Passages of a Working Life during Half a Century
Prelude 2
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Section II
At the midsummer of 1805, I was taken altogether from my school.
It did not appear to me that I was changing restraint for freedom. I left with bitter
feelings, for I had imbibed such a tincture of learning as made me desirous to be a
scholar. My father’s determination to put me to business, at the early age of
fourteen, did not pass without some remonstrance from my schoolmaster. His answer was that
I had acquired enough knowledge to fit me for my station in life; and if I became a
bookseller I was not likely to be treated as Johnson
treated Osborne, when he knocked him down with a
folio, saying, “Lie there, thou lump of lead.” My destiny was sealed
when I signed my indenture of apprenticeship. My life, however, was not altogether without
opportunities of mental improvement. My first occupation interested me greatly. M. Porny, of whom I have spoken, died in 1804, leaving my
father one of his executors. The co-executor declined to act. With the exception of a few
legacies, all M. Porny’s property, of which the residue exceeded
4000l., was bequeathed to a small charity school at Eton. Upon
his decease, letters which he had prepared were forwarded to his surviving relatives at
Caen, and they manifested an intention to dispute his chief bequest, under the Statute of
Mortmain. A friendly suit in Chancery was accordingly commenced; and it being necessary
that a somewhat voluminous French correspondence should be laid ![]()
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before
the Master in Chancery to whom the matter was referred, my first literary task was to
translate the letters which had been sent and received during the half century in which
M. Porny had found a refuge in England from the alleged unkindness
of his family. The probability is that the Master never read either the originals or my
translation; but these letters were read by me with intense interest. In them there was a
mystery gradually unfolded, as in some enchaining narrative of fiction. The real name of
the French teacher at Eton College—the author of many elementary books, and of a well-known
volume on Heraldry, that bear the name of A. Porny—was
Antoine Pyron du Martre. Here were depicted the undying memories
of early wrongs; the strong will which had scorned all fellowship of his kinsmen when the
solitary native of Normandy was struggling for bread in a foreign land; the triumphs of his
pride in rejecting the proffered kindness which came too late; the determination that he
would leave his hard-earned riches for the benefit of the land in which he had gathered
them. The educational books of M. Porny are obsolete. But there is a
building in Eton, known as “Porny’s Free School,” which will not pass
into oblivion; for here sixty boys and thirty girls are educated. The old foreigner, as I
knew him, was a Poor Knight of Windsor. I have a curious account, in his own handwriting,
of “most of all the expenses which I have incurred for being made a Poor Knight of
Windsor,” in which the date of his removal from Eton to the Castle is given
as the 27th of November, 1781. This paper is in some respects a singular record of a past
condition of society. It would appear that M. Porny’s
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official residence in the Upper Foundation was in a ruinous condition;
that he had to bear the cost of repairs himself, amounting in various items to more than
two hundred pounds, after he had vainly petitioned the Board of Works, and had, with a
sagacious appreciation of the habits of public departments, propitiated the local officer
of the Board by presents of two dozen of claret, two dozen of Madeira, a turbot, and two
lobsters. The good old Frenchman was thus anything but a Poor Knight
when he retired from his labours. He lived in his lettered ease very frugally for the
accomplishment of his cherished purpose of founding a Free School, having his chief
enjoyment in a small garden which he rented near the town, wherein he built a sort of
pavilion where he worked and meditated.
And now began to be developed the peculiar temptations of my position—the
opportunity for desultory reading to the neglect of all systematic acquirement; the
tendency to day-dreams and morbid fancies, in the utter want of any improving companionship
with those of my own age. From fourteen to seventeen I was learning the printer’s
trade, more, as it were, for recreation than for use; set no task-work, but occasionally
working with irregular industry at some self-appointed tasks. The indulgence of my father
was meant, I may believe, to compensate me for his opposition to my desire for a higher
occupation than that which he pursued. Thus I was often galloping my pony along the glades
of the forest; or watching my float, hour after hour, from the Thames bank at Datchet or at
Clewer; or wandering, book in hand, by the river-side in the early morning; or plunging
into “the shade of ![]()
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melancholy boughs” on some
“sunshine holiday.” I read the old novels and the old poems again
and again. Miss Porter and Mrs. Opie gave me fresh excitement when I was tired of
Mrs. Radcliffe. “The Pleasures of Hope” and Beattie’s “Minstrel” had long been my familiar favourites.
At this time there were published charming little volumes of verse and prose, as
“Walker’s Classics,” one of
which was generally in my pocket. But in 1805 a new world of romance was opened to me by
“The Lay of the Last Minstrel.”
The old didactic form of poetry now seemed tedious compared with the adventures of
William of Deloraine, and the tricks of the Goblin
Page. Meanwhile my small Latin and less Greek were vanishing away. The newspaper, too,
occupied much of my reading time. It was a period of tremendous interest, even to the
apprehension of a boy. What an autumn and what a winter were those of 1805, in which I was
enabled, day by day, to read the narratives of such deeds as stirred the heart of England
in the days of the great Armada! Napoleon had broken
up the camp at Boulogne, and was marching to the Rhine. Nelson had gone on board the “Victory”
at Portsmouth, and had joined the fleet before Cadiz. On the 3rd of November came the news
of the surrender of the Austrian army to the French Emperor at Ulm. On the 7th we were
huzzaing for the final naval glory of Trafalgar, and weeping for the death of
Nelson. Pitt rejoiced and
wept when he was called up in the night to receive this news, as the humblest in the land
rejoiced and wept. Before I saw the funeral of Nelson, on the 9th of
January, Pitt had received that fatal mail which told of the ![]()
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destruction at Austerlitz of all his hopes of a triumphant coalition
against France. It broke his heart. He died on the 23rd of January. Tame, by comparison, as
were the great public events which followed these mighty struggles, they were perhaps more
exciting in the conflicting opinions which they provoked. England was still heart-whole.
She was not dismayed, even when Napoleon had the Prussian monarchy at
his feet, and Alexander of Russia had exchanged vows
of friendship with him on the raft at Tilsit. Though she became isolated in her great
battle for existence, her resolution was not exhausted. But she was humiliated by the
events of the Dardanelles and of Buenos Ayres. She blushed when Copenhagen was bombarded,
and she fancied that the abstraction of the Danish fleet was a wanton robbery. In this
case, as in many others, journalism was not history. The secret articles of the Treaty of
Tilsit had not then come to light for the vindication of the Government.
The people at this time, even at Windsor, grew gloomy and discontented.
Public affairs were unprosperous; parties ran high; the taxes increased with the expenses
of the war and the yearly additions to the interest of the debt. It was not only the actual
amount of taxation of which the middle classes complained, but of the oppressive and
insulting mode of their assessment. The excisable trader had too long been familiarised
with the presence of the revenue officer to complain. He walked into the
tallow-chandler’s workshop without ceremony, put a seal upon his copper and his
dipping vat, and locked up his moulds. He looked over the grocer’s wares of tobacco,
pepper, and tea, at his good pleasure; and this pro-![]()
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cess, which he
called taking stock, was insulting and troublesome to the honest, and no real check upon
the fraudulent. The liquor-merchant did not dare to send out a dozen of wine or a gallon of
spirits without a permit. The Income-Tax was truly inquisitorial, for the local
Commissioners had no hesitation in ordering a tradesman to produce his ledger and
cash-book. If there was an error in the return of Assessed Taxes the resident officer of
revenue, called an Inspector, immediately made a surcharge, which it was extremely
difficult to get off by appeal. I was once horror-struck by witnessing a scene between an
apoplectic innkeeper and the tax-collector, who had no alternative but to insist upon the
payment of a confirmed surcharge. The unhappy man, doubly red with passion, slid out of his
arm-chair in the bar, and, falling upon his knees, exclaimed, “May the curse of
God light upon you all. Now I’ll pay it.”
And yet, amidst much grumbling and disaffection, the majority of my
townsmen went on in the lighthearted course which was habitual to them. There were few
fluctuations of fortune amongst us, as in a manufacturing district; no sudden prostrations
of the capitalist; no exceptional miseries of the labourer. There was amusement and
excitement for us in the invariable round of the weeks and months. The 4th of June was a
great day of bell-ringing, and reviews, and the regatta of the Eton boys, which closed with
fireworks. There were Ascot Races, to which the Royal Family came in state up the course,
their carriages preceded by the master of the buckhounds, with his huntsman and his yeomen
prickers. Ascot was too distant from London for a multifarious assemblage from Tottenham
Court Road ![]()
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and St. Mary Axe to be there. The neighbouring gentry came
in their carriages, and the farmers, came in their taxed carts. A few Bow Street officers
stood around the royal booth, but they were not installed in the preventive duties of
suppressing E. O. tables, and of overturning the stools of the numberless professors of
“the thimble-rig” and “prick in the garter.” If a pickpocket were
detected, he had Lynch law. He was conducted to a pond at the rear of the booths, and
there, with a long rope fastened round his waist, was dragged through the water till he was
half dead. There was the weekly meet of the hounds, who duly went forth to some
neighbouring common from the kennel at Swinley, with the deer in the cart. It was not
necessary to give the poor animal much law, for the stag-hound of that day was slow, and
there were more hacks than hunters in the field. The King walked as usual on the Terrace,
but loyalty was not so demonstrative as in the earlier days. The Marquis of Thomond knocked off a man’s hat when it was not lifted as
the King passed, and the suspected democrat knocked down the Marquis of
Thomond.
Left much to my own thoughts, young as I was, I gradually grew into a
chronic state of suspicion as to the general excellence of our political and social system.
I saw a vast deal of wretchedness around me, and I saw no attempt to relieve it except by
doles of bread at the church door on Sundays, with an indiscriminate alms-giving to
vagrants every night by the overseer, and a driving of them out of the borough by the
beadle the next day. There was no education, except at the Free School for some thirty boys
and ![]()
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twenty girls. The national school of Eton, which the good old
Frenchman founded, preceded our Windsor national school by fifteen years. Out relief to the
poor was voted every week by a committee with a lavish hand. The assistant overseer
insulted the weak, and was bullied by the strong. The parish gravel-pit was the specific
for want of employment, continuous or temporary. The poors rate was enormous, for there was
destitution everywhere through sickness and death, produced by the contempt of sanitary
laws. There was no dispensary, and the parish doctor was hard worked and ill paid. It is
difficult, in these happier times of fiscal enlightenment, to estimate what the poor had to
endure in the incidence of taxation. The great burden which they had to bear was in the
dearness of food. Without mentioning the effect upon their means of living by the laws for
the protection of agriculture—which told upon the market-price not only of bread, but of
meat, bacon, butter, cheese—there was excessive direct taxation for the purposes of revenue
upon sugar, upon tea, upon coffee, upon soap, upon candles, upon salt. They lived in
miserable hovels, for there were duties of enormous pressure upon bricks, upon foreign
timber, upon glass. The cost of a cotton gown was enhanced by the duties upon raw cotton
and upon printed calicos. Worst of all, the effect of this vast mass of injudicious taxes
was to arrest the profitable employment of capital, and thus to reduce the labourer to the
lowest condition. The oppression and the neglect which I witnessed all around me,—evils of
which I did not see the causes or anticipate the remedies,—drove me into those socialistic
beliefs which it is a mistake to think did not exist in ![]()
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young and
incautious minds long before the present day. I was a sort of Communist in 1808. In a
satirical poem (whose MS. has turned up with other rubbish of verse and prose stored in an
old box) I poured out my indignation against the indifference and pride, lay and clerical,
which I saw around me. I find there these lines, which I give, believe me, not as evidence
of poetical talent but of a jaundiced imagination. Many have written much of the same stuff
at a riper age than mine, who have in time learnt the worth of more practical philanthropy.
But surely that youth is to be pitied who begins by setting up for a political economist. “Hail happy days, primeval ages hail, Which deck the warm enthusiast’s glowing tale, When simple Nature, pure and unconfined, With equal gifts ennobled all mankind; When hardy energy and rugged toil Alone could snatch the blessings of the soil, And wearied diligence return’d to seize The cup of pleasure in the lap of ease! Now when the hand of unsubstantial worth Grasps every treasure of the teeming earth, And Nature vainly spreads her equal store Whilst millions, heirs of plenty, still are poor, Say, shall the glittering pomp of pride despise The humble toil that taught the proud to rise? Say, shall the wretched, all-laborious hind In vain demand the bread he gives mankind?” |
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I fear that in this unwatched time of morbid thoughts my religious
principles were in as great danger of running wild as my political. I had read some of the
old divines—Hall, and Barrow, and Jeremy Taylor—with real
benefit. I fear that I acquired a sceptical humour from such defences of the faith as
Watson’s “Apology for the Bible,” and ![]()
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Lyttelton’s “Conversion of St. Paul.” They attempted to
prove too much to satisfy my reason, which they addressed exclusively. They did not marshal
their proofs with the consummate skill displayed by Sherlock in his “Trial of
the Witnesses;” nor did they charm away the mists of doubt by the tolerant
and fearless candour of Berkeley in his “Alciphron.” Beattie’s “Essay on Truth” did not sink deep into my heart,
although the King and Queen had lauded it as the greatest of all theological triumphs, as
if there had been no such book as Butler’s
“Analogy.” The service
at our church was too cold and formal—often too slovenly—to satisfy me. There was no
congregational singing. Chaunts and musical responses were unknown. I got away from it,
whenever I could, to find a seat in St. George’s Chapel, where the cathedral service
was exquisitely performed. On Sunday the choir was full; but I could stand by the iron
gates of the south aisle, and hear every note of the rich harmonies of Boyce and Handel
breathed from the lips of Sale or Vaughan. On a frosty winter evening of the week-day it
mattered little to me that the choir was empty and cold. I yielded up my whole heart to the
soothing influences. I was sometimes glad to be admitted into a stall by a good-natured
verger; for at times my attention was sadly distracted by the tricks and grimaces of the
young choristers, who, as they knelt in apparent prayer, were occupied in modelling hideous
figures out of the ends of their wax candles. Such were the secrets disclosed to me as I
commonly sat on the free bench by the side of the sportive lads. These practices were
gradually extinguished by a better discipline; but there was one practice which no
discipline could ![]()
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control, for it was an institution as old as the days
of James I. Decker, in his
“Gull’s Horn-book,”
thus ironically advises the lounger in Paul’s: “Be sure your silver spurs
clog your heels, and then the boys will swarm about you like so many white butterflies;
when you, in the open quire, shall draw forth a perfumed embroidered purse, and quoit
silver into the boys’ hands.” Thus have I seen a stranger civilian
stalk into the choir of St. George’s Chapel. The spur was instantly detected; and
when the bewildered man was surrounded by a bevy of white surplices as he loitered in the
nave, there was no help for him but to pay the spur-money.
Such interruptions to the beauty and solemnity of the service were not
sufficient to prevent their abiding impressions; and thus the salt of devotion was not
wholly washed out of me. I was, however, well nigh rushing into the desert, in going
through the ceremony which was to keep me in the fold. I had diligently prepared myself for
Confirmation. Dr. Fisher, Bishop of Salisbury, was
to perform the rite. There was an absence of all solemnity, and even of decency, upon which
I look back with disgust. I still see the bishop’s officers driving the young people
to the altar-rails as if they were sheep going to the fair; the monotonous formality of the
imposition of hands upon the huddled batches who knelt for a few minutes, and then were
chased back to their seats by the impatient ministers of the solemnity. Its failure
altogether to satisfy my excited feelings compelled me into a passion of tears, and I went
home and told my father that I would be a Quaker or a Unitarian. I think that Confirmation
confirmed whatever was ![]()
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sceptical in my composition; and I had to escape
into the region of natural piety, and long dwell there, before I could become reconciled to
the establishment which could endure such profanations.
Up to my sixteenth or seventeenth year I had found little in my
professional pursuits to interest me. But I then became what Mr. Hill Burton terms a “Bookhunter.” My father was always a
great buyer of second-hand books. He attended sales. He purchased private libraries. He
bought many more books than he sold. Many of his rare volumes had been heaped up in
cupboards till I routed them out, and made a complete catalogue of some thousands. This
occupation was of lasting advantage to me, in widening my horizon of knowledge. I was led
to study and abstract, not only Dibdin and De Bure, but the catalogues of great London booksellers,
such as those of White and Egerton and Cuthell (the
predecessors of the later and greater authorities). These enlightened my provincial
estimate of value by “scarce,” “rare,” “very rare.” To
hunt in brokers’ shops; to attend sales, and sometimes bid for volumes that I carried
home in triumph at a small price; to talk with gusto to an old apothecary at Slough about
black-letter treasures; this was a pursuit that weaned me from many of my idle reveries,
and was not without its use in later life. The remembrance of that worthy book-collector of
the then small village of Slough fills me, even now, with a sort of pride at the honour of
having been regarded by him with a feeling that we were fellow-travellers upon the same
road—he with his large experience and superb acquisitions, I with my newly-developed
bibliomania and small store of ![]()
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treasures. Often have I peeped into his
little shop on the high road,—strong in many odours among which rhubarb prevailed,—to see
if my master was at liberty to discourse to a pupil on his favourite theme. He would
suspend his labours, if he were not too busy, and hand over the pestle to his attendant
boy. We then went up his narrow staircase into his sanctum. His first words invariably
were, “What have you got?” I remember to have found upon a stall in
Windsor market two black-letter pamphlets of the early English Reformers. They were not
much to his taste when I produced them; nor did he care for a rare
Elzevir which I brought out of my pocket. He would then unlock the
casket where he kept his jewels, and would delight my eyes with something rich and rare
that he had recently obtained in a hasty visit to London, made for the especial purpose of
a book-hunt. How well do I recollect the glow of his honest face as he placed before me a
Wynkyn de Worde, torn and, dirty, but
nevertheless a fit companion for the imperfect Caxton on his most sacred shelf. Missals he had, and early English Bibles.
They ranged harmoniously side by side. I soon grew to laugh at Dr.
Peckham’s enthusiasm; but better thoughts would suggest to me how good
it was that an old man who had no cares of children to engross him,—one who had little
aptitude for the acquirement of real knowledge, scientific or literary—should have a
pursuit which was intensely gratifying to him, and had a semblance of learning to the world
as well as to himself.
Even as Sir William Jones advised
the young Templar to read over law catalogues at his breakfast, that he might gain a
general perception of ![]()
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the learning of which he desired to become the
master, so I gained something like a broad view of the range of literature by my
bibliographical studies. In these dealings in second-hand books, a circumstance occurred
which I think had some effect in leading me to one of the most pleasant labours of my
future life. I had been sent to a house at Old Windsor to make a list of books belonging to
a clergyman who had received an appointment in India. When the price to be given had been
settled at home, I again went to make the offer, with the money in my hand. The generous
man was pleased with what he considered liberal terms, and said to me, “Young
gentleman, I give you that imperfect copy of Shakspere for yourself.” It was the first folio. Sadly
defective it was in many places. I devised a plan for making the rare volume perfect. The
fac-simile edition, then recently published, was procured. Amongst the oldest founts of
type in our printing-office was one which exactly resembled that of the folio of 1623. We
had abundant fly-leaves of seventeenth-century books which matched the paper on which this
edition was printed. I set myself the task of composing every page that was wholly wanting,
or was torn and sullied. When the book was handsomely bound I was in raptures at my
handiwork. I was to have the copy for myself; but one of the Eton private-tutors, to whom
my father showed the volume, and explained how it had been completed, offered a tempting
price for it, and my treasure passed from me. Some real value remained. The process of
setting up the types led me to understand the essential differences of the early text, as
compared with modern editions with ![]()
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which I was familiar, especially
those which had been maimed and deformed for the purposes of the stage. What would I not
now give, could I obtain this testimonial that I had not been altogether uselessly employed
in this morning of my life, before a definite purpose for the future had given energy and
consistency to my pursuits!
My future walk in the world was gradually shaping itself into a distant
view of a practicable hill-side road. It became clear to me that, as the professions seemed
to be shut out from my adoption by my father’s anxious desire that I should remain
with him, my only way of escape from the petty cares of the trade of a country bookseller
and small printer was to make literature, in some way or other, my vocation. It was not by
writing commonplace essays and occasional odes and sonnets (which I had the sense to burn
as fast as they were composed) that I was to carry out this purpose. If I were to
accomplish anything, I must have a locus standi.
There was my father’s printing-office; he was not without capital. Windsor, with its
objects of interest, was without a newspaper. Some day, not very far off, should my
ambition gain me the conduct of such a journal? I felt that the vocation of a
journalist—even of a provincial journalist—required thought, energy, various knowledge. I
applied myself to study the history of my country and the nature of its institutions. I had
De Lolme and Blackstone often at my side. Burke
enchanted me. Yet I did not wholly surrender my political faith to the eloquent philosophy
which had become Toryism, and which, in the dread of the French Revolution, was opposed to
every change and every obvious remedy for the grossest ![]()
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abuses. The
Hunts—John and Leigh—began to publish “The Examiner” in 1808. To my enthusiastic views, the
Hunts were the true men—almost the only ones who spoke the
truth—as the younger brother was the most winning of periodical writers. Then there was the
“Edinburgh Review”—advocating
Catholic Emancipation and many practical reforms which were held as dangerous innovations,
and which, in their terror of the word “innovation,” legislators were afraid to
touch. But when the Reviewers were indiscriminately denouncing the conduct of the war and
the imbecility of the Government—bitter in their sarcasms against administrative mistakes,
depressing in their belief of the hopelessness of the contest, and ungenerous in their
appreciation of the only military leader who seemed likely to stand between the living and
the dead and stay the plague,—I could see, however imperfectly, the one-sidedness of
political partizanship which neutralized the best efforts of the Whig Journal. Conflicting
opinions sometimes distracted me. There were the alternations of joy and of gloom, of
confidence and of despair, as the events of 1808-9 presented themselves to view. The
insurrection of the Spanish Patriots was a beacon-light amidst the darkness. The people
were shouting one day for Wellesley’s triumph
over Junot, and the next day cursing the Convention
of Cintra. Moore had marched into Spain in November;
on the 1st of January he had accomplished his disastrous retreat to Corunna, there won a
victory and died a soldier’s death. Never shall I forget my feelings on the bitter
cold day on which this news arrived, nor the indignation with which, some months after, his
Journal was perused. There came ![]()
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to Windsor the son of a joiner, who had
left his father’s house a stalwart dragoon, and returned crippled and emaciated from
the Spanish campaign. He lent me his simple diary of his sufferings and privations, which
told of the horrors of war far more forcibly than the newspaper reports of the wounded and
fever-stricken who filled the hospitals. The public mind was inflamed by the mixed feelings
of disappointment and pity. Then came the wretched inquiry into the conduct of the
Duke of York. The hopes that had been revived of
Germany being roused to resistance were dissipated by the battle of Wagram. The expectation
of a mighty blow to be struck by England single-handed against France, by the greatest
armament that had ever left our shores, came to an end in the pestilent marshes of
Walcheren. Talavera failed to raise the once-sanguine national spirit. It was a long while
before many people warmed into hope and confidence; months, and even years, before they
could fully learn to disbelieve the prophecies of the Whigs, and refuse to throw themselves
in the dust before the car of the conqueror. For myself, I had the old patriotic
associations around me to prevent me wholly agreeing with the freeholders of my county in
their address to the King, that, “under the government of persons apparently
inadequate to avert the dangers and difficulties of the country, we see no end to our
misfortunes.” I was not yet prepared to write Finis Anglicæ. With my fellow-townspeople of all ranks and ages, I
went into the boundless excitement of the Jubilee of the 25th of October; was a manager of
the ox-roasting in the Bachelor’s Acre; marched in a procession of Bachelors, in the
evening costume ![]()
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of blue coat, white waistcoat, knee-breeches, and silk
stockings, to present slices of the ox on a silver salver to the Queen and Princesses;
danced at the Jubilee Ball, at the Town Hall; and wrote satirical verses upon the genteel
exclusives who attempted to separate the attorneys’ wives and daughters from the
grocers’ wives and daughters, by stretching a silken rope across the room, thus
forming two sets. I somehow recollect that the plebeian ladies were as well dressed, and
rather more beautiful, than those above the rope, so that a good many of the exalted were
left without partners—at least, by the younger officers of the Blues and the Stafford
Militia.
Windsor was a town that had ceased, in those days, to be the residence of
many persons of independent fortunes. There was mushroom gentility growing up at the
Castle’s foot; there was the unapproachable dignity of Canons of Windsor and Fellows
of Eton; there were the pretensions of brewers and corn-dealers, who flattered themselves
that they ranked far above shopkeepers. An atmosphere of proud ignorance was surrounding
the whole region. I had a confident belief that I could do something, among my own class,
to dissipate this fog. In 1810 I formed some dozen young men into a Reading Society. We
hired a room of the corporation in connection with the Town Hall. They elected me their
President. Twenty-three years afterwards Sir John
Herschel was the President of a similar society at Windsor; and in a lecture
which I then delivered I told my old townsmen how we had failed, and what were the changes
of opinion that had made one of the greatest scientific men of the age a leader in the
diffusion of intelligence, whilst ridicule awaited the earlier effort of ![]()
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myself and a few others. In the old box of forgotten records of my tentative progress to
usefulness in my generation, I find my inaugural address. Let me copy a passage to exhibit
a specimen of the good old times:—
“An opinion has been set forth with no little activity, and with
a plausibility of ridicule sufficient to actuate those who ought to have united most
cordially in this measure—a cry which has been raised in the haunts of the ignorant and
at the tables of the educated—that it is departing from our proper sphere of action to
engage in pursuits of this nature. These sagacious reasoners would imply that the
common reward of ordinary occupation is sufficient to engross every faculty of the
industrious part of the community. No pursuits shall fill up the hour of relaxation but
those of trifling vulgarity or listless inaction. Good heavens! when I devote myself to
occupations which are alike rendered necessary by my duty and my interest, am I to
extinguish every honourable and praiseworthy feeling and rest satisfied with the torpid
exercise of daily drudgery? When these cold-hearted bigots would thus exclude me from
every gratification of intellect, why do they not demand that I should close my eyes to
the appearances of universal nature, where every object excites my curiosity and my
wonder? I am so sufficiently convinced of the dignity and importance of an industrious
life, that I will never exchange it for the gaudy insipidity of luxurious idleness; but
I will yet earnestly endeavour to raise its importance, by acquisitions that will
exempt me from the oppressions of power or the arrogance of wealth.”
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injustice to those who prevented the extension of what would now be called a
“Literary and Scientific Institution.” I believe we were ourselves exclusives;
and that if any one of our members had proposed the admission of the most intelligent
journeyman amongst us, the sons of substantial tradesmen and the lawyers’ or
bankers’ clerks would have hooted him down. The age of mechanics’ institutes,
in which it is desired, if not altogether attained, that all are to meet on the common
platform of knowledge, was still far off. The opinions of the great majority were against
adult education altogether. The young men of the middle class were to rest satisfied with
their small school acquirements. For the working class to read books was to make them
dangerous members of society. Nevertheless, some did read; and their reading was not
altogether of that innocent but dreary kind which those who dropped tracts in poor
men’s homes, about the duty of loyal obedience and reverential content, thought
sufficient—the next best thing to the old safe ignorance.
A great revolution was coming over Windsor. In November, 1810, the
Princess Amelia died. The youngest daughter of
George III.—perhaps the most beautiful of a
beautiful female family—had for some years been a sufferer from a malady which the best
surgical advice had arrested but had failed to cure. One of the Frogmore fêtes was given
in. honour of her supposed restoration, and I remember a transparency of Hygeia, which was an emblem of gratitude for a signal
blessing. After the death of the Princess, I had the task of making a catalogue of her
well-selected library, in the suite of apartments which she occupied on the East side of
the Castle. ![]()
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It seemed like a voice from the tomb when I recently
lighted upon a touching prayer, which I had copied from a blank leaf of her Prayer Book. It
will not now be considered a violation of confidence if I print it:
“Gracious God, support thy unworthy servant in this time of
trial. Let not the least murmur escape my lips, nor any sentiment but of the deepest
resignation enter my heart; let me make the use Thou intendest of that affliction Thou
hast laid upon me. It has convinced me of the vanity and emptiness of all things here;
let it draw me to Thee as my support, and fill my heart with pious trust in Thee, and
in the blessings of a redeeming Saviour, as the only consolations of a state of trial.
Amen.”
The illness of the Princess Amelia
produced an effect upon the mind of the King from which
he never recovered. It is scarcely necessary for me to repeat the story of the ring which
she placed upon her father’s finger, nor to infer the mysteries which were supposed
to be involved in that solemn appeal to his affection. This interview is popularly held to
have called forth, with a fatal intensity, the dormant insanity of his constitution. At the
beginning of 1811 the Regency Bill passed. Then we looked upon the Queen’s
council—archbishops, chancellor, chief justices, master of the rolls, lord-chamberlain,
master of the horse—driving through our streets, for their periodical inspection of their
afflicted sovereign. The council of the 6th of April, 1811, was thus attended. Rumours soon
went forth that the King was better. On Sunday night, the 20th of May, our town was in a
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the next day the
physicians would allow his Majesty to appear in public. On that Monday morning it was said
that his saddle-horse was ordered to be got ready. This truly was no wild rumour. We
crowded to the Park and the Castle Yard. The favourite horse was there. The venerable man,
blind but steady, was soon in the saddle, as I had often seen him,—a hobby-groom at his
side with a leading rein. He rode through the Little Park to the Great Park. The bells
rang; the troops fired a feu de joie. The King
returned to the Castle within an hour. He was never again seen outside those walls.
The failure of my scheme of an association for mutual improvement was a
blow to me. I had other mortifications which disgusted me more and more with my position,
and made me fear that it would be a wild attempt to establish a journal at Windsor. I was
again driven to the moody companionship of my own thoughts. For two years the dear tutor of my school-days at Ealing had resided near
Windsor—occasionally doing duty at our church—once more my warm friend and instructor.
Under his guidance I accomplished a distant and a wearisome travel, but with a new sense of
pleasure in beholding unfamiliar scenes. With him I saw the sea for the first time. With
him I made the tedious and somewhat perilous passage from London Bridge to Margate. Ye
happier youths and maidens of another generation, smile not at the epithets I bestow upon
this sail upon a summer-sea. None of you citizens of the 25th of Victoria can fitly understand what those had to go through in the 50th of
George III., who ventured upon the deck of a Margate
hoy. The quick run in the steamer from Tilbury after the comfortable ![]()
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early dinner, and then your shrimps and tea in your lodging-house long before the sun is
down—contrast these delights with what I have to remember. A hurried breakfast at six, so
as to be on board at seven; two hours of danger amidst the colliers in the Pool; a pelting
storm in the river, with no luxurious cabin to fly to; Gravesend clock striking two as we
drifted past the dingy town; hungry; the steward provided with no more tempting fare than a
slice of hard boiled-beef and a lump of stony cheese; no drink but rum and water, for
brandy was almost unknown and soda-water undiscovered; the wind rising; the waves raging;
groans above and below; darkness soon after we had passed the Nore; then the hoy becalmed
off Herne Bay; Margate cliffs in sight as another morning breaks; no pier to land at; a
pickaback ride through the surf in a dirty fellow’s grasp; a struggle between the
temptations of breakfast or bed; a decision for bed; and a second day almost gone before we
can find our appetite or our legs.
Circumstances too soon removed the friend of my boyhood to a distant part
of the country. I was alone. I pined for the conversation of educated men. No one took heed
of me. I writhed under neglect; but I lost little in not being familiar with those above me
in station. There was a coarseness of manners, not only amongst half-pay officers and
retired tradesmen, but amongst persons of independent means and good families—aye, even
amongst courtiers—which revolted me. I have heard at our mayors feast toasts proposed by
men whose rank gave them a claim to the seats of honour, which the lowest and the most
ignorant would now be ashamed to utter. Notwithstanding my strong local attachment, I grew
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to be thoroughly disgusted with my position at Windsor. About this
time I became possessed of a small entailed estate at Iver, which I fancied would give me
the means of emancipation from a life that had become distasteful to me. I entreated my
father to enter me as a student at one of the Inns of Court. He at last gave a reluctant
consent, and went to London, to make the necessary arrangements, as I believed. We neither
of us knew much about the probationary condition of a barrister’s life, and it was
necessary to obtain some accurate information. His friend, the Editor of a daily paper (of
whom I shall have more particularly to speak), dissuaded my father from encouraging my
ambition. The Bar, as he represented it, was a profession of which the prizes were very
few. If they came at all, they had to be waited for during a long and dreary time. Many a
clever man, as he had seen, had struggled for the five years before his call, and had then
to starve through another ten years before he got a brief. To live in London was expensive;
and thus the young man who had set out with a vision of the Great Seal to marshal him the
way that he was going, gave up the Pleaders desk to learn the use of the Reporter’s
notebook; became corrupted by the careless and dissipated life of too many “gentlemen
of the press”; was cut off from domestic happiness; and passed through the world
unhonoured—a careless sensualist or a splenetic misanthrope. My father returned home with
such a dismal picture of the life which I had courted, that I somewhat doggedly resumed my
easy and inglorious occupation; not without a belief that “There’s a Divinity that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them how we will.” |
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In the autumn of 1811 I had a few weeks of happiness, in which I regained
something of my confidence in the existence of goodness and kindness. The Countess of Orkney, who lived at Cliefden—occupying the
wings of the old palatial mansion whose principal front had been burnt down a few years
before, but whose fame was imperishable, as the “Cliefden’s proud
alcove” of Pope—desired to have a catalogue
made of a large collection of books that had been long neglected. I was sent to accomplish
this work, in the most charming of seasons, and surrounded by the most delightful of
scenery. An artist of some eminence in his own walk of animal painting, R. B. Davis, was there also, repairing the pictures. My
companion, who was some years my elder, had been the pupil of probably the worst painter of
his day, but nevertheless enjoying a fashionable reputation—Sir
Francis Bourgeois. Richard Davis was the son of the
huntsman of the Royal Harriers. He was the brother of Charles
Davis, who in his vigorous old age rides across a country as few young ones
would dare, and who has seen more revolutions in the hunting field than most living men.
George III., inspecting some of the lad’s
sketches, placed him with the Polish Knight, who was the King’s own
landscape-painter. In this position the young student had extraordinary advantages in
cultivating his taste, by such an acquaintance with the old masters as few could obtain at
the time when the continent was closed to travellers. He assisted Sir
Francis and Noel Desenfans in forming
that noble collection which now constitutes the Dulwich Gallery. Often have I heard him,
loyal subject as he was, execrate the memory of Pitt
for his contempt of art. After the ![]()
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death of
Desenfans, who had bequeathed these choice cabinet pictures to his
friend, Bourgeois went to the great minister, and proposed to give the
collection to the nation, if the Government would build a gallery to receive them.
“We have no money for such objects.” said Pitt.
Thus the Desenfans treasures went to the college founded by Alleyn the actor; and the rich landscape-painter
bequeathed also to that obscure foundation two thousand pounds to build the gallery in
which we now look upon them in a clear atmosphere. The art-knowledge of my companion
enlarged my range of ideas. But the chief happiness of that autumn was due to the noble
lady who was the owner of Cliefden—the inheritor of the Peerage bestowed upon the companion
in arms of Marlborough—in grace and dignity the type of
la vieille cour—in unaffected courtesy
the memorial of a stately but genial aristocracy that was passing away. She came to talk
with us about books and paintings. She urged us to make holiday afternoons. We rambled in
the woods that crowned the chalky heights, or let our skiff drop down the unruffled Thames
beneath those delicious banks. I there wrote a descriptive poem which was printed. It
pleased Lady Orkney, and that was sufficient for me to defy criticism.
Cliefden has passed into the hands of another great family whose wondrous
prosperity is associated with ancestral victories of peace rather than with those of war.
With permission, the woods amidst which I wandered may still be trodden by the stranger.
But no permission is wanting to linger out an autumnal eve under those magnificent banks,
leaving the boat to glide slowly and noiselessly along, as if it were unwilling to disturb
the exquisite mirror ![]()
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which reflects every form and every colour of the
varied foliage. What walks are there still left in that charming neighbourhood, which the
dweller in the great city may enjoy to the fall after an hour’s railway-ride! Let him
cross the Thames at Cookham and ascend the hill to Hedsor, to look upon a scene which
others have felt to be as beautiful as I felt it to be in my early manhood. My heart leapt
up, a short while since, when I read in Henry
Kingsley’s “Ravenshoe” a description of a landscape, every feature of which I should
have recognised even though he had not said, “You may see just such a scene, with
variations, of course, from Park Place, or Hedsor, or Cliefden, or fifty other houses,
on the king of rivers.” “The
Plain Englishman” (of which work I shall have to speak) contains a tale
written by me, and my description of the scene in which the story is laid points
unmistakeably to Hedsor: “The situation of this churchyard was one of singular
loveliness. It terminated a hill, which, for several miles, formed a precipitous and
rugged bank to the curving river which it overshadowed. The cliffs of chalk, sometimes
rising abruptly from the water’s edge, without a path or verdure, and sometimes
presenting a slip of grass or foliage, where the human foot was wont to tread—here and
there adorned with stately beeches, towering one above the other in clustering pride,
and here and there discovering only a few ancient and fantastic yews;—the expanse of
luxuriant pastures, through which the Thames wandered, with their scattered habitations
of contented industry;—the gently-swelling hills of the distance, marking the horizon
with their soft outlines, and carrying the imagination forward to the devious course of
the ![]()
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same placid river between their bosoms;—this landscape
possessed all the richness and grace of lowland scenery, with some small portion of the
wildness that belongs to the regions of rapid streams and mighty mountains. But it was
strictly English scenery; and such scenery as England only can furnish, in its
fertility and variety.”
In the spring of 1812 the old familiar intercourse of the Sovereign with
his people was at an end at Windsor. The Terrace was shut up. Soon was the ancient pathway
under the Castle diverted. All was changed at the time my own life was changing. I was soon
to look upon a world of stern realities. I was to have other remembrances to note than the
fleeting visions of my boyhood.
I stand upon the threshold of “A Working Life
during Half a Century.” I had a few months of experiment before the final
choice of a career; but those months brought with them new responsibilities, which were
essentially work. My trade apprenticeship was ended. I had to begin in the metropolis that
apprenticeship to literature through the rough ways of journalism, which many a young man
has found to have been not the least improving part of his education. With some
reminiscences which hover round Windsor I shall conclude this Prelude.
It was, perhaps, not the worse for me that the old pleasures of the
scenes amidst which I lived had lost none of their original charms. I doubt whether I ever
thought it perfect wisdom
“To scorn delights and live laborious days.” |
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But at this period I could look upon a future of “laborious days” as not
incompatible with “delights,” ![]()
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such as Milton himself might not have scorned in his early life on
the banks of the Colne.
From the tenth year of my boyhood till after I entered upon man’s
estate, I had tried every variety of angling, from the whipping for bleak on a warm evening
in May, to the trolling for pike on a gray morning in October. I am not ashamed to confess
that in these pursuits I was singularly unlucky. I at last arrived at a lurking suspicion
either that angling was a lost art, or that our river was so universally fished—not angled
but netted—or that fortune was so unjust that I was not one of the happy persons to whom
Izaak Walton discourses of “a trout that
will fill six reasonable bellies.”
And yet I look back upon these days of hope deferred with infinite
delight. Upon the banks of the Thames, long after the halcyon season of a schoolboy’s
leisure, have I wandered, rod in hand, into secluded nooks, where scarcely sound was ever
heard but the noise of the kingfisher diving down plumb into the deep; or I have sculled
the rickety Eton skiff (not so dangerous as the modern canoe) up the crystal current, till
the evening star has warned me that my course must be retraced over the dangerous shallows
and the dead waters. Often, at that silent hour, have I partly learnt the secret of the
marvellous ill-fortune of ambitious anglers of the unpreserved Thames. Many a time, in the
sober twilight, have I seen the river-poacher busy with his eel-lines and his baskets under
some bank of osiers, looking around with fearful suspicion, as the wind swept along the
rippling water, and creeping closer under the shadow of the willow, as the light clouds
flew off from the face of the rising moon. But I must not ![]()
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wholly blame
the secret enemy of “the contemplative man.” The truth is that I was an
idle votary of the seductive art. I had the contentedness and the love of meditation of the
steadiest angler, but not the patience. I would stick the barbel-rod into the bank, and lie
down upon the soft grass, far away from the busy world, to gaze upon the shifting rack; or
perchance resign my heart to Spenser or Tasso, while the reel in vain gave notice of the
unprofitable bite. I despised the early lessons I had received from an enthusiastic student
of Walton and Cotton, who invariably passed over their descriptive and poetical passages,
which only were heeded by his unworthy pupil. The painful instructions he had given me in
the science of artificial fly-making were wholly forgotten. I have taken the first clumsy
imitation of the willow-fly or the gray drake, which the cunning woman who dealt in tackle
routed out from her ancient stores; and have gone home at night without an ounce in my
basket, abundantly satisfied to have had an excuse for passing a holiday afternoon—truly
caring little for the sport, “So I the fields and meadows green might view, And by the quiet river walk at will.” |
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In these river-rambles I was not altogether uselessly occupied, for my
mind was growing in its love of Nature. But I was not turning my wanderings to direct use,
as was a young Naturalist at a somewhat later period. I have seen a youth, apparently idle,
lying under the willow-branches in a little boat, with a book on his knee and a gun by his
side. There is a well-known sound, and the gun is cocked. The kingfisher has darted upon
his prey. As he rises with a minnow, and his orange-breast and green-blue ![]()
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tail glitter in the evening sun, his flight is ended. In a few days he is stuffed,
sitting on a pendant bough ready for the plunge. The mechanical skill of this youth amazes
the unscientific bird-stuffers, who have lost their trade. Good judges of Natural History
eagerly buy these remarkable specimens of life in death. More useful patrons than casual
purchasers perceive his rare merit. He is engaged by the Zoological Society to prepare
specimens for their Museum. He marries. His wife has an equally rare talent for delineating
objects of Natural History with accuracy and taste. They publish a beautiful example of
their joint ability—he as the accurate author, she as the accomplished artist—“A Century of Birds from the Himalaya
Mountains.” After a few years they will travel together in regions far
remote from the home-scenes of their early days, to produce volumes as magnificent as they
are scientific. When I think of the young naturalist of Eton, I look back with some regret
upon my own purposeless wanderings by the creeks of the Thames, where John Gould was educating himself to rival Wilson and Audubon.
There was a sport a little more sensual than the dreamy idleness of my
old angling days, but nevertheless a fresh and natural enjoyment, which the dwellers on our
river-side could then command without molestation from those whom Sir Humphry Davy calls “the Cockney fishermen who
fish for roach and dace in the Thames.” The South-Western Railway, or the
Great Western, brought then, on a bright August morning, no parties of second-class
passengers, who each rushed down to Brocas Lane to secure for four or five companions a
punt and a waterman, ![]()
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who was ready with the most monstrous lies of his
exclusive knowledge of the gravel-beds where the gudgeon might be taken, ten dozen at a
pitch. Wretched men! They will swill their beer at Surly Hall, and return to Whitechapel, a
paltry dozen or two in their capacious creels. Such was not the glorious gudgeon-fishing of
Jack Hall, well known to every Etonian of the
days of Keate, whose memory is preserved in a
characteristic portrait engraved in the very best style of art. Did the Palmerston of “Punch” derive the flower in his mouth from that spruce elderly man, who,
as he lounged upon the old wooden bridge of Windsor, had always a honeysuckle or a rose
between his lips? Three of us, in those days of unmolested use of our river, would make an
appointment with him for the next morning at Bray Reach. Thither we wend, in cart or chaise
(the word “trap” was not then invented), well supplied with a sufficient basket
of ham, tongue, veal-pie, Stilton cheese, bottled ale and porter, a little sherry, and a
cigar or two. Jack is there with his punt and his easy bow. We begin
to fish. The well of the punt gradually fills. The morning quickly speeds on towards noon.
What an inviting nook for luncheon is that little creek, where the willows make a natural
bower of grateful shade. But we must not linger. By three o’clock we have caught
forty dozen. Jack says, that sort of thing is “bonum
securum;” and he will best tell us how to dispose of our prey. We land
at Monkey Island; and whilst we are examining the sketches of monkeys on the then
dilapidated walls of the old banqueting-room of a Thames-loving Duke of
Marlborough, the accomplished Hall is preparing our
fry. He is a better cook than Izaak Walton; ![]()
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and moreover he will troll us a merry song as well as the merriest of
the crew in the old haberdasher’s “honest alehouse, with lavender in the
windows, and twenty ballads stuck about the wall.” But
Jack had other sources of amusement. He could not only display his
scraps of dog-latin, but could tell queer stories about the Eton days of some of the then
mightiest in the land, such as we now look for in vain in pompous autobiographies and dull
memoirs. Fain would I recollect some of these stories,—but they are better forgotten. A
game of quoits or trap-ball succeeds. It is sunset before we are aware. The punt floats
down the Thames, whilst the silence around us is broken by the chorus of some forgotten
anacreontic of the old times of jollity, or by the unscientific breathings of a flute
simple in its construction as the shepherd’s reed.
There was a time, from early boyhood till the Inclosure of Windsor
Forest, when I might have said—
“I know each lane and every alley green, Dingle, or bushy dell of this wild wood, And every bosky bourn from side to side, My daily walks and ancient neighbourhood.” |
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The inclosure changed in a few years all the aspect of the scenes with which I was
once so familiar. Vast plains were soon covered with hundreds of thousands of vigorous
saplings; heaths, where straggling hawthorns used once to be the landmarks of the wanderer,
are now one sea of pine. Some of the work of change was set about too much in the spirit of
a ruthless utility. At the extremities of the forest near Easthampstead, earthworks, which
showed where the Roman had encamped, were levelled or planted over. Nearer Windsor, many an
old tree with a ![]()
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thirty-foot girth, into whose hollow I had crept from
the passing shower and thought of the Norman hunters, was mercilessly cut down. There was a
good deal of rash innovation some fifty years ago, but it appears to have been repented of;
for some of the giants of the wood, sublime in their decay, are now carefully fenced round.
Much of the picturesque of forest scenery remains in the Great Park. Some has been spoilt
by the desire to embellish what is far more beautiful without adventitious ornament. Some
of the wildest scenes—now, perhaps, shaven lawn and carefully tended shrubberies—used to
come upon me as a surprise. I remember one spot, especially, near the house erected a few
years since by the accomplished Belgian minister. My devious steps conducted me from the
quiet green of a hamlet where a few children were at play, into one of the most
unfrequented parts of the Forest. The sun was yet brightly shining in the west, but his
rays did not pierce the thick gloom of the elms and beeches into which I had penetrated.
The place was singularly wild, and seemed scarcely to belong to the quiet scenery of our
inland counties. A rapid stream, which in winter must become a torrent, had formed a deep
ravine with high and precipitous banks. The fern grew about in the wildest profusion; the
old roots of the trees which hung over this bourn, as the people of the Forest then called
it, were bared to the wind and frost; but they still grasped the earth resolutely and
firmly. As I walked on, endeavouring to follow the course of the stream, the scene became
still more solitary. I could gain no eminence to look round upon the surrounding country; I
could not hear either the tinkling of a sheep-bell, the low of ![]()
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cattle,
or the bark of the watch-dog; even the herds of deer had forsaken this spot of unbroken
solitude. I could have fancied myself far removed from the haunts of men; and that solemn
feeling which such a consideration inspires came across my heart.
In the holiday days of my youth, Virginia Water appeared to me the very
perfection of romantic scenery. It was then sixty years since Duke William of Cumberland created the little lake and its gentle fir-clad
banks out of a wild swampy district, whose waters drained into an unsightly basin, and then
flowed on to the Thames at Chertsey. Paul Sandby was
the landscape gardener. The ambitious name of the lake must be received simply as
expressive of silence and solitude amidst woods and waters, but without any real
association with the boundless forests and mighty rivers, where the Anglo-Saxon first
carried the processes of civilization which his descendants appear too ready to forget. The
playthings of George IV. spoilt Virginia Water. The
character of these solitudes was destroyed by sticking up a Chinese Fishing Temple, and by
building a mock ruin out of a collection of antique fragments, Egyptian and Grecian—relics
of a great past, joined together by plaster and paint into something like an imitation of
their awful decay.
In the summer of 1815, Shelley
rented a house on Bishopsgate Heath. There he composed his “Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude.” Mrs. Shelley says, in a note on this poem, “he
spent his days under the oak-shades of Windsor Great Park; and the magnificent woodland
was a fitting study to inspire the various descriptions of forest-scenery found in the
poem.” Shelley wrote it after his recovery from a
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disease, of which, in the spring, he was considered to be
dying. A “solemn spirit reigns throughout—the worship of the majesty of nature,
the broodings of a poet’s heart in solitude.” “Alastor”—a copy of which was lent to me soon after the date of its
composition (I think it was privately printed)—appeared to me rather as the ideal of
forest-scenery than as presenting the character of the “magnificent
woodland” around Bishopsgate, amidst which Shelley
“spent his days,” and which I well knew a few years before. I wanted
something more literal—more pre-Raphaelite, if I may apply this term to poetry. I had
previously attempted some out-door sketches of these scenes—feeble enough as efforts of
imagination, but a pretty faithful transcript of what was before my eyes. I had intended
these Spenserian stanzas to have grown up to a poem of some magnitude. Fortunately for me,
the sketches were never finished; for the age even then had grown tired of that
word-painting of nature which was once so fashionable; and which, even in the hands of
Denham and Pope, seems now so artificial. I had not for a long time looked upon the
precise spot which I described as— “A wilderness of thistle, rush, and fern, ’Mid green spots for the seldom-startled deer, And plashy marshes for the lonely hern; “With birds and sylvan sounds for the hush’d ear.” |
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When, thirty years afterwards, I spent a morning in the woods near Bishopsgate with my
friend William Harvey, some of the old feeling
returned. Still, the intensity of that solitude would be oppressive but for its shifting
aspects of the varied hues of “Elm, chestnut, oak, lime, Leech, and scatter’d thorn,” |
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as the morning sun at one minute lights them up, and then a passing
cloud clothes them in shadow. The red deer bounds noiselessly along; the ring-dove gently
coos; the distance seems slumbering in the half-eclipsed noonshine. Suddenly a flood of
brilliancy is shed over the vast amphitheatre of leaves before us; the distant hills of
Berkshire on one side, and of Middlesex on the other, crowd into the foreground. One object
is pre-eminent in grandeur and beauty. But how greatly is it changed in its architectural
details—grander perhaps, but I doubt if quite as picturesque, as when I wrote— “Thou mighty Windsor, rising o’er the woods, Though bounded by this grove of proud-topp’d trees, Rapt in thy majesty lone Fancy broods, And in thy towers of yore she dimly sees Interpreters of Heaven’s o’erpast decrees; And though full lovely is that glorious gleam Of sun on buttress, parapet, and frieze, Lovelier th’ historic light which down doth stream, Clear as the mid-day sheen, romantic as a dream.” |
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Yes, History itself was then to me the most brilliant of romances. The
distant castle—seen through those glades in apparent continuity, as if there were no
middle-ground between the breadths of foliage and the old gray towers—had historical
associations enough to satisfy the most imaginative. Every nook of the antique buildings,
untouched by modern improvement, was then familiar to me. The fortress which the Norman
reared was gone—his keep, his donjon. Which of those towers, I used to speculate, are the
remaining memorials of the time before Edward III. built
the new castle? Surely, where the ecclesiastical portion of the vast pile now stands, there
was once a compact fortress, looking proudly ![]()
| 104 | EARLY REMINISCENCES: | [§
II. |
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and serenely over the low
grounds which the Thames watered. In that noble tower—whose base now stands boldly in view
as we ascend the steep street, but which a few years ago was hidden by one continuous line
of the meanest houses—Stephen might have defied his
queenly rival and John his indomitable barons. And then I
thought of Runnemede close at hand; and could look down upon it from Cooper’s Hill;
and let the eye range onward to a more complete view of the work of the great Anglo-Norman,
who had forsaken the old western side of the fortress and was holding feasts of the Round
Table in a grander castle on the east. Here he was thinking of leading his chivalry to
Crecy and Poitiers; here the Black Prince was
learning to bear himself knightly in the tournament. Softer associations were present to me
as I thought of the story of James I. of Scotland and
Jane Beaufort, which has been so prettily told by Washington Irving. The course of time led me onward to the
“large green courts” where Surrey
lived “in lust and joy;” to the memory of the jealous tyrant of whom
Surrey was the last victim; to Elizabeth and Leicester; to Charles and Cromwell;
the romance gradually fading away as I thought of Charles
II. and his neglected queen banqueting with the heathen gods on Verrio’s ceilings. It almost wholly vanished when I
remembered the Anne described by Swift, “hunting in a chaise with one horse, which
she drives herself, and drives furiously like Jehu.”
Edward Alleyn (1566-1626)
English actor and theater manager who founded Dulwich College near London.
Princess Amelia (1711-1786)
Born in Hanover, she was the second daughter of George II, known for her sharp
tongue.
Princess Amelia (1783-1810)
The youngest daughter of George III; she died of tuberculosis after a long illness to the
despair of her father.
John James Audubon (1785-1851)
American ornithologist; he published
Birds of America
(1827-38).
Isaac Barrow (1630-1677)
Professor of Greek (1660) and Lucasian Professor of Mathematics (1663) at Cambridge;
author of
Exposition of the Creed, Decalogue, and Sacraments (1669).
His sermons were much admired.
James Beattie (1735-1803)
Scottish poet and professor of moral philosophy and logic at Marischal College, author of
Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth (1770), and
The Minstrel (1771, 1774).
George Berkeley, bishop of Cloyne (1685-1753)
Bishop of Cloyne and philosopher; author of
A New Theory of Vision
(1709, 1710, 1732),
A Treatise concerning the Principles of Human
Knowledge (1710, 1734), and
Three Dialogues between Hylas and
Philonous (1713, 1725, 1734).
Sir William Blackstone (1723-1780)
English jurist, the author of
Commentaries on the Laws of England,
4 vols (1765-69).
William Boyce (1711-1779)
English composer appointed Master of the King's Musick in 1755; Thomas Linley was among
his pupils.
Edmund Burke (1729-1797)
Irish politician and opposition leader in Parliament, author of
On the
Sublime and Beautiful (1757) and
Reflections on the Revolution
in France (1790).
John Hill Burton (1809-1881)
Educated at Marischal College, Aberdeen, he was a political economist and historian of
Scotland who published in the
Edinburgh and
Westminster Reviews.
Joseph Butler, bishop of Durham (1692-1752)
English physico-theologian; he was author of the
Analogy of
Religion (1736); he was dean of St. Paul's (1740) and bishop of Durham
(1750).
William Caxton (1422 c.-1492)
The first English printer, who set up a press at Westminster in 1476 and translated
several of the books he published.
King Charles I of England (1600-1649)
The son of James VI and I; as king of England (1625-1649) he contended with Parliament;
he was revered as a martyr after his execution.
Charles Cotton (1630-1687)
English poet, translator, and friend of Isaac Walton; author of
Scarronides, or Virgile travestie (1664).
Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658)
English general and statesman; fought with the parliamentary forces at the battles of
Edgehill (1642) and Marston Moor (1644); led expedition to Ireland (1649) and was named
Lord Protector (1653).
John Cuthell (d. 1818)
London antiquarian bookseller notable for the quality of his book catalogues.
Charles Davis (1788-1866)
The son of Richard Davis (1750–1825) huntsman to George III, and younger brother of the
painter of hunting scenes, Richard Barrett Davis; he was huntsman to the royal buckhounds
from 1822.
Richard Barrett Davis (1782-1854)
English painter educated at the Royal Academy Schools; he specialized in hunting scenes
and enjoyed court patronage.
Sir Humphry Davy, baronet (1778-1829)
English chemist and physicist, inventor of the safety lamp; in Bristol he knew Cottle,
Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey; he was president of the Royal Society (1820).
Thomas Dekker (1572 c.-1632)
English playwright and satirist; he is the author of
The Shoemaker's
Holiday (1600) and
The Gul's Hornebooke (1609).
Sir John Denham (1615-1669)
Irish-born poet and translator, author of the topographic poem,
Cooper's Hill (1642).
Noel Joseph Desenfans (1744-1807)
French art-dealer who emigrated to London in 1769 and patronized the painter Peter
Francis Bourgeois; his collection is now in the Dulwich Gallery.
Thomas Frognall Dibdin (1776-1847)
English bibliographer and original member of the Roxburghe Club (1812); his most popular
book was
Bibliomania (1809).
Thomas Egerton (1830 fl)
London bookseller who began business in 1782.
John Fisher, bishop of Salisbury (1748-1825)
Educated at St Paul's School and Peterhouse, Cambridge, he was tutor to Princess
Charlotte (1805), consecrated bishop of Salisbury in 1807.
Frederick Augustus, Duke of York (1763-1827)
He was commander-in-chief of the Army, 1798-1809, until his removal on account of the
scandal involving his mistress Mary Anne Clarke.
John Gould (1804-1881)
The son of a gardener at Windsor Castle, he became a taxidermist, ornithologist, and
publisher of illustrated books on birds.
Jack Hall (d. 1834)
A celebrated angler who was a servant at Eton College; following his death by drowning a
commemorative print and coin were issued.
George Frideric Handel (1685-1759)
German composer who settled in England in 1712 where he composed oratorios, among them
The Messiah, first produced in Dublin in 1742.
William Harvey (1796-1866)
English wood-engraver who trained with Thomas Bewick; his illustrations to the
Thousand and one Nights were popular.
Joseph Heath (1783 c.-1830)
The son of Joseph Heath of Warwickshire; educated at St. John's College, Oxford, he was
master of Lucton School (1816) and vicar of Wigmore in Herefordshire (1830).
Henry Howard, earl of Surrey (1517-1547)
English sonneteer known as the Earl of Surrey; the son of the Duke of Norfolk, he was
beheaded for treason.
John Hunt (1775-1848)
English printer and publisher, the elder brother of Leigh Hunt; he was the publisher of
The Examiner and
The Liberal, in
connection with which he was several times prosecuted for libel.
James Henry Leigh Hunt (1784-1859)
English poet, journalist, and man of letters; editor of
The
Examiner and
The Liberal; friend of Byron, Keats, and
Shelley.
James I, king of Scotland (1394-1437)
The son of Robert III; educated in England, he was an accomplished poet and less
effective monarch.
Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
English man of letters, among many other works he edited
A Dictionary
of the English Language (1755) and Shakespeare (1765), and wrote
Lives of the Poets (1779-81).
Sir William Jones [Oriental Jones] (1746-1794)
English poet, jurist, and oriental philologist; he published
Poems,
consisting chiefly of Translations from the Asiatic Languages (1772).
Jean-Andoche Junot (1771-1813)
French general who commanded the invasion of Portugal in 1807 and was driven back by
Wellington the following year.
John Keate (1773-1852)
Headmaster at Eton College (1809-1834) and canon of Windsor; he had a reputation as a
flogger.
Henry Kingsley (1830-1876)
The younger brother of Charles Kingsley; educated at Worcester College, Oxford, he
published essays and novels.
Jean Louis de Lolme (1741-1806)
Born in Geneva, the author of
The Constitution of England (1775);
he was called by D'Israeli “the English Montesquieu.”
John Milton (1608-1674)
English poet and controversialist; author of
Comus (1634),
Lycidas (1638),
Areopagitica (1644),
Paradise Lost (1667), and other works.
Sir John Moore (1761-1809)
A hero of the Peninsular Campaign, killed at the Battle of Corunna; he was the son of Dr.
John Moore, the author of
Zeluco.
Emperor Napoleon I (1769-1821)
Military leader, First Consul (1799), and Emperor of the French (1804), after his
abdication he was exiled to Elba (1814); after his defeat at Waterloo he was exiled to St.
Helena (1815).
Horatio Nelson, viscount Nelson (1758-1805)
Britain's naval hero who destroyed the French fleet in the Battle of the Nile (1798) and
defeated the combined French and Spanish fleets at Trafalgar (1805) in which action he was
killed.
Murrough O'Brien, first marquess of Thomond (1726-1808)
The son of James O'Brien, he married Mary O'Brien, Countess of Orkney, and was an Irish
and British MP, was Knight of the Order of St. Patrick (1783), and was created Marquess of
Thomond in 1800.
Amelia Opie [née Alderson] (1769-1853)
Quaker poet and novelist; in 1798 she married the painter John Opie (1761-1807); author
of
Father and Daughter (1801) and other novels and moral
fables.
Thomas Osborne (1704-1767)
London bookseller who purchased the Harleian Library and hired Samuel Johnson and William
Oldys to catalogue it, resulting in the quarrel in which the lexicographer knocked down the
bibliopole with a folio.
William Pitt the younger (1759-1806)
The second son of William Pitt, earl of Chatham (1708-1778); he was Tory prime minister
1783-1801.
Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
English poet and satirist; author of
The Rape of the Lock (1714)
and
The Dunciad (1728).
Mark Anthony Porny (1731-1802)
Originally Antoine Pyron Du Martre; he was a French master at Eton College who published
a book on heraldry. He left £4,000 to found a school for boys and girls.
Jane Porter (1776-1850)
English novelist, sister of the poet and novelist Anna Maria Porter (1778-1832); she
wrote
The Scottish Chiefs (1810).
John Sale (1758-1827)
English singer who was master of the choristers at St Paul's (1800).
Paul Sandby (1731-1809)
Water-color painter who introduced the aquatint process into England and was a founding
member of the Royal Academy.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley [née Godwin] (1797-1851)
English novelist, daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecaft, and the second wife
of Percy Bysshe Shelley. She is the author of
Frankenstein (1818)
and
The Last Man (1835) and the editor of Shelley's works
(1839-40).
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
English poet, with Byron in Switzerland in 1816; author of
Queen
Mab (1813),
The Revolt of Islam (1817),
The Cenci and
Prometheus Unbound (1820), and
Adonais (1821).
Edmund Spenser (1552 c.-1599)
English poet, author of
The Shepheards Calender (1579) and
The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596).
Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)
Dean of St Patrick's, Scriblerian satirist, and author of
Battle of the
Books with
Tale of a Tub (1704),
Drapier
Letters (1724),
Gulliver's Travels (1726), and
A Modest Proposal (1729).
Torquato Tasso (1554-1595)
Italian poet, author of
Aminta (1573), a pastoral drama, and
Jerusalem Delivered (1580).
Henry John Temple, third viscount Palmerston (1784-1865)
After education at Harrow and Edinburgh University he was MP for Newport (1807-11) and
Cambridge University (1811-31), foreign minister (1830-41), and prime minister (1855-58,
1859-65).
Thomas Vaughan (1782-1843)
English singer patronized by George III; he was vicar-choral of St Paul's Cathedral and
lay vicar of Westminster Abbey.
Antonio Verrio (1636 c.-1707)
Italian decorative painter who emigrated to England in 1671 and worked at Whitehall
Palace, Windsor Castle, and Hampton Court.
John Walker (d. 1817)
London bookseller from the 1770s; he was the brother-in-law of George Robinson and Common
Councilman of the Ward of Farringdon Within. He published John Wolcot.
Izaak Walton (1593-1683)
The friend and biographer of John Donne, and author of
The Compleat
Angler (1653).
Richard Watson, bishop of Llandaff (1737-1816)
Regius Professor of Divinity, Trinity College, Cambridge and bishop of Llandaff (1782);
he published
Apology for Christianity (1776) in response to Gibbon,
and
Apology for the Bible (1796) in response to Paine.
Alexander Wilson (1766-1813)
Scottish weaver, pedlar, and poet who emigrated to the United States in 1794 where he
became a schoolmaster and naturalist; he published
American
Ornithology (1808–14).
Wynkyn de Worde (d. 1534)
Born in Alsace; with Caxton he established printing in England, setting up his shop in
London.
The Englishman. (1803-1834). A London weekly newspaper; the proprietor was William I. Clement (1821-34).
The Examiner. (1808-1881). Founded by John and Leigh Hunt, this weekly paper divided its attention between literary
matters and radical politics; William Hazlitt was among its regular contributors.
