A Talk Over Autographs: Third Paper

FOR many years I was a regular contributor to the Saturday Review, — the “ Superfine Review ” of Thackeray, the “Great Saturday Reviler ” of John Bright. With the political part of that journal I had nothing whatever to do. Its politics, the editor told me, were Liberal with a small l. The l was so small that I never discovered it. In religious matters the Saturday Review was a pillar of the old-fashioned Church and State party. If the first editor was orthodox, he must nevertheless have been a somewhat strange prop for a church, for he swore like a trooper. There was, I was told, only one man in the office who could stand up against his volley of oaths, and that was the manager, — a quiet-looking old gentleman, whose name of David Jones, pleasant as it looked at the bottom of his quarterly checks, was in itself somewhat suggestive of marine profanity. He was so religious a man that he would not have submitted to be damned even by a prince without rebuke. The proprietor of the paper, Mr. Beresford Hope, one of the two members of Parliament for the University of Cambridge, used every year to give the contributors a grand dinner at Greenwich. How oppressive was the bill of fare! What courses had to be struggled through, — courses each with its own appropriate wine ! One year I chanced to sit by one of the first physicians of London. When he saw me pass over course after course, and reject wine after wine, he broke out into indignant remonstrances. My delicate state of health, I said, forced me to be abstemious. “ My dear sir,” he replied, “ you should have done as I always do on such occasions. For the last three days I have carefully prepared myself for this dinner, and you can easily see how thorough and successful my preparation has been.” I told him that he reminded me of the great Abernethy, who, early in the century, had stood at the head of the medical profession in England. In one of his works he had laid it down as an invariable rule that no more than eight ounces of animal food should be taken in a single day. From time to time lie would give a dinner to the most promising of his hospital students. ,l Now, my lads,” he used to say, as they sat down to a well-spread table, hang the eight-ounce rule ; ” and they did suspend it for that night, at least. I went on to say that I always wished, at these Greenwich dinners, that every guest were provided with the placard which in certain towns I had seen hung outside the omnibuses when there was room for no more passengers, — “ Full inside.” Furnislied with it, a man, when he had had enough, could enjoy a quiet talk with those sitting near him without being worried at every moment by the waiter thrusting dishes and bottles of wine over his shoulder.

At one of these Saturday Review dinners, the cook had forgotten to bring up the rear of the long line of dainties with those boiled beans and bacon in which the man of oaths took special delight. This happened before I had begun to write for the paper, so that I did not witness the strange scene which followed. The landlord was sent for, and on him was opened a battery of the strongest and most original profanity, worthy of the rage of a man who, having dined on turtle-soup, fish of a dozen varieties, fowl, flesh, and venison, felt that, without beans and bacon, all was vanity and vexation of spirit. The memory of such a man should surely be honored in Boston.

Scarcely less strange a pillar of the Anglican Church was my kind friend the second editor. In his early manhood he had filled the pulpit in the Unitarian chapel in London in which Mr. Moncure Conway so long officiated in later years. A Unitarian. I believe, he remained till the end of his life. Like Lord Chancellor Eldon, he was a buttress rather than a pillar of the Church, for he was never seen inside. His were the palmy days of the Saturday Review. He was supported by a large and strong staff of reviewers. Matthew Arnold once said to me that it was easy to see that every subject was entrusted to a writer who was master of it. Among the contributors were E. A. Freeman and J. R. Green, the historians, Sir Henry Maine and Lord Justice Bowen, Sir James Stephen and his brother Mr. Leslie Stephen, and Professor Owen. It was in the Saturday Review that Mr. Freeman and some of the younger writers of his school so often exposed the blunders into which Mr. Froude was always falling. In this exposure, Mr. Green, I have little doubt, often bore his part. I was told that when he was still a young writer, — unhappily he did not live to be an old one, — at an evening party, the lady of the house brought him up to introduce him to Mr. Froude. The great man looked coldly at him for a moment, and then exclaimed, “ Saturday Reviewer ! Don’t want to know him.” It is a pity that Mr. Froude could not have laid to heart the lessons that were taught him by his reviewers, however bitter was the language in which they were imparted. Of strict accuracy he seemed incapable by nature ; just as Johnson’s friend, Bennet Langton, “ had no turn to economy,” so Mr. Froude had no turn to truthfulness. Where nature had fallen short, inclination and study did little to remedy the deficiency. He was not, perhaps, aware of his failings. I once sent him a few notes about some errors in his Life of Carlyle. He replied, “ The utmost care will not prevent mistakes. Printers blunder when no blunders could be anticipated, and the eye passes over them unconsciously.” In this defense of himself against the suspicion of carelessness he was so careless as to send his letter unsigned.

My friend the editor, from whom I have been led away by this digression, however severe was the formidable Review which he so ably conducted, was himself the most kindly and gentle of men. He was rarely to be seen anywhere but in his office and his home. He never went to a club, and he never dined out except on a Saturday when the week’s work was done. His daughter, under the name of Ross Niel, had published a few volumes of poetical plays, written with great taste and spirit. ilis one relief from work was music. Every evening he played on the violoncello, while she accompanied him on the piano. However late his task was finished,— and every Thursday night it went on to the small hours of the morning, — he soothed his tired nerves by this little concert. How the nerves of the authors were soothed, who were often so mercilessly criticised, is matter for conjecture.

He once sent me for review the longest modern novel I have ever seen. It could scarcely have fallen short of Richardson’s Clarissa. It was so long that some of the volumes I made no pretense of reading. I did not even cut their leaves. To my surprise, my article was not inserted, though I received for it the usual payment. The author — an old soldier — had just had a play brought out at one of the London theatres, and had received some compliments in the Saturday Review. He wrote so grateful a letter of acknowledgment that my friend owned to me that he had not the heart to ridicule his foolish novel, and so had committed my article to the wastepaper basket.

One day he told me of a vexatious blunder into which he had fallen. I had sent him an article on school histories, in which I maintained that Goldsmith’s History of Greece with all its errors, written as it was by a man of genius, was a far better book for young people than Dr. Smith’s History with all its accuracy and all its dullness. Dr. Smith was a big man in the literary world of London, not by his schoolbooks, though they brought him in many thousands of pounds every year, hut as the editor of the Quarterly Review, that famous Review which, years earlier, was thought to have “ snuffed out ” poor Keats’s soul. He had long wished to know my friend, and had asked a common acquaintance to let them meet at his dinner-table. The dinner was fixed for a certain Saturday. On the morning of that very day appeared my article. .It had been in type for some weeks. That it contained an attack on Dr. Smith’s History had altogether escaped my friend’s memory. The awkward blunder which he had made he discovered an hour or two before the dinner-party. It was with a heavy heart that he went to meet this brother editor. It was impossible to allude to the article, and explain his entire innocence of any wish to give offense. He felt sure it would be believed that it was a premeditated slight. The meeting was a cool one. Dr. Smith, he told me with a smile, never expressed the slightest wish to see him again.

My friend had also an amusing story to tell of the editor of the Westminster Review, one Mr. H —, a successor, though not the immediate successor, of John Stuart Mill in that post. Mr. H—published a book on theology, in which he supported his views by citations from the Greek fathers. Of Greek, however, he knew next to nothing, and so he sought the aid of a learned friend in his translations of these passages. Unfortunately, it too frequently happened that learning and his theological theories were at variance. In those cases it was learning that had to yield. The fathers were made to say, not what they had said, but what they ought to have said, and what undoubtedly they would have said had each of them been a Mr. H—. He begged my friend, who was at this time assistant editor of the Saturday Review, and whom he had long known, to get his book noticed in that journal. All he asked for was a review, — whether favorable or unfavorable he cared not a jot. The work was accordingly sent to a learned critic, who, without any pity, mercilessly exposed the writer’s monstrous blunders. So severe was the criticism that the assistant editor did all he could to keep it from appearing. Just as, in the Reign of Terror, a friendly clerk in the office of the Committee of Public Safety often saved a man’s life by keeping the paper containing his case at the bottom of the pile, so the assistant editor for many weeks kept this review at the bottom of the pile of articles that were awaiting insertion. The only result was a succession of bitter reproaches from the author for his indifference to an old friend, who asked for nothing but a review, and cared not whether it was friendly or hostile. At last the review was printed. Mr. H— at once quarreled with his old friend, and never spoke to him again.

It was not till about the year 1869 that I became a contributor to the Saturday Review; but when I had once begun to write there were few numbers for some years in which I had not an article. The editor discovered in me a certain vein of humor, and for the most part sent me books to review which deserved little more than ridicule. What havoc I made among the novelists and the minor poets !

I amused my readers because I was first amused myself by the absurdities which I everywhere found in these writers, and by the odd fancies which rose in my mind as I read their works. At last, however, my humor began to fail. It was over the minor poets that I first became dejected. Even in their tragedies I no longer found anything amusing. I entreated my friendly editor to hand them over to a fresher hand. With the novelists I struggled on for some while ; but finally even they could no longer raise a natural laugh. My mirth was becoming forced, and I let them follow the poets. Now and then, it is true, I lighted upon a pretty story. I recall with pleasure Mrs. Parr’s Dorothy Fox and Mrs. Walford ’s Mr. Smith. Whenever I met modest worth, I hope I always did it justice.

One result of all this novel - reading was a total incapacity, lasting for many years, of reading any novels except those which were the favorites of my younger days. To read a novel became so inseparably connected, in my mind, with three pounds ten shillings (about seventeen dollars), the usual payment for a Saturday Review article, that without the one I could not undertake the other. All in vain have friends urged me to read the works of Black, Blackmore, Hardy, Howells, Henry James, Stevenson, and Kipling. Not a single story of any one of these writers have I ever read, or am I likely ever to read. Perhaps, however, I should be less confident on this matter, for I have just been induced to listen to Miss Jewett’s A Marsh Island. It pleased me so much that I see it is possible that stories may solace the hours of my old age, as it draws on, as they charmed those of my youth.

Among my autographs there are not a few letters from those who had suffered from my reviews. They were forwarded to me by the editor ; for my name was not known, as the contributions were anonymous. An enraged poetess warned me that the day would come when women would have their rights. Then the dastardly man who insolently compared the flights of a swan to the waddlings of the domestic duck would have to meet her whom he had thus wronged, face to face, pistol in hand. She was far fiercer than a brother poet who had insisted on being reviewed. “ When I read my own poems,” he wrote to the editor, “ and remember that they are written by a man not yet twenty-one, I am astounded at my own genius. Other men would say ability; but genius I say, and genius I mean.” All I recall of his verse is a single line, in which he describes how the sea

“ Burst in one terrific boil.”

A year or so later we received from him the following letter : —

SIR, — You reduced me to a jelly re my Throbs of Genius. Can you find it in you to discover balm in Gilead for After-Throbs ?

Your broken-boned

AUGUSTUS Jinks.¹

He wrote too late. My review of After-Throbs appeared the very day on which I received his letter, and it was not balm that it contained. Unhappy poet! may his genius have long ceased to astound him, but may it be the object of the ardent if somewhat perplexed admiration of a dutiful and loving wife !

Now and then my reviews brought me letters of a different character. One was from a grand-niece of Sir Walter Scott, who was grateful for the resentment I had shown when a popular female novelist, with a great parade of conferring a benefit on the world, began to serve up a miserable hash of his stories, each in a penny number some twenty or thirty pages long. In her abridgment of Rob Roy she had been so shameless as to make one of the purest of writers guilty of a coarse jest. There was something in this abridgment which led me to suspect that it had not been made from the original, but in the very wantonness of indolence from the dramatized version. I turned to the play, and my suspicions were confirmed, for there I found this same coarse jest. “ It is,” wrote Scott’s niece, ” a real pleasure to me to thank you, those who would have done so far better than I being all dead. . . . There is something touching in the fact that Sir Walter’s fame lives in children ; we must be men and women to thoroughly appreciate him, but it is as children that we learn to love him and his creations.”

The following letter came to me from the west coast of Ireland :—

DEAR MR. LITERARY CRITIC, — I’d rather like to make your acquaintance in the flesh, as I have done long since in the spirit — for you seem to have a good deal of fun in you, and some feeling ; I say some feeling with caution, for in many ways you are utterly without heart, witness the cruel way you cut up those poor lady-novelists. You hash their grammar — their best and most finely-turned phrases, their plots, their spelling, everything is made mince-meat of, without mercy, and without remorse. In the review I have just laid down after some minutes of quiet enjoyment of Mrs. ——’s novel, how you ravened like a wolf among her pet descriptions (there’s a bit of metaphor for you now to carp at), and then you were coarse, not to say brutal, when you said that you could have seen her heroine hanged with much complacency. I often think you are a sour discontented old bachelor with a natural antipathy to the sex — when suddenly you turn round and by a little sentence betray more feeling than I could give you credit for, which makes me suppose you are lord of a happy household of girls and boys with quite a fund of general benevolence in your composition.

Now it was not to tell you all this I have taken the trouble on this blessed Valentine’s Day to sit down and write to you. It is to tell you (and here, if you have got so far, you smile sardonically) I too am among the foolish women. I have written a book — of verses — and published them. I have put dashes purposely between each word to give you time to breathe — and I want to know will you review it ? or has it come to you ? or would you if I sent you a copy ? You said in one of your late Saturdays that though nearly every one who can rhyme tries his or her hand at a sonnet — very few succeed. I send you four sonnets. Do you think them any good ? Some reviewer in this sweet little Ireland, peaceful, prosperous, happy Ireland — said I had been following in Mrs. Browning’s footsteps, of course I love and honour her — and admire her with all my heart, but I never had the presumption to fancy I could follow her even afar off. One day after I had read these remarks, the thought stuck to me, till I wrote these things I send you. When first her sonnets from the Portuguese were given me — I lived on them.

I don’t know if this letter will ever reach its destination. I have a very vague idea about a reviewer in the Saturday. He is a sort of myth — and yet a very palpable reality. ... I ’d almost rather be cut up than passed over in contemptuous silence, and I don’t think any one with a soul worth calling a soul would let it be “ snuffed out by an article.” I ’m perfectly sure Keats never deserved that line of Byron’s — poor fellow — there was “ death in his hand ” long before the review in the Quarterly was put into it.

Farewell. May you live to write many more critiques — but not on me — clever, satirical, abusive, amusing, admirable, as yours sometimes are. I say sometimes

— as I before said some — for you are not infallible.

Truly yours,

I cannot call to mind whether we received this lady’s poems. Her letter shows that she might have done something better than write sonnets. Anybody can write sonnets, though few can read them.

The following letter was written to one of my uncles, a young barrister, by Major John Cartwright, a radical of the old school. So early as 1774 he had published a Letter in Defence of American Independence. He was at that time an officer in the navy. Fond as he was of his profession, he threw it up rather than take part in the war against our colonies. He entered the militia, and rose to the rank of major. Three years before the date of his letter, he had been present at a meeting held in Birmingham for the purpose of electing a “legislatorial attorney,” who was to knock at the door of the House of Commons, and claim the right to look after the interests of that great town in Parliament. With all its population, its industry, and its wealth, it was unrepresented. In its case, and in the case of many another English town in those evil days, taxation went without representation. The major and four gentlemen who stood by his side at the meeting were put on their trial at the Warwick assizes for misdemeanor. Another of my uncles had been on the platform, but he was young and insignificant enough to escape prosecution. His brother, the barrister, was one of Cartwright’s counsel. On the morning of the trial, the old fellow said to him, “ I hope they will send me to prison. It will be the best thing for the cause, for I am sure to die there. I hope they will send me to prison.” The judge was too wise to make such a martyr. Cartwright’s four friends were punished with imprisonment, but he himself was let off with a fine of a hundred pounds. From one of the pockets of his waistcoat, which, after the fashion of the previous century, he wore of a great size, he drew out a large canvas bag, from which he slowly counted one hundred pounds in gold. “ He believed, he said, they were all good sovereigns.” Even the judge himself was amused by his composed manner and his dry tone. Cartwright outlivedhis trial three years, dying at the age of eighty-four. His statue stands before his house in Burton Crescent, London. His niece, Mrs. Penrose, under the assumed name of Mrs. Markham, used to be well known to the children of my younger days by her histories.

DEAR HILL, — Col. de Vergier and two other French officers, escaped from Bourbon Dungeons, dine with me on Thursday at 5.

Make one with us if you can. Yours truly, J. CARTWRIGHT.

Remember the Titles of the several Acts respecting Juries.

BURTON CRESCENT, Tuesday, 12 Nov. 1822. M. D. HILL, ESQ. Boswell Court, Carey Street,

Lincoln’s Inn.

The major, it is said, usually signed his letters, “ Yours radically.” These French officers had escaped from that tyranny which the armies of the allies had imposed on France, and on so much of Europe, after the defeat of Napoleon. The common tyrant had been caged in St. Helena, but over each unhappy nation the tyrant of the ancient stock was only the more firmly fixed. What the rulers of the earth were doing in the year in which this letter was written is thus shown by Miss Martineau : “ The king of Prussia amused himself and his advisers with devising a plan of a new order of nobility which should suddenly become as imposing and influential as if it had been a thousand years old. Ferdinand of Spain was inventing tinsel ornaments for the Virgin. The restored Bourbons of France were studying how best to impose dumbness on their noisy nation. The king of Sardinia was swimming paper ducks in a wash basin to while away his time.” My father met one of the French officers who had escaped from the Bourbon dungeons, who said to him, in English with a foreign accent which added not a little to his humor, “ I was once hanged in France, but, very fortunately, I was not present on the occasion.” He and his fellow-prisoners who had been happy enough to escape the gallows, to which some of their associates were sent, had been hanged in effigy. The same officer told my father that many of his countrymen maintained that the French had gained the battle of Trafalgar. “Yes, I reply,” the officer continued. “ It is true we gained the battle ; but, unfortunately, our French sailors were so ignorant of navigation that they steered their own ships, and their English prizes also, straight into English harbors.”

From a Bourbon king by an easy transition we arrive at Charles I.; for both stubbornly moved along the same narrow groove of dull bigotry and tyranny. In this case I have no autograph, but something perhaps as interesting as an autograph, — a handbill announcing the public sale of the property of the Crown. it runs as follows : —

“ The Contractors for sale of the Lands and Possessions of the late King, Queen, and Prince have resolved to begin their sittings for Sales upon Monday the Fourth of March 1649, as to all such of the said Lands (onely) before that time Surveyed and Certified to the Register, whereof there shall be immediate Tenancies ; from which day the respective preemptions of the immediate Tenants are to begin : And for all such of the Lands, wlierof there are such immediate Tenancies, and wherof the Surveys shall be returned after that day, the said respective preemptions to commence according to a late Additional Act of the 18th of February 1649.

WILLIAM TAYLEURE, CLERK attending the Contractors.”

How great is the transition when we pass from the old radical major and the contractors for the sale of the king’s lands to the poet laureate Southey, a man who, with all his noble qualities, had broken, like the Lost Leader, from the van and the freemen, and sunk to the rear and the slave ! A few months after the date of the following letter, young George Ticknor met him at an evening party. “ There was little company present,” writes Ticknor, “ and soon after I went in I found myself in a corner with Southey, from which neither of us moved until nearly midnight. He immediately began to talk about America. Of Roger Williams and John Eliot I was ashamed to find that he knew more than I did. Roger Williams, he thought, deserved the reputation which Penn has obtained, and Eliot he pronounced one of the most extraordinary men of any country. As he was once traveling in a post-chaise to London, he bought at a stall in Nottingham Mather’s Magnalia, which he read all the way to town, and found it one of the most amusing books he had ever seen. He had read most of our American poetry, and estimated it more highly than we are accustomed to.”Two years later, Ticknor, who visited Southey at Keswick, recorded : “ He considers himself an author by profession, and therefore, as he told me, never writes anything which will not sell, in the hours he regularly devotes to labor. For this reason his poetry has been strictly his amusement. His light reading after supper is now in the fifty-three folios of the Acta Sanctorum.” Macaulay wrote of him : “ A good father, husband, brother, friend, but prone to hate people whom he did not know, solely on account of differences of opinion, and in his hatred singularly bitter and rancorous. Then he was arrogant beyond any man in literary history. To do him justice, he had a fine, manly spirit where money was concerned.” Like Johnson, whom he resembled in his generosity, Southey had known the meaning of the word impransus. “ When Joan of Arc was in the press,”he wrote, “ I often walked the streets at dinner-time for want of a dinner, when I had not eighteen pence for the ordinary, nor bread and cheese at my lodgings. But do not suppose that I thought of my dinner when I was walking; my head was full of what I was composing.”It may well be doubted whether he was more bitter in his hatred towards any one than Macaulay was towards Brougham and Croker: Brougham, of whom he wrote, “ His powers gone. His spite immortal. A dead nettle ; ” and Croker, whom ’‘he detested more than cold boiled veal.” and whose “ varlet s jacket" he promised “to dust in the next number of the Blue and Yellow [the Edinburgh Review].”Southey’s arrogance had been fostered by Landor, who, in the beautiful lines beginning,

comparing him with Virgil, had described the English poet laureate as

Landor’s monstrous laudation had perhaps been won by Southey’s admiration of his brother bard. Writing of him, he said. “ He is the only man living of whose praise I was ambitious, or whose censure would have humbled me.”

The lady to whom Southey’s letter was addressed was a correspondent of Pascal Paoli, the Corsican patriot, and of Mrs. Hemans; I have letters addressed to her by both of them. J. Rickman, who franked it, was the secretary of the Speaker of the House of Commons.

“ His outside,”wrote Southey, “ has so little polish about it that once, having gone from Christ Church to Pool in his own boat, he was taken by the press gang; his robust figure, hard-working hands, and strong voice all tending to deceive them.”

KESWICK, 23 Dec., 1816.

DEAR Madam,— I am very much obliged to you for the manuscript music. The ears which nature has given me are of no use when music is the case, — but my eldest daughter has some allotment of a sense in which I am deficient, — and the tune seems to give pleasure to all who hear it.

Mf Bonamy informed me that Mr. M. Coates was, at that time, hopelessly ill.

I have not seen him since I had the ideasure of meeting you at his table, — and probably he is no longer an inhabitant of this world! Of my other Bristol friends so few are now remaining, that I do not think I shall ever have heart to set foot within my native city again. — Should you ever visit this part of England (the most beautiful part of it) it will give both M Southey and myself great pleasure to show you the environs of Keswick.

Believe me my dear Madam Your obliged

ROBERT SOUTHEY. LONDON, Twenty Sixth Dec., 1816 Miss MAYNARD, 6 Portland Place, Clifton. Bristol.

Free. J. RICKMAN.

His indifference to music Southey shared with many men of genius. “ Sir Isaac Newton, hearing Handel play on the harpsichord, could find nothing worthy to remark but the elasticity of his fingers.” That great man, by the way, cared as little for poetry as for music: “ once being asked his opinion of it, he quoted a sentiment of Barrow that it was ingenious nonsense.”Pope, who had so exquisite an ear for the melody of verse, had no more music in his soul than Newton. One day, at a concert, he asked Dr. Arbutlnot whether the rapture of the company over Handel and his band did not proceed solely from affectation. Johnson, in the Hebrides, used often to stand for some time with his ear close to the great drone of the bagpipe; nevertheless, much as he must have endeared himself to his Highland host by this devotion, he owned that it was not till he was past seventy that he was ever affected by musical sounds. What first moved him were the French horns at a Freemason’s funeral procession. Wordsworth’s ear, if I am not mistaken, was almost as deficient as his brother poet’s.

Southey, twenty years after the date of his letter, had the heart once more to set foot in his native city. If he was saddened by the loss of the friends of his youth, he had a father’s quiet pleasure in showing his son the home of his early years. “ We visited together all his old haunts,” the young man wrote,— “the house where he was born, the schools he had been sent to. He had forgotten nothing, — no short cut, no by-way; and he would surprise me often by darting down some alley, or threading some narrow lane, — the same which in his schoolboy days he had traversed.

From Southey I pass to De Quincey. What a curious account has Carlyle given us of the poet laureate’s outburst of anger against the opium-eater ! “ I asked mildly, with no appearance of special interest, but with more than I really felt, ‘ Do you know De Quineey ? ’ Yes, sir,’ said Southey, with extraordinary animosity, ‘ and if you have opportunity, I ’ll thank you to tell him he is one of the greatest scoundrels living ! ’ I laughed lightly, said I had myself little acquaintance with the man, and could not wish to recommend myself by that message. Southey’s face, as I looked at it, was become of slate color, the eyes glancing, the attitude rigid, the figure altogether a picture of Rhadamanthine rage, — that is, rage conscious to itself of being just. He doubtless felt I would expect some explanation from him. ‘ I have told Hartley Coleridge,’ said he, ‘that he ought to take a strong cudgel, proceed straight to Edinburgh, and give De Quincey, publicly in the streets there, a sound beating, as a calumniator, cowardly spy, traitor, base betrayer of the hospitable social hearth for one thing!’” The thrashing would have been well deserved, though one of the Wordsworths should have had a hand in it; for both the poet and his sister, quite as much as Coleridge, had found him “ a base betrayer of the hospitable social hearth. The hospitality and kindness which he bad for years received from them he repaid by laying bare, in magazine articles, the privacy of their quiet home, and by strokes of envy all the more malignant because they were covert. It was, it seems probable, the recollection of De Quincey’s treachery which led Mr. Lowell to describe him as “ a kind of inspired cad.” “Though my intercourse with Southey,” De Quincey writes, “was at no time very strict, I was yet on such terms that I might in a qualified sense call myself his friend.”If Southey’s advice had been followed, and if the cudgel had been brought down on the opiumeater’s back, De Quincey might have cried out to this “ friend in a qualified sense in the words of the old epigram :

There would have been no need for Hartley Coleridge to take a strong cudgel; it was not a case for “ an oak-plant of a tremendous size,” such as old Johnson kept by him when he received “ the menaces of the ruffian ” Macpherson. For De Quincey a cane would have sufficed. “ He was,” writes Carlyle, “ one of the smallest man figures I ever saw ; shaped like a pair of tongs, and hardly above five feet in all.” “ What would one give to have him in a box, and take him out to talk ! ” said Mrs. Carlyle. Hartley Coleridge was scarcely the man to send to cudgel any one, even a dwarf. With his constant drinking, it was as much as he could have done to keep himself upright; that he should be expected to knock a man down was surely unreasonable. In those summer holidays of my boyhood which I spent at Ambleside I often heard stories of his intemperance. He was living at that time in a cottage on the road to Rydal, supporting himself mainly by giving lessons. No prudent person, I was told, in offering him refreshments, ever had more than a single glass of wine brought in. If the whole bottle was set before him, he was sure to finish it. One summer, on my returning to Ambleside, I learnt that he was dead. He had been overcome with drink at some friend’s house or at an inn. Staggering homewards, he had crept into a low shed, where he had passed the night on the bare earth. The chill which he caught carried him off in a few days. Every one spoke of him with kindly pity. His only enemy was himself.

The following letter was written to the wife of my uncle the barrister; in what year I do not know : —

Monday Night Oct. 12.

MY DEAR MADAM, — I have been obliged to go to bed from mere overpowering want of sleep, and thus — viz. by sleeping too long (having only this minute awakened) — I have unavoidably broken up our plan, which was to have come up in a coach, and have left it to your choice either to return with us (viz. our party of last night), or else to retain us as your companions during Mr. Hill’s absence: — This on the assumption that you had no other engagement. At present, though too late for this choice, yet on the same assumption of your being not otherwise engaged, I write to propose that Mrs De Quincey, myself and my daughter, should come up: — we shall take tea before coming. But we are not quite sure whether we were right in understanding that you did not yourself mean to accompany the gentlemen to the dinner-party. One word of answer will suffice — viz. YES, meaning that you are at home and disengaged, or not better occupied in reading, writing, etc. No, meaning generally that you are unavoidably engaged.

Believe me, my dear Madam, Ever your faithful Servant THOMAS DE QUINCEY.

On September 23, 1828, my uncle had written to his wife: “ I found De Quincey, who has for the tenth time renounced opium, which he said he had not tasted for one hundred and eighty days. He received me with great warmth.” In some Reminiscences which my uncle left he says : “ De Quincey possessed but few books, and those few were generally where he was not. His habits of life to other evils added that of procrastination, and this practice caused him often to revolve the matter of his works for years before he reduced his thoughts to writing.” A curious instance of this revolving habit is thus described by Mrs. Carlyle : “ A boy of the English opium-eater’s told me once he would begin Greek presently; but his father wished him to learn it through the medium of Latin, and he was not entered in Latin yet because his father wished to teach him from a grammar of his own, which he had not yet begun to write.” In the fewness of the books which De Quincey possessed he was like Wordsworth and Landor. Wordsworth had never had many books, while Landor gave away his almost as fast as he got them. It was the want of them which led him into those errors as to facts and those inaccuracies in quotation with which his writings are thickly strewn. When I was an undergraduate at Oxford, one of my comrades, the late Professor John Nichol, of Glasgow, son of the author of The Architecture of the Heavens, told me that his father first met De Quincey at a dinner-party in Edinburgh. The little man came very late, dressed in a rusty suit of black. In the drawing-room, after dinner, he and Dr. Nichol stood together in a corner, engaged in talk, when, in a slow, measured tone, De Quincey said to his new acquaintance, “ Dr. Nichol, can you lend me twopence?” He borrowed money, my friend added, to lay out on opium, and always asked for very small sums, knowing that they would not be refused. Dr. Nichol was so much charmed with his talk that he asked him to visit him, and had him for his guest for some weeks.

In 1880, General Gordon’s brother. Sir Henry W. Gordon, entrusted me with the interesting duty of editing the letters which that great man had written to his sister during the six years of his government of the Soudan. Sir Henry had at first hoped that the work would be undertaken by my brother-in-law, Sir John Scott, at that time vice-president of the international court at Alexandria, now judicial adviser to the Egyptian government. He, fortunately for me, felt that his official position would not allow him to write with the necessary freedom. On bis recommendation I was entrusted with the task.² During these six years of command, vast as was the region over which Gordon exercised almost absolute power, he held no higher rank than colonel. On him was conferred no promotion and no reward. Decorations and honors, year after year, on New Year’s Day and the Queen’s birthday, fell in showers ; none fell on him.

Though he had given his consent to the publication of his letters, he refused to take any direct part in the work. Whatever information I needed I had to get from him through his brother. At first his answers to my questions were copied by Sir Henry. Before long, one came to me in Gordon’s own hand, with the addition of a few words advising his brother henceforth to spare himself the trouble of making copies. I noticed how anxious he was to avoid giving pain. Thus, in a paper which I have had the pleasure of depositing in the library of Williams College, he says, “ In this memo. allusions are made to Baker which must be wrapped up.” Baker was Sir Samuel Baker, the African explorer. Gordon had asked that a few words should be added to the final chapter, in acknowledgment of the kindness shown him on a certain occasion by the Duke of Cambridge and General Sir Lintorn Simmons. All my proofs were read by his brother, but the proof of the last sheet he saw himself, as I discovered when it was returned to me. Against the passage where I said that the duke and Sir Lintorn doubtless felt that in honoring him they were honoring themselves he had written in the margin, in pencil, “ Oh! oh ! ”

The following trifling incident shows the kindness of this great man’s heart. I had never met him, for he did not wish to see me till the book was published. After its publication, it so happened that we were never in London at the same time. He chanced to pay a visit to Bournemouth, where, as he had learnt from some common friend, my youngest son was at school. He went to see the little fellow, talked kindly to him, and gave him a half-crown.

I do not know whether this anecdote is in print. I had it from my publisher, who in his turn had it from Sir Henry Gordon. The Prince of Wales invited the general to dinner, soon after his return to England from the East. The hero replied that he regretted he could not accept the invitation, as by the hour named for the meal he was always in bed. The prince at once begged him to come to lunch.

The following letter was written to my brother-in-law : —

U[NITRD] S[KRVICE] CLCB, PALL MALL.

10. 2. 80.

MY DEAR MR. SCOTT. — I am sending out the Deed Box, full of the papers, addressed to Morrice, Pacha to whom I have written ; you will not mind paying him any expences ; I will pay the Box as far as I can. One paper on Abyssinia will come to you by post in a short time, also some other papers I have, and which have not yet come from Egypt. I send you two books, one as much in praise as the other is in blame of me. I do so because I wish to point my remark, that the praise or blame of man does not affect a man’s welfare ; many would have been troubled at having a book written about them, such as Lindley wrote. Thank God, it has never done me any harm, though its publication cost £1000.

RWdid a noble act, be called on me, so 1 at once apologized for my rude telegram and am going to call on him.

I send you the key of Box and pity you reading those letters.

Believe me, with kind regards to M? Scott and your children,

Yours sincerely and obliged,

C. G. GORDON.

I have in my collection the originals of the two following telegrams sent to Gordon when he was acting as the representative of England on the European Commission of the Danube.³ I reproduce them exactly as they were written, with all their faults in spelling.

ThERAPIA, 1 September, 1873. COLONEL GORDON, GALATZ :

I have received the following telegram from nubar pasha sir Samuel Baka etant de retour le Kedive disereroit s’assures les services du Colonel Gordon pour organiser pays haut nil, et poursuivre suppression de la traite ne sachant pas si Colonel Gordon est encore au Danube le Kedive m’a chargt? de recourrir a votre excellence pour s’enquerir s’ il accepterait cette mission et ces fonctions. H. ELLIOT.

On this telegraph form is written with a red pencil, “ exped àa M. le Colonel. Tueseha.” (Signature undecipherable.) There is an indorsement in Sir Henry Gordon’s hand : “ Sir Henry Elliott ambassador writing to Gordon, offering to Gordon to go to take Baker’s place.”

CAIRO.

Colonel Gordon comissaire gouvernement anglais pour Comission Danube.

Son altesse a heureuse de votre lettre et acceptation le gouvernement anglais vous accordera lautorisation que son altesse a fait demander que vous le demandez vousmém formelement et directement au ministre de la guerre j’ai repondu a votre lettre mais attendu feriez bien de faire votre demande pour automation. NUBAR

[Indorsed by Sir Henry Gordon] “ Nubar Pacha’s telegraph, to Gordon deciding his leaving Danube for Equator.”

I have Gordon’s own copy of Beke’s British Captives in Abyssinia. The frontispiece of this work is a picture of a British captive at Magdala, chained hand and foot, and watched by a native armed with a spear and shield. Underneath Gordon has written in pencil, “I got well out of Johannis power.” Johannis was the king of Abyssinia. In 1879 Gordon was sent to him on a mission by the Khedive. The following brief account by Gordon of his lieutenant-general, Romulus Gessi, I inserted in part in my book. Some lines I suppressed, lest they might give that brave soldier offense. He died, however, of the hardships he had undergone before the publication took place.

“ NOTE. Romulus Gessi aged 49 short compact figure, cool most determined man, born genius for practical ingenuity in mechanics, ought to have been born in 1600 not 1832. Piratical disposition same as Francis Drake ; has been engaged in many petty political affairs, was Interpreter to H. M. Forces in Crimea in 1854-55, born at Multeha [?] Italian subject one day with £1000 another with 2/1d.

“ He is Liva [?] Pacha (General Brigade Pacha), he is 2nd Class of Osmanli order.”

How great a curse European discovery and European trade have brought on Africa is shown in the following brief note in Gordon’s autograph : —

“ I mentioned that the slave districts were entered first by an Englishman ; the trade never was so great before, as it became after the voyages of Petherick related in this book.⁴He opened the country, and these Ivory stations he created rapidly became slave centres, such as Baker describes in his Albert Nyanza. C. G. G.”

In another note, speaking of the end of his first term of command, he says, I returned with the sad conviction that no good could ever he done in these parts, and that it would have been better had Sir S. Baker’s expedition never been sent.” The discoverer and the missionary have generally gone before the trader, while the trader has too often been followed by the slave-dealer, who spreads desolation far and wide. Less than forty years ago, along the banks of the Upper Nile, for hundreds of miles, were thriving villages where Gordon found only a waste. Even in those parts of Africa where the kidnapper has not penetrated, the white man, following in the steps of the discoverer and the missionary, has introduced his poisonous spirits, adding one more horror to the savage life of the tropics. “ I do not much wish well to discoveries,” wrote Johnson, “for I am always afraid that they will end in conquest and robbery.” Horace Walpole tells of a black servant, a remarkably sensible man, who had lived in England many years. His mistress was having read aloud to her the account of the Pelew Islands. “ Somebody happened to say we were sending a ship thither ; the black, who was in the room, exclaimed, ‘ Then there is an end of their happiness.’ ”

George Birkbeek Hill.