Austin Dobson

“ Once free of these, a few steps would bring you to the unimposing entrance of the garden,—a gate or wicket in the front of an ordinary-looking house. Here you either exhibited your ticket, or paid your shilling; hurried, not without a throb of anticipation, down a darkened passage; and then, if you were as young and unsophisticated as Fanny Bolton in 'Pendennis,' probably uttered an involuntary exclamation of wonder as, with a sudden sound of muffled music, the many-lighted inclosure burst upon your view. ”

“ Whether he is smoking his black and consolatory pipe in the gallery of the inn, or losing his way while he meditates a passage of Greek, or groaning over the fatuities of the man- of-fashion in Leonora's story, or brandishing his famous crabstick in defence of Fanny, he is always the same delightful mixture of benevolence and simplicity, of pedantry and credulity and ignorance of the world. ”

“ Here is health for your limb, without lint or lotion;
Here is all that you lack, in this tiny flask;
And the price is a couple of silver groschen!
"Buy,—who'll buy?" So the tale runs on:
And still in the great world's market-places
The Quack, with his quack catholicon,
Finds ever his crowd of upturned faces;
For he plays on our hearts with his pipe and drum,
On our vague regret, on our weary yearning;
For he sells the thing that never can come,
Or the thing that has vanished, past returning. ”

“ He is the draughtsman of fancy rather than imagination; and he is moreover better in the mellow copper of his early days than the 'cold steel' of his decline. If you would view your Stothard aright, you must take him as the illustrator of the eighteenth-century novelists, of Richardson, of Fielding, of Sterne, of Goldsmith, where the costume in which he delighted was not too far removed from his own day, and where the literary note was but seldom pitched among the more tumultuous passions. In this semidomestic atmosphere he moves always easily and gracefully. ”

“ In all these pictures, it may be noted, Miss Burney insists upon her fidelity to fact. “I never mix truth and fiction,” she tells “Daddy” Crisp. “I have other purposes for imaginary characters than filling letters with them.” “The world, and especially the Great world, is so filled with absurdity of various sorts, now bursting forth in impertinence, now in pomposity, now giggling in silliness, and now yawning in dullness, that there is no occasion for invention to draw what is striking in every possible species of the ridiculous.” ”

“ A generation like the present, for whom fiction has unravelled so many intricate combinations, and whose Gothicism and Mediævalism are better instructed than Walpole's, no longer feels its soul harrowed up in the same way as did his hushed and awe-struck readers of the days of the third George. To the critic the book is interesting as the first of a school of romances which had the honour of influencing even the mighty 'Wizard of the North,' who, no doubt in gratitude, wrote for Ballantyne's Novelist's Library a most appreciative study of the story. ”

“ HENRY FIELDING. (To James Russell Lowell.)
Not from the ranks of those we call
Philosopher or Admiral,—
Neither as Locke was, nor as Blake,
Is that Great Genius for whose sake
We keep this Autumn festival.
And yet in one sense, too, was he
A soldier—of humanity;
And, surely, philosophic mind
Belonged to him whose brain designed
That teeming Comic Epos where,
As in Cervantes and Molière,
Jostles the medley of Mankind. ”

“ At the same time, Johnson was undoubtedly the reigning model; and, consciously or unconsciously, Miss Burney copied him. “Fanny carries bird-lime in her brains”—said her father—“for everything that lights there sticks.” As the writer of Evelina, she had remembered the writer of the Rambler; and nothing is more reasonable than that she should remember him all the more in Cecilia, when, by personal contact and personal admiration, she had absorbed and assimilated his method and vocabulary. Whether she would not have done better to copy herself, is another matter. ”

“ Of all the lettered figures of the eighteenth century, none is more dear to us than the gentle recluse of the sleepy little town by the Ouse. What!—the captivating letter-writer, the inventor of the immortal 'John Gilpin,' the delightful 'diva-gator' of the 'Task' and the tea-urn, the kindly proprietor of those 'canonized pets of literature,' Puss and Bess and Tiney—how, upon such a theme, could one excusably utter things harsh or censorious! ”

“ Here Trip wear his master's brocade on his back!
Here a hussy may ride, and a rogue take the wall;—
Sing Tantarara,—Vauxhall! Vauxhall!
Here Beauty may grant, and here Valour may ask!
Here the plainest may pass for a Belle (in a mask) !
Here a domino covers the short and the tall;—
Sing Tantarara,—Vauxhall! Vauxhall!
'Tis a type of the world, with its drums and its din;
'Tis a type of the world, for when once you come in
You are loth to go out; like the world 'tis a ball;—
Sing Tantarara,—Vauxhall! Vauxhall! ”

“ Loo at Princess Amelie's, loo at Lady Hertford's, are the capital events of my history, and a Sunday alone, at Strawberry, my chief entertainment. All this is far from gay; but as it neither gives me ennui, nor lowers my spirits, it is not uncomfortable, and I prefer it to being déplacé in younger company.' Such is his account of his life in 1774-5, when he is nearing sixty, and it probably represents it with sufficient accuracy. But a trifling incident easily stirs him into unwonted vivacity. ”

“ At present, in this quiet backwater of street traffic, where Burke and Johnson and Franklin and Reynolds all came formerly to visit their favourite authoress, nothing is discoverable but a dingy tenement with dusty upper windows, with a ground floor that is used as a day school, and a front of stucco'd red brick upon which the blue tablet of the Society of Arts has something of the forlorn effect of an order of merit upon a shoeblack. ”

“ Again, there is a marked change in the attitude of the author,—a change not wholly reconcilable with the brief period which separates the two novels. However it may have chanced, whether from failing health or otherwise, the Fielding of Amelia is suddenly a far older man than the Fielding of Tom Jones. The robust and irrepressible vitality, the full-veined delight of living, the energy of observation and strength of satire, which characterise the one give place in the other to a calmer retrospection, a more compassionate humanity, a gentler and more benignant criticism of life. ”

“ There are no eyes more beautiful than yours!
[Pg 229] GROWING GRAY.
"On a l'âge de son cœur."—A. d'Houdetot.
A little more toward the light;—
Me miserable! Here's one that's white;
And one that's turning;
Adieu to song and "salad days;"
My Muse, let's go at once to Jay's,
And order mourning.
We must reform our rhymes, my Dear,—
Renounce the gay for the severe,—
Be grave, not witty;
We have, no more, the right to find
That Pyrrha's hair is neatly twined,—
That Chloe's pretty.
Young Love's for us a farce that's played;
Light canzonet and serenade
No more may tempt us ”

“ The goings and comings of these, and other notables and notorieties,—for those mentioned by no means exhaust the list,—must have been an unexampled school of character to a budding novelist, whose gift lay especially in seizing upon the peculiarities of human nature, whose perceptions were at their freshest and keenest, and whose singularly retentive memory was not yet perplexed and bewildered by too prolonged an experience of the very variegated patchwork of Eighteenth Century society. ”

“ Gray always poses a little as the aggrieved person who could not speak first, and to whom unmistakable overtures must be made by the other side. He as yet 'neither repents, nor rejoices over much, but is pleased,'—he tells Chute in 1750. On the other hand, Walpole, though he appears to have proffered his palm-branch with very genuine geniality, and desire to let by-gones be by-gones, was not above very candid criticism of his recovered friend. 'I agree with you most absolutely in your opinion about Gray,' he writes to Montagu in September, 1748: 'he is the worst company in the world. ”

“ Thus, instead of uniting like the members of a commonwealth, they are divided into almost as many factions as there are men; and their jarring constitution, instead of being styled a republic of letters, should be entitled an anarchy of literature.' One rubs one's eyes as one reads; one asks oneself under one's breath if it is of our day that the satirist is speaking. No; it is of the reign of the second of the Georges, before Grub Street was turned into Milton Street.
Literature, in its different aspects, plays not a small part in the lucubrations of Lien Chi. ”

“ Strip off the thin Disguise of Wisdom from Self-Conceit, of Plenty from Avarice, and of Glory from Ambition. Come thou, that hast inspired thy Aristophanes, thy Lucian, thy Cervantes, thy Rabelais, thy Moliere, thy Shakespear, thy Swift, thy Marivaux, fill my Pages with Humour, till Mankind learn the Good-Nature to laugh only at the Follies of others, and the Humility to grieve at their own."
From the little group of immortals who are here enumerated, it may be gathered with whom Fielding sought to compete, and with whom he hoped hereafter to be associated. ”

“ At noon I dream on the settle; at night I cannot sleep;
For my love, my love it groweth; I waste me all the day;
And when I see sweet Alison, I know not what to say.
The sparrow when he spieth his Dear upon the tree,
He beateth-to his little wing; he chirketh lustily;
But when I see sweet Alison, the words begin to fail;
I wot that I shall die of Love—an I die not of Ale.
Her lips are like the muscadel; her brows are black as ink ”

“ Two years later Fashion has declared itself on the side of the new garden, and Walpole has gone over to the side of Fashion. 'Every night constantly [he tells Conway] I go to Ranelagh; which has totally beat Vauxhall. Nobody goes anywhere else,—everybody goes there. My Lord Chesterfield is so fond of it that he says he has ordered all his letters to be directed thither. If you had never seen it, I would make you a most pompous description of it, and tell you how the floor is all of beaten princes; that you can't set your foot without treading on a Prince of Wales or Duke of Cumberland. ”

“ In the shadow of a thicket to the left of the spectator is the negligent nurse who should have watched over her charge, but who, at this precise moment of time, is wholly engrossed by the attentions of an admirer whose arm is round her waist; Nor is it in those accessories alone which aid the story that Bewick is so careful. His local colouring is scrupulously faithful to nature, and, although not always an actual transcript of it, is invariably marked by that accuracy of invention which, as some one said of Defoe, 'lies like truth.' Nothing in his designs is meaningless. ”

“ In short, having been admitted "behind the Scenes of this Great Theatre of Nature," he paints humanity as he has found it, extenuating nothing, nor setting down aught in malice, but reserving the full force of his satire and irony for affectation and hypocrisy. His sincere endeavour, he says moreover in his dedication to Lyttelton, has been "to recommend Goodness and Innocence," and promote the cause of religion and virtue. And he has all the consciousness that what he is engaged upon is no ordinary enterprise. ”

“ Your eyes must greet that luckless One
Who rhymed you, newly born,—
Who o'er your "helpless cradle" bent
His idle verse to turn;
And twanged his tiresome instrument
Above your unconcern! [Pg 79]
Nay,—let my words be so discreet,
That, keeping Chance in view,
Whatever after fate you meet
A part may still be true.
Let others wish you mere good looks,—
Your sex is always fair;
Or to be writ in Fortune's books,—
She's rich who has to spare:
I wish you but a heart that's kind,
A head that's sound and clear ”

“ If Mme. Duval was not a person of “position” in one sense, she was at least (as the Colonel says in Punch) a person of exceedingly “uncomfortable position” in another. Yet, as Miss Burney has depicted the episode, we must presume that she has actually depicted something she had heard of or seen. And there is no doubt that there was an under side to the often superficial and conventional refinement of her day,—a side of absolute heartlessness and insensibility, begotten of brutal pastimes, butcherly penal laws, and a cynical disregard for the value of human life. ”