| LAMAN BLANCHARD. | 207 |
I have said that Blanchard disliked the country. But this must be taken with that
qualification which every broad and sweeping assertion respecting the leading features of
his character would require; for, so plastic was his temperament, that he could learn to
like or dislike anything or anybody, so far as the immutable principles of truth and
justice did not forbid. He disliked the country, because the necessities of the social
position he had imposed upon himself made it indispensable to his personal comfort and
peace of mind that he should do so. He had, as it were, sold himself, body and soul, to the
brilliant slavery of the periodical and newspaper press. This was the only literary
employment capable of giving full play to the almost morbid activity of his mind; and, in
devoting himself to it, he not only
| 208 | LAMAN BLANCHARD. |
But when Blanchard did occasionally permit himself to escape from his beloved London “to that world elsewhere,” in which he scarcely allowed himself to believe, except when he was in the presence of it, the latent sympathy with external nature which was inherent in his truly poetical temperament burst out with a force proportioned to the length of time it had been suppressed. I shall never forget the tumult of almost childish delight in which he passed part of two days with me at my house at Highwood Hill, and the sort of desperate resolution with which, at last, he tore himself away from what he seemed to regard as a perilous temptation to be false to his London allegiance.
The following is his half-unwilling attempt to escape from another proposed
social meeting, every feature of which would have been agreeable to him, except that of the
scene of it being ten miles from town. He
| LAMAN BLANCHARD. | 209 |
“Dear Patmore,—Friday is
always a writing day with me, for the “Examiner” work, not to be done earlier or later in the week.
So, unhappily (at least for me), I am obliged to write to
——, foregoing the proffered engagement. I had supposed
you to be at Hendon or Harrow, by the account Hazlitt gave
me, or I should have sought you in Southampton Street, whither, indeed, I was
about to bend my steps, when I encountered the said Hazlitt. Ever since you strolled over here I have been
“going” to do so. Your account, however, of the haymaking freaks
amuses me mightily, and suggests a pretty moral as to the evils that wait on
absentee landlords. The same story reminds me of Leigh
Hunt’s anecdote of the two boys (his own cockney
subjects), who, having reached Primrose Hill, dreaded penetrating farther into
the wild and seemingly uninhabited
| 210 | LAMAN BLANCHARD. |
“What are you doing in the country?”
Here is another of his pleasant notes, written on a similar occasion, of my wishing him and his family to change a scene which had just been darkened by domestic trouble.
“My dear Patmore,—We are
delighted with your kind note, which, though we could not any of us start off
to take advantage of it, was the more welcome for coming in a season of
trouble,—one of my little boys having had his face cut to pieces by the
bursting of a soda-water bottle. It has
| LAMAN BLANCHARD. | 211 |
“Our friendliest regards to Mrs. Patmore, and my especial remembrances to C. P.
“I have been writing night and day about the subscription for the children of my poor old friend Elton; it is most successful.”
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