“Are thieves and knaves the favourites of a court, The scales and sword of justice make their sport— Sure to come off with honour—happy lot! Such must make interest to be hanged or shot!”

Wolcot preferred Pope to Dryden as a poet. I asked him if Pope had written anything to equal “Alexander’s Feast.”

“Pooh!” said he, “Dryden was drunk when he wrote that ode.”

Kosciusko came to England after being emancipated, by Paul of Russia, from the dungeon in which the Messalina of the north had incarcerated him. On arriving in London he sent for Wolcot, making the apology that his wounds would not permit him to call upon him, as he was suffering afresh from them. Wolcot wondered at the request. He called, saw the great patriot stretched upon a sofa, and after the first salutations were over, asked the Pole how it happened that he honoured him with such a message.

Kosciusko said that when he was flung into the prison at St. Petersburgh, he had asked the gaoler if he

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could lend him a book. The man produced a volume of Wolcot’s works. He was so pleased with the freedom with which great people were treated, and the spirit of liberty enjoyed in England, that he determined the first person he saw in England should be the doctor.

“He presented me with a bottle of real Falernian,” said the doctor, “or what was said to be so, of which he had but a couple left. I was to take the wine with me, that we might pledge each other in the wine of Horace.”

Wolcot told me that no individuals of note called upon Kosciusko, except Charles Fox and Mr. Grey, so little sympathy did the fate of Poland excite in England.

Wolcot was making love to a lady while Opie was living with him. He introduced the artist to her, and Opie took it into his head he must be more welcome to her than the doctor, who was twenty years older.

“Jan had much youthful vanity,” said Wolcot, “even before he knew the great world.”

To prevent Wolcot from interrupting him in his visits to her, he took care to borrow the doctor’s horse for the purpose, and thus secured himself from interruption. The doctor gave him credit for the trick.

Besides Bone and Opie, there was an artist called Paye, whom the doctor befriended, but of whom he could make nothing. At last all intimacy between them ceased. Paye then caricatured the doctor in a bad imitation of Hogarth’s satire on Churchill, only the doctor was depicted as a bear standing before an easel, in place of the Russian Hercules.

I once found Wolcot, when I called a good time

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before his death, laid up in his bed-room, his eyes bandaged. “What is the matter, doctor?”

“Since you were here, Adams the oculist (afterwards Sir William Rawson) who goes about blinding every body, persuaded me to submit to the operation for cataract.”

“I gave him the worst eye of the two to block up. He had persuaded me into it. At just eighty years of age, it was folly. Adams knew better. He wished my name to puff a cure with.”

One of the doctor’s stories is not less good because it is true and has been before told. The Vicar of Menaccan, near the Lizard Point, related it to him. The Reverend divine was reading the passage—“Then fearing lest we should have fallen upon the rocks, they cast four anchors out of the stern.” A fisherman cried out to the astonishment of the congregation, “All wrong—all wrong—put about—put about! lubberly fellows, d—— me if I would not have saved ship and cargo.”

“The justices fined the poor fellow five shillings for

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swearing, the very next day, only,” said Wolcot, “for a little honest esprit de corps. There was no question about the bad seamanship.”

He said that Fuseli had the whole stock of scholarship of the Academy of Painting, Reynolds being no more, and that they made the most of him and his stock in trade. Fuseli had a notion that sublimity consisted in strangeness, and was annoyed that other people would not think so too. One day I came up behind him when he did not observe me, and he said, looking at one of his own pictures, “Py got! no one did ever see such a picture as dat is before.”

“No, nor ever will again, Fuseli,” I exclaimed, close to his ear. He never forgave me, because I attacked his monsters.

A lady at a dinner party who was overwhelmed with admiration of George III., asked Wolcot if he had no compunctious visitings for satirizing so gracious and good a king—whether he did not think he was a most disloyal subject?

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“Grandmamma to Kirkman, the great pianoforte maker, my dear.”

“In ancient days, great Jove to show To gazing mortals here below, The loves, the virtues, and the graces, Was forced to form three female faces. But (so improved his art divine) In one fair female now they shine. Aloud I hear the reader cry:— ‘Heavens! (to the poet) what a lie!’ Now, as I hate the name of liar, Sweet Dickenson, I do desire, You’ll see this unbelieving Jew, And prove that all I’ve said is true!”

Opie was no match for Wolcot in a species of humorous banter, which used to take place between them. The former, in the way of retaliation, placed the doctor’s head upon one of Milton’s fallen angels. Few knew the doctor personally, and the joke did not take. There had been a meeting of the “Friends of the People “at Copenhagen House. Wolcot, more of an aristocrat

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than a Jacobite, as all who spoke freely were called in those days, attended out of mere curiosity. Pitt was labouring at the suppression of political opinions as much as possible. Arrests had taken place, in consequence of his fears. Opie thought of a scheme of retaliation upon his old friend, and drew Ozias Humphrey, his brother academician, into the plot. The doctor knowing how obnoxious he was by his writings to the minister, when he reflected on his visit to that meeting, got into alarm on being told by Opie that he had heard the government kept its eyes upon him. Humphrey, in a great coat and slouched hat, stationed himself early in the evening, just opposite the doctor’s house. Opie called, in the meanwhile, in an apparent hurry, and said that a warrant was to be issued against him. “As I came in, I saw a fellow I did not like on the opposite side of the way, just look out at the window.”

Out of the window dropped the doctor, and disappeared to ensconce himself in an obscure lodging near Windsor, observing, in allusion to the palace there, that the point of greatest danger, was that of most safety. Here he remained a fortnight. Opie and Humphrey spreading abroad the story to the great delight of many of their brethren of the brush, whom Wolcot had sharply handled. Thus as was rarely the case, he had the worst of the game.

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Opie did not treat the doctor well. A difference between them took place some years before the death of the artist, and he died without their long intercourse having been resumed. One day Wolcot, when eighty years of age, asked me if I knew Betsy Cranch. I could not conceive who he meant, for he had gone back many years before I was born. On demanding an explanation, he replied, “she was an old sweetheart of mine, who dismissed me with the most comfortable assurance, that a man in love ever received.”

Expressing my ignorance of who the lady was, the poet said, “Ah, you were not born then. I forgot she married John Vivian. She was a sweet creature. ‘Betsy,’ said I, ‘will you take me for better for worse?’

That lady I knew when I was a child as Mrs. Vivian. She was mother of the late Sir Hussey Vivian, master-general of the ordnance, and finally Lord Vivian. An excellent officer, and better still, a kind, brave, honourable and good man.

Wolcot talked with delight to the last, respecting the females whom he had met in his youthful days in the west.

Speaking of Dr. Johnson, Wolcot said that everybody appeared in awe of him, nor was he himself an exception. He determined to try what Johnson would say in the way of contradiction. “I laid a trap for him. ‘I think, doctor,’ I observed, ‘that picture of Sir Joshua’s is one of the best he ever painted,’ naming the work.

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Wolcot made no other attempt at conversation. The picture was one of Sir Joshua’s best.

“Traps, are good things,” said Wolcot, “to bring out character. The idea of a discussion with Johnson, never entered my head. I had too great an apprehension of his powers of conversation to attempt disputing with the giant of the day.”

During Wolcot’s last painless indisposition, I called upon him a week before his decease. He was dressed, but in his chamber, and had thrown himself on the bed, tired with having sat up a few hours. He conversed as sensibly and well as he had done for years before. I saw red wine on the table, and said:

“No, no, I am an old fellow, and I must go. I should like to lie as near as possible to the bones of old Hudibras Butler. I shan’t live. I am an old man. Nothing will do unless you can bring me back my youth.”

Wolcot did not believe in the Christian system. He had as strong a conviction as a man can have of the

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existence of God, of his power and attributes. He was in fact a deist honestly avowed, which is better than being a Christian in name alone, and belying its most benevolent doctrines in practice. We had more than once conversed on the subject of religion.

I notice this point because just after Wolcot’s death an article appeared about him in the “Quarterly Review,” not written in ignorance, for Gifford well knew the true state of the case, and if Southey and not Gifford wrote the article, the latter sanctioned it. It set out by rebuking Moore for indelicate writing, the steaming filth, and lubricity of Gifford’s “Juvenal” being forgotten, having translations enough before of that poet’s pruriences. If Southey wrote the article, for something of the author of “Wat Tyler,” and “Martyn, the Regicide,” was to be found in it, such as denouncing judgments on all who did not choose to be as deep in lack of principle as himself, Gifford was still answerable. I will give this piece of cant verbatim.

Hear that in your grave “once more Tom Moore.” This was a blow at Wolcot and at Shelley. The last, I presume, was set in this second sort of Vision of Judgment for his youthful inconsiderate works. Wolcot for “mispending a large portion of considerable talents, and a long life in endeavouring to bring into ridicule a pattern of private virtue in the most eminent public station,” so “sublimely canticled in the renowned ‘Vision of Judgment,’” should have been added. The

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reference is to Wolcot’s ridicule of George III. The doctor never by all his ridicule made the world laugh as heartily at the poor king, as Southey made the world laugh at himself and his arrangements with St. Peter in the monarch’s behalf. Then comes the more deliberate falsehood. “Wolcot terminated his life, long after the decay of his genius, in such obscurity that his death was hardly heard of. It is difficult to conceive a condition of life more miserable than his was as it approached its close. His talents while in their vigor, were of a kind to procure him much of the homage and flattery of social life. He outlived them all—the talents and the rewards. He passed his latter years in solitude, and extreme penury—aged, atheistical and blind. He lived a life of jovial profligacy and died deserted.”

Such is the charity that deals judgments on its fellow-men, under the assumed garb of religion and loyalty. This kind of duplicity is odious, and though the parties are gone to their account, their past hypocrisy should be a beacon to the living. Wolcot was all his life what a professional man should be, he was a temperate man in food and wine, a patron of the arts, and a kind man to the poor when acting as a physician. His talents were indisputable.

Campbell requested me to draw up a memoir of him to introduce into a new edition of his specimens of the British Poets, “because Wolcot was the inventor of a style of poetry peculiarly that of his own genius, and exceedingly effective.” His writings will live with the language. Can the same be said of those of the editor of the “Quarterly.” Several editions of his works have appeared since his decease; I have one of 1827. Wolcot

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was no companion of gamblers and jockeys, nor did he mingle in noblemen’s harems, nor was he a pantisocratist. His ridicule of the monarch, if indecorous, did not empower the editor of the “Quarterly,” or his minion, to send him perpendicularly down into a nameless place, though it might justify both in complimenting the ruler of that place with a specimen of their own qualifications for his service in the division, Quevedo would tell us, was appropriated to mendacity.

Wolcot was between eighty and ninety years of age when he died; but age is a calamity in such a case, a sort of “judgment!” He lived no further in obscurity than all men do who outlive their old friends: he never wanted visitors. His faculties were clear to the last. He did not spend his income. He left one servant a hundred guineas, and the other fifty, paying the legacy duty; hardly a proof of the crime of extreme poverty, so described in the article. Such were his solitude and extreme penury! I never saw an old man change less during the last ten years of life. If we are to affix bodily calamities as the judgments of Heaven, what shall we say of Southey, whose latter time was passed in idiotcy. God forbid that what he called a “judgment” upon others, should be retaliated upon himself, any more than the venomous doctrine he inculcated in other respects, as that on Byron as soon as he heard the noble poet was no more. His attacks of this nature on others, would be answered by his friends, “O but Southey was an excellent family man,”—who ever denied it? But what had the private conduct of George III. to do with his public life, or that of the pantisocratist of the Lakes with his misuse of his pen?

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Mr. John Taylor saw Wolcot, too, just before he died. He was opposed to Wolcot in politics. He spoke of Wolcot’s being lame. I never observed it—it could only have been temporary. That he was all his life troubled with asthma, I knew, but he rarely showed it in company. Mr. Taylor said:—

“As a proof that he was a kind and considerate master, when one of his servants came to tell me he was taken ill, and was delirious when she left him, she wept all the time she described his situation. I went as soon as I could, and then learned that he had recovered his faculties and was asleep. I sat by his bedside, expecting he would awake, amusing myself with a volume of his works till ten o’clock.” He then awoke and Taylor said, “Is there anything I can do for you?” His answer delivered in a strong deep tone was:

Wolcot was no Jacobin. He was attached to the aristocracy and was not even a politician. He opposed Pitt because Pitt forsook the principles of his father to hold place. Lord Chatham was Wolcot’s political hero, whom he was never tired of praising. He told me that the first verses he ever printed appeared in Martyn’s Magazine, “Lines to Mr. Pitt on his recovery from a fit of the Gout,” dated from Fowey in Cornwall, I think about 1757.

The ministry more than once offered him a pension. He was willing to be silenced. It was at a moment

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when his funds were low, and he was tired of composition. But it appeared this would not do; he was expected to write in their behalf with which he would not comply. He actually received the first quarter of the sum; but money coming in unexpectedly from another quarter, he returned it, and wrote—“Peter can live without a Pension.”

When the prince regent came into power, a message was sent to the doctor from Carlton House, requesting to know what the Prince was indebted to him for the slips of his works which had been uniformly sent by the prince’s own desire, when Wolcot was in the zenith of his reputation. He was surprised, and sent back word that he thought he had been honoured by the prince’s desire to have his squibs, and he did not expect to be insulted by such a demand, so many years afterwards. He thus dismissed the messenger, who came a second time, when Wolcot told him he had nothing now to do with the profits of his works, but referred him to Walker the bookseller, to whom he wrote to make out a formal bill, and account for every thing to a farthing. The sum was between forty and fifty pounds, which was sent to him personally in the shape of a fifty pound note, and with the messenger was again referred to Walker, the doctor desiring the change to be returned.

“It was such an insult,” he said, “that having read my verses and satires upon his relatives, the prince so many years after, should suppose he was indebted to me—why did he not, if it were so, discharge the debt before. He should have paid me at the time, if money had been in the question. I never expected it. Weljie,

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of his own household, supplied me with the subjects of some of my jokes on the court. The shaving of the heads of the royal cooks was really ordered, but stopped; the king was in a fury at finding a hair on his plate—you know what I made of it?”

“That is a family failing beginning with George I.,” observed the doctor. “They made great sport of my verses at Carlton House, though in ridicule of the court.”

When he was in the height of his reputation, from twenty to thirty thousand of his works went off in a day. He was an excellent Latin scholar, and spoke French well; but enough, he is now among the associations of the past. I read his works before I knew him, and they diverted many an hour of boyhood, in the sunny time of my life. I believe the vividness of such recollections is fresher in my mind than in that of most others. I cling to shadowy recollections the more rapidly as time hurries me on towards oblivion. God knows for what end I became a cumberer of his earth, but he will do with me that which his benevolence and power may design. To be passive to his will, and do all the good that is in my power is, I imagine, to obey him. I will not take tradition for a guide, nor the conflicting evidence of men in darker times. It is not consistent with justice that the rules by which I am to live or die eternally, should be presented to me in the doubtful form of human caprices, and in aspects con-

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trary to the demonstrable laws of the Divine will in the government of the world, of which every day the order, beauty, and simplicity, become more and more manifest. Are we to advance in all things but religion? Are our immortal interests sought to be reconciled more and more with the superstitions of dark ages, as our knowledge of science and its discoveries expand? Are we to continue to dispute while we exist upon that which should be all charity! Man cannot live without religion; but it cannot surely be required that his obscurity and perplexity on that subject should be increased with time, that his hope should rest on the revival of degrading superstitions under religion’s name, and that the simplicity and force of irresistible truths should once more be involved in gloom, rendered as irrational as depressing to intellect, and as unworthy the dignity of an enlightened era. Yet such appears to be the existing state of the question. For my own part, I doubt what I hear when I see such a state of things, and feel tempted to credit the simple rather than the complicated, because all great and important things are simple up to the laws by which it pleases God to rule the universe. It is impossible to mark without a conviction of something wrong coming uppermost, the contradictions, asperities, and tendencies that prevail among a great portion of the religious world. In other matters we do not dream of going back to idols, or of retrogradation to ignorance, and the dark middle ages. Now old improbabilities are modern probabilities, it is still more out of character to cling to practices which common sense repudiates. It is to be feared the crafty stimulate the weak and uninstructed to support such a

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system, and for those who are thus misled, philanthropy must console itself with the axiom of a well-known divine: “God makes allowance for invincible ignorance, and blesses the faith notwithstanding the superstition.” It seems to me that it is high time to leave off disputation, and begin to practice the Christian virtues, a thing more difficult than we imagine, where moral courage is denominated rudeness and infidelity.

We had excellent contributors in the “New Monthly” from the church, but it is singular we never got good papers from the universities. It is necessary for college men to complete their earlier studies, and then mingling with the world to imbibe some knowledge of its tastes and more enlarged views, before writing for its entertainment. One clergyman’s verses, occasionally received from the west, were exceedingly beautiful. I allude to the Reverend Mr. Johns. Calling at Campbell’s one evening, Mrs. Campbell put a letter into my hand which she had put aside, knowing it was for the magazine. She remarked the neatness of the hand writing.

“They are verses I see,” said Campbell, “let us know what they are upon.”

Morn, evening, came; the sunset smiled, The calm sea sought in gold the shore, As though it ne’er had man beguiled Or never would beguile him more.

“Beautiful! that stanza,” said Campbell, “let us have it again—that is poetry to my mind.”

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He repeated the lines, which he had by heart in a minute or two. “That is fine, never mind the rest. How faultless this description,” he observed to his wife, who scarcely replied, for she did not pretend to any judgment upon such a subject. The verses were called “The Maid of Orkney.” It struck me that the lines were coincident with that tranquil beauty, much of which is so admirably realized in “Gertrude of Wyoming.”

The poet was idle. He often got me to look over his proofs, for, except his own compositions, I had to correct the entire magazine. Talfourd, indeed, saw his own two or three pages, for I had them sent to him. Campbell being absent from town, and the Scotch tongue, except in the pages of Burns, not being known to me, for I had read little of its orthography, none indeed, of the local history of the equivocal race whom Scott’s magical pen transmuted into heroes, I thought he had misspelt a proper name in his verses, and I got from him, as if in a moment of recollection, the following unsatisfactory explanation.

“I am not sure about the orthography of ‘Maccalin More,’ but by looking at Scott’s ballad of ‘Lord Ronald’ it will be found, I dare say, exactly spelt. My own idea is, that it should be ‘Maccallin,’ I don’t know.”

I had not Scott’s ballads at hand, and by the time I had set the matter right, I had message after message from the printer. I found, too, that I had been wrong had I adopted Campbell’s notion, “Macaillan Mor,” being the right appellation. There was really something so kind in Campbell’s general conduct in those departed days, that I could not but help out his idleness a little,

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when it was in my power. I never grudge the reflection that I did so, though my second great error in life was committed in following a task in the prime of existence, which left me no time to employ myself in some work more for my own advantage. It was true my contributions were paid for, but then they were not numerous enough to be sources of much pecuniary advantage, with the rest of the labour of such a work wholly on my hands.

Of Campbell’s antipathy to Hazlitt something has been already said, and that it was owing to Hazlitt having charged him with a plagiarism, in his line about angel-visits. Now the alphabet permits an infinity of changes. The Greek, for example, in its syllables reaches one hundred millions, and near a quarter above. It is, therefore, possible, and no more, that three or four letters forming the same words may come together alike, though all the words in the English language are but forty or fifty thousand. Then there is the similar expression of the same ideas which is likely to happen, and, lastly, the want of remembering that the image has been used before, if it had ever been observed. Hazlitt was one of the best writers of the day. I received an article I did not like, it was a thoroughly blackguard subject. It was disgracing our literature in the eyes of other nations—why not a paper upon American gouging, Stamford bull-baiting, or similar elegancies. It was a picture of existing manners, it was true, the more the pity, and that it could not sooner be a record only of our barbarities. Campbell did not like it either, but Colburn had spoken of it to several persons, and Hazlitt’s friends were expecting it. I believe, too, that omitting it would

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have been thought to sanction the belief in the poet’s dislike to the writer, so it went into a work the terror of the other articles, which were of a very dissimilar character. A bookseller, if he imagines an article will help a sale, has no other consideration about it, the reputation of the editor is of no moment.

The illness of his son, who had returned from Bonn, with some mental affection, rendered the poet, for a time, wholly unfit for literary duty. He went from home. Once or twice, living near, Mrs. Campbell sent for me in his absence, in consequence of her son’s state of mind and violence, which latter was only for a short period. He was so ill at one time, that he threatened all in the house, and I was obliged to go to his bed-room with means at hand to subdue perforce any attempt he might make to do mischief. After some exacerbation the attack moderated, he fell asleep, and awoke the next day much better. The distress of his mother was great. She did not like that he should be anywhere but under the parental roof. The poet never knew the worst of these breakings out. Mrs. Campbell once told me, on accidentally calling at the house, that Campbell was gone out, for “he could not bear the way in which Thomas looked at him—so fixedly!” Yet a kinder disposition I never saw than this youth possessed. It was enough for the poet to fancy his son’s gaze upon him to be somewhat erratic, to derange his nerves. The truth was, that his thoughts were directed to the destruction of his future hopes regarding him.

“I shall never make anything of Tom, my friend—what can I make of him in such a state?”

I observed the irritability natural to the poet’s con-

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stitution, and was induced to think that in early life he must have exhibited great variation of temper and habit. This seemed to return after the death of his wife, for he greatly changed from that event. To the period of her decease must be added the period required to unchange, if I may so say, habitudes that from his marriage had become familiar. Francis Horner remarked to Lady Mackintosh how much matrimony had improved him. Neither before nor after a married life does he seem to have had settled habits. He lost his early ones when he married, and fell into them again afterwards, when he became a widower. This accounts for the different statements regarding his conduct in his latter years. During my long intercourse with him, before he was a widower, nothing could be more orderly than his house, or more of a home-keeper than himself, or one more choice in the society he kept. I left London for several years after our mutual pursuits ceased, but I heard enough to make me acquainted with the change which had taken place. Of all isolations, that of a man dependent upon the other sex for so much that renders life orderly and comfortable, and to effect which he is more than unused himself, that of widowership is the most injurious. It is really not good for man to be alone, it is the most unfortunate of his varied destinies.

“I have a kindness to request of you, which I have

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no doubt you will show, and I shall hope to have a proper opportunity of testifying my sense of it. It is to correct the punctuation, particularly of the sheets which follow ‘Theodoric,’ in my little forthcoming volume. May I ask you, also, to see that they go quickly to press, for I have not yet received a single sheet beyond ‘Theodoric,’ and if I go on in this way I know not when I may get out. You will do me the greatest favour by accepting of this trusteeship. I mean to retain only ‘Theodoric’ standing in type, for a week or so longer. The poems of the other sheets can be compared with the poems printed in the ‘New Monthly.’ This you can do with more accuracy than myself. I am conscious of giving you a deal of trouble, which I have no right to request, but I have no friend to whom I can make the application but yourself.”

I was often troubled by the poet’s overlooking his own errors—’many are apt to do this from the passage being in the memory. He had spelt Eratosthenes as Erastosthenes, and a second proof came with the word not altered. I wrote again, and then the thing was done. This trifle cost the trouble of three post letters. I never wrote an alteration on one of his proofs. It was wrong to do so without communicating, however plain the error. At another time, he returned the proof with the error uncorrected, I wrote to him that it was wrong if it was in Lisias’ funeral oration. This inattention was a part of his natural character, and it occurred in other things besides literature. It had often no connection with the business of the magazine which pressed me sufficiently. Yet had it occurred twice as frequently I should not fail to have set it right. There was

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a heartiness about the poet that took with me greatly, not perceptible but upon familiar intercourse. His forgetfulness which often appeared too like inattention, was not really such. He was continually in a mental abstraction upon topics which tended to no result, but into which he was led by some casual observation or desultory reading. Having two partridges sent him, then scarce, he intended to send me one for breakfast, and sent both. Then he had to send for one back again, which he did with the following note:

Here was double forgetfulness, which I have stated because characteristic of his action in more important matters. He knew that I never touched Glenlivet or any other species of whiskey. He played Lockhart an ill compliment in the same forgetful way, sending him an invitation to dinner one day, and the next day writing to say he was sorry his table would be full, and he should have no room for him, the truth being that it was not to Lockhart he intended his invitation to go, but to another person, to whom he would make a sort of apology for not asking him to join a particular party. These things continually occurred. I forgot to state that we had a ramble or two together when we were at

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Cheltenham, from which he eloped in such a hurry, declaring he would be back in two days, came back no more, and declared he had forgotten all about it until he missed me in town. We had clambered Birdlip Hills. Those of Malvern of a deep blue colour seen from our lodgings, he compared to the hills of Italy in pictures. “We seldom have the atmosphere so clear in Scotland. It makes my heart leap as it used to do in the Highlands.”

“I think Burns has made less of your mountains than might have been expected, he scarcely touches upon them in his beautiful verse.”

Yon wild mossy mountains so lofty and wide, That nurse in their bosom the youth of the Clyde,

“I replied I should be most happy if we could have such a jaunt, but how could we be both away from

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London together? I had, heretofore, preferred going south, because of the bad account the old lady of Berwick gave of the Scotch never going back to their own country, if they could once get out of it. The missing of a number of the magazine for a month would hardly do.”

“True,” he replied, “the devil take the magazine. I should like such a journey much, to go over my boyish scenes at Glasgow together. We could visit Wilson, and have some pleasure in Edinburgh.”

“Naturalists assert it,” I replied, “Hook and other observers state that some species of papillon have thirty thousand eyes, with every accessary perfect to each. That I had myself known some insects with numerous eyes.”

“I hold it a very bad sign,” said one, “that both

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editors should be absent at Cheltenham at once. (I have already spoken of our jaunt there). The bile of an editor is the best security for the piquancy of a journal, and the aquæ expurgatoriæ as dangerous to its spirit, as the index expurgatorius. The first carries off the malice prepense against all mankind necessary to give life and acidity to the articles, the second clears away all the irritability against rival publications, while the want of the third leaves the fluids so bland that you might as well expect intoxication from a mess of bread and milk as vigour from the villication of the nervous fibrils in the course of their circulation. Now whatever may be the case with yourself, who I laud the gods for it, do not want a spice of the devil in your composition, yet our worthy friend, the poet, is by nature occasionally disposed to be a respecter of times and persons, and if he cools his temperament too far with the cursed sulphate of magnesia, we poor fellows, who pass his ordeal, must measure our wits by Figaro’s standard, and write nothing against anything that belongs to anybody. I think he was not judgmatical in the matter of Lord Byron’s marriage, for, in the first place, it was too much a ‘Holy Alliance’ fancy, to hope by any suppression* to serve his friend Lady Byron, and in the next, the women, particularly the single ladies beyond a certain age, cabal so desperately against Byron’s memory, that it was but bare justice to let us hear the other side. Medwin’s book is a shameful misuse of private intercourse, as far as respects third persons, yet I think it bears much internal evidence of truth, and after the burning of the MSS. (Byron’s gift to Moore) we are not

* Captain Medwin.

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bound to be too nice as to the sources of intelligence. I was much amused, too, at the editorial note in the article on Rogers and Bowles. Of the latter I know nothing.”

Shall I read this to Campbell? The cooling nature of the water induced me to wait till the next morning, at seven o’clock at the Spa. The poet laughed heartily. I proceeded farther. “What do folks say about Medwin, Dallas and Hobhouse’s article in the ‘Westminster?’ The latter is written with too much of the virulence of a partizan. Thank God, however, he has turned over the parson, who is by far the most flagitious caitiff, ‘my conversation ever copied withal.’ Against Medwin he has not succeeded equally well. His detections of error are few and unimportant, and he omitted the worst charges, namely, the dragging in Lady C. L. and Lady O.”

“I don’t agree with that,” interrupted Campbell, “I think Hobhouse has done well. It was a troublesome thing for a friend to undertake. You know that Fitzgerald was not a wise or clever man. Yet even Fitzgerald is described as writing to Byron ‘elegant copies of verses,’ thus writes Dallas. Did he ever write anything worth reading? All the world knows the contrary. Dallas may be judged by this opinion. If Fitzgerald ever did write as Dallas says, he kept the treasure under a bushel. I think Dallas a poor miserable creature. In regard to Byron’s conduct towards women, it is impossible not to feel indignant at it. As a man of gallantry, if he chose to be so, he was bound in honour to keep a woman’s secret—bound by the honour of his own views if you will, not to drag

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forth the names of ladies in that way before individuals almost strangers to him. A man of strict honour would not impart such secrets to a bosom friend, and what if it were mere boasting! Might it not involve innocent people in mischief not to be repaired? Don’t you think so?”

I replied, “that it exhibited an absence of high chivalrous feeling, that could not be denied.” Campbell thought Byron must, in consequence, be disliked by the female sex. The statement thus made, too, in any society bore a taint of self-laudation. In short, if true, the poet could not tolerate that “kiss and tell” kind of conduct, and Medwin hardly invented it, Byron was thoughtless, and did not dream of the violation of private conversation. This opinion prevailed in Campbell’s mind when, some years afterwards, he wrote his letter to Moore in behalf of Lady Byron. Campbell, however, being the creature of impulse, was the most injudicious of advocates. It was not jealousy of Byron’s fame, as some would have it, that made Campbell the advocate of Lady Byron. He always exalted the poet’s genius, but independently of any wish to vindicate Lady Byron against misrepresentation, I imagine the “sides of his interest” were spurred by a sort of knight errantry on behalf of the sex in general. If he was a bad advocate that had nothing to do with the intention. I should be sorry to have had the poet for my advocate in the most trivial case; he would have marr’d it with the intention of doing otherwise, by insisting most on the weakest points that made against me.

I am thus particular, though the bulk of the present generation may feel less and less interest in the matter,

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as in all relative to our sterling literature, but the time will again arrive when a deeper curiosity than ever will be felt in all relating to the sons of genius. The never dying vestal flame will continue to burn in the temple forsaken by the present living. Worshippers will again return to kindle anew at the sacred fire, lights to illumine the track of our humanity, to generate noble imaginings and aspirations, and to fill the spirit with the atmosphere that surrounds the throne of the fountain of eternal wisdom, from whence alone proceed those mental sensations redolent of unknown existences, of which, in mortals of genius, we have hitherto only had glimpses.

I once found a stranger at Campbell’s of foreign manners, but well bred and gentlemanly. It was Brandt, the son of the Indian chief whom the poet had charged with atrocities in his “Gertrude.” Campbell had made no enquiry into the facts of the case, but had taken some historical party-statement for the purpose of his story, when he wrote his poem; nor in the subsequent editions did he do that copious justice to young Brandt’s feelings which I think was their due. Brandt, the elder, was not even present at the massacre after the battle at Wyoming. He was a Mohawk chief of remarkably civilized habits. I confess that the singular circumstance of an Indian chief coming so far, and feeling anxious to vindicate his father’s memory on a charge of which he was innocent, did not appear to move Campbell as so touching an incident might have done. The elder Brandt had the rank of colonel in the English service; a house was built for him at the public expence, and the place called Brandtford. He himself built a church near, where he is entombed, and at which his

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tribe attended. Brandt, the son, was a fine young man, since dead. He was a lieutenant in the English service. His sister, a very graceful pretty creature at that time, whose presence would have been an acquisition in European society, was lately alive. It is true the poet published a letter to young Brandt, but that is forgotten. It should be annexed to the notes of the poem, more emphatically.

I had a singular dispute with Campbell, who, if he once adopted an idea, was very difficult to convince of being in error. He had written a letter to the editor of the “Edinburgh Review,” in consequence of the reviewer having stated that his poem of the “Last Man,” had been suggested by Byron’s “Darkness.” He stated that in a conversation with Byron, in St. James’ Street, he had mentioned the subject of the extinction of the creation, and of the human species to Byron, as a fit subject for a poem. I happened to know that Byron and Shelley were standing together looking at the splendid view of the Alps across the Leman, and Shelley remarked:

Such a thought was likely to arise in the minds of more persons than one. Barry Cornwall had told Campbell that some friend of his thought of writing a poem on that subject. The date of the conversation of Shelley and Byron I cannot state exactly, but I know it was years before the “Last Man” of Campbell appeared. I told the poet this, and contended that the idea was not new. I do not like to quote myself, but

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printed a little poem when a youth, of which I here produce a passage out of one of the few copies now in existence. The title, printer’s name, and so on, are annexed.”

Mine was a simile in the description of a sea-fight:—

“Thus, when Creation’s destined course is run, And shrinking Nature views the expiring sun, Some lonely sage, the last of human race, Faith in his soul, and glory in his face, Unmoved shall brave the moment of affright, When chaos reassumes the throne of night, And warring elements resistless hurl’d, Destroy the harmonious chain that binds the world.”

I said that such an idea was obvious to every imaginative person. But more is to come. When I published some notes of my labours with the poet in 1845, a letter came to me from the publisher, about this same claim of the poet to originality in the thought. The poet himself was where neither the voice of the muse, nor the charm of music, could arouse the ear once so deeply sensitive to both. This note ran in substance as follows. It was from Dr. Dickson of Hertford Street, May Fair, and the extract was from Horne’s Sermon, “On the Death of the old Year.”

“For not only friends die and years expire, and we ourselves shall do the same, but the world itself approaches to its end. It likewise must die. Once already has it suffered a watery death; it is to be destroyed a second time, by fire. A celebrated author having in his

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writings followed it through all its changes from the creation to the consummation, describes the eruption of this fire, and the progress it is to make, with the final and utter devastation to be effected by it, when all sublunary nature shall be overwhelmed and sink in a molten deluge. In this situation of things, he stands over the world as if he had been the only survivor, and pronounces its funeral oration in a strain of sublimity scarce ever equalled by mere man.”