Life of Frederick Marryat

eed, he began to have very serious reason indeed for complaining of straitened means. His father's fortune, which must have been considerable, had been invested in the West Indies in those golde

travagant and speculative habits. In 1839 the pinch was not as yet felt so severely as it was later on. Marryat, immediately upon his return, went over to Paris for his family, which[115] had moved thither from Lausanne during his stay in the States; and, bringing them to England, settled at 8, Duke Street, St. James's. For some four years he led, as he had hitherto done, a somewhat wandering life. After a br

e affairs of a gentleman simply because he has done it the inestimable service of supplying it with readable books. That Marryat, who has just been found expressing a wish to retire from the "fraternity of authors," was writing himself blind in these years, is a fact which tells its own tale. Add to this a few indications which Mrs. Ross Church has thought it right to supply-a brief reference to some family misfortune of which the details are not given; a complaint in one of Marryat's letters that[116] somebody, apparently a relation, had

cribed. In his quarters in his various London lodgings we are given to understand that there was much and gay hospitality. Friends were profusely entertained in rooms adorned with furs, trophies, Burmese idols, and weapons-all the miscellaneous curios collected by a sailor and traveller during many wandering hours. In Burmah, Marryat had even made a collection of jewels cut from out of the bodies of slain enemies. The[117] Burman who has a gem makes an incision in his leg and hides it there, as our sailors discovered more or less to their profit. Unfortunately the curios and the talk are all scattered and irrecoverable. "It has all vanished like

to be wondered at that Marryat's letters between 1839 and 1840 contain references to the state of his health of a constantly more melancholy nature. "I shall," he wrote to the same lady friend in the first of these years, "be at leisure, I really believe, about the first week in December; but the second portion of 'America' has been a very tough job. I am now correcting press (sic) of the third volume, and half of it is done. I hope to be quite finished by the end of the month, and also to have the other work ready for publication on the 1st of January; but what with printers, engravers, stationers, and publishers, I have been much overworked. I have written and read till my eyes have been no bigger than a mole's, and my sight about as perfect. I have remained sedentary till I have had un accés de bile, and have been under the hands of the doctor, and for some days obliged to keep my bed; all owing to want of air and exercise. Now I am quite well again." Some two years later the news is much worse, and there is no mention of complete recovery. "That you may not think me unkind," he writes again to th

utation. Mrs. Ross Church states that he received for the "Diary," "on first publishing the manuscript," ￡1,600. But, according to the same authority, he had received nearly as much for several of his other books in a lump sum, and they continued to bring him in a yearly harvest, whereas the[120] "Diary" sank at once into the position of a mere book about America. In truth, this kind of writing had been overdone. There was no longer a market for books of the Trollope or even the Martineau order. Everything had been said about the United States which the public wanted to

ctual experience that a little was enough. Had he so pleased he might, with the help of Hakluyt, of Monson, and of Sir Richard Hawkins' "Voyage," have given us a picture of the Elizabethan seamen. He might have drawn the "chivalry of the sea," as Washington Irving asked him to do. A "Westward Ho" he would not have written. We should not have had from him (nor have expected) anything equivalent to the dream of Amyas Leigh, or the exquisite speech at the grave of Salvation Yeo. But what he could have done was what Kingsley could not do, and, with the tact of an artist, did not try to do too much. He might have realized the actual sea life of the time-the ships, the seamen, and the seamanship of the past. It was a work in which only a sailor could have succeeded. The pictorial imagination of Kingsley and the conscientious workmanship of Charles Reade alike fail to give reality to their sea scenes. The firs

time ignorance of women, except bumboat women and the ladies of the Hard. The scenes in which his heroines are on the stage are skip. Amine's appearances, however, are not skip. She is a very acceptable heroine of melodrama, good of her kind, with a decided character of her own. The Inquisition scenes in which she is the central figure are the highest point Marryat reached in romance. Very good too are the successive appearances of the Phantom[123] Ship, done as was commonly the case with Marryat, simply, without straining, without obvious desire to make you shiver. If the last scene of all trenches on the namby pamby, as I am afraid it does, it is preceded by a very good one indeed. Marryat has indicated the loneliness, the weary waiting, the heart-broken striving of Vanderdecken's doomed crew, very sufficiently by the futile effort of the poor mate, who would fain persuade the

nguished from them by any very marked characteristics. One piece of fun it does contain not inferior to his best, the immortal apology of the midshipman who had told the master that he was not fit to carry guts to a bear. The palpable absurdity of the incident is on a par with Mr. Easy's amazing use of the Articles of War. "The Poacher" and "Percival Keene," which also belong to these years, both have a flavour of work done only because the author was "rather in want of money." The first is another venture in the same line as "Japhet." The second is the least pleasant, take it for al

omes languid, and wants to be amused: but it also likes precision of detail, and is eager to learn the why and how of everything. With these two rules to guide him-not to be too obtrusively instructive, and yet to explain every incident as it came, Marryat wrote a model child's story. Forster was certainly in the right in declaring it to be the most read, and the most willingly re-read, of its class. For its mere cleverness the book can be enjoyed by the oldest of[126] readers who is not too dreadfully in earnest. It was no small feat to have taken so well worn a situation as the shipwreck and the desert island, and to have made out of it a book which may stand next to Defoe's. The desertion of the Pacific and her passengers by the crew, her wreck, the life on the island, the fight with the savages, and the rescue, are as probable, they follow one another as naturally, as the events in the life of Robinson Crusoe. Marryat had too much tact and knowledge to fall into the extravagances of the "Swiss Family Robinson." The beasts and plants of the island are not an impossible collection of the flora and fauna of three continents. Then, too, the book contains two of Marryat's very best characters. Masterman Ready is an ideal old sailor, brave, modest, kind, helpful, able to turn his hand to anything, and to do it well, yet, withal, no mere bundle of abstract virtues, but a most credible human being-such a man as might have been formed by such a life. Very di

ertain way and at a certain price, fell foul of Marryat for choosing this low method of publication. This egregious person wrote in Fraser, and very gratuitously attacked Marryat, in the course of some remarks on Harrison Ainsworth, in the following "slashing" style: "If writing monthly fragments threatened to deteriorate Mr. Ainsworth's productions, what must be the result of this hebdomadal habit? Captain Marryat,[128] we are sorry to see, has taken to

on the rarity or frequency of an author's appearing before the public, the scale descending from the 'caressed of generous publishers' to the 'starveling of Grub Street'-the former, by your implication, constituting the aristocracy and the latter the profanum vulgus of the quill. Now although it is a fact that the larger and nobler animals of creation produce but slowly, while the lesser, such as rabbits, rats, and mice, are remarkable for their fecundity; I do not think that the comparison will hold good as to the breeding of[129] brains; and to prove it, let us examine-if this argument by implication of yours is good-at what grades upon the scale it would place the w

ion and ill-will towards the Government, and assisting the nefarious views of demagogues, and chartists. It is certain that men would rather laugh than cry-would rather be amused than rendered gloomy and discontented-would sooner dwell upon the joys and sorrows of others, in a[130] tale of fiction, than brood over their supposed wrongs. If I put good and wholesome food (and, as I trust, sound moral) before the lower classes, they will eventually eschew that which is coarse and disgusting, which is only resorted to because no better is supplied. Our weekly newspapers are at prese

ve. It has not been found that when the "poor man" [or other reader for that matter], has a choice of Hercules given him between good literature and bad, he will cleave to the first and reject the last. Also, there is a candid confession of the faith "that there is nothing like leather" in Marryat's confidence that good weekly stories would soothe the discon