Some Brief Biographies

FIVE Oxford men have written with knowledge as well as with excellent judgment and taste sketches of the lives of five princesses of the House of Stuart,¹ four of whom, by their close relationship, their connection with and influence upon the history of their time, can well be placed together in a single volume, their stories being in a way different portions of the same family chronicle. The first of these ladies is Elizabeth, only the Winter Queen of Bohemia, but always the Queen of Hearts, — no less so in the long years of exile, of ceaseless ill-fortune and calamity, than in her happy girlhood in the England still bright with the afterglow of the Elizabethan age. It was in the ominous year when she wore a crown that Wotton dedicated one of the loveliest of English lyrics to The Mistress, and in the evil time to come there were always those willing to devote life and fortune to her service with the ardor of knights of romance. Her marriage had been the occasion of unexampled public rejoicings, she had left England with thousands acclaiming her; fifty years later she returned almost unnoticed to a world where all had changed, — returned only to die. Mr. Hodgkin tells her story admirably; history and personal biography are mingled in their just proportions, and the narrative is vivid and full of interest, notwithstanding the necessity for heroic condensation laid upon the author.

Not one of Elizabeth’s children was dull or commonplace, and her youngest daughter, though perhaps not so exceptionally gifted as two of her elder sisters, was a woman of keen intelligence, quick-witted, humorous, tolerant, interested in many things, and always herself, whether in youth or age, a most interesting personage. It was a melancholy fatality that Sophia’s eldest son should be the one of all her children least to resemble her. From his mother came his splendid regal inheritance, but scarcely a quality of person, mind, or spirit was transmitted to him from the brilliant Palatines. Could not the editor have allowed himself a little more space wherein to have expanded, to the still greater pleasure of his readers, his well-considered sketch of the Electress ? The studies of the little known Mary of Orange and of Henrietta of Orleans, the theme of so many eloquent tongues and pens, are adequate, though in the first, biography is rather overweighted by history. Mr. Bridge is to be commended for his treatment of the fable regarding Henrietta’s death, which Saint-Simon believed and perpetuated. The invincible ignorance of physicians like to those Molière drew naturally encouraged the growth of such fictions, but they should not be repeated to-day as facts. Far distant from these latterday Stuarts seems the shadowy but appealing figure of Margaret, the beloved daughter of the poet-king Janies I., and the unloved wife of the Dauphin who was to he Louis XI. The pathetic story of the beautiful, sensitive girl, with her passion for poetry, — “She often spent the hours of the night in writing roundels, as many as twelve perchance, in the revolution of one day, ” — who was so early done to death by slanderous tongues, has been sympathetically told by Mr. Butler, though as a conscientious historian he has been compelled to set aside some of the charming legends that have clustered about the young Dauphine’s memory, legends doubtless true in spirit if not in the letter.

The volume is made still more attractive by a number of well-selected portraits; but how, in so competently edited a book, does a reproduction of a picture by Vandyck — plainly of Mary of Orange, whom the artist painted so often, from her babyhood till she went a ten-year old bride to Holland, that her child face is a familiar one — appear as a portrait of Henrietta, who was not born till some years after Sir Anthony’s death?

The lady whose pen name is George Paston has already shown considerable skill in the not altogether easy task of giving in some sort the quintessence of certain more or less elaborate biographies, thus making the way easy for readers to obtain a good deal of entertainment and even enlightenment with the smallest possible expenditure of time and trouble. In her latest volume,² which mainly illustrates English literary and artistic life in the first half of the nineteenth century, the place of honor is given to Haydon, an extraordinary man, if not, as he passionately believed, a great painter. It is to be hoped that his Journal is still read in its entirety by some even of the larger public, for not only is it one of the most complete self-revelations in English literature, and one of its most moving tragedies, but it is also the work of a man who read and thought, who could observe and describe. May George Paston’s clever sketch serve as a stepping-stone for adventurous readers. Lady Morgan is brightly, fairly, and sufficiently dealt with; but the study of Lady Hester Stanhope seems something like task-work, — an uncommon fault in this author. The Howitts are written of sympathetically, but it is rather painful to find these dearly beloved friends of one’s childhood relegated so completely to the past. Two aliens complete the group, Prince Pückler-Muskau and N. P. Willis, both on account of their pictures of English society in the twenties and thirties. The Prince who was, in no insignificant degree, soldier, sportsman, traveler, fashionable author, landscape gardener, dandy, Don Juan, unconscious humorist, and heiress hunter, visited England in the last capacity, and, his two years search being vain, revenged himself by publishing his travels. Willis, a decade later, was a more appreciative and better-tempered observer than the disappointed German. The lapse of time not only has rendered that early but shining example of “personal journalism,” Pencillings by the Way, innocuous, but has given to those graphic and readable letters a distinct and increasing value. Here, as elsewhere in this agreeable book, proper names are sometimes maltreated, as when the lady who became Mrs. Motley is called “Mary Benham, ” and Willis’s biographer (to whom George Paston owes so much in this sketch that it is to be wished she had always followed his lead more carefully) appears as “Mr. De Beers.” There are slips too in dates, and less than justice is done to Willis on one sad occasion in his life by the confounding of one year with another. S. M. F.