English Lands Letters and Kings 9

English Lands Letters and Kings 9

Murray, however, in the good Christian spirit which sometimes overtakes

publishers, stanched these wounds, and brought the poets to bask together

in the smiles of royalty. The first Baronetcy the Prince bestowed--after

coming to Kingship--was that which made the author of Waverley Sir Walter;

the poet had witnessed and reported the scenes at the Coronation of 1820

in London; and on the King’s gala visit to Edinboro’--when all the heights

about the gray old city boomed with welcoming cannon, and all the streets

and all the water-ways were a-flutter with tartans and noisy with

bagpipes--it was Sir Walter who virtually marshalled the hosts, and gave

chieftain-like greeting to the Prince. Scott’s management of the whole

stupendous paraphernalia--the banquets, the processions, the receptions,

the decorations (of all which the charming water-colors of Turner are in

evidence)--gave wonderful impressions of the masterful resources and

dominating tact of the man; now clinking glasses (of Glenlivet) with the

mellow King (counting sixty years in that day); now humoring into quietude

the jealousies of Highland chieftains; again threading Canongate at

nightfall and afoot--from end to end--to observe if all welcoming

bannerols and legends are in place; again welcoming to his home, in the

heat of ceremonial occupation, the white-haired and trembling poet Crabbe;

anon, stealing away to his Castle Street chamber for a new chapter in the

_Peveril of the Peak_ (then upon the anvil), and in the heat, and fury,

and absorption of the whole gala business breaking out of line with a

bowed head and aching heart, to follow his best friend, William Erskine

(Lord Kinnedder),[25] out by Queensferry to his burial.

 

It was only eight years thereafter, when this poet manager of the great

Scotch jubilee--who seemed good for the work of a score of years--sailed,

by royal permission (an act redeeming and glorifying royalty) upon a

Government ship--seeking shores and skies which would put new vigor (if it

might be) into a constitution broken by toil, and into hopes that had been

blighted by blow on blow of sorrow.

 

Never was a royal favor more worthily bespoken; never one more vainly

bestowed. ’Twas too late. No human eye--once so capable of seeing--ever

opened for a first look so wearily upon the blue of the

Mediterranean--upon the marvellous fringed shores of lower Italy--upon

Rome, Florence, and the snowy Swiss portals of the Simplon.

 

Royalty (in person of William IV., then on the throne) asked kindly after

the sick magician--who was established presently on a sick bed in London;

while the cabmen on street corners near by talked low of the “great mon”

who lay there a-dying. A little show of recovery gave power to reach

home--Abbotsford and Tweed-side--once more. There was no hope; but it took

time for the great strength in him to waste.

 

Withal there was a fine glint of royalty at the end. “Be virtuous, my

dear,” he said to Lockhart; “be a good man.” And that utterance--the

summing up of forty years of brilliant accomplishment, and of baffled

ambitions--emphasized by the trembling voice of a dying man--will dwell

longer in human memories, and more worthily, than the empty baronial pile

we call Abbotsford, past which the scurrying waters of the Tweed ripple

and murmur--as they did on the day Sir Walter was born, and on the day he

was buried at Dryburgh.

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER III.

 

 

Our last chapter was opened by a rather full sketch of Professor Wilson,

and a briefer one of Thomas Campbell--who though of higher repute as a

poet, was a far less interesting man. We then entered upon what may have

seemed a very inadequate account of the great author of Waverley--because

I presumed upon the reader’s full and ready knowledge; and because the

Minstrel’s grand stride over all the Scottish country that is worth the

seeing, and over all that domain in English Lands and Letters, which he

made his own, has been noted by scores of tourists, and by scores of

admiring commentators. You may believe me in saying--that his story was

not scrimped for lack of love; indeed, it would have been easy to riot in

talk about the lively drum-beat of his poems, or the livelier and more

engaging charms of his prose Romance--through two chapters or through ten.

But we must get on; there is a long road before us yet.

 

 

_A Start in Life._

 

It was somewhere about the year 1798, that a sharp-faced, youngish

Englishman--who had been curate of a small country parish down in

Wiltshire--drove, upon a pleasant June day, on a coach-top, into the old

city of Edinboro’. This clergyman had a young lad seated beside him, whom

he was tutoring; and this tutoring business enabled the curate to take a

respectable house in the city. And by reason of the respectable house, and

his own pleasant humor and intelligence, he came after a year or two to

know a great many of the better folk in Edinboro’, and was invited to

preach an occasional sermon at a small Episcopal chapel in his

neighborhood. But all the good people he met did not prevent his being

a-hungered after a young person whom he had left in the south of England.

So he took a vacation presently and fetched her back, a bride, to the

Scottish capital--having (as he said) thrown all his fortune in her lap.

This fortune was of maternal inheritance, and consisted of six well-worn

silver teaspoons. There was excellent society in Edinboro’ in that day,

among the ornaments of which was Henry Mackenzie,[26] a stately

gentleman--a sort of dean of the literary coteries, and the author of

books which it is well to know by name--_The Man of Feeling_ and _Julia de

Roubigné_--written with great painstaking and most exalted sentiment,

and--what we count now--much dreariness. Then there was a Rev. Archibald

Alison--he too an Episcopal clergyman, though Scotch to the backbone--and

the author of an ingenious, but not very pregnant book, still to be found

in old-fashioned libraries, labelled, _Alison on Taste_. Dugald Stewart

was then active, and did on one or two occasions bring his honored

presence to the little chapel to hear the preaching of the young English

curate I spoke of. And this young curate, poor as he is and with a young

wife, has an itch for getting into print; and does after a little time

(the actual date being 1800) publish a booklet, which you will hardly find

now, entitled _Six Sermons preached at Charlotte Chapel, Edinboro, by Rev.

Sydney Smith_.[27] But it was not so much these sermons, as his wit and

brightness and great range of information, which brought him into easy

intimacy with the most promising young men of the city. Walter Scott he

may have encountered odd whiles, though the novelist was in those days

bent on his hunt after Border Minstrelsy, and would have been shy of the

rampant liberalism ingrained with Smith.

 

But the curate did meet often, and most intimately, a certain prim,

delicate, short-statured, black-eyed, smug, ambitious, precocious young

advocate named Francis Jeffrey; and it was in a chamber of this latter--up

three pair of stairs in Buccleugh Place--that Sydney Smith, on a certain

occasion, proposed to the host and two or three other friends there

present, the establishment of a literary journal to be published

quarterly; and out of that proposition grew straightway that famous

_Edinburgh Review_ which in its covers of buff and blue has thrived for

over ninety years now--throwing its hot shot into all opposing camps of

politics or of letters. I have designated two of the arch plotters, Sydney

Smith and Jeffrey. Francis Horner[28] was another who was in at the start;

he, too, a young Scotch lawyer, who went to London on the very year of the

establishment of the journal, but writing for its early issues, well and

abundantly. Most people know him now only by the beautiful statue of him

by Chantrey, which stands in Westminster Abbey; it has a noble head, full

of intellect--full of integrity. Sydney Smith said the Ten Commandments

were writ all over his face. Yet the marble shows a tenderness of soul not

common to those who, like him, had made a profession of politics, and

entered upon a parliamentary career. But the career was short; he died in

1817--not yet forty--leaving a reputation that was spotless; had he lived,

he would have come, without a doubt, to the leadership of liberal opinion

in England. The mourning for him was something extraordinary in its reach,

and its sincerity; a remarkable man--whose politics never up-rooted his

affections, and whose study of the laws of trade did not spoil his temper,

or make him abusive. His example, and his repeated advices, in connection

with the early history of the _Review_, were always against the

personalities and ugly satire which were strong features of it in the

first years, and which had their source--very largely--in the influences

and pertinacity of another member of the _Review_ Syndicate; I mean Henry

Brougham.

 

 

_Henry Brougham._

 

This was another young lawyer--of Scottish birth, but of Cumberland stock;

ambitious like Jeffrey and equally clever, though in a different line; he

was ungainly and lank of limb; with a dogmatic and presuming manner, and a

noticeably aggressive nose which became afterward the handle (and a very

good handle it made) for those illustrative caricatures of Mr. Punch,

which lasted for a generation. Brougham[29] was always a debater from his

boy-days--and not a little of a bully and outlaw; precocious too--a

capital Latinist--writing a paper on Optics at eighteen, which found

publishment in the Philosophical Transactions; member of the Speculative

Society where Jeffrey and Mackintosh, and Alison were wont to go, and

where his disputatious spirit ran riot. He didn’t love to agree with

anybody; one of those men it would seem who hardly wished his dinner to

agree with him.

 

Yet Brougham was one of the master spirits in this new enterprise, and

became a great historic personage. His reputation was indeed rather

political and forensic, than literary, and in his writings he inclined to

scientific discussion. He had, however, a streak of purely literary

ambition, and wrote a novel at one period of his life--after he had

reached maturity--which he called a philosophic Romance.[30] Indeed this

bantling was so swaddled, in philosophic wrappings that it could have

made no noise. Very few knew of it; fewer still ever read it. He said, “It

had not enough of indecency and blasphemy in it to make it popular” (it

was written when Byron was in high repute). But the few who did read it

thought there were other reasons for its want of success.

 

He drifted quickly away from Edinboro’, though long keeping up his

connection with the _Review_; became famous as an advocate--notably in

connection with Queen Caroline’s trial; went into Parliament; was

eventually Lord High Chancellor, and won a place in the Peerage. He was

associated intimately, too, with great beneficent schemes--such as the

suppression of the slave trade, the establishment of the London

University, the founding of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful

Knowledge, and the urgence of the great Reform measures of 1832. Yet in

all these, he arrogated more than his share of the honor, wearying his

associates by incessant bickering and scolding, picking flaws in

everything not entirely his own; jealous, suspicious, conceited to the

last degree; never generous in praise of one living beside him; an

enormous worker, with sinews of iron, and on occasions (which are of

record) speaking and wrangling in the House of Commons until two of the

morning, and then going home--not to sleep--but to write a thirty-page

article for the _Edinburgh Review_. Such men make a place for themselves,

and keep it. He was an acrid debater, but a most thorough one--holding all

aspects of a case in view; never getting muddled; ready with facts; ready

with fallacies (if needed); ready for all and any interruptions; setting

them on fire by the stress of his argumentation--like carbons in an

electric circuit; ready with storms of irony and running into rough-edged

sarcasm with singular ease and sharpest appetite.

 

On a May evening of 1845 the present writer had the pleasure of watching

him for an hour or more in the House of Lords. He was lank, as I have

said; awkward, nervous, restless; twisting the great seals at his

watch-chain; intent upon everything; now and then sniffing the air, like a

terrier that has lost the scent; presenting a petition, in the course of

the session, in favor of some Newfoundland clients who were anxious for

more direct postal communication--who objected that their mails were sent

in a roundabout way _via_ Halifax. Whereupon Lord Stanley (afterward Earl

Derby), then Secretary for the Colonies, rose in explanation, “regretting

that his Lordship had not communicated with the Colonial Office, which had

considered the question raised; there was no communication by land; the