English Lands Letters and Kings Part 11

[Sidenote: Shenstone.]

Shenstone[4] is a name not very much known--not very much worth knowing: he was a big, somewhat scholarly, fastidious, indolent, rhyme-haunted man, who had studied at Oxford, and who, when the muses were buzzing about his ears, came into possession of a pretty farm in that bit of Shropshire which (by queer English fashion) is planted within the northern borders of Worcestershire; and it was there that he wrote--what is typical of all that he ever wrote, and what has his current and favorite sing-song in it:--

"Since Phyllis vouchsafed me a look I never once dreamt of my vine.

May I lose both my pipe and my crook If I knew of a kid that was mine!

I prized every hour that went by Beyond all that had pleased me before; But now they are past, and I sigh; And I grieve that I prized them no more."

And again--

"When forced the fair nymph to forego What anguish I felt at my heart!

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Yet I thought--but it might not be so-- 'Twas with pain that she saw me depart.

She gazed as I slowly withdrew.

My path I could hardly discern; So sweetly she bade me Adieu I thought that she bade me return!"

What should we think of that if we encountered it fresh in a corner of one of our Sunday newspapers? We should hardly reckon its author among our boasted treasures; yet Burns says "his elegies do honor to our language," and a great deal of the same guileless tintinnabulum did have its admirers all over England a century ago; and some of Shenstone's pretty wares have come drifting down on the wings of alb.u.ms and anthologies fairly into our day.

Yet I should rather have encountered him in his fields, than in his garret; for he made those fields very beautiful. He was a bad farmer, to be sure; and sacrificed turnips to marigolds; and wheat to primroses and daisies, fast as the season went round; but his home at Leasowes was a place worth visiting for its charming graces of every rural sort; even our staid John Adams, when he was in England in those days, looking after American {160} colonial interests--must needs coach it in company with Jefferson from Cirencester to Leasowes, for a sight of this charming homestead. Goldsmith too gave its beauties the embalmment of his language; and Dr. Johnson sat down upon it, with the weight of his ponderous sentences. One echo more we will have of him, as it comes fresh from his pet paradise of that corner of Shropshire--and certainly carrying a honeyed rhythmic flow:--

"My banks they are furnished with bees, Whose murmur invites one to sleep; My grottoes are shaded with trees, And my hills are white over with sheep.

I seldom have met with a loss, Such health do my fountains bestow; My fountains all bordered with moss Where the hare-bells and violets grow."

[Sidenote: William Collins.]

William Collins[5] was a man of a totally different stamp--better worth your knowing--yet maybe with the general public not so well known.

{161} There is the c.h.i.n.k of true and rare poetic metal in his verse, and it is fused by an imagination capable of intense heat and wonderful flame. He was only a hatter's boy from Chichester, in the South of England; was at Oxford for a while, and left there in a huff--though securing a degree, 1743; afterward went to London; wrote and printed some odes, which he knew were better than most current poetry, but which n.o.body bought or read. He sulked under that neglect, and his rage ran--sometimes to verse--sometimes to drink; he had known Thomson and Johnson, and both befriended him; but the world did not; indeed he never met the world half way; the poetic phrenzy in him so fined his sensibilities that he could not and would not put out a feeling hand for promiscuous greetings. Poverty, too, came in the wake of his poetic cultures, to aggravate his mental inapt.i.tudes and his moral distractions--all ending at last in a mad-house. He was not, to be sure, continuously under restraint--such terrific restraints as belonged to treatment of the insane in that day; but for a half dozen or more years of the latter part of his life--wandering all awry--saying {162} weak and pointless things, in place of the odes which had coruscated under his fine fancy; lingering about his childhood's home; stealing under the cathedral vaults of Chichester (where his body rests now), and lifting up a vacant and wild treble of sound in dreary sing-song to mingle with the music from the choir.

There are accomplished critics who insist that the odes of Collins carry in them the finest and the loftiest strains which go to marry the music of the nineteenth century poets to the music of the days of Elizabeth. Certain it is, that he loomed far above the ding-dong of such as Shenstone--that he scorned the cla.s.sic trammels of the empire of Pope--certain that there were fires in him which were lighted by poets who lived before the time of the Stuarts, and which gave foretaste and promise of the freedom and the graces that shine to-day.[6]

I cannot quote better to show his quality than {163} from that "Ode to Evening" which is so often cited:--

"For when thy folding star arising, shows His paly circlet at his warning lamp, The fragrant hours and elves Who slept in flowers the day,

"And many a nymph who wreathes her brows with And sheds the freshning dew, and, lovelier still, The pensive pleasures sweet, Prepare thy shadowy car.

"Then lead, calm votress, where some sheety lake Cheers the lone heath, or some time hallowed pile, Or upland fallows gray Reflect its last cool gleam.

"But when chill, bl.u.s.tering winds or driving rain Forbid my willing feet, be mine the hut That from the mountain's side, Views wilds and swelling floods,

"And hamlets brown and dim discovered spires, And hears their simple bell, and marks o'er all Thy dewy fingers draw The gradual dusky veil."

This is poetry that goes without help of rhyme; even its halts are big with invitations to the "upland fallows gray," and to the "pensive pleasures sweet." Swinburne says, with piquancy and truth, {164} "Corot, on canvas, might have signed the 'Ode to Evening.'"

Dr. Johnson, who was a strong friend of Collins, tells us, in his _Lives of the Poets_, that he died in 1756; and that story is repeated by most early biographies; the truth is, however, that after that date he was living--only a sort of death in life, under the care of his sister at Chichester; and it was not until 1759, when--his moral and physical wreck complete--the end came.

_Miss Burney._

[Sidenote: Miss Burney.]

We have next to bring to your notice, a clever, somewhat frisky, _debonnaire_ young person of the other s.e.x, whom you should know--whom perhaps you do know; I mean Miss Frances Burney.[7] You will remember that we have encountered her once before pushing her kindly way into old Dr. Johnson's ante-room when he was near to death. The old gentleman had known intimately her {165} father, Dr. Burney, and had always shown for her a strong attachment; so did a great many of Dr.

Burney's acquaintances, Garrick among them and Burke; and it was probably from such men and their talk that she caught the literary bee in her bonnet and wrote her famous story of _Evelina_. You should read that story--whatever you may do with _Cecilia_ and other later ones--if only to see how good and cleanly a piece of work in the way of a society novel can come out of those broiling times, when _Humphrey Clinker_ and _Tom Jones_ and the prurient and sentimental languors of Richardson were on the toilette tables of the clever and the honest.

The book of _Evelina_ is, all over, Miss Burney; that gives it the rarest and best sort of realism. Through all her work indeed, we have this over-jubilant and gushing, yet timid and diffident young lady, writing her stories--with all her timidities and large, unspoken hopes, tumbling and twittering in the bosoms of her heroines: if my lady has the fidgets, the fidgets come into her books; and you can always chase back the tremors that smite from time to time the fair Evelina, to {166} the kindred tremors that afflict the clever and sensitive daughter of old Dr. Burney.

The book was published anonymously at first, and the secret of authorship tolerably well kept; she says her papa did not know; but young ladies are apt to put too small a limit to the knowledge of their papas! It is very certain that her self-consciousness, and tremulous, affected, simpers of ignorance, were not good to stave away suspicion.

It was not long before the world, confounding book and person, came to call her "Evelina."

A pretty picture with this motif comes into her Diary: On a certain morning, our Dr. Franklin--being then in London on colonial business--makes a call upon Dr. Burney:--and in absence of her father, meets the daughter: a big, square-shouldered man, very formal, very stout, but very kindly, approaches her and says--"I think I have the pleasure of speaking with Evelina."

"Oh, no," she replies, "I am Frances Burney," and he--"Ah--indeed! I thought it had been Evelina:" and there it ends, and we lose sight of our broad-shouldered Dr. Franklin, with only this "Ah!" upon his lips.

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She had a modesty that was vain by its excess, and was awkward when caught unexpectedly or with strangers; in great trepidation lest her books might be talked of--yet with her books and her authorship always tormentingly uppermost in her thought. Her Diary and letters are full of them. Yet she is attractive--strangely so--by her sympathetic qualities; so responsive to every shade of sorrow or of joy; winning, because so tell-tale of heart; and with a tongue that could prattle gracefully when at ease; Evelina, in short, without Evelina's beauty or expectations.

I have read the book over again after a gap of many years--with a view to this talk of the auth.o.r.ess, and find myself wondering more than ever, how so many of great and commanding intellect should have so heartily admired it. Burke read it with most eager attention and largest praise; old Dr. Johnson delighted in it, and declared it superior in many points to Richardson (which for him was extravagant commendation). Even Mme. de Stael, some few years later, gave it her applause; and the quick and swift-witted Mrs. Thrale was in raptures with it; {168} and Mrs. Thrale knew a dunce, and detested dunces.

There must have been a deftness in her touch of things local,--of which, I think, she was but half conscious; there was beside a pretty dramatic art which found play in many pages of her Diary, and in all she did and all she spoke. For her third novel of _Camilla_, which scarce ever comes off the shelf of old libraries now--where it survives in deserved retirement--she received, according to the rumors current in those days, the sum of 3,000; such rumors, very likely exaggerated the amount; they are apt to do so--in all times.

Her Diary[8] is of special interest; particularly the portion which takes one into the domestic life of Royalty. For one of the bitter fruits of her celebrity, was her appointment as Lady of the Robes (or other such t.i.tle), to the Queen. The service indeed did not last many years, but long enough to give us a good sight of the well-disposed, {169} fussy, indolent, kind-hearted Queen, and of the inquisitive, obstinate, good-natured King.

[Sidenote: Trials of the Queen.]

She was at the palace, indeed, when one of the earlier attacks of that mental ailment which at last slew George III.--fell upon him. She sees the poor Queen growing wild with dread--disturbed and trembling under those flashes of disorderly talk which smite upon her ear. She watches the King as he goes out to his drive on a certain fatal day;--hears the hushed, m.u.f.fled steps and the babel of uncertain sounds, as he comes back late at night,--waits hour on hour for her usual summons to the Queen's presence, which does not come. At last, midnight being long past (and she meantime having hint of some great calamity) goes to the Queen's chamber; two other lady attendants were with her, she says; and the Queen, ghostly pale and shuddering--puts her hand kindly upon that of the poor little trembling Miss Burney and says "I am like ice--so cold--so cold!"

"I tried to speak," says Miss Burney in her Diary, "but burst into tears: then the Queen did." And there was cause: for from beyond the chamber--along the corridor,--came the idle {170} jabbering of King George; and the intellectual power (such as there was of it) "thro'

words and things went sounding on its dim and perilous way."

I tell this not to test the reader's capability for sympathy, but to fasten poor little Miss Burney, the author of _Evelina_ and _Cecilia_, in mind; and to connect her service in the palace of St. James, in the year 1788, with the first threat and the first real attack of the King's insanity. I am afraid we must set down, as one helping cause to the King's affliction, the American obstinacy in maintaining their Independence.

Miss Burney shortly after, with a pension of 100, retired from the royal duties, which had tried her sadly; and some years later encountering and greatly admiring General d'Arblay, who had come over an exile from France, in company with other distinguished emigrants, on the outbreak of the French Revolution, she married him (1793), and gave him a home that grew up out of the moneys received from her _Camilla_--hence called by old Dr. Burney, "Camilla Cottage."

She survived her husband and a son (a clergyman {171} of the Established Church), and lived to so great an age as to find all her conquests in fiction over-run at last by the brilliant successes of Miss Austen, of Miss Edgeworth, and the more splendid triumphs of Walter Scott. She died almost in our day (1840) and was buried in Bath; but her best monument you can see without going there; it is her book of _Evelina_ and her Diary.

_Hannah More._

[Sidenote: Mistress More.]

Over-fine literary people will, I suppose, hardly recognize Hannah More--or Mistress Hannah More,[9] as I prefer to call her, in virtue of a good old English, and a good old New Englandish custom, too, which gave this t.i.tle of dignity to matronly women--married or unmarried, of mature age, and of worthy lives.

We must go into the neighborhood of that picturesque old city of Bristol, in the West of England, to find her. She was one of the five daughters of a respectable schoolmaster in Gloucestershire. Hannah, though among the youngest, {172} proved the clever one, and had written poems, more than pa.s.sably good, before she was fifteen; and had completed a pastoral drama, when only seventeen. She was, moreover, comely; she was witty and alert of mind, and had so won upon the affections of a neighbor landholder, and wealthy gentleman of culture, that a marriage between the two came after a while to be arranged for; but this affair never went beyond the arrangement,--for reasons which do not clearly appear. It does appear that the parties remained friendly, and that Mistress Hannah More was in receipt of an annual pension of 200--in the way of _amende_ perhaps--her life through, from the backsliding but friendly groom. I am sorry to tell this story of her (about the 200). I think so well of her as to wish she had put it in an envelope, and returned it with her compliments--year after year--if need were. However, it went, as did many another hundred pounds and thousand pounds of her earnings, in the line of those great charities which ill.u.s.trated and adorned her life.

Her elder sisters as early as 1757 established in Bristol a school for young ladies, which became {173} one of the most popular and favorite schools of the West of England; and when Hannah, some fifteen years later, went up to London, to look after the publication of her _Search after Happiness_, one or two of the sisters accompanied her; and Miss Hannah, who was "taken off her feet" by the acting of Garrick, was met most kindly by the great tragedian--was taken to his house, indeed, and became thereafter one of the most intimate of the friends of Mrs.

Garrick. Dr. Johnson, too, was enchanted by the brisk humor and lively repartee in these clever West-of-England girls; and we have on record a bit of his talk to one of them. He said, in his leviathan way: "I have heard that you are engaged in the useful and honorable employment of teaching young ladies." Whereupon they tell the story of it all, in their bright, full, eager way, and of their successes: and the Doctor, softened and made jolly and companionable, says, "What, five women live happily together in the same house! Bless me! I never was in Bristol--but I will come and see you. I'll come; I love you all five!"