Chapter XVII: Book THE FOURTH (5)

I visited Lavater himself[370] in 1791 in Switzerland. He then enjoyed great celebrity throughout Europe. His fanciful theories, though never admitted by men of reflection, were yet the subject of some study and more curiosity, especially among artists. If it was a rash attempt in him to reduce physiognomy to a science, he had himself some good personal reasons for inculcating a faith in the impressions produced by the countenance and figure of a man. His own bespoke no little intelligence and yet greater benevolence. He was, I believe, an enthusiast in religion, and probably, in his pretended science, the sincere dupe of his own ingenuity. However, like other professors of similar sciences, he delighted in delineating the characters of those whose qualities had been reported to him by common fame or were actually known to him by familiar intercourse, rather than of those to whose peculiarities he had no guide but such as their features furnished him with. He gave, for instance, a sketch of Mr. Fox, whom he had seen at Berne in 1788; but of Mr. Windham, who was with him at that time, and who was remarkable for a characteristic countenance and appearance, he made no delineation. The fame of Mr. Fox’s eloquence and abilities had reached Lavater, but Mr. Windham’s celebrity as an orator was, at that time, confined to England, and the philosopher thought it indiscreet to trust to his visionary prognostics of disposition and talents, when he had no previous clue from public notoriety or private information to guide him in his researches.

There was, indeed, one celebrated Englishman then resident in the same country, whose appearance would have baffled him—Mr. Gibbon, the historian. His friends, with more zeal to gratify public curiosity than kindness to him, have been at great pains to preserve drawings and descriptions of his disgusting figure and revolting features. They are not caricatures. His countenance expressed neither quickness nor reflection. No man could have surmised from his inanimate yet hideous face that he possessed such powers of application and such faculties of wit and reasoning as his works unquestionably display, and as observant persons might have discovered, though in much fainter lines, in his conversation. His devotion to letters was the most estimable part of his character. It gives great interest to his memoirs, which are entertaining and instructive. As to affections, he seems to have had none. He was more like what he admired and produced, a large book, than a living member of society.

He was affected in his manner and sometimes ludicrously vain. I have been told that he imagined himself handsome. When somebody, presuming on that foible, ventured to try the extent of his conceit by telling him he was like Mr. Fox, whose face, full of kindness and intelligence, had nothing in common with his but a sallow complexion and dark eyebrows, Gibbon pettishly replied, “that any likeness to Mr. Fox in understanding or disposition he should deem an honour, but he could not be flattered with a supposed, and he hoped a mistaken, resemblance to his person.” Even in the latter period of his life he occasionally hinted at his amorous propensities, and invited his friends to banter him on supposed but impossible debaucheries. More human senses than one must have been suspended in his favour, to render his enormous and disgusting complaint imperceptible to his friends and acquaintance.

His want of principle in politics was obvious enough from the incidents of his life, but it was an odd act of friendship in Lord Sheffield[371] to furnish the public with so many proofs of it from his correspondence. There is an anecdote respecting his acceptance of a seat at the Board of Trade, which, though rather of a political than literary cast, I will relate here. Mr. Fox wrote in a presentation copy of the first volume of the _Roman History_ words to this effect: “This gentleman told me on the Monday that no good would be done till the heads of Lord North and his colleagues were laid on the table of the House of Commons, and on the Saturday the same gentleman accepted a place under Lord North.” Some years afterwards an execution took place in Mr. Fox’s house. He had consigned his books to another person; but the creditors contended the books were his, and the question was tried in the Common Pleas, where Lord Loughborough, a particular friend of Mr. Gibbon, presided. The counsel for the creditors argued that the books really belonged to Mr. Fox, from notes in his handwriting being found in the blank leaves. Some question arose on the admissibility of the notes as evidence; the Court seemed inclined to admit them. But when, in the course of the argument, the book had been handed up to Lord Loughborough, the friend prevailed over the judge, and he earnestly, if not peremptorily, prevented the public perusal of them.

The song on Gibbon’s acceptance of office,[372] which begins:

King George in a fright
Lest Gibbon should write
The story of Britain’s disgrace, etc.

was erroneously ascribed by common report to Mr. Fox. It was, I believe, one among the many effusions of General FitzPatrick, who, if he fell at all short in bitter, sarcastic humour, equalled in wit and excelled in taste and refinement, as well as in harmony, the political poet of the preceding generation, Sir Charles Hanbury Williams.

Gibbon had lived in some familiarity with the society that surrounded Mr. Fox, although they were neither sparing of their censures on his political tergiversation nor very indulgent to his affectations in writing and conversation. It was he who first introduced Mr. Sheridan to Mr. Fox, after the former had written _The Rivals_.[373]

During the two days I had the advantage of passing with Mr. Gibbon at Lausanne, he dwelt with much complacency on a variety of anecdotes and _bon mots_ of persons with whom I had been familiar from my childhood. Many of them I had heard before from others, and most, if not all of them, I should judge by his studied manner of relating them, adjusting, as he did most carefully, the rap of his snuff-box and the twist of his finger and thumb to the point of the jest, he had been in the habit of frequently repeating. They were, however, diverting, instructive, and well told. I remember that among them he recited some verses of Mr. Hare. Full of vivacity, humour, and fancy as was that most ready and brilliant of all fashionable wits, he seldom committed any specimen of his talents to paper, either in verse or prose.

From the variety, therefore, if not the merit, of such a performance, the rhymes which Gibbon recollected and I afterwards ascertained to be authentic, may be acceptable to my reader. Mr. Hare, from the want of a better office, had been destined by his friend and early schoolfellow, Mr. Fox, during one of his short Ministries, to the mission to Warsaw; and he thereupon vented his sense of the necessity but disagreeableness of the appointment, almost extempore, in the following lines:

Having been born to no land,
’Tis thought that I must go to Poland;
So having long exhausted all tick,
I soon, alas! must cross the Baltic.
Of all the towns I read of or saw,
I least expected seeing Warsaw:
And now _’tisn’t ten to one_[374] I a’nt sick
Before I ever get to Dantzic.

With the exception of some very trifling _jeux d’esprit_, the above are, I believe, the only verses Mr. Hare ever wrote, or at least acknowledged, after he had left school, where, if I mistake not, he distinguished himself by an English exercise.

Having thus incidentally mentioned Mr. Hare, I will endeavour to give some notion of him here, for his wit and _bon mots_, exquisite and delightful as they were, were not of a kind that bear repetition, nor such as the recollection of the events of the day or the state of parties brings back naturally to one’s mind. He was, indeed, all fire and fancy. His starting eyes and eager countenance seemed animated, and his slender frame emaciated, by the vivacity of his genius [and] his keen sense of ridicule; and the felicity of his language was inspired by the earnestness with which he felt what he expressed. His knowledge was confined to scholarship and _belles lettres_; his judgment, except in matters of taste and language, was not very remarkable; and his temper was always impetuous, and occasionally fretful. It rarely disfigured his manners, but it not unfrequently gave such an edge of severity to his wit, as raised more sympathy for his victim and perhaps more terror than delight and admiration in his audience. In short, he was occasionally unmerciful. His vanity, disciplined and chastised by good breeding and good taste, never exposed him to ridicule; but when mortified it inflicted, I suspect, some bitter sufferings in private and revenged itself on some subsequent occasion by pitiless retaliation on those who had offended him.

Of his birth and family I knew little. His father, who was, I believe, an apothecary at Bristol,[375] died insolvent before, or soon after, his son had left Eton. He consequently entered life almost without property. He had no connections but such as his merits procured him at school, at college, and in the world. If, as Horace affirms, the favour and friendship of distinguished men constitute no slight commendation, no person in English society ever earned a larger portion of that reward in a manner more honourable to himself than Mr. Hare. He married, indeed, early in life, a lady (Miss Hume) with some money but no beauty, and he was soon separated from her, but on terms which, I believe, even her friends acknowledged to be handsome and liberal on his part. Indeed, in all _pecuniary_ transactions he conducted himself, even in the narrowest circumstances, with great honour and disinterestedness. His figure, without deformity, was neither robust nor elegant. His face, though full of animation and exempt from any bad expression, was not prepossessing. Yet to the honour of female judgment in wit and conversation, more, I fear, than to the happiness of those to whom he devoted his attentions, few men were more successful in gallantry with no external advantages. He dazzled and captivated women of beauty, talent, and condition, by the brilliancy of his wit, the vivacity of his imagination, and a natural, unaffected earnestness of manner, in which there was not the slightest tinge of vulgarity or ill-breeding. But as, with due preservation of the forms of society, he could be unmerciful to men who had offended him, so I am afraid that, without departing from the rules of good company, he was occasionally sarcastic, cutting, and even cruel, to those of the other sex who had had the imprudence of pleasing him too much. He was, in truth, from over refinement, too exquisitely sensitive and fastidious not to tease himself and others with unnecessary reproaches.

In politics he was a follower and almost a worshipper of Mr. Fox.[376] He had himself never thought seriously on matters of State or principles of government, but affection and gratitude attached him to any opinion or party that his friend adopted. He measured all men’s political merits and even talents by the degree of devotion they paid to Mr. Fox. He never attempted to speak in Parliament but once. It was on a point of order, in which his friend had been attacked. Rage almost choked his utterance, and, as he used to relate, Mr. Fox, on his sitting down, greeted him with a remark, more frank and natural than encouraging, “What a fine, passionate fellow you are!”[377]

Nevertheless, the part he took in politics was very far from being indifferent or unuseful to the cause he espoused or the friend he adhered to. He devoted his wit and conversation to their service. The keenness with which he, in private, exposed the fallacies and disparaged the abilities of the adversary, came wonderfully in aid of the public and more serious exertions of the leader, to inspire his followers with zeal for his person and with indignation and even contempt for his most formidable opponents. If many were convinced by Mr. Fox in the House of Commons that the logic of the Minister was inconclusive and the measures of Government pernicious, not a few, especially of the young members of his party, were equally wrought upon at supper at Brookes’, where several of his early friends, and Mr. Hare in particular, were wont to descant on the incidents of the debate, to extol their supporters, and run down their adversaries. How often, heated with the enthusiasm which conviviality, wit, and a common cause inspire, have we left the room half persuaded that Mr. Pitt was an empty declaimer, and his speech of that night beneath criticism or even contempt!

I record these practices, whether laudable or blameworthy, merely to mark the difference which a change in the habits of society has insensibly wrought in political parties. Private dinners, tavern suppers, convivial meetings, perhaps intemperance itself, constituted a large portion of the ways and means of public men some thirty or forty years ago. But our usages have been altered. Social intercourse is no longer confined to those _qui idem sentiunt de republicâ_. The comparative disuse of men dinners, improving no doubt the intercourse of private life, has nevertheless very sensibly impaired the strength and union of party zeal and connection.

To return to Gibbon. He was naturally a great object of veneration in the small town of Lausanne, in which he resided: and he enjoyed the superiority his celebrity gave him. If he did not positively exact, he very complacently accepted, from all classes, such homage as is rarely offered but to Royalty or power. No amusement commenced where he was expected until he had made his appearance. Poets impatient to read their works, ladies equally so to display their musical talents, and all convened to partake of the Swiss collations called _thés_ or _goûtées_, generally suspended the indulgence of their respective wishes till the presence and sanction of the great historian allowed them to begin. I have been assured that if the practice was ever departed from, the oracles and responses of the idol never failed to betray, although with becoming gentleness, that he had remarked the omission. Such a life was more suited to his taste, as well as to his bodily powers, than either Parliament or the Militia. He dwells, however, with some complacency on the latter in his memoirs. He manifestly entertained some pompous notions of the military knowledge he had acquired in the country quarters of the Hampshire. Indeed, in the MS., chiefly written in French, he betrayed, according to Lord Sheffield, who showed me the passage, the same predilection for his warlike achievements. On his first acquaintance with Lord Sheffield, then Mr. Holroyd, he writes: “Holroyd est un homme d’esprit, mais un peu suffisant. Il a tous les préjuges de son état (he was a Dragoon officer) _contre la Milice_.” Some less partial persons might perhaps have thought that the unfavourable clause of the judgment, thus pronounced, was perfectly intelligible without further explanation, but Lord Sheffield himself accounted for it thus. He was fresh from England when he met Gibbon at Paris. The _Mayor of Garralt_ had just come out on the London theatre. Lord Sheffield was full of it. He described Foote in Major Sturgeon, mimicked him in parts of the character, and repeated all the jokes against train bands and Militia, with which the dialogue abounds. Gibbon, still in the Hampshire, grew half angry, inveighed against the licentiousness of the stage, and seriously maintained that such satires on the national force of a free country should not be endured.

It would be hardly just to myself and to my sense of literary merit to close my true though flippant account of Gibbon’s person, manners, and character, without bearing the tribute of my admiration, insignificant as it is, to his immortal work. I have lately (1835) read it for the third time, with some attention; and, in my judgment, his unwearied search for historical truth, and his yet more rare and discriminating impartiality in discerning it, place him in the very first rank of historians. He is one of the chief ornaments of his age and country. To whatever strictures his speculative opinions and somewhat indulgent morality may expose him from the religious and the austere, none can doubt his humanity, question his sincerity, or deny the justness of his views, without betraying their own want [of] candour, sincerity, or judgment.

It is curious that, in the same corps with that great writer and at the same time, another learned, though less eminent, historian was serving as a subaltern. This was Mr. Mitford,[378] elder brother of Lord Redesdale, and author of the _History of Greece_. He, like Gibbon, was somewhat fatigued with his regimental duties, and consulted him how to dispel his _ennui_ by any rational pursuit. Gibbon advised him to read, study, and _write_ history; I believe he suggested Greece as the subject. The first volume, in point of labour, ingenuity, and critical acumen, does credit to the advice, and may vie with the works of the adviser himself. But before the second was published the French Revolution had intervened. Mitford, though a retired man, was virulent in his politics. His detestation of the Republicans and reformers of his own day, combining with a propensity to paradox inherent in his nature, induced him to extol the tyrants whom the orators and historians of Greece have consigned to the execration of mankind, and to detract from the acts of heroism and models of oratory which the world has been taught for ages to regard as the most signal triumphs of patriotism and genius.

Among the literary anecdotes related to us at Lausanne by Gibbon, there were several that proved the superficial information of modern travellers generally, and of Coxe, of King’s,[379] afterwards known by the nickname of “Quarto” Coxe, in particular. He had been travelling tutor to Lord Pembroke, Mr. Whitbread, and others. The exorbitance of his salaries for such services was a common subject of ridicule in the University of Cambridge. So much so, that in a puppetshow Punch was introduced complaining or bragging of the high price he paid for a fashionable bear-leader. When questioned who he was, he replied, “Who but Cocksh, of King’s!”—a piece of buffoonery which the reverend object of it was so ill-advised as to resent, and he solicited the Vice-Chancellor to put it down by authority. Whatever were his gains as tutor, he was not satisfied with them. He strove to draw from every journey he made fresh profit, by transferring each item of information he picked up, from whatever source derived, into a book of travels. He had as little discrimination and delicacy in collecting as in retailing his intelligence. An anecdote which suited his book was as welcome on the authority of a _laquais de place_, as from that of a Minister of State: and on the other hand he questioned the latter character, if admitted to his company, with as little scruple as the former.

Gibbon was full of stories of his impudence and of proofs of his inaccuracy. His sins, however, he said, had been visited by a species of retributive justice, which had injured the sale of his books. No sooner had his travels in Russia appeared than they had been abridged and corrected by an abler pen, whose production superseded the original publication; and his book upon Switzerland had been followed by a French translation, with the notes of a well-informed Swiss, which was more convenient to the traveller and more instructive to the student than the English volumes of Coxe. He lived to an advanced age, and continued to the last to load our shelves with compositions or compilations of history and biography; for, being a thoughtless and hospitable man, as well as an intrepid writer, he was compelled, notwithstanding his Archdeaconry and some good Church preferment, to adhere to his trade of bookmaking. In default of judgment he had great experience, some sort of felicity in the choice of his subject, great industry, or rather importunity, in procuring materials, though with an utter want of discrimination in selecting, and yet greater in using or reasoning upon, such facts as he collected. Of his rapidity in determining on laborious works without any previous knowledge of the subjects whatever, and of his activity in begging and purloining documents for his new undertaking, many ludicrous stories are related; of his slender capacity of using them every reader must be aware, and the posthumous production which lies on my table, as I write this in 1829, proves that his judgment did not improve with his years.[380]

That his selection from papers and correspondence was as injudicious as his comment, may be inferred from one fact, that Sir James Mackintosh, who followed him in his researches through many private correspondences, seldom found that Coxe and himself marked the same paper or passage in common for transcription. Yet his labours were not altogether unuseful. His assiduity in discovering hidden or unheeded papers, and his indelicacy in applying for the loan or perusal of them, dragged some valuable documents into light; and the easy access he found to them directed subsequent and better historians to the sources of intelligence yet extant in private and family collections. He never lived with literary men of much note, and his society during his latter years was for the most part within [the] close of Salisbury, of which cathedral he was a Prebendary.

He had seen, however, during his residence, two Bishops, who in different ways were eminent for their scholarship. I mean Dr. Douglas[381] and Dr. Burgess.[382] The last is a mere bookworm; but though a bad critic, he is a laborious and learned man. He is more active in, what they call at college, sporting paradoxes than ingenious in maintaining them. But though singularly tenacious of his opinions, he formed them himself. Narrow as they are, they are his own, and adopted without any suggestion of others, or, I believe, any view of power or profit. He is chiefly remarkable, although little remarked, for publishing a larger number of dull polemical pamphlets in favour of exploded opinions in criticism, politics, and religion than any person of his cloth, and certainly than any or all the Bishops of the Bench. It is fair to add that, if not candid, he is temperate in argument and quite exempt from that irritability which such controversies usually either denote or create.

Dr. Douglas, who was not his immediate predecessor, was a very different and very superior man. He had been private secretary to Pulteney, Lord Bath. His detection of Lauder’s forgeries against Milton is well known. I speak from my own experience when I mention him as liberal in his dealings, and from particular as well as general report when I represent him as amiable, agreeable, and simple, though somewhat irascible in his disposition. His learning was considerable, and he combined with it the taste of a poet and the acumen of a critic. Though in principle and connection rather a Tory than a Whig, he obtained the good opinion of Mr. Fox, who felt for his judgment in literary matters something nearly approaching to admiration. Indeed, his estimation in the club where Mr. Fox occasionally met him, in the company of Dr. Johnson, Mr. Burke, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and Sir William Scott,[383] would raise a fair presumption that he was no ordinary man, even if the direct testimony of his writings and of his son (a person himself of strong understanding) did not abundantly justify my favourable report.

Before I became a member of that celebrated club, he, as well as the yet greater luminaries of it, were no more.[384] But as I had two uncles Mr. Fox and Lord Ossory, who generally attended, and as I was well acquainted in my childhood with Sir Joshua Reynolds, who never missed a meeting, I was familiar with the style and character of the society which composed it from the earliest period of my life. The origin of the institution may be collected from Boswell; Johnson was its founder, object, and oracle. Even now, though dignified by some with a more aspiring title, the members less ostentatiously and more correctly term it “Johnson’s Club.” He attended long as the living idol, and when he was no more it continued to be the favourite shrine at which his worshippers offered, in the shape of anecdotes and quotations, their incense to his memory. In such rites Sir Joshua Reynolds, Mr. Windham, and Sir William Scott successively officiated as High Priests, and the conversation of the two last, in addition to other attractions, derived no little lustre in that place from the knowledge of their early study and admiration of him. Sir Joshua, equally a worshipper, had been long distinguished in one branch of excellence peculiarly and exclusively his own. Being, too, one of the earliest, if not of the original, members of the club, he seemed to depend less on the respect cherished for Johnson than on his own merits as an artist and philosopher.

He was surely the greatest painter England ever produced. Even in his blemishes there was thought, grace, and genius. His pictures, if duly studied, elucidate the great truth which his conversation and writings so earnestly and pleasantly inculcated, namely, that, to attain excellence in the arts of imitation, intellect and fancy as well as observation and diligence, are requisite. Though neither fluent nor grammatically correct in his familiar language, he had acquired a habit from his intimacy with Johnson and Burke that reminded one of the reported conversations of those two extraordinary men, and proved that he was one of their school. This consisted in a perpetual and often successful endeavour to draw some general inference from casual facts or remarks mentioned in conversation. He would account for them by some moral maxim or make them subservient to the proof of some principle. He had not only caught this manner of philosophising, but had studiously imitated it, partly for his instruction and partly for his diversion.

I remember he repeated to me and my sister, in a journey we made with him from Bedfordshire to London, a composition of his own in a supposed dialogue between Johnson and Boswell. The affected simplicity and deference and the real sycophancy of the disciple, as well as the ponderous humour, contemptuous tone, and sterling good sense of the Master, mingled with playful rudeness, were throughout very happily preserved. The topic was the intellectual powers of Garrick. Johnson was made, according to his custom, to disparage them, and yet more those of his injudicious admirer, Boswell, most unmercifully. It ended, I think, nearly thus:

_B._ “Surely, Sir, he is a great man?”

_J._ “No, Sir. He is _not_ a great man. Garrick, a great man indeed! Let us have no more of such stuff.”

_B._ “You will allow him, at least, to be great in one line—a great actor?”

_J._ “Aye, Sir, but what of that? There are many things great. There are great merchants, great sportsmen, great brewers, great grocers, great actors, and great fools; Davy Garrick for aught I know or care is the last but one, and you, Bozzy (laughing immoderately), may be the last if you like it.”

This propensity in Johnson to detract from the merits of Garrick, to deride and scoff at his profession, and to expose without mercy the infirmities of his character, was well known, and has often been adduced as proofs of his envy, malignity, and ingratitude, by the friends of that lively man and inimitable actor. For Johnson, as they urged, was Garrick’s hero.

Judge, O ye Gods, how dearly Garrick loved him;

and thence they drew an inference that Johnson was a brute to stab him with such merciless severity. John Kemble, however, who never loved Garrick, and suspected him, on very slight grounds, of having been jealous of Mrs. Siddons, pretended that he had frequently insulted his old master and friend by a studious and pompous display of his wealth.

As an instance of this purse-proud insolence and assumed superiority, he related that when Johnson complimented Garrick upon his tea, and owned that he envied his success in nothing more sensibly than in being able to purchase so exquisite a beverage, Garrick not only smiled complacently, but added that the tea so admired was by no means the best he had; he possessed some far more refined, but he reserved it for his fashionable guests (naming Sir John this or Lord that). This affectation of superiority Johnson resented so highly, that he wrote the two hundredth Number of the _Rambler_ the very next day, and he stigmatised therein the folly and insolence of men suddenly enriched, under the character of Prospero, with signal severity, introducing the anecdote of the tea to make the popular player feel that the portrait was intended for him.

Sir Joshua’s _Dialogue_ seems to preserve the recollection without recording the excuse for such a practice in Johnson. It was printed somewhere about the year 1801 by Lady Thomond.[385] It was always the fashion to say that the _Discourses_ of Sir Joshua had been corrected and retouched by Johnson. That great writer died, and the continued beauty of the _Discourses_ confuted the supposition. But the public, ever grudging fame in two lines of excellence at a time, hardily maintained that Burke assisted Sir Joshua Reynolds, and, to borrow a metaphor from art, draped the figures of the artist’s rhetoric.

It is, however, my firm belief that he was less assisted in his writings than in his pictures. In the mechanical and inferior parts of the latter he certainly employed very largely Northcote, Marchi, and other scholars by no means incapable of extending their labours to the more finished portions of the piece—a fact I would not invidiously record, if it were not, I fear, equally true that munificence or even friendliness to such assistants formed no part of his otherwise amiable character. My opinion that his writings are his own is chiefly founded on his conversation. That uniformly bespoke an ingenious and sprightly mind, unwearied in exercising itself in the principles and philosophy of art, and consequently well stored with the materials of which his _Discourses_ are composed. It is true that he did not disdain in talk to give a paradoxical turn to his sound opinions on such subjects. I remember, when fresh from school, I heard with astonishment this great judge, proficient in the “beautiful,” declare that Vanbrugh was, in a painter’s eye, the best of architects, and that Holland, with its dykes and canals, was the most picturesque country in Europe. This way of enforcing just principles by phrases seemingly paradoxical was, no doubt, devised to give point and relish to his conversation, and to invite discussion on his favourite topics. It answered its purpose. The practice taught him an arch, playful, and delicate manner of insinuating philosophical tasks.

When one of his vulgar employers objected to the price of a portrait, saying, “Seventy guineas is a large sum, Sir Joshua, for three or four hours’ labour, and you have not spent five on this picture.” “Not five hours?” (exclaimed he). “Why, I have been nearly all my life about it!”[386] Even in parrying just criticism on his defects, he would contrive to inculcate some maxim generally applicable to his art. I saw his great picture of _The Death of Cardinal Beaufort_[387] on his easel, and some friends of his availed themselves of the presence of a schoolboy to convey their criticism, by setting me on to ask why he had not shown us King Henry VI.’s face, which is covered by his arm raised to bless the expiring Prelate. He perceived the drift of the question, which I who put it was not aware of, and archly replied, “Aye, now, I’m glad you asked that question, for I shall teach something about art. That very omission which surprises you, the want of the King’s face, is a great part of my skill. Had it been there, you would have looked at him instead of the Cardinal, to whom it was my business to direct your eye. The contrivance how to hide Henry’s face cost me, I can tell you, more trouble and thought than half the picture besides and than the painting twenty such kings would have done.” My prompters were probably not quite satisfied that indolence had no share in the determination, but they laughed at the promptitude with which he detected and answered the censure, and they must have felt the truth of the general principle involved in his ingenious defence.

In that picture is a figure on which Mr. Fox loved to descant whenever he praised Sir Joshua. “None,” he said, “but a man of genius could have conceived, and none but one of consummate skill could have executed, such a design.” It is an inferior attendant looking through the door, whose countenance, on observing the agonies of the Cardinal, expresses forcibly, but almost ludicrously, his persuasion that all is not as it should be, and that, if the truth were known, it is a very bad piece of business. What more natural? What better contrived to tell the story? If the sentiment is somewhat more comic than one should expect on so terrible an occasion, the inferior character, as well as position, of the person expressing it prevents its impairing in the slightest degree the horror and sublimity of the remorse in the principal figure.

The prosperity and cheerfulness of Sir Joshua Reynolds have often been remarked. He was familiar with the great, though no favourite at Court, for the King[388] was too insensible to genius to admire his works, and too deficient in knowledge or philosophy to enjoy his society. But though royal taste patronised other artists, Sir Joshua was honoured by the multitude and intimate with the men of his day most eminent for judgment or acquirements in science, literature, politics, law, or divinity. It was not, therefore, a mere hyperbolical flourish in Mr. Burke, when eulogising him after the funeral at St. Paul’s, to style him the pattern of human happiness in temper, profession, fortune, and fame. It was, on the contrary, natural in the orator, at such an era of political dissension, to contrast the career of an artist, soothed with the breath of flattery and wafted along by rank, fortune, fashion, and talent to prosperity and fame, even to the close of the scene, with the less enviable life of a statesman, too often shattered in its long and lingering decay by the loss of its branches, and exposed with declining strength to the assaults of enmity and detraction.

But such a panegyric, like a good portrait, had on that occasion the merit of particular resemblance as well as of general truth. Reynolds was prosperous in his life and cheerful in his temper. It is possible that he might not be, at all seasons, quite exempt from that jealousy to which artists are so particularly liable. In mitigation, however, if not in contradiction, to such insinuations against him, I can myself bear testimony to his speaking frequently of Gainsborough in terms of kindness and admiration; of Wilson, whom he is supposed to have disliked personally, with high commendation; and even of Romney, whom a set of minor wits were industrious in extolling at his expense, with full acknowledgment of his peculiar merits, and with ample praise of his talents as a draughtsman. It is somewhat strange that neither he nor the connoisseurs of that day, though earnest even to affectation in extolling the genius of Hogarth, ever spoke of that extraordinary man as a great colourist.

It was reserved for the exhibition in Pall Mall about the year 1820[389] to procure him a reputation, which his arrogant pretensions as a critic and his unsuccessful attempt at a yet higher order of excellence in _Sigismonda_[390] lost him for near fifty years. He was for a long time, though very preposterously, considered as a mere caricaturist, the first, indeed, and father of that line in England, but of the same race as Bunbury, or even Sayer and Gillray, who devoted their skill in that diverting but not difficult branch of art, and furnished our print shops with political caricatures. Neither they nor Bunbury aspired to the character of painters.

The only artist of my time, who could aspire to anything like a competition with Hogarth, was Goya[391] in Spain. There is spirit and even genius in his designs, but they are generally extravagant and sometimes unintelligible. He lacks that inimitable knowledge of human nature and character, which made Horace Walpole class Hogarth with great writers of comedy. Goya’s portraits on canvas are said to be extremely good. In 1809 there existed one at Jadrague, of Don Gaspar Melchior de Jovellanos,[392] who, in addition to his other attainments, was a connoisseur in painting, and has inserted many articles in _La Biblioteca de las bellas artes_ full of interest to the lovers of art or biography.

I first made acquaintance with that remarkable man, in 1793, at Gijon. To that town, his native place, he had been sent with some commission, to an honourable exile, soon after the death of Campomanes. That Minister, himself an Asturian, had not failed to distinguish the rising genius of Jovellanos. Both were proficients in political economy, but it was not in such useful and severe studies alone that Jovellanos acquired a reputation. Works of criticism, a drama of great merit (the _Delinquente Honrado_), and a satire entitled _Pan y Toros_, generally ascribed to him, proved the versatility of his talents, the correctness of his taste, and the purity of his style. His conversation was equally delightful—clear, perspicuous, and natural, and though not divested of playfulness and pleasantry, elevated and instructive. There was too much benevolence both of countenance and manner to impose any unpleasant restraint on the company, and yet an unaffected simplicity and a certain dignity and purity, both in language and sentiment, manifestly the offspring of an unblemished character and a philosophical mind, gave a tone of earnestness and propriety to conversation, such as is rarely preserved in the unrestricted dialogue of a southern society.

He was, I think, the only person eminent in literature, with whom I became acquainted in my first journey through Spain in 1793. I might, indeed, except the Abbé Cavanilles,[393] a botanist and topographical writer of some fame, who was a _protégé_ of the House of Infantado, a man of prepossessing manners, and a native of the Kingdom of Valencia, of which he published a description.

Lord St. Helens,[394] then Ambassador of Madrid, though of more refined taste and cultivated mind than was common at that time in the ranks of English diplomacy, never had his curiosity awakened to Spanish literature, nor was at the pains to open his house to such writers, scholars, or artists, as the country would have afforded. In Italy, however, where I spent the two next years, I frequented many societies where connoisseurs, scholars, and antiquaries abounded, who

Sui memores alios fecere merendo;

and however unpropitious that season of stormy politics was to the growth or cultivation of letters, I found many in different provinces of art, science, and literature.

In art, indeed, there were but few natives of Italy, and, if I except Canova,[395] not one who had either then or has since that time attained great celebrity. He was a man of simple, engaging manners, with all that gentleness which characterises Venetians, and with enough of the enthusiasm of an artist to give animation to his countenance and conversation. It would be tedious to enumerate artists, not Italians, though subsequent success may have implied merit in many of them. The list would be long. With the exception, however, of Fabre[396]—a successful pupil of David, but as furious an anti-revolutionary, as his master was a revolutionary politician, and better known as the lover, some say the third husband, of Madame D’Albany,[397] than as a painter—those I was acquainted with were chiefly English students.

Flaxman,[398] indeed, visited Italy while I was there. I am afraid I was more struck with the deformity of his person, the sanctity of his primitive manners, and the visionary turn of his opinions, than with his works or conversation; but the Italians had more sagacity than his countrymen, and discerned early the grand originality of his conceptions, his just ideas of beauty, and the real simplicity of his character. His sketches and models were studied as works of established excellence even then at Rome. He was, in truth, as Lord Egremont comically designated him, a prodigy of deformity and genius. If unequal, from bodily infirmity, to complete any great _chef d’œuvre_ in sculpture, he contrived to enlighten his contemporaries and followers, and did more by his example and his drawings to improve art than any Englishman, Sir Joshua, in the sister branch, always excepted.

Natural philosophy, however, was the passion of the day, and geology, chemistry, and electricity the fashionable topics of conversation. I was myself far too ignorant to judge of the professors or proficients in such studies: I never saw Spallanzani,[399] nor was I acquainted with Galvani,[400] whom I have met at Bologna. But of Fontana,[401] whose contemporary reputation was greater than the works he has left will maintain, I can speak from personal intercourse amounting almost to intimacy.

He was as remarkable for the boldness of his opinions as for the energy, eloquence, and ingenuity, with which he defended them. There had long existed in Tuscany a school of very free, not to say irreligious, philosophy. Cocchi was, if not the founder, a leading disciple in it. He had co-operated with the Grand Duke Leopold in suppressing both Jesuits and Inquisition, and in reducing the number, power, and wealth of the monastic institutions. Fontana, who, when young, had frequented Baron Holbach’s society in Paris, was a professed materialist after the system of Helvetius. He naturally assumed the ascendancy among the free-thinkers of Florence, and, no doubt, more covertly favoured the political principles which Condorcet and other Frenchmen of the _Encyclopédie_ had adopted. He was positive, vehement, and dogmatic, but far from unpleasant, in conversation; more remarkable, I suspect, for the natural vigour of his understanding than for the extent or accuracy of his knowledge in science or literature, over the whole range of which he somewhat presumptuously was wont to assert his dominion. He was well with the Grand Duke and his Minister, Manfredini. It was generally whispered in Florence, always the _città maldicente_ that Dante describes, that he made an ungenerous use of his influence, that he checked rather than promoted the reward of others, and that he did not scruple to appropriate to himself their labours and discoveries.

Thus the anatomical man, composed of many thousand pieces of wood accurately representing parts of the human body in wood, was said to be the work of Fabroni,[402] the Sub-Director; although Fontana, the Director, was in the habit of exhibiting, explaining, and extolling it as his own. He had patronised Fabroni when very young, and introduced him into the institution from the stage, where he was, if not actually a dancer, connected with the ballet. But when the proficiency of the disciple attracted notice, the master was suspected of repressing him, from jealousy of attainments which were more than equal to his own; though in natural understanding, as well as Court favour, Fontana unquestionably maintained his superiority.

Fabroni was a Tuscan; Fontana, a native of Reveredo. Manfredini, who came from the latter place, also might have some prepossession in favour of Fontana; but his Tuscan origin could not fail to give his rising rival corresponding advantages in a society so narrowly national as that of Florence. Fontana had a brother, a monk and a professor at Pavia, where I saw him. He had the appearance as well as name of a man of genius; but, suspected of republican principles, he was compelled to remove the aspersion by publications in the opposite extreme, and to consign his character to posterity as the strenuous and even acrimonious advocate of systems religious, moral, and political, which he loathed and abhorred. Hard is the lot of genius under arbitrary governments. Accordingly, the faculties best suited to the improvement of mankind are more desirous, on such soils, to withdraw than to force themselves into notice.

Parini,[403] the first poet and one of the most amiable men of that period, I never met. Monti[404] had not yet acquired such celebrity as was likely to attract a young traveller. The only literary man, within the Austrian dominions, whom I visited in 1795, was the Spanish ex-Jesuit Andrès,[405] more distinguished for laborious and impartial compilation than for critical acumen or original thought. He lived unmolested, but little known, in Mantua, and preferred publishing his works in Italian, though the subjects of which they treat and the good taste they inculcate would have been more useful and more novel to Spanish readers than to those who were familiar with Tiraboschi.[406]

There were, no doubt, many more men of letters in Venice and its dependencies, but I had not the advantage of knowing any but Cesarotti.[407] He was in appearance a grave, heavy, old-fashioned professor, and his large tye wig resembled that which, in ridicule of his translation of Homer, a caricaturist had placed on the bust of that poet. Cesarotti had, indeed, the audacity to paraphrase and alter the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_! There was less presumption and more success in bestowing some Italian graces on the _Ossian_ of Macpherson. He reconciled many southern readers, and among them Napoleon Bonaparte himself, to the equivocal bard of the north.

It was in 1796 that the English public, saturated with political disquisition and party invectives, were recalled to a sense of the sweets of literature and poetry, and especially to a taste for the Italian writers, by the publication of a book, whose merit, after all, is scarcely equal to its success, and whose success is mainly to be attributed to the fortunate period of its appearance. This was _The Life [of] Lorenzo of Medici_, by Mr. Roscoe,[408] an attorney and afterwards merchant and banker at Liverpool. After the horrors and wars, _plus quam civilia_, which revolutionary fanaticism in France, and the real or affected dread of it elsewhere, had diffused pretty generally throughout Europe, a languor succeeded; a strong desire for such enjoyments, as the calmer pursuits of poetry and criticism afford, bespoke a favourable reception for Mr. Roscoe’s book, which was more easy and spirited in those parts which related to the revival of arts and literature, than in such as professed but failed to explain the changes and institutions of Florence under the Medici.

There was something _piquant_ (to use a French term) in the appearance of a history of Florence written at Liverpool. Mr. Roscoe was a man of no great scope of genius. Yet when the nature and extent of his attainments is contrasted with his slender means of acquiring them, he becomes a sort of prodigy. He was the lad or waiter at a coffee house, and even that humble occupation had been a step from his original condition, for when a boy he was accustomed to bring potatoes with his father to market. His assiduity, cleanliness, and honesty recommended him, and some of the guests articled him as a clerk to a thriving solicitor. His passion for letters was inextinguishable and his application unwearied. It was accidentally directed to Italian; and a friend (the Rev. Dr. Clarke, I think) being settled for some years in Tuscany, he collected through him various materials and dedicated himself to the composition of a work which immediately placed him on the line of the most successful authors of the day.

Lord Orford,[409] who had hailed Robertson and Gibbon, but not, I think, Hume, on the first appearance of their works, lived to offer similar incense in particles of epigrammatic antithesis to the biographer of Lorenzo de Medici. Mr. Fox, overlooking a style which he could not approve, through his delight at passages of Italian poetry not inelegantly rendered in the course of the work, greeted the publication and the author with encouragement. To the praise of Mr. Roscoe be it said, that neither this burst into sudden blaze nor his subsequent success in public life ever turned his head or disfigured the simplicity of his manners. He spoke in Parliament with judgment and effect, but in a short time, upon elections and other occurrences, there appeared some unequivocal symptoms of that indecision which disqualifies a man from public life more irretrievably than vulgarity or affectation or even than ignorance and incapacity. He confined himself afterwards to his literary pursuits, and to establishing a taste for arts in his native town not unworthy of his celebrated Florence; and Liverpool bids fair to give to its architecture, public works, amusements, and society, a refinement not usual in communities so rapidly enriched by commercial enterprise alone.

In this task Dr. Currie,[410] the physician and the biographer of Burns, was his most active coadjutor. He had a stronger understanding, but less correct taste, than his friend. In his own profession he was distinguished for a new, bold, and successful application of cold water in certain stages of fever; and on matters of politics, science, and philosophy he had acquired great provincial authority. Some popular letters on the effect of the war upon trade, printed with the name of Jaspar Wilson, were with justice attributed to him, and added not a little to his reputation.

Roscoe, after shrinking from a contested election at Liverpool during the No-Popery cry, engaged in trade and was unfortunate. A body of his literary friends, led by Dr. Shepherd,[411] handsomely relieved him from many of the consequences, and alleviated the chagrin at his failure. Mr. Coke, of Norfolk, with much delicacy and generosity, employed him in classing his MSS. at Holkham, of which the curious library of Justus Lipsius forms a part. Roscoe, broken by misfortunes and somewhat impaired by age, did not show all the discernment expected from him; but he had the merit of being the first guest at Holkham who drew the attention of his host and directed his own to those philological treasures. Many men of learning and taste had been in the habit of visiting Mr. Coke; but all (according to Mr. Roger Wilbraham’s malicious remark), including Dr. Parr, most delicately and politely caught the spirit of the place, and preferred the pleasures of the field and of the table to the intellectual labours of classical research. Roscoe and the literary society in Liverpool were not singular in their profession of liberal principles in politics and religion; almost all provincial _literati_ at the close of the seventeenth century (Whitaker and some clergymen excepted) were averse to the war and the system with which it was studiously interwoven. They were, accordingly, more or less stigmatised as visionary speculatists or disaffected Jacobins. The rebound from this contumely and repression was sensibly felt afterwards. It contributed with other causes to the successive and alternate reforms which have ensued.

Perhaps the insensibility to all intellectual merit which pervaded the Court of George III., and the yet more unaccountable indifference to the progress of literature of a man so capable of relishing and judging of genius as Mr. Pitt, estranged the whole republic of letters from their politics. Possibly the selection of “_savans_” in France for the direction of human affairs (no very successful experiment, it must be acknowledged) engaged the ardent spirits of the time in the cause of democracy. In aid of such propensities, a passion, or at least a curiosity, for German literature suddenly seized the reading part of the community. Young authors educated in Germany gratified this appetite for foreign novelties by plays, novels, and poems, translated from the German originals. Whatever might be their motives, they were practically labourers in the same vineyard. The fruits of their studies had all a tang or smack of philosophy very opposite to that which it was the endeavour of our Government, as well [as] of our Church, to disseminate.

Among these, my college friend, Mr. M. G. Lewis,[412] commonly known by the name of his first novel, _The Monk_, deserves to be recorded; for, though a Member of Parliament, he supported the Minister and the French war. He inculcated in his writings opinions which led to a directly opposite conclusion. He had a clear and even a strong understanding, imagination amounting almost to genius, and indefatigable industry. As a poet he was endowed with an excellent ear and a command of elegant language. But his mind was vitiated with a mystical, though irreligious, philosophy; his taste in reading, writing, and thinking, corrupted by paradox; and his conversation disfigured by captious perverseness in controversy or sickly affectation in sentiment. His efforts at pleasantry, which were continual, were very unsuccessful. He had no talent for humour. He was sincere, affectionate, and generous; but his vanity was inordinate and more troublesome than diverting.