1831.] REVIEW.-Nichols's Literary Illustrations, vol. VI. tues only can neither obtain nor preserve, and, in contesting which, corruption on one side must be opposed by corruption on the other. It may be remembered, that soon after Mr. Pitt, in consequence of a dissolution of parliament, became fairly seated at the head of the administration, he endeavoured to redeem a pledge he had given, to introduce a bill for the reform of parliament. This was introduced in 1785, and was defeated. Some at that time doubted whether he was sincere, and it is certain that a considerable proportion of his opponents were not sincere. At this time, Lord Camelford's correspondent, Mr. Hardinge, sat as member for Old Sarum, and it would appear had stated some embarrassment as to what part he should act. This produced the following letter from his Lordship, which we shall copy entire, as applying very closely to the great question which now agitates the public inind. "My dear Hardinge, Oxford-street, Jan. 28, 1785. "A few words upon the last sentence in your note as to your democratical principles of Reform, of which you say you gave me early notice. The question now grows more serious, and therefore let us understand one another. I never wished you to vote against your opinion upon any subject, nor do I wish it now. Your principles, however, cannot be more decided upon the business of Reform than mine; nor are they half so strongly pledged to the public. Old Sarum has two representatives; upon one of them I have not the smallest claim, because I never pretended any kindness to him in the seat I gave him. It is to be sure, even in his instance, however, a whimsical thing, that from his connection with Pitt he feels himself under a necessity of subverting, as far as his vote goes, the seat he is entrusted with by his constituents, or, if you chuse to call it so, by his constituent. But were he to vote against what Pitt, to whom he owes it, professes to have at heart, I am well aware it might be interpreted by the enemies of his friend as inconsistency and double dealing. What is your case? the argument cuts exactly the other way. Who will believe, if they see you take a part in direct opposition to what I have so often declared to be my deliberate opinion, that there is not a game played between us for the sake of flattering the Minister's favourite object! My line has been distinct, and I have never departed from it. I dread every change; and at this moment in particular think it not only unnecessary, but, considering the state of Scotland and Ireland, I think 327 such a measure madness and absurdity. If, "As to the democratical principle, how far that is likely to he gratified by enabling three or four great families in every county (generally Peers) to add to their influence in the House of Commons, or by rendering such additional influence still more powerful in extinguishing the balance of the open boroughs, I leave to your reflection. I profess to wish that power and property may go together, and am therefore not very anxious for the plebeian system. "All I shall add is, that, if I were to consider only my own emolument and that of my son (for I look no further), I should be happy that any scheme took place that would enable me to convert my privilege into an increase of income, which is a far more solid advantage than what is called importance and consideration. Weigh all this calmly in your own mind, and assure yourself that no difference of opinion will ever make an alteration in the affectionate regard with which I am faithfully "Yours, CAMELFORD." Perhaps, however, we cannot do justice to his Lordship's opinions, either as to good sense or purity, without extracting a passage from the letter which follows the above: "At this moment neither you nor I are acquainted with the plan Mr. Pitt has adopted; all we know with certainty is, that any augmentation of county members alone is quite unsatisfactory to the wishes of the reformers, and in the teeth of their professed principles, either of democracy or equality in proportion, or the right of actual representation; and that any extinction of boroughs, without proof of delinquency or forfeiture, is either an act of arbitrary violence, and therefore in every sense of the word unconstitutional, or it is liable to objections insuperable, if it is attempted to be put into a shape that will make it optional without injustice. 328 REVIEW. Nichols's Literary Illustrations, vol. VI. [April, "Do not imagine, however, my dear friend, that I wish to persuade you against your conviction; use your own discretion, act upon your own feelings in perfect freedom; all I have to beg of you is, that if you apprehend your duty obliges you to take a part contrary to my opinions, you will at the same time find an opportunity of making it clearly understood, that it is so far from being in concert with me, that it is in direct opposition to those sentiments which I have so repeatedly declared, and which I shall entertain to my dying day. Having now explained our thoughts to each other freely on both sides, let us drop the subject, and hope that it will be the only important one upon which there will ever be such a difference of sentiment between you and faithful and affectionyour CAMELFORD." ate, In 1787, Lord Camelford visited several parts of the Continent, particularly Italy, where he continued to pass the greater part of the remainder of his life. His letters from abroad, although his health was much decayed, are written with great vivacity, and contain many curious remarks, both on what was passing at home, and on the manners, &c. of the country he visited. While at Rome, Lord C. exerted himself to procure an order of treasury, or an act of parliament, if the latter should be thought necessary, to relieve the English artists and students from the heavy duties imposed upon the importation into this country of moulds, plaister casts, models, or other auxiliaries of the arts, and was successful. A young nobleman, now Earl Grosvenor, being on his return home, was intrusted by Lord C. with this commission, and it is perhaps unnecessary to add that he afterwards distinguished himself by forming one of the finest collections of pictures in this country. We well recollect, but with shame, that the commencement of Mr. Pitt's administration was not remarkable for much liberality in the promotion of art and science; witness the sale of the Houghton collection, the rejection of Dr. Hunter's offer of his museum, &c. At that time, taxation was every thing. Another and a better spirit now prevails; and we trust will render the last two reigns as illustrious for arts as for arms, although we may still be annually disgusted by the wretched parsimony that would hazard the destruction of our choicest museums and libraries. During Lord C.'s residence abroad, his Majesty's alarming illness occurred. In a letter dated Lyons, Nov. 19, 1788, he begins : "Heavens! what a misfortune does your letter announce to me! I can think of no thing else. I loved him (George III.) as a man who bore his faculties so meekly.' I feel gratitude to him as one who so lately honoured me with proofs of his esteem and gracious distinction; but what are my private feelings to those of the public? I conclude, before this answer reaches you, our fate will have been decided; in truth, I already look upon the stroke as past. I dare not look forward. What a revolution we are to expect; not only England, but all Europe, trembles at the expected change of men and measures! Our situation was too prosperous; happy in our interior government and respected abroad, every power looked up to us to restore and to preserve the peace of Europe. Young as our minister is in years, the wisdom of experience seemed to be born with him, and he was regarded as a consummate statesman in the wisest cabi nets. What will succeed him we are to see ; but we know already that they are likely to be such as will be neither possessed of the confidence of the nation or the reverence of foreign princes. Pitt has shewn himself great in power, it remains for him to support when deprived of office the high opinion he has acquired. If he is betrayed into the petulance of opposition, and lends himself, as all have done before him, to be at the head of a faction, instead of consistently espousing the cause of his country, whether the proposition comes from one side of the House or the other, he will be no more in future than a common man with good parts." But his Lordship was soon informed that he had no cause for despair, and although at a distance from the scene of action, he was statesman enough to follow, from his own judginent, the measures by which Mr. Pitt's rash and impatient enemies rendered his triumphs easy, and defeated their own purposes in a manner which he could hardly anticipate. For all this they were chiefly indebted to the unconstitutional politics of Lord Loughborough, and the frantic and ungovernable passions of Mr. Burke, who, disappointed in the popularity he expected from his favourite hobby, the impeachment of Hastings, thought that he had now got hold of a force which nothing could overturn; but which was overturned by the hand of Providence, the voice of the nation, and his own infatuation. We shall return with pleasure to this subject, and to the sentiments of Lord C. in our next. (To be continued.) 1831.] REVIEW.-Cunningham's British Architects. The Lives of the most eminent British Architects. By Allan Cunningham. (Murray's Family Library, No. XIX.) THIS forms the fourth volume of "the Lives of British Painters, Sculptors, and Architects,” which have been already noticed with just commendation. The first in this useful collection is the life of William of Wykeham; one of a class of men, who, "trained to other studies, and living in the daily discharge of devout duties, planned and reared edifices with a mathematical skill, a knowledge of effect, and a sense of elegance and usefulness which regular practitioners have never surpassed." In reviewing the labours of this celebrated man, Mr. Cunningham is naturally led by his subject into an investigation of the style of architecture denominated the Gothic. He claims for it a character original and peculiar; and, unable to reconcile the conflicting theories of Evelyn, Gray, Warburton, and others, he finds in it a distinct order, not inappropriately denominated the Order of the Catholic Church, fitted and adapted to the religion of the country, corresponding with the scenery, and suited to the peculiarities of the climate; and with out denying the resemblance that may exist between the Grecian and the Gothic, he considers the general theory to be merely an ingenious fallacy, which supposes it to be a happy corruption of the Greek. The character of Wykeham is vigor, ously drawn: "Wykeham was the Cardinal Wolsey of Edward the Third, with more than Wolsey's munificence, and nothing of his worldly ambition. He was a wise and sagacious minister to the state, and a watchful and faithful one to the Church, bringing to either service strong good sense a wonderful aptitude for business-eloquence full of persuasion—a temper whose serenity nothing could disturb a courage which no trials dismayed-and, last and best of all, a character of unsullied honesty. Though a rigid Romanist, he was merciful to the Wickliffites, when his brethren set an example of severity; he adorned and enriched the churches which others of the clergy desired to plunder; and he laid out his wealth in colleges and schools, that knowledge might increase in the land." The next architect noticed by Mr. Cunningham is Inigo Jones; "a name," says Walpole, "which would alone save England from the reproach of not having her representatives GENT. MAG. April, 1831. 329 among the arts." Jones was the Vitruvius of England; the establisher of a classic taste; and if his opportunities had been equal to his designs, his country would have possessed prouder memorials of his talents than those to which she now points the admiring finger. Of his early life little is recorded, and that little not to be depended on. His taste was formed by the intense study of Greek and Roman architecture. He designed a palace for James the First, of the most magnificent kind; the whole of which, says Mr. Cunningham slyly, is still in the portfolio, except that beautiful detached fragment, from whose middle window his unfortunate son Charles the First stepped out upon a scaffold. Nor was the talent of Jones confined to architecture; he was the deviser of court pageants and masques, and in conjunction with Ben Jonson produced several, of which the latter claimed the poetry, and assigned the machinery to his partner. The result, as might have. been expected, was perpetual strife and merciless satire, in which the irritable poet lampooned his colleague with a porcupine quill dipped in gall." The works of Jones were numerous, but few remain; enough, however, is left to show of what his. genius was capable, had he fallen on better times. In his restoration of St. Paul's, he was thwarted by the Parliament; and the following is the melancholy close of his labours and his life: "The chief of the works on which he had depended for fame was stopt by Parliament far short of completion, and the whole structure treated with such contumely that its destruction was dreaded. Tradition says, that the sorrowing old man was sometimes to be seen wandering in the vicinity of Whitehall and St. Paul's Cathedral, looking at those splendid but incomplete works. From one of the windows of the former, the royal master, for whom he had made so many masques and planned so many mansions, was conducted to an undeserved fate; and he could see with his own eyes the degradation of St. Paul's. During the Usurpation,' says Dugdale, the stately portico with the beautiful Corinthian pillars being converted into shops for seamstresses and other trades, with lofts and stairs ascending thereto-the statues had been despitefully thrown down and broken in pieces.' Of this he was witness; but he did not live to see the unfinished cathedral with its magnificent portico wrapt in those flames which consumed so much of London. Inigo,' says Walpole, "tasted early of the misfortunes of his mas 330 REVIEW.-John Jones's Poems. ter. He was not only a favourite but a Roman Catholic. Grief, misfortunes, and age terminated his life. He died at Somerset House, and was buried in the Church of St. Bennet's, Paul's Wharf, where a monument erected to his memory was destroyed in the fire of London.' Walpole adds some erroneous dates. We know that Jones was eighty years old when he died in June, 1653." To Jones succeeds Sir Christopher Wren. His life is written with great perspicuity, and forms a very interesting portion of the volume. Among his churches, St. Paul's, St. Mary-le-Bow, St. Stephen's Walbrook, and St. Bride's Fleet-street, are well-known triumphs of his genius. His steeples, says Mr. Cunningham, are universally admired, and deserve to be studied by mathematicians as well as by architects; they surpass all others in geometrical beauty. As the poverty of James confined the magnificent conceptions of Inigo Jones to paper, so the profligacy of Charles the Second was as fatal to one of the noblest designs of Wren. The Commons voted seventy thousand pounds for a mausoleum to receive the body of Charles the First. The body was not found, for there was no disposition to discover it; the money was spent by the profligate son of the Royal Martyr, and the mausoleum of Wren still lives -on paper. Insult and indignity were the rewards of Sir Christopher Wren; he was ignominously dismissed from his employments in the 86th year of his age, through the intrigues of a faction, and the dullness of the first sovereign of the House of Brunswick. Castle Howard and Blenheim are the trophies of Vanbrugh, whose life is next upon the record. Mr. C. has spoken a volume against the writings of this licentious dramatist, when he expresses a hope that they are for ever closed to our countrywomen. His character and merits are well summed up in the closing passage of his biography. It may be sufficient to say of Gibbs that he was the architect of St. Martin's Church, the chief beauty of which, amongst many beauties, is the portico. His lines," if we may be allowed the expression, fell "on pleasanter places" than those of Jones and Wren; he was largely employed, and was a liberal and charitable man. Of Kent it is said, that he enjoyed the rare felicity of maintaining his fame in painting, sculpture, architecture, [April, and landscape-gardening. "His name,” says Mr. C. was so famous in many ways in his own time, that it could not be omitted in these sketches; but I doubt whether any man would take it as a compliment now to be told that he painted a picture, planned a monument, designed a house, or laid out a garden, like William Kent." Of Lord Burlington we are told that he was an elegant copyist, admired in his own day, but has been ever since on the wane. The colonnade of Burlington House and Chiswick House are of his designing, but his fame is best secured by the flattery of Pope. The volume concludes with the life of Sir William Chambers, who has written upon art with more talent than he exemplified it. No one who desires the talent of an architect can acquire it without the treatise of Chambers. This is Mr. Cunningham's praise, and it is deserved. His dissertation on oriental gardening, however, was an error in taste, which was severely handled by the celebrated Heroic Epistle to Sir William Chambers; a satire, according to Warton, "cut out by Walpole, and buckram'd by Mason.” " There is no one who writes upon art more to our taste than Allan Cunningham; he speaks out honestly and fearlessly; he throws off the trainmels of prepossession and prejudices, and like the giant tears off "like withes the fetters that would enthral the freedom of his mind; he sustains his opinions with the manly independence of unbiassed intellect, and sees with his own eyes; hence his remarks, whether of blame or praise, are valuable, as well from the conviction we feel of their sincerity, as from the talent with which they are enforced. Attempts in Verse, by John Jones, an old Servant, with some account of the writer, written by himself; and an Introductory Essay on the Lives and Works of our uneducated Poets. By Robert Southey, Esq. Poet Laureate. Murray. MR. SOUTHEY has furnished about one half of this volume, and we need hardly say by far the most interesting portion. The "attempts" of the servant are introduced by an Essay from a master, in which the lives of some half dozen of the great "uneducated" are traced, and their works criticised, in a tone of feeling honourable to him who leads the van of the eru 1831.] REVIEW.-John Jones's Poems. dite. His own "healthy understanding," his own "generous spirit,” and the goodness of his own heart, are conspicuous in every page of the vólume; they have buoyed up the fragile bark of poor Jones, and they will bear it down the stream of time, unscathed by the rocks, or, to be poetical, unharmed by the Scylla of criticism, or the Charybdis of neglect. The introduction of Jones to Mr. Southey was accidental; a visit of the latter to Harrowgate, which had been noticed in a Leeds paper, induced the poet, who was resident in a family, to address a letter to Mr. S., with a specimen of his poetry; a circumstance by no means uncommon, for as offers of tortoise-shell tom-cats had been the plague of Sir Joseph Banks's life, the MSS. of poets had been the annoyance of Mr. Southey's. The odds were against poor Jones; but the letter was perused, and the incipient displeasure dispelled. Whether the fortuitous circumstances of Harrowgate leisure and Harrowgate waters, had any share in the business, we are not told; but the result was certainly the volume before us. "Upon perusing the poems," says Mr. S., "I wished they had been either better or worse. Had I consulted my own convenience, or been fearful of exposing myself to misrepresentation and censure, I should have told my humble applicant that although his verses contained abundant proof of a talent for poetry, which, if it had been cultivated, might have produced good fruit, they would not be deemed worthy of publication in these times. But on the other hand, there were in them such indications of a kind and happy disposition, so much observation of natural objects, such a relish of the inuocent pleasures offered by nature to the eye, and ear, and heart, which are not closed against them, and so pleasing an example of the moral benefit derived from those pleasures, when they are received by a thankful and thoughtful mind, that I persuaded myself there were many persons who would partake, in perusing them, the same kind of gratification which I had felt. There were many, I thought, who would be pleased at seeing how much intellectual enjoyment had been attained in humble life, and in very unfavourable circumstances; and that this exercise of the mind, instead of rendering the individual discontented with his station, had conduced greatly to his happiness, and if it had not made him a good man, had contributed to keep him so. This pleasure should in itself, methought, be sufficient to content those subscribers who might kindly patronize a little volume of his verses. More 331 over, I considered that, as the Age of Reason had commenced, and we were advancing with quick step in the March of Intellect, Mr. Jones would in all likelihood be the last versifyer of his class; something might properly be said of his predecessors, the poets in low life, who with more or less good fortune had obtained notice in their day; and here would be matter for an introductory essay, not uninteresting in itself, and contributing something towards our literary history. And if I could thus render some little service to a man of more than ordinary worth (for such upon the best testimony Mr. Jones appeared to be), it would be something not to be repented of, even though I should fail in the hope (which failure, however, I did not apprehend) of affording some gratification to "gentle readers: for readers there still are, who, having escaped the epidemic disease of criticism, are willing to be pleased, and grateful to those from whose writings they derive amusement or instruction." We have then very interesting sketches of the lives of Taylor the Water Poet, Stephen Duck, James Woodhouse, John Bennet, Anne Yearsley, and Bryant. We are happy to find that it is Mr. Southey's intention to do honour to the memory of Bloomfield by a separate work. " It is little to the credit of the age," says Mr. S., " that the latter days of a man whose name was at have been passed in poverty, and perhaps one time so deservedly popular should ing been brought on by no misconduct shortened by distress, that distress havor imprudence of his own." This is true; and we happen to know that this distress would have been aggrasionate kindness of the Literary Fund. vated but for the frequent and compas In But we must speak of Mr. Jones. a simple narrative written by himself, he tells in a natural manner of his early difficulties, his limited means of acquiring the most ordinary education, and the first stirrings of the poetical spirit within him; his propensity to poetry nity or impaired his usefulness; he is does not appear to have excited his vaknow him. still in service, respected by all who His letter thus con cludes: "I therefore hope, Sir, that if some of the fruits of my humble muse be destined to see the light, and should not be thought worthy of commendation, no person of a beneficent disposition will regret any little encouragement given to an old servant under such circumstances; but above all, Sir, I hope there will be found no person so illnatured as to upbraid you for the part you |