English Lands Letters and Kings

parted company also, with that more lovable, though less important man, Dr. Goldsmith-of whom it would have been easy and

t put into our search for a great many entombed under much greater show of marble. But Goldsmith's bones do not lie in the Abbey; he was buried somewhere under the wing of the Old Temple Church-the parti

rtraits, some of which belong to every considerable gallery of England; Burke and Gibbon lie in quiet country places-the first near to his old home of Beaconsfield; and the historian among those southern downs of

ish His

id

ered some of his highest honors in France. Of course you know his History of England-where it begins, where it ends-but we do not press examination on these points. In most editions you will find-(it should be found in all)-among the foreleaves, a short autobiographic sketch, written in his most neat, perspicuous, and engaging manner, which is well worth the close attention of every reader, even if he do not wade through the royal extensions of the History. You will learn there that David Hume was born in that pleasant border land of Scotland which is watered by the Tweed, th

latively, then than now: but Bristol merchandizing presently disgusts him; and husbanding carefully his small moneys, he goes across the Channel-to study philosophy, while practising the economies of French provincial life in a small town of central France. A few years thereafter he prints his first book in London on Human Nature; and he says it fell "dead-born" from the press; but he is still sanguine and cheery; writes other essays after his return from France-hovering between Edinboro' and his old Berwickshire h

s Eng

ly for a professorship in one of the Scottish universities, but was counted too unsafe a man. As Custodian of the Advocates' Library of Edinboro', a place which he secured shortly after-largely through the influence of lady friends-he came to that familiar fellowship with books which prompted him to the making

"I was discouraged," he says, "and had not the war been at that time breaking out between France and England, I had certainly

Mme. de Boufflers-a pet of the Paris salons-who has written gushingly of her admiration; and the stolid, good-humored, cool-blooded Hume has responded in his awkward manner; other missives, with growing confidences have passed; she always clever, and wi

in

way through the pretty martyrdoms of the salon. And he bore it bravely; he had feared, indeed, that his inaptitudes and inexperience would have made such a life irksome to one of his quiet habits; but he good-humoredly and complacently accepted the sacrifice and came to love the intoxicating incense. Sterne, who happened in Paris in tho

philosopher, banked in between those feminine piles of silk and jewels, only rubs his hands, slaps his knees, purses up his mouth, and says over and over, in his inconsequent French,-"Eh bien, Mesdemoiselles, vous voilà! vous voilà donc! Eh bien, nous voici!" Wher

id

y's worth if I broke my neck to-morrow." And though his reputation is now largely upon the growth at home, still he is not pleasantly lié with the masters. Somewhat later, when by another unexpected good turn he is made Under-Secretary of State and has official position in London, he writes to Dr. Blair, of Edinboro', who has offered to give him a letter to Bishop Percy-"I thank you, but it would be impracticable for me to cultivate his friendship, as men of letters have here no place of rendezvous; and are indeed sunk and forgot in the general torrent of the world."

Twenty odd years before he had lived in the old city on an income of ￡50 a year; and now he lives in the new with an income of ￡1,000 a year. In the old times he had hardly secured place as Custodian of the mouldy Library of the Advocates; now he is the marked potentate in the literary world of Scotland. Stanch Presbyterians do indeed look at him askance, and shake their heads at his uncanny beliefs, or rather lack of beliefs. Old nurses put hobgoblin wings upon him to frighten good children; but he has stanch, loving friends among the best and the cle

h of

the first scholarly History of England, died, and was buried on a shoulder of the Calton Hill, from which one may look east

e his meaning as if we looked through crystal; and if the crystal is toned by his prejudices-as it is and very largely-it is altogether free from the impertinent decorative arabesques of the rhetorician. Many of the periods of which he gives the record, have had new light thrown upon them by the searching inquiries of late days. Old reputations with which he dealt reverently have suffered collapse; political horizons which wer

or intrusion upon literary ground-sets his logic to an easy canter all around the soberer paces of the great Scotch charger-showing nice agreemen

r of

po

ce; not well paired indeed, as you will find: but each one in his own way giving us music

nst

rd, and who, when the muses were buzzing about his ears, came into possession of a pretty farm in that bit of Shropshire which (by queer English fashion) is planted withi

lis vouchsa

ce dreamt

oth my pipe

f a kid tha

very hour

hat had plea

y are past,

that I prized

ag

the fair ny

sh I felt

t-but it mig

in that she s

as I slowl

could hard

y she bad

hat she bad

sted treasures; yet Burns says "his elegies do honor to our language," and a great deal of the same guileless tintinnabulum did have its admirers all

e worth visiting for its charming graces of every rural sort; even our staid John Adams, when he was in England in those days, looking after American colonial interests-must needs coach it in company with Jefferson from Cirencester to Leasowes, for a sight of this charming homestead. Gold

y are furnish

r invites o

are shaded

are white ove

ave met wi

do my foun

s all borde

e-bells and v

am Co

ry, but which nobody bought or read. He sulked under that neglect, and his rage ran-sometimes to verse-sometimes to drink; he had known Thomson and Johnson, and both befriended him; but the world did not; indeed he never met the world half way; the poetic phrenzy in him so fined his sensibilities that he could not and would not put out a feeling hand for promiscuous greetings. Poverty, too, came in the wake of his poetic cultures, to aggravate his mental inaptitudes and his moral distractions-all ending at last in a mad-house. He

he music of the days of Elizabeth. Certain it is, that he loomed far above the ding-dong of such as Shenstone-that he scorned the classic trammels of the empire of Pope-certain that

quality than from that "Ode to E

folding star

clet at his

ant hours

in flowe

ph who wreathes

eshning dew, and

ve pleasu

thy shad

votress, where

heath, or some t

nd fall

ts last c

blustering wind

ling feet, be

the mounta

s and swel

own and dim dis

simple bell, a

y finge

ual dusk

ns to the "upland fallows gray," and to the "pensive pleasures sweet." Swinburne says

repeated by most early biographies; the truth is, however, that after that date he was living-only a sort of death in life,

Bur

Bur

gentleman had known intimately her father, Dr. Burney, and had always shown for her a strong attachment; so did a great many of Dr. Burney's acquaintances, Garrick among them and Burke; and it was probably from such men and their talk that she caught the literary bee in her bonnet and wrote her famous story of Evelina. You should rea

t young lady, writing her stories-with all her timidities and large, unspoken hopes, tumbling and twittering in the bosoms of her heroines: if my lady has the fidgets, the fidgets come into

are apt to put too small a limit to the knowledge of their papas! It is very certain that her self-consciousness, and tremulous, affected, simpe

nial business-makes a call upon Dr. Burney:-and in absence of her father, meets the daughter: a big, square-shouldered man

ought it had been Evelina:" and there it ends, and we lose sight of o

r authorship always tormentingly uppermost in her thought. Her Diary and letters are full of them. Yet she is attractive-strangely so-by her sympathetic qualities; so responsive to every

ch for him was extravagant commendation). Even Mme. de Stael, some few years later, gave it her applause; and the quick and swift-witted Mrs. Thrale was in raptures with it; and Mrs. Thrale knew a dunce, and detested dunces. There must have been a deftness in her touch of things local,-of which, I think, she was but half conscious; there was beside a pretty dramatic art whi

her celebrity, was her appointment as Lady of the Robes (or other such title), to the Queen. The service indeed did not last many years, but lo

of th

King as he goes out to his drive on a certain fatal day;-hears the hushed, muffled steps and the babel of uncertain sounds, as he comes back late at night,-waits hour on hour for her usual summons to the Queen's presence, which does not come. At last, midnight being long past (and s

cause: for from beyond the chamber-along the corridor,-came the idle jabbering of King George; and the inte

nd; and to connect her service in the palace of St. James, in the year 1788, with the first threat and the first real attack of the King's in

admiring General d'Arblay, who had come over an exile from France, in company with other distinguished emigrants, on the outbreak of the French Revolutio

ion over-run at last by the brilliant successes of Miss Austen, of Miss Edgeworth, and the more splendid triumphs of Walter Scott. She died a

ah M

ress

I prefer to call her, in virtue of a good old English, and a good old New Englandish custom, too, which

and alert of mind, and had so won upon the affections of a neighbor landholder, and wealthy gentleman of culture, that a marriage between the two came after a while to be arranged for; but this affair never went beyond the arrangement,-for reasons which do not clearly appear. It does appear that the parties remained friendly, and that Mistress Hannah More was in receipt of an annual pension of ￡200-in the way of amend

taken to his house, indeed, and became thereafter one of the most intimate of the friends of Mrs. Garrick. Dr. Johnson, too, was enchanted by the brisk humor and lively repartee in these clever West-of-England girls; and we have on record a bit of his talk to one of them. He said, in his leviathan way: "I have heard that you are engaged in the useful and honorable employment of teaching young ladies." Whereupon they tell the story of it all, in t

ran some twenty nights successively; the tale of her stage profits running up to ￡600, which would pay for a good many trips from London to Bristol. When she came to treat for the publication of a poem wh

indeed at her home on the Adelphi Terrace[10] with the disconsolate Mrs. Garrick; but all phases of life have now, for Miss More, taken on a soberer hue; she teaches; she founds schools for the poor; she founds chapels; she writes tracts; her forward and sturdy evan

u will not find in all stories nowadays-a definite beginning and a definite end. I know what you may say, if you do read it. You would say that the sermons are too long, and that the hero is a prig; and that you would never marry him if he were worth twice his fortune, and were to offer himself ten times over. Well-perhaps not; but he had a deal of money. And that book of Coelebs-whatever you may choose to say of it, had a tremendous success; it ran over Europe like wildfire; was translated into French, into German, into Dutch, into Polish, and I know not what language besides; and across the Atlantic-in those colonial days, when book-shops were not, as now, at every corner-over thirty thousand copies were sold. Those of

n series, had a very sober binding; so that his mamma, Mrs. Newcome, when she observed the boy reading it, thought-deceived by that grave binding-that the boy might be regaling himself with some work of Mistress Hannah More's;

smile at her quaintness-her primness-her starch; but there is that in her industry, her

over to another chapter, when we will speak too of Sterne-whom we had almost forgotten-and of Ch

on of his works edited by Green and Grose, 4

imes. He may indeed say rash things about "that crafty animal called a Politician," and the mean rapacity of capitalists; but he is full of sympathy for

hysician, author of various popular novels, of which The E

d. 1763. His works (verse and

d. 1759. Interesting memoir by

ggeration-"the only man of his time who had in him a note

etter known as Mme. D'Arblay; though she married somew

Diary and Letters has been published by Geo

More, b. 17

kment"; John Adams was in that