Thomas Campbell Jeffrey

“ Rescuing the ribbon from my hands, which no doubt were running a little too freely over its snowy surface, he smiled with the indulgence proper from such a man to a novice like myself, and observed quite frankly:
“You will consider these observations as confidential. You know how to hold your tongue; that you have proved. Hold it then a little longer. The case is not yet ripe. Mr. Jeffrey is a man of high standing, with a hitherto unblemished reputation. It won’t do, my boy, to throw the doubt of so hideous a crime upon so fine a gentleman without ample reason. ”

“ He has not been spoiled by fortune—has not been tempted by power—is firm without violence, friendly without weakness—a critic and even-tempered, a casuist and an honest man—and amidst the toils of his profession and the distractions of the world, retains the gaiety, the unpretending carelessness and simplicity of youth. Mr. Jeffrey in his person is slight, with a countenance of much expression, and a voice of great flexibility and acuteness of tone. ”

“ Now he knew he was understanding, now he knew he had a hot love in him, and he was good always to Melanctha Herbert who was the one had made him have it. Now he knew he could be good, and not cry out for help to her to teach him how to bear it. Every day Jeff felt himself more a strong man, the way he once had thought was his real self, the way he knew it. Now Jeff Campbell had real wisdom in him, and it did not make him bitter when it hurt him, for Jeff knew now all through him that he was really strong to bear it. ”

“ Is it not rather remarkable that the porter should have noticed no difference between the body of Jeffrey and the living man whom he knew by sight, and who must, after all, have been distinctly different in appearance? ”

“ Moore, whom Jeffrey places late in his list of fading luminaries, and Campbell, whom he finds most nearly unchanging in lustre, are both in a way Romanticists; but they are alike in seeking chiefly for decorative effects and in not taking their art too seriously. So long, then, as the fire and the heat of Romanticism spent themselves merely in giving imaginative splendour to style, Jeffrey could tolerate the movement, and could even regard it with favour, as a return to that power and fervour and wild beauty that he had taught himself to admire in Elizabethan poetry. ”

“ There is a fine vein of mischief in Jeffrey that leads continually to very grateful ridicule of pedantry, dulness, and all kinds of absurdity.{11} Even the devoutest Wordsworthian will, if he be not an ingrained prig, relish Jeffrey’s raillery at the expense of Wordsworth’s occasional pompous ineptitude. And if Jeffrey’s vivacity still seems amusing, how much more irresistible must his style have seemed before the days of Hazlitt and Lamb and Macaulay and Carlyle. ”

“ Hence, on the whole, the biography was placed in the right hands. We thus have a more transparent record of the character of Jeffrey, than if the work had been prepared in a more ambitious literary spirit. In fact, his letters reveal to us the best parts of his nature, far more than could have been done by any labored eulogy. The light they throw on his affections is a perpetual surprise. His reputation in literature depends so much on the keenness and severity of his critical judgments, that we have learned to identify them with the personal character of the writer. ”

“ That this state of things, though paradoxical, is not new appears from the case of Lord Jeffrey as narrated by this shrewd observer. Apart from his pre-eminence at the Scottish Bar, Jeffrey’s editorship of the ‘Edinburgh Review’ invested him with [109] double personal interest. His maiden speech was looked forward to with absorbing interest. He rose in a crowded House. According to the implacable Q, the effort was a failure so lamentable that he never repeated it, content with briefly taking part in debate only when the duty was imposed upon him in connection with his office as Lord Advocate. ”

“ Whatever may be insinuated in regard to those particular portions of the writings of our great novelist by cynical depreciators, who have not the heart to recognise—as did Lord Jeffrey, for instance, one of the keenest and shrewdest critics of his age—the exquisite pathos of a death-scene like that of little Nell or of little Paul Dombey, in the utterance by himself of those familiar passages nothing but the manliest emotion was visible and audible from first to last. ”

“ Paradox, violence, nay even originality of conception is not seldom owing to our dwelling long and pertinaciously on some one part of a subject, instead of attending to the whole. Mr. Jeffrey is neither a bigot nor an enthusiast. He is not the dupe of the prejudices of others, nor of his own. He is not wedded to any dogma, he is not long the sport of any whim ”

“ Jeffrey is rather below the middle size, slight, rapid in his speech and motion, never still, and glances from one subject to another, with less abruptness and more quickness than any man I had ever seen. ”

“ Jeffrey shines in mixed company; he is not good in a tête-à-tête. You can only shew your wisdom or your wit in general society: but in private your follies or your weaknesses are not the least interesting topics; and our critic has neither any of his own to confess, nor does he take delight in hearing those of others. Indeed in Scotland generally, the display of personal character, the indulging your whims and humours in the presence of a friend, is not much encouraged—every one there is looked upon in the light of a machine or a collection of topics. ”

“ An inmate in the home of Albert smiled,
Or blest his noonday walk--she was his only child.
The rose of England bloom'd on Gertrude's cheek--
What though these shades had seen her birth, her sire
A Briton's independence taught to seek
Far western worlds; and there his household fire
The light of social love did long inspire,
And many a halcyon day he lived to see
Unbroken but by one misfortune dire,
When fate had reft his mutual heart--but she
Was gone--and Gertrude climb'd a widow'd father's knee. ”

“ To find a man of Wordsworth’s age and literary experience deliberately penning such bewildering stanzas and expressing such unintelligible emotions, shook for the moment Jeffrey’s faith in his own little, well-ordered universe, and then, as he recovered from his earthquake, escaped from its vapours, and felt secure once more in the clear, every-day light of common sense, led him into fierce invective against the cause of his momentary panic. ”

“ Jeffrey, I have something to say which is not exactly fitted for the ears of servants.” Then, as he pushed his chair suddenly back, I added reassuringly: “It is not a police matter, sir, but an entirely personal one. It may strike you as important, and it may not. Mr. Jeffrey, I was the man who made the unhappy discovery in the Moore mansion, which has plunged this house into mourning.” ”

“ Jeffrey had a double interest in the household at Craigenputtock—an almost brotherly regard for the wife, and a belief, restrained by the range of a keen though limited appreciation, in the powers of the husband, to whom he wrote: "Take care of the fair creature who has entrusted herself so entirely to you," and with a half truth, "You have no mission upon earth, whatever you may fancy, half so important as to be innocently happy." ”

“ It was Dite, or another member of the club, who wrote “The Wife o' Deeside,” of all the songs of the period the one that had the greatest vogue in the county at a time when Lord Jeffrey was cursed at every fireside in Thrums. The wife of Deeside was tried for the murder of her servant, who had infatuated the young laird, and had it not been that Jeffrey defended her she would, in the words of the song, have “hung like a troot.” It is not easy now to conceive the rage against Jeffrey when the woman was acquitted. ”

“ The chief portion of Jeffreys’ time, however, still belonged to Percy, and it was a decided relief to him that that young gentleman scoffed at and eschewed the endless hospitalities and entertainments with which his mother delighted to fill up their life in London.
“I don’t see the fun of gorging night after night, do you, Jeff? A good spread’s all very well now and again, but you get sick of it seven nights a week. ”

“ But you little know me, if you imagine that any thoughts of fear or favour would make me abstain from speaking publicly of Jeffrey as I think, and as he deserves. I despise his commendation, and I defy his malice. He crush the 'Excursion!!!' [33] Tell him that he might as easily crush Skiddaw. For myself, popularity is not the mark I shoot at; if it were, I should not write such poems as 'Roderick;' and Jeffrey can no more stand in my way to fame, than Tom Thumb could stand in my way in the street. ”

“ JEFFREYS, GEORGE, first Baron Jeffreys of Wem (1648–1689) , judge, born in 1648 at Acton, near Wrexham, Denbighshire, was sixth son of John Jeffreys, by his wife Margaret, daughter of Sir Thomas Ireland, knt., of Beausay, near Warrington, Lancashire. The family name has been spelled in eight different ways; in the patent of his peerage it appears as ‘Jeffreys,’ a form of spelling which he always used afterwards.
His father lived to a great age. Pennant saw his portrait at Acton House, taken in 1690, in the eighty-second year of his age (Pennant, Tours in Wales, i. 385) . ”

“ "I certainly do care for you Jeff Campbell less than you are always thinking and much more than you are ever knowing." ”

“ And Albert--Albert falls! the dear old father bleeds!
And tranced in giddy horror Gertrude swoon'd;
Yet, while she clasps him lifeless to her zone,
Say, burst they, borrow'd from her father's wound,
These drops?--Oh, God! the life-blood is her own!
And faltering on her Waldegrave's bosom thrown;
"Weep not, O Love!"--she cries, "to see me bleed;
Thee, Gertrude's sad survivor, thee alone
Heaven's peace commiserate; for scarce I heed
These wounds;--yet thee to leave is death, is death indeed! ”

“ But however much he may sometimes seem to carp and complain, however much we may sometimes wish for a little more equity and a little less law, it is astonishing how weighty Jeffrey's critical judgments are after three quarters of a century which has seen so many{134} seeming heavy things grow light. There may be much that he does not see; there may be some things which he is physically unable to see ”

“ The captain, with much consideration, drew back the hand he had impulsively stretched toward the ribbon.
“No, no,” he protested; “we can not do that; we can do nothing till the coroner comes. It is necessary that he should see her just as she was found. Besides, Mr. Jeffrey has a right to the same privilege. We expect him any moment.” ”

“ Few men have more eloquence in their speech than Jeffrey, and I have met with none who had half as much in his face.
Another character in this reeling crowd, which never fails to attract the attention of a stranger, is that of Robert Forsyth. As far as one man can be unlike another, he is the very antipodes of Jeffery. He is large, square, and muscular, more intended by nature, you would think, for breaking stones on the high road, than for breaking syllogisms before their Lordships. ”

“ But Cora Tuttle was not easy to please, and the first men of Washington came and went before her eyes without awakening in her any special interest till she met Francis Jeffrey, who stole her heart with a look.
Those who remember her that winter say that under his influence she developed from a handsome woman into a lovely one. Yet no engagement was announced, and society was wondering what held Francis Jeffrey back from so great a prize, when Veronica Moore came home, and the question was forever answered. ”

“ And, in the sequel, Jeffrey admitted in writing that he had been too severe. A good deal, however, had happened first. Moore's first impulse does not seem to have been belligerent, and as the purpose of calling Jeffrey out dawned on him, there dawned also a difficulty. ”

“ Jeffrey is far from a flowery or affected writer; he has few tropes or figures, still less any odd startling thoughts or quaint innovations in expression:—but he has a constant supply of ingenious solutions and pertinent examples; he never proses, never grows dull, never wears an argument to tatters; and by the number, the liveliness and facility of his transitions, keeps up that appearance of vivacity, of novel and sparkling effect, for which others are too often indebted to singularity of combination or tinsel ornaments. ”

“ Still one does carry away an impression that very seldom has there been so much attention by a celebrity of fifty-three years of age to a rising junior, or so much of care in befriending him practically, 335as the good Jeffrey bestowed, in 1827 and for some subsequent years, on a young man of letters so utterly different from himself in character, so intractable to his Whig teaching, and so wrapt up in a certain foreign and unintelligible Mr. ”

“ Forrester was perhaps the most expert of Jeffreys’ enemies. He worried the Cad not so much out of spite as because it amused him, and, like the nimble matador, he kept well out of reach of the bull all the time he was firing shots at him.
“Hullo, Jeff!” he called out, as the Cad approached. “Are you going to play in the match on Saturday?”
“No,” said Jeffreys.
“You’re not? Haven’t you got any old clothes to play in?”
Jeffreys’ brow darkened. He glanced down at his own shabby garments, and then at Scarfe’s neat suit.
“I’ve got flannels,” he said.
“Flannels! Why don’t you play, then? ”

“ Jeffrey.
It was a sentiment we could all echo; for he, to whom she had alluded in these few lines as one she could not love, was a man whom most women would consider the embodiment of all that was admirable and attractive.
That one woman so regarded him was apparent to all. If ever the heart spoke in a human face, it spoke in that of Miss Tuttle as she watched her sister’s husband struggling for composure above the prostrate form of her who but a few hours previous had been the envy of all the fashionable young women in Washington. ”