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Biographical Essays

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There is another instance, presenting itself in every page, of
ignorance concurring with laziness, on the part of all Pope's
editors, and with the effect not so properly of misleading as of
perplexing the general reader. Until Lord Macclesfield's bill for
altering the style in the very middle of the eighteenth century,
six years, therefore, after the death of Pope, there was a custom,
arising from the collision between the civil and ecclesiastical
year, of dating the whole period that lies between December 31st
and March 25th, (both days _exclusively,_) as belonging
indifferently to the past or the current year. This peculiarity had
nothing to do with the old and new style, but was, we believe,
redressed by the same act of Parliament. Now in Pope's time it was
absolutely necessary that a man should use this double date,
because else he was liable to be seriously misunderstood. For
instance, it was then always said that Charles I had suffered on
the 30th of January 1648/9, and why? Because, had the historian
fixed the date to what it really was, 1649, in that case all those
(a very numerous class) who supposed the year 1649 to commence on
Ladyday, or March 25, would have understood him to mean that this
event happened in what we _now_ call 1650, for not until 1650
was there any January which _they_ would have acknowledged as
belonging to 1649, since _they_ added to the year 1648 all the
days from January 1 to March 24. On the other hand, if he had said
simply that Charles suffered in 1648, he would have been truly
understood by the class we have just mentioned; but by another
class, who began the year from the 1st of January, he would have
been understood to mean what we _now_ mean by the year 1648.
There would have been a sheer difference, not of one, as the reader
might think at first sight, but of _two_ entire years in the
chronology of the two parties; which difference, and all
possibility of doubt, is met and remedied by the fractional date
1648/1649 for that date says in effect it was 1648 to you who do
not open the new year till Ladyday; it was 1649 to you who open it
from January 1. Thus much to explain the real sense of the case,
and it follows from this explanation, that no part of the year ever
_can_ have the fractional or double date except the interval
from January 1 to March 24 inclusively. And hence arises a
practical inference, viz, that the very same reason, and no other,
which formerly enjoined the use of the compound or fractional date,
viz, the prevention of a capital ambiguity or dilemma, now enjoins
its omission. For in our day, when the double opening of the year
is abolished, what sense is there in perplexing a reader by using a
fraction which offers him a choice without directing him how to
choose? In fact, it is the _denominator_ of the fraction, if
one may so style the lower figure, which expresses to a modern eye
the true year. Yet the editors of Pope, as well as many other
writers, have confused their readers by this double date; and why?
Simply because they were confused themselves. (period omitted
in original; but there is a double space following, suggesting one
should have been there) Many errors in literature of large extent
have arisen from this confusion. Thus it was said properly enough
in the contemporary accounts, for instance, in Lord Monmouth's
Memoirs that Queen Elizabeth died on the last day of the year 1602,
for she died on the 24th of March, and by a careful writer this
event would have been dated as March 24, 1602/1603. But many
writers, misled by the phrase above cited, have asserted that James
I. was proclaimed on the 1st of January, 1603. Heber, Bishop of
Calcutta, again, has ruined the entire chronology of the Life of
Jeremy Taylor, and unconsciously vitiated the facts, by not
understanding this fractional date. Mr Roscoe even too often leaves
his readers to collect the true year as they can. Thus, e. g. at p.
509, of his Life, he quotes from Pope's letter to Warburton, in
great vexation for the surreptitious publication of his letters in
Ireland, under date of February 4, 174-0/1. But why not have
printed it intelligibly as 1741? Incidents there are in most men's
lives, which are susceptible of a totally different moral value,
according as the are dated in one year or another That might be a
kind and honorable liberality in 1740, which would be a fraud upon
creditors in 1741. Exile to a distance of ten miles from London in
January, 1744 might argue, that a man was a turbulent citizen, and
suspected of treason, whilst the same exile in January, 1745, would
simply argue that, as a Papist, he had been included amongst his
whole body in a general measure of precaution to meet the public
dangers of that year. This explanation we have thought it right to
make both for its extensive application to all editions of Pope,
and on account of the serious blunders which have arisen from the
case when ill understood, and because, in a work upon education,
written jointly by Messrs Lant Carpenter and Shephard though
generally men of ability and learning, this whole point is
erroneously explained.

NOTE 2.

It is apparently with allusion to this part of his history, which
he would often have heard from the lips of his own father, that
Pope glances at his uncle's memory somewhat disrespectfully in his
prose letter to Lord Harvey.

NOTE 3.

Some accounts, however, say to Flanders, in which case, perhaps,
Antwerp or Brussels would have the honor of his conversion.

NOTE 4.

This however was not Twyford, according to an anonymous pamphleteer
of the times but a Catholic seminary in Devonshire Street that is,
in the Bloomsbury district of London, and the same author asserts,
that the scene of his disgrace as indeed seems probable beforehand,
was not the first but the last of his arenas as a schoolboy Which
indeed was first, and which last, is very unimportant; but with a
view to another point, which is not without interest, namely, as to
the motive of Pope for so bitter a lampoon as we must suppose it to
have been, as well as with regard to the topics which he used to
season it, this anonymous letter throws the only light which has
been offered; and strange it is, that no biographer of Pope should
have hunted upon the traces indicated by him. Any solution of
Pope's virulence, and of the master's bitter retaliation, even
_as_ a solution, is so far entitled to attention; apart from
which the mere straightforwardness of this man's story, and its
minute circumstantiality, weigh greatly in its favor. To our
thinking, he unfolds the whole affair in the simple explanation,
nowhere else to be found, that the master of the school, the mean
avenger of a childish insult by a bestial punishment, was a Mr.
Bromley, one of James II.'s Popish apostates; whilst the particular
statements which he makes with respect to himself and the young
Duke of Norfolk of 1700, as two schoolfellows of Pope at that time
and place, together with his voluntary promise to come forward in
person, and verify his account if it should happen to be
challenged,--are all, we repeat, so many presumptions in favor of
his veracity. "Mr. Alexander Pope," says he, "before he had been
four months at this school, or was able to construe Tully's
Offices, employed his muse in satirizing his master. It was a libel
of at least one hundred verses, which (a fellow-student having
given information of it) was found in his pocket; and the young
satirist was soundly whipped, and kept a prisoner to his room for
seven days; whereupon his father fetched him away, and I have been
told he never went to school more." This Bromley, it has been
ascertained, was the son of a country gentleman in Worcestershire,
and must have had considerable prospects at one time, since it
appears that he had been a gentleman-commoner at Christ's Church,
Oxford. There is an error in the punctuation of the letter we have
just quoted, which affects the sense in a way very important to the
question before us. Bromley is described as "one of King James's
converts in Oxford, some years _after_ that prince's
abdication;" but, if this were really so, he must have been a
conscientious convert. The latter clause should be connected with
what follows:" _Some years after that prince's abdication he kept
a little seminary_; "that is, when his mercenary views in
quitting his religion were effectually defeated, when the Boyne had
sealed his despair, he humbled himself into a petty schoolmaster.
These facts are interesting, because they suggest at once the
motive for the merciless punishment inflicted upon Pope. His own
father was a Papist like Bromley, but a sincere and honest Papist,
who had borne double taxes, legal stigmas, and public hatred for
conscience' sake. His contempt was habitually pointed at those who
tampered with religion for interested purposes. His son inherited
these upright feelings. And we may easily guess what would be the
bitter sting of any satire he would write on Bromley. Such a topic
was too true to be forgiven, and too keenly barbed by Bromley's
conscience. By the way, this writer, like ourselves, reads in this
juvenile adventure a prefiguration of Pope's satirical destiny.

NOTE 5.

That is, Sheffield, and, legally speaking, of Buckingham
_shire_. For he would not take the title of Buckingham, under
a fear that there was lurking somewhere or other a claim to that
title amongst the connections of the Villiers family. He was a
pompous grandee, who lived in uneasy splendor, and, as a writer,
most extravagantly overrated; accordingly, he is now forgotten.
Such was his vanity, and his ridiculous mania for allying himself
with royalty, that he first of all had the presumption to court the
Princess (afterwards Queen) Anne. Being rejected, he then offered
himself to the illegitimate daughter of James II., by the daughter
of Sir Charles Sedley. She was as ostentatious as himself, and
accepted him.

NOTE 6.

Meantime, the felicities of this translation are at times perfectly
astonishing; and it would be scarcely possible to express more
nervously or amply the words,

--"_jurisque secundi_
_Ambitus impatiens_, et summo dulcius unum
Stare loco,"----

than this child of fourteen has done in the following couplet,
which, most judiciously, by reversing the two clauses, gains the
power of fusing them into connection.

"And impotent desire to reign alone,
_That scorns the dull reversion of a throne_."

But the passage for which beyond all others we must make room, is a
series of eight lines, corresponding to six in the original; and
this for two reasons: First, Because Dr. Joseph Warton has
deliberately asserted, that in our whole literature, "we have
scarcely eight more beautiful lines than these;" and though few
readers will subscribe to so sweeping a judgment, yet certainly
these must be wonderful lines for a boy, which could challenge such
commendation from an experienced _polyhistor_ of infinite
reading. Secondly, Because the lines contain a night-scene. Now it
must be well known to many readers, that the famous night scene in
the Iliad, so familiar to every schoolboy, has been made the
subject, for the last thirty years, of severe, and, in many
respects, of just criticisms. This description will therefore have
a double interest by comparison, whilst, whatever may be thought of
either taken separately for itself, considered as a translation,
this which we now quote is as true to Statius as the other is
undoubtedly faithless to Homer

"_Jamque per emeriti surgens confima Phoebi
Titanis, late mundo subvecta silenti
Rorifera gelidum tenuaverat aera biga
Jam pecudes volucresque tacent. jam somnus avaris
Inserpit curis, pronusque per aera nutat,
Grata laboratae referens oblivia vitae_"
Theb I 336-341.

"'Twas now the time when Phoebus yields to night,
And rising Cynthia sheds her silver light,
Wide o'er the world in solemn pomp she drew
Her airy chariot hung with pearly dew
All birds and beasts he hush'd. Sleep steals away
The wild desires of men and toils of day,
And brings, descending through the silent air,
A sweet forgetfulness of human care."



NOTE 7.

One writer of that age says, in Cheapside, but probably this
difference arose from contemplating Lombard Street as a
prolongation of Cheapside.

NOTE 8.

Dr Johnson said, that all he could discover about Mr Cromwell, was
the fact of his going a hunting in a tie wig, but Gay has added
another fact to Dr Johnson's, by calling him "Honest _hatless_
Cromwell with red breeches" This epithet has puzzled the
commentators, but its import is obvious enough Cromwell, as we
learn from more than one person, was anxious to be considered a
fine gentleman, and devoted to women. Now it was long the custom in
that age for such persons, when walking with ladies, to carry their
hats in their hand. Louis XV. used to ride by the side of Madame de
Pompadour hat in hand.

NOTE 9.

It is strange indeed to find, not only that Pope had so frequently
kept rough copies of his own letters, and that he thought so well
of them as to repeat the same letter to different persons, as in
the case of the two lovers killed by lightning, or even to two
sisters, Martha and Therese Blount (who were sure to communicate
their letters,) but that even Swift had retained copies of _his.
_

NOTE 10.

The word _undertake_ had not yet lost the meaning of
Shakspeare's age, in which it was understood to describe those
cases where, the labor being of a miscellaneous kind, some person
in chief offered to overlook and conduct the whole, whether with or
without personal labor. The modern _undertaker,_ limited to
the care of funerals, was then but one of numerous cases to which
the term was applied.

NOTE 11.

We may illustrate this feature in the behavior of Pope to Savage.
When all else forsook him, when all beside pleaded the insults of
Savage for withdrawing their subscriptions, Pope sent his in
advance. And when Savage had insulted _him_ also, arrogantly
commanding him never "to presume to interfere or meddle in his
affairs," dignity and self-respect made Pope obedient to these
orders, except when there was an occasion of serving Savage. On his
second visit to Bristol (when he returned from Glamorganshire,)
Savage had been thrown into the jail of the city. One person only
interested himself for this hopeless profligate, and was causing an
inquiry to be made about his debts at the time Savage died. So much
Dr. Johnson admits; but he _forgets_ to mention the name of
this long suffering friend. It was Pope. Meantime, let us not be
supposed to believe the lying legend of Savage; he was doubtless no
son of Lady Macclesfield's, but an impostor, who would not be sent
to the tread-mill.





CHARLES LAMB.



It sounds paradoxical, but is not so in a bad sense, to say, that
in every literature of large compass some authors will be found to
rest much of the interest which surrounds them on their essential
_non_-popularity. They are good for the very reason that they
are not in conformity to the current taste. They interest because
to the world they are _not_ interesting. They attract by means
of their repulsion. Not as though it could separately furnish a
reason for loving a book, that the majority of men had found it
repulsive. _Prima facie_, it must suggest some presumption
_against_ a book, that it has failed to gain public attention.
To have roused hostility indeed, to have kindled a feud against its
own principles or its temper, may happen to be a good sign.
_That_ argues power. Hatred may be promising. The deepest
revolutions of mind sometimes begin in hatred. But simply to have
left a reader unimpressed, is in itself a neutral result, from
which the inference is doubtful. Yet even _that_, even simple
failure to impress, may happen at times to be a result from
positive powers in a writer, from special originalities, such as
rarely reflect themselves in the mirror of the ordinary
understanding. It seems little to be perceived, how much the great
scriptural [Endnote: 1] idea of the _worldly_ and the
_unworldly_ is found to emerge in literature as well as in
life. In reality the very same combinations of moral qualities,
infinitely varied, which compose the harsh physiognomy of what we
call worldliness in the living groups of life, must unavoidably
present themselves in books. A library divides into sections of
worldly and unworldly, even as a crowd of men divides into that
same majority and minority. The world has an instinct for
recognizing its own; and recoils from certain qualities when
exemplified in books, with the same disgust or defective sympathy
as would have governed it in real life. From qualities for instance
of childlike simplicity, of shy profundity, or of inspired
self-communion, the world does and must turn away its face towards
grosser, bolder, more determined, or more intelligible expressions
of character and intellect; and not otherwise in literature, nor at
all less in literature, than it does in the realities of life.

Charles Lamb, if any ever _was_ is amongst the class here
contemplated; he, if any ever _has_, ranks amongst writers
whose works are destined to be forever unpopular, and yet forever
interesting; interesting, moreover, by means of those very
qualities which guarantee their non-popularity. The same qualities
which will be found forbidding to the worldly and the thoughtless,
which will be found insipid to many even amongst robust and
powerful minds, are exactly those which will continue to command a
select audience in every generation. The prose essays, under the
signature of _Elia_, form the most delightful section amongst
Lamb's works. They traverse a peculiar field of observation,
sequestered from general interest; and they are composed in a
spirit too delicate and unobtrusive to catch the ear of the noisy
crowd, clamoring for strong sensations. But this retiring delicacy
itself, the pensiveness chequered by gleams of the fanciful, and
the humor that is touched with cross-lights of pathos, together
with the picturesque quaintness of the objects casually described,
whether men, or things, or usages, and, in the rear of all this,
the constant recurrence to ancient recollections and to decaying
forms of household life, as things retiring before the tumult of
new and revolutionary generations; these traits in combination
communicate to the papers a grace and strength of originality which
nothing in any literature approaches, whether for degree or kind of
excellence, except the most felicitous papers of Addison, such as
those on Sir Roger de Coverly, and some others in the same vein of
composition. They resemble Addison's papers also in the diction,
which is natural and idiomatic, even to carelessness. They are
equally faithful to the truth of nature; and in this only they
differ remarkably--that the sketches of Elia reflect the stamp and
impress of the writer's own character, whereas in all those of
Addison the personal peculiarities of the delineator (though known
to the reader from the beginning through the account of the club)
are nearly quiescent. Now and then they are recalled into a
momentary notice, but they do not act, or at all modify his
pictures of Sir Roger or Will Wimble. _They_ are slightly and
amiably eccentric; but the Spectator him-self, in describing them,
takes the station of an ordinary observer.

Everywhere, indeed, in the writings of Lamb, and not merely in his
_Elia_, the character of the writer cooperates in an under
current to the effect of the thing written. To understand in the
fullest sense either the gaiety or the tenderness of a particular
passage, you must have some insight into the peculiar bias of the
writer's mind, whether native and original, or impressed gradually
by the accidents of situation; whether simply developed out of
predispositions by the action of life, or violently scorched into
the constitution by some fierce fever of calamity. There is in
modern literature a whole class of writers, though not a large one,
standing within the same category; some marked originality of
character in the writer become a coefficient with what he says to a
common result; you must sympathize with this _personality_ in
the author before you can appreciate the most significant parts of
his views. In most books the writer figures as a mere abstraction,
without sex or age or local station, whom the reader banishes from
his thoughts. What is written seems to proceed from a blank
intellect, not from a man clothed with fleshly peculiarities and
differences. These peculiarities and differences neither do, nor
(generally speaking)_could_ intermingle with the texture of
the thoughts so as to modify their force or their direction. In
such books, and they form the vast majority, there is nothing to be
found or to be looked for beyond the direct objective. (_Sit
venia verbo_!) But, in a small section of books, the objective
in the thought becomes confluent with the subjective in the
thinker--the two forces unite for a joint product; and fully to
enjoy that product, or fully to apprehend either element, both must
be known. It is singular, and worth inquiring into, for the reason
that the Greek and Roman literature had no such books. Timon of
Athens, or Diogenes, one may conceive qualified for this mode of
authorship, had journalism existed to rouse them in those days;
their "articles" would no doubt have been fearfully caustic. But,
as _they_ failed to produce anything, and Lucian in an after
age is scarcely characteristic enough for the purpose, perhaps we
may pronounce Rabelais and Montaigne the earliest of writers in the
class described. In the century following _theirs_, came Sir
Thomas Brown, and immediately after _him_ La Fontaine. Then
came Swift, Sterne, with others less distinguished; in Germany,
Hippel, the friend of Kant, Harmann, the obscure; and the greatest
of the whole body--John Paul Fr. Richter. In _him_, from the
strength and determinateness of his nature as well as from the
great extent of his writing, the philosophy of this interaction
between the author as a human agency and his theme as an
intellectual reagency, might best be studied. From _him_ might
be derived the largest number of cases, illustrating boldly this
absorption of the universal into the concrete--of the pure
intellect into the human nature of the author. But nowhere could
illustrations be found more interesting--shy, delicate,
evanescent--shy as lightning, delicate and evanescent as the
colored pencillings on a frosty night from the northern lights,
than in the better parts of Lamb.

To appreciate Lamb, therefore, it is requisite that his character
and temperament should be understood in their coyest and most
wayward features. A capital defect it would be if these could not
be gathered silently from Lamb's works themselves. It would be a
fatal mode of dependency upon an alien and separable accident if
they needed an external commentary. But they do _not_. The
syllables lurk up and down the writings of Lamb which decipher his
eccentric nature. His character lies there dispersed in anagram;
and to any attentive reader the regathering and restoration of the
total word from its scattered parts is inevitable without an
effort. Still it is always a satisfaction in knowing a result, to
know also its _why_ and _how_; and in so far as every
character is likely to be modified by the particular experience,
sad or joyous, through which the life has travelled, it is a good
contribution towards the knowledge of that resulting character as a
whole to have a sketch of that particular experience. What trials
did it impose? What energies did it task? What temptations did it
unfold? These calls upon the moral powers, which in music so
stormy, many a life is doomed to hear, how were they faced? The
character in a capital degree moulds oftentimes the life, but the
life _always_ in a subordinate degree moulds the character.
And the character being in this case of Lamb so much of a key to
the writings, it becomes important that the life should be traced,
however briefly, as a key to the character.

That is _one_ reason for detaining the reader with some slight
record of Lamb's career. Such a record by preference and of right
belongs to a case where the intellectual display, which is the sole
ground of any public interest at all in the man, has been intensely
modified by the _humanities_ and moral _personalities_
distinguishing the subject. We read a Physiology, and need no
information as to the life and conversation of its author; a
meditative poem becomes far better understood by the light of such
information; but a work of genial and at the same time eccentric
sentiment, wandering upon untrodden paths, is barely intelligible
without it. There is a good reason for arresting judgment on the
writer, that the court may receive evidence on the life of the man.
But there is another reason, and, in any other place, a better;
which reason lies in the extraordinary value of the life considered
separately for itself. Logically, it is not allowable to say that
_here;_ and, considering the principal purpose of this paper,
any possible _independent_ value of the life must rank as a
better reason for reporting it. Since, in a case where the original
object is professedly to estimate the writings of a man, whatever
promises to further that object must, merely by that tendency,
have, in relation to that place, a momentary advantage which it
would lose if valued upon a more abstract scale. Liberated from
this casual office of throwing light upon a book--raised to its
grander station of a solemn deposition to the moral capacities of
man in conflict with calamity--viewed as a return made into the
chanceries of heaven--upon an issue directed from that court to try
the amount of power lodged in a poor desolate pair of human
creatures for facing the very anarchy of storms--this obscure life
of the two Lambs, brother and sister, (for the two lives were one
life,) rises into a grandeur that is not paralleled once in a
generation.

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