Calamities And Quarrels Of Authors Part 20

"DEAR WIFE,--I have been in great pain of body and mind since I came out. You are extremely cruel to a generous nature, which has a tenderness for you that renders your least _dishumour_ insupportably afflicting. After short starts of pa.s.sion, not to be inclined to reconciliation, is what is against all rules of Christianity and justice.

When I come home, I beg to be kindly received; or this will have as ill an effect upon my fortune, as on my mind and body."

In a postscript to another billet, he thus "sneers at Lady Steele's excessive attention to money":--

"Your man Sam owes me threepence, which must be deducted in the account between you and me; therefore, pray take care to get it in, or stop it."

Such despatches as the following were sent off three or four times in a day:--

"I beg of you not to be impatient, though it be an hour before you see

"Your obliged husband, R. STEELE."

"DEAR PRUE,--Don't be displeased that I do not come home till eleven o'clock.

Yours, ever."

"DEAR PRUE,--Forgive me dining abroad, and let Will carry the papers to Buckley's.

Your fond devoted R. S."

"DEAR PRUE,--I am very sleepy and tired, but could not think of closing my eyes till I had told you I am, dearest creature, your most affectionate, faithful husband,

R. STEELE.

"From the Press, One in the morning."

It would seem by the following note that this hourly account of himself was in consequence of the connubial mandate of his fair despot:--

"DEAR PRUE,--It is a strange thing, because you are handsome, that you will not behave yourself with the obedience that people of worse features do--but that I must be always giving you an account of every trifle and minute of my time. I send this to tell you I am waiting to be sent for again when my Lord Wharton is stirring."

LITERARY DISAPPOINTMENTS DISORDERING THE INTELLECT.

LELAND AND COLLINS.

This awful calamity may be traced in the fate of LELAND and COLLINS: the one exhausted the finer faculties of his mind in the grandest views, and sunk under gigantic tasks; the other enthusiast sacrificed his reason and his happiness to his imagination.

LELAND, the father of our antiquaries, was an accomplished scholar, and his ample mind had embraced the languages of antiquity, those of his own age, and the ancient ones of his own country: thus he held all human learning by its three vast chains. He travelled abroad; and he cultivated poetry with the ardour he could even feel for the acquisition of words. On his return home, among other royal favours, he was appointed by Henry VIII. the king's antiquary, a t.i.tle honourably created for Leland; for with him it became extinct. By this office he was empowered to search after English antiquities; to review the libraries of all the religious inst.i.tutions, and to bring the records of antiquity "out of deadly darkness into lively light."

This extensive power fed a pa.s.sion already formed by the study of our old rude historians; his elegant taste perceived that they wanted those graces which he could lend them.

Six years were occupied, by uninterrupted travel and study, to survey our national antiquities; to note down everything observable for the history of the country and the honour of the nation. What a magnificent view has he sketched of this learned journey! In search of knowledge, Leland wandered on the sea-coasts and in the midland; surveyed towns and cities, and rivers, castles, cathedrals, and monasteries; tumuli, coins, and inscriptions; collected authors; transcribed MSS. If antiquarianism pored, genius too meditated in this sublime industry.

Another six years were devoted to shape and to polish the immense collections he had ama.s.sed. All this untired labour and continued study were rewarded by Henry VIII. It is delightful, from its rarity, to record the grat.i.tude of a patron: Henry was worthy of Leland; and the genius of the author was magnificent as that of the monarch who had created it.

Nor was the grat.i.tude of Leland silent: he seems to have been in the habit of perpetuating his spontaneous emotions in elegant Latin verse.

Our author has fancifully expressed his grat.i.tude to the king:--

"Sooner," he says, "shall the seas float without their silent inhabitants; the th.o.r.n.y hedges cease to hide the birds; the oak to spread its boughs; and Flora to paint the meadows with flowers;"

Quam Rex dive, tuum labatur pectore nostro Nomen, quod studiis portus et aura meis.

Than thou, great King, my bosom cease to hail, Who o'er my studies breath'st a favouring gale.

Leland was, indeed, alive to the kindness of his royal patron; and among his numerous literary projects, was one of writing a history of all the palaces of Henry, in imitation of Procopius, who described those of the Emperor Justinian. He had already delighted the royal ear in a beautiful effusion of fancy and antiquarianism, in his _Cygnea Cantio_, the Song of the Swans. The swan of Leland, melodiously floating down the Thames, from Oxford to Greenwich, chants, as she pa.s.ses along, the ancient names and honours of the towns, the castles, and the villages.

Leland presented his "Strena, or a New Year's Gift," to the king.--It consists of an account of his studies; and sketches, with a fervid and vast imagination, his magnificent labour, which he had already inscribed with the t.i.tle _De Antiquitate Britannica_, and which was to be divided into as many books as there were s.h.i.+res. All parts of this address of the King's Antiquary to the king bear the stamp of his imagination and his taste. He opens his intention of improving, by the cla.s.sical graces of composition, the rude labours of our ancestors; for,

"Except Truth be delicately clothed in purpure, her written verytees can scant find a reader."

Our old writers, he tells his sovereign, had, indeed,

"From time to time preserved the acts of your predecessors, and the fortunes of your realm, with great diligence, and no less faith; would to G.o.d with like eloquence!"

An exclamation of fine taste, when taste was yet a stranger in the country. And when he alludes to the knowledge of British affairs scattered among the Roman, as well as our own writers, his fervid fancy breaks forth with an image at once simple and sublime:--

"I trust," says Leland, "so to open the window, that the light shall be seen so long, that is to say, by the s.p.a.ce of a whole thousand years stopped up, and the old glory of your Britain to re-flourish through the world."[123]

And he pathetically concludes--

"Should I live to perform those things that are already begun, I trust that your realm shall so well be known, once painted with its native colours, that it shall give place to the glory of no other region."

The grandeur of this design was a const.i.tuent part of the genius of Leland, but not less, too, was that presaging melancholy which even here betrays itself, and even more frequently in his verses.

Everything about Leland was marked by his own greatness; his country and his countrymen were ever present; and, by the excitement of his feelings, even his humbler pursuits were elevated into patriotism.

Henry died the year after he received the "New Year's Gift." From that moment, in losing the greatest patron for the greatest work, Leland appears to have felt the staff which he had used to turn at pleasure for his stay, break in his hands.

He had new patrons to court, while engaged in labours for which a single life had been too short. The melancholy that cherishes genius may also destroy it. Leland, brooding over his voluminous labours, seemed to love and to dread them; sometimes to pursue them with rapture, and sometimes to shrink from them with despair. His generous temper had once shot forwards to posterity; but he now calms his struggling hopes and doubts, and confines his literary ambition to his own country and his own age.

POSTERITATIS AMOR DUBIUS.

Posteritatis amor mihi perblanditur, et ultro Premitt.i.t libris secula multa meis.

At non tam facile est oculato imponere, nosco Quam non sim tali dignus honore frui.

Graecia magniloquos vates desiderat ipsa, Roma suos etiam disperiisse dolet.

Exemplis quum sim claris edoctus ab istis, Qui sperem Musas vivere posse meas?

Certe mi sat erit praesenti scribere saeclo, Auribus et patriae complacuisse meae.

IMITATED.

Posterity, thy soothing love I feel, That o'er my volumes many an age may steal: But hard it is the well-clear'd eye to cheat With honours undeserved, too fond deceit!

Greece, greatly eloquent, and full of fame, Sighs for the want of many a perish'd name; And Rome o'er her ill.u.s.trious children mourns, Their fame departing with their mouldering urns.

How can I hope, by such examples shown, More than a transient day, a pa.s.sing sun?

Enough for me to win the present age, And please a brother with a brother's page.

By other verses, addressed to Cranmer, it would appear that Leland was experiencing anxieties to which he had not been accustomed,--and one may suspect, by the opening image of his "Supellex," that his pension was irregular, and that he began, as authors do in these hard cases, to value "the furniture" of his mind above that of his house.