Byron was addicted to marginalizing; and though he could not equal Coleridge in the profundity of his criticisms, or impart such charming interest to them, still he was quite original and often piquant. Burns contented himself with trifling criticisms of approval or disapproval pencilled in the margin of books, especially poetical ones, which were nearly all he was in the habit of reading.
Many famous authors and public men have been extravagantly fond of the rod and line, disciples of that patient and poetical angler, Izaak Walton. George Herbert, the English poet; Henry Wotton, diplomatist and author; Dr. Paley, Archdeacon of Carlisle; John Dryden, poet and dramatist; Sydney Smith, the witty divine; Sir Humphry Davy, the eminent chemist,--all were devoted anglers.[81] This brief list might be largely increased. Bulwer-Lytton says: "Though no partic.i.p.ator in the joys of more vehement sport, I have a pleasure that I cannot reconcile to my abstract notions of the tenderness due to dumb creatures, in the tranquil cruelty of angling. I can only palliate the wanton destructiveness of my amus.e.m.e.nt by trying to a.s.sure myself that my pleasure does not spring from the success of the treachery I practise towards a poor little fish, but rather from that innocent revelry in the luxuriance of summer life which only anglers enjoy to the utmost."
Walton puts himself on record in these words: "We may say of angling, as Dr. Boteler said of strawberries: "Doubtless G.o.d could have made a better berry, but doubtless G.o.d never did;" and so, if I might be judge, G.o.d never did make a more calm, quiet, innocent recreation than angling." Sydney Smith declared it to be an occupation fit for a bishop, and that it need in no way interfere with sermon-making.
Perhaps the best thing said or done in angling is an unpublished anecdote of the great preacher to the seamen,--the late Father Taylor, of Boston. He was once lured to try his hand at the rod, and soon brought up a very little fish that had been tempted by his bait. He took the small creature carefully from the hook, gazed at it a moment, and then cast it back into the water, with this advice: "My little friend, go and tell your mother that you have seen a ghost!"
Dr. Parr, the profound English scholar, was a most inveterate smoker; so was Charles Lamb,[82] who one day said to his doctor, "I have acquired this habit by toiling over it, as some men toil after virtue."
Robert Hall, the popular English divine, was very much addicted to tobacco and other stimulants. A friend who found him in his study blowing forth clouds of smoke from his lips, said, "There you are, at your old idol!" "Yes," replied the divine, "burning it." Napoleon could never abide smoking tobacco; yet observing how much other men seemed to enjoy it, he tried to acquire the habit, but finally gave it up in disgust. He, however, took snuff to excess. Sir Walter Scott was very fond of smoking. Thackeray, like Burns, loved to get away by himself and enjoy the flavor of a rank tobacco-pipe. Carlyle, like Tennyson, did not care for a cigar, but kept a pipe in his mouth most of his waking hours.
Bulwer-Lytton was a ceaseless smoker; and there are few if any notable Germans who have not been addicted to the same indulgence. The nicotine produced from tobacco is one of the most deadly of all poisons, as has been proven by some startling experiments in the Paris hospitals.[83]
Thackeray said there was good eating in Scott"s novels. Extending the remark, it might be added that there was good drinking in those of d.i.c.kens, and good smoking in those of Thackeray.
Dean Swift relieved his sombre moods by harnessing his servants with cords and driving them, school-boy fashion, up and down the stairs and through the garden of the deanery of St. Patrick"s Cathedral, Dublin.
d.i.c.kens was controlled by a nervous activity which made him crave physical exercise of some sort, and he daily found relief in an eight or ten mile walk. Thackeray once told the author of these pages that he preferred to take his exercise driving upon very easy roads. When d.i.c.kens was in this country he was frequently accompanied in his long walks by the late James T. Fields, who was ever ready to sacrifice himself to the pleasure of others. Mr. Fields was not partial to extreme pedestrian exercise, and the author of the "Pickwick Papers" tested his good-nature to the verge of exhaustion in this respect. Dumas, when not otherwise engaged, was accustomed to go down into his kitchen, and, deposing the servants, cook his own dinner; and an excellent cook he must have been, if one half the stories rife about him be true. Besides, did he not write an original cook-book, which still stands for good authority in the cafes of the boulevards?
Dr. Warton, the English critic and author, as represented by contemporary authority, was noted for a love of vulgar society, which he daily sought in low tap-rooms and gin-shops, where he joked away the evening hours. Turner the painter had similar tastes and habits, though he was of a reserved and unsociable character, and noted for his parsimony. Sh.e.l.ley, Goldsmith, and Macaulay delighted in the company of young children. "They are so near to G.o.d," said Sh.e.l.ley. "Intercourse with them freshens and rejuvenates one"s soul," wrote Macaulay. "I love these little people; and it is not a small thing when they, who are so fresh from G.o.d, love us," said d.i.c.kens. Children always had a most tender and humanizing effect upon Douglas Jerrold, no matter what was his mood. He writes: "A creature undefiled by the taint of the world, unvexed by its injustice, unwearied by its hollow pleasures; a being fresh from the source of light, with something of its universal l.u.s.tre in it. If childhood be this, how holy the duty to see that in its onward growth it shall be no other!"
History tells us that Henry of Navarre, who was every inch a king, was often seen upon his palace floor with two of his children upon his back, playing elephant and rider. What a peep into the king"s heart we get by this little picture of his domestic life! Where was all the monarch"s pride of State, his kingly dignity? "How hard it is to hide the sparks of nature!" It is related of Epictetus that he would steal away from his philosophical a.s.sociates to pa.s.s an hour romping with a group of children,--"to prattle, to creep, and to play with them." Charles Robert Maturin, the poet, author of the tragedy of "Bertram," and other successful dramas, could not endure to have children near him during his hours of literary composition. At such times he was particularly sensitive, and pasted a wafer on his forehead as a token to the members of his family that he was not to be interrupted. He said if he lost the thread of his ideas even for a moment, they were gone from him altogether. Sir Walter Scott, on the contrary, was ever ready to lay down his pen at any moment, to exchange pleasant words with child or adult, friend or stranger; and it was notorious that children could always interrupt him with impunity. He declared that their childish accents made his heart dance with glee. He could not check their confidence and simplicity, though pressed upon him when his thoughts were soaring in poetic flights or describing vivid scenes of warfare and carnage. Scott preserved considerable system, nevertheless, in his composition and labor. He lay awake, he tells us, for a brief period in the quiet of the early morning, and arranged carefully in his mind the work of the coming day. He laid out systematically the subject upon which he was writing, and resolved in what manner he would treat it.
Thus it was that he could lay down his pen at any moment without deranging the purpose of the work. He had one axiom to which he tenaciously adhered, and was often heard to repeat it to his dependants and friends: "Do whatever is to be done, at once; take the hours of reflection or recreation after business, and never before it."
Schiller said that children made him half glad and half sorry,--always inclined to moralize. "Happy child," he exclaims, "the cradle is still to thee a vast s.p.a.ce: become a man, and the boundless world will be too small for thee." Goethe was ever watchful, loving, and tender with the young. "Children," he says, "like dogs, have so sharp and fine a scent, that they detect and hunt out everything." He thought their innocent delusions should be held sacred. Elihu Burritt, the "Learned Blacksmith," says that he once congratulated an humble farmer upon having a fine group of sons. "Yes, they are good boys," was the father"s answer. "I talk to them often, but I do not beat my children,--the world will beat them by and by, if they live." A fine thought, rudely expressed.
Sh.e.l.ley"s interest in children was connected with his half belief in the Platonic doctrine of pre-existence. As he was pa.s.sing over one of the great London bridges, meditating on the mystery, he saw a poor working-woman with a child a few months old in her arms. Here was an opportunity to bring the theory to a decisive test: and in his impulsive way he took the infant from its astonished mother, and in his shrill voice began to ask it questions as to the world from which it had so recently come. The child screamed, the indignant parent called for the police to rescue her baby from the philosophical kidnapper; and as Sh.e.l.ley reluctantly delivered the infant to its mother"s arms, he muttered, as he pa.s.sed on, "How strange it is that these little creatures should be so provokingly reticent!" Sh.e.l.ley was a child himself in many respects; in ill.u.s.tration of which the reader has only to recall the poet"s singular amus.e.m.e.nt of sailing paper boats whenever he found himself conveniently near a pond. So long as the paper which he chanced to have about him lasted, he remained riveted to the spot.
First he would use the cover of letters, next letters of little value; but he could not resist the temptation, finally, of employing for the purpose the letters of his most valued correspondents. He always carried a book in his pocket, but the fly-leaves were all consumed in forming these paper boats and setting them adrift to const.i.tute a miniature fleet. Once he found himself on the banks of the Serpentine River without paper of any sort except a ten-pound note. He refrained for a while; but presently it was rapidly twisted into a boat by his skilful fingers, and devoted to his boat-sailing purpose without further delay.
Its progress being watched, it was finally picked up on the opposite sh.o.r.e of the river and returned to the owner for more legitimate use.
Charles Lamb in his quaint way says: "I know that sweet children are the sweetest things in nature, not even excepting the delicate creatures which bear them; but the prettier the kind of a thing is, the more desirable it is that it should be pretty of its kind. One daisy differs not much from another in glory; but a violet should look and smell the daintiest."[84]
Good and substantial food is quite as necessary to authors and public men, as to those who gain their livelihood by laborious physical employment. Authors are, however, as a rule, rather inclined to free indulgence at table. There is as much intemperance in eating as in drinking. Tom Moore, who was the best diner-out of his day, said, by way of excusing this habit, "In grief, I have always found eating a wonderful relief." N. P. Willis was quite a gourmand. "There are," he once wrote, "so few invalids untemptable by those deadly domestic enemies, sweetmeats, pastry, and gravies, that the usual civilities at a meal are very like being politely a.s.sisted to the grave." It is certainly better to punish our appet.i.tes than to be punished by them.
d.i.c.kens and Thackeray were both inclined to free indulgence at the table, the former being struck with death at a public banquet. Dean Swift often gave better advice than he was himself inclined to follow.
He says: "Temperance," meaning both in eating and drinking, "is a necessary virtue to great men, since it is the parent of the mind, which philosophy allows to be one of the greatest felicities in life."
Macready, the famous English tragedian, would not touch food of any kind for some hours before making one of his grand dramatic efforts, but drank freely of strong tea before appearing in public,--a subtle stimulant in which the late Rufus Choate freely indulged, particularly before addressing a jury.
Abstinence in diet was a special virtue with Milton. Sh.e.l.ley utterly despised the pleasures of the table. Walter Scott was an abstemious eater. Pope was a great epicure, and so was the poet Gay. Speaking of appet.i.te, Coleridge tells us of a man he once saw at a dinner-table, who struck him as remarkable for his dignity and wise face. The awful charm of his manner was not broken until the m.u.f.fins appeared, and then the wise one exclaimed, "Them"s the jockeys for me!" Dignity is sometimes very rudely unmasked, and an imposing air is nearly always the cloak of a fool. Newton lived on the simplest food. "If Aristotle could diet on acorns," he said, "so can I;" and before sitting down to study he exercised freely and abstained from food. Dr. George Fordyce, the eminent Scotch physician, ate but one meal a day, saying that if one meal in twenty-four hours was enough for a lion, it was sufficient for a man; but in order not to be like the lion, he drank a bottle of port, half a pint of brandy, and a pitcher of ale with his one meal. Lamartine used to pa.s.s one day in ten fasting, as he said, to clear both stomach and brain. Aristo, the stoic philosopher, used to fast for days on acorns. Thomas Byron, a well-known author, never ate flesh of any sort.
Dryden"s favorite dish was a chine of bacon. Charles Lamb was enamoured of roast pig. He said, "You can no more improve sucking pig than you can refine a violet!" Keats was a very fastidious eater, but was fond of the table, especially where there was good wine,[85] and yet he was not addicted to its intemperate use. Dr. Johnson was greedy over boiled mutton; and Dr. Rhondelet, the famous writer on fishes, was so fond of figs that he died from having at one time eaten immoderately of them.
Barrow, one of the greatest of English theologians and mathematicians, is said to have died of a surfeit of pears,--a fruit of which he was extravagantly fond.
Gastronomic appet.i.te and reason have been compared to two buckets in a well; when one is at the top the other is at the bottom. Byron nearly starved himself to prevent growing gross and uninteresting in physical aspect. Addison was addicted to port and claret, and was accustomed, as already spoken of, while meditating a moral or political essay, to pace up and down the long gallery of Holland House.[86] When a humorous suggestion occurred to his fertile fancy, he solaced himself with claret; or fortified himself with a gla.s.s of port when a moral sentiment required to be enforced by an impressive close to a beautifully constructed sentence.[87] This was after his frigid marriage to the Dowager Countess of Warwick. On his death-bed he is reported to have said to her graceless son, "See how a Christian can die!" Probably the profligate youth, spying his father-in-law as he walked in the gallery, might have irreverently remarked: "See how a Christian can drink!" But the truth is that Addison, judged by the habits of his time, should be considered a moderate drinker. Poe"s nerves were so shattered that a slight amount of wine would intoxicate him into a frenzy of dissipation; the same amount swallowed by a regular toper would hardly disturb his brain at all. While Pitt was quite a young man, he was so weakly that his physician ordered him to drink freely of port wine, and he thus contracted the habit of depending upon stimulants, and could not do without them. Lord Greville tells us he has seen him swallow a bottle of port wine by tumblerfuls before going to the House. This, together with the habit of late suppers, helped materially to shorten his life.[88]
Goldsmith had a queer fancy for sa.s.safras tea, from which he imagined he derived an excellent tonic effect. Such a relish had certainly one element to recommend it,--and that was its harmlessness. Dr. Shaw, the English naturalist, nearly killed himself by drinking green tea to excess. Haydn partook immoderately of strong coffee, and kept it brewing by his side while he composed. Burns lived on whiskey for weeks together, supplemented by tobacco, which caused Byron to say that he was "a strange compound of dirt and deity."
Aristippus of old lived up to his own motto; namely, "Good cheer is no hindrance to a good life." Few men reason about their appet.i.tes, but they give way to them until disease reminds them they are made of mortal stuff. Even Plutarch used to indulge at times in riotous living, saying, "You cannot reason with the belly; it has no ears." Addison has pithily recorded his own ideas of this matter. "When I behold a fashionable table set out in all its magnificence," he says, "I fancy that I see gouts and dropsies, fevers and lethargies, with other innumerable distempers, lying in ambuscade among the dishes. Nature delights in the most plain and simple diet. Every animal but man keeps to one dish.
Herbs are the food of this species, fish of that, and flesh of a third.
Man falls upon everything that comes in his way; not the smallest fruit or excrescence of the earth, scarce a berry or a mushroom, can escape him." It is among the easiest of all things to outsit both our health and our pleasure at the table. "The pleasures of the palate," said shrewd old Seneca, "deal with us like Egyptian thieves, who strangle those whom they embrace."
Thackeray said towards the close of his life, that his physicians warned him habitually not to do what he habitually did. "They tell me that I should not drink wine, and somehow I drink wine; that I should not eat this or that, and, guided by my appet.i.te for this or that, I disregard the warning."
Eminent men are not unlike the rest of humanity in a desire for some sort of recreation, and each one finds it after his own natural bent or fancy. Literature is capable of affording the most rational and lasting enjoyment to cultured minds, but physical exercise has also its reasonable demands. The late Victor Emmanuel found recreation only in hunting, having a number of lodges devoted to this purpose in different parts of Italy. McMahon, late President of France, was also an ardent sportsman. William the Conqueror pa.s.sed all his leisure in the hunting-field; and President Cleveland hastens with rod and gun to pa.s.s his vacation in the Adirondack region. Henry V. occupied a whole day at a time upon his one game,--tennis. Cardinal Mazarin, while virtual ruler of France, used to shut himself up in his library and pa.s.s an hour daily in jumping over the chairs. Louis XVI. had a pa.s.sion for constructing intricate locks and keys, many curious specimens of which are still extant in the Cluny Museum. Charles II. in his leisure hours enjoyed practical chemistry. John Milton wiled away the long hours of his blindness, when not engaged in composing and dictating, by playing upon a cabinet organ; and Chief Justice Saunders was given to the same recreation. The Duke of Burgundy had a singular fancy for constructing mechanical traps and surprises in his house and grounds, so that visitors were liable to encounter practical jokes at every turn.
We might cover pages in enumerating the resorts of notable people in their instinctive search after necessary recreation from sterner duties.
Man must be doing something in order to be happy; action being quite as necessary to the health of body and brain as thought. Schiller declared that he found the greatest happiness of life to consist in the regular discharge of some mechanical duty. "Cheerfulness," says the shrewd and practical Dr. Horne, is "the daughter of employment; and I have known a man come home from a funeral in high spirits, merely because he had the management of it." It is in our unoccupied moments that discontent creeps into the mind; busy people have no time to be very miserable.
Amus.e.m.e.nts are not without a double purpose, and it is only a mistaken zeal which argues against those that are innocent. "Let the world," says that wise old philosopher Robert Burton, "have their May-games, wakes, whatsunales, their dancings and concerts; their puppet-shows, hobby horses, tabors, bagpipes, b.a.l.l.s, barley-breaks, and whatever sports and recreations please them best, provided they be followed with discretion."
Sir George Cornewall Lewis, a scholar as well as a statesman, found delight in a variety of intellectual work. He shirked as well as he could all invitations to parties, b.a.l.l.s, and dinners, and once despairingly exclaimed, when he was called from his studies to enter into some form of amus.e.m.e.nt, "that life was tolerable were it not for its pleasures."
CHAPTER V.
Leonardo da Vinci, the inspired painter of the "Last Supper" upon the walls of the time-worn Milan convent,[89] is said to have had a strange inclination for dirt. One biographer tells us he grovelled in it. Da Vinci was a great engineer and scientist, as well as artist. The face of Judas in the group seated at the table carries with it a legend. The artist entertained a bitter enmity towards a priest of the Cathedral who had worked him some vital injury, either real or imaginary. His revenge was clear to him; his enemy"s hated features were impressed upon his mind, and so, a little modified to suit the supposed treacherous character of the disciple, were made to const.i.tute those of Judas at the moment when he contemplates the betrayal of his Master. The likeness was too plain not to be recognized by those who knew of the ill feeling existing between the artist and priest. The result was that the latter was virtually banished from the city, as he asked to be, and was transferred to Rome.
Raphael thought he could paint best under the inspiration of wine, and therefore used it freely. Some modern critics pretend to discover the vinous influence in certain exaggerations of style peculiar to his best pictures. Notwithstanding the number and grandeur of the works which he left behind him, he died prematurely at the age of thirty-seven. A book might easily be written upon the peculiarities and habits of artists; but we continue our desultory gossip.
How often we see the lives and fortunes of individuals contingent upon seeming chance! Cromwell and Hampden, who were cousins, both took pa.s.sage in a vessel that lay in the Thames, bound for this country, in 1637. They were actually on board, when an order of council prohibited the vessel from sailing. We recall two other instances of a similar character in the career of Goethe and Robert Burns, each of whom was once on the eve of sailing for America to seek a foreign home. Locke was banished from England by force of public opinion, in company with his friend Lord Ashley, and wrote his well-known "Essay on the Human Understanding"[90] in a Dutch garret. He finally lived down all detraction, and was himself a practical example of that self-teaching which he so strongly advocates in his writings. He possessed a wonderful memory; so also did Thomas Fuller, who could repeat five hundred unconnected words after twice hearing them. Coleridge esteemed Fuller, not only for his wit, originality, and liberality, but as being the most sensible great man of an age that boasted a galaxy of great men.
Jeremy Taylor, whose birth is shrouded in mystery, though he is said to be the son of a barber, was a singular compound, in character, of simplicity and erudition. He was always a child among children, and it is said that a child could at any time attract his attention. He encountered many of the sterner vicissitudes of life, being more than once cast into prison. In the civil war he was a decided adherent of Charles I., and some have supposed him to have been a natural son of that monarch. Emerson calls him the Shakespeare of divines. Gibbon, the distinguished historian, composed while walking back and forth in his room, completely arranging his ideas in his brain before taking his pen in hand, which in a degree accounts for the correctness of his ma.n.u.script.[91] Montaigne and Chateaubriand,[92] when disposed to composition, sought the open fields and unfrequented paths, where, somewhat like Gibbon, they arranged their matter with great precision before sitting down to write. Bacon always wrote in a small room, because, as he believed, it enabled him to concentrate his thoughts.
Franklin wrote and studied with a plate of bread and cheese by his side to repair mental waste, as he said, and also to economize time. Is there not a ceaseless interest hanging over the domestic and professional habits of these famous men of the past?
Congreve, to whom Pope dedicated his Iliad and Dryden submitted his poems for criticism before giving them to the public, was extremely popular, witty, and original as a dramatist. Congreve was a slow writer, and was the father, as it were, of that style of writing which died with Sheridan. He wrote only a few dramas, but those were incomparable for the brilliancy of the dialogue; yet the brilliancy was obtained by the hardest intellectual _work_. According to Macaulay, no English author except Byron had at so early an age stood so high in the estimation of his contemporaries. But the licentiousness and general immorality of the works of Congreve are without excuse.[93] He had not even the paltry plea of necessity, which might lead him to pander to a vitiated taste in seeking a market for his wares, as was evidently the case with Fielding.
He was very desirous to pa.s.s for a man of fashion, and affectedly sneered at his own literary productions, declaring them to be produced simply to while away his idle hours. Vanity seems to have completely overshadowed any spirit of ambition which may have originally inspired him. Flattery and royal patronage were the ruin of Congreve so far as his after fame is concerned. Had he known the wholesome spur of necessity, his grand powers would have shone with surpa.s.sing l.u.s.tre. He had the genius, but not the incentive, wherewith to make a great name.
Pope is said, on a certain occasion, to have hinted as much to Congreve, whom he really reverenced for his ability, and to have incurred his partial enmity thereby. "Oh that men"s ears should be to counsel deaf,"
says Shakespeare, "but not to flattery." The broad inconsistency of Congreve"s dramas is the fact that all his characters are equally endowed with wit, culture, and genius. Collier, in his review of the profaneness of the English stage, administered to Congreve a merited castigation, to which the dramatist attempted to reply, but without success.
The remarkable vicissitudes which have waited upon the career of men of genius, and especially of authors, are very noticeable. The earliest authentic history shows us the same fatality besetting the paths of such characters as has pursued them to the present day. The student of the past will recall as examples Seneca and his friend Lucan, who were honored and famous in the days of Nero. Both of these renowned authors, when condemned to death, lanced their veins and sung a dying requiem while the tide of their lives ebbed slowly away. So Socrates drank of the fatal hemlock, like Sappho and Lucretius, voluntarily seeking death.
"That which is a necessity to him that struggles, is little more than a choice to him who is willing," says Seneca. Sophocles, the Greek tragic poet and rival of aeschylus, was brought to trial by his own children as a lunatic. He composed more than a hundred tragedies, of which seven are still extant. He also excelled as a musician. Plautus, poet and dramatist, was at one time a baker"s a.s.sistant, earning his bread by grinding corn in a hand-mill. Ta.s.so, Italy"s favorite epic poet, became broken-hearted from unrequited love, and was confined in a mad-house for years, and, ill.u.s.trative of the mutability of fortune, was afterwards brought to Rome to be crowned, like Petrarch, with laurels, but died before the day of coronation. Euripides, one of the three tragic poets of Greece, was torn to pieces by dogs; and Hesiod, a still more ancient poet, fell by the a.s.sa.s.sin"s dagger. In later times there looms up the name of Galileo, the discoverer and natural philosopher, imprisoned by the Inquisition for teaching men that the world moved.[94] "Poor Galileo," said a modern wit, "was too honest; he should have treated these inquisitors to a champagne supper, and they would have risen from it with the conviction that the world surely _did_ turn round."
Galileo"s greatest affliction, however, was that of becoming totally blind. Milton, who visited him in prison, tells us he was poor and old.
In a letter which he dictated to a correspondent, Galileo says: "Alas!
your dear friend has become irreparably blind. The heavens, the earth, this universe, which by wonderful observation I have enlarged a thousand times past the belief of former ages, are henceforth shrunk into the narrow s.p.a.ce which I myself occupy." Handel also pa.s.sed the last of his life in the gloom of blindness; and Beethoven was afflicted with incurable deafness, which nearly drove him to suicide.[95] It was perhaps the most trying misfortune possible to one with his special endowments. Have not these historic characters tested the familiar axiom that calamity is man"s true touchstone?
Dante, the greatest poet between the Augustan and Elizabethan ages, was expatriated and exiled from wife and children, becoming a poverty-stricken wanderer. Thus broken in heart and fortune he was hurried by persecution to his grave. Spenser, who endowed English verse with the soul of harmony while eking out a life of misery, finally died in abject poverty. Milton sold "Paradise Lost"[96] for ten pounds. "When Milton composed that grand poem," says Carlyle, "he was not only poor but impoverished; he was in darkness, and with dangers compa.s.sed round, he sang his immortal song, and found fit audience, though few." At one time Milton borrowed fifty pounds of Jonathan Hartop, of Aldborough, who lived to the remarkable age of one hundred and thirty-eight years, dying in 1791. He returned the loan at the time agreed upon, but Mr. Hartop, knowing his straitened circ.u.mstances, refused to take the money; the pride of the poet, however, was equal to his genius, and he sent the money back a second time with an angry letter, which was found years afterwards among the papers of the remarkable old man. Corneille, the French dramatist; Vaugelas, a noted author of the same nationality; Crabbe, the English poet; Chatterton, the precocious and versatile genius; Holzmann, the profound Oriental scholar; Cervantes; Camoens,[97]
the pride of Portugal; and Erasmus, the Dutch scholar, who rose to the leadership of the literature of his day,--all lived more or less continuously on the verge of starvation. Camoens had a black servant who had grown old with him. This man, a native of Java, is said to have saved his master"s life in the shipwreck whereby he lost all his fortune except his poems. In after years, when Camoens became so much reduced as to be able no longer to support his servant, the faithful retainer begged in the streets of Lisbon for bread to sustain the one great poet of Portugal. Le Sage, author of "Gil Blas," was endowed with exquisite literary taste, but the victim of extreme poverty. De Quincey, the eminent English author, tells us that he pa.s.sed much time in London in the most abject want, living upon precarious charity. Nowhere else can so vivid a picture of misused genius be found as in the "Confessions of an English Opium-Eater." De Quincey was noted for his rare conversational powers, supplemented by a vast and varied stock of information. He was finally successful in a business point of view, and was possessed of a n.o.ble generosity, as he relieved at a critical moment the necessities of Coleridge at a cost of five hundred pounds. This was at a comparatively early period of De Quincey"s life. Afterwards he was himself often in want of a tenth part of the sum. He was a voluminous writer, though not always publishing under his own name; his collection of works as issued in this country, edited by J. T. Fields, forms some twenty volumes. Let us not forget to mention Sydenham, the English scholar who gave us, among other profound works, the best version of Plato, and who breathed his last in a London sponging-house. "Genius,"
says Whipple, "may almost be defined as the faculty of acquiring poverty."
Some writers have contended, and not without reason, that such adversity was often providential; that without the spur of necessity genius would rarely accomplish its best, and that distress has often elicited talents which would otherwise have remained dormant. In speaking of Burns, Carlyle says: "We question whether for his culture as a poet, poverty and much suffering were not absolutely advantageous. Great men in looking back over their lives have testified to that effect. "I would not for much," says Jean Paul, "that I had been born rich." And yet Jean Paul"s birth was poor enough, for in another place he adds: "The prisoner"s allowance is bread and water, and I have often only the latter." But the gold that is refined in the hottest furnace comes out the purest; or, as he has himself expressed it, "the canary-bird sings sweetest the longer it has been trained in a darkened cage."" Horace emphatically declares, that adversity has the effect of developing talents which prosperous circ.u.mstances would not have elicited. The hardships endured by many historic persons crowd upon the mind in this connection. We remember John Bunyan in Bedford jail,[98] writing that immortal work, "Pilgrim"s Progress;" Ben Jonson,[99] the comrade of Shakespeare; John Seldon, the profound scholar and author; and Jeremy Taylor, whose "Holy Living and Dying" is only second to "Pilgrim"s Progress,"--all of whom endured the suffering of imprisonment.[100] Nor must we forget Sir Walter Raleigh, who during his thirteen years of prison-life produced his incomparable "History of the World."[101]
Lydiat, the subtle scholar to whom Dr. Johnson refers, wrote his "Annotations on the Parian Chronicles," while confined for debt in the King"s Bench; and Wicquefort"s curious work on Amba.s.sadors is dated from the prison to which he was condemned for life. Voltaire wrote his "Henriad" while confined in the Bastile; De Foe produced his best works within the walls of Newgate; and Cervantes gave the world "Don Quixote"
from a prison.[102]
Some of the sweetest love-lyrics extant were written by Charles, Duke of Orleans, during his captivity of twenty-five years. Baron Trenck wrote his wonderful book of personal experience during a ten years"
captivity in a subterranean dungeon at Magdeburg,--a book which has been translated into every modern language. He was released from prison, but died by the guillotine at Paris in 1794. Silvio Pellico, the Italian poet and dramatist, who wrote the well-known story of his prison life, was ten years confined in the fortress of Spielberg, in Moravia. Ponce de Leon, among the foremost of Spanish poets, as well as the poet Alonzo de Ereilla, were victims of long and severe incarceration because they dared to translate the Biblical Songs of Solomon into Spanish.
James Howell, the English author, wrote his "Familiar Letters" in the Fleet Prison. So popular were they, that he had the pleasure of seeing ten editions of them published in rapid succession; this was about the year 1646. William Penn and Roger Williams, both founders of States in this country, suffered imprisonment. The former wrote his well-known "No Cross, No Crown" in the Tower of London. Oakley, the great Oriental scholar, whose remarkable Asiatic researches have rendered his name famous, wrote his work on the Saracens in jail. Cobbett, the political satirist, was no stranger to the inside of a prison; and we all remember Cooper, the English chartist, who made himself famous by his "Prison Rhymes," written behind the frowning bars. Montgomery suffered the same chilling influences for daring to make a public plea for freedom of speech. Theodore Hook, the novelist, delightful miscellaneous writer, and unrivalled wit, was for a long period imprisoned.[103]
Richard Lovelace, the English poet, was a gallant soldier who spilled his blood for his king in the civil war and impoverished himself in the same cause, was imprisoned for political reasons, and died poor and neglected at the age of forty. He wrote to "Lucasta,"[104] when going to the wars, that fine and often-quoted couplet:--
"I could not love thee, dear, so much, Loved I not honor more."
Lucasta (_Lux casta_, "pure light"), to whom his verses were dedicated, was Lady Sacheverell, whom he devotedly loved, but who married another after having been deceived by the false report that Lovelace had been killed. He was liberated from prison under Cromwell, but lived a wretched life thereafter. Leigh Hunt, the most genial of essayists, was imprisoned for two years, when he was visited by Lamb, Byron, and Moore.