CHAP. XIV.] DEATHS: PRISCILLA WAKEFIELD-RICHARD EVANS-&c. happy from that devotedness in the study of nature which is not subject to the disappointment to which most human pursuits are liable. His eagerness about his first earnings was that they might carry him into the Scotch Highlands, where, with his plaid about his shoulders, and the Lay of the Last Minstrel in his pocket, and the dusky fells and rolling mists before his eyes, he was happy to his heart's content. The spirit of those early seen Scotch mountains is in his pictures to the last. The frequenters of the Water-colour Exhibition must have been struck by the frequent appearance of Durham and its cathedral. It was because Durham was Robson's native city. He took care that its fine aspect should be nearly as familiar to others as to himself, though they had not, as he had, feasted their eyes upon it from four years old, and crept to the shoulder of every wandering artist who sat down to sketch anywhere in the environs. One of Robson's last pictures was judged to be one of his best-London from the Bridge, before Sunrise.' There are, in the province of literature and learning, some names of the departed during this period which we would not let pass without some grateful mention; and there are others which excite a deeper emotion. Among the humbler benefactors in this department was Priscilla Wakefield, whose books for children were usually found in a thumbed and tattered condition on nursery shelves-intensely moral as they were, and fine in the phraseology of their dialogue. In those days, when there were scarcely any children's books in existence, her efforts were as welcome as they were praiseworthy. Mrs Wakefield died, very aged, in September 1832. -An excellent man was removed in the same year, before he was forty, who had given his life to such good works that it is sad that his years were not doubled. Richard Evans, himself a scholar, and the conservator of the ancient Welsh manuscripts of the Cambrian Society, took to heart the ignorance of the poor Welsh in London who were not at home in the English tongue. Mr Evans collected and superintended a little colony of Welsh familiesabout twenty-in the neighbourhood of one of his warehouses. He instituted weekly lectures on mechanics in Welsh, for all of that people in London who chose to attend; and he spent much money and time in diffusing the means of knowledge among them. In Hazlitt we lost the prince of critics at this time; and after he was gone, there were many who could never look at a picture, or see a tragedy, or ponder a point of morals, or take a survey of any public character, without a melancholy sense of loss in Hazlitt's absence and silence. There can scarcely be a stronger gratification of the critical faculties than in reading Hazlitt's essays. He was born in 1778, and died of cholera in 1830. He was not an amiable and happy, but he was a strong and courageous minded man. His constitutional irritability was too restless to be soothed by the influences of literature and art, and his friends suffered from his temper almost as much as himself. Yet he was regarded with respect for his ingenuous courage in saying what was true about many important things and persons of his time, of whom it was 443 Hazlitt fitting that the truth should be told. would have passed his life as an artist, but that he could not satisfy his own critical taste, and had no patience with any position but the first in any department in which he worked. The greater part of his life, therefore, was spent in a province of literature in which he was supreme in his own day, if not alone. As an essayist he had rivals; as a critical essayist, he had none.-Two popular dramatists, O'Keefe and Prince Hoare, died in 1833 and 1834. The name of O'Keefe carries us back some way into the last century, his popular farce, Tony Lumpkin, having been acted at the Haymarket Theatre in 1778. After writing fifty dramatic pieces, he subsided into the quiet befitting his blindness and old age, and lived till his eightysixth year. Prince Hoare was very aged tooeighty when he died. In 1788 his comic opera, No Song, no Supper, won him his first fame. In more advanced life, he became secretary to the Royal Academy, and from his scholarship in art and literature he was a member of several societies. He was esteemed and beloved for the most engaging moral qualities; and his parting act was a beneficent one: he bequeathed his library to the Royal Society of Literature. The venerable William Roscoe, of Liverpool, died in 1831-venerable for the benignity of his character and the purity of his tastes, and especially for the gentle steadiness with which, through long seasons of trial, he upheld the cause of the negro against the slaveholding spirit of Liverpool in his day. On this matter, he never, with all his love of peace and social good-will, gave way for a moment. It is for this, rather than his literary acts, that Mr Roscoe is and will be remembered. His principal work was the Life of Lorenzo de' Medici, which obtained great reputation at once, from the character of the times, which, impeding research of the kind required, rendered such works scarce and extremely superficial. Mr Roscoe reached his eighty-first year. Some of the most affectionate and solemn associations relating to this period are called up by the name of Mackintosh. Sir James Mackintosh died, unexpectedly, in 1832, at the age of sixty-seven; and the word 'untimely' was applied to his death, through a sort of general expectation that a man of such powers would yet do something which would make his great name live after him. In early life, when he published his Vindiciae Gallica, his name had been in every mouth; and in his latest years, the House of Commons listened, heart and soul, whenever he spoke. But he was not destined to effect much during his life, or to make a monument for himself. He had stores of knowledge, remarkable powers of subtle thought, and an unsurpassed facility of expression; but a fatal indolence, which extended to the interaction of his faculties, scattered his resources, and vitiated much of the work which he actually did. His Dissertation, containing a General View of the Progress of Ethical Philosophy-prefixed to the Encylopædia Britannica-is the work on which his reputation is commonly supposed to rest; but it is a more frail support than the memories of those who knew him, and than the records of his speeches in parliament. It will not bear the test of advancing science, any more than the kindred writings of Dugald Stewart. In parliament, his heart and voice were always on the side of justice and humanity, as justice and humanity appeared to him. In print and in private, though there might be much that was superficial and unsound in his views, as well as subtle and profound, the spirit of earnestness and reverence was never absent. He held the office of recorder of Bombay for some years; and was in parliament for several sessions; and had a way to any eminence opened to him by the pioneering influence of general expectation-yet he died amidst a celebrity which had still more of anticipation than of acknowledgment in it. His life had been a swaying between contemplation and action; and, though he might by this have obtained some enlargement for his own mind, the indecision was fatal to his leaving any substantial memorial of himself in either region. He enjoyed the friendship and homage of most of the leading men of his time; and there was no one living who did not share his placid good-will. His integrity in political life was in accordance with the simple unworldliness of his mind. Henry Mackenzie, who wrote The Man of Feeling, died at the age of eighty-five in 1831. A mistake of his own affords as good a eulogium as his worshippers could desire. From the unbounded success of his beautiful story, The Man of Feeling, he was induced to offer a companion-novel, The Man of the World, which shews, unmistakably, the unsophisticated character of the author, and his inability to understand the ways and thoughts of worldly men. Those who were amazed at the badness of the second tale should have felt rebuked for their disappointment by the beauty of the first.--Anna Maria Porter, the novelist, died in 1832, just three months before him whose marvellous works had swallowed up the fame of all contemporary writers of fiction. While Scott was yet but a boy, however-while he was lying on the heathery hillside, nourishing and playing with his powers of conception and narration, Miss Porter's novels-Thaddeus of Warsaw, the Recluse of Norway, and others-were giving great pleasure, and preparing the multitude of lovers of fiction for the treat to come.-Of Scott, it is impossible, as it is needless, to speak at length this place. Every trait of his life is in all memories; every character of his long-drawn pageant is vivid before all eyes. Any attempt to estimate his share in modifying the mind of his time would be in vain ; and if it were not, the materials for an estimate lie equally open to all. Every one can inquire of himself what the writings of Scott have been to himself and to those whom he knows best; and from that recognition, let him form his estimate. As for the man himself, every one knows all that can be told, and sees that he was not so happy or so wise as such a genius as his should have made him; that he did not honour his genius, and repose upon it as it would have been bliss to do; but looked down to lower objects, and so was deprived of his repose by that very genius, avenging itself. In a mood of respectful compassion, the nation had seen him sinking under toil to which a common-place ambition had subjected him, and which it would have been cruelty to compel him to forego. For some time before his death, his mind had sunk utterly; and at last the day of repose for the feeble body came in-brightly and mildly. It was in the noon of one of those autumn days which are so sweet in Scotland, when the window at Abbotsford was open, and the ripple of the Tweed over the stones was heard by those who were around the death-bed, that the eyes closed and the breathing CHAP. XIV.] DEATHS: SOTHEBY-CRABBE-COLERIDGE. ceased. The life which had gone out had been crowded with toils; the world was full of these rich gifts, and the national heart was sad at the thought that there could be no more. The gifts remain, however, a boon for each coming generation as it rises; and thus the fame of Scott may well be committed to the general charge.—There was a sad sweep among his connections afterwards. Within half a year, his confidant, partner, friend, and printer, James Ballantyne, without whose co-operation the whole of his enterprise must have borne a different character, died in middle age. And in the next June, the daughter Ann, who had tended Scott in his long decline, drooped and sank. And since that time, all his other children have died-in these few years and no descendants but two grandchildren are left to inherit the glory for which he cared so little, and the estate for which he sacrificed so much. Such are the caprices of the human mind and the human lot! 445 the human race, he had no power of will-of that virtuous will without which every man, be he who he may, is himself a slave. In Coleridge it was a constitutional defect, early marked, and fatal to his life. It was a constitutional deficiency, to be allowed for as such; but it must not be disguised that it rendered him incapable of duty-of fidelity in friendship, in citizenship, and in domestic life. And it vitiated his philosophy by eating out of it its reality and substantive truth. Thus, his theology was anything but the gospel-the religion which men prize, because it is equally the treasure of the lowly and the exalted in intellect; it was an airy fabric of the argumentative faculties and the imagination, and baseless sentiment, and not a deep concern of the understanding and the heart. And thus it was with his philosophy; for true philosophy absolutely requires a broad foundation of science, and the vital element which can be supplied only from the affections. This said, which in conscience must be said, the rest remains wonderful-even awful in its wonder. And the consolation of the case lies in the virtue which the power and the deficiency together called out in other men. The forbearance, the tenderness, the reverence, with which Coleridge was regarded, in the face of his vitiated life, are more than a compensation for what was wanting in himself. From the days when awe-struck schoolmates gathered round the inspired boy' in the cloisters at Christ's Hospital, to the present moment, when his worshippers turn away from a sound of censure, as from a desecration of his grave, he has met with that magnanimous justice which it requires some of the loftiest qualifications to command; and in this influence lay one of the chief benefits of his life. Others were the sublime faculty by which he opened to us new worlds of thought, and made the oldest new; the subtlety of analysis by which he displayed the inner workings of what was before our eyes, before closed and impenetrable; the instinct by which he discerned relations among things which before were isolated; and the thrilling sense of beauty which he awakened by bringing all the appearances of nature into illustration of ideas before wholly abstract. Thus, his discourses on the laws and facts of thought, his dramatic criticisms, and his own poems, are full of lights and charms which hardly need the magic of his utterance to make them intoxicate the young thinker, and stimulate the faculties of the more mature. He was the wonder of his time. If he had not been subject to one great deficiency, he would have been its miracle. As it is, his fame is not likely to grow-less because his magical voice is silenced, than because his enchantment itself must be broken up by the touch of science. Even then, glorious will be the fragments that will remain. They will be truly the traces of old idolatries-not of one, but of many; for he spent his life in the worship of a succession of idols-those idols being ideas, which he called opinions, and which he was for ever Of poets, we lost, during this period, some of great note. The elegant, scholarly Sotheby was not one to be popular; but he gave much pleasure to his own circle of admirers, and his life was happy in a serene course of literary exertion. He made many elegant translations, and wrote tragedies, masques, and epics; none of them containing elements of grandeur, but all of them full of purity and grace. He lived to seventy-six, and died at the close of 1833. The venerable George Crabbe died, in old age, in 1832, leaving behind him memories which any one might covet. It is one of Burke's titles to honour that he saved this pure genius from extinction under the pressure of poverty, from no lower impulse than a generous humanity. Crabbe was starving, when he made a simple and straight appeal to the great man, and was met in the spirit in which brother should meet brother in our perplexed human life. From that hour, all went well with Crabbe; and his long life was passed in virtuous clerical duty, in domestic peace, and in giving a charming utterance to his experience of the heart, and his observation of the various human lot. His poems are full of minute details, ennobled by a genial spirit, and made touching by the pathos of truth and love. His poems, besides finding their way at once to a million of hearts and homes, remain a quiet, but living picture of English life in his time, which may probably kindle the heart of a remote antiquarianism in ages when English life, always the same in spirit, may have changed most of its forms.-S. T. Coleridge may perhaps be best placed among the poets, rather than the philosophers of his time, because the finest characteristics of his philosophy give an immortal substance to his poetry, while they leave his philosophy without base or permanent substance. A genius so lofty and so various has rarely distinguished man; but the absence of one essential element brought it down to a lower level than that of a crowd of otherwise inferior minds. With an imagination which soared above the stars, a subtlety which would have enabled him to hold his place in a council in pande-changing. S. T. Coleridge was born in a Devonshire monium, a power of abstraction which should have strengthened him to put the sensuous world beneath his feet, and an eloquence which might have enslaved vicarage, in 1772; and he died at Highgate, on the 25th of July 1834. A man of great benevolence, who indirectly contributed much to the great work of national education, which yet remains, for the most part, to be achieved, ought to be mentioned at the close of this period. Dr Bell, a prebendary of Westminster, was once a chaplain in India, and there conceived the idea of extending the benefits of education by setting pupils to instruct each other. He reported his method; and it was soon adopted in England to such an extent, that he saw 10,000 schools established, attended by 600,000 children. He believed that the object of general education was gained; and so did many others. It required some years to shew that nothing like education can be obtained by the ignorant teaching the ignorant. The results have been But public such as to disabuse the most sanguine. attention was turned to the instruction of the childhood and youth of the nation; and, in this sense, we may be said to be still benefiting by the introduction of the Bell and Lancaster system. Dr Bell employed his large fortune in acts of beneficence, devoting £50,000 to the establishment of a college in his native city of St Andrews. He died in January 1831. Having now recorded the acts, and buried the treasures, of an important period of our history, we must proceed to learn what further blessings have been brought home to our country and people by the life-giving hand of peace. BOOK V. CHAPTER I. ROM the time of the passage of the Reform Bill, the three parties in the state-kindred with those which exist in every free state-began to accept one another's new titles, and the professions included in those titles. The Tories, Whigs, and Radicals wished to be called Conservatives, Reformers, and Radical Reformers; and the easy civility of calling people by the name they like best, spread through public manners till the word Tory was seldom heard except among old-fashioned people, or in the heat of political argument. The Whig title has since revived-inevitably-from the Whigs having ceased even to pretend to the character of Reformers; and the Radical Reformers were not numerous or powerful enough in parliament to establish for themselves a title which should become traditional. There was some dispute, and a good deal of recrimination, at the outset, about the assumption by each party of its own title; the Tories declaring that they were as reforming, in intention and in fact, as the Whigs, only in a preservative way; the Whigs declaring that the only true conservatism was through reforms like theirs; and the Radicals, who were called Destructives by both the others, declaring that a renovation of old institutions-a regeneration on occasion-was the only way to avoid that ultimate revolution which the Tories would invite and the Whigs permit. While the titles were changing, the parties were as yet essentially the same as ever; as usual, they consisted mainly of the representatives of those who had much to lose, those who had much to gain, and the umpire party, disliked by both, whose function is to interpose in times of crisis, and whose fate it is to exhaust the credit acquired in such seasons during long intervals of indolence and vacillation. Such was, as usual, the constitution of the three political parties, after the passage of the Reform Bill, and when the changes in their titles actually took place; but there were clearsighted men at that time who perceived that the change of names was but the first sign of an approaching disintegration of the parties themselves; a disintegration which must be succeeded by more or less fusion-that fusion being introductory to a new exhibition of products. The old parties, notwithstanding their new names, were about to disappear. They could not be annihilated; but they would reappear so transmuted that none but the philosopher would know them again-with new members, a new language, a new task, and a whole set of new aims. As much of this prevision has come true as time has yet allowed for. The disintegration and fusion have taken place; and all thoughtful people see that a new formation of parties must be at hand. One limit of the transition period of parties remains still future; the other must be laid down at the date of Sir Robert Peel's accession to power, in December 1834. Here we have the old Eldon oracle speaking again-speaking in the spirit of fear,' and not in that of power, and of love, and of a sound mind,' and therefore giving out its truth in a dismal disguise; but still giving out more truth than anybody could use at the time. Here we have Lord Eldon's party view of the future, while the Wellingtons and Rodens, and Knatchbulls and Lyndhursts, and Wharncliffes and Ellenboroughs, were in power, at the opening of the year 1835: The new ministers certainly have the credit, if that be creditable, of being inclined to get as much popularity by what are called reforms as their predecessors; and if they do not, at present, go to the full length to which the others were going, they will at least make so many important changes in Church and State, that nobody can guess how far the precedents they establish may lead to changes of a very formidable kind hereafter.' Though Lord Eldon could see no other reason for Tories making changes than a hankering after popularity, we can discern in the facts, and his statement of them, the beginning of that wasting away of parties which he did not live to see. The new Conservative rule began with a joke. Some, who could not take the joke easily, were very angry; but most people laughed; and among them, the person most nearly concerned-the Duke of Wellington-laughed as cheerfully as anybody. Sir Robert Peel was at Rome; it must be a fortnight before he could arrive; and nothing could be done about the distribution of office in his absence; so the duke took the business of the empire upon himself during the interval. This he called not deserting his sovereign; and he was as well satisfied |