English Lands Letters and Kings 12

English Lands Letters and Kings 12

hence the little squib of verse, which will help to keep his exact title

in mind:

 

“Why is Lord Brougham like a sweeping man

That close by the pavement walks?

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

He takes up his _Broom_ and _Valks_!”

 

As for Jeffrey, he became by his resolute industry and his literary graces

and aptitudes one of the most admired and honored critics of Great

Britain.

 

 

_Gifford and His Quarterly._

 

Our start-point to-day is on the Thames--in that devouring city of London,

which very early in the century was laying its tentacles of growth on all

the greenness that lay between Blackwall and Bayswater, and which--athwart

the Thames shores--strode blightingly from Clapham to Hackney.

 

It was, I believe, in the year 1809 that Mr. John Murray, the great

publisher of London--stirred, perhaps, by some incentive talk of Walter

Scott, or of other good Tory penmen, and emulous of the success which had

attended Jeffrey’s _Review_ in the north, established a rival one--called

simply _The Quarterly_--intended to represent the Tory interests as

unflinchingly and aggressively as the _Edinburgh_ had done Whig interests.

The first editor was a William Gifford[40] (a name worth remembering among

those of British critics), who was born in Devonshire. He was the son of a

dissolute house-painter, and went to sea in his young days, but was

afterwards apprenticed to a shoemaker. Some piquant rhymes he made in

those days attracting the attention of benevolent gentlemen, he was put in

the way of schooling, and at Oxford, where he studied. It was while there

he meditated, and perhaps executed, some of those clever translations from

Persius and Juvenal, which he published somewhat later. He edited Ben

Jonson’s works in a clumsy and disputatious way, and in some of his

earlier, crude, satirical rhymes (_Baviad_) paid his respects to Madame

Thrale in this fashion:

 

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

And bring in pomp laborious nothings home.”

 

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

 

“Boswell, aping with preposterous pride,

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

His heavy head from hour to hour erects,

Affects the fool, and is what he affects.”

 

These lines afford a very good measure of his poetic grace and aptitude;

but they give only a remote idea of his wonderful capacity for abusing

people who did not think as he thought. He had a genius in this direction,

which could not have discredited an editorial room in New York--or

elsewhere. Walter Scott--a warm political friend--speaks of him as “a

little man, dumpled up together, and so ill-made as to seem almost

deformed;” and I think that kindly gentleman was disposed to attribute

much of the critic’s rancor to his invalidism; but if we measure his

printed bile in this way, there must be credited him not only his usual

rheumatic twinges, but a pretty constant dyspepsia, if not a chronic

neuralgia. Of a certainty he was a most malignant type of British party

critics; and it is curious how the savors of its first bitterness do still

linger about the pages of the _Quarterly Review_.

 

John Wilson Croker[41] will be best known to our readers as the editor of

that edition of Boswell’s “Johnson,” to which I have alluded. Within the

last ten years, however, his memoirs and correspondence, in two bulky

volumes, have excited a certain languid interest, and given entertainment

to those who are curious in respect to the political wire-pullings of the

early part of this century in London. He was an ardent co-worker with

Gifford in the early history of the _Quarterly Review_. He loved a lord

every whit as well as Gifford, and by dint of a gentlemanly manner and

gentlemanly associations was not limited to the “back-stairs way” of Mr.

Gifford in courting those in authority. His correspondence with dukes and

earls--to all of whom he is a “dear Croker”--abound; and his account of

interviews with the Prince Regent, and of dinners at the Pavilion in

Brighton, are quite Boswellian in their particularity and in their

atmosphere of worship. There is also long account in the book to which I

have called attention, of a private discourse by George IV., of which Mr.

Croker was sole auditor; and it is hard to determine whether Croker is

more elated by having the discourse to record, or Mr. Jennings by having

such a record to edit.

 

 

_A Prince Regent._

 

This royal mention brings us once more, for a little space, to our

background of kings. Of the old monarch, George III., we have had frequent

and full glimpses. We wish to know something now of that new prince (whom

we saw in our Scott chapter), but who in 1810, when his father’s faculties

failed altogether, became Regent; and we wish to learn what qualities are

in him and under what training they developed.

 

The old father had a substructure of good, hard sense that showed itself

through all his obstinacies; for instance, when Dr. Markham, who was

appointed tutor to his two oldest sons--Prince of Wales and Duke of

York--asked how he should treat them, the old king said: “Treat them? Why,

to be sure, as you would any gentleman’s sons! If they need the birch,

give them the birch, as you would have done at Westminster.” But when they

had advanced a bit, and a certain Dr. Arnold (a later tutor) undertook the

same regimen, the two princes put their forces together and gave the

doctor such a drubbing that he never tried birch again. But it was always

a very close life the princes led in their young days; the old king was

very rigorous in respect of hours and being out at night. By reason of

which George IV. looked sharply after his opportunities, when they did

come, and made up for that early cloisterhood by a large laxity of

regimen.[42] Indeed, he opened upon a very glittering career of

dissipations--the old father groaning and grumbling and squabbling against

it vainly.

 

It was somewhere about 1788 or 1789, just when the French Revolution was

beginning to throw its bloody foam over the tops of the Bastille, that

temporary insanity in the old King George III. did for a very brief space

bring the Prince into consequence as Regent. Of the happening of this, and

of the gloom in the palace, there is story in the diary of Madame

D’Arblay,[43] who was herself in attendance upon the Queen. If, indeed,

George III. had stayed mad from that date, and the Prince--then in his

fullest vigor, and a great friend of Fox and other Liberal leaders--had

come to the full and uninterrupted responsibility of the Regency, his

career might have been very different. But the old king rallied, and for

twenty years thereafter put his obstinacies and Tory caution in the way of

the Prince, who, with no political royalties to engage him, and no

important official duties (though he tried hard to secure military

command), ran riot in the old way. He lavishes money on Carlton House;

builds a palace for Mrs. Fitzherbert; coquets with Lady Jersey; affects

the fine gentleman. No man in London was prouder of his walk, his cane,

his club nonchalance, his taste in meats, his knowledge of wines, ragoûts,

indelicate songs, and arts of the toilette. Withal, he is well-made, tall,

of most graceful address, a capital story-teller, too; an indefatigable

diner-out; a very fashion-plate in dress--corsetted, puffed out in the

chest like a pouter pigeon; all the while running vigorously and

scandalously in debt, while the father is setting himself squarely

against any further parliamentary grant in his favor. There are,

however--or will be--relentings in the old King’s mind, if “Wales” will

promise to settle down in life and marry his cousin, Caroline of

Brunswick--if, indeed, he be not already married to Mrs. Fitzherbert,

which some avow and some deny. It does not appear that the Prince is very

positive in his declarations on this point--yes or no. So he filially

yields and accedes to a marriage, which by the conditions of the bargain

is to bring him £70,000 to pay his debts withal. She is twenty-seven--a

good-looking, spirited Brunswicker woman, who sets herself to speaking

English--nips in the bud some love-passages she has at home, and comes

over to conquer the Prince’s affections--which she finds it a very hard

thing to do. He is polite, however; is agreeably disposed to the marriage

scheme, which finds exploitation with a great flourish of trumpets in the

Chapel Royal of St. James. The old King is delighted with his niece; the

old Queen is a little cool, knowing that the Prince does not care a penny

for the bride, and believing that she ought to have found that out.

 

She does find it out, however, in good time; and finds out about Mrs.

Fitzherbert and her fine house; and does give her Prince some very severe

curtain lectures--beginning early in that branch of wifely duty. The

Prince takes it in dudgeon; and the dudgeon grows bigger and bigger on

both sides (as such things will); finally, a year or more later--after the

birth of her daughter, the Princess Charlotte--proposals for separation

are passed between them (with a great flourish of diplomacy and golden

sticks), and accepted with exceeding cordiality on both sides.

 

Thereafter, the Prince becomes again a man about town--very much about

town indeed. Everybody in London knows his great bulk, his fine

waistcoats, his horses, his hats and his wonderful bows, which are made

with a grace that seems in itself to confer knighthood. For very many

years his domestic life,--what little there was of it,--passed without

weighty distractions. His Regency when established (1811) was held through

a very important period of British history; those great waves of

Continental war which ended in Waterloo belonged to it; so did the

American war of 1812; so did grave disaffection and discontent at home. He

did not quarrel with his cabinets, or impede their action; he learned how

to yield, and how to conciliate. Were it only for this, ’tis hardly fair

to count him a mere posture-master and a dandy.

 

He loved, too, and always respected his old mother, the Queen of George

III.;[44] loved too,--in a way--and more than any other creature in the

world except himself, that darling daughter of his, the Princess

Charlotte, who at seventeen became the bride of Leopold, afterward King of

Belgium,--she surviving the marriage only a year. Her memory is kept alive

by the gorgeous marble cenotaph you will see in St. George’s Chapel,

Windsor.

 

It was only when George IV. actually ascended the throne in 1820 that his

separated wife put in a disturbing appearance again; she had been living

very independently for some years on the Continent; and it occurred to

her--now that George was actually King--that it would be a good thing, and

not impinge on the old domestic frigidities, to share in some of the

drawing-room splendors and royalties of the British capital. To George IV.

it seemed very awkward; so it did to his cabinet. Hence came about those

measures for a divorce, and the famous trial of Queen Caroline, in which

Brougham won oratorical fame by his brilliant plea for the Queen. This was

so far successful as to make the ministerial divorce scheme a failure; but

the poor Queen came out of the trial very much bedraggled; whether her

Continental life had indeed its criminalities or not, we shall never

positively know. Surely no poor creature was ever more sinned against than

she, in being wheedled into a match with such an unregenerate partaker in

all deviltries as George IV. But she was not of the order of women out of

which are made martyrs for conscience’s sake. It was in the year 1821 that

death came to her relief, and her shroud at last whitened a memory that

had stains.

 

 

_A Scholar and Poet._

 

We freshen the air now with quite another presence. Yet I am to speak of a

man whose life was full of tumult, and whose work was full of learning and

power--sometimes touched with infinite delicacy.

 

He was born four years after Sydney Smith and Walter Scott--both of whom

he survived many years; indeed he lacked only eleven years of completing a

century when he died in Florence, where most of his active--or rather

inactive--life was passed. I allude to the poet and essayist, Walter

Savage Landor.[45] He is not what is called a favorite author; he never

was; he never will be. In fact, he had such scorn of popular applause,

that if it had ever happened to him in moments of dalliance with the

Muses, and of frolic with rhythmic language, to set such music afloat as

the world would have repeated and loved to repeat, I think he would have

torn the music out in disdain for the approval of a multitude. Hear what

he says, in one of his later poetic utterances: