Thomas Day (1748-89), the author of Sandford and Merton, was born in London, and, when thirteen months old, by his father's death came into £900 a year. From the Charterhouse he passed to Corpus College, Oxford, and presently struck up a close friendship with Richard Lovell Edgeworth. In 1765 he entered the Middle Temple, in 1775 was called to the Bar, but he never practised. A good, clever eccentric, a disciple of Rousseau, he brought up two girls, an orphan blonde and a foundling brunette, one of whom should become his wife. That scheme miscarried; and, admitted to the Lichfield coterie, he proposed first to Honora Sneyd, and next to her sister Elizabeth. She sent him to France to acquire the French graces; as acquired by him, they but moved her to laughter. Finally in 1778 he married an appreciative heiress, and spent with her eleven happy years, farming on philanthropic and costly principles in Essex and Surrey, till in 1789 he was killed by a fall from a colt he was breaking in. His wife died broken-hearted two years afterwards, and they both lie in Wargrave churchyard, near Henley. Two only of Day's eleven works call for mention-The Dying Negro, partly by his friend James Bicknell, a barrister (1773), and the History of Sandford and Merton (3 vols. 1783-89). The poem struck the keynote of the anti-slavery movement; the child's book, like its author, is sometimes ridiculous but always excellent. See Lives of Day by Keir (1791) and Blackman (1862), the Memoirs of R. L. Edgeworth (1820), and Miss Thackeray's Book of Sibyls (1883). Sir Nathanael William Wraxall (17511831), born at Bristol, was for three years in the East India Company's service, travelled over Europe (1772-79), and discharged various confidential and diplomatic missions. He published his Cursory Remarks made in a Tour in 1775, his Memoirs of the Valois Kings in 1777, entered Parliament in 1780 as a follower of Lord North, but went over to Pitt, and was made a baronet in 1813. His next books were the History of France from Henry III. to Louis XIV. (1795); Memoirs of the Courts of Berlin, Dresden, Warsaw, and Vienna (1799); and the famous Historical Memoirs of my own Time, 1772-84, not published, however, till 1815. For a libel there made on Count Woronzov, Russian envoy to England, he was fined £500 and sentenced to six months' imprisonment. Violent attacks on his veracity were made by the reviews, the Quarterly and the Edinburgh being, strange to say, equally denunciatory; Macaulay unkindly discovered and named a new scientific species 'Mendacium Wraxallianum;' but Wraxall's Answers were accounted sufficient to re-establish his credit on the whole, though not perhaps to authenticate all his anecdotes. A continuation of the Memoirs (1784-90) was published in 1836. See Wheatley's edition of the whole work (5 vols. 1884). Robert Hall (1764-1831), born at Arnsby near Leicester, was educated at a Baptist academy at Bristol and at Aberdeen, and was appointed assistant minister at Bristol and tutor in the academy. Even at Bristol his eloquent preaching attracted overflowing audiences; and at Cambridge, whither he went in 1790, he rose to the highest rank of British pulpit orators. Among his writings are an Apology for the Freedom of the Press (1793) and On Terms of Communion (1815). For twenty years he laboured in Leicester, but he returned in 1826 to Bristol. His most famous sermon was that on the death of the Princess Charlotte in 1817. His works, with a Memoir by Dr O. Gregory, were published in 1831-33 (11th ed. 1853). It cannot be said that they give an adequate notion of the fascination he produced on his audiences by his fervid eloquence. Dugald Stewart praised his style as 'the English language in its perfection.' There is a short Life of him by Paxton Hood (1881). John Foster (1770-1843), 'the essayist,' was born in the parish of Halifax, Yorkshire, the elder son of a yeoman-weaver, and was trained for the ministry at Brierly Hall and the Baptist College in Bristol; but, after preaching for twenty-five years with indifferent success to various small congregations, lived by literature from 1817 on. His Essays, in a series of Letters (1805), were only four in number-the best-known that 'On Decision of Character.' In 1819 appeared his Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance, urging the necessity of national education. In 1806-39 he contributed one hundred and eighty-four articles to the Eclectic Review, some of which were republished in two volumes in 1844, and, in extracts, in Fosteriana. He died at Stapleton, Bristol, his home for twentytwo years. Mackintosh regarded him as 'one of the most profound and eloquent writers England had produced.' His Life and Correspondence was edited by J. E. Ryland (1846; new ed. 1852). From the Essay On the Epithet Romantic.' If they chose, for their own and others' amusement, to dismiss a sound judgment awhile from its office, to stimu late their imagination to the wildest extravagances, and to depicture the fantastic career in writing, the book might be partly the same thing as if produced by a mind in which sound judgment had no place; it would exhibit imagination actually ascendant by the writer's voluntary indulgence, though not necessarily so by the constitution of his mind. It was a different case if a writer kept his judgment active amidst these very extravagances, with the intention of shaping and directing them to some particular end, of satire or sober truth. But, however, the romances of the ages of chivalry and the preceding times were composed under neither of these intellectual conditions. They were not the productions either of men who, possessing a sound judgment, chose formally to suspend its exercise, in order to riot awhile in scenes of extravagant fancy, only keeping that judgment so far awake as to retain a continual consciousness in what degree they were extravagant; or of men designing to give effect to truth or malice under the disguise of a fantastic exhibition. It is evident that the authors were under the real ascendency of imagination; so that, though they must at times have been conscious of committing great excesses, yet they were on the whole wonderfully little sensible of the enormous extravagance of their fictions. They could drive on their career through monstrous absurdities of description and narration, without, apparently, any check from a sense of inconsistency, improbability, or impossibility; and with an air as if they really reckoned on being taken for the veritable describers of something that could exist or happen within the mundane system. And the general state of intellect of the age in which they lived seems to have been well fitted to allow them the utmost license. The irrationality of the romancers, and of the age, provoked the observing and powerful mind of Cervantes to expose it by means of a parallel and still more extravagant representation of the prevalence of imagination over reason, drawn in a ludicrous form, by which he rendered the folly palpable even to the sense of that age. From that time the delirium abated; the works which inspirited its ravings have been blown away beyond the knowledge and curiosity of any but bibliomaniacs; and the fabrication of such is gone among the lost branches of manufacturing art. Yet romance was in some form to be retained, as indispensable to the craving of the human mind for something more vivid, more elated, more wonderful, than the plain realities of life; as a kind of mental balloon, for mounting into the air from the ground of ordinary experience. To afford this extra-rational kind of luxury, it was requisite that the fictions should still partake, in a limited degree, of the quality of the earlier romance. The writers were not to be the dupes of wild fancy; they were not to feign marvels in such a manner as if they knew no better; they were not wholly to lose sight of the actual system of things, but to keep within some measures of relation and proportion to it; and yet they were required to disregard the strict laws of verisimilitude in shaping their inventions, and to magnify and diversify them with an indulgence of fancy very considerably beyond the bounds of probability. Without this their fictions would have lost what was regarded as the essential quality of romance. If, therefore, the epithet Romantic, as now employed for description and censure of character, sentiments, and schemes, is to be understood as expressive of the quality which is characteristic of that class of fictions, it imputes, in substance, a great excess of imagination in proportion to judgment; and it imputes, in particulars, such errors as naturally result from that excess. . . It is not strange that a faculty of which the exercise is so easy and bewitching, and the scope infinite, should obtain a predominance over judgment, especially in young persons, and in such as may have been brought up, like Rasselas and his companions, in great seclusion from the sight and experience of the world. Indeed, a considerable vigour of imagination, though it be at the expense of a frequent predominance over juvenile understanding, seems necessary, in early life, to cause a generous expansion of the passions, by giving the most lively aspect to the objects which must attract them in order to draw forth into activity the faculties of our nature. It may also contribute to prepare the mind for the exercise of that faith which converses with things unseen, but converses with them through the medium of those ideal forms in which imagination presents them, and in which only a strong imagination can present them impressively. And I should deem it the indication of a character not destined to excel in the liberal, the energetic, or the devout qualities, if I observed in the youthful age a close confinement of thought to bare truth and minute accuracy, with an entire aversion to the splendours, amplifications, and excursions of fancy. The opinion is warranted by instances of persons so distinguished in youth, who have become subsequently very intelligent indeed, in a certain way, but dry, cold, precise, devoted to detail, and incapable of being carried away one moment by any inspiration of the beautiful or the sublime. They seem to have only the bare intellectual mechanism of the human mind, without the addition of what is to give it life and sentiment. They give one an impression analogous to that of the leafless trees observed in winter, admirable for the distinct exhibition of their branches and minute ramifications so clearly defined on the sky, but destitute of all the green soft luxury of foliage which is requisite to make a perfect tree. And the affections which may exist in such minds seem to have a bleak abode, somewhat like those bare deserted nests which you have often seen in such trees. If, indeed, the signs of this exclusive understanding in. dicated also such an extraordinary vigour of the faculty as to promise a very great mathematician or metaphysician, one would perhaps be content to forgo some of the properties which form a complete mind, for the sake of this pre-eminence of one of its endowments; even though the person were to be so defective in sentiment and fancy that, as the story goes of an eminent mathematician, he could read through a most animated and splendid epic poem, and on being asked what he thought of it, gravely reply, 'What does it prove?' But the want of imagination is never an evidence, and perhaps but rarely a concomitant, of superior understanding. Catherine Maria Fanshawe (1765-1834), the deformed and sickly daughter of a Surrey squire, was, like the two sisters with whom she lived in London, an accomplished draftswoman; and, though her poems were not printed till much later, was famous as a poetess towards the end of the eighteenth century. Her best-known poem is the famous Riddle on the Letter H,' commonly credited to Lord Byron, of which the first line was altered-apparently by Horace Smith-to the form now current, "Twas whispered in heaven, 'twas muttered in hell ;' though some of her serious poems are equally noteworthy. The serio-comic Elegy on the Birthnight Ball is also famous; it begins: Now cease the exulting strain, A Riddle on the Letter H. 'Twas in heaven pronounced-it was muttered in hell, 'Twill be found in the sphere when 'tis riven asunder, It begins every hope, every wish it must bound, With the husbandman toils, and with monarchs is crowned. Without it the soldier, the seaman may roam, But woe to the wretch who expels it from home! In the whispers of conscience its voice will be found, James Beresford (1764-1820), born at Upham in Hampshire, was educated at the Charterhouse and at Merton College, Oxford, and died rector of Kibworth Beauchamp in Leicestershire. He wrote verse translations, religious works, and, in humorous dialogues, The Miseries of Human Life (1806-7), which scored a great success and found numerous imitators. It went through nine editions in a twelvemonth-largely because it formed the subject of an amusing critique in the Edinburgh Review from the pen of Sir Walter Scott. 'It is the English only,' Scott declared, 'who submit to the same tyranny, from all the incidental annoyances and petty vexations of the day, as from the serious calamities of life;' and it is these petty miseries which in this work form the subject of dialogues between the imaginary interlocutors, Timothy Testy and Samuel Sensitive. The jokes are frequently artificial, overstrained, and trifling, and the classical quotations far-fetched, but the author's aim was doubtless attained the book gave him éclat, and its readers laughed. These are two of the briefer 'groans': After having left a company in which you have been galled by the raillery of some wag by profession, thinking at your leisure of a repartee which, if discharged at the proper moment, would have blown him to atoms. Rashly confessing that you have a slight cold in the hearing of certain elderly ladies of the faculty,' who instantly form themselves into a consultation upon your case, and assail you with a volley of nostrums, all of which, if you would have a moment's peace, you must solemnly promise to take off before night-though well satisfied that they would retaliate by taking you off' before morning. William Robert Spencer (1769-1834), a grandson of the third Duke of Marlborough, was educated at Harrow and Christ Church, Oxford, and from 1797 to 1826 was a commissioner of stamps. He wrote many vers de société, somewhat exaggerated in compliment and adulation, and wittily parodied in Rejected Addresses. Falling into pecuniary difficulties, he migrated in 1825 to Paris, and there he died. He was one of several English authors (H. J. Pye, Taylor of Norwich, Sir Walter Scott amongst them) who about the same date translated Bürger's Lenore. Spencer's (1796) had many excellences, though the swift movement of Bürger's varied measure is but imperfectly reproduced in monotonous verses of this kind: The fiend horse snorts; blue fiery snakes Heaves heavy in the grasp of death. Of his original poems, 'Too late I stayed' has been often quoted; but by far the best-known (based on the Welsh form of the widespread and greatly varying folk-tale) was his ballad of Beth Gêlert, or the Grave of the Greyhound. And still he blew a louder blast, 'Oh, where does faithful Gêlert roam, So true, so brave-a lamb at home, 'Twas only at Llewelyn's board The faithful Gêlert fed; He watched, he served, he cheered his lord, In sooth he was a peerless hound, But now no Gêlert could be found, And now, as o'er the rocks and dells That day Llewelyn little loved The chace of hart and hare; Unpleased, Llewelyn homeward hied, But when he gained his castle-door, The hound all o'er was smeared with gore; Llewelyn gazed with fierce surprise; Onward, in haste, Llewelyn passed, And still, where'er his eyes he cast, He called his child-no voice replied--- But nowhere found his child. 'Hell-hound! my child's by thee devoured,' The frantic father cried; And to the hilt his vengeful sword His suppliant looks, as prone he fell, But still his Gêlert's dying yell Aroused by Gêlert's dying yell, Some slumberer wakened nigh: The cherub boy he kissed. Nor scathe had he, nor harm, nor dread, Lay a gaunt wolf, all torn and dead, Ah, what was then Llewelyn's pain! His gallant hound the wolf had slain Vain, vain was all Llewelyn's woe; The frantic blow which laid thee low And now a gallant tomb they raise, Poor Gêlert's bones protect. There, never could the spearman pass, And there he hung his horn and spear, In fancy's ear he oft would hear And, till great Snowden's rocks grow old, The Visionary. When midnight o'er the moonless skies Her pall of transient death has spread, When mortals sleep, when spectres rise, And nought is wakeful but the dead: No bloodless shape my way pursues, No sheeted ghost my couch annoys ; Visions more sad my fancy views, Visions of long-departed joys! The shade of youthful hope is there, That lingered long, and latest died; Ambition all dissolved to air, With phantom honours by his side. What empty shadows glimmer nigh? They once were Friendship, Truth, and Love! Since lifeless to my heart ye prove! These last two verses Sir Walter Scott, who knew and esteemed Spencer, quotes in his diary as fine lines' expressing his own feelings amidst the wreck of his fortunes at Abbotsford. A Memoir of Spencer was prefixed to a volume of his poems reprinted in 1835. Francis Wrangham (1769-1842), son of a Yorkshire farmer, studied at Cambridge, and became an accomplished classic, English poet, and miscellaneous writer. With Basil Montagu's assistance he took in pupils at his Surrey curacy, issuing an elaborate scheme of study which led Sir James Mackintosh to say: 'A boy thus educated will be a walking encyclopædia;' he was ultimately Archdeacon of the East Riding of Yorkshire and Prebendary of Chester. The thirty-six publications by him named in the Dictionary of National Biography comprise Latin poems, English poems, songs; translations from Aristophanes, Virgil, Horace, Petrarch; sermons, books on the evidences of Christianity, and the English version commonly printed of Milton's second Defensio. Sir John Malcolm (1769-1833) was born at Burnfoot near Langholm, and at thirteen entered the Madras army; distinguished himself at Seringapatam (1799) and in the wars with the Pindaris and Holkar; and besides holding minor political appointments in Mysore, the Deccan, &c., was thrice ambassador to Persia in 1800-10, and Governor of Bombay (1827-30). In 1812-17 and again in 1822-30 he was in England, being knighted in 1812; in due time he became G.C.B.; and having entered Parliament in 1831, opposed the Reform Bill. Several of his works became standard authorities: A History of Persia (1815), Memoir of Central India (1823), Political History of India, 1784-1823 (1826), Sketches in Persia (1827), and Life of Clive (1836). A Life of him was written by Kaye (1856). James Montgomery (1771-1854) was born at Irvine in Ayrshire, the son of a Moravian pastor, who from Ireland went to Barbadoes in 1783, and there died. The boy had in 1777 been sent to the Moravian school at Fulneck near Leeds, and, after ten dreamy years there, was put apprentice to a grocer at Mirfield. In his sixteenth year, with 3s. 6d. in his pocket, he ran away from Mirfield, and, after some suffering, became a shop-boy in the village of Wath. He next tried London, carrying with him a collection of his poems, but failed to obtain a publisher. In 1792 he was clerk in a newspaper office in Sheffield; four years later he became editor of the Sheffield Iris, a weekly journal, which he conducted on Liberal lines and in a kindly spirit till 1825. But his course did not always run smooth. In January 1795 he was tried for having struck off a broadsheet ballad by a Belfast clergyman on the demolition of the Bastille; it was really his predecessor who had printed it, but Montgomery was sentenced to three months' imprisonment in York Castle, and a fine of £20. In January 1796, tried for a paragraph in his paper on the conduct of a magistrate in quelling a riot at Sheffield, he was again convicted, and sentenced to six months' imprisonment and a fine of £30. The Wanderer of Switzerland, and other Poems JAMES MONTGOMERY. From an Engraving after Chantrey. (1806), dealing with the French occupation, was his first poem to catch the public ear, and speedily went through two editions; his publishers had just issued a third, when the Edinburgh Review of January 1807' denounced the unfortunate volume in a style of such authoritative reprobation as no mortal verse could be expected to survive,' and prophesied immediate oblivion for the author and all his works. Nevertheless a score of editions of what is admittedly a feeble poem appeared: a lyric in it, 'The Grave,' has been always recognised as one of his best things; both Blackwood and Byron commended it. The West Indies (1809), written (in heroic couplets) in honour of the abolition of the slave-trade, is an eloquent, sincere, and tender expression of the kindlier sentiment of the time. Prison Amusements he had written during his nine months' confinement in York Castle. The World before the Flood, a more elaborate poem in ten cantos, describes with much energy and with frequent touches of real human interest the antediluvian patriarchs in their happy valley, the invasion of Eden by the descendants of Cain, the loves of Javan and Zillah, the translation of Enoch, and the final deliverance of the little band of patriarchal families from the giants. Thoughts on Wheels (1817) was a verse denunciation of State lotteries; and The Climbing Boy's Soliloquies, also in verse, was levelled by him and others against the cruel practice of sending boys up chimneys. Greenland (1819), a poem in five cantos, dealing with the Ancient Moravian Church, its revival in the eighteenth century, and its missions to Greenland, secured favour even outside devout circles both by descriptive power and narrative interest. Montgomery's only other long poem, The Pelican Island, in nine cantos of blank verse, was suggested by a passage in Captain Flinders's voyage to Terra Australis, describing the ancient haunts of the pelican on the small islands off the Australian coast. He wrote also a number of short pieces published in periodicals, short translations from Dante and Petrarch, and many hymns which have found wide acceptance, such as Go to dark Gethsemane,' 'For ever with the Lord,' 'Songs of praise the angels sang,' 'Hail to the Lord's anointed,' 'According to thy gracious word,' and 'Pour out thy spirit from on high.' Dr John Julian computes that about a hundred of his hymns are still in common use. His selection of hymns, with introduction and notes, called The Christian Psalmist (1825), has been said to have laid the foundation of scientific hymnology. In 1830 and 1831 he delivered a course of lectures at the Royal Institution on Poetry and General Literature, published in 1833. A pension of £150, conferred at the instance of Sir Robert Peel in 1835, he enjoyed till his death, at eighty-three, in 1854. Montgomery was a warm-hearted, earnest, good man, a philanthropist universally esteemed, but was great neither as a thinker nor as a poet. His later poems, just touched by Shelley's influence instead of Campbell's, are decidedly better than his earlier. The longer ones are too long, and tediously didactic, though relieved here and there by admirable descriptive passages. Conscience, the bosom-hell of guilty man;' 'Where justice reigns, 'tis freedom to obey ;' and the like fragments quoted from him, are rather ethical maxims than poetical thoughts. Many of his shorter pieces and lyrics are really fine, but his following was always mainly amongst those who sympathised most heartily with his theological views and prized his works for their religious tone and ethical teaching. He did not overestimate his own powers as a poet, and frankly anticipated that none of his poems would live-'except perhaps a few of my hymns.' He was apparently a true prophet; save for the hymns and a few selections, he is even now hardly read or remembered. |