Cecilia, whose delicate features, lighted up by love and music, art has rescued from the common decay. There were the members of that brilliant society, which quoted, criticized, 5 and exchanged repartees, under the rich peacock-hangings of Mrs. Montague.10 And there the ladies whose lips, more persuasive than those of Fox himself, had carried the Westminster election against palace and treasury, shone around Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire. The Serjeants made proclamation. Hastings advanced to the bar, and bent his knee. The culprit was indeed not unworthy of that and populous country, had made laws and treaties, had sent forth armies, had set up and pulled down princes. And in his high places had so borne himself, that all had feared him, that most had loved him, and that hatred itself could deny him no title to glory, except virtue. He looked like a great man, and not like a bad man. A person small and emaciated, yet deriving dignity from a carriage which, their vestments of state attended to give advice on points of law. Near a hundred and seventy lords, three fourths of the Upper House as the Upper House then was, walked in solemn order from their usual place of assembling to the tribunal. The junior Baron present led the way, George Elliot, Lord Heathfield, recently ennobled for his memorable defence of Gibraltar against the fleets and armies of France and Spain. The long procession was closed by the 10 Duke of Norfolk, Earl Marshall of the realm, by the great dignitaries and by the brothers and sons of the King. Last of all came the Prince of Wales, conspicuous by his fine person and noble bearing. The grey old walls were hung 15 great presence. He had ruled an extensive with scarlet. The long galleries were crowded by an audience such as has rarely excited the fears or the emulations of an orator. There were gathered together from all parts of a great, free, enlightened, and prosperous em- 20 pire, grace and female loveliness, wit and learning, the representatives of every science and of every art. There were seated round the Queen the fair-haired young daughters of the House of Brunswick. There the Ambassadors of great 25 while it indicated deference to the Court, Kings and Commonwealths gazed with admiration on a spectacle which no other country in the world could present. There Siddons, in the prime of her majestic beauty, looked with emotion on a scene surpassing all the imi- 30 tations of the stage. There the historian of the Roman Empire" thought of the days when Cicero pleaded the cause of Sicily against Verres, and when, before a senate which still retained some show of freedom, Tacitus thundered 35 against the oppressor of Africa. There were seen side by side the greatest painter and the greatest scholar of the age. The spectacle had allured Reynolds from that easel which preserved to us the thoughtful foreheads of 40 so many writers and statesmen, and the sweet smiles of so many noble matrons. It had induced Parr to suspend his labours in that dark and profound mine from which he had extracted a vast treasure of erudition, a treasure 45 too often buried in the earth, too often paraded with injudicious and inelegant ostentation, but still, precious, massive, and splendid. There appeared the voluptuous charms of her to whom the heir of the throne had in secret 50 plighted his faith. There too was she, the beautiful mother of a beautiful race, the Saint 4 Sarah Siddons, a great English actress (1755-1831). Edward Gibbon (1737-94), author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Marius Priscus, pro-consul of Africa, was charged with extortion, and successfully prosecuted by Tacitus and Pliny the Younger. 7 Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-92). Dr. Samuel Parr (1747-1825), a man of vast learning. The Prince of Wales (afterward George III), had married Mrs. Fitzherbert in 1785. indicated also habitual self-possession and self-respect, a high and intellectual forehead, a brow pensive, but not gloomy, a mouth of inflexible decision, a face pale and worn, but serene, on which was written, as legibly as under the picture in the council-chamber at Calcutta, Mens æqua in arduis; such was the aspect with which the great Proconsul presented himself to his judges. His counsel accompanied him, men all of whom were afterwards raised by their talents and learning to the highest post in their profession, the bold and strong-minded Law, afterwards Chief Justice of the King's Bench; the more humane and eloquent Dallas, afterwards Chief Justice of the Common Pleas; and Plomer who, near twenty years later, successfully conducted in the same high court the defence of Lord Melville, 12 and subsequently became Vice-chancellor and Master of the Rolls. But neither the culprit nor his advocates attracted so much notice as the accusers. In the midst of the blaze of red drapery, a space had been fitted up with green benches and tables for the Commons. The managers, with Burke at their head, appeared in full 10 Elizabeth Montague (1720-1800), a writer of some note in her day, and a leader of London society, who numbered among her visitors Walpole, Johnson, Burke, Garrick, and Reynolds. 11 A calm mind in the midst of troubles. 12 Melville, who had been largely responsible for the investigation of Indian affairs which led to the impeachment of Hastings, was tried in 1806 for "gross malversation and breach of duty," while acting as treasurer of the Navy. 5 dress. The collectors of gossip did not fail to remark that even Fox, generally so regardless of his appearance, had paid to the illustrious tribunal the compliment of wearing a bag and sword. Pitt13 had refused to be one of the conductors of the impeachment; and his commanding, copious, and sonorous eloquence was wanting to that great muster of various talents. Age and blindness had unfitted Lord North14 for the duties of a public prosecutor; and his friends were left without the help of his excellent sense, his tact, and his urbanity. But, in spite of the absence of these two distinguished members of the Lower House, the box in which the managers stood contained an array of speakers such as perhaps had not appeared together since the great age of Athenian eloquence. There were Fox and Sheridan, the English Demosthenes and the English Hyperides, 15 There was Burke, ignorant indeed, or negligent of the art of adapting his reasonings and his style to the capacity and taste of his hearers, but in amplitude of comprehension and richness of imagination superior to every orator, ancient or 25 isted in his own mind, he proceeded to arraign modern. There, with eyes reverentially fixed on Burke, appeared the finest gentleman of the age, his form developed by every manly exercise, his face beaming with intelligence and spirit, the ingenious, the chivalrous, the high- 30 admiration from the stern and hostile Chansouled Windham. 16 Nor, though surrounded by such men, did the youngest manager pass unnoticed. At an age when most of those who distinguish themselves in life are still contending for prizes and fellowships at college, 35 he had won for himself a conspicuous place in parliament. No advantage of fortune or connection was wanting that could set off to the height his splendid talents, and his unblemished honor. At twenty-three he had been thought 40 were heard; and Mrs. Sheridan19 was carried worthy to be ranked with the veteran statesmen who appeared as the Delegates of the British Commons, at the bar of the British nobility. All who stood at that bar, save him alone, are gone, culprit, advocates, accusers. 45 To the generation which is now in the vigor of life, he is the sole representative of a great age which has passed away. But those who, within the last ten years, have listened with delight, till the morning sun shone on the 50 the English nation, whose ancient honor he has tapestries of the House of Lords, to the lofty and animated cloquence of Charles, Earl Grey," are able to form some estimate of the powers of a race of men among whom he was not the foremost. The charges and the answers of Hastings were first read. The ceremony occupied two whole days, and was rendered less tedious than it otherwise would have been by the silver voice and just emphasis of Cowper, the clerk 10 of the court, a near relation of the amiable poet. On the third day Burke rose. Four sittings were occupied by his opening speech, which was intended to be a general introduction to all the charges. With an exuberance of 15 thought and a splendor of diction which more than satisfied the highly raised expectation of the audience, he described the character and institutions of the natives of India, recounted the circumstances in which the Asiatic em20 pire of Britain had originated, and set forth the constitution of the Company" and of the English presidencies. Having thus attempted to communicate to his hearers an idea of Eastern society, as vivid as that which ex 13 William Pitt the Younger (1759-1806), Prime Minister of England. 14 Prime Minister from 1770-82, he may be remembered by his obstinate adherence to the policy of oppression with respect to America. 15 An Athenian orator of the fourth century B. C., who although a friend of Demosthenes was chosen to prosecute him on a charge of bribery. 16 William Windham, a member of Parliament, and afterwards a member of the Ministry of the Pitt and Grenville administration. the administration of Hastings as systematically conducted in defiance of morality and public law. The energy and pathos of the great orator extorted expressions of unwonted cellor, and, for a moment seemed to pierce even the resolute heart of the defendant. The ladies in the galleries, unaccustomed to such displays of eloquence, excited by the solemnity of the occasion, and perhaps not unwilling to display their taste and sensibility, were in a state of uncontrollable emotion. Handkerchiefs were pulled out; smelling bottles were handed round; hysterical sobs and screams out in a fit. At length the orator concluded. Raising his voice till the old arches of Irish oak resounded, "Therefore," said he, "hath it with all confidence been ordered, by the Commons of Great Britain, that I impeach Warren Hastings of high crimes and misdemeanors. I impeach him in the name of the Commons' House of Parliament, whose trust he has betrayed. I impeach him in the name of sullied. I impeach him in the name of the people of India, whose rights he has trodden under foot, and whose country he has turned into a desert. Lastly, in the name of human 55 nature itself, in the name of both sexes, in the 17 Grey later became Prime Minister, and did much toward the passing of the Reform Bill in 1832. 18 The East India Company. 19 The wife of the dramatist and statesman Richard Brinsley Sheridan. name of every age, in the name of every rank, I impeach the common enemy and oppressor of all!''20 OLIVER GOLDSMITH (1856) came, and through life continued to be, a passionate admirer of the Irish music, and especially of the compositions of Carolan,' some of the last notes of whose harp he heard. It ought to 5 be added that Oliver, though by birth one of the Englishry, and though connected by numerous ties with the Established Church, never showed the least sign of that contemptuous antipathy with which, in his days, the garded the subject majority. So far, indeed, was he from sharing in the opinions and feelings of the caste to which he belonged, that he conceived an aversion to the Glorious and Immortal Memory, and, even when George the Third was on the throne, maintained that nothing but the restoration of the banished dynasty could save the country. Oliver Goldsmith was one of the most pleasing English writers of the eighteenth century. He was of a Protestant and Saxon family which 10 ruling minority in Ireland too generally rehad been long settled in Ireland, and which had, like most other Protestant and Saxon families, been, in troubled times, harassed and put in fear by the native population. His father, Charles Goldsmith, studied, in the reign of Queen Anne, 15 at the diocesan school of Elphin, became attached to the daughter of the school-master, married her, took orders, and settled at a place called Pallas, in the county of Longford. There he with difficulty supported his wife and 20 soldier Goldsmith was removed in his ninth children on what he could earn, partly as a curate and partly as a farmer. At Pallas, Oliver Goldsmith was born in November, 1728. That spot was then, for all prac From the humble academy kept by the old year. He went to several grammar-schools, and acquired some knowledge of the ancient languages. His life at this time seems to have been far from happy. He had, as appears from tical purposes, almost as remote from the busy 25 the admirable portrait of him at Knowle, and spendid capital in which his later years were passed, as any clearing in Upper Canada or any sheep-walk in Australasia now is. Even at this day those enthusiasts who venture to make a pilgrimage to the birthplace of the poet are 30 forced to perform the latter part of their journey on foot. The hamlet lies far from any highroad, on a dreary plain which, in wet weather, is often a lake. The lanes would break any jaunting-car to pieces; and there are ruts and 35 sloughs through which the most strongly built wheels cannot be dragged. features harsh even to ugliness. The small-pox had set its mark on him with more than usual severity. His stature was small, and his limbs ill put together. Among boys little tenderness is shown to personal defects; and the ridicule excited by poor Oliver's appearance was heightened by a peculiar simplicity and a disposition to blunder which he retained to the last. He became the common butt of boys and masters, was pointed at as a fright in the play-ground, and flogged as a dunce in the school-room. When he had risen to eminence, those who once derided him ransacked their memory for the events of his early years, and recited repartees and couplets which had dropped from him, and which, though little noticed at the time, were supposed, a quarter of a century later, to indicate the powers which produced the "Vicar of Wakefield" and the "Deserted Village." When Oliver was still a child, his father was presented to a living, worth about two hundred pounds a year, in the county of Westmeath. 40 The family accordingly quitted their cottage in the wilderness for a spacious house on a frequented road, near the village of Lissoy. Here the boy was taught his letters by a maid-servant, and was sent, in his seventh year, to a village 45 school kept by an old quarter-master on half pay, who professed to teach nothing but reading, writing and arithmetic, but who had an inexhaustible fund of stories about ghosts, banshees, and fairies, about the great Rapparee 50 long been relieved. They swept the court; chiefs, Baldearg O'Donnell and galloping Hogan Cand about the exploits of Peterborough and Stanhope, the surprise of Monjuich, and the glorious disaster of Brihuega. This man must have been of the Protestant religion, but he 55 was of the aboriginal race, and not only spoke the Irish language, but could pour forth unpremeditated Irish verses. Oliver early be20 V. p. 406, supra. In his seventeenth year Oliver went up to Trinity College, Dublin, as a sizar. The sizars2 paid nothing for food and tuition, and very little for lodging; but they had to perform some menial services from which they have they carried up the dinner to the fellows' table, and changed the plates and poured out the ale of the rulers of the society. Goldsmith was quartered, not alone, in a garret, on the 1 Turlogh O'Carolan (1670-1738). One of the last of the Irish bards, who spent his days wandering about Ireland, singing, and playing on his harp. 2 At Cambridge, and at Trinity College, Dublin, a sizar was a student allowed free commons, and other gratuities, in return for services rendered. versity at which he had resided-in his twentyseventh year, without a degree, with the merest smattering of medical knowledge, and with no property but his clothes and his 5 flute. His flute, however, proved a useful friend. He rambled on foot through Flanders, France, and Switzerland, playing tunes which everywhere set the peasantry dancing, and which often procured for him a supper and a window of which his name, scrawled by himself, is still read with interest. From such garrets many men of less parts than his have made their way to the wool-sack3 or to the episcopal bench. But Goldsmith, while he suffered all the humiliations, threw away all the advantages of his situation. He neglected the studies of the place, stood low at the examinations, was turned down to the bottom of his class for playing the buffoon in the lecture- 10 bed. He wandered as far as Italy. His musiroom, was severely reprimanded for pumping on a constable, and was caned by a brutal tutor for giving a ball in the attic story of the college to some gay youths and damsels from the city. cal performances, indeed, were not to the taste of the Italians; but he contrived to live on the alms which he obtained at the gates of convents. It should, however, be observed, that 15 the stories which he told about this part of his life ought to be received with great caution; for strict veracity was never one of his virtues, and a man who is ordinarily inaccurate in narration is likely to be more than ordinarily inaccurate when he talks about his own travels. Goldsmith, indeed, was so regardless of truth as to assert in print that he was present at a most interesting conversation between Voltaire and Fontenelle, and that this conversation took place at Paris. Now, it is certain that Voltaire never was within a hundred leagues of Paris during the whole time which Goldsmith passed on the continent. While Oliver was leading at Dublin a life divided between squalid distress and squalid dissipation, his father died, leaving a mere pittance. The youth obtained his bachelor's degree, and left the university. During some 20 time the humble dwelling to which his widowed mother had retired was his home. He was now in his twenty-first year; it was necessary that he should do something; and his education seemed to have fitted him to do nothing but 25 to dress himself in gaudy colors, of which he was as fond as a magpie, to take a hand at cards, to sing Irish airs, to play the flute, to angle in summer, and to tell ghost stories by the fire in winter. He tried five or six pro- 30 fessions in turn without success. He applied for ordination; but, as he applied in scarlet clothes, he was speedily turned out of the episcopal palace. He then became tutor in an opulent family, but soon quitted his situation in 35 consequence of a dispute about play. Then he determined to emigrate to America. His relations, with much satisfaction, saw him set out for Cork on a good horse, with thirty pounds in his pocket. But in six weeks he came back 40 on a miserable hack, without a penny, and informed his mother that the ship in which he had taken his passage, having got a fair wind while he was at a party of pleasure, had sailed without him. Then he resolved to study the 45 of this situation so keenly, that he thought it a In 1756 the wanderer landed at Dover, without a shilling, without a friend, and without a calling. He had, indeed, if his own unsupported evidence may be trusted, obtained from the University of Padua a doctor's degree; but this dignity proved utterly useless to him. In England his flute was not in request: there were no convents; and he was forced to have recourse to a series of desperate expedients. He turned strolling player; but his face and figure were ill suited to the boards even of the humblest theatre. He pounded drugs and ran about London with phials for charitable chemists. He joined a swarm of beggars, which made its nest in Axe Yard. He was for a time usher of a school, and felt the miseries and humiliations promotion to be permitted to earn his bread as a bookseller's hack; but he soon found the new yoke more galling than the old cne, and was glad to become an usher again. He ob law. A generous kinsman advanced fifty pounds. With this sum Goldsmith went to Dublin, was enticed into a gaming-house, and lost every shilling. He then thought of medicine. A small purse was made up; and in his 50 tained a medical appointment in the service twenty-fourth year he was sent to Edinburgh. At Edinburgh he passed eighteen months in nominal attendance on lectures, and picked up some superficial information about chemistry and natural history. Thence he went to Leyden 55 still pretending to study physic. He left that celebrated university-the third uni i. e. the office of Lord High Chancellor, who sat upon a cushion of wool. of the East India Company; but the appointment was speedily revoked. Why it was revoked we are not told. The subject was one on which he never liked to talk. It is probable that he was incompetent to perform the duties of the place. Then he presented himself at Surgeons' Hall for examination, as mate to a Probably Axe and Bottle Yard (now King Street), an open space near the old Marshalsea Prison in Southwark naval hospital. Even to so humble a post he was found unequal. By this time the schoolmaster whom he had served for a morsel of food and the third part of a bed was no more. Nothing remained but to return to the lowest drudgery of literature. Goldsmith took a garret in a miserable court, to which he had to climb from the brink of Fleet Ditch by a dizzy ladder of flag-stones called Breakneck Steps. The court and the ascent have long 10 as the first of living English writers; to Reydisappeared; but old Londoners well remember both. Here, at thirty, the unlucky adventurer sat down to toil like a galley-slave. certain natural grace and decorum, hardly to be expected from a man a great part of whose life had been passed among thieves and beggars, street-walkers, and merry-andrews, 5 in those squalid dens which are the reproach of great capitals. In the succeeding six years he sent to the As his name gradually became known, the circle of his acquaintance widened. He was introduced to Johnson, who was then considered nolds, the first of English painters; and to Burke, who had not yet entered Parliament, but had distinguished himself greatly by his writings and by the eloquence of his conver became intimate. In 1763 he was one of the nine original members of that celebrated fraternity which has sometimes been called the Literary Club, but which has always disclaimed that epithet, and still glories in the simple name of The Club. Az press some things which have survived, and 15 sation. With these eminent men Goldsmith many which have perished. He produced articles for reviews, magazines, and newspapers; children's books, which, bound in gilt paper and adorned with hideous woodcuts, appeared in the window of the once far- 20 famed shop at the corner of St. Paul's Churchyard; "An Inquiry into the State of Polite By this time Goldsmith had quitted his Learning in Europe," which, though of little. miserable dwelling at the top of Breakneck or no value, is still reprinted among his works; Steps, and had taken chambers in the more a "Life of Beau Nash," which is not reprinted, 25 civilized region of the Inns of Court. But he though it well deserves to be so; a superficial was still often reduced to pitiable shifts. Toand incorrect, but very readable, "History of ward the close of 1764 his rent was so long in England," in a series of letters purporting to arrear that his landlady one morning called in be addressed by a nobleman to his son; and the help of a sheriff's officer. The debtor, in some very lively and amusing "Sketches of 30 great perplexity, despatched a messenger to London Society," in a series of letters pur- Johnson; and Johnson, always friendly, though porting to be addressed by a Chinese traveller often surly, sent back the messenger with a to his friends. All these works were anony- guinea, and promised to follow speedily. He mous; but some of them were well known to be came, and found that Goldsmith had changed Goldsmith's; and he gradually rose in the es-35 the guinea, and was railing at the landlady over timation of the booksellers for whom he a bottle of Madeira. Johnson put the cork into drudged. He was, indeed, emphatically a the bottle, and entreated his friend to consider popular writer. For accurate research or calmly how money was to be procured. Goldgrave disquisition he was not well qualified smith said that he had a novel ready for the by nature or by education. He knew nothing 40 press. Johnson glanced at the manuscript, accurately: his reading had been desultory; nor saw that there were good things in it, took it to had he meditated deeply on what he had read. a bookseller, sold it for sixty pounds, and soon He had seen much of the world; but he had no- returned with the money. The rent was paid, ticed and retained little more of what he had and the sheriff's officer withdrew. According seen than some grotesque incidents and char- 45 to one story, Goldsmith gave his landlady a 50 acters which had happened to strike his fancy. sharp reprimand for her treatment of him; according to another, he insisted on her joining him in a bowl of punch. Both stories are probably true. The novel which was thus ushered into the world was the "Vicar of Wakefield." But before the "Vicar of Wakefield" appeared in print came the great crisis of Goldsmith's literary life. In Christmas week, 1764, he published a poem, entitled the "Traveller." It was the first work to which he had put his name; and it at once raised him to the rank of a legitimate English classic. The opinion of the most skilful critics was that nothing finer had For an account of this incident, v. p. 427, supra. |