Memoirs by Charles Godfrey Leland Part 3

"Now, Jamie, ye divil, kape dark there, And hould the big bull-dog in; There's a b.l.o.o.d.y big crowd of rade-birds, That nade a pepperin'!"

_Ker-rack_! goes the single barrel, _Flip-boong_! roars the old Queen Anne; There's a Paddy stretched out in the mud-hole, A kicked-over, knocked-down man.

"Och, Jamie, ye shtupid crature, Sure ye're the divil's son; How many fingers' load, thin, Did ye putt in this d---d ould gun?"

"How many fingers, be jabers?

I nivir putt in a wan; Did ye think I'd be afther jammin'

Me fingers into a gun?"

"Well, give me the powder, Jamie."

"The powder! as sure as I'm born, I put it all into yer musket, For I'd nivir a powder-horn!"

Then we all had reed-bird suppers or lunches, eked out perhaps with terrapins and soft-sh.e.l.l crabs, gumbo, "snapper," or pepper-pot soup, peaches, venison, bear-meat, _salon la saison_--for both bear and deer roamed wild within fifty or sixty miles--so that, all things considered, if Philadelphians, and Baltimoreans did run somewhat over-much to eating up their intellects--as Dr. Holmes declares they do--they had at least the excuse of terrible temptation, which the men of my "grandfather-land"

(New England), as he once termed it in a letter to me, very seldom had at any time.

Once it befell, though a few years later, that one winter there was a broad fair field of ice just above Fairmount dam, which is about ten feet high, that about a hundred and fifty men and maidens were merrily skating by moonlight. I know not whether Colonel James Page, our great champion skater, was there cutting High Dutch; but this I know, that all at once, by some strange rising of the stream, the whole flake of ice and its occupants went over the dam. Strangely enough, no one was killed, but very few escaped without injury, and for some time the surgeons were busy. It would make a strange wild picture that of the people struggling in the broken floes of ice among the roaring waters.

And again, during a week on the same spot, some practical joker amused himself with a magic-lantern by making a spirit form flit over the fall, against its face, or in the misty air. The whole city turned out to see it, and great was their marvelling, and greater the fear among the negroes at the apparition.

Sears C. Walker, who was an intimate friend, kept a school in Sansom Street, to which I was transferred. I was only seven years old at the time, and being the youngest, he made, when I was introduced, a speech of apology to his pupils. He was a good kind man, who also, like Jacob, gave us lectures on natural philosophy and chemistry. There I studied French, and began to learn to draw, but made little progress, though I worked hard. I have literally never met in all my life any person with so little natural gift or apt.i.tude for learning languages or drawing as I have; and if I have since made an advance in both, it has been at the cost of such extreme labour as would seem almost incredible. I was greatly interested in chemistry, as a child would be, and, having heard Mr. Walker say something about the colouring matter in quartz, resolved on a great invention which should immortalise my name. My teacher used to make his own ink by pounding nut-galls in an iron mortar. I got a piece of coa.r.s.e rock-crystal, pounded it up in the same mortar, pouring water on it. Sure enough the result was a pale ink, which the two elder pupils, who had maliciously aided and encouraged me, declared was of a very superior quality. I never shall forget the pride I felt. I had, first of all scientists, extracted the colouring matter from quartz! The recipe was at once written out, with a certificate at the end, signed by my two witnesses, that they had witnessed the process, and that this was written with the ink itself! This I gave to Mr. Walker, and could not understand why he laughed so heartily at it. It was not till several days after that he explained to me that the ink was the result of the dregs of the nut-galls which remained in the mortar.

We had not many books, but what we had I read and reread with great a.s.siduity. Among them were Cooper's novels, Campbell's poems, those of Byron, and above all, Was.h.i.+ngton Irving's "Sketch Book," which had great influence on me, inspiring that intense love for old English literature and its a.s.sociations which has ever since been a part of my very soul.

Irving was indeed a wonderful, though not a _startling_ genius; but he had sympathised himself into such appreciation of the golden memories and sweet melodies of the olden time, be it American or English, as no writer now possesses. In my eighth year I loved deeply his mottoes, such as that from Syr Grey Steel:--

"He that supper for is dight, He lies full cold I trow this night; Yestreen to chamber I him led, This nighte Grey Steel has made his bed."

Lang--not Andrew--has informed us that no copy of the first black-letter edition of Sir Grey Steel is known to exist. In after years I found in the back binding of an old folio two pieces of it, each about four inches square. It has been an odd fatality of mine that whenever a poet existed in black-letter, I was always sure to peruse him first in that type, which I always from childhood preferred to any other. To this day I often dream of being in a book-shop, turning over endless piles of marvellously quaint parchment bound books in _letres blake_, and what is singular, they are generally works quite unknown to the world--first discoveries--unique! And then--oh! then--how bitter is the waking!

There was in Mr. Walker's school library a book, one well known as Mrs.

Trimmer's "Natural History." This I read, as usual, thoroughly and often, and wrote my name at the end, ending with a long snaky flourish.

Years pa.s.sed by, and I was at the University, when one evening, dropping in at an auction, I bought for six cents, or threepence, "a blind bundle"

of six books tied up with a cord. It was a bargain, for I found in it in good condition the first American editions of De Quincey's "Opium-Eater,"

"The Rejected Addresses," and the Poems of Coleridge. But what startled me was a familiar-looking copy of Mrs. Trimmer's "Natural History," in which at the end was my boyish signature.

"And still wider." In 1887 I pa.s.sed some weeks at a hotel in Venice. A number of Italian naval officers dined at our _table-d'hote_ every evening. One of them showed us an intaglio which he had bought. It represented a hunter on an elephant firing at a tiger. The owner wished to know something about it. Baron von Rosenfeld, a chamberlain of the Emperor of Austria, remarked at once that it was as old as the days of flint-locks, because smoke was rising from the lock of the gun. I felt that I knew more about it, but could not at once recall what I knew, and said that I would explain it the next day. And going into the past, I remembered that this very scene was the frontispiece to Mrs. Trimmer's "Natural History." I think that some gem engraver, possibly in India, had copied it to order. I can even now recall many other things in the book, but attribute my retention of so much which I have read _not_ to a good memory, such as the mathematician has, which grasps _directly_, but simply to frequent reading and mental reviewing or revising. Where there has been none of this, I forgot everything in a short time.

My father took in those years _Blackwood's_ and the _New Monthly Magazine_, and as I read every line of them, they were to me a vast source of knowledge. I remember an epigram by "Martial in London" in the latter:--

"In Craven Street, Strand, four attorneys find place, And four dark coal-barges are moored at the base; Fly, Honesty, fly--seek some safer retreat, For there's craft on the river, and craft in the street."

I never pa.s.s by Craven Street without recalling this, and so it has come to pa.s.s that by such memories and a.s.sociations London in a thousand ways is always reviving my early life in America.

The _Noctes Ambrosianae_ puzzled me, as did the Bible, but I read, read, read, _toujours_. My uncle Amos lent me the "Arabian Nights," though my father strictly prohibited it. But the zest of the forbidden made me study it with wondrous love. The reader may laugh, but it is a fact that having obtained "Mother Goose's Melodies," I devoured them with a strange interest reflected from Was.h.i.+ngton Irving. The truth is, that my taste had been so precociously developed, that I unconsciously found a _literary_ merit or charm in them as I did in all fairy-tales, and I remember being most righteously indignant once when a young bookseller told me that I was getting to be too old to read such stuff! The truth was, that I was just getting to be old enough to appreciate it as folk- lore and literature, which he never did.

The great intellectual influence which acted on me most powerfully after Irving was an incomplete volume of about 1790, called "The Poetical Epitome." It consisted of many of Percy's "Relics" with selections of ballads, poems, and epigrams of many eminent writers. I found it a few years after at a boarding-school, where I continually read it as before.

As I was backward in my studies, my parents, very injudiciously so far as learning was concerned, removed me from Mr. Walker's school, and put me under the care of T. Bronson Alcott, who had just come to Philadelphia.

This was indeed going from the frying-pan into the very fire, so far as curing idleness and desultory habits and a tendency to romance and wild speculation was concerned. For Mr. Alcott was the most eccentric man who ever took it on himself to train and form the youthful mind. He did not really teach any practical study; there was indeed some pretence at geography and arithmetic, but these we were allowed to neglect at our own sweet will. His forte was "moral influence" and "sympathetic intellectual communion" by talking; and oh, heaven! what a talker he was!

He was then an incipient Transcendentalist, and he did not fail to discover in me the seeds of the same plant. He declared that I had a marvellous imagination, and encouraged my pa.s.sion for reading anything and everything to the very utmost. It is a fact that at nine years of age his disquisitions on and readings from Spenser's "Faerie Queen"

actually induced me to read the entire work, of which he was very proud, reminding me of it in 1881, when I went to Harvard to deliver the Phi Beta Kappa poem. He also read thoroughly into us the "Pilgrim's Progress," Quarles's "Emblems," Northcote's "Fables," much Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Milton, all of which sunk into my very soul, educating me indeed "ideally" as no boy perhaps in Philadelphia had ever been educated, at the utter cost of all real "education." It was a great pity, and pity 'tis 'tis true. The word _ideal_ was ever in his mouth.

All of the new theories, speculations, or fads which were beginning to be ventilated among the Unitarian liberal clergy found ready welcome in his dreamy brain, and he retailed them all to his pupils, among whom I was certainly the only one who took them in and seriously thought them over.

Yet I cannot say that I _really_ liked the man himself. He was not to me exactly sympathetic-human. Such training as his would develop in any boy certain weaknesses--and I had mine--which were very repulsive to my father, who carried plain common-sense to extremes, and sometimes into its opposite of unconscious eccentricity, though there was no word which he so much hated.

Bulwer's "Last Days of Pompeii," "The Disowned," and "Pilgrims of the Rhine" made a deep and lasting impression on me. I little thought then that I should in after years be the guest of the author in his home, and see the skull of Arbaces. Oh, that by some magic power every author could be made to feel _all_ the influence, all the charm, which his art exerts on his readers, and especially the young. Sometimes, now and then, by golden chance, a writer of books does realise this, and then feels that he has lived to some purpose. Once it happened to me to find a man, an owner of palaces and millions, who had every facility for becoming familiar with far greater minds and books than mine, who had for years collected with care and read everything which I had ever written.

He actually knew more about my books than I did. I was startled at the discovery as at a miracle. And if the reader knew _what_ a _melange_ I have written, he would not wonder at it.

It is very probable that no man living appreciates the vast degree to which any book whatever which aims at a little more than merely entertaining, and appeals at all to thought, influences the world, and how many readers it gets. There are books, of which a thousand copies were never sold, which have permeated society and been the argument of national revolutions. Such a book was the "Political Economy" of H. C.

Carey, of which I possess the very last copy of the first, and I believe the only, edition. And there are novels which have gone to the three hundred thousand, of whose authors it may be said that

"Over the barren desert of their brains There never strayed the starved camel of an idea,"

and whose works vanish like wind.

What is very remarkable is the manner in which even the great majority of readers confuse these two cla.s.ses, and believe that mere popular success is correlative with genius and desert. A great cause of this really vulgar error is the growing conviction that artistic skill alone determines merit in literature, and that intellect, as the French, beginning mildly with Voltaire and ending violently with Sainte-Beuve, a.s.sert is of far less importance than style. "_Le style_, _c'est l'esprit du siecle_." Apropos of which I remarked that in the warlike Middle Age in France the motto might have been "_L'homme c'est le_ STEEL." Then came the age of wigs, when the cry was, "_L'homme c'est le_ STYLE." And now we are in the swindling and bogus-company-promoting age, when it might be proclaimed that "_L'homme c'est le_ STEAL."

There was another book which I read through and through in early childhood to great profit. This was Cottle's "Alfred," an epic of some merit, but chiefly in this, that it sets forth tolerably clearly the old Norse life and religion. George Boker owned and gave me some time after a book ent.i.tled "Five Norse Poems," in the original, and translated. This with Grey's poems, which latter I possessed, laid the basis for a deep interest in after years in Northern antiquities; they were soon followed by Mallett; and if I have since read many sagas in Icelandic and studied with keenest interest the museums of the North, the first incentive thereto came from my boyish reading. When I was sixteen I executed a poetic version of the "Death Song of Regner Lodbrog," which, though it was never published, I think was at least as good as any translation which I have since executed, "however that may be." I very seriously connected this Norse spirit with my grandfather and his stern uncles and progenitors, who had fought in Canada and in the icy winters of New England; grim men they were all; and I daresay that I was quite right. It always seems to me that among these alternately fighting and farming Icelanders I am among my Leland relatives; and I even once found Uncle Seth in his red waistcoat in the Burnt Njals saga to the life. There was a paragraph, as I write, recently circulating in the newspapers, in which I was compared in appearance to an old grey Viking, and it gave me a strange uncanny thrill, as if the writer of it were a wizard who had revealed a buried secret.

My parents, on coming to Philadelphia, had at first attended the Episcopal church, but finding that most of their New England friends held to the Rev. W. H. (now Dr.) Furness, an Unitarian, they took a pew in his chapel. After fifteen years they returned to the Episcopal faith, but allowed me to keep the pew to myself for one or two years, till I went to college. In Dr. Furness's chapel I often heard Channing and all the famous Unitarian divines of the time preach, and very often saw Miss Harriet Martineau, Dr. Combe, the phrenologist, and many other distinguished persons. In other places at different times I met Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay, to whom I was introduced, Daniel Webster, to whom I reverently bowed, receiving in return a gracious acknowledgment, Peter Duponceau, Morton, Stephen Girard, Joseph Buonaparte, the two authors of the "Jack Downing Letters"; and I once heard David Crockett make a speech. Apropos of Joseph Buonaparte, I can remember to have heard my wife's mother, the late Mrs. Rodney Fisher, tell how when a little girl, and while at his residence at Bordentown, she had run a race with the old ex-king of Spain. A very intimate friend in our family was Professor John Frost, the manufacturer of literally innumerable works of every description. He had many thousands of woodcut blocks, and when he received an order--as, for example, a history of any country, or of the world, or of a religion, or a school geography, or book of travel or adventure, or a biography, or anything else that the heart of man could conceive--he set his scribes to write, scissors and paste, and lo! the book was made forthwith, he aiding and revising it. What was most remarkable was that many of these _pieces de manufacture_ were rather clever, and very well answered the demand, for their sale was enormous.

He had when young been in the West Indies, and written a clever novelette ent.i.tled "Ramon, the Rover of Cuba." Personally he was very handsome, refined, and intelligent; a man meant by Nature for higher literary work than mere book-making.

Miss Eliza Leslie, the writer of the best series of sketches of American domestic life of her day, was a very intimate friend of my mother, and a constant visitor at our house. She was a sister of Leslie, the great artist, and had been in her early life much in England. I was a great favourite with her, and owed much to her always entertaining and very instructive conversation, which was full of reminiscences of distinguished people and remarkable events. I may say with great truth that I really profited as much by mere hearing as many boys would have done by knowing the originals, so deep was the interest which I felt in all that I heard, and so eager my desire to learn to know the world.

Then I was removed, and with good cause, from Mr. Alcott's school, for he had become so very "ideal" or eccentric in his teaching and odd methods of punishment by tormenting without ever whipping, that people could not endure his purely intellectual system. So for one winter, as my health was bad and I was frequently ill, for a long time I was allowed to do nothing but attend a writing-school kept by a Mr. Rand. At the end of the season, he sadly admitted that I still wrote badly; I think he p.r.o.nounced me the worst and most incurable case of bad writing which he had ever attended. In 1849 Judge (then Mr.) Cadwallader, with whom I was studying law, said that he admired my engrossing hand more than any he had ever seen except one. As hands go round the clock, our hands do change.

I was to go the next summer to New England with my younger brother, Henry Perry Leland, to be placed in the celebrated boarding-school of Mr.

Charles W. Greene, at Jamaica Plains, five miles from Boston; which was done, and with this I enter on a new phase of life, of which I have very vivid reminiscences. Let me state that we first went to Dedham and stayed some weeks. There I found living with his father, an interesting boy of my own age, named William Joshua Barney, a grandson of the celebrated Commodore Barney, anent whom was written the song, "Barney, leave the girls alone," apropos of his having been allowed to kiss Marie Antoinette and all her maids of honour. William had already been at Mr.

Greene's school, and we soon became intimate.

During this time my father hired a chaise; I borrowed William's shot-gun, and we went together on a delightful tour to visit all our relations in Holliston, Milford, and elsewhere. At one time we stopped to slay an immense black snake; at another to shoot wild pigeons, and "so on about"

to Providence and many places. From cousins who lived in old farmhouses in wild and remote places I received Indian arrow-heads and a stone tomahawk, and other rustic curiosities dear to my heart. At the Fremont House in Boston my father showed me one day at dinner several foreign gentlemen of different nations belonging to different Legations. In Rhode Island I found by a stream several large pot-holes in rocks of which I had read, and explained to my father (gravely as usual) how they were made by eddies of water and gravel-stones. One day my father in Boston took me to see a marvellous white sh.e.l.l from China, valued at one hundred pounds. What was the amazement of all present to hear me give its correct Latin name, and relate a touching tale of a sailor who, finding such a sh.e.l.l when s.h.i.+pwrecked on a desert island, took it home with him, "and was thereby raised (as I told them) from poverty to affluence." Which tale I had read the week before in a children's magazine, and, as usual, reflected deeply on it, resolving to keep my eye on all sh.e.l.ls in future, in the hope of something turning up.

I was _not_, however, a little prig who bored people with my reading, for I have heard old folk say that there was a quaint _naivete_ and droll seriousness, and total unconsciousness of superior information in my manner, which made these outpourings of mine very amusing. I think I was a kind of little Paul Dombey, unconsciously odd, and perhaps innocently Quaker-like. I could never understand why Aunt Nancy, and many more, seemed to be so much amused at serious and learned examples and questions which I laid down to them. For though they did not "smile outright," I had learned to penetrate the New England ironical glance and satirical intonation. My mother said that, when younger, I, having had a difficulty of some kind with certain street-boys, came into the house with my eyes filled with tears, and said, "I told them that they were evil-minded, but they laughed me to scorn." On another occasion, when some vagabond street-boys asked me to play with them, I gravely declined, on the ground that I must "Shun bad company"--this phrase being the t.i.tle of a tract which I had read, and the boys corresponding in appearance to a picture of sundry young ragam.u.f.fins on its t.i.tle-page.

My portrait had been admirably painted in Philadelphia by Mrs. Darley, the daughter of Sully, who, I believe, put the finis.h.i.+ng touches to it.

When Mr. Walker saw it, he remarked that it looked exactly as if Charley were just about to tell one of his stories. At the time I was reading for the first time "The Child's Own Book," an admirable large collection of fairy-tales and strange adventures, which kept me in fairy-land many a time while I lay confined to bed for weeks with pleurisies and a great variety of afflictions, for in this respect I suffered far more than most children.

AT SCHOOL IN NEW ENGLAND.

Mr. Charles W. Greene was a portly, ruddy, elderly Boston gentleman of good family, who had been in early life attached in some diplomatic capacity to a Legation, and had visited Constantinople. I think that he had met with reverses, but having some capital, had been established by his many friends as a schoolmaster. He was really a fine old gentleman, with a library full of old books, and had Madeira in quaint little old bottles, on which, stamped in the gla.s.s, one could read GREENE 1735. He had a dear little wife, and both were as kind to the boys as possible.

Once, and once only, when I had really been very naughty, did he punish me. He took me solemnly into the library (oh, what blessed beautiful reading I often had there!), and, after a solemn speech, and almost with tears in his eyes, gave me three blows with a folded newspaper! That was enough. If I had been flayed with a rope's end, it would not have had a greater moral effect than it did.

Everything was very English and old-fas.h.i.+oned about the place. The house was said in 1835 to be a hundred and fifty years old, having been one of the aristocratic Colonial manors. One building after another had been added to it, and the immense elms which grew about testified to its age.

The discipline or training was eminently adapted to make young gentlemen of us all. There was almost no immorality among the boys, and no fighting whatever. The punishments were bad marks, and for every mark a boy was obliged to go to bed an hour earlier than the others. Extreme cases of wickedness were punished by sending boys to bed in the daytime.

When two were in a room, and thus confined, they used to relieve the monotony of their imprisonment by fighting with pillows. Those who had bad marks were also confined within certain bounds. Good boys, or those especially favoured, were allowed to chop kindling wood, or do other light work, for which they were paid three cents per hour.