Eighteenth Century Vignettes

'The metaphors and illusions,' says Goldsmith in one of those admirable prefaces of which he possessed the secret, 'are all drawn from the East;' and in another place he tells us that a certain apostrophe is wholly translated from Ambulaaohamed, a real (or fictitious) Arabian poet. To these ingenuities he no doubt attached the exaggerated importance habitually assigned to work which has cost its writer pains. But it is not the adroitness of his adaptations from Le Comte and Du Halde that most detains us now. The purely Oriental part of the work – although it includes the amusing story (an 'Ephesian Matron' à la Chinoise) of the widow who, in her haste to marry again, fans her late husband's grave to dry it quicker, and the apologue of Prince Bonbennin and the White Mouse – is practically dead wood. It is Goldsmith under the transparent disguise of Lien Chi – Goldsmith commenting, after the manner of Addison and Steele, upon Georgian England, that attracts and interests the modern reader. His Chinese Philosopher might well have wondered at the lazy puddle moving muddily along the ill-kept London streets, at the large feet and white teeth of the women, at the unwieldy signs with their nondescript devices, at the unaccountable fashion of lying-in-state; but it is Goldsmith, and Goldsmith only, who could have imagined the admirable humour of the dialogue on liberty between a prisoner (through his grating), a porter pausing from his burden to denounce slavery and the French, and a soldier who, with a tremendous oath, advocates, above all, the importance of religion. It is Goldsmith again – the Goldsmith of Green-Arbour-Court and Griffith's back-parlour – who draws, from a harder experience than could have been possible to Lien Chi, the satiric picture of the so-called republic of letters which forms his twentieth epistle. 'Each looks upon his fellow as a rival, not an assistant in the same pursuit. They calumniate, they injure, they despise, they ridicule each other: if one man writes a book that pleases, others shall write books to show that he might have given still greater pleasure, or should not have pleased. If one happens to hit on something new, there are numbers ready to assure the public that all this was no novelty to them or the learned; that Cardanus or Brunus, or some other author too dull to be generally read, had anticipated the discovery. Thus, instead of uniting like the members of a commonwealth, they are divided into almost as many factions as there are men; and their jarring constitution, instead of being styled a republic of letters, should be entitled an anarchy of literature.' One rubs one's eyes as one reads; one asks oneself under one's breath if it is of our day that the satirist is speaking. No; it is of the reign of the second of the Georges, before Grub Street was turned into Milton Street.

Literature, in its different aspects, plays not a small part in the lucubrations of Lien Chi. Two of the best letters are devoted to a whimsical description of the vagaries of some of its humbler professors, who hold a Saturday Club at the 'Broom' at Islington; others treat of the decay of poetry; of novels, and 'Tristram Shandy' in particular; of the necessity of intrigue or riches as a means to success. Nor are Art and the Drama neglected. The virtuoso, who afforded such a fund of amusement to Fielding and Smollett, receives his full share of attention; and in the papers upon acting and actors, Goldsmith once more displays that critical common-sense which he had shown so conspicuously in 'The Bee.' Travellers and their trivialities are freely ridiculed; there are papers on Newmarket, on the Marriage Act, on the coronation, on the courts of justice; on quacks, gaming, paint, mourning, and mad dogs. There is a letter on the irreverent behaviour of the congregation in St. Paul's; there is another on the iniquity of making shows of public monuments. Now and then a more serious note is touched, as when the author is stirred to unwonted gravity by the savage penal code of his day, which, 'cementing the laws with blood,' closed every avenue with a gibbet, and against which Johnson too lifted his sonorous voice.

'Scarce can our fields, such crowds at Tyburn die,With hemp the gallows and the fleet supply,' —

he sang in 'London,' anticipating his later utterances in 'The Rambler.' Goldsmith, on the other hand, crystallized in his verse the raw material of which he made his Chinese philosopher the mouthpiece. Several of the best known passages of his two longest poems have their first form in the prose of Lien Chi. Indeed, one actual line of 'The Traveller,' 'A land of tyrants, and a den of slaves,' is simply a textual quotation from 'The Citizen of the World.'

But what in the Chinese letters is even more remarkable than their clever raillery of social incongruities and abuses, is their occasional indication of the author's innate but hitherto undisclosed gift for the delineation of humorous character. Up to this time he had exhibited no particular tendency in this direction. The little sketches of Jack Spindle and 'my cousin Hannah,' in 'The Bee,' go no farther than the corresponding personifications of particular qualities in the 'Spectator' and 'Tatler;' and they are not of the kind which, to employ a French figure, 'enter the skin' of the personality presented. But in the case of the eccentric philanthropist of 'The Citizen of the World,' whom he christens the 'Man in Black,' he comes nearer to such a definite embodiment as Addison's 'Will Wimble.' The 'Man in Black' is evidently a combination of some of those Goldsmith family traits which were afterwards so successfully recalled in Dr. Primrose, Mr. Hardcastle, and the clergyman of 'The Deserted Village.' The contrast between his credulous charity and his expressed distrust of human nature, between his simulated harshness and his real amiability, constitutes a type which has since been often used successfully in English literature; it is clear, too, that in the account of his life he borrows both from his author and his author's father. When he speaks of his unwillingness to take orders, of his dislike to wear a long wig when he preferred a short one, or a black coat when he dressed in brown, he is only giving expression to that incompatibility of temper which led to Goldsmith's rejection for ordination by the Bishop of Elphin; while in his picture of his father's house, with its simple, kindly prodigality, its little group of grateful parasites who laugh, like Mr. Hardcastle's servants, at the host's old jokes, and the careless paternal benevolence which makes the children 'mere machines of pity,' 'instructed in the art of giving away thousands before they were taught the more necessary qualifications of getting a farthing,' one recognizes the environment of that emphatically Irish household on the road from Ballymahon to Athlone, in which Goldsmith's own boyhood had been spent.

Excellent as he is, however, the 'Man in Black,' with his grudging generosity and his 'reluctant goodness,' is surpassed in completeness of characterization by the more finished portrait of Beau Tibbs. The poor little pinched pretender to fashion, with his tarnished finery and his reed-voiced, simpering helpmate, – with his coffee-house cackle of my Lord Mudler and the Duchess of Piccadilly, and his magnificent promises of turbot and ortolan, which issue pitifully in postponed ox-cheek and bitter beer, – approaches the dimensions of a masterpiece. Charles Lamb, one would think, must have rejoiced over the reckless assurance which expatiates on the charming view of the Thames from the garret of a back-street in the suburbs, which glorifies the 'paltry, unframed pictures' on its walls into essays in the manner of the celebrated Grisoni and transforms a surly Scotch hag-of-all-work into an old and privileged family-servant, – the gift 'of a friend of mine, a Parliament man from the Highlands.' Nor are there many pages in Dickens more perennially humorous than the scene in which the 'Man in Black,' his inamorata the pawnbroker's widow, and Mr. and Mrs. Tibbs, all make a party to the picturesque old Vauxhall Gardens of Jonathan Tyers. The inimitable sparring which ensues between the second-hand gentility of the beau's lady and the moneyed vulgarity of the tradesman's relict, their different and wholly irreconcilable views of the entertainment, and the tragic termination of the whole, by which the widow is balked of 'the waterworks' because good manners constrain her to sit out the wiredrawn roulades and quavers of Mrs. Tibbs – these are things which age cannot wither nor custom stale. If Goldsmith had written nothing but this miniature trilogy of Beau Tibbs, – if Dr. Primrose were uninvented and Tony Lumpkin non-existent, – he would still have earned a perpetual place among English humourists.

Something of this, undoubtedly, he owed to the fortunate instinct which dictated his choice of his material. The forerunner of Dickens, – the disciple, although he knew it not, of Fielding, – he makes his capital by his disregard of the reigning models of his time. Declining to select his characters from the fashionable abstractions of Sentimental Comedy and the mechanical puppets of conventional High Life, he turns aside to the moving, various, many-coloured middle-classes, from whose ranks originality has not yet been banished, or nature cast out. Of these he had knowledge and experience; of those he had seen but little. Upon the other walk, his labours might have been as forgotten as the 'Henry' of Richard Cumberland or the 'Henrietta' of Mrs. Charlotte Lenox. But he took his own line; and in consequence, Beau Tibbs and the pawnbroker's widow (with her rings and her green damask) are as much alive to-day as Partridge or Mrs. Nickleby.

XI. AN OLD LONDON BOOKSELLER

DEC. 22. Mr. John Newbery, of St. Paul's who knew him.' These words, copied from the 'Gentleman's Magazine' for 1767, record the death of one who, in his way, was an eighteenth century notability. He belonged to the good old 'Keep-your-Shop-and-your-Shop-will-keep-you' class of tradesmen, who lived without pretence near their places of business in the City, worked industriously during the week, marched off to St. Bride's or St. Dunstan's on Sunday morning with a crop-eared 'prentice in the rear to carry the great gilt Bible, and jogged away in crowded chaises of summer afternoons to eat tarts at Highgate or drink tea out of china in the Long churchyard, sincerely lamented by all.

In due time they made their 'plumbs;' sent their sons to St. Paul's or Merchant Taylors', sometimes even to Oxford or Cambridge; and finally left their portraits to posterity in the becoming and worshipful garb of Sheriffs or Common-councilmen. Unfortunately for this paper, there is no such limner's likeness of 'honest John Newbery.' Yet we are not wholly without details as to his character and personal appearance. That 'glorious pillar of unshaken orthodoxy,' Dr. Primrose, formerly of Wakefield, for whom, as all the world knows, he had published a pamphlet' 'against the Deuterogamists of the age,' describes him as a red-faced, good-natured little man, who was always in a hurry. 'He was no sooner alighted,' says the worthy Vicar, 'but he was in haste to be gone; for he was ever on business of the utmost importance.' 'Mr. Idler' confirms this indication. 'When he enters a house, his first declaration is, that he cannot sit down; and so short are his visits, that he seldom appears to have come for any other reason but to say, He must go.' It is not difficult to fill in the outline of Johnson and Goldsmith. 'The philanthropic bookseller in St. Paul's church-yard' was plainly a bustling, multifarious, and not unkindly personage, essentially commercial, essentially enterprising, rigorously exacting his money's worth of work, keeping prudent record of all casual cash advances, but, on the whole, not unbeneficent in his business fashion to the needy brethren of the pen by whom he was surrounded. Many of John Newbery's guineas passed to Johnson, to Goldsmith, to poor mad Christopher Smart, who married his step-daughter. As Johnson implies, it is not impossible that he finally fell a victim to that unreasoning mental activity which left him always struggling hopelessly with more schemes and proposals than one man could possibly manage. His wig must often have been awry, and his spectacles mislaid, in that perpetual journey from pillar to post which ultimately landed him, at the comparatively early age of fifty-four, in his grave at Waltham St. Lawrence.

It was at Waltham St. Lawrence, a quiet little Berkshire village, whose churchyard is dotted with the tombs of earlier Newberys, that he had been born. His father, a small farmer, destined him for his own calling. But, like Gay, it was not John Newbery's fate 'to brighten ploughshares in paternal land.' He passed early into the service of a 'merchant,' otherwise a printer and newspaper proprietor, at Reading, managing so well that, when his employer died, he was left a co-legatee in the business. Thereupon, being a resolute man, he did better still, and married his master's widow, who had three children. Even this succeeded; upon which, progressing always in prosperity, he began to think of starting in London. Before doing so, he made a tour in the provinces. Of this expedition there exists a curious record in the shape of an unprinted journal, throwing much light upon modes of travelling in those early coaching days, when the unfortunate outside passenger (like Pastor Moritz in a later paper *) had to choose between being jolted to death in the basket, or clinging like a fly to the slippery top of the vehicle.

* See-post, 'A German in England.'

The majority of the entries are merely matter of business, – titles for new books, recipes for diet-drinks, shrewd trade maxims, and the like. But here and there the writer intersperses notes of general interest, – on Dick Turpin the highwayman, on Lady Godiva and peeping Tom, and (more than once) upon that 'curious and very useful machine,' the Ducking-Stool for scolds, a 'plan of which instrument (he says) he shall procure and transplant to Berkshire for the good of his native county.' His business at Reading was as miscellaneous as his memorandum book, and he seems to have dealt in all kinds of goods. About 1744 he removed to London, opening a shop at the sign of the 'Bible and Crown,' near Devereux Court, without Temple Bar, together with a branch establishment at the Royal Exchange. To this Johnson probably refers when he says: 'He has one habitation near Bow Church, and another about a mile distant. By this ingenious distribution of himself between two houses, he has contrived to be found at neither.' From the 'Bible and Crown,' which had been his old Reading sign, he moved a year later to the 'Bible and Sun' in St. Paul's Churchyard. This continued to be his headquarters until his death. Gradually his indiscriminate activities narrowed themselves to two distinct branches of business, in these days incongruous enough, – the sale of books and the sale of patent medicines. While at Reading, he had become part owner, among other things, of Dr. Hooper's Female Pills; and soon after his settlement in London, he acquired the sole management of a more famous panacea, Dr. James's Fever Powders, which had in their time an extraordinary vogue. According to Mrs. Delany, the King dosed the Princess Elizabeth with them; Gray and Cowper both believed in their efficacy; and Horace Walpole, declared he should take them if the house were on fire. Fielding specially praises them in 'Amelia,' affirming that in almost any country but England they would have brought 'public Honours and Rewards' to his 'worthy and ingenious Friend Dr. James;' while Goldsmith may be said to have laid down his life for them. With the sale of these and kindred specifics, John Newbery alternated his unwearied speculations as a bookseller. He was at the back of Smollett's venture of the 'British Magazine;' it was for his 'Universal Chronicle' that Johnson wrote his 'Idler' and quizzed his proprietor as 'Jack Whirler;' he was the publisher of Goldsmith's 'Traveller' and 'Citizen of the World;' and lie probably found part of the historical sixty guineas which somebody paid for the 'Vicar of Wakefield.' He died at Canbury or Canonbury House, Islington, in the still-existent Tower of which he was an occasional resident. Indeed, it is more than probable that he was at one time the responsible landlord of that favourite retiring place for literary men, – a retiring place not without its exceptional advantages, if we* are to believe last-century advertisements, which, in addition to a natural cold bath, speak of 'a superlative Room, furnish'd for a single Person, or two Gentlemen, having a Prospect into five Counties ['longos prospicit agros!'], and the use of a good Garden and Summer-House.' Besides this there were traditions of Prior Bolton and Anne of Cleves, of Bacon and Elizabeth, of Sir John Spencer and William Fielding, Earl of Denbigh (the novelist's grand-uncle), which certainly have figured in any schedule of attractions, and must naturally have been interesting to the Smarts and Hills and Woodfalls and Goldsmiths who afterwards inhabited the old ivy-clad Tower.

Newbery's epitaph in the churchyard of his native village lays its main stress upon his connection with Dr. James's nostrum; and it was doubtless to this and the other patent medicines with which he was connected that he owed the material part of his prosperity. Yet it is not now upon the celebrated 'Arquebusade Water' (dear to Lady Mary Coke), or the far-famed 'Cephalic Snuff,' or the incomparable 'Beaume de Vie,' once so familiar in eighteenth-century advertisements, that he bases his individual claim to the gratitude of posterity. It is, to quote his biographer, Mr. Welsh, as 'the first bookseller who made the issue of books, specially intended for children, a business of any importance;' as the publisher of 'The Renowned History of Giles Gingerbread: a little Boy who lived upon Learning,' of 'Mrs. Margery Two-Shoes' (afterward Lady Jones), of the redoubtable 'Tommy Trip and his dog Jouler,' of the 'Lilliputian Magazine,' and of numbers of other tiny masterpieces in that flowered and gilt Dutch paper of which the art has been lost, that he is best remembered. Concerning these commendable little treatises, with their matter-of-fact title-pages and their artless appeal to all little Masters and Misses 'who are good, or intend to be good,' there are varying opinions. Dr. Johnson, according to Mrs. Thrale, thought them too childish for their purpose. He preferred the 'Seven Champions,' or 'Parisenus and Parismenus.' 'Babies,' he said in his legislative way, 'do not want to hear about babies. They like to be told of giants and castles, and of somewhat which can stretch and stimulate their little minds.' 'Remember always,' he added, 'that the parents buy the books, and that the children never read them.' Yet it is claimed for Robert Southey that in Newbery's 'delectable histories' he found just that very stimulus which made him a life-long book-lover; and it is characteristic of Charles Lamb (a better judge of children's literature than Johnson) that he puts forward these particular publications against the Bar-baulds and Trimmers ('those blights and blasts of all that is human in man and child'), as presenting the very quality which Johnson desired, the 'beautiful interest in wild tales, which made the child a man, while all the time he suspected himself to be no bigger than a child.' 'Think what you would have been now,' he writes to Coleridge of 'Goody Two-Shoes,' 'if instead of being fed with tales and old wives' fables in childhood, you had been crammed with geography and natural history!' The authorship of these 'classics of the nursery' is an old battle ground. Newbery, it is alleged, wrote some of them himself. He was (says Dr. Primrose when he met him) 'at that time actually compiling materials for the history of one Mr. Thomas Trip,' and if this can hardly be accepted as proof positive, it may be safely asserted that to Newbery's business instincts are due those ingenious references to his different wares and publications which crop up so unexpectedly in the course of the narrative. For example, in 'Goody Two-Shoes' we are told that the heroine's father 'died miserably' because he was 'seized with a violent Fever in a place where Dr. James's Powder was not to be had!' But who were Newbery's assistant authors? Giles and Griffith Jones, say some; Oliver Goldsmith, say others. With respect to the last-named no particular testimony seems to be forthcoming beyond his known relations to the publisher, and the so-called 'evidence of style.' In the absence of confirmatory details the former is worthless; and the latter is often entirely misleading. Without going back to the time-honoured case of Erasmus and Scaliger's oration, two modern instances of this may be cited. Mr. Thackeray, says Mr. Forster, claimed the 'Pleasant and Delightful History of Thomas Hickathrift' for Henry Fielding. But both Mr. Forster and Mr. Thackeray should have remembered that their common acquaintance, Mr. Isaac Bickerstaff, of the 'Tatler,' had written of Hickathrift as a chap-book when Fielding was a baby. In the same way 'Tommy Trip' has, by no mean judges, been attributed to Goldsmith upon the strength of the following quatrain: —

'Three children sliding on the iceUpon a summer's day,As it fell out they all fell in,The rest they ran away.'

Alas! and alas! for the 'evidence of style.' Not only had these identical lines been turned into Latin in the 'Gentleman's Magazine' for July, 1754, when Goldsmith was still studying medicine at Leyden; but they are quoted at p. 30 of 'The Character of Richard St[ee]le,

Esq;' by 'Toby, Abel's Kinsman,' which was issued by 'J. Morphew, near Stationer's Hall,' as far back as the month of November, 1713. As a matter of fact, they are much older still, being affirmed by Chambers in his excellent 'Book of Days' to be, in their first form, part of a long and rambling story in doggerel rhyme dating from the early part of the Civil Wars, which is to be found at the end of a little old book entitled 'The Loves of Hero and Leander,' 12mo, London, 1653, and 1677.

XII. GRAY'S LIBRARY

AMONG Gray's papers was one inscribed 'Dialogue of Books.' The handwriting was that of his biographer Mason, but it was believed to be either by Gray or by West. There is a strong presumption that the author was Gray; and it is accordingly attributed to him in the Rev. D. C. Tovey's 'Gray and his Friends,' where for the first time it was printed. It shows us the little great man (if it is accurately dated 1742, it must have been in the year of his fullest poetical activity) sitting tranquilly in his study chair, when he is 'suddenly alarmd with a great hubbub of Tongues.' He listens; and finds that his books are talking to one another. Madame de Sévigné is being what Mrs. Gamp would call 'scroudged' by Aristotle, who replies to her compressed expostulations with all the brutality of a philosopher and a realist. Thereupon she appeals to her relative, the author of the 'Histoire amoureuse des Gaules.' But the gallant M. Bussy-Rabutin, himself pining for an interchange of compliments with a neighbouring Catullus, is hopelessly penned in by a hulking edition of Strabo, and cannot possibly arrive to the assistance of his belle Cousine. Elsewhere La Bruyère comments upon the strange companions with whom Fate has acquainted him; and Locke observes, with a touch of temper, that he is associated with Ovid, – and Ray the Naturalist! 22 Virgil placidly quotes a line of his own poems; More, the Platonist, delivers himself of a neat little copybook sentiment in praise of theological speculation; and great fat Dr. Cheyne huskily mutters his own adage, 'Every man after forty is either a fool or a Physician.'

In another corner an ill-judged and irrelevant remark by Euclid, touching the dimensions of a point, brings down upon him the scorn both of Swift and Boileau, who clamour for the unconditional suppression of mathematics. (If there be nothing else, this in itself is almost sufficient to fix the authorship of the paper with Gray, whose hatred of mathematics was only equalled by that of Goldsmith.) Then a pert exclamation from a self-sufficient Vade Mecum provokes the owner of the library to so hearty an outburst of merriment that the startled tones at once shrink back into 'uncommunicating muteness.' Laughter, it would seem, is as fatal to books as it was of old to the Coquecigrues.