Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847

Part III

-–On passing the little village of Erith, once one of the prettiest rustic spots in Kent, where the parson and the surgeon formed the heads of the community, and its only intelligence of the living world depended on the casual arrival of a boat from the Margate Hoy in search of fresh eggs for the voyage, a small house was pointed out to me, embosomed in a dell, which would have completely suited the solitary tastes of a poet weary of the world:

Fifty years ago, a weekly newspaper was the only remembrancer to either parson or doctor, of the world which they had left, and that one only sent by the member for the county, when he thought it desirable to awake the general gratitude on the approach of a general election. The Thames certainly might remind the village population that there were merchants and mariners among mankind; but what were those passing phantoms to them? John the son of Thomas lived and died as Thomas the father of John had lived and died from generation to generation. The first news of the American war reached it in the firing of the Woolwich guns for peace; and the original tidings of the French Revolution, in similar rejoicings for the Battle of Waterloo.

says the philosophic Cowley; and with Cowley I perfectly agree.

But Erith is this scene of philosophy no more. It has now shared the march of mind: it has become almost a watering-place; it has a library, a promenade, lodgings for gouty gentlemen, a conventicle, several vigorous politicians, three doctors, and, most fatal of all, four steam-boat arrivals every day. Solitude has fled, and meditation is no more.

But, to my story. In that lonely house, lived for several years, in the beginning of the century, a singular character, of whom nothing more was known, than that he had come from some distant place of abode; that he never received a letter; and that he never hunted, shot, or fished with the squiredom of the country. He was of large form, loud voice, had a sullen look, and no trust in her Majesty's ministers for the time being. At length, on some occasion of peculiar public excitement, the recluse had gone to Gravesend, where, tempted by the impulse of the moment, he had broken through his reserve, dashed out into a diatribe of singular fierceness, but of remarkable power, accused England of all kinds of oppression to all kinds of countries, and finished his speech by a recapitulation of all the wishes, wants, woes, and wrongs, as he called them, of Ireland,

Within the next twelve hours, a pair of Bow Street officers were seen galloping into the village in a post-chaise and four. They brought a warrant from the Secretary of State to arrest the Irish orator, as a leader of the late Rebellion returned from transportation, on his own authority. He was captured, and conveyed to the Tower. And this was the last intelligence of the patriot; except that he appealed to the government against all repetition of his Australian voyage, and swore that he preferred the speedier performance of the law to the operations on the Coal-mine river. A remarkable tempest, which broke all the windows, and threw down half the chimneys of the city, a few weeks after; was supposed by the imaginative to be connected with his disappearance. At all events, he was heard of no more.

The river widens, and we sweep along by the rich slopes and deep wooded vales of the Kentish shore. From time to time little pastoral villages emerge, from plantations of willows and poplars, and all water-loving trees. Before coming to Purfleet, we had passed a noble hill, looking over a vast expanse of country, on which stands a princely mansion,—Belvedere, with its battlements glittering above groves as thick as the depths of the Black Forest. This was once the mansion of Lord Eardley, one of the greatest humorists of the age,—the companion of George the Fourth, before he ceased to be a wit and became a king.

How many delightful things are lost to the world, by the world's own laziness. Why have we not a Boswell in every city? Her majesty pays a laureate, who writes nothing but the annual receipt for his pension. Why not transfer the office to a Boswell? why not establish a Cabinet-dinner Boswell? a Buckingham-palace Boswell? a Windsor Boswell? with orders to make their weekly returns of gaiety and gossipry to the Home Department; to be thence issued by instalments of anecdote, in volumes, like "Lord Campbell's Lives of the Chancellors," or in columns, like the protocols of the Montpensier marriage, for the laughter of mankind?

But the report of a heavy gun, and all eyes turned to a huge shell, making its curve a mile above our heads, reminded us that the artillery had a field-day as we passed Woolwich, and that there was every possibility that this vagrant messenger of destruction, might plump into our midships. The consternation on board grew, as it descended, looking bigger and blacker every instant. If it had come on board, it must have torn us up like paper. The catastrophe would have been invaluable to the journals of the empire, at this moment of a dearth of news, enough to make bankrupts of all the coffee-houses in London, and close every club from Charing Cross to Hyde Park Corner. We should all have been immortal in paragraphs without number. Coroners, surgeons, poets, and special juries, would have made their reputation out of us; and for a month of hot weather, we should have been a refreshing topic in the mouths of mankind. But it was otherwise decreed: the shell dropped within a foot of the steamer, and we were quittes pour la peur.

I fired a poetic shot at Woolwich in return.

The sun had now overcome the mists of the morning, and was throwing a rich lustre over the long sheets of foliage which screened, but without concealing, a large and classic villa on the Essex side. The park reached to the water's edge, in broad vistas, green as the emerald; deer were moving in groups over the lawn, or on standing still to gaze on the wonder of our flying ship. A few boats were slowly passing near the shore, along with the tide; the water was without a ripple,—the air was soft and fragrant, as it flowed from grove and garden; and the whole was a scene of sylvan and summer beauty. The thought suddenly shot across my mind, what a capital prize this would be, in a revolution! How handsomely it would repay a patriot for his trouble in uprooting lords and commons! What a philosophic consummation of a life of husting harangues, and league itinerancy, it would be, to lie on the drawing-room sofa of a mansion so perfectly Greek, railing at the tyranny of thrones, the bigotry of bishops, and the avarice of aristocracies; lamenting the privations of the poor, over a table of three courses, and drinking confusion to all monopolies in Vin de Comete!

But, who was the present possessor? I asked the name and heard it. But, from the captain to the cabin-boy, not a soul could give me another syllable of information. Like the gravedigger in Hamlet, they might "cudgel their brains," but all came to the gravedigger's confession at last,—"Mass, I cannot tell."

Such, thought I, are the chances of the world. The owner of this marine palace,—of these gardens, groves, deer, and dovecotes,—cannot have less than £10,000 a-year; yet his name has never reached the auricular sensibilities of man, beyond the fence of his own park. Was he philosopher, statesman, lawyer, orator, historian? inventor of steam-engine, of spinning jenny, of gunpowder, or of gun-cotton? No, I searched every cell of memory for some "trivial fond record" which might justify his title to a mansion and grounds fit for Sophocles, Schiller, or Shakspeare, the master of them all. I could not find, in all the rolls of the court of reminiscences, a single scrape of the pen to inform me; not so much as the commemorative smoke of a candle on the ceiling of the alcove of Mnemosyne; not a vestige of the "light fantastic toe," of those sylphs who treasure the flippancies of noble pens, and live in the fragrance of albums, otto-perfumed. Still I was driven to the confession, "Mass, I cannot tell."

I had brought a volume of poor Tom Campbell in my pocket, and had been glancing over his chef-d'œuvre, "Ye Mariners of England," when this stately edifice first checked my inspiration. In the wrath of my spirit I tossed the volume overboard. "Psha!" I involuntarily exclaimed, "what is the use of being a genius? What is the gratitude of a country, where a cotton-spinner can purchase the fee-simple of a province, while the man who spreads its fame over the world is left to gather his contemplations over a stove in an attic, watch the visage of his landlady, and shudder at the rise of coals!

'England, with all thy faults I love thee still.'

But it must be confessed, that thou art the most pitiful, paltry, beggarly, blind—" I shall say no more. Thy whole munificence, thy whole magnanimity, thy whole generosity, to the living lights of thy sullen region of toil, trimming, and tribulation, of the dulness of dukes and the mountainous fortunes of pinmakers—is exactly £1200 a-year! and this to be divided among the whole generation of the witty and the wise, of the sons and daughters of the muse,—the whole "school of the prophets," the lustres of the poetry and the science of England! £1200 a-year for the only men of their generation who will be remembered for five minutes by the generation to come. £1200 a-year, the salary of an Excise commissioner, of a manipulator of the penny post, of a charity inspector, of a police magistrate, of a register of cabs, of any thing and every body: and this, reduced to decimals, is to be the national prize, the luxurious provision, the brilliant prospect, the illustrious tribute of a treasury of fifty millions sterling a-year, to the whole literature of a land which boasts of its being the intellectual leader of the world!

I have found the poems of our living bards on the shores of Hudson's Bay, and heard men talking of them round a stove, while the thermometer outside the window was 30° below zero. I have found them in a plantain-thatched hovel on the banks of the Niger, and forgotten while I read them that the thermometer was 110° in the shade. I have found them in the hands of a learned pundit on the banks of the Ganges, whom they were seducing into dreams of dewy pastures and crystal rills. And one of the pleasantest evenings I ever remember to have spent, was, by the help of the "Lay of the Last Minstrel," as I sat at a supper of rice milk, after a day of fire on the eastern branch of the Nile, a thousand miles above Tourists, sheltered under the wagon of a Moorish ambassador from Sultaun Abderahman to the monarch of Gondar. "England!" exclaimed this ebony-visaged worshipper of the Beaux Arts, as he displayed the volume before me. It was the only civilised word in his vocabulary. But I felt the compliment with patriotic fervency, and in spirit thanked the bard for the barbarian's acknowledgment of my poetic and penurious country.

I have not done with the theme yet. On returning from the equator, I saw Campbell's funeral. Westminster Abbey was a mob of dukes, statesmen, privy-councillors, and men of countless acres. Poor Tom's whole life had been thankless toil; wasting in meagre industry the powers which ought to have been cherished by his country for purposes of national honour. Such is always the course of things. The very stones of Burns' pillars would have made the great poet happy for life, if their price had been given to him to cheer his melancholy fireside. Why has the poetic spirit of England folded its wings, and been content to abandon its brilliant region to the butterflies of albums, but that the spirit of England has suffered itself to be fettered by the red tape of a peddling parsimony? Should we have had a Shakspeare without the smiles of an Elizabeth, and the generosity of a Southampton? No. He would have split his pen after his first tragedy; have thrown his ink-stand into the Thames; have taken the carrier's cart to Stratford, and there finished his days in writing epitaphs in the churchyard, laughing at Sir Thomas Lucy, and bequeathing deathless scoffs, to the beggary of mankind.

I was growing into what the dramatists call a "towering passion," and meditating general reforms of Civil Lists, Chancellors of the Exchequer, and Lord Chamberlains, when my attention was turned to a very animated scene going on between a pair who seemed perfectly unconscious of all the external creation. One of the parties was a showy-looking fellow, with the mingled expression of rouéism and half-pay, which is so frequent and so unmistakeable in the neighbourhood of St James's. The lady was a calm and composed personage, whom, on a second glance, I remembered to have seen wherever the world could bow down to the fair possessor of countless "consols." But the passion for a handsome mansion, a handsome stud, and a handsome rental, is indefatigable, and the ex-staff man poured his adorations into her ear with all the glow of a suitor ten thousand pounds worse than nothing.

Poesy! sweetest of all the maids of Parnassus! it is thou that givest thy votary power to read the soul: it is thou that canst translate the glance into a speech, and give eloquence to the clasp of a hand. It is thou alone to whom the world is indebted for this true version of the pleadings of the Guardsman.