FINANCE. | 229 |
Sine Cerere et Baccho friget Venus.
|
But, since life at most a jest is,
As philosophers allow,
Still to laugh by far the best is,
Then laugh on as I do now.
Laugh at all things,
Great and small things,
Sick or well, on sea or shore;
While we’re quaffing,
Let’s have laughing—
Who the devil cares for more?
|
Finance is a dry subject, and one which, except on the single
instance described in the last chapter, I never liked. Indeed I had always a sort of dread
of figures after I lost my precocious aptitude for them (see vol. i.) and my blunders in
attempting numbers, reckonings, or accounts have been so ludicrous, that a schoolboy of ten
years old would have been whipt for making them, and they could hardly be believed to be
ought but affectations of carelessness, instead of inherent stupidity, or a predestiny to
be incorrect. Such matters are difficult to explain. I could perfectly understand and make
myself master of the most complicated problems, but I rarely succeeded in summing up a row
of cyphers, were it merely the
230 | AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY. |
Well, but finance is a dry subject; and, in the present instance, I fly from it, regardless of the order of time, to give as good an account as I can of one of those symposia, which furnish a day to be marked with a white stone, and leave an impression not to be forgotten. The subjoined letter from Frederic Mansell Reynolds, written in the L. G. office, may serve as prologue* to what turned out to be a very merry play.
“I have gone through so many misfortunes, that I scarcely know how to commence the recapitulation of them.—In the first place, Lockhart does not come on Saturday; in the next place, Theodore Hook, nor Lockhart, nor Luttrell can come on Wednesday, but Theodore Hook, Luttrell, Lockhart, Lord Normanby, Coleridge, H. Harris the Covent Garden proprietor, and Tom Hill can come on Monday week.—Now, my dear Jerdan, my fate is in your hands, I stand before you like a criminal at the bar, and await your decision—I shall call for it at half-past four, when I understand you will be here.
* I may notice that I was indebted to Mansell Reynolds, the son of the dramatist, author of “Miserrimus,” &c., and editor-of the “Keepsake Annual,” for my introduction to a subsequent pleasant acquaintance with Wordsworth, respecting whom I will add a few words to this miscellaneous chapter. |
A DAY WITH HOOK. | 231 |
“Let mo tell you it is no easy task to get up a dinner at this time of the year—mind you wait for me—I shall he here rather before the half hour.”
Flattered by being invited to be the key-stone of such an arch, it may readily be supposed that I did not stand in the way of its immediate completion. Reynolds had hired, for the autumn months, the upper portion of a small gardener’s cottage at Highgate, a shell of a place, the first floor of which supplied two little cabins, just big enough for coziness, fun, and revel. The party was at last disappointed of Lord Normanby, and instead of Henry Harris, his brother, Captain Harris, the member for Boston came, and we sat down to dinner,
Eight precious souls, and all resolved To dash through thick and thin. |
Our host had replenished his sideboard with fine wines from his
father’s cellars and wine merchants in town; but having, unluckily, forgotten port, a
few bottles of black-strap had been obtained for the nonce from the adjacent inn at
Highgate; and sooth to say it was not of the first quality. To add to this grievance, the
glasses appertaining to the lodgings were of a diminutive capacity, and when they came to
be addressed to champagne and hock, were only tolerable and not to be endured. Thus, in the
midst of dinner, or rather
232 | AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY. |
The rays of wit gild wheresoe’er they strike; |
A DAY WITH HOOK. | 233 |
So full of shapes in fancy, That it alone is high fantastical. |
Grave folks wonder at those who are, as Shakspere hath
* This letter is so interesting in other literary respects, that I venture to indulge myself and readers with it here:— “My dear
Sir, “I have not as yet seen or heard anything of the ‘New Grandpapa Tales,’ but will send them over the moment I get them, and no doubt my copy will be a very early one. “I have no news. Do you know that the King has bought all Wilkie’s Spanish pictures, seven in number, and two of the Italian. This munificence will re-establish David, and ought to be celebrated in prose and in rhyme. “Your ‘Literary Gazette’ comes to me every Saturday morning, and proves an agreeable breakfast-table friend. Have you seen the Edinburgh one? I fear it is very poor stuff. “Mr. Moore, as you will perceive, is very indignant with F. M. Reynolds for putting in extempore without his consent. The poet asserts in a letter to Murray that they offered him six hundred guineas for the benefit of his name in the ‘Keepsake,’ and that he declined the offer. Whether was Heath or Moore most mad? Our tumbler-shying was nothing to this.’ “Yours truly, “Sir Thomas Lawrence has just finished a most admirable painting, a full-length of Mr. Southey, for Mr. Peel’s great gallery at Whitehall. “Sir Thomas’s contemporary portraits are now getting into their proper places in the long gallery at Windsor Castle. One caravan the other morning conveyed Lord Eldon, Mr. Pitt, and Sir Walter Scott from Russell-square to their regal destination.” |
234 | AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY. |
When I was a maiden of bashful fifteen |
A DAY WITH HOOK. | 235 |
In due season the feast of souls and the flow of tumblers told their tale;
and it must be confessed that some of us were a trifle uproarious. It so happened that the
name of the gardener was M’Pherson; and his busy wife, plying
her utmost care in getting the dinner up from the kitchen below (we had an experienced
waiter from Brompton for the dining-room), had been rather frightened by the catastrophe of
the glasses and the festive cheering and shouting of the hilarious party. Towards the
close, Mistress M’Pherson was the topic assigned to Hook for his last song, and he sung it! Now I have
mentioned that it was a shell of a cottage, and consequently Mrs. Mac
was an astonished auditress of this unique composition, which had such an effect upon her
nerves, that she bolted from her domicile to seek her sister to stay with her, and
(together with the foresaid waiter), take care of her till her husband came home. Of this,
however, I was not aware till later in the night, when it cost me a threat of watch-house;
for Lockhart, Hook, and I,
returned in the same carriage, and after leaving my companions in the Regent’s Park
and Cleveland-row, I resolved on walking home, attended by my neighbour the waiter, who had
availed himself of the coachbox; and as we wended our way up Piccadilly, amused me by
describing the scenes in the inferior regions whilst we
236 | AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY. |
Gaiety such as this, still enriched with intellectual fruits, and, though apparently approaching in description the limit where excess would begin, far short of Milton’s “riot and ill-managed merriment,” sheds a bright halo, like an evening sun, over the clouds of life, and teaches us the wisdom of the preacher, that there is a time to laugh and (a better time it is too than) a time to cry.
A friend has reminded me of another lesser dining-bout, and, as his note is very short, I add it.
The merry party assembled at Hook’s, in Cleveland Row. It consisted of the gifted Wilson Croker, the eccentric Dean of Patcham—Cannon, the versatile C.
Mathews, the laughter-loving F.
Yates, the gentle Allan Cunningham, the
—— Jerdan, (I modestly suppress the epithet), and a
sprightly noble Lord, William Lennox, who has since,
as a novelist, hit off the characters of the host on that occasion, and Edward
Cannon as well, perhaps better than any other writer. The dinner in the
“Tuft Hunter,” in
which Hook figures as a principal character, and the scene at Newbury
with Hook and Cannon, in “Percy Hamilton,” prove that
his lordship was studying the peculiarities of those he has since so cleverly portrayed in
the above-mentioned novels. But to our dinner, or, as the French say, “revenons à nos moutons.” At first the
conversation was quiet, no
HOOK-ERIES. | 237 |
Wordsworth seldom visited London, and I had only
once an opportunity of seeing him at his home, when I went by
238 | AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY. |
Give me the man who can enjoyment find In brooks and streams, and every flower that grows; Who in a daisy can amusement see, And gather wisdom from a floating straw: His soul a spring of pleasure might possess Quite inexhaustible. |
But Wordsworth in town was very
different from Wordsworth in the country, or rather, perhaps, he was
not the same person in mixed company as when tête-à-tête, or with a couple of friends. In the
former case he was often very lively and entertaining. I recollect meeting him at breakfast
after his being at the Italian Opera the preceding night, and his remarks on the singing
and his limning of the limbs of the dancers, were as replete with shrewdness and pleasantry
as anything I ever heard from the most witty and graphic lips. I was so charmed both with
the matter and manner, that I wrote immediately to offer carte
blanche for his correspondence, from the continent, whither he was
then
WORDSWORTH. | 239 |
“Your letter of the 23rd August I did not receive till my arrival here, several weeks after it was written. My stay in London was only of a few days, or I should have been pleased to renew my acquaintance with you.
“I really cannot change my opinion as to the little interest which would attach to such observations as my ability or opportunity enabled me to make during my ramble upon the continent, or it would have given me pleasure to meet your wishes. There is an obstacle in the way of my ever producing anything of this kind, viz.—idleness, and yet another which is an affair of taste.* Periodical writing, in order to strike, must be ambitious; and this style is, I think, in the record of tours or travels, intolerable; or, at any rate, the worst that can be chosen. My model would be Gray’s Letters and Journal, if I could muster courage to set seriously about anything of the kind; but I suspect Gray himself would be found flat in these days.
“I have named to Mr. Southey your communication about Mr. Percival’s death; he received them and wrote you a letter of thanks, which by some mishap or other does not appear to have reached you.
“If you happen to meet with Mr. Reynolds, pray tell him that I received his prospectuses, (an ugly word!) and did as he wished with them. “I remain, dear Sir,
* Mr. Orme wrote me to be earnest, as he thought Mr. W. “only wanted a little poetical pressing;” but I could not succeed.—W. J. |
240 | AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY. |
Had he complied with my wish, and written letters in the tone and spirit of the criticisms on the opera, I am sure the public would have had a variation in the style of Wordsworth which would greatly have surprised it, little anticipating that the tender poet could also be the grotesque delineator of individual peculiarities, and humourous caricaturist of social anomalies. I shall only relate one of his remarks as a sample, and I choose that most unlike his other self (i.e. the bard of simplicity and the lakes,) as a contrast to a style both in writing and conversing, which was always decorous and refined. We had gone together to the exhibition in Somerset-house, in the year when Turner hung up a little picture of Jessica, decidedly the most worthless and extravagant whim with which he ever amused himself (as I am convinced from his own mouth he frequently did, laughing in his sleeve) by foisting on these walls. “Did you ever see anything like that?” said my companion; “it looks to me as if the painter had indulged in raw liver until he was very unwell,” and it was a perfectly applicable and just critique. The picture was yellow ochre, with dabs of dirty clotted brownish-red upon it; and Jessica (oh, how unlike a pretty young Jewess!) was leaning out of a casement quite in keeping with the other colours.
Men who read much seldom think much. There is a medium in all things. In our day the reading is of the most frivolous nature, or a few may read for particular objects, but there is not one in a thousand who reads and thinks as our great teachers did from a century and a half to two centuries and a half ago.
I offer this apology for the facetious character of this chapter, which will not demand more thought than usual, being perfectly in keeping with the popular writings of the age.
ACKERMANN. | 241 |
Among my amusing and friendly acquaintances, I kept up with no one in a more kindly way than with the worthy German bibliopole, Rudolph Ackermann. Ackermann was a character. A large, heavy German, but sagacious and energetic, good-natured and liberal, simple and far-sighted. The compound altogether was such as to conciliate esteem for an honest man, and regard for a kindly one. I enjoyed and liked him very much. His ability and transparency, his sound information, quaintness of manner, and fatherland ideas expressed in fatherland use of the English tongue, were never-failing sources of gratification and amusement to me; and many a pleasant diet did I pass with Ackermann, both at his residence in the Strand and latterly at his villa on the Fulham Road, which he purchased from Andrews, the bookseller, of Bond-street, “as it stood, furniture and all,” and immediately put into requisition for some very agreeable blue parties; for the literary ladies usually outnumbered the literary gentlemen.
Ackermann’s patriotism and indefatigable
exertion in getting up the subscription for the distresses in Germany, reflected great
honour upon him, and justly procured him the grateful acknowledgments of his country, to
which he remitted a succour of upwards of £40,000. His literary and artistic
conversazioni were the first in London, and the example has since been advantageously
followed. He published the first Annual, the “Forget me not,” the prototype of a numerous and splendid progeny, which
seem to have had their day, or rather their year, and like all earthly things declined—it
may be to rise again, for the encouragement of the arts and literature, when the trade
which destroyed them can see its way more clearly. The first of this class of publications
in England was projected by Rodwell and Martin, in
Bond-street, and proposed to me to edit. We had
242 | AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY. |
But Ackermann did not force his little flower “Forget me not,” into the hothouse atmosphere of exotics, brought into wonderful flower by the names of celebrated authors who sold at a high price their names and sweepings of their studies for the advertising baits of A., B., or C, their contributions being public disappointments, and nearly all the rest of the starved book being unpaid mediocrity—he went on quietly, and I believe prosperously, as long as I had any acquaintance with this, his favourite yearly undertaking.
But I must leave annuals for a few characteristics of my old friend (so I
may fairly call him), and endeavour to afford a “notion” of what used to
entertain me so much. I forget the occasion, but an unfavourable notice of some publication
of his having appeared in the Gazette, I
received a letter from “my sincere friend, always ready to acknowledge the boon when
in his power,” grievously reclaiming against the just act. He reproached me with
ingratitude, saying (which in fact I had never been told and would not have cared for
THE FIRST ANNUALS. ACKERMANN. | 243 |
I was wont to tell stories of Ackermann and imitate his dialect, which was replete with mispronunciations of the most ludicrous description—such as cannot be “set down”—but I will try if print can convey any idea of what was, vivâ voce, so laughable.
I had dropt in at the Strand about two o’clock, about something or
other, when Mr. A. insisted on my staying to eat “suberb saur
krout” with a fine German boy, the son of a nobleman just imported. I consented, and
we chatted together till long past the dinner hour, for which Ackermann and his stomach were particularly punctual. His nephew (?) and
the young noble had gone out in the morning to see lions, and had not returned. We waited,
and waited, till near three o’clock (an hour over time), when my host, unable to
contain his anger and hunger any longer, ordered dinner, and we sat down to excellent
rotten cabbage, but washed down with sensible muzzle and schnaps. About the middle of the
repast the young gentlemen made their appearance, and
244 | AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY. |
Papworth, a most worthy man and able architect, poor
Pyne, Shoberl, and other clever men, were much associated with Ackermann, who, in his day, was led by his own impulse,
and by their advice, to do a great deal for the encouragement of the fine arts. Neither his
heart nor purse were contracted, as is too much the case amongst his
ACKERMANN. | 245 |
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