And

ing it to an inch" and skating Arbuthnot lamented.
on thin ice. "Succession in
danger" shout the Whigs;
"Church in danger," the Tories.
It is a jostling phantasmagoria
of England while she makes
the famous peace that chic-
aned the Dutch and contented
the great Monarch. And mean-
while Vanessa fans her flame
with the classics and arranges
her "spark's" Sunday periwig.
Stella and Dingley are wearied
of expecting the letter that shall
herald Presto's return. And
Presto himself domineers and
despairs; sits up four nights
a-week making believe to crack
bottles with Lord Treasurer or
Bolingbroke, and jests with all
that brilliant throng of sixteen
"Brothers" whose master-spirit
he was.
In rushes "Mordanto "
Peterborough, fresh from his
diplomatic wanderings, and
warm-heartedly embraces the
imperious parson, who is power-
ful without place. Outside rage
and brawl the Mohocks. The
watch cries "Twelve of the
clock," and still Swift dallies.
It is "twelvepenny weather,"
and the thrifty economist will
trudge it home. He creates
Sterne Bishop of Dromore, and
accepts his deanery with dis-
gust. And then succeeds the
home-coming, with Vanessa in
his wake. Fled is the rapture
of the deferred meeting. That
brief spell of dictatorship has
ruined his life. Ambition has
murdered sleep. He has drunk
of those troubled waters, and
obeys the summons of their
spell he hastens back-only
to be in at the death. Ah, if
but the queen had lived! "Fui-
mus Tores!" as delightful Dr

henceforth there is no more
journal, no more peace. The
fine friends fade away into ex-
ile or dependence or death.
Walpole mounts the throne.
He cares no more for the "Scrib-
lerus Club" than his two au-
gust servants did for letters.
And, despite more fame and
more wretchedness, Swift, after
Stella's death, retires in hag-
gard mockery till he dies "like
a poisoned rat in a hole." The
brave vessel with its jolly crew
has made shipwreck. All that
sparkling company is dispersed.
It has become a phantom ship
of immortal but ghostly fable.

And this naturally brings us to Horace Walpole. Men of letters are no longer men of affairs. The former yield the latter homage in exchange for patronage, or defiance as the badge of disappointment. The age of pasteboard classicality has begun-of industrious trifles and elaborate impromptu. Walpole may be called the founder of "anecdotage," just as Spence inaugurated the literary curiosity - shop. The former was the precursor of Greville, the latter of Isaac Disraeli. pole styles himself a "garrulous Brantôme." In his "Reminiscences of the Courts of George the First and Second," compiled for the inquisitive Misses Berry, we find him at his best. Macaulay has unduly belittled Walpole. His trifling is not trivial; he is a dilettante, but in the grand style. From that style Thackeray himself borrowed, as witness the subjoined extract from Walpole concerning George II.: "The King's

last years passed as regularly
as clockwork. At nine at night
he had cards in the apartment
of his daughters... with Lady
Yarmouth, two or three of the
late queen's ladies, and as many
of the most favoured officers of
his own household. Every Sat-
urday in summer he carried
that uniform party, but with-
out his daughters, to dine at
Richmond, They went in
coaches and six in the middle
of the day, with the heavy
horseguards kicking up the
dust before them-dined, walked
an hour in the garden, returned
in the same dusty parade, and
his majesty fancied himself the
most gallant and lively prince
in Europe. Every one re-
members his dramatis persona.
What galaxy of shabby they deemed rejected.
a
state and magnificent mean-
ness! There are the princesses
Amelia and Caroline in two
camps with their two heart-
less and titled lovers orientally
cooped up in that royal seraglio;
there are royalties enthusiastic
for the deposed family; there is
the royal father always hating
the royal son, and, by a trans-
ference of the wars of succession
to the cabals of the successor,
ensuring the peace of England.
There is dark-eyed insolent
Anne Brett, the late King's
English mistress, whose mother
was Savage's. Abishag was
lodged in the palace under the
eyes of Bathsheba." There is
aging Duchess Sarah, still ra-
pacious and still revengeful;
and there is cool, dogged Sir
Robert, who buys boroughs as
a grazier buys oxen, and who
with his matter-of-pocket mas-
terfulness annihilates the old

66

Marlborough Junto. "When a reconciliation had been patched up between the two courts, and my father became First Lord of the Treasury a second time, Lord Sunderland in a tête-à-tête with him said, 'Well, Mr Walpole, we have settled matters for the present, but we must think whom we will have next.' Walpole said, 'Your lordship may think as you please, but my part is taken."" We gain a pleasant glimpse of the clever, stoical Queen Caroline, who on the accession of her husband undid his rash choice of the zany Sir Spencer Compton for minister. The crowd of turncoat courtiers flocked to Leicester House and fought studiously shy of the favourite, whom "Mr Walpole being descried by the queen, 'There I am sure I see a friend,' she cried." And in Horace Walpole himself runs an unsuspected vein of his father's patriotic fibre. In 1745, when the national horizon was threatening, he thus writes to Sir Horace Mann:

... How much I wish myself with you! anywhere where I could have my thoughts detached in some degree by distance and length of time from England. With all the reasons that I have for not loving great part of it, it is impossible not to feel the shock of living at the period of all its greatness. To be one of the Ultimi Romanorum." One can scarcely check a smile at the affectation of Horace Walpole as Horace Walpole as "Last of the Romans. No better commentary could be instanced than the description of the frontis

66

piece to his 'Memories of to be a talebearer, an eavesGeorge the the Second': "The dropper, a common butt in the author leaning on a globe of taverns of London." Dickens the world, between Heracleitus calls him an unconscious coxand Democritus, presents his comb." It was Carlyle who book to the latter. In the first drew attention to Boswell's landscape is a view of the author's villa at Strawberry Hill, near Twickenham, where the memoirs were chiefly written. At the bottom is the date of the year, with emblems and the author's arms and motto. . . ." To complete the contrast we append the following "short notes" of his diary for 1754: "June 25.-I erected a printing-press at my house in Strawberry Hill. August 8.I published two odes by Mr Gray, the first production of my press. In September I erected a tomb in St Anne's churchyard, Soho, for Theodore King of Corsica." Could forcible feebleness further go?

6

It is refreshing to turn to Boswell. We shall confine ourselves to Boswell's character, which has been little studied. If the Journal to Stella' is a diary of two worlds, Boswell's 'Life' is an atmosphere of one -that of his hero. Yet through this atmosphere his own personality emerges clear and palpable. Rogers (also a diarist) instances in his commonplace-book "Boswell drunk at Lord Falmouth's in Cornwall, kicking about his bed at midnight, swearing at the house, in which he said there was no bed to lie on and no wine to drink." Macaulay, in his famous essay, brands him more suo as "vile and impertinent, shallow and pedantic, a bigot and a sot, bloated with family pride,... yet stooping

higher nature. But Carlyle,
with his love of exaggerated
alternative, and his fatal in-
capacity for thinking out things
thoroughly, delineates Johnson
as a sort of practical Don Quix-
ote, with Boswell as Sancho
Panza. Johnson sallies forth
with the broadsword of truth
to slay giants; the sensual,
ignorant Boswell has yet the
saving instinct of hero-worship,
and chooses and serves valiantly
a spiritual master.
All this is hyperbole. It is
true that Boswell drank deep,
but then so on occasion did
Johnson: it was a drinking age.
The question is not whether he
drank, but what he did while
drinking. Boswell loved to lis-
ten to wisdom-a gift almost
as rare as wisdom itself—and
port stimulated the wisdom and
kindled the conversation. At
their opening rendezvous in the
Mitre Tavern each finished a
bottle, and, among other things,
discussed orthodoxy. It was on
this that Johnson, with the ge-
nial glow around him, exclaimed,
"Give me your hand-I have
taken a liking to you." It is
true that Boswell, before he
met Johnson first at Davies's
shop in 1763, had been in search
of a celebrity, but when one
comes close up to him one dis-
cerns the reason. He had co-
quetted with Romanism. He
was a man of weak will but
good instincts, who had hitherto
seen the better and followed the

His wife who afterwards reconciled herself by a pot of her own marmalade remarked caustically that she had seen many a bear led by a man, but never before a man led by a bear. The bore as martyr is surely a rara avis. Two considerations must also be borne in mind. One, that Boswell was hypochondriacal — a touch of nature that made them kin. The other, that he rejoiced in a faculty in which Johnson was deficient an extreme patience

-

papers. The consequence has been a vast number of secondhand platitudes and ineptitudes. "Un sot a toujours un plus sot qui l'admire."

The diaries that enthral that present great actors off the stage, and commanders at ease -have been comparatively few. One such diary was destroyed -Byron's. But portions of his journals are embalmed in Moore's Life, and agree so closely with the spirit of his letters that some mention of them must here be made. No one in perusing them can fail to be struck with their predominant, even violent, sincerity. Byron's writing was mainly a vent for his impetuous feelings. In all his compositions, public as well as private, a sense of lurid smoke from the flame of passion is manifest; they are the craters of his heart. His emphasis and directness of expression, the shrewd common-sense imputed to him by Disraeli, his vivid intuitions of men, things, and scenery, his moody sense of doom-originally implanted by the Calvinist superstitions of his nurse, and apparent in his very scepticism-his thirst for action, his untamable genius for rebellion, his proud intensity in collision with the filmed hollowness of fashionable life, all these forces are welded together, not in chaos, as might have been supposed, but in a weird creative harmony. Let us cull one example from his Ravenna diary: "Hear the carriage-order pistols and greatcoat as usual-necessary articles -weather cold-carriage open

and inhabitants somewhat savage, rather treacherous and highly inflamed by politics. Fine fellows, though, good material for a nation. Out of chaos God made a world, and out of high passions comes a people." And out of high passions came Byron. If only he had oftener transcended the domain of the merely passionate! The Swiss diary-a fragment

contains an episode of characteristic scorn about the English lady who exclaimed of Mont Blanc, "Did you ever see anything more rural?”—“as if it was Highgate or Hampton or Brompton or Haye's!" while his earliest diary of all shows a specimen of quite "Don Juan" calibre : "Went to bed and slept dreamlessly, but not refreshingly: awoke and up an hour before being called, but dawdled three hours in dressing. When one subtracts from life infancy (which is vegetation), sleep, eating and swilling buttoning and unbuttoninghow much remains of down right existence?-the summer of a dormouse."

But the most methodical diary of any, one beginning while Byron was a boy and lasting till 1867, is that of Henry Crabb Robinson-a man whose elevation of spirit, alertness of mind, and volatile salt companioned him with the most various intellects of his protracted life. The intimate of the Clarksons and Mrs Barbauld, the comrade of Hazlitt, the friend and correspondent of Goethe and his court, of Tieck and Schelling, the acquaintance of Schiller and Madame de