English Lands Letters and Kings 11

English Lands Letters and Kings 11

“Light, dust, contradiction--the sight of a dissenter--anything sets

me sneezing; and if I begin sneezing at twelve, I don’t leave off

till two, and am heard distinctly in Taunton (when the wind sets

that way), a distance of six miles.”

 

This does not show quite so large a reserve and continence of speech as we

naturally look for in the clerical profession; but this, and other such

do, I think, set the Rev. Sydney Smith before us, with his witty

proclivities, and his unreserve, and his spirit of frolic, as no citations

from his moral and intellectual philosophy could ever do. And I easily

figure to myself this portly, well-preserved gentleman of St. Paul’s,

fighting the weaknesses of the gout with a gold-headed cane, and picking

his way of an afternoon along the pavements of Piccadilly, with eye as

bright as a bird’s, and beak as sharp as a bird’s--regaling himself with

the thought of the dinner for which he is booked, and of the brilliant

talkers he is to encounter, with the old parry and thrust, at Rogers’s

rooms, or under the noble ceiling of Holland House.

 

 

_A Highlander._

 

Another writer--whose sympathies from the beginning were with the

Liberalism of the _Edinburgh Review_ (though not a contributor till some

years after its establishment) was Sir James Mackintosh.[36] A Highlander

by birth--he was at Aberdeen University--afterwards in Edinboro’, where he

studied medicine, and getting his Doctorate, set up in London--eking out a

support, which his medical practice did not bring, by writing for the

papers.

 

This was at the date when the recent French Revolution and its issues were

at the top of all men’s thoughts; and when Burke had just set up his

glittering bulwark of eloquence and of sentiment in his famous

“Reflections”; and our young Doctor (Mackintosh)--full of a bumptious

Whiggism, undertook a reply to the great statesman--a reply so shrewd, so

well-seasoned, so sound--that it brought to the young Scotchman (scarce

twenty-five in those days) a fame he never outlived. It secured him the

acquaintance of Fox and Sheridan, and the friendship of Burke, who in his

latter days invited the young pamphleteer, who had so strongly, yet

respectfully, antagonized his views, to pass a Christmas with him at his

home of Beaconsfield. Of course, such a success broke up the doctoring

business, and launched Mackintosh upon a new career. He devoted himself to

politics; was some time an accredited lecturer upon the law of nations;

was knighted presently and sent to Bombay on civil service. His friends

hoped he might find financial equipment there, but this hope was vain;

red-tape was an abomination to him always; cash-book and ledger

represented unknown quantities; he knew no difference between a shilling

and a pound, till he came to spend them. He was in straits all his life.

 

His friendship for Jeffrey, Sydney Smith, and Brougham was maintained by

correspondence, and on his return from India he became an occasional

contributor to the great Scotch _Review_ on various subjects.

 

His range of acquirements was most wide--too wide and too unceasing for

the persistency which goes with great single achievements. His histories

are fragments. His speeches are misplaced treatises; his treatises are

epitomes of didactic systems. When we weigh his known worth, his keenness

of intellect, his sound judgment, his wealth of language, his love for

thoroughness--which led him to remotest sources of information--his

amazing power in colloquial discourse, we are astonished at the little

store of good things he has left. There was a lack in him, indeed, of the

salient and electrical wit of Sydney Smith; a lack of the easy and

graceful volubility of Jeffrey; lack of the abounding and illuminating

rhetoric of Macaulay; but a greater lack was of that dogged, persistent

working habit which gave to Brougham his triumphs.

 

Yet Mackintosh was always plotting great literary designs; but his

fastidious taste, and his critical hunger for all certainties, kept him

forever in the search of new material and appliances. He was dilatory to

the last degree; his caution always multiplied delays; no general was ever

so watchful of his commissariat--none ever so unready for a “Forward,

march!” Among his forecasts was that of a great history of England. Madame

de Staël urged her friend to take possession of her villa on Lake Geneva

and, like Gibbon, write his way there to a great fame. He did for awhile

set himself resolutely to a beginning at the country home of Weedon Lodge

in Buckinghamshire--accumulated piles of fortifying MSS. and private

records; but for outcome we have only that clumsy torso which outlines the

Revolution of 1688.[37]

 

His plans wanted a hundred working years, instead of the thirty which are

only allotted to men. What Jeffrey left behind him marks, I think, the

full limit of his powers; the same is true of Brougham, and true probably

of Macaulay; and I think no tension and no incentive would have wrought

upon Sydney Smith to work greater and brighter things than he did

accomplish. A bishopric would only have set his gibes into coruscation at

greater tables, and perhaps given larger system to his charities. But

Mackintosh never worked up to the full level of his best power and large

learning, except in moments of conversational exaltation.

 

 

_Rest at Cannes._

 

Before closing our chapter we take one more swift glimpse at that

arch-plotter for Whiggism--in the early days of the _Edinburgh

Review_--whom we left fidgetting in the House of Lords, on a May evening

of 1845. He had a longer life by far than most of those who conspired for

the maintenance of the great blue and buff forerunner of British critical

journals. He was only twenty-three when he put his shoulder to the

quarterly revolutions of the _Edinburgh_--youngest of all the immediate

founders;[38] and he outlived them all and outvoiced them all in the

hurly-burly of the world.

 

He survived Macaulay too--an early contributor of whom we shall have more

to say--and though he was past eighty at the death of the historian, he

was alert still, and his brain vagrantly active; but the days of his early

glory and fame--when the young blusterer bolstered up Reform, and slew the

giants of musty privilege and sent “the schoolmaster abroad,” and

antagonized slavery, were gone;[39] so, too, were those palmy times when

he made the courts at Westminster ring with his championship of that poor

Queen (who, whatever her demerits--and they were many--was certainly

abominably maltreated by a husband far worse than she); times when the

populace who espoused her cause shouted bravos to Harry Brougham--times

when he was the best known and most admired man in England; all these, and

his chancellorship, and his wordy triumphs in the House of Lords, were far

behind him, and the inevitable loss of place and power fretted him

grievously. He quarrelled with old coadjutors; in Parliament he shifted

from bench to bench; in the weakness of age, he truckled to power; he

exasperated his friends, and for years together--his scoldings, his

tergiversations, and his plaid trousers made a mine of mockery for Mr.

Punch. As early as 1835-40, Lord Brougham had purchased an estate in the

south of France, in a beautiful nook of that mountain shore which sweeps

eastward from the neighborhood of Marseilles--along the Mediterranean,

and which so many travellers now know by the delights of the Cornice Road

and Monaco, and Mentone, and San Remo. The little fishing village where

years ago Lord Brougham set up his Villa of Louise Eléonore (after a

darling and lost child) is now a suburb of the fashionable resort of

Cannes. At his home there, amongst the olives, the oleanders and the

orange-trees, the disappointed and petulant ex-chancellor passed most of

the later years of his life.

 

Friends dropping in upon him--much doubting of their reception--found him

as the humors changed, peevish with strong regrets and recriminations, or

placid under the weight of his years, and perhaps narcotized by the

marvellous beauty of the scenes around him.

 

He was over ninety at his death in 1868. To the very last, a man not to be

reckoned on: some days as calm as the sea that rippled under his window;

other days full of his old unrest and petulancies. There are such men in

all times and in all societies--sagacious, fussy, vain, indefatigable,

immensely serviceable, cantankerous; we _can’t_ get on without them; we

are for ever wishing that we could.

 

* * * * *

 

In our next chapter we shall come upon a critic, who was a famous

editor--adroit, strong, waspish, bookish, and ignoble. We shall encounter

a king, too--of whom we have thus far only had glimpses--who was

jolly--excellently limbed and conditioned physically--a man “of an

infinite jest,” too, and yet as arrant a dastard--by all old-fashioned

moral measures of character--as Falstaff himself. Again we shall follow

traces of a great poet--but never a favorite one--who has left markings of

his career, strong and deep; a man who had a Greek’s delight in things of

beauty, and a Greek’s subtlety of touch; but one can fancy a faun’s ears

showing their tips upon his massive head, and (without fancy) grow

conscious of a heathenism clouding his great culture. Other two poets of

lighter mould we shall meet;--more gracious, lighter pinioned--prettily

flitting--iridescent--grace and sparkle in their utterances, but leaving

no strong markings “upon the sands of time.”

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER IV.

 

 

We have wandered much in our two last chapters beyond what may be reckoned

strictly English lands, into that pleasant region lying between the Tweed

and the Firth of Forth; and it was north of the heights of Lammermuir and

of the Pentland Hills, and in that delightful old city which is dominated

by the lesser heights of the Salisbury crags, the Castle Rock, and Calton

Hill, that we found the builders of that great _Review_, which in its

livery of buff and blue still carries its original name. I traced the

several careers of Sydney Smith, Lord Brougham, and Judge Jeffrey; the

first of these, from a humble village curacy, coming to be one of the most

respected literary men of England, and an important official of St. Paul’s

Cathedral; if his wit had been less lively he might have risen to a

bishopric. Brougham was, first, essayist, then advocate, then

Parliamentary orator, then Reformer, then Lord High Chancellor--purging

the courts of much legal trumpery--always a scold and quarreller, and

gaining in the first year of William IV. his barony of Brougham and Vaux: