English Lands Letters and Kings Part 1

English Lands Letters and Kings.

by Donald G. Mitch.e.l.l.

_LETTER OF DEDICATION_

[To Mrs. Grover Cleveland.]

MY DEAR MADAM:

_Many bookmakers of that early Georgian period covered by this little volume eagerly sought to dignify their opening pages with the name and t.i.tles of some high-placed patron or patroness. It is not, my dear Madam, to revive this practice that I have asked permission to inscribe this little book to so worthy an occupant of the Presidential Mansion; but, rather, I have had in mind the courteous reception which--while yet an inmate of a college on the beautiful banks of Cayuga Lake--you once gave to some portions of the literary talk embodied in these pages; and remembering, furthermore, the unswerving dignity, and the unabating womanly gentleness by which you have conquered and adorned the trying conditions of a high career, I have wished to add my applause (as I do now and here) for the grace and kindliness which have enn.o.bled your life, and made us all proud of such an example of American womanhood._

_Very respectfully yours,_ Don^d. G. Mitch.e.l.l.

_Edgewood, June,_ 1895.

CHAPTER I.

We open in this book upon times--belonging to the earlier quarter of the eighteenth century--when, upon the Continent of Europe, Peter the Great was stamping out sites for cities in the bogs by the Finland gulf--when that mad-cap Swedish King Charles XII. was cutting his b.l.o.o.d.y swathe through Poland--when Louis XIV., tired at last of wars, and more tired of Marlborough, was nearing the end of his magnificent career, and when King Mammon was making ready his huge bloat of the Mississippi Bubble for France and of the South Sea Company for England.

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Queen Anne, that great lady of the abounding ringlets--so kindly and so weak--was now free from the clutch of Sara of "Blenheim"; and veering sometimes, under Harleyan influences, toward her half-brother the "Pretender;" and other times under persuasion of such as Somers, favoring her cousins of Hanover.

The visitor to London in those times could have taken the "Silent way"

along the river--a shilling for two oarsmen and sixpence for a "scull"--from the Bridge to Limehouse; or he might encounter, along the Strand, sooty chimney sweepers and noisy venders of eggs and b.u.t.ter, with high-piled baskets upon their heads. Sir Roger de Coverley coming to town--if we may believe Addison--cannot sleep the first week by reason of the street cries; while Will Honeycomb, on the other hand, likens these cries to songs of nightingales: always and everywhere this difference of ear, between those who love the country and those who love the towns!

There were lumbering hackney cabs in London streets to be hired at ten shillings a day (of twelve hours) for those who preferred this to the "Silent {3} way"; and there were grand coaches for those who could pay for such display; evidences of wealth were growing year by year. The Venetian Republic, now in its last days of power, made a brave if false show upon London streets in those times. Luttrel[1] says, under date of May, 1707:--

"Yesterday the V^n amba.s.sadors made their public entry thro' the city to Somerset House in great state and splendor; their coach of state embroidered with gold, and the richest that ever was seen in England: They had two with 8 horses, and eight with 6 horses, trimmed very fine with ribbons; 48 footmen in blue velvet covered with gold lace; 24 gentlemen and pages on horseback with feathers in their hats, etc."

Dr. Swift, four years after, writes to Stella--"The Venetian coach is the most monstrous, huge, fine, rich, gilt thing I ever saw."

_An Irish Bishop._

It could not have been more than two or three years after this sight of the Venetian Coach that Dean Swift introduced to his friend Miss {4} Vanhomrigh (Vanessa) a young protege of his, whom he had known at Dublin, and who had made a great reputation there among thinkers, by an ingenious _Theory of Vision_, and by his eloquent advocacy of an Idealism, which he believed would cut away all standing ground for the materialism that threatened Christian Faith.

[Sidenote: Bishop Berkeley.]

This protege was George Berkeley[2]--afterward Dean and Bishop--a most engaging and winning person then and always. Addison befriended this young philosopher, who wrote half a dozen papers for Steele's _Guardian_, with much of Steele's grace in them, and more than Steele's Christian earnestness. He went over to the Continent in the wake of a British Amba.s.sador--was four or five years there, variously employed, equipping himself in worldly knowledge, and came back to warn[3]

Englishmen against that extravagance and {5} greed for money, which had made possible the South-Sea disaster. New Yorkers might read the warning with profit now. For himself, he comes presently to the Deanship of Derry, and to a considerable legacy from that Miss Vanhomrigh--the acquaintance of an hour--so impressed had she been by Berkeley's promise of good. Nor was the promise ever belied.

With an altruism unusual then, and unusual now, he braved the loss of his Deanship, and current friendships in England, and set his heart, his energies, and his fortune upon a scheme for building up the English colonies in America in ways of Christian living, and of learning. Long before, the devout George Herbert had said that Religion was "ready to pa.s.s to the American Strand;" and now Berkeley, fresh from the sight of dearth and decay in Europe, was earnest in the belief that Christian civilization was to win its greatest coming conquests "over seas." His enthusiasms had, for once, carried him into verse, of which a prophetic refrain has tingled in many an American ear:--

Westward the course of Empire takes its way!

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The nidus of the good Dean's hopes and schemes lay in a great college which was to be built up in the Summer Islands (Bermuda) where the air "is perpetually fanned and kept cool by sea-breezes." But his stepping-stone on the way thither was Rhode Island; and for the harbor of Newport he sailed, with a few friends, and a newly married wife in the year 1728, after long and weary waiting for a grant, which at last is made good on parchment, but never made good in money.

[Sidenote: Berkeley at Newport.]

Yet he has faith; and for nearly three years lingers there at his farm of Whitehall (the old house still standing), within sound of the surf that breaks upon the ribbed and glistening sands of Newport beaches.

The winter is not so mild as in England, but he "has seen colder ones in Italy." Possibly it may be well to set up the college in Newport rather than the Summer Islands--when the grant comes: but the grant does _not_ come. He makes friends of the farmers about him--of the Quakers, the Methodists; sometimes he preaches at Trinity Church (still there), and his sermons are unctuous with the broadest and most liberal Churchism: "Sad," he says in one, "that {7} Religion, which requires us to love, should become the cause of our hating one another." He corresponds with Samuel Johnson, of Stratford, Ct.;[4] also, possibly, with Mr. Jonathan Edwards, not as yet driven away into the wilds of Western Ma.s.sachusetts, by theologic contumacies, from his pleasant Northampton home. In the hearing of the pleasant lapse of the waters upon the beaches--while he waits--the Dean sets himself to that pleasant, curious writing of _The Minute Philosopher_ in which he adroitly parries thrusts with the whole tribe of Free Thinkers, and sublimates anew his old and cherished theory--that the spiritual apprehension of material things is the only condition (or cause) of their being.

Children are born to him--and death winnows his small flock--while he waits. John Smibert, who was fellow-voyager with him, painted that little family of the Dean, and the picture is now in possession of Yale College. At last, in despair of receiving the royal grant, he goes back with his {8} family to England (1731). Many of his books,[5] and eventually his Whitehall farm, were bestowed upon Yale; and in that lively inst.i.tution year after year, there be earnest students who contend still for Berkeley scholarships and Berkeley prizes; while the name of the good Dean is still further kept in American remembrance, by that n.o.ble site of a Great Pacific University, which on the Californian sh.o.r.es, looks through a Golden Gate to a pathway still bearing "Westward."

We may well believe that the Dean was disheartened by the breaking down--through no fault of his own--of the great scheme and hope of his life. But he found friendly hands and hearts upon his return to England. Through the influences of Queen Caroline (consort of George II.) he was given the bishopric of Cloyne--seated among the heathery hills which lie northward of the harbor of Queenstown. All the poor people of that region loved him: and who did not?

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He was never so profound a thinker, as he was ingenious, subtle, and acute. Though his philosophies all were over-topped by his sweet humanities,[6] yet American students may well cherish his memory, and keep his _Alciphron_--if not his _Hylas and Philonous_--upon their book-rolls.

_A Scholar._

[Sidenote: Richard Bentley]

It is certain that in your forays into the literature of these times--if made with any earnestness--you will come upon the name of Dr.

Bentley;[7] if nowhere else, then attached to critical footnotes at the bottom of books.

His demolition of the claims, long maintained by an older generation of scholars, respecting certain _Epistles of Phalaris_, commanded attention {10} at an early stage of his career, and showed ability to cross swords, in a scholastic and bitter way, with such men as Atterbury and Boyle; and--if need were--with such others as Sir William Temple and Dr. Swift.

As early as 1700 he had come to the mastership of Trinity College, Cambridge (where a portrait of him by Thornhill now hangs in the Master's Lodge), a proud position--made prouder by his large hospitalities. He had a sensible wife, courteous "for two"--as many scholars' wives have need to be--and two daughters; one of whom inheriting the father's sharp tongue, made a good many young fellows of the college sing; and made some of them sigh too--marrying at last a certain young c.u.mberland, who became the father of Richard c.u.mberland, the poet and dramatist.[8]

Some small chronicler tells us of his preference for port over claret; indeed he loved all intense things, rather than things diluted, and was inaccessible to those finer, milder, delicater {11} graces--whether of wine or poetry--which ripen under long reposeful workings. I spoke of a portrait of him in the Master's Lodge; there was another in Pope's _Dunciad_--not so flattering:

"The mighty scholiast, whose unwearied pains Made Horace dull, and humbled Milton's strains; Turn what they will to verse, their toil is vain, Critics like me shall make it prose again."

--Lib. iv., 211 _et seq._

[Sidenote: Bentley's scholarship]

He left no great work; yet what he did in lines of cla.s.sical criticism could not by any possibility have been better done by others. He supplied interpretations--where the world had blundered and stumbled--which blazed their way to unquestioned acceptance. He mastered all the difficulties of language, and wore the mastership with a proud and insolent self-a.s.sertion--a very Goliath of learning, with spear like a weaver's beam, and no son of Jesse to lay him low. One wishing to see his slap-dash manner and his amazing command of authorities should read the _Dissertation on Phalaris_; not a lovable man surely, but prince of all schoolmastery lore: and how rarely we love the schoolmaster! When you meet with that name of {12} Bentley you may safely give it great weight in all scholarly matters, and not so much in matters of taste. Trust him in foot-notes to Aristophanes (a good mate for him!) or to Terence; trust him less in foot-notes to Milton,[9] or even Horace (when he leaves prosody to talk of rhythmic _susurrus_). You will think furthermore of this Dr. Bentley as living through all his fierce battles of criticisms and of college mastership to an extreme old age, and into days when Swift and Pope and Steele and Addison were all gone--a gray, rugged, persistent, captious old man, with a great, full eye that looked one through and through, and with a short nose, turned up--as if he always scented a false quant.i.ty in the air.

_Two Doctors._

We approach a doctor now as mild and gentle as Bentley was irritable and pugnacious; a man not {13} often enrolled among literary veterans; treated with scorn, maybe, by the professional critics; and yet this name now brought to your attention is I think, tenderly a.s.sociated with New Englanders' earliest recollections of rhyme or verse; and it is specially these literary firstlings of the memory that it is well for us to trace and hold in hand. Let us listen for a moment to that old cradle hymn:

"Hush, my dear, lie still and slumber, Holy angels guard thy bed; Heavenly blessings without number Gently falling on thy head."