     On the great river's fertile shore,
     He fixed the city of his rest.
     He taught us then to bind the sheaves,
     To strain the palm's delicious milk,
     And from the dark green mulberry leaves
     To cull the filmy silk.
     Then first from straw-built mansions roamed
     O'er flower-beds trim the skilful bees;
     Then first the purple wine vats foamed
     Around the laughing peasant's knees;
     And olive-yards, and orchards green,
     O'er all the hills of Nod were seen.
 
 
     "Of our father and our king
     Let his grateful children sing.
     From him our race its being draws,
     His are our arts, and his our laws.
     Like himself he bade us be,
     Proud, and brave, and fierce, and free.
     True, through every turn of fate,
     In our friendship and our hate.
     Calm to watch, yet prompt to dare;
     Quick to feel, yet firm to bear;
     Only timid, only weak,
     Before sweet woman's eye and cheek.
     We will not serve, we will not know,
     The God who is our father's foe.
     In our proud cities to his name
     No temples rise, no altars flame.
     Our flocks of sheep, our groves of spice,
     To him afford no sacrifice.
     Enough that once the House of Cain
     Hath courted with oblation vain
     The sullen power above.
     Henceforth we bear the yoke no more;
     The only gods whom we adore
     Are glory, vengeance, love.
 
 
     "Of our father and our king
     Let his grateful children sing.
     What eye of living thing may brook
     On his blazing brow to look?
     What might of living thing may stand
     Against the strength of his right hand?
     First he led his armies forth
     Against the Mammoths of the north,
     What time they wasted in their pride
     Pasture and vineyard far and wide.
     Then the White River's icy flood
     Was thawed with fire and dyed with blood,
     And heard for many a league the sound
     Of the pine forests blazing round,
     And the death-howl and trampling din
     Of the gigantic herd within.
     From the surging sea of flame
     Forth the tortured monsters came;
     As of breakers on the shore
     Was their onset and their roar;
     As the cedar-trees of God
     Stood the stately ranks of Nod.
     One long night and one short day
     The sword was lifted up to slay.
     Then marched the firstborn and his sons
     O'er the white ashes of the wood,
     And counted of that savage brood
     Nine times nine thousand skeletons.
 
 
     "On the snow with carnage red
     The wood is piled, the skins are spread.
     A thousand fires illume the sky;
     Round each a hundred warriors lie.
     But, long ere half the night was spent,
     Forth thundered from the golden tent
     The rousing voice of Cain.
     A thousand trumps in answer rang
     And fast to arms the warriors sprang
     O'er all the frozen plain.
     A herald from the wealthy bay
     Hath come with tidings of dismay.
     From the western ocean's coast
     Seth hath led a countless host,
     And vows to slay with fire and sword
     All who call not on the Lord.
     His archers hold the mountain forts;
     His light armed ships blockade the ports;
     His horsemen tread the harvest down.
     On twelve proud bridges he hath passed
     The river dark with many a mast,
     And pitched his mighty camp at last
     Before the imperial town.
 
 
     "On the south and on the west,
     Closely was the city prest.
     Before us lay the hostile powers.
     The breach was wide between the towers.
     Pulse and meal within were sold
     For a double weight of gold.
     Our mighty father had gone forth
     Two hundred marches to the north.
     Yet in that extreme of ill
     We stoutly kept his city still;
     And swore beneath his royal wall,
     Like his true sons to fight and fall.
 
 
     "Hark, hark, to gong and horn,
     Clarion, and fife, and drum,
     The morn, the fortieth morn,
     Fixed for the great assault is come.
     Between the camp and city spreads
     A waving sea of helmed heads.
     From the royal car of Seth
     Was hung the blood-reg flag of death:
     At sight of that thrice-hallowed sign
     Wide flew at once each banner's fold;
     The captains clashed their arms of gold;
     The war cry of Elohim rolled
     Far down their endless line.
     On the northern hills afar
     Pealed an answering note of war.
     Soon the dust in whirlwinds driven,
     Rushed across the northern heaven.
     Beneath its shroud came thick and loud
     The tramp as of a countless crowd;
     And at intervals were seen
     Lance and hauberk glancing sheen;
     And at intervals were heard
     Charger's neigh and battle word.
 
 
     "Oh what a rapturous cry
     From all the city's thousand spires arose,
     With what a look the hollow eye
     Of the lean watchman glared upon the foes,
     With what a yell of joy the mother pressed
     The moaning baby to her withered breast;
     When through the swarthy cloud that veiled the plain
     Burst on his children's sight the flaming brow of Cain!"
 
 
     There paused perforce that noble song;
     For from all the joyous throng,
     Burst forth a rapturous shout which drowned
     Singer's voice and trumpet's sound.
     Thrice that stormy clamour fell,
     Thrice rose again with mightier swell.
     The last and loudest roar of all
     Had died along the painted wall.
     The crowd was hushed; the minstrel train
     Prepared to strike the chords again;
     When on each ear distinctly smote
     A low and wild and wailing note.
     It moans again.  In mute amaze
     Menials, and guests, and harpers gaze.
     They look above, beneath, around,
     No shape doth own that mournful sound.
     It comes not from the tuneful quire;
     It comes not from the feasting peers.
     There is no tone of earthly lyre
     So soft, so sad, so full of tears.
     Then a strange horror came on all
     Who sate at that high festival.
     The far famed harp, the harp of gold,
     Dropped from Jubal's trembling hold.
     Frantic with dismay the bride
     Clung to her Ahirad's side.
     And the corpse-like hue of dread
     Ahirad's haughty face o'erspread.
     Yet not even in that agony of awe
     Did the young leader of the fair-haired race
     From Tirzah's shuddering grasp his hand withdraw,
     Or turn his eyes from Tirzah's livid face.
     The tigers to their lord retreat,
     And crouch and whine beneath his feet.
     Prone sink to earth the golden shielded seven.
     All hearts are cowed save his alone
     Who sits upon the emerald throne;
     For he hath heard Elohim speak from heaven.
     Still thunders in his ear the peal;
     Still blazes on his front the seal:
     And on the soul of the proud king
     No terror of created thing
     From sky, or earth, or hell, hath power
     Since that unutterable hour.
 
 
     He rose to speak, but paused, and listening stood,
     Not daunted, but in sad and curious mood,
     With knitted brow, and searching eye of fire.
     A deathlike silence sank on all around,
     And through the boundless space was heard no sound,
     Save the soft tones of that mysterious lyre.
     Broken, faint, and low,
     At first the numbers flow.
     Louder, deeper, quicker, still
     Into one fierce peal they swell,
     And the echoing palace fill
     With a strange funereal yell.
     A voice comes forth.  But what, or where?
     On the earth, or in the air?
     Like the midnight winds that blow
     Round a lone cottage in the snow,
     With howling swell and sighing fall,
     It wails along the trophied hall.
     In such a wild and dreary moan
     The watches of the Seraphim
     Poured out all night their plaintive hymn
     Before the eternal throne.
     Then, when from many a heavenly eye
     Drops as of earthly pity fell
     For her who had aspire too high,
     For him who loved too well.
     When, stunned by grief, the gentle pair
     From the nuptial garden fair,
     Linked in a sorrowful caress,
     Strayed through the untrodden wilderness;
     And close behind their footsteps came
     The desolating sword of flame,
     And drooped the cedared alley's pride,
     And fountains shrank, and roses died.
 
 
     "Rejoice, O Son of God, rejoice,"
     Sang that melancholy voice,
     "Rejoice, the maid is fair to see;
     The bower is decked for her and thee;
     The ivory lamps around it throw
     A soft and pure and mellow glow.
     Where'er the chastened lustre falls
     On roof or cornice, floor or walls,
     Woven of pink and rose appear
     Such words as love delights to hear.
     The breath of myrrh, the lute's soft sound,
     Float through the moonlight galleries round.
     O'er beds of violet and through groves of spice,
     Lead thy proud bride into the nuptial bower;
     For thou hast bought her with a fearful price,
     And she hath dowered thee with a fearful dower.
     The price is life.  The dower is death.
     Accursed loss!  Accursed gain!
     For her thou givest the blessedness of Seth,
     And to thine arms she brings the curse of Cain.
 
 
     Round the dark curtains of the fiery throne
     Pauses awhile the voice of sacred song:
     From all the angelic ranks goes forth a groan,
     'How long, O Lord, how long?'
     The still small voice makes answer, 'Wait and see,
     Oh sons of glory, what the end shall be.'
 
 
     "But, in the outer darkness of the place
     Where God hath shown his power without his grace,
     Is laughter and the sound of glad acclaim,
     Loud as when, on wings of fire,
     Fulfilled of his malign desire,
     From Paradise the conquering serpent came.
     The giant ruler of the morning star
     From off his fiery bed
     Lifts high his stately head,
     Which Michael's sword hath marked with many a scar.
     At his voice the pit of hell
     Answers with a joyous yell,
     And flings her dusky portals wide
     For the bridegroom and the bride.
 
 
     "But louder still shall be the din
     In the halls of Death and Sin,
     When the full measure runneth o'er,
     When mercy can endure no more,
     When he who vainly proffers grace,
     Comes in his fury to deface
     The fair creation of his hand;
     When from the heaven streams down amain
     For forty days the sheeted rain;
     And from his ancient barriers free,
     With a deafening roar the sea
     Comes foaming up the land.
     Mother, cast thy babe aside:
     Bridegroom, quit thy virgin bride:
     Brother, pass thy brother by:
     'Tis for life, for life, ye fly.
     Along the drear horizon raves
     The swift advancing line of waves.
     On:  on:  their frothy crests appear
     Each moment nearer, and more near.
     Urge the dromedary's speed;
     Spur to death the reeling steed;
     If perchance ye yet may gain
     The mountains that o'erhang the plain.
 
 
     "Oh thou haughty land of Nod,
     Hear the sentence of thy God.
     Thou hast said, 'Of all the hills
     Whence, after autumn rains, the rills
     In silver trickle down,
     The fairest is that mountain white
     Which intercepts the morning light
     From Cain's imperial town.
     On its first and gentlest swell
     Are pleasant halls where nobles dwell;
     And marble porticoes are seen
     Peeping through terraced gardens green.
     Above are olives, palms, and vines;
     And higher yet the dark-blue pines;
     And highest on the summit shines
     The crest of everlasting ice.
     Here let the God of Abel own
     That human art hath wonders shown
     Beyond his boasted paradise.'
 
 
     "Therefore on that proud mountain's crown
     Thy few surviving sons and daughters
     Shall see their latest sun go down
     Upon a boundless waste of waters.
     None salutes and none replies;
     None heaves a groan or breathes a prayer
     They crouch on earth with tearless eyes,
     And clenched hands, and bristling hair.
     The rain pours on:  no star illumes
     The blackness of the roaring sky.
     And each successive billow booms
     Nigher still and still more nigh.
     And now upon the howling blast
     The wreaths of spray come thick and fast;
     And a great billow by the tempest curled
     Falls with a thundering crash; and all is o'er.
     In what is left of all this glorious world?
     A sky without a beam, a sea without a shore.
 
 
     "Oh thou fair land, where from their starry home
     Cherub and seraph oft delight to roam,
     Thou city of the thousand towers,
     Thou palace of the golden stairs,
     Ye gardens of perennial flowers,
     Ye moted gates, ye breezy squares;
     Ye parks amidst whose branches high
     Oft peers the squirrel's sparkling eye;
     Ye vineyards, in whose trellised shade
     Pipes many a youth to many a maid;
     Ye ports where rides the gallant ship,
     Ye marts where wealthy burghers meet;
     Ye dark green lanes which know the trip
     Of woman's conscious feet;
     Ye grassy meads where, when the day is done,
     The shepherd pens his fold;
     Ye purple moors on which the setting sun
     Leaves a rich fringe of gold;
     Ye wintry deserts where the larches grow;
     Ye mountains on whose everlasting snow
     No human foot hath trod;
     Many a fathom shall ye sleep
     Beneath the grey and endless deep,
     In the great day of the revenge of God."
 

THE COUNTRY CLERGYMAN'S TRIP TO CAMBRIDGE.—AN ELECTION BALLAD. (1827.)

 
      As I sate down to breakfast in state,
      At my living of Tithing-cum-Boring,
      With Betty beside me to wait,
      Came a rap that almost beat the door in.
      I laid down my basin of tea,
      And Betty ceased spreading the toast,
      "As sure as a gun, sir," said she,
      "That must be the knock of the post."
 
 
      A letter—and free—bring it here—
      I have no correspondent who franks.
      No!  Yes!  Can it be?  Why, my dear,
      'Tis our glorious, our Protestant Bankes.
      "Dear sir, as I know you desire
      That the Church should receive due protection,
      I humbly presume to require
      Your aid at the Cambridge election.
 
 
      "It has lately been brought to my knowledge,
      That the Ministers fully design
      To suppress each cathedral and college,
      And eject every learned divine.
      To assist this detestable scheme
      Three nuncios from Rome are come over;
      They left Calais on Monday by steam,
      And landed to dinner at Dover.
 
 
      "An army of grim Cordeliers,
      Well furnished with relics and vermin,
      Will follow, Lord Westmoreland fears,
      To effect what their chiefs may determine.
      Lollard's bower, good authorities say,
      Is again fitting up for a prison;
      And a wood-merchant told me to-day
      'Tis a wonder how faggots have risen.
 
 
      "The finance scheme of Canning contains
      A new Easter-offering tax;
      And he means to devote all the gains
      To a bounty on thumb-screws and racks.
      Your living, so neat and compact—
      Pray, don't let the news give you pain!—
      Is promised, I know for a fact,
      To an olive-faced Padre from Spain."
 
 
      I read, and I felt my heart bleed,
      Sore wounded with horror and pity;
      So I flew, with all possible speed,
      To our Protestant champion's committee.
      True gentlemen, kind and well-bred!
      No fleering! no distance! no scorn!
      They asked after my wife who is dead,
      And my children who never were born.
 
 
      They then, like high-principled Tories,
      Called our Sovereign unjust and unsteady,
      And assailed him with scandalous stories,
      Till the coach for the voters was ready.
      That coach might be well called a casket
      Of learning and brotherly love:
      There were parsons in boot and in basket;
      There were parsons below and above.
 
 
      There were Sneaker and Griper, a pair
      Who stick to Lord Mulesby like leeches;
      A smug chaplain of plausible air,
      Who writes my Lord Goslingham's speeches.
      Dr Buzz, who alone is a host,
      Who, with arguments weighty as lead,
      Proves six times a week in the Post
      That flesh somehow differs from bread.
 
 
      Dr Nimrod, whose orthodox toes
      Are seldom withdrawn from the stirrup;
      Dr Humdrum, whose eloquence flows,
      Like droppings of sweet poppy syrup;
      Dr Rosygill puffing and fanning,
      And wiping away perspiration;
      Dr Humbug who proved Mr Canning
      The beast in St John's Revelation.
 
 
      A layman can scarce form a notion
      Of our wonderful talk on the road;
      Of the learning, the wit, and devotion,
      Which almost each syllable showed:
      Why divided allegiance agrees
      So ill with our free constitution;
      How Catholics swear as they please,
      In hope of the priest's absolution;
 
 
      How the Bishop of Norwich had bartered
      His faith for a legate's commission;
      How Lyndhurst, afraid to be martyr'd,
      Had stooped to a base coalition;
      How Papists are cased from compassion
      By bigotry, stronger than steel;
      How burning would soon come in fashion,
      And how very bad it must feel.
 
 
      We were all so much touched and excited
      By a subject so direly sublime,
      That the rules of politeness were slighted,
      And we all of us talked at a time;
      And in tones, which each moment grew louder,
      Told how we should dress for the show,
      And where we should fasten the powder,
      And if we should bellow or no.
 
 
      Thus from subject to subject we ran,
      And the journey passed pleasantly o'er,
      Till at last Dr Humdrum began;
      From that time I remember no more.
      At Ware he commenced his prelection,
      In the dullest of clerical drones;
      And when next I regained recollection
      We were rambling o'er Trumpington stones.
 

SONG. (1827.)

 
     O stay, Madonna! stay;
     'Tis not the dawn of day
     That marks the skies with yonder opal streak:
     The stars in silence shine;
     Then press thy lips to mine,
     And rest upon my neck thy fervid cheek.
 
 
     O sleep, Madonna! sleep;
     Leave me to watch and weep
     O'er the sad memory of departed joys,
     O'er hope's extinguished beam,
     O'er fancy's vanished dream;
     O'er all that nature gives and man destroys.
 
 
     O wake, Madonna! wake;
     Even now the purple lake
     Is dappled o'er with amber flakes of light;
     A glow is on the hill;
     And every trickling rill
     In golden threads leaps down from yonder height.
 
 
     O fly, Madonna! fly,
     Lest day and envy spy
     What only love and night may safely know:
     Fly, and tread softly, dear!
     Lest those who hate us hear
     The sounds of thy light footsteps as they go.
 

POLITICAL GEORGICS. (MARCH 1828.)

 
     "Quid faciat laetas segetes," etc.
 

 
     How cabinets are formed, and how destroy'd,
     How Tories are confirmed, and Whigs decoy'd,
     How in nice times a prudent man should vote,
     At what conjuncture he should turn his coat,
     The truths fallacious, and the candid lies,
     And all the lore of sleek majorities,
     I sing, great Premier.  Oh, mysterious two,
     Lords of our fate, the Doctor and the Jew,
     If, by your care enriched, the aspiring clerk
     Quits the close alley for the breezy park,
     And Dolly's chops and Reid's entire resigns
     For odorous fricassees and costly wines;
     And you, great pair, through Windsor's shades who rove,
     The Faun and Dryad of the conscious grove;
     All, all inspire me, for of all I sing,
     Doctor and Jew, and M—s and K—g.
     Thou, to the maudlin muse of Rydal dear;
     Thou more than Neptune, Lowther, lend thine ear.
     At Neptune's voice the horse, with flowing mane
     And pawing hoof, sprung from the obedient plain;
     But at thy word the yawning earth, in fright,
     Engulf'd the victor steed from mortal sight.
     Haste from thy woods, mine Arbuthnot, with speed,
     Rich woods, where lean Scotch cattle love to feed:
     Let Gaffer Gooch and Boodle's patriot band,
     Fat from the leanness of a plundered land,
     True Cincinnati, quit their patent ploughs,
     Their new steam-harrows, and their premium sows;
     Let all in bulky majesty appear,
     Roll the dull eye, and yawn th' unmeaning cheer.
     Ye veteran Swiss, of senatorial wars,
     Who glory in your well-earned sticks and stars;
     Ye diners-out from whom we guard our spoons;
     Ye smug defaulters; ye obscene buffoons;
     Come all, of every race and size and form,
     Corruption's children, brethren of the worm;
     From those gigantic monsters who devour
     The pay of half a squadron in an hour,
     To those foul reptiles, doomed to night and scorn,
     Of filth and stench equivocally born;
     From royal tigers down to toads and lice;
     From Bathursts, Clintons, Fanes, to H— and P—;
     Thou last, by habit and by nature blest
     With every gift which serves a courtier best,
     The lap-dog spittle, the hyaena bile,
     The maw of shark, the tear of crocodile,
     Whate'er high station, undetermined yet,
     Awaits thee in the longing Cabinet,—
     Whether thou seat thee in the room of Peel,
     Or from Lord Prig extort the Privy Seal,
     Or our Field-marshal-Treasurer fix on thee,
     A legal admiral, to rule the sea,
     Or Chancery-suits, beneath thy well known reign,
     Turn to their nap of fifty years again;
     (Already L—, prescient of his fate,
     Yields half his woolsack to thy mightier weight;)
     Oh! Eldon, in whatever sphere thou shine,
     For opposition sure will ne'er be thine,
     Though scowls apart the lonely pride of Grey,
     Though Devonshire proudly flings his staff away,
     Though Lansdowne, trampling on his broken chain,
     Shine forth the Lansdowne of our hearts again,
     Assist me thou; for well I deem, I see
     An abstract of my ample theme in thee.
     Thou, as thy glorious self hath justly said,
     From earliest youth, wast pettifogger bred,
     And, raised to power by fortune's fickle will,
     Art head and heart a pettifogger still.
     So, where once Fleet-ditch ran confessed, we vie
     A crowded mart and stately avenue;
     But the black stream beneath runs on the same,
     Still brawls in W—'s key,—still stinks like H—'s name.
 

THE DELIVERANCE OF VIENNA.
TRANSLATED FROM VINCENZIO DA FILICAIA.
(Published in the "Winter's Wreath," Liverpool, 1828.)

 
     "Le corde d'oro elette," etc.
 

 
     The chords, the sacred chords of gold,
     Strike, O Muse, in measure bold;
     And frame a sparkling wreath of joyous songs
     For that great God to whom revenge belongs.
     Who shall resist his might,
     Who marshals for the fight
     Earthquake and thunder, hurricane and flame?
     He smote the haughty race
     Of unbelieving Thrace,
     And turned their rage to fear, their pride to shame.
     He looked in wrath from high,
     Upon their vast array;
     And, in the twinkling of an eye,
     Tambour, and trump, and battle-cry,
     And steeds, and turbaned infantry,
     Passed like a dream away.
     Such power defends the mansions of the just:
     But, like a city without walls,
     The grandeur of the mortal falls
     Who glories in his strength, and makes not God his trust.
     The proud blasphemers thought all earth their own;
     They deemed that soon the whirlwind of their ire
     Would sweep down tower and palace, dome and spire,
     The Christian altars and the Augustan throne.
     And soon, they cried, shall Austria bow
     To the dust her lofty brow.
     The princedoms of Almayne
     Shall wear the Phrygian chain;
     In humbler waves shall vassal Tiber roll;
     And Rome a slave forlorn,
     Her laurelled tresses shorn,
     Shall feel our iron in her inmost soul.
     Who shall bid the torrent stay?
     Who shall bar the lightning's way?
     Who arrest the advancing van
     Of the fiery Ottoman?
 
 
     As the curling smoke-wreaths fly
     When fresh breezes clear the sky,
     Passed away each swelling boast
     Of the misbelieving host.
     From the Hebrus rolling far
     Came the murky cloud of war,
     And in shower and tempest dread
     Burst on Austria's fenceless head.
     But not for vaunt or threat
     Didst Thou, O Lord, forget
     The flock so dearly bought, and loved so well.
 
 
     Even in the very hour
     Of guilty pride and power
     Full on the circumcised Thy vengeance fell.
     Then the fields were heaped with dead,
     Then the streams with gore were red,
     And every bird of prey, and every beast,
     From wood and cavern thronged to Thy great feast.
 
 
     What terror seized the fiends obscene of Nile!
     How wildly, in his place of doom beneath,
     Arabia's lying prophet gnashed his teeth,
     And cursed his blighted hopes and wasted guile!
     When, at the bidding of Thy sovereign might,
     Flew on their destined path
     Thy messages of wrath,
     Riding on storms and wrapped in deepest night.
     The Phthian mountains saw,
     And quaked with mystic awe:
     The proud Sultana of the Straits bowed down
     Her jewelled neck and her embattled crown.
     The miscreants, as they raised their eyes
     Glaring defiance on Thy skies,
     Saw adverse winds and clouds display
     The terrors of their black array;—
     Saw each portentous star
     Whose fiery aspect turned of yore to flight
     The iron chariots of the Canaanite
     Gird its bright harness for a deadlier war.
 
 
     Beneath Thy withering look
     Their limbs with palsy shook;
     Scattered on earth the crescent banners lay;
     Trembled with panic fear
     Sabre and targe and spear,
     Through the proud armies of the rising day.
     Faint was each heart, unnerved each hand;
     And, if they strove to charge or stand
     Their efforts were as vain
     As his who, scared in feverish sleep
     By evil dreams, essays to leap,
     Then backward falls again.
     With a crash of wild dismay,
     Their ten thousand ranks gave way;
     Fast they broke, and fast they fled;
     Trampled, mangled, dying, dead,
     Horse and horsemen mingled lay;
     Till the mountains of the slain
     Raised the valleys to the plain.
     Be all the glory to Thy name divine!
     The swords were our's; the arm, O Lord, was Thine.
     Therefore to Thee, beneath whose footstool wait
     The powers which erring man calls Chance and Fate,
     To Thee who hast laid low
     The pride of Europe's foe,
     And taught Byzantium's sullen lords to fear,
     I pour my spirit out
     In a triumphant shout,
     And call all ages and all lands to hear.
     Thou who evermore endurest,
     Loftiest, mightiest, wisest, purest,
     Thou whose will destroys or saves,
     Dread of tyrants, hope of slaves,
     The wreath of glory is from Thee,
     And the red sword of victory.
 
 
     There where exulting Danube's flood
     Runs stained with Islam's noblest blood
     From that tremendous field,
     There where in mosque the tyrants met,
     And from the crier's minaret
     Unholy summons pealed,
     Pure shrines and temples now shall be
     Decked for a worship worthy Thee.
     To Thee thy whole creation pays
     With mystic sympathy its praise,
     The air, the earth, the seas:
     The day shines forth with livelier beam;
     There is a smile upon the stream,
     An anthem on the breeze.
     Glory, they cry, to Him whose might
     Hath turned the barbarous foe to flight,
     Whose arm protects with power divine
     The city of his favoured line.
     The caves, the woods, the rocks, repeat the sound;
     The everlasting hills roll the long echoes round.
 
 
     But, if Thy rescued church may dare
     Still to besiege Thy throne with prayer,
     Sheathe not, we implore Thee, Lord,
     Sheathe not Thy victorious sword.
     Still Panonia pines away,
     Vassal of a double sway:
     Still Thy servants groan in chains,
     Still the race which hates Thee reigns:
     Part the living from the dead:
     Join the members to the head:
     Snatch Thine own sheep from yon fell monster's hold;
     Let one kind shepherd rule one undivided fold.
 
 
     He is the victor, only he
     Who reaps the fruits of victory.
     We conquered once in vain,
     When foamed the Ionian waves with gore,
     And heaped Lepanto's stormy shore
     With wrecks and Moslem slain.
     Yet wretched Cyprus never broke
     The Syrian tyrant's iron yoke.
     Shall the twice vanquished foe
     Again repeat his blow?
     Shall Europe's sword be hung to rust in peace?
     No—let the red-cross ranks
     Of the triumphant Franks
     Bear swift deliverance to the shrines of Greece
     And in her inmost heart let Asia feel
     The avenging plagues of Western fire and steel.
 
 
     Oh God! for one short moment raise
     The veil which hides those glorious days.
     The flying foes I see Thee urge
     Even to the river's headlong verge.
 
 
     Close on their rear the loud uproar
     Of fierce pursuit from Ister's shore
     Comes pealing on the wind;
     The Rab's wild waters are before,
     The Christian sword behind.
     Sons of perdition, speed your flight,
     No earthly spear is in the rest;
     No earthly champion leads to fight
     The warriors of the West.
     The Lord of Host asserts His old renown,
     Scatters, and smites, and slays, and tramples down.
     Fast, fast beyond what mortal tongue can say,
     Or mortal fancy dream,
     He rushes on his prey:
     Till, with the terrors of the wondrous theme
     Bewildered, and appalled, I cease to sing,
     And close my dazzled eye, and rest my wearied wing.
 

THE LAST BUCCANEER. (1839.)

 
     The winds were yelling, the waves were swelling,
     The sky was black and drear,
     When the crew with eyes of flame brought the ship without a name
     Alongside the last Buccaneer.
 
 
     "Whence flies your sloop full sail before so fierce a gale,
     When all others drive bare on the seas?
     Say, come ye from the shore of the holy Salvador,
     Or the gulf of the rich Caribbees?"
 
 
     "From a shore no search hath found, from a gulf no line can
     sound,
     Without rudder or needle we steer;
     Above, below, our bark, dies the sea-fowl and the shark,
     As we fly by the last Buccaneer.
 
 
     "To-night there shall be heard on the rocks of Cape de Verde,
     A loud crash, and a louder roar;
     And to-morrow shall the deep, with a heavy moaning, sweep
     The corpses and wreck to the shore."
 
 
     The stately ship of Clyde securely now may ride,
     In the breath of the citron shades;
     And Severn's towering mast securely now flies fast,
     Through the sea of the balmy Trades.
 
 
     From St Jago's wealthy port, from Havannah's royal fort,
     The seaman goes forth without fear;
     For since that stormy night not a mortal hath had sight
     Of the flag of the last Buccaneer.
 

EPITAPH ON A JACOBITE. (1845.)

 
     To my true king I offered free from stain
     Courage and faith; vain faith, and courage vain.
     For him, I threw lands, honours, wealth, away.
     And one dear hope, that was more prized than they.
     For him I languished in a foreign clime,
     Grey-haired with sorrow in my manhood's prime;
     Heard on Lavernia Scargill's whispering trees,
     And pined by Arno for my lovelier Tees;
     Beheld each night my home in fevered sleep,
     Each morning started from the dream to weep;
     Till God who saw me tried too sorely, gave
     The resting place I asked, an early grave.
     Oh thou, whom chance leads to this nameless stone,
     From that proud country which was once mine own,
     By those white cliffs I never more must see,
     By that dear language which I spake like thee,
     Forget all feuds, and shed one English tear
     O'er English dust.  A broken heart lies here.
 

LINES WRITTEN IN AUGUST. (1847.)

 
     The day of tumult, strife, defeat, was o'er;
     Worn out with toil, and noise, and scorn, and spleen,
     I slumbered, and in slumber saw once more
     A room in an old mansion, long unseen.
 
 
     That room, methought, was curtained from the light;
     Yet through the curtains shone the moon's cold ray
     Full on a cradle, where, in linen white,
     Sleeping life's first soft sleep, an infant lay.
 
 
     Pale flickered on the hearth the dying flame,
     And all was silent in that ancient hall,
     Save when by fits on the low night-wind came
     The murmur of the distant waterfall.
 
 
     And lo! the fairy queens who rule our birth
     Drew nigh to speak the new-born baby's doom:
     With noiseless step, which left no trace on earth,
     From gloom they came, and vanished into gloom.
 
 
     Not deigning on the boy a glance to cast
     Swept careless by the gorgeous Queen of Gain;
     More scornful still, the Queen of Fashion passed,
     With mincing gait and sneer of cold disdain.
 
 
     The Queen of Power tossed high her jewelled head,
     And o'er her shoulder threw a wrathful frown;
     The Queen of Pleasure on the pillow shed
     Scarce one stray rose-leaf from her fragrant crown.
 
 
     Still Fay in long procession followed Fay;
     And still the little couch remained unblest:
     But, when those wayward sprites had passed away,
     Came One, the last, the mightiest, and the best.
 
 
     Oh glorious lady, with the eyes of light
     And laurels clustering round thy lofty brow,
     Who by the cradle's side didst watch that night,
     Warbling a sweet, strange music, who wast thou?
 
 
     "Yes, darling; let them go;" so ran the strain:
     "Yes; let them go, gain, fashion, pleasure, power,
     And all the busy elves to whose domain
     Belongs the nether sphere, the fleeting hour.
 
 
     "Without one envious sigh, one anxious scheme,
     The nether sphere, the fleeting hour resign.
     Mine is the world of thought, the world of dream,
     Mine all the past, and all the future mine.
 
 
     "Fortune, that lays in sport the mighty low,
     Age, that to penance turns the joys of youth,
     Shall leave untouched the gifts which I bestow,
     The sense of beauty and the thirst of truth.
 
 
     "Of the fair brotherhood who share my grace,
     I, from thy natal day, pronounce thee free;
     And, if for some I keep a nobler place,
     I keep for none a happier than for thee.
 
 
     "There are who, while to vulgar eyes they seem
     Of all my bounties largely to partake,
     Of me as of some rival's handmaid deem
     And court me but for gain's, power's, fashion's sake.
 
 
     "To such, though deep their lore, though wide their fame,
     Shall my great mysteries be all unknown:
     But thou, through good and evil, praise and blame,
     Wilt not thou love me for myself alone?
 
 
     "Yes; thou wilt love me with exceeding love;
     And I will tenfold all that love repay,
     Still smiling, though the tender may reprove,
     Still faithful, though the trusted may betray.
 
 
     "For aye mine emblem was, and aye shall be,
     The ever-during plant whose bough I wear,
     Brightest and greenest then, when every tree
     That blossoms in the light of Time is bare.
 
 
     "In the dark hour of shame, I deigned to stand
     Before the frowning peers at Bacon's side:
     On a far shore I smoothed with tender hand,
     Through months of pain, the sleepless bed of Hyde:
 
 
     "I brought the wise and brave of ancient days
     To cheer the cell where Raleigh pined alone:
     I lighted Milton's darkness with the blaze
     Of the bright ranks that guard the eternal throne.
 
 
     "And even so, my child, it is my pleasure
     That thou not then alone shouldst feel me nigh,
     When in domestic bliss and studious leisure,
     Thy weeks uncounted come, uncounted fly;
 
 
     "Not then alone, when myriads, closely pressed
     Around thy car, the shout of triumph raise;
     Nor when, in gilded drawing rooms, thy breast
     Swells at the sweeter sound of woman's praise.
 
 
     "No:  when on restless night dawns cheerless morrow,
     When weary soul and wasting body pine,
     Thine am I still, in danger, sickness, sorrow,
     In conflict, obloquy, want, exile, thine;
 
 
     "Thine, where on mountain waves the snowbirds scream,
     Where more than Thule's winter barbs the breeze,
     Where scarce, through lowering clouds, one sickly gleam
     Lights the drear May-day of Antarctic seas;
 
 
     "Thine, when around thy litter's track all day
     White sandhills shall reflect the blinding glare;
     Thine, when, through forests breathing death, thy way
     All night shall wind by many a tiger's lair;
 
 
     "Thine most, when friends turn pale, when traitors fly,
     When, hard beset, thy spirit, justly proud,
     For truth, peace, freedom, mercy, dares defy
     A sullen priesthood and a raving crowd.
 
 
     "Amidst the din of all things fell and vile,
     Hate's yell, and envy's hiss, and folly's bray,
     Remember me; and with an unforced smile
     See riches, baubles, flatterers, pass away.
 
 
     "Yes:  they will pass away; nor deem it strange:
     They come and go, as comes and goes the sea:
     And let them come and go:  thou, through all change,
     Fix thy firm gaze on virtue and on me."
 

TRANSLATION FROM PLAUTUS. (1850.)

[The author passed a part of the summer and autumn of 1850 at Ventnor, in the Isle of Wight. He usually, when walking alone, had with him a book. On one occasion, as he was loitering in the landslip near Bonchurch, reading the Rudens of Plautus, it struck him that it might be an interesting experiment to attempt to produce something which might be supposed to resemble passages in the lost Greek drama of Diphilus, from which the Rudens appears to have been taken. He selected one passage in the Rudens, of which he then made the following version, which he afterwards copied out at the request of a friend to whom he had repeated it.]

     Act IV. Sc. vii.

 
     DAEMONES:
     O Gripe, Gripe, in aetate hominum plurimae
     Fiunt transennae, ubi decipiuntur dolis;
     Atque edepol in eas plerumque esca imponitur.
     Quam si quis avidus pascit escam avariter,
     Decipitur in transenna avaritia sua.
     Ille, qui consulte, docte, atque astute cavet,
     Diutine uti bene licet partum bene.
     Mi istaec videtur praeda praedatum irier:
     Ut cum majore dote abeat, quam advenerit.
     Egone ut, quod ad me adlatum esse alienum sciam,
     Celem?  Minime istuc faciet noster Daemones.
     Semper cavere hoc sapientes aequissimum est,
     Ne conscii sint ipsi maleficiis suis.
     Ego, mihi quum lusi, nil moror ullum lucrum.
 
 
     GRIPUS:
     Spectavi ego pridem Comicos ad istum modum
     Sapienter dicta dicere, atque iis plaudier,
     Quum illos sapientis mores monstrabant poplo;
     Sed quum inde suam quisque ibant diversi domum,
     Nullus erat illo pacto, ut illi jusserant.
 
 
     DAIM:
     O Gripe, Gripe, pleista pagidon schemata
     idoi tis an pepegmen en thneton bio,
     kai pleist ep autois deleath, on epithumia
     oregomenos tis en kakois alisketai
     ostis d apistei kai sophos phulattetai
     kalos apolauei ton kalos peporismenon.
     arpagma d ouch arpagm o larvax outosi,
     all autos, oimai, mallon arpaxei tina.
     tond andra kleptein tallotri—euphemei, talan
     tauten ye me mainoito manian Daimones.
     tode gar aei sophoisin eulabeteon,
     me ti poth eauto tis adikema sunnoe
     kerde d emoige panth osois euphrainomai,
     kerdos d akerdes o toumon algunei kear.
 
 
     GRIP:
     kago men ede komikon akekoa
     semnos legonton toiade, tous de theomenous
     krotein, mataiois edomenous sophismasin
     eith, os apelth ekastos oikad, oudeni
     ouden paremeine ton kalos eiremenon.
 

PARAPHRASE OF A PASSAGE IN THE CHRONICLE OF THE MONK OF ST GALL

[In the summer of 1856, the author travelled with a friend through Lombardy. As they were on the road between Novara and Milan, they were conversing on the subject of the legends relating to that country. The author remarked to his companion that Mr Panizzi, in the Essay on the Romantic Narrative Poetry of the Italians, prefixed to his edition of Bojardo, had pointed out an instance of the conversion of ballad poetry into prose narrative which strongly confirmed the theory of Perizonius and Niebuhr, upon which "The Lays of Ancient Rome" are founded; and, after repeating an extract which Mr Panizzi has given from the chronicle of "The Monk of St Gall," he proceeded to frame a metrical paraphrase. The note in Mr Panizzi's work (volume i. page 123, note b) is here copied verbatim.]

"The monk says that Oger was with Desiderius, King of Lombardy, watching the advance of Charlemagne's army. The king often asked Oger where was Charlemagne. Quando videris, inquit, segetem campis inhorrescere, ferreum Padum et Ticinum marinis fluctibus ferro nigrantibus muros civitatis inundantes, tunc est spes Caroli venientis. His nedum expletis primum ad occasum Circino vel Borea coepit apparere, quasi nubes tenebrosa, quae diem clarissimam horrentes convertit in umbras. Sed propiante Imperatore, ex armorum splendore, dies omni nocte tenebrosior oborta est inclusis. Tunc visus est ipse ferreus Carolus ferrea galea cristatus, ferreis manicis armillatus, etc., etc. His igitur, quae ego balbus et edentulus, non ut debui circuitu tardiore diutius explicare tentavi, veridicus speculator Oggerus celerrimo visu contuitus dixit ad Desiderium: Ecce, habes quem tantopere perquisisti. Et haec dicens, pene exanimis cecidit.—"Monach. Sangal." de Reb. Bel. Caroli Magni. lib. ii. para xxvi. Is this not evidently taken from poetical effusions?"

PARAPHRASE.

 
     To Oggier spake King Didier:
     "When cometh Charlemagne?
     We looked for him in harvest:
     We looked for him in rain.
     Crops are reaped; and floods are past;
     And still he is not here.
     Some token show, that we may know
     That Charlemagne is near."
 
 
     Then to the King made answer
     Oggier, the christened Dane:
     "When stands the iron harvest,
     Ripe on the Lombard plain,
     That stiff harvest which is reaped
     With sword of knight and peer,
     Then by that sign ye may divine
     That Charlemagne is near.
 
 
     "When round the Lombard cities
     The iron flood shall flow,
     A swifter flood than Ticin,
     A broader flood than Po,
     Frothing white with many a plume,
     Dark blue with many a spear,
     Then by that sign ye may divine
     That Charlemagne is near."
 

INSCRIPTION ON THE STATUE OF LORD WM. BENTINCK. AT CALCUTTA. (1835.)

 
     To
     WILLIAM CAVENDISH BENTINCK,
     Who, during seven years, ruled India with eminent
     Prudence, Integrity, and Benevolence:
     Who, placed at the head of a great
     Empire, never laid aside
     The simplicity and moderation of a private citizen:
     Who infused into Oriental despotism the spirit of British
     Freedom:
     Who never forgot that the end of Government is
     The happiness of the Governed:
     Who abolished cruel rites:
     Who effaced humiliating distinctions:
     Who gave liberty to the expression of public opinion:
     Whose constant study it was, to elevate the intellectual
     And moral character of
     The Nations committed to his charge:
     This Monument
     Was erected by men,
     Who, differing in Race, in
     Manners, in Language, and in Religion,
     Cherish, with equal veneration and gratitude,
     The memory of his wise, upright, and Paternal Administration.
 

EPITAPH ON SIR BENJAMIN HEATH MALKIN. AT CALCUTTA. (1837.)

 
     This monument
     Is sacred to the memory
     of
     SIR BENJAMIN HEATH MALKIN, Knight,
     One of the Judges of
     The Supreme Court of Judicature:
     A man eminently distinguished
     By his literary and scientific attainments,
     By his professional learning and ability,
     By the clearness and accuracy of his intellect,
     By diligence, by patience, by firmness, by love of truth,
     By public spirit, ardent and disinterested,
     Yet always under the guidance of discretion,
     By rigid uprightness, by unostentatious piety,
     By the serenity of his temper,
     And by the benevolence of his heart.
 
 
     He was born on the 29th September 1797.
     He died on the 21st October 1837.
 

EPITAPH ON LORD METCALFE. (1847.)

 
     Near this stone is laid
     CHARLES, LORD METCALFE,
     A Statesman tried in many high offices,
     And difficult conjunctures,
     And found equal to all.
     The three greatest Dependencies of the British Crown
     Were successively entrusted to his care.
     In India, his fortitude, his wisdom,
     His probity, and his moderation,
     Are held in honourable remembrance
     By men of many races, languages, and religions.
     In Jamaica, still convulsed by a social revolution,
     His prudence calmed the evil passions
     Which long suffering had engendered in one class
     And long domination in another.
     In Canada, not yet recovered from the calamities of civil war,
     He reconciled contending factions to each other,
     And to the Mother Country.
     Costly monuments in Asiatic and American cities
     Attest the gratitude of the nations which he ruled.
     This tablet records the sorrow and the pride
     With which his memory is cherished by his family.