Agnes Repplier

“ When an industrious young authoress named Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger—a model of painstaking insignificance—invited Charles and Mary Lamb to drink tea with her one cold December night, she little dreamed she was achieving a deathless and unenviable fame; and that, when her half dozen books should have lapsed into comfortable oblivion, she herself should never be fortunate enough to be forgotten. It is a cruel chance which crystallizes the folly of an hour, and makes it outlive our most serious endeavours. ”

“ Shell-work, which was one of her accomplishments, became the rage. Her illustrious friend, the Duchess of Portland, "made shell frames and feather designs, adorned grottoes, and collected endless objects in the animal and vegetable kingdom." Young ladies of taste made flowers out of shells, dyeing the white ones with Brazil wood, and varnishing them with gum arabic. A rose of red shells, with a heart of knotted yellow silk, was almost as much admired as a picture of birds with their feathers pasted on the paper. This last triumph of realism presented a host of difficulties to the perpetrator. ”

“ Scott sorrowfully admitted to Miss Baillie that he found these warblings—of which he was the reluctant editor—"execrable"; and that the despair which filled his soul on receiving Miss Seward's letters gave him a lifelong horror of sentiment; but for once it is impossible to sympathize with Sir Walter's sufferings. If he had never praised the verses, he would never have been called upon to edit them; and James Ballantyne would have been saved the printing of an unsalable book. There is no lie so little worth the telling as that which is spoken in pure kindness to spare a wholesome pang. ”

“ Miss Grace Kennedy's stories are as absurd as Miss More's, and—though the thing may sound incredible—much duller; but they give one an impression of painful earnestness, and of that heavy atmosphere engendered by too close a contemplation of Hell. A pious Christian lady, with local standards, a narrow intelligence, and a comprehensive ignorance of life, is not by election a novelist. Neither do polemics lend themselves with elasticity to the varying demands of fiction. ”

“ Miss More's reputation was already established at the dawning of my cherished half-century, and, for the whole fifty years, her life was a series of social, literary, and religious triumphs. In her youth, she was mistaken for a wit. In her old age, she was revered as a saint. In her youth, Garrick called her "Nine,"—gracefully intimating that she embodied the attributes of all the Muses. In her old age, an acquaintance wrote to her: "You who are secure of the approbation of angels may well hold human applause to be of small consequence." ”

“ Chapone wrote to Sir William Pepys: "It is a dangerous commerce for friends to praise each other's Virtues, instead of reminding each other of duties and of failings." Yet a too robust candour carried perils of its own, for Miss Seward having written to her "beloved Sophia Weston" with "an ingenuousness which I thought necessary for her welfare, but which her high spirits would not brook," Sophia was so unaffectedly angry that twelve years of soothing silence followed. ”

“ It is the irony of circumstance that Dr. Johnson and Charles Lamb should have been childless, for they were the two eminent Englishmen who, for the best part of a century, respected the independence of childhood. They were the two eminent Englishmen who could have been trusted to let their children alone. Lamb was nine years old when Dr. Johnson died. He was twenty-seven when he hurled his impotent anathemas at the heads of "the cursed Barbauld crew," "blights and blasts of all that is human in man and child." By that time the educator's hand lay heavy on schoolroom and nursery. ”

“ How much we all suffer in life from the discretion of our families and friends!
Thackeray laughed the dim ghost of "Lalla Rookh" out of England. He mocked at the turbans, and at the old ladies who wore them; at the vapid love songs, and at the young ladies who sang them. ”

“ No wonder Dr. Gregory counselled his daughters [172] to silence. Lovers less generous than Cœlebs might well have been alienated by such disqualifications. “Oh, how lovely is a maid’s ignorance!” sighs Rousseau, contemplating with rapture the many things that Sophie does not know. “Happy the man who is destined to teach her. She will never aspire to be the tutor of her husband, but will be content to remain his pupil. She will not endeavour to mould his tastes, but will relinquish her own. She will be more estimable to him than if she were learned. It will be his pleasure to enlighten her.” ”

“ I rejoice in the grand chorus of the day, and feel content in the silent serene of night, while I listen to the morning hymn of the whole animal creation, I recollect how beautiful it is, sum’d up in the works of our great poet, Milton, every rivulet murmurs in poetical cadence, and to the melody of the nightingale I add the harmonious verses she has inspired in many languages. ”

“ Montagu writes to Miss Carter that she has seen the splendid coronation of George III, Miss Carter hastens to remind her that such splendour is for majesty alone.
“High rank and power require every external aid of pomp and éclat that may awe and astonish spectators by the ideas of the magnificent and sublime; while the ornaments of more equal conditions should be adapted to the quiet tenour of general life, and be content to charm and engage by the gentler graces of the beautiful and pleasing.” ”

“ West is as dull as Dr. Gregory is penetrating, as verbose as he is laconic, as obvious as he is individual. She devotes many agitated pages to theology, and many more to irrefutable, though one hopes unnecessary, arguments in behalf of female virtue. But she also advises a careful submission, a belittling insincerity, as woman’s best safeguards in life. It is not only a wife’s duty to tolerate her husband’s follies, but it is the part of wisdom to conceal from him any knowledge of his derelictions. ”

“ Johnson had been dead four years when Mrs. Hartley, daughter of Dr. David Hartley of Bath, wrote to Sir William Pepys:—
“Education is the rage of the times. Everybody tries to make their children more wonderful than any children of their acquaintance. The poor little things are so crammed with knowledge that there is scant time for them to obtain by exercise, and play, and vacancy of mind, that strength of body which is much more necessary in childhood than learning.” ”

“ There is a great deal lost in being born out of date. What freak of fortune thrust Galileo into the world three centuries too soon, and held back Richard Burton's restless soul until he was three centuries too late?
For myself, I confess that the last twenty-five years of the eighteenth century and the first twenty-five years of the nineteenth make up my chosen period, and that my motive for so choosing is contemptible. ”

“ There is a natural limit to the success we wish our friends, even when we have spurred them on their way.
If the English court did not lend itself with much gayety or grace to dramatic entertainments, English society was quick to respond to the delights of a modified orientalism. That is to say, it sang melting songs about bulbuls and Shiraz wine; wore ravishing Turkish costumes whenever it had a chance (like the beautiful Mrs. Winkworth in the charades at Gaunt House) ; and covered its locks—if they were feminine locks—with turbans of portentous size and splendour. ”

“ A firm insistence upon admitted truths, a loving presentation of the obvious, a generous championship of those sweet commonplaces we all deem dignified and safe, made her especially pleasing to good King George and his consort. Even her letters are models of sapiency. "Tho' I meet with no absolutely perfect character," she writes to Sir William Pepys, "yet where I find a good disposition, improved by good principles and virtuous habits, I feel a moral assurance that I shall not find any flagrant vices in the same person, and that I shall never see him fall into any very criminal action." ”

“ The ultimatum of the modern publisher, "No poet need apply!" had not yet blighted the hopes and dimmed the lustre of genius. "Everybody thinks he can write verse," observed Sir Walter mournfully, when called upon for the hundredth time to help a budding aspirant to fame.
With so many competitors in the field, it was uncommonly astute in Mr. Hayley to address himself exclusively to that sex which poets and orators call "fair." There is a formal playfulness, a ponderous vivacity about the "Triumphs of Temper," which made it especially welcome to women. ”

“ The Queen, who considered it a masterpiece, lent it to Miss Burney, who in turn gave it to Colonel Fairly, who ventured to observe that it was not "piquant," and asked for a "Rambler" instead.
"Emmeline" is not piquant. Its heroine has more tears than Niobe. "Formed of the softest elements, and with a mind calculated for select friendship and domestic happiness," it is her misfortune to be loved by all the men she meets. The "interesting languor" of a countenance habitually "wet with tears" proves their undoing. Her "deep convulsive sobs" charm them more than the laughter of other maidens. ”

“ A handkerchief, designed as a gift from a young girl to her betrothed, had a celestial sphere worked in one corner, to indicate the purity of their flame; a bouquet of buds and blossoms in another, to mark the pleasures and the brevity of life; and, in a third, Cupid playing with a spaniel, "as an emblem of the most passionate fidelity." Even samplers, which represented the first step in the pursuit of accomplishments, had their emblematic designs no less than their moral axioms. ”

“ The ambition to prove that—albeit a woman—one may be on terms of literary intimacy with the seven deadly sins (“Je ne suis qu’un pauvre diable de perruquier, mais je ne crois pas en Dieu plus que les autres”) had not yet dawned upon the feminine horizon. The literary lady accepted with enthusiasm the limitations of her sex, and turned them to practical account; she laid with them the foundations of her fame. Mrs. Montagu, an astute woman of the world, recognized in what we should now call an enfeebling propriety her most valuable asset. ”

“ THE ALBUM AMICORUM
She kept an album too, at home,
Well stocked with all an album's glories,
Paintings of butterflies and Rome,
Patterns for trimmings, Persian stories.
Praed.
Modern authors who object to being asked for their autographs, and who complain piteously of the persecutions they endure in this regard, would do well to consider what they have gained by being born in an age when commercialism has supplanted compliment. Had they been their own great-grandfathers, they would have been expected to present to their female friends the verses they now sell to magazines. ”

“ Their methods are akin to those of the irrepressible Miss J——, who undertook, Bible in hand, the conversion of that pious gentleman, the Duke of Wellington; or of Miss Lewis, who went to Constantinople to convert that equally pious gentleman, the Sultan. Miss Kennedy’s heroes and heroines stand ready to convert the world. They would delight in expounding the Scriptures to the Pope and the Patriarch of Constantinople. Controversy affords their only conversation. Dogma of the most unrelenting kind is their only food for thought. Piety provides their only avenue for emotions. ”

“ Elderly bankers weep profusely over their beloved pastor's eloquence, and fashionable ladies melt into tears at the inspiring sight of a village Sunday School. Young gentlemen, when off on a holiday, take with them "no companion but a Bible"; and the lowest reach of worldliness is laid bare when an unconverted mother asks her daughter if she can sing something more cheerful than a hymn. Conformity to the Church of England is denounced with unsparing warmth; and the Church of Rome is honoured by having a whole novel, the once famous "Father Clement," devoted to its permanent downfall. ”

“ As she waxed old, and affluent, and disputatious, it was deemed well to encourage a timid public with the reminder that her genius, though “great and commanding,” was still “lovely and kind.” And when she died, it was recorded that “a cultivated taste for moral scenery was one of her distinctions”;—as though Nature herself attended a class of ethics before venturing to allure too freely the mistress of Barley Wood.
It is in the contemplation of such sunlight mediocrity that the hardship of being born too [9] late is felt with crushing force. ”

“ Is it possible that anybody except Miss Burney could have shrunk modestly from the sight of a lover's neck, especially when it had a bullet in it? Could a sense of decorum be more overwhelmingly expressed? Yet the same novel which held up to our youthful great-grandmothers this unapproachable standard of propriety presented to their consideration the most intimate details of libertinism. ”

“ What patience and ingenuity must have been expended upon this pasteboard castle, which had a wing for the ink well, a wing for the sand box, five circular steps leading up to the principal entrance, a terrace which was a drawer, a balcony surrounded by a "crenelled screen," a tower to hold the quills, a vaulted cupola which lifted like a lid, and a lantern with a "quadrilateral pyramid" for its roof, surmounted by a real pea or a glass bead as the final bit of decoration. ”

“ There are few things more difficult to conceive than an enthusiastic brother tunefully entreating his sister to go on enrapturing the world with her pen. Oh, thrice-favoured Anna Letitia Barbauld, who could warm even the calm fraternal heart into a glow of sensibility. ”

“ There is no harder fate than to be immortalized as a fool; to have one’s name—which merits nothing sterner than obliteration—handed down to generations as an example of silliness, or stupidity, or presumption; to be enshrined pitilessly in the amber of the “Dunciad”; to be laughed at forever because of Charles Lamb’s impatient and inextinguishable raillery. ”