DR. JOHNSON'S CONVERSATION. "I was very assiduous in recording his conversation."-BOSWELL. HAT Johnson said! how talk would wane, WHA How mute would every man remain When he, with utterance loud and slow, Some truth would teach, some moral show; His weighty words-a ponderous train- With vigorous wit and wisdom plain, And none would dare to question low What Johnson said! But "Goldy," of distinction vain, Might interrupt in random strain, While "Bozzy" listened all aglow Resolved his Journal soon should know— To all mankind's enduring gain What Johnson said. DORA CAVE I TABLE TALK. THORNBURY'S LIFE OF TURNER. HAVE been reading afresh the life of J. M. W. Turner, R.A.,' by my old friend Walter Thornbury: a work to which a good many years ago I contributed a few paragraphs of gossip of no special importance. I was tempted to do this by the appearance of a new edition in one convenient volume, with coloured reproductions of some of Turner's most renowned and characteristic plates. The work appears to me a marvel of cheapness, and I scarcely understand how, with all the newest resources of art, it can be produced for the price at which it is published, were that price even subject to none of the reductions indispensable between publisher and public. With these things I am, however, no way concerned; my interest in it is purely literary, and I derived a good deal of pleasure and entertainment from studying the character of Turner afresh in Thornbury's bright and animated if rather desultory pages. Whatever else he may not have done, Thornbury conveys a striking idea of Turner's strange and in some respects fascinating individuality. It is a real man that is set before us—a man reserved, difficult of access, ignorant of the arts that make pleasant social life, but with a vein of thoughtful tenderness and sentiment in him which, though generally hidden, struggled sometimes into light. In reviewing my impressions, I became aware of a certain resemblance between Turner and David Garrick. IN TURNER AND GARRICK. N some respects no men could be less alike. On the one hand stands Garrick, petted and spoilt by the fashionable world, loving dearly a lord, playing through life a part; a man, indeed, who stands before us in Goldsmith's brilliant sketch, who was not wholly neglected by the Muses, was the privileged associate of the most distinguished men of his day, and whose death, according to Johnson, "eclipsed the gaiety of nations." "Eclipsed," not "extinguished," he subsequently said. On the other is Turner, awkward, London: Chatto & Windus. taciturn, reserved, conscious of drawbacks, and preferring, like Kean and Burns, association with those with whom he could unbend himself. Both were natures d'élite; but Turner, though his verse reaches the lowest depths of incapacity-and he is noteworthy only in connection with his incomparable art—is transcendently the superior of Garrick in genius. Both had, however, in common, the fact that, though men of sincere and exemplary generosity, each left behind him at his death the character of a miser. The excuse is in each case the same. Johnson-who, though he sneered at and insulted Garrick, allowed no one else to attack him-said in memorable words, "Garrick was a very good man, the cheerfullest man of his age; a decent liver in a profession which is supposed to give indulgence to licentiousness, and a man who gave away freely money acquired by himself. He began the world with a great hunger for money; the son of a half-pay officer, bred in a family whose study was to make fourpence do as much as others make fourpencehalfpenny do. But when he had got money he was very liberal." Early conditions with Turner were kindred, and his stinginess, became proverbial. His reputation was, indeed, to some extent merited. The iron of poverty had entered deeply into his soul, and he could not in later life indulge in hospitality. He was nevertheless capable of acts of great generosity. He would refuse thousands for a picture, and, as Thornbury says, he left £140,000 to found an almshouse for decayed artists. Careful he was through life, as was Garrick; but neither can be regarded as a miser. A LUCIUS CARY, VISCOUNT FALKLAND. MONG historical characters few have been the object of eulogy so splendid and unmixed as Lucius Cary, second Viscount Falkland. Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, his closest friend, whom he addressed in his letters as "Sweetheart," and who stood by his side in the Long Parliament, has praised him up to the skies, and dedicated to him the most touching passages in the "History of the Rebellion." One of the most impressive stories in history or mythology is that telling how King Charles I., when the Court and regal government were at Oxford, consulted the "Sortes Virgiliana," and drew thence liveliest previsions of their approaching fate. Matthew Arnold in modern days has spoken of him as a "martyr of sweetness and light, of lucidity of mind and largeness of temper." Dr. Rawson Gardiner again, in his "History of the Great Civil War," speaking of the monument that has been erected to Falkland, declares concerning him that it was "his glory that, when other eyes persisted in seeing nothing but party divisions, he had persisted in seeing England as a whole, and that he had then ceased to be in accord either with the party which he had joined or with the party which he had deserted. It was because he could sympathise with neither that he flung away life by an act which can hardly be distinguished from suicide." In a description of the fight at Newbury, Dr. Gardiner says again concerning Falkland: "At Gloucester he had courted death in vain. The longed-for hour had struck at last; dressing himself in clean linen, he bemoaned the misery of his country. He was weary of the times,' he said, 'but he would be out of it ere the night.'" DR. DID FALKLAND COMMIT SUICIDE? R. GARDINER says, practically, yes. Falkland's latest biographer, apparently a descendant, says no.' That Falkland, having made every [futile] preparation to die decently and cleanly, as his friend Byron says in his "Narrative," "more gallantly than advisedly" spurred his horse through a gap down which the hostile bullets were pouring is known. It is known also that he was weary of the internecine slaughter, hopeless and eager to be out of it. His new biographer will, however, have nought of this. He advances a com. parison. When the Victory was going into action in the battle of Trafalgar, one of the captains, who was just leaving the flagship for his own, wished Nelson success. "God bless you," replied Nelson, as he shook his hand, "I shall never speak to you again." But this is no evidence that Nelson either sought death or intended a moral suicide. Certainly not. The cases, however, do not run on all fours. Nelson was a practised fighter, used to the expenditure of blood, his own or others'. He had an ill-divining soul so far as regards himself, but he was anything rather than anxious to die; wished, indeed, to live, and never for a second despaired concerning his country. With Falkland the reverse was the case. He was unused to action, averse from the sight of blood, hopeless for the future of the side he had adopted and of the country he loved. He was of the sort of amiable and accomplished men who are a chief grace of the piping times of peace, but are wholly unable to face the horrors of war and the exigencies of revolution. There is no cause for shame, even on the part of a descendant, if Falkland's brain and heart gave way when contemplating miseries for which he was held in part responsible, and that he was swept away by the whirlwind he sought vainly to direct. I could, if necessary, find in modern life a parallel to the case. Our estimate of Falkland remains what it has always been, and a gallant attempt to rehabilitate one who needs no rehabilitation must be held to have failed. Falklands. Longmans. SYLVANUS URBAN. THE GENTLEMAN'S MAGAZINE THE MARCH 1898. AN IMPOSTOR. BY KATHARINE Wylde. Un che dirà nell' Inferno a' malnati: I. HE Rev. Edwin Blake, curate of St. Chad's Without, in Darkneedle Street, sat alone in the vestry after the old-fashioned evening service; the meagre collection still on the silver dish before him, and the massive Communion plate, which was the one glory of the forgotten city church, not yet put away in its singularly unsafe resting-place. He was an elderly, gentle-faced, ineffectual man, long a widower, and now in mourning for his only son. very tired and very sad, and while with the easy patience of low spirits he awaited the verger's return from some trivial errand, he was reflecting on the loss of his boy, on the dulness of his sermon, on the thinness of the congregation, and on the small amount of good accomplishing in that dreary parish by himself and his apathetic vicar. The door opened; someone looked in; stealthily perhaps, diffidently it seemed to Mr. Blake. He recognised the only one of the few communicants who had interested him; a youth, fragile and un-English looking, with a smooth dark face, and strange colourless bright eyes under pencilled eyebrows. "Come in!" said the curate, rousing himself; "you wish to speak to me?" VOL. CCLXXXIV. NO. 2007. |