AN ENGLISH CURATE.

83

livelier and more engaging charms of his prose Romance through two chapters or through ten. But we must get on; there is a long road before us yet.

A Start in Life.

It was somewhere about the year 1798, that a sharp-faced, youngish Englishman-who had been curate of a small country parish down in Wiltshire-drove, upon a pleasant June day, on a coach-top, into the old city of Edinboro'. This clergyman had a young lad seated beside him, whom he was tutoring; and this tutoring business enabled the curate to take a respectable house in the city. And by reason of the respectable house, and his own pleasant humor and intelligence, he came after a year or two to know a great many of the better folk in Edinboro', and was invited to preach an occasional sermon at a small Episcopal chapel in his neighborhood. But all the good people he met did not prevent his being a-hungered after a young person whom he had left in the south of England. So he took a vacation presently and fetched her

back, a bride, to the Scottish capital-having (as he said) thrown all his fortune in her lap. This fortune was of maternal inheritance, and consisted of six well-worn silver teaspoons. There was excellent society in Edinboro' in that

day, among the ornaments of which was Henry Mackenzie, a stately gentleman a sort of dean

*

-

of the literary coteries, and the author of books which it is well to know by name

The Man of Feeling and Julia de Roubigné - written with great painstaking and most exalted sentiment, and-what we count now-much dreariness. Then there was a Rev. Archibald Alison - he too an Episcopal clergyman, though Scotch to the backbone- and the author of an ingenious, but not very pregnant book, still to be found in old-fashioned libraries, labelled, Alison on Taste. Dugald Stewart was then active, and did on one or two occasions bring his honored presence to the little chapel to hear the preaching of the young English curate I spoke of. And this young

curate, poor as he is and with a

young wife, has

*Henry Mackenzie, b. 1745; d. 1831. Man of Feeling,

1771; The Lounger, 1785.

FRANCIS JEFFREY.

85

an itch for getting into print; and does after a little time (the actual date being 1800) publish a booklet, which you will hardly find now, entitled Six Sermons preached at Charlotte Chapel, Edinboro, by Rev. Sydney Smith.* But it was not so much these sermons, as his wit and brightness and great range of information, which brought him into easy intimacy with the most promising young men of the city. Walter Scott he may have encountered odd whiles, though the novelist was in those days bent on his hunt after Border Minstrelsy, and would have been shy of the rampant liberalism ingrained with Smith.

But the curate did meet often, and most intimately, a certain prim, delicate, short-statured, black-eyed, smug, ambitious, precocious young advocate named Francis Jeffrey; and it was in a chamber of this latter-up three pair of stairs in Buccleugh Place-that Sydney Smith, on a certain occasion, proposed to the host and two or three other friends there present, the establishment of a literary journal to be published

* Rev. Sydney Smith, b. 1771; d. 1845. Memoir by Lady Holland.

quarterly; and out of that proposition grew straightway that famous Edinburgh Review which in its covers of buff and blue has thrived for over ninety years now-throwing its hot shot into all opposing camps of politics or of letters. I have designated two of the arch plotters, Sydney Smith and Jeffrey. Francis Horner* was another who was in at the start; he, too, a young Scotch lawyer, who went to London on the very year of the establishment of the journal, but writing for its early issues, well and abundantly. Most people know him now only by the beautiful statue of him by Chantrey, which stands in Westminster Abbey ; it has a noble head, full of intellect full of integrity. Sydney Smith said the Ten Commandments were writ all over his face. Yet the marble shows a tenderness of soul not common to those who, like him, had made a profession of politics, and entered upon a parliamentary career. But the career was short; he died in 1817- not yet forty-leaving a reputation that was spotless; had he lived, he would have come, without a

* Francis Horner, b. 1778; d. 1817. Memoirs and Correspondence, 1843.

HENRY BROUGHAM

87

doubt, to the leadership of liberal opinion in England. The mourning for him was something extraordinary in its reach, and its sincerity; a remarkable man-whose politics never up-rooted his affections, and whose study of the laws of trade did not spoil his temper, or make him abusive. His example, and his repeated advices, in connection with the early history of the Review, were always against the personalities and ugly satire which were strong features of it in the first years, and which had their source

- very largely in the influences and pertinacity of another member of the Review Syndicate; I mean Henry Brougham.

Henry Brougham.

This was another young lawyer- of Scottish birth, but of Cumberland stock; ambitious like Jeffrey and equally clever, though in a different line; he was ungainly and lank of limb; with a dogmatic and presuming manner, and a noticeably aggressive nose which became afterward the handle (and a very good handle it made) for those illustrative caricatures of Mr. Punch, which