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. ”

“ There are false colours on the objects about him; he looks at everything 'as through a curtain;' he sees 'a vision.' Most of all he suffers from his inability to think. But the old love of letters still survives; he quotes his own verses; and when in his waking moments Spence reads to him the 'Daphnis and Chloe' of Longus, he marvels how the infected mind of the Regent Orleans can have relished so innocent a book. ”

“ Here you are actually in Johnson's house; and as you turn to look at the stairway you have just quitted, it is odds if you do not expect to see the shrivelled wig, the seared, blinking face, and the heavy shoulders of the Doctor himself rising slowly above the aperture with a huge volume under his arm. For it was in this very garret in Gough Square, within sound of the hammers of that famous clock of St. Dunstan's, to which Cowper refers in the 'Connoisseur,' * that the great Dictionary was compiled. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Excellent as he is, however, the 'Man in Black,' with his grudging generosity and his 'reluctant goodness,' is surpassed in completeness of characterization by the more finished portrait of Beau Tibbs. The poor little pinched pretender to fashion, with his tarnished finery and his reed-voiced, simpering helpmate,—with his coffee-house cackle of my Lord Mudler and the Duchess of Piccadilly, and his magnificent promises of turbot and ortolan, which issue pitifully in postponed ox-cheek and bitter beer,—approaches the dimensions of a masterpiece. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Swift flashing unutterable scorn as he scribbles off this piece of intelligence to Stella and Mrs. Dingley.
In the letters which follow Steele's above-quoted expostulation, the embers of misunderstanding flame and fade, to flame and fade again. A word or two of kindness makes him rapturous; a harsh expression sinks him to despair. As time goes on, the letters grow fewer, and the writers grow more used to each other's ways. But to the last Steele's affectionate nature takes fire upon the least encouragement. ”

“ In the art of shedding a sedate playfulness over the least promising themes, in magnifying the incidents of his 'set gray life' into occurrences worthy of record, in communicating to his page all the variations of mood that sweep across him as he writes, he is unrivalled. Mandeville christened Addison a parson in a tye-wig; Cowper (at his best) is a humourist in a nightcap. It would be easy to select from his correspondence passages that show him in all these aspects—morbid and gloomy to Newton, genial and friendly to Hill and Unwin, confidential and caressing to Lady Austen and Lady Hesketh. ”

“ Farther on (a lovely little landscape) is the clump of poplars by the water (not the poplars of the poem: those were already felled) which the poet mistook for elms; and here, lastly, is Cowper's own cottage at Weston, which, with its dormer windows, and its vines and jasmines, might have served as a model for Randolph Caldecott or Kate Greenaway. And, behold! ('blest be the art that can immortalize!') here is Mrs. Unwin in a high waist entering at the gate, while Cowper bids her welcome from the doorway.
Of Olney itself there are not many glimpses in the little volume. ”

“ There was more than mere veracity in Boswell's method. Conscious or unconscious, his faculty for reproducing his impressions effectively, and his thoroughly individual treatment of his material, are far more nearly akin to genius than folly. Nor could his success be said to be a matter of chance, since on two subsequent occasions—in the 'Tour to the Hebrides' and the 'Life of Johnson'—he not only repeated that success, but carried further towards perfection those fortunate characteristics which he had exhibited at first. ”

“ Swift tempering candour by compliment, is an unusual but not an impossible spectacle; while the Duchess writes exactly as one would expect her to write with Swift's fast friend at her elbow. Gay, knowing that she will probably follow him, warns Swift playfully that she has her antipathies,—that she likes her own way,—that she is very frank, and that in any dispute he must be on her side. ”

“ Cowper has been styled by a recent editor the best of English letter-writers, a term which Scott applied to Walpole, and it has been applied to others. Criticism loses its balance in these superlatives. To be the best—to use a schoolboy illustration—is to have the highest marks all round. For epistolary vigour, for vivacity, for wit, for humour, for ease, for simplicity, for subject—can you give Cowper the highest marks? The answer obviously must be 'no.' Other writers excel him in subject, in wit, in vigour. But you can certainly give him high marks for humour ”

“ Equally impossible is it, in this age of egotisms and eccentricities that pass for character, to realize the fascination of those splendid manners for which Lord Chesterfield was celebrated.
The finished elegance, the watchful urbanity, the perfect ease and self-possession, which Fielding commended, and Johnson could not contest, are things too foreign to our restless overconsciousness to be easily intelligible. ”

“ But when, travelling rapidly backwards, past the Empire and the Alhambra, past Wylde's Globe and the Panopticon, past Burford's Panorama and Miss Linwood's needlework, we enter the last century, we are in the Leicester Fields of Reynolds and Hogarth, of Newton and John Hunter,—the Leicester Fields of Sir George Savile and Frederick, Prince of Wales, of Colbert and Prince Eugene. ”

“ The ice has thawed into dark pools on either side, and snow has fallen on what remains. He has strapped his bundle and stick at his back, and, with the foresight taught of necessity in those bridgeless days, is astride upon a long bough, so that if by any chance the ice gives way, or he plumps into some hidden fissure, he may still have hope of safety. ”

“ It is Goldsmith again—the Goldsmith of Green-Arbour-Court and Griffith's back-parlour—who draws, from a harder experience than could have been possible to Lien Chi, the satiric picture of the so-called republic of letters which forms his twentieth epistle. 'Each looks upon his fellow as a rival, not an assistant in the same pursuit. They calumniate, they injure, they despise, they ridicule each other: if one man writes a book that pleases, others shall write books to show that he might have given still greater pleasure, or should not have pleased. ”

“ Later still—a year later—he writes to Newton: 'My greenhouse is never so pleasant as when we are just upon the point of being turned out of it. The gentleness of the autumnal suns, and the calmness of this latter season, make it a much more agreeable retreat than we ever find it in the summer; when, the winds being generally brisk, we cannot cool it by admitting a sufficient quantity of air, without being at the same time incommoded by it. ”

“ He has lost his hat and broken his stick, but he is afraid to get down because he has a basket of excited live fowl on his arm. Occasionally the humour is a little grim, after the true North Country fashion. Such is the case in the tailpiece to the Curlew where a blacksmith (or is it a tanner?) looks on pitiless at the unhappy dog with a kettle dangling at its tail; such, again, in the vignette of the mischievous youngster who leads the blind man into mid-stream. As a moralist, Bewick is never tired of exhibiting the lachrimo rerum, the brevity of life, the emptiness of fame. ”

“ No members of the Royal Academy now assemble periodically round the historical blue dragon punch-bowl, still religiously preserved, over which Hogarth and Lambert and Highmore and the other pictorial patrons of a place must often have chirruped 'Life a Bubble,' or 'Drink and Agree,' at their annual dinners; neither is there of our day any munificent maestro like Handel to present the institution with a new organ or the original score of an oratorio. ”

“ When its master is safe across, it will come bounding in his tracks. The desolate stillness of the spot, the bleak, inhospitable look of the snow-clad landscape, are admirably given. But Bewick is capable of even higher things than these. ”

“ To pass Bevis Mount with the barest mention of Lord Peterborough; to come to Amesbury and 'Prior's Kitty' and be fobbed off with 'a pious rhapsody;' to stop at Stockbridge for which Steele was member when he was expelled from Parliament, only to enter upon fifty pages of indiscriminate reflections on Public Love, Self-examination, the Vanity of Life, and half a dozen other instructive but irrelevant subjects,—these things, indeed, are hard to bear, especially as they are not recommended by any particular distinction of matter or manner. ”

“ They were imitated in his own day; they are imitated still—only to prove once more how rare and exceptional is the peculiarly individual combination that produced them. Some of his own pupils, Luke Clennell, for instance, working under his eye and in his atmosphere, have occasionally trodden hard upon his heels in landscape; others, as Robert Johnson, have caught at times a reflex of his distinctive humour; but, as a rule, a Bewick tailpiece of the best period is a thing per se, unapproachable, inimitable, unique ”

“ In a case like the present where the artist's mind is so uniformly pure and innocent, so constitutionally gentle and refined, the gain of individuality is far greater than the loss of finish and academic accuracy. If to Stothard's grace and delicacy we add a certain primness of conception, a certain prudery of line, it is difficult not to recognize the fitness of that happy title which was bestowed upon him by the late James Smetham. ”

“ On a stone hard, by is the date '4 June, 1795,' and he has obviously been toasting the nativity of his Majesty George the Third.
But clearness of message, truth to nature, and skill in compressed suggestion are not Bewick's sole good qualities. He does not seem to have known much of Hogarth—perhaps the Juvenalian manner of that great graphic satirist was not entirely to his taste—but he is a humourist to some extent in Hogarth's manner, and, after the fashion of his day, he is a moralist. He delights in queer dilemmas and odd embarrassments. ”

“ We are accustomed to think of Hogarth and Reynolds as contemporaries. But Reynolds was in the pride of his prime when he came to Leicester Fields, while Hogarth was an old and broken man, whose greatest work was done. Apart from this, there could never have been much real sympathy between them. Hogarth, whose own efforts as a portrait-painter were little appreciated in his life time, must have chafed at the carriages which blocked up the doorway of his more fortunate brother ”

“ Pope. Richard Bentley the younger, he would remind you, had also drawn some excellent illustrations to Gray (the originals of which he will show you later in the library) ; and meanwhile he invites your attention at the end of the winding walk to another masterpiece from the same ingenious brain—a huge oaken seat shaped like a shell, in which once sat together three of the handsomest women in England—the Duchess of Hamilton, the Duchess of Richmond, and the Countess of Ailesbury. ”

“ Bolingbroke called her 'Sa Singularité;' Walpole spoke of her roundly as 'an out-pensioner of Bedlam.' But neither the Abbot of Strawberry nor Pope's 'guide, philosopher, and friend' had any right to set up for a Forbes-Winslow or a Brouardel; and there is in reality little more in what is related of her than might be expected of one who, at once a spoiled child, a beauty, and a woman of parts, deliberately revolted against the tyrannous conventionalities of her time. ”

“ The mention of the decorations in the Prince of Wales's pavilion recalls one of the historical attractions of the gardens,—the pictures in the other supper-boxes. At night-time each of these was 'enlightened to the front with globes;' and a story, which has always seemed to us a little indefinite, traces the first suggestion of them to Hogarth. But one of the earliest and most trustworthy of the guides—the 'Sketch of the Spring Gardens, Vauxhall: In a Letter to a Noble Lord'—implies that Hayman was the true originator in this matter. ”