If it is not a voluntary favour, interrupted Glanville, it is not a voluntary offence; and if you do not think yourself obliged by one, neither are you at liberty to be offended with the other. The question, said Arabella, is not whether I ought to be offended at being loved, but whether it is not an offence to be told I am so. If there is nothing criminal in the passion itself, madam, resumed Glanville, certainly there can be no crime in declaring it. However specious your arguments may appear, interrupted Arabella, I am persuaded it is an unpardonable crime to tell a lady you love her; and though I had nothing else to plead, yet the authority of custom is sufficient to prove it. Custom, Lady Bella, said Glanville, smiling, is wholly on my side; for the ladies are so far from being displeased at the addresses of their lovers, that their chiefest care is to gain them, and their greatest triumph to hear them talk of their passion: so, madam, I hope you will allow that argument has no force. I do not know, answered Arabella, what sort of ladies they are who allow such unbecoming liberties; but I am certain that Statira, Parisatis, Clelia, Mandane, and all the illustrious heroines of antiquity, whom it is a glory to resemble, would never admit of such discourses. Ah! for Heaven's sake, cousin, interrupted Glanville, endeavouring to stifle a laugh, do not suffer yourself to be governed by such antiquated maxims! The world is quite different to what it was in those days; and the ladies in this age would as soon follow the fashions of the Greek and Roman ladies, as mimic their manners; and, I believe, they would become one as well as the other. I am sure, replied Arabella, the world is not more virtuous now than it was in their days: and there is good reason to believe it is not much wiser: and I do not see why the manners of this age are to be preferred to those of former ones, unless they are wiser and better: however, I cannot be persuaded that things are as you say; but that when I am a little better acquainted with the world, I shall find as many persons who resemble Oroondates, Artaxerxes, and the illustrious lover of Clelia, as those who are like Teribases, Artaxes, and the presuming and insolent Glanville. By the epithets you give me, madam, said Glanville, I find you have placed me in very bad company: but pray, madam, if the illustrious lover of Clelia had never discovered his passion, how would the world have come to the knowledge of it? He did not discover his passion, sir, resumed Arabella, till by the services he did the noble Clelius and his incomparable daughter, he could plead some title to their esteem: he several times preserved the life of that renowned Roman; delivered the beautiful Clelia when she was a captive; and, in fine, conferred so many obligations upon them, and all their friends, that he might well expect to be pardoned by the divine Clelia for daring to love her. Nevertheless, she used him very harshly when he first declared his passion, and banished him also from her presence; and it was a long time before she could prevail upon herself to compassionate his sufferings. The marquis, coming in, interrupted Arabella; upon which she took occasion to retire, leaving Glanville more captivated with her than ever. He found her usage of him was grounded upon examples she thought it her duty to follow; and, strange as her notions of life appeared, yet they were supported with so much wit and delicacy, that he could not help admiring her, while he foresaw the oddity of her humour would throw innumerable difficulties in his way before he should be able to obtain her. However, as he was really passionately in love with her, he resolved to accommodate himself, as much as possible, to her taste, and endeavour to gain her heart by a behaviour most agreeable to her: he therefore assumed an air of great distance and respect; never mentioned his affections, nor the intentions of her father in his favour; and the marquis observing his daughter conversed with him with less reluctance than usual, leaving to time, and the merit of his nephew, to dispose her to comply with his desires, resolved not to interpose his authority in an affair upon which her own happiness so much depended. Elizabeth Montagu (1720-1800) held a prominent place in the literary society of the period. The daughter of a wealthy Yorkshire squire, Mr Robinson, she married the wealthy grandson of the Earl of Sandwich; and both before and after her husband's death made her house the chief resort of persons of both sexes distinguished for rank, taste, and talent. Numerous references to this circle will be found in Boswell's Johnson, in the Life of Beattie, and in the works of Hannah More. Mrs Montagu became the Mme du Deffand of London ;' and it was to her reunions and those of friends who imitated her in substituting conversation for the usual pastime of cardplaying that Mr Benjamin Stillingfleet came with his famous blue worsted stockings, instead of the black silks of the card-playing assemblies-whence the application of the term to learned ladies. The 'blue-stocking' circle included Mrs Thrale, Mrs Chapone, Hannah More, and Fanny Burney, and a long series of famous men, from Dr Johnson to William Wilberforce. Mrs Montagu was authoress of a famous Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakspear, compared with the Greek and French Dramatic Poets, with some Remarks upon the Misrepresentations of M. de Voltaire (1769). This essay had great success at home and abroad; was praised by Reynolds, Lyttelton, and Cowper: condemned by Johnson and Boswell; and is now interesting as showing the low state of poetical and Shakespearean criticism at the time it was written. A memoir, with letters, of Mrs Montagu was published in 1873 by Dr Doran, under the title of A Lady of the Last Century. Hester Chapone (1727-1801), daughter of Thomas Mulso, a Northamptonshire squire, wrote a romance before she was ten; studied French, Italian, Latin, and music; contributed to Johnson's Rambler; and became the intimate friend of Richardson the novelist. Her married life lasted only a few months, her husband, an attorney, dying in 1761. In 1772 she wrote her best-known book, or rather a collection of essays, called Letters on the Improvement of the Mind, and in 1775 ber Miscellanies. An edition of her works, with a Life, appeared in 1807, and extended to six volumes. The following from the Improvement is rather characteristic: When I speak of the best company, I do not mean in the common acceptation of the word-persons of high rank and fortune-but rather the most worthy and sensible. It is however very important to a young woman to be introduced into life on a respectable 1ooting, and to converse with those whose manners and style of life may polish her behaviour, refine her sentiments, and give her consequence in the eye of the world. Your equals in rank are most proper for intimacy, but to be sometimes amongst your superiors is every way desirable and advantageous, unless it should inspire you with pride, or with the foolish desire of emulating their grandeur and expense. Above all things avoid intimacy with those of low birth and education! nor think it a mark of humility to delight in such society; for it much oftener proceeds from the meanest kind of pride, that of being the head of the company, and seeing your companions subservient to you. The servile flattery and submission which usually recommend such people and make amends for their ignorance and want of conversation, will infallibly corrupt your heart and make all company insipid from whom you cannot expect the same homage. Your manners and faculties, instead of improving, must be continually lowered to suit you to your companions; and, believe me, you will find it no easy matter to raise them again to a level with those of polite and well-informed people. The greatest kindness and civility to inferiors is perfectly consistent with proper caution on this head. Treat them always with affability, and talk to them of their own affairs, with an affectionate interest; but never make them familiar, nor admit them as associates in your diversions: but, above all, never trust them with your secrets, which is putting yourself entirely in their power, and subjecting yourself to the most shameful slavery. Catherine Macaulay (1731-91) was an ardent politician of outspokenly republican sentiments the hen-brood of faction,' according to Walpole. The daughter of John Sanbridge, a Kentish proprietor, she married a Scotch doctor Macaulay in 1760, and in 1778, after twelve years of widowhood, a brother of the famous quack doctor Graham, also a Scotsman. Her chief work was a History of England from the Accession of James I. to the Elevation of the House of Hanover (8 vols. 1763-83). Though a work of no authority, it has well-written passages, and was highly thought of by Mirabeau and Madame Roland. Lecky calls Mrs Macaulay 'the ablest writer of the new Radical school,' and Horace Walpole and Gray even put her History above Hume's. To ridicule Mrs Macaulay's republicanism, Johnson one day proposed that her footman, 'a very sensible, civil, well-behaved fellow-citizen,' should be allowed to sit down to dinner with the party; and in a still less complimentary vein, said it was better she should redden her own cheeks than blacken other people's characters. Before her death she had visited George Washington in America, written against Burke's denunciation of the French Revolution, criticised Hobbes, and produced a treatise on morals and letters on education. What Mrs Macaulay had in common with her illustrious namesake, and what she had not, will be gathered from the following paragraphs from her account of the Revolution, on The Bishops committed to the Tower. There cannot be a stronger mark of that deep-rooted prejudice which the doctrines of passive obedience had fixed in the minds of James and his party, and the entire dependence they had in the sincerity of its professors, than the boldness of a step which must naturally excite the resentment of a people who had shewn such ample testimonies of a blind devotion to the interests and power of the church. Jeffries, who had hitherto been the foremost in all the violent councils of this and the preceding reign, remonstrated against the measure as impolitic and dangerous, and the anxiety and attention with which the public waited the issue of this business struck a terror in the minds of the most determined of the king's servants. Directions were given that the reverend fathers should be carried by water, in order to prevent the emotions which a sight of their humiliations in a passage through the city might occasion; but this caution was needless, for the inflamed populace rushed in innumerable crowds to the river to wait for their arrival: the banks were covered on both sides, and the rooms, and even the roofs of all the adjoining houses, were filled with eager spectators: a shout of acclamation, which resounded from one end of the town to the other, was set up by the multitude when the bishops were discovered at a distance. This was immediately followed by a deluge of tears; fervent prayers were offered up to heaven for their deliverance; as they approached the ground was strewed with the protestant bodies of pious devotees; whilst others, yet more inflamed with zeal, ran up to the chin into the water to receive their blessing. The contagion caught even the soldiers, who threw themselves on their knees to their prisoners, nor could Daniel in the lion's den excite more terror and compassion in the breasts of the devout Jews, than a lodgment in the Tower for a few weeks excited in the minds of a people who had beheld often with the eye of indifference those cruel executions which sully the page of history during the last reign and in the beginning of the present; and who but a few months before had beheld without any extraordinary emotion the rigorous scourging of Samuel Johnson, an honest but zealous divine of the church of England, who had been given up by his brethren to the resentment of the court, which had been drawn on him for a publication entitled 'An humble and hearty address to all the English protestants in the army, in which they are intreated not to make themselves the tools of the papists, to enslave their country and subvert their religion.' Such are the effects of imagination over the human heart, that rancour and sympathy, indifference and passion, take their alternate rise from the mere phantoms of the brain, without being in any measure rationally regulated by the nature of circumstances or the complexion of facts. The behaviour of the bishops was equally calculated to correspond with their public professions, and at the same time to enflame the sympathy of the multitude. They distributed to all around them their blessings without reserve; they augmented the general favour by the most lowly submissive deportment; they exhorted the people to fear God, honour the king, and to maintain their loyalty; and no sooner had they entered the precincts of the Tower, than they hurried to chapel, in order to return thanks for those afflictions which heaven in defence of its holy cause had thought them worthy to endure. The triumph of the church over prerogative, the idol to which they had taught the multitude to bow, was yet more splendid on the day of their trial, than in their passage to the Tower. Twenty-nine peers, the far greater number of which were of the high Tory faction, and had been highly instrumental in exalting the power of the crown and fixing James on the throne, with a great number of commoners and divines of inferior rank, attended the bishops to Westminster-hall; and the populace who assembled in expectation of the event was more numerous than had ever been seen on any occasion. Clara Reeve (1729-1807), born at Ipswich, the daughter of the rector of Freston, translated Barclay's Argenis (1772), and wrote The Champion of Virtue, a Gothic Story (1777), renamed The Old English Baron, which was avowedly an imitation of Walpole's Castle of Otranto. The Old English Baron used constantly to be printed along with the Castle of Otranto, and in virtue of her chef d'œuvre, Miss Reeve has an assured place in the history of the romantic movement in our literature; she was Mrs Radcliffe's literary godmother. It may even be said that in the management of the supernatural machinery so as to produce mystery and weird effect, she surpassed her prototype; but she had neither Walpole's pointed style nor his grace. Scott thought her weak in imagination, and criticised her style as sometimes tame and tiresome. But the book has gone through more than a dozen editions, and was three times reprinted between 1883 and 1888. Miss Reeve wrote four other novels, all forgotten, and The Progress of Romance (1785), a sort of history of fiction. David Lewis (1683?-1760), a Welshman born, seems to have been an usher in Westminster School. He wrote a blank-verse tragedy on Philip of Macedon (1727), but is best known for a collection of Miscellaneous Poems by Several Hands (1726), which contained Dyer's 'Grongar Hill,' Pope's 'Vital Spark,' and a number of songs and poems, some of the best of which are attributed to himself, such as the following, reprinted in Percy's Reliques: Away! let nought to love displeasing, What though no grants of royal donors, Our name while virtue thus we tender, What though from fortune's lavish bounty And that's the only life to live. And I'll go wooing in my boys. James Merrick (1720-69) was a distinguished classical scholar. Born at Reading, and educated there and at Trinity College, Oxford, he gained a fellowship, and took holy orders, but was unable to do duty from delicate health. Merrick wrote some hymns, and, with no great success, attempted a version of the Psalms. Better known is The Chameleon. Oft has it been my lot to mark Two travellers of such a cast, 'Hold there,' the other quick replies; "Tis green-I saw it with these eyes, As late with open mouth it lay, And warmed it in the sunny ray; Stretched at its ease, the beast I viewed, And saw it eat the air for food.' 'I've seen it, sir, as well as you, And must again affirm it blue; At leisure I the beast surveyed Extended in the cooling shade.' His breath-doors of life on a sudden were shut, And he died full as big as a Dorchester butt. "Tis green, 'tis green, sir, I assure ye.' Green!' cries the other in a fury: ← Why, sir, d'ye think I've lost my eyes?' "Twere no great loss,' the friend replies; For if they always serve you thus, You'll find 'em but of little use.' So high at last the contest rose, 'Sirs,' cries the umpire, 'cease your pother; And I'll be sworn, that when you've seen The reptile, you'll pronounce him green.' 'Well, then, at once to ease the doubt,' Replies the man, 'I'll turn him out : And when before your eyes I've set him, If you don't find him black, I'll eat him.' He said; and full before their sight Produced the beast, and lo!-'twas white. Both stared; the man looked wondrous wise'My children,' the Chameleon cries (Then first the creature found a tongue), 'You all are right, and all are wrong: When next you talk of what you view, Think others see as well as you : Francis Fawkes (1721-77) translated Anacreon, Sappho, Bion, Moschus, Musæus, and Theocritus, and wrote pleasing original verses. Born at Warmsworth near Doncaster, and educated at Bury and Jesus Colleges, Cambridge, he was vicar of Orpington and rector of Hayes in Kent. He enjoyed the friendship of Johnson and Warton; Johnson acknowledged that 'Frank Fawkes had done the Odes of Anacreon very finely;' but, however classic in his tastes and studies, Fawkes relished a cup of English ale, as is shown by his praise of The Brown Jug. Dear Tom, this brown jug that now foams with mild ale (In which I will drink to sweet Nan of the vale) Was once Toby Fillpot, a thirsty old soul, In bousing about 'twas his praise to excel, It chanced as in dog-days he sat at his ease, His body when long in the ground it had lain, And time into clay had resolved it again, A potter found out in its covert so snug, And with part of fat Toby he formed this brown jug; Now sacred to friendship, and mirth, and mild ale, So here's to my lovely sweet Nan of the vale! John Gambold (1711-71), bred at Oxford, came under Wesley's influence, and in 1742 resigned his living at Stanton Harcourt in Oxfordshire to become a preacher, and ultimately a bishop, among the Moravian Brethren. He wrote religious and theological works, hymns, and poems. Erskine of Linlathen re-edited his works (1823), and an edition of his Poetical Works appeared in 1816. His principal poem was a dramatic piece (written 1740), in which he described himself in the character of Claudius, a Roman soldier. The Mystery of Life. So many years I've seen the sun, And called these eyes and hands my own, A thousand little acts I've done, And childhood have, and manhood known : O what is life! and this dull round To tread, why was a spirit bound? So many airy draughts and lines, And warm excursions of the mind, So many tender joys and woes Have on my quivering soul had power; So many human souls divine, So at one interview displayed, In lasting bonds my heart have laid : And gentle ardours from above, Ere long, when sovereign wisdom wills, This frame, and waft me to the dead: Thoughts, virtues, friendships, griefs, and joys. James Hammond (1710–42), son of a Huntingdonshire squire, was educated at Westminster, became one of the friends of Frederick Prince of Wales, but did not shine in Parliament as member for Truro. According to the story, he fell deep in love with Miss Dashwood, a friend of Lady Bute, whose inexorable rejection of his suit inspired his once-admired love-elegies, condemned by Johnson though praised by Thomson and Chesterfield; they are obvious imitations of Tibullus-smooth, tame, and frigid. In the following elegy Hammond imagines himself married to his Delia, and retired to the country: Let others boast their heaps of shining gold, And view their fields, with waving plenty crowned, Whom neighbouring foes in constant terror hold, And trumpets break their slumbers, never sound: While calmly poor, I trifle life away, Enjoy sweet leisure by my cheerful fire, No wanton hope my quiet shall betray, But, cheaply blest, I'll scorn each vain desire. For her I'll yoke my oxen to the plough, Ah, what avails to press the stately bed, And far from her 'midst tasteless grandeur weep, By marble fountains lay the pensive head, And, while they murmur, strive in vain to sleep?.. Beauty and worth in her alike contend, To charm the fancy, and to fix the mind; In her, my wife, my mistress, and my friend, I taste the joys of sense and reason joined. On her I'll gaze, when others' loves are o'er, And dying press her with my clay-cold handThou weep'st already, as I were no more, Nor can that gentle breast the thought withstand. Oh, when I die, my latest moments spare, Nor let thy grief with sharper torments kill; Convey the corse in melancholy state, Richard West (1716-42), the friend of Gray and Walpole, was the only son of the Lord Chancellor of Ireland and a grandson of Bishop Burnet. Bred at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, he wrote a number of fugitive poems and a lost drama. All his known poems are given in the Rev. D. C. Tovey's Gray and his Friends (1890), where many letters are printed for the first time, in addition to those in the Walpole and the Gray correspondence. The following is 'imitated' from Tibullus (iii. 5), the text differing in sundry minor points from the earlier form given by Tovey: Ad Amicos. Yes, happy youths, on Camus' sedgy side, |