English Lands Letters and Kings Part 19

"Here didst thou dwell, here schemes of pleasure plan, Beneath yon mountain's ever beauteous brow; But now, as if a thing unblest by man, Thy fairy dwelling is as lone as thou!

Here giant weeds a pa.s.sage scarce allow To halls deserted, portals gaping wide.

Fresh lessons to the thinking bosom, how Vain are the pleasaunces on earth supplied, Swept into wrecks anon by Time's ungentle tide."

Byron would now have to mend his description, since the estate is at present owned by a London merchant, who has bought a t.i.tle from the weak king-folk of Portugal, and keeps the great house in Pimlico order.

It is one of the show places of Cintra; and if Moorish domes, and marble halls, and sculpture delicate as that of the Alhambra, and fountains, and palms, and oranges, and bowers of roses, and century-old oaks, and cliffs, and wooded dells, and far-off sight of sails from the Bay of Biscay are deserving of show, surely this old palace of the rich Englishman is.

Another palace--for Beckford had an {290} architectural mania--was built at Fonthill, the place of his birth, not far east of Salisbury.

Here was a great ancestral estate, around which he caused to be erected a huge wall of masonry, some ten or twelve miles in length, to secure privacy and protect his birds. Within he built courts, towers, and halls--some six hundred men often working together night and day on these constructions--which he equipped with the rare and munificent spoils brought back from his travel. To this Fairy land, however, Byron's lament would better apply; the walls are down and the towers have fallen; the property is divided; only here and there and blended with new structures and new offices can you see traces of the old architectural extravagance. The spoiled plantations of Jamaica--whence the Vathek revenue mostly came--brought the change; enough, however, remained for the erection of a costly home in Bath, portions of which may still be seen.

A daughter of Beckford's became d.u.c.h.ess of Hamilton; another daughter, who declined Ducal overtures which the father favored, was treated therefor with severities that would have become an {291} Eastern caliph--for which, maybe, he now, like the poor creatures of Eblis Hall, is holding his right hand over "a burning heart."

_Robert Burns._

[Sidenote: Burns.]

We go now out of England, northward of the Solway, to find that peasant poet[15] at whose career I hinted in the last chapter, and whose burst of Scotch song was a new wakening for that kingdom of the highlands and the moors. I dare not, and will not speak critically of his verses; there they are--in their little budget of gilt-bound, or paper-bound leaves; rhythmic, tender, coa.r.s.e, glowing, burning, with a grip in many of them at our heart-strings which we may not and cannot shake off. To tell you about these poems and of their special melodies would be like taking you to the sea and telling you how the waves gather and roll--with murmurs that you know--along all the sh.o.r.e.

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Nor can I hope to tell any more of what will be new to you about his life and fate. We all know that white-washed, low, roadside cottage--a little drive out from the old Scotch town of Ayr--where he was born; we have been there perhaps; we have seen other Scottish peasants boozing there over their ale; and have noted the names scribbled over tables and cupboards and walls to testify to the world's yearnings and to its pilgrimages thither. We know, too, that other low cottage of Mossgiel, where his poor father--a gospel abiding man--made his last struggle against the fates--and who of a Sat.u.r.day night--

"Collects his spades, his mattocks, and his hoes, Hoping the morn in ease and rest to spend, And weary, o'er the moor, his course does homeward bend."

We all know what a brave fight the two Burns boys, Gilbert and Rob, made of it when Death, "the poor man's dearest friend," took off the father; Gilbert the elder; but Robert the brighter and keener--making verselets in the fields which the elder brother approves, and says would "bear {293} to be printed;" and so presently after, the first poor, thin, dingy volume finds it way to the light, and gives to far-away Edinboro' people their earliest hint of this strange, fine, new, human plant which has begun to blossom under the damps of Mossgiel. But the farm life is hard; the poet is wayward; his jolly friends near by who chant his songs are not helpful; his love affairs, of which he has overstock in his young wildness, run to confusion; quarrels threaten; so he books himself with what moneys the thin, dingy volume of poems have brought him, for America.

What if he had come!

But no; one low, wee encouraging voice--the piping answer to those poems--reaches him from Edinboro', and the poet goes thither in his best gear; Dugald Stewart, and Dr. Blacklock the blind poet, and Mackenzie, of whom I have already made mention, all befriend him. The gentlewomen of Edinboro' entertain him, and admire him, and flatter him; and he, in best blue and buff, with his dark, rolling eyes, and lips that command all shapes of language, holds his dignity with these fine ladies of the Northern capital; {294} gives compliments that make them tremble; prints other and fuller edition of his poems; goes northward amongst the highlands--dropping jewels of verse as he goes--to beautiful women, to waterfalls, to n.o.ble patrons. The next season in Edinboro', however, is no longer the same; that brilliant series of fetes and of conquests has gone by; the new lion is too audacious; he shakes his fetters with a bold rage that intimidates. So we find him with some three hundred pounds only, saved out of the new book and the junketings of the Capital, going off to lease quietly the farm of Ellisland, near to Dumfries, and turn ploughman once more.

It is a poor place, but very beautiful; it is in Nithsdale, and the murmur of the river through its wooded banks makes the poet forget the crop of pebbles which every ploughing turns to the top. He is presently in the Excise too (1789): so gets some added pence by the gauging of beer-barrels and looking after frauds upon the revenue; married too--having out of all the loose love-strings, which held him more or less weakly, at last knotted one, which ties the quiet, pretty, womanly, much injured Jean Armour to his hearth and {295} home, forever. And he begins that Ellisland life bravely well; has prayers at night; teaches the "toddlin' wee things" their catechism; has hope and faith, and sings--and sings; and this, amongst other things, was what he sang--

"O, Willie brewed a peck o' maut, And Bob and Allen cam to see; Three blither hearts that lee-lang night Ye wad na find in Christendie.

We are na fou, we're na that fou, But just a drappie in our e'e; The c.o.c.k may craw, the day may daw, And ay we'll taste the barley bree.

It is the moon, I ken her horn, That's blinkin in the lift sae hie; She shines sae bright, to wyle us hame; But, by my sooth, she'll wait a wee.

The c.o.c.k may craw, the day may daw, And aye we'll taste the barley bree."

No wonder the pebbles began to show more and more in the plough-land; no wonder the jolly fellows of Dumfries came oftener and oftener; the long bouts too amongst the hills chilled him; the crops grew smaller and smaller; the "barley bree" better and better; he has no tact at bargaining; a stanza of Tam O'Shanter is worth more than ten {296} plough-days, yet he makes gifts of his best songs. Household affairs go all awry, let poor Jeanie Armour struggle as she may; the cottage palings are down; debts acc.u.mulate; and so do those rollicking nights at the Globe, or in a shieling amongst the hills. Yet from out all the impending want, and the gloom, and the desperation, come such sweet notes as these, reaching the ear of humanity everywhere:--

"John Anderson, my jo, John, We clamb the hill thegither; And mony a canty day, John, W've had wi' ane anither: Now we maun totter down, John, But hand in hand we'll go, And sleep thegither at the foot, John Anderson, my jo."

At last Ellisland must be given up--crops, beasties and all; and never more the wooded banks of Nithsdale shall feel his tread, or hear his chant mingling with the river murmurs. He, and they all--five souls now--just of an age to relish most the woods, the range, the fields, the daisies of Ellisland, must go to one of the foulest and least attractive streets of Dumfries, and to a {297} home as little attractive as the street. Fifty years thereafter I went over that house and found it small, pinched, and pitifully meagre in all its appointments; twenty years later, Hawthorne speaks of both house and street as _filthy_. What could or should supply the place now--to the peasant poet--of the fields, the open sky, the gentle fret and murmurs of the streams of Nithsdale?

The foul fiends who taunted him in the woods now lay hold upon him in earnest; every day his fame is flying over straits and seas; every day his poems, old and new, are planting themselves in fresh hearts and brains; every day his wild pa.s.sions are dealing him back-handed blows.

Old neighbors have to pa.s.s him by; modest women look away; he has forfeited social position; and I suspect, welcomed in those days of July, 1796, the approaches of the disease which he knew was sapping his life:--

"Oh, Martinmas wind! when wilt thou blaw And shake the dead leaves frae the tree?

Oh gentle death! when wilt thou come And tak a life that wearies me?"

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And it comes, in that dismal, miserable upper chamber that you can see when you go there;--his wife ill; his little children wandering aimlessly about; it comes sharply; he is on his back--"uneasy" the nurse said, and "chafing"; when suddenly by a great effort--as if at last he would shake off all the beleaguerments of sense, and the haunting phantoms swarming about him--he rallied all his powers--rose to his full height from the bed--tottered for a moment, then fell p.r.o.ne forward a dead man.

This was in the month of July, 1796; Burns being then only thirty-seven. Walter Scott, a young fellow of twenty-five, living in Edinboro', had just printed his translation of _Leonora_.

Wordsworth--unknown save for a thin booklet of indifferent verse--was living down in Dorsetshire, enjoying the "winding wood-walks green,"

with that sister Dorothy, who "added sunshine to his daylight." These two had not as yet made the acquaintance of that coming man, S. T.

Coleridge, who is living at Clevedon, over by Bristol Channel, with that newly married wife, who has decoyed him from his schemes of American migration; {299} and the poet of the Ancient Mariner (as yet unwritten) has published his little booklet with Mr. Cottle, of Bristol, in which are some modest verses signed C. L. And Charles Lamb (for whom those initials stand) is just now in his twenty-first year, and is living in humble lodgings in Little Queen Street, London, from which he writes to Coleridge, saying that "Burns was a G.o.d of my idolatry." And in that very year (1796) the dismalest of tragedies is to overshadow those humble lodgings of Little Queen Street. Of this and of Coleridge and of Wordsworth, we shall have somewhat to say in the chapter we open upon next.

[1] Gilbert White, b. 1720; d. 1793. Oxford man; Fellow in 1744; curate of Faringdon 1758; after 1784, at Selborne.

[2] A charmingly ill.u.s.trated edition of _The Natural History of Selborne_--showing his ivy-covered home and other objects of interest, was published by Macmillan & Co. in 1875 (edited by Frank Buckland). I am indebted for a copy to my friend, Wm. Robinson, of the London _Garden_.

[3] Jane Austen, b. 1775; d. 1817. _Sense and Sensibility_, published 1811. Life was written by her nephew J. Austen-Leigh. Her _Letters_, edited by Lord Brabourne, 1884.

[4] Not the dreadful, seamy, photographic reproduction of an old oil painting that Lord Brabourne gives, which must be wholly unfair to her; but the earlier engravings.

[5] Thomas Day, b. 1748; d. 1789. Oxford man; married, 1778; _Sandford and Merton_ published 1783.

[6] Mrs. Barbauld (Anna Let.i.tia Aikin), b. 1743; d. 1825. There is a pleasant sketch of Mrs. Barbauld and (for a wonder) an approving and commendatory notice of her in Miss Martineau's _Autobiography_, vol.

i., pp. 228-39.

Miss Martineau's father, it appears, had been a pupil of Mrs. Barbauld.

[7] Boswell's Johnson, vol. vi., p. 28.

[8] The circ.u.mstances are given in _Crabb Robinson's Diary_.

[9] Maria Edgeworth, b. 1767; d. 1849. First volume of _Parent's a.s.sistant_ was published, 1796; _Castle Rackrent_, 1800; _Popular Tales_, 1804.

[10] Miss Honora Sneyd among them, in 1773.

[11] Maria Regina Roche, b. 1766; d. 1845. The _Grand Dict. Universal du XIX. Siecle_ enumerates no less than thirteen other romances by her--in forty odd volumes, all translated, and now utterly forgotten!

[12] Mrs. Radcliffe (Ann Ward), b. 1764; d. 1823; _Romance of the Forest_, 1791; _Mysteries of Udolpho_, 1794.

Miss Jane Porter, b. 1776; d. 1850; _Thaddeus of Warsaw_, published 1803; _Scottish Chiefs_, 1810; _Sir Edward Seaward's Narrative_ (in concert with her sister Anna Maria Porter), published in 1826.

[13] Senior member of the old firm of J. & J. Harper, 82 Cliff Street.

[14] William Beckford, b. 1759; d. 1844. _Vathek_, published (in French), 1787; better known by an unauthentic English translation, published 1784.

[15] Robert Burns, b. 1759; d. 1796. Poems published 1786. First collected edition, 1800; Cunningham edition, with life, in 1834, 4 vols.