IMMORTAL MEMORIES

ByCLEMENT SHORTER

HODDER AND STOUGHTONLONDON MCMVII

_Butler and Tanner_, _The Selwood Printing Works_, _Frome_, _and London_. 

PREFATORY

The following addresses were delivered at the request of various literarysocieties and commemorative committees. They amused me to write, andthey apparently interested the audiences for which they were primarilyintended. Perhaps they do not bear an appearance in print. But they arenot for my brother-journalists to read nor for the judicious men ofletters. I prefer to think that they are intended solely for those whomHazlitt styled "sensible people. " Hazlitt said that "the most sensiblepeople to be met with in society are men of business and of the world. " Iam hoping that these will buy my book and that some of them will like it. 

It is recorded by Sir Henry Taylor of Samuel Rogers that when he wrotethat very indifferent poem, _Italy_, he said, "I will make people buy. Turner shall illustrate my verse. " It is of no importance that thebiographer of Rogers tells us that the poet first made the artist knownto the world by these illustrations. Taylor's story is a good one, andthe moral worth taking to heart. The late Lord Acton, most learned andmost accomplished of men, wrote out a list of the hundred best books ashe considered them to be. They were printed in a popular magazine. Theynaturally excited much interest. I have rescued them from the pages ofthe _Pall Mall Magazine_. Those who will not buy my book for its sevenother essays may do so on account of Lord Acton's list of books beinghere first preserved "between boards. " I shall be equally well pleased. 

CLEMENT SHORTER. 

GREAT MISSENDEN, BUCKS. 

I. TO THE IMMORTAL MEMORY OF DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON

A toast proposed at the Johnson Birthday Celebration held at the ThreeCrowns Inn, Lichfield, in September, 1906. 

In rising to propose this toast I cannot ignore what must be in many ofyour minds, the recollection that last year it was submitted by a verydear friend of my own, who, alas! has now gone to his rest, I mean Dr. Richard Garnett. {3} Many of you who heard him in this place willrecall, with kindly memories, that venerable scholar. I am one of thosewho, in the interval have stood beside his open grave; and I know youwill permit me to testify here to the fact that rarely has such brilliantscholarship been combined with so kindly a nature, and with so muchgenerosity to other workers in the literary field. One may sigh that itis not possible to perpetuate for all time for the benefit of others thevast mass of learning which such men as Dr. Garnett are able toaccumulate. One may lament even more that one is not able to present insome concrete form, as an example to those who follow, his fine qualitiesof heart and mind--his generous faculty for 'helping lame dogs overstiles. '

Dr. Garnett had not only a splendid erudition that specially qualifiedhim for proposing this toast, he had also what many of you may think anequally exceptional qualification--he was a native of Lichfield; he wasborn in this fine city. As a Londoner--like Boswell when charged withthe crime of being a Scotsman I may say that I cannot help it--I supposeI should come to you with hesitating footsteps. Perhaps it was rash ofme to come at all, in spite of an invitation so kindly worded. Yet howgladly does any lover, not only of Dr. Johnson, but of all goodliterature, come to Lichfield. Four cathedral cities of our land standforth in my mind with a certain magnetic power to draw even the mosthumble lover of books towards them--Oxford, Bath, Norwich, Lichfield, these four and no others. Oxford we all love and revere as thenourishing mother of so many famous men. Here we naturally recall Dr. Johnson's love of it--his defence of it against all comers. The glamourof Oxford and the memory of the great men who from age to age have walkedits streets and quadrangles, is with us upon every visit. Bath again hasnoble memories. Upon house after house in that fine city is inscribedthe fact that it was at one time the home of a famous man or woman of thepast. Through its streets many of our great imaginative writers havestrolled, and those streets have been immortalized in the pages ofseveral great novelists, notably of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. 

For the City of Norwich I have a particular affection, as for long thehome in quite separate epochs of Sir Thomas Browne and of George Borrow. I recall that in the reign of one of its Bishops--the father of DeanStanley--there was a literary circle of striking character, that men andwomen of intellect met in the episcopal palace to discuss all 'obstinatequestionings. '

But if he were asked to choose between the golden age of Bath, ofNorwich, or of Lichfield, I am sure that any man who knew his books wouldgive the palm to Lichfield, and would recall that period in the life ofLichfield when Dr. Seward resided in the Bishop's Palace, with his twodaughters, and when they were there entertaining so many famous friends. I saw the other day the statement that Anna Seward's name was unknown tothe present generation. Now I have her works in nine volumes {6}; I haveread them, and I doubt not but that there are many more who have done thesame. Sir Walter Scott's friendship would alone preserve her memory ifevery line she wrote deserved to be forgotten as is too readily assumed. Scott, indeed, professed admiration for her verse, and a yet greaterpoet, Wordsworth, wrote in praise of two fine lines at the close of oneof her sonnets, that entitled 'Invitation to a Friend, ' lines which Ibelieve present the first appearance in English poetry of the form ofblank verse immortalized by Tennyson. 

 Come, that I may not hear the winds of night, Nor count the heavy eave-drops as they fall. 

"You have well criticized the poetic powers of this lady, " saysWordsworth, "but, after all, her verses please me, with all their faults, better than those of Mrs. Barbauld, who, with much higher powers of mind, was spoiled as a poetess by being a dissenter. "

Less, however, can be said for her poetry to-day than for her capacity asa letter writer. A letter writing faculty has immortalized more than oneEnglish author, Horace Walpole for example, who had this in common withAnna Seward, that he had the bad taste not to like Dr. Johnson. 

Sooner or later there will be a reprint of a selection of Anna Seward'scorrespondence; you will find in it a picture of country life in themiddle of the eighteenth century--and by that I mean Lichfield life--thatis quite unsurpassed. Anna Seward, her friends and her enemies, standbefore us in very marked outline. As with Walpole also, she must havewritten with an eye to publication. Veracity was not her strong point, but her literary faculty was very marked indeed. Those who have read theletters that treat of her sister's betrothal and death, for example, willnot easily forget them. The accepted lover, you remember, was a Mr. Porter, a son of the widow whom Johnson married; and Sarah Seward, agedonly eighteen, died soon after her betrothal to him. That is but one ofa thousand episodes in the world into which we are introduced in thesepages. {8}

The Bishop's Palace was the scene of brilliant symposiums. There onemight have met Erasmus Darwin of the _Botanic Garden_, whose fame hasbeen somewhat dulled by the extraordinary genius of his grandson. Therealso came Richard Edgeworth, the father of Maria, whose _Castle Rackrent_and _The Absentee_ are still among the most delightful books that weread; and there were the two young girls, Honora and Elizabeth Sneyd, whowere destined in succession to become Richard Edgeworth's wives. There, above all, was Thomas Day, the author of _Sanford and Merton_, a bookwhich delighted many of us when we were young, and which I imagine withall its priggishness will always survive as a classic for children. There, for a short time, came Major Andre, betrothed to Honora Sneyd, butdestined to die so tragically in the American War of Independence. It isto Miss Seward's malicious talent as a letter writer that we owe theexceedingly picturesque account of Day's efforts to obtain a wife upon aparticular pattern, his selection of Sabrina Sidney, whom he prepared forthat high destiny by sending her to a boarding school until she was ofthe right age--his lessons in stoicism--his disappointment because shescreamed when he fired pistols at her petticoats, and yelled when hedropped melted sealing-wax on her bare arms; it is a tragi-comic picture, and one is glad that Sabrina married some other man than her exactingguardian. But we would not miss Miss Seward's racy stories for anything, nor ignore her many letters with their revelation of the glories of old-time Lichfield, and of those 'lunar meetings' at which the wise onesforegathered. Now and again these worthies burst into sarcasm at oneanother's expense, as when Darwin satirizes the publication of Mr. Seward's edition of _Beaumont and Fletcher_, and Dr. Johnson's edition of_Shakspere_

 From Lichfield famed two giant critics come, Tremble, ye Poets! hear them! Fe, Fo, Fum! By Seward's arm the mangled Beaumont bled, And Johnson grinds poor Shakspere's bones for bread. 

But perhaps after all, if we eliminate Dr. Johnson, the lover of lettersgives the second place, not to Miss Seward and her circle, but to DavidGarrick. Lichfield contains more than one memento of that great man. Theactor's art is a poor sort of thing as a rule. Johnson, in his tartermoments, expresses this attitude, as when he talked of Garrick as a manwho exhibited himself for a shilling, when he called him 'a futilefellow, ' and implied that it was very unworthy of Lord Campden to havemade much of the actor and to have ignored so distinguished a writer asGoldsmith, when thrown into the company of both. Still undoubtedlyJohnson's last word upon Garrick is the best--'his death has eclipsed thegaiety of nations and diminished the public stock of harmless pleasure. 'We who live more than a hundred years later are able to recognize thatGarrick has been the one great actor from that age to this. As a rulethe mummers are mimics and little more, and generations go on, givingthem their brief but glorious hour of fame, and then leaving them as merenames in the history of the stage. Garrick was preserved from this fate, not only by the circumstance that he had an army of distinguishedliterary friends, but by his interesting personality and by his ownwritings. Many lines of his plays and prologues have become part ofcurrent speech. Moreover his must have been a great personality, asthose of us who have met Sir Henry Irving in these latter days haverealized that his was also a great personality. It is fitting, therefore, that these two great actors, the most famous of aninteresting, if not always an heroic profession, should lie side by sidein Westminster Abbey. 

I now come to my toast "The memory of Dr. Johnson. " After all, Johnsonwas the greatest of all Lichfieldians, and one of the great men of hisown and of all ages. We may talk about him and praise him because weshall be the better for so doing, but we shall certainly say nothing new. One or two points, however, seem to me worthy of emphasis in this companyof Johnsonians. I think we should resent two popular fallacies which youwill not hear from literary students, but only from one whom it isconvenient to call "the man in the street. " The first is, that we shouldknow nothing about Johnson if it were not for Boswell's famous life, andthe second that Johnson the author is dead, and that our great hero onlylives as a brilliant conversationalist in the pages of Boswell andothers. Boswell's _Life of Johnson_ is the greatest biography in theEnglish language; we all admit that. It is crowded with incident andanecdote. Neither Walter Scott nor Rousseau, each of whom has had anequal number of pages devoted to his personality, lives so distinctly forfuture ages as does Johnson in the pages of Boswell. Understanding allthis, we are entitled to ask ourselves what we should have thought of Dr. Johnson had there been no Boswell; and to this question I do not hesitateto answer that we should have loved him as much as ever, and that therewould still have been a mass of material with the true Boswellianflavour. He would not have made an appeal to so large a public, but someingenious person would have drawn together all the anecdotes, all theepigrams, all the touches of that fine humanity, and given us from thesevarious sources an amalgam of Johnson, that every bookman at least wouldhave desired to read and study. In Fanny Burney's _Letters and Diaries_the presentation of Johnson is delightful. I wonder very much that allthe Johnson fragments that Miss Burney provides have not been publishedseparately. Then Mrs. Thrale has chatted about Johnson copiously in her"Anecdotes, " and these pleasant stories have been reprinted again andagain for the curious. I recall many other sources of information aboutthe great man and his wonderful talk--by Miss Hawkins, Miss Reynolds, Miss Hannah More for example--and many of you who have Dr. BirkbeckHill's _Johnson Miscellanies_ have these in a pleasantly acceptable form. 

My second point is concerned with Dr. Johnson's position apart from allthis fund of anecdote, and this brilliant collection of unforgettableepigram in Boswell and elsewhere. As a writer, many will tell you, Dr. Johnson is dead. The thing is absurd on the face of it. There is roomfor some disagreement as to his position as a poet. On that question ofpoetry unanimity is ever hard to seek; so many mistake rhetoric forpoetry. Only twice at the most, it seems to me, does Dr. Johnson reachanything in the shape of real inspiration in his many poems, {15}although it must be admitted that earlier generations admired themgreatly. To have been praised ardently by Sir Walter Scott, by Byron, and by Tennyson should seem sufficient to demonstrate that he was a poet, were it not that, as I could prove if time allowed, poets are almostinvariably bad critics of poetry. Sir Walter Scott read _The Vanity ofHuman Wishes_ with "a choking sensation in the throat, " and declared thathe had more pleasure in reading that and Johnson's other long poem, _London_, than any other poetic compositions he could mention. But thenI think it was always the sentiment in verse, and not its quality, thatattracted Scott. Byron also declared that _The Vanity of Human Wishes_was "a great poem. " Certainly these poems are quotable poems. Who doesnot recall the line about "surveying mankind from China to Peru, " orthink, as Johnson taught us, to:--

 Mark what ills the scholar's life assail, Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail. 

Or remember his epitaph on one who:--

 Left a name at which the world grew pale, To point a moral or adorn a tale. 

One line--"Superfluous lags the veteran on the stage" has done duty againand again. I might quote a hundred such examples to show Johnson, whatever his qualities as a poet, is very much alive indeed in his verse. It is, however, as a great prose writer, that I prefer to consider him. Here he is certainly one of the most permanent forces in our literature. _Rasselas_, for example, while never ranking with us moderns quite sohigh as it did with the excellent Miss Jenkins in _Cranford_, is a neverfailing delight. So far from being a dead book, is there a young man ora young woman setting out in the world of to-day, aspiring to anall-round literary cultivation, who is not required to know it? It hasbeen republished continually. What novelist of our time would not givemuch to have so splendid a public recognition as was provided when LordBeaconsfield, then Mr. Disraeli, after the Abyssinian Expedition, pictured in the House of Commons "the elephants of Asia dragging theartillery of Europe over the mountains of Rasselas. "

Equally in evidence are those wonderful _Lives of The Poets_ whichJohnson did not complete until he was seventy-two years of age, literaryefforts which have always seemed to me to be an encouraging demonstrationthat we should never allow ourselves to grow old. Many of these 'Lives'are very beautiful. They are all suggestive. Only the other day I readthem again in the fine new edition that was prepared by that staunchJohnsonian, Dr. Birkbeck Hill. The greatest English critic of theselatter days, Mr. Matthew Arnold, showed his appreciation by making aselection from them for popular use. From age to age every man with thesmallest profession of interest in literature will study them. Of howmany books can this be said?

Greatest of all was Johnson as a writer in his least premeditated work, his _Prayers and Meditations_. They take rank in my mind with the verybest things of their kind, _The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius_, _TheConfessions of Rousseau_, and similar books. They are healthier than anyof their rivals. William Cowper, that always fascinating poet andbeautiful letter writer, more than once disparaged Johnson in thisconnexion. Cowper said that he would like to have "dusted Johnson'sjacket until his pension rattled in his pocket, " for what he had saidabout Milton. He read some extracts, after Johnson's death, from the_Meditations_, and wrote contemptuously of them. {18} But if Cowper hadalways possessed, in addition to his fascinating other-worldliness thehealthy worldliness of Dr. Johnson, perhaps we should all have been thehappier. To me that collection of _Prayers and Meditations_ seems one ofthe most helpful books that I have ever read, and I am surprised that itis not constantly reprinted in a handy form. {19} It is a valuableinspiration to men to keep up their spirits under adverse conditions, toconquer the weaknesses of their natures; not in the stifling manner ofThomas a Kempis, but in a breezy, robust way. Yes, I think that thesethree works, _Rasselas_, _The Lives of the Poets_, and the _Prayers andMeditations_, make it quite clear that Johnson still holds his place asone of our greatest writers, even if we were not familiar with his manydelightful letters, and had not read his _Rambler_--which his old enemy, Miss Anna Seward, insisted was far better than Addison's _Spectator_. 

All this is only to say that we cannot have too much of Dr. Johnson. Theadvantage of such a gathering as this is that it helps us to keep thatfact alive. Moreover, I feel that it is a good thing if we can heartenthose who have devoted themselves to laborious research connected withsuch matters. Take, for example, the work of Dr. Birkbeck Hill: his manyvolumes are a delight to the Johnson student. I knew Dr. Hill very well, and I have often felt that his work did not receive half theencouragement that it deserved. We hear sometimes, at least in London, of authors who advertise themselves. I rather fancy that all suchadvertisement is monopolized by the novelist, and that the newspapers donot trouble themselves very much about literary men who work in otherfields than that of fiction. Fiction has much to be said for it, but asa rule it reaps its reward very promptly, both in finance and in fame. Nosuch rewards come to the writer of biography, to the writer of history, to the literary editor. Dr. Hill's beautiful edition of Boswell's_Life_, with all its fascinating annotation, did not reach a secondedition in his lifetime. I am afraid that the sum that he made out ofit, or that his publishers made out of it, would seem a very poor rewardindeed when gauged by the results in other fields of labour. 

Within the past few weeks I have had the privilege of reading a book thatcontinues these researches. Mr. Aleyn Lyell Reade has published ahandsome tome, which he has privately printed, entitled _Dr. Johnson'sAncestry_: _His Kinsfolk and Family Connexions_. I am glad to hear thatthe Johnson Museum has purchased a copy, for such a work deserves everyencouragement. The author must have spent hundreds of pounds, withoutthe faintest possibility of obtaining either fame or money from thetransaction. He seems to have employed copyists in every town inStaffordshire, to copy wills, registers of births and deaths, and kindredrecords from the past. Now Dr. Birkbeck Hill could not have afforded todo this; he was by no means a rich man. Mr. Reade has clearly been ableto spare no expense, with the result that here are many interesting factscorrective of earlier students. The whole is a valuable record of theancestry of Dr. Johnson. It shows clearly that whereas Dr. Johnsonthought very little of his ancestry, and scarcely knew anything of hisgrandfather on the paternal or the maternal side, he really sprang from avery remarkable stock, notably on the maternal side; and that hismother's family, the Fords, had among their connexions all kinds offairly prosperous people, clergymen, officials, professional men as wellas sturdy yeomen. These ancestors of Dr. Johnson did not help him muchto push his way in the world. Of some of them he had scarcely heard. Allthe same it is of great interest to us to know this; it in a mannerexplains him. That before Samuel Johnson was born, one of his family hadbeen Lord Mayor of London, another a Sheriff, that they had beenassociated in various ways, not only with the city of his birth, but alsowith the great city which Johnson came to love so much, is to let in aflood of fresh light upon our hero. My time does not permit me to domore than make a passing reference to this book, but I should like tooffer here a word of thanks to its author for his marvellous industry, and a word of congratulation to him for the extraordinary success thathas accrued to his researches. 

I mention Mr. Reade's book because it is full of Lichfield names andLichfield associations, and it is with Dr. Johnson's life-long connexionwith Lichfield that all of us are thinking to-night. Now here I may say, without any danger of being challenged by some visitor who has themisfortune not to be a citizen of Lichfield--you who are will not wish tochallenge me--that this city has distinguished itself in quite an uniqueway. I do not believe that it can be found that any other town or cityof England--I will not say of Scotland or of Ireland--has done honour toa literary son in the same substantial measure that Lichfield has donehonour to Samuel Johnson. The peculiar glory of the deed is that it wasdone to the living Johnson, not coming, as so many honours do, too latefor a man to find pleasure in the recognition. We know that--

 Seven wealthy towns contend for Homer dead, Through which the living Homer begged his bread. 

But I doubt whether in the whole history of literature in England it canbe found that any other purely literary man has received in his lifetimeso substantial a mark of esteem from the city which gave him birth, asJohnson did when your Corporation, in 1767, "at a common-hall of thebailiffs and citizens, without any solicitation, " presented him with theninety-nine years' lease of the house in which he was born. Yourcitizens not only did that for Johnson, but they gave him other marks oftheir esteem. He writes from Lichfield to Sir Joshua Reynolds to expresshis pleasure that his portrait has been "much visited and much admired. ""Every man, " he adds, "has a lurking desire to appear considerable in hisnative place. " Then we all remember Boswell's naive confession that hispleasure at finding his hero so much beloved led him, when the pairarrived at this very hostelry, to imbibe too much of the famous Lichfieldale. If Boswell wished, as he says, to offer incense to the spirit ofthe place, how much more may we desire to do so to-night, when exactly125 years have passed, and his hero is now more than ever recognized as aking of men. 

I do not suggest that we should honour Johnson in quite the same way thatBoswell did. This is a more abstemious age. But we must drink to hismemory all the same. Think of it. A century and a quarter have passedsince that memorable evening at the _Three Crowns_, when Johnson andBoswell thus foregathered in this very room. You recall the journey fromBirmingham of the two companions. "We are getting out of a state ofdeath, " the Doctor said with relief, as he approached his native city, feeling all the magic and invigoration that is said to come to those whoin later years return to "calf-land. " Then how good he was to an oldschoolfellow who called upon him here. The fact that this man had failedin the battle of life while Johnson had succeeded, only made the Doctorthe kinder. I know of no more human picture than that--"A Mr. Jackson, "as he is called by Boswell, "in his coarse grey coat, " obviously verypoor, and as Boswell suggests, "dull and untaught. " The "great Cham ofLiterature" listens patiently as the worthy Jackson tells his troubles, so much more patiently than he would have listened to one of the famousmen of his Club in London, and the hero-worshipping Boswell drinks hisdeep potations, but never neglects to take notes the while. Of Boswellone remembers further that Johnson had told Wilkes that he had broughthim to Lichfield, "my native city, " "that he might see for once realCivility--for you know he lives among savages in Scotland, and amongrakes in London. " All good stories are worth hearing again and again, and so I offer an apology for recalling the picture to your mind at thistime and in this place. 

Alas! I have not the gift of the worldfamed Lord Verulam, who, as FrancisBacon, sat in the House of Commons. The members, we are told, sodelighted in his oratory that when he rose to speak they "were fearfullest he should make an end. " I am making an end. Johnson then was notonly a great writer, a conversationalist so unique that his sayings havepassed more into current speech than those of any other Englishman, buthe was also a great moralist--a superb inspiration to a better life. Weshould not love Johnson so much were he not presented to us as a man ofmany weaknesses and faults akin to our own, not a saint by any means, andtherefore not so far removed from us as some more ethereal characters ofwhom we may read. Johnson striving to methodize his life, to fightagainst sloth and all the minor vices to which he was prone, is theJohnson whom some of us prefer to keep ever in mind. "Here was, " I quoteCarlyle, "a strong and noble man, one of our great English souls. " Ilove him best in his book called _Prayers and Meditations_, where we knowhim as we know scarcely any other Englishman, for the good, uprightfighter in this by no means easy battle of life. It is as such a fighterthat we think of him to-night. Reading the account of _his_ battles mayhelp us to fight ours. 

Gentlemen, I give you the toast of the evening. Let us drink in solemnsilence, upstanding, "The Immortal Memory of Dr. Samuel Johnson. "

II. TO THE IMMORTAL MEMORY OF WILLIAM COWPER

An address entitled 'The Sanity of Cowper, ' delivered at the CentenaryCelebration at Olney, Bucks, on the occasion of the Hundredth Anniversaryof the Death of the poet William Cowper, April 25, 1900. 

I owe some apology for coming down to Olney to take part in what Ibelieve is a purely local celebration, in which no other Londoner, as faras I know, has been asked to take part. I am here not because I professany special qualification to speak about Cowper, in the town with whichhis name is so pleasantly associated, but because Mr. Mackay, {31} theson-in-law of your Vicar, has written a book about the Brontes, and Ihave done likewise, and he asked me to come. This common interest haslittle, you will say, to do with the Poet of Olney. Between Cowper andCharlotte Bronte there were, however, not a few points of likeness or atleast of contrast. Both were the children of country clergymen; bothlived lives of singular and, indeed, unusual strenuousness; both were thevery epitome of a strong Protestantism; and yet both--such is theinevitable toleration of genius--were drawn in an unusual manner toattachment to friends of the Roman Catholic Church--Cowper to LadyThrockmorton, who copied out some of his translations from Homer for him, assisted by her father-confessor, Dr. Gregson, and Miss Bronte to herProfessor, M. Heger, the man in the whole world whom she most revered. Under circumstances of peculiar depression both these great Protestantwriters went further on occasion than their Protestant friends would haveapproved, Cowper to contemplate--so he assures us in one of hisletters--the entering a French monastery, and Miss Bronte actually tokneel in the Confessional in a Brussels church. Further, let me remindyou that there were moments in the lives of Charlotte Bronte and hersisters, when Cowper's poem, _The Castaway_, was their most soul-stirringreading. Then, again, Mary Unwin's only daughter became the wife of aVicar of Dewsbury, and it was at Dewsbury and to the very next vicar, that Mr. Bronte, the father of Charlotte, was curate when he first wentinto Yorkshire. Finally, let it be recalled that Cowper and CharlotteBronte have attracted as much attention by the pathos of their lives asby anything that they wrote. Thus far, and no further, can a strainedanalogy carry us. The most enthusiastic admirers of the Brontes can onlyclaim for them that they permanently added certain artistic treasures toour literature. Cowper did incomparably more than this. His work markedan epoch. 

But first let me say how interested we who are strangers naturally feelin being in Olney. To every lover of literature Olney is made classicground by the fact that Cowper spent some twenty years of his life init--not always with too genial a contemplation of the place and itsinhabitants. "The genius of Cowper throws a halo of glory over all thesurroundings of Olney and Weston, " says Dean Burgon. But Olney hasclaims apart from Cowper. John Newton {34} presents himself to me as animpressive personality. There was a time, indeed, of youthfulimpetuosity when I positively hated him, for Southey, whose biography Iread very early in life, certainly endeavours to assist the view thatNewton was largely responsible for the poet's periodical attacks ofinsanity. 

But a careful survey of the facts modifies any such impression. Newtonwas narrow at times, he was over-concerned as to the letter, oftenignoring the spirit of true piety, but the student of the two volumes ofhis _Life and Correspondence_ that we owe to Josiah Bull, will becompelled to look at "the old African blasphemer" as he called himself, with much of sympathy. That he had a note of tolerance, with which he isnot usually credited, we learn from one of his letters, where he says:

 I am willing to be a debtor to the wise and to the unwise, to doctors and shoemakers, if I can get a hint from any one without respect of parties. When a house is on fire Churchmen and Dissenters, Methodists and Papists, Moravians and Mystics are all welcome to bring water. At such times nobody asks, "Pray, friend, whom do you hear?" or "What do you think of the five points?"

Even my good friend Canon Benham, who has done so much to sustain thehonourable fame of Cowper, and who would have been here to-day but for along-standing engagement, is scarcely fair to Newton. {35} It is nottrue, as has been suggested, that Cowper always changed his manner intoone of painful sobriety when he wrote to Newton. One of his mosthumorous letters--a rhyming epistle--was addressed to that divine. 

 I have writ (he says) in a rhyming fit, what will make you dance, and as you advance, will keep you still, though against your will, dancing away, alert and gay, till you come to an end of what I have penned; which you may do ere Madam and you are quite worn out with jigging about, I take my leave, and here you receive a bow profound, down to the ground, from your humble me, W. C. 

Now, I quote this very familiar passage from the correspondence to remindyou that Cowper could only have written it to a man possessed ofconsiderable healthy geniality. 

At any rate, alike as a divine and as the author of the _Olney Hymns_, Newton holds an important place in the history of theology, and Olney hasa right to be proud of him. An even more important place is held byThomas Scott, {36} and it seems to me quite a wonderful thing that Olneyshould sometimes have held at one and the same moment three suchremarkable men as Cowper, Newton, and Scott. 

In my boyhood Scott's name was a household word, and many a time have Ithumbed the volumes of his _Commentaries_, those _Commentaries_ which SirJames Stephen declared to be "the greatest theological performance of ourage and country. " Of Scott Cardinal Newman in his _Apologia_ said, itwill be remembered, that "to him, humanly speaking, I almost owe mysoul. " Even here our literary associations with Olney and itsneighbourhood are not ended, for, it was within five miles of thistown--at Easton Maudit--that Bishop Percy {37} lived and prepared those_Reliques_ which have inspired a century of ballad literature. Here thefuture Bishop of Dromore was visited by Dr. Johnson and others. What apity that with only five miles separating them Cowper and Johnson shouldnever have met! Would Cowper have reconsidered the wish made when heread Johnson's biography of Milton in the _Lives of the Poets_: "Oh! Icould thresh his old jacket till I made his pension jingle in hispocket!"?

But it is with Cowper only that we have here to do, and when we aretalking of Cowper the difficulty is solely one of compression. So muchhas been written about him and his work. The Lives of him form ofthemselves a most substantial library. He has been made the subject ofwhat is surely the very worst biography in the language and of one thatis among the very best. The well-meaning Hayley {38a} wrote the one, inwhich the word "tenderness" appears at least twice on every page, andSouthey {38b} the other. Not less fortunate has the poet been in hiscritics. Walter Bagehot, James Russell Lowell, Mrs. Oliphant, GeorgeEliot {38c}--these are but a few of the names that occur to me as havingsaid something wise and to the point concerning the Poet of Olney. 

I somehow feel that it is safer for me to refer to the Poet of Olney thanto speak of William Cowper, because I am not quite sure how you wouldwish me to pronounce his name. _Cooper_, he himself pronounced it, ashis family are in the habit of doing. The present Lord Cowper is knownto all the world as Lord Cooper. The derivation of the name and thefamily coat-of-arms justify that pronunciation, and it might be said thata man was, and is, entitled to settle the question of the pronunciationof his own name. And yet I plead for what I am quite willing to allow isthe incorrect pronunciation. All pronunciation, even of the simplestwords, is settled finally by a consensus of custom. Throughout theEnglish-speaking world the name is now constantly pronounced Cowper, asif that most useful and ornamental animal the cow had given it itsorigin. Well-read Scotland is peculiarly unanimous in the custom, andwell-read America follows suit. William Shakspere, I doubt not, calledhimself Shaxspere, and we decline to imitate him, and so probably many ofus will with a light heart go on speaking of William Cowper to the end ofthe chapter. At any rate Shakspere and Cowper, divergent as were theirlives and their work--and one readily recognizes the incomparably greaterposition of the former--had alike a keen sense of humour, rare amongpoets it would seem, and hugely would they both have enjoyed such acontroversy as this. 

This suggestion of the humour of Cowper brings me to my main point. Humour is so essentially a note of sanity, and it is the sanity of Cowperthat I desire to emphasize here. We have heard too much of the insanityof Cowper, of the "maniac's tongue" to which Mrs. Browning referred, ofthe "maniacal Calvinist" of whom Byron wrote somewhat scornfully. Only aday or two ago I read in a high-class journal that "one fears thatCowper's despondency and madness are better known to-day than hispoetry. " That is not to know the secret of Cowper. It is true thatthere were periods of maniacal depression, and these were not alwaysreligious ones. Now, it was from sheer nervousness at the prospect ofmeeting his fellows, now it was from a too logical acceptance of thedoctrine of eternal punishment. Had it not been these, it would havebeen something else. It might have been politics, or a hundred thingsthat now and again give a twist to the mind of the wisest. With Cowperit was generally religion. I am not here to promote a paradox. I acceptthe only too well-known story of Cowper's many visitations, but, lookingback a century, for the purpose of asking what was Cowper's contributionto the world's happiness and why we meet to speak of our love for him to-day, I insist that these visitations are not essential to our memory ofhim as a great figure in our literature--the maker of an epoch. 

Cowper lived for some seventy years--sixty-nine, to be exact. Of theseyears there was a period longer than the full term of Byron's life, ofShelley's or of Keats's, of perfect sanity, and it was in this periodthat he gave us what is one of the sanest achievements in our literature, view it as we may. 

Let us look backwards over the century--a century which has seen manychanges of which Cowper had scarcely any vision--the wonders of machineryand of electricity, of commercial enterprise, of the newspaper press, ofbook production. The galloping postboy is the most persistent figure inCowper's landscape. He has been replaced by the motor car. Nations havearisen and fallen; a thousand writers have become popular and have ceasedto be remembered. Other writers have sprung up who have made themselvesimmortal. Burns and Byron, Coleridge and Wordsworth, Scott and Shelleyamong the poets. 

We ask ourselves, then, what distinctly differentiates Cowper's life fromthat of his brothers in poetry, and I reply--his sanity. He did notindulge in vulgar amours, as did Burns and Byron; he did not ruin hismoral fibre by opium, as did Coleridge; he did not shock his best friendsby an over-weening egotism, as did Wordsworth; he did not spoil his lifeby reckless financial complications, as did Scott; or by too great anenthusiasm to beat down the world's conventions, as did Shelley. I donot here condemn any one or other of these later poets. Their livescannot be summed up in the mistakes they made. I only urge that, as itis not good to be at warfare with your fellows, to be burdened with debtsthat you have to kill yourself to pay, to alienate your friends bydistressing mannerisms, to cease to be on speaking terms with yourfamily--therefore Cowper, who avoided these things, and, out ofthreescore years and more allotted to him, lived for some forty or fiftyyears at least a quiet, idyllic life, surrounded by loyal and lovingfriends, had chosen the saner and safer path. That, it may be granted, was very much a matter of temperament, and for it one does not need topraise him. The appeal to us of Robert Burns to gently scan our brotherman will necessarily find a ready acceptance to-day, and a plea on behalfof kindly toleration for any great writer who has inspired his fellows isnatural and honourable. But Cowper does not require any such kindlytoleration. His temperament led him to a placid life, where there werefew temptations, and that life with its quiet walks, its occasionaldrives, its simple recreations, has stood for a whole century as ourEnglish ideal. It is what, amid the strain of the severest commercialismin our great cities, we look forward to for our declining years as ahaven on this side of the grave. 

But I have undertaken to plead for Cowper's sanity. I desire, therefore, to beg you to look not at this or that episode in his life, when, as weknow, Cowper was in the clutches of evil spirits, but at his life as awhole--a life of serene contentment in the company of his friends, hishares Puss, Tiny and Bess, his "eight pair of tame pigeons, " hiscorrespondents; and then I ask you to turn to his work, and to note theessential sanity of that work also. 

First there is his poetry. When after the Bastille had fallen CharlesJames Fox quoted in one of his speeches Cowper's lines--written longyears before--praying that that event might occur, he paid an unconscioustribute to the sanity of Cowper's genius. {44} Few poets who have lettheir convictions and aspirations find expression in verse have come sonear the mark. 

Wordsworth's verse--that which was written at the same age--is studdedwith prophecy of evils that never occurred. It was not because of anysupermundane intelligence, such as latter-day poets have been pleased toaffect and latter-day critics to assume for them, that Cowper wrote inanticipation of the fall of the Bastille in those thrilling lines, butbecause his exceedingly sane outlook upon the world showed him thatFrance was riding fast towards revolution. 

We have been told that Cowper's poetry lacked the true note of passion, that there was an absence of the "lyric cry. " I protest that I find thenote of passion in the "Lines on the Receipt of my Mother's Picture, " inhis two sets of verses to Mrs. Unwin, in his sonnet to Wilberforce notless marked than I find it in other great poets. I find in _The Task_and elsewhere in Cowper's works a note of enthusiasm for humanbrotherhood, for man's responsibility for man, for universal kinship, that had scarcely any place in literature before he wrote quietly here atOlney thoughts wiser and saner than he knew. To-day we call ourselves bymany names, Conservatives or Liberals, Radicals, or Socialists; we differwidely as to ways and means; but we are all practically agreed about onething--that the art of politics is the art of making the world happier. Each politician who has any aspirations beyond mere ambition desires toleave the world a little better than he found it. This is a commonplaceof to-day. It was not a commonplace of Cowper's day. Even the great-hearted, lovable Dr. Johnson was only concerned with the passing act ofkindliness to his fellows; patriotism he declared to be the last refugeof a scoundrel; collective aspiration was mere charlatanry in his eyes, and when some one said that he had lost his appetite because of a Britishdefeat, Johnson thought him an impostor, in which Johnson was probablyright. There have been plenty of so-called patriots who were scoundrels, there has been plenty of affectation of sentiment which is little betterthan charlatanry, but we do not consider when we weigh the influence ofmen whether Rousseau was morally far inferior to Johnson. We know thathe was. But Rousseau, poor an instrument as he may have been, helped tobreak many a chain, to relieve many a weary heart, to bring to wholepeoples a new era in which the horrors of the past became as a nightmare, and in which ideals were destined to reign for ever. Cowper, anincomparably better man than Rousseau, helped to permeate England withthat collective sentiment, which, while it does not excuse us forneglecting our neighbour, is a good thing for preserving for nations ahealthy natural life, a more and more difficult task with the growingcomplications of commercialism. Cowper here, as I say, unconsciouslyperformed his greatest service to humanity; and it was performed, be itremembered, at Olney. It has been truly said that in Cowper:--

 The poetry of human wrong begins, that long, long cry against oppression and evil done by man to man, against the political, moral, or priestly tyrant, which rings louder and louder through Burns, Coleridge, Shelley, and Byron, ever impassioned, ever longing, ever prophetic--never, in the darkest time, quite despairing. {47}

And Cowper achieved this without losing sight for one moment of theessential necessity for personal worth:

 Spend all thy powers Of rant and rhapsody in Virtue's praise, Be most sublimely good, verbosely grand, and it profiteth nothing, he said in effect. 

That was not his only service as a citizen. He struck the note of honestpatriotism as it had not been struck before since Milton, by the familiarlines commencing:

 England, with all thy faults, I love thee still, My country!

As also in that stirring ballad "On the Loss of the _Royal George_:"

 Her timbers yet are sound, And she may float again, Full charged with England's thunder, And plough the distant main. 

There are two other great claims that might here be made for Cowper didtime allow, that he anticipated Wordsworth alike as a lover of nature, asone who had more than a superficial affection for it--the superficialaffection of Thomson and Gray--and that he anticipated Wordsworth also asa lover of animal life. Cowper's love of nature was the less effectivethan Wordsworth's only, surely, in that he had not had Wordsworth'sadvantage of living amid impressive scenery. His love of animal life wasfar less platonic than Wordsworth's. To his hares and his pigeons andall dumb creatures he was genuinely devoted. Perhaps it was because hehad in him the blood of kings--for, curiously enough, it is no moredifficult to trace the genealogical tree of both Cowper and Byron down toWilliam the Conqueror than it is to trace the genealogical tree of QueenVictoria--it was perhaps, I say, this descent from kings which led him tobe more tolerant of "sport" than was Wordsworth. At any rate, Cowper'svigorous description of being in at the death of a fox may be contrastedwith Wordsworth's "Heart Leap Well, " and you will prefer Cowper orWordsworth, as your tastes are for or against our old-fashioned Englishsports. But even then, as often, Cowper in his poetry was less tolerantthan in his prose, for he writes in _The Task_ of:

 detested sport That owes its pleasures to another's pain, We may note in all this the almost entire lack of indebtedness in Cowperto his predecessors. One of his most famous phrases, indeed, that on"the cup that cheers, but not inebriates, " he borrowed from Berkeley; buthis borrowings were few, far fewer than those of any other great poet, whereas mine would be a long essay were I to produce by the medium ofparallel columns all that other poets have borrowed from him. 

Lastly, among Cowper's many excellencies as a poet let me note hishumour. His pathos, his humanity--many fine qualities he has in commonwith others; but what shall we say of his humour? If the ubiquitous Scotwere present, so far from his native heath--and I daresay we have one ortwo with us--he might claim that humour was also the prerogative ofRobert Burns. He might claim, also, that certain other greatcharacteristics of Cowper were to be found almost simultaneously inBurns. There is virtue in the _almost_. Cowper was born in 1731, Burnsin 1759. At any rate humour has been a rare product among the greaterEnglish poets. It was entirely absent in Wordsworth, in Shelley, inKeats. Byron possessed a gift of satire and wit, but no humour, Tennysononly a suspicion of it in "The Northern Farmer. " From Cowper toBrowning, who also had it at times, there has been little humour in thegreatest English poetry, although plenty of it in the lesser poets--Hoodand the rest. But there was in Cowper a great sense of humour, as therewas also plenty of what Hazlitt, almost censoriously, calls "eleganttrifling. " Not only in the imperishable "John Gilpin, " but in the "CaseBetween Nose and Eyes, " "The Nightingale and Glow-worm, " and other piecesyou have examples of humorous verse which will live as long as ourlanguage endures. 

Cowper's claims as a poet, then, may be emphasized under four heads:--

I. His enthusiasm for humanity. 

II. His love of nature. 

III. His love of animal life. 

IV. His humour. 

And in three of these, let it be said emphatically, he stands out as thecreator of a new era. 

There is another claim I make for him, and with this I close--hisposition as a master of prose, as well as of poetry. Cowper was thegreatest letter-writer in a language which has produced many great letter-writers--Walpole, Gray, Byron, Scott, FitzGerald, and a long list. Butnearly all these men were men of affairs, of action. Given a goodliterary style they could hardly have been other than interesting, theyhad so much to say that they gained from external sources. EvenFitzGerald--the one recluse--had all the treasures of literatureconstantly passing into his study. Cowper had but eighteen booksaltogether during many of his years in Olney, and some of us who havelent our volumes in the past and are still sighing over gaps in ourshelves find consolation in the fact that six of Cowper's books had beenreturned to him after a friend had borrowed for twenty years or so. Now, it is comparatively easy to write good letters with a library around you;it is marvellous that Cowper could have done this with so littlematerial, and his letters are, from this point of view, the best ofall--"divine chit-chat" Coleridge called them. His simple stylecaptivates us. And here let me say--keeping to my text--that it is the_sanest_ of styles, a style with no redundancies, no rhetoric, nostraining after effect. The outlook on life is sane--what could be finerthan the chase for the lost hare, or the call of the Parliamentarycandidate, or the flogging of the thief?--and the outlook on literatureis particularly sane. 

Cowper was well-nigh the only true poet in the first rank in Englishliterature who was at the same time a true critic. Literary historyaffords a singular revelation of the wild and incoherent judgments oftheir fellows on the part of the poets. For praise or blame, there arefew literary judgments of Byron, of Shelley, of Wordsworth that willstand. Coleridge was a critic first, and his poetry, though good, issmall in quantity, and the same may be said of Matthew Arnold. Tennysondiscreetly kept away from prose, and his letters, be it remembered, lackdistinction as do most letters of the nineteenth century. If, however, as we are really to believe, he it was who really made the first editionof Palgrave's _Golden Treasury of Lyric Poetry_, he came near to Cowperin his sanity of judgment, and one delights to think that in thatprecious volume Cowper ranks third--that is, after Shakspere andWordsworth--in the number of selections that are there given, and rightlygiven, as imperishable masterpieces of English poetry. Tennyson, also, was at one with Cowper in declaring that an appreciation of _Lycidas_ wasa touchstone of taste for poetry. To Tennyson, as to Cowper, Milton wasthe one great English poet after Shakspere; and here, also, we revere thesaneness of view. More sane too, was Cowper than any of the moderncritics, in that he did not believe that mere technique was thestandpoint from which all poetry must ultimately be judged. 

 "Give me, " he says, "a manly rough line with a deal of meaning in it, rather than a whole poem full of musical periods, that have nothing in them, only smoothness to recommend them!"

And thus he justified Robert Browning and many another singer. 

Let us then dismiss from our minds the one-sided picture of Cowper as agloomy fanatic, who was always asking himself in Carlylian phrase, "Am Isaved? Am I damned?" Let us remember him as staunch to the friends ofhis youth, sympathetic to his old schoolfellow, Warren Hastings, when theworld would make him out too black. Opposed in theory to tobacco, how hedelighted to welcome his good friend Mr. Bull. "My greenhouse, " he says, "wants only the flavour of your pipe to make it perfectly delightful!"Naturally tolerant of total abstinence, he asks one friend to drink tothe success of his Homer, and thanks another for a present ofbottle-stands. From beginning to end, save in those periods ofaberration, there is no more resemblance to Cowper in the picture thatcertain narrow-minded people have desired to portray than there is inthese same people's conception of Martin Luther. The real Luther, wholoved dancing and mirth and the joy of living as much as did any of themen he so courageously opposed, was not more remote from a conception ofhim once current in this country than was the real Cowper--the frank, genial humorist, who wrote "John Gilpin, " who in his youth "giggled andmade giggle" with his girl-cousins, and in his maturer years "laughed andmade laugh" with Lady Austen and Lady Hesketh. 

To all men there are periods of weariness and depression, side by sidewith periods of happiness and hopefulness. Cowper, alas! had more thanhis share of the tragedy of life, but let us not forget that he had someof its joy, and that joy is reflected for us in a substantial literaryachievement, which has lived, and influenced the world, while his moretragic experiences may well be buried in oblivion. This, you may havenoted, is not a criticism of Cowper, but an eulogy. I would wish to say, however, that the criticism of Cowper by living writers has been ofsurpassing excellence. For the first fifty or sixty years of the centurythat we are recalling Cowper was the most popular poet of our country, with Burns and Byron for rivals. He has been largely dethroned byWordsworth and Shelley, and Tennyson, not one of whom has been praisedtoo much. But if Cowper has sunk somewhat out of sight of late years, owing to inevitable circumstances, it is during these late years that hehas secured the goodwill of the best living critics. Would that Mr. Leslie Stephen {56}--who wrote his life in the _Dictionary of NationalBiography_--would that Mr. Edmund Gosse--who has so recently published agreat biography of Cowper's memorable ancestor, Dr. Donne--were, one orother of them, here to-day; or Mr. Austin Dobson, who has visited Olney, and described his impressions; or Dr. Jessopp, who lives near Cowper'stomb in East Dereham Church. These writers are, alas! not with us, andsome presentment of a poet they love has fallen to less capable hands. 

But not the most brilliant of speeches, not all the enthusiasm of all thecritics, can ever restore Cowper to his former immense popularity. We dowell, however, to celebrate his centenary, because it is good at certainperiods to remember our indebtedness to the great men who have helped usin literature or in life. But that is not to say that we work for thedethronement of later favourites. "Each age must write its own books, "says Emerson, and this is particularly the case with the great body ofpoetry. Cowper, however, will live to all time among students ofliterature by his longer poems; he will live to all time among themultitude by his ballads and certain of his lyrics. He will, assuredly, live by his letters, to study which will be a thousand times more helpfulto the young writer than many volumes of Addison, to whom we were onceadvised to devote our days and our nights. Cowper will live, above all, as a profoundly interesting and beautiful personality, as a great andgood Englishman--the greatest of all the sons of this his adopted town. 

III. TO THE IMMORTAL MEMORY OF GEORGE BORROW

An Address delivered in Norwich on the Occasion of the Borrow Centenary, 1903. 

One hundred years ago there was born some two miles from the pleasantlittle town of East Dereham, in this county, a child who was christenedGeorge Henry Borrow. That is why we are assembled here this evening. Icount it one of the most interesting coincidences in literary historythat only three years earlier there should have left the world in thesame little town--a town only known perhaps to those of us who areNorfolk men--a poet who has always seemed to me to be one of the greatestglories of our literature: I mean William Cowper. Cowper died in April, 1800, and Borrow was born in July, 1803, in this same town of EastDereham: and there very much it might be thought, any point of likenessor of contrast must surely end. 

Cowper and Borrow do, indeed, come into some trivial kind of kinship atone or two points. In reading Cowper's beautiful letters I have comeacross two addressed by him to one Richard Phillips, a bookseller of thatday, who had been in prison for publishing some of Thomas Paine's works. Cowper had been asked by Phillips to write a sympathetic poemdenunciatory of the political and religious tyranny that had sentPhillips to jail. Cowper had at first agreed, but was afterwards advisednot to have anything more to do with Phillips. Judging by the aftercareer of Phillips, Cowper did wisely; for Phillips was not a good man, although twenty years later he had become a sheriff of London and wasknighted. As Sir Richard Phillips he was visited by George Borrow, thena youth at the beginning of his career. Borrow came to Phillips armedwith an introduction from William Taylor of Norwich, and his reception ismost dramatically recorded in the pages of _Lavengro_. This is, however, to anticipate. Then there is a poem by Cowper to Sir John Fenn {62} theantiquary, the first editor of the famous _Paston Letters_. In it thereis a reference to Fenn's spouse, who, under the pseudonym of "Mrs. Teachwell, " wrote many books for children in her day. Now Borrow couldremember this lady--Dame Eleanor Fenn--when he was a boy. He recalledthe "Lady Bountiful leaning on her gold-headed cane, while the sleek oldfootman followed at a respectful distance behind. " Lady Fenn was forty-six years old when Cowper referred to her. She was sixty-six when theboy Borrow saw her in Dereham streets. At no other points do these greatEast Dereham writers come upon common ground: Cowper during the greaterpart of his life was a recluse. He practically fled from the world. Inreading the many letters he wrote--and they are among the best letters inthe English language--one is struck by the small number of hiscorrespondents. He had few acquaintances and still fewer friends. Hehad never seen a hill until he was sixty, and then it was only the modesthills of Sussex that seemed to him so supremely glorious. He was neveron the Continent. For half a lifetime he did not move out of one county, the least picturesque part of Buckinghamshire, the neighbourhood of Olneyand of Weston. There he wrote the poems that have been a delight toseveral generations, poems which although they may have gone out offashion with many are still very dear to some among us; and there, as Ihave said, he wrote the incomparable letters that have an equallypermanent place in literature. 

You could not conceive a more extraordinary contrast than the life ofthis other writer associated with East Dereham, whom we have met tocelebrate this evening. George Borrow was the son of a soldier, who hadrisen from the ranks, and of a mother who had been an actress. Soldierand actress both imply to all of us a restless, wandering life. Thesoldier was a Cornishman by birth, the actress was of French origin, andso you have blended in this little Norfolk boy--who is a Norfolk boy inspite of it all--every kind of nomadic habit, every kind of fiery, imaginative enthusiasm, a temperament not usually characteristic of thoseof us who claim East Anglia as the land of our birth or of ourprogenitors. I wish it were possible for me to reconstruct that Norwichworld into which young George Borrow entered at thirteen years of age. That it was a Norwich of great intellectual activity is indisputable. Inthe year of Borrow's birth John Gurney, who died six years later, firstbecame a partner in the Norwich bank. His more famous son, Joseph JohnGurney--aged fifteen--left the Earlham home in order to study at Oxford. His sister, the still more famous Elizabeth Fry, was now twenty-three. Sothat when Borrow, the thirteen year old son of the veteran soldier--whohad already been in Ireland picking up scraps of Irish, and in Scotlandadding to his knowledge of Gaelic--settled down for some of his mostimpressionable years in Norwich, Joseph John Gurney was a young man oftwenty-eight and Elizabeth Fry was thirty-six. Dr. James Martineau waseleven years of age and his sister Harriet was fourteen. Another equallyclever woman, not then married to Austin, the famous jurist, was SarahTaylor, aged twenty-three. This is but to name a few of the crowd ofNorwich worthies of that day. Would that some one could produce apicture of the literary life of Norwich of this time and of a quarter ofa century onward--a period that includes the famous Bishop Stanley's {66}occupancy of the See of Norwich and the visits to this city from allparts of England of a great number of famous literary men. It is mypleasant occupation to-night to endeavour to show that Borrow, the veryleast of these men and women in public estimation for a good portion ofhis life, and perhaps the least in popular judgment even since his death, was really the greatest, was really the man of all others to whom thisbeautiful city should do honour if it asks for a name out of itsnineteenth century history to crown with local recognition. 

For whatever homage may have fallen to Borrow during the half-century ormore since his name first came upon many tongues Norwich, it must beadmitted, has given very little of it. No one associated with your city, I repeat, but has heard of the Gurneys and the Martineaus, of theStanleys and the Austins, whose life stories have made so large a part ofyour literary and intellectual history during this very period. But Iturn in vain to a number of books that I have in my library for anyinformation concerning one who is indisputably the greatest among theintellectual children of Norwich. I turn to Mr. Prothero's _Life of DeanStanley_--not one word about Borrow; to that pleasant _Memoir_ of SarahAustin and her mother, Mrs. Taylor, called _Three Generations of aNorfolk Family_--again not one word. I turn to Mr. Braithwaite'sbiography of Joseph John Gurney, and to Mr. Augustus Hare's book _TheGurneys of Earlham_--upon these worthy biographers Borrow made noimpression whatever, although Joseph John Gurney was personally helpfulto him and we read in _Lavengro_ of that pleasant meeting between thepair on the river bank when Mr. Gurney chided the boy Borrow or Lavengrofor angling. "From that day, " he says, "I became less and less apractitioner of that cruel fishing. " In Harriet Martineau's_Autobiography_, which enjoyed its hour of fame when it was publishedtwenty-six years ago, there is a contemptuous reference to the discipleof William Taylor, "this polyglot gentleman, who went through Spaindisseminating Bibles. " If Miss Martineau were alive now she would hearthe works of "this polyglot gentleman" praised on every hand, and wouldfind that a cult had arisen which to her would certainly be quiteincomprehensible. In that large, dismal book--the _Life of JamesMartineau_, again, there is but one mention of Dr. Martineau's famousschoolfellow whose name has been linked with him only by a silly story. Do not let it be thought that I am complaining of this neglect; the worldwill always treat its greatest writers in precisely this fashion. Borrowdid not lack for fame of a kind, but he was, as I desire to show, praisedin his lifetime for the wrong thing, where he was praised at all. Everyone in the fifties and sixties read _The Bible in Spain_, as theyread a hundred other books of that period, now forgotten. Many read itwho were deceived by its title. They expected a tract. Many read it aswe to-day read the latest novel or biography of the hour. Then a newbook arises and the momentary favourite is forgotten. We think for awhole week that we are in contact with a well-nigh immortal work. Alittle later we concern ourselves not at all whether the book is immortalor not. We go on to something else. The critic is as much to blame asthe reader. Not one man in a hundred whose profession it is to comebetween the author and the public, and to guide the reader to the best inliterature, has the least perception of what is good literature. It iseasy when a writer has captured the suffrages of the crowd for the criticto tell the world that he is great. That happened to Carlyle, toTennyson, to many a popular author whose earliest books commanded littleattention: but, happily, these writers did not lose heart. They kept onwriting. Borrow was otherwise made. He wrote _The Bible in Spain_--abook of travel of surprising merit. It sold largely on its title. Mr. Augustine Birrell has told us that he knew a boy in a very stricthousehold who devoured the narrative on Sunday afternoons, the titlebeing thought to cover a conventional missionary journey. Well, when Iwas a boy _The Bible in Spain_ had gone out of fashion and the public hadnot taken up with the author's greater work, _Lavengro_. Borrow wasnaturally disappointed. He abused the critics and the public. Perhapshe grew somewhat soured. He did not hesitate in _The Romany Rye_ to talkcandidly about those "ill-favoured dogs . . . The newspaper editors, " andhe made the gentleman's gentleman of _Lavengro_ describe how he wasexcluded from the Servants' Club in Park Lane because his master followeda profession "so mean as literature. " In fact as a reaction from theunfriendly reception accorded to the _Romany Rye_--now one of the mostcostly of his books in a first edition--he lost heart, and he grew todespise the whole literary and writing class. Hence the various storiespresenting him in not very sympathetic guise, the story of Thackeraybeing snubbed on asking Borrow if he had read the _Snob Papers_, of MissAgnes Strickland receiving an even more forcible rebuff when she offeredto send him her _Queens of England_. "For God's sake don't Madame; Ishould not know where to put them or what to do with them. " Thesestories are in Gordon Hake's _Memoirs of Eighty Years_, but Mr. FrancisHindes Groome has shown us the other side of the picture, and others alsoto whom I shall refer a little later have done the same. Perhaps theliterary class is never the worse for a little plain speaking. The realsecret of Borrow is this--that he was a man of action turned into awriter by force of circumstances. 

The life of Borrow, unlike that of most famous men of letters, has notbeen overwritten. His death in 1881 caused little emotion and attractedbut small attention in the newspapers. _The Times_, then as now soexcellent in its biographies as a rule, devoted but twenty lines to him. Here I may be pardoned for being autobiographical. I was last in Norwichin the early eighties. I had a wild enthusiasm for literature so far asmy taste had been directed--that is to say I read every book I cameacross and had been doing so from my earliest boyhood. But I had neverheard of George Borrow or of his works. In my then not infrequent visitsto Norwich I cannot recall that his name was ever mentioned, and in mylife in London, among men who were, many of them, great readers, I neverheard of Borrow or of his achievement. He died in 1881, and as I do notrecall hearing his name at the time of his death or until longafterwards, I must have missed certain articles in the _Athenaeum_--twoof them admirable "appreciations" by Mr. Watts-Dunton--and so my state ofbenightedness was as I have described. It may be that those who are ayear or two older than I am and those who are younger may find thisextraordinary. You have always heard of Borrow and of his works, but Ithink I am entitled to insist that when Borrow sank into his grave, anold, and to many an eccentric and bitter man, he had fallen into the mostcurious oblivion with the public that has ever come to a man, I will notsay of equal distinction, but of any distinction whatever. Mr. EgmontHake told the readers of the _Athenaeum_ in a biography that appeared atthe time of Borrow's death that Borrow's works were "forgotten inEngland" and I find in turning to the biography of Borrow in _TheNorvicensian_, for 1882--the organ of the Norwich Grammar School--thatthe writer of this obituary notice confessed that there were none ofBorrow's works in the library of the school of which Borrow had been themost distinguished pupil. 

From that time--in 1881--until 1899, a period of eighteen years, Borrowhad but little biographical recognition. A few introductions to hisbooks, sundry encyclopaedia articles, and one or two magazine essays madeup the sum total of information concerning the author of _Lavengro_ untilDr. Knapp's _Life_ appeared in 1899. That _Life_ has been severelyhandled by some lovers of Borrow, and lovers of Borrow are now plentifulenough. Dr. Knapp had not the cunning of the really successfulbiographer. His book still remains in the huge two-volumed form in whichit was first issued four years ago, and I do not anticipate that it willever be a popular book. There is no literary art in it. There is acapacity for amassing facts, but no power of co-ordinating these facts. Moreover Dr. Knapp did a great deal of mischief by very over-zeal. Hemade too great a research into all the current gossip in Norfolk andSuffolk concerning Borrow. If you were to make special research into thelife of any friend or acquaintance of the past you would hear muchfoolish gossip and a great many wrong motives imputed, and possibly youwould not have an opportunity of checking the various statements. Thewhole of Dr. Knapp's book seems to be written upon the principle of "Iwould if I could" say a good many things, and, indeed, every few monthsthere appears in the _Eastern Daily Press_, a journal of your city that Ihave read every day regularly since boyhood, a letter from some oneexplaining that the less inquiry about this or that point in Borrow'scareer the better for Borrow. Take, for example, last Saturday's issueof the journal I have named, where I find the following from acorrespondent:--

 Dr. Knapp, from dictates of courtesy, left it unrevealed, and as he could say nothing to Borrow's credit, passed the affair over in silence, and on this point all well-wishers of Borrow's reputation would be wise to take their cue from this biographer's example. 

Now there is nothing more damnatory than a sentence of this kind. Whatdoes it amount to? What is the 'it' that is unrevealed by the courteousDr. Knapp? It seems to amount to the charge that Borrow is accused ofgibbeting in his books the people he dislikes; this is what every greatimaginative writer has been charged with to the perplexing of dullpeople. There are many characters in Dickens's novels which are supposedto be a presentation of near relatives or friends. These he ought tohave treated with more kindliness. That heroic little woman, MissBronte, gave a picture of Madame Heger, who kept a school at Brussels, that conveyed, I doubt not, a very mistaken presentation of the subjectof her satire. Imaginative writers have always taken these liberties. When the worst is said it simply amounts to this, that Borrow was a goodhater. Dr. Johnson said that he loved a good hater, and he might verywell have loved Borrow. Dante, whom we all now agree to idolize, treatedpeople even more roughly; he placed some of his acquaintances who had ill-used him in the very lowest circles of hell. May I express a hope, therefore, that this type of letter to the Norwich newspapers about Dr. Knapp's "kindness" to Borrow's reputation may cease. If Dr. Knapp hadprinted the whole of the facts we should know how to deal with them; butthis is one of his limitations as a biographer. He has not in the leasthelped to a determination of Borrow's real character. 

Had Borrow possessed a biographer so skilful with her pen as Mrs. Gaskellin her _Life of Charlotte Bronte_, so keen-eyed for the dramatic note asSir George Trevelyan in his _Life of Macaulay_, he would have multipliedreaders for _Lavengro_. There are many people who have read the Brontenovels from sheer sympathy with the writers that their biographer, Mrs. Gaskell, had kindled. Let us not, however, be ungrateful to Dr. Knapp. He has furnished those of us who are sufficiently interested in thesubject with a fine collection of documents. Here is all the material ofbiography in its crude state, but presenting vividly enough the liveBorrow to those who have the perception to read it with care andjudgment. Still more grateful may we be to Dr. Knapp for his edition ofBorrow's works, particularly for those wonderful episodes in _Lavengro_which he has reproduced from the original manuscript, episodes asdramatic as any other portion of the text, and making Dr. Knapp's editionof _Lavengro_ the only possible one to possess. 

But to return to the main facts of Borrow's career, which every one hereat least is familiar with. You know of his birth at East Dereham, of hislife in Ireland and in Scotland, of his school days at Norwich, of hisdeparture from Norwich to London on his father's death, of his direstruggles in the literary whirlpool, and of his wanderings in gipsy land. You know, thanks to Dr. Knapp, more than you could otherwise have learnedof his life at St. Petersburg, whither he had been sent by the BibleSociety, on the recommendation of Mr. Joseph John Gurney and anotherpatron. Then he has himself told us in picturesque fashion of his lifein Portugal and Spain. After this we hear of his marriage to MaryClarke, his residence from 1840 to 1853 at Oulton, in Suffolk, from 1853to 1860 at Yarmouth, from 1860 to 1874 in Hereford Square, London, andfinally from 1874 to 1881 at Oulton, where he died. That is the bareskeleton of Borrow's life, and for half his life, I think, we should becontent with a skeleton. For the other half of it we have the bestautobiography in the English language. An autobiography that ranks withGoethe's _Truth and Poetry from my Life_ and Rousseau's _Confessions_. Infour books--in _Lavengro_, _Romany Rye_, _The Bible in Spain_, and _WildWales_ we have some delightful glimpses of an interesting personality, and here we may leave the personal side of Borrow. Beyond this we knowthat he was unquestionably a devoted son, a good husband, a kind father. The literary life has its perils, so far as domesticity is concerned. SirWalter Scott in his life of Dryden speaks of:--

 Her who had to endure the apparently causeless fluctuation of spirits incidental to one compelled to dwell for long periods of time in the fitful realms of the imagination, and it is certain that those who dwell in the realms of the imaginationare usually very irritable, very difficult to live with. Literaryhistory in its personal side is largely a dismal narrative of theuncomfortable relations of men of genius with their wives and with theirfamilies. Your man of genius thinks himself bound to hang up his fiddlein his own house, however merry a fellow he may prove himself to ahundred boon companions outside. George Borrow was perhaps the oppositeof all this. As a companion and a neighbour he did not always shine, ifthe impression of many a witness is to be trusted. They tell anecdotesof his lack of cordiality, of his unsociability, and so on. They havetold those anecdotes more industriously in Norwich than anywhere else. Hehimself in an incomparable account of going to church with the gypsies in_The Romany Rye_ has the following:

 It appeared as if I had fallen asleep in the pew of the old church of pretty Dereham. I had occasionally done so when a child, and had suddenly woke up. Yes, surely, I had been asleep and had woke up; but no! if I had been asleep I had been waking in my sleep, struggling, striving, learning and unlearning in my sleep. Years had rolled away whilst I had been asleep--ripe fruit had fallen, green fruit had come on whilst I had been asleep--how circumstances had altered, and above all myself whilst I had been asleep. No, I had not been asleep in the old church! I was in a pew, it is true, but not the pew of black leather, in which I sometimes fell asleep in days of yore, but in a strange pew; and then my companions, they were no longer those of days of yore. I was no longer with my respectable father and mother, and my dear brother, but with the gypsy cral and his wife, and the gigantic Tawno, the Antinous of the dusky people. And what was I myself? No longer an innocent child but a moody man, bearing in my face, as I knew well, the marks of my strivings and strugglings; of what I had learnt and unlearnt. 

But this "moody man, " let it be always remembered, was a good husband andfather. His wife was devoted to him, his step-daughter carries now to anold age a profound reverence and affection for his memory. Grievedbeyond all words was she--the Henrietta or "Hen" of all his books--atwhat is maintained to be the utterly fictitious narrative of Borrow'sdescribed deathbed that Professor Knapp presented from the ill-consideredgossip that he picked up while staying in the neighbourhood. {80} Borrowhas himself something to say concerning his family in _Wild Wales_:--

 Of my wife I will merely say that she is a perfect paragon of wives--can make puddings and sweets and treacle posset, and is the best woman of business in East Anglia: of my step-daughter, for such she is though I generally call her daughter, and with good reason seeing that she has always shown herself a daughter to me, that she has all kinds of good qualities and several accomplishments, knowing something of conchology, more of botany, drawing capitally in the Dutch style, and playing remarkably well on the guitar. 

Yes, I am not quite sure but that Borrow was really a good fellow allround, as well as being a good husband and father. He hated the literaryclass, it is true. He considered that the "contemptible trade ofauthor, " as he called it, was less creditable than that of a jockey. Heavoided as much as possible the writers of books, and particularly theblue-stocking, and when they came in his way he was not always verypolite, sometimes much the reverse. Only the other day a letter waspublished from the late Professor Cowell describing a visit to Borrow andhis not very friendly reception. Well, Borrow was here as elsewhere aman of insight. The literary class is usually a very narrow class. Itcan talk about no trade but its own. Things have grown worse sinceBorrow's day, I am sure, but they were bad enough then. Borrow was a manof very varied tastes. He took interest in gypsies and horses and prizefighters and a hundred other entertaining matters, and so he despised theliterary class, which cared for none of these things. But unhappily forhis fame the literary class has had the final word; it has revealed allthe gossip of a gossiping peasantry, and it has done its best to presentthe recluse of Oulton in a disagreeable light. Fortunately for Borrow, who kept the bores at bay and contented himself with but few friends, there were at least two who survived him to bear testimony to the effectthat he was "a singularly steadfast and loyal friend. " One of these wasMr. Watts-Dunton, who tells us in one of his essays that:

 George Borrow was a good man, a most winsome and a most charming companion, an English gentleman, straightforward, honest, and brave as the very best examplars of that fine old type. 

I have dwelt longer on this aspect of my subject than I should have donehad I been addressing any other audience than a Norwich one. But thefact is that all the gossip and backbiting and censoriousness that hasgathered round Borrow for a hundred years has come out of this very city, commencing with the "bursts of laughter" that, according to MissMartineau, greeted Borrow's travels in Spain for the Bible Society. Borrow was twenty-one years of age when he left Norwich to make his wayin the world. During the next twenty years he may have undergone manychanges of intellectual view, as most of us do, as Miss Martineau notablydid, and Miss Martineau and her laughing friends were diabolicallyuncharitable. That lack of charity followed Borrow throughout his life. He was libelled by many, by Miss Frances Power Cobbe most of all. However, the great city of Norwich will make up for it in the future, andshe will love Borrow as Borrow indisputably loved her. How he praisedher fine cathedral, her lordly castle, her Mousehold Heath, her meadowsin which he once saw a prize fight, her pleasant scenery--no city, noteven glorious Oxford, has been so well and adequately praised, and Idesire to show that that praise is not for an age but for all time. 

If George Borrow has not been happy in his biographer, and if, as istrue, he has received but inadequate treatment on this account--suchseries of little books as _The English Men of Letters_ and the _GreatWriters_ quite ignoring him--he has been equally unfortunate in hiscritics. There are hardly any good and distinctive appreciations inprint of Borrow's works. While other great names in the great literatureof the Victorian Period have been praised by a hundred pens, there hasscarcely been any notable and worthy praise of Borrow, and if I were inan audience that was at all sceptical as to Borrow's supreme merits, which happily I am not; if I were among those who declared that theycould see but small merit in Borrow themselves, but were prepared toaccept him if only I could bring good authority that he was a very greatwriter, I should be hardly put to to comply with the demand. I can onlyname Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton and Mr. Augustine Birrell as critics ofconsiderable status who have praised Borrow well. "The delightful, thebewitching, the never sufficiently-to-be-praised George Borrow, " says Mr. Birrell in one of the essays he has written on the subject; {84} whileMr. Theodore Watts-Dunton, has written no less than four papers on onewhom he knew and admires personally, and of whom he insists that "hisidealizing powers, his romantic cast of mind, his force, his originality, give him a title to a permanent place high in the ranks of English prosewriters. "

All this is very interesting, but in literature as in life we have got towork out our own destinies. We have not got to accept Borrow becausethis or that critic tells us he is good. I have therefore no quarrelwith any one present who does not share my view that Borrow was one ofthe greater glories of English literature. I only desire to state mycase for him. 

To be a lover of Borrow, a Borrovian, in fact, it is not necessary toknow all his books. You may never have seen copies of the _RomanticBallads_ or of _Faustus_, of _Targum_ or of _The Turkish Jester_, ofBorrow's translation of _The Talisman_ of Pushkin. Your state may benone the less gracious. To possess these books is largely a collector'shobby. They are interesting, but they would not have made for the authoran undying reputation. Further, you may not care for _The Bible inSpain_, you may be untouched by the _Gypsies in Spain_ and _Wild Wales_, and even then I will not deny to you the title of a good Borrovian, ifonly you pronounce _Lavengro_ and _The Romany Rye_ to be among thegreatest books you know. I can admire the _Gypsies in Spain_ and _WildWales_. I can read _The Bible in Spain_ with something of the enthusiasmwith which our fathers read it. It is a stirring narrative of travel andmuch more. Robert Louis Stevenson did, indeed, rank it among his "dearacquaintances" in bookland, "the _Pilgrim's Progress_ in the first rank, _The Bible in Spain_ not far behind, " he says. All the same, it has not, none of these three books has, the distinctive mark of first class geniusthat belongs to the other two in the five-volumed edition of Borrow'sCollected Works that many of us have read through more than once. Notall clever people have thought _Lavengro_ and _The Romany Rye_ to be thusgreat. A critic in the _Athenaeum_ declared _Lavengro_ when it waspublished in 1851 to be "balderdash, " while a critic writing just fiftyyears afterwards and writing from Norfolk, alas! insisted that the authorof this book "was absolutely wanting in the power of invention" that he(Borrow) could "only have drawn upon his memory, " that he had "no senseof humour. " If all this were true, if half of it were true, Borrow wasnot the great man, the great writer that I take him to be. But it is nottrue. _Lavengro_ with its continuation _The Romany Rye_, is a great workof imagination, of invention; it is in no sense a photograph, a memorypicture, and it abounds in humour as it abounds in many other greatcharacteristics. What makes an author supremely great? Surely a certainquality which we call genius, as distinct from the mere intellectualpower of some less brilliant writer:--

 True genius is the ray that flings A novel light o'er common things

and here it is that Borrow shines supreme. He has invested with quitenovel light a hundred commonplace aspects of life. Not an inventor! notimaginative! Why, one of the indictments against him is thatphilologists decry his philology and gyptologists his gypsy learning. If, then, his philology and his gypsy lore were imperfect, as I believe theywere, how much the greater an imaginative writer he was. To say that_Lavengro_ merely indicates keen observation is absurd. Not the keenestobservation will crowd so many adventures, adventures as fresh and asnovel as those of Gil Blas or Robinson Crusoe, into a few months'experience. "I felt some desire, " says Lavengro, "to meet with one ofthose adventures which upon the roads of England are generally asplentiful as blackberries in autumn. " I think that most of us willwander along the roads of England for a very long time before we meet anIsopel Berners, before we have such an adventure as that of theblacksmith and his horse, or of the apple woman whose favourite readingwas _Moll Flanders_. These and a hundred other adventures, the fightwith the Flaming Tinman, the poisoning of Lavengro by the gypsy woman, the discourse with Ursula under the hedge, when once read are fixed uponthe memory for ever. And yet you may turn to them again and again, andwith ever increasing zest. The story of Isopel Berners is a piece ofimaginative writing that certainly has no superior in the literature ofthe last century. It was assuredly no photographic experience. IsopelBerners is herself a creation ranking among the fine creations ofwomanhood of the finest writers. I doubt not but that it was inspired bysome actual memory of Borrow--the memory of some early love affair inwhich the distractions of his mania for word-learning--the Armenian andother languages--led him to pass by some opportunity of his life, losingthe substance for the shadow. But whether there were ever a real Isopelwe shall never know. We do know that Borrow has presented his fictitiousone with infinite poetry and fine imaginative power. We do know, moreover, that it is not right to describe Isopel Berners as a marvellousepisode in a narrative of other texture. _Lavengro_ is full ofmarvellous episodes. Some one has ventured to comment upon Borrow'sstyle--to imply that it is not always on a high plane. What does thatmatter? Style is not the quality that makes a book live, but the noveltyof the ideas. Stevenson was a splendid stylist, and his admirers havedeluded themselves into believing that he was, therefore, among theimmortals. But Stevenson had nothing new to tell the world, and he wasnot, he is not, therefore of the immortals. Borrow is of the immortals, not by virtue of a style, but by virtue of having something new to say. He is with Dickens and with Carlyle as one of the three great Britishprose writers of the age we call Victorian, who in quite different wayshave presented a new note for their own time and for long after. It isthe distinction of Borrow that he has invested the common life of theroad, of the highway, the path through the meadow, the gypsy encampment, the country fair, the very apple stall and wayside inn with an air ofromance that can never leave those of us who have once come under themagnificent spell of _Lavengro_ and the _Romany Rye_. Perhaps Borrow ispre-eminently the writer for those who sit in armchairs and dream ofadventures they will never undertake. Perhaps he will never be thefavourite author of the really adventurous spirit, who wants the realthing, the latest book of actual travel. But to be the favourite authorof those who sit in arm-chairs is no small thing, and, as I have saidalready, Borrow stands with Carlyle and Dickens in _our_ century, bywhich I mean the nineteenth century; with Defoe and Goldsmith in theeighteenth century, as one of the really great and imperishable mastersof our tongue. 

What then will Norwich do for George Borrow? I ask this question, although it would, perhaps, be an impertinence to ask it were I not aNorwich man. If you have read Dr. Knapp's _Life of Borrow_, you willhave seen more than one reference to Mrs. Borrow's landlord, "old King, ""Tom King the carpenter, " and so on, who owned the house in Willow Lanein which Borrow spent his boyhood. That 'old King the carpenter'--Ibelieve he called himself a builder, but perhaps this was when he grewmore prosperous--was my great-great-uncle. One of his sons becamephysician to Prince Talleyrand and married a sister of John Stuart Mill. One of his great-nieces was my grandmother, and her mother's family, theParkers, had lived in Norwich for many generations. So on the strengthof this little piece of genealogy let me claim, not only to be a goodBorrovian, but also a good Norvicensian. Grant me then a right to pleadfor a practical recognition of Borrow in the city that he loved most, although he sometimes scolded it as it often scolded him. I should liketo see a statue, or some similar memorial. If you pass through thecities of the Continent--French, German, or Belgian--you will find inwell-nigh every town a memorial to this or that worthy connected with itsliterary or artistic fame. How many memorials has Norwich to the peopleconnected with its literary or artistic fame? Nay, I am not rash andimpetuous. I would beg any one of my hearers who thinks that Borrowmight well have a memorial in marble or bronze in your city to wait awhile. You are busy with a statue to Sir Thomas Browne--a mostcommendable scheme. To attempt to raise one to Borrow at this momentwould probably be to court disaster. Nor do I advocate a memorial byprivate subscription. Observation has shown me what that means: failureor half failure in nearly every case. The memorial when it comes must beinitiated by the City Fathers in council assembled. That time is perhapsfar distant. But let us all do everything we can to make secure the highand honourable achievement of George Borrow, to kindle an interest in himand his writings, to extend a taste for the undoubted beauties of hisworks among all classes of his fellow-citizens--that is to secure Borrowthe best of all monuments. More durable than brass will be the memorialthat is contained in the assurance that he possesses the reverence andthe homage of all true Norfolk hearts. 

IV. TO THE IMMORTAL MEMORY OF GEORGE CRABBE

An Address delivered at the Crabbe Celebration at Aldeburgh in Suffolk onthe 16th of September, 1905. 

I have been asked to say something in praise of George Crabbe. The taskwould be an easier one were it not for the presence of the distinguishedcritic from the University of Nancy who is with us to-day. M. Huchon{97} has devoted to the subject a singleminded zeal to which one whoseprofession is primarily that of a journalist can make no claim. Moreoverit has been well said that _the judgment of foreigners is the judgment ofposterity_, and I fully believe that where a writer has secured thesuffrages of men of another nation than his own, he has done more for hisultimate fame than the passing and fickle favour of his countrymen cansecure for him. In any case Crabbe has been praised more eloquently thanalmost any other modern, and this in spite of the fact that he was notread by the generation succeeding his death, nor is he read much in ourown time. 

If you want to read Crabbe to-day in his entirety, you must becomepossessed of a huge and clumsy volume of sombre appearance, small typeand repellant double columns. For fully seventy years it has not paid apublisher to reprint Crabbe's poems properly. {98} When this wasachieved in 1834, the edition in eight volumes was comparatively afailure, and the promised two volumes of essays and sermons were notforthcoming in consequence. Selections from Crabbe have been many, butwhen all is said he has been the least read for the past sixty or seventyyears of all the authors who have claims to be considered classics. Theleast read but perhaps the best praised--that is one point of certainty. The praise began with the politicians--with the two greatest politicalleaders of their age. The eloquent and noble Edmund Burke, the great-hearted Charles James Fox. Burke "made" George Crabbe as no poet wasever made before or since. To me there is no picture in all literaturemore unflaggingly interesting than that of the great man, whose life wasso full of affairs, taking the poor young stranger by the hand, readingthrough his abundant manuscripts, and therefrom selecting--as the poetwas quite unable to select--_The Library_ and _The Village_ as the mostsuitable for publication, helping him to a publisher, introducing him tofriends, and proving himself quite untiring on his behalf. There is aletter of Burke's printed in a little known book--_The Correspondence ofSir Thomas Hanmer_, Speaker of the House of Commons--in which Burke takesthe trouble to defend Crabbe's moral character and to press his claimsfor being admitted to holy orders. "Dudley North tells me, " hecontinues, "that he has the best character possible among those with whomhe has always lived, that he is now working hard to qualify, and has notonly Latin, but some smattering of Greek. " It had its graciousamenities, that eighteenth century, for I do not believe that there is aman in the ranks of the present Government, or of the present Opposition, who would take all this trouble for a poor unknown who had appealed tohim merely by two or three long letters recounting his career. Nay, Cabinet Ministers are less punctilious than formerly, and the newesttype, I understand, leaves letters unanswered. I can imagine theattitude of one of our modern statesmen in the face of two quite bulkypackages of many sheets from a young author. He would request hissecretary to see what they were all about, and then would follow the curtanswer--"I am directed by Dash to say that he cannot comply with yourrequest. " Burke not only wrote to the Speaker of the House of Commons, but enclosed Crabbe's letter to him, a quite wonderful piece ofautobiography. {100} All Crabbe's admirers should read that letter. Crabbe apologizes for writing again, and refers to "these repeatedattacks on your patience. " "My father, " he said, "had a place in theCustom House at Aldeburgh. He had a large family, a little income and noeconomy, " and then the story of his life up to that time is told to Burkein fullest detail. 

Again, there is that other statesman-admirer of Crabbe, Charles JamesFox. Fox gave to Crabbe's work an admiration which never faltered, andon his death-bed requested that the pathetic story of Phoebe Dawson in_The Parish Register_ should be read to him--it was, we are told, "thelast piece of poetry that soothed his dying ear. "

In Lord Holland's _Memoirs of the Whig Party_ there is a statement by hisnephew which no biographer so far has quoted:--

 I read over to him the whole of Crabbe's _Parish Register_ in manuscript. Some parts he made me read twice; he remarked several passages as exquisitely beautiful, and objected to some few which I mentioned to the author and which he, in almost every instance, altered before publication. Mr. Fox repeated once or twice that it was a very pretty poem, that Crabbe's condition in the world had improved since he wrote _The Village_, and his view of life, likewise _The Parish Register_, bore marks of considerably more indulgence to our species; though not so many as he could have wished, especially as the few touches of that nature were beautiful in the extreme. He was particularly struck with the description of the substantial happiness of a farmer's wife. 

From great novelists the tributes are not less noteworthy than from greatstatesmen. Jane Austen, whose personality perhaps has more real womanlyattractiveness than that of any sister novelist of the first rank, declared playfully that if she could have been persuaded to change herstate it would have been to become Mrs. Crabbe; and who can forget SirWalter Scott's request in his last illness: "Read me some amusingthing--read me a bit of Crabbe. " They read to him from _The Borough_, and we all remember his comment, "Capital--excellent--very good. " Yet atthis time--in 1832--any popularity that Crabbe had once enjoyed wasalready on the wane. Other idols had caught the popular taste, and fromthat day to this there was to be no real revival of appreciation forthese poems. There were to be no lack of admirers, however, of theaudience "fit though few. " Byron's praise has been too often quoted forrepetition. Wordsworth, who rarely praised his contemporaries in poetry, declared of Crabbe that his works "would last from their combined meritas poetry and truth. " Macaulay writes of "that incomparable passage inCrabbe's _Borough_ which has made many a rough and cynical reader crylike a child"--the passage in which the condemned felon

 Takes his tasteless food, and when 'tis done, Counts up his meals, now lessen'd by that one, --

a story which Macaulay bluntly charges Robert Montgomery with stealing. Lord Tennyson, again, at a much later date, admitted that "Crabbe has aworld of his own. "

Not less impressive surely is the attitude of the two writers as far asthe poles asunder in their outlook upon life and its mysteries--CardinalNewman and Edward FitzGerald. The famous theologian, we learn from the_Letters and Correspondence_ collected by Anne Mozley, writes in 1820 ofhis "excessive fondness" for _The Tales of the Hall_, and thirty yearslater in one of his _Discourses_ he says of Crabbe's poems that they areamong "the most touching in our language. " Still another twenty years, and the aged cardinal reread Crabbe to find that he was more delightedthan ever with our poet. That great nineteenth century pagan, on theother hand, that prince of letter-writers and wonderful poet of whomSuffolk has also reason to be proud, Edward FitzGerald, was even moreardent. Praise of Crabbe is scattered freely throughout the many volumesof his correspondence, and he edited, as we all know, a book ofSelections, which I want to see reprinted. It contains a preface that, it may be admitted, is not really worthy of FitzGerald, so lacking is itin the force and vigour of his correspondence. But this also was in factyet another death-bed tribute, for it was, I think, one of the lastthings FitzGerald wrote. FitzGerald, however, has done more for Crabbeamong the moderns than any other man. His keen literary judgment musthave brought new converts to that limited brotherhood of the elect, ofwhich this gathering forms no inconsiderable portion. 

We have one advantage in speaking about George Crabbe that does notobtain with any other poet of great eminence; that is to say, that hislife story has not been hackneyed by repetition. With almost any otherwriter there is some standing biography which is widely familiar. The_Life of George Crabbe_, written by his son, although it is one of thevery best biographies that I have ever read, is little known. It wasquite out of print for years, and it has never been reprinted separatelyfrom the poems. It is an admirable biography, and it offers acontradiction of the view occasionally urged that a man's life should notbe written by a member of his own family; for George Crabbe the secondwould seem not only to have been an exceedingly able man, but possessedof a frankness of disposition in criticizing his father which sons areoften prone to show in real life, but which, I imagine, they rarely showin print. His book is a model of candid statement, treating of Crabbe'slittle weaknesses--and who of us has not his little weaknesses--in themost cheery possible manner. It is perhaps a small matter to tell us inone place of his father's want of "taste, " his insensibility to thebeauty of order in his composition--that had been done by the criticsbefore him; but he even has something to say about the philandering whichcharacterized the old gentleman in the last years of his life, hisapparent anxiety to get married again. {106} The only thing that he allbut ignores is Crabbe's opium habit--a habit that came to him as asedative from a painful complaint and inspired, as was the case withColeridge, his more melodious utterances. Taken altogether the pictureis as pleasant as it is capable and exhaustive. We see his early boyhoodat Aldeburgh, his schooldays: his first period of unhappiness atSlaughden Quay, his apprenticeship near Bury St. Edmunds, where we seemto hear his master's daughters, when he reached the door, exclaim withlaughter, "La! Here's our new 'prentice. " We follow him a littlehigher, to the house of the Woodbridge surgeon, then through hisprolonged courtship of Sarah Elmy, then to those dreary, uncongenialduties of piling up butter casks on Slaughden Quay. A brief period ofstarvation in London, and we find him again in a chemist's shop inAldeburgh. Lastly comes his most important journey to London upon theborrowed sum of 5 pounds, only three of which he carried in hard cash. His hand to mouth existence in London for some months is among the mostinteresting things in literature. Chatterton's tragic fate might havebeen his, but, more fortunate than Chatterton, he had friends at Beccleswho helped him, and he was even able to publish a poem, _The Candidate_. Although this poem contained only thirty-four pages, one is not quitesure but that it helped to ruin its publisher. In any case thatpublisher went bankrupt soon after. 

Crabbe has been reproached for having continually attempted to secure a"patron" at this time, and it has been hinted by Sir Leslie Stephen thathe ought to have recognized that the patron was out of date, killed byDr. Johnson's sturdy defiance. I do not agree with this view. Dr. Johnson, in spite of his famous epigram, was always more or less assistedby the patron, although his personality was strong enough to enable himto turn the tables at the end. When one comes to think of it, Thrale thebrewer was a patron of Johnson, so was Strahan the printer. And does henot say in his famous letter to Lord Chesterfield that "Seven years, mylord, have now passed since I waited in your outward rooms, or wasrepulsed from your door, " clearly implying that if Chesterfield was notJohnson's patron it was not the great Doctor's fault? In any case thepatron must always exist for the poor man of letters in every age. Now, he is frequently a collective personality rather than an individual. Heis represented for the author who has tried and failed by the RoyalLiterary Fund, by such bounty as is awarded by the Society of Authors, orby the Civil List Grant. For the author in embryo he is assisted aboveall by the literary log-roller who flourishes so much in our day. If heis not this "collective personality, " or one of the others I have named, then he is something much worse--that is, a capitalist publisher. We cannone of us who have to earn a living run away from the patronage ofcapital, and when Sir Leslie Stephen was being paid a salary by the lateMr. George Smith for editing the _Dictionary of National Biography_, andwas told, as we remember that he frequently was, that it was not aremunerative venture and that, as Mr. Smith was fond of saying, hispublishing business did not pay for his vineries, Sir Leslie Stephen wasexperiencing a patronage, if he had known it, not less melancholy thananything Crabbe suffered from Edmund Burke or the Duke of Rutland. 

When one meets a writer who desires to walk on high stilts and to talk ofthe independence of literature, one is entitled to ask him if it was agreater indignity for Lord Tennyson in his younger days to have received200 pounds a year from the Civil List than for Crabbe to have receivedthe same sum as the Duke of Rutland's chaplain; in fact, Crabbe earnedthe money, and Tennyson did not. There are, as I have said, some mostwonderful and pathetic touches in the account of Crabbe's attempt toconquer London. There are his letters to his sweetheart, for example, his "dearest Mira, " in one of which he says that he is possessed of6. 25_d. _ in the world. In another he relates that he has sold hissurgical instruments in order to pay his bills. Nevertheless, we findhim standing at a bookstall where he sees Dryden's works in threevolumes, octavo, for five shillings, and of his few shillings he venturesto offer 3_s. _ 6_d. _--and carries home the Dryden. What bibliophile butmust love such a story as that, even though a day or two afterwards itshero writes, "My last shilling became 8_d. _ yesterday. " But what a goodinvestment withal. Dryden made him a much better poet. Then comes thefamous letter to Burke, and the less known second letter to which I havereferred, and Burke's splendid reception of the writer. Nothing, Irepeat, in the life of any great man is more beautiful than that. AsCrabbe's son finely says: "He went in Burke's room a poor youngadventurer, spurned by the opulent and rejected by the publishers, hislast shilling gone, and his last hope with it. He came out virtuallysecure of almost all the good fortune that by successive stagesafterwards fell to his lot. " The success that comes to most men is builtup on such chances, on the kind help of some one or other individual. 

Finally there came--for I am hastily recapitulating Crabbe's story--theyears of prosperity, curacies, rectories, the praise of greatcontemporaries, but nothing surely more edifying than the burning ofpiles of manuscripts so extensive that no fireplace would hold them. Theson's account of his assisting at these conflagrations is not the leastinteresting part of his biography, the merits of which I desire toemphasize. 

People who make jokes about that most succulent edible, the crab, whenthe poet Crabbe is mentioned in their presence--and who can resist anobvious pun--are not really far astray. There can be little doubt butthat a remote ancestor of George Crabbe took his name from the"shellfish, " as we all persist, in spite of the naturalist, in callingit; and the poet did not hesitate to attribute it to the vanity of anancestor that his name had had two letters added. Nor when we hear ofCromer crabs, or crabs from some other part of Norfolk as distinct fromwhat I am sure is equally palatable, the crustacean as it may be found inAldeburgh, are we remote from the story of our poet's life. For therecannot be a doubt but that Norfolk shares with Suffolk the glory of hisorigin. His family, it is clear, came first from Norfolk. The Crabbesof Norfolk were farmers, the Crabbes of Suffolk always favoured theseacoast, and all the glory that surrounds the name of the poet to whomwe do honour to-day is reflected in the town in which he was born andbred. Aldeburgh is Crabbe's own town, and it is an interesting fact thatno other poet can be identified with one particular spot in the way inwhich Crabbe can be identified with this beautiful watering-place inwhich we are now assembled. Shakspere was more of a Londoner than aStratfordian; nearly all his best work was written in London, and many ofthe most receptive years of his life were spent in that city. Milton'shonoured name is identified with many places, apart from London, the cityof his birth. Shelley, Byron and Keats were essentially cosmopolitans intheir writings as in their lives. Wordsworth was closely identified withGrasmere, although born in a neighbouring county; but he went to many andvaried scenes, and to more than one country, for some of his mostinspired verses. Then Cowper, the poet of whom one most often thinkswhen one is recalling the achievement of Crabbe, is a poet of some half-dozen places other than Olney, and perhaps his best verses were writtenat Weston-Underwood. Now George Crabbe in the years of his success wasidentified with many places other than Aldeburgh: with Belvoir Castle, with Muston, and with Trowbridge, where he died, and some of his admirershave even identified him with Bath. When all this is allowed, it is uponAldeburgh that the whole of his writings turned, the place where he wasborn, where he spent his boyhood, and the earlier years of a perhaps toosordid manhood, whither he returned twice, as a chemist's assistant andas curate. It is the place that primarily inspired all his verses. Aldeburgh stands out vividly before us in each succeeding poem--in _TheVillage_, _The Borough_, _The Parish Register_, _The Tales_, and even inthose _Tales of the Hall_, composed in later life in faraway Trowbridge. Crabbe's vivid observations indeed come home to every one who has studiedhis works when they have visited not only Aldeburgh but its vicinity. Every reach of the river Ald recalls some striking line by him: thescenery in _The Lover's Journey_ we know is a description of the roadbetween Aldeburgh and Beccles, and all who have sailed along the river toOrford have recognized that no stream has been so perfectly portrayed bya poet's pen. Here in his writings you may have a suggestion of Muston, here of Allington, and here again of Trowbridge; but in the main it isthe Suffolk scenery that most of us here know so well that was ever inhis mind. 

When an attempt was once made to stir up the Great Eastern Railway toidentify this district with the name of Crabbe as the English Lakes wereidentified with the name of Wordsworth, and the Scots Lakes with that ofSir Walter Scott, a high official of the railway made the statement thatup to that moment he had never even heard the name of Crabbe. Well, allthat is going to be changed. I do not at all approve of the phrasebeloved of certain book-makers and of railway companies that implies thatany county or district is the monopoly of one man, be he ever so great awriter. Yet I venture to say that within the next ten years the "CrabbeCountry" will sound as familiar to the officials of the Great Eastern asthe "Wordsworth Country" does to those of the Midland or the NorthWestern. It is true that once in the bitterness of his heart the poetreferred to Aldeburgh as "a little venal borough in Suffolk" and that hemore than once alluded to his unkind reception upon his reappearance as acurate, when he had previously failed at other callings. "In my ownvillage they think nothing of me, " he once said. But who does not knowhow the heart turns with the years to the places associated withchildhood and youth, and Crabbe was a remarkable exemplification of this. A well-known literary journal stated only last week that "Crabbe'sconnexion with Aldeburgh was not very protracted. " So far from thisbeing true it would be no exaggeration to say that it extended over thewhole of his seventy-eight years of life. It included the first five-and-twenty years almost entirely. It included also the brief curacy, theprolonged residence at Parham and Glenham, frequent visits for holidaysin after years, and who but a lover of his native place would have doneas his son pictures him doing when at Stathern--riding alone to the coastof Lincolnshire, sixty miles from where he was living, only to dip in thewaves that also washed the beach of Aldeburgh and returned immediately tohis home. "There is no sea like the Aldeburgh sea, " said EdwardFitzGerald, and we may be sure that was Crabbe's opinion also, forrevisiting it in later life he wrote:--

 There once again, my native place I come Thee to salute, my earliest, latest home. 

One picture in Crabbe's life stands out vividly to us all--the long yearsof devotion given by him to Sarah Elmy, and the reciprocal devotion ofthe very capable woman who finally became his wife. Crabbe's courtshipand marriage affords a pleasant contrast to the usual unhappy relationsof poets with their wives. Shakspere, Milton, Dryden, Byron, Shelley, and many another poet was less happy in this respect, and I am not surehow far the belief in Crabbe's powers as a poet has been affected by thefact that he lived on the whole a happy, humdrum married life. Thepublic has so long been accustomed to expect a different state of things. 

I have given thus much time to Crabbe's life story because it interestsme, and I do not believe that it is possible nowadays to kindle a veryprofound interest in any writer without a definite presentation of hispersonality. Apart from his biography--his three biographies by GeorgeCrabbe the second, Mr. T. E. Kebbel, and Canon Ainger, there are theseven volumes of his works. Now I do not imagine that any greataccession will be made to the ranks of Crabbe's admirers by asking peopleto take down these seven volumes and read them right through--a thing Ihave myself done twice, and many here also I doubt not. Rather would Iplead for a reprint of Edmund FitzGerald's Selections, or failing that Iwould ask you to look at the volume of Selections made by Mr. BernardHolland, or that other admirable selection by the Rev. Anthony Deane. "Imust think my old Crabbe will come up again, though never to be popular, "wrote FitzGerald to Archbishop Trench. Well, perhaps the "large stillbooks" of the older writers are never destined to be popular again, butthey will always maintain with genuine book lovers their place in EnglishLiterature, and if the adequate praise they have received from many goodjudges is well kept to the front there will be constant accessions to theranks, and readers will want the whole of Crabbe's works in which to digfor themselves. Crabbe's place in English Literature needed not such agathering as this to make it secure, but we want celebrations of ourliterary heroes to keep alive enthusiasm, and to encourage thefaint-hearted. 

In the glorious tradition of English Literature, then, Crabbe comes afterCowper and before Wordsworth. There is a lineal descent as clear andwell-defined as any set forth in the peerages of "Burke" or "Debrett. " Weread in vain if we do not fully grasp the continuity of creative work. Cowper was born in 1731, Crabbe in 1754, and Cowper was called to the Barin the year that Crabbe was born. In spite of this disparity of yearsthey started upon their literary careers almost at the same time. _TheVillage_ was published in 1783, and _The Task_ in 1785, yet Cowper is inevery sense the elder poet, inheriting more closely the traditions ofPope and Dryden, coming less near to humanity than Crabbe, and being moreemphatically a child of the eighteenth century in its artificial aspects. It is impossible to indict a whole century with all its variedaccomplishments, and the century that produced Swift and Cowper andCrabbe had no lack of the finer instincts of brotherhood. Yet thecentury was essentially a cruel one. Take as an example the attitude ofnaturally kindly men to the hanging of Dr. Dodd for forgery. Even SamuelJohnson, who did what he could for Dodd, did not find, as he should havedone, his whole soul revolted by such a punishment for a crime againstproperty. Cowper has immense claim upon our regard. He is one of thetruest of poets, and one of the most interesting figures in all Englishliterature, although no small share of his one-time popularity was due tohis identification with Evangelicalism in religion. Cowper had humourand other qualities which enabled him to make the universal appeal to allhearts which is the test of the greatest literature--the appeal of "JohnGilpin, " the "Lines" to his Mother's Portrait, and his verses on "Theloss of the _Royal George_. " Crabbe made no such appeal, and he has notthe adventitious assistance that association with a religious sectaffords. Hence the popularity he once enjoyed was more entirely on hismerits than was that of Cowper. He was the first of the eighteenthcentury poets who was able to _see things as they really are_. Thereinlies his strength. Were they poets at all--those earlier eighteenthcentury writers? It sounds like rank blasphemy to question it, but whatis poetry? Surely it is the expression artistically in rhythmic form--oreven without it--of the sincerest emotions concerning nature and life. The greatest poet is not the one who is most sincere--a very bad poet canbe that--but the poet who expresses that sincerity with the most perfectart. From this point of view the poets before Cowper and Crabbe, Pope, Goldsmith, Johnson and others were scarcely poets at all. Masters oflanguage every one of them, able to command a fine rhetoric, but notpoets. Gray in two or three pieces was a poet, but for Johnson thatclaim can scarcely be made. Cowper was the first to emancipate himselffrom the conventionality of his age, and Crabbe emancipated himself stillfurther. He had boundless sincerity, and he is really a very great poeteven if he has not the perfection of art of some later poets. Many knowCrabbe only by the parody of his manner in _Rejected Addresses_:

 John Richard William Alexander Dwyer Was footman to Justinian Stubbs Esquire; But when John Dwyer listed in the blues, Emanuel Jennings polished Stubbs's shoes. 

and it must be admitted that there are plenty of lines like these inCrabbe, as for example:--

 Grave Jonas Kindred, Sybil Kindred's sire Was six feet high, and looked six inches higher. 

or this:--

 The church he view'd as liberal minds will view And there he fixed his principles and pew. 

Banalities of this kind are scattered through his pages as they arescattered through those of Wordsworth. Nevertheless he was a great poet, bringing us before Wordsworth out of the ruck of artificiality andinsincerity. Does any one suppose that Pope in his _Essay on Man_, thatJohnson in his _London_ or that Goldsmith in his _Deserted Village_ hadany idea other than the production of splendid phrases. Each and all ofthem were brilliant men of letters. Crabbe was not a brilliant man ofletters, but he was a fine and a genuine poet. You will look in vain inhis truest work for the lyrical and musical gift that we associate withpoets who came after:--Shelley, Keats, Tennyson--poets who made Crabbe'swork quite distasteful for some three generations. Crabbe it has beenclaimed had that gift also, to be found in "Sir Eustace Grey" and otherverses written under the inspiration of opium, as much of Coleridge'sbest work was written--but it is not in these that his admirers will seekto emphasize his achievement--it is in his work which treats of

 The simple annals of my parish poor. 

_The Village_, _The Parish Register_, _The Borough_, and many of the_Tales_ bear witness to a clear vision of life as it is lived by themajority of people born into this world. I have seen criticism of Crabbewhich calls him the poet who took the middle classes for his subjects, criticism which compared him with George Eliot. All this is quite besidethe mark. Crabbe is pre-eminently the poet of the poor, with a lessonfor to-day as much as for a century ago. Villages are not now what theywere then, we are told. But I fully believe that there are all theconditions of life to-day hidden beneath the surface as Crabbe's closeobservations pictured them. "The altered position of the poor, " says Mr. Courthope, "has fortunately deprived his poems of much of the realitythey once possessed. " I do not believe it. The closely packed towns, the herding together of families, the squalor are still to be found inour midst. Crabbe has his message for our time as well as for his own. How he tore the veil from the conventional language of his day, thepicture of the ideal village where the happy peasantry passed throughlife so joyously. Contrast such pictures with his sad declaration--

 I've seldom known, though I have often read Of happy peasants on their dying-bed. 

Solution Crabbe offers none for the tragedy of poverty. He was nopolitician. He signed the nomination paper for John Wilson Croker theTory in his native Aldeburgh, and he supported a Whig at the sameelection at Trowbridge. His politics were summed up in backing hisfriends of both parties. But he did see, as politicians are onlybeginning to see to-day, that the ultimate solution was a social one andnot a mere question of political parties. Generations have passed awaysince he lived, and men are still shouting themselves hoarse to provethat in this Shibboleth or in that may be found the salvation of thecountry, yet we have still our thousands on the verge of starvation, wehave still the very poor in our midst, and the problem seems as far fromsolution as ever. But it would be all the better for the State if wecould keep the questions raised by Crabbe in his wonderful pictures morecontinually in view, --lacking in taste as they may sometimes seem to weakstomachs, coarse, unvarnished narratives though they be of a life whichis really almost entirely sordid. 

Then let us turn to Crabbe's gallery of pictures. Phoebe Dawson, and theequally pathetic Ruth, Blaney and Clelia, Peter Grimes and many another. They are as clearly defined a set of entirely human beings as any Masterhas given us. It is not assuredly in George Eliot, as Canon Aingersuggests, that I find an affinity to Crabbe among the moderns, but in twomuch greater writers of quite different texture, Balzac and Dickens. HadCrabbe not been bounded and restrained by the conventions of his cloth, he might have become one of the most popular story-tellers in ourliterature--the English Balzac. At a hundred points Charles Dickens isan entire contrast to Crabbe--in his buoyant humour, his gaiety of heart, in the glamour that he throws over the life of the poor, a glamour thatwas more present in the early Victorian era than in our own, but Crabbeis with Balzac and with Dickens in that he presents as no other modernshave done living pictures of suffering human lives. 

There is yet one other literary force, powerful in our day, that has beenlargely influenced by Crabbe. Those who love the novels of Mr. ThomasHardy, whom we rejoice to see with us at this Celebration, --his_Woodlanders_, _The Return of the Native_, _Far from the Madding Crowd_, and many another book that touches the very heart of things in nature andhuman life, will rejoice to hear that this great writer has admittedGeorge Crabbe to be the most potent influence that has affected his work. I have heard him declare many times how much he was inspired by Crabbe, whereas the later French realists had no influence upon him whatever. "Crabbe was our first great English realist" Mr. Hardy would tell you ifonly we could persuade him to speak from this platform, as unfortunatelyhe will not. 

Lastly let us take Crabbe as a great story-teller. He has many moreideas than most of the novelists. That is why we do well to recall thehint of the writer who said that when a new work came out we should takedown an old one from our shelves. Instead of the "un-idead" novels, thatcome out by the dozen and are so popular. I wish we could agree to readCrabbe's novels in verse. Unhappily their form is against them in thepresent age. But it would not be at all a misfortune if we could makeCrabbe's _Tales_ once more the vogue. They are good stories, absorbinglyinteresting. They leave a very vivid impression on the mind. Once readthey are unforgettable. 

I have seen it stated that these stories are old-fashioned both in mannerand in substance. In manner they may be, but in substance I maintainthey are intensely modern, alive with the spirit of our time. Any latter-day novelist might envy Crabbe his power of developing a story. It isthis essential modernity that is to make Crabbe's place in Englishliterature secure for generations yet to come. 

Finally, Crabbe's place in English literature is as the bridge betweenthe eighteenth and nineteenth century. With him begins that "enthusiasmof humanity" which the eighteenth century so imperfectly understood. Byron and Wordsworth, disliking each other cordially, did well to praisehim, for he was their forerunner. A master of pathos, you may find inhis work incentive to tears and laughter, although sometimes the humour, as in _The Learned Boy_, is sadly unconscious. 

But I must bring these rambling remarks to a close, and in doing so Imust once again quote that other Suffolk worthy to whom many of us arevery much attached, I mean Edward FitzGerald. When Sir Leslie Stephenwrote what is to my mind a singularly infelicitous essay on Crabbe in the_Cornhill_, he quoted the remark, which seemed to be new to FitzGerald, as to Crabbe being a "pope in worsted stockings"--a remark made by HoraceSmith of _Rejected Addresses_, although I have seen it ascribed to Byronand others. "Pope in worsted stockings, " exclaimed FitzGerald, "why Icould cite whole paragraphs of as fine a texture as Moliere; 'incapableof epigram, ' the jackanapes says--why, I could find fifty of the verybest epigrams in five minutes, " and later, in another letter he writes--

 I am positively looking over my everlasting Crabbe again; he naturally comes in about the fall of the year. 

Here surely is an appropriate quotation, a little prophetic perhaps, forour gathering--the "everlasting Crabbe. " We cannot all love Crabbe asmuch as FitzGerald loved him, but this gathering will not be vain ifafter this we handle his volumes more lovingly, read his poems moresympathetically, and continue with more zeal than ever before to be proudof the man who, born in Aldeburgh a century and a half ago, is closelyidentified with this county of Suffolk as I believe no other great writeris closely identified with any county in England. An Aldeburgh man--aSuffolk man he was--yet even more in the future than in the past, he isdestined to gain the whole world for his parish. He is the everlastingCrabbe!

V. THE LITERARY ASSOCIATIONS OF EAST ANGLIA

An address to the East Anglian Society on the occasion of a dinner to Mr. William Dutt, author of "Highways and Byways in East Anglia. " March 25, 1901. 

I appreciate the privilege of being allowed to speak this evening for afew minutes upon the literary associations of East Anglia, of beingpermitted to ask you, while doing honour to a well-known East Anglianwriter of to-day, to cast a glance back upon the literature of the pastso far as it affects that portion of the British Empire with which wenearly all of us here are proud to be associated. There is necessarilysome difference of opinion as to what constitutes East Anglia. I findthat our guest of to-night tells us that it is "Norfolk, Suffolk andportions of Essex, Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire. " Dr. Knapp, thebiographer of Borrow, says that it is Norfolk, Suffolk andCambridgeshire; personally I am content with that classification, because, although I was born in London, I claim, apart from schoolboydays at Downham Market, a pretty lengthy ancestry from Norwich on oneside--which is indisputably East Anglia--and from Welney, near Wisbeach, on another side, and Welney and Wisbeach are, I affirm, just as much EastAnglia as Norwich and Ipswich. With reference to those other countiesand portions of counties, I think that the inhabitants must be allowed todecide for themselves. I imagine that they will give every possiblestretch to the imagination in order to allow themselves the honour ofbeing incorporated in East Anglia, a name that one never pronounceswithout recalling that fine old-world compliment of St. Augustine ofCanterbury to our ancestors, that they ought to be called not "Angles"but "Angels. "

Every one in particular who loves books must be proud to partake of ourgreat literary tradition. If it is difficult to decide precisely whatEast Anglia is, it is perhaps equally difficult to speak for a fewminutes on so colossal a theme as the literature of East Anglia. Itwould be easy to recapitulate what every biographical dictionary willprovide, a long list of famous names associated with our counties; toremind you that we have produced two poet-laureates--John Skelton, ofDiss, the author of _Colyn Cloute_, and Thomas Shadwell, of Broomhill, the playwright--the latter perhaps not entirely a subject for pride; twovery rough and ready political philosophers, Thomas Paine, born atThetford, and William Godwin, born at Wisbeach; a very popular novelistin Bulwer Lytton, and a very popular theologian in Dr. Samuel Clarke; asalso the famous brother and sister whose works appealed to totallydifferent minds, James and Harriet Martineau. Then there was thatpathetic creature and indifferent poet, Robert Bloomfield, whose_Farmer's Boy_ once appeared in the luxurious glories of an expensivequarto. Finally, one recalls that two of the most popular women writersof an earlier generation, Clara Reeve, the novelist, and AgnesStrickland, the historian, were Suffolk women. 

But I am not concerned to give you a recapitulation of all the EastAnglian writers, whose names, as I have said, can be found in anybiographical dictionary, and the quality of whose work would rathersuggest that East Anglia, from a literary point of view, is a land ofextinct volcanoes. I am naturally rather anxious to make use of thegolden opportunity that has been afforded me to emphasize my own literarysympathies, and to say in what I think lies the glory of East Anglia, atleast so far as the creation of books is concerned. Here I make aninteresting claim for East Anglia, that it has given us in CaptainMarryat perhaps the very greatest prose writer of the nineteenth centurywho has been a delight to youth, and two of the very greatest prosewriters of all times for the inspiration of middle-age, Sir Thomas Browneand George Borrow. It has given us in Sarah Austin an example of alearned woman who was also a fascinating woman; it has given us again themost remarkable letter-writers in the English language--Margaret Paston, Horace Walpole and Edward FitzGerald. To these there were only threeserious rivals as letter-writers--William Cowper, Thomas Grey and CharlesLamb; and the first found a final home and a last resting-place in ourmidst. It has given us that remarkable novelist and entertainingdiarist, Fanny Burney. Finally, it has given us in that same WilliamCowper--who rests in East Dereham Church, and for whom we claim on thatand for other reasons some share and participation in his genius--a greatand much loved poet. It has given us indeed in William Cowper and GeorgeCrabbe the two most natural and the two most human poets in the Englishliterature of two centuries, only excepting the favourite poet ofScotland--Robert Burns. It is to these of all writers that I would pinmy faith in talking of East Anglia and its literature; it is their namesthat I would have you keep in your mind when you call up memories of theliterature which has most inspired our East Anglian life. 

In connexion with many writers a point of importance will occur to us. Only occasionally has a great English author a special claim on oneparticular portion of England. He has not been the lesser or the greaterfor that, it has merely been an accident of his birth and of his career. The greatest of all writers, the one of whom all Englishmen are naturallythe most proud, Shakspere, has, it is true, an abundant association withWarwickshire, but Shakspere stands almost alone in this, as in manythings. Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Byron and Keats were born in London;they travelled widely, they lived in many different counties orcountries, and cannot be said to have adorned any distinctively localtradition. Shelley was born in Sussex, but a hundred cities, includingRome, where his ashes rest, may claim some participation in his finespirit. Wordsworth, on the other hand, who was born in Cumberland, certainly obtained the greater part of his inspiration from theneighbouring county of Westmorland, where his life was passed. But whenwe come to East Anglia we are face to face with a body of writers whobelong to the very soil, upon whom the particular character of thelandscape has had a permanent effect, who are not only very greatEnglishmen and Englishwomen, but are great East Anglians as well. 

I have said that Captain Marryat was an East Anglian, and have we not aright to be proud of Marryat's breezy stories of the sea? Our youth hasfound such plentiful stimulus in _Peter Simple_, _Frank Mildmay_, and_Mr. Midshipman Easy_; generations of boys have read them with delight, generations of boys will read them. And not only boys, but men. Onerecalls that Carlyle, in one of his deepest fits of depression, tookrefuge in Marryat's novels with infinite advantage to his peace of mind. Speaking of Captain Marryat and books for boys, a quite minor kind ofliterature perhaps some of you may think, I must recall that an earlierand still more famous story for children had an East Anglian origin. Didnot The Babes in the Wood come out of Norfolk? Was it not their estatein that county that, as we learn from Percy's _Reliques_, their wickeduncle coveted, and were not the last hours of those unfortunate children, in this most picturesque and pathetic of stories, solaced by East Anglianrobins and their poor bodies covered by East Anglian vegetation?

Let me pass, however, to what may be counted more serious literature. What can one say of Sir Thomas Browne unless indeed one has an hour inwhich to say it. Every page of that great writer's _Religio Medici_ and_Urn Burial_ is quotable--full of worldly wisdom and of an inspirationthat is not of the world. Browne was born in London, and not until hewas thirty-two years of age did he settle in Norwich, where he was "muchresorted to for his skill in physic, " and where he lived for forty-fiveyears, when the fine church of St. Peter Mancroft, received his ashes--achurch in which, let me add, with pardonable pride, my own grandfatherand grandmother were married. I am glad that Norwich is shortly tocommemorate by a fitting monument not the least great of her sons, onewho has been aptly called "the English Montaigne. " {138}

Perhaps there are those who would dispute my claim for Marryat and forSir Thomas Browne that they were East Anglians--both were only EastAnglians by adoption. There are even those who dispute the claim for onewhom I must count well-nigh the greatest of East Anglian men ofletters--George Borrow. Borrow, I maintain, was an East Anglian if everthere was one, although this has been questioned by Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton. Now I have the greatest possible regard for Mr. Watts-Dunton. Heis distinguished alike as a critic, a poet, and a romancer. But I mustjoin issue with him here, and you, I know, will forgive me for taking upyour time with the matter; for if Mr. Watts-Dunton were right, one of thechief glories would be shorn from our East Anglian traditions. He deniesin the Introduction to a new edition of _The Romany Rye_, just published, the claim of Borrow to be an East Anglian, although Borrow himselfinsisted that he was one. 

 One might as well call Charlotte Bronte a Yorkshire woman as call Borrow an East Anglian. He was no more an East Anglian than an Irishman born in London is an Englishman. His father was a Cornishman and his mother of French extraction. Not one drop of East Anglian blood was in the veins of Borrow's father, and very little in the veins of his mother. Borrow's ancestry was pure Cornish on one side, and on the other mainly French. But such was the egotism of Borrow that the fact of his having been born in East Anglia made him look upon that part of the world as the very hub of the universe. 

Well, I am not prepared to question the suggestion that East Anglia isthe hub of the universe, only to question Mr. Watts-Dunton's position. There is virtue in that qualification of his that there was "very little"East Anglian blood in the veins of Borrow's mother, and that she was"mainly" French. As a matter of fact she was, of course, partly EastAnglian; that is to say, she must have had two or three generations ofEast Anglian blood in her, seeing that it was her great-grandfather whosettled in Norfolk from France, and he and his children and grandchildrenintermarried with the race. But I do not pin my claim for Borrow uponthat fact--the fact of three generations of his mother's family atDumpling Green--or even on the fact that he was born near East Dereham. There is nothing more certain than that we are all of us influencedgreatly by our environment, and that it is this, quite as much as birthor ancestry, that gives us what characteristics we possess. It is thecustom, for example, to call Swift an Irishman, whereas Swift came ofEnglish parentage and lived for many of his most impressionable years inEngland. Nevertheless, he may be justly claimed by the sister-island, for during a long sojourn in that country he became permeated with thesubtle influence of the Irish race, and in many things he thought andfelt as an Irishman. It is the custom to speak of Maria Edgeworth as anIrish novelist, yet Miss Edgeworth was born in England of Englishparentage. Nevertheless, she was quite as much an Irish novelist asCharles Lever and Samuel Lover, for all her life was spent in directcommunion with the Irish race, and her books were Irish books. It is, onthe other hand, quite unreasonable to deny that Charlotte Bronte was aYorkshire woman. Only once at the end of her life did she visit Irelandfor a few weeks. Her Irish father and her Cornish mother doubtlessinfluenced her nature in many ways, but not less certain was theinfluence of those wonderful moors around Haworth, and the people amongwhom she lived. Neither Ireland nor Cornwall has as much right to claimher as Yorkshire. I am the last to disclaim the influence of what issometimes called "Celticism" upon English literature; upon this point Iam certain that Matthew Arnold has said almost the last word. TheCelts--not necessarily the Irish, as there are three or four races ofCelts in addition to the Irish--have in the main given English literatureits fine imaginative quality, and even where he cannot trace a Celticorigin to an English writer we may fairly assume that there is Celticblood somewhere in an earlier generation. 

Nevertheless, the impressions, as I have said, derived from environmentare of the utmost vitality, and assuredly Borrow was an East Anglian, asSir Thomas Browne was an East Anglian. In each writer you can trace theinfluence of our soil in a peculiar degree, and particularly in Borrow. Borrow was proud of being an East Anglian, and we are proud of him. In_Lavengro_, I venture to assert, we have the greatest example of prosestyle in our modern literature, and I rejoice to see a growing Borrowcult, a cult that is based not on an acceptance of the narrower side ofBorrow--his furious ultra-Protestantism, for example--as was thepopularity that he once enjoyed, but upon the fact that he was amagnificent artist in words. No artist in words but is influenced byenvironment. Charles Kingsley, for example, who came from quitedifferent surroundings, was profoundly influenced by the East Anglian fen-country:--

 "They have a beauty of their own, those great fens, " he said, "a beauty of the sea, of boundless expanse and freedom. Overhead the arch of heaven spreads more ample than elsewhere, and that vastness gives such cloud-lands, such sunrises, such sunsets, as can be seen nowhere else within these isles. "

But I must hasten on, although I would fain tarry long over George Borrowand his works. I have said that East Anglia is the country of greatletter writers. First, there was Margaret Paston. There is no suchcontribution to a remote period of English history as that contained inthe _Paston Letters_, and I think we must associate them with the name ofa woman--Margaret Paston. Margaret's husband, John Paston; her son, SirJohn Paston; and her second son, who, strangely enough, was also a John, and called himself "John Paston the Youngest, " come frequently before usin the correspondence, but Margaret Paston is the central figure. 

It may not be without interest to some of my hearers who are married torecall that Margaret Paston addresses her husband not as "Dear John, " or"My dear John, " as I imagine a wife of to-day would do, but as "RightReverend and Worshipful Husband. " Nowhere is there such a vivid pictureof a bygone age as that contained in these _Paston Letters_. We who sitquietly by the hearth in the reign of King Edward VII may read what itmeant to live by the hearth in the reign of King Edward IV. It iscurious that the most humane documents of far-off times in our historyshould all come from East Anglia, not only those _Paston Letters_, brimful of the most vital interest concerning the reigns of Henry VI andEdward IV, but also an even earlier period--the life, or at least themonastic life in the time of the first Richard and of King John is in amost extraordinarily human fashion mirrored for us in that Chronicle ofSt. Edmund's Bury Monastery known as the Jocelyn Chronicle, published bythe Camden Society, which Carlyle has vitalized so superbly for us in_Past and Present_. 

But I was speaking of the great letter writers, commencing with MargaretPaston. Who are our greatest letter writers? Undoubtedly they areHorace Walpole, William Cowper and Edward FitzGerald. You know what asuperb picture of eighteenth century life has been presented to us in thenine volumes of correspondence we have by Horace Walpole. {144} Walpolewas to all practical purposes an East Anglian, although he happened to beborn in London. His father, the great Sir Robert Walpole, was a notableEast Anglian, and he had the closest ties of birth and association withEast Anglia. Many of his letters were written from the family mansion ofHoughton. {145}

Next in order comes William Cowper. I believe that more than oneliterary historian has claimed Cowper as a Norfolk man. Cowper was bornin Hertfordshire; he lived for a very great deal of his life in Olney, inBuckinghamshire, in London and in Huntingdon, but if ever there was a manwho took on the texture of East Anglian scenery and East Anglian life itwas Cowper. That beautiful river, the Ouse, which empties itself intothe Wash, was a peculiar inspiration to Cowper, and those who know thescenery of Olney know that it has conditions exactly analogous in everyway to those of East Anglia. One of Cowper's most beautiful poems isentitled "On Receipt of my Mother's Portrait out of Norfolk, " and hehimself, as I have said, found his last resting-place on East Angliansoil--at East Dereham. 

If there may be some doubt about Cowper, there can be none whatever aboutEdward FitzGerald, the greatest letter-writer of recent times. Inmentioning the name of FitzGerald I am a little diffident. It is likeintroducing "King Charles's head" into this gathering; for was he not theauthor of the poem known to all of us as the _Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam_, and there is no small tendency to smile to-day whenever the name of OmarKhayyam is mentioned and to call the cult a "lunacy. " It is perhapsunfortunate that FitzGerald gave that somewhat formidable title to hisparaphrase, or translation, of the old Persian poet. It is not the faultof those who admire that poem exceedingly that it gives them a suspicionof affecting a scholarship that they do not in most cases possess. Whatmany of us admire is not Omar Khayyam the Persian, nor have we any desireto see or to know any other translation of that poet. We simply admit toan honest appreciation of the poem by Edward FitzGerald, the Suffolksquire, the poem that Tennyson describes as "the one thing done divinelywell. " That poem by FitzGerald will live as long as the Englishlanguage, and let it never be forgotten that it is the work of an EastAnglian, an East Anglian who, like Borrow, possessed a marked Celticquality, the outcome of a famous Irish ancestry, nevertheless of an EastAnglian who loved its soil, its rivers and its sea. 

Then I come to another phase of East Anglian literary traditions. It isastonishing what a zest for learning its women have displayed; I mightgive you quite a long list of distinguished women who have come out ofEast Anglia. Crabbe must have had one in mind when he wrote of Arabellain one of his _Tales_:--

 This reasoning maid, above her sex's dread Had dared to read, and dared to say she read, Not the last novel, not the new born play, Not the mere trash and scandal of the day; But (though her young companions felt the shock) She studied Berkeley, Bacon, Hobbes and Locke. 

The one who perhaps made herself most notorious was Harriet Martineau, and in spite of her disagreeable egotism it is still a pleasure to readsome of her less controversial writings. Her _Feats on the Fiord_, forexample, is really a classic. But I can never quite forgive HarrietMartineau in that she spoke contemptuously of East Anglian scenery, scenery which in its way has charms as great as any part of Europe canoffer. No, in this roll of famous women, the two I am most inclined topraise are Sarah Austin and Fanny Burney. Mrs. Austin was, you willremember, one of the Taylors of Norwich, married to John Austin, thefamous jurist. She was one of the first to demonstrate that her sexmight have other gifts than a gift for writing fiction, and that it waspossible to be a good, quiet, domestic woman, and at the same time anexceedingly learned one. Even before Carlyle she gave a vogue to thestudy of German literature in this country; she wrote many books, manyarticles, and made some translations, notably what is still the besttranslation of von Ranke's _History of the Popes_. In the muster-roll ofEast Anglian worthies let us never forget this singularly good woman, this correspondent of all the most famous men of her day, of Guizot, ofGrote, of Gladstone, and one who also, as a letter-writer, showed thatshe possessed the faculty that seems, as I have said, to be peculiar tothe soil of East Anglia. Still less must we forget Fanny Burney, who, born in King's Lynn, lived to delight her own generation by _Evelina_ andby the fascinating _Diary_ that gives so pleasant a picture of Dr. Johnson and many another of her contemporaries. _Evelina_ and the_Diary_ are two of my favourite books, but I practise self-restraint andwill say no more of them here. 

I now come to my ninth, and last, name among those East Anglian worthieswhom I feel that we have a particular right to canonize--GeorgeCrabbe--"though Nature's sternest painter yet the best, " as Byrondescribed him. Now it may be frankly admitted that few of us read Crabbeto-day. He has an acknowledged place in the history of literature, butthere pretty well even well-read people are content to leave him. "Whathave our literary critics been about that they have suffered such awriter to drop into neglect and oblivion?" asks a recent QuarterlyReviewer. He does not live as Cowper does by a few lyrics and balladsand by incomparable letters. Scarcely a line of Crabbe survives incurrent conversation. If you turn to one of those handy volumes ofreference--Dictionaries of Quotation, as they are called--from which wewho are journalists are supposed to obtain most of the literary knowledgethat we are able to display on occasion, you will scarcely find a dozenlines of Crabbe. And yet I venture to affirm that Crabbe has a great andpermanent place in literature, and that as he has been a favourite in thepast, he will become a favourite in the future. Crabbe can never losehis place in the history of literature, a place as the forerunner ofWordsworth and even of Cowper, but it would be a tragedy were he to dropout of the category of poets that are read. A dainty little edition ineight volumes is among my most treasured possessions. I have read it notas we read some so-called literature, from a sense of duty, but withunqualified interest. We have had much pure realism in these latterdays; why not let us return to the most realistic of the poets. He wasbeloved by all the greatest among his contemporaries. Scott andWordsworth were devoted to his work, and so also was Jane Austen. At alater date Tennyson praised him. We have heard quite recently the storyof Mr. James Russell Lowell in his last illness finding comfort inreading Scott's _Rob Roy_. Let us turn to Scott's own last illness andsee what was the book he most enjoyed, almost on his deathbed:--

 "Read me some amusing thing, " said Sir Walter, "read me a bit of Crabbe. " "I brought out the first volumes of his old favourite that I could lay hand on, " says Lockhart, "and turned to what I remembered was one of his favourite passages in it. He listened with great interest. Every now and then he exclaimed, "Capital, excellent, excellent, very good. "

Cardinal Newman and Edward FitzGerald at the opposite poles, as it were, of religious impressions, agree in a devotion to Crabbe's poetry. Cardinal Newman speaks of _Tales of the Hall_ as "a poem whether inconception or in execution one of the most touching in our language, " andin a footnote to his _Idea of a University_ he tells us that he had readthe poem thirty years earlier with extreme delight, "and have never lostmy love of it, " and he goes on to plead that it is an absolute _classic_. 

Not to have read Crabbe, therefore, is not to know one of the mostindividual in the glorious muster-roll of English poets, and Crabbe waspre-eminently an East Anglian, born and bred in East Anglia, and takingin a peculiar degree the whole character of his environment, as onlyShakspere, Cowper and Wordsworth among our great poets, have done. 

In conclusion, let me recapitulate that the names of Marryat, Sir ThomasBrowne, George Borrow, Margaret Paston, Horace Walpole, Sarah Austin, Fanny Burney, Edward FitzGerald, and George Crabbe are those that Iprefer to associate with East Anglian Literature. We are well aware thatliterature is but an aspect of our many claims on the gratitude of thoseEnglishmen who have not the good fortune to be East Anglians. We havegiven to the Empire a great scholar in Porson, a great statesman in SirRobert Walpole, a great lawyer in Sir Edward Coke, great ecclesiastics inCardinal Wolsey and Archbishop Parker, great artists in Gainsborough, Constable and Crome, and perhaps above all great sailors in SirCloudesley Shovel and the ever memorable Lord Nelson. Personally Iadmire a certain rebel, Kett the Tanner, as much as any of those I havenamed. 

Of all these East Anglian worthies the praise has often been sung, butlet me be pardoned if, on an occasion like this, I have dwelt rather atlength on the less familiar association of East Anglia with letters. ThatI have but touched the fringe of the subject is obvious. What might notbe said, for example, concerning Norwich as a literary centre underBishop Stanley--the Norwich of the Taylors and the Gurneys, possessed ofas much real intellectual life as London can boast of to-day. What, again, might not be said of the influence upon writers from afar. ReadKingsley's _Hereward the Wake_, Mr. Swinburne's _Midsummer Holiday_, Charles Dickens' description of Yarmouth and Goldsmith's poeticaldescription in his _Deserted Village_, where clearly Houghton wasintended. {153} These, and a host of other memories touch the heart ofall good East Anglians, but that East Anglians do not forget the livingin doing honour to the dead is indicated by this gathering to-night. Weare grateful to Dr. Augustus Jessopp, to Mr. Walter Rye, to Mr. EdwardClodd, and to our guest of this evening, Mr. William Dutt, for keepingalive the folk-lore, the literary history, the historical tradition ofthat portion of the British Isles to which we feel the most profoundattachment by ties of residence or of kinship. 

VI. DR. JOHNSON'S ANCESTRY

A paper read before the members of the Johnson Club of London atSimpson's Restaurant in the Strand. 

There is, I believe, a definite understanding among our members that we, the Brethren of the Johnson Club, have each and all of us read every lineabout Dr. Johnson that is in print, to say nothing of his works. It isparticularly accepted that the thirteen volumes in which our latebrother, Dr. Birkbeck Hill, enshrined his own appreciation of our GreatMan, are as familiar to us all as are the Bible and the Book of CommonPrayer. For my part, with a deep sense of the responsibility that mustbelong to any one who has rashly undertaken to read a paper before theClub, I admit to having supplemented these thirteen volumes by areperusal of the little book entitled _Johnson Club Papers_, by VariousHands, issued in 1899 by Brother Fisher Unwin. I feel as I reread theseaddresses that there were indeed giants in those days, although myadmiration was moderated a little when I came across the statement of oneBrother that Johnson's proposal for an edition of Shakspere "came tonothing"; and the statement of another that "Goldsmith's failings werealmost as great and as ridiculous as Boswell's;" while my bibliographicalire was awakened by the extraordinary declaration in an article on "Dr. Johnson's Library, " that a first folio edition of Shakspere might haverealized 250 pounds in the year 1785. Still, I recognize the talent thatilluminated the Club in those closing years of the last century. Happilyfor us, who love good comradeship, most of the giants of those days arestill in evidence with their polished armour and formidable spears. 

What can I possibly say that has not already been said by one or other ofthe Brethren? Well, I have put together these few remarks in the hopesthat no one of you has seen two books that are in my hands, the first, _The Reades of Blackwood Hill_, _with Some Account of Dr. Johnson'sAncestry_, by Aleyn Lyell Reade; the other, _The Life and Letters of Dr. Birkbeck Hill_, by his daughter Mrs. Crump. The first of these isprivately printed, although it may be bought by any one of the Brethrenfor a couple of guineas. As far as I am able to learn, Brother AugustineBirrell is the only one of the Brethren who has as yet purchased a copy. The other book, our Brother Birkbeck Hill's biography, is to be issuednext week by Mr. Edward Arnold, who has kindly placed an early copy at mydisposal. In both these volumes there is much food for reflection forall good Johnsonians. Dr. Johnson's ancestry, it may be, makes littleappeal to the crowd, but it will to the Brethren. There is no morefavourite subject for satire than the tendency to minute study of anauthor and his antecedents. But the lover of that author knows thefascination of the topic. He can forgive any amount of zeal. I confessthat personally I stand amazed at the variety and interest of Mr. Reade'sresearches. Let me take a sample case of his method before coming to themain issue. In the opening pages of Boswell's _Johnson_ there is someaccount of Mr. Michael Johnson, the father. The most picturesqueanecdote told of Johnson Senior is that concerning a young woman of Leekin Staffordshire, who while he served his apprenticeship there conceiveda passion for him, which he did not return. She followed him toLichfield, where she took lodgings opposite to the house in which helived, and indulged her hopeless flame. Ultimately she died of love andwas buried in the Cathedral at Lichfield, when Michael Johnson put astone over her grave. This pathetic romance has gone unchallenged by allBoswell's editors, even including our prince of editors, Dr. BirkbeckHill. Mr. Reade, it seems to me, has completely shattered the story, which, as all Johnsonian students know, was obtained by Boswell from MissAnna Seward. Mr. Reade is able to show that Michael Johnson had beensettled in Lichfield for at least eleven years before the death ofElizabeth Blaney, that for five years she had been the much appreciateddomestic in a household in that city. Her will indicates moreover agreat affection for her mistress and for that mistress's son; she leavesthe boy a gold watch and his mother the rest of her belongings. The onlyconnexion that Michael Johnson would seem to have had with the woman wasthat he and his brother were called in after her decease to make aninventory of her little property. I think that these little facts aboutMistress Blaney, her five years' residence at Lichfield apparently in amost comfortable position, her omission of Michael Johnson from her will, and the fact that he had been in Lichfield at least six months before shearrived, are conclusive. 

There is another picturesque fact about Michael Johnson that Mr. Readehas brought to light. It would seem that twenty years before hismarriage to Sarah Ford, he had been on the eve of marriage to a youngwoman at Derby, Mary Neyld; but the marriage did not take place, althoughthe marriage bond was drawn out. Mary was the daughter of Luke Neyld, aprominent tradesman of Derby; she was twenty-three years of age at thetime and Michael twenty-nine. Even Mr. Reade's industry has not beenable to discover for us why at the very last moment the marriage wasbroken off. It explains, however, why Michael Johnson married late inlife and his melancholia. The human romance that Mr. Reade has unveiledhas surely a certain interest for Johnsonians, for had Michael Johnsonbrought his first love affair to a happy conclusion, we should not havehad the man described twenty years later as "possessed of a vilemelancholy, " who, when his wife's tongue wagged too much, got upon hishorse and rode away. There would have been no Samuel Johnson, and therewould have been no Johnson Club--a catastrophe which the human mind findsit hard to conceive of. Two years after the breaking off of herengagement with Michael Johnson, I may add, Mary Neyld married one JamesWarner. 

Mr. Reade also calls in question another statement of Boswell's, thatMichael Johnson was really apprenticed at Leek in Staffordshire; our onlyauthority for this also is the excellent Anna Seward. Further, it issufficiently curious that the names of two Samuel Johnsons are recordedas being buried in one of the churches at Lichfield, one before ourSamuel came into the world, the other three years later: of these, onedied in 1654, the other in 1712. But these points, although of a certaininterest, have nothing to do with Dr. Johnson's ancestry. Now before weleft our homes this evening, each member of the Johnson Brotherhood, asis his custom, turned up Brother Birkbeck Hill's invaluable index to seewhat Johnson had to say upon the subject of ancestry. We know that theDoctor was very keen upon the founding of a family; that when Mr. Thralelost his only son Johnson's sympathies went out to him in a double way, and perhaps in the greater degree because as he said to Boswell, "Sir, don't you know how you yourself think? Sir, he wished to propagate hisname. " Johnson himself, Boswell tells us, had no pretensions to blood. "I here may say, " he said, "that I have great merit in being zealous forsubordination and the honours of birth; for I can hardly tell who was mygrandfather. " Johnson further informed Mrs. Thrale that he did notdelight in talking much of his family: "There is little pleasure, " hesays, "in relating the anecdotes of beggary. " He constantly deprecatedhis origin. According to Miss Seward, he told his wife before he marriedher that he was of mean extraction; but the letter in which Miss Sewardgives her version of Johnson's courtship is worth recalling, although Ido not believe a single word of it:--

 The rustic prettiness and artless manners of her daughter, the present Mrs. Lucy Porter, had won Johnson's youthful heart, when she was upon a visit at my grandfather's in Johnson's school-days. Disgusted by his unsightly form, she had a personal aversion to him, nor could the beautiful verses he addressed to her teach her to endure him. The nymph at length returned to her parents at Birmingham, and was soon forgotten. Business taking Johnson to Birmingham on the death of his own father, and calling upon his coy mistress there, he found her father dying. He passed all his leisure hours at Mr. Porter's, attending his sick bed, and in a few months after his death, asked Mrs. Johnson's consent to marry the old widow. After expressing her surprise at a request so extraordinary--"No, Sam, my willing consent you will never have to so preposterous a union. You are not twenty- five, and she is turned fifty. If she had any prudence, this request had never been made to me. Where are your means of subsistence? Porter has died poor, in consequence of his wife's expensive habits. You have great talents, but, as yet, have turned them into no profitable channel. " "Mother, I have not deceived Mrs. Porter: I have told her the worst of me; that I am of mean extraction; that I have no money, and that I have had an uncle hanged. She replied, that she valued no one more or less for his descent; that she had no more money than myself; and that, although she had not had a relation hanged, she had fifty who deserved hanging. "

Now why did Dr. Johnson take this attitude about his ancestry, socontrary to the spirit that guided him where other people's genealogicaltrees were concerned? It was certainly not indifference to family ties, because Brother Birkbeck Hill publishes many interesting letters writtenby Johnson in old age, when finding that he had a certain sum of money tobequeath, he looked around to see if there were any of his own kinliving. The number of letters the old man wrote, inquiring for this orthat kinsman, are quite pathetic. It seems to me that it was really dueto an ignorant vagueness as to his family history. During his earlyyears his family had passed from affluence to penury. They were of atype very common in England, but very rare in Scotland and Ireland, thattake no interest whatever in pedigrees, and never discuss any but theirimmediate relations, with whom, in the case of the Johnsons, veryfriendly terms did not prevail. I think we should be astonished if wewere to go into some shops in London of sturdy prosperous tradesmen inquite as good a position as old Michael Johnson, and were to try and drawout one or other individual upon his ancestry. We should promptly comeagainst a blank wall. 

What then do we know of Johnson's father from the ordinary sources? Thathe was a bookseller at Lichfield, and that he was Sheriff of that city inthe year that his son Samuel was born; that he feasted the citizens, asJohnson tells us, in his _Annals_, with "uncommon magnificence. " He isdescribed by Johnson as "a foolish old man, " because he talked with toofond a pride of his children and their precocious ways. He was a zealousHigh Churchman and Jacobite. We are told by Boswell further, on theauthority of Mr. Hector of Birmingham, that he opened a bookstall once aweek in that city, but lost money by setting up as a maker of parchment. "A pious and most worthy man, " Mrs. Piozzi tells us of him, "but wrong-headed, positive and affected with melancholia. " "I inherited a vilemelancholy from my father, " Johnson tells us, "which has made me mad allmy life. " When he died in 1731 his effects were estimated at 20 pounds. "My mother had no value for his relations, " Johnson tells us. "Those weknew were much lower than hers. " Of Michael Johnson's brother, Andrew, Johnson's uncle, we know still less. From the various Johnson books weonly cull the story mentioned in Mrs. Piozzi's _Anecdotes_. She relatesthat Johnson, after telling her of the prowess of his uncle, CorneliusFord, at jumping, went on to say that he had another uncle, Andrew--"myfather's brother, who kept the ring at Smithfield for a whole year, andwas never thrown or conquered. Here are uncles for you, Mistress, ifthat is the way to your heart. " Mr. Reade has supplemented this byshowing us that not only was Andrew Johnson a skilful wrestler, but thathe was a very good bookseller. For a time he assisted his brother in theconduct of the business at Lichfield. Later, however, he settled as abookseller at Birmingham, which was to be his home until his death overthirty years later. Here he published some interesting books; the title-pages of some of these are given by Mr. Reade, who reproduces of coursehis will. He had a son named Thomas who fell on evil days. You willfind certain letters to Thomas in Birkbeck Hill's edition; Dr. Johnsonfrequently helped him with money. 

Of more interest, however, than Andrew Johnson was Catherine, the onesister of Michael and Andrew, an aunt of Samuel's, who was evidently forsome unknown reason ignored by her two brothers. Here we are not onabsolutely firm ground, but it seems to me clear that Catherine Johnsonmarried into a position far above her brothers. A fortnight before hisdeath Dr. Johnson wrote to the Rev. William Vyse, Rector of Lambeth; aletter in which he asked him to find out "whether Charles Skrymsher"--hemisspelt it "Scrimshaw"--"of Woodseaves"--he misspelt it "Woodease"--"inyour neighbourhood, be now alive, " and whether he could be found withoutdelay. He added that "it will be an act of great kindness to me, "Charles Skrymsher being "very nearly related. " Charles Skrymsher was notfound, and Johnson told Dr. Vyse that he was disappointed in theinquiries that he had made for his relations. This particular relation, indeed, had been twenty-two years dead when Dr. Johnson, probably withthe desire of leaving him something in his will, made these inquiries. His mother, Mrs. Gerald Skrymsher, was Michael Johnson's sister. One ofher daughters became the wife of Thomas Boothby. Boothby was twicemarried, and his two wives were cousins, the first, Elizabeth, being thedaughter of one Sir Charles Skrymsher, the second, Hester, as I havesaid, of Gerald Skrymsher, Dr. Johnson's uncle. Hence Johnson had acousin by marriage who was a potentate in his day, for it is told ofThomas Boothby of Tooley Park, grand-nephew of a powerful and wealthybaronet, that he was one of the fathers of English sport. An issue of_The Field_ newspaper for 1875 contains an engraving of a hunting hornthen in the possession of the late Master of the Cheshire Hounds, andupon the horn is the inscription: "Thomas Boothby, Esq. , Tooley Park, Leicester. With this horn he hunted the first pack of fox hounds then inEngland fifty-five years. " He died in 1752. His eldest son took thematernal name of Skrymsher, and under the title of Thomas BoothbySkrymsher became M. P. For Leicester, and an important person in his day. His wife was Anne, daughter of Sir Hugh Clopton of New Place, Stratford-on-Avon. Admirers of Mrs. Gaskell will remember the Clopton legend toldby her in Howett's _Visits to Remarkable Places_. 

I wish that I had time to follow Mr. Reade through all the ramificationsof an interesting family history, but I venture to think that there issomething pathetic in Dr. Johnson's inquiries a fortnight before hisdeath as to cousins of whose life story he knew nothing, whose well-knownfamily home of Woodseaves he--the great Lexicographer--could not spellcorrectly, and of whose very name he was imperfectly informed. Yet he, the lover of family trees and of ancestral associations, was all his lifein ignorance of these wealthy connexions and their many substantialintermarriages. 

Before Mr. Reade it was known that Johnson's father was a manufacturer ofparchment as well as a bookseller; but it was supposed that only in hislast few years or so of life did he undertake this occupation whichruined him. Mr. Reade shows that he had been for thirty years engaged inthis trade in parchment. Brother Birkbeck Hill quotes Croker, who hintedthat Johnson's famous definition of Excise as "a hateful tax levied uponcommodities, and adjudged not by the Common Judge of Property but bywretches hired by those to whom Excise is paid, " was inspired byrecollections of his father's constant disputes with the Excise officers. Mr. Reade has unearthed documents concerning the crisis of this quarrel, when Michael Johnson in 1718 was indicted "for useing ye Trade of aTanner. " The indictment, which is here printed in full, charges him, "one Michael Johnson, bookseller, " "that he did in the third year of thereign of our Lord George by the Grace of God now King of Great Britain, for his own proper gain, get up, use and exercise the art, mystery ormanual occupation of a Byrseus, in English a Tanner, in which art, mystery or manual occupation of a Tanner the said Michael Johnson was notbrought up or apprenticed for the space of seven years, an evil exampleof all others offending in such like case. " Michael's defence was thathe was "tanned for" and did not tan himself, he being only "a merchant inskins tradeing to Ireland, Scotland and the furthermost parts ofEngland. " The only known example of Michael Johnson's handwriting isthis defence. Michael was committed for trial but acquitted. It isprobable, however, that this prosecution laid the foundation of his ruin. 

But I must pass on to the other branch: the family of Dr. Johnson'smother. Here Dr. Johnson did himself a great injustice, for he had agenuine right to count his mother's "an old family, " although the term isin any case relative. At any rate he could carry his pedigree back to1620. "In the morning, " says Boswell, "we had talked of old families, and the respect due to them. Johnson said--

 "'Sir, you have a right to that kind of respect, and are arguing for yourself. I am for supporting the principle, and I am disinterested in doing it, as I have no such right. '"

Nevertheless, Boswell, in this opening chapter, refers to the mother as"Sarah Ford, descended of an ancient race of substantial yeomanry inWarwickshire, " and Johnson's epitaph upon his mother's tomb describes heras "of the ancient family of Ford. " Thus one is considerably bewilderedin attempting to reconcile Johnson's attitude. The only one of hisfamily for whom he seems to have had a good word was Cornelius Harrison, of whom, writing to Mrs. Thrale, he said that he was "perhaps the onlyone of my relations who ever rose in fortune above penury or in characterabove neglect. " This Cornelius was the son of John Harrison, who hadmarried Johnson's aunt, Phoebe Ford. Johnson's account of Uncle John inhis _Annals_ is not flattering, but he was the son of a Rector ofPilborough, whose father was Sir Richard Harrison, one of the gentlemenof the King's Bedchamber, and a personality of a kind. Cornelius, thereputable cousin, died in 1748, but his descendants seem to have been apoor lot, whatever his ancestors may have been. Mr. Reade traces theirhistory with all the relentlessness of the genealogist. 

Johnson's great-grandfather was one Henry Ford, a yeoman in Birmingham. One of his sons, Henry, Johnson's grand-uncle, was born in 1628. Heowned property at West Bromwich and elsewhere, and was a fellow ofClifford's Inn, London. Then we come to Cornelius Ford--"Cornelius Ford, gentleman, " he is styled in his marriage settlement. Cornelius died fourmonths before Samuel Johnson was born. Cornelius had a sister Mary, whomarried one Jesson, and their only son, I may mention incidentally, entered at Pembroke College in 1666, sixty years before hissecond-cousin, our Samuel, entered the same college. Another cousin bymarriage was a Mrs. Harriots, to whom Johnson refers in his _Annals_, andalso in his _Prayers and Meditations_. The only one of Cornelius Ford'sfamily referred to in the biographies is Joseph Ford, the father of thenotorious Parson Ford, Johnson's cousin, of whom he several times speaks. Joseph was a physician of eminence who settled at Stourbridge. Hemarried a wealthy widow, Mrs. Hickman. He was a witness to the marriageof his sister Sarah to Michael Johnson. There can be no doubt but thatthe presence of Dr. Ford and his family at Stourbridge accounts forJohnson being sent there to school in 1725. He stayed in the house ofhis cousin Cornelius Ford, not as Boswell says his _uncle_ Cornelius, atPedmore, about a mile from Stourbridge. He walked in every day to theGrammar School. A connexion of the boy, Gregory Hickman, was residingnext to the Grammar School. A kinsman of Johnson and a descendant ofHickman, Dr. Freer, still lives in the house. I met him at Lichfieldrecently, and he has sent me a photograph of the very house, which standsto-day much as it did when Johnson visited it, and wrote at twenty-two, asonnet to Dorothy Hickman "playing at the Spinet. " Dorothy was one ofJohnson's three early loves, with Ann Hector and Olivia Lloyd. Dorothymarried Dr. John Turtin and had an only child, Dr. Turtin, the celebratedphysician who attended Goldsmith in his last illness. 

I have not time to go through the record of all Dr. Johnson's uncles onthe maternal side, and do full justice to Mr. Reade's industry andmastery of detail. I may, however, mention incidentally that the unclewho was hanged, if one was, must have been one of his father's brothers, for to the Fords that distinction does not seem to have belonged. Muchthat is entertaining is related of the cousin Parson Ford, who, aftersharing with the famous Earl of Chesterfield in many of his profligacies, received from his lordship the Rectory of South Luffenham. There is noevidence, however, that Chesterfield ever knew that his at one timechaplain and boon companion was cousin of the man who wrote him the mostfamous of letters. 

The mother of Cornelius Ford was a Crowley, and this brings Johnson intorelationship with London city worthies, for Mrs. Ford's brother was SirAmbrose Crowley, Kt. , Alderman, of London, the original of Addison's JackAnvil. One of Sir Ambrose Crowley's daughters married Humphrey Parsons, sometime M. P. For London and twice Lord Mayor. Thus we see that duringthe very years of Johnson's most painful struggle in London one of hisdistant cousins or connexions was Chief Magistrate of this City. Anotherconnexion, Elizabeth Crowley, was married in 1724 at Westminster Abbey toJohn, tenth Lord St. John of Bletsoe. "Here are ancestors for you, Mistress, " Dr. Johnson might have said to Mrs. Thrale if he had onlyknown--if he had had a genealogist at his elbow as well as a pushfulbiographer. 

Mr. Reade prints the whole of the marriage settlement upon the union ofJohnson's mother and father. It is a very elaborate document, andsuggests the undoubted prosperity of the parties at the time. Thehusband was fifty, the bride thirty-seven. Samuel was not born untilthree years and three months after the marriage. The pair frequently inearly married life received assistance by convenient deaths as thefollowing extracts from wills indicate:--

 _Cornelius Ford of Packwood in the Co. Of Warwick_. 

 I give and bequeath unto my son-in-law Michaell Johnson the sum of five pounds, and to his wife my daughter five and twenty pounds. 

 Proved May 1, 1709. 

 _Jane Ford of Old Turnford_, _widow of Joseph Ford_. 

 I do will and appoint that my son Cornelius Ford do and shall pay to my brother-in-law, Mr. Michael Johnson and his wife and their trustees, the sum of 200 pounds which is directed by his late father's Will to be paid to me and in lieu of so much moneys which my said late husband received in trust for my said brother Johnson and his wife. 

 Proved at Worcester, October 2, 1722. 

Then "good cousin Harriotts" does not forget them:--

 I give and bequeath to my cousin Sarah the wife of Michael Johnson the like sum of 40 pounds for her own separate use, and one pair of my best flaxen sheets and pillow coats, a large pewter dish and a dozen of pewter plates, provided that her husband doth at the same time give the like bond to my executor to permit his wife to dispose of the same at her will and pleasure. 

 Elizabeth Harriotts of Trysall in Staff. , October 23, 1726. 

But I must leave this fascinating volume. I cannot find time to tell youall it has to say about the Porter family. Mr. Reade is as informativewhen treating of the Porters, of Mrs. Johnson and her daughter Lucy, ashe is with the family trees of which I have spoken. 

I hasten on to Dr. Hill's _Life_, with which I am only concerned here atthe point where it is affected by Mr. Reade's book. The reflectioninevitably arises that it is well-nigh impossible efficiently to do workinvolving research unless one has an income derived from other sources. Your historian in proportion to the value of his work must be a rich man, and so must the biographer. Good as Brother Birkbeck Hill's work was, itwould have been better if he had had more money. He might have had manyof these wills and other documents copied, upon the securing of which Mr. Reade must have expended such very large sums. Dr. Hill was fully aliveto this. "If I had not some private means, " he wrote to a friend in1897, "I could never edit Johnson and Boswell; but I do not get so wellpaid as a carpenter. " As a matter of fact, I find that he lost exactly 3pounds by publishing _Dr. Johnson_: _his Friends and his Critics_. Hemade 320 pounds by the first four years' sale of the "Boswell. " This 320pounds, including American rights, made the bulk of his payments for hismany years' work, and the book has not yet gone into a second edition. Ithink 2, 000 were printed. There were between 40, 000 and 50, 000 copies ofCroker's editions sold, so that we must not be too boastful as to theimproved taste of the present age. 320 pounds is a mere bagatelle tonumbers of our present writers of utterly foolish fiction. Several ofthem have been known to spend double that sum on a single motor-car. Inconnexion with this matter I cannot refrain from giving one passage froma letter of Brother Hill's:--

 My old friend D--- lamented that the two new volumes (of my _Johnson Miscellanies_) are so dear as to be above his reach. The net price is a guinea. On Sunday he had eight glasses of hollands and seltzer--a shilling each, a pint of stout and some cider, besides half a dozen cigars or so. Two days' abstinence from cigars and liquor would have paid for my book. 

Mrs. Crump, who writes her father's life, has expressed regret to me thatthere is so little in the book concerning the Johnson Club to whichBrother Hill was so devoted. She had asked me for letters, but I feltthat all in my possession were unsuited for publication, dealing ratherfreely with living persons. Brother Hill was impatient of the merebookmaker--the literary charlatan who wrote without reading sufficiently. There are two pleasant glimpses of our Club in the volume; I quote one. It was of the night that we discussed _Dr. Johnson as a Radical_:--

 I wish that you and Lucy could have been present last night and witnessed my scene of triumph. I was indeed most nobly welcomed. The scribe told me with sympathetic pride that the correspondent of the _New York Herald_ had asked leave to attend, as he wished to telegraph my paper out to America!!! as well as the discussion. There were some very good speeches made in the discussion that followed, especially by a Mr. Whale, a solicitor, who spoke remarkably well and with great knowledge of his _Boswell_. He said that he preferred to call it, not Johnson's radical side, but his humanitarian side. Mr. Birrell, the _Obiter Dicta_ man, also spoke very well. He is a clever fellow. He was equally complimentary. He maintained in opposition to Mr. Whale that radical was the right term, and in fact that radicalism and humanitarianism were the same. Many of them said what a light the paper had thrown on Johnson's character. One gentleman came up and congratulated me on the very delicate way in which I had handled so difficult a subject, and had not given offence to the Liberal Unionists and Tories present. Edmund Gosse, by whom I sat, was most friendly, and called the paper a wonderful _tour de force_, referring to the way in which I had linked Johnson's sayings. He asked me to visit him some day at Trinity College, Cambridge, and assured me of a hearty welcome. It is no wonder that what with the supper and the smoke I did not get to sleep till after two. Among the guests was the great Bonner, the Australian cricketer, whose health had been drunk with that of the other visitors, and his praise sounded at having hit some balls over the pavilion at Lord's. With great simplicity he said that after seeing the way in which Johnson's memory was revered, he would much rather have been such a man than have gained his own greatest triumphs at cricket. He did not say it jocularly at all. 

Another letter from Dr. Hill describes how he found himself at Ashbournein Derbyshire with the Club, or rather with a fragment of it. He wrotefrom the _Green Man_ there concerning his adventures. 

I have far exceeded my time, but I would like in conclusion to say howadmirably his daughter has written this book on our Brother BirkbeckHill. What a pleasant picture it presents of a genuine lover ofliterature. His was not an analytical mind nor was he a great critic. His views on Dante and Newman will not be shared by any of us. But, whatis far more important than analysis or criticism, he had an entirelylovable personality and was a most clubbable man. He was moreover theideal editor of Boswell. What more could be said in praise of a belovedBrother of the Johnson Club!

VII. THE PRIVATE LIFE OF FERDINAND LASSALLE {185}

 Ich habe die Inventur meines Lebens gemacht. Es war gross, brav, wacker, tapfer und glanzend genug. Eine kunftige Zeit wird mir gerecht zu warden wissen. 

 --FERDINAND LASSALLE, _August_ 9, 1864. 

I. The Countess Sophie von Hatzfeldt. 

Ferdinand Lassalle was born at Breslau on April 11, 1825. His parentswere of Jewish race, his father a successful silk merchant. From boyhoodhe was now the tyrant, now the slave of a mother whom he loved and bywhom he was adored. Heymann Lassal--his son changed the spelling duringhis Paris sojourn--appears to have been irritable and tyrannical; andthere are some graphic instances in the recently published "Diary" {186}of the differences between them, ending on one occasion in the boyrushing to the river, where his terrified father finds him hesitating onthe brink, and becomes reconciled. A more attractive picture of the oldman is that told of his visit to his son-in-law, Friedland, who hadmarried Lassalle's sister. Friedland was ashamed of his Jewish origin, and old Lassalle startled the guests at dinner by rising and franklystating that he was a Jew, that his daughter was a Jewess, and that herhusband was of the same race. The guests cheered, but the host neverforgave his too frank father-in-law. 

Lassalle was a student at Breslau University, and later at Berlin, wherehe laid the foundation of those Hegelian studies to which he owed hispolitical philosophy. In 1845 he went to Paris, and there secured thefriendship of Heine, being included with George Sand in the interestingcircle around the "mattress grave" of the sick poet. 

Among Heine's letters {187} there are four addressed to Lassalle, now as"Dear and best beloved friend, " now as "Dearest brother-in-arms. " "Beassured, " he says, "that I love you beyond measure. I have never beforefelt so much confidence in any one. " "I have found in no one, " he saysagain, "so much passion and clearness of intellect united in action. Youhave good right to be audacious--we others only usurp this Divine right, this heavenly privilege. " And to Varnhagen von Ense he writes:--

 My friend, Herr Lassalle, who brings you this letter, is a young man of the most remarkable intellectual gifts. With the most thorough erudition, with the widest learning, with the greatest penetration that I have ever known, and with the richest gift of exposition, he combines an energy of will and a capacity for action which astonish me. . . . In no one have I found united so much enthusiasm and practical intelligence. 

"In every line, " says Brandes, "this letter shows the far-seeing studentof life, indeed, the prophet!"

Lassalle is not backward in reciprocating the enthusiasm. 

 "I love Heine, " he declares; "he is my second self. What audacity! what crushing eloquence! He knows how to whisper like a zephyr when it kisses rose-blooms, how to breathe like fire when it rages and destroys; he calls forth all that is tenderest and softest, and then all that is fiercest and most daring. He has the command of all the range of feeling. "

Lassalle's sympathy with Heine never lessened. It was Heine who lostgrasp of the intrinsically higher nature of his countryman andco-religionist, and an acute difference occurred, as we shall see, whenLassalle interfered in the affairs of the Countess von Hatzfeldt. Introduced to the Countess by his friend Dr. Mendelssohn, in 1846, Lassalle felt that here in concrete form was scope for all his enthusiasmof humanity, and he determined to devote his life to championing thecause of the oppressed lady. {188} The Countess was the wife of awealthy and powerful nobleman, who ill-treated her shamefully. Heimprisoned her in his castles, refused her doctors and medicine insickness, and carried off her children. Her own family, as powerful asthe Count, had often intervened, and the Count's repentances were manybut short-lived. In 1846 matters reached a crisis. The Count wrote tohis second son, Paul, asking him to leave his mother. The boy carriedthis letter to the Countess; and Lassalle relates that, finding the ladyin tears, he persuaded her to a full disclosure of the facts. He pledgedhimself to save her, and for nine years carried on the struggle, withultimate victory, but with considerable loss of reputation. He firsttold the story to Mendelssohn and Oppenheim, two friends of great wealth, the latter a Judge of one of the superior courts in Prussia. They agreedto help him; for then, as always, Lassalle's persuasive powers wereirresistible. They went with him from Berlin to Dusseldorf, the Countbeing in that neighbourhood. Von Hatzfeldt was at Aix-la-Chapelle, caught in the toils of a new mistress, the Baroness Meyendorff. Lassallediscovered that she had obtained from the Count a deed assigning to hersome property which should in the ordinary course have come to the boyPaul. The Countess, hearing of the disaster which seemed likely tobefall her favourite son, made her way into her husband's presence, andin the scene which followed secured a promise that the document should berevoked--destroyed. But no sooner had she left him than the Countreturned to the Meyendorff influence, and refused to see his wife again. Soon afterwards it was discovered that the woman had set out for Cologne. Lassalle begged his friends Oppenheim and Mendelssohn, to follow her and, if possible, to ascertain whether the momentous document had actuallybeen destroyed. They obeyed, and reached the hotel at Cologne about thesame time as the Baroness. Here they were guilty of an indiscretion, ifof nothing worse, for which Lassalle can surely in no way be blamed, butwhich was used for many a year to tarnish his name. Oppenheim, on hisway upstairs, observed a servant with the luggage of the Baroness; amongother things a desk or casket of a kind commonly used to carry valuablepapers. Thinking only of the fact that it was desirable to obtain acertain document from the brutal Count, he pounced upon the casket whenthe servant's back was turned. But he had no luggage with him in whichto conceal it, and so handed it to Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn, althoughfully sensible of the blunder that had been committed, could not deserthis friend, and placed the casket in his trunk. 

The whole hotel was in an uproar when the Baroness discovered her loss. The friends fled panic-stricken in opposite directions. Suspicionimmediately fell upon Dr. Mendelssohn, because his room was seen to havebeen left in confusion. He was pursued, but succeeded in escaping from arailway carriage and fleeing to Paris, leaving his luggage in the handsof the police. In his box some papers were found which incriminatedOppenheim; and Oppenheim, a Judge of one of the superior courts, and theson of a millionaire, was arrested and imprisoned for theft!

Lassalle visited Oppenheim in prison, and extracted from him a promise ofsilence as to the motive for his conduct. He then threw himselfvigorously into the struggle, both in the press and in the law courts. Here he seems to have parted company with Heine, because, as he tells us, "the Baroness Meyendorff was a friend of the Princess de Lieven, and thePrincess de Lieven was the mistress of Guizot, and Heine received apension from Guizot. "

Oppenheim was acquitted in 1846, and Mendelssohn, who was really innocentof the actual robbery, naturally thought it safe to return to Germany. Hewas, however, tried before the assize court of Cologne, and sentenced tofive years' imprisonment. Alexander von Humboldt obtained a reduction ofthe sentence to one year, but on condition that Mendelssohn should leaveEurope. He went, after his release from prison, to Constantinople, andwhen the Crimean war broke out joined the Turkish army, dying on themarch in 1854. 

Meanwhile Germany rang for many years with the story of the so-calledrobbery, and Lassalle's name was even more associated therewith than werethose of his more culpable friends. And this was not unnatural, becausehe was engaged year after year in continuous warfare with CountHatzfeldt. At length, in 1854, about the time that the unfortunate Dr. Mendelssohn died in the East, he secured for the Countess completeseparation and an ample provision. 

Lassalle's friendship with this lady inevitably gave rise to scandal. Butnever surely was scandal so little justified. She was twenty years hissenior, and the relation was clearly that of mother and son. In herletters he is always "my dear child, " and in his she is the confidante ofthe innumerable troubles of mind and of heart of which so impressionablea man as Ferdinand Lassalle had more than his share. 

"You are without reason and judgment where women are concerned, " shetells him, when he confides to her his passion for Helene von Donniges;and the remark opens out a vista of confidences of which the worldhappily knows but little. From the assize court of Dusseldorf, of allplaces, we have a very definite glimpse of a good-looking man, likely tobe a favourite in the society of the opposite sex:--

 "Ferdinand Lassalle, " runs the official document, "aged twenty-three, a civilian, born at Breslau, and dwelling recently at Berlin. Stands five feet six inches in height, has brown curly hair, open forehead, brown eyebrows, dark blue eyes, well proportioned nose and mouth, and rounded chin. "

He was indeed a favourite in Berlin drawing-rooms, pronounced a"Wunderkind" by Humboldt, and enthusiastically admired on all sides. But, assuming the story of Sophie Solutzeff to be mythical, there is noevidence that Lassalle had ever had any very serious romance in his lifeuntil he met Helene von Donniges. 

 _Es ist eine alte Geschichte_, _Doch bleibt sie immer neu_. --HEINE. 

II. Helene von Donniges

Helene von Donniges has told us the story in fullest detail--the story ofthat tragic love which was to send Lassalle to his too early death. Shewas the daughter of a Bavarian diplomatist who had held appointments inItaly, and later in Switzerland. She was betrothed as a child of twelveto an Italian of forty years of age. At a time when, as she says, herthoughts should have been concentrated upon her studies, they weredistracted by speculations on marriage and the marriage tie. A youngWallachian student named Yanko Racowitza crossed her path. Hisloneliness--he was far from home and friends--kindled her sympathy. Darkand ugly, she compared him to Othello, and called him her "Moor. " Inspite of some parental opposition she insisted upon plighting her trothto him, and the Italian lover was scornfully dismissed. Then comes theopening scene of the present story. It was in Berlin, whither Helen--wewill adopt the English spelling of the name--had travelled with hergrandmother in 1862, that she was asked at a ball the momentous question, "Do you know Lassalle?" She had never heard his name. Her questionerwas Baron Korff, a son-in-law of Meyerbeer, who, charmed by heroriginality, remarked that she and Lassalle were made for one another. Two weeks later her curiosity was further excited, when Dr. KarlOldenberg let fall some similar remark as to her intellectual kinshipwith the mysterious Lassalle. She asked her grandmother about him, andwas told that he was a "shameless demagogue. " Then she turned to herlover, who promised to inquire. Racowitza brought her information aboutthe Countess, the casket, and other "sensations"--only to excite hercuriosity the more. Finally a friend, Frau Hirsemenzel, undertook tointroduce her to the notorious Socialist. The introduction took place ata party, and if her account is to be trusted, no romance could be moredramatic than the actuality. They loved one another at first sight, conversed with freedom, and he called her by an endearing name as heoffered her his arm to escort her home. 

"Somehow it did not seem at all remarkable, " she says, "that a strangershould thus call me 'Du' on first acquaintance. We seemed to fit to oneanother so perfectly. "

She was in her nineteenth year, Lassalle in his thirty-ninth. The pairdid not see one another again for some months, not in fact until Helenvisited Berlin as the guest of a certain lawyer Holthoff. Here she metLassalle at a concert, and the friendly lawyer connived at their beingmore than once together. At a ball, on one occasion, Lassalle asked herwhat she would do if he were sentenced to death, and she beheld himascending the scaffold. 

"I should wait till your head was severed, " was her answer, "in orderthat you might look upon your beloved to the last, and then--I shouldtake poison. "

He was pleased with her reply, but declared that there was no fear--hisstar was in the ascendant! And so it seemed; for although youngRacowitza even then accosted him in the ballroom, the friendly Holthoffsoon arranged an informal betrothal; and Lassalle was on the eve of agreat public triumph which seemed more likely to take him to the thronethan to the scaffold. 

To many this will seem an exaggeration. Yet hear Prince Bismarck in theReichstag seventeen years after Lassalle's death:--

 He was one of the most intellectual and gifted men with whom I have ever had intercourse, a man who was ambitious in high style, but who was by no means Republican: he had very decided national and monarchical sympathies, and the idea which he strove to realize was the German Empire, and therein we had a point of contact. Lassalle was extremely ambitious, and it was perhaps a matter of doubt to him whether the German Empire would close with the Hohenzollern dynasty or the Lassalle dynasty; but he was monarchical through and through. Lassalle was an energetic and very intellectual man, to talk with whom was very instructive. Our conversations lasted for hours, and I was always sorry when they came to an end. {198}

The year 1864, which was to close so tragically, opened indeed withextraordinary promise. Lassalle left Berlin in May--Helen had gone backto Geneva two or three months earlier--travelling by Leipzig and Colognethrough the Rhenish provinces, and holding a "glorious review" the while. 

 "I have never seen anything like it, " he writes to the Countess von Hatzfeldt. "The entire population indulged in indescribable jubilation. The impression made upon me was that such scenes must have attended the founding of new religions. "

And it appeared possible that Heine's description of Lassalle as theMessiah of the nineteenth century was to be realized. The Bishop ofMayence was on his side, and the King of Prussia sympathetic. As hepassed from town to town the whole population turned out to do himhonour. Countless thousands met him at the stations: the routes wereornamented with triumphal arches, the houses decorated with wreaths, andflowers were thrown upon him as he passed. As the cavalcade approachedthe town of Ronsdorf, for example, it was easy to see that the peoplewere on tip-toe with expectation. At the entrance an arch bore theinscription:--

 Willkommen dem Dr. Ferdinand Lassalle Viel tausendmal im Ronsdorfer Thal!

Under arches and garlands, smothered with flowers thrown by young work-girls, whose fathers, husbands, brothers, cheered again and again, Lassalle and his friends entered the town, while a vast multitudefollowed in procession. It was at Ronsdorf that Lassalle made the speechwhich had in it something of fateful presentiment:--

 "I have not grasped this banner, " he said, "without knowing quite clearly that I myself may fall. The feelings which fill me at the thought that I may be removed cannot be better expressed than in the words of the Roman poet:

 '_Exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor_!'

 or in German, '_Moge_, _wenn ich beseitigt werde_, _irgend ein Racher und Nachfolger aus meinen Gebeinen auferstehen_!' May this great and national movement of civilization not fall with my person, but may the conflagration which I have kindled spread farther and farther, so long as one of you still breathes. Promise me that, and in token raise your right hands. "

All hands were raised in silence, and the impressive scene closed with astorm of acclamation. 

But Lassalle was worn out, and he fled for a time from the storm andconflict to Switzerland. Helen at Geneva heard of his sojourn at Righi-Kaltbad, and she made an excursion thither with two or three friends, andthus on July 25 (1864) the lovers met again. An account of theirromantic interview comes to us in Helen's own diary and in the letterwhich Lassalle wrote to the Countess Hatzfeldt two days later. Helentells how they climbed the Kulm together, discussing by the way thequestion of their marriage and the possibility of opposition. 

"What have your parents against me?" asked Lassalle; and was told thatonly once had she mentioned his name before them, and that their horrorof the Jew agitator had ever since closed her mouth. So the conversationsped. The next morning their hope of "a sunrise" was destroyed by a fog. "How often, " says Helen, "when in later years I have stood upon thesummit of the Righi and seen the day break in all its splendour, have Irecalled this foggy, damp morning, and Lassalle's disappointment!"

As he looked upon her, so pale and trembling, he abused the climate, andpromised that he would give up politics, devote himself to science andliterature, and take her to Egypt or India. He talked to her of theCountess, "who will think only of my happiness, " and he talked ofreligion. Was his Jewish faith against him in her eyes? Mahommedanismand Judaism, it was all one to her, was the answer, but paganism bypreference! They parted, to correspond immediately, and Lassalle towrite to the astonished, and in this affair, unsympathetic Countess, ofthe meeting with his beloved. With the utmost friendliness, however, heendeavoured to keep the elder lady at a distance for a time. 

On July 20 Helen writes to him, repeating her promise to become his wife. 

 You said to me yesterday: "Say but a sensible and decided 'Yes'--_et je me charge du reste_. " Good; I say "Yes"--_chargez-vous donc du reste_. I only require that we first do all in our power to win my parents to a friendly attitude. To me belongs, however, a painful task. I must slay in cold blood the true heart of Yanko von Racowitza, who has given me the purest love, the noblest devotion. With heartless egotism I must destroy the day-dream of a noble youth. But for your sake I will even do what is wrong. 

Meanwhile Lassalle's unhappy attempts to conciliate the Countesscontinue. He writes of Helen's sympathy and dwells upon her entirefreedom from jealousy. He tells Frau von Hatzfeldt how much Helen islonging to see his old friend. In conclusion, as though not to showhimself too blind a lover, he remarks that Helen's one failing is a totallack of will. "When, however, we are man and wife, " he adds, "then shallI have 'will' enough for both, and she will be as clay in the hands ofthe potter. " The Countess continues obdurate, and in a further letter(Aug. 2) Lassalle says:--

 It is really a piece of extraordinary good fortune that, at the age of thirty-nine and a half, I should be able to find a wife so beautiful, so sympathetic, who loves me so much, and who--an indispensable requirement--is so entirely absorbed in my personality. 

At Lassalle's request, Helen herself wrote thus to the Baroness vonHatzfeldt:--

 DEAR AND BELOVED COUNTESS, --

 Armed with an introduction from my lord and master, I, his affianced wife, come to you--unhappily only in writing--_le coeur et la main ouverte_, and beg of you a little of that friendship which you have given to him so abundantly. How deeply do I regret that your illness separates us, that I cannot tell you face to face how much I love and honour him, how ardently I long for your help and advice as to how I can best make my beautiful and noble eagle happy. This my first letter must necessarily seem somewhat constrained to you; for I am an insignificant, unimportant being, who can do nothing but love and honour him, and strive to make him happy. I would fain dance and sing like a child, and drive away all care from him. My one desire is to understand his great and noble nature, and in good fortune and in bad to stand faithful and true by his side. 

Then followed a further appeal for the love and help of this friend ofLassalle's early years. It was all in vain. Instead of a letter, Helenreceived from the Countess what she called "a scrawl, " and Lassalle along homily on his lack of judgment and foresight. Lassalle defendedhimself, and so the not too pleasing correspondence went on. 

Yet these days in Berne were the happiest in the lives of Lassalle andhis betrothed. Helen was staying with a Madame Aarson, and wasconstantly visited by her lover. It was agreed between them thatLassalle should follow her to Geneva, and see her parents. But no soonerhad he entered his room at the Pension Leovet, in the neighbourhood ofthe house of Herr von Donniges, than a servant handed him a letter fromHelen. It told how on her arrival she had found the whole house excitedby the betrothal of her sister Margaret to Count von Keyserling. Hermother's delight in the engagement had tempted her (contrary toLassalle's express wish) to confidences, and she had told of her love forthe arch-agitator. Her mother had turned upon her with loathing, execrated Lassalle without stint, spoken scornfully of the Countess, thecasket robbery, and kindred matters. "It is quite impossible, " urged thefrantic woman, "that Count Keyserling will unite himself to a family witha connexion of this kind. " The father joined in the upbraiding, thedisowning of an undutiful daughter. One has but to remember the vulgar, tradesman instinct, which then, as now, guides the marriage ideals of acertain class, to take in the whole situation at a glance. 

Lassalle had hardly begun to read the letter when Helen appeared beforehim, and begged him to take her away immediately--to France--anywhere!Her father's violence, her mother's abuse, had driven her to despair. 

Lassalle was indignant with her. Why had she not obeyed him? He wouldspeak to her father. All would yet be well. But--she was compromisedthere--at his hotel. Had she a friend in the neighbourhood?

At this moment her maid came in to say that there was a carriage ready totake them to the station. A train would start for Paris in a quarter ofan hour. Helen renewed her entreaty, but Lassalle remained resolute. Hewould only receive her from her father. To what friend could he takeher? Helen named Madame Caroline Rognon, who beheld them withastonishment. 

A few minutes later Frau von Donniges and her daughter Margaret enteredthe house. Then followed a disagreeable scene between Lassalle and themother, ending, after many scornful words thrown at the everself-restrained lover, in Helen being carried off before his eyes--indeed, by his wish. Lassalle had shown dignity and self-restraint, but he hadkilled the girl's love--until it was too late. 

Duhring speaks of Lassalle's "inconceivable stupidity, " and there is agreat temptation at this date, with all the circumstances before us, tolook at the matter with Duhring's eyes. But to one whom Heine had calleda Messiah, whom Humboldt had termed a "Wunderkind, " and Bismarck hadgreeted as among the greatest men of the age, it may well have seemedflatly inconceivable that this insignificant little Swiss diplomatistcould long refuse the alliance he proposed. Yet stronger and more potentmay have been the feeling--although of this there is no positive evidenceextant--that the social movement which he had so much at heart could notwell endure a further scandal. The Hatzfeldt story had been used againsthim frequently enough. An elopement--so sweetly romantic under somecircumstances--would have been the ruin of his great politicalreputation. 

Lassalle speedily regretted his course of action--what man in love wouldnot have done so?--but his first impulse was consistent with the life ofstrenuous effort for the cause he had embraced. To a romantic girl, however, his conduct could but seem brutal and treacherous. Helen haddone more than enough. She had compromised herself irretrievably, and animmediate marriage was imperatively demanded by the conventionalities. She was, however, seized by a brutal father and confined to her room, until she understood that Lassalle had left Geneva. Then the entreatiesof her family, the representation that her sister's marriage, even herfather's position, were in jeopardy, caused her to declare that she wouldabandon Lassalle. 

At this point the story is conflicting. Helen herself says that shenever saw Lassalle again after he had handed her over to her mother, andthat after a long period of ill-usage and petty persecution, she washurried one night across the lake. Becker, however, declares that asLassalle and his friend Rustow were walking in Geneva a carriage passedthem on the way to the station containing Helen and another lady, andthat Helen acknowledged their salute. Anyway, it is clear that Helenwent to Bex on August 9, and that Lassalle left Geneva on the 13th. Letter after letter was sent by Lassalle to Helen--one from Karlsruhe onthe 15th, and one from Munich on the 19th, but no answer. In Karlsruhe, according to von Hofstetten, Lassalle wept like a child. Hiscorrespondence with the Countess and with Colonel Rustow becomes forciblein its demands for assistance. Writing to Rustow, he tells of a twohours' conversation with the Bavarian Minister for Foreign Affairs, Baronvon Schrenk, who assures him of his sympathy, says that he cannotunderstand the objections of von Donniges, and that in similarcircumstances he would be proud of the alliance, although he deprecatedthe political views of Lassalle. Finally this accommodating Minister ofState--here, at least, the tragi-comedy is but too apparent--engages tosend a lawyer, Dr. Haenle, as an official commissioner to negotiate withthe obdurate father and refractory ambassador. 

Richard Wagner, the great composer, the Bishop of Mayence, and noblemen, generals, and scholars without number were also pressed into the service, but in vain. The treachery of intimate friends more than counterbalancedall that could be achieved by well-meaning strangers. If Helen is to bebelieved--and the charge is not denied--Lassalle's friend Holthoff, sentto negotiate in his favour, entreated her to abandon Lassalle, and tocomply with her parents' wishes. Lassalle, he declared, was not in anyway a suitable husband, and her father had decided wisely. The poor girllived in a constant atmosphere of petty persecution. Her father, she wastold, might lose his post in the Bavarian service if she married thisSocialist, her brother would have absolutely no career open to him, hersisters could not marry in their own rank of life; in fact, the wholefamily were alleged to be entirely unhappy and miserable through herstubbornness. The following letter--obviously dictated--was the notunnatural outcome:--

 TO HERR LASSALLE. 

 SIR, --

 I have again become reconciled to my betrothed bridegroom, Herr Yanko von Racowitza, whose love I have regained, and I deeply repent my earlier action. I have given notice of this to your legal representative, Herr Holthoff, and I now declare to you of my own free will and firm conviction, that there never can be any further question of a marriage between us, and that I hold myself in all respects to be released from such an engagement. I am now firmly resolved to devote to my aforesaid betrothed bridegroom my eternal love and fidelity. 

 HELENE VON DONNIGES. 

This letter came through Rustow, and Lassalle addressed the followingreply to Helen, which, however, she never received--it came in fact intothe possession of the Countess--a sufficient commentary on the duplicityand the false friendship not only of Holthoff, but of Colonel Rustow andthe Countess Hatzfeldt in this sad affair. 

 MUNICH, _Aug. _ 20, 1864. 

 HELEN, --

 My heart is breaking! Rustow's letter will kill me. That you have betrayed me seems impossible! Even now I cannot believe in such shamelessness, in such frightful treachery. It is only for a moment that some one has overridden your will and obliterated your true self. It is inconceivable that this can be your real, your abiding determination. You cannot have thrown aside all shame, all love, all fidelity, all truth. If you did, you would dishonour and disfigure humanity. There can be no truth left in the world if you are false, if you are capable of descending to this depth of abandonment, of breaking such holy oaths, of crushing my heart. Then there is nothing more under the sun in which a man can still believe. 

 Have you not filled me with a longing to possess you? Have you not implored me to exhaust all proper measures, before carrying you away from Wabern? Have you not by your own lips and by your letters, sworn to me the most sacred oaths? Have you not declared to me, even in your last letters, that you were nothing, nothing but my loving wife, and that no power on earth should stay your resolution? And now, after you have bound this true heart of mine to yourself so strongly, this heart which when once it gives itself away gives itself for ever; now, when the battle has scarcely begun, do you cast me off? Do you betray me? Do you destroy me? If so, you succeed in doing what else no fate can do; you will have crushed and shattered one of the hardest of men, who could withstand unflinchingly all outward storms. No, I can never survive such treachery. It will kill me inwardly and outwardly. It is not possible that you are so dishonourable, so shameless, so reckless of duty, so utterly unworthy and infamous. If you were, you would deserve of me the most deadly hatred. You would deserve the contempt of the world. Helen, it is not your own resolution which you have communicated to Rustow. Some one has fastened it upon you by a coercion of your better feelings. Listen to me. If you abide by this resolution, you will lament it as long as you live. 

 Helen, true to my words, "_Je me charge du reste_, " I shall stay here, and shall take all possible steps to break down your father's opposition. I have already excellent means in my hand, which will certainly not remain unused, and if they do not succeed, I shall still possess thousands of other means, and I will grind all hindrances to dust if you will but remain true to me. If you remain true, there is no limit to my strength or to my love of you, _Je me charge toujours du reste_! The battle is hardly begun, you cowardly girl. But can it be, that while I sit here, and have already achieved what seemed impossible, you are betraying me, and listening to the flattering words of another man? Helen, my fate is in your hands! But if you destroy me by this wicked treachery, from which I cannot recover, then may evil fall upon you, and my curse follow you to the grave! This is the curse of a true heart, of a heart that you wantonly break, and with which you have cruelly trifled. Yes, this curse of mine will surely strike you. 

 According to Rustow's message, you want your letters to be returned to you. In any case, you will never receive them otherwise than from me--after a personal interview. For I must and will speak to you personally, and to you alone. I must and will hear my death-doom from your own lips. It is only thus that I can believe what otherwise seems impossible to me. 

 I am continuing here to take further steps to win you, and when I have done all that is possible, I shall come to Geneva. Helen, our destinies are entwined!

 F. LASSALLE. {213}

It is pitiable to realize the amount of false or imperfect friendshipwhich led Lassalle on to his ruin. Rustow was false, and Holthoff wasfalse, if it were not rather that both looked upon Lassalle's affectionfor this girl, half his age, as a mad freak to be cured and forgotten. More might have been expected from the Countess, to whom Lassalle hadgiven so much pure and disinterested devotion; but here again, a sense ofmaternal ownership in Lassalle was sufficient to justify, in such awoman, any means to keep him apart from this fancy of the hour. To theCountess, however, Helen had turned for help, and had received a notewhich had but enraged her, and made the breach between her and Lassalleyet wider. In the after years, Helen published one letter and theCountess another as the actual reply of the Countess to Helen's appeal, and the truth will now never be known. Meanwhile Dr. Arndt, a nephew ofvon Donniges, had gone to Berlin to fetch Yanko von Racowitza. Of YankoHelen has herself given us a pleasant picture, as the one man for whomshe really cared until the overwhelming presence of Lassalle appearedupon the scene, as her one friend during her persecution. Absent fromLassalle's influence, it was not strange that the delicateWallachian--even younger than herself and the slave of her everywhim--should have an influence in her life. Had Lassalle, however, hadyet another personal interview with her, there can scarcely be a doubtthat she would have been as he had once said, "as clay in the hands ofthe potter"--but this was not to be. Lassalle came back to Geneva onAugust 23, and immediately wrote an earnest letter to Herr von Donniges, begging for an interview, and stating that he had not the least enmitytowards him for what had happened. With the fear of the Foreign Ministerat Munich before his eyes Helen's father could not well refuse again, andthe interview took place. Lassalle, according to von Donniges, demandedthat Yanko von Racowitza should be forbidden the house, while he himselfshould have ready access to Helen. He further charged von Donniges withcruelty to his daughter, and was called a liar to his face, while eventhe cook was called upon the scene to give her evidence as to thedomestic ethics of this family circle. The letter of von Donniges to Dr. Haenle was clearly meant to be shown to the Foreign Minister, and thewily diplomatist naturally took the opportunity both to justify himselfand to vilify Lassalle. Then began a painful dispute as to whether Herrvon Donniges had ill-used his daughter; the overwhelming evidence, whichincludes the testimony of that daughter, written long after her father'sdeath, tending to prove the truth of Lassalle's allegation. Lassallemeanwhile found no opportunity of approaching Helen, and having everyreason to believe that she was entirely faithless, gave up the struggle. He referred to the girl in language characteristic of a despairing andjilted lover, and sent von Donniges a challenge, although many yearsbefore, in a political controversy, he had declined to fight--onprinciple. His seconds were to be General Becker and Colonel Rustow, andthe latter has left us a long account of the affair. 

On the appointed day, August 22, Rustow went everywhere to look for Herrvon Donniges, but the minister had fled to Berne. Rustow then sawLassalle at the rooms of the Countess von Hatzfeldt. Lassalle mentionedthat he had that morning had his challenge accepted by von Racowitza, whose seconds were Count Keyserling and Dr. Arndt. Rustow insisted, bothto Lassalle and to Racowitza's friends, that von Donniges should havepriority, but was overruled; and it was agreed that the duel should befought that very evening. Rustow protested that he could not findanother second in so short a time--General Becker does not seem to havebeen available--but at length it was arranged that General Bethlem shouldbe asked to fill the office, and that the duel should take place on thefollowing morning, August 28. There seems to have been considerabledifficulty in finding suitable pistols, and at the last moment GeneralBethlem declined to be a second, and Herr von Hofstetten consented toact. Rustow called upon Lassalle at the Victoria Hotel at five o'clock. At half-past six the party started for Carouge, a village in theneighbourhood of Geneva, which they reached an hour later. Lassalle wasquite cheerful, and perfectly confident that he would come unharmed outof the conflict. The opponents faced one another and Racowitza woundedLassalle, who was carried by Rustow and Dr. Seiler to a coach, and thenceto the Victoria Hotel, Geneva. He suffered dreadfully both then andafterwards, and was only relieved by a plentiful use of opium. Threedays later, on Wednesday, August 31, 1864, he died. 

Was it the chance shot of a delicate boy that killed one of the mostremarkable men of the nineteenth century, or was it a planned attack uponone who loved the people? This last view was taken and is still taken bymany of his followers; but it is needless to say that it has nofoundation in fact. Lassalle was killed by a chance shot, and killed ina duel which had not even the doubtful justification of hatred of hisopponent. "Count me no longer as a rival; for you I have nothing butfriendship, " were the words written to Racowitza at the moment that hechallenged von Donniges, and he declared on his death-bed that he died byhis own hand. 

The revolutionists of all lands assembled around his dead body, which wasembalmed by order of the Countess. This woman talked loudly ofvengeance, called not only von Racowitza but Helen a murderer, {218}little thinking that posterity would judge her more hardly than Helen. She proposed to take the corpse in solemn procession through Germany; butan order from the Prussian Government disturbed her plans, and atBreslau, Lassalle's native town, it was allowed to rest. Lassalle isburied in the family vault in the Jewish Cemetery, and a simple monumentbears the inscription:

 HERE RESTS WHAT IS MORTAL OF FERDINAND LASSALLE, THE THINKER AND THE FIGHTER. 

To understand the whole tragedy and to justify its great victim is tofeel something of the strain which comes to every thinker and fighterwho, like Lassalle, writes and speaks persistently to vast audiences, often against great odds, and always with the prospect of a prison beforehim. That his nerves were utterly unstrung, that he was not his realself in those last days, is but too evident. Armed, as he claimed, withthe entire culture of his century, a maker of history if ever there wasone, he became the victim of a love drama which I suppose that Mr. Matthew Arnold would describe as of the surgeon's apprentice order: butwhich, apart from his political creed, will always endear him to men andwomen who have "lived and loved. "

And what shall we say of Helen von Donniges? Her own story is surely oneof the most romantic ever written. In _My Relation to FerdinandLassalle_, she tells how Yanko broke to her the news that he was going tofight Lassalle, and how much she grieved. "Lassalle will inevitably killYanko, " she thought; and she pitied him, but her pity was not withoutcalculation. "When Yanko is dead and they bring his body here, therewill be a stir in the house, " she said, "and I can then fly to Lassalle. "But the hours flew by, and finally Yanko came to tell her that he hadwounded his opponent. For the moment, and indeed until after Lassalle'sdeath, she hated her successful lover; but a little later his undoubtedgoodness, his tenderness and patience, won her heart. They were married, but he died within a year, of consumption. Being disowned by herrelations, Helen then settled in Berlin, and studied for the stage. Sheherself relates how at Breslau on one occasion, when acting a boy's partin one of Moser's comedies, some of Lassalle's oldest friends beingpresent remarked upon her likeness to Lassalle in his youth, aresemblance on which she and Lassalle had more than once pridedthemselves. At a later date Frau von Racowitza married a RussianSocialist, S. E. Shevitch, then resident in America. M. Shevitchreturned to Russia a few years after this and lived with his wife atRiga. Those who have seen Madame Shevitch describe her as one of themost fascinating women they have ever met. She and her husband were veryhappy in their married life. Madame Shevitch is now living in Munich. Our great novelist and poet George Meredith has immortalized her in his_Tragic Comedians_. 

VIII. LORD ACTON'S LIST OF THE HUNDRED BEST BOOKS

Every one has heard of Lord Avebury's (Sir John Lubbock's) Hundred BestBooks, not every one of Lord Acton's. It is the privilege of the _PallMall Magazine_ {225} to publish this latter list, the final impression asto reading of one of the most scholarly men that England has known in ourtime. The list in question is, as it were, an omitted chapter of a bookthat was one of the successes of its year--_The Letters of Lord Acton toMiss Mary Gladstone_--published by Mr. George Allen. That series ofletters made very pleasant reading. They showed Lord Acton not as aDryasdust, but as a very human personage indeed, with sympathiesinvariably in the right place. 

Nor can his literary interests be said to have been restricted, for heread history and biography with avidity, and probably knew more oftheology than any other layman of modern times. In imaginativeliterature, however, his critical instinct was perhaps less keen. Hecalled Heine "a bad second to Schiller in poetry, " which is absurd; andhe thought George Eliot the greatest of modern novelists. In arriving atthe latter judgment he had the excuse of personal friendship andadmiration for a woman whose splendid intellectual gifts were undeniable. 

In one letter we find Lord Acton discussing with Miss Gladstone theeternal question of the hundred best books. Sir John Lubbock hadcomplained to her of the lack of a guide or supreme authority on thechoice of books. Lord Acton had replied that, "although he had somethingto learn on the graver side of human knowledge, " Sir John would executehis own scheme better than almost anybody. We all know that Sir JohnLubbock attempted this at a lecture delivered at the Great Ormond StreetWorking Men's College; that that lecture has been reprinted again andagain in a book entitled _The Pleasures of Life_, and that the publishershave sold more than two hundred thousand copies--a kind of success thatmight almost make some of our popular novelists turn green with envy. Later on in the correspondence Lord Acton quoted one of the popes, whosaid that "fifty books would include every good idea in the world. ""But, " continued Lord Acton, "literature has doubled since then, and itwould be hard to do without a hundred. "

Lord Acton was possessed of the happy thought that he would like some ofhis friends and acquaintances each to name his ideal hundred bestbooks--as for example Bishop Lightfoot, Dean Church, Dean Stanley, CanonLiddon, Professor Max Muller, Mr. J. R. Lowell, Professor E. A. Freeman, Mr. W. E. H. Lecky, Mr. John Morley, Sir Henry Maine, the Duke of Argyll, Lord Tennyson, Cardinal Newman, Mr. Gladstone, Matthew Arnold, ProfessorGoldwin Smith, Mr. R. H. Hutton, Mr. Mark Pattison, and Mr. J. A. Symonds. Strange to say, he thought there would be a surprisingagreement between these writers as to which were the hundred best books. I am all but certain, however, that there would not have been more thantwenty books in common between rival schools of thought--the secular andthe ecclesiastical--between, let us say, Mr. John Morley and CardinalNewman. But it is probable that not one of these eminent men would havefurnished a list with any similarity whatever to the remainder. Eachwould have written down his own hundred favourites, and herein may beadmitted is an evidence of the futility of all such attempts. The bestbooks are the books that have helped us most to see life in all itscomplex bearings, and each individual needs a particular kind of mentalfood quite unlike the diet that best stimulates his neighbour. Writingmore than a year later, Lord Acton said that he had just drawn out a listof recommended authors for his son, as being the company he would likehim to keep; but this list is not available--it is not the one before me. That was compiled yet another twelve months afterwards, when we find LordActon sending to Miss Mary Gladstone (Mrs. Drew) his own ideal "hundredbest books. " This list is now printed for the first time. EvidentlyMiss Gladstone remonstrated with her friend over the character of thelist; but Lord Acton defended it as being in his judgment really thehundred _best books_, apart from works on physical science--that ittreated of principles that every thoughtful man ought to understand, andwas calculated, in fact, to give one a clear view of the various forcesthat make history. "We are not considering, " he adds, "what will suit anuntutored savage or an illiterate peasant woman, who would never come toan end of the _Imitation_. "

However, here is Lord Acton's list, which Mrs. Drew has been kind enoughto place in the hands of the Editor of the _Pall Mall Magazine_. I givealso Lord Acton's comment with which it opens, and I add in footnotes oneor two facts about each of the authors:

* * * * *

"In answer to the question: Which are the hundred best books in theworld?

"Supposing any English youth, whose education is finished, who knowscommon things, and is not training for a profession. 

"To perfect his mind and open windows in every direction, to raise him tothe level of his age so that he may know the (20 or 30) forces that havemade our world what it is and still reign over it, to guard him againstsurprises and against the constant sources of error within, to supply himboth with the strongest stimulants and the surest guides, to give forceand fullness and clearness and sincerity and independence and elevationand generosity and serenity to his mind, that he may know the method andlaw of the process by which error is conquered and truth is won, discerning knowledge from probability and prejudice from belief, that hemay learn to master what he rejects as fully as what he adopts, that hemay understand the origin as well as the strength and vitality of systemsand the better motive of men who are wrong, to steel him against thecharm of literary beauty and talent; so that each book, thoroughly takenin, shall be the beginning of a new life, and shall make a new man ofhim--this list is submitted":--

1. Plato--_Laws_--Steinhart's _Introduction_. {230a}

2. Aristotle--_Politics_--Susemihl's _Commentary_. {230b}

3. Epictetus--_Encheiridion_--_Commentary_ of Simplicius. {230c}

4. St. Augustine--_Letters_. {230d}

5. St. Vincent's _Commonitorium_. {231a}

6. Hugo of S. Victor--_De Sacramentis_. {231b}

7. St. Bonaventura--_Breviloquium_. {231c}

8. St. Thomas Aquinas--_Summa contra Gentiles_. {231d}

9. Dante--_Divina Commedia_. {232a}

10. Raymund of Sabunde--_Theologia Naturalis_. {232b}

11. Nicholas of Cusa--_Concordantia Catholica_. {232c}

12. Edward Reuss--_The Bible_. {232d}

13. Pascal's Pensees--_Havet's Edition_. {233a}

14. Malebranche, _De la Recherche de la Verite_. {233b}

15. Baader--_Speculative Dogmatik_. {233c}

16. Molitor--_Philosophie der Geschichte_. {233d}

17. Astie--_Esprit de Vinet_. {233e}

18. Punjer--_Geschichte der Religions-philosophie_. {234a}

19. Rothe--_Theologische Ethik_. {234b}

20. Martensen--_Die Christliche Ethik_. {234c}

21. Oettingen--_Moralstatistik_. {234d}

22. Hartmann--_Phanomenologie des sittlichen Bewusstseins_. {234e}

23. Leibniz--_Letters_ edited by Klopp. {235a}

24. Brandis--_Geschichte der Philosophie_. {235b}

25. Fischer--_Franz Bacon_. {235c}

26. Zeller--_Neuere Deutsche Philosophie_. {235d}

27. Bartholomess--_Doctrines Religieuses de la Philosophie Moderns_. {236a}

28. Guyon--_Morale Anglaise_. {236b}

29. Ritschl--_Entstehung der Altkatholischen Kirche_. {236c}

30. Loening--_Geschichte des Kirchenrechts_. {236d}

31. Baur--_Vorlesungen uber Dogmengeschichte_. {237a}

32. Fenelon--_Correspondence_. {237b}

33. Newman's _Theory of Development_. {237c}

34. Mozley's _University Sermons_. {237d}

35. Schneckenburger--_Vergleichende Darstellung_. {238a}

36. Hundeshagen--_Kirckenvorfassungsgeschichte_. {238b}

37. Schweizer--_Protestantische Centraldogmen_. {238c}

38. Gass--_Geschichte der Lutherischen Dogmatik_. {238d}

39. Cart--_Histoire du Mouvement Religieux dans le Canton de Vaud_. {238e}

40. Blondel--_De la Primaute_. {239a}

41. Le Blanc de Beaulieu--_Theses_. {239b}

42. Thiersch. --_Vorlesungen uber Katholizismus_. {239c}

43. Mohler--_Neue Untersuchungen_. {239d}

44. Scherer--_Melanges de Critique Religieuse_. {240a}

45. Hooker--_Ecclesiastical Polity_. {240b}

46. Weingarten--_Revolutionskirchen Englands_. {240c}

47. Kliefoth--_Acht Bucher von der Kirche_. {240d}

48. Laurent--_Etudes de l'Histoire de l'Humanite_. {240e}

49. Ferrari--_Revolutions de l'ltalie_. {241a}

50. Lange--_Geschichte des Materialismus_. {241b}

51. Guicciardini--_Ricordi Politici_. {241c}

52. Duperron--_Ambassades_. {241d}

53. Richelieu--_Testament Politique_. {242a}

54. Harrington's Writings. {242b}

55. Mignet--_Negotiations de la Succession d'Espagne_. {242c}

56. Rousseau--_Considerations sur la Pologne_. {243a}

57. Foncin--_Ministere de Turgot_. {243b}

58. Burke's _Correspondence_. {243c}

59. Las Cases--_Memorial de Ste. Helene_. {243d}

60. Holtzendorff--_Systematische Rechtsenzyklopadie_. {244a}

61. Jhering--_Geist des Romischen Rechts_. {244b}

62. Geib--_Strafrecht_. {244c}

63. Maine--_Ancient Law_. {245a}

64. Gierke--_Genossenschaftsrecht_. {245b}

65. Stahl--_Philosophie des Rechts_. {245c}

66. Gentz--_Briefwechsel mit Adam Muller_. {246a}

67. Vollgraff--_Polignosie_. {246b}

68. Frantz--_Kritik aller Parteien_. {246c}

69. De Maistre--_Considerations sur la France_. {246d}

70. Donoso Cortes--_Ecrits Politiques_. {247a}

71. Perin--_De la Richesse dans les Societes Chretiennes_. {247b}

72. Le Play--_La Reforme Sociale_. {247c}

73. Riehl--_Die Burgerliche Sociale_. {247d}

74. Sismondi--_Etudes sur les Constitutions des Peuples Libres_. {248a}

75. Rossi--_Cours du Droit Constitutionnel_. {248b}

76. Barante--_Vie de Royer Collard_. {248c}

77. Duvergier de Hauranne--_Histoire du Gouvernement Parlementaire_. {249a}

78. Madison--_Debates of the Congress of Confederation_. {249b}

79. Hamilton--_The Federalist_. {249c}

80. Calhoun--_Essay on Government_. {249d}

81. Dumont--_Sophismes Anarchiques_. {250a}

82. Quinet--_La Revolution Francaise_. {250b}

83. Stein--_Sozialismus in Frankreich_. {250c}

84. Lassalle--_System der Erworbenen Rechte_. {251a}

85. Thonissen--_Le Socialisme depuis l'Antiquite_. {251b}

86. Considerant--_Destines Sociale_. {251c}

87. Roscher--_Nationalokonomik_. {251d}

89. Mill--_System of Logic_. {251e}

90. Coleridge--_Aids to Reflection_. {252a}

91. Radowitz--_Fragmente_. {252b}

92. Gioberti--_Pensieri_. {252c}

93. Humboldt--_Kosmos_. {253a}

94. De Candolle--_Histoire des Sciences et des Savants_. {253b}

95. Darwin--_Origin of Species_. {253c}

96. Littre--_Fragments de Philosophie_. {253d}

97. Cournot--_Enchainements des Idees fondamentales_. {253e}

98. _Monatschriften der wissenschaftlichen Vereine_. {254}

This list, written in 1883 in Miss Gladstone's (Mrs. Drew's) Diary, mustalways have an interest in the history of the human mind. 

But my readers will, I imagine, for the most part, agree with me thatthere are others besides untutored savages and illiterate peasant womento whom such a list is entirely impracticable. It indicates the enormouspreference which on the whole Lord Acton gave to the Literature ofKnowledge over the Literature of Power, to use De Quincey's famousdistinction. With the exception of Dante's _Divine Comedy_ there ispractically not a single book that has any title whatever to a place inthe Literature of Power, a literature which many of us think the onlything in the world of books worth consideration. Great philosophy ishere, and high thought. Who would for a moment wish to disparage St. Bonaventure, the Seraphic Doctor, or Aquinas the Angelic? Plato andPascal, Malebranche and Fenelon, Bossuet and Machiavelli are all amongthe world's immortals. Yet now and again we are bewildered by findingthe least important book of a well-known author--as for exampleRousseau's _Poland_ instead of the _Confessions_ and Coleridge's _Aids toReflection_ instead of the _Poems_ or the _Biographia Literaria_. Thinkof an historian whose ideal of historical work was so high that hedespised all who worked only from printed documents, selecting the_Memorial of St. Helena_ of Las Casas in preference not only to a hundred-and-one similar compilations concerning Napoleon's exile, but inpreference to Thucydides, Herodotus and Gibbon. 

Sometimes Lord Acton names a theologian who is absolutely out-of-date, atothers a philosopher who is in the same case. But on the whole it is afascinating list as an index to what a well-trained mind thought thenoblest mental equipment for life's work. At the best, it is true, itwould represent but one half of life. But then Lord Acton recognizedthis when he asked that men should be "steeled against the charm ofliterary beauty and talent, " and he was assuming in any case that all thebooks in aesthetic literature, the best poetry and the best history hadalready been read, as he undoubtedly had read them. 

"The charm of literary beauty and talent!" There is the whole question. Nothing really matters for the average man, so far as books areconcerned, but this charm, and I am criticizing Lord Acton's list for theaverage man. The student who has got beyond it need not worry himselfabout classified lists. He may read his Plato, and Aristotle, his Pascaland Newman, his Christian apologists and German theologians, as he wills;or he may read in some other quite different direction. Guidance isimpossible to a mind at such a stage of cultivation as Lord Acton had inview. 

Only minds at a more primitive stage of culture than this most learnedand most accomplished man seemed able to conceive of, could be betteredby advice as to reading. Given, indeed, contact with some superior mind, which out of its rich equipment of culture should advise as to the booksthat might be most profitably read, I could imagine advice being helpful. It would be of no value, it is true, to an untutored savage or illiteratepeasant, but to a youth fresh from school-books and much modern fiction, to a young girl about to enter upon life in its more serious aspects, itwould be immensely serviceable. It was of such as these that Mr. Ruskinthought when he wrote of "King's Treasures" in _Sesame and Lilies_, andthe same idea was doubtless in Sir John Lubbock's mind when he lecturedon the "Hundred Best Books. " But Lord Avebury's list had itslimitations, it seems to me, for any one who has an interest in goodliterature and guidance to the reading thereof. To give "Scott" as onebook and "Shakspere" as another was I suggest to shirk muchresponsibility of selection. Scott is a whole library, Shakspere is yetanother. One may give "Keats" or "Shelley" because they are more limitedin quantity. Even to name novels by Charles Kingsley and Bulwer Lyttonin this select hundred was to demonstrate to men of this generation thatLord Avebury being of an earlier one had a bias in favour of the booksthat we are all outgrowing. To include Mill's _Logic_ is to ignore theTime Spirit acting on philosophy; to include Tennyson's _Idylls_ itsaction on poetry. Mill and Tennyson will always live in literature butnot I think by these books. 

But the fact is that there is no possibility of naming the hundred bestbooks. No one could quarrel with Lord Avebury if he had named these ashis hundred own favourites among the books of the world. Still, it mighthave been _his_ hundred; it could not possibly have been any one else'shundred because every man of education must make his own choice. No! thenaming of the hundred best books for any large, general audience is quiteimpossible. All that is possible in such a connexion is to stateemphatically that there are very few books that are equally suitable toevery kind of intellect. Temperament as well as intellectual endowmentmake for so much in reading. Take, for example, the _Imitation_ of_Christ_. George Eliot, although not a Christian, found itsoul-satisfying. Thackeray, as I think a more robust intellect, found itwell nigh as mischievous as did Eugene Sue, whose anathematizations inhis novel _The Wandering Jew_ are remembered by all. Other books thathave been the outcome of piety of mind leave less room for difference ofopinion. Surely Dante's _Divine Comedy_, and Bunyan's _Pilgrim'sProgress_, make an universal appeal. That universal appeal is the pointat which alone guidance is possible. There are great books that can beread only by the few, but surely the very greatest appeal alike to theeducated and the illiterate, to the man of rich intellectual endowmentand to the man to whom all processes of reasoning are incomprehensible. _Hamlet_ is a wonderful test of this quality. It "holds the boards" atthe small provincial theatre, it is enacted by Mr. Crummles to anilliterate peasantry, and it is performed by the greatest actor to themost select city audience. It is made the subject of study by learnedcommentators. It is world-embracing. 

Are there in the English language, including translations, a hundredbooks that stand the test as _Hamlet_ stands it? No two men would makethe same list of books that answer to this demand of an universal appeal, and obviously each nation must make its own list. Mine is for Englishboys and girls just growing into manhood and womanhood, or for those whohave had no educational advantages in early years. I exclude livingwriters, and I give the hundred in four groups. 

POETRY. 

1. The Bible. {260a}

2. _The Odyssey_, translated by Butcher and Lang. {260b}

3. The _Iliad_, translated by Lang, Leaf and Myers. {260b}

4. Aeschylus, translated by George Warr. {261a}

5. Sophocles, translated by J. S. Phillimore. {261a}

6. Euripides, translated by Gilbert Murray. {261a}

7. Virgil, translated by Dryden. {261b}

8. Catullus, translated by Theodore Martin. {261c}

9. Horace, translated by Theodore Martin. {261d}

10. Dante, translated by Cary. {262a}

11. Shakspere, _Hamlet_. {262b}

12. Chaucer, _Canterbury Tales_. {262c}

13. FitzGerald, _Omar Khayyam_. {263a}

14. Goethe, _Faust_. {263b}

15. Shelley. {263c}

16. Byron. {263d}

17. Wordsworth. {264a}

18. Keats. {264b}

19. Burns. {264c}

20. Coleridge. {264d}

21. Cowper. {264e}

22. Crabbe. {265a}

23. Tennyson. {265b}

24. Browning. {265c}

25. Milton. {265d}

FICTION. 

1. _The Arabian Nights Entertainment_. {266a}

2. _Don Quixote_, by Cervantes. {266b}

3. _Pilgrim's Progress_, by Bunyan. {266c}

4. _Robinson Crusoe_, by Defoe. {266d}

5. _Gulliver's Travels_, by Swift. {267a}

6. _Clarissa_, by Richardson. {267b}

7. _Tom Jones_, by Fielding. {267c}

8. _Rasselas_, by Johnson. {267d}

9. _Vicar of Wakefield_, by Goldsmith. {268a}

10. _Sentimental Journey_, by Sterne. {268b}

11. _Nightmare Abbey_, by Peacock. {268c}

12. _Kenilworth_, by Walter Scott. {268d}

13. _Pere Goriot_, by Balzac. {268e}

14. _The Three Musketeers_, by Dumas. {269a}

15. _Vanity Fair_, by Thackeray. {269b}

16. _Villette_, by Charlotte Bronte. {269c}

17. _David Copperfield_, by Charles Dickens. {269d}

18. _Barchester Towers_, by Anthony Trollope. {269e}

19. Boccaccio's _Decameron_. {269f}

20. _Wuthering Heights_, by Emily Bronte. {270a}

21. _The Cloister and the Hearth_, by Charles Reade. {270b}

22. _Les Miserables_, by Victor Hugo. {270c}

23. _Cranford_, by Mrs. Gaskell. {270d}

24. _Consuelo_, by George Sand. {270e}

25. _Charles O'Malley_, by Charles Lever. {270f}

MISCELLANEOUS. HISTORY, ESSAYS, ETC. 

1. Macaulay, _History of England_. {271a}

2. Carlyle, _Past and Present_. {271b}

3. Motley, _Dutch Republic_. {271c}

4. Gibbon, _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_. {271d}

5. Plutarch's _Lives_. {272a}

6. Montaigne's _Essays_. {272b}

7. Richard Steele, _Essays_. {272c}

8. Lamb, _Essays of Elia_. {272d}

9. De Quincey, _Opium Eater_. {272e}

10. Hazlitt, _Essays_. {273a}

11. Borrow, _Lavengro_. {273b}

12. Emerson, _Representative Men_. {273c}

13. Landor, _Imaginary Conversations_. {273d}

14. Arnold, _Essays in Criticism_. {273e}

15. Herodotus, _Macaulay's Translation_. {273f}

16. Howell's _Familiar Letters_. {274a}

17. Buckle's _History of Civilization_. {274b}

18. Tacitus, Church and Brodribb's Translation. {274c}

19. Mitford's _Our Village_. {274d}

20. Green's _Short History of the English People_. {274e}

21. Taine, _Ancient Regime_. {275a}

22. Bourrienne, _Napoleon_. {275b}

23. Tocqueville, _Democracy in America_. {275c}

24. Walton, _Compleat Angler_. {275d}

25 White, _Natural History of Selbourne_. {276a}

BIOGRAPHICAL AND AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL. 

1. Boswell's Johnson. {276b}

2. Lockhart's Scott. {276c}

3. Pepys's Diary. {276d}

4. Walpole's Letters. {277a}

5. The Memoirs of Count de Gramont. {277b}

6. Gray's Letters. {277c}

7. Southey's Nelson. {277d}

8. Moore's Byron. {277e}

9. Hogg's Shelley. {278a}

10. Rousseau's Confessions. {278b}

11. Froude's Carlyle. {278c}

12. Rogers's Table Talk. {279a}

13. Confessions of St. Augustine. {279b}

14. Amiel's Journal. {279c}

15. Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. {279d}

16. Lewes's Life of Goethe. {279e}

17. Sime's Life of Lessing. {280a}

18. Franklin's Autobiography. {280b}

19. Greville's Memoirs. {280c}

20. Forster's Life of Dickens. {280d}

21. Madame D'Arblay's Diary. {280e}

22. Newman's Apologia. {281a}

23. The Paston Letters. {281b}

24. Cellini's Autobiography. {281c}

25. Browne's Religio Medici. {281d}

My readers for the most part have read every one of these books. I throwout this list as a tentative effort in the direction of suggesting ahundred books with which to start a library. The young student will findmuch to amuse, and certainly nothing here to bore him. These books willnot make him a prig, as Mr. James Payn said that Lord Avebury's listwould make him a prig. They will make the dull man less dull, the brightman brighter. Here is good, cheerful, robust reading for boy and girl, for man and woman. There are many sins of omission, but none ofcommission. Our young friend will add to this list fast enough, butthere is nothing in it that he may not read with profit. These books, Irepeat, make an universal appeal. The learned man may enjoy them, theunlearned may enjoy them also. They are, as _Hamlet_ is, of universalinterest. Devotion to science will not impair a taste for them, nor willzest for abstract speculations. Not even those who are "better skilledin grammar than in poetry" can fail to appreciate. These hundred bookswill in the main be the hundred best books of many of my readers who arequite capable of selecting for themselves. One last word of advice. Letnot the young reader buy large quantities of books at once or be beguiledinto subscribing for some cheap series which will save him the trouble ofselecting. He may buy many books from such cheap series afterwards, butnot his first hundred, I think. These should be acquired through muchsaving, and purchased with great thought and deliberation. The purchaseof a book should become to the young book-lover a most solemn function. 

_Butler and Tanner_, _The Selwood Printing Works_, _Frome_, _and London_

Footnotes:

{3} Richard Garnett (1835-1906) was son of the philologist of the samename who was for a time priest-vicar of Lichfield Cathedral. He attendedthe Johnson Celebration on Sept. 18, 1905, and proposed "the ImmortalMemory of Dr. Johnson. " He died on the following Good Friday, April 13, and was buried in Highgate Cemetery April 17, 1906. 

{6} Anna Seward (1747-1809). Her works were published after herdeath:--_The Poetical Works of Anna Seward_. _With Extracts from herLiterary Correspondence_. Edited by Walter Scott, Esq. In threevolumes--_John Ballantyne & Co. _, 1810. _Letters of Anna Seward writtenbetween the Years_ 1784 _and_ 1807. In six volumes. Archibald Constable& Co. , 1811. "Longwinded and florid" one biographer calls her letters, but by the aid of what Scott calls 'the laudable practice of skipping'they are quite entertaining. 

{8} Sir Robert Thomas White-Thomson, K. C. B. , wrote to me in reference tothis estimate of Miss Seward from Broomford Manor, Exbourne, North Devon, and his letter seemed of sufficient importance from a genealogicalstandpoint for me to ask his permission to make an extract from theletter: "I have read your address in a Lichfield newspaper. Apart fromthe wider and more important bearings of your words, those which hadreference to the Seward family were especially welcome to me. You willunderstand this when I tell you that, with the exception of the Romneyportrait of Anna, and a few other objects left 'away' by her will, mygrandfather, Thomas White, of Lichfield Close, her cousin and residuarylegatee, became possessed of all the contents of her house. Some of thebooks and engravings were sold by auction, but the remainder were takengood care of, and passed to me on my mother's death in 1860. As thus, 'in a way' the representative of the 'Swan of Lichfield, ' you can easilysee what such an appreciation of her as was yours means to me. Of courseI know her weak points, and how the pot of clay must suffer in trying to'bump' the pot of iron in midstream, but I also know that she was noordinary personage in her day, when the standard of feminine culture waslow, and I have resented some things that have been written of her. Mrs. Oliphant treats her kindly in her _Literary History of England_, and nowI have your 'appreciation' of her, for which I beg to thank you. "

{15} Once certainly in the lines "On the Death of Mr. Robert Levet":--

 Well try'd through many a varying year, See Levet to the grave descend, Officious, innocent, sincere, Of ev'ry friendless name the friend. 

{18} _Prayers and Meditations_: composed by Samuel Johnson, LL. D. , andpublished from his Manuscripts by George Straham, D. D. , Prebendary ofRochester and Vicar of Islington in Middlesex, 1785. Dr. Birkbeck Hillsuggests that Johnson could not have contemplated the publication of thework in its entirety, but the world is the better for the selfrevelation, notwithstanding Cowper's remark in a letter to Newton (August27, 1785), that "the publisher of it is neither much a friend to thecause of religion nor to the author's memory; for by the specimen of itthat has reached us, it seems to contain only such stuff as has a directtendency to expose both to ridicule. "

{19} There is an edition with a brief Introduction by Augustine Birrell, published by Elliot Stock in 1904, and another, with an Introduction by"H. C. , " was issued by H. R. Allenson in 1906. 

{31} The Rev. Angus Mackay, author of _The Brontes In Fact and Fiction_. He was Rector of Holy Trinity Church, Dean Bridge, Edinburgh, when hedied, aged 54, on New Year's Day, 1907. Earlier in life he had been aCurate at Olney. 

{34} John Newton (1725-1807) had been the captain of a slave ship beforehis 'conversion. ' He became Curate of Olney in 1764 and published thefamous Olney Hymns with Cowper in 1779. In 1780 Newton became thepopular Incumbent of St. Mary Woolnoth, London. 

{35} See the Globe _Cowper_, with an Introduction by the Rev. WilliamBenham, the Rector of St. Edmund's, Lombard Street. Canon Benham haswritten many books, but he has done no better piece of work than thisfine Introduction which first appeared in 1870. 

{36} Thomas Scott (1747-1821). His commentaries first appeared inweekly parts between 1788 and 1792, and were first issued in ten volumes, 1823-25. He was Rector of Astin Sandford in Buckinghamshire from 1801until his death. His _Life_ was published by his son, the Rev. JohnScott, in 1822. 

{37} Thomas Percy (1729-1811) became Vicar of Easton Maudit, Northamptonshire, in 1753. Johnson visited him here in 1764. In 1765Percy published his _Reliques of Ancient English Poetry_. He becameBishop of Dromere in 1782. 

{38a} William Hayley (1745-1820) was counted a great poet in his day andplaced in the same rank with Dryden and Pope. He wrote _Triumphs ofTemper_ 1781, _Triumphs of Music_ 1804, and many other works; but he isof interest here by virtue of his _Life and Letters of William Cowper_, _Esq. _, _with Remarks on Epistolary Writers_, published in 1803. 

{38b} Robert Southey (1774-1843), whose _Life and Works of Cowper_ is infifteen volumes, which were published by Baldwin & Cradock between theyears 1835 and 1837. The attractive form in which the works arepresented, the many fine steel engravings, and the excellent type makethis still the only way for book lovers to approach Cowper. Southey hadto suffer the competition of the Rev. T. S. Grimshawe, who produced, through Saunders & Otley, about the same time a reprint of Hayley'sbiography with much of Cowper's correspondence that is not in Southey'svolumes. The whole correspondence was collected by Mr. Thomas Wright, and published by Hodder & Stoughton in 1904. 

{38c} Walter Bagehot (1826-1877) in his _Literary Studies_. JamesRussell Lowell (1819-1891) in his _Essays_. Mrs. Oliphant (1828-1897) inher _Literary History of England_; and George Eliot (1819-1880) in her_Essays_ (Worldliness and Other Worldliness). 

{44} It has no bearing upon the subject that the horrors of the Bastilleat the time of its fall were greatly exaggerated. 

{47} _Theology in the English Poets_, by Stopford A. Brooke. 

{56} Mr. Leslie Stephen, who became Sir Leslie Stephen, K. C. B. , in 1902, was born in 1832 and died in 1904. In addition to the article in the_D. N. B. _, this great critic has one on "Cowper and Rousseau" in his_Hours in a Library_. 

{62} Sir John Fenn (1739-1794), the antiquary, obtained the originals ofthe _Paston Letters_ from Thomas Worth, a chemist of Diss. The followinglines were first printed in Cowper's Collected Poems, by Mr. J. C. Baileyin his admirable edition of 1906, published by the Methuens:--

 Two omens seem propitious to my fame, Your spouse embalms my verse, and you my name; A name, which, all self-flattery far apart Belongs to one who venerates in his heart The wise and good, and therefore of the few Known by these titles, sir, both yours and you. 

They were written to please his cousin John Johnson who was to obligeFenn by giving him an autograph of Cowper's. 

{66} Edward Stanley (1779-1849), the father of Arthur Penrhyn Stanley(1815-1881), Dean of Westminster, was Bishop of Norwich from 1837 to1849. 

{80} Borrow's step-daughter, Henrietta Clarke, married James McOubrey, an Irish doctor. She outlived Borrow for many years, dying at GreatYarmouth in 1904. All her literary effects, including many interestingmanuscripts, have been passed on to me by her executor, Mr. Hubert Smith, and these will be used in my forthcoming biography of Borrow. 

{84} I ventured to ask my friend Mr. Birrell for a line to read to myNorwich audience and he sent me the following characteristic letter datedDecember 8, 1903:--

". . . For my part I should leave George Borrow alone, to take his ownpart even as Isopel Berners learnt to take hers in the great house atLong Melford. He has an appealing voice which no sooner falls on the earof the born Borrovian, than up the lucky fellow must get and follow hismaster to the end of the chapter. 

"However, if you will insist upon going out into the highways and hedgesand compelling the wayfaring man--though a fool--to come in and take aseat at the _Lavengro_ feast, nobody can stop you. 

"The great thing is to get people to read the Borrow books: there isnothing else to be done. If, after having read them, some enthusiasts goon to learn _Romany_ and seek to trace authorities on Gypsies and Gypsylore--why, let them. They may soon know more about Gypsies than Borrowever did--but they will never write about them as he did. 

"The essence of the matter is to enjoy Borrow's books for themselvesalone. As for Borrow's biography, it appears to me either that he hasalready written it, or it is not worth writing. Anyhow, place the booksin the forefront, reprint things as often as you dare without _note orcomment_ or even _prefatory appreciation_, and you cannot but earn thegratitude of every true Borrovian who in consequence of your efforts comeupon the Borrow books for the first time. "

{97} M. Rene Huchon, who addressed the visitors at the CrabbeCelebration, published his _George Crabbe and his Times_: _A Critical andBiographical Study_, through Mr. John Murray, early in the present year, 1907. 

{98} This reproach has since been removed by the appearance of the_Complete Works of George Crabbe_ in three volumes of the CambridgeEnglish Classics Series, published by the Cambridge University Press, andedited by Dr. A. W. Ward, the Master of Peterhouse. 

{100} The original letter is in the possession of Mr. A. M. Broadley, ofBridport. It is reprinted from the Hanmer Correspondence in an appendixto M. Huchon's biography. 

{106} But M. Huchon makes it clear in _George Crabbe and his Times_ thatCrabbe declined at the last moment to marry Miss Charlotte Ridout, whoseems to have been really in love with him. 

{138} This monument, a fine statue facing the house which replaces theone in which Sir Thomas Browne lived, was unveiled in October, 1905. 

{144} For every student Cunningham's nine volumes have been supersededsince this Address was delivered by the sixteen volumes of the Letters ofHorace Walpole, edited by Mrs. Paget Toynbee for the Clarendon Press. 

{145} The other side of the picture may, however, be presented. Horace, says Cunningham (Walpole's _Letters_, vol. I. ), hated Norfolk, the nativecountry of his father, and delighted in Kent, the native country of hismother. "He did not care for Norfolk ale, Norfolk turnips, Norfolkdumplings and Norfolk turkeys. Its flat, sandy aguish scenery was not tohis taste. " He dearly liked what he calls most happily, "the rich, blueprospects of Kent. "

{153} Goldsmith doubtless had more than one experience in his mind whenhe wrote of:--

 Sweet Auburn! loveliest village of the plain. 

Lissoy, near Ballymahon, Ireland, served to provide many concretefeatures of the picture, but that the author drew upon his experiences ofHoughton is believed by his principal biographer, John Forster, byProfessor Masson and others, and on no other assumption than that of anEnglish village can the lines be explained:--

 A time there was, ere England's griefs began, When every rood of ground maintained its man. 

{185} Originally written to serve as an Introduction to an edition ofMr. George Meredith's _Tragic Comedians_, of which book Lassalle is thehero. That edition was published by Messrs. Ward Lock & Bowden, whoafterwards transferred all rights in it to Messrs. Archibald Constable &Co. , by whose courtesy the paper is included here. 

{186} Lassalle's _Tagebuch_, edited by Paul Lindau, 1891. 

{187} _Henrich Heine's sammtliche Werke_, vol. Xxii. , pp. 84-99. 

{188} The most concise account of the affair is contained in the storyof Sophie Solutzeff, entitled, _Eine Liebes-episode aus dem LebenFerdinand Lassalle's_. This booklet, which is published in German, French, and Russian, professes to be an account of Lassalle's love for ayoung Russian lady, Sophie Solutzeff, some two years before he met Helenevon Donniges. He is represented as being himself in a frenzy of passion;the lady, however, rejecting as a lover the man she had been prepared toworship as a teacher. There can be little doubt that the whole story isa fabrication, in which the Countess von Hatzfeldt had a considerablepart. The Countess was rightly judged by popular opinion to have playeda discreditable role in the love passages between Lassalle and Helene;and Helene's own account of the matter in her _Reminiscences_ was anadditional blow at the pseudo-friend who might have helped the lovers somuch. What more natural than that the Countess should be anxious tobreak the force of Helene's indictment, by endorsing the popular, andindeed accurate judgment, that Lassalle was very inflammable where womenwere concerned. This she could do by depicting him, a little earlier, inprecisely similar bondage to that which he had professed to Helene. Thatthe Countess wrote, or assisted to write, the compilation of letters anddiaries, does not, however, destroy its value as a record of Lassalle'sstruggle on her behalf. That account, if not written by Lassalle, waswritten or inspired by the other great actor in the Hatzfeldt drama, andmay therefore be considered a fairly safe guide in recounting the story. Mr. Israel Zangwill, since the above was written, has published anarticle on Lassalle in his _Dreamers of the Ghetto_. He accepts SophieSolutzeff's story as genuine, but that is merely the credulity of anaccomplished romancer. 

{198} Debate in the German Reichstag, April 2, 1881. Quoted by W. H. Dawson. 

{213} Becker's _Enthullungen_, 1868. 

{218} Briefe an Hans von Bulow, 1885. 

{225} Reprinted with alterations from the _Pall Mall Magazine_ of July, 1905, by kind permission of the proprietor and editor; and of Miss MaryGladstone (Mrs. Drew) to whom the list of books was sent in a letter. 

{230a} Plato (B. C. 427-347). Dr. Jowett has translated the _Laws_. See_The Dialogues_ of Plato With Analysis and Introductions by BenjaminJowett. In Five Volumes. Vol. V. The Clarendon Press. 

{230b} Aristotle (B. C. 384-322). Dr. Jowett has translated the_Politics_ into English. Two volumes. The Clarendon Press. 

{230c} Epictetus (born A. D. 50, died in Rome, but date unknown). His_Encheiridion_, a collection of Maxims, was made by his pupil Arrian. Thebest translation into English is that by George Long, first published in1877. (George Bell. )

{230d} St. Augustine (A. D. 353-430). See a translation of his _Letters_edited by Mary Allies, published in 1890. 

{231a} St. Vincent of Lerins--Vincentius Lirinensis. Native of Gaul. Monk in monastery of Lerinat, opposite Cannes. Died about 450. In 434wrote _Commonitorium adversus profanus omnium heretiecrum novitates_. Itcontains the famous threefold text of orthodoxy--"quod ubique, quodsemper, quod ad omnibus creditum est. " Printed at Paris, 1663 and later. Also in Mignes, Patrologia Latina, Vol. 50. Hallam calls the text "thecelebrated rule. " It is all now remembered of St. V. By most educatedmen. It is shown to be of no practical value in an able criticism by SirG. C. Lewis, _Influence of Authority in Matters of Opinion_, 2nd ed. , 1875, p. 57. Mr Gladstone reviewed this work of Lewis, _NineteenthCentury_ March, 1877. 

{231b} Hugo of St. Victor (1097-1141), a celebrated Mystic born at Ypresin Flanders. His collected works first appeared at Rouen in 1648. 

{231c} St. Bonaventura (A. D. 1221-1274). Born at Bagnarea, nearOrvieto, in Tuscany, became a Franciscan monk and afterwards a Professorof Theology at Paris, where he gained the title of the "Seraphic Doctor. "Made a Cardinal by Pope Gregory X, who sent him as his Legate to theCouncil at Lyons, where he died. In 1482 he was canonized. His writingsappeared at Rome in 1588-96. 

{231d} St. Thomas Aquinas (A. D. 1225-1274). The Angelic Doctor was bornat the castle of Rocca-Secca near Aquino, between Rome and Naples. Entered the Dominican Order in 1243. Went to Paris in 1252 and attainedgreat distinction as a theologian. His _Summa Theologiae_ was followedby his _Summa contra Gentiles_. His works were first collected in 17volumes in 1570. Aquinas was canonized in 1323. 

{232a} Dante (A. D. 1265-1321). The _Divina Commedia_ has beentranslated into English by many scholars. The best known version is thepoetical renderings of H. F. Cary (1772-1844) and W. W. Longfellow (1807-1882) and the prose translations (the "Inferno" only) of John Carlyle(1801-79) and A. J. Butler in whose three volumes of the "Purgatory, ""Paradise" and "Inferno" the original Italian may be studied side by sidewith the translation. 

{232b} Raymund of Sabunde, a physician of Toulouse of the fifteenthcentury. He published his _Theologia naturalis_ at Strassburg in 1496. "I found the concerts of the author to be excellent, the contexture ofhis works well followed, and his project full of pietie" writes Montaignein telling us of his father's request that he should translate Sabunde's_Theologia naturalis_. Florio's Translation. Book II, Ch. XII. 

{232c} Nicholas of Cusa (A. D. 1401-1464) was born at Kues on theMoselle. His _De Concordantia Catholica_ was a treatise in favour of theCouncils of the Church and against the authority of the Pope. He wasmade a Cardinal by Pope Nicholas V. 

{232d} Edward Reuss (1804-1891), a professor of Theology, who was bornat Strassburg. Published his _History of the New Testament_ in 1842 andhis _History of the Old Testament_ in 1881. _The Bible_, _a newtranslation with Introduction and Commentaries_, appeared in 19 volumesbetween 1874 and 1881. 

{233a} Pascal, Blaise (1623-1662). Born at Clermont-Ferrand inAuvergne. His _Letters to a Provincial_, written in 1656-7, made hisfame by their attack on the Jesuists. His _Pensees_ appeared after hisdeath, in 1669, and they have reappeared in many forms, "edited" by manyschools of thought. The edition edited by Ernest Havet (1813-1889) waspublished in 1852. 

{233b} Malebranche, Nicolas (1638-1715). Born in Paris. The works ofDescartes drew him to philosophy. The famous dictum, "Malebranche sawall things in God, " had reference to his treatise, _De la Recherche de laVerite_, first published in 1674. 

{233c} Baader, Franz (1765-1841). A speculative philosopher andtheologian, born at Munich, who endeavoured to reconcile the tenets ofthe Church of Rome with philosophy. Of his many works his _Vorlesungenuber Spekulative Dogmatik_ is here selected. It appeared between 1828and 1838 in five parts. 

{233d} Molitor, Franz Joseph (1779-1860). A philosophical writer, bornnear Frankfurt. His _Philosophie der Geschichte_, _oder uber Tradition_was published in 4 volumes between 1827 and 1853. 

{233e} Astie, Jean Frederic (1822-1894). A French Protestanttheologian, who held a Chair of Theology in New York from 1848 to 1853. In 1856 became a Professor in Switzerland. He published his _Espritd'Alexandre Vinet_ at Paris in 1861. In 1882 appeared his _Le Vinet de lalegende et celui de l'histoire_. 

{234a} Punjer, Bernard (1850-1884). A theologian whose _Geschichte derReligions-philosophie_ was much the vogue with theological students atthe time of its publication in 1880. It was reissued in 1887 in anEnglish translation by W. Hastie, under the title, _History of theChristian Philosophy of Religion from the Reformation to Kant_. Punjeralso wrote _Die Religionslehre Kant's_, published at Jena in 1874. 

{234b} Rothe, Richard (1799-1867). A Protestant theologian. Was for atime preacher to the Prussian Embassy in Rome, and afterwards insuccession Professor of Theology at Wittenberg, at Heidelberg, and atBonn. His _Theologische Ethik_ appeared at Wittenberg in 3 volumesbetween 1845 and 1848. 

{234c} Martensen, Hans Lassen (1808-1884). A Danish theologian, born atFleusburg and died at Copenhagen, where he was long a Professor ofTheology. He became Bishop of Zeeland. _Die Christliche Ethik_ was oneof many works by him. He also wrote _Die Christliche Dogmatik_, _DieChristliche Taufe_, and a _Life of Jakob Bohme_. 

{234d} Oettingen, Alexander von (1827-1905). A theologian andstatistician principally associated with Dorpat in Livonia, where hestudied from 1845 to 1849. He became Professor of Theology at its famousUniversity. His principal book is entitled, _Die Moralstatistik in ihrerBedeutung fur eine Sozialethik_. 

{234e} Hartmann, Karl Robert Eduard von (1842-1906). Born in Berlin, the son of General Robert von Hartmann, and served for some time in theArtillery of the German Army. He has written many philosophical works. His _Phanomenologie des sittlichlen Bewusstseins_ was published in Berlinin 1879. 

{235a} Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1646-1716). Born at Leipzig and diedat Hanover. Visited Paris and London, and became acquainted with Boyleand Newton. In 1676 appointed to a librarianship at Hanover. Hisphilosophical views are mainly derived from his letters. The edition ofthe _Letters_, edited by Ouno Klopp (1822-1903), appeared at Hanoverbetween 1862 and 1884 in 11 volumes. 

{235b} Brandis, Christian August (1790-1867). A philosopher andphilologist, born in Hildesheim, studied in Gottingen and Kiel. Accompanied Niebuhr as Secretary to the Embassy to Rome in 1816. In 1822became Professor of Philosophy in Bonn. His _Handbuch der Geschichte dergriechischromischen Philosophie_, doubtless here referred to by LordActon, was published in Berlin at long intervals (1835-66) in 3 volumes. 

{235c} Fischer, Kuno (1824-1907). Born at Sandewalde in Silesia. Deprived of his professorship of philosophy at Heidelberg by the BadenGovernment in 1853 on account of charge of Pantheism, but recalled toHeidelberg in 1872. His principal book is _Geschichte der NeuernPhilosophie_ (1852-1903). His _Franz Baco von Verulam_ appeared in 1856, and _Francis Bacon und seine Schule_ made the 10th volume of his_Geschichte_. 

{235d} Zeller, Eduard (1814- still living). Theologian and historian ofphilosophy. Studied at Tubingen and Berlin, became Professor of Theologyat Berne, afterwards held chairs successively at Heidelberg and Berlin. His many works include _The Philosophy of Ancient Greece_, _PlatonicStudies_ and _Zwingli's Theological System_. 

{236a} Bartholomess, Christian (1815-1856). A French philosopher, bornat Geiselbronn in Alsace. From 1853 Professor of Philosophy atStrassburg. Died at Nuremberg. Wrote a _Life of Giordano Bruno_, and_Philosophical History of the Prussian Academy_, _particularly underFrederick the Great_, as well as the _Histoire critique des doctrinesreligieuses de la philosophie moderne_, published in 2 volumes in 1855. 

{236b} Madame Guyon (1648-1717) was born at Montargis in France, and hermaiden name was Jeanne Marie Bouvieres de la Mothe. She married at 16years of age Jacques Guyon. Left a widow, she devoted herself to areligious mysticism which raised up endless controversies during thesucceeding years. She was compelled to leave Geneva because herdoctrines were declared to be heretical. She was imprisoned in theBastile from 1695 to 1702. Her works are contained in 39 volumes. 

{236c} Ritschl, Albrecht (1822-1889). Professor of Theology, born inBerlin, died in Gottingen. Became Professor of Theology in Bonn andlater in Gottingen. He wrote many books. His _Die Entstehung deraltkatholischen Kirche_ first appeared in 1850. 

{236d} Loening, Edgar (1843- still living), was born in Paris. Has heldprofessorial chairs at Strassburg, Dorpat, Rostock, and at Halle. His_Geschichte des deutschen Kirchenrechts_ first appeared in 1878. 

{237a} Baur, Ferdinand Christian (1792-1860). Born at Schmiden, nearKannstatt. Held various theological chairs before that of Tubingen, which he occupied from 1826 until his death. He wrote a great number oftheological works, of which his _Vorlesungen uber die christlicheDogmengeschichte_ was published in Leipzig in 3 volumes between 1865 and1867. 

{237b} Fenelon, Francois de Salignac de la Mothe (1651-1715). Born inPerigord in France, and famous alike as a divine and as a man of letters, his _Telemaque_ living in literature. His controversy over Madame Guyonis well known. Louis XIV made him preceptor to his grandson, the Duke ofBurgundy, and later Archbishop of Cambrai. His _Correspondence_ waspublished between 1727 and 1729 in 11 volumes. 

{237c} Newman, John Henry (1801-1890). A famous Cardinal of the Churchof Rome; born in London, educated at Trinity College, Oxford; first Vicarof St. Mary's, Oxford; took part in the Tractarian Movement with some ofthe _Tracts for the Times_. His _Apologia pro Vita Sua_ appeared in1864, his _Dream of Gerontius_ in 1865. There is no _Theory ofDevelopment_ by Newman. His _Essay on the Development of ChristianDoctrine_ appeared in 1845, and was replied to by the Rev. J. B. Mozleyin a volume bearing the title _The Theory of Development_. 

{237d} Mozley, James Bowling (1813-1878). A Church of England divine;born at Gainsborough, educated at Oriel College, Oxford; became Vicar ofOld Shoreham, Canon of Worcester, and, in 1871, Regius Professor ofDivinity at Oxford. His _Oxford University Sermons_ appeared in 1876. 

{238a} Schneckenburger, Matthias (1804-1848). A Protestant theologian;born at Thalheim and died in Berne, where he was for a time Professor ofTheology at the newly founded University. His _Vergleichende Darstellungdes lutherischen und reformierten Lehrbegriffs_ was published inStuttgart in 2 volumes in 1855. 

{238b} Hundeshagen, Karl Bernhard (1810-1872). A Protestant theologianwho held a professorship in Berne, later in Heidelberg and finally inBonn, where he died. His many works included one upon the Conflictbetween the Lutheran, the Calvinistic, and the Zwinglian Churches. His_Beitrage zur Kirchenverfassungsgeschichte und Kirchenpolitikinsbesondere des Protestantismus_ was published at Wiesbaden in 1864 in 1volume. 

{238c} Schweizer, Alexander (1808-1888). A theologian and preacher whostudied in Zurich and Berlin. He wrote his _Autobiography_ which waspublished in Zurich the year after his death. His book, _Dieprotestantischen Centraldogmen innerhalb der reformierten Kirche_, appeared in Zurich in 2 volumes in 1854 and 1856. 

{238d} Gass, Wilhelm (1813-1889). A Protestant theologian; born atBreslau and died in Heidelberg, where he held a theological chair. Hisbest-known book is his _Geschichte der protestantischen Dogmatik_, published in Berlin between 1854 and 1867 in 4 volumes, and to this LordActon doubtless refers. 

{238e} Cart, Jacques Louis (1826- probably still living). A Swisspastor; born in Geneva; the author of many books, of which the one namedby Lord Acton is fully entitled, _Histoire du mouvement religieux etecclesiastique dans le canton de Vaud pendant la premiere moitie du XIXesiecle_. It appeared between 1871 and 1880 in 6 volumes. 

{239a} Blondel, David (1590-1655). Born at Chalons-sur-Marne in France;a learned theologian and historian who defended the Protestant positionagainst the Catholics. Was Professor of History at Amsterdam. His _Dela primaute de l'Eglise_ appeared in 1641. 

{239b} Le Blanc de Beaulieu, Louis (1614-1675). A French Protestanttheologian who enjoyed the consideration of both parties and wasapproached by Turenne with a view to a reunion of the churches. Hisposition was sustained before the Protestant Academy at Sedan withcertain theses published under the title of _Theses Sedanenzes_ in 1683. 

{239c} Thiersch, Heinrich Wilhelm Josias (1817-1885). Born in Munichand died in Basle; held for a time a Professorship of Theology inMarburg, then became the principal pastor of the Irvingite Church inGermany, preaching in many cities. He wrote many books. His_Vorlesungen uber Katholizismus und Protestantismus_ appeared first in1846. 

{239d} Mohler, Johann Adam (1796-1838). Born in Igersheim and died inMunich. A Catholic theologian and Professor of Theology at Tubingen. His_Neue Untersuchungen der Lehrgegensatze zwischen den Katholiken undProtestanten_ was first published in Mainz in 1834. 

{240a} Scherer, Edmond (1815-1889). A French theologian; born in Paris, died at Versailles. Was for a time in England, then Professor ofExegesis in Geneva. Was for many years a leader of the French ProtestantChurch. His _Melanges de critique religieuse_ appeared in Paris in 1860. 

{240b} Hooker, Richard (1554-1600). Born in Exeter. In 1584 was Rectorof Drayton-Beauchamp, near Tring, and the following year became Master ofthe Temple. In 1591 became Vicar of Boscombe and sub-Dean of Salisbury. His _Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity_ was published in 1594. In 1595 heremoved to Bishopsbourne, near Canterbury, where he died. 

{240c} Weingarten, Hermann (1834-1892). Protestant ecclesiasticalhistorian, born in Berlin, where in 1868 he became a professor, laterheld chairs successively at Marberg and Breslau. His book _DieRevolutionskirchen Englands_ appeared in 1868. 

{240d} Kliefoth, Theodor Friedrich (1810-1895). A Lutheran theologian;born at Kirchow in Mecklenburg, and died at Schwerin, where he was for atime instructor to the Grand Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, and heldvarious offices in connexion with that state. He wrote many theologicalworks. His _Acht Bucher von der Kirche_ was published at Schwerin in 1volume in 1854. 

{240e} Laurent, Francois (1810-1887). Born in Luxemburg and died inGent, where he long held a professorship. His principal work, _Etudessur l'histoire de l'humanite_, _Histoire du droit des gens_ was publishedin Brussels in 18 volumes between 1860 and 1870. 

{241a} Ferrari, Guiseppe (1812-1876) was born in Milan, and died inRome. Achieved fame as a philosophical historian. Held a chair at Turinand afterwards at Milan. As member of the Parliament of Piedmont he wasan opponent of Cavour's policy of a United Italy. His principal book isentitled _Histoire des revolutions de l'Italie_, _ou Guelfes etGibelins_, published in Paris in four volumes between 1856 and 1858. 

{241b} Lange, Friedrich Albert (1828-1875). Philosopher and economicwriter, born at Wald bei Solingen, died at Marburg. Held a professorialchair at Zurich and later at Marburg. His most famous book, the_Geschichte des Materialismus und Kritik seiner Bedentung in derGegenwart_, first appeared in 1866. It was published in England in 1878-81 by Trubner in three volumes. 

{241c} Guicciardini, Francesco (1483-1540), the Italian historian andstatesman, was born at Florence. Undertook in 1512 an embassy fromFlorence to the Court of Ferdinand the Catholic, and learned diplomacy inSpain. In 1515 he entered the service of Pope Leo X. His principal bookis his _History of Italy_. The _Istoria d'Italia_ appeared in Florencein ten volumes between 1561 and 1564. His _Recordi Politici_ consists ofsome 400 aphorisms on political and social topics and has been describedby an Italian critic as "Italian corruption codified and elevated to arule of life. "

{241d} Duperron, Jacques Davy (1556-1618), a Cardinal of the Church, born at Saint Lo. He was a Court preacher under Henry III of France anddenounced Elizabeth of England in a funeral sermon on Mary Stuart. It istold of him that he once demonstrated before the king the existence ofGod, and being complimented upon his irrefutable arguments, replied thathe was prepared to bring equally good arguments to prove that God did notexist. He became Bishop of Evreux in 1591. 

{242a} Richelieu, Cardinal--(Armand-Jean Du Plessis)--(1585-1642). Thefamous minister of Louis XIII; born in Paris, of a noble family ofPoitou. Was made Bishop of Lucon by Henry IV at the age of twenty-two. Became Almoner to Marie de Medici, the Regent of France. Was elected aCardinal in 1622. He wrote many books, including theological works, tragedies, and his own Memoirs. The authenticity of his _Testamentpolitique_ was disputed by Voltaire. 

{242b} Harrington, James (1611-1677) was born at Upton, Northamptonshire; was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge. Hetravelled on the Continent, but was back in England at the time of theCivil War, in which, however, he took no part. He published his _Oceana_in 1656. He is buried in St. Margaret's Church, Westminster, next to thetomb of Sir Walter Raleigh. His _Writings_ in an edition issued in 1737by Millar contained twenty separate treatises in addition to _Oceana_, but concerned with that book. 

{242c} Mignet, Francois Auguste Marie (1796-1884). The historian; wasborn at Aix and died in Paris. Published his _History of the FrenchRevolution_ in 1824. His _Negociations relatives a la successiond'Espagne_ appeared in 4 volumes between 1836 and 1842. He also wrote a_Life of Franklin_, a _History of Mary Stuart_, and many other works. 

{243a} Rousseau, Jean Jacques (1712-1778), the famous writer, was bornin Geneva and died at Ermenonville. Much of his life story has been toldin his incomparable _Confessions_. In 1759 he published _NouvelleHeloise_; in 1762, _L'Emile ou de l'Education_. His _Considerations surla Pologne_ was written by Rousseau in 1769 in response to an applicationto apply his own theories to a scheme for the renovation of thegovernment of Poland, in which land anarchy was then at its height. Mr. John Morley (_Rousseau_, Vol. II) dismisses the pamphlet with acontemptuous line. 

{243b} Foncin, Pierre (1841- still living). A French Professor ofHistory; born at Limoges, and has long held important official positionsin connexion with education. He has written many books, including an_Atlas Historique_. His _Essai sur le ministere Turgot_ appeared in1876, and obtained a prize from the French Academy. 

{243c} Burke, Edmund (1729-1797), the famous statesman, was born inDublin and died at Beaconsfield, Bucks, where he was buried. His_Vindication of Natural Society_ appeared in 1756. Burke enteredParliament for Wendover in 1765, sat for Bristol, 1774-80, and Malton, 1780-94. His _Collected Works_ first appeared in 1792-1827 in 8 volumes, the first three of which were issued in his lifetime; his _CollectedWorks and Correspondence_ was published in 8 volumes in 1852, but the_Correspondence_ had appeared separately in 4 volumes in 1844. 

{243d} Las Cases, Emmanuel Augustine Dieudonne Marir Joseph (1766-1842). Educated at the Military School in Paris but entered the French navy;emigrated at the Revolution; fought at Quiberon; taught French in London;published in 1802 his _Atlas historique et geographique_ under thepseudonym of "Le Sage. " On his return to France he came under the noticeof Napoleon, who made him a Count of the Empire and sent him upon severalimportant missions. During the Emperor's exile in Elba he again went toEngland. He returned during the Hundred Days and accompanied Napoleon toSt. Helena. Here he recorded day by day the conversations of the greatexile. At the end of eighteen months he was exiled by Sir Hudson Lowe tothe Cape of Good Hope. He returned to France after the death of Napoleonand became a Deputy under Louis Philippe. His _Memorial deSainte-Helene_, published in 1823-1824, secured a great success. 

{244a} Holtzendorff, Franz von (1829-1889), was Professor ofJurisprudence first at Berlin and afterwards at Munich, where he died. Hewrote many books concerned with crime and its punishment, with the prisonsystems of the world, etc. His _Enzyklopadie der Rechtswissenschaft insystematischer und alphabetischer Bearbeitung_ was first published atLeipzig in 1870 and 1871. 

{244b} Jhering, Rudolph von (1818-1892), was for a time professor atBasle, Rostock, Kiel and Vienna. His _Geist des romischen Rechts auf denverschiedenen Stufen seiner Entwickelung_ appeared in Leipzig between1852 and 1865, and is counted a classic in jurisprudence. 

{244c} Geib, Karl Gustav (1808-1864). An eminent criminologist. Was aProfessor of Zurich and afterwards of Tubingen, where he died. Wrotemany books, of which the most important was his _Geschichte des romischenKriminalprozesses bis zum Tode Justinians_ in 1842. His _Lehrbuch desdeutschen Strafrechts_ appeared in 1861 and 1862, but was nevercompleted. 

{245a} Maine, Sir Henry James Sumner (1822-1888). Jurist; born inKelso, Scotland; educated at Christ's Hospital, London, and at PembrokeCollege, Cambridge; was Regius Professor of Civil Law at Cambridge, 1847-54. In 1862 he became a legal member of Council in India and held theoffice for seven years. In 1871 he became a K. C. S. I. And had a seat onthe Indian Council. In 1877 he was elected Master of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and in 1887 became Whewell Professor of International Law atCambridge. He died at Cannes. His principal work is his _Ancient Law_:_its Connexion with the Early History of Society and its Relation toModern Ideas_, first published in 1861. 

{245b} Gierke, Otto Friedrich (1841- still living), was born in Stettin;was Professor of Law in Breslau, Heidelberg and Berlin successively. Served in the Franco-German War of 1870. His principal work, _Dasdeutsche Genossenschaftsrecht_, appeared in 3 volumes in Berlin, thefirst in 1868, the third in 1881. 

{245c} Stahl, Friedrich Julius (1802-1861), was born in Munich of Jewishparents, died in Bruckenau. Held chairs of law and jurisprudence inBerlin and other cities, and wrote many books. His _Die Philosophie desRechts und geschichtlicher Ansicht_ appeared at Heidelberg in 2 volumesin 1830 and 1837. 

{246a} Gentz, Friedrich von (1764-1832). A distinguished publicist andstatesman; born in Breslau, died at Weinhaus, near Vienna; studiedJurisprudence in Konigsberg. One of his earliest literary efforts was atranslation of Burke's _Reflections upon the French Revolution_. Playeda very considerable part in the combination of the powers of Europeagainst Napoleon in 1809-15. He was the author of many books. His_Briefewechsel mit Adam Muller_ was published in Stuttgart in 1857--longafter his death. 

{246b} Vollgraff, Karl Friedrich (1794-1863), was for a time Professorof Jurisprudence at Marburg, where he died. His two most important bookswere: (1) _Der Systeme der praktischen Politik im Abendlande_; (2)_Erster Versuch einer Begrundung der allgemeinen Ethnologie durch dieAnthropologie und der Staats und Rechts Philosophie durch die Ethnologieoder Nationalitat der Volker_, published in 4 volumes in 1851 to 1855. Itis in this last volume that a section is devoted to Polignosie. 

{246c} Frantz, Konstantin (1817-1891). Distinguished publicist; born atHalberstadt and died at Blasewitz, near Dresden, where he made his homefor many years. Was for a time German Consul in Spain. His greatdoctrine laid down in his _Die Weltpolitik_, 1883, was the union ofCentral Europe against the growing power of Russia and the United Statesof America. His _Kritik aller Parteien_ was published in Berlin in 1862. 

{246d} Maistre, Joseph Marie Comte de (1753-1821). A distinguishedFrench publicist; born at Chambery; studied at the University of Turin. Lived for some years at Lausanne, where he published in 1796 his_Considerations sur la Revolution francaise_. 

{247a} Donoso Cortes, Jean Francois (1809-1853). A famous Spanishpublicist; born in Estremadura; played a considerable part in Spanishaffairs under Marie-Christine and Queen Isabella. Was for a time SpanishAmbassador to Berlin, and later to France, where he died in Paris. Hewrote much upon such questions as the Catholic Church and Socialism. 

{247b} Perin, Henri Charles Xavier (1815- ), a Belgium economist, bornat Mons; became an advocate at Brussels and also Professor of PoliticalEconomy in that city. His book _De la Richesse dans les SocietesChretiennes_ appeared in Paris in 2 volumes in 1861. 

{247c} Le Play, Pierre Guillaume Frederic (1806-1882). Born atHonfleur. He directed the organization of the Paris InternationalExhibitions of 1855 and 1867. He wrote many books. His _La reformesociale en France deduite de l'observation comparee des peuplesEuropeens_ was published in two volumes in 1864. 

{247d} Riehl, Wilhelm Heinrich (1823-1897). A well-known author; bornat Biebrich-am-Rhein, died in Munich. He was associated with severalGerman newspapers, and edited from 1848 to 1851 the _NassauischeAllgemeine Zeitung_, from 1851 to 1853 the _Augsburger AllgemeineZeitung_, and afterwards became a Professor of Literature at Munich. In1885 he became the director of the Bavarian National Museum. He wrotemany books, the one referred to by Lord Acton having been published in1851 under the title of _Die burgerliche Gesellschaft_. 

{248a} Sismondi, Jean Charles Leonard Sismonde de (1773-1842), thedistinguished historian of the Italian republics, was born at Geneva ofan Italian family originally from Pisa. He resided for a time inEngland. His famous book the _Histoire des Republiques Italiennes deMoyen-Age_ appeared between 1807 and 1818 in 16 volumes. His _Etudes surles Constitutions des Peuples Libres_, was one of many other books. 

{248b} Rossi, Pellegrino Luigi Odoardo (1787-1848). An Italianpublicist; born at Carrara. Keenly sympathized with the FrenchRevolution and served under Murat in the Hundred Days, after which hefled to Geneva. In later years he became a nationalized Frenchman, occupied a Chair of Constitutional Law, and finally became a peer. AsComte Rossi he went on a special embassy to Rome. He was assassinated inthat city during the troubles of 1848. His _Traite du DroitConstitutionnel_ appeared in 2 volumes. 

{248c} Barante, Aimable Guillaume Prosper Brugiere, baron de(1782-1868), historian and politician, was born at Riom. He was made aCounciller of State by Louis XVIII in 1815, and a peer of France in 1819. He was elected a member of the French Academy in 1828. Under LouisPhilippe he became Ambassador first at Turin and afterwards at St. Petersburg. After the revolution of 1848 he devoted himself entirely toliterature. He wrote many historical and literary studies, andtranslated the works of Schiller into French. His _Vie politique deRoyer-Collard_ has several times been reprinted. 

{249a} Duvergier de Hauranne, Prosper (1798-1881), was a distinguishedFrench publicist, born at Rouen. He was parliamentary deputy forSancerre in 1831 and took part in most of the political struggles of thefollowing twenty years. He was exiled from France at the time of the_Coup d'Etat_, but returned during the reign of Napoleon III. Henceforthhe devoted himself exclusively to historical studies. His _Histoire dugouvernement parlementaire en France_, published in 1870, secured hiselection to the French Academy. 

{249b} Madison, James (1751-1836). The fourth President of the UnitedStates; born at Port Conway, Virginia. Acted with Jay and Hamilton inthe Convention which framed the Constitution and wrote with them _TheFederalist_. He had two terms of office--between 1809 and 1817--asPresident. He died at Montpelier, Virginia. His _Debates of theCongress of Confederation_ was published in Elliot's "Debates on theState Conventions, " 4 vols. , Philadelphia, 1861. 

{249c} Hamilton, Alexander (1757-1804). A great American statesman, whoserved in Washington's army, and after the war became eminent as a lawyerin New York. He wrote fifty-one out of the eighty-five essays of _TheFederalist_. He was appointed Secretary of the Treasury to the UnitedStates in 1789. He was mortally wounded in a duel by Aaron Burr in 1804. His influence upon the American Constitution gives him a great place inthe annals of the Republic. 

{249d} Calhoun, John Campbell (1782-1850). An American statesman; bornin Abbeville County, South Carolina and studied at Yale. As a Member ofCongress he supported the war with Great Britain in 1812-15. He wastwice Vice-President of the United States. He died at Washington. A_Disquisition on Government_ and a _Discourse on the Constitution andGovernment of the United States_ were written in the last months of hislife. His _Collected Works_ appeared in 1853-4. 

{250a} Dumont, Pierre Etienne Louis (1759-1829). A great publicist;born in Geneva, and principally known in England by his association withBentham, to whom he acted as an editor and interpreter. Lived much inParis, St. Petersburg, and, above all, in London, where he knew Fox, Sheridan, and other famous men, and taught the children of LordShelburne. Dumont's _Sophismes Anarchiques_ appears in Bentham's_Collected Works_ as _Anarchical Fallacies_. 

{250b} Quinet, Edgar (1803-1875). French historian and philosopher;born at Borg and died in Paris. His epic poem of _Ahasuerus_ was placedupon the Index. Of his many books his _La Revolution Francaise_ is thebest known. It was written in Switzerland, where he was an exile duringthe reign of Napoleon III. He returned to France in 1870. 

{250c} Stein, Lorenz von (1815-1890). Writer on economics, studied inKiel and in Jena. In 1855 he became Professor of International Law inVienna. He wrote books on statecraft and international law. His workentitled _Der Sozialismus und Kommunismus des heutigen Frankreich_appeared in Leipzig in 1843. 

{251a} Lassalle, Ferdinand (1825-1864), the famous social democrat, wasof Jewish birth; born at Breslau. He took part in the revolution of 1848and received six months' imprisonment. He was wounded in a duel atGeneva over a love affair and died two days later. His _System derErworbenen Rechte_ appeared in 1861. 

{251b} Thonissen, Jean Joseph (1817-1891). A distinguished jurist; bornin Belgium. He studied at Liege and in Paris; became a Professor of theCatholic University of Louvain; afterwards became a Minister of State. Ofhis many works his _Socialisme depuis l'antiquite jusqu'a la constitutionfrancaise de 1852_ is best known. 

{251c} Considerant, Victor (1808-1894). Born at Salins, and, after theRevolution of 1848, entered the Chamber of Deputies. He crossed toAmerica to found a colony in Texas, but ruined himself by the experiment. He returned to France in 1869. He was the author of many socialistictreatises. 

{251d} Roscher, Wilhelm (1817-1894), economist, was born in Hanover. Held a chair first in Gottingen and afterwards in Leipzig, where he died. His _Geschichte der Nationalokonomik in Deutschland_ appeared in Munichin 1874. 

{251e} Mill, John Stuart (1806-1873), the famous publicist and author, was born in London, and educated by his father, James Mill (1773-1836). He served in the India Office, 1823-58; he was M. P. For Westminster, 1865-68. His works include the _Principles of Political Economy_, 1848; the_Essay on Liberty_, 1859, and the _System of Logic_, which first appearedin 1843. 

{252a} Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834), poet and critic, was bornat Ottery St. Mary, Devonshire; educated at Christ's Hospital, London, and at Jesus College, Cambridge. In the volume of _Lyrical Ballads_ byWordsworth of 1798 Coleridge contributed the _Ancient Mariner_, and hewas to make his greatest reputation by this and other poems. His bestprose work was his _Biographia Literaria_ (1817). His _Aids toReflection_ was first published in 1825. 

{252b} Radowitz, Joseph Maria von (1797-1853). A Prussian general andstatesman; born in Blankenberg and died in Berlin. Fought in theNapoleonic wars and was wounded at the battle of Leipzig. Afterwardsserved as Ambassador to various German Courts. He wrote severaltreatises bearing upon current affairs, and his _Fragments_ form Vols. IVand V of his _Collected Works_ in 5 volumes, which were issued in Berlinin 1852-53. 

{252c} Gioberti, Vincent (1801-1852). An Italian statesman andphilosopher; born in Turin, where he afterwards became Professor ofTheology. Was for a time Court Chaplain, but his liberal views led toexile, and he retired first to Paris, then to Brussels. Afterwardsbecame famous as a neo-Catholic with his attempt to combine faith withscience and art, and urged the independence and the unity of Italy. His_Jesuite moderne_, published in 1847, created a sensation. After someyears of home politics he was appointed by King Victor Emmanuel asAmbassador to Paris. It is noteworthy in the light of Lord Acton'srecommendation of his _Pensieri_ that his works have been placed on theIndex. 

{253a} Humboldt, Friedrich Heinrich Alexander Baron von (1769-1859), thegreat naturalist, was born and died in Berlin, and studied at Frankfort-on-the-Oder, Berlin and Gottingen; he spent five years (1799-1804) inexploring South America, and in 1829 travelled through Central Asia. His_Kosmos_ appeared between 1845 and 1858 in 4 volumes. 

{253b} De Candolle, Alphonse de (1806-1893). The son of the celebratedbotanist, Augustin Pyramus de Candolle, and was himself a professor ofthat science at Geneva. His _Histoire des sciences et des savants depuisdeux siecles_ appeared in 1873. 

{253c} Darwin, Charles Robert (1809-1882), the great naturalist anddiscoverer of natural selection, was born at Shrewsbury, where he waseducated at the Grammar School, at Edinburgh University, and at Christ'sCollege, Cambridge. His most famous book, _The Origin of Species bymeans of Natural Selection_, was first published in 1859. 

{253d} Littre, Maximilien Paul Emile (1801-1884), the famouslexicographer whose _Dictionnaire de la langue francaise_ gave him aworld-wide reputation. He was born in Paris. He associated himself withAuguste Comte and the _Positive Philosophy_, and contributed many volumesin support of Comte's standpoint. 

{253e} Cournot, Antoine Augustin (1801-1877). Born at Gray in Savoy;wrote many mathematical treatises. His _Traite de l'enchainement desidees fondamentales dans les sciences et dans l'histoire_ was publishedin 2 volumes. 

{254} This was a most comprehensive addition, and fully makes up for theabrupt termination of the list of the hundred best books with twoomissions. The omission of the book numbered 88 will also have beenremarked. There are probably a hundred "Monatschriften derWissenschaftlichen Vereine" or magazines of scientific societies issuedin Germany. Sperling's _Zeitschriften-Adressbuch_ gives more than twocolumns of these. 

{260a} The Bible can be best read in paragraph form from the Eversleyedition, published by the Macmillans, or from the Temple Bible, issued byJ. M. Dent--the latter an edition for the pocket. The translation of1610 is literature and has made literature. The revised translation ofour own day has neither characteristic. Something can be said for theDouay Bible in this connexion. It was published in Douay in the sameyear as the Protestant version appeared--1610. Certain words from it, such as "Threnes" for "Lamentations" as the Threnes of Jeremiah, have apoetical quality that deserved survival. 

{260b} The Iliad may be read in a hundred verse translations of whichthose by Pope and Cowper are the best known. Both these may be found inBohn's Libraries (G. Bell & Sons); but the prose translation for whichMr. Lang and his friends are responsible (Macmillan) is for ourgeneration far and away the best introduction to Homer for thenon-Grecian. 

{261a} Under the title of "The Athenian Drama, " George Allen haspublished three fine volumes of the works of the Greek dramatists. 

{261b} Dryden's translation of Virgil has been followed by many othersboth in prose and verse. There was one good prose version by C. Davidsonrecently issued in Laurie's Classical Library. An interestingtranslation of Virgil's _Georgics_ into English verse was recently madeby Lord Burghclere and published by John Murray. The young student, however, will do well to approach Virgil through Dryden. He will findthe book in the Chandos Classics, or superbly printed in ProfessorSaintsbury's edition of _Dryden's Works_, Vol. XIV. 

{261c} There have been many translations of Catullus. One, by SirRichard Burton, was issued by Leonard Smithers in 1894. In Bohn'sLibrary there is a prose translation by Walter K. Kelly. ProfessorRobinson Ellis made a verse translation that has been widely praised. Grant Allen translated the Attis in 1892. On the whole, the Englishverse translation by Sir Theodore Martin made in 1861 (Blackwood & Son)is far and away the best suited for a first acquaintance with this the'tenderest of Roman Poets. '

{261d} Horace has been made the subject of many translations. Perhapsthere are fifty now available. John Conington's edition of his completeworks, two volumes (Bell), is well known. The best introduction toHorace for the young student is in Sir Theodore Martin's translation, twovolumes (Blackwood), and a volume by the same author entitled _Horace_ in"Ancient Classics for English Readers" (Blackwood) is a charming littlebook. 

{262a} Dante's _Divine Comedy_ as translated by Henry Francis Cary (1772-1844) has been described by Mr. Ruskin as better reading than Milton's"Paradise Lost. " James Russell Lowell, with true patriotism, declaredthat his countrymen Longfellow's translation (Routledge) was the best. Something may be said for the prose translation by Dr. John Carlyle ofthe _Inferno_ (Bell) and for Mr. A. J. Butler's prose translation of thewhole of the _Divine Comedy_ in three volumes (Macmillan). Othertranslations which have had a great vogue are by Wright and DeanPlumptre. The best books on Dante are those by Dr. Edward Moore(Clarendon Press). Cary's translation can be obtained in one volume inBohn's Library (Bell) or in the Chandos Classics (Warne). 

{262b} I contend that while most of the poets are self-contained in asingle volume, Shakspere's plays are best enjoyed as separate entities. Certainly each of them has a library attached to it, and it is quiteprofitable to read Hamlet in Mr. Horace Howard Furness's edition(Lippincott) with a multitude of criticisms of the play bound up with thetext of Hamlet. But Hamlet should be read first in the Temple Shakspere(Dent) or in the Arden Shakspere (Methuen). To this last there is anadmirable introduction by Professor Dowden. 

{262c} Chaucer's _Canterbury Tales_ should be read in Mr. Alfred W. Pollard's edition, which forms two volumes of the "Eversley Library"(Macmillan). The "Tales" may be obtained in cheaper form in the_Chaucer_ of the Aldine Poets (Bell), of which I have grateful memories, having first read "Chaucer" in these little volumes. The enthusiast willobtain the Complete Works of Chaucer edited for the Clarendon Press byProfessor W. W. Skeat. 

{263a} FitzGerald's _Omar Khayyam_ can be obtained in its four versions, each of which has its merits, only from the Macmillans, who publish it inmany forms. The edition in the Golden Treasury Series may beparticularly commended. The present writer has written an introductionto a sixpenny edition of the first version. It is published by WilliamHeinemann. 

{263b} Goethe's _Faust_ has been translated in many forms. CertainlyAnster's version (Sampson Low) is the most vivacious. Anna Swanwick, SirTheodore Martin and Bayard Taylor's translations have about equal merit. 

{263c} Shelley's _Poetical Works_ should be read in the one volumeissued in green cloth by the Macmillans, with an introduction by EdwardDowden, or in the Oxford Poets (Henry Froude), with an introduction by H. Buxton Forman, but perhaps the best edition is that of the ClarendonPress with an introduction by Thomas Hutchinson. Mr. Forman's libraryedition of _Shelley's Complete Works_ is the desire of all collectors. 

{263d} _Byron's Poetical Works_, edited by Ernest Coleridge, form sevenvolumes of John Murray's edition of Byron's _Works_ in thirteen volumes. There is not a good one-volume Byron. I particularly commend the three-volume edition (George Newnes). 

{264a} Wordsworth may be read in his entirety in the sixteen volumes of_Prose and Poetry_ edited by William Knight in the Eversley Library(Macmillan). The same publisher issues an admirable _Wordsworth_ in onevolume, edited, with an introduction by John Morley. But the firstapproach to Wordsworth's verse should be made through Matthew Arnold's_Select Poems_ in the Golden Treasury Series (Macmillan). 

{264b} _Keats's Works_ are issued in one volume in the Oxford Poets(Froude), and in five shilling volumes by Gowans and Gray of Glasgow. Mr. Buxton Forman's annotations to this cheap edition exceed in value thoseattached to his more expensive "Library Edition, " which, however, as withthe _Shelley_, in eight volumes, is out of print. 

{264c} The four volumes of Burns, with an introduction by W. E. Henley, are pleasant to read. They are published by Jack, of Edinburgh. Thebest single-volume _Burns_ is that in the Globe Library (Macmillan), withan introduction by Alexander Smith. 

{264d} There is no rival to the one-volume edition of _Coleridge'sPoems_, with an introduction by J. Dykes Campbell, published byMacmillan. Mr. Dykes Campbell's biography of Coleridge should also beread. The prose works of Coleridge are obtainable in Bohn's Library. Thefortunate book lover has many in Pickering editions. 

{264e} _Cowper's Complete Works_ are acquired for a modest sum of thesecond-hand bookseller in Southey's sixteen-volume edition. The two bestone-volume issues of the _Poems_ are the Globe Library Edition with anintroduction by Canon Benham (Macmillan), and _Cowper's Complete Poems_with an introduction by J. C. Bailey (Methuen). The best of the lettersare contained in a volume in the Golden Treasury Series, with anintroduction by Mrs. Oliphant. _The Complete Letters of Cowper_, editedby Thomas Wright, have been published by Hodder & Stoughton in fourvolumes. 

{265a} _Crabbe's Works_, in eight volumes, with biography by his son, may be obtained very cheaply from the second-hand book seller. With allthe merits of both _Works_ and _Life_ they have not been reprintedsatisfactorily. The only good modern edition of _Crabbe's Poems_ is inthree volumes published by the Cambridge University Press, edited by A. W. Ward. 

{265b} The best one-volume _Tennyson_ is issued by the Macmillans, whostill hold certain copyrights. The Library Edition of _Tennyson_, withthe Biography included in the twelve volumes, is a desirable acquisition. 

{265c} Not all the sixteen volumes of the Library Edition of _Browning_pay for perusal. The most convenient form is that of the two-volumeedition (Smith, Elder & Co. ), with notes by Augustine Birrell. 

{265d} _Milton's Poetical Works_ as annotated by David Masson(Macmillan) make the standard library edition, and the same publishershave given us the best one-volume _Milton_ in the Globe Library, with anintroduction by Professor Masson, Milton's one effective biographer. 

{266a} _The Arabian Nights' Entertainments_ is first introduced to usall as a children's story-book. Tennyson has placed on record his ownearly memories:--

 "In sooth it was a goodly time, For it was in the golden prime Of good Haroun Alraschid. "

But the collector of the hundred best books will do well to read the_Arabian Nights_ in the translation by Edward William Lane, edited byStanley Lane Poole, in 4 volumes, for George Bell & Sons. 

{266b} The most satisfactory translation of Cervantes's great romance isthat made by John Ormesby, revised and edited by James Fitzmaurice-Kelly, published by Gowans & Gray in 4 shilling volumes. 

{266c} _The Pilgrim's Progress_ is presented in a hundred forms. Thepresent writer first read it in a penny edition. It should be possessedby the book-lover in a volume of the Cambridge English Classics, in which_Grace Abounding_ and _The Pilgrim's Progress_ are given together, editedby Dr. John Brown, and published by the Cambridge University Press. 

{266d} Schoolboys, notwithstanding Macaulay, usually know but few goodbooks, but every schoolboy knows Defoe's _Robinson Crusoe_ in one form oranother. The maker of a library will prefer it as a Volume of Defoe's_Works_ (J. M. Dent), or as Volume VII of Defoe's _Novels andMiscellaneous Works_ (Bell & Sons). There are many good shillingeditions of the book by itself, but Defoe should be read in many of hisworks and particularly in _Moll Flanders_. 

{267a} As with _Robinson Crusoe_, _Gulliver's Travels_ can be obtainedin many cheap forms, but it is well that it should be obtained as VolumeVIII of _Swift's Prose Works_, published in Bohn's Libraries by GeorgeBell & Sons. There has not been a really good edition of Swift's workssince Scott's monumental book. 

{267b} _Clarissa_ should be read in nine of the twenty volumes ofRichardson's Novels, published by Chapman & Hall--a very daintywell-printed book. "I love these large, still books, " said LordTennyson. 

{267c} The greatest of all novels, _Tom Jones_, is obtainable in severalLibrary Editions of Fielding's _Works_. A cheap well-printed form isthat of the _Works of Henry Fielding_ in 12 volumes, published by Gay &Bird. Here _The Story of Tom Jones a Foundling_ is in 4 volumes. Thebook is in 2 volumes in Bohn's Library--an excellent edition. 

{267d} Johnson's _Rasselas_ has frequently been reprinted, but there isno edition for a book-lover at present in the bookshops. It is includedin _Classic Tales_ in a volume of Bohn's Standard Library. The wisecourse is to look out for one of the earlier editions with copper platesthat are constantly to be found on second-hand bookstalls. But Johnson's_Works_ should be bought in a fine octavo edition. 

{268a} Goldsmith's _Vicar of Wakefield_ should be possessed in theedition which Mr. Hugh Thomson has illustrated and Mr. Austin Dobson hasedited for the Macmillans. There is a good edition of Goldsmith's_Works_ in Bohn's Library. 

{268b} Sterne's _Sentimental Journey_ is also a volume for the second-hand bookstall, although that and the equally fine _Tristram Shandy_ maybe obtained in many pretty forms. I have two editions of Sterne's books, but they are both fine old copies. 

{268c} There are two very good editions of Peacock's delightfulromances. _Nightmare Abbey_ forms a volume of J. M. Dent's edition in 9volumes, edited by Dr. Garnett; and the whole of Peacock's remarkablestories are contained in a single volume of Newnes' "Thin PaperClassics. "

{268d} Sir Walter Scott's novels are available in many forms equallyworthy of a good library. The best is the edition published by Jack ofEdinburgh. The Temple Library of Scott (J. M. Dent) may be commended forthose who desire pocket volumes, while Mr. Andrew Lang's Introductionsgive an added value to an edition published by the Macmillans, Scott'stwenty-eight novels are indispensable to every good library, and everyreader will have his own favourite. 

{268e} Balzac's novels are obtainable in a good translation by EllenMarriage, edited by George Saintsbury, published in New York by theMacmillan Company and in London by J. M. Dent. 

{269a} A translation of Dumas' novels in 48 volumes is published byDent. _The Three Musketeers_ is in 2 volumes. There are many cheap onevolume editions. 

{269b} Thackeray's _Vanity Fair_ is pleasantly read in the edition ofhis novels published by J. M. Dent. His original publishers, Smith, Elder & Co. , issue his works in many forms. 

{269c} The best edition of Charlotte Bronte's _Villette_ is that in the"Haworth Edition, " published by Smith, Elder & Co. , with an Introductionby Mrs. Humphry Ward. 

{269d} Charles Dickens' novels, of which _David Copperfield_ isgenerally pronounced to be the best, should be obtained in the "OxfordIndia Paper Dickens" (Chapman & Hall and Henry Frowde). A serviceableedition is that published by the Macmillans, with Introductions byCharles Dickens's son, but that edition still fails of _Our MutualFriend_ and _The Mystery of Edwin Drood_, of which the copyright is notyet exhausted. 

{269e} Anthony Trollope's novels are being reissued, in England by JohnLane and George Bell & Sons, and in America in a most attractive form byDodd, Mead & Co. All three publishers have a good edition of _BarchesterTowers_, Trollope's best novel. 

{269f} Boccaccio's _Decameron_ is in my library in many forms--in 3volumes of the Villon Society's publications, translated by John Payne;in 2 handsome volumes issued by Laurence & Bullen; and in the ExtraVolumes of Bohn's Library. There is a pretty edition available publishedby Gibbons in 3 volumes. 

{270a} Emily Bronte's _Wuthering Heights_ forms a volume of the HaworthEdition of the Bronte novels, published by Smith, Elder & Co. It has anintroduction by Mrs. Humphry Ward. 

{270b} Charles Reade's _Cloister and the Hearth_ is available in manyforms. The pleasantest is in 4 volumes issued by Chatto & Windus, withan Introduction by Sir Walter Besant. There is a remarkable shillingedition issued by Collins of Glasgow. 

{270c} Victor Hugo's _Les Miserables_ may be most pleasantly read in the10 volumes, translated by M. Jules Gray, published by J. M. Dent & Co. 

{270d} Mrs. Gaskell's _Cranford_ can be obtained in the six volumeedition of that writer's works published by Smith, Elder & Co. , withIntroductions by Dr. A. W. Ward; in a volume illustrated by Hugh Thomson, with an Introduction by Mrs. Ritchie, published by the Macmillans, or inthe World's Classics (Henry Frowde), where there is an additional chapterentitled, "The Cage at Cranford. "

{270e} The translation of George Sand's _Consuelo_ in my library is byFrank H. Potter, 4 volumes, Dodd, Mead & Co. , New York. 

{270f} Lever's _Charles O'Malley_ I have as volumes of the _CompleteWorks_ published by Downey. There is a pleasant edition in Nelson's"Pocket Library. "

{271a} Macaulay's _History of England_ is available in many attractiveforms from the original publishers, the Longmans. There is a neat thinpaper edition for the pocket in 5 volumes issued by Chatto & Windus. 

{271b} For Carlyle's _Past and Present_ I recommend the CentenaryEdition of Carlyle's _Works_, published by Chapman & Hall. There is anannotated edition of _Sartor Resartus_ by J. A. S. Barrett (A. & C. Black), two annotated editions of _The French-Revolution_, one by Dr. Holland Rose (G. Bell & Sons), and an other by C. R. L. Fletcher, 3volumes (Methuen), and an annotated edition of _The Cromwell Letters_, edited by S. C. Lomax, 3 volumes (Methuen). No publisher has yetattempted an annotated edition of _Past and Present_, but Sir ErnestClarke's translation of _Jocelyn of Bragelond_ (Chatto & Windus) may becommended as supplemental to Carlyle's most delightful book. 

{271c} Motley's _Works_ are available in 9 volumes of a Library Editionpublished by John Murray. A cheaper issue of the _Dutch Republic_ isthat in 3 volumes of the World's Classics, to which I have contributed abiographical introduction. 

{271d} For many years the one standard edition of _Gibbon_ was thatpublished by John Murray, in 8 volumes, with notes by Dean Milman andothers. It has been superseded by Professor Bury's annotated edition in7 volumes (Methuen). 

{272a} Plutarch's _Lives_, translated by A. Stewart and George Long, form 4 volumes of Bohn's Standard Library. There is a handy volume forthe pocket in Dent's Temple Classics in 10 volumes, translated by SirThomas North. 

{272b} Montaigne's _Essays_ I have in three forms; in the TudorTranslations (David Nutt), where there is an Introduction to the 6volumes of Sir Thomas North's translation by the Rt. Hon. George Wyndham;in Dent's Temple Classics, where John Florio's translation is given in 5volumes. A much valued edition is that in 3 volumes, the translation byCharles Cotton, published by Reeves & Turner in 1877. 

{272c} Steele's essays were written for the _Tatler_ and the _Spectator_side by side with those of Addison. The best edition of _The Spectator_is that published in 8 volumes, edited by George A. Aitken for Nimmo, andof _The Tatler_ that published in 4 volumes, edited also by Mr. Aitkenfor Duckworth & Co. 

{272d} Lamb's _Essays of Elia_ can be read in a volume of the EversleyLibrary (Macmillan), edited by Canon Ainger. The standard edition ofLamb's _Works_ is that edited by Mr. E. V. Lucas, in 7 volumes, forMethuen. Mr. Lucas's biography of Lamb has superseded all others. 

{272e} Thomas de Quincey's _Opium Eater_ may be obtained as a volume ofNewnes's Thin Paper Classics, in the World's Classics, or in Dent'sEveryman's Library. But the _Complete Works_ of De Quincey, in 16volumes, edited by David Mason and published by A. & C. Black, should bein every library. 

{273a} William Hazlitt never received the treatment he deserved untilMr. J. M. Dent issued in 1903 his _Collected Works_, in 13 volumes, edited by A. R. Waller and Arnold Glover. Of cheap reprints of Hazlitt Icommend _The Spirit of the Age_, _Winterslow_ and _Sketches and Essays_, three separate volumes of the World's Classics (Frowde). 

{273b} George Borrow's _Lavengro_ should only be read in Mr. JohnMurray's edition, as it there contains certain additional and valuablematter gathered from the original manuscript by William I. Knapp. TheLibrary Edition of Borrow, in 6 volumes (Murray), may be particularlycommended. 

{273c} Emerson's _Complete Works_ are published by the Routledges in 4volumes, in which _Representative Men_ may be found in Vol. II. Some mayprefer the Eversley Library _Emerson_, which has an Introduction by JohnMorley. There are many cheap editions of about equal value. 

{273d} Lander's _Imaginary Conversations_ form six volumes of thecomplete _Landor_, edited by Charles G. Crump, and published in 10volumes by J. M. Dent. 

{273e} Matthew Arnold's _Essays in Criticism_ is published by Macmillan. It also forms Vol. III of the Library Edition of his _Works_ in 15volumes. A "Second Series" has less significance. 

{273f} _The Works of Herodotus_, published by the Macmillans, translatedby George C. Macaulay, is the best edition for the general reader. CanonRawlinson's _Herodotus_, published by John Murray, has had a longer life, but is now only published in an abridged form. 

{274a} James Howell's _Familiar Letters_, or _Epistolae Ho Elianae_, should be read in the edition published in 2 volumes by David Nutt, withan Introduction by Joseph Jacobs. 

{274b} _The History of Civilization_, by Henry Thomas Buckle, is in mylibrary in the original 2 volumes published by Parker in 1857. It is nowissued in 3 volumes in Longman's Silver Library, and in 3 volumes in theWorld's Classics. 

{274c} _The History of Tacitus_ should be read in the translation byAlfred John Church and William Jackson Brodripp. It is published by theMacmillans. 

{274d} _Our Village_, by Mary Russell Mitford, is a collection of essayswhich in their completest form may be obtained in two volumes of Bohn'sLibrary (Bell). The essential essays should be possessed in the editionpublished by the Macmillans--_Our Village_, by Mary Russell Mitford, withan Introduction by Anne Thackeray Ritchie, and one hundred illustrationsby Hugh Thomson. 

{274e} Green's _Short History of the English People_ is published by theMacmillans in 1 volume, or illustrated in 4 volumes. The book wasenlarged, but disimproved, under the title of _A History of the EnglishPeople_, in 4 volumes, uniform with the _Conquest of England_ and the_Making of England_ by the same author. 

{275a} Taine's _Ancient Regime_ is a good introduction to the conditionswhich made the French Revolution. It forms the first volume of _LesOrigines de la France Contemporaine_, and may be read in a translation byJohn Durand, published by Dalby, Isbister & Co. In 1877. 

{275b} _The Life of Napoleon_ has been written by many pens, in our ownday most competently by Dr. Holland Rose (2 vols. Bell); but a goodaccount of the Emperor, indispensable for some particulars and anundoubted classic, is that by de Bourrienne, Napoleon's privatesecretary, published in an English translation, in 4 volumes, by Bentleyin 1836. 

{275c} _Democracy in America_, by Alexis de Tocqueville, may be had in atranslation by Henry Reeve, published in 2 volumes by the Longmans. Readalso _A History of the United States_ by C. Benjamin Andrews, 2 volumes(Smith, Elder), and above all the _American Commonwealth_, by JamesBryce, 2 volumes (Macmillan). 

{275d} _The Compleat Angler_ of Isaac Walton may be purchased in manyforms. I have a fine library edition edited by that prince of livinganglers, Mr. R. B. Marston, called The Lea and Dove Edition, this beingthe 100th edition of the book (Sampson Low, 1888). I have also anedition edited by George A. B. Dewar, with an Introduction by Sir EdwardGrey and Etchings by William Strang and D. Y. Cameron, 2 volumes(Freemantle), and a 1 volume edition published by Ingram & Cooke in theIllustrated Library. 

{276a} There are many editions of Gilbert White's _Natural History ofSelbourne_ to be commended. Three that are in my library are (1) editedwith an Introduction and Notes by L. C. Miall and W. Warde Fowler(Methuen); (2) edited with Notes by Grant Allen, illustrated by Edmund H. New (John Lane); (3) rearranged and classified under subjects by CharlesMosley (Elliot Stock). 

{276b} Of _Boswell's Life of Johnson_ there are innumerable editions. The special enthusiast will not be happy until he possesses Dr. BirkbeckHill's edition in 6 volumes (Clarendon Press). The most satisfactory 1volume edition is that published on thin paper by Henry Frowde. I havein my library also a copy of the first edition of _Boswell_ in 2 volumes. It was published by Henry Baldwin in 1791. 

{276c} The best edition of Lockhart's _Life of Scott_ is that publishedin 10 volumes by Jack of Edinburgh. Readers should beware ofabridgments, although one of these was made by Lockhart himself. Thewhole eighty-five chapters are worth reading, even in the 1 volumeedition published by A. & C. Black. 

{276d} _Pepys's Diary_ can be obtained in Bohn's Library or in Newnes'Thin Paper Classics, but Pepys should only be read under Mr. H. B. Wheatley's guidance. A cheap edition of his book, in 8 volumes, hasrecently been published by George Bell & Sons. I have No. 2 of the largepaper edition of this book, No. 1 having gone to Pepys's own college ofBrazenose, where the Pepys cypher is preserved. 

{277a} Until recently one knew Walpole's _Letters_ only through PeterCunningham's edition, in 9 volumes (Bentley), and this has stillexclusive matter for the enthusiast, Cunningham's Introduction to wit;but the Clarendon Press has now published Walpole's _Letters_, edited byMrs. Paget Toynbee, in 16 volumes, or in 8. Here are to be found moreletters than in any previous edition. 

{277b} _The Memoirs of Count de Gramont_, by Anthony, Count Hamilton, can be obtained in splendid type, unannotated, in an edition published byArthur L. Humphreys. A well-illustrated and well-edited edition is thatpublished by Bickers of London and Scribner of New York, edited by AllanFea. 

{277c} Gray's _Letters_, with poems and life, form 4 volumes inMacmillan's Eversley Library, edited by Edmund Gosse. 

{277d} You can obtain Southey's _Nelson_, originally written forMurray's Pocket Library as a publisher's commission, in one well-printedvolume, with Introduction by David Hannay, published by WilliamHeinemann. It should, however, be supplemented in the _Life_ by CaptainMahan (2 volumes, Sampson Low & Co. ), or by Professor Laughton's _Nelsonand His Companion in Arms_ (George Allen). 

{277e} Moore's _Life and Letters of Byron_ is published by John Murrayin 6 volumes. It is best purchased second-hand in an old set. Moore'sbook must be supplemented by the 6 volumes of _Correspondence_ edited byRowland Prothero for Mr. Murray. 

{278a} Sir George Trevelyan says in his _Early History of Charles JamesFox_ that Hogg's _Life of Shelley_ is "perhaps the most interesting bookin our language that has never been republished. " The reproach has beenin some slight measure removed by a cheap reprint in small type issued bythe Routledges in 1906. The reader should, however, secure a copy of thefirst edition, 2 volumes, 1857. Professor Dowden, in his _Life ofShelley_, 1886, uses the book freely. 

{278b} "What is the best book you have ever read?" Emerson is said tohave asked George Eliot when she was about twenty-two years of age andresiding, unknown, near Coventry. "Rousseau's _Confessions_, " was thereply. "I agree with you, " Emerson answered. But the book should not beread in a translation. The completest translation is one in 2 volumespublished by Nicholls. There is a more abridged translation by Gibbonsin 4 volumes. 

{278c} _The Life of Carlyle_, by James Anthony Froude, which created somuch controversy upon its publication, is worthy of a cheap edition, which does not, however, seem to be forthcoming. The book appeared in 4volumes, _The First Forty Years_ in 1882 and _Life in London_ in 1884. Ithad been preceded by _Reminiscences_ in 1881. Every one should read the_Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle_, 3 volumes, 1883. All the9 volumes are published by the Longmans. 

{279a} Samuel Rogers' _Table Talk_ has been given us in two forms, firstas _Recollections of the Table Talk of Samuel Rogers_, edited byAlexander Dyce, 1856, and second as _Reminiscences of Samuel Rogers_, 1859. The _Recollections_ were reprinted in handsome form by H. A. Rogers, of New Southgate, in 1887, and the material was combined in asingle volume in 1903 by G. H. Powell (R. Brimley Johnson). I have thefour books, and delight in the many good stories they contain. 

{279b} _The Confessions of St. Augustine_ may be commended in many smalland handy editions. One, with an Introduction by Alice Meynell, waspublished in 1900. The most beautifully printed modern edition is thatissued by Arthur Humphreys in his Classical Series. 

{279c} Amiel's _Journal_ is a fine piece of introspection. Atranslation by Mrs. Humphry Ward is published in 2 volumes by theMacmillans. De Senancour's _Obermann_, translated by A. E. Waite(Wellby), should be read in this connexion. 

{279d} _The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius_, translated by George Long, appears as a volume of Bohn's Library, and more beautifully printed inthe Library of Arthur Humphreys. There are many other goodtranslations--one by John Jackson, issued in 1906 by the Clarendon Press, has great merit. 

{279e} George Henry Lewes's _Life of Goethe_ has gone through manyeditions and remains a fascinating book, although it may be supplementedby the translation of Duntzer's _Life of Goethe_, 2 volumes, Macmillan, and Bielschowsky's _Life of Goethe_, Vols. I and II (Putnams). 

{280a} _The Life of Lessing_, by James Sime, is not a great biography, but it is an interesting and most profitable study of a noble man. Lessing will be an inspiration greater almost than any other of themoderns for those who are brought in contact with his fine personality. The book is in 2 volumes, published by the Trubners. 

{280b} You can read Benjamin Franklin's _Autobiography_ in 1 volume(Dent), or in his Collected Works--_Memoirs of the Life and Writings ofBenjamin Franklin_, edited by his grandson, William Temple Franklin, 6volumes (Colburn), 1819. There have been at least two expensive reprintsof his _Works_ of late years. 

{280c} _The Greville Memoirs_ were published in large octavo form in thefirst place. Much scandal was omitted from the second edition. They arenow obtainable in 8 volumes of Longmans' Silver Library. They form aninteresting glimpse into the Court life of the later Guelphs. 

{280d} It has been complained of John Forster's _Life of CharlesDickens_ that there is too much Forster and not enough Dickens. Yet itis the only guide to the life-story of the greatest of the Victoriannovelists. Is most pleasant to read in the 2 volumes of the GadshillEdition, published by Chapman & Hall. 

{280e} _The Early Diary of Frances Burney_, afterwards Madame D'Arblay, edited by Annie Raine Ellis, has just been reprinted in two volumes ofBohn's Library (Bell). We owe also to Mr. Austen Dobson a fine reprintof the later and more important _Diaries_, which he has edited in 6volumes for the Macmillans. 

{281a} The _Apologia pro Vita Sua_ of John Henry Newman is one of thevolumes of Cardinal Newman's _Collected Works_ issued by the Longmans. Itis the most interesting, and is perhaps the most destined to survive, ofall the books of theological controversy of the nineteenth century. 

{281b} There is practically but one edition of the _Paston Letters_, that edited by James Gairdner, of the Public Record Office, and publishedby the firm of Archibald Constable. The luxurious Library Edition issuedby Chatto & Windus in 6 volumes should be acquired if possible. 

{281c} _The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini_ is best known in thetranslation of Thomas Roscoe in Bohn's Library. Mr. J. AddingtonSymonds, however, made a new translation, issued in two fine volumes byNimmo. 

{281d} The _Religio Medici_ of Sir Thomas Browne can be obtained in manyforms, although the well-to-do collector will be satisfied only with theedition edited by Simon Wilkin. The book is admirably edited by W. A. Greenhill for the "Golden Treasury Series. "