R. PLUMER WARD. | 297 |
As the following personal sketch of Mr. Plumer Ward belongs to about the period more immediately referred to in the preceding sections, I will insert it here. It was written as part of a series of Pen and Ink Portraits supposed to be taken at a West End Club House:—
Observe (as he stands with his back to the fire, at the upper extremity of
the room) that tall and somewhat stately, but slim figure, perfectly upright, and with the
head thrown slightly back, giving to the air and bearing an aristocratic cast, without
interfering with that bland amenity which keeps possession of all the features of a face
wherein years and the spirit of youth blend together in friendly contention, and put to
shame the
298 | R. PLUMER WARD. |
“Crabbed age and youth Cannot live together.” |
“Age cannot dim, Nor custom stale, the infinite variety” |
R. PLUMER WARD. | 299 |
Perhaps there is nothing in connexion with our intellectual nature more
immediately gratifying in itself, and more directly and surely leading to after
gratification, than the contemplation of a character in which the qualities and attributes
we have referred to are so happily allied as they are in that of the author of “Tremaine,” and the happy results of
which are so legibly written on their visible exponents. If there is a fear more pervading
than all others that oppress the human mind after a certain age, it is that of growing old.
But that it is to all intents and purposes “a lost fear,” the example before us
may demonstrate. If you are to believe Mr. Plumer
Ward himself, he is considerably more than sixty years of age. If you are to
trust to the indications set forth by nature in his face, his person, his voice, his air,
his carriage, and the ever-springing green that overspreads the pleasant pastures of his
mind and heart, you must conclude that the world and its ways are as new to him as to a boy
of sixteen bred up on a mountain side. Where, then, shall we strike the happy mean? He cannot be so old as he says. And yet
300 | R. PLUMER WARD. |
“Years have brought the philosophic mind,”
|
“Put a spirit of youth in everything,” |
Wordsworth, in his beautiful stanzas, entitled “A Poet’s Epitaph,” says, addressing the supposed passer-by—
“Art thou a statesman, in the van Of public business train’d and bred? First learn to love one living man; Then mayst thou think upon the dead.” |
R. PLUMER WARD. | 301 |
“In the van Of public business train’d and bred,” |
302 | R. PLUMER WARD. |
“’Tis in ourselves that we are thus and thus,” |
Such is R. Plumer Ward; the favourite
protegé of Pitt; the friend and companion of
Canning and Peel; the right hand of every department of the public service to which he
has belonged in connexion with the Government of his country; the pet of the female world
of high society, from the most antiquated of its dowagers to the most blooming of its
newly-budding beauties; and (best of all in our estimation) the
writer of “Tremaine” and
“De Vere”—the two most
delightful, and at the same time the most instructive works of our day, in that most
delightful and in-
R. PLUMER WARD. | 303 |
Should the more sedate of our female friends desire to be made acquainted
with more particulars respecting the person of their favourite
writer (for such we must believe him to be, the Bulwers, Trollopes, Gores, &c., of the circulating library
notwithstanding), we may inform them that his head and features are small as compared with
the commanding height and carriage of his figure; that his eyes have the piercing
expression of some of the gentler species of the hawk, and are overshadowed by brows that
bear a remarkable likeness to the very remarkable ones of Walter
Scott; that his nose is slightly retroussé, which, in
connexion with an expression of sly humour about the mouth, gives a slightly sarcastic
character to the general expression of the countenance; that the forehead and upper part of
the head are wholly bald, the hair which remains being of light brown tinged with grey; and
that the whole
304 | R. PLUMER WARD. |
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