Thomas Whitgift

“ On a complaint made by Bishop Aylmer, Whitgift suspended him, and silenced for a while probably the most eloquent preacher in Europe. His contemporaries named him the Chrysostom of England. His church was crowded to excess; and amongst his hearers, persons of the highest rank, and those of the most cultivated and fastidious judgment, were content to stand in the throng of citizens. ”

“ Instead of finding a gruff old fossil, or bearding a lion in his den, they found an everyday, quiet, dignified man.
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XIII WARREN FRITZINGER "He (Mr. Wilkins) left Mr. Whitman in October, 1889, and was succeeded as nurse by Warren Fritzinger, a young man of twenty-five, and a son of Mary O. Davis, his housekeeper and friend. Mr. Fritzinger (Warry) remained with Mr. Whitman until his death, a faithful, earnest man."—Thomas Donaldson. ”

“ Thomas Laurie's inaccurate quotation, he nowhere quotes what Whitman wrote about any other object in his making the ride except to lead out a migration, and nowhere from beginning to end of his book does he even intimate that the Mission would have been "broken up just then" if Whitman had not made his ride. ”

“ He was Greek reader of his college, and subsequently became secretary to Archbishop Whitgift, then comptroller, and ultimately steward of his household, and commissary of the faculties. He died on 3 April 1608 at Waddon, near Croydon, Surrey, where he leased a farm from George and John Whitgift (Probate Act Book, P.C.C. 1605-1609) , and was buried on the 12th in the chancel of Croydon Church, as near Archbishop Whitgift as possible. ”

“ Ceremonies which in an hour of triumph he might have regarded as solaces to weak brethren, he looked on as acts of treason in this hour of defeat. Above all he would listen to no words of reconciliation with a religious system in which he saw nothing but a lie, nor to any pleas for concession in what he held to be truth. The craving of the Arminian for a more rational theology he met by a fiercer loyalty to the narrowest dogma. Archbishop Whitgift had striven to force on the Church of England a set of articles which embodied the tenets of an extreme Calvinism ”

“ I was there again, and came across him chopping in the woods and making the chips fly right smart, and last week I went there after lambs, and saw him ploughing by himself with the horses; and I venture to say there’s not a man of all who run him down can draw so straight a furrow as that fellow drew. I reckon Whitman has just got a treasure in that redemptioner, and I, for one, am glad of it. Jonathan Whitman is a man who is willing that others should live as well as himself, and uses everybody and everything well, from the cattle in his pastures to the hired hands in his field. ”

“ In the following year, upon the information of Edward Middleton, Whitgift gave orders to Sandys to proceed against Wigginton, and he was in consequence cited before Chaderton and deprived of his living. In 1586, while visiting London, he was apprehended by one of Whitgift's pursuivants, carried before the archbishop at Lambeth, and, on refusing the oath again, was committed to the White Lion prison, where he was loaded with irons and treated with great severity. ”

“ This attendant was Mary Oakes Davis.
With but one exception (Thomas Donaldson, in "Walt Whitman the Man") , all writers who have touched upon Whitman's domestic life seem to have failed to mention the interval between his two Camden homes. Fortunately it was of short duration, but in it came the great turning point in his career.
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Of his early habits something may be learned from his brother George, who says: "Wait was always a trying person to live with." ("In Re Walt Whitman.") Then he goes on to relate some of the poet's peculiarities, irregularities and eccentricities. ”

“ In 1612 he published, with a dedication to Archbishop Abbot, his ‘Life of Whitgift;’ and it is clear that he retained the favour of Whitgift's successor. He also attracted the notice of Buckingham, through whom he obtained legal work for the crown. On 30 March 1621 he received a grant, along with Sir Robert Heath, solicitor-general, of the survivorship of the office of chief clerk for enrolling pleas in the king's bench. ”

“ I am always glad to do what I can to set Dr. Whitman right before the people. His only critics, it seems, are those who did not come here till long after his death; and the only persons who have the temerity to question his character or throw aspersions upon his motives, are those who never saw or heard of him while in the flesh. Briefly stated, the facts are as follows:—
In 1838 my father decided to send me to Scotland to be educated, the intention being for me to cioss the continent by the Manitoba route in company with the regular Montreal Express. ”

“ Mary's and in Trinity College chapel, the new bishop was escorted to his home at Worcester by a cavalcade of university friends.
Whitgift discharged his episcopal functions with characteristic zeal. Every Sunday he preached either in his cathedral or in a parish church of his diocese. He cultivated the society of the gentry, and employed his influence to allay disputes among them. ”

“ Whitman got off his horse, and kneeling in the snow, committed his little company, his loved wife, his work, and his Oregon to the Infinite One for guidance and protection. The lead pack mule being left to himself by the guide pricked up his long ears, turning them this way and that, and began plunging through the snowdrifts. The Mexican guide called out, 'Follow this old mule, he will find the camp if he lives long enough to reach it.'"
And he did lead them to the still burning fire they had left in the morning in the deep, dark cañon. ”

“ The magnificent personality of Walt Whitman and his general comradeship, inspired by his ingrained feelings and intuitive beliefs concerning the destiny of America, must certainly have impressed all who met him long before he was known as a poet. He lived a life so broad and noble that it will be more studied and emulated, and will sink deeper and deeper into the heart. The social, human world, through his aid, will reach a level hitherto unattained. ”

“ Whitman spent some of his time, apparently after school hours, in learning the printing business in the office of James J. Brenton’s Long Island Democrat, to the pages of which he contributed a considerable number of sketches and essays replete with juvenile philosophy, as well as a number of patriotic and sentimental poems in conventional measures. The poet’s tendency to dream—to loaf and invite his soul—to the neglect of more earthly duties, a tendency that was to become a tradition wherever he thereafter worked, had already marked him as an unusual person. ”

“ She lived to see every member of it an active Christian. She died September 6th, 1857, aged 79, and was buried beside her husband near Rushville, New York.
Dr. Marcus was her second son, and inherited from her a strong frame and great endurance. After his father's death he was sent to his paternal grandfather, Samuel Whitman, of Plainfield, Massachusetts, where he remained ten years for training and education. There he received a liberal training in the best schools the place afforded, supplemented by a thorough course in Latin, and more advanced studies under the minister of the place. ”

“ Jesse Applegate, in his "Day with the Cow Column of 1843": "To no other individual are the emigrants of 1843 so much indebted for the successful conclusion of their journey as to Dr. Marcus Whitman."
Fourteenth—"According to Mr. Applegate," says Mrs. Victor, "Mr. Remeau, of the Hudson's Bay Company, furnished a complete way-bill of the route, with camping places." But Mr. Applegate was in the "cow column," or latter part of the immigration, and what good did this way-bill do when Dr. Whitman's ad vice in reference to taking wagons to the Columbia had prevailed over Captain Grant's doubts ”

“ Whitman at the Waiilatpu Mission, as the Doctor and my father were very warm friends. Here we were to separate, I to return to Fort Walla Walla (now Wallula) to join the express, and father to continue across the Blue Mountains to Fort Hall. When Dr. Whitman learned what the plans were for my future, he protested, and urgently urged father to send me to the United States and "make an American "of me. He said this country would certainly belong to the United States in a few years, and I would succeed better here if I was educated in the States and be come an American in thought and feeling. ”

“ His preparation for a frontiersman’s life began early for young Whitman. Born in Connecticut when the eighteenth century had all but run its course, he was still in his swaddling-clothes when his parents, falling victims to the prevalent fever for “going west,” piled their lares and penates into an ox-cart and trekked overland to the fertile lake region of central New York, Mrs. Whitman making the four-hundred-mile journey on foot, with her year-old babe in her arms. Building a cabin with the tree trunks cleared from the site, they began the usual pioneer’s struggle for existence. ”

“ One hesitates even to call Whitman the poet of "democracy," or of "personality," or of "the modern," because such terms only half define him. He quickly escapes into that large and universal air which all great art breathes. We cannot sum him up in a phrase. He flows out on all sides, and his sympathies embrace all types and conditions of men. He is a great democrat, but, first and last and over all, he is a great man, a great nature, and deep world-currents course through him. ”

“ In Whitman we find the most complete identification of the man with the subject. He always is, or becomes, the thing he portrays. Not merely does he portray America,—he speaks out of the American spirit, the spirit that has broken irrevocably with the past and turns joyously to the future; he does not praise equality, he illustrates it; he puts himself down beside the lowest and most despised person, and calls him brother. ”

“ Yet Whitman could not have spoken, as he did, with a kind of authority on this subject, if he had not been fully aware that through the masses of the people this attachment was already alive and working—though doubtless in a somewhat suppressed and un-self-conscious form—and if he had not had ample knowledge of its effects and influence in himself and others around him. Like all great artists he could but give form and light to that which already existed dim and inchoate in the heart of the people. ”

“ Whitman was no humbug, but there is surely some humbug about the Whitman culte. The Whitmanites deify him. They speak of him constantly as a seer, a man of exalted intellect. I do not believe that he was a great thinker, but only a great feeler. Was he the great poet of America, or even a great poet at all? A great poet includes a great artist, and "Leaves of Grass," as has been pointed out times without number, is the raw material of poetry rather than the finished product. ”

“ What always saves Whitman is his enormous endowment of what is "commonest, nearest, easiest,"—his atmosphere of the common day, the common life, and his fund of human sympathy and love. He is strange because he gives us the familiar in such a direct, unexpected manner. ”

“ The essentially prose form which Whitman chose is far more in keeping with the spirit and aim of his work than any conventional metrical system could have been. Had he wrought solely as a conscious artist, aiming at the effect of finely chiseled forms, he would doubtless have chosen a different medium.
IX
Whitman threw himself with love and enthusiasm upon this great, crude, seething, materialistic American world. The question is, Did he master it? Is he adequate to absorb and digest it? Does he make man-stuff of it? Is it plastic in his hands? Does he stamp it with his own image? ”

“ But I am far from thinking Walt Whitman a humbug. He was a man of genius whose work had a very solid core of genuine meaning. It is good to read him in spots—he is so big and friendly and wholesome; he feels so good, like a man who has just had a cold bath and tingles with the joy of existence. ”

“ The millions of people love fair play and honest dealing and can appreciate solid work, and they will learn to love the memory of the modest hero, and will be glad to do him honor in so practical a method. It will soon be half a century since 257 Dr. Whitman and his noble wife fell at their post of duty at Waiilatpui. Had Dr. Whitman been a millionaire, a man of noble birth, had he been a military man or a statesman, his praise would have been sung upon historic pages as the praise of others has. ”

“ Hence we have in Whitman the whole human attitude towards the universe, towards God, towards life and death, towards good and evil, completely changed. We have absolute faith and acceptance in place of the fear and repentance of the old creeds; we have death welcomed as joyously as life, we have political and social equality as motifs and impulses, and not merely as sentiments. He would show us the muse of poetry, as impartial, as sweeping in its vision, as modern, as real, as free from the morbid and make-believe, as the muse of science. He sees good in all, beauty in all. ”

“ To deny that Whitman belongs to the fraternity of great artists, the shapers and moulders of the ideal,—those who breathe the breath of life into the clay or stone of common facts and objects, who make all things plastic and the vehicles of great and human emotions,—is to read him very inadequately, to say the least. ”