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[Illustration]


A LITTLE ENGLISH GALLERY

by

LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY






[Illustration]

New York
Harper and Brothers
MDCCCXCIV

Copyright, 1894, by Harper & Brothers.

All rights reserved.




    TO

    EDMUND GOSSE

    THIS FRIENDLY TRESPASS ON HIS FIELDS




PREFATORY NOTE


THE studies in this book are chosen from a number written at irregular
intervals, and from sheer interest in their subjects, long ago.
Portions of them, or rough drafts of what has since been wholly
remodelled from fresher and fuller material at first hand, have
appeared within five years in _The Atlantic Monthly_, _Macmillan’s_,
_The Catholic World_, and _Poet-Lore_; and thanks are due the
magazines for permission to reprint them. Yet more cordial thanks,
for kind assistance on biographical points, belong to the Earl of
Powis; the Rev. R. H. Davies, Vicar of old St. Luke’s, Chelsea; the
Rev. T. Vere Bayne, of Christchurch, and H. E. D. Blakiston, Esq.,
of Trinity College, Oxford; T. W. Lyster, Esq., of the National
Library of Ireland; Aubrey de Vere Beauclerk, Esq.; Miss Langton,
of Langton-by-Spilsby; the Vicars of Dauntsey, Enfield Highway, and
Montgomery, and especially those of High Ercall and Speke; and the
many others in England through whose courtesy and patience the tracer
of these unimportant sketches has been able to make them approximately
life-like.




CONTENTS


    CHAP.                                PAGE
      I. LADY DANVERS (1561-1627)           1

     II. HENRY VAUGHAN (1621-1695)         53

    III. GEORGE FARQUHAR (1677-1707)      119

     IV. TOPHAM BEAUCLERK (1739-1780)
                  AND
         BENNET LANGTON (1741-1800)       171

      V. WILLIAM HAZLITT (1778-1830)      229




I

LADY DANVERS

1561-1627


MR. MATTHEW ARNOLD somewhere devotes a grateful sentence to the women
who have left a fragrance in literary history, and whose loss of long
ago can yet inspire men of to-day with indescribable regret. Lady
Danvers is surely one of these. As John Donne’s dear friend, and George
Herbert’s mother, she has a double poetic claim, like her unforgotten
contemporary, Mary Sidney, for whom was made an everlasting epitaph.
If Dr. Donne’s fraternal fame have not quite the old lustre of the
incomparable Sir Philip’s, it is, at least, a greater honor to own
Herbert for son than to have perpetuated the race of Pembroke. Nor is
it an inharmonious thing to remember, in thus calling up, in order to
rival it, the sweet memory of “Sidney’s sister,” that Herbert and
Pembroke have long been, and are yet, married names.

Magdalen, the youngest child of Sir Richard Newport, and of Margaret
Bromley, his wife, herself daughter of that Bromley who was
Privy-Councillor, Lord Chief-Justice, and executor to Henry VIII., was
born in High Ercall, Salop; the loss or destruction of parish registers
leaves us but 1561-62 as the probable date. Of princely stock, with
three sisters and an only brother, and heir to virtue and affluence,
she could look with the right pride of unfallen blood upon “the many
fair coats the Newports bear” over their graves at Wroxeter. It was
the day of learned and thoughtful girls; and this girl seems to have
been at home with book and pen, with lute and viol. She married, in
the flower of her youth, Richard Herbert, Esquire, of Blache Hall,
Montgomery, black-haired and black-bearded, as were all his line; a man
of some intellectual training, and of noted courage, descended from
a distinguished brother of the yet more distinguished Sir Richard
Herbert of Edward IV.’s time, and from the most ancient rank of Wales
and England. At Eyton in Salop, in 1581, was born their eldest child,
Edward, afterwards Lord Herbert of Cherbury, a writer who is still the
puzzle and delight of Continental critics. He is said to have been a
beautiful boy, and not very robust; his first speculation with his
infant tongue was the piercing query: “How came I into this world?” But
his next brother, Richard, was of another stamp; and went his frank,
flashing, fighting way through Europe, “with scars of four-and-twenty
wounds upon him, to his grave” at Bergen-op-Zoom, with William, the
third son, following in his soldierly footsteps. Charles grew up
reserved and studious, and died, like his paternal uncle, a dutiful
Fellow of New College, Oxford. The fifth of these Herberts, “a soul
composed of harmonies,” as Cotton said of him, and destined to make the
name beloved among all readers of English, was George, the poet, the
saintly “parson of Fuggleston and Bemerton.” Henry, his junior, with
whom George had a sympathy peculiarly warm and long, became in his
manhood Master of the Revels, and held the office for over fifty years.
“You and I are alone left to brother it,” Lord Herbert of Cherbury once
wrote him, in a mood more tender than his wont, when all else of that
radiant family had gone into dust. The youngest of Magdalen Newport’s
sons was Thomas, “a posthumous,” traveller, sailor, and master of a
ship in the war against Algiers. Elizabeth, Margaret, and Frances
were the daughters, of whom Izaak Walton says, with satisfaction,
that they lived to be examples of virtue, and to do good to their
generation. None of them made an illustrious match. Margaret married
a Vaughan. Frances secured unto herself the patronymic Brown, and was
happily seconded by Elizabeth, George Herbert’s “dear sick sister,”
who became Mistress Jones. In the south chancel transept of Montgomery
Church, where Richard Herbert the elder had been buried three years
before, there was erected in 1600, at his wife’s cost, a large canopied
alabaster altar-tomb, with two portrait-figures recumbent. All around
it, in the quaint and affectionate boast of the age, are the small
images of these seven sons and three daughters; “Job’s number and Job’s
distribution,” as she once remarked, and as her biographers failed
not to repeat after her. But their kindred ashes are widely sundered,
and “as content with six foot as with the moles of Adrianus.” This at
Montgomery is the only known representation of the Lady Magdalen. Her
effigy lies at her husband’s left, the palms folded, the eyes open, the
full hair rolled back from a low brow, beneath a charming and simple
head-dress. Nothing can be nobler than the whole look of the face, like
her in her prime, and reminding one of her son’s loving epithet, “my
Juno.” The short-sighted inscription upon the slab yet includes her
name.

Never had an army of brilliant and requiring children a more excellent
mother. “_Severa parens_,” her gentle George called her in his
scholarly verses; and such she was, with the mingled sagacity and
joyousness which made up her character. If we are to believe their
own testimony, the leading members of her young family were of
excessively peppery Cymric temperaments, and worthy to call out that
“manlier part” of her which Dr. Donne, who had every opportunity of
observing it in play, was so quick to praise. There is a passage in
a letter of Sir Thomas Lacy, addressed to Edward Herbert, touching
upon “the knowledge I had how ill you can digest the least indignity.”
“Holy George Herbert” himself, in 1618, commended to his dear brother
Henry the gospel of self-honoring: “It is the part of a poor spirit to
undervalue himself and blush.” And physical courage went hand in hand
with this blameless haughtiness of the Herberts, a pretty collateral
proof of which may be adduced from a message of Sir Henry Jones to his
brother-in-law, the other Henry just mentioned, concerning a gift for
his little nephew. “If my cozen, William Herbert your sonne... be
ready for the rideing of a horse, I will provide him with a Welch nagg
that shall be as mettlesome as himself.” There is no doubt that all
this racial fire was fostered by one woman. “Thou my root, and my most
firm rock, O my mother!” George cried, long after in the _Parentalia_,
aware that he owed to her his high ideals, and the strength of
character which is born of self-discipline.

“God gave her,” says one of her two devoted annalists, who we wish
were not so brief and meagre of detail—“God gave her such a comeliness
as though she was not proud of it, yet she was so content with it as
not to go about to mend it by any art.” Her fortune was large, her
benevolence wide-spreading. All the countryside knew her for the living
representative of the ever-hospitable houses of Newport and Bromley.
“She gave not on some great days,” continues Dr. Donne, “or at solemn
goings abroad; but as God’s true almoners, the sun and moon, that pass
on in a continual doing of good; as she received her daily bread from
God, so daily she distributed it, and imparted it to others.” In these
years of her wifehood and widowhood at Montgomery Castle (the “romancy
place” dating from the eleventh century, and ruined, like the fine
old house at High Ercall, during the Civil Wars), and afterwards at
Oxford and London, she reared her happy crew of boys and girls in an
air of generosity and honor; training