English Lands Letters and Kings Part 4

We have had many vain men to encounter in these talks of ours--men a.s.sured of their own judgment and taste; but not one, I think, as yet, so thoroughly and highly conscious that his cleverness and scholarship and deftness and wit were as sure of their reward as the sun was sure to shine.

I can fancy him pausing after having wrought {48} some splendid score of Homeric lines, which blaze and palpitate with new Greek fire: I can fancy him humming them over to himself--growing heated with the flames that flash and play in them--his slight, frail figure trembling with the rhythmic outburst, and he smiling serenely at a mastery which his will and wit have brought to such supreme pitch of excellence that no handling of English will go beyond it.

_His Last Days._

[Sidenote: Last days of Pope.]

I have spoken of one face--I mean Lady Mary Montagu's--which used sometimes to light up the grotto of Mr. Pope, and have told you how that badly managed friendship went out in a great muddle of sootiness and rage; nor were the mud and the filth, which he used in that direction with such cruel vigor, weapons which he was unused to handling: poor John Dennis, a poet and critic of that day, had been put in a rage over and over. Lord Hervey had been scarified. Blackmore and Phillips and Bentley had caught his stiletto thrusts; even Daniel Defoe had been subject of his sneers; and {49} so had the bland, courteous Addison. This sensitive, weak-limbed man saw offence where other men saw none; and straightway drew out that flashing sword of his and made the blood spurt. Of course there were counter-thrusts, and heavy ones, that caused that poor decrepid figure of his to writhe again--all the more because he pretended a stoicism that felt no such attack. To say that he often made his thrusts without reason, and that much of his satire was dastardly, is saying what all the world knows, and what every admirer of his fine powers must lament. But he had his steady friendships, too, and his tendernesses. Nothing could exceed the kindly consideration and affectionate watchfulness which belonged to his protection and shelter of his old mother, lingering in that poet's faery home of Twickenham till over ninety. A strange, close friendship knit him to Dean Swift, who had seemed incapable of rallying this sensitive man's--or, indeed, any man's--affections. Pope, and Bolingbroke--the brilliant and the courted--were long bound together in very close and friendly communion; the tears of this latter were among the honestest which {50} fell when the poet died. Bishop Warburton, too, was most kindly treated by Pope in all his later years, and to this gentleman most of his books were left. There can be no doubt, also, that the poet felt the tenderest regard for that neighbor of his, Miss Patty Blount, who had grown old beside him, and who used at times to bring her quiet face into the parlors of Twickenham. Pope in his last days would, I think, have seen her oftener--did covertly wish for a sight of that kindly smile, which he had known so long and perhaps had valued more than he had dared to confess. But in those final days she had gone her ways; maybe was grown tired of waiting upon the peevish humors of the poet; certainly was not seen by him more often than a fair neighborly regard would dictate. Yet he left her all his rights there at Twickenham, and much money beside.

[Sidenote: Death of Pope.]

They say that at the last he complained of seeing things dimly--seeing things, too, which others did not see (as the bystanders told him).

"Then, 'twas a vision," he said. Two days thereafter he entered very quietly upon the visions all men see after death; leaving that poor, scathed, {51} misshapen body--I should think gladly--leaving the pleasant home shaded by the willows he had planted; and leaving a few wonderful poems which I am sure will live in literature as long as books are printed.

[1] Narcisse Luttrel: _A brief historical Relation of State affairs_ from September, 1678, to April, 1714.

[2] George Berkeley, b. 1685; d. 1753. His works (3 vols.) and Life and Letters (1 vol.); edited by Fraser, in 1871. See also very interesting monograph on Berkeley, in Professor Tyler's _Three Men of Letters_, Putnam, 1895.

[3] _An essay toward preventing the Ruin of Great Britain_, 1721.

[4] Dr. Samuel Johnson, afterward, 1754, first President of King's (now Columbia) College, New York; he was a graduate of Yale; life by Dr.

Beardsley.

[5] In 1730, he writes to Samuel Johnson, of Stratford, Ct.: "Pray let me know whether they [the college authorities] would admit the writings of Hooker and Chillingworth to the Library of the College of New Haven?"

[6] One of his last publications was, "_Siris: a chain of Philosophical Reflections and inquiries concerning the Virtues of Tar-water._" And it is remarkable that its arguments and teeming ill.u.s.trations have not been laid hold of by our modern venders of Tar-soap.

[7] Richard Bentley, b. 1662; d. 1742. Native of Oulton, Yorkshire.

Was first Boyle Lecturer, 1692; Master of Trinity, 1700; _Works_, edited by Dyce, London, 1836 (only 3 vols. issued of a proposed 8 vol.

edition). _Life_, by Jacob Mahly, Leipsic, 1868.

[8] B. 1732; d. 1811. Best known by his _Memoirs_, 1806; among his plays is _False Impressions_, in which appears Scud, the forerunner of d.i.c.kens's _Alfred Jingle_.

[9] All along the foot-notes in a great Quarto of the _Paradise Lost_ (London, 1732) Bentley's critical pyrotechnics flame, and flare; and he closes a bristling preface with this droll caveat;--"I made [these]

notes _extempore_, and put them to the Press as soon as made; without any Apprehension of growing leaner by Censures, or plumper by Commendations."

[10] Isaac Watts, b. 1674; d. 1748. _Horae Lyricae_: Memoir by Southey (vol. ix., _Sacred Cla.s.sics_: London, 1834). Lowndes (_Bib. Manual_) says, that up to 1864, there were sold annually 50,000 copies of Watts's Hymns.

[11] B. 1681; d. 1765. Works, with memoir, by J. Mitford. 2 vols., 12mo. London, 1834.

[12] Only _staying_; since the play (of _The Brothers_) was brought out in 1753, some twenty years after his establishment in the rectory of Welwyn.

[13] Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, b. 1690 (or 1689?); d. 1762. Works (3 vols.), edited by her great grandson, Lord Wharncliffe: Later edition (1861), with life by Moy Thomas.

[14] Wife of Lord Mar, who was exiled for his engagement in the abortive rebellion of 1715.

[15] Dilke; _Papers, etc._, vol. ii. pp. 354-5.

[16] Alexander Pope, b. 1688; d. 1744. Editions of his works are numerous. I name those by Bowles and Roscoe, with that of Elwin and Courthope; see also Dilke's _Papers of a Critic_, Leslie Stephen's _Life_, and notices by Lowell, Minto, and Mrs. Oliphant.

[17] Lowell, Professor Minto, De Quincey, Hazlitt, Covington, etc. De Quincey says, "It is the most exquisite monument of playful fancy that universal literature offers."

[18] The ident.i.ty of the house of Pope was destroyed by a lady owner (widow of Dr. Phipps, the Court oculist) in or about 1807. Pope loved landscape gardening and was aided by Kent and Bridgeman. Warburton speaks extravagantly of the poetic graces which he lavished upon his grotto.

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CHAPTER II

The name of Dean Berkeley--an acute and kindly philosopher--engaged our attention in the last chapter. So did that ripe scholar and master of Trinity, Richard Bentley;[1] then came that more saintly Doctor--Isaac Watts, whose Doxologies will long waken the echoes in country churches; we had a glimpse of the gloomy and lurid draperies, with which the muse of Dr. Edward Young sailed over earth and sky; sadly draggled, too, we sometimes found that muse with the stains of earth. We spoke of a Lady--Wortley Montagu--conspicuous for her beauty, for her acquirements, for her vivacity of mind, for her {53} boldness, for her contempt of the convenances of society, and at last, I think, a contempt for the whole male portion of the human race.

Then came that keen, discerning, accomplished poet, Alexander Pope, with a brain as strong and elastic as his body was weak and shaky; and who, of all the poets we have encountered since Elizabeth's day, knew best how to give to words their full forces, and how to make them jingle and shine.

But the lives of these I have now named, and of those previously brought to your notice[2] overreached the reign of Queen Anne, and dropped off--some in the time of George I., some under his son George II., and others in an early part of the long reign of George III.

_From Stuart to Brunswick._

But how came the Georges of Hanover and Brunswick to succeed Anne Stuart? Yes, there was a son of the deposed and exiled James II.

(whose {54} mother was an Italian princess--making him half-brother to Queen Anne) known, sometimes as James Edward, and sometimes as The Pretender. He had favorers about the Court of Anne; and if the Queen had lingered somewhat longer, or if the Jacobite or Tory political machine had been a little better oiled and in better play, this Pretender might have come to the throne instead of Hanover George.

Poet and Amba.s.sador Prior, who was suspected of favoring this, was one of those who went to the Tower, and came near losing his head in the early days of King George; and Bolingbroke, the friend of Pope, a known plotter for the Stuarts, took himself off hastily to France for safety.

James Edward, however, did not give the matter up, but made a landing in Scotland in 1715 and led that dreary rebellion, in which the poor Earl of Mar went astray, and in which Argyle figured; a rebellion which gives its small scenes of battle and its network of conspiracies to Scott's story of _Rob Roy_. The Pretender escaped with difficulty to France, made no succeeding attempt, lived in comparative obscurity, and died in Rome fifty years {55} later. He was, according to best accounts, a poor, weak creature, of dissipated habits--of melancholy aspect--dubbed King of England[3] by the Pope--given a stipend by the over-gracious Holy Father--and at last a costly tomb in St. Peter's, which is dignified by some good sculptural work. Travelling sentimentalists may meditate over its grandiose inscription of James III., King of England!

James Edward had married, however, a Princess Sobieski of the Polish family, by whom he had two sons, Charles Edward and Henry. The elder, Charles Edward, an ambitious, handsome, gentlemanly, and amiable man--known as the Young Pretender--did, by favor of French aid, and stimulated by larger French promises, make a landing in Scotland in 1745, which was successful at first, but ended with that defeat on Culloden Moor, which--with pretty romantic broidery--gives a gloomy setting to Scott's first novel of _Waverley_.

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A second plotting of some friends of the Young Pretender, somewhere about 1751-1752 (dimly foreshadowed in the story of _Redgauntlet_), proved abortive. Thenceforward he appears no more in English history.

We know only that this bright, clever, brave Chevalier, who bewitched many a Highland maiden, lived a corrupt life, made a dreary and unfortunate marriage (1772), and, bloated with drink and blighted in hopes, died at Rome in 1788.

His brother Henry was a priest, and was made a cardinal. He spent all his money in pompous living, became miserably poor, and died in Venice early in the present century--the last of his family. There is in St.

Peter's Church at Rome, in the Chapel of the Presentation, a great tomb, showy with the sculptures of Canova, which commemorates all these Stuarts, and--so far as Latin inscriptions can do it--makes kings and princes of these unfortunate representatives of the family of King James II.

Still we are without an answer to our question: How and why did the Georges of Hanover come to the British throne?

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Those who recall my mention[4] of that slip-shod pedantic king, James I., who came from Scotland, and who brought the Stuart name with him, will remember an allusion to an ambitious daughter of his, Elizabeth Stuart, who married a certain Frederic of the Palatinate, and possessor of the famous chateau whose beautiful ruins are still to be seen on the hill above Heidelberg. You will remember my mention of that extravagant ambition which brought her husband to grief and to an early death. Well, she had many children; and among them one named Sophia, who married, in 1658, Ernest Augustus, Duke of Brunswick and--afterward--Elector of Hanover. She was a good woman, a fairly p.r.o.nounced Protestant--unlike some sisters she had; so that in casting about for a Protestant successor to William III. and to Anne, the orthodox wise ones of England fixed upon this Sophia, the grand-daughter of old James I. She died, however, before Anne died and in the same year; so that the succession fell to her son George Louis, who became George I. of Great Britain.

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He was well toward sixty when he came to England--did not care overmuch to come; loved his ease; loved his indulgences, of which he had a good many, and a good many bad ones; was a German all over; not speaking English even, nor ever learning to speak it; had been a good soldier and fought hard in his day, but did not care for more fighting, or fatigue of any sort; had little culture, and minded the welcoming odes which English poets sang to him less than he would mind the gurgling of good "trink" from a beer-bottle. Yet withal, he was fairly well-intentioned, not a meddler, never wantonly unjust, willing to do kindnesses, if not fatiguing; a heavy, good-natured, heathenish, sottish lout of a king.