

E-text prepared by Emmy, MFR, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
(http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made available by
Internet Archive (https://archive.org)



Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
      file which includes the original illustration.
      See 54219-h.htm or 54219-h.zip:
      (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/54219/54219-h/54219-h.htm)
      or
      (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/54219/54219-h.zip)


      Images of the original pages are available through
      Internet Archive. See
      https://archive.org/details/littleenggallery00guinrich


Transcriber's note:

      Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_).

      A carat character is used to denote superscription. A
      single character following the carat is superscripted
      (example: 9^a).





[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