A History of Nineteenth Century Literature (1780-1895) Part 7

The other contributors of the first generation to the _Edinburgh Review_ do not require much notice here; for Brougham was not really a man of letters, and belongs to political and social, not to literary history, while Mackintosh, though no one would contest his claims, will be better noticed under the head of philosophy. Nor do many of the first staff of the _Edinburgh's_ great rival, the _Quarterly_, require notice; for Gifford, Canning, Ellis, Scott, Southey have all been noticed under other heads.

Two, however, not of the absolutely first rank, may be mentioned here more conveniently than anywhere else--Sir John Barrow and Isaac Disraeli. The former had a rather remarkable career; for he was born, in 1764, quite of the lower rank, and was successively a clerk in a workshop, a sailor, a teacher of mathematics, and secretary to Macartney on his famous emba.s.sy to China. After following the same patron to South Africa, Barrow, at the age of forty, became Secretary of the Admiralty, which post he held with one short break for more than forty years longer. He was made a baronet in 1835, and died in 1848. Barrow was a considerable writer on geography and naval history; and one of the pillars of the _Quarterly_. Isaac Disraeli, son of one Benjamin of that name and father of another, seems to have been as unlike his famous offspring as any father could be to any son. Born at Enfield in 1766, he showed absolutely no taste for business of any kind, and after some opposition was allowed to cultivate letters. His original work was worth little; indeed, one of the amiable sayings attributed to his friend Rogers was that Isaac Disraeli had "only half an intellect." He fell, however, pretty early (1791) into an odd but pleasant and profitable course of writing which amused himself during the remainder of a long life (he died blind in the same year with Barrow), and has amused a vast number of readers for more than a century. The _Curiosities of Literature_, the first part of which appeared at the date above mentioned, to be supplemented by others for more than forty years, were followed by the _Calamities of Authors_ and the _Quarrels of Authors_ (1812-14), a book on _Charles I._, and the _Amenities of Literature_ (1840). Of these the _Curiosities_ is the type, and it is also the best of them. Isaac Disraeli was not a good writer; and his original reflections may sometimes make the reader doubt for a moment whether Rogers was not more wrong in granting him half an intellect than in denying him a whole one. But his anecdotage, though, as perhaps such anecdotage is bound to be, not extremely accurate, is almost inexhaustibly amusing, and indicates a real love as well as a wide knowledge of letters.

The next periodicals, the founding of which enlisted or brought out journalists or essay-writers of the true kind, were _Blackwood's Magazine_, founded at Edinburgh in 1817, and the _London Magazine_, of about the same date, the first with one of the longest as well as the most brilliant careers to run that any periodical can boast of, the latter as short-lived as it was brilliant. Indeed, the two had an odd and--in the Shakespearian sense--metaphysical opposition. Scotland and England, the country and the c.o.c.kney schools, Toryism and Liberalism (though the _London_ was by no means so thoroughgoing on the Liberal side as _Blackwood_ was on the Tory, and some of its most distinguished contributors were either Tory, as De Quincey, or neutral, as Lamb) fought out their differences under the two flags. And by a climax of coincidence, the fate of the _London_ was practically decided by the duel which killed John Scott, its editor, this duel being the direct result of an editorial or contributorial quarrel between the two periodicals.

Both these magazines, besides being more frequent in appearance than the _Edinburgh_ and the _Quarterly_, attempted, as their very t.i.tle of "magazine" expressed, a much wider and more miscellaneous collection of subjects than the strict "review" theory permitted. From the very first _Blackwood_ gave a welcome to fiction, to poetry, and to the widest possible construction of the essay, while, in almost every respect, the _London_ was equally hospitable. Both had staffs of unusual strength, and of still more unusual personality; and while the _London_ could boast of Charles Lamb, of Hazlitt, of De Quincey, of Hood, of Miss Mitford, besides many lesser names, _Blackwood_ was practically launched by the triumvirate of Wilson, Lockhart, and the Ettrick Shepherd, with the speedy collaboration of Maginn.

The eldest of these, and if not the most vigorous, if very nearly the least prolific, yet the most exquisite and singular in literary genius, was Charles Lamb. He also was of the "Seventy Club," as we may call it, which founded the literature of the nineteenth century, and he was born in London on 18th February 1775. He was of rather lower birth than most of its other members (if members.h.i.+p can be predicated of a purely imaginary body), being the son of a lawyer's clerk and confidential servant; but he was educated at Christ's Hospital, and, through the interest of his father's employer, obtained, at the age of seventeen, a berth in the East India House, which a.s.sured his modest fortunes through life. But there was the curse of madness in his family, and though he himself escaped with but one slight and pa.s.sing attack of actual lunacy, and at the cost of an eccentricity which only imparted a rarer touch to his genius, his elder sister Mary was subject to constant seizures, in one of which she stabbed her mother to the heart. She was more gently dealt with than perhaps would have been the case at present, and Lamb undertook the entire charge of her. She repaid him by unfailing care and affection during her lucid intervals (which were long and frequent), and by a sympathy with his own literary tastes, which not seldom made her a valuable collaborator as well as sympathiser. But the shadow was on his whole life: it made it impossible for him to marry, as he evidently would have done if it had not existed; and it perhaps had something to do with a venial but actual tendency on his part to take, rather fully, the convivial license of the time. But Lamb had no other weakness, and had not this in any ruinous degree. The quality of his genius was unique. He had from the first been a diligent and affectionate student of sixteenth and seventeenth century writers, and some of his first literary efforts, after some early sonnets (written with Coleridge and their friend Lloyd, and much fallen foul of by the Tory wits of the _Anti-Jacobin_), were connected with these studies. He and his sister wrote _Tales from Shakespeare_, which, almost alone of such things, are not unworthy of the original. He executed an Elizabethan tragedy, _John Woodvil_, which is rather better than it has been generally said to be; and he arranged a series (or rather two) of scenes from the Elizabethan drama itself, the short, interspersed, critical remarks of which, though occasionally a very little fanciful, contain the most exquisitely sympathetic criticism to be found anywhere in English literature.

It was not, however, till he had well reached middle age that the establishment of the _London_, the later publishers of which, Taylor and Hessey, were his friends, gave him that half accidental, and yet it would seem necessary, opening which has so often made the fame of men of genius, and which apparently they are by no means often able to make for themselves. Lamb's poems have occasionally an exquisite pathos and more frequently a pleasant humour, but they would not by themselves justify a very high estimate of him; and it is at least possible that, if we had nothing but the brief critical remarks on the dramatists above noticed, they would, independently of their extreme brevity, have failed to obtain for him the just reputation which they now hold, thanks partly to the fact that we have, as comments on them, the _Essays of Elia_ and the delightful correspondence. This latter, after being first published soon after Lamb's death in 1834 (nine years after he had been pensioned off from the India House), by Mr., afterwards Serjeant and Sir Thomas Talfourd, has been gradually augmented, till it has at last found an excellent and probably final editor in Canon Ainger.

It is in these two collections that Lamb presents himself in the character which alone can confer on any man the first rank in literature, the character of unicity--of being some one and giving something which no one before him has given or has been. The _Essays of Elia_ (a _nom de guerre_ said to have been taken from an Italian comrade of the writer's elder brother John in the South Sea House, and directed by Lamb himself to be p.r.o.nounced "Ell-ia") elude definition not merely as almost all works of genius do, but by virtue of something essentially elvish and tricksy in their own nature. It is easy to detect in them--or rather the things there are so obvious that there is no need of detection--an extraordinary familiarity with the great "quaint" writers of the seventeenth century--Burton, Fuller, Browne--which has supplied a diction of unsurpa.s.sed brilliancy and charm; a familiarity with the eighteenth century essayists which has enabled the writer to construct a form very different from theirs in appearance but closely connected with it in reality; an unequalled command over that kind of humour which unites the most fantastic merriment to the most exquisite pathos; a perfect humanity; a cast of thought which, though completely conscious of itself, and not in any grovelling sense humble (Lamb, forgiving and gentle as he was, could turn sharply even upon Coleridge, even upon Southey, when he thought liberties had been taken with him), was a thousand miles removed from arrogance or b.u.mptiousness; an endlessly various and attractive set of crotchets and whimsies, never divorced from the power of seeing the ludicrous side of themselves; a fervent love for literature and a wonderful gift of expounding it; imagination in a high, and fancy almost in the highest degree. But when all this has been duly set down, how much remains both in the essays and in the letters, which in fact are chiefly distinguished from one another by the fact that the essays are letters somewhat less discursive and somewhat in fuller dress, the letters essays in the rough. For the style of Lamb is as indefinable as it is inimitable, and his matter and method defy selection and specification as much as the flutterings of a b.u.t.terfly.

One thing he has always, and that is charm; as for the rest he is an epitome of the lighter side of _belles lettres_, and not always of the lighter side only.

No one who studies Lamb can fail to see the enormous advantage which was given him by his possession of an official employment which brought him a small but sufficient income without very hard labour. Such literary work as his could never be done (at any rate for a length of time) as "collar-work," and even if the best of it had by chance been so performed, it must necessarily have been mixed, as that of Leigh Hunt is, with a far larger quant.i.ty of mere work to order. No such advantage was possessed by the third of the great trio of c.o.c.kney critics, or at least critics of the so-called c.o.c.kney school; for William Hazlitt, as much the greatest of English critics in a certain way as Lamb is in another and Jeffrey in a third (though a lower than either), was a c.o.c.kney neither by extraction nor by birth, nor by early sojourn, nor even by continuous residence in later life. His family was Irish, his father a Unitarian minister; he was born at Maidstone in 1778. When his father was officiating at Wem in Shrops.h.i.+re, in Hazlitt's twentieth year, Coleridge, who at times affected the same denomination, visited the place, and Hazlitt was most powerfully impressed by him. He was, however, divided between art and literature as professions, and his first essays were in the former, which he practised for some time, visiting the Louvre during the peace, or rather armistice, of Amiens, to copy pictures for some English collectors, and to study them on his own account. Returning to London, he met Lamb and others of the literary set in the capital, and, after some newspaper work, married Miss Stoddart, a friend of Mary Lamb's, and a lady of some property. He and his wife lived for some years at her estate of Winterslow on Salisbury Plain (long afterwards still a favourite resort of Hazlitt's), and then he went in 1812 once more to London, where abundant work on periodicals of all kinds, on the Liberal side, from daily newspapers to the _Edinburgh Review_, soon fell into his hands. But after a time he gave up most kinds of writing except literary, theatrical, and art criticism, the delivery of lectures on literature, and the composition of essays of a character less fanciful and less purely original than Lamb's, but almost as miscellaneous.

He lived till September 1830, the first of those early thirties of the nineteenth century which were to be as generally fatal to his generation of great English men of letters as the seventies of the eighteenth had been prolific of them; and his dying words, "Well, I have had a happy life," are noteworthy. For certainly that life would hardly have seemed happy to many. He quarrelled with his first wife, was divorced from her in Scotland, discreditably enough; published to the world with astounding lack of reticence the details of a frantic pa.s.sion for Sarah Walker, a lodginghouse-keeper's daughter, who jilted him; and after marrying a second time, was left by his second wife. He had never been rich, and during the last years of his life was in positive difficulties, while for almost the whole period of his second sojourn in London he was the object of the most virulent abuse from the Tory organs, especially the _Quarterly_ and _Blackwood_--abuse which, it must be confessed, he was both ready and able to repay in kind with handsome interest. He appears to have played the part of firebrand and makebate in the John Scott duel already referred to. Even with his friends he could not keep upon good terms, and the sincere gentleness of Lamb broke down at least once, as the easy good-nature of Leigh Hunt did many times, under the strain of his perverse and savage wrong-headedness.

But whether the critical and the unamiable temper are, as some would have it, essentially one, or whether their combination in the same person be mere coincidence, Hazlitt was beyond all question a great, a very great, critic--in not a few respects our very greatest. All his work, or almost all that has much merit, is small in individual bulk, though the total is very respectable. His longest book, his _Life of Napoleon_, which was written late and as a counterblast to Scott's, from the singular standpoint of a Republican who was an admirer of Bonaparte, has next to no value; and his earliest, a philosophical work in eighteenth century style on _The Principles of Human Action_, has not much. But his essays and lectures, which, though probably not as yet by any means exhaustively collected or capable of being identified, fill nine or ten volumes, are of extraordinary goodness. They may be divided roughly into three cla.s.ses. The first, dealing with art and the drama, must take the lowest room, for theatrical criticism is of necessity, except in so far as it touches on literature rather than acting, of very ephemeral interest; and Hazlitt's education in art and knowledge of it were not quite extensive enough, nor the examples which in the first quarter of this century he had before him in England important enough, to make his work of this kind of the first importance. The best of it is the _Conversations with Northcote_, a painter of no very great merit, but a survivor of the Reynolds studio; and these conversations very frequently and very widely diverge from painting into literary and miscellaneous matters. The second cla.s.s contains the miscellaneous essays proper, and these have by some been put at the head of Hazlitt's work. But although some of them, indeed, nearly all, display a spirit, a command of the subject, and a faculty of literary treatment which had never been given to the same subjects in the same way before, although such things as the famous "Going to a Fight," "Going a Journey," "The Indian Jugglers," "Merry England," "Sundials," "On Taste," and not a few more would, put together and freed from good but less good companions, make a most memorable collection, still his real strength is not here.

Great as Hazlitt was as a miscellaneous and Montaignesque essayist, he was greater as a literary critic. Literature was, though he coquetted with art, his first and most constant love; it was the subject on which, as far as English literature is concerned (and he knew little and is still less worth consulting about any other), he had acquired the largest and soundest knowledge; and it is that for which he had the most original and essential genius. His intense prejudices and his occasional inadequacy make themselves felt here as they do everywhere, and even here it is necessary to give the caution that Hazlitt is never to be trusted when he shows the least evidence of dislike for which he gives no reason. But to any one who has made a little progress in criticism himself, to any one who has either read for himself or is capable of reading for himself, of being guided by what is helpful and of neglecting what is not, there is no greater critic than Hazlitt in any language. He will sometimes miss--he is never perhaps so certain as his friends Lamb and Hunt were to find--exquisite individual points.

Prejudice, accidental ignorance, or other causes may sometimes invalidate his account of authors or of subjects in general. But still the four great collections of his criticism, _The Characters of Shakespeare_, _The Elizabethan Dramatists_, _The English Poets_, and _The English Comic Writers_, with not a few scattered things in his other writings, make what is on the whole the best corpus of criticism by a single writer in English on English. He is the critics' critic as Spenser is the poets' poet; that is to say, he has, errors excepted and deficiencies allowed, the greatest proportion of the strictly critical excellencies--of the qualities which make a critic--that any English writer of his craft has ever possessed.

_Blackwood's Magazine_, the headquarters, the citadel, the _place d'armes_ of the opposition to the c.o.c.kney school and of criticism and journalism that were Tory first of all, enlisted a younger set of recruits than those hitherto mentioned, and the special style of writing which it introduced, though exceedingly clever and stimulating, lent itself rather less to dispa.s.sionate literary appreciation than even the avowedly partisan methods of the _Edinburgh_. In its successful form (for it had a short and inglorious existence before it found out the way) it was launched by an audacious "skit" on the literati of Edinburgh written by John Wilson, John Gibson Lockhart, and James Hogg, while very soon after its establishment it was joined by a wild and witty Bohemian scholar from the south of Ireland, William Maginn, who, though before long he drifted away to other resorts, and ere many years established in _Fraser_ a new abode of guerilla journalism, impressed on _Blackwood_ itself, before he left it, several of its best-known features, and in particular is said to have practically started the famous _Noctes Ambrosianae_. Of Hogg, enough has been said in a former chapter. For the critical purpose of "Maga," as _Blackwood's Magazine_ loved to call itself, he was rather a b.u.t.t, or, to speak less despiteously, a stimulant, than an originator; and he had neither the education nor indeed the gifts of a critic. Of each of the others some account must be given, and Maginn will introduce yet another flight of brilliant journalists, some of whom, especially the greatest of all, Carlyle, lived till far into the last quarter of the present century.

Wilson, the eldest of those just mentioned, though a younger man than any one as yet noticed in this chapter, and for many years the guiding spirit (there never has been any "editor" of _Blackwood_ except the members of the firm who have published it) of _Maga_, must at some time or other have taken to literature, and would probably in any case have sooner or later written the poems and stories which exist under his name, but do not in the very least degree const.i.tute its eminence. It was the chapter of accidents that made him a journalist and a critic. He was born in 1785, his father being a rich manufacturer of Paisley, was educated at the universities of Glasgow and Oxford, came early into a considerable fortune, married at twenty-six, and having established himself at Elleray on Windermere, lived there the life of a country gentleman, with more or less literary tastes. His fortune being lost by bad luck and dishonest agency, he betook himself to Edinburgh, and finding it impossible to get on with Jeffrey (which was not surprising), threw himself heart and soul into the opposition venture of _Blackwood_.

He had, moreover, the extraordinary good luck to obtain, certainly on no very solid grounds (though he made at least as good a professor as another), the valuable chair of Moral Philosophy in the University of Edinburgh, which of itself secured him from any fear of want or narrow means. But no penniless barrister on his promotion could have flung himself into militant journalism with more ardour than did Wilson. He re-created, if he did not invent, the _Noctes Ambrosianae_--a series of convivial conversations on food, drink, politics, literature, and things in general, with interlocutors at first rather numerous, and not very distinct, but latterly narrowed down to "Christopher North" (Wilson himself), the "Ettrick Shepherd" (Hogg), and a certain "Timothy Tickler," less distinctly identified with Wilson's mother's brother, an Edinburgh lawyer of the name of Sym. A few outsiders, sometimes real (as De Quincey), sometimes imaginary, were, till the last, added now and then. And besides these conversations, which are his great t.i.tle to fame, he contributed, also under the _nom de guerre_ of Christopher North, an immense number of articles, in part collected as _Christopher North in his Sporting Jacket_, substantive collections on Homer, on Spenser, and others, and almost innumerable single papers and essays on things in general. From the time when Lockhart (see below) went to London, no influence on _Blackwood_ could match Wilson's for some ten or twelve years, or nearly till the end of the thirties. Latterly ill-health, the death of friends and of his wife, and other causes, lessened his energy, and for some years before his death in 1854 he wrote little. Two years before that time his increasing ailments caused him even to resign his professors.h.i.+p.

Wilson--whose stories are merely mediocre, and whose poems, _The Isle of Palms_ (1812) and _The City of the Plague_ (1816), merely show that he was an intelligent contemporary of Scott and Byron, and a neighbour of the Lake poets--developed in his miscellaneous journalism one of the most puissant and luxuriant literary faculties of the time; and in particular was among the first in one, and perhaps the very first in another, kind of writing. The first and less valuable of the two was the subjection of most, if not all, of the topics of the newspaper to a boisterous but fresh and vigorous style of critical handling, which bears some remote resemblance to the styles of L'Estrange towards the end of the seventeenth century, and Bentley a little later, but is in all important points new. The second and higher was the attempt to subst.i.tute for the correct, balanced, exactly-proportioned, but even in the hands of Gibbon, even in those of Burke, somewhat colourless and jejune prose of the past age, a new style of writing, exuberant in diction, semi-poetical in rhythm, confounding, or at least alternating very sharply between, the styles of high-strung enthusiasm and extravagant burlesque, and setting at naught all precepts of the immediate elders. It would be too much, no doubt, to attribute the invention of this style to Wilson. It was "in the air"; it was the inevitable complement of romantic diction in poetry; it had been antic.i.p.ated to some extent by others, and it displayed itself in various forms almost simultaneously in the hands of Landor, who kept to a more cla.s.sical form, and of De Quincey, who was modern. But Wilson, unless in conversation with De Quincey, cannot be said to have learnt it from any one else: he preceded most in the time, and greatly exceeded all in the bulk and influence of his exercises, owing to his position on the staff of a popular and widely-read periodical.

The defect of both these qualities of Wilson's style (a defect which extends largely to the matter of his writings in criticism and in other departments) was a defect of sureness of taste; while his criticism was more vigorous than safe. Except his Toryism (which, however, was shot with odd flashes of democratic sentiment and a cross-vein of crotchety dislike not to England but to London), he had not many pervading prejudices. But at the same time he had not many clear principles: he was the slave of whim and caprice in his individual opinions; and he never seems to have been able to distinguish between a really fine thing and a piece of fustian, between an urbane jest and a piece of gross buffoonery, between eloquence and rant, between a reasoned condemnation and a spiteful personal fling. Accordingly the ten reprinted volumes of his contributions to _Blackwood_ and the ma.s.s of his still uncollected articles contain the strangest jumble of good and bad in matter and form that exists anywhere. By turns trivial and magnificent, exquisite and disgusting, a hierophant of literature and a mere railer at men of letters, a prince of describers, jesters, enthusiasts, and the author of tedious and commonplace newspaper "copy," Wilson is one of the most unequal, one of the most puzzling, but also one of the most stimulating and delightful, figures in English literature. Perhaps slightly over-valued for a time, he has for many years been distinctly neglected, if not depreciated and despised; and the voluminousness of his work, coupled with the fact that it is difficult to select from it owing to the pervading inequality of its merits, may be thought likely to keep him in the general judgment at a lower plane than he deserves. But the influence which he exerted during many years both upon writers and readers by his work in _Blackwood_ cannot be over-estimated. And it may be said without fear that no one with tolerably wide sympathies, who is able to appreciate good literature, will ever seriously undertake the reading of his various works without equal satisfaction and profit.

Wilson's princ.i.p.al coadjutor in the early days of _Blackwood_, and his friend of all days (though the mania for crying down not so much England as London made "Christopher North" indulge in some girds at his old comrade's editors.h.i.+p of the _Quarterly_), was a curious contrast to Wilson himself. This contrast may may have been due partly, but by no means wholly, to the fact that there was ten years between them. John Gibson Lockhart was born at Cambusnethan, where his father was minister, on 14th July 1794. Like Wilson, he was educated at Glasgow and at Oxford, where he took a first-cla.s.s at a very early age, and whence he went to Germany, a completion of "study-years" which the revolutionary wars had for a long time rendered difficult, if not dangerous. On returning home he was called to the Scottish Bar, where it would seem that he might have made some figure, but for his inability to speak in public. _Blackwood_ gave him the very opening suited to his genius; and for years he was one of its chief contributors, and perhaps the most dangerous wielder of the pretty sharp weapons in which its staff indulged. Shortly afterwards, in 1819, he published (perhaps with some slight a.s.sistance from Wilson) his first original book (he had translated Schlegel's _Lectures on History_ earlier), _Peter's Letters to his Kinsfolk_. The t.i.tle was a parody on Scott's account of his continental journey after Waterloo, the substance an exceedingly vivacious account of the things and men of Edinburgh at the time, something after the fas.h.i.+on of _Humphrey_ _Clinker_. Next year, on 29th April, Lockhart married Sophia, Scott's elder daughter; and the pair lived for some years to come either in Edinburgh or at the cottage of Chiefswood, near Abbotsford, Lockhart contributing freely to _Blackwood_, and writing his four novels and his _Spanish Ballads_. At the end of 1825 or the beginning of 1826, just at the time when his father-in-law's financial troubles set in, he received the appointment of editor of the _Quarterly Review_ in succession, though not in immediate succession, to Gifford. He then removed to London, where he continued to direct the _Review_, to contribute for a time to _Fraser_, to be a very important figure in literary and political life, and after Scott's death to write an admirable _Life_. Domestic troubles came rather thickly on him after Scott's death, which indeed was preceded by that of Lockhart's own eldest son, the "Hugh Littlejohn" of the _Tales of a Grandfather_. Mrs. Lockhart herself died in 1837. In 1843 Lockhart received the auditors.h.i.+p of the duchy of Lancaster, a post of some value. Ten years later, in broken health, he resigned the editors.h.i.+p of the _Quarterly_, and died towards the end of the year.

Lockhart's works, at present uncollected, and perhaps in no small proportion irrecoverable, must have been of far greater bulk than those of any one yet mentioned in this chapter except Wilson, and not inconsiderably greater than his. They are also of a remarkable variety, and of an extraordinary level of excellence in their different kinds.

Lockhart was not, like Wilson, an advocate or a pract.i.tioner of very ornate or revolutionary prose. On the contrary, he both practised, preached, and most formidably defended by bitter criticism of opposite styles, a manner in prose and verse which was almost cla.s.sical, or which at least admitted no further Romantic innovation than that of the Lake poets and Scott. His authors.h.i.+p of the savage onslaught upon Keats in _Blackwood_ is not proven; but there is no doubt that he wrote the scarcely less ferocious, though much more discriminating and better-deserved, attack on Tennyson's early poems in the _Quarterly_. He was himself no mean writer of verse. His _Spanish Ballads_ (1823), in which he had both Southey and Scott as models before him, are of great excellence; and some of his occasional pieces display not merely much humour (which n.o.body ever denied him), but no mean share of the feeling which is certainly not often a.s.sociated with his name. But verse was only an occasional pastime with him: his vocation was to write prose, and he wrote it with admirable skill and a seldom surpa.s.sed faculty of adaptation to the particular task. It is indeed probable--and it would be no discredit to him--that his reputation with readers as opposed to students will mainly depend, as it depends at present, upon his _Life of Scott_. Nor would even thus his plumes be borrowed over much. For though no doubt the letters and the diary of Sir Walter himself count for much in the interest of the book, though the beauty and n.o.bility of Scott's character, his wonderful achievements, the pathetic revolution of his fortune, form a subject not easily matched, yet to be equal to such a subject is to be in another sense on an equality with it. Admiration for the book is not chequered or tempered, as it almost necessarily must be in the case of its only possible rival, Boswell's _Johnson_, with more or less contempt for the author; still less is it (as some have contended that admiration for Boswell is) due to that contempt. The taste and spirit of Lockhart's book are not less admirable than the skill of its arrangement and the competency of its writing; nor would it be easily possible to find a happier adjustment in this respect in the whole annals of biography.

But this great book ought not to obscure the other work which Lockhart has done. His biography of Burns is of remarkable merit; it may be questioned whether to this day, though it may be deficient in a few modern discoveries of fact (and these have been mostly supplied in the edition by the late Mr. Scott Douglas), it is not the best book on the subject. The taste and judgment, the clear vision and sound sense, which distinguished Lockhart, are in few places more apparent than here. His abridgment of Scott's _Life of Napoleon_ is no ordinary abridgment, and is a work of thorough craft, if not even of art. His novels, with one exception, have ceased to be much read; and perhaps even that one can hardly be said to enjoy frequent perusal. _Valerius_, the first, is a cla.s.sical novel, and suffers under the drawbacks which have generally attended its kind. _Reginald Dalton_, a novel in part of actual life at Oxford, and intended to be wholly of actual life, still shows something of the artificial handling, of the supposed necessity for adventure, which is observable in Hook and others of the time, and which has been sufficiently noticed in the last chapter. _Matthew Wald_, the last of the four, is both too gloomy and too extravagant: it deals with a mad hero. But _Adam Blair_, which was published in the same year (1821) with _Valerius_, is a wonderful little book. The story is not well told; but the characters and the princ.i.p.al situation--a violent pa.s.sion entertained by a pious widowed minister for his neighbour's wife--are handled with extraordinary power. _Peter's Letters_, which is half a book and half journalism, may be said to be, with rare exceptions (such as an obituary article on Hook, which was reprinted from the _Quarterly_), the only specimen of Lockhart's miscellaneous writing that is easily accessible or authentically known. He was still but in his apprentices.h.i.+p here; but his remarkable gifts are already apparent.

These gifts included a faculty of sarcastic comment so formidable that it early earned him the t.i.tle of "the Scorpion"; a very wide and sound knowledge of literature, old and new, English and foreign; some acquirements in art and in other matters; an excellent style, and a solid if rather strait-laced theory of criticism. Except that he was, as almost everybody was then, too much given to violent personalities in his anonymous work, he was a very great journalist indeed, and he was also a very great man of letters.

Thomas de Quincey was not of the earliest _Blackwood_ staff (in that respect Maginn should be mentioned before him), but he was the older as well as the more important man of the two, and there is the additional reason for postponing the founder of _Fraser_, that this latter periodical introduced a fresh flight of birds of pa.s.sage (as journalists both fortunate and unfortunate may peculiarly be called) to English literature. De Quincey was born in 1785 (the same year as his friend Wilson) at Manchester, where his father was a merchant of means. He was educated at the Grammar School of his native town, after some preliminary teaching at or near Bath, whither his mother had moved after his father's death. He did not like Manchester, and when he had nearly served his time for an exhibition to Brasenose College, Oxford, he ran away and hid himself. He went to Oxford after all, entering at Worcester, where he made a long though rather intermittent residence, but took no degree. In 1809 he took up his abode at Grasmere, married after a time, and lived there, at least as his headquarters, for more than twenty years. In 1830 he moved to Edinburgh, where, or in its neighbourhood, he resided for the rest of his long life, and where he died in December 1859. He has given various autobiographic handlings of this life--in the main it would seem quite trustworthy, but invested with an air of fantastic unreality by his manner of relation.

His life, however, and his personality, and even the whole of his voluminous published work, have in all probability taken colour in the general thought from his first literary work of any consequence, the wonderful _Confessions of an English Opium Eater_, which, with the _Essays of Elia_, were the chief flowers of the _London Magazine_, and appeared in that periodical during the year 1821. He had acquired this habit during his sojourn at Oxford, and it had grown upon him during his at first solitary residence at the Lakes to an enormous extent. Until he thus committed the results of his dreams, or of his fancy and literary genius working on his dreams, or of his fancy and genius by themselves, to print and paper, in his thirty-sixth year, he had been, though a great reader, hardly anything of a writer. But thenceforward, and especially after, in 1825, he had visited his Lake neighbour Wilson at Edinburgh, and had been by him introduced to _Blackwood_, he became a frequent contributor to different magazines, and continued to be so, writing far more even than he published, till his death. He wrote very few books, the chief being a very free translation of a German novel, forged as Scott's, and called _Walladmor_; a more original and stable, though not very brilliant, effort in fiction, ent.i.tled _Klosterheim_; and the _Logic of Political Economy_. Towards the end of his life he superintended an English collection--there had already been one in America--of his essays, and this has been supplemented more than once since.

It may, indeed, fairly be doubted whether so large a collection, of miscellaneous, heterogeneous, and, to tell the truth, very unequally interesting and meritorious matter, has ever been received with greater or more lasting popular favour, a fresh edition of the fourteen or sixteen volumes of the _Works_ having been called for on an average every decade. There have been dissidents: and recently in particular something of a set has been made against De Quincey--a set to some extent helped by the gradual addition to the _Works_ of a great deal of unimportant matter which he had not himself cared to reproduce. This, indeed, is perhaps the greatest danger to which the periodical writer is after his death exposed, and is even the most serious drawback to periodical writing. It is impossible that any man who lives by such writing can always be at his best in form, and he will sometimes be compelled to execute what Carlyle has called "honest journey-work in default of better,"--work which, though perfectly honest and perfectly respectable, is mere journey-work, and has no claim to be disturbed from its rest when its journey is accomplished. Of this there was some even in De Quincey's own collection, and the proportion has been much increased since. Moreover, even at his very best, he was not a writer who could be trusted to keep himself at that best. His reading was enormous,--nearly as great perhaps as Southey's, though in still less popular directions,--and he would sometimes drag it in rather inappropriately. He had an unconquerable and sometimes very irritating habit of digression, of divagation, of aside. And, worst of all, his humour, which in its own peculiar vein of imaginative grotesque has seldom been surpa.s.sed, was liable constantly to degenerate into a kind of laboured trifling, inexpressibly exasperating to the nerves. He could be simply dull; and he can seldom be credited with the possession of what may be called literary tact.

Yet his merits were such as to give him no superior in his own manner among the essayists, and hardly any among the prose writers of the century. He, like Wilson, and probably before Wilson, deliberately aimed at a style of gorgeous elaboration, intended not exactly for constant use, but for use when required; and he achieved it. Certain well-known pa.s.sages, as well as others which have not become hackneyed, in the _Confessions of an Opium Eater_, in the _Autobiography_, in _The English Mail Coach_, in _Our Ladies of Sorrow_, and elsewhere, are unsurpa.s.sed in English or out of it for imaginative splendour of imagery, suitably reproduced in words. Nor was this De Quincey's only, though it was his most precious gift. He had a singular, though, as has been said, a very untrustworthy faculty of humour, both grim and quaint. He was possessed of extraordinary dialectic ingenuity, a little alloyed no doubt by a tendency to wire-drawn and over subtle minuteness such as besets the born logician who is not warned of his danger either by a strong vein of common sense or by constant sojourn in the world. He could expound and describe admirably; he had a thorough grasp of the most complicated subjects when he did not allow will-o'-the-wisps to lure him into letting it go, and could narrate the most diverse kinds of action, such as the struggles of Bentley with Trinity College, the journey of the Tartars from the Ukraine to Siberia, and the fortunes of the Spanish Nun, Catalina, with singular adaptability. In his biographical articles on friends and contemporaries, which are rather numerous, he has been charged both with ill-nature and with inaccuracy. The first charge may be peremptorily dismissed, the second requires much argument and sifting in particular cases. To some who have given not a little attention to the matter it seems that De Quincey was never guilty of deliberate fabrication, and that he was not even careless in statement. But he was first of all a dreamer; and when it is true of a man that, in the words of the exquisite pa.s.sage where Calderon has come at one with Shakespeare, his very dreams are a dream, it will often happen that his facts are not exactly a fact.

Nevertheless, De Quincey is a great writer and a great figure in literature, while it may plausibly be contended that journalism may make all the more boast of him in that it is probable that without it he would never have written at all. And he has one peculiarity not yet mentioned. Although his chief excellences may not be fully perceptible except to mature tastes, he is specially attractive to the young.

Probably more boys have in the last forty years been brought to a love of literature proper by De Quincey than by any other writer whatever.

Of other contributors to these periodicals much might be said in larger s.p.a.ce, as for instance of the poisoner-critic Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, the "Ja.n.u.s Weatherc.o.c.k" of the _London_, the original of certain well-known heroes of Bulwer and d.i.c.kens, and the object of a more than once recurrent and distinctly morbid attention from young men of letters since. Lamb, who was not given to think evil of his friends, was certainly unlucky in calling Wainewright "warm- as light-hearted"; for the man (who died a convict in Australia, though he cheated the gallows which was his due) was both an affected c.o.xcomb and a callous scoundrel. But he was a very clever fellow, though indignant morality has sometimes endeavoured to deny this. That he antic.i.p.ated by sixty years and more certain depravations in style and taste notorious in our own day is something: it is more that his achievement in gaudy writing and in the literary treatment of art was really considerable.

Wainewright, however, is only "curious" in more than one sense of that term: Leigh Hunt, who, though quite incapable of poisoning anybody, had certain points in common with Wainewright on the latter's more excusable sides, and whose prose must now be treated, is distinguished. He reappears with even better right here than some others of the more important const.i.tuents of this chapter. For all his best work in prose appeared in periodicals, though it is impossible to say that all his work that appeared in periodicals was his best work. He was for fourteen years editor of, and a large contributor to, the _Examiner_, which he and his brother started in 1808. After his liberation from prison he not merely edited, but in the older fas.h.i.+on practically wrote the _Reflector_ (1810), the _Indicator_ (1819-21), and the _Companion_ (1828). His rather unlucky journey to Italy was undertaken to edit the _Liberal_. He was one of the rare and rash men of letters who have tried to keep up a daily journal una.s.sisted--a new _Tatler_, which lasted for some eighteen months (1830-32); and a little later (1834-35) he supported for full two years a similar but weekly venture, in part original, in part compiled or borrowed, called _Leigh Hunt's London Journal_. These were not his only ventures of the kind: he was an indefatigable contributor to periodicals conducted by others; and most of his books now known by independent t.i.tles are in fact collections of "articles"--sometimes reprinted, sometimes published for the first time.

It was impossible that such a ma.s.s of matter should be all good; and it is equally impossible to deny that the combined fact of so much production and of so little concentration argues a certain idiosyncrasy of defect. In fact the b.u.t.terfly character which every unprejudiced critic of Leigh Hunt has noticed, made it impossible for him to plan or to execute any work on a great scale. He never could have troubled himself to complete missing knowledge, to fill in gaps, to co-ordinate thinking, as the literary historian, whose vocation in some respects he might seem to have possessed eminently, must do--to weave fancy into the novelist's solid texture, and not to leave it in thrums or in gossamer.

But he was, though in both ways a most unequal, a delightful miscellanist and critic. In both respects it is natural, and indeed unavoidable, to compare him with Lamb and with Hazlitt, whom, however, he really preceded, forming a link between them and the eighteenth century essayists. His greater voluminousness, induced by necessity, puts him at a rather unfair disadvantage with the first; and we may perhaps never find in him those exquisite felicities which delight and justify the true "Agnist." Yet he has found some things that Lamb missed in Lamb's own subjects; and though his prejudices (of the middle-cla.s.s Liberal and freethinking kind) were sometimes more damaging than any to which Lamb was exposed, he was free from the somewhat wilful eclecticism of that inimitable person. He could like nearly all things that were good--in which respect he stands above both his rivals in criticism. But he stands below them in his miscellaneous work; though here also, as in his poetry, he was a master, not a scholar. Lamb and Hazlitt improved upon him here, as Keats and Sh.e.l.ley improved upon him there. But what a position is it to be "improved upon" by Keats and Sh.e.l.ley in poetry, by Hazlitt and Lamb in prose!

Hartley Coleridge might with about equal propriety have been treated in the last chapter and in this; but the already formidable length of the catalogue of bards perhaps turns the scale in favour of placing him with other contributors to _Blackwood_, to which, thanks to his early friends.h.i.+p with Wilson, he enjoyed access, and in which he might have written much more than he did, and did actually write most of what he published himself, except the _Biographia Borealis_.

The life of Hartley was a strange and sad variant of his father's, though, if he lacked a good deal of S. T. C.'s genius, his character was entirely free from the baser stains which darkened that great man's weakness. Born (1796) at Clevedon, the first-fruits of the marriage of Coleridge and Sara, he was early celebrated by Wordsworth and by his father in immortal verse, and by Southey, his uncle, in charming prose, for his wonderful dreamy precocity; but he never was a great reader.

Southey took care of him with the rest of the family when Coleridge disappeared into the vague; and Hartley, after schooling at Ambleside, was elected to a post-masters.h.i.+p at Merton College, Oxford. He missed the Newdigate thrice, and only got a second in the schools, but was more than consoled by a Fellows.h.i.+p at Oriel. Unfortunately Oriel was not only gaining great honour, but was very jealous of it; and the probationary Fellows were subjected to a most rigid system of observation, which seems to have gone near to espionage. If ever there was a man born to be a Fellow under the old English University scheme, that man was Hartley Coleridge; and it is extremely probable that if he had been let alone he would have produced, in one form or another, a justification of that scheme, worthy to rank with Burton's _Anatomy_.

But he was accused of various shortcomings, of which intemperance seems to have been the most serious, though it is doubtful whether it would have sunk the beam if divers peccadilloes, political, social, and miscellaneous, had not been thrown in. Strong interest was made in favour of mercy, but the College deprived him of his Fellows.h.i.+p, granting him, not too consistently, a _solatium_ of 300. This was apparently in 1820. Hartley lived for nearly thirty years longer, but his career was closed. He was, as his brother Derwent admits, one of those whom the pressure of necessity does not spur but numbs. He wrote a little for _Blackwood_; he took pupils unsuccessfully, and school-mastered with a little better success; and during a short time he lived with a Leeds publisher who took a fancy to him and induced him to write his only large book, the _Biographia Borealis_. But for the most part he abode at Grasmere, where his failing (it was not much more) of occasional intemperance was winked at by all, even by the austere Wordsworth, where he wandered about, annotated a copy of Anderson's _Poets_ and some other books, and supported himself (with the curious Coleridgean faculty of subsisting like the bird of paradise, without either foot or foothold) till, at his mother's death, an annuity made his prospects secure. He died on 6th January 1849, a little before Wordsworth, and shortly afterwards his work was collected by his brother Derwent in seven small volumes; the _Poems_ filling two, the _Essays and Fragments_ two, and the _Biographia Borealis_ three.

This last (which appeared in its second form as _Lives of Northern Worthies_, with some extremely interesting notes by S. T. C.) is an excellent book of its kind, and shows that under more favourable circ.u.mstances Hartley might have been a great literary historian. But it is on the whole less characteristic than the volumes of _Poems_ and _Essays_. In the former Hartley has no kind of _souffle_ (or long-breathed inspiration), nor has he those exquisite lyrical touches of his father's which put Coleridge's scanty and unequal work on a level with that of the greatest names in English poetry. But he has a singular melancholy sweetness, and a meditative grace which finds its special home in the sonnet. In the "Posthumous Sonnets" especially, the sound--not an echo of, but a true response to, Elizabethan music--is unmistakable, and that to Shakespeare ("the soul of man is larger than the sky"), that on himself ("When I survey the course that I have run"), and not a few others, rank among the very best in English. Many of the miscellaneous poems contain beautiful things. But on the whole the greatest interest of Hartley Coleridge is that he is the first and one of the best examples of a kind of poet who is sometimes contemned, who has been very frequent in this century, but who is dear to the lover of poetry, and productive of delightful things. This kind of poet is wanting, it may be, in what is briefly, if not brutally, called originality. He might not sing much if others had not sung and were not singing around him; he does not sing very much even as it is, and the notes of his song are not extraordinarily piercing or novel. But they are true, they are not copied, and the lover of poetry could not spare them.

It is improbable that Hartley Coleridge would ever have been a great poet: he might, if Fate or even if the Oriel dons had been a little kinder, have been a great critic. As it is, his essays, his introduction to Ma.s.singer and Ford, and his _Marginalia_, suffer on the one side from certain defects of reading; for his access to books was latterly small, and even when it had been ample, as at Oxford, in London, or at Southey's house, he confesses that he had availed himself of it but little. Hence he is often wrong, and more often incomplete, from sheer lack of information. Secondly, much of his work is mere jotting, never in the very least degree intended for publication, and sometimes explicitly corrected or retracted by later jottings of the same kind. In such a case we can rather augur of the might-have-been than p.r.o.nounce on the actual. But the two volumes are full of delicate critical views on literature; and the longest series, "Ignoramus on the Fine Arts," shows how widely, with better luck and more opportunity, he might have extended his critical performances. In short, Hartley Coleridge, if a "sair sicht" to the moralist, is an interesting and far from a wholly painful one to the lover of literature, which he himself loved so much, and practised, with all his disadvantages, so successfully.

All the persons. .h.i.therto mentioned in this chapter appear by undoubted right in any history of English Literature: it may cause a little surprise to see that of Maginn figuring with them. Yet his abilities were scarcely inferior to those of any; and he was kept back from sharing their fame only by infirmities of character and by his succ.u.mbing to that fatal Bohemianism which, constantly recurring among men of letters, exercised its attractions with special force in the early days of journalism in this century. William Maginn (1793), who was the son of a schoolmaster at Cork, took a brilliant degree at Trinity College, Dublin, and for some years followed his father's profession.

The establishment, however, and the style of _Blackwood_ were an irresistible attraction to him, and he drifted to Edinburgh, wrote a great deal in the earlier and more boisterous days of _Maga_ under the pseudonym of Ensign O'Doherty, and has, as has been said, some claims to be considered the originator of the _Noctes_. Then, as he had gone from Ireland to Edinburgh, he went from Edinburgh to London, and took part in divers Tory periodicals, acting as Paris correspondent for some of them till, about 1830, he started, or helped in starting, a London _Blackwood_ in _Fraser_. He had now every opportunity, and he gathered round him a staff almost more brilliant than that of the _Edinburgh_, of the _London_, of the _Quarterly_, or of _Blackwood_ itself. But he was equally reckless of his health and of his money. The acknowledged original of Thackeray's Captain Shandon, he was not seldom in jail; and at last, a.s.sisted by Sir Robert Peel almost too late, he died at Walton on Thames in August 1842, not yet fifty, but an utter wreck.

The collections of Maginn's work are anything but exhaustive, and the work itself suffers from all the drawbacks, probable if not inevitable, of work written in the intervals of carouse, at the last moment, for ephemeral purposes. Yet it is instinct with a perhaps brighter genius than the more accomplished productions of some much more famous men. The _Homeric Ballads_, though they have been praised by some, are nearly worthless; and the longer attempts in fiction are not happy. But Maginn's shorter stories in _Blackwood_, especially the inimitable "Story without a Tail," are charming; his more serious critical work, especially that on Shakespeare, displays a remarkable combination of wide reading, critical ac.u.men, and sound sense; and his miscellanies in prose and verse, especially the latter, are characterised by a mixture of fantastic humour, adaptive wit, and rare but real pathos and melody, which is the best note of the specially Irish mode. It must be said, however, that Maginn is chiefly important to the literary historian as the captain of a band of distinguished persons, and as in a way the link between the journalism of the first and the journalism of the second third of the century. A famous plate by Maclise, ent.i.tled "The Fraserians," contains, seated round abundant bottles, with Maginn as president, portraits (in order by "the way of the sun," and omitting minor personages) of Irving, Gleig the Chaplain-General, Sir Egerton Brydges, Allan Cunningham, Carlyle, Count D'Orsay, Brewster, Theodore Hook, Lockhart, Crofton Croker of the Irish Fairy Tales, Jerdan, Dunlop of the "History of Fiction," Gait, Hogg, Coleridge, Harrison Ainsworth, Thackeray, Southey, and Barry Cornwall. It is improbable that all these contributed at one time, and tolerably certain that some of them were very sparing and infrequent contributors at any time, but the important point is the juxtaposition of the generation which was departing and the generation which was coming on--of Southey with Thackeray and of Coleridge with Carlyle. Yet it will be noticed (and the point is of some importance) that these new-comers are, at least the best of them, much less merely periodical writers than those who came immediately before them. In part no doubt this was accident; in part it was due to the greater prominence which novels and serial works of other kinds were beginning to a.s.sume; in part it may be to the fact that the great increase in the number of magazines and newspapers had lowered their individual dignity and perhaps their profitableness. But it is certain that of the list just mentioned, Thackeray and Carlyle, of the contemporary new generation of the _Edinburgh_ Macaulay, of the nascent _Westminster_ Mill, and others, were not, like Jeffrey, like Sydney Smith, like Wilson, and like De Quincey, content to write articles. They aspired to write, and they did write, books; and, that being so, they will all be treated in chapters other than the present, appropriated to the kinds in which their chief books were designed.

The name of John Sterling is that of a man who, with no great literary claims of his own, managed to connect it durably and in a double fas.h.i.+on with literature, first as the subject of an immortal biography by Carlyle, secondly as the name-giver of the famous Sterling Club, which about 1838, and hardly numbering more members than the century did years, included a surprising proportion of the most rising men of letters of the day, while all but a very few of its members were of literary mark. John Sterling himself was the son of a rather eccentric father, Edward Sterling, who, after trying soldiering with no great, and farming with decidedly ill, success, turned to journalism and succeeded brilliantly on the _Times_. His son was born in the Isle of Bute on 20th July 1806, was educated, first privately, then at Glasgow, and when about nineteen went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he fell in with a famous and brilliant set. He migrated from Trinity College to Trinity Hall, took no degree, wrote a little for the then young _Athenaeum_, was engaged in a romantic and in all ways rather unfortunate business of encouraging a rebellion in Spain, but married instead of taking active part in it, and went to the West Indies. When he came home he, it is said under Coleridgean influence, took orders, but soon developed heterodox views and gave up active duty. He lived, though under sentence of death by consumption, till 1843, spending much time abroad, but writing a little, chiefly for periodicals.

The chief characteristic of Sterling in life and thought appears to have been a vacillating impulsiveness, while in letters his production, small in bulk, is anything but strong in substance or form. But, like some other men who do not, in the common phrase, "do much," he seems to have been singularly effectual as a centre of literary friends.h.i.+p and following. The Sterling Club included not merely Tennyson, John Stuart Mill, Carlyle, Allan Cunningham, Lord Houghton, Sir Francis Palgrave, Bishop Thirlwall, who all receive separate notice elsewhere, but others who, being of less general fame, may best be noticed together here.

There were the scholars Blakesley, Worsley, and Hepworth Thompson (afterwards Master of Trinity); H. N. Coleridge, the poet's nephew, son-in-law, and editor; Sir Francis Doyle, afterwards Professor of Poetry at Oxford, the author of some interesting reminiscences in prose, and in verse of some of the best songs and poems on military subjects to be found in the language, such as "The Loss of the Birkenhead," the "Private of the Buffs," and above all the n.o.ble and consummate "Red Thread of Honour"; Sir Edmund Head, Fellow of Merton and Governor-General of Canada, and a writer on art (not to be confounded with his namesake Sir Francis, the agreeable miscellanist, reviewer, and travel writer, who was also a baronet and also connected with Canada, where he was Governor of the Upper Province at the time of the Rebellion of 1835). There was Sir George Cornewall Lewis, a keen scholar and a fastidious writer, whose somewhat short life (1806-63) was chiefly occupied by politics; for he was a Poor-Law Commissioner, a Member of Parliament, and a holder of numerous offices up to those of Chancellor of the Exchequer and Secretary of State. Lewis, who edited the _Edinburgh_ for a short time, wrote no very long work, but many on a great variety of subjects, the chief perhaps being _On the Influence of Authority in Matters of Opinion_, 1850 (a book interesting to contrast with one by a living statesman forty-five years later), the _Inquiry into the Credibility of the Ancient Roman History_ (1855), and later treatises on _The Government of Dependencies_ and the _Best Form of Government_. He was also an exact verbal scholar, was, despite the addiction to "dry" subjects which this list may seem to show, the author of not a few _jeux d'esprit_, and was famous for his conversational sayings, the most hackneyed of which is probably "Life would be tolerable if it were not for its amus.e.m.e.nts."

But even this did not exhaust the Sterling Club. There was another scholar, Malden, who should have been mentioned with the group above; the second Sir Frederick Pollock, who wrote too little but left an excellent translation of Dante, besides some reminiscences and other work; Philip Pusey, elder brother of the theologian, and a man of remarkable ability; James Spedding, who devoted almost the whole of his literary life to the study, champions.h.i.+p, and editing of Bacon, but left other essays and reviews of great merit; Twisleton, who undertook with singular patience and shrewdness the solution of literary and historical problems like the Junius question and that of the African martyrs; and lastly George Stovin Venables, who for some five and thirty years was the main pillar in political writing of the _Sat.u.r.day Review_, was a parliamentary lawyer of great diligence and success, and combined a singularly exact and wide knowledge of books and men in politics and literature with a keen judgment, an admirably forcible if somewhat mannered style, a disposition far more kindly than the world was apt to credit him with, and a famous power of conversation. All these men, almost without exception, were more or less contributors to periodicals; and it may certainly be said that, but for periodicals, it is rather unlikely that some of them would have contributed to literature at all.

Not as a member of the Sterling Club, but as the intimate friend of all its greatest members, as a contributor, though a rather unfrequent one, to papers, and as a writer of singular and extraordinary quality but difficult to cla.s.s under a more precise head, may be noticed Edward FitzGerald, who, long a recluse, unstintedly admired by his friends but quite unknown to the public, became famous late in life by his translation of Omar Khayyam, and familiar somewhat after his death through the publication of his charming letters by Mr. Aldis Wright. He was born on 31st March 1809, near Woodbridge in Suffolk, the neighbourhood which was his headquarters for almost his entire life, till his death on a visit to a grandson of the poet Crabbe at Merton in Norfolk, 14th June 1883. He went to school at Bury, and thence to Cambridge, where he laid the foundation of his acquaintance with the famous Trinity set of 1825-30. But on taking his degree in the last named year and leaving college, he took to no profession, but entered on the life of reading, thinking, gardening, and boating, which he pursued for more than half a century. Besides his Trinity contemporaries, from Tennyson and Thackeray downwards, he had Carlyle for an intimate friend, and he married the daughter of Bernard Barton, the poet-Quaker an