Page images
PDF
EPUB

"Oh!" observed one of the committee, with a blank look, not altogether reassuring. "We are a poor church, and it is a heavy liability," I continued; "but we are heart and soul with you, and I hope you will do us the justice to believe that we are incorruptible voters. For ourselves we would not take a farthing" ["Not a brass farden!" interposed Pincher]; "but for the church we are bound to judge and act differently." I stopped, falteringly, though Mary's father said "Go on," and Pincher cried "Hear, hear!"

gratification of conveying to the Conservatives a dignified refusal of their offer; and a few days after of seeing my people go up like the honest and sturdy Britons they were, to register their votes in accordance with their own independent and incorruptible principles. The Liberals won by a majority of nineteen only.

Mary and I were married soon after; and the chapel is called Election Chapel to this day.

AN UNSUBJECTED WOMAN.

MRS. ELIZABETH CARTER died an unmarried

lady, aged eighty-nine, in the year 1806. She was eldest daughter of the Rev. Nicholas Carter, D.D., perpetual curate of the chapel at Deal, afterwards rector of Woodchurch and of Ham, and one of the six preachers in Canterbury Cathedral. Dr. Carter was the son of a rich grazier in the vale of Aylesbury, and in his boyhood had looked forward to a milkyway of life; but was sent rather late to Camre-bridge, where he became hopelessly addicted to Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. He therefore took orders in the church, and produced, instead of tubs of butter, tracts on controversial theology. Elizabeth was his first child by his first wife; but he married twice, and had a variety of sons and daughters, who were all reared on a diet of Greek, Latin, and Hebrew.

It seemed to me that the committee fully comprehended our position and their own. They retired to the further end of the room, where stood a table, on which lay a number of papers; and then they entered into an animated and protracted debate. I wondered how it was going to end; but the helm was out of my hand altogether, and we were drifting I knew not whither. Was it possible that I could endure the anguish of seeing my own people go up like luctant martyrs to the Conservative booth, and there offer up their dearest principles as a sacrifice to the cause? For it was pretty certain now that the chapel debt would be paid off as the price of our votes -but by whom? If our own side would but buy us in; I thought, with growing antipathy, of the prim curate, and the glances he had cast at my Mary when we had met him once or twice in the lane. Was his star or mine in the ascendant?

At this instant one of the committee walked along the room, with loud and creaking boots which set my excited nerves all ajar. His countenance was sombre; his mien, I thought, rejective.

"Do all your votes go together ?" asked, gloomily.

"To a man, with emphasis.

66

he

," answered Mary's father,

Forty votes?" he added. "Forty votes," repeated Mary's father. I think I was very near dying of anxiety

at that moment.

"They must be ours," said the agent; "four hundred pounds, you say, will pay off your chapel debt. It shall be done. You must give your votes to us."

I do not know how I got back to Little Coalmoor. The change wrought in my future prospects during the last six hours had been wrought too rapidly. But I have a distinct recollection of Mary meeting me at her father's door, and testifying her pleasure in a manner perfectly satisfactory to myself. The next day I had the

Little Betsey, in her nursery days, did not take kindly to her father's way of dieting his children on dead languages. She suffered so much intellectual congestion from them that she became, as a girl, afflicted with frequent and severe headaches, which were the plague of all her after life. When a young lady, she took to snuff to keep herself awake over her studies, and relieve her head. For the rest of

her life she was a snufftaker.

Mrs. Carter was not one of the true blue-stockings, for the characteristic of their coterie was not the possession, but the affectation of, much learning. Her early training bent her life in a particular direction, but in that direction she grew vigorously.

Elizabeth Carter in her youth learnt French of a French refugee minister, she gave all the by being sent to board for a year in the house time required of our grandmothers to "the various branches of needlework," and with much pains learnt to spoil music with the spinet and the German flute. She had been most assiduously trained in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew; in these studies she succeeded best, and especially she took to Greek, which became a living tongue to her, and which she conquered without help of such Greek grammars as were then in use. Dr. Johnson said in compliment of a celebrated scholar, that he understood Greek better than any one he had ever known except Elizabeth Carter. Like other young ladies, Betsey Carter wrote verse, and at the

age of twenty-one she published a very small collection of poems, with a Greek motto from Euripides, signifying that they were nothing. She liked the morality of Mrs. Rowe's letters, which are still to be found lying neglected on old bookstalls, and wrote on the occasion of her death, that it would be her own justest pride,

My best attempt for fame,

That joins my own to Philomela's name, Philomela being Mrs. Rowe. She admired also the poetry of Stephen Duck, the thresher, patronised and pensioned by the Queen of George the Second, and addressed him in lines which begin

Accept, O Duck, the Muse's grateful lay. When about twenty years old there was some prospect of a place at Court for her if she understood the German of the reigning family. She learnt German on this hint, but did not go to Court, and for many years saw London life only when visiting among her relations. Afterwards she learnt Spanish and Italian, some Portuguese, and even Arabic, making for herself an Arabic Dictionary. She had a taste also for geography, ancient of course, knowing a great deal more of the geography of Greece B.C. 1184, than of Middlesex in her own time. But with all her work she had passed a youth not without playfulness, and she was throughout life heartily and cheerfully religious, with a wholesome disrelish of controversy, wherein she was wiser than her father.

Surely the doctor's influence would have sufficed to keep her zeal for study within wholesome bounds. She was throughout life an early riser, considering herself to be up late if she was only up by seven. Her common time of rising was between four and five. Early to rise comes well enough after early to bed; but we have Dr. Carter praising his daughter in her girlhood for a virtuous resolution not to study beyond midnight." The only stand he made was against her use of snuff to keep herself awake and abate headache. When she was the worse for the want of it, he let her have it; his protest failed against the snuff, and was not made against the overwork that made snuff necessary: and not snuff only. Poor little Betsey Carter used also to keep herself awake for night study by binding a wet towel round her head, putting a wet cloth to the pit of her stomach, and chewing green tea and coffee. Be it observed, nevertheless, that she did not kill herself. She lived to the age of eighty-nine. aches were the penalty inflicted on her for abridging hours of sleep.

enjoyment, and walk to it three miles and back in a gale of wind. She studied astronomy, but had not a soul above shirt-buttons, and made her brother's shirts. It was suspected that her love of study had produced a secret resolution against marriage. She said, indeed, at eightysix, "Nobody knows what may happen. I never said I would not marry ;" and among offers refused in her youth was one that tempted her enough to make her hesitate while her friends urged acceptance. If he had not furnished evidence against himself by publishing a few rather licentious verses, Elizabeth would probably have taken to this suitor's shirt-buttons, and had a livelier firstborn than her translation of Epictetus. When she was sixty-five years old, Hayley dedicated his Essay on Old Maids to Mrs. Elizabeth Carter, as "Poet, Philosopher, and Old Maid," an attention which she did not gratefully appreciate, because she disliked the temper of his essay. Perhaps she was too fastidious. Punch himself was in awe of her. She was not above going to a puppet-show, but when she went to one at Deal, "Why, Punch," said the showman, "what makes you so stupid?" "I can't talk my own talk," said Punch. "The famous Mrs. Carter is here."

And how had the lady become famous? Thus: Edward Cave, of the Gentleman's Magazine, being an old friend of her father's, admitted into his magazine occasional bits of verse from her, signed Eliza. The first appeared before she was quite seventeen years old. Through Cave she made the acquaintance of young Samuel Johnson upon his first coming to London. Two or three months after his first contribution to Cave's magazine had ap peared-it was a Latin alcaic ode-Dr. Carter replied from the country to his daughter's letter from town, "You mention Johnson; but this is a name with which I am utterly unacquainted Neither his scholastic, critical, or poetical character ever reached my ears." Johnson was then aged nine-and-twenty and Miss Carter twenty-one. It was in Cave's shop, as fellowcontributor to the Gentleman's Magazine, before either of them had tasted fame, that the acquaintanceship began to which Elizabeth Carter owes much of her fame. Writing to her eighteen or twenty years after the beginning of their cordial but ceremonious friendship, Johnson said, "To every joy is appended a sorrow. The name of Miss Carter introduces the memory of Cave. Poor dear Cave! I owed him much; for to him I owe that I have known you;" and he subscribed himself her But her head-most obedient and most humble servant, "with respect, which I neither owe nor pay to any other." At the age of twenty-two Miss Carter had translated out of French the criticism of De Crousaz upon Pope's Essay on Man, and immediately afterwards translated also for Cave, from the Italian of Algarotti, six dialogues for the use of ladies upon Newton's philosophy of light and colour. Samuel Johnson, then at work for Cave, corrected the proofs for the young lady, of whom the learned Doctor

Now, it is not just to the body to overcome its fatigues habitually with snuff in the nose, green tea-leaves in the mouth, a wet towel round the head, and a wet cloth at the pit of the stomach. But against all that, was here to be set a placidly cheerful temper and a mind well occupied. Elizabeth Carter, in her youth, could get through nine hours' dancing with

Thomas Birch then made a note, which showed that she already seemed to be upon the way to fame. 66 This lady," said Dr. Birch, in noting her bit of translation, "is a very extraordinary phenomenon in the republic of letters, and justly to be ranked with the Sulpitias of the ancients and the Schurmanns and the Daciers of the moderns. For to an uncommon vivacity and delicacy of genius, and an accuracy of judgment worthy the maturest years, she has added the knowledge of the ancient and modern languages at an age when an equal skill in any one of them would be a distinction in a person of the other sex."

A learned woman was a marvel in those days, and her place in creation yet unsettled. Already there cropped up in connexion with Miss Carter, when she was little more than a girl, the sublime idea, not merely that she was fit to be an elector of M.P.s, but that she was competent to be one. "Here's all Deal," wrote one of her sisters to her, "is in amazement that you want to be a Member of the Parliament House; and Mrs. Blank, was told it, but so strongly affirmed that it was no such thing, that she came to our house quite eager to ask, and was quite amazed to hear 'twas so. Let me know in your next whether 'tis a jest, or that you really want to go."

Her scholarship and knowledge of modern languages must have attracted a good deal of general attention, for Miss Carter was hailed as a sister prodigy by the marvellous youth John Philip Baratier, who was about four years younger than herself. Of Baratier it is said that, when four years old, he talked with his mother in French, with his father in Latin, and with the servants in German. He read Greek at the age of six, Hebrew at eight, and translated Benjamin of Tudela's travels out of Hebrew into French when a boy of eleven. When he was but fourteen years old, the University of Halle conferred on him the degree of Master of Arts, and he astonished crowded audiences by his disputations upon fourteen theses. He died of consumption before he had attained the age of twenty, and it was in the last year or two of his life that he heard of the learned English damsel Elizabeth Carter. He then opened a correspondence, in which he praised her as one whose Latin verse the Romans of the Augustan age would have taken for that of the swan of Mantua, or of a Latin Sappho.

While corresponding with Baratier, Miss Carter formed a more abiding friendship with Miss Catherine Talbot, a bishop's granddaughter, who lived with her widowed mother in the family of Dr. Secker, then Bishop of Oxford, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury; Dr. Secker gratefully remembering that he was indebted to her family for his first steps of promotion in the church. Through her friend Catherine Talbot, Miss Carter obtained the friendship of Dr. Secker, which was so emphatically shown, that when the archbishop became a widower the London world assigned to him Elizabeth Carter for a second wife. But

some there were who gave her to Dr. Hayter, Bishop of London. "Brother Hayter," the archbishop said one day, "the world has it that one of us two is to marry Madam Carter; now I have no such intention, and therefore resign her to you." "I will not pay your grace the same compliment," replied the bishop. "The world does me much honour by the report." So as Deal had held that Elizabeth Carter was the woman to have a seat in the House of Commons, London believed her place to be among the bishops. Or among the players. For when Edward Moore's play of the Gamester came out, it was held to be so highly judicious and moral, that it was at first attributed to Mrs. Carter. Moore wrote also Fables for the Female Sex, which were not less worthy of one who might be assigned as bride to an archbishop. But among he-writers of that day the true primate of the female world was Samuel Richardson; and Richardson embalmed a characteristic piece of Elizabeth Carter's verse, her Ode to Wisdom, in his Clarissa. He had not been able to find out the author of the ode, and had, therefore, republished it in his novel (in the first edition part of it only) without consent; for which, though he had done honour thereto by engraving it and giving it with music, he was called to order by the lady. He replied with extreme courtesy, as one who "would sooner be thought unjust or ungenerous by any lady in the world than by the author of the Ode to Wisdom."

[ocr errors]

When at home with her father in the parsonage at Deal, Miss Carter had a bell at the head of her bed, pulled by a string which went through a chink in her window, down into the sexton's garden. The sexton, who got up between four and five, made it his first duty to toll this bell lustily. Some evil-minded people of my acquaintance," she wrote to a friend, "have most wickedly threatened to cut my bell-rope, which would be the utter undoing of me, for I should infallibly sleep out the whole summer." Up thus betimes, she went to work as a schoolboy to his lessons, and thence to the ramble before breakfast over sunny commons, or through dewy cornfields, or the brambles of the narrow lane, pulling sometimes a friend out of bed to be companion of the walk, and respectfully noted by the country folks as "Parson Carter's daughter." Then home, and "when I have made myself fit to appear among human creatures we go to breakfast, and are extremely chatty; and this and tea in the afternoon are the most sociable and delightful parts of the day. We have a great variety of topics in which everybody bears a part, till we get insensibly upon books; and whenever we go beyond Latin and French, my sister and the rest walk off, and leave my father and me to finish the discourse and the teakettle by ourselves, which we should infallibly do, if it held as much as Solomon's molten sea." Her work in later life was mainly to keep fresh the fruits of early study. Her headaches had to be considered, and her book

work was done with rests every half-hour, and rambles off to water her pinks and roses, or to gossip a few minutes with any friend or relation who was in the house. But she read every day before breakfast two chapters of the Bible, and a sermon, besides some Hebrew, Greek, and Latin; and after breakfast, or at some other time of the day, a little of every modern language she had learnt, in order to keep her knowledge of it from rusting.

When she began her translation of Epictetus, at the wish of her friends Dr. Secker and Catherine Talbot, Elizabeth Carter was helping her father by taking the sole charge of the education of her youngest brother, whom she sent up to Cambridge so well prepared that he astonished much the examiners, who asked at what school he had been educated, with the reply that his only teacher was his eldest sister. Miss Carter's translation of Epictetus was not begun with a view to publication, but when it was done, and revised by Dr. Secker, there was publication in view, and she was told that a life of Epictetus must be written. Her reply to Miss Talbot will astonish those who connect learning in women with want of shirt-buttons among men. She said, "Whoever that somebody or other is who is to write the life of Epictetus, seeing I have a dozen shirts to make, I do opine, dear Miss Talbot, that it cannot be I." It was urged on her also that she must add notes to christianise the book of the heathen philosopher, and prevent "danger to superficial readers." She did all that was urged on her, at the same time that she was finishing the preparation of her brother's back and brains for college.

The book appeared in seventeen 'fifty-eight, and there were more than a thousand subscribers for it. By way of compliment, more copies were subscribed for than were claimed, and the lady earned by this labour a thousand pounds. The book, also, when published, was maintained in good repute. Some years afterwards her friend Dr. Secker brought her a bookseller's catalogue, and said, "Here, Madam Carter, see how ill I am used by the world. Here are my Sermons selling at half price, while your Epictetus is not to be had under eighteen shillings, only three shillings less than the original subscription." Such a work from a woman was a thing to be talked of in Europe, as the world then went. An account of the learned lady was published even in Russia, where, as Miss Carter said, they were just learning to walk on their hind legs.

Four years later appeared Miss Carter's poems, in a little volume dedicated to the Earl of Bath; and she was now able to have a lodging of her own in London-a room on a first floor in Clarges-street-whence she was always fetched out to dinner by the chairs or carriages of her many friends. Her brothers and sisters had grown up and been put out in the world; her father's second wife was dead, and he was moving about at Deal from one hired house to another. Elizabeth then bought herself a house by the Deal shore, took her

father for its tenant, and lived there with him until his death, he working in his library, and she in hers, with the annual treat of a visit to London. The nautical world of Deal, impressed by her erudition, held that she had done something in mathematics which had puzzled all the naval officers. She had foretold a storm, and some were not at all sure that she could not raise one. A young man remarked to a verger's wife in Canterbury Cathedral that it was very cold. "Yes," she said, "and it will be a dreadful winter, and a great scarcity of corn; for the famous Miss Carter has foretold it." While her house at Deal was being settled (she had bought two small houses and was turning them into one), Madam Carter took a tour upon the Continent in company with the Queen of the Blue Stockings, Mrs. Montagu, and the Earl of Bath, who died in the next year rather suddenly, and did not, as her friends had thought he would, bequeath her an annuity. The bulk of his property went to his only surviving brother, who died three years later, and the next heir then, delicately professing that it was to fulfil Lord Bath's intentions, secured to Miss Carter an annuity of a hundred pounds during her life, which, towards the close of her life, was increased to a hundred and fifty. The annuity came to Miss Carter in seventeen 'sixty-seven, and a couple of years earlier she had received a like annuity from Mrs. Montagu, who then, by her hus band's death, obtained the whole disposal of his fortune. An uncle of Miss Carter's, who was a silk-mercer, had also died and left fourteen thousand pounds to Dr. Carter and his children, of which Elizabeth's share was fifteen hundred in her father's lifetime. In later years an annuity of forty pounds came to Miss Carter from another friend. She was rich, therefore, beyond her needs; for she lived inexpensively, and had money to spare for struggling rela tions, and for those of the poor whose griefs she saw. When left alone in the Deal house, she kept up a healthy hospitality with tea and rubbers of whist for threepenny points; was a neat cheerful old woman, simply dressed and scrupulously clean, before her time in knowledge of the value of a free use of cold water, fond of her tea and her snuff, and never worrying her country friends with ostentation of her learning.

The headaches at last almost put an end to study. Mrs. Carter read Fanny Burney's novels with enjoyment, delighted in Mrs. Radcliffe's, objected to the morality of Charlotte Smith's, and thought there was more of Shakespeare in Joanna Baillie than in any writer since his time. That was because she had a strong prejudice on behalf of female writers at a time when women were only beginning to find their way into the broad space they now occupy in English literature. She thought much less of Burns than of Joanna Baillie, because Miss Baillie was always proper, and Burns was in some places anything but ladylike. Though living at Deal, she refused to buy there any article which, by its cheapness or otherwise, she could suspect to have been smuggled. But her reason

for this, given to Mrs. Montagu, was a generous one: "I cannot help pitying these poor ignorant people, brought up from their infancy to this wretched trade, and taught by the example of their superiors to think there can be no great harm in it, when they every day see the families of both hereditary and delegated legislators loading their coaches with contraband goods. Surely in people whom Heaven has blessed with honours and fortune and lucrative employments of government, the fault is much greater than that of the poor creatures whom they thus encourage?" She was a kindly old woman, whose gentle courteous manner won the hearts of servants in the houses that she visited. One lady ascribed some of the excellence of her own servants to Mrs. Carter's influence upon them; for she was often mindful of the hearts and heads and open ears of servants behind the chairs at dinner, in a way that made her direct conversation into a form that would ensure their carrying away some wholesome thoughts from their attendance.

Now this, faithful in small things, was a good womanly life, although the life of a lady given to Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, and much other erudition, a lady high in honour at the original blue-stocking assemblies, and one who could be truly described as a snuffy old maid. That description of her would be true, but not exhaustive. She had a woman's religiousness devoid of theologic spite; a woman's social vivacity of speech, with a disrelish of uncharitable comment and flippant bitterness which went far to suppress that form of conversation in her presence. She cheered her family and eased her father's labour and cost in the rearing of his younger children. She blended the writing of an essay upon Epictetus with the making of a set of shirts. Without distinguished genius, by industry with love of knowledge and a calm adherence to her sense of right, she passed into an old age honoured with affectionate respect from people of all ranks of life and all degrees of intellect. Looking back at her out of our century into hers, we may find that many of her ways and notions were old fashioned; but in the good unspoilt by her learning; and the less likely to be spoilt because it was true learning, the result of steady work.

fashion that never grows old, she was a woman

GREEN TEA.

A CASE REPORTED BY MARTIN HESSELIUS, THE GERMAN PHYSICIAN.

IN TEN CHAPTERS. PREFace. THOUGH carefully educated in medicine and surgery, I have never practised either. The study of each continues, nevertheless, to interest me profoundly. Neither idleness nor caprice caused my secession from the honourable profession which I had just entered. The cause was a very trifling scratch inflicted by a dissecting-knife. This

trifle cost me the loss of two fingers, amputated promptly, and the more painful loss of my health, for I have never been quite well since, and have seldom been twelve months together in the same place.

In my wanderings I became acquainted with Dr. Martin Hesselius, a wanderer like myself, like me a physician, and like me an enthusiast in his profession. Unlike me in this, that his wanderings were voluntary, and he a man, if not of fortune, as we estimate fortune in England, at least in what our forefathers used to term "easy circumstances."

In Dr. Martin Hesselius I found my master. His knowledge was immense, his grasp of a case was an intuition. He was the very man to inspire a young enthusiast, like me, with awe and delight. My admiration has stood the test of time and survived the separation of death. I am sure it was well-founded.

For nearly twenty years I acted as his medical secretary. His immense collection of papers he has left in my care, to be arranged, indexed, and bound. His treatment of some of these cases is curious. He writes in two distinct characters. He describes what he saw and heard as an intelligent layman might, and when in this style of narrative he has seen the patient either through his own hall-door, to the light of day, or through the gates of darkness to the caverns of the dead, he returns upon the narrative, and in the terms of his art, and with all the force and originality of genius, proceeds to the work of analysis, diagnosis, and illustration.

Here and there a case strikes me as of a kind to amuse or horrify a lay reader with an interest quite different from the peculiar one which it may possess for an expert. With slight modifications, chiefly of language, and of course a change of names, I copy the following. The narrator is Dr. Martin Hesselius. I find it among the voluminous notes of cases which he made during a tour in England about fifty-four years ago.

It is related in a series of letters to his friend Professor Van Loo of Leyden. The professor was not a physician, but a chemist, and a man who read history and metaphysics and medicine, and had, in his day, written a play.

The narrative is therefore, if somewhat less valuable as a medical record, necessarily written in a manner more likely to interest an unlearned reader.

These letters, from a memorandum at

« ՆախորդըՇարունակել »