The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 03, No. 17, March, 1859

Francis Horner died of consumption in Italy before he was forty years of age, and there is nothing of surpassing brilliancy or power in any of his writings. Yet he made a most extraordinary impression upon his contemporaries. His name is never mentioned by his associates except with unusual respect. Brougham, when he alludes to him, even in a letter, seems to check his pen into soberness, and to be as cautious as if he were speaking on a religious subject. Search through the published correspondence of Jeffrey, Sydney Smith, and Mackintosh, and Horner is found uniformly mentioned, not with peculiar affection or kindness, not with any intention of doing him honor, but as a man whose qualities were quite superior to those of other men, and whose destiny it was to be the first statesman of his country. Lord Cockburn, who was a schoolmate of Horner, relates that the latter was at one time selected by his class to present a book to the master, and adds: "As he stepped forward at the close of a recitation, and delivered the short Latin presentation-address, I thought him to be a god." This fascination is hard to be explained. The great seriousness of Horner's character may in part account for it. He could not bear trifling on important subjects, and could not help frowning on all jests which were not more wise than witty. The calm determination, the unvarying earnestness of his character, may aid in explaining it. From a boy, he never swerved from great purposes, pursued the most useful though difficult knowledge, and cultivated with equal zeal the ornaments of taste and those recondite historical and statistical studies which are the roots of political science. He was as far from being flighty as Immanuel Kant. Everything that he did was marked both by temperance and sagacity. Philosophically speaking, a personality, any personal being, is undoubtedly the most mysterious thing in the universe. How abstract ideas come together to grow and bloom in a young bosom is wholly past the comprehension of philosophy. As personality in the abstract fascinates a philosopher by its mystery, so a personality of uncommon purity, intensity, and completeness fascinates all men, and thus, perhaps, is explained the high estimation in which Horner was held. He was regarded by those who knew him, as Pythagoras was by his disciples, with the deference commanded by a superior person.

The indefatigable character of Lord Brougham, the only survivor of this group, cannot yet be sketched in a paragraph. To Sydney Smith we shall presently return.

The second group of young men was formed fifteen years later. They were the antagonists of the Edinburgh reviewers, the authors of the "Noctes Ambrosianae," the main support of "Blackwood's Magazine," almost from its beginning. Their names were John Wilson, J.G. Lockhart, James Hogg, and, for a time, William Maginn. These were very high, as well as, excepting Hogg, very young Tories. It would be an apotheosis of loyalty to say that they were also eminently religious, though they drank many bumpers to their religion. When they meet in the third of the "Noctes" and have taken their places at the table, North proposes: "A bumper! The King! God bless him!" and three times three are given. Then Tickler proposes: "A bumper! The Kirk of Scotland!" and the rounds of cheers are repeated. These indispensable ceremonies being over, the Blackwood council proceeds to discuss men and things over nectar and ambrosia.

Wilson was the centre and best representative of this group. At Oxford, he had been so democratic that he blacked his own boots on principle. On leaving Oxford, he had roamed for a time as a wild man in a band of gypsies. He next took a cottage in the lake district in the North of England, where he associated with Wordsworth, and occupied himself alternately with desperate gymnastic exercises and composing slight descriptive poems. Even after connecting himself with the magazine and becoming the symposiarch of the "Noctes," and perhaps the greatest Tory in all broad Scotland, he did not renounce his home among the lakes. He was a lover of scenery, and an enthusiast and master in manly sports. He is said to have fished in every trout-brook north of the Clyde, and he wandered every season over the Highlands. In his sportsman's accomplishments he took a truly English pride, and made fun of the Edinburgh Whigs by representing a company of them as getting by chance into the same room with himself and his associates, and then, pipes and tobacco being brought, as being fairly smoked out, sickened, and obliged to retreat by the superior smoking capacities of the Tories. He ridiculed Leigh Hunt for fancying in one of his poems that he should like a splendid life on a great estate, when (as Wilson says) he couldn't even ride without being thrown. Yet, of all the men of this time, there was probably no one who had wider sympathies or more delightful prejudices than Professor Wilson, or who made more sagacious reflections. The centre of a literary clique, he loved to associate with all the other cliques, and was one of the first to recognize and proclaim the great merits of Wordsworth.

The third group was larger than either of the preceding, retained its esprit de corps longer, and may be most conveniently defined as the associates of Charles Lamb. Beside Lamb, there were Coleridge, Southey, Lovel, Dyer, Lloyd, and Wordsworth, among the earlier members of it,—and Hazlitt, Talfourd, Godwin, De Quincy, Bernard Barton, Procter, Leigh Hunt, Gary, and Hood, among the later. This group, unlike the others, did not make politics, but literature, its leading object. It was composed of literary men,—a title of doubtful import, but which certainly in civilized society will always designate a class. Political life has more of outward importance, religious life is holier, but literary life is the most humane of all the avocations. It is to the professions what pastoral occupations are to the trades. Politics and religion both have something to do with institutions. A mechanical man can play a part in them not very well, but passably well. But the literary man is sheer humanity, with nothing to help him but his thoughtfulness and sensibility. He is the unfelled tree, not the timber framed into the ship of state or carved into ecclesiastic grace. He lives as Nature lives, putting on the splendor of green when the air is sunny, and of crystal when the blasts sweep by; and while his roots reach down into the earth, there rises nothing above him but the heavens. Past experience shows that he may be harsh, prejudiced, and unhappy; but it shows also that the richest human juices are within him, and that not only the most peculiar and most sensitive, but also the most highly-endowed characters are named in the list of authors. The central and most admirable figure in this particular group of literary men is Charles Lamb; and as each of the other groups clustered around an organ, so at a later period Lamb and his associates supported the "London Magazine," in which the "Essays of Elia" first appeared.

If it be asked what gave that strong coherence to these associates which constituted them groups, a wise man would answer,—congeniality of character. A wiser man, however, would not overlook the element of suppers. The "Edinburgh Review" seems to have been first suggested over a quiet bottle of wine; and at a later day the Edinburgh reviewers, increased in number by the accession of Mackintosh and one or two others, formed an honored clique by themselves in the splendid society of Holland House. The "Noctes Ambrosianae" is the enduring monument of the way in which the Blackwood men passed their nights, and not the less so from the fact that they were for the most part written out by Wilson in sober solitude. Charles Lamb began his career of suppers with Coleridge, as the latter came up to London from the University to visit him, and the famous Wednesday-evening parties given by him and his sister Mary would occupy a large space in the literary history of this epoch. It is a true proverb, that people are but distant acquaintances till they have eaten salt together.

The sketches which we have thus given will indicate the leading tendencies that were operating in English literature, though the groups themselves did not include all the eminent literary men. Campbell, Shelley, and Byron were single lights, and did not form constellations,—unless, perhaps, Shelley and Byron may be regarded as a wayward and quickly-disappearing Gemini. Sir Walter Scott, and, in their later years, Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, were of a cosmopolitan character, and served as links between different parties. And it may be added, that diplomatic relations and frequent intercommunication existed between all the groups.

Passing from the general schedule to the characters and careers of Charles Lamb and Sydney Smith, it will be our aim to show how these two most witty men were also intensely serious and dutiful,—how they were both disciplined by a great sorrow, and obedient to a noble purpose,—and thus to relieve wit from the charge of having any natural alliance with frivolity.

A thorn, it needs not a sage to say, vexes the side of every human being. Poetry laments the inadequacy of men to their ideals, philosophy declares an error in the figures which sum up life, religion reveals the fall of the race. The thorn is known which pierced the matchless joyousness of Charles Lamb. His family, highly gifted with wit, tenderness of feeling, and mutual love, had a tinge of madness in the blood. At twenty years of age he was himself shut up six weeks in a madhouse, his imagination in a vagary. He was not again affected; but the poison had sunk deeper into the veins of his sister. The shadow of a deed done in the dark ever pursued her. Charles devoted his life to her whose life was an intermittent madness, yet who, in her months of sanity, was a worthy sister of such a brother. His kindness to her knew no bounds. It was strange that she had premonition of the recurring fits of her disorder; and when the ghost of unreason beckoned, Charles took her by the hand and led her to the appointed home. Charles Lloyd relates, that, at dusk one evening, he met them crossing the field together on their melancholy way toward the asylum, both of them in tears. In the smiles of Charles Lamb, and they were many, his friends always remarked a prevailing expression of sadness. The "fair-haired maid," who had been the theme of his first poetizing, appears not again in his verses or in his life. He and Mary lived together, received evening visitors together, went to the theatre and picture-gallery together, visited the lakes and the poets together; and if he was ever seen in public without her, his friends knew there could be but one reason for it, and did not ask. When he left the India House, he had reserved from his income a considerable sum for her support; though the liberality of his employers, as it proved, rendered this precaution unnecessary. She was his partner in writing the Shakspearian tales, and he always affirmed that hers were better done than his own. To her he dedicated the first poems that he published; and she, too, was a poetess, excellent in her simple way. Thus was Charles Lamb's life saddened by a great affliction ever impending over it, and sanctified by a great duty which he never for a moment forgot.

It was his good-fortune, while at school at Christ's Hospital, to become acquainted with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. A timid boy, creeping around among his boisterous companions like a little monk, it was that soaring spirit which first taught him to look up. Two men whose intellects more strongly contrasted could not be found. Coleridge suffered throughout life from over-much speculation. Could he have had his eye less upon the heavens and more upon the earth, could he have been concentrated upon some human duty, he would have been a much wiser and better man. Even in his youth he was the rhapsodist of old philosophies, had resolved social life into its elements, and dreamed of putting it together again to suit himself on the banks of the Susquehannah. Though Lamb wondered at the speculations of Coleridge, and, loving him, loved the metaphysics which were a part of him, yet it was without changing his own essentially opposite disposition. Lamb clung to the earth. He cultivated the excellency of this life. He was concrete, and hugged the world as he did his sister. He reverently followed the discourses of Coleridge, admiring, perhaps, "the beauty of the words, but not the words themselves"; but when the Opium-Eater also began to take speculative flights before Lamb, the latter stopped him at once by jangling his metaphysics into jokes. It was in conversation with Coleridge, begun at school and continued afterward at frequent meetings, that Lamb first ventured to try his own powers and was prompted to literary activity. But for a slight defect in his speech, he would probably have followed Coleridge to the University with the intention of going into the Church. A delightful clergyman he would have been, if he had duly undertaken the office, and one would have walked far to see him in the priestly robe, to hear him chant the service, to receive pastoral advice from him; yet we fear the "Essays of Elia" would have been less admirable than now. He was roused by Coleridge; and though he could not put the aureole of the latter about his own head, he began to do the best he could in his own way.

Life is a play between accident and purpose. Why was it, that, of all the books in the world, Charles Lamb should have fixed his affections chiefly on the old English dramatists? He might have turned to old Greece, admired the fruits of the classic ages, and become one of those sparkling artistic Hellenists that are occasionally seen in modern times. He might have turned to the mediaeval period. He had an eye for cloisters and nuns. His fancy would have been struck with the grotesqueness of many of the ideas and institutions of those times. He would have got on finely with Gurth the swineherd and Burgundy the tusk-toothed, and one of his masterly witticisms would have upset Duns Scotus. Perhaps, of all the mediaeval characters, he would have been most smitten with the court fool, and, if he could have been seated at a princely table of the twelfth century, the bowl surely would not have been round many times before he and the fool would have had a few passes at each other. There was enough in the Middle Ages to have fascinated him; and could he, like some romantic Novalis, have once penetrated thither, and tasted the fruit, he would have found it a lotus, and would have wished never to depart. His soul would have clung to church architecture,—under which term may be included all the religious, political, poetical, moral, and practical life of the Middle Ages. The accident in the case, however, was, that his uncle's library did not contain the Greeks, nor the Middle Ages, but did contain the old English authors. These he mastered; and out of these he created his ideals. In the affluent vigor of the Elizabethan age, in the buoyant négligé of the times of merry Charles, he found people that he liked. To every reflective and slightly scholastic mind, there is a charm in looking at things in the distance. The perspective fits the eye. This may have helped the enthusiasm with which he looked upon the writers and heroes of the old English literature; but its principal cause was their open-heartedness, their informality, their stout and free humanity underneath laces and uniform.

Having thus found his place in literature, he began also to be rich in friends, and his life was devoted every moment to thought and affection. The time that he passed at the desk of the India House was time in which he did not live; or perhaps, while he autographed the mercantile books, there was a higher half-conscious life of the fancy which lightly flitted round and round the steady course of his pen. He thus exults, after his emancipation from his clerkship upon a pension:—"I came home FOREVER on Tuesday in last week. The incomprehensibleness of my condition overwhelmed me. It was like passing from life into eternity. Every year to be as long as three; that is, to have three times as much time that is real time—time that is my own—in it. I wandered about thinking I was happy, but feeling I was not. But the tumultuousness is passing off, and I begin to understand the nature of the gift." For this one-third of his waking time, to have and to hold unhampered by any dependence, he had most willingly consigned the rest to drudgery. The value which he set upon it appears from the following answer which he made to Bernard Barton, who thought of abandoning his place in a bank and of relying upon literary labor for support:—"Throw yourself on the world without any rational plan of support beyond what the chance employ of booksellers would afford you! Throw yourself, rather, my dear Sir, from the steep Tarpeian rock, slap-dash, headlong, upon iron spikes. If you have but five consolatory minutes between the desk and the bed, make much of them, and live a century in them, rather than turn slave to the booksellers. Hitherto you have been at arm's length from them,—come not within their grasp. I have known many authors want for bread,—some repining, others enjoying the blessed security of a counting-house, all agreeing that they would rather have been tailors, weavers,—what not?—rather than the things they were. I have known some starved, some go mad, one dear friend literally dying in a madhouse. Oh! you know not—may you never know!—the miseries of subsisting by authorship." Thus he esteemed of priceless worth honestly-earned independent time for the pursuits that were dearest to him.

His literary and social avocations were so intimately blended that they seem to have been almost the same. He was as thoughtful in his evening parties as he was in the act of composition, and as gentle and kindly in writing as he was to his friends. He gathered about him not many of the most famous, but many of the most original and peculiar men of his time. His Wednesday-evening parties were assemblies of thinkers. They were composed in large part of men who were not balanced by a profession, who were devoted only to wit, fancy, or speculation, who cultivated each a peculiar field and cherished each peculiar tastes and opinions, who were interested in different quarters of the heavens, and yet who came together, prompted by the spirit of sociality and kindliness, to lay perhaps the backs of their heads together, and to talk always sincerely and wisely, but in the form of sense or nonsense, as the case might be. Lamb and his sister were always ready to appreciate every variety of goodness, and doubtless their guests received an order something like that which was addressed to the dwellers in Thomson's enchanting castle:—

  "Ye sons of Indolence! do what you will,  And wander where you list, through hall or glade;  Be no man's pleasure for another stayed:  Let each as likes him best his hours employ,  And cursed be he who minds his neighbor's trade!"

To these parties sometimes came Coleridge, who in conversation seems to have been a happy mixture of a German philosopher and an Italian improvvisatore. Here Hazlitt learned to utter the philosophic criticisms which he most passionately believed in; and Lloyd, whose intellect was one of peculiar refinement, discoursed modestly of metaphysical problems, analyzing to an extent that Talfourd says was positively painful. Here the social reformer Leigh Hunt came, and for the moment forgot that social reforms were needed. Here the Opium-Eater came, and his cloudy abstract loves and hates and visions were exploded by the sparks of Elia's wit. Here the philosopher Godwin developed philosophy out of whist. Here the pensive face of the Quaker poet, Bernard Barton, shed a mild light upon the scene; and here the lawyer Thomas Noon Talfourd came to admire the finest characters that he knew of.

Having thus noticed the painful experience and unfaltering devotion to noble aims which marked the career of Charles Lamb, we leave him with his friends, and pass to notice the same elements in the life of his brother wit.

Sydney Smith preferred the legal profession, and esteemed himself a victim in entering the Church. His practical wisdom informed him, that, from the beginning even until then, qualities like his had not found a happy sphere of action in the pulpit, but, on the contrary, had rusted or grown ugly in it. He had as much sentiment as Sterne, and perhaps as much political sagacity as Swift, yet the finest instincts within him recoiled from following in the path of either the one or the other. With a subtile and exuberant wit,—he knew that wit touches not sacred things. With great practical prudence and a brilliant speculative capacity,—in a clergyman, prudence is less than faith, and brilliancy of thought than the glow of the heart. In his rich composite character he had, indeed, the qualities which make the clergyman; his disposition was religious, his heart was tender and Christian, he could give the best advice to the people; and though his appearance was not quite saint-like, it was at least suggestive of a good man who was walking in the way which he pointed out to others. But these qualities were not those with which he was most highly endowed. Energy and sterling common-sense, which he had inherited from his father, an elastic, mercurial, and passionate nature, which had come to him from his Huguenot mother,—these were the strong points in his character, and it belongs to neither of them to take the lead in the Church. Sydney had scanned the whole field. Having questioned well his desires, examined well his blood, derived what wisdom he could from history and observation, he deliberately chose the law. Why, then, did he take to theology? We read that his father had incurred so much expense in educating his eldest son for the legal profession, and in fitting out two others for India, that he could not well furnish the means for Sydney's education, and strongly recommended him to go into the Church; and that the son sacrificed his own to his father's inclination.

We may imagine Sydney Smith's reflections. With his versatile talent, honorable ambition, and consciousness that he could have made a shining name in political life, his object now was to find a sufficient sphere for the exercise of all his powers in the Church. It was no fault of his that he was unwilling to settle as curate and have no aim beyond his parish except to go to heaven at last. With his superfluity of human nature, for him to become a saint was out of the question. What then? Should he enter the realm of dogmatics, and become a learned and redoubted champion of the faith, passing his life amid exegesis? Should he renounce thorough thinking, and become a polished and popular pastor, an ornament of the pulpit and of society? Should he signalize himself for gravity, orthodoxy, and ability, seek the earthly prizes of his profession, and perhaps become Archbishop of Canterbury? Should he become a jolly, vinous, and Friar-Tuck sort of clergyman? God forbid! he said to each of these queries, and rushed forward into his profession. Regarding himself as a lamb for the slaughter, yet tremendously in earnest not to be sacrificed, he went into the Church groping and fearing, but resolute. Trembling lest he should not do his duty both to himself and to his sacred office, he yet determined to try. Thus the thorn which troubled Sydney Smith was not an affliction, but was what he regarded as a danger; and, though less patent and pointed than that in the life of Charles Lamb, probably had not less influence in the discipline of character.

Behold, then, the long and venerable line of the clergy opening to receive him, and behold him entering it! The clergy, the priesthood, the holy fathers, the strong bishops, the monks, the ghostly race, the retired enthusiasts, now melancholy, now rapt, now merry-making, the consolers of sorrow, the divine heroes in an earthly life,—even one of this family does Sydney propose to be. At the age of twenty-four he becomes curate in the little hamlet of Salisbury Plain,—the young graduate of Oxford sent into the country to be pastor to the inmates of half-a-dozen hovels! Then he writes his description of a curate:—"The poor working man of God,—a learned man in a hovel, good and patient,—a comforter and a teacher,—the first and purest pauper of the hamlet; yet showing that in the midst of worldly misery he has the heart of a gentleman, the spirit of a Christian, and the kindness of a pastor." He regards himself as almost excluded from his kind, and quotes (or originates) the proverb, that there are three sexes, men, women, and clergymen. He took long solitary walks over the plains of Salisbury, reflecting upon the manifold activities of the world, in which he had no part. The only society that he had was during the occasional visits of the squire to the neighborhood, who, surprised to find the curate so interesting a person, gave him frequent invitations to dinner. Thus passed two years, when the squire consigned his son to the curate to be educated, and Sydney Smith, starting with the young man for the Continent, was driven by stress of war to Edinburgh.