was pleasant in man" was sleeping in Westminster Abbey, Johnson said of him," he was the cheerfullest man of his age"; and we know from other sources that his gaiety never went beyond "the limits of becoming mirth" that it was not purchased, like Foote's, and that of so many wits, by the loss of his own self-respect, or at the cost of pain to other people. and not only did he bring it out, but he lent his own great name and genius to the second part in the piece. Nor did Garrick ever lose his early admiration for his old preceptor. Very pleasant is the picture Boswell gives of his bustling about him with a kind of filial fondness at the Literary Club, and flattering the old man's pride with a subtle deference of homage. In this there was no So, too, when we hear of Garrick's being servility, for, well as he knew how free meanly parsimonious, and some loose words Johnson at times made with his name, he of Johnson are quoted to support the charge, could bear such passing slights for the sake let us set against them such passages as of the old times and the core of true regard these" Sir, I know that Garrick has giv- for him which he well knew to be in the en away more money than any man that I heart of a man whose genius and worth am acquainted with, and that not from os- threw all his foibles into the shade. Nor tentatious views." "Garrick was a very could this deference be otherwise than most good man- a man who gave away freely grateful to Johnson; for here was a man of money acquired by himself." More conclu- unquestionable genius, with fame, fortune, sive than all upon this and many other influence, and troops of friends at his compoints, where Garrick's character was chief- mand, throwing off all airs of superiority, if ly assailed by his detractors, are the words he had any, and placing himself humbly which Reynolds puts into Johnson's mouth among the foremost of his admirers. People in that admirable Imaginary Conversation accused Garrick of being prone to play off between him and Gibbon, which Croker says too much the airs of a prosperous man. Sir George Beaumont told him was not Such accusations successful men, however invention, but the substance of what Rey-humble, are sure to provoke from the unsucnolds had heard Johnson say in many con- cessful. One who knew human nature so versations. "That he loved money, nobody will dispute. Who does not? But if you mean, by loving money, that he was parsimonious to a fault, sir, you have been misinformed! To Foote, and such scoundrels, who circulated these reports, to such profligate spendthrifts, prudence is meanness, and economy is avarice." Precisely so. It was just by Foote and others of his class, who had made frequent appeals to him for money in large sums, and not made them in vain, that Garrick was slandered for meanness and avarice. None knew this better than Johnson and Reynolds; and with two such vouchers for his liberality, let Macklin, Foote, Murphy, and the like say their worst of him, the ultimate verdict is certain to be in his favour. Johnson in many ways had reason to speak well of Garrick. In his prosperity, the successful actor and manager had a warm heart and hand for the poor scholar with whom he had come up to London to seek their fortunes; Johnson, to use his own mocking phrase, with twopence halfpenny in his pocket, and Garrick with three halfpence in his. Among his first acts as manager was to bring out his friend's Irene, that most perfect specimen of what Johnson meant when he spoke of plays in which Declamation roared, while passion slept; well as Johnson could not fail to take a juster view of Garrick's demeanour. "If all this good fortune," he said, " had happened to me, I should have had a couple of fellows with long poles walking before me, to knock down everybody that stood in my way. Consider, if all this had happened to Cibber or Quin, they'd have jumped over the moon. Yet Garrick speaks to us." Yes, dearly in his heart did that strange medley of nobleness and weakness love his Davie. When Davie died, a great piece of sunshine disappeared from Johnson's life. Better than the fine panegyric which he wrote of him a few months after that event, that it had "eclipsed the gaiety of nations, and impoverished the public stock of harmless pleas more convincing to our hearts of the high qualities as a man which he knew to have distinguished him who had never been less to him than the admiring friend of the old Edial days-is the picture shown to us in these words of Cumberland: -"I saw old Samuel Johnson standing beside his grave at the foot of Shakespeare's monument, and bathed in tears." Burke was there too, and showed no less emotion. ure The reputation of Garrick is in a measure unique. He sprang at once to the very summit of his profession, without previous training or experience. From his childhood he had been fond of the theatre, and, like most boys who are so, he had appeared in pearance than ever anybody did with twenty years' practice; and, good God, what will he be in time?" Such success might well have turned any head. It did not turn Garrick's. He had both the modesty of true genius, which always sees before it a higher ideal than it reaches, and its patience, which spares no pains to rise nearer to its ideal. In this he stood alone among all the actors of his time, and by this he realized the anticipations both of Pope and Mrs. Porter. He knew well that no art demands a wider range of accomplishments, a more certain command of resources, than the actor's. The great player is called on to express All thoughts, all passions, all delights, private theatricals. But his instinct as an artist was too true to admit of his going deeply into such amateur trifling. He studied the living stage and its professors, and learned from their violation of truth and nature what at least it behoved him to avoid, before he could hope to realize the dream of histrionic greatness which haunted his youth. After a few trial performances at Ipswich, he appeared at Giffard's Theatre in Goodman's Fields as Richard the Third, and next morning awoke and found himself famous. The genius of the young actor took the town by storm. Dukes by the dozen, all the leaders of fashion, even Cabinet Ministers, drove down from the West-end to an obscure street in the City to see this great master of the passions. Pope himself came out to see him. "I saw," says Garrick," our little poetical hero, dressed in black, seated in a side-box near the stage, and viewing me Voice, feature, action, are all subject to the with a serious and earnest attention. His strictest scrutiny. There are no second look shot and thrilled like lightning through thoughts, no retouches. The right key must my frame, and I had some hesitation in pro- be struck at once, or failure ensues. No ceeding, from anxiety and from joy. As amount of practice will effect this if the inRichard gradually blazed forth, the house ner nature of the artist has not been was in a roar of applause, and the conspiring hand of Pope showered me with laurels." Well might the young actor's heart leap when he saw the deep searching eyes of the poet riveted upon him! Garrick worshipped genius; and here to judge him had come the, to him, most notable man of his time, the man who had moreover been familiar with his great predecessors, Betterton and Booth. What that judgment was is happily upon record. "That young man never had his equal as an actor, and he will never have a rival." The old actors tried to sneer at the youth who was teaching the town that nature and the stage need not of necessity be divorced. "This," said Quin, "is the wonder of a day; Garrick is a new religion; the people follow him as another Whitefield, but they will soon return to church again." But they did not return; and Garrick, great in epigram as in acting, turned the tables upon Quin by some happy lines, of which these have become proverbial: When doctrines meet with general approbation, His success was something to which his rivals were not likely to be soon reconciled. But the great tragic actress, Mrs Porter, who had left both the stage and London, and could afford to be candid, may be believed when, having come up to town to see the new star, she said of him to a friend: -"He is born an actor, and does more at his first ap brought by culture to the point at which --- nor Nothing, indeed, strikes us as more remarkable in Garrick than his industry. Placed at the age of twenty-four at the very top of his profession; courted and caressed by society, of which, like all men who shine in it, he was fond; constantly extending his range of parts; with the management of a great theatre on his shoulders, and all the toil, anxiety, and irritation which that entails was ever manager so worried as he by the insolence of authors and the jealous susceptibilities of actors Garrick found time to write farces, to recast plays, to compose innumerable prologues, epilogues, and vers de société, and to keep up an immense correspondence, while at the same time he seems to have been as well read in the literature of Eu 126 rope as other men who had little to do but to How much the toils of Garrick's life were soothed, and his career prolonged, by the love of his charming wife it is easy to imagine. Her beauty lives for us in Hogarth's fine picture now at Windsor Castle, which represents her stealing behind her husband, and catching his pen, as he pauses to fix the thoughts as they flash before his fancy. The picture was painted for Garrick, and the catalogue of his sale states that it represents him writing his prologue to Foote's farce of Taste. We can fancy him at that point where, in illustration of the virtuoso's passion for the antique, he says, Their Venus must be old, and want a nose! when his reverie is broken by the saucy eyes as ever made a husband's heart happy. "It It is the life of this man that Mr. Percy Fitzgerald - having, it appears, performed a similar office for Sterne- has undertaken to write. That there was room for a good life of Garrick there can be no doubt. The memoirs by Murphy and Davies, valuable so far as they go, are both imperfect; and the sketch by Boaden prefixed to the two bulky quartos of Garrick's Correspondence published in 1831, though excellent in many respects, is somewhat meagre, and fails in turning to due account the valuable materials which lay ready to the writer's hands, in the letters to which it forms the introduction. From these and other scattered, though by no means recondite, sources of information the fullest light as to the man and the actor were to be drawn. But judgment, taste, a power of appreciating character, and of depicting it, with a special familiarity with the men and manners of the time, and the history and usages of the stage, were required for the task. The subject was, moreover, worthy of all the pains that a careful and conscientious writer could give it, and of that nice finish in execution of which Garrick's own performances were In all these qualities Mr. an example. Fitzgerald's work is painfully deficient. He has appropriated all that is good in the works of Murphy, Davies, and Boaden in the most wholesale way, without skill in condensation, and very constantly without acknowledgment, and he has thrown together, very confusedly, an immense quantity of miscellaneous materials from other sources, taking no pains to winnow what is worthless or even fictitious from what is characteristic and authentic. Mr. Fitzgerald shoots all kinds of rubbish upon his reader without mercy, and has manifestly never taken home to himself the wholesome axiom that the excellence of all books, and of biographies especially, lies quite as much in what the author does not write as in what he does. He suppresses nothing, not even himself. Nor does Mr. Fitzgerald fail only in the exercise of that discrimination which we have a right to demand in a biographer dealing with copious materials which it is his duty to sift for his reader. His workmanship is slovenly in the last degree. For grace of style it would be idle to look in a writer of Mr. Fitzgerald's class; but some little regard to method and grammar might not have been too much to expect. What is to be said of a man who could print such a passage as this? Here, too, was seen that wild and witty and drunken Dr. Barrowby, who after a jovial life had died the death that so often attends a jovial life." Or this: - "He tried to get into the Royal Society, and when he was rejected, held up two old patrons, who had opposed, his admission, in the most outrageous manner.' We might fill columns with similar specimens of slipslop. 66 Mr. Fitzgerald, like all weak writers, is very hard upon former biographers. He takes infinite pains to point out Murphy's mistakes, which Boaden and others had pointed out before, as if the discovery of them were his own. He even accuses Boaden of having made a most arbitrary selection in printing the Garrick correspondence, "printing almost the least interesting, cutting up the letters, often suppressing the best portions and mistaking the sense." This is a most serious charge, but Mr. Fitzgerald has not even attempted to support it by evidence. Where in his book are these "best portions?" where anything more interesting than the letters actually printed by Boaden in 1831 ? Certainly not in Mr. Fitzgerald's volumes. Even in the sorry fragments of new matter which he prints, he, too, resorts to suppression of the most absurd kind. From a manuscript journal of Garrick's grandfather he quotes the notice by the writer of the death of a brother, having suffered like a martyr with a retention.' A retention of what? "Of urine," says the original, of which a copy is before us; but the fact was too gross for the squeamish taste of Mr. Fitzgerald! Why, then, quote the passage at all? 66 Without enthusiasm for his subject no man can write a good biography; but unless enthusiasm is controlled by judgment, biography degenerates into panegyric. So it has been with Mr. Fitzgerald. His portrait has no shadows. His avowed aim has been to show that his hero was "as great in Garrick as in Lear"- - a very laudable one if discreetly pursued, and one with which we heartily sympathise. But here it has not been discreetly pursued. "Estne quisquam, qui tibi purior, prudentior, humanior, officiosior, liberalior videatur?" might have been taken from Cicero's speech for Roscius as the motto of the book, for it is the question put to the reader all through these two bulky volumes with a very clumsy persistency. But Mr. Fitzgerald would have come much nearer his mark had he kept his enthusiasm in check by remembering Churchill's warning, He hurts the most who lavishly commends. A PAPER in the Contemporary Review which calls for especial notice is that of Mr. Plumptre, the King's College Professor of Theology. It is a curious attempt to dissect the party organization of the Church of England, from the stand-point of one who professes to belong to neither. The oddest thing about it is that one who ought to be well-informed, makes no mention whatever of the great Anglican party which is represented by the main body of our bishops, clergy and laity, and which is notoriThey cannot certainly be included in the Broad ously that of many of our leading Divines. or Low Church parties, and the only other party he gives us is the High Church, but then that party is represented in Mr. Plumptre's analysis by Dr. Pusey and the Tracts, by the Guardian, Christian Remembrancer, and Ecclesiastic in its better phase, by its "more recent developments " in its later and worse. and cheaper organs The Anglican party has never accepted that position, never" treated the great work of the Reformation as an unlucky episode, a limb badly set, which must be broken before it can be set right again""; never" spoken and written as if the Anglican reformers were martyrs either for an opinion which was itself heretical, or through sheer stupid incapacity to perceive that their teaching and that of the Church of Rome were substantially identical." As this party, beyond a doubt, represents the Reformers, and nearly all the Divines of any importance of whom the Church of England has boasted since, and as it has never accepted some of the principal points of the Tractarian theology and loudly repudiated their "organs," it is, we say, strange that the learned Professor should have quietly omitted all notice of it. Perhaps it as might be, one would think, that he was himself part of it, and that his reticence arose from. a sort of misplaced modesty, but his vehement partiality for the Latitudinarians which comes out in every page forbids the assumption. This partiality has led him into some odd statements. It is surely an unworthy trick to claim Bishop Butler as in any sense a parent of the Broad Church school. If ever there was a divine who would have been horrified at the modern principles of that school, it would have been the great author of the "Analogy," whose destruction of Rationalism on its own premises is thus twisted to his discredit. Does the Professor really mean to let his friends " sume the fallibility of the Bible and of the Church"? Has he weighed the fact that the doctrine of the Atonement is held pretty much alike by High and Low Churchmen? Has he any logical theory of the Divine relation to man, except what is Rationalistic, which will entitle him to throw such bitter scorn on the Pampton Lectures of 1858? As a minor blunder, does he really consider Leighton and Baxter as the representatives of the "Puritan tradition"? They were of a much higher stamp; representatives of Presbyterianism, no doubt, but that was a very different thing. In short, we are sorry for Mr. Plumptre's reputation that he should have undertaken a task so much beyond his strength as an analysis of Church parties; and still more sorry to see how much he is identified with the worst of them. His complacency at the prospect of the whole education of the country getting into the hands of the Broad Churchmen is perhaps one of the most painful parts of his article. With him it is" matter for rejoicing"; but it is fair to say that his joy is founded on the mistake we have already exposed, that no other teachers are possible but those of the school of the Record or the Church Times. All who are not of these schools are with him comprehended in the "Broad Church" school, with those who from "Dr. Arnold downwards have been prominent in the work of educational progress.' What can we say of such an analysis of the Church of England of to-day! - London Churchman. TO MY NOSE. KNOWS he, who never took a pinch, Nosey, the pleasure thence which flows? Knows he the titillating joy That my nose knows? O Nose! I am as proud of thee |