Country sports exhausted his finances, and in 1820 he took orders and was presented to the rectory of Ballagh in Connemara. His novel of O'Hara was followed by his Wild Sports of the West (1832), and that by Stories from Waterloo. Though his congregation was practically non-extant and his duties were nominal, he was ultimately deprived for non-residence. Having produced a score of works, including a Life of the Duke of Wellington and a history of the Irish rebellion, but none of them bearing remotely on theology, he died at Musselburgh in Midlothian. Dr Maginn prefixed a Life of him to an edition of his Erin-go-Bragh, or Irish Life Pictures (2 vols. 1859). John Hamilton Reynolds (1796-1852) was born at Shrewsbury, educated at St Paul's, and practised law in London pretty regularly till about 1840, when he accepted a post as clerk to the County Court at Newport in the Isle of Wight. Devotion to literature interfered with his professional success; as early as 1814 he had published poems, and these were followed by several volumes of poetry-The Naiad (1816); The Garden of Florence, from Boccaccio (1821)-in which he showed successively the influence of Byron, Scott, Wordsworth, Leigh Hunt, Keats, and Shelley. He produced also several farces, a burlesque of Wordsworth's Peter Bell, and some humorous poems. He is best remembered as the intimate friend of Keats, who wrote many letters to him and a poetical epistle. One of Reynolds's best sonnets is addressed to Keats; and Reynolds was for a time associated with his brother-in-law, Thomas Hood, in some of his literary ventures. He latterly wrote for the magazines, and till 1831 was one of the proprietors of the Athenæum. John Abraham Heraud (1799-1887), an author of curious and varied erudition, was born in London of Huguenot stock, studied in Germany, and sought to make Schelling's philosophy known in England. He had begun writing for the magazines, and in 1820 published his first poem. Later he made two attempts at epic grandeur in his poems, The Descent into Hell (1830) and Judgment of the Flood (1834). He was also a contributor to the drama, having written several tragedies, one of which, Videna, was successfully acted in 1854. Mr Heraud was in poetry what Martin was in art, a worshipper of the vast, the remote, and the terrible. His Descent and Judgment are psychological curiosities, displaying much misplaced intellectual and poetic power. Mr Heraud published also books on Savonarola and Shakespeare, books of travel and history, an historical romance, lyrical ballads, sonnets, and The War of Ideas, a poem on the Franco-Prussian war, and The Sibyl among the Tombs (1886). He did much editorial and magazine work, and was dramatic critic for the Athenæum and for the Illustrated London News. Edward Irving (1792-1834) came at thirteen from Annan to the Edinburgh University, and after graduating in 1809 did school work for some years. He had been Carlyle's schoolfellow at Annan, and the two friends were teachers in Kirkcaldy at the same time; and everybody knows how ultimately Carlyle married the pupil to whom Irving had lost his heart when teaching at Haddington. Licensed to preach, in 1819 he was appointed assistant to Dr Chalmers in Glasgow. In 1822 he was called to the Caledonian Church, Hatton Garden, London; his success as a preacher there was such as had never been known. De Quincey thought him 'the greatest orator of his times;' Coleridge was an intimate ; Canning heard the Scotch minister preach the 'most eloquent sermon he ever listened to;' Scott, meeting him at a dinner-table, 'could hardly keep his eyes off him; Hazlitt and Wordsworth were more or less attracted by this meteor; and around him in London, as Carlyle said, were 'mad extremes of flattery, followed by madder contumely, by indifference and neglect.' In 1825 he began to announce his convictions in regard to the imminent second advent of Christ; this was followed by the translation of The Coming of the Messiah (1827), by 'Aben Ezra'-really the work of a Spanish Jesuit. Before 1828, when his Homilies on the Sacraments appeared, he had begun to elaborate his views of the Incarnation, and he was charged with heresy as maintaining the sinfulness of Christ's nature. He was now deep in the prophecies, and when in the beginning of 1830 he heard of extraordinary manifestations of prophetic power in Dumbartonshire, he gladly believed them. He was arraigned before the (Scottish) Presbytery of London in 1830 and convicted of heresy, ejected from his new church in Regent's Square in 1832, and finally deposed in 1833 by the Presbytery of Annan, which had licensed him. The majority of his congregation adhered to him, and a new communion, the Catholic Apostolic Church, was developed, commonly known as Irvingite, though Irving had little to do with the establishment of its doctrine, ritual, or hierarchy. Shortly after his health failed, and soon after returning to Scotland he died of consumption. Irving's works hardly betray the secret of his power, which was partly due to his imposing figure and commanding personality. His books are almost all written in a rhetorical and exalted style, not without really majestic and noble passages. Their titles are significant of his eschatological monomania-For the Oracles of God, For Judgment to Come, The Last Days, and the like. True Political Reformation. Almost all the high genius and enterprise of this age, at home and abroad, calculate that these effects which we claim for divine government will result from political reformation; and they have drawn after them the sympathies of by far the most disinterested part of our nation, with whom the watchword of domestic and Ioreign renovation is well-balanced and well-administered political institutions. Now, from all I can understand and learn of the nature of civil polity, it will stretch no farther than to protect and defend us in our several rights; and when it would enter farther in, to take an oversight of our private, our domestic, our personal conduct, it then becomes tyranny. Why, then, should there be any dispute between us and the politicians; or why should they scowl on us, and we look scowling back on them? Let them mind the outworks and defences of each man's encampment, guard the craft of priests and the power of governors from coming in to molest it; we will in the meantime set all things in order within the poor man's cottage, which their good endeavours have made to be revered as 'the poor man's castle.' Let them keep the king from daring to enter it; we will endeavour to keep the devil from daring to enter it. And in our turn we will do them as good a service as they have done us; for we will touch the lethargic bosoms of the sluggish people with the Promethean spark of religion, which persecution and power cannot quench, and which will light and feed the lamp of freedom when need be; we will give them a people fearful of no one save God, armed in religion and virtue, which alone are incorruptible by the bribes, reckless of the power, and more terrible to the measures of wicked governors than an army with banners-a people who will stand for liberty on the earth and shape themselves for glory in heaven. And we will satisfy the legislators no less than the reformers; we will give them a people obedient to wholesome laws, and examples of peaceable conduct to all around, but as refractory against conscientious bonds or arbitrary measures as the Puritans and Covenanters were of old. And we will satisfy the economists no less; for we will give them a people industrious upon principle, independent upon principle, and who will refrain their natural instincts rather than cover a country with pauperism and misery. The Day of Judgment. Imagination cowers her wing, unable to fetch the compass of the ideal scene. The great white throne descending out of heaven, guarded and begirt with the principalities and powers thereof the awful presence at whose sight the heavens and the earth flee away, and no place for them is found-the shaking of the mother elements of nature, and the commotion of the hoary deep to render up their long-dissolved dead-the rushing together of quickened men upon all the winds of heaven down to the centre, where the Judge sitteth on His blazing throne. To give form and figure and utterance to the mere circumstantial pomp of such a scene no imagination availeth. Nor doth the understanding labour less. The Archangel, with the trump of God, riding sublime in the midst of heaven, and sending through the widest dominions of death and the grave that sharp summons which divideth the solid earth, and rings through the caverns of the hollow deep, piercing the dull, cold ear of death and the grave with the knell of their departed reign; the death of Death, the sprouting of the grave with vitality, the reign of life, the second birth of living things, the reunion of body and soul-the one from unconscious sleep, the other from apprehensive and unquiet abodes-the congregation of all generations over whom the stream of time hath swept. This outstretches my understanding no less than the material imagery confuses my imagination. And when I bring the picture to my heart, its feelings are overwhelmed; when I fancy this quick and conscious frame one instant reawakened, the next reinvested, the next summoned before the face of the Almighty Judge-now begotten, now sifted through every secret corner, my poor soul possessed with the memory of its misdeeds, submitted to the scorching eye of my Maker, my fate depending upon His lips, my everlasting, changeless fate—I shriek and shiver with mortal apprehension; and when I fancy the myriads of men all standing thus explored and known, I seem to hear their shiverings like the aspen leaves in the still evening of autumn. Pale fear possesseth every countenance, and blank conviction every quaking heart. They stand like men upon the perilous edge of battle, withholden from speech and pinched for breath through excess of struggling emotions-shame, remorse, mortal apprehension, and trembling hope. There was a collected edition of Irving's works (5 vols. 1864-65); his prophetical works' were separately edited (2 vols. 1867-70); and there was a volume of Miscellanies (1867). The standard Life is that by Mrs Oliphant (1862); Carlyle's Life, Essays, and Reminiscences give an even more vivid picture of his fascination and his aberrations. Augustus and Julius Hare, joint authors of the Guesses at Truth, were the sons of the impoverished squire of Hurstmonceaux, who made a romantic marriage with the brilliant cousin of the Duchess of Devonshire, and lived mainly abroad, writing dramas, a novel, and histories of the Helvetic republics and of Germany during the Thirty Years' War. Augustus William (17921834), born in Rome, was educated at Winchester and New College, Oxford, and became rector of Alton Barnes near Devizes. Besides his share in the Guesses he left two volumes of sermons. Julius Charles (1795-1855), born near Vicenza, from the Charterhouse passed in 1812 to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he became a Fellow in 1818, and in 1822 classical lecturer. He took orders in 1826, and succeeded his uncle in the rich family living of Hurstmonceaux, Sussex, in 1832; in 1844 married Frederick Denison Maurice's sister; became Archdeacon of Lewes in 1840, and in 1853 chaplain to the Queen. His annual charges awakened Englishmen to the fact that they had much to learn in theology from Germany, and helped to mark him out as a leader of the Broad-Church party. In 1820 he translated Fouqué's Sintram; in 1827 he and his brother Augustus published anonymously Guesses at Truth -a volume of reflections, suggestions, and short essays on a great variety of subjects, varying in length from brief aphorisms like, 'Our poetry in the eighteenth century was prose; our prose in the seventeenth poetry,' to disquisitions of twenty pages on art, religion, literature, and philosophy. In so far as they dealt with theological questions, they, like some of their other works, gave to many the impression that the brothers were dangerously liberal. Unitarianism, Calvinism, and popery are equally condemned; Shakespeare, Bacon, Coleridge, and Byron are commented on; Schleiermacher and Kant furnish matter for meditation ; South and Voltaire are contrasted; and pregnant thoughts often relieve what now seem rather trite or commonplace elucubrations. The next work of Julius was the translation of Niebuhr's History of Rome (1828-32) in collaboration with Thirlwall, and his own Vindication of Niebuhr's History (1829). In 1848 he published the Essays and Tales of his friend and somewhile curate, John Sterling, with a Memoir to which Carlyle's masterpiece was meant to be a corrective-Carlyle holding that Hare made too much of Sterling as a doubting theologian and clergyman. Hare wrote also a Vindication of Luther (1854) and several volumes of sermons. The quotations are all from the Guesses. Wastefulness of Moral Gifts. Among the numberless marvels at which nobody marvels, few are more marvellous than the recklessness with which priceless gifts, intellectual and moral, are squandered and thrown away. Often have I gazed with wonder at the prodigality displayed by Nature in the cistus, which unfolds hundreds or thousands of its white starry blossoms morning after morning, to shine in the light of the sun for an hour or two, and then fall to the ground. But who, among the sons and daughters of men-gifted with thoughts which wander through eternity,' and with powers which have the godlike privilege of working good and giving happiness-who does not daily let thousands of those thoughts drop to the ground and rot? Who does not continually leave his powers to draggle in the mould of their own leaves? The imagination can hardly conceive the heights of greatness and glory to which mankind would be raised if all their thoughts and energies were to be animated with a living purpose-or even those of a single people, or of the educated among a single people. But as in a forest of oaks, among the millions of acorns that fall every autumn, there may perhaps be one in a million that will grow up into a tree, somewhat in like manner it fares with the thoughts and feelings of man. What then must be our confusion when we see all these wasted thoughts and feelings rise up in the judgment and bear witness against us ! But how are we to know whether they are wasted or not? We have a simple, infallible test. Those which are laid up in heaven, those which are laid up in any heavenly work, those whereby we in any way carry on the work of God upon earth, are not wasted. Those which are laid up on earth, in any mere earthly work, in carrying out our own ends or the ends of the Spirit of Evil, are heirs of death from the first, and can only rise out of it for a moment, to sink back into it for ever. Age lays open the Character. Age seems to take away the power of acting a character, even from those who have done so the most successfully during the main part of their lives. The real man will appear, at first fitfully, and then predominantly. Time spares the chiselled beauty of stone and marble, but makes sad havoc in plaster and stucco. Loss of the Village Green. What a loss is that of the village green! It is a loss to the picturesque beauty of our English landscapes. A village green is almost always a subject for a painter who is fond of quiet home scenes, with its old, knotty, wide-spreading oak or elm or ash; its gray church-tower; its cottages scattered in pleasing disorder around, each looking out of its leafy nest; its flock of geese sailing to and fro across it. Where such spots are still found, they refresh the wayworn traveller, wearied by the interminable hedge walls with which 'restless ownership'-to use an expression of Wordsworth's-excludes profane feet from its domain consecrated to Mammon. The main loss, however, is that to the moral beauty of our landscapes-that to the innocent, wholesome pleasures of the poor. The village green was the scene of their sports, of their games. It was the playground for their children. It served for trapball, for cricket, for manly humanising amusements, in which the gentry and farmers might unite with the peasantry. How dreary is the life of the English husbandman now! 'Double, double toil and trouble,' day after day, month after month, year after year, uncheered by sympathy, unenlivened by a smile; sunless, moonless, starless. He has no place to be merry in but the beer-shop, no amusements but drunken brawls, nothing to bring him into innocent, cheerful fellowship with his neighbours. The stories of village sports sound like legends of a mythical age, prior to the time when 'Sabbathless Satan,' as Charles Lamb has so happily termed him, set up his throne in the land. For the Hares see the Memorials of a Quiet Life (1872), largely a life of Mrs Augustus Hare, by Mr A. J. C. Hare, a nephew of the brothers; and also the same author's stupendous Autobiography (6 vols. 1896-1900). This Mr Hare is well known by his Walks in Rome and many other charming topographical works, his Two Noble Lives, and The Gurneys of Earlham. John Sterling (1806-43), born at Kames Castle, Bute, was the son of Captain Edward Sterling, at that time a farmer, but by-and-by, settled in London, to be known as the 'thunderer' of the Times-not the editor, but a very influential contributor to the great journal. At sixteen John went to Glasgow University, and at nineteen to Cambridge, where he distinguished himself at the Union; he left without a degree in 1827, and soon was busy on the Athenæum, which he partly owned and with F. D. Maurice largely edited and wrote for a few months. Influenced by Coleridge, and liberal in sympathies, he was nearly sailing on that crazy expedition to overthrow the tyrant, Ferdinand of Spain, which ended in the execution at Malaga of his friend General Torrijos and his own cousin Boyd. He married in November 1830, but soon fell dangerously ill, and spent fifteen months in St Vincent. In 1833 he published anonymously a novel, Arthur Coningsby, containing the ballad quoted below. In 1833 he took orders, and served eight months as Julius Hare's curate at HurstmonHis health again giving way, he resigned, and never advanced to priest's orders; the divergence between his opinions and the Church's soon widened beyond even Coleridgean accommodation. He contributed to Blackwood's and the Westminster, planned tragedies (Strafford one of them, ceaux. printed in 1843), and wrote poems, one of which, The Election, humorous or even comic rather than Crabbean, was published in 1841. An earlier poem was The Sexton's Daughter; a later one, a serio-comic or Bernesque piece, unfinished, on Richard Cœur de Lion. For Maga he wrote The Palace of Morgana, a singular prose poem. There were also remarkable essays on Montaigne and on Carlyle, which showed he had drifted farther from Broad-Church semi-orthodoxy. He ulti mately accepted some of the main positions of D. F. Strauss; and it is significant that the intimate of his later years, to whom he confided the guardianship of his son, was Francis William Newman. In August 1838 he founded the (later so-called) Sterling Club, among whose members were Carlyle, Allan Cunningham, G. C. Lewis, Malden, Mill, Milnes, Spedding, Tennyson, Thirlwall, W. H. Thompson, and Venables. Julius Hare edited his Essays and Tales (1848), with a Memoir, which seemed to Carlyle so inadequate, and as dealing with Sterling mainly as theologian and Christian clergyman, so misleading, that he himself undertook that masterpiece of biography which, more probably than any of Sterling's own writings, will preserve the memory of an interesting and significant personality. Ballad. A maiden came gliding o'er the sea, In a boat as light as boat could be, 'O, where shall I find the brave young sprite That will follow the track of my boat to-night?' To the strand the youths of the village run, They hoisted the sail, and they plied the oar, (From Arthur Coningsby.) Robert Vaughan (1795-1868), born in England but of Welsh descent, was Independent minister at Worcester and Kensington, Professor of History in London University 1830-43, and president of the Independent College at Manchester 1843-57. He founded the British Quarterly in 1845, and edited it till 1867. Among his score of books are, besides works in devotional and polemical theology, a Life of Wycliffe (1828), a History of England under the Stuarts (1840), and Revolutions in History (1859–63); and he edited an edition of Milton, with a Life. Sir John Bowring (1792–1872) was born in Exeter, and on leaving school entered a merchant's office, where he pursued that course of polyglot study that enabled him ultimately to boast he knew two hundred languages and could speak a hundred. The national poetry of different peoples had special attractions for him, and he translated folk-songs of most of the languages of Europe, including not merely Dutch and Spanish, but Russian, Polish, Bohemian, Servian, and Hungarian (some of them by help of German 'cribs'). In 1821 he formed a close friendship with Bentham, and in 1824 became the first editor of his Radical Westminster Review. After visiting Switzerland, Italy, Egypt, Syria, and the countries of the Zollverein, he prepared valuable government reports on their commerce; and he sat in Parliament for Kilmarnock (1835-37) and for Bolton (1841-49), actively promoting the adoption of Free Trade. From 1849 to 1853 he was British consul at Hong-kong; in 1854 he was knighted and made Governor. His active policy in the ‘affair of the lorcha Arrow, involving the bombardment of Canton (1856), nearly upset the Palmerston Ministry. In 1855 he concluded a commercial treaty with Siam, in 1858 made a tour through the Philippines; and his accounts of those two visits are about the most readable of thirty-six works. His own poems were accounted of less consequence than his translations (not merely the folk-songs, but from Goethe, Schiller, and Heine). But some of his religious poems and hymns found wide acceptance; and though in not a few his Unitarian theology repels the orthodox, the hymn 'In the cross of Christ I glory' is Catholic enough to have been written by Watts or Wesley, and is actually sung by Christians of all denominations. His Autobiographical Reminiscences (1877) are hardly so entertaining as might have been expected. Henry Francis Lyte (1793-1847), author of 'Abide with me' and some others of the bestknown English hymns, was born at Ednam near Kelso, in Scotland, but was the son of an English officer, a member of a very ancient Somersetshire family. He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and for twenty-four years laboured faithfully, in spite of feeble health, at Lower Brixham in Devonshire. His best-known hymn was written on the evening of the Sunday on which he for the last time administered the communion to his congregation before starting for that sojourn at Nice whence he never returned. 'Jesus, I my cross have taken,' is another of his hymns; many of them are paraphrases of the Psalms, such as 'Pleasant are thy courts above,' 'Sweet is the solemn voice that calls,'' Praise, my soul, the King of Heaven,' and 'God of mercy, God of grace.' His Poems, chiefly Religious (1833), were reprinted as Miscellaneous Poems (1868). There is a Life prefixed to the Remains (1850). Sir Thomas Noon Talfourd (1795-1854), son of a brewer at Reading, was educated at its grammar-school under the famous Dr Valpy, was called to the Bar in 1821, and in 1833 got his silk gown. As Serjeant Talfourd he was conspicuous for his popular eloquence and his Liberalism, and was Whig member for his native town 1835-41 and 1847-49; in 1849 he became a Justice of Common Pleas, and was knighted. He wrote much for the reviews, was dramatic critic to a monthly, and produced books or long articles on Greek and Roman history and Greek poetry. In 1835 he printed privately his tragedy of Ion, which was next year performed at Covent Garden Theatre. His next tragedy, The Athenian Captive (1838), was almost equally successful, as was also The Massacre of Glencoe (1840); The Castilian (1853) was only privately printed. He died of apoplexy while delivering his charge to the grand jury at Stafford. Ion, his highest effort, aims (somewhat ineffectively) at reproducing the grandeur of the Greek drama, and its plot is a story embodying the Greek conception of destiny. The oracle of Delphi had announced that the punishment of pestilence drawn down on the people by the misrule of the royal race could only be stayed by the destruction of the royal stock. Ion dedicates himself to the business of slaying the tyrant, who falls by another hand; and Ion, discovered to be himself the son of the king, recognises his doom and patriotically accepts it. The play is not without poetry or power, but is, like the author's prose, too copious and rhetorical. Not even Ion has lived on. Talfourd is remembered as the admirer and the faithful friend and literary executor of Charles Lamb (see page 72), and as having published in two sections Lamb's Memoir (Letters, 1837; Final Memorials, 1848). This work-the standard and authoritative life-appeared in one volume in 1875, and again in 1892. Talfourd helped Bulwer to edit Hazlitt's works; and he deserves honour for introducing in 1837 the Copyright Bill, which, amended, passed in 1842. Ion. Ion, our sometime darling, whom we prized As it would perish at the touch of wrong! Hath his clear spirit vanquished-Love, the germ If in the earnestness of childish sports lon. Am I indeed so pale? Stand forth, Agenor. Agenor. Pardon me Ion. Nay, I will promise 'tis my last request; Grant me thy help till this distracted state Rise tranquil from her griefs-'twill not be long, If the great gods smile on us now. Remember, Meanwhile, thou hast all power my word can give, Whether I live or die. Agenor. Crythes. Ion. |