Pye had already translated Lenore in 1782, but this version was not published till 1795; and it was Taylor's translation, read by Mrs Barbauld in Edinburgh and repeated to him by a friend who had been present, that so stirred Scott-' made him a poet,' Scott said-and sent him too to Bürger. Tales of Yore was another book of translations, mainly stories; and another outcome of this miscellaneous work was English Synonyms Discriminated (1813), where, for example, he draws between Fancy and Imagination the distinction Wordsworth adopted and worked out. The mannerisms of his prose and his word-coinings led Mackintosh to speak of the 'Taylorian language.' He was advanced in politics, more advanced or even paradoxical in theology. Borrow's Lavengro describes his philosophy, his scepticism, and his inveterate smoking. His correspondence with Southey, Scott, Mackintosh, Godwin, and others is given in the Life of him by Robberds (1843); and see Georg Herzfeld, Taylor von Norwich, eine Studie (1897). Vicesimus Knox (1752–1851) earned a title to commemoration in this work as compiler of the long-famous Elegant Extracts; his sermons, his essays, his treatises on Liberal Education and on The Lord's Supper, and his aggressive Whig Spirit of Despotism, dedicated to' and levelled at Castlereagh, are all equally forgotten. The son of a master in Merchant Taylors' School, afterwards headmaster of Tunbridge School, he was educated at Merchant Taylors' and St John's, Oxford, and from 1778 to 1812 held the post at Tunbridge vacated by his father. He was also rector of two small livings in Essex, but from 1812 lived mainly in London. The first Elegant Extracts bore to be 'useful and entertaining passages in prose selected for the improvement of scholars at classical and other schools in the art of speaking, in reading, thinking, composing, and the conduct of life,' and appeared in a quarto in 1783; the poetical series appeared in 1789, and the Elegant Epistles, a 'selection of familiar and amusing letters,' followed in 1790. The three series were constantly reprinted, separately or jointly (often in six volumes; sometimes with a select series of sermons appended), on till about the middle of the nineteenth century. In spite of the name, the selections constituted a valuable and most serviceable work. Even in their own day they must have been regarded as on the whole more improving than amusing; one of the things that entertains a modern reader is the way in which he finds, amidst extracts from Dr Johnson, Dr Parr, Mr Gibbon, &c., others described simpliciter as being by Moses, David, and Job-Knox's plan comprising passages from the authorised version of Scripture. Francis Douce (1757–1834), an eccentric and learned antiquary, born in London, was some time keeper of the British Museum MSS.; he deserves mention here mainly for his Illustrations of Shakespeare (1807) and a book on The Dance of Death (1833). He bequeathed his splendid collection of books, MSS., prints, and coins to the Bodleian; his curiosities to Sir Samuel R. Meyrick; and his letters and commonplace-books to the British Museum in a chest not to be opened till 1900. When the seal on the latter was solemnly broken and the papers examined in May of 1900, the documents were found to contain no important mysteries and to have little interest or value of any kind. William Sotheby (1757-1833), son of an officer of good family, was born in London and bred at Harrow and the Military Academy of Angers. When stationed with his regiment at Edinburgh he became Sir Walter Scott's friend, and when he retired from the army, welcomed Scott to his house in London, and made him known to many of his intimates, who included Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Rogers, Moore, and all the brilliant literary circles they represented. Byron afterwards called Sotheby's works trash, and said he 'imitated everybody, and occasionally surpassed his models.' Sotheby published Poems in 1790, secured the esteem of Wieland by a translation of Oberon (1798), and when his version of Virgil's Georgics appeared, was acclaimed by Jeffrey and Christopher North as author of the best translation in the language. None of his dramas, Oberon, Julian and Agnes, or The Confession, Llewelyn the Great, and the rest (some nine in all, in blank verse), were successful; and his odes, epics, poetical epistles, &c., 'On the Battle of the Nile,' on 'Saul,' 'Constance of Castille' (in imitation of the Lady of the Lake), met with little public favour. His last considerable enterprise, a translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey in rhyming couplets, followed Pope's model, but was perhaps less Homeric. Richard Sharp (1759-1835), commonly called 'Conversation Sharp,' was born in Newfoundland, and made a fortune in London as a West India merchant and hat manufacturer. After mingling in the distinguished society of London, from the days of Johnson and Burke to those of Byron, Rogers, and Moore, in 1834 he published-at first anonymously—a volume of Letters and Essays in Prose and Verse. Rogers thought it hardly equal to Sharp's reputation; Mackintosh, however, termed Sharp the best critic he had ever known. Sharp was in Parliament off and on from 1806 to 1827, and left £250,000 realised in business. The Essays show knowledge of the world and sound sense, as may be seen from these maxims and reflections: Satirical writers and talkers are not half so clever as they think themselves, nor as they ought to be. They do winnow the corn, 'tis true, but 'tis to feed upon the chaff. I am sorry to add that they who are always speaking ill of others are also very apt to be doing ill to them. It requires some talent and some generosity to find out talent and generosity in others; though nothing but self-conceit and malice are needed to discover or to imagine faults. The most gifted men that I have known have been the least addicted to depreciate either friends or foes. Dr Johnson, Mr Burke, and Mr Fox were always more inclined to overrate them. Your shrewd, sly, evil-speaking fellow is generally a shallow personage, and frequently he is as venomous and as false when he flatters as when he reviles-he seldom praises John but to vex Thomas. Trifling precautions will often prevent great mischiefs; as a slight turn of the wrist parries a mortal thrust. Untoward accidents will sometimes happen; but after many, many years of thoughtful experience, I can truly say that nearly all those who began life with me have succeeded or failed as they deserved. Even sensible men are too commonly satisfied with tracing their thoughts a little way backwards; and they are, of course, soon perplexed by a profounder adversary. In this respect, most people's minds are too like a child's garden, where the flowers are planted without their roots. It may be said of morals and of literature as truly as of sculpture and painting, that to understand the outside of human nature we should be well acquainted with the inside. Sir Samuel Egerton Brydges (1762–1837), born at Wooton House in Kent, and educated at Maidstone, Canterbury, and Queen's College, Cambridge, was called to the Bar in 1787, but retired five years later to his books at his country house in Kent. He published poetry and novels of much less value than his edition of Edward Philip's Theatrum Poetarum Anglicanorum (1800), his Censura Literaria, containing Titles and Opinions of old English Books (10 vols. 1805-9), and his edition of Collins Peerage of England (9 vols. 1812). The claim of his family to the barony of Chandos broke down, but Brydges was gratified with a Swedish knighthood in 1808 and an English baronetcy in 1814. He represented Maidstone in 1812-18, and printed privately at the 'Lee Priory Press' small editions of many rare Elizabethan books. After 1818 he lived abroad, and he died near Geneva. See his Autobiography (1834). Edward Daniel Clarke (1769-1822), born at Willingdon vicarage, Sussex, passed from Tunbridge School to Jesus College, Cambridge, and from 1790 to 1799 was tutor and travelling companion in noblemen's families, making the tour of Britain, France, Italy, Switzerland, and Germany. In 1799-1802 he thus traversed Finland, Russia, Scandinavia, Tartary, Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt, and Greece. Ordained in 1805, he held two livings, and was (from 1808) first Professor of Mineralogy at Cambridge. His Travels (6 vols. 1810-23) were received with extraordinary favour, and became a kind of standard by which records of travel were judged; his other works were chiefly on antiquarian subjects and mineralogy. There is a Life of him by Bishop Otter (1825). Thomas Hartwell Horne (1780-1860), distinguished as an early Biblical critic, born in London, and educated at Christ's Hospital, became clerk to a barrister, and then held a post in the Record Office. In 1818 he published his Introduction to the Holy Scriptures, a work which procured him admission to orders, a London rectory, a prebend of St Paul's, and an assistant librarianship at the British Museum. His other theological works numbered over a score. The Introduction became the standard English work on the subject, and passed through many editions: in the tenth (1856), in which the point of view was changed, and 'advanced' views startled old-fashioned readers, he was assisted by Dr Samuel Davidson and Dr Tregelles. His Reminiscences were issued by his daughter (1862). Rudolf Erich Raspe (1737-94) was nearly forty years of age when, fleeing in disgrace from Germany, he first reached the shores of England : but by his Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen, published ten years later, he established his claim to be considered a minor English classic. Born in Hanover, Raspe studied at Göttingen and Leipzig, and already in his student days was familiar with English. He was an early translator of Macpherson's Ossian, discussing its authenticity, and seems to have been the very first to call the attention of Germany to Percy's Reliques-a work which was to exercise such a remarkable influence on Bürger and Herder, and on romanticism on the Continent as well as at home. The indefatigable and versatile Raspe had acquired special mineralogical learning, had helped to edit Leibniz, and had written an allegorical poem of chivalrous derring-do, when in 1767 he was appointed a lecturer at Cassel and keeper of the Landgrave's coins, gems, and medals. He soon became librarian at Cassel, wrote on mineralogy and natural history, and in 1769, for a paper on the fossil remains of the mammoth, was made an honorary F.R.S. of London. He wrote also on lithography and music; but when he was travelling in Italy in 1775 he was discovered to have made away with valuable coins from the collection under his charge. He was apprehended, but escaped from the police, and was soon busy publishing in London works on German and Hungarian geology and mineralogy. In 1781 he translated Lessing's Nathan, and by other translations helped to make German literature known in England. An Essay on the Origin of Oil-Painting (1781) secured Horace Walpole's favour, and was published under his auspices; and in 1782 the refugee held a post as a mining expert at Dolcoath in Cornwall. Here he produced the original Munchausen, published in 1785: and was next engaged by James Tassie to prepare in English and French a Descriptive Catalogue of his collection of 'ancient and modern gems, cameos, &c.' (mainly pastes or impressions), published in two volumes 4to in 1791. About this time he cheered the heart of Sir John Sinclair of Ulbster by finding valuable ores in his Caithness territories; but, alas! it was found he had 'salted' the shafts with rich metal from Cornwall-thus doubtless giving Scott a hint for Dousterswivel. He was engaged in presumably more honest mining enterprises in the wild west of Donegal when fever carried him off in 1794. He had known the veritable Freiherr Karl Friedrich Hieronymus von Münchhausen (172097), a veteran who had in the Russian service made several campaigns against the Turks, and at his castle of Bodenwerder, in Hanover, had entertained relays of friends with such marvellous tales of his single-handed prowess that 'Münchhausiaden' became a name for exploits of a fabulous height of achievement. Some few actual reminiscences of Münchhausen's talk for the swindling mineralogist had been the garrulous old gentleman's guest-Raspe mixed with old crusted facetia from time-honoured German jest-books of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, tales of wholly impossible and frankly incredible feats of ingenuity, dexterity, valour, and eccentricity, and so produced a 'potboiler' of fifty small pages in 1785, which, like the second edition next year, contained but five (II.-VI.)-but by far the bestof the thirty-four chapters which appear in later editions the rest, later added, being by quite other and English penmen unknown. The original stories are pure extravaganza, without direct or intentional satire, and are written in English which has no distinction or charm, but is so good as to suggest a native reviser. Of the additional chapters, those down to Chapter XX. appeared in a third edition in 1786; these, with a later supplement and a sequel constituting a second volume (1793), are largely deliberate burlesque, and introduce reminiscences of Lucian's Vera Historia, and satirical parodies or allusions to Bruce's Travels, Johnson's Tour in the Hebrides, Cook's Voyages, and numerous books of travel and adventure, with more or less facetious references to Montgolfier's and Lunardi's ballooning and other contemporary events of public notoriety. In these successive additions Raspe seems to have had no part or responsibility. The book has passed through innumerable editions, and has been illustrated by Rowlandson, Crowquill, Cruikshank, Strang, and others. The fifth edition had the honour of being done into German, with additions by no less a person than the author of Lenore; and for long Bürger was supposed to be the original author. Another assumption, long current, was that Raspe was the author, but had written the work at first in German. A special German continuation in three volumes was published in 1800; there have also been French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Danish, Russian, and Magyar translations. Indeed, few books of its sort or of any sort have been more industriously circulated and made known. And flattering imitations of the manner have from time to time been produced in England and America, down to the days of Artemus Ward and Mark Twain. See the admirable edition with elaborate introduction by Mr Seccombe (1895); and for fuller details as to the origin of the original tales, see Ellissen's (11th) German edition (1873; reprinted 1890), and Müller-Fraureuth's Die Deutschen Lügendichtungen bis auf Münchhausen (1881). Isaac D'Israeli, author of the Curiosities of Literature and a long series of kindred works and compilations, was born at Enfield in May 1766, the only son of a Jewish merchant whose ancestors had been persecuted by the Inquisition out of Spain and had found a refuge in the Venetian republic. Benjamin D'Israeli (1730-1816), settling in England in 1748, made a fortune in business in ISAAC D'ISRAELI. From an Engraving by Graves after Denning. London, and was naturalised as an English citizen in 1801. Isaac was educated for two years at Amsterdam under a freethinking tutor, and spent some time in Paris. He was wholly devoted to literature; and his parents, who considered him moonstruck, after various attempts to make him a business man, acquiesced in his determination to become a man of letters. After some abortive poetical efforts, he in 1791 published the first volume of his Curiosities of Literature; a second was added in 1793, and a third in 1817. A second series in three volumes was published in 1823-34. During the progress of this magnum opus of the author, he issued essays on Anecdotes, on the Manners and Genius of the Literary Character, a volume of Miscellanies or Literary Recreations, and several volumes of novels and romances long since forgotten. At length he struck into his natural vein with Calamities of Authors (1813) and Quarrels of Authors (1814), followed by the Literary and Political Character of James I. (1816); Commentaries on the Life and Reign of Charles I. (1828-31); Eliot, Hampden, and Pym (1832). Though labouring under partial blindness, he in 1840 issued three volumes entitled The Amenities of Literature, consisting, like the Curiosities and Miscellanies, of detached papers and dissertations on literary and historical subjects, written in a pleasant but somewhat slipshod style, which present the fruits of much curious and miscellaneous research, though verified accuracy is not their strong point (as was insisted on in a sarcastic volume of Illustrations by Bolton Corney in 1837). The observant and suggestive compiler was apt to magnify overmuch the importance of small literary discoveries. His most systematic and elaborate work-that on Charles I. -secured him the D.C.L. of Oxford. Byron admired the work of 'that most entertaining and researching writer,' Scott knew some of his poems by heart, and Southey and Rogers were his intimate friends. D'Israeli died at his seat of Bradenham House, Bucks, in 1848, aged eightytwo. His fortune was sufficient for his wants, his literary reputation was considerable, and he possessed a happy equanimity of character. 'His feelings,' says his famous son, though always amiable, were not painfully deep, and amid joy or sorrow, the philosophic vein was ever evident.' His thoughts centred in his library. Always lax in his attitude towards Jewish belief and ritual, he broke with the Synagogue in 1817 and had all his children baptised-a daughter and four sons, of whom Benjamin, Earl of Beaconsfield, illustrious both in literature and in statesmanship, was the eldest. The following extract is from an essay in the second series of the Curiosities of Literature, referred to by Wordsworth in support of an argument on the timidity of authors (in the 'Essay Supplementary to the Preface' of 1815). Shenstone's 'School-Mistress.' The inimitable School-Mistress of Shenstone is one of the felicities of genius; but the purpose of this poem has been entirely misconceived. Johnson, acknowledging this charming effusion to be the most pleasing of Shenstone's productions,' observes, I know not what claim it has to stand among the moral works.' The truth is, that it was intended for quite a different class by the author, and Dodsley, the editor of his works, must have strangely blundered in designating it ‘a moral poem.' It may be classed with a species of poetry till recently rare in our language, and which we sometimes find among the Italians, in their rime piacevoli, or poesie burlesche, which do not always consist of low humour in a facetious style with jingling rhimes, to which we attach our idea of a burlesque poem. There is a refined species of ludicrous poetry, which is comic yet tender, lusory yet elegant, and with such a blending of the serious and the facetious that the result of such a poem may often, among its other pleasures, produce a sort of ambiguity; so that we do not always know whether the writer is laughing at his subject, or whether he is to be laughed at. Our admirable Whistlecraft met this fate! 'The School-Mistress' of Shenstone has been admired for its simplicity and tenderness, not for its exquisitely ludicrous turn. This discovery I owe to the good fortune of possessing the original edition of The School-Mistress,' which the author printed under his own directions, and to his own fancy. To this piece of ludicrous poetry,' as he calls it, 'lest it should be mistaken,' he added a ludicrous index, 'purely to show fools that I am in jest.' But the fool, his subsequent editor, thought proper to suppress this amusing ludicrous index,' and the consequence is, as the poet foresaw, that his aim has been mistaken.' The whole history of this poem, and this edition, may be traced in the printed correspondence of Shenstone. Our poet had pleased himself by ornamenting A sixpenny pamphlet' with certain 'seemly' designs of his, and for which he came to town to direct the engraver; he appears also to have intended accompanying it with 'The deformed portrait of my old school-dame, Sarah Lloyd.' The frontispiece to this first edition represents the Thatched house' of his old school-mistress, and before it is the 'birch tree,' with the sun setting and gilding the scene.' He writes on this, I have the first sheet to correct upon the table. I have laid aside the thoughts of fame a good deal in this unpromising scheme; and fix them upon the landskip which is engraving, the red letter which I propose, and the fruit-piece which you see, being the most seemly ornaments of the first sixpenny pamphlet that was ever so highly honoured. I shall incur the same reflection with Ogilby, of having nothing good but my decorations. I expect that in your neighbourhood and in Warwickshire there should be twenty of my poems sold. I print it myself. I am pleased with Mynde's engravings.' On the publication Shenstone has opened his idea on its poetical characteristic. I dare say it must be very incorrect; for I have added eight or ten stanzas within this fortnight. But inaccuracy is more excusable in ludicrous poetry than in any other. If it strikes any, it must be merely people of taste; for people of wit without taste, which comprehends the larger part of the critical tribe, will unavoidably despise it. I have been at some pain、 to recover myself from A. Philips' misfortune of mere childishness, “Little charm of placid mien,” &c. I have added a ludicrous index purely to show (fools) that I am in jest; and my motto, "O, quà sol habitabiles illustrat oras, maxime principum!" is calculated for the same purpose. You cannot conceive how large the number is of those that mistake burlesque for the very foolishness it exposes; which observation I made once at the rehearsal, at Tom Thumb, at Chrononhotonthologos, all which are pieces of elegant humour. I have some mind to pursue this caution further, and advertise it "The School-Mistress, &c., a very childish performance everybody knows" (novorum more). But if a person seriously calls this, or rather burlesque, a childish or low species of poetry, he says wrong. For the most regular and formal poetry may be called trifling, folly, and weakness, in comparison of what is written with a more manly spirit in ridicule of it.' This first edition is now lying before me, with its splendid red-letter,' its 'seemly designs,' and, what is more precious, its 'Index.' Lord Beaconsfield prefixed a memoir of his father to an edition of the Curiosities in 1849; see also Beaconsfield's own Letters, and the books about the statesman-novelist. William Blake, poet, painter, and mystic, was born at 28 Broad Street, Golden Square, London, on 28th November 1757. He was of Irish extraction. Early in the eighteenth century a certain John O'Neil married Ellen Blake, a shebeen-keeper at Rathmines, Dublin, and adopted her name, whereupon his son James (the offspring of a previous union) also took the name of Blake. James had married and settled as a hosier in London when William was born. He was an imaginative child, but his visionary bent escaped the schoolmaster, and he dreamed through his boyhood in a mystical rapture, screaming when God put His head to the window,' seeing angels in a tree at Peckham Rye, and being beaten by his mother for having encountered Ezekiel sitting under a green bough. No poet or prophet ever saw the pageantry of subjective vision more objectively than Blake. A natural seer, his life was one luminous symbol from birth to death. To him nothing was real but the unreal, nothing unreal but the real. 'Behind, the sea of time and space roars and follows swiftly. He who keeps not right onward is lost.' From youth to age Blake heard the roar of that sea and kept right onward, a mental traveller' clothed with supernatural toil. At ten the impulse of utterance drove him to the study of drawing. He haunted print-shops and salerooms, instinctively preferring Raphael, Michelangelo, and Dürer to the elegant mediocrities then admired. In his twelfth year he began to grope after utterance in poetry as well as in painting, and thenceforward raged in him a fierce duel between the two arts. In his fourteenth year he was apprenticed to Basire, an engraver, at whose shop he caught a glimpse of Oliver Goldsmith. Basire sent him to make drawings in Westminster Abbey, where Gothic art fed his hungering imagination with its 'living form.' His apprenticeship ended in 1778, and for a while he studied at the Royal Academy; but soon rebelling against academic fetters, he began to earn his livelihood by engraving for booksellers, a pursuit which won for him the friendship of Stothard and Flaxman. In 1782 he married Catherine Sophia Boucher, a comely brunette, then in her twenty-first year. Of humble station, she was so illiterate that she could not sign the Parish Register; but she had rarer qualities which made her, in Mr Swinburne's phrase, 'about the most perfect wife on record.' The young couple took lodgings at 23 Green Street, Leicester Fields. About this time Flaxman introduced Blake to Mrs Mathew, a bluestocking and patroness of youthful artists. At her house, 27 Rathbone Place, Blake found himself in a pinchbeck Philistia; but Mrs Mathew had some power of recognising genius, and persuaded her husband to join Flaxman in bearing the cost of privately printing the thin octavo volume, Poetical Sketches, which was the first blast blown against the Jericho of eighteenth-century materialism. In such lyrics as 'My silks in fine array' and the 'Mad Song' Blake recaptured the lost Elizabethan music. The lines 'To the Evening Star' foreshadowed the renascence of verbal glamour in twelve magical words : Speak silence with thy glimmering eyes And wash the dusk with silver. In that great dramatic fragment, Edward the Third, Blake soared into prophecy, foretelling in majestic images the imperial destiny of England a hundred years before the imperial idea fired the popular imagination : The flowing waves Of Time come rolling o'er my breast, he said, Our sons shall rise from thrones in joy, each one The book is dated 1783, but apparently was never published, the whole impression having been presented to Blake. What he did with it is a mystery. That a copy found its way to Coleridge, Wordsworth, Cowper, or Burns seems improbable, but there is no doubt that Blake was 'the first that ever burst into that silent sea' on which our poetry has voyaged ever since. The Poetical Sketches were all written between 1768 and 1777. Cowper's Poems were published in 1782. Burns issued his Poems in the Scottish Dialect in 1786. Wordsworth and Coleridge published the Lyrical Ballads in 1798, fifteen years after Blake's Poetical Sketches, nine years after his Songs of Innocence, and four years after his Songs of Experience. It is possible that Coleridge and Wordsworth had seen the Songs of Innocence and Experience before they wrote the Lyrical Ballads, for Blake was not unknown, and his poems were purchased and prized by literary and artistic connoisseurs. In 1784 Nollekens Smith heard Blake 'read and sing several of his poems' to airs composed by himself. These tunes were sometimes 'most singularly beautiful,' and were 'noted down by musical professors.' Charles Lamb may well have been the link that united Blake and Coleridge. Crabb Robinson, writing in 1825 to Miss Wordsworth, says: Coleridge has visited Blake, and I am told talks finely about him.' But Coleridge may have known the poetry long before he visited the poet. |