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observable in Hook and others of the time, and which has been
sufficiently noticed in the last chapter. Matthew Wald, the last of the
four, is both too gloomy and too extravagant: it deals with a mad
hero. But Adam Blair, which was published in the same year (1821)
with Valerius, is a wonderful little book. The story is not well told;
but the characters and the principal situation—a violent passion
entertained by a pious widowed minister for his neighbour's wife—
are handled with extraordinary power. Peter's Letters, which is half a
book and half journalism, may be said to be, with rare exceptions
(such as an obituary article on Hook, which was reprinted from the
Quarterly), the only specimen of Lockhart's miscellaneous writing
that is easily accessible or authentically known. He was still but in
his apprenticeship here; but his remarkable gifts are already
apparent. These gifts included a faculty of sarcastic comment so
formidable that it early earned him the title of "the Scorpion"; a very
wide and sound knowledge of literature, old and new, English and
foreign; some acquirements in art and in other matters; an excellent
style, and a solid if rather strait-laced theory of criticism. Except that
he was, as almost everybody was then, too much given to violent
personalities in his anonymous work, he was a very great journalist
indeed, and he was also a very great man of letters.
Thomas de Quincey was not of the earliest Blackwood staff (in that
respect Maginn should be mentioned before him), but he was the
older as well as the more important man of the two, and there is the
additional reason for postponing the founder of Fraser, that this
latter periodical introduced a fresh flight of birds of passage (as
journalists both fortunate and unfortunate may peculiarly be called)
to English literature. De Quincey was born in 1785 (the same year as
his friend Wilson) at Manchester, where his father was a merchant of
means. He was educated at the Grammar School of his native town,
after some preliminary teaching at or near Bath, whither his mother
had moved after his father's death. He did not like Manchester, and
when he had nearly served his time for an exhibition to Brasenose
College, Oxford, he ran away and hid himself. He went to Oxford
after all, entering at Worcester, where he made a long though rather
intermittent residence, but took no degree. In 1809 he took up his
abode at Grasmere, married after a time, and lived there, at least as
his headquarters, for more than twenty years. In 1830 he moved to
Edinburgh, where, or in its neighbourhood, he resided for the rest of
his long life, and where he died in December 1859. He has given
various autobiographic handlings of this life—in the main it would
seem quite trustworthy, but invested with an air of fantastic unreality
by his manner of relation.
His life, however, and his personality, and even the whole of his
voluminous published work, have in all probability taken colour in
the general thought from his first literary work of any consequence,
the wonderful Confessions of an English Opium Eater, which, with
the Essays of Elia, were the chief flowers of the London Magazine,
and appeared in that periodical during the year 1821. He had
acquired this habit during his sojourn at Oxford, and it had grown
upon him during his at first solitary residence at the Lakes to an
enormous extent. Until he thus committed the results of his dreams,
or of his fancy and literary genius working on his dreams, or of his
fancy and genius by themselves, to print and paper, in his thirty-sixth
year, he had been, though a great reader, hardly anything of a
writer. But thenceforward, and especially after, in 1825, he had
visited his Lake neighbour Wilson at Edinburgh, and had been by
him introduced to Blackwood, he became a frequent contributor to
different magazines, and continued to be so, writing far more even
than he published, till his death. He wrote very few books, the chief
being a very free translation of a German novel, forged as Scott's,
and called Walladmor; a more original and stable, though not very
brilliant, effort in fiction, entitled Klosterheim; and the Logic of
Political Economy. Towards the end of his life he superintended an
English collection—there had already been one in America—of his
essays, and this has been supplemented more than once since.
It may, indeed, fairly be doubted whether so large a collection, of
miscellaneous, heterogeneous, and, to tell the truth, very unequally
interesting and meritorious matter, has ever been received with
greater or more lasting popular favour, a fresh edition of the
fourteen or sixteen volumes of the Works having been called for on
an average every decade. There have been dissidents: and recently
in particular something of a set has been made against De Quincey
—a set to some extent helped by the gradual addition to the Works
of a great deal of unimportant matter which he had not himself
cared to reproduce. This, indeed, is perhaps the greatest danger to
which the periodical writer is after his death exposed, and is even
the most serious drawback to periodical writing. It is impossible that
any man who lives by such writing can always be at his best in form,
and he will sometimes be compelled to execute what Carlyle has
called "honest journey-work in default of better,"—work which,
though perfectly honest and perfectly respectable, is mere journey-
work, and has no claim to be disturbed from its rest when its
journey is accomplished. Of this there was some even in De
Quincey's own collection, and the proportion has been much
increased since. Moreover, even at his very best, he was not a writer
who could be trusted to keep himself at that best. His reading was
enormous,—nearly as great perhaps as Southey's, though in still less
popular directions,—and he would sometimes drag it in rather
inappropriately. He had an unconquerable and sometimes very
irritating habit of digression, of divagation, of aside. And, worst of
all, his humour, which in its own peculiar vein of imaginative
grotesque has seldom been surpassed, was liable constantly to
degenerate into a kind of laboured trifling, inexpressibly
exasperating to the nerves. He could be simply dull; and he can
seldom be credited with the possession of what may be called
literary tact.
Yet his merits were such as to give him no superior in his own
manner among the essayists, and hardly any among the prose
writers of the century. He, like Wilson, and probably before Wilson,
deliberately aimed at a style of gorgeous elaboration, intended not
exactly for constant use, but for use when required; and he achieved
it. Certain well-known passages, as well as others which have not
become hackneyed, in the Confessions of an Opium Eater, in the
Autobiography, in The English Mail Coach, in Our Ladies of Sorrow,
and elsewhere, are unsurpassed in English or out of it for
imaginative splendour of imagery, suitably reproduced in words. Nor
was this De Quincey's only, though it was his most precious gift. He
had a singular, though, as has been said, a very untrustworthy
faculty of humour, both grim and quaint. He was possessed of
extraordinary dialectic ingenuity, a little alloyed no doubt by a
tendency to wire-drawn and over subtle minuteness such as besets
the born logician who is not warned of his danger either by a strong
vein of common sense or by constant sojourn in the world. He could
expound and describe admirably; he had a thorough grasp of the
most complicated subjects when he did not allow will-o'-the-wisps to
lure him into letting it go, and could narrate the most diverse kinds
of action, such as the struggles of Bentley with Trinity College, the
journey of the Tartars from the Ukraine to Siberia, and the fortunes
of the Spanish Nun, Catalina, with singular adaptability. In his
biographical articles on friends and contemporaries, which are rather
numerous, he has been charged both with ill-nature and with
inaccuracy. The first charge may be peremptorily dismissed, the
second requires much argument and sifting in particular cases. To
some who have given not a little attention to the matter it seems
that De Quincey was never guilty of deliberate fabrication, and that
he was not even careless in statement. But he was first of all a
dreamer; and when it is true of a man that, in the words of the
exquisite passage where Calderon has come at one with
Shakespeare, his very dreams are a dream, it will often happen that
his facts are not exactly a fact.
Nevertheless, De Quincey is a great writer and a great figure in
literature, while it may plausibly be contended that journalism may
make all the more boast of him in that it is probable that without it
he would never have written at all. And he has one peculiarity not
yet mentioned. Although his chief excellences may not be fully
perceptible except to mature tastes, he is specially attractive to the
young. Probably more boys have in the last forty years been brought
to a love of literature proper by De Quincey than by any other writer
whatever.
Of other contributors to these periodicals much might be said in
larger space, as for instance of the poisoner-critic Thomas Griffiths
Wainewright, the "Janus Weathercock" of the London, the original of
certain well-known heroes of Bulwer and Dickens, and the object of
a more than once recurrent and distinctly morbid attention from
young men of letters since. Lamb, who was not given to think evil of
his friends, was certainly unlucky in calling Wainewright "warm- as
light-hearted"; for the man (who died a convict in Australia, though
he cheated the gallows which was his due) was both an affected
coxcomb and a callous scoundrel. But he was a very clever fellow,
though indignant morality has sometimes endeavoured to deny this.
That he anticipated by sixty years and more certain depravations in
style and taste notorious in our own day is something: it is more that
his achievement in gaudy writing and in the literary treatment of art
was really considerable.
Wainewright, however, is only "curious" in more than one sense of
that term: Leigh Hunt, who, though quite incapable of poisoning
anybody, had certain points in common with Wainewright on the
latter's more excusable sides, and whose prose must now be
treated, is distinguished. He reappears with even better right here
than some others of the more important constituents of this chapter.
For all his best work in prose appeared in periodicals, though it is
impossible to say that all his work that appeared in periodicals was
his best work. He was for fourteen years editor of, and a large
contributor to, the Examiner, which he and his brother started in
1808. After his liberation from prison he not merely edited, but in
the older fashion practically wrote the Reflector (1810), the Indicator
(1819-21), and the Companion (1828). His rather unlucky journey to
Italy was undertaken to edit the Liberal. He was one of the rare and
rash men of letters who have tried to keep up a daily journal
unassisted—a new Tatler, which lasted for some eighteen months
(1830-32); and a little later (1834-35) he supported for full two
years a similar but weekly venture, in part original, in part compiled
or borrowed, called Leigh Hunt's London Journal. These were not his
only ventures of the kind: he was an indefatigable contributor to
periodicals conducted by others; and most of his books now known
by independent titles are in fact collections of "articles"—sometimes
reprinted, sometimes published for the first time.
It was impossible that such a mass of matter should be all good; and
it is equally impossible to deny that the combined fact of so much
production and of so little concentration argues a certain
idiosyncrasy of defect. In fact the butterfly character which every
unprejudiced critic of Leigh Hunt has noticed, made it impossible for
him to plan or to execute any work on a great scale. He never could
have troubled himself to complete missing knowledge, to fill in gaps,
to co-ordinate thinking, as the literary historian, whose vocation in
some respects he might seem to have possessed eminently, must do
—to weave fancy into the novelist's solid texture, and not to leave it
in thrums or in gossamer. But he was, though in both ways a most
unequal, a delightful miscellanist and critic. In both respects it is
natural, and indeed unavoidable, to compare him with Lamb and
with Hazlitt, whom, however, he really preceded, forming a link
between them and the eighteenth century essayists. His greater
voluminousness, induced by necessity, puts him at a rather unfair
disadvantage with the first; and we may perhaps never find in him
those exquisite felicities which delight and justify the true "Agnist."
Yet he has found some things that Lamb missed in Lamb's own
subjects; and though his prejudices (of the middle-class Liberal and
freethinking kind) were sometimes more damaging than any to
which Lamb was exposed, he was free from the somewhat wilful
eclecticism of that inimitable person. He could like nearly all things
that were good—in which respect he stands above both his rivals in
criticism. But he stands below them in his miscellaneous work;
though here also, as in his poetry, he was a master, not a scholar.
Lamb and Hazlitt improved upon him here, as Keats and Shelley
improved upon him there. But what a position is it to be "improved
upon" by Keats and Shelley in poetry, by Hazlitt and Lamb in prose!
Hartley Coleridge might with about equal propriety have been
treated in the last chapter and in this; but the already formidable
length of the catalogue of bards perhaps turns the scale in favour of
placing him with other contributors to Blackwood, to which, thanks
to his early friendship with Wilson, he enjoyed access, and in which
he might have written much more than he did, and did actually write
most of what he published himself, except the Biographia Borealis.
The life of Hartley was a strange and sad variant of his father's,
though, if he lacked a good deal of S. T. C.'s genius, his character
was entirely free from the baser stains which darkened that great
man's weakness. Born (1796) at Clevedon, the first-fruits of the
marriage of Coleridge and Sara, he was early celebrated by
Wordsworth and by his father in immortal verse, and by Southey, his
uncle, in charming prose, for his wonderful dreamy precocity; but he
never was a great reader. Southey took care of him with the rest of
the family when Coleridge disappeared into the vague; and Hartley,
after schooling at Ambleside, was elected to a post-mastership at
Merton College, Oxford. He missed the Newdigate thrice, and only
got a second in the schools, but was more than consoled by a
Fellowship at Oriel. Unfortunately Oriel was not only gaining great
honour, but was very jealous of it; and the probationary Fellows
were subjected to a most rigid system of observation, which seems
to have gone near to espionage. If ever there was a man born to be
a Fellow under the old English University scheme, that man was
Hartley Coleridge; and it is extremely probable that if he had been
let alone he would have produced, in one form or another, a
justification of that scheme, worthy to rank with Burton's Anatomy.
But he was accused of various shortcomings, of which intemperance
seems to have been the most serious, though it is doubtful whether
it would have sunk the beam if divers peccadilloes, political, social,
and miscellaneous, had not been thrown in. Strong interest was
made in favour of mercy, but the College deprived him of his
Fellowship, granting him, not too consistently, a solatium of £300.
This was apparently in 1820. Hartley lived for nearly thirty years
longer, but his career was closed. He was, as his brother Derwent
admits, one of those whom the pressure of necessity does not spur
but numbs. He wrote a little for Blackwood; he took pupils
unsuccessfully, and school-mastered with a little better success; and
during a short time he lived with a Leeds publisher who took a fancy
to him and induced him to write his only large book, the Biographia
Borealis. But for the most part he abode at Grasmere, where his
failing (it was not much more) of occasional intemperance was
winked at by all, even by the austere Wordsworth, where he
wandered about, annotated a copy of Anderson's Poets and some
other books, and supported himself (with the curious Coleridgean
faculty of subsisting like the bird of paradise, without either foot or
foothold) till, at his mother's death, an annuity made his prospects
secure. He died on 6th January 1849, a little before Wordsworth,
and shortly afterwards his work was collected by his brother
Derwent in seven small volumes; the Poems filling two, the Essays
and Fragments two, and the Biographia Borealis three.
This last (which appeared in its second form as Lives of Northern
Worthies, with some extremely interesting notes by S. T. C.) is an
excellent book of its kind, and shows that under more favourable
circumstances Hartley might have been a great literary historian. But
it is on the whole less characteristic than the volumes of Poems and
Essays. In the former Hartley has no kind of souffle (or long-
breathed inspiration), nor has he those exquisite lyrical touches of
his father's which put Coleridge's scanty and unequal work on a level
with that of the greatest names in English poetry. But he has a
singular melancholy sweetness, and a meditative grace which finds
its special home in the sonnet. In the "Posthumous Sonnets"
especially, the sound—not an echo of, but a true response to,
Elizabethan music—is unmistakable, and that to Shakespeare ("the
soul of man is larger than the sky"), that on himself ("When I survey
the course that I have run"), and not a few others, rank among the
very best in English. Many of the miscellaneous poems contain
beautiful things. But on the whole the greatest interest of Hartley
Coleridge is that he is the first and one of the best examples of a
kind of poet who is sometimes contemned, who has been very
frequent in this century, but who is dear to the lover of poetry, and
productive of delightful things. This kind of poet is wanting, it may
be, in what is briefly, if not brutally, called originality. He might not
sing much if others had not sung and were not singing around him;
he does not sing very much even as it is, and the notes of his song
are not extraordinarily piercing or novel. But they are true, they are
not copied, and the lover of poetry could not spare them.
It is improbable that Hartley Coleridge would ever have been a great
poet: he might, if Fate or even if the Oriel dons had been a little
kinder, have been a great critic. As it is, his essays, his introduction
to Massinger and Ford, and his Marginalia, suffer on the one side
from certain defects of reading; for his access to books was latterly
small, and even when it had been ample, as at Oxford, in London, or
at Southey's house, he confesses that he had availed himself of it
but little. Hence he is often wrong, and more often incomplete, from
sheer lack of information. Secondly, much of his work is mere
jotting, never in the very least degree intended for publication, and
sometimes explicitly corrected or retracted by later jottings of the
same kind. In such a case we can rather augur of the might-have-
been than pronounce on the actual. But the two volumes are full of
delicate critical views on literature; and the longest series,
"Ignoramus on the Fine Arts," shows how widely, with better luck
and more opportunity, he might have extended his critical
performances. In short, Hartley Coleridge, if a "sair sicht" to the
moralist, is an interesting and far from a wholly painful one to the
lover of literature, which he himself loved so much, and practised,
with all his disadvantages, so successfully.
All the persons hitherto mentioned in this chapter appear by
undoubted right in any history of English Literature: it may cause a
little surprise to see that of Maginn figuring with them. Yet his
abilities were scarcely inferior to those of any; and he was kept back
from sharing their fame only by infirmities of character and by his
succumbing to that fatal Bohemianism which, constantly recurring
among men of letters, exercised its attractions with special force in
the early days of journalism in this century. William Maginn (1793),
who was the son of a schoolmaster at Cork, took a brilliant degree at
Trinity College, Dublin, and for some years followed his father's
profession. The establishment, however, and the style of Blackwood
were an irresistible attraction to him, and he drifted to Edinburgh,
wrote a great deal in the earlier and more boisterous days of Maga
under the pseudonym of Ensign O'Doherty, and has, as has been
said, some claims to be considered the originator of the Noctes.
Then, as he had gone from Ireland to Edinburgh, he went from
Edinburgh to London, and took part in divers Tory periodicals, acting
as Paris correspondent for some of them till, about 1830, he started,
or helped in starting, a London Blackwood in Fraser. He had now
every opportunity, and he gathered round him a staff almost more
brilliant than that of the Edinburgh, of the London, of the Quarterly,
or of Blackwood itself. But he was equally reckless of his health and
of his money. The acknowledged original of Thackeray's Captain
Shandon, he was not seldom in jail; and at last, assisted by Sir
Robert Peel almost too late, he died at Walton on Thames in August
1842, not yet fifty, but an utter wreck.
The collections of Maginn's work are anything but exhaustive, and
the work itself suffers from all the drawbacks, probable if not
inevitable, of work written in the intervals of carouse, at the last
moment, for ephemeral purposes. Yet it is instinct with a perhaps
brighter genius than the more accomplished productions of some
much more famous men. The Homeric Ballads, though they have
been praised by some, are nearly worthless; and the longer attempts
in fiction are not happy. But Maginn's shorter stories in Blackwood,
especially the inimitable "Story without a Tail," are charming; his
more serious critical work, especially that on Shakespeare, displays a
remarkable combination of wide reading, critical acumen, and sound
sense; and his miscellanies in prose and verse, especially the latter,
are characterised by a mixture of fantastic humour, adaptive wit, and
rare but real pathos and melody, which is the best note of the
specially Irish mode. It must be said, however, that Maginn is chiefly
important to the literary historian as the captain of a band of
distinguished persons, and as in a way the link between the
journalism of the first and the journalism of the second third of the
century. A famous plate by Maclise, entitled "The Fraserians,"
contains, seated round abundant bottles, with Maginn as president,
portraits (in order by "the way of the sun," and omitting minor
personages) of Irving, Gleig the Chaplain-General, Sir Egerton
Brydges, Allan Cunningham, Carlyle, Count D'Orsay, Brewster,
Theodore Hook, Lockhart, Crofton Croker of the Irish Fairy Tales,
Jerdan, Dunlop of the "History of Fiction," Gait, Hogg, Coleridge,
Harrison Ainsworth, Thackeray, Southey, and Barry Cornwall. It is
improbable that all these contributed at one time, and tolerably
certain that some of them were very sparing and infrequent
contributors at any time, but the important point is the juxtaposition
of the generation which was departing and the generation which
was coming on—of Southey with Thackeray and of Coleridge with
Carlyle. Yet it will be noticed (and the point is of some importance)
that these new-comers are, at least the best of them, much less
merely periodical writers than those who came immediately before
them. In part no doubt this was accident; in part it was due to the
greater prominence which novels and serial works of other kinds
were beginning to assume; in part it may be to the fact that the
great increase in the number of magazines and newspapers had
lowered their individual dignity and perhaps their profitableness. But
it is certain that of the list just mentioned, Thackeray and Carlyle, of
the contemporary new generation of the Edinburgh Macaulay, of the
nascent Westminster Mill, and others, were not, like Jeffrey, like
Sydney Smith, like Wilson, and like De Quincey, content to write
articles. They aspired to write, and they did write, books; and, that
being so, they will all be treated in chapters other than the present,
appropriated to the kinds in which their chief books were designed.
The name of John Sterling is that of a man who, with no great
literary claims of his own, managed to connect it durably and in a
double fashion with literature, first as the subject of an immortal
biography by Carlyle, secondly as the name-giver of the famous
Sterling Club, which about 1838, and hardly numbering more
members than the century did years, included a surprising
proportion of the most rising men of letters of the day, while all but
a very few of its members were of literary mark. John Sterling
himself was the son of a rather eccentric father, Edward Sterling,
who, after trying soldiering with no great, and farming with
decidedly ill, success, turned to journalism and succeeded brilliantly
on the Times. His son was born in the Isle of Bute on 20th July
1806, was educated, first privately, then at Glasgow, and when
about nineteen went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he fell in
with a famous and brilliant set. He migrated from Trinity College to
Trinity Hall, took no degree, wrote a little for the then young
Athenæum, was engaged in a romantic and in all ways rather
unfortunate business of encouraging a rebellion in Spain, but
married instead of taking active part in it, and went to the West
Indies. When he came home he, it is said under Coleridgean
influence, took orders, but soon developed heterodox views and
gave up active duty. He lived, though under sentence of death by
consumption, till 1843, spending much time abroad, but writing a
little, chiefly for periodicals.
The chief characteristic of Sterling in life and thought appears to
have been a vacillating impulsiveness, while in letters his production,
small in bulk, is anything but strong in substance or form. But, like
some other men who do not, in the common phrase, "do much," he
seems to have been singularly effectual as a centre of literary
friendship and following. The Sterling Club included not merely
Tennyson, John Stuart Mill, Carlyle, Allan Cunningham, Lord
Houghton, Sir Francis Palgrave, Bishop Thirlwall, who all receive
separate notice elsewhere, but others who, being of less general
fame, may best be noticed together here. There were the scholars
Blakesley, Worsley, and Hepworth Thompson (afterwards Master of
Trinity); H. N. Coleridge, the poet's nephew, son-in-law, and editor;
Sir Francis Doyle, afterwards Professor of Poetry at Oxford, the
author of some interesting reminiscences in prose, and in verse of
some of the best songs and poems on military subjects to be found
in the language, such as "The Loss of the Birkenhead," the "Private
of the Buffs," and above all the noble and consummate "Red Thread
of Honour"; Sir Edmund Head, Fellow of Merton and Governor-
General of Canada, and a writer on art (not to be confounded with
his namesake Sir Francis, the agreeable miscellanist, reviewer, and
travel writer, who was also a baronet and also connected with
Canada, where he was Governor of the Upper Province at the time
of the Rebellion of 1835). There was Sir George Cornewall Lewis, a
keen scholar and a fastidious writer, whose somewhat short life
(1806-63) was chiefly occupied by politics; for he was a Poor-Law
Commissioner, a Member of Parliament, and a holder of numerous
offices up to those of Chancellor of the Exchequer and Secretary of
State. Lewis, who edited the Edinburgh for a short time, wrote no
very long work, but many on a great variety of subjects, the chief
perhaps being On the Influence of Authority in Matters of Opinion,
1850 (a book interesting to contrast with one by a living statesman
forty-five years later), the Inquiry into the Credibility of the Ancient
Roman History (1855), and later treatises on The Government of
Dependencies and the Best Form of Government. He was also an
exact verbal scholar, was, despite the addiction to "dry" subjects
which this list may seem to show, the author of not a few jeux
d'esprit, and was famous for his conversational sayings, the most
hackneyed of which is probably "Life would be tolerable if it were not
for its amusements."
But even this did not exhaust the Sterling Club. There was another
scholar, Malden, who should have been mentioned with the group
above; the second Sir Frederick Pollock, who wrote too little but left
an excellent translation of Dante, besides some reminiscences and
other work; Philip Pusey, elder brother of the theologian, and a man
of remarkable ability; James Spedding, who devoted almost the
whole of his literary life to the study, championship, and editing of
Bacon, but left other essays and reviews of great merit; Twisleton,
who undertook with singular patience and shrewdness the solution
of literary and historical problems like the Junius question and that
of the African martyrs; and lastly George Stovin Venables, who for
some five and thirty years was the main pillar in political writing of
the Saturday Review, was a parliamentary lawyer of great diligence
and success, and combined a singularly exact and wide knowledge
of books and men in politics and literature with a keen judgment, an
admirably forcible if somewhat mannered style, a disposition far
more kindly than the world was apt to credit him with, and a famous
power of conversation. All these men, almost without exception,
were more or less contributors to periodicals; and it may certainly be
said that, but for periodicals, it is rather unlikely that some of them
would have contributed to literature at all.
Not as a member of the Sterling Club, but as the intimate friend of
all its greatest members, as a contributor, though a rather
unfrequent one, to papers, and as a writer of singular and
extraordinary quality but difficult to class under a more precise head,
may be noticed Edward FitzGerald, who, long a recluse, unstintedly
admired by his friends but quite unknown to the public, became
famous late in life by his translation of Omar Khayyám, and familiar
somewhat after his death through the publication of his charming
letters by Mr. Aldis Wright. He was born on 31st March 1809, near
Woodbridge in Suffolk, the neighbourhood which was his
headquarters for almost his entire life, till his death on a visit to a
grandson of the poet Crabbe at Merton in Norfolk, 14th June 1883.
He went to school at Bury, and thence to Cambridge, where he laid
the foundation of his acquaintance with the famous Trinity set of
1825-30. But on taking his degree in the last named year and
leaving college, he took to no profession, but entered on the life of
reading, thinking, gardening, and boating, which he pursued for
more than half a century. Besides his Trinity contemporaries, from
Tennyson and Thackeray downwards, he had Carlyle for an intimate
friend, and he married the daughter of Bernard Barton, the poet-
Quaker and friend of Lamb. He published nothing till the second half
of the century had opened, when Euphranor, written long before at
Cambridge, or with reference to it, appeared. Then he learnt
Spanish, and first showed his extraordinary faculty of translation by
Englishing divers dramas of Calderon. Spanish gave way to Persian,
and after some exercises elsewhere the famous version, paraphrase,
or whatever it is to be called, of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám
appeared in 1859, to be much altered in subsequent editions.
FitzGerald's works in the collected edition of 1889 fill three pretty
stout volumes, to which a considerable number of letters (he was
first of all and almost solely a letter-writer and translator) have been
added. In his prose (no disrespect being intended to Euphranor, a
dialogue Berkeleian in form and of great beauty, and other things)
he interests us doubly as a character and as a critic, for the letters
contain much criticism. Personally FitzGerald was a man of rather
few and not obtrusive, but deep and warm sympathies, slow to
make new friends but intensely tenacious of and affectionate
towards the old, with a very strong distaste for crowds and general
society, and undoubtedly somewhat of what the French call a
maniaque, that is to say, a slightly hypochondriac crotcheteer. These
characteristics, which make him interesting as a man, are still more
interestingly reflected in his criticism, which is often one-sided and
unjust, sometimes crotchety (as when he would not admit that even
his beloved Alfred Tennyson had ever been at his best since the
collection of 1842), but often also wonderfully delicate and true.
As a translator he stands almost alone, his peculiar virtue, noticeable
alike in his versions from the Spanish and Greek, being so capitally
and once for all illustrated in that of Omar Khayyám that in narrow
space it is not necessary to go beyond this. From the purist and
pedantic point of view FitzGerald, no doubt, is wildly unfaithful. He
scarcely ever renders word for word, and will insert, omit, alter, with
perfect freedom; yet the total effect is reproduced as perhaps no
other translator has ever reproduced it. Whether his version of the
Rubaiyat, with its sensuous fatalism, its ridicule of asceticism and
renunciation, and its bewildering kaleidoscope of mysticism that
becomes materialist and materialism that becomes mystical, has not
indirectly had influences, practical and literary, the results of which
would have been more abhorrent to FitzGerald than to almost any
one else, may be suggested. But the beauty of the poem as a poem
is unmistakable and altogether astounding. The melancholy richness
of the rolling quatrain with its unicorn rhymes, the quaint mixture of
farce and solemnity, passion and playfulness, the abundance of the
imagery, the power of the thought, the seduction of the rhetoric,
make the poem actually, though not original or English, one of the
greatest of English poems.
Of the periodical too, if not entirely, was Richard Harris Barham,
"Thomas Ingoldsby," the author of the most popular book of light
verse that ever issued from the press. His one novel, My Cousin
Nicholas, was written for Blackwood; the immortal Ingoldsby
Legends appeared in Bentley and Colburn. Born at Canterbury in
1788, of a family possessed of landed property, though not of much,
and educated at St. Paul's School and Brasenose College, Barham
took orders, and, working with thorough conscience as a clergyman,
despite his light literature, became a minor canon in St. Paul's
Cathedral. He died in 1845. Hardly any book is more widely known
than the collected Ingoldsby Legends, which originally appeared in
the last eight years of their author's life. Very recently they have met
with a little priggish depreciation, the natural and indeed inevitable
result, first of a certain change in speech and manners, and then of
their long and vast popularity. Nor would any one contend that they
are exactly great literature. But for inexhaustible fun that never gets
flat and scarcely ever simply uproarious, for a facility and felicity in
rhyme and rhythm which is almost miraculous, and for a blending of
the grotesque and the terrible which, if less fine than Praed's or
Hood's, is only inferior to theirs—no one competent to judge and
enjoy will ever go to Barham in vain.
The same difficulty which beset us at the end of the last chapter
recurs here, the difficulty arising from the existence of large
numbers of persons of the third or lower ranks whose inclusion may
be desired or their exclusion resented. At the head, or near it, of this
class stand such figures as that of Douglas Jerrold, a sort of very
inferior Hook on the other side of politics, with a dash (also very
inferior) of Hood, whose Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures and similar
things were very popular at and a little before the middle of the
century, but whose permanent literary value is of the smallest, if
indeed it can be said to exist. But of these—not a few of them more
worthy if less prominent in their day than Jerrold—there could be no
end; and there would be little profit in trying to reach any. The
successful "contributor," by the laws of the case, climbs on the
shoulders of his less successful mates even more than elsewhere;
and the very impetus which lands him on the height rejects them
into the depths.
 CHAPTER V
THE HISTORIANS OF THE CENTURY

After the brilliant group of historians whose work illustrated the close
of the period covered by the preceding volume, it was some time
before a historical writer of the first rank again appeared in England;
and there were reasons for this. Not that, as in the case of purely
creative literature, in prose as in verse, there is any natural or actual
lull between different successive periods in this case; on the contrary
the writing of history is more likely to be stimulated by example, and
requires rather the utmost talent than positive genius, except in
those rare cases which, as in other departments, are not to be
accounted for, either in their presence or in their absence, by
observation or inference. But in the first place the greatest minds of
the first generation of which we have to take account, who were
born about the beginning of the third quarter of the eighteenth
century, were, partly by time and partly by chance, directed for the
most part either into poetry, or into politics, or into active life; and
the five and twenty years of the Revolutionary War in which they
passed their manhood were more likely to provide materials for
history, than history itself.
Yet history, after the example given by Hume, by Robertson, and
above all by Gibbon, was not at all likely to cease, nor did some men
of great talents in other ways fail to betake themselves to it. Godwin
was a historian, and, considering his strong prejudices, the
unkindness of fortune (for history demands leisure almost as much
as poetry), and some defects of knowledge, not a contemptible
historian in his way. Mackintosh, intended for a philosopher, was a
historian. Southey was a very considerable historian, and master of
one of the most admirable historical styles on record. But he was
signally unfortunate in having that work of his which should have
been most popular, the History of the Peninsular War, pitted against
another by a younger man of professional competence, of actual
experience, and of brilliant literary powers, Sir William Napier (1786-
1860). The literary value of these two histories is more even than a
generation which probably reads neither much and has almost
forgotten Southey is apt to imagine; and though there is no doubt
that the Poet Laureate was strongly prejudiced on the Tory side, his
competitor was even more partial and biassed against that side. But
the difference between the two books is the difference between a
task admirably performed, and performed to a certain extent con
amore, by a skilled practitioner in task-work, and the special effort of
one who was at once an enthusiast and an expert in his subject. It is
customary to call Napier's History of the Peninsular War "the finest
military history in the English language," and so, perhaps, it is. The
famous description of the Battle of Albuera is only one of many
showing eloquence without any mere fine writing, and with the
knowledge of the soldier covering the artist's exaggeration.
Moore, Campbell, Scott himself, were all, as has been previously
recorded in the notices of their proper work, historians by trade,
though hardly, even to the extent to which Southey was, historians
by craft. But an exception must be made for the exquisite Tales of a
Grandfather, in which Sir Walter, without perhaps a very strict
application of historical criticism, applied his creative powers,
refreshed in their decay by combined affection for the subject and
for the presumed auditor, to fashioning the traditional history of old
Scotland into one of the most delightful narratives of any language
or time. But Henry Hallam, a contemporary of these men (1778-
1859), unlike them lives as a historian only, or as a historian and
literary critic—occupations so frequently combined during the
present century that perhaps an apology is due for the presentation
of some writers under the general head of one class rather than
under that of the other. Hallam, the son of a Dean of Bristol,
educated at Eton and Christ Church, an early Edinburgh reviewer,
and an honoured pundit and champion of the Whig party, possessing
also great literary tastes, much industry, and considerable faculty
both of judging and writing, united almost all the qualifications for a
high reputation; while his abstinence from public affairs, and from
participation in the violent half-personal, half-political squabbles
which were common among the literary men of his day, freed him
from most of the disadvantages, while retaining for him all the
advantages, of party connections. Early, too, he obtained a post in
the Civil Service (a Commissionership of Audit), which gave him a
comfortable subsistence while leaving him plenty of leisure. For
thirty years, between 1818 and 1848, he produced a series of books
on political and literary history which at once attained a very high
reputation, and can hardly be said to have yet lost it. These were a
View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages, published in the
first, and supplemented by a volume of notes and corrections in the
last, of the years just mentioned; a Constitutional History of England
from Henry VII. to George II. (1827); and an Introduction to the
Literature of Europe in the Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth
Centuries (1837-39).
The value of Hallam as a political and as a literary historian is by no
means the same. In the former capacity he was perhaps too much
influenced by that artificial and rather curious ideal of politics which
distinguished the Whig party of the later eighteenth century, which
was exaggerated, celebrated brilliantly, and perhaps buried by his
pupil and younger contemporary, Macaulay, and which practically
erects the result of a coincidence of accidents in English history into
a permanent and rationally defensible form of government,
comparable with and preferable to the earlier and unchanging forms
of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy with their sub-varieties. A
certain coldness and sluggishness of temperament and sympathy
also marred this part of Hallam's work, though less mischievously
than elsewhere. But to balance these drawbacks handsomely in his
favour, he possessed an industry which, immense as have been the
pains spent on his subjects since he wrote, leaves him in possession
of a very fair part of the field as a still trustworthy authority; a mind,
on the whole, judicial and fair; and an excellently clear and scholarly
if not exactly brilliant or engaging style.