have enjoyed in past times, with the same circles, in the same
houses!"

But a wealthy aunt, with handsome daughters, came from the West
Indies, and Great Ormond-street, and afterward Merton, in Surrey,
where this aunt went to live, became a new and happy resort for him.

After Leigh Hunt quitted Christchurch, of which, and of the life
there, he gives a very interesting description, at the age of sixteen
was published a volume of his school-boy verses. He then spent some
time in what he calls "that gloomiest of all '_darkness
palpable_'"--a lawyer's office; he became theatrical critic in a
newly established paper, the News; and his zeal, integrity, and talent
formed a striking contrast to the dishonest criticism and insufferable
dramatic nonsense then in public favor. In 1805, an amiable nobleman,
high in office, procured him a humble post under government; but this
was as little calculated for the public spirit of honest advocacy
which lived in him as the lawyer's office. He soon threw it up, having
engaged with his brother in the establishment of the well known
newspaper, the Examiner. The integrity of principle which
distinguished this paper, was as ill suited to the views of government
at that dark and despotic period, as such integrity and boldness for
constitutional reform were eminently needed by the public interests.
He was soon visited with the attentions of the attorney-general; who,
twice prosecuting him for libel, branded him "_a malicious and ill
disposed person_." It is now matter of astonishment for what causes
such epithets and prosecutions were bestowed by government at that
day. On one occasion, in quoting an account of some birthday or levee,
to the fulsome statement of the hireling court scribe, that the prince
regent "looked like an Adonis," he added the words "of fifty"--making
it stand "the prince looked like an Adonis of fifty!" This was cause
enough for prosecution, and an imprisonment of two years in
Horsemonger-lane jail. It was here, in 1813, that Lord Byron and Moore
dined with him. They found him just as gay, happy, and poetical, as if
his prison was a shepherd's cot in Arcadia, and there was no such
thing as "an Adonis of fifty" in the world. The "wit in the dungeon,"
as Lord Byron styled him in some verses of the moment, had his
trellised flower-garden without, and his books, busts, pictures, and
piano-forte within. Byron has recorded his opinion at that time of Mr.
Hunt, in his journal, thus:--"Hunt is an extraordinary character, and
not exactly of the present age. He reminds me more of the Pym and
Hampden times: much talent, great independence of spirit, and an
austere, yet not repulsive aspect. If he goes on _qualis ab
incepto_, I know few men who will deserve more praise, or obtain
it. He has been unshaken, and will continue so. I don't think him
deeply versed in life: he is the bigot of virtue (not religion), and
enamored of the beauty of that 'empty name,' as the last breath of
Brutus pronounced, and every day proves it."

What a different portrait is this to that of the affected, finicking,
artificial cockney, which the critics of that day would fain have made
the world accept for Leigh Hunt. Lord Byron was a man of the world as
well as a poet; he could see into character as well as any body when
there were no good-natured souls at his elbow to alarm his
aristocratic pride. He was right. Mr. Hunt has gone on _qualis ab
incepto_; and deserved and done great things. The critic-wolves
have long ceased to howl; the world knows and loves the man.

In process of time the Examiner was made over to other parties, and
Mr. Hunt devoted his pen more exclusively to literary subjects. His
connection with Byron and Shelley led him to Italy, where the Liberal,
a journal, the joint product of the pens of those three celebrated
writers, was started, but soon discontinued; and Leigh Hunt, before
his return, saw the cordiality of Lord Byron toward him shaken, and
witnessed one of the most singular and solemn spectacles of modern
times--the burning of the body of his friend Shelley on the sea-shore,
where he had been thrown up by the waves.

The occasion of Leigh Hunt's visit to Italy, and its results, have
been placed before the public, in consequence of their singular
nature, and of the high standing of the parties concerned, in a more
prominent position than any other portion of his life. There has been
much blame and recrimination thrown about on all sides. Mr. Hunt has
stated his own case, in his work on Lord Byron and his Cotemporaries.
The case of Lord Byron has been elaborately stated by Mr. Moore, in
his Life and Letters of the noble poet. It is not the place here to
discuss the question; but posterity will very easily settle it. My
simple opinion is, that Mr. Hunt had much seriously to complain of,
and, under the circumstances, has made his statement with great
candor. The great misfortune for him, as for the world, was, that
almost immediately on his arrival in Italy with his family, his true
and zealous friend, Mr. Shelley, perished. From that moment, any
indifferent spectator might have foreseen the end of the connection
with Lord Byron. He had numerous aristocratic friends, who would, and
who did spare no pains to alarm his pride at the union with men of the
determined character of Hunt and Hazlitt for progress and free
opinion. None worked more earnestly for this purpose, by his own
confession, than Moore. From that hour there could be nothing for Mr.
Hunt but disappointment and mortification. They came fast and fully.
With all the splendid qualities of Lord Byron, whether of disposition
or intellect, no man of sensibility would willingly have been placed
in any degree of dependence upon him; no man of genius could be so
without undergoing the deepest possible baptism of suffering. Through
that Leigh Hunt went, and every generous mind must sympathize with
him. Had Shelley lived, how different would have been the whole of
that affair, and the whole of his future life. He died--and all we
have to do is now simply to notice the residences of Leigh Hunt in
Italy, without further reference to these matters.

The chief places of Mr. Hunt's Italian sojourn were Pisa, Genoa, and
Florence. At Leghorn he and his family landed, and almost immediately
went on with Shelley to Pisa, where Byron joined them; but at Monte
Nero, near Leghorn, was at once introduced to a curious scene of mixed
English and Italian life. "In a day or two, I went to see Lord Byron,
who was in what the Italians call _villeggiatura_, at Monte Nero;
that is to say, enjoying a country house for the season. I there met
with a singular adventure, which seemed to make me free of Italy and
stilettos, before I had well set foot in the country. The day was very
hot; the road to Monte Nero was very hot, through dusty suburbs; and
when I got there, I found the hottest-looking house I ever saw. Not
content with having a red wash over it, the red was the most
unseasonable of all reds, a salmon color. Think of this flaming over
the country in a hot Italian sun.

"But the greatest of all the heats was within. Upon seeing Lord Byron,
I hardly knew him, he was grown so fat; and he was longer in
recognizing me, I was grown so thin. He was dressed in a loose nankeen
jacket and white trowsers, his neckcloth open, and his hair in thin
ringlets about his throat; altogether presenting a very different
aspect from the compact, energetic, and curly-headed person whom I had
known in England.

"He took me into an inner room, and introduced me to a young lady in a
state of great agitation. Her face was flushed, her eyes lit up, and
her hair, which she wore in that fashion, looked as if it streamed in
disorder. This was the Countess Guiccioli. The Conte Pietro, her
brother, came in presently, also in a state of agitation, and having
his arm in a sling. I then learned, that a quarrel having taken place
among the servants, the young count had interfered, and been stabbed.
He was very angry; Madame Guiccioli was more so, and would not hear of
the charitable comments of Lord Byron, who was for making light of the
matter. Indeed, there was a look in the business a little formidable;
for though the stab was not much, the inflictor of it threatened more,
and was at that minute keeping watch under the portico, with the
avowed intention of assaulting the first person that issued forth. I
looked out of the window, and met his eye glaring upward like a tiger.
The fellow had a red cap on like a _sans culotte_, and a most
sinister aspect, dreary and meager, a proper caitiff. Thus, it
appeared, the house was in a state of blockade; the nobility and
gentry of the interior all kept in a state of impassibility by a
rascally footman.

"How long things had continued in this state I can not say: but the
hour was come when Lord Byron and his friends took their evening ride,
and the thing was to be put an end to somehow. Fletcher, the valet,
had been dispatched for the police, and was not returned.... At length
we set out, Madame Guiccioli earnestly entreating 'Bairon' to keep
back, and all of us uniting to keep in advance of Conte Pietro, who
was exasperated. It was a curious moment for a stranger from England.
I fancied myself pitched into one of the scenes in the Mysteries of
Udolpho, with Montoni and his tumultuous companions. Every thing was
new, foreign, and violent. There was the lady, flushed and disheveled,
exclaiming against the '_scelerato_;' the young count, wounded
and threatening; the assassin waiting for us with his knife; and last,
not least in the novelty, my English friend metamorphosed,
round-looking, and jacketed, trying to damp all this fire with his
cool tones, and an air of voluptuous indolence. He had now, however,
put on his loose riding-coat of mazarine blue, and his velvet cap,
looking more lordly then, but hardly less foreign. It was an awkward
moment for him, not knowing what might happen; but he put a good face
on the matter; and as to myself, I was so occupied with the novelty of
the scene, that I had not time to be frightened. Forth we issued at
the door, all squeezing to have the honor of being the boldest, when a
termination is put to the tragedy by the vagabond throwing himself on
a bench, extending his arms, and bursting into tears. His cap was half
over his eyes; his face gaunt, ugly, and unshaven; his appearance
altogether more squalid and miserable than an Englishman could
conceive it possible to find in such an establishment. This blessed
figure reclined weeping and wailing, and asking pardon for his
offense, and to crown all, he requested Lord Byron to kiss him."

This was a curious introduction to Italian life. Leghorn, Mr. Hunt
says, is a polite Wapping, with a square and a theater. The country
around, though delightful to a first view, from its vines hanging from
the trees, and the sight of the Apennines, is uninteresting when you
become acquainted with it. They left here and proceeded to Pisa. There
they occupied the ground-floor of the Casa Lanfranchi, on the Lung'
Arno. The house is said to have been built by Michael Angelo, and is
worthy of him. It is, says Mr. Hunt, in a bold and broad style
throughout, with those harmonious graces of proportion which are sure
to be found in an Italian mansion. The outside is of rough marble.

Here poor Shelley saw his friends settled in their apartments, and
took his leave forever! Here they spent their time in the manner which
has been made so well known by the Life and Letters of Lord
Byron,--talking or reading till afternoon in the house; then riding
out to a wood or a vineyard, and firing pistols, after which they
would occasionally alight at a peasant's cottage, and eat figs in the
shade--returning to dinner. "In the evening," observes Mr. Hunt, "I
seldom saw Byron. He recreated himself in the balcony, or with a book;
and at night when I went to bed, he was just thinking of setting to
work with Don Juan."

In the autumn, they left Pisa for Genoa; and in their way visited the
deserted house of Shelley. Wild as the place is, it now seemed
additionally so. It was melancholy, its rooms empty, and its garden
neglected. "The sea fawned upon the shore, as though it could do no
harm."

Genoa now became, as it would appear, the residence of Leigh Hunt for
the greater part of the time that he continued in Italy, for he
describes himself as quitting it for Florence, three years afterward.
Mrs. Shelley had preceded them thither, and had furnished houses both
for herself and Lord Byron, in the village of Albaro. With her they
took up their residence in the Casa Negroto. There were forty rooms in
it, some of them such as would be considered splendid in England, and
all neat and new, with borders and arabesques. The balcony and
stair-case were of marble; and there was a little flower-garden. The
rent was twenty pounds a-year. Byron paid for his twenty-four pounds.
It was called the Casa Saluzzi, was older and more imposing, with
rooms in still greater plenty, and a good piece of ground. Mr. Hunt
describes himself as passing a melancholy time at Albaro, walking
about the stony alleys, and thinking of Shelley. Here the first number
of that unfortunate publication, The Liberal, reached them; here they
prepared the few numbers which succeeded it, and here the coldness
between Byron and Hunt grew to its height, and they parted.

We next, and lastly, find Mr. Hunt at Florence. "I hailed it," he
says, "as a good omen in Florence, that the two first words that
caught my ears were flowers and woman--_fiori_ and _donne_.
The night of our arrival, we put up at an hotel in a very public
street, and were kept awake by songs and guitars. It was one of the
pleasantest pieces of the south we had experienced; and for the
moment, we lived in the Italy of books. One performer to a jovial
accompaniment, sung a song about somebody's fair wife--_bianca
moglie_--which set the street in roars of laughter. From the hotel,
we went into a lodging in the street of beautiful women--Via delle
Belle Donne--a name which is a sort of tune to pronounce. We there
heard one night a concert in the street, and looking out, saw
music-stands, books, etc., in regular order, and amateurs performing
as in a room. Opposite our lodging was an inscription on a house,
purporting that it was the Hospital of the Monks of Vallombrosa.
Wherever you turned was music or a graceful memory. From the Via delle
Belle Donne, we went to live in the Piazza Santa Croce, next to the
church of that name, containing the ashes of Michael Angelo. On the
other side of it was the monastery in which Pope Sixtus V. went
stooping as if in decrepitude; 'looking,' as he said afterward, 'for
the keys of St. Peter.' We lodged in the house of a Greek, who came
from the island of Andros, and was called Dionysius; a name which has
existed there, perhaps, ever since the god who bore it."

"The church of Santa Croce," says Mr. Hunt, "would disappoint you as
much inside as out, if the presence of great men did not always cast a
mingled shadow of the awful and beautiful over our thoughts." He then
adds, "Agreeably to our old rustic propensities, we did not stop long
in the city. We left Santa Croce to live at Maiano, a village on the
slope of one of the Fiesolan hills, about two miles off. I passed
there a very disconsolate time; yet the greatest comfort I experienced
in Italy was from being in that neighborhood, and thinking, as I went
about, of Boccaccio. Boccaccio's father had a house at Maiano,
supposed to have been situate at the Fiesolan extremity of the hamlet.
That divine writer, whose sensibility outweighed his levity a
hundredfold--as a divine face is oftener serious than it is merry--was
so fond of the place, that he not only laid the two scenes of the
Decamerone on each side of it, with the valley his company resorted to
in the middle, but has made the two little streams that embrace
Maiano, the Affrico and the Mensola, the hero and heroine of his
Nimphale Fiesolano. A lover and his vestal mistress are changed into
them, after the fashion of Ovid. The scene of another of his works is
on the banks of the Mugnone, a river a little distant; and the
Decamerone is full of the neighboring villages. Out of the windows of
one side of our house, we saw the turret of the Villa Gherardi, to
which his 'joyous company' resorted in the first instance; a house
belonging to the Machiavelli was nearer, a little on the left; and
farther to the left, among the blue hills, was the white village of
Settignano, where Michael Angelo was born. The house is still
remaining in the possession of the family. From our windows on the
other side, we saw, close to us, the Fiesole of antiquity and of
Milton, the site of the Boccaccio house before mentioned still closer,
the valley of Ladies at our feet; and we looked toward the quarter of
the Mugnone, and of a house of Dante, and in the distance beheld the
mountains of Pistoia. Lastly, from the terrace in front, Florence lay
clear and cathedraled before us, with the scene of Redi's Bacchus
rising on the other side of it, and the villa of Arcetri, illustrious
for Galileo.

"But I stuck to my Boccaccio haunts, as to an old home. I lived with
the divine human being, with his friends of the Falcon and the Basil,
and my own not unworthy melancholy; and went about the flowery hills
and lanes, solitary, indeed, and sick to the heart, but not
unsustained. * * * My almost daily walk was to Fiesole, through a path
skirted with wild myrtle and cyclamen; and I stopped at the cloister
of the Doccia, and sat on the pretty melancholy platform behind it,
reading, or looking through the pines down to Florence. In the valley
of Ladies, I found some English trees,--trees not vine and olive,--and
even a bit of meadow; and these, while I made them furnish me with a
bit of my old home in the north, did no injury to the memory of
Boccaccio, who is of all countries, and finds his home wherever we do
ourselves, in love, in the grave, in a desert island."

In the twenty-third article of the Wishing Cap, Mr. Hunt gives us this
further description of Fiesole and the valley of Ladies:--

"Milton and Galileo give a glory to Fiesole beyond even its starry
antiquity; nor perhaps is there a name eminent in the best annals of
Florence, to which some connections can not be traced with this
favored spot. When it was full of wood, it must have been eminently
beautiful. It is at present, indeed, full of vines and olives, but
this is not wood _woody_: not arboraceous, and properly sylvan. A
few poplars and forest trees mark out the course of the Affrico; and
the convent ground contrived to retain a good slice of evergreens,
which make a handsome contrast on the hillside with its white
cloister. But agriculture, quarries, and wood-fires have destroyed the
rest. Nevertheless, I now found the whole valley beautiful. It is
sprinkled with white cottages; the cornfields presented agreeable
paths, leading among vines and fig-trees; and I discovered even a
meadow; a positive English meadow, with the hay cut, and adorned with
English trees. In a grassy lane, betwixt the corn, sat a fair rustic,
receiving the homage of three young fellows of her acquaintance. In
the time of Boccaccio, the Affrico formed a little crystal lake, in
which (the said lake behaving itself, and being properly sequestered)
the ladies of his company, one day, bathe themselves. The gentlemen,
being informed of it, follow their example in the afternoon; and the
next day the whole party dine, take their _siesta_ under the
trees, and recount their novels. This lake has now disappeared before
the husbandman, as if it were a fairy thing, of which a money-getting
age was unworthy. Part of the Affrico is also closed up from the
passenger by private grounds; but the rest of it runs as clearly as it
did; and under the convent, a remnant of the woodier part of the
valley, a delicious remnant, is still existing. The stream jumps into
it, as if with delight, and goes slipping down little banks. It is
embowered with olives and young chestnut-trees, and looks up to the
long, white cloister, which is a conspicuous object over the country.

"A white convent, a woody valley, chestnut-trees intensely green, a
sky intensely blue, a stream at which it is a pleasure to stop and
drink,--behold a subject fit for a day in August.

"This then is the 'Valle delle Donne.' If Boccaccio's spirit ever
visits his native country, here must it repose. It is a place for a
knight in romance to take his rest in, his head on his elbow, and the
sound of the water in his ear.

"I whisk to England in my Wishing Cap, and fetch the reader to enjoy
the place with me.

"How do you like it? Is it not a glen most glen-icular? a confronting
of two leafy banks, with a rivulet between? Shouldn't you like to live
in the house over the way, where the doves are? If you walk a little
way to the left, through the chestnut-trees, you see Florence. The
convent up above us on the right is the one I spoke of. There is
nobody in it now, but a peasant for housekeeper. Look at this lad
coming down the path with his olive complexion and black eyes. He is
bringing goats. I see them emerging from the trees; huge creatures,
that when they rise on their hind legs to nibble the boughs, almost
look formidable. There is Theocritus for you. And here is Theocritus
or Longus, which you will; for a peasant-girl is with him, one of the
pleasantest countenances in the world, with a forehead and eyes fit
for a poetess; as they all have. I wish the fellow were as neat as his
companion, but somehow these goatherds look of a piece with their
goats. They love a ragged picturesque."

From this charming and celebrated spot of earth, Leigh Hunt turned
northward and homeward through Switzerland and France. Every lover of
true poetry and of an excellent and high-hearted man, must regret that
his visit to Italy was dashed by such melancholy circumstances, for no
man was ever made more thoroughly to enjoy that fine climate and
classical land. Yet as the friend of Shelley, Keats, Charles Lamb, and
others of the first spirits of the age, Mr. Hunt must be allowed, in
this respect, to have been one of the happiest of men. It were no mean
boon of providence to have been permitted to live in the intimacy of
men like these; but, beside this, he had the honor to suffer, with
those beautiful and immortal spirits, calumny and persecution. They
have achieved justice through death--he has lived injustice down. As a
politician, there is a great debt of gratitude due to him from the
people, for he was their firm champion when reformers certainly did
not walk about in silken slippers. He fell on evil days, and he was
one of the first and foremost to mend them. In literature he has
distinguished himself in various walks; and in all he has manifested
the same genial, buoyant, hopeful, and happy spirit. His Sir Ralph
Esher, a novel of Charles II.'s time, is a work which is full of
thought and fine painting of men and nature. His Indicator and his
London Journal abound with papers which make us in love at once with
the writer and ourselves. There is a charm cast over everyday life,
that makes us congratulate ourselves that we live. All that is
beautiful and graceful in nature, and love-inspiring in our
fellow-men, is brought out and made part of our daily walk and
pleasure. His Months, a calendar of nature, bears testimony to his
intense love of nature, which breathes equally in every page of his
poetry. In these prose works, however, as well as in some of his
earlier poetry, we find certain artificialities of phrase, fanciful
expressions, and what are often termed conceits, which the critics
treated as cockneyisms, and led them to style him the head of the
Cockney school. There are certainly many indications, particularly in
The Months, of his regarding the country rather as a visitor than an
inhabitant. His _Standpunct_, as the Germans call it, his point
of standing, or in our phraseology, his point of view from which he
contemplates nature, is the town. He thus produces to a countryman a
curious inversion of illustration. For instance, he compares April to
a lady watering her flowers at a balcony; and we almost expect him, in
praising real flowers, to say that they are nearly equal to artificial
ones. But these are but the specks on a sun-disk, all glowing with the
most genuine love of nature. In no writer does the love of the
beautiful and the good more abound. And, after all, the fanciful
epithets in which he endeavors to clothe as fanciful notions, are, as
he himself has explained, nothing whatever belonging to London, or the
land of Cockayne, but to his having imbued his mind long and deeply
with the poetry, and, as a matter of course, with the poetic language
of our older writers. In a wider acquaintance with nature, the world,
and literature, these have vanished from his style; and I know of no
more manly, English, and chastely vigorous style than that of his
poems in general. In conformity with the strictures of various
critics, he has, moreover, rewritten his fine poem Rimini. It was
objected that the story was not very moral, and he has now, in the
smaller edition published by Moxon, altered the story so as to
palliate this objection as much as possible, and, as he says, to bring
it, in fact, nearer to the truth of the case. For my part, I know not
what moral the critics would have, if wretchedness and death, as the
consequences of sin, be not a solemn moral. If the selfish old father,
who deceives his daughter into a marriage by presenting to her the
proxy as the proposed spouse, is punished by finding his daughter and
this proxy prince, who went out from him with pomp and joy, soon come
back to him in a herse, and with all his ambitious projects thus
dashed to the ground, is not held as a solemn warning, where shall
such be found? However, the poet has shown his earnest desire to set
himself right with the public, and the public has now the poem in its
two shapes, and can accommodate its delicate self at its pleasure. I
regret that the space allowed for this notice does not permit me to
point out a number of those delightful passages which abound in his
beautiful and graceful poems. The graphic as well as dramatic power of
Rimini, the landscape and scene-painting of that poem, are only
exceeded by the force with which the progress of passion and evil is
delineated. The scene in the gardens and the pavilion, where the
lovers are reading Lancelot du Lac, is not surpassed by any thing of
the kind in the language. The sculptured scenes on the walls of this
pavilion are all pictures living in every line:--

                      "The sacrifice
    By girls and shepherds brought, with reverend eyes,
    Of sylvan drinks and foods, simple and sweet,
    And goats with struggling horns and planted feet."

The opening of the poem, beginning--

    "The sun is up, and 'tis a morn of May
    Round old Ravenna's clear-shown towers and bay,"--

all life, elasticity, and sunshine;--and the melancholy ending--

    "The days were then at close of autumn--still,
    A little rainy, and toward nightfall chill:
    There was a fitful moaning all abroad;
    And ever and anon over the road,
    The last few leaves came fluttering from the trees," etc.,

are passages of exquisite beauty, marking the change from joy to
sorrow in one of the loveliest poems in the language. We have in it
the genuine spirit of Chaucer, the rich nervous cadences of Dryden,
with all the grace and life of modern English. But it is in vain here
to attempt to speak of the poetic merits of Leigh Hunt. A host of fine
compositions comes crowding on our consciousness. The Legend of
Florence, a noble tragedy; The Palfrey; Hero and Leander; The Feast of
the Poets; and The Violets; numbers of delightful translations from
the Italian, a literature in which Leigh Hunt has always reveled; and
above all, Captain Sword and Captain Pen. We would recommend every
body, just now that the war-spirit is rising among us, to read that
poem, and learn what horrors they are rejoicing over, and what the
Christian spirit of this age demands of us. But we must praise the
lyrics of the volume:--the pathos of the verses "To T. L. H., six
years old, during a sickness," and the playful humor of those "To J.
H., four years old," call on us for notice; and then the fine blank
verse poems, Our Cottage, and Reflections of a Dead Body, are equally
importunate. If any one does not yet know what Leigh Hunt has done for
the people and the age, let him get the pocket edition of his poems,
and he will soon find himself growing in love with life, with his
fellow-men, and with himself. The philosophy of Leigh Hunt is loving,
cheerful, and confiding in the goodness that governs us all. And when
we look back to what was the state of things when he began to write,
and then look round and see what it is now, we must admit that he has
a good foundation for so genial a faith.

It remains only to take a glance or two at his English homes. To
several of these we can trace him. Soon after his quitting
Horsemonger-lane prison, he was living at Paddington, having a study
looking over the fields toward Westbourne-green. In this he had a
narrow escape one morning of being burned, owing his escape to some
"fair cousin" not named. There he was visited by Lord Byron and
Wordsworth. At one time he was living at 8, York-buildings, New-road,
Marylebone. In the London Journal of January 7, 1835, Mr. Hunt gives a
very charming account of a very happy Twelfth Night spent there, and
in commemoration of it planted some young plane-trees within the rails
by the garden gate. Under these trees, but a year or two ago, he had
the pleasure of seeing people sheltering from the rain; but they are
now cut down. Here he first had the pleasure of seeing John Keats, and
here he was visited by Foscolo. At other times he lived in
Lisson-grove; at Hampstead, in the Vale of Health, where, as already
observed, Keats wrote Sleep and Poetry; at Highgate, near Coleridge;
and at Woodcote-green, near Ashstead-park, in Surrey, where he laid
the scene, and, I believe, wrote the romance, of Sir Ralph Esher.

Since his return to England he has lived chiefly in the suburbs of
London, in what Milton called "garden houses;" for some years in
Chelsea, near Thomas Carlyle; and now in Edwardes-square, Kensington,
a square of small, neat houses, built by a Frenchman, it is said in
expectation of the conquest of England by Bonaparte, and with a desire
to be ready settled, and with homes for his countrymen of more limited
means against that event. The speculation failing with the mightier
speculation of Napoleon, the poor Frenchman was ruined.

Such is a hasty sketch of the many wanderings and sojourns of Leigh
Hunt. May his age be rewarded for the services of his youth. In
closing this article I would, also with this wish, express another,
and that is, that he would sometime publish that small, but most
beautiful manual of domestic devotion, called by him Christianism, and
printed only for private circulation, some years ago. The object of
this little work seems to be, to give to such as had not full faith in
Christianity an idea of what is excellent in it, and by which they
might be benefited and comforted, even though they could not attain
full belief in its authenticity. The spirit and style of it are
equally beautiful.

[Illustration: House in St. James's Place]

SAMUEL ROGERS.

One of the greatest pleasures that an author can have, is to record
the delight which he has derived from other authors; after a long
career of intellectual enjoyment, to pay the due tribute of gratitude
to those writers of an antecedent period who have laid the foundations
of his taste, and stimulated him in that career which has made his
happiness. This is always an act of love, an act of reverence and
regard, which is full of its own peculiar pleasure. But how much is
this pleasure augmented, when this tribute can be paid to the living;
to one who preceded us, and yet is still among us; to the teacher of
the past, to the patriarch of the present! Of the writers, and
especially the poets, who charmed our young and inexperienced spirits,
how few are those whose works will bear the test of time; how few to
whom we can turn, at a mature age, and find them all that we ever
believed them to be! Mr. Rogers is one of this rare class. Among the
very earliest literary pleasures which I can remember, was that of
reading--and that time after time--his Pleasures of Memory: and the
reading of this poem is now, after nearly half-a-century, not only one
of my pleasures of memory, but, on reperusal, is equally fresh,
equally true to nature, and equally attractive, by the soundness and
the beauty of its sentiments. Mr. Rogers stands among us, if not the
very oldest living literary man, yet by far the oldest of our poets;
and it is a welcome testimony to the good sense and feeling of the
age, that he stands among us with all the affectionate respect and the
honor which he has so well won. Mr. Rogers, I believe, has never met
with that species of Mohawk criticism, that scalping and scarifying
literary assault and battery, which so many of his cotemporaries have
had to undergo. There was a gentleness and a calm suavity about his
writings which disarmed the most eager assailant of merit. There was
in him an absence of that militant and antagonistic spirit which
provokes the like animus. There was felt only the purity of taste, the
deep love of beauty in art and nature, the vivid yet tender sympathy
with humanity, which put every one dreadfully in the wrong who should
attempt to strike down their possessor. The very first line of
criticism applied to the writings of Mr. Rogers, was in the Monthly
Review, on his Ode to Superstition, with some other Poems, published
by Cadell, in 1786, and was this--"In these pieces we perceive the
hand of a master."

The master thus discovered in the first essay of his power, has never
ceased since to be acknowledged. In 1792, or six years afterward, he
published the Pleasures of Memory, which was received with universal
and delighted acclamation. It took hold, at once, of the English
heart; and became, and remains, and is likely to remain, one of the
classic beauties of our national poetry. From that day, to so late a
period as 1830, Mr. Rogers, at leisurely but tolerably regular
intervals, has gone on adding to the riches of our hoards of taste and
genius. In 1798, or in another six years, he published his Epistle,
with other Poems; in 1812, or fourteen years afterward, The Voyage of
Columbus; two years after that, Jacqueline, _i.e._, in 1814; five
years later, or in 1819, Human Life; and, finally, in 1830, or when he
was sixty-seven years of age, his Italy.

These works have steadily extended his fame; and amid the truest
enjoyment of that fame, Mr. Rogers has lived a long and honored, and,
singularly for a poet, fortunate life. His wealth and position in
society, not less than his wealth and position in the world of mind,
have drawn around him all the distinguished characters of his time;
and his house, filled from top to bottom with evidences of his taste,
and of his means of indulging it, has been the resort of most of those
who have given its intellectual stamp to the age. Amid the great
struggles and events of that period, the wars, the revolutions, and
the social contests which have communicated their fiery elements to
the spirit of genius, and produced works of a like extreme character,
the mind of Rogers, calm and self-balanced, has pursued its course,
apparently uninfluenced by all that moved around him. With human
nature, and human life in general, he sympathized; but the love of the
true and beautiful in it has prevailed over the contagion of the vast
and violent: he has dealt rather with the pure and touching incidents
of existence, than with the passionate and the tragic. Many, on this
account, have been disposed to attribute to him a want of power and
greatness, forgetting that the predominating character of his taste
has inevitably decided the character of his subjects, and that to
these subjects he has given all the power and beauty which they were
capable of. Mr. Rogers is a great master in his own department. In him
taste lives as strongly as genius. He is a poetic artist. The
beautiful and the refined mingle themselves with the structure as
inseparably as with the material of his compositions. He knows that
there is greatness in the broad champagne, with its woods and towns,
as well as in the huge and splendid mountain; in the lofty but pure
and placid sky, as well as in the stormy ocean. It is not the creator
only of the Laocoon in all his agonies, that is a great artist--the
Apollo Belvedere, and the Venus de Medicis, and the Mourning Psyche,
calm in most perfect repose, or depressed with grief, equally
demonstrate the hand of a master. There is often the most consummate
display of genius in the stillest statue. Poussin or Claude are not
the less admirable because they do not affect the robust horrors of
Rubens, or the wildness of Salvator. In Rogers, the true, the
pathetic, all those feelings, and sentiments, and associations, that
are dear to us as life itself, are evolved with a skill that is
unrivaled; and the language is elaborated to a perfection that
resembles the finish of a beautiful picture, or the music to
inimitable words. If we need the excitement of impetuous emotions, we
would turn to Byron; if the influence of calm, and soothing, and
harmonizing ones, we would sit down to Rogers. Each is eminent in his
own department, each will exercise the supremacy of his genius upon
us.

In the Pleasures of Memory we are forcibly reminded of Goldsmith and
the Deserted Village. We feel how deeply the genius of that exquisite
writer had affected the mind of Rogers in his youth. There is a
striking similarity of style, of imagery, and of subject. It is not a
deserted village, but a deserted mansion, which is described, and
where we are led to sympathize with all that is picturesque in nature,
and dear to the heart in domestic life.

    "Mark yon old mansion peering through the trees,
    Whose hollow turret woos the whistling breeze.
    That casement, arched with ivy's brownest shade,
    First to these eyes the light of heaven conveyed.
    The moldering gateway shows the grass-grown court,
    Once the calm scene of many a simple sport;
    When nature pleased, for life itself was new,
    And the heart promised what the fancy drew.

      See, through the fractured pediment revealed,
    Where moss inlays the rudely sculptured shield,
    The martin's old hereditary nest--
    Long may the ruin spare its hallowed guest!

      As jars the hinge, what sullen echoes call!
    Oh haste, unfold the hospitable hall!
    That hall, where once in antiquated state,
    The chair of justice held the grave debate.

      Now stained with dews, with cobwebs darkly hung,
    Oft has its roof with peals of rapture rung;
    When round yon ample board in due degree,
    We sweetened every meal with social glee.
    The heart's light laugh pursued the exciting jest;
    And all was sunshine in each little breast.
    'Twas here we traced the slipper by the sound.
    And turned the blindfold hero round and round.
    'Twas here, at eve, we formed our fairy ring;
    And Fancy fluttered on her wildest wing.
    Giants and genii chained each wondering ear;
    And orphan sorrows drew the ready tear.
    Oft with the babes we wandered in the wood,
    Or viewed the forest feats of Robin Hood.
    Oft, fancy-led, at midnight's fearful hour,
    With startling step we scaled the lonely tower,
    O'er infant innocence to hang and weep,
    Murdered by ruffian hands, when smiling in its sleep.

      Ye household deities! whose guardian eye
    Marked each pure thought we registered on high;
    Still, still ye walk the consecrated ground,
    And breathe the soul of inspiration round.

      As o'er the dusky furniture I bend,
    Each chair awakes the feelings of a friend.
    The storied arras, source of fond delight,
    With old achievement charms the wildered sight;
    And still with heraldry's red hues impressed,
    On the dim window glows the pictured crest;
    The screen unfolds its many colored chart;
    The clock still points its moral to the heart--
    That faithful monitor 'twas heaven to hear,
    When soft it spoke a promised pleasure near;
    And has its sober hand, its simple chime,
    Forgot to trace the feathered feet of Time?
    That massive beam with curious carvings wrought,
    Whence the caged linnet soothed my pensive thought;
    Those muskets cased with venerable rust.
    Those once-loved forms still breathing through their dust,
    Still from the frame in mold gigantic cast,
    Starting to life--all whisper of the past!"

This is so exquisite and old-English that it will continue to charm as
long as there are hearts and memories. The whole of the first part of
the poem is of the like tone and feature; the old garden, the old
school and its porch, the Gipsy group, the old beggar, the village
church and church-yard--

    "On whose gray stone, that fronts the chancel door,
    Worn smooth by tiny feet now seen no more,
    Each eve we shot the marble through the ring,
    When the heart danced, and life was in the spring."

As it advances, however, it takes a wider range, and gradually
embraces higher topics and more extensive regions. History, and death,
and eternity, all swell into its theme.

A new element of style also marks the progress of this poem. There are
more animated invocations, and a greater pomp of versification. It
looks as if the muse of Darwin had infused its more ambitious tone,
without leading the poet away from his purely legitimate subjects. By
whatever passing influences, or what processes of thought, this change
was produced, there it is. This poem, and this peculiar style of
versification, soon caught the ear and fascinated the mind of
Campbell, when a very young man, and out of the Pleasures of Memory
sprung the Pleasures of Hope. The direct imitation of both style,
manner, subject, and cast of subject, by Campbell, is one of the most
striking things in the language; the peculiarities of the style and
phraseology only, as was natural by an enthusiastic youth, much
exaggerated. In Campbell, that which in Rogers is somewhat sounding
and high-toned, becomes, with all its beauty, turgid, and often
bordering on bombast. The very epithets are the same. "The wild bee's
wing"--"the war-worn courser," and "pensive twilight in her dusky
car," continually in the Pleasures of Hope remind you of the Pleasures
of Memory.

    "Hark, the bee winds her small but mellow horn,
    Blithe to salute the sunny smile of morn.
    O'er thymy downs she bends her busy course,
    And many a stream allures her to its source.
    'Tis noon, 'tis night. That eye so finely wrought,
    Beyond the reach of sense, the soar of thought,
    Nor vainly asks the scenes she left behind:
    Its orb so full, its vision so confined!
    Who guides the patient pilgrim to her cell?
    Who bids her soul with conscious triumph swell?
    With conscious truth retrace the mazy clew
    Of summer scents, that charmed her as she flew?
    Hail, Memory, hail! thy universal reign
    Guards the least link of being's glorious chain."--_Rogers._

In the disciple the manner is reproduced, and yet modified as in these
lines:--

    "Auspicious Hope! in thy sweet garden grow
    Wreaths for each toil, a charm for every woe;
    Won by their sweets, in Nature's languid hour.
    The way-worn pilgrim seeks thy summer bower;
    There as the wild bee murmurs on the wing,
    What peaceful dreams thy handmaid spirits bring!
    What viewless forms th' Æolian organ play,
    And sweep the furrowed lines of conscious thought away."

How the master and the scholar may be again recognized in the
following passages:--

    "So, when the mild TUPIA dared explore
    Arts yet untaught, and worlds unknown before;
    And with the sons of science wooed the gale,
    That rising, swelled their strange expanse of sail;
    So when he breathed his firm, yet fond adieu,
    Borne from his leafy hut, his carved canoe,
    And all his soul best loved, such tears he shed
    While each soft scene of summer beauty fled.
    Long o'er the wave a wistful look he cast,
    Long watched the streaming signal from the mast;
    Till twilight's dewy tints deceived his eye,
    And fairy forests fringed the evening sky."--_Rogers_.

    "And such thy strength-inspiring aid, that bore
    The hardy Byron to his native shore,--
    In horrid climes where Chiloe's tempests sweep
    Tumultuous murmurs o'er the troubled deep,
    'Twas his to mourn misfortune's rudest shock,
    Scourged by the winds, and cradled on the rock,
    To wake each joyless morn and search again
    The famished haunts of solitary men;
    Whose race, unyielding as their native storm,
    Know not a trace of nature but the form;
    Yet at thy call the hardy tar pursued,
    Pale, but intrepid, sad, but unsubdued;
    Pierced the deep woods, and hailing from afar
    The moon's pale planet, and the northern star;
    Paused at each dreary cry unheard before,
    Hyenas in the wild, and mermaids on the shore;
    Till led by thee o'er many a cliff sublime,
    He found a warmer world, a milder clime,
    A home to rest, or shelter to defend,
    Peace and repose, a Briton and a friend!"--_Campbell_.

Into every form of expression the scholar follows his master:--

    "When Diocletian's self-corrected mind
    The imperial fasces of a world resigned,
    Say, why we trace the labors of his spade
    In calm Salona's philosophic shade?
    Say, when contentious Charles renounced a throne,
    To muse with monks unlettered and unknown,
    What from his soul the parting tribute drew,
    What claimed the sorrows of a last adieu?"--_Rogers_.

    "And say, when summoned from the world and thee,
    I lay my head beneath the willow-tree,
    Wilt thou, sweet mourner! at my stone appear,
    And soothe my parting spirit lingering near?"--_Campbell_.

But the likeness is found everywhere--in phrase, in imagery, in
topics, and in tone. When, after a lapse of twenty-seven years, Mr.
Rogers produced his poem of Human Life, what a change of manner, what
a transformation of style had taken place in him! No longer the
grandiloquent invocations were found; no longer the sounding style, no
longer the easy recurrence of the cadence, pausing on the cæsura and
falling at the close of the line. Here the whole rhythm and
construction were of a new school and a new generation. The style was
more simple and more vigorous. The sentences marched on with a rare
recurrence of the cæsura, the cadence did not fall with the end of the
line, but oftener far in the middle of it, and the verse abounded with
triplets.

    "He reads thanksgiving in the eyes of all--
    All met as at a holy festival!
    --On the day destined for his funeral!
    Lo! there the friend, who, entering where he lay,
    Breathed in his drowsy ear--'Away, away!
    Take thou my cloak--Nay, start not, but obey!
    Take it, and leave me.'"

What a total revolution is here! The old chime is gone, the old melody
is exchanged for a new. All depends on entirely new principles, and
seeks to give pleasure through an utterly fresh medium. But the poem
itself is one of the most beautiful things in any language. It is
human life from the cradle to the tomb, with all its pleasures,
aspirations, trials, and triumphs. Every thing which clings round the
spirit of man as precious, every thing which wins us onward, and
sustains us in sorrow, and soothes us under the infliction of
wrong--the glory of public good, and the hallowed charm of domestic
affection, is thrown into this poem, with the art of a master and the
great soul of a sanctified experience. Never either were the varied
scenes of English life more sweetly described. The wedding and the
burial, the village wake and the field sports, the battle and the
victory, all are blended inimitably into the great picture of
existence, and at times the aged minstrel rises into a strain of power
and animation, such as rebuke the doubters of those attributes in him.

    "Then is the age of admiration--Then
    Gods walk the earth, or beings more than men;
    Who breathe the soul of inspiration round,
    Whose very shadows consecrate the ground!
    Ah! then comes thronging many a wild desire,
    And high imagining, and thought of fire!
    Then from within, a voice exclaims--'Aspire!'
    Phantoms, that upward point, before him pass,
    As in the cave athwart the wizard's glass;
    They, that on youth a grace, a luster shed,
    Of every age, the living and the dead!"

Still this poem of Human Life is but the life of one section of our
fellow-men--that of the gentry. It is curious, that it does not
descend into the midst of the multitude, and give us any of those deep
and somber shades which abound so much in Crabbe. The reason is
obvious. Crabbe had seen it and felt it. He had been born among it,
and had himself to struggle. Rogers has gone on that easy path of life
that is paved with gold, and "the huts where poor men lie," therefore,
probably never for a moment protruded themselves through the charmed
circle of his poetic inspiration. Happily for him his are fully the
Pleasures of Memory. Yet it is not the less true, or less honorable,
that in actual life, there is no man who has remembered the struggling
more sympathetically, nor has held out so generous a hand to the aid
of unfriended merit.

From the Voyage of Columbus the following extract will afford an
example of the beautiful description and rich imaginative power which
abound in that poem:--

    THE NEW WORLD.

    "Long on the deep the mists of morning lay,
    Then rose, revealing, as they rolled away,
    Half-circling hills, whose everlasting woods
    Sweep with their sable skirts the shadowy floods:
    And say,--when all to holy transport given,
    Embraced and wept as at the gate of Heaven,
    When one and all of us, repentant, ran,
    And on our faces, blessed the wondrous man,--
    Say, was I thus deceived, or from the skies
    Burst on my ear seraphic harmonies?
    'Glory to God!' unnumbered voices sung,
    'Glory to God!' the vales and mountains rung--
    Voices that hailed creation's primal morn,
    And to the shepherds sung a Savior born.

    Slowly, bareheaded, through the surf we bore
    The sacred cross, and kneeling, kissed the shore.
    But what a scene was there? Nymphs of romance!
    Youths graceful as the fawn, with eager glance
    Spring from the glades, and down the alleys peep;
    Some headlong rush, bounding from steep to steep,
    And clap their hands, exclaiming as they run,
    'Come and behold the children of the sun!'
    When hark, a signal-shot! The voice it came
    Over the sea, in darkness and in flame!
    They saw, they heard; and up the highest hill,
    As in a picture, all at once were still!
    Creatures so fair, in garments strangely wrought,
    From citadels, with Heaven's own thunder fraught,
    Checked their light footsteps--statue-like they stood,
    As worshiped forms, the Genii of the Wood!

    At length the spell dissolves! the warrior's lance
    Rings on the tortoise with wild dissonance!
    And see, the regal plumes, the coach of state!
    Still, where it moves, the wise in council wait!
    See now borne forth the monstrous masks of gold,
    And ebon chair of many a serpent fold;
    These now exchanged for gifts that thrice surpass
    The wondrous ring, and lamp, and horse of brass.
    What long-drawn tube transports the gazer home,
    Kindling with stars at noon the ethereal dome?
    'Tis here: and here circles of solid light
    Charm with another self the cheated sight;
    As man to man another self disclose,
    And now with terror starts, with triumph glows!"

Italy, Mr. Rogers's last published poem of any length, is a fine
production, full of that glorious land, and abounding with the finest
subjects for the painter and the sculptor; but we must not be tempted
to speak further of it here.

The changes of Mr. Rogers's life, or of his abodes, have not been
many. He was born at Newington-green, in 1763, and is, consequently,
eighty-three years of age. Newington-green, his birthplace, has all
the marks of an old locality. In this neighborhood the Tudor princes
used to live a good deal. Canonbury, between this green and Islington,
was a favorite hunting-seat of Elizabeth, and no doubt the woods and
wastes extended all round this neighborhood. There is Kingsland, now
all built on, there is Henry VIII.'s walk, and Queen Elizabeth's walk,
all in the vicinity; and this old, quiet green seems to retain a
feeling and an aspect of those times. It is built round with houses,
evidently of a considerable age. There are trees and quietness about
it still. In the center of the south side is an old house standing
back, which is said to have been inhabited by Henry VIII. At the end
next to Stoke Newington stands an old Presbyterian chapel, at which
the celebrated Dr. Price preached, and of which, afterward, the
husband of Mrs. Barbauld was the minister. Near this chapel De Foe was
educated, and the house still remains. In this green lived, too, Mary
Wollstoncraft, being engaged with another lady in keeping a school.
Samuel Rogers was born in the stuccoed house at the southwest corner,
which is much older than it seems. Adjoining it is a large, old
garden. Here his father, and his mother's father, lived before him. By
the mother's side he was descended from the celebrated Philip Henry,
the father of Matthew Henry, and was therefore of an old
Non-conformist family. Mr. Rogers's grandfather was a gentleman,
pursuing no profession, but his father engaged in banking. Mr. Rogers
continued to reside in this house till after his father's death, and
wrote and published here his Pleasures of Memory, which appeared a
short time before his father's decease.

On quitting Newington-green, Mr. Rogers took chambers in the Temple,
where he continued to reside five years, or till about 1800, when he
removed to his present house; so that he has occupied his present
abode the greater part of half-a-century. In this house, 22, St.
James's-place, he has not only written every one of his chief poems,
except the Pleasures of Memory, but he has been visited in it by a
vast number of the most celebrated men of his time, among them Byron,
Scott, Moore, Crabbe, Fox, Campbell, Wordsworth, Southey, Coleridge,
etc.

At an early period of his life he was anxious to purchase an estate in
the country, not too far from London, where he could build a house
after his own taste. He pitched on Fredley farm, in Norbury-park, near
Mickleham, in Surrey, which was to be disposed of. By some means it
escaped him, and disappointed in his object, he seems to have given up
the search for another situation, and contented himself with building
his house on paper. The result was the abode described in his Epistle
to a Friend, published in 1798. His villa is placed in a rustic
hamlet, has few apartments, but is not without its library and cold
bath, and is furnished with prints after the best painters, and casts
from the antique. The whole of this poem breathes the love of the
country, of simplicity of life, and condemns the pomp and the follies
of London fashionable life. Its accompaniments, its exterior and
interior, are all of the same unostentatious character--it is an abode
that any man of taste might possess without any great wealth.

    "Still must my partial pencil love to dwell
    On the home prospects of my hermit-cell:
    The mossy pales that skirt the orchard green
    Here hid by shrub-wood, there by glimpses seen;
    And the brown pathway that with careless flow
    Sinks, and is lost among the trees below.
    Still must it trace, the flattering tints forgive,--
    Each fleeting charm that bids the landscape live.
    Oft o'er the mead, at pleasing distance pass,
    Browsing the hedge by fits, the panniered ass;
    The idling shepherd-boy with rude delight,
    Whistling his dog to mark the pebble's flight;
    And, in her kerchief blue, the cottage maid,
    With brimming pitcher from the shadowy glade
    Far to the south a mountain vale retires,
    Rich in its groves, and glens, and village spires;
    Its upland lawns, and cliffs with foliage hung,
    Its wizard stream, nor nameless, nor unsung.
    And through the various year, the various day,
    What scenes of glory burst and melt away!"

His interior embellishment shall be my last extract:--

    "Here no state chambers in long line unfold,
    Bright with broad mirrors, rough with fretted gold:
    Yet modest ornament, with use combined,
    Attracts the eye to exercise the mind.
    Small change of scene, small space his home requires,
    Who leads a life of satisfied desires.
    What though no marble breathes, no canvas glows,
    From every point a ray of genius flows!
    Be mine to bless the more mechanic skill,
    That stamps, renews, and multiplies at will;
    And cheaply circulates through distant climes
    The fairest relics of the purest times.
    Here from the mold to conscious being start
    Those finer forms, the miracles of art;
    Here chosen gems, impressed on sulphur shine,
    That slept for ages in the secret mine;
    And here the faithful graver dares to trace
    A Michael's grandeur and a Raphael's grace!
    Thy gallery, Florence, gilds my humble walls,
    And my low roof the Vatican recalls."

But Mr. Rogers had the power to procure the originals; and therefore
the same taste put him in possession of them. He was destined to spend
his life in London, and only premising that the front of his house
overlooks the Green-park, and possesses a gateway into it, I shall
present the account of its interior, or rather of its treasures of
art, from the pen of the well known Professor Waagen of Berlin,
knowing from the poet himself that it is accurate.

"By the kindness of Mr. Solly, who continues to embrace every
opportunity of doing me service, I have been introduced to Mr. Rogers
the poet, a very distinguished and amiable man. He is one of the few
happy mortals to whom it has been granted to be able to gratify, in a
worthy manner, the most lively sensibility to every thing noble and
beautiful. He has accordingly found means, in the course of his long
life, to impress this sentiment on every thing about him. In his house
you are everywhere surrounded and excited with the higher productions
of art. In truth one knows not whether more to admire the diversity or
the purity of his taste. Pictures of the most different schools,
ancient and modern sculptures, Greek vases, alternately attract the
eye, and are so arranged, with a judicious regard to their size, in
proportion to the place assigned them, that every room is richly and
picturesquely ornamented, without having the appearance of a magazine
from being overfilled, as we frequently find. Among all these objects
none is insignificant; several cabinets and portfolios contain, beside
the choicest collections of antique ornaments in gold that I have
hitherto seen, valuable miniatures of the middle ages, fine drawings
by the old masters, and the most agreeable prints of the greatest of
the old engravers, Marcantonio, Durer, etc., in the finest
impressions. The enjoyment of all these treasures was heightened to
the owner by the confidential intercourse with the most eminent, now
deceased, English artists, Flaxman and Stothard; both have left him a
memorial of their friendship. In two little marble statues of Cupid
and Psyche, and a mantle-piece, with a bas-relief representing a muse
with a lyre and Mnemosyne by Flaxman, there is the same noble and
graceful feeling which has so greatly attracted me from my childhood
in his celebrated compositions after Homer and Æschylus. The hair and
draperies are treated with great, almost too picturesque softness.
Among all the English painters, none, perhaps, has so much power of
invention as Stothard. His versatile talent has successfully made
essays in the domains of history, or fancy and poetry, of humor, and
lastly, even in domestic scenes, in the style of Watteau. To this may
be added much feeling for graceful movements, and cheerful, bright
coloring. In his pictures, which adorn a chimney-piece, principal
characters from Shakspeare's plays are represented with great spirit
and humor; among them Falstaff makes a very distinguished and comical
figure. There is also a merry company, in the style of Watteau; the
least attractive is an allegorical representation of Peace returning
to the earth, for the brilliant coloring approaching to Rubens can not
make up for the poorness of the heads and the weakness of the drawing.

"As there are among the pictures some of the best works of Sir Joshua
Reynolds, fine specimens of the works of three of the most eminent
British artists of an earlier date are here united.

"Beside portraits, properly so called, Sir Joshua Reynolds was the
happiest in the representation of children, where he was able, in the
main, to remain faithful to nature, and in general an indifferent but
naïve action or occupation alone was necessary. In such pictures, he
admirably succeeded in representing the youthful bloom and artless
manners of the fine English children. This it is which makes his
celebrated strawberry girl, which is in this collection, so
attractive. With her hands simply folded, a basket under her arm, she
stands in her white frock, and looks full at the spectator, with her
fine, large eyes. The admirable impasto, the bright, golden tone,
clear as Rembrandt, and the dark landscape background, have a striking
effect. Sir Joshua himself looked upon this as one of his best
pictures. A sleeping girl is also uncommonly charming, the coloring
very glowing; many cracks in the painting, both in the background and
the drapery, show the uncertainty of the artist in the mechanical
processes of the art. Another girl with a bird does not give me so
much pleasure. The rather affected laugh is, in this instance, not
stolen from nature, but from the not happy invention of the painter;
in the glowing color there is something specky and false. Puck, the
merry elf in Shakspeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, called by the
English Robin Goodfellow, represented as a child, with an arch look,
sitting on a mushroom, and full of wantonness, stretching out arms and
legs, is another much admired work of Sir Joshua. But though this
picture is painted with much warmth and clearness, the conception does
not at all please me. I find it too childish, and not fantastic
enough. In the background, Titania is seen with the ass-headed weaver.
Psyche with the lamp, looking at Cupid, figures as large as life, is
of the most brilliant effect, and, in the tender, greenish half-tints,
also of great delicacy. In the regard for beautiful leading lines,
there is an affinity to the rather exaggerated grace of Parmeggiano.
In such pictures by Sir Joshua, the incorrect drawing always injures
the effect. I was much interested at meeting with a landscape by this
master. It is in the style of Rembrandt, and of very strong effect.

"Of older English painters, there are here two pretty pictures by
Gainsborough, one by Wilson; of the more recent, I found only one by
the rare and spirited Bonington, of a Turk fallen asleep over his
pipe, admirably executed in a deep, harmonious chiaro-oscuro. Mr.
Rogers's taste and knowledge of the art are too general for him not to
feel the profound intellectual value of works of art in which the
management of the materials was in some degree restricted. He has
therefore not disdained to place in his collection the half-figures of
St. Paul and St. John, and fragments of a fresco painting from the
Carmelite Church at Florence, by Giotto; Salome dancing before Herod,
and the beheading of St. John, by Fiesole; a coronation of the Virgin,
by Lorenzo de Condi, the fellow-scholar and friend of Leonardo da
Vinci, whose productions and personal character were so estimable.
Next to these pictures is a Christ on the Mount of Olives, by Raphael,
at the time when he had not abandoned the manner of Perugio. This
little picture was once a part of the predella to the altar-piece
which Raphael painted in the year 1505 for the nuns of St. Anthony, at
Perugio. It came with the Orleans gallery to England, and was last in
the possession of Lord Eldin, in Edinburgh. Unhappily it has been much
injured by cleaning and repairing, but in many parts, particularly in
the arms of the angel, there are defects in the drawing, such as we do
not find in Raphael even at this period. So that, most probably, the
composition alone should be ascribed to him, and the execution to one
of the assistants, who painted the two saints belonging to the same
predella now in Dulwich College.

"From the Orleans gallery, Mr. Rogers has Raphael's Madonna, well
known by Flipart's engraving, with the eyes rather cast down, on whom
the child standing by her fondly leans. The expression of joyousness
in the child is very pleasing. The gray color of the under-dress of
the virgin, with red sleeves, forms an agreeable harmony with the blue
mantle. To judge by the character and drawing, the composition may be
of the early period of Raphael's residence at Rome. In other respects,
this picture admits of no judgment, because many parts have become
quite flat by cleaning, and others are painted over. The landscape is
in a blue-greenish tone, differing from Raphael's manner.

"Of the Roman school I will mention only one more. Christ bearing his
cross, by Andrea Sacchi, a moderate-sized picture from the Orleans
gallery, is one of the capital pictures of this master, in
composition, depth of coloring, and harmony.

"The crown, however, of the whole collection, is Christ appearing to
Mary Magdalene, by Titian. It was formerly in the possession of the
family of Muselli at Verona, and afterward adorned the Orleans
gallery. In the clear, bright, golden tone of the flesh, the careful
execution, the refined feeling, in the impassioned desire of the
kneeling Magdalene to touch the Lord, and the calm, dignified refusal
of the Savior, we recognize the earlier time of this master. The
beautiful landscape, with the reflection of the glowing horizon upon
the blue sea, which is of great importance here, in proportion to the
figures, proves how early Titian obtained extraordinary mastery in
this point, and confirms that he was the first who carried this branch
to a higher degree of perfection. This poetic picture is, on the
whole, in very good preservation; the crimson drapery of the Magdalene
is of unusual depth and fullness. The lower part of the legs of Christ
have, however, suffered a little. The figures are about a third the
size of life.

"The finished sketch for the celebrated picture, known by the name of
La Gloria di Tiziano, which he afterward, by the command of Philip
II., King of Spain, painted for the church of the convent where the
Emperor Charles V. died, is also very remarkable. It is a rich, but
not very pleasing composition. The idea of having the coffin of the
emperor carried up to heaven, where God the Father and Son are
enthroned, is certainly not a happy one. The painting is throughout
excellent, and of a rich, deep tone in the flesh. Unfortunately, it is
not wanting in re-touches. The large picture is now in the Escurial.

"As the genuine pictures of Giorgione are so very rare, I will briefly
mention a young knight, small, full-length, noble and powerful in face
and figure; the head is masterly, treated in his glowing tone; the
armor with great force and clearness in the chiaro-oscuro.

"The original sketch of Tintoretto, for his celebrated picture of St.
Mark coming to the assistance of a martyr, is as spirited as it is
full and deep in the tone.

"The rich man and Lazarus, by Giacomo Bassano, is, in execution and
glow of coloring, approaching to Rembrandt, one of the best pictures
of the master.

"There are some fine cabinet pictures of the school of Carracci: a
Virgin and Child, worshiped by six saints, by Lodovico Carracci, is
one of his most pleasing pictures in imitation of Corregio. Among four
pictures by Domenichino, two landscapes, with the punishment of
Marsyas, and Tobit with the fish, are very attractive, from the poetry
of the composition and the delicacy of the finish. Another likewise
very fine one of Bird-catching, from the Borghese Palace, has
unfortunately turned quite dark. A Christ, by Guido, is broadly and
spiritedly touched in his finest silver tone.

"There is an exquisite little gem by Claude Lorraine. In a soft
evening light, a lonely shepherd, with his peaceful flocks, is playing
the pipe. Of the master's earlier time; admirable in the impasto,
careful and delicate, decided and soft, all in a warm golden tone. In
the Liber Veritatis, marked No. 11. Few pictures inspire like this a
feeling for the delicious stillness of a summer's evening.

"A landscape by Nicolas Poussin, rather large, of a very poetic
composition and careful execution, inspires, on the other hand, in the
brownish silver tone, the sensation of the freshness of morning. There
is quite a reviving coolness in the dark water and under the trees of
the foreground.

"Two smaller historical pictures by Poussin, of his earlier time,
class among his careful and good works.

"Of the Flemish school there are a few, but very good, specimens.

"There is a highly interesting picture by Rubens. During his residence
in Mantua, he was so pleased with the triumph of Julius Cæsar, by
Mantegna, that he made a fine copy of one of the nine pictures. His
love for the fantastic and pompous led him to choose that with the
elephants carrying the candelabra; but his ardent imagination, ever
directed to the dramatic, could not be content with this. Instead of a
harmless sheep, which in Mantegna is walking by the side of the
foremost elephant, Rubens made a lion and a lioness, which growl
angrily at the elephant. The latter, on his part, is not idle, but,
looking furiously round, is on the point of striking the lion a blow
with his trunk. The severe pattern which he had before him in Mantegna
has moderated Rubens in his usually very full forms, so that they are
more noble and slender than they generally are. The coloring, as in
all his earlier pictures, is more subdued than in the later, and yet
powerful. Rubens himself seems to have set much value on this study;
for it was among the effects at his death. During the revolution, Mr.
Champernowne brought it from the Balbi Palace, at Genoa. It is three
feet high, and five feet five inches wide.

"The study for the celebrated picture, the Terrors of War, in the
Pitti Palace at Florence, and respecting which we have a letter in
Rubens's own hand, is likewise well worth notice. Rubens painted this
picture for the Grand Duke of Tuscany. Venus endeavors, in vain, to
keep Mars, the insatiable warrior, as Homer calls him, from war; he
hurries away to prepare indescribable destruction. This picture, one
foot eight inches high, and two feet six and a half inches wide, which
I have seen in the exhibition of the British Institution, is, by the
warmth and power of the coloring, and the spirited and careful
execution, one of the most eminent of Rubens's small pictures of this
period.

"Lastly, there is a Moonlight by him. The clear reflection of the moon
in the water, its effect in the low distance, the contrast of the dark
mass of trees in the foreground, are a proof of the deep feeling for
striking incidents in nature, which was peculiar to Rubens. As in
another picture the flakes of snow were represented, he has here
marked the stars.

"I have now become acquainted with Rembrandt in a new department; he
has painted in brown and white a rather obscure allegory on the
deliverance of the United Provinces from the union of such great
powers as Spain and Austria. It is a rich composition, with many
horsemen. One of the most prominent figures is a lion chained at the
foot of a rock, on which the tree of liberty is growing. Over the rock
are the words, '_Solo Deo gloria_.' The whole is executed with
consummate skill, and the principal effect striking.

"His own portrait, at an advanced age, with very dark ground and
shadows, and, for him, a cool tone of the lights, is to be classed,
among the great number of them, with that in the Bridgewater Gallery;
only it is treated in his broadest manner, which borders on looseness.

"A landscape, with a few trees upon a hill, in the foreground, with a
horseman and a pedestrian in the background, a plain with a bright
horizon, is clearer in the shadows than other landscapes by Rembrandt,
and therefore, with the most powerful effect, the more harmonious.

"Among the drawings I must at least mention some of the finest.

"RAPHAEL. The celebrated Entombment, drawn with the utmost spirit with
the pen. From the Crozat collection. Mr. Rogers gave £120 for it.

"ANDREA DEL SARTO. Some studies in black chalks, for his fresco
paintings in the Chapel del Scalzo. That for the young man who carries
the baggage in the visitation of the Virgin is remarkably animated.

"LUCAS VAN LEYDEN. A pen drawing, executed in the most perfect and
masterly manner, for his celebrated and excessively rare engraving of
the portrait of the Emperor Maximilian I. This wonderful drawing has
hitherto been erroneously ascribed to Albert Durer.

"ALBERT DURER. A child weeping. In chalk, on colored paper, brightened
with white; almost unpleasantly true to reality.

"Among the admirable engravings, I mention only a single female
figure, very delicately treated, which is so entirely pervaded with
the spirit of Francisco Francia, that I do not hesitate to ascribe it
to him. Francia, originally a goldsmith, is well known to have been
peculiarly skilled in executing larger compositions in niello. How
easily, therefore, might it have occurred to him, instead of working
as hitherto in silver, to work with his graver in copper, especially
as in his time the engraving on copper had been brought into more
general use in Italy, by A. Mantegna and others; and Francia had such
energy and diversity of talents that, in his mature age, he
successfully made himself master of the art of painting, which was so
much more remote from his own original profession. Beside this, the
fine delicate lines in which the engraving is executed indicate an
artist who had been previously accustomed to work for niello-plates,
in which this manner is usually practiced. The circumstance, too, that
Marcantonio was educated in the workshop of Francia, is favorable to
the presumption that he himself had practiced engraving.

"Among the old miniatures, that which is framed and glazed and hung
up, representing, in a landscape, a knight in golden armor, kneeling
down, to whom God the Father, surrounded by cherubim and seraphim,
appears in the air, while the damned are tormented by devils in the
abyss, is by far the most important. As has been already observed by
Passavant, it belongs to a series of forty miniatures, in the
possession of Mr. George Brentano, at Frankfort-on-Maine, which were
executed for Maître Etienne Chevalier, treasurer of France under King
Charles VII., and may probably have adorned his prayer-book. They are
by the greatest French miniature painter of the fifteenth century,
Johan Fouquet de Tours, painter to King Louis XI. In regard to the
admirable, spirited invention, which betrays a great master, as well
as the finished execution, they rank uncommonly high.

"An antique bust of a youth, in Carrara marble, which, in form and
expression, resembles the eldest son of Laocoon, is in a very noble
style, uncommonly animated, and of admirable workmanship. In
particular, the antique piece of the neck and the treatment of the
hair are very delicate. The nose and ears are new; a small part of the
chin, too, and the upper lip, are completed in a masterly manner in
wax.

"A candelabrum in bronze, about ten inches high, is of the most
beautiful kind. The lower part is formed by a sitting female figure
holding a wreath. This fine and graceful design belongs to the period
when art was in its perfection. This exquisite relic, which was
purchased for Mr. Rogers, in Italy, by the able connoisseur, Mr.
Millingen, is, unfortunately, much damaged in the epidermis.

"Among the elegant articles of antique ornament in gold, the earrings
and clasps, by which so many descriptions of the ancient poets are
called to mind, there are likewise whole figures beat out in thin gold
leaves. The principal article is a golden circlet, about two and a
half inches in diameter, the workmanship of which is as rich and
skillful as could be made in our times.

"Of the many Greek vases in terra cotta, there are five, some of them
large, in the antique taste, with black figures on a yellow ground,
which are of considerable importance. A flat dish, on the outer side
of which five young men are rubbing themselves with the strigil, and
five washing themselves, yellow on a black ground, is to be classed
with vases of the first rank, for the gracefulness of the invention,
and the beauty and elegance of the execution. In this collection, it
is excelled only by a vase, rounded below, so that it must be placed
in a peculiar stand. The combat of Achilles with Penthesilia is
represented upon it, likewise, in red figures. This composition,
consisting of thirteen figures, is by far the most distinguished, not
only of all representations of the subject, but, in general, of all
representations of combats which I have hitherto seen on vases, in the
beauty and variety of the attitudes, in masterly drawing, as well as
in the spirit and delicacy of the execution. It is in the happy medium
between the severe and the quite free style, so that in the faces
there are some traces of the antique manner."

It remains only to add, that Mr. Rogers has embellished his works with
the same exquisite taste as his house. They are splendid specimens of
typography, and are rich in the most beautiful designs by Stothard and
Turner, from the most celebrated burins of the day. I believe more
than fifty thousand copies of them have been circulated.

[Illustration: Cottage at Sloperton]

THOMAS MOORE.

The author of Lalla Rookh, like most of the race of genius, is one
whom his own genius has ennobled. The man who has not to thank his
ancestors for what he enjoys of wealth, station, or reputation, has
all the more to thank himself for. The heralds, says Savage Landor,
will give you a grandfather if you want one, but a genuine poet has no
need of a grandfather; he is his own grandfather, his own
shield-bearer, and stands forth to the world in the proud attitude of
debtor to none but God and himself, the shield-bearer and the
grandfather of others. Thomas Moore was born in a humble house in
Dublin, the son of humble but respectable parents. He has made his own
way in the world, and given to those parents the honor of having
produced a distinguished son. That is as it should be. People should
honor their parents, it is rarely that parents can honor their
children. They can not bequeath their genius to them; it is not always
that they can succeed in engrafting on them their virtues; and if
parents be glorious in reputation and in goodness, if the children do
not walk worthy of that glory, the glory itself is only a blaze that
exposes them to the world; lights up and aggravates every blemish to
the general eye. How truly is honor, true honor, in nine cases out of
ten, a self-acquisition. Wealth you may entail, station you may
entail; but well won honor is a thing which, like salvation, every man
must achieve for himself. Poets in general know no ancestry. In their
poetic character they are as truly and newly created as Adam himself.
Who cares a button for the ancestors of Byron, of Milton, of
Shakspeare, of Goëthe, or of Schiller? These men start out to our eyes
in the blaze of their own genius, which darkens all around them. They
are creations of God, and not of man. They are sent forth into the
world, and not born into it. Their ancestors are not the ancestors of
their genius. They are the progenitors of the earthy caterpillar,--the
butterfly, the Psyche of genius, is born of itself. With the splendid
spirit which breaks forth sometimes from an old line, that line
commonly has nothing more to do than the earth on which we tread, the
common mother of us all, has to do with our soul and its celestial
powers. These come out of the hand of God, gifts to us and the world;
luminaries burning in a divine isolation; priests after the order of
Melchisedec, whose ancestry and whose posterity are not known. God has
vindicated to himself the origination of Genius and Christianity. They
both came into the world independent of governments and princes; they
spring out of the habitations of the poor, and walk among the poor:
they disdain to confer on worldly pride the honor of their alliance,
but they do their mission in the strength of their sender, and mount
to heaven.

These are great truths that every man of genius should see,
acknowledge, and act upon. His birth is higher than that of any
prince, even be it more lowly than that of the Son of God, in a stable
and a manger, with a stalled ox instead of the Archbishop of
Canterbury, and an ass instead of a prime minister, attending as
witnesses. Nobles can confer no nobility on him: he bears his patent
of honor in his own bosom; the escutcheon of genius in his broad and
exalted brow. He should remember this; and the world will not then
forget it. He should think of himself as sent forth by God, doing
God's work in the earth, and having to render up to God the account of
his embassy. With this idea within him and before him, his work will
be done the more nobly; and the public which is made what it is by
him,--effeminate through his effeminacy, corrupt through his
corruption, wise through his wisdom, will soon place him in his true
rank, above all heaps of metal and spadefuls of earth, and honor him
as the only true noble, the only man who has no need of heraldic lies
and fictitious grandfathers. These are great truths that the children
of men of genius too should bear in mind. They should feel that they
can not inherit genius, but they may possess it in some new shape, an
equal gift of heaven. This will keep alive in them the spirit of
honorable action; and they may come to live, not in the moonshine of
their ancestral lights, but in a genuine warm sunshine of their own.
The honor of a distinguished parent is not our honor but our foil, if
we do not seek to establish an alliance with it by our own exertion,
and above all, by goodness.

For want of poets and poets' children entertaining these rational
ideas, what miseries have from age to age awaited them! In the course
of my peregrinations to the birthplaces and the tombs of poets, how
often have these reflections been forced upon me. Humble, indeed, are
frequently their birthplaces; but what is far worse, how wretched are
often the places of their deaths! How many of them have died in the
squalid haunts of destitution, and even by their own hand. How many of
them have left their families to utter poverty; how many of those
caressed in their lives, lie without a stone or a word of remembrance
in their graves! Scott, with all his glory and his monuments in other
places, has not even a slab bearing his name laid upon his breast.
Chatterton's very bones have been dispersed to make a market.
Motherwell, amid all the proud cenotaphs in the Necropolis at Glasgow,
such men as Major Monteith having whole funeral palaces to themselves,
has not even a cubic foot of stone, or a mere post with his initials,
to mark his resting-place. But still more melancholy is the
contemplation of the beginning and the end of Robert Tannahill, the
popular song-writer of Paisley. Tannahill was no doubt stimulated by
the fame of Burns. True, he had not the genius of Burns, but genius he
had, and that is conspicuous in many of those songs which during his
lifetime were sung with enthusiasm by his countrymen. Tannahill was a
poor weaver at Paisley. The cottage where he lived is still to be
seen, a very ordinary weaver's cottage in an ordinary street; and the
place where he drowned himself may be seen too at the outside of the
town. This is one of the most dismal places in which a poet ever
terminated his career. Tannahill, like Burns, was fond of a jovial
hour amid his comrades in a public-house. But weaving of verse and
weaving of calico did not agree. The world applauded, but did not
patronize; poverty came like an armed man; and Tannahill in the frenzy
of despair resolved to terminate his existence. Outside of Paisley
there is a place where a small stream passes under a canal. To
facilitate this passage, a deep pit is sunk, and a channel for the
waters is made under the bottom of the canal. This pit is, I believe,
eighteen feet deep. It is built round with stone, which is rounded off
at its mouth, so that any one falling in can not by any possibility
get out, for there is nothing to lay hold of. Any one once in there
might grasp and grasp in vain for an edge to seize upon. He would sink
back and back till he was exhausted and sunk forever. No doubt
Tannahill in moments of gloomy observation had noted this. And at
midnight he came, stripped off his coat, laid down his hat, and took
the fatal plunge. No cry could reach human ear from that horrible
abyss; no effort of the strongest swimmer could avail to sustain him:
soon worn out he must go down, and amid the black, boiling torrent be
borne through the subterranean channel onward with the stream. Thus
died Robert Tannahill, and a more fearful termination was never put to
a poetical career. This place is called Tannahill's hole, and cats and
dogs drowned in it, from its peculiar fitness for inevitable drowning,
float about on the surface, and add to the revolting shudder which the
sight of it creates.

Such are some of the dominant tendencies of poetic fate which made
Wordsworth exclaim,

    "We poets in our youth begin in gladness,
    But thereof come in the end despondency and madness;"

and such must there be till genius respect itself, and cause the
public to respect it; till it reflect that it is a heavenly endowment,
and not a trade stock.

Among the more fortunate men of genius,--among those who by strength
of pinion, and by various resources of prose, poetry, and music, have
soared above the poet's ordinary path, beset with ropes, poison,
throat-cutting, razors, pistols, and drowning holes,--is the gay and
genial Thomas Moore. Moore was born, as I have said, in Dublin. His
father kept a shop in Aungier-street, and was a respectable grocer and
spirit dealer. The shop continues exactly as it was to the present
day, is employed for the same trade, and over it is the little
drawing-room in which Mr. Moore himself tells us, that he used to
compose his songs, and with his sister and some young friends, act
plays as a boy.

He was first educated by Mr. Samuel Whyte, to whom in his fourteenth
year he addressed a sonnet, which was published in a Dublin magazine,
called the Anthologia. This Mr. Whyte was fond of dramatic
representation, and is mentioned by Moore as having superintended
private theatricals at different gentlemen's and noblemen's houses, as
at the Duke of Leinster's, at Marly, the seat of the Latouches, etc.,
where he supplied prologues. Sheridan had been a pupil of Whyte's, and
it is further stated by Mr. Moore, that many parents were alarmed at
the danger of his instilling a love for these things into his
scholars. Can there be a doubt that he did so with Sheridan and Moore?

He was sent to the university in Dublin, where the unfortunate Robert
Emmet was at the time. Moore soon formed an acquaintance with him, and
became a member of a debating society, at which Emmet and other young
patriots assembled to prepare themselves for public life. On the
approach of the frightful explosion of 1798, the university was
visited by Lord Clare, its vice-chancellor, with a rigorous
examination, government having become aware of the students being
deeply engaged in the organization of the Irish union. Among those
found to be thus implicated, were Emmet, John Brown, and others. They
became marked men. Moore himself underwent examination, but came clear
off. From these connections and early impressions, however, we may
date his steady adherence to liberal and patriotic sentiments.

At the university his poetic genius early displaying itself, he soon
found his way over to England, where his wit, his songs, and his
conversational brilliancy, introduced him to the first circles of
fashionable life, and to government patronage. He was appointed to the
situation of Registrar to the Admiralty Court at the Bermudas. This
appointment turned out unfortunately for him, but it enabled him to
extend his knowledge of the world. He published on his return a
collection of odes, epistles, and fugitive poems, illustrative of the
scenery and life of that island; and he made a tour in the United
States, from which he indited a series of most caustic and satirical
epistles. From the hour that he settled down again in England,
notwithstanding the time which he must have devoted to society, into
which his peculiar powers of pleasing have continually drawn him, he
has displayed an extraordinary industry. The catalogue of his writings
from first to last is enormous. The Odes of Anacreon translated. A
Candid Appeal to Public Confidence, or Considerations on the dangers
of the Present Crisis, 1803. Corruption and Intolerance, two poems.
Epistles, Odes, and other Poems, 1806. Little's Poems, 1808. A Letter
to the Roman Catholics of Dublin, 1810. M.P., or the Blue Stocking; a
comic opera, in three acts, performed at the Lyceum, 1811. Intercepted
Letters, or the Twopenny Post Bag, by Thomas Browne the younger, 1812:
this has gone through upward of fourteen editions. Irish Melodies.
Arthur Murphy's Translation of Sallust completed. The Skeptic, a
philosophical Satire. Lalla Rookh, 1817. The Fudge Family in Paris,
1818. Ballads, Songs, etc. Tom Crib's Memorial to Congress, in verse.
Trifles Reprinted, in verse. Loves of the Angels. Rhymes on the Road.
Miscellaneous Poems by Members of the Procurante Society. Fables for
the Holy Alliance. Ballads, Songs, Miscellaneous Poems, etc. Memoirs
of Captain Rock. Life of Sheridan. The Epicurean. Odes on Cash, Corn,
Catholics, etc. Evenings in Greece. Life and Letters of Lord Byron, in
17 vols. History of Ireland, etc., etc., etc.

If Mr. Moore has been a gay man, it can not be said that he has been
an indolent one. He was born in May, 1780, and is, consequently, now
only sixty-six. It would appear that, on coming to England, he
destined himself for the bar, as he entered himself of the Middle
Temple, in 1799. But instead of legal studies, poetical ones seem to
have occupied him in his chambers; for in the course of 1800, and
before he had completed his twentieth year, he published his
translation of the Odes of Anacreon. This seems to have decided his
fate for literature. In 1801 out came Little's Poems, many of which, I
am persuaded, the author would give a great portion of his fame to be
able to cancel forever; and, indeed, in his late edition, in one
volume, I am glad to see that the most exceptionable are excluded. In
1803 he set sail to take possession of his office in the West Indies;
on which occasion he was absent something more than a year. To pursue
a rapid outline of his life;--on his return to England he married a
Miss Dyke, said to be a lady of great personal beauty, most amiable
disposition, and accomplished manners. I believe she has always shown
herself a woman of much energy of character and tact of judgment, and
that the poet has found great cause to rely on her opinion in matters
of daily life. His great poem, Lalla Rookh, appeared in 1817; and in
the summer of that year Moore visited Paris, where he collected the
materials for that humorous production, The Fudge Family in Paris. In
the following year he made a visit to Ireland, where he was received
with the highest enthusiasm and public honor. In 1822 he again visited
Paris, where great respect was shown him by the French literati, and a
public dinner was given to him by the English nobility and gentry
resident there. In one of his prefaces to his different volumes,
which, in fact, contain his literary life, we learn, that he was
compelled to live in France at this time, in consequence of the
responsibilities under which he had fallen from the conduct of his
deputy in the Bermudas. He was, indeed, liable to demands of at least
six thousand pounds, and it was not safe for him to remain in England
till this matter was arranged; which was at length done by his
friends, and the sum reduced to one thousand; of which the deputy's
uncle paid three hundred. Two summers Moore states himself and family
to have lived in a cottage of some Spanish friends, near their seat.
La Butte Coaslin. He says that it conjured up an apparition of
Sloperton, which by a happy quotation from Pope he defines--

    "A little cot with trees a row.
    And, like his master, very low."

Here he used to wander in the noble park of St. Cloud, with his
pocket-book and pencil, composing verses, and pondering on the
Epicurean; and closing the evening by practicing duets with the lady
of his Spanish friend, or listening to her guitar. King, the dramatic
writer, lived near them, and Washington Irving visited him there. In
1823 he published The Loves of the Angels; and since then, beside the
Life of Sheridan, and various other productions, the Life and Letters
of Lord Byron.

Perhaps the most important event connected with his later life was the
destruction of the Memoirs of Lord Byron, which had been intrusted to
him for publication after his death. These Memoirs had been given to
Mr. Moore, and Mr. Moore had sold the copyright of them to Mr. Murray,
for two thousand guineas. Lord Byron being dead, and the time for
publication come, the relatives of Lord Byron took alarm, and implored
Mr. Moore to allow them to be destroyed. To this Mr. Moore was weak
enough to consent. That he did so from a sense of the most delicate
honor, there could be no question; even had he not proved that by the
sacrifice of two thousand guineas and interest, which he repaid to Mr.
Murray, though he had to borrow it of Messrs. Longman. But if honor to
Lord Byron's relatives was preserved, it was neither so to Lord Byron
nor the public. It was a sacred trust of the one for the gratification
of the other, and had Mr. Moore had any scruples on the subject of
publication, he should have returned the MS. to Lord Byron while
living. When dead, there was no such way out; there was no
alternative, without a betrayal of the most sacred trust that could be
reposed in man, but to allow the noble donor's intention to be
faithfully carried out. There has been much controversy on this topic,
but this still continues, and will continue to be, the result of
public opinion.

One of the secrets of Mr. Moore's successful industry, perhaps, may be
found in the fact of his having, spite of his social disposition, and
of all the fascinations of society for a man of his fame, wit, and
accomplishments, lived the greater part of his life since his marriage
in the country. Among the various places of his abode, two only have
been residences of much duration. These are Mayfield cottage, near
Ashbourne, in Derbyshire, and Sloperton cottage, near Devizes, in
Wiltshire.

At Mayfield he lived several years, and here he wrote Lalla Rookh.
This village is not particularly picturesque, nor is the immediate
neighborhood striking; but it lies in a fine country, and within a
short distance of it are Dovedale, and other beautiful scenes in
Derbyshire and Staffordshire. The recommendations of Mayfield have
been thus enumerated by a cotemporary writer in a periodical. "Moore's
cottage is in a secluded part of Mayfield, a village on the
Staffordshire side of the river Dove, about two miles from Ashbourne.
It is a spot not often alluded to in literature, though the
neighborhood has been peculiarly honored by literary men. Three miles
from Mayfield is Wootton-hall, where Rousseau lived several years;
where he botanized, and where he wrote his Confessions. One mile from
Mayfield, on the other side of the Dove, lived a great, and perhaps, a
much better man than Rousseau, but who will not attain an equal
renown--Michael Thomas Sadler. At Oakover, one mile from Mayfield, is
the residence of the late Mr. Ward, author of Tremaine. Two miles
farther up the river, in the loveliest of all villages, a grotto is
still preserved in which Congreve wrote his first drama. A ten
minutes' walk affords a view of the grand entrance to Dovedale,
immortalized by old Izaak Walton. At Tissington, another most
exquisite village, like the former without work-house or ale-house,
lived Greaves, the author of the Spiritual Quixote. Dr. Taylor, one of
Dr. Johnson's most esteemed friends, was an inhabitant of Ashbourne.
The great lexicographer was a visitor of this neighborhood, and some
of his most amusing conversations and peculiarities are recorded by
Boswell while staying in this quiet town. Mayfield cottage bears now
some claim to the notice of the lovers of literature, from its being
the residence of Mr. Alfred Butler, the clever author of the novels of
Elphinstone and The Herberts."

It was not, however, the attractions enumerated in the above passage
which determined the settlement of Moore there. His wife and himself
were traveling along from a scene of great aristocratic splendor, of
which they had become so weary, that they sighed for the utmost
simplicity, retirement, and repose, and vowed that they would take the
very first place of such a character that they found vacant. Mayfield
cottage was the one. "It was a poor place," said Moore to myself,
"little better than a barn, but we at once took it, and set about
making it habitable."

It is no doubt from some such remark on the part of the poet that a
paragraph originated which I have lately seen going the round of the
newspapers, that he wrote Lalla Rookh in a barn. That barn was, in
fact, Mayfield cottage. The right-hand front window is pointed out as
belonging to Moore's little parlor; the window at the side belonged to
his not very extensive library, and the trees visible above the roof
are part of the orchard, his favorite study, in which some of his
choicest lyrics were composed.

The warm-hearted poet, though it is many years since he quitted
Mayfield, speaks with pleasure of the enjoyment he experienced there.
The country around, both in Derbyshire and Staffordshire, has many
charms for a poetic eye. There are, too, many persons of taste and
intelligence living in it, from whom he and his family received every
cordial attention. He was zealously engaged in working out what he
deemed was to be the crowning work of his fame, Lalla Rookh, and he
regarded the cottage at Mayfield, and the scene immediately
surrounding it, peculiarly favorable for this purpose. "It was
indeed," he observes, in the preface to his eighth volume, "to the
secluded life I led during the years 1813-1816, in a lone cottage in
the fields of Derbyshire, that I owed the inspiration, whatever may
have been its value, of some of the best and most popular portions of
Lalla Rookh. It was amid the snows of two or three Derbyshire winters
that I found myself enabled, by that concentration of thought which
retirement alone gives, to call up around me some of the sunniest of
those Eastern scenes which have since been welcomed in India itself as
almost native to its clime." It is, he says, a peculiarity of his
imagination that it is easily broken in upon and diverted by striking
external objects. "I am," said he to me, "at once very imaginative,
and very matter-of-fact. The matter-of-fact can at any moment put to
flight all the operations of the imagination. It was, therefore,
necessary for me to exclude matter-of-fact, and all very striking or
attractive objects, and to concenter all my imagination on the objects
I wished to portray. My story lay in the East, and I must imbue and
saturate my imagination entirely with Eastern ideas, and Eastern
imagery. I must create, and place, and keep before me a peculiar
world, with all its people and characteristics. No place could be more
favorable for this than Mayfield, because it had nothing prominent or
seducing enough to rush through and force itself into the world which
I had evoked, created, and was walking and working in. The result was
most complete. Never having been into the East myself, yet every one
who _has_ been there declares that nothing can be more perfect
than my representations of it, its people, and life, in Lalla Rookh."

But though living in the country, Moore was always in the pretty
regular habit of visiting town during the season. Here he was the
charm of the circles of the Whig nobility, especially at Lansdowne and
Holland houses. At these places, and especially the latter, he met all
the distinguished men of the time. Byron, Jeffrey, Sidney Smith,
Campbell, Brougham, and the like. Even in the country he has lived
much at times in the houses of his great friends. In particular he
records his visit at Chatsworth, and at Donnington-park, the seat of
Lord Moira, where he describes himself as passing whole weeks in the
library there, even when the family was absent, "indulging in all the
freest airy castle-building of authorship." Here he met, oddly enough,
with the rival princes of France, poor Charles X. and his brother, the
Duc de Montpensier, and the Comte Beaujolais, at the same time with
the Duke of Orleans, the present Louis Philippe, who in the library at
the same house would be deep in a volume of Clarendon, "unconsciously
preparing himself by such studies for the high and arduous destiny
which not only the good genius of France, but his own sagacious and
intrepid spirit had early marked out for him." Rogers and Moore have
been for many years very intimate friends, and of course Moore has for
years been much at home in the classic abode of the latter poet.
During Byron's residence in Italy, Moore visited him there, and
received the unlucky gift of the Memoirs, out of which, and his two
thousand guineas, he was so shamefully wheedled by those who could so
very well afford to pay the price of that burnt offering, to him a
serious sacrifice.

But Lord Lansdowne was anxious to get the wit and poet down into his
own neighborhood, and pressed him to come and live near Bowood.
"Tommy, who dearly loves a lord," was the designation given to Moore
by his _dear_ friend, LORD Byron. As he obliged the relatives of
Byron by burning the horror-creating Memoirs, so he was willing to
oblige Lord Lansdowne by living near him. His lordship sent him word
that there was a house just the thing for him, at Bromham, not far
from Bowood. Moore went to it, but found it far too large and
expensive for a poet's income. He, however, told Mrs. Moore on his
return that he had seen a cottage on the road that was every thing
that _he_ desired, with a most delicious garden, and in a sweet
situation. With her usual energy, Mrs. Moore at once took coach,
hastened to the cottage, liked it as well as her husband did, and took
it at once. This was Sloperton cottage, and here they have resided
nearly thirty years.

It is Sloperton cottage which hereafter will be regarded with the
chief interest as the residence of the poet. It stands in the midst of
a delightful country, and though itself buried, as it were, in an
ordinary thickly wooded lane, branching off to the left from the
high-road, about two miles from Devizes, on the way to Chippenham, yet
from its upper windows, as well as from its garden, enjoys peeps
through the trees into lovely scenes. Down southward from the far end
of the house opens the broad and noble vale toward Trowbridge; in
front to the right, across a little valley, stands on a fine mount,
amid nobly grown trees, the village of Bromham, with a gentleman's
house standing, boldly backed and flanked by the masses of wood, and
the church spire peering above it. More to the left, in front, you
look across some miles of country, and see the historical foreland of
Roundaway hill, the termination of the chalk-hills of the
White-house-vale, proudly overlooking Devizes. This hill, my driver
gravely assured me, was Roundaway hill, _where King John signed the
charter_! Behind the cottage, across some rich fields, are the
wooded slopes of Spy-park, once the property of Sir Andrew Baynton.

At a few hundred yards' distance, on the left-hand side of the lane as
you advance from the Devizes road, there stands the old manor-house of
Nonsuch, which has gone through many hands, and has, I believe, lately
been sold, and is now refitting for a modern mansion. A narrow
foot-lane descends past its grounds down through the valley, between
tall hedges and embowering alders, to the village of Bromham, which
gives you a view of the ancient knolls of the parklike environs of
Nonsuch. Old sturdy oaks are standing here and there on these knolls,
and every thing presents an air of great antiquity. A footpath runs
through these grounds, by which you are admitted to loiter at your
leisure amid the retired slopes and woodland hollows of this old
English scenery. The footway which, I have said, leads also down past
it, to Bromham, is peculiarly rural. It is paved, as the bottom
abounds in water, where a beautiful spring gushes up from the foot of
the ascent toward the village; and in passing along it, you feel
yourself to be shrouded amid a luxuriant growth of water-loving trees,
and surrounded by the quietness of woodland banks, and rustic farm
lands. The village is purely agricultural, and has a fine church, with
a singularly richly ornamented battlement.

Such is the immediate situation of Moore's cottage. Views of it every
one has seen; but it is only when you stand actually before it, see it
covered with clematis, its two porches hung with roses, and the lawn
and garden which surround it kept in the most exquisite order, and
fragrant with every flower of the season, that you are fully sensible
of what a genuine poet's nest it is.

The house was originally quite a common cottage. This part forms still
the end next to the Devizes road, which road, however, is three
quarters of a mile distant; but fresh erections have been added, so
that now it is not a very large, but a very goodly and commodious
dwelling. The old entrance has been left, as well as a new one made in
the new part, so that no unnecessary interruption may be occasioned to
the family by visitors. The old entrance leads to the little
drawing-room, the newer one to the family sitting-room. The poet's
study is up stairs. In the garden there is a raised walk running its
whole length, bounded by a hedge of laurel. This gives you the view
over the fields of Spy-park, and its finely wooded slopes. This is a
favorite walk of the poet; and it was, indeed, the fascination of this
garden which originally took his fancy, and occasioned him to think of
securing it.

At present Thomas Moore is suffering one of the afflictions to which
all men are liable, but which press, perhaps, most sensibly on the
poetic temperament--the loss of a son, an officer in foreign service.
What is worthy of remark, and is an evidence of his independent and
unselfish disposition, is that, I believe, with the exception of his
Bermuda appointment, which turned out a loss, through the dishonesty
of an agent, he has never received any other appointment, or any
pension, though he has been so thoroughly identified with, and
caressed by the Whigs. He can say, and does say, with a just
pride,--What I am, I have made myself--what I have, I have won by my
own hand. He has been careful to tell us himself, in his preface to
his third volume, the actual amount of _royal_ patronage which he
had been said to have received, and unworthily repaid, by quizzing the
modern Heliogabalus. It is this, and is worth reading: "Luckily, the
list of benefits showered upon me from that high quarter may be
dispatched in a few sentences. At the request of the Earl of Moira,
one of my earliest and best friends, his royal highness graciously
permitted me to dedicate to him my Translation of the Odes of
Anacreon. I was twice, I think, admitted to the honor of dining at
Carlton-house; and when the prince, on his being made regent, in 1811,
gave his memorable fête, I was one of the envied--about fifteen
hundred, I believe, in number--who enjoyed the privilege of being his
guests on the occasion." The obligation was certainly not
overpowering, especially when the country had to pay for it. Moore
adds, that history has now pretty well settled the character of this
royal patron. The obligation to nobility is not much more onerous.
This, to the poet himself, is highly honorable; but to the party, and
the noblemen of that party--the Lansdownes, Hollands, and
Russells--what is it? The cause of these men the warm and patriotic
pen of the Irish poet has essentially served. His wit, in songs and
squibs in the morning papers, and through various vehicles, has been
to them a sharp and glittering cimiter, lopping off the heads of whole
hosts of heavy arguments and accusations. Around their tables he has
cast a radiance and a merriment that would else have been sought for
in vain. To them he has been a genuine and a daily benefactor. They
have had the honor of his countenance, while they probably thought
that they were gracing him with theirs. How posterity laughs at all
such aristocratic self-delusions! How it reduces things to their real
dimensions! What may be the ideas of Thomas Moore, on this subject, I
do not know. I speak merely according to the impressions which the
contemplation of his peculiar career leaves upon me; and these are,
that his aristocratic friends have had a very good friend in him, and
he a very indifferent one in them. While, on all occasions, they have
been filling their families and ordinary hangers-on with wealth, the
ablest man of their party has been rewarded with a shake of the hand
and invitations to dinners, because he was too proud to ask for any
thing better. If he has dearly loved a lord, it must be confessed that
it has been with a very disinterested affection. Lord Byron was the
most generous to him of his class; but Lord Byron's friends robbed him
of that solitary benefit. And so, at the age of sixty-six, the
champion of the Whigs, the poet of the loves, the merry wit, and the
pungent satirist, the friend of the richest men in England, still sits
at his desk, and works for honest bread. Long may he enjoy it!

[Illustration: The "Ranter" Preaching]

EBENEZER ELLIOTT.

The manufacturing town, as well as the country, has found its Burns.
As Burns grew and lived amid the open fields, inhaling their free
winds, catching views of the majestic mountains as he trod the
furrowed field, and making acquaintance with the lowliest flower and
the lowliest creatures of the earth, as he toiled on in solitude; so
Elliott grew and lived amid the noisy wilderness of dingy houses,
inhaling smoke from a thousand furnaces, forges, and engine chimneys,
and making acquaintance with misery in its humblest shapes, as he
toiled on in the solitude of neglect. The local circumstances were
diametrically different, to show that the spirit in both was the same.
They were men of the same stamp, and destined for the same great work;
and, therefore, however different were their immediate environments,
the same operating causes penetrated through them, and stirred within
them the spirit of the prophet. They were both of that chosen class
who are disciplined in pain, that they may learn that it is a
prevailing evil, and are stimulated to free not only themselves, but
their whole cotemporary kindred. Of poets, says Shelley:

    "They learn in suffering what they teach in song;"

and the names of Milton, Chatterton, Byron, and of Shelley himself,
remind us how true as well as melancholy is the assertion. Burns and
Elliott were to be great teachers, and they both had their appointed
baptisms. The same quick and ardent passions; the same quivering
sensibility; the same fiery indignation against tyranny and
oppression; the same lofty spirit of independence, and power of
flinging their feelings into song, strong, piercing, and yet most
melodious, belong to them. They are both of the people--their sworn
brethren and champions. For their sakes they defy all favor of the
great; they make war to the death on the humbug of aristocratic
imposition; to them humanity is alone great, and by that they stand
unmoved by menace, unabashed by scorn, unseduced by flatterers. As
messengers of God, they honor God in man; and if they show a
preference, it is for man in his misery. They are drawn by a divine
sympathy to the injured and afflicted. The world knows its own, and
they know it, and leave the world to worship according to its worldly
instinct. For them the gaudy revel goes on, the chariot of swelling
property rolls by, the palace and the castle receive or pour out their
glittering throngs, unmarked save by a passing glance of contempt; for
they are on their way to the cabins of wretchedness, where they have
their Father's work to do. In their eyes, "the whole need not a
physician, but those that are sick." They leave the dead to bury their
dead, and have enough to do to soothe the agonies of the living; of
those who live only to suffer, the martyr mass of mankind who groan in
rags, and filth, and destitution, under the second great curse--not
that of earning their bread by the sweat of their brow, but of not
being able to do it.

England owes a debt of thanks to a good Providence, who, affluent in
his gifts of honor and beneficence, has raised up great men in every
class and every location on her bosom, where they were most needed. In
that magnificent work which England has assuredly to do in the
earth--that of spreading freedom, knowledge, arts, and Christianity
over every distant land and age, gross errors have been committed, and
malignant powers have been developed, like pestilential diseases in
her constitution; but these have not been suffered to stop, though
they may have retarded her career. New infusions of health have been
made, new strength has been manifested; out of the pressure of
wretchedness new comfort has sprung; and when hope seemed almost
extinct, new voices have been heard above the wailing crowd, that have
startled the despairing into courage, and shed dismay into the soul of
tyranny. As the population has assumed new forms and acquired new
interests, out of the bosom of the multitude have arisen the poets who
have borne those forms, and have been made familiar with those
interests from their birth. Byron and Shelley, from the regions of
aristocracy, denounced, in unsparing terms, its arrogant assumptions;
Burns, beholding the progressing work of monopoly and selfishness,
uttered his contempt of the spirit that was thrusting down the
multitude to the condition of serfs, and haughtily returning glance
for glance with pride of rank and pride of purse, exclaimed--

"A man's a man for a' that!"

But the work of evil went on. While war scourged the earth in the
defense of the doting despotism of kingship, and monopoly shut out the
food of this nation in defense of the domestic despotism of
aristocracy, millions and millions of men were born to insufferable
misery, to hunger, nakedness, and crime, the result of maddened
ignorance; and that in a land teeming with corn and cattle, and the
wealth that could purchase them; and in a land, too, that sent out
clothing for a world. The work of selfishness had proceeded, but had
not prospered; wealth had been accumulated, but poverty had been
accumulated too, a thousandfold; rents had been maintained, but ruin
looked over the wall; there was universal activity, but its wages were
famine; there was a thunder of machinery, and a din of never ceasing
hammers; but amid the chaos of sounds there were heard--not songs, but
groans. It was then that Elliott was born, and there that he grew, in
the very thick of this swarming, busy, laborious, yet miserable
generation. He saw with astonishment that all that prodigious industry
produced no happiness; there was pomp and pauperism; toil and
starvation; Christianity preached to unbelieving ears, because there
were no evidences of its operation on hearts that had the power to
bless; and thus famine, ignorance, and irritation were converting the
crowd into a mass of ravenous and dehumanized monsters. There needed a
new orator of the patriot spirit. There needed a Burns of the
manufacturing district, and he was there in the shape of Elliott. Had
Burns been born again there, and under those circumstances, he would
have manifested himself exactly as Elliott has done. He would have
attacked manfully this monstrous bread-tax, which had thus
disorganized society, disputing the passage of God's blessings to the
many, and stamping a horrible character on the few. He would have
vindicated the rights of man and his labors, and have sung down with
fiery numbers all the crowding bugbears that armed monopoly had
gathered round the people to scare them into quiet. Elliott has done
that exactly; done that and no less. In the unpresuming character of
"A Corn-Law Rhymer," of "The Poet of the Rabble," he sent out, right
and left, songs, sarcasms, curses, and battle-cries, among the people.
His words, never ceasing, fell like serpents among the multitude
deadened by long slavery, and stung them into life. His voice once
raised, never faltered, never paused; wherever the multitude met they
heard it; wherever they turned they saw it embodied in largest
handwriting on the wall. "Up! bread-taxed slave! Up! our bread is
taxed--arise!" It was Elliott who sounded from day to day, and month
to month, these ominous words in the nation's ears. He took the very
form of Burns's patriot song, and instead of "Scots, wha ha' wi'
Wallace bled," exclaimed--

    "Hands, and hearts, and minds are ours;
    Shall we bow to bestial powers?
    Tyrants, vaunt your swords and towers!
                Reason is our citadel.

    "With what arms will ye surprise
    Knowledge of the million eyes?
    What is mightier than the wise?
                Not the might of wickedness.

    "Trust in force!--So tyrants trust!
    Words shall crush ye into dust;
    Yet we _fight_, if fight we must--
                Thou didst, Man of Huntingdon![5]

    "Heirs of Pym! can ye be base?
    Locke! shall Frenchmen scorn a race
    Born in Hampden's dwelling-place?
                Blush to write it, Infamy

    "What we are our fathers were;
    What they dared their sons can dare:
    Vulgar tyrants! hush! beware!
                Bring not down the avalanche.

    "By the death which Hampden died
    By oppression mind-defied!
    Despots, we will tame your pride--
                Stormily, or tranquilly!"

          [5] One Oliver Cromwell, a brewer.

These brave words were not uttered in vain. The Burns of Sheffield did
not speak to the dead. The fire which he scattered was electric. It
spread rapidly, it kindled in millions of hearts, it became the soul
of the sinking multitude. It was slower to seize on the moist and
comfortable spirits of the middle classes and master-manufacturers;
but the progress of foreign competition soon drove even them into
action against the landlord's monopoly. The League arose. The
prose-men took up the cry of the poet, and with material and ground
prepared by him, went on from year to year advancing, by force of
arguments and force of money, the great cause, till at this moment it
may be said to be won. The prime minister of England pronounced the
doom of the Corn-Law, and fixed the date of its extinction. All honor
to every man who fought in the good fight, but what honor should be
shown to him who began it? To the man who blew, on the fiery trumpet
of a contagious zeal, defiance to the hostile power in the pride of
its strength, and called the people together to the great contest? In
that contest the very name of Ebenezer Elliott has of late ceased to
be heard. Others have prolonged the war-cry, and the voice of him who
first raised it seems to be forgotten; but not the less did he raise
it. Not the less does that cause owe to him its earliest and amplest
thanks. Not the less is it he who dared to clear the field, to defy
the enemy, to array the host, to animate them to the combat, and
proclaim to them a certain and glorious victory. And when the clamor
of triumph shall have ceased, and a grateful people sit down to think,
in their hours of evening or of holyday ease, of the past, they will
remember the thrilling songs of their poet, and pay him a long and
grateful homage.

In comparing Ebenezer Elliott to Robert Burns, I do not mean to say
that their poetry is at all points to be compared. On the contrary, in
many particulars they are very different, but the great spirit and
principles of them are the same. In the felicitous power of throwing a
popular sentiment into a popular song, Elliott can not come near
Burns; nay, in the lyrical portion of his composition, we do not find
the full stature and strength of Elliott; it is in his larger poems
that he more completely presents himself, and no one can read them
without feeling that he is not only a true but a great poet.

There are many people who have read only his corn-law effusions in
newspapers and periodicals, who are at a loss to find the warrant for
the high character assigned by others to his writings. These give them
an idea of a fierce, savage, and often coarse demagogue. And when they
add to the expression of these compositions that of the only portraits
hitherto published of him, they are perfectly confirmed in the idea
that he is a stern, hard-souled, impetuous, and terrible man of iron.
Such are the false judgments derived from a one-sided knowledge, and
the cruel calumnies of bad artists! Ebenezer Elliott is one of the
gentlest, most tender-hearted of men; and, however strange it may
seem, it is this very character, this compassion for the unhappy, this
lively and soft sympathy for human suffering, that has roused him to
his loftiest pitch of anger, and put into his mouth his most terrible
words. It is the noble and feeling soul, which creates the patriot,
the savior, and champion of men. It was Christ, who died for the
world, and prayed for his enemies, and taught us to pray for ours,
that uttered those awful and scarifying denunciations--"Woe unto you,
Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!" It is impossible that it should be
otherwise. It is impossible that a feeling soul, endowed with power as
well as feeling, should not rise into the battle attitude at the sight
of oppression, and with the sledge-hammer of a great indignation
demolish the gates of cruelty, when the poor are crying within. But it
must never be forgotten, that it is out of the excess of love that
springs this excess of zeal. It is this that marks the great
distinction between the tyrant and the savior; the one is inspired by
cruelty, the other by mercy.

Whoever sees Ebenezer Elliott, having first only seen the portrait
prefixed to some of his works--a vile caricature--and having read only
his Corn-law Rhymes, will see with wonder a man of gentle manners, and
in all his tones, the expression of a tender and compassionate
feeling. But those who have read the whole of his poetry, will
_not_ be surprised at this. It is what they will expect. Elliott,
though born in a manufacturing town, and having lived there most of
his life, displays, like Burns, the most passionate attachment to
nature, and what is more, a most intimate acquaintance with her. He
possesses a singular power of landscape painting; and what he paints,
possesses all the beauty of Claude, and the wild magnificence of a
Salvator Rosa, with the finest and most subtile touches of a Dutch
artist. In his landscapes you are not the more amazed by the sublimity
of the tempest on the dark and crag-strewn moorland mountains of the
Peak, than you are by the perfect accuracy of his most minute details.
In the woodland, on the vernal bank, and in the cottage garden, you
find nothing which should not be there; nothing out of place, or out
of season; and the simplest plant or flower is exactly what you will
find; not nicknamed as the poor children of nature so often are by our
writers. There is one instance of Ebenezer Elliott's taste that meets
you everywhere, and marks most expressively the peculiar, delicate,
and poetic affection of his feelings. It is his preeminent love for
spring, and its flowers and imagery. The primrose, the snow-drop, "the
woe-marked cowslips," the blossom of the hawthorn and the elm, how
constantly do they recur. In what favorite scene has he not introduced
the wind-flower? Thus, in this admirable picture of a mechanic's
garden--

    "Still nature, still he loves thy uplands brown--
    The rock that o'er his father's freehold towers!
    And strangers hurrying through the dingy town
    May know his workshop by its sweet wild flowers.
    Cropped on the Sabbath from the hedge-row bowers,
    The hawthorn blossom in his window droops;
    Far from the headlong stream and lucid air,
    The pallid alpine rose to meet him stoops,
    As if to soothe a brother in despair,
    Exiled from nature, and her pictures fair.
    Even winter sends a posy to his jail,
    Wreathed of the sunny celandine; the brief,
    Courageous wind-flower, loveliest of the frail;
    The hazel's crimson star, the woodbine's leaf,
    The daisy with its half-closed eye of grief;
    Prophets of fragrance, beauty, joy, and song."--P. 63.

Or in this passage, as remarkable for the sweet music of its
versification as for its suggestive power, winging the imagination
into the far-off woodland with the plover's cry--

    "When daisies blush, and wind-flowers wet with dew;
    When shady lanes with hyacinths are blue;
    When the elm blossoms o'er the brooding bird,
    And wild and wide the plover's wail is heard
    When melt the mists on mountains far away,
    Till morn is kindled into brightest day,
    No more the shouting youngsters shall convene
    To play at leap-frog on the village green," etc.--P. 87.

These are beautiful; but Elliott can be strong as beautiful, and
sublime as strong; and the great charm of all his poetry is, that he
makes his description subservient to the display of human life and
passion, human joys, and sorrows, and struggles, and wrongs. He deals,
as the poet of the people, with the life of the people. The thronged
manufacturing town,--thronged with men, and misery, and crime, but not
destitute of domestic virtues, nor precious domestic
affections,--lives nowhere as it does in Elliott's pages. The village
and the cottage, with its gardens, and their inhabitants, all come
before us with their beloved characteristics, and also with their
tales of trial and death.

Elliott has been said to have copied from Crabbe and Wordsworth, and
heaven knows who. Every page of his tells that he has read and loved