Imatges de pàgina
PDF
EPUB

-

Castle, with its solemn shadowy woods, and the Ochils, on the south,-Ochtertyre, one of the loveliest spots in Scotland, and the gorge of Glenturrett, on the north,—and the bold dark hills which surround the romantic village of Comrie, on the west. Crieff is now a place of considerable note, and forms a centre of summer attraction to multitudes; but at the commencement of the eighteenth century it must have been a miserable hamlet. Malloch was originally the name of the poet, and the name is still common in that part of Perthshire. David attended the college of Aberdeen, and became, afterwards, an unsalaried tutor in the family of Mr. Home of Dreghorn, near Edinburgh. We find him next in the Duke of Montrose's family, with a salary of £30 per annum. In 1723 he accompanied his pupils to London, and changed his name to Mallett, as more euphonious. Next year he produced his pretty ballad of William and Margaret,' and published it in Aaron Hill's Plain Dealer.' This served as an introduction to the literary society of the metropolis, including such names as Young and Pope. In 1733 he disgraced himself by a satire on the greatest man then living. the venerable Richard Bentley. Mallett was one of those mean creatures who always worship a rising, and turn their backs on a setting sun. By his very considerable talents, his management, and his address, he soon rose in the world. He was appointed under-secretary to the Prince of Wales, with a salary of £200 a year. In conjunction with Thomson, to whom he was really kind, he wrote, in 1740, The Masque of Alfred,' in honour of the birthday of the Princess Augusta. His first wife, of whom nothing is recorded, having died, he married the daughter of Lord Carlisle's steward, who brought him a fortune of £10,000. Both she and Mallett gave themselves out as Deists. This was partly owing to his intimacy with Bolingbroke, to gratify whom he heaped abuse upon Pope in a preface to 'The Patriot-King,' and was rewarded by Bolingbroke leaving him the whole of his works and MSS. These he afterwards published, and exposed himself to the vengeful sarcasm of Johnson, who said that Bolingbroke was a scoundrel and a coward -a scoundrel, to charge a blunderbuss against Christianity; and a coward, because he durst not fire it himself, but left a shilling to a beggarly Scotsman to draw the trigger after his death. Mallett ranked himself among the calumniators and, as it proved, murderers of Admiral Byng. He wrote a Life of Lord Bacon, in which, it was said, he forgot that Bacon was a philosopher, and would, probably, when he came to write the Life of Marlborough, forget that he was a general. This Life of Bacon is now utterly forgotten. We happened to read it in our early days, and thought it a very contemptible performance. The Duchess of Marlborough left £1,000 in her will between Glover and Mallett to write a Life of her

[ocr errors]

husband. Glover threw up his share of the work, and Mallett engaged to perform the whole, to which, besides, he was stimulated by a pension from the second Duke of Marlborough. He got the money, but when he died it was found that he had not written a line of the work. In his latter days he held the lucrative office of Keeper of the Book of Entries for the port of London. He died on the 21st of April, 1765.

"Mallett is, on the whole, no credit to Scotland. He was a bad, mean, insincere, and unprincipled man, whose success was procured by despicable and dastardly arts. He had doubtless some genius, and his Birks of Invermay' and 'William and Margaret' shall preserve his name after his clumsy imitation of Thomson, called The Excursion,' and his long, rambling Amyntor and Theodora,' have been forgotten."-See Gilfillan's "Less-known Brit. Poets," vol. iii., pp. 130-132.

MARK AKENSIDE.

"Mark Akenside, born 1721, died 1770, was the son of a butcher, and was born at Newcastle-on-Tyne. An accident in his early years, caused by the fall of his father's cleaver on his foot, lamed him for life, and perpetuated the memory of his lowly birth. He received his education at the grammar-school of that town, where Lord Eldon, Lord Stowell, and Lord Collingwood also received the rudiments of learning he afterwards graduated at the universities of Edinburgh and Leyden. On his return to England he settled for a shrot time at Northampton, then at Hampstead, and finally in London. Here he gained ultimately the highest honours of his profession, and when he died was physician to the queen. His chief poem, on The Pleasures of Imagination,' he completed before he left Leyden. On reaching London it was sent to Dodsley, who, by Pope's advice, purchased and published it. The sum he gave was £120, then deemed a large amount for such a work. It immediately gained a measure of celebrity which it has scarcely maintained. In later life Akenside altered it in parts without improving it he made it, indeed, only more dry and scholastic, and is said to have remodelled some of the passages which in their primitive state are still most admired and popular. He also published a collection of 'Odes,' and in 1746 he engaged to write in the Museum,' a periodical then issued by Dodsley's house.

"Akenside's genius was decidedly classical: he had extensive learning, lofty conceptions, and a true love and knowledge of nature. His Puritan origin and tastes gave an earnestness to his moral views which pervades all his writing. His ear, though not equal to Gray's,

was correct, and his blank verse is free and beautifully modulated, deserving to be studied by all who would excel in that truly English metre. His philosophical ideas are taken chiefly from Plato, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson. He adopted Addison's threefold division of the sources of the pleasures of imagination, though in his later edition he substituted another. The poem is seldom read continuously, but it contains many passages of great force and beauty; those, for example, where he speaks of the death of Cæsar, where he compares nature and art, where he describes the final causes of the emotion of taste, and in a fragment of a fourth book, where he sketches the landscape on the banks of his native Tyne, and notes the feelings of his own boyhood. His Hymn to the Naiads' has the true classic ring, and has caught the manner and the feeling of Callimachus. His inscriptions-those, for example, on Chaucer and Shakspere-are reckoned among our best, and have been imitated by both Southey and Wordsworth. odes are his least successful productions; his 'Ode to the Earl of Huntingdon' having received most favour. Yet withal, his popularity was greater in his own day than it is likely to be in ours-popularity attributable to the influence of the writings of Gray, and especially to the revived study of Milton and other classic models through the notes and writings of Warton.

[ocr errors]

His

"It may be added that, upon the question sometimes discussed, whether the progress of science is favourable to poetry, Akenside differs from Campbell. The latter speaks of poetic feelings that yield to cold material laws.' the former holds that the rainbow's tinctured hues' shine the more brightly when science has investigated and explained them." -Dr. Angus's "Handbook of Eng. Lit.," pp. 216, 217. Lit."

See Allibone's "Crit. Dict. Eng.

borough of Oakhampton; and being warmed with that patriotic ardour which rarely fails to inspire the bosom of an ingenuous youth, he became a distinguished partisan of opposi tion politics, whilst his father was a supporter of the ministry, then ranged under the banners of Walpole. When Frederic Prince of Wales, having quarrelled with the court, formed a separate court of his own, in 1737, Lyttelton was appointed secretary to the Prince, with an advanced salary. At this time Pope bestowed his praise upon our patriot in an animated couplet:

Free as young Lyttelton her course pursue, Still true to virtue, and as warm as true.

"In 1741 he married Lucy, the daughter of Hugh Fortescue, Esq., a lady for whom he entertained the purest affection, and with whom he lived in unabated conjugal harmony. Her death in childbed, in 1747, was lamented by him in a Monody,' which stands prominent among his poetical works, and displays much natural feeling, amidst the more elaborate strains of a poet's imagination. So much may suffice respecting his productions of this class, which are distinguished by the correctness of their versification, the elegance of their diction, and the delicacy of their sentiments. His miscellaneous pieces, and his history of Henry II., the last, the work of his age, have each their appropriate merits, but may here be omitted.

"The death of his father, in 1751, produced his succession to the title and a large estate; and his taste for rural ornament rendered Hagley one of the most delightful residences in the kingdom. At the dissolution of the ministry, of which he composed a part, in 1759, he was rewarded with elevation to the peerage, by the style of Baron Lyttelton, of Frankley, in the county of Worcester. He died of a lingering disorder, which he bore with pious resignation, in August, 1773, in the 64th year of his age."-Aikin's "Select Brit. Poets." See Gilfillan's Ed. of "Brit. Poets."

GEORGE, LORD LYTTELTON. "George, Lord Lyttelton, born at Hagley, in Jan., 1708-9, was the eldest son of Sir Thomas Lyttelton, Bart., of the same place. He received his early education at Eton, whence he was sent to Christchurch College, Oxford. In both of these places he was distinguished for classical literature, and some of his poems which we have borrowed were the fruits of his juvenile studies. In his nineteenth year he set out on a tour to the Continent; and some of the letters which he wrote during this absence to his father are pleasing proofs of his sound principles, and his unreserved confidence in a venerated parent. He also wrote a poetical epistle to Dr. Ayscough, his Oxford tutor, which is one of the best of his works. On his return from abroad he was chosen representative in Parliament for the

THOMAS GRAY.

66

Thomas Gray, born 1716, died 1771, was a man of vast and varied acquirements, and whose life was devoted to the cultivation of letters. He was the son of a respectable London money-scrivener, but his father was a man of violent and arbitrary character, and the poet was early left to the tender care of an excellent mother, who had been obliged to separate from her tyrannical husband. He received his education at Eton, and afterwards settled in learned retirement at Cambridge, where he passed nearly the whole of his life. He travelled in France and Italy as tutor to Horace Walpole, but quarrelling with his

6

pupil, he returned home alone. Fixing himself at Cambridge, he soon acquired a high poetical reputation by his beautiful 'Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College,' published in 1747, which was followed, at pretty frequent intervals, by his other imposing and highly-finished works, the Elegy written in a Country Churchyard,' the 'Pindaric Odes,' and the far from numerous but splendid productions which make up his works. His quiet and studious retirement was only broken by occasional excursions to the North of England, and other holiday journeys, of which he has given in his letters so vivid and animated a description. His correspondence with his friends, and particularly with the poet Mason, is remarkable for interesting details, descriptions, and reflections, and is indeed, like that of Cowley, among the most delightful records of a thoughtful and literary life. Gray refused the offer of the Laureateship, which was proposed to him on the death of Cibber, but accepted the appointment of Professor of Modern History in the University, though he never performed the functions of that chair, his fastidious temper and indolent selfindulgence keeping him perpetually engaged in forming vast literary projects which he never executed. He appears not to have been popular among his colleagues; his haughty, retiring, and somewhat effeminate character prevented him from sympathizing with the tastes and studies that prevailed there; and he was at little pains to conceal his contempt for academical society. His industry was untiring, and his acquirements undoubtedly immense; for he had pushed his researches far beyond the usual limits of ancient classical philology, and was not only deeply versed in the romance literature of the Middle Ages, in modern French and Italian, but had studied the then almost unknown departments of Scandinavian and Celtic poetry. Constant traces may be found in all his works of the degree to which he had assimilated the spirit not only of the Greek lyric poetry, but the finest perfume of the great Italian writers: many passages of his works are a kind of mosaic of thought and imagery borrowed from Pindar, from the choral portions of the Attic tragedy, and from the majestic lyrics of the Italian poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries but though the substance of these mosaics may be borrowed from a multitude of sources, the fragments are, so to say, fused into one solid body by the intense flame of a powerful and fervent imagination. His finest lyric compositions are the Odes entitled The Bard,' that on the Progress of Poetry,' the 'Installation Ode' on the Duke of Grafton's election to the Chancellorship of the University, and the short but truly noble Ode to Adversity,' which breathes the severe and lofty spirit of the highest Greek lyric inspiration. The Elegy written in a Country Churchyard' is a masterpiece from beginning

:

[ocr errors]

to end. The thoughts indeed are obvious enough, but the dignity with which they are expressed, the immense range of allusion and description with which they are illustrated, and the finished grace of the language and versification in which they are embodied, give to this work something of that inimitable perfection of design and execution which we see in an antique statue or a sculptured gem. In the 'Bard,' starting from the picturesque idea of a Welsh poet and patriot contemplating the victorious invasion of his country by Edward I., he passes in prophetic review the whole panorama of English History, and gives a series of most animated events and per. sonages from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century. It is true that he is occasionally turgid, but the general march of the poem has a rush and a glow worthy of Pindar himself. The phantoms of the great and the illustrious flit before us like the shadowy kings in the weird procession of Macbeth: and the unity of sentiment is maintained first by the gratified vengeance with which the prophet foresees the crimes and sufferings of the oppressors of his country and their descendants, and by the triumphant prediction of the glorious reign of the Tudor race in Britain. In the odes entitled The Fatal Sisters' and 'The Descent of Odin,' Gray borrowed his materials from the Scandinavian legends. The tone of the Norse poetry is not perhaps very faithfully reproduced, but the fiery and gigantic imagery of the ancient Scalds was for the first time imitated in English; and though the chants retain some echoes of the sentiment and versification of more modern and polished literature, these attempts to revive the rude and archaic grandeur of the mythological traditions of the Eddas deserve no niggardly meed of approbation. In general Gray may be said to overcolour his language, and to indulge occasionally excess of ornament and personification; he will nevertheless be always regarded as a lyric poet of a very high order, and as one who brought an immense store of varied and picturesque erudition to feed the fire of a rich and powerful fancy."-Shaw's Hist. Eng. Lit.," pp. 388, 389; Allibone's "Crit. Dict. Eng. Lit."; Beeton's "Dict. Univer. Biog."; Gilfillan's Ed. of "Gray's Poems."

in an

WILLIAM MASON.

[ocr errors]

"William Mason, a poet of some distinction, born in 1725, was the son of a clergyman, who held the living of Hull. He was admitted first of St. John's College, and afterwards of Pembroke College, Cambridge, of the latter of which he was elected Fellow in 1747. He entered into holy orders in 1754, and, by the favour of the Earl of Holderness, was pre

sented to the valuable rectory of Aston, Yorkshire, and became chaplain to His Majesty. Some poems which he printed gave him reputation, which received a great accession from his dramatic poem of Elfrida.' By this piece, and his Caractacus,' which followed, it was his aim to attempt the restoration of the ancient Greek chorus in tragedy; but this is so evidently an appendage of the infant and imperfect state of the drama, that a pedantic attachment to the ancients could alone suggest its revival. 1756 he published a small collection of In 'Odes,' which were generally considered as displaying more of the artificial mechanism of poetry, than of its genuine spirit. This was not the case with his Elegies,' published in 1763, which, abating some superfluity of ornament, are in general marked with the simplicity of language proper to this species of composition, and breathe noble sentiments of freedom and virtue. A collection of all his poems which he thought worthy of praserving, was published in 1764, and afterwards went through several editions. married an amiable lady, who died of a conHe had sumption in 1767, and was buried in the cathedral of Bristol, under a monument, on which are inscribed some very tender and beautiful lines, by her husband.

[ocr errors]

"In 1772, the first book of Mason's 'English Garden,' a didactic and descriptive poem, in blank verse, made its appearance, of which the fourth and concluding book was printed in 1781. Its purpose was to recommend the modern system of natural or landscape gardening, to which the author adheres with the rigour of exclusive taste. tion is formed upon the best models, and the The versificadescription, in many parts, is rich and vivid; but a general air of stiffness prevented it from attaining any considerable share of popularity. Some of his following poetic pieces express his liberal sentiments on political subjects; and when the late Mr. Pitt came into power, being then the friend of a free constitution, Mason addressed him in an 'Ode,' containing many patriotic and manly ideas. But being struck with alarm at the unhappy events of the French Revolution, one of his latest pieces was a 'Palinody to Liberty.' He likewise revived, in an improved form, and published, Du Fresnoy's Latin poem on the Art of Painting, enriching it with additions furnished by Sir Joshua Reynolds, and with a metrical version. have been better executed than this, which unites to great beauties of language a correct representation of the original. His tribute to the memory of Gray, being an edition of his poems, with some additions, and Memoirs of his Life and Writings,' was favourably received by the public.

Few

"Mason died in April, 1797, at the age of seventy-two, in consequence of a mortification produced by a hurt in his leg. A tablet has

[SIXTH PERIOD.

been placed to his memory in Poets' Corner, in Westminster Abbey. His character in private life was exemplary for worth and active benevolence, though not without a degree of stateliness and assumed superiority of manner."-Aikin's "Select Brit. Poets." See Gilfillan's "Less-known Brit. Poets"; Campbell's "Specimens."

OLIVER GOLDSMITH.

[ocr errors]

Oliver Goldsmith, born 1728, died 1774. "The most charming and versatile, and certainly one of the greatest writers of the eighteenth century, whose works, whether in prose or verse, bear peculiar stamp of gentle grace and elegance. He was born at the village of Pallas, in the county of Longford, Ireland. His father was a poor curate of English extraction, struggling, with the aid of farming and a miserable stipend, to bring up a large family. By the assistance of a benevolent uncle, Mr. Contarine, Oliver was enabled to enter the University of Dublin in the humble quality of sizar. He however neglected the opportunities for study which the place offered him, and became notorious for his irregularities, his disobedience to authority, and above all for a degree of improvidence carried to the extreme, though excused by a tenderness and charity almost morbid. The earlier part of his life is an obscure and monotonous narrative of ineffectual struggles to subsist, and of wanderings which enabled him to traverse almost the whole of Europe. Having been for

a short time tutor in a family in Ireland, he determined to study medicine; and after nominally attending lectures in Edinburgh, he began those travels-for the most part on foot, and subsisting by the aid of his flute and the charity given to a poor scholarwhich successively led him to Leyden, through Holland, France, Germany, and Switzerland, and even to Pavia, where he boasted, though the assertion is hardly capable of proof, that he received a medical degree. fessional as well as his general knowledge His prowas of the most superficial and inaccurate character. It was while wandering in the guise of a beggar in Switzerland that he sketched out the plan of his poem of the 'Traveller,' which afterwards formed the commencement of his fame. found his way back to his native country; In 1756 he and his career during about eight years was a succession of desultory struggles with famine, sometimes as a chemist's shopman in London; sometimes as an usher in boardingschools, the drudge of his employers and the butt and laughing-stock of the pupils; sometimes as a practitioner of medicine among the poorest and most squalid population- the

beggars in Axe Lane,' as he expressed it himself; and more generally as a miserable and scantily-paid bookseller's hack. More than once, under the pressure of intolerable distress, he exchanged the bondage of the school for the severer slavery of the corrector's table in a printing-office, and was driven back again to the bondage of the school. The grace and readiness of his pen would probably have afforded him a decent subsistence, even from the hardly-earned wages of a drudge-writer, but for his extreme improvidence, his almost childish generosity, his passion for pleasure and fine clothes, and above all his propensity for gambling. At one time, during this wretched period of his career, he failed to pass the examination qualifying him for the humble medical post of a hospital mate; and, under the pressure of want and improvidence, committed the dishonourable action of pawning a suit of clothes lent him by his employer, Griffiths, for the purpose of appearing with decency before the Board. His literary apprenticeship was passed in this severe school -writing to order, and at a moment's notice, schoolbooks, tales for children, prefaces, indexes, and reviews of books; and contributing to the Monthly,' Critical,' and 'Lady's Review,' the British Magazine,' and other periodicals. His chief employer in this way appears to have been Griffiths, and he is said to have been at one time engaged as a corrector of the press in Richardson's service. In this period of obscure drudgery he composed some of his most charming works, or at least formed that inimitable style which makes him the rival, and perhaps more than the rival, of Addison. He produced the Chinese Letters,' the plan of which is imitated from Montesquieu's Lettres Persanes,' giving a description of English life and manners in the assumed character of a Chinese traveller, and containing some of those little sketches and humorous characters in which he was unequalled; a Life of Beau Nash;' and a short and gracefully-narrated 'History of England,' in the form of Letters from a Nobleman to his Son,' the authorship of which was ascribed to Lyttelton. It was in 1764 that the publication of his beautiful poem of the Traveller' caused him to emerge from the slough of obscure literary drudgery in which he had hitherto been crawling. The universal judgment of the public pronounced that nothing so harmonious and so original had appeared since the time of Pope; and from this period Goldsmith's career was one of uninterrupted literary success, though his folly and improvidence kept him plunged in debt which even his large earnings could not enable him to avoid, and from which indeed no amount of fortune would have saved him. In 1766 appeared the Vicar of Wakefield,' that masterpiece of gentle humour and delicate tenderness; in the following year his first comedy, the Goodnatured Man,' which failed

[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]

6

upon the stage in some measure from its very merits, some of its comic scenes shocking the perverted taste of an audience which admired the whining, preaching, sentimental pieces that were then in fashion. In 1768 Goldsmith composed, as taskwork for the booksellers-though taskwork for which his now rapidly rising popularity secured good payment-the History of Rome,' distinguished by its extreme superficiality of information and want of research no less than by enchanting grace of style and vivacity of narration. In 1770 he published the Deserted Village,' the companion poem to the 'Traveller,' written in some measure in the same manner, and not less touching, and perfect; and in 1773 was acted his comedy 'She Stoops to Conquer,' one of the gayest, plea santest, and most amusing pieces that the English stage can boast. Goldsmith had long risen from the obscurity to which he had been condemned: he was one of the most admired and popular authors of his time; his society was courted by the wits, artists, statesmen, and writers who formed a brilliant circle round Johnson and Reynolds-Burke, Garrick, Beauclerk, Percy, Gibbon, Boswell-and he became a member of that famous Club which is so intimately associated with the intellectual history of that time. Goldsmith was one of those men whom it is impossible not to love, and equally impossible not to despise and laugh at; his vanity, his childish though not malignant envy, his more than Irish aptitude for blunders, his eagerness to shine in conversation, for which he was peculiarly unfitted, his weaknesses and genius combined, made him the pet and the laughingstock of the company. He was now in the receipt of an income which for that time and for the profession of letters might have been accounted splendid; but his improvidence kept him plunged in debt, and he was always anticipating his receipts, so that he continued to be the slave of booksellers, who obliged him to waste his exquisite talent on works hastily thrown off, and for which he neither possessed the requisite knowledge nor could make the necessary researches: thus he successively put forth as taskwork the History of England,' the History of Greece,' and the History of Animated Nature,' the two former works being mere compilations of second-hand facts, and the last an epitomized translation of Buffon. In these books we see how Goldsmith's neverfailing charm of style and easy grace of narration compensates for total ignorance and a complete absence of independent knowledge of the subject. In 1774 this brilliant and feverish career was terminated. Goldsmith was suffering from a painful and dangerous disease, aggravated by disquietude of mind arising from the disorder in his affairs; and relying upon his knowledge of medicine he imprudently persisted in employing a

6

« AnteriorContinua »