English Lands Letters and Kings Part 12

One of the sisters wrote home that {174} she thought--"perhaps--the big Doctor might marry Hannah; for 'twas nothing but--'My love,' and 'My little Kitten,' between them all the evening."

Shortly thereafter Mistress More wrote her tragedy of _Percy_; n.o.body, I think, reads it now; but Garrick became sponsor for it--writing both prologue and epilogue; and by reason perhaps of his sponsors.h.i.+p it ran some twenty nights successively; the tale of her stage profits running up to 600, which would pay for a good many trips from London to Bristol. When she came to treat for the publication of a poem which she wrote at that period--she being ignorant of rates,--it was arranged with her publisher that she should receive the sum, whatever it might have been, which was paid Goldsmith for _The Deserted Village_!

In those early years she was the lively one, and the gay one, and the worldly one of the family; but with the death of Garrick, which came upon her like a blow, life and all its colors seemed to change. She haunted London and the theatres no more; she went up to weep indeed at her home {175} on the Adelphi Terrace[10] with the disconsolate Mrs.

Garrick; but all phases of life have now, for Miss More, taken on a soberer hue; she teaches; she founds schools for the poor; she founds chapels; she writes tracts; her forward and st.u.r.dy evangelical proclivities involve her indeed in difficulties with the local church authorities; for her charities go vaulting over their canons; whereupon she relents and abases herself--and then sins in the same holy and beneficent ways of charity again--canons or no canons.

As a worker she is indefatigable; she drives, rides, and walks over her missionary ground near to Bristol, with the zeal of a gold-hunter.

There were those who questioned her wisdom and who questioned the quality of her wit, but never one, I think, anywhere, who questioned her goodness. She wrote a novel called _Coelebs in Search of a Wife_.

Do you happen to have read it? I hardly know whether to advise it, or not; there is so much to read! But if you do, you will find most excellent English in it, and a great deal of {176} very good preaching; and many hints about the social habits of that time--trustworthy even to the dinner hour and the lunch hour; and maxims good enough for a copy book, or a calendar; and you will find--what you will not find in all stories nowadays--a definite beginning and a definite end. I know what you may say, if you do read it. You would say that the sermons are too long, and that the hero is a prig; and that you would never marry him if he were worth twice his fortune, and were to offer himself ten times over. Well--perhaps not; but he had a deal of money. And that book of _Coelebs_--whatever you may choose to say of it, had a tremendous success; it ran over Europe like wildfire; was translated into French, into German, into Dutch, into Polish, and I know not what language besides; and across the Atlantic--in those colonial days, when book-shops were not, as now, at every corner--over thirty thousand copies were sold. Those of us who can remember forty and fifty years back, and who knew anything of the inner side of an old-fas.h.i.+oned New England homestead, must recall the saints.h.i.+p that invested good Mistress Hannah More! What unfailing {177} Sunday books her books did make! and with what child-like awe we looked upon her good, kind, old, peaked face as it looked out from the frontispiece--with soberly frilled hair all about the forehead, and over this a muslin cap with huge ruffles hemming in the face, and above this circ.u.mambient ruffle and in the lee of the great puff of muslin--which gave place, I suppose, to the old lady's comb--a portentous bow, constructed of an awful quant.i.ty of ribbon and crowning that saintly, kindly, homely face of Hannah More.

Do you remember--I wonder--that in the early pages of "The Newcomes"--the Colonel tells Olive Newcome, how he used in his boy days to steal the reading of some of Fielding's famous novels; and how _Joseph Andrews_, in that forbidden series, had a very sober binding; so that his mamma, Mrs. Newcome, when she observed the boy reading it, thought--deceived by that grave binding--that the boy might be regaling himself with some work of Mistress Hannah More's; and how, under this belief, she took up the book when he had laid it by; and read and read, and flung it down all on a sudden with such a killing, scornful {178} look at the young Colonel, as he never, never forgot in all his life.

It was unfair of Thackeray to poke fun in this way at good Mistress Hannah More! We may smile at her quaintness--her primness--her starch; but there is that in her industry, her courage, her mental range, her wide Christian beneficence which we must always venerate.

We have run on so far, that we have no words to-day for the st.u.r.dy old King George. We turn him over to another chapter, when we will speak too of Sterne--whom we had almost forgotten--and of Chatterton and of some writing men who sometimes lifted up their voices in the British Parliament.

[1] David Hume, b. 1711; d. 1776. Best edition of his works edited by Green and Grose, 4 vols., 1874. For life, see Burton and Huxley.

[2] Adam Smith, b. 1723; d. 1790. A Fifes.h.i.+re man, and author of that famous book--_The Wealth of Nations_; a good book to read in these times, or in any times. He may indeed say rash things about "that crafty animal called a Politician," and the mean rapacity of capitalists; but he is full of sympathy for the poor, and for those who labor; and is everywhere large in his thought and healthy and generous.

I am glad to pay this tribute, though only in a note.

[3] George Tobias Smollett, b. 1721; d. 1771. A Scottish physician, author of various popular novels, of which _The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker_ is, by many, counted the best.

[4] William Shenstone, b. 1714; d. 1763. His works (verse and prose) were published in 1764-69.

[5] William Collins, b. 1731; d. 1759. Interesting memoir by Moy Thomas, published in 1858.

[6] Swinburne says, with something more than his usual exaggeration--"the only man of his time who had in him a note of pure lyric song";--excluding Gray, and both the Wesleys!

[7] Frances Burney, b. 1752; d. 1840. She is perhaps better known as Mme. D'Arblay; though she married somewhat late in life, and after her reputation had been won.

[8] The newest and most faithful copy of her _Diary and Letters_ has been published by George Bell & Sons, London, 1889, 2 vols., 8vo.

[9] Hannah More, b. 1745; d. 1833.

[10] Near present London "Embankment"; John Adams was in that day stopping at a tavern near by.

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CHAPTER V.

I have spoken within the last few pages of David Hume--philosopher and historian; he was kindly natured, witty, serene, with a capacity for large and enduring friends.h.i.+ps; yet with not much beguiling warmth in him; leaving a much accredited history, and philosophical writings eminent for their ingenuity, acuteness, and subtlety. Under our larger and freer range of thinking to-day, it is hard to understand how he became such a bugbear to so many, and was so unwisely set upon with personal scourgings; even if a man's religious conclusions be all awry, we shall make them no better, nor undo them, by tying a noisy kettle of maledictions at his heels, and goading him into a yelping and maddened gallop all down the high ways. He died unmarried in 1776; his elder brother John, for some reasons of {180} property--which he counted larger than the historian's large repute--changed his name to Home; so that there is not now in Scotland any representative of the immediate family of this Scotch metaphysician, who bears his name. I spoke of Shenstone and gave some specimens of his rhythmic and tender graces; but he never struck deeply into the poetic mine, whether of pa.s.sion or of mystery. William Collins, however, did; he was not among the very foremost poets certainly, but he gave to us tingling and sonorous echoes of the great utterances of olden times, and piquant foretaste of n.o.bler utterances that were to come. We had our little social brush with the lively and chatty "Evelina" Burney; we paid our wors.h.i.+p at the shrine of Mistress Hannah More--and I tried hard to fix her quaint, homely, kindly figure in your gallery of literary portraits.

She lived, like Mme. d'Arblay, to a very great age--eighty-eight, I think, and was (with the exception of the last-named lady) the latest survivor of all those whose lives and works we have thus far made subject of comment in the present volume. And the life and works of these people {181} about whom we have latterly spoken, have had steady parallelism--longer or shorter--with the life and reign of George III.

_King George III._

[Sidenote: George III.]

We ought to know something of the personality of this king who came to the head of the British household while all these keen brains were astir in it, and within the limits of whose rule the American Revolution began, and ended in the establishment of a new nationality; while the French Revolution too gathered its seething forces, and shot up its lurid flame and fell away into the fiery masters.h.i.+p of Napoleon.

You will remember that George II. was son of George I., who inherited through his mother, Sophia (of Brunswick), who was granddaughter of old King James I. of Scotland and England. George III. was not the son--but a grandson--of George II. His father, Prince Frederic, who lived to mature years, who wrote some poor poetry--who was generous, wayward, incompetent, always at issue with father and mother {182} both--was a man n.o.body much respected and n.o.body greatly mourned for.

It was of him that a squib-like epitaph was written, which I suppose expressed pretty justly popular indifference respecting him and others of his family:--

Here lies Fred, Who was alive and is dead.

Had it been his father I had much rather; Had it been his sister, No one would have missed her.

But since 'tis only Fred Who was alive and is dead, There's no more to be said.

George III. was severely brought up by his mother and by old Lord Bute; taught to be every inch a king; and he was royally stiff and obstinate to the last. Two romantic episodes attaching to his young days belong to the royal traditions--in which a pretty Quakeress, and that beautiful Sarah Lennox--whose portrait by Reynolds now hangs in Holland House--both figure; but these episodes are of vague and shadowy outline, almost mythical, with issues only of the Maud Muller sort--they sighing "it might have been," and he--not {183} sighing at all. It is certain that he accepted complacently and contentedly the bride Charlotte, who came over to him from Germany; and alone of all the quartette of Georges, made a devoted and constant husband as long as he reigned. But if he did not give his queen heart-aches in the usual Georgian fas.h.i.+on, I have no doubt that he gave her many a heart-ache of other sorts; for he was bigoted, unyielding, austere, and, like most men, selfish. He had his notions about meal-times and prayer-time, and getting-up time, and about what meals should be eaten and what not eaten; under this discipline wife and children grew up--until the boys made their escape, which they did actively. Yet this old gentleman of the crown is considerate too--more perhaps outside his palace than within: he purposes no unkindness; he indulges in pleasant chit-chat with his humble neighbors at Windsor; has sometimes half-crowns by him for poor favorites; cherishes homely tastes; knows a good pig when he sees it, and can test the fat upon a bullock with a punch of his staff. He professed a certain art knowledge, too--but always loved the spectacular, melodramatic works of our {184} Benjamin West (in which, art-heresy of the time he had excellent company), better than the rare sweet faces of Reynolds, or the picturesqueness of Gainsborough.

He was English in his speech (though familiar with French and German); English, too, in his contempt for the mere graces of oratory; loving better point-blank talk, fired with interrogation points and interjections. Mme. d'Arblay, whose acquaintance we made, makes us a party to some of this talk:--"And so you wrote 'Evelina,' eh? and they didn't know; what--what? You didn't tell? eh? And you mean to write another--eh--what?"

Yet withal, Dr. Franklin--whose name is entered in the London Directory of 1770, as "Agent for Pennsylvania," Craven Street, Strand--says of the king: "I can scarcely conceive a man of better disposition, of more exemplary virtues, or more truly desirous of promoting the welfare of his subjects." Ten years later, I think Dr. Franklin would have qualified the speech.

But he never could have gainsaid the exemplary virtues of that quiet household--where king and {185} queen lived like Darby and Joan--going before light through the chilly corridors to morning prayers; with early dinners, no suppers, no gambling, no painted women coming between them. Yet the king, as he grew old, loved plays and farces, and used to laugh obstreperously at them, till Charlotte would tap him with her fan and pray his majesty to be "less noisy."

He knew genealogies and geography; he could talk with courtiers about their aunts and cousins, and stepfathers and mothers-in-law--which is a great lift to conversation for some minds. He knew all parts of his establishment--who cleaned the silver and the bra.s.s; and what both cost. Like all such meddling, fussy masters of households, he believed himself always right; prayed himself into accessions of that belief: and on that belief went on pounding and pumelling the American branch of his family into a state that proved explosive. In short he was one of those methodic, obstinate, sober, stiffly religious, conventional, straight backed, economic, terrific, excellent men whom we all like to look at, and read about, rather than to live with.

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As a school-master he would have set the old lessons in c.o.c.ker (if it were c.o.c.ker) and recognized nothing better; and if the sums were not done, you would hear of it. "What, what? not done? sums not done!" and then the old red ruler, and the hand put out, and a spat, and another spat. This was George III. "Those colonists not going to pay taxes, eh? and throwing tea into Boston harbor? What--what? Zounds--punish the rebels. Punish 'em well! I'll teach 'em. Flinging tea overboard--what--eh?"

And so the war crept on; and all through it the great old stiff school-master brandis.h.i.+ng his red ruler and making cuts with it over seas. But the time came when he couldn't reach his rebels; and then the long ruler, which was the national power, got broken in half, and it has stayed broken in half ever since.

There is interesting record of the first approaches of that insanity which ultimately beset the king, in Mme. d'Arblay's Diary, which we have already mentioned; but he made what seemed an entire recovery from the early stroke of 1788; and was king, in all his headstrong and kingly ways, once {187} more. It was in 1785 when John Adams was presented to him as Envoy of the United States of America--not a presentation, it would seem, that would have any soothing aspect.

Yet the old king received Mr. Adams courteously; and under the pretty fustian of conventional speech the one covered his regrets and the other covered his exultation. But it was not many years before the distraught brain--after renewed threats--waylaid the monarch again--this time with a surer grip; his speech, his sight, his hearing, all lost their fineness of quality and went down in the general wreck; in 1810, that mad-cap, that posture-master, that over-fine gentleman--so far as dress and carriage and polite accomplishment could make George IV. a gentleman--took rule; but for years thereafter, his lunatic father, in white hair and long white beard, might be seen stalking along the terrace at Windsor, babbling weak drivel, and humming broken tunes, leading no whither.

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_Two Orators._

[Sidenote: Charles James Fox.]

Among the younger members of the famous Literary Club, some ten years after its foundation, was a muscular, swarthy young fellow[1]--full of wit and humor, a great friend of Burke's until the bitterness of politics parted them; shy of approaches to Dr. Johnson, with whom he differed on almost all points; a man known now in literary ways only by the fragment of British History which he wrote, but known in his own times as the most brilliant of debaters, most liberal in his politics, and always an ardent friend of America. This was Charles James Fox, who could trace back his descent--if he had chosen--through a d.u.c.h.ess of Gordon, to Charles II., and who was a younger son of a very rich Lord Holland, owner and {189} occupant of that famous Holland House, which with its remnant of evergreen garden (in whose alleys we found Addison walking) still makes a venerable breakwater against the waves of brick and mortar which are piling around it.

Lord Holland was over-indulgent to this son of his, allowing him, when a boy on his first visit to Bath, five guineas a night to "risk" at cards; and the boy took with great kindness to that order of training, sending home to his father, when he came to travel (after a brief career at Oxford) vouchers, and honest vouchers too, for gaming debts of one hundred thousand dollars from the city of Naples alone. And he matched these losses, and larger ones, at Brooks's in London. Old stagers said that he was so sagacious and brilliant at whist, that he could easily have won his five thousand a year; but he took to hazards at dice that brought him losses--on one occasion at least--of four times as much in a night. It is a wonder he ever became the man in Parliament that he was, after such dandling as befell him in the lap of luxury. Yet he was an accomplished Greek scholar; loving the finesse of the language, and loving more {190} the exquisite tenderness of such lamentations as that of Alcestis; his sympathies all alive indeed, in youth and manhood, to humane instincts--the pains and pleasures of the race touching his heart-strings, as winds touch an Eolian harp. Study of exact sciences put him to sleep; he loved the game of Probabilities better than the certainties of mathematics--gambling away great estates, and put to keenest endeavor by the tears of a woman; speaking with his heart on his tongue--too much there indeed--carrying the comradery of the clubs into public life; sharp as a knife to those who had done him, or his, injury; but unbosoming himself with reckless freedom to those who had befriended him; never un-ready in debate; warming easily into an eloquence that charmed men. But there must have been much in the voice and eye to explain the force of speeches which now seem almost dull;[2] the best elocutionist cannot read the magnetism into them which electrified the Commons, and which made {191} Burke declare him the "most brilliant debater the world ever saw."

Indeed we can only account for his great successes as an orator, his amazing repute, and his exceptional popularity, when we sum up a half score of contributory causes, which lie outside of the cold print of the Parliamentary record; among these, we count--his Holland wealth and training, his environments of rank and luxury, his picturesque bearing, his _bonhomie_, his scorn of the rank he held, his accessibility to all, his outspoken, democratic sympathies, that warmed him into outbursts of generous pa.s.sion, his fearlessness, his bearding of the king, his earnestness whenever afoot, his very shortcomings too, and the crowding disabilities that grew out of his trust--his simplicities--his lack of forethought, his want of moneyed prudence, his free-handedness, his little, unfailing, every-day kindnesses--these all backed his speeches and put a tender under-tone, and a glow, and a drawing power in them, which we look for vainly in the rhetoric or the argumentation. He was often in Parliament--sometimes in the Ministry; but his disorderly and reckless life (gaming was not his {192} worst vice) made his fellow-politicians wary, and put a bar to any easy confidences between himself and the old-fas.h.i.+oned, sober-sided, orderly George III. We must think of him as an accomplished, generous-hearted, impulsive, dissolute wreck of a man.

[Sidenote: William Pitt.]