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Louise Imogen Guiney’s A Little English Gallery profiles figures including Magdalen Herbert, Lady Danvers, arguing that her character and relationships shaped her literary circle. The deck covers her family, her friendship with John Donne, and the religious and social details the chapter records.
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Chapter 1 · Question
Who were Lady Danvers's two most famous literary connections?
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Chapter 1 · Answer
She was the dear friend of John Donne and the mother of George Herbert, the poet. The chapter says this gives her a double poetic claim, comparable to Mary Sidney. It notes that to own Herbert for a son is a greater honor than to have perpetuated the Pembroke line.
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She was the dear friend of John Donne and the mother of George Herbert, the poet. The chapter says this gives her a double poetic claim, comparable to Mary Sidney. It notes that to own Herbert for a son is a greater honor than to have perpetuated the Pembroke line.
Chapter 1
The author calls her a most excellent mother to a brilliant, demanding family. George Herbert called her "severa parens" in his verses. The chapter says she combined sagacity with joyousness, and that her sons' peppery Welsh temperaments called out the "manlier part" of her that Donne praised.
Chapter 1
In the Parentalia George calls her "Thou my root, and my most firm rock, O my mother!" The chapter says he owed her his high ideals and the strength of character born of self-discipline. It credits her with fostering the racial fire of the whole family.
Chapter 1
Erected in 1600 at her cost, the alabaster altar-tomb shows her and her husband recumbent, surrounded by small images of their seven sons and three daughters — "Job's number and Job's distribution," as she remarked. The chapter calls it the only known representation of her.
Chapter 1
The chapter says that she and her whole family, like a church in the elect lady's house, would every Sabbath shut up the day at night with a general and cheerful singing of psalms. She also reared her children in generosity and honor, training them to hardiness, simplicity, and equal relish of work and play.
Chapter 2
Edward testifies that after he nearly drowned learning to swim, his mother charged him on her blessing never to learn, saying she had learned of more drowned than saved by it. He adds that though the reason failed to impress him, the commandment did, so he never learned to swim. The author calls this a pretty paradox making her quite human.
Chapter 2
The author says that, without undue officiousness but with the foresight of a shrewd saint, she moved from Montgomery to Oxford to handle Mistress Herbert's husband during his minority. Walton says she kept Edward in moderate awe of her and under her eye daily, yet with such sweetness and compliance with youthful recreations that he willingly spent much time with his dear and careful mother.
Chapter 2
The chapter calls it a chivalrous friendship that embalmed her memory. Donne, then not yet ordained, came to Oxford and attached himself to her and her sons, on whom he had a marked and lasting influence. Citing Walton, the author describes an amity not polluting their souls but made up of suitable inclinations and virtues, compared to St. Chrysostom and Olympias or St. Jerome and Paula.
Chapter 2
Magdalen Herbert supplied the family's daily needs, described as a "bountiful benefactor," while Donne was "as grateful an acknowledger." The chapter says the support did not cease. Donne's first letter to her from Mitcham, Surrey, dated July 10, 1607, consists of terse, tender thanks and encloses sonnets and hymns that are now lost.
Chapter 3
The sonnets and hymns Donne enclosed are "lost to us," and Walton movingly says they were doubtless such as the two now sing in heaven. Dr. Grosart claims with a show of justice that the sequence called La Corona is the identical set passed between them. The chapter presents this as Grosart's claim, not settled fact.
Chapter 3
The chapter says nowhere is Donne's sentiment more genuine or his workmanship more happy and less complex than in verses dedicated to her blameless name, with lucidity unsurpassed among straightforward lyrics of the day. Yet it also notes that in these eulogies, as in most graver contemporaneous poems of the sort, little personality is detectable; the homage has a floating outline and unapproaching music.
Chapter 3
By 1607-8 her privacy ended, probably while she watched her son George at Westminster School; she married Sir John Danvers of Dauntsey, Wilts, twenty years younger than she. Donne says her endowments drew a man of birth, youth, court favor, and legal proximity to great possessions; their unequal years were reduced to evenness, and he would count them thirty apiece, "for as twins of one hour they lived."
Chapter 3
John Marston's masque was given in August 1607 at the ruined castle of Ashby-de-la-Zouch, eighteen miles from Leicester. It was devised by Lord Huntingdon and his young wife, Lady Elizabeth Stanley, to welcome her mother, Alice, Countess-Dowager of Derby, on the first night of her arrival. Fourteen noble ladies took part, among them "Mris Da'vers."
Chapter 4
The chapter cautions that we cannot be too sure. Sir John Danvers was not knighted until the following year, and there was another Mistress Da'vers at court whose letter of February 3, 1613, signed "Mary Magdaline," troubled Camden Society experts. Chamberlain's letter of March 3, 1608-9 reports "Young Davers" wedded to the widow Herbert, more than twice his age, which seems to preclude the fair masquer being the same person.
Chapter 4
Writing on May 12, 1615, she tells her son it is strange to hear him complain of want of care, since her thoughts are seldom removed from him. She swears Sir John's love is to no man more, and that he has been so careful to keep Edward from lack of money abroad that, when the bailiffs fail to pay, he goes to the merchant and offers himself and all the powers he can make.
Chapter 4
She reports that the bailiffs have not paid her sons' annuities due at Midsummer, and only half those due at Christmas, which could prejudice Edward. She notes his sister Johnes is weak after bearing a boy, and Lady Vachell lies dying. She sends little Florence's letter and urges Edward to let his wife and sweet children draw him home, desiring more to see him than anything else in the world.
Chapter 4
Writing in July 1625 while plague raged in London, Donne dated his letter to Sir Henry Wotton "from S'r John Davor's house at Chelsey," saying that this house and Lord Carlisle's at Hanworth made up his "Tusculum," comparing his leisure there to Cicero's golden leisure. The chapter notes many peaceful evenings the two likely passed on the terraces, within sound of solemn songs dear to both.
Chapter 5
Preached at St. Luke's, Chelsea, on 1 July 1627, the sermon says she died "without any change of countenance or posture, without any struggling, any disorder," expecting "God's physic and God's music, a Christianly death." Donne called her "eyes to the blind, and feet to the lame," and "naturally cheerful and merry, and loving facetiousness and sharpness of wit," while Izaak Walton watched from a near pew.
Chapter 5
Printed with her funeral sermon as a small duodecimo sold at the Golden Lion in Paul's Churchyard, Herbert's commemorations are in Greek and Latin. The chapter says he is there unusually strained in prosody and given to awkward pagan conceits, yet the lines beginning Corneliae sanctae preserve precious personal fragments and a picture of her daily habits: morning prayer, her bath, plaiting her glossy hair, housewifely cares, fit replies, letters to friends, and love of music.
Chapter 5
The chapter says morbid, persistent thoughts of the ruin befalling bright human bodies beset Donne from this hour more than ever, until he had an effigy of himself painted and laid in his failing sight. Yet he ended his sermon in a wholesomer strain, quoting "I charge you, O daughters of Jerusalem, that ye wake her not!" He died in 1631, and his epitaph in old St. Paul's reads "Hic licet in occiduo cinere, aspicit eum cujus nomen est Oriens."
Chapter 5
Guiney notes that Walton had the entire correspondence with Dr. Donne before him when writing of Lady Danvers, and that Walton mentions "sacred endearments" between them. Yet Guiney says it now seems impossible to trace these letters or others from the same source, despite George Herbert's praise in the Parentalia of his mother's letter-writing.
Chapter 6
Guiney describes his debts as sprouting perennially in the Chelsea registers, with his name figuring oftener than any rival's as borrowing and paying interest on a forty-pound note that was always renewed once demolished. She calls this disgraceful business his chief concern, and says he sank deeper into entanglements as he aged, especially after the King's death.
Chapter 6
Guiney mentions Lady Danvers's "high tides of melancholy," whose true cause she says Lady Danvers certainly would not have complained of to Dr. Donne. Guiney connects it to the young spendthrift Sir John, who must have had his wheedling way with such of her ample revenues as were yet extant.
Chapter 6
Guiney says Danvers died at Chelsea in April 1655, about his seventy-fourth year, and his manor fell an immediate forfeit to the crown. In 1661 the dead republican was attainted, and all his unprotected estate was declared regal booty. Guiney links this to his having signed the warrant for the King's execution.
Chapter 6
Clarendon calls Sir John Danvers a "proud, formal, weak man," one whom Cromwell "employed and contemned at once." This is a hostile judgment, and the chapter sets it beside George Bate's even harsher charge and the countervailing fact that Dr. Thomas Fuller, like Aubrey, was Danvers's friend and preached at Chelsea at his request.
Chapter 7
Bate says Danvers proved his brother a delinquent in the Rump Parliament so he might overthrow his will and compass the estate himself. He adds that Danvers sided with the sectarian party, was one of the King's judges, and lived years in his sin without repentance. Bate also notes Fuller preached at Chelsea at Danvers's desire.
Chapter 7
His house at Chelsea, now commemorated by Danvers Street, adjoined Sir Thomas More's and was presumably part of the same estate. Around it lay the first Italian garden planted in England, with long flower-beds and orchard-alleys rolling toward the Thames, recalled in the "horti deliciae dominae" of filial sorrow. The home was pulled down and built over in 1716.
Chapter 7
The author argues Danvers was no monster: a comely man of some parts, approved by Lord Bacon and thanked by George Wither, loved by George Herbert, Walton, and Fuller. He was a luckless worldling eager to feather his own nest, driven by timidity and desire for gain into treacheries against himself. His elegance, hospitality, and devotion to his elderly wife won over her circle.
Chapter 7
Vaughan called himself the Silurist, claiming descent from the royal chiefs of southern Wales mentioned by Tacitus, whose home district under Roman rule was called Siluria. He kept this distinctive name even in his humblest epitaph near his home in the valley of the Usk and Honddu.
Chapter 8
He suffered a long, nearly fatal illness during which his wife and dearest friends died, and he was deeply affected by the execution of the King as a passionate partisan. Meanwhile he read George Herbert, and his theory of proportional values began to change, leading him to suppress his youthful verses.
Chapter 8
The author argues that once Vaughan shook off secular ambitions, his voice grew freer and more forceful, and a marked intellectual gain sprang from an apparently slight spiritual readjustment. The author compares this to John Henry Newman three centuries later, and praises Vaughan's out-of-door beauty as almost without parallel.
Chapter 8
It says he was a learned man in the liberal sense, full of lifelong curiosity, though it is not sure he applied himself gracefully to the university curriculum. He thirsts for hidden knowledge, would gladly die if death bought intellectual growth, and looks to eternity as the unsealing of mysteries.
Chapter 8
Guiney states that Vaughan's occupation as a resident physician must have fostered his fine eye and ear for the green earth, furnishing him with musings in sylvan solitudes and rides over fresh hill-paths. The breath of the mountains is about his books, and as an early riser he urged that "Manna was not good after sun-rising."
Chapter 9
Guiney says Vaughan's opinion of Puritanism never varied; he loved almost everything except the Jesuits and his "ogres the Puritans." He mostly kept his snarls and satires hedged within his prose, the proper ground of animosities, though when singing he could not always forget his spites, casting hints like "Who saint themselves, they are no saints!"
Chapter 9
Vaughan explicitly states in Ad Posteros and a prayer in Silex Scintillans that he had no personal share in the struggle and shed no blood. Guiney argues that despite his abstract reasoning against battle, he would have ridden off readily had not "God's finger touched him": a comparison of dates shows he was bedridden while the war went on.
Chapter 9
Guiney says Vaughan nursed the heartiest loathing of democracy and shared the tastes of a clerk of the Temple "who never could be brought to write Oliver with a great O." Politics was his most vehement concern; he tells us playfully that had he been richer, nothing on earth would have kept him from meddling with national issues.
Chapter 9
Born during James I's reign, Vaughan survived the Civil War, the two Protectorates, the excesses of the Restoration (which he satirized), and the Revolution of 1688. He saw the Stuarts come and go repeatedly, and his seventy-four years ended before the dull Georgian era began.
Chapter 10
The author argues Vaughan was thoroughly out of touch with his surroundings: while the world was devil-may-care or Calvinist, he possessed a rapt, inexhaustible joy. Anthony à Wood called him "a proud, humoursome person." He preferred solitude, paradoxes, and his own dreams to the noisy England of pikes and bludgeons.
Chapter 10
The author argues Vaughan was something of a fatalist who followed a lonely, straight path away from crowds, eager only for what fell into his hands. He believed temporal advantage is often an eternal handicap, and the chapter calls this passive quality characteristic of happy men, sustained by faith and will despite calamity and failure.
Chapter 10
Orinda was Catherine Fowler, who married royalist James Philips of Cardigan Priory in 1647. Her home was about fifty miles from Vaughan's, making her a "neighbor" in Welsh solitude. She wrote commendatory verses for his work, praising his secular Muse as "Truth clothed in wit, and Love in innocence" with seriousness and "charming rigour."
Chapter 10
Rev. Thomas Vaughan, Henry's twin brother, backed by other Oxford men, brought out Olor Iscanus in 1650 over the author's head. He disregarded Henry's exaggerated remorse for the fruits of his profaner years and issued the poems as 'formerly written and newly named,' with a motto from the Georgics. The preface, in Eugenius Philalethes' gallant style, admits he lacks the author's approbation but claims law on his side.
Chapter 11
The author argues Vaughan was strictly a man of letters, not a writer by accident. He writes like a Roman, evenly and without a superfluous syllable; every word is congested force packed with meaning. He never broached what he had never brewed, so his work shows little variation and second editions were wellnigh unknown. Its faults are not slips but as radical and congenital as its virtues, since he is enamoured of perfection before writing.
Chapter 11
The author argues Vaughan's conceits are not monstrous, though those not drawn from the open air, where he was happiest, are too bold and too many, coming from finance, medicine, mills, the nursery, and clocks. Unlike Donne in The Valediction, who starts wrong and turns 'stiff twin-compasses' into memorable beauty, Vaughan never starts wrong. His worst conceit, about loving a rose within rather than in hand or skin, bears comparison with Carew and Herbert.
Chapter 11
The author argues that when Vaughan lets go of his regrets, advice, and growls over the bad times, he falls into instant melody, as if that were his real strength rather than rough impressiveness. The example is his blessing for the river Usk, beginning 'Garlands, and songs, and roundelays,' which flows sweetly as the tide it hangs upon. The chapter notes he played with pauses and misplaced metrical stress.
Chapter 11
The author argues Vaughan never learned to distill vowels at the expense of his message, which he tried only to make compact and clear. His speech has a deep, free harmony of its own for those not repelled by abruptness, and even critics who prefer masters of verbal sound may acknowledge the nature of this limitation.
Chapter 12
The author calls Vaughan a born observer and pioneer of nineteenth-century feeling for landscape. His canvas is small and he was indifferent to autumn and ignorant of the sea, yet he portrayed depth and distance at a stroke. He also employed detail during a literary interval when it was out of fashion, as in his lines on leaves remaining on elm, lime, and oak.
Chapter 12
The author argues Vaughan never loved or served art and nature for themselves. His cue was to walk abroad with reverence because in all things he found God. He marks violets and earth-odors after rain, and prays not to forget that physical beauty is a great symbol but only a symbol, a hid ascent through masks and shadows to the divine.
Chapter 12
Vaughan's meek reputation began to renew about 1828, when four critics fitted to appraise his worth were in their prime. Curiously, none of them, not even Charles Lamb, who said a just word for Wither, rescued his sunken name. Bernard Barton, Lamb's friend, seems to have known and admired his Vaughan.
Chapter 12
Vaughan began publishing in 1646 and practically ceased in 1655, reappearing only in 1678 with Thalia Rediviva, which was not issued under his own supervision. Eight little books, counting the two parts of Silex Scintillans as one, enclose all of his original work.
Chapter 13
The chapter says it is commonly supposed Vaughan's verses were forgotten until Lyte's 1847 Aldine edition, but Mr. Carew Hazlitt discovered the advertisement of an eighteenth-century reprint of Vaughan. The author argues the real Vaughan is still debarred from the general reader, since Grosart's results are semi-private.
Chapter 13
Vaughan was thirteen when Herbert died at Bemerton, and he first read Herbert in the sick-chamber where five years of early-manhood distress confined him. The reading could not predate 1647, since Olor Iscanus was ready for the press that year. The author notes Vaughan thanks Herbert's 'holy ever-living lines' for checking his blood.
Chapter 13
The author argues Vaughan foreshadows Wordsworth, especially in poems like The Retreat, Childhood, and Corruption, which contain the point and pathos of Wordsworth's line about "trailing clouds of glory." Dr. Grosart is credited with proving Vaughan was in the Rydal Mount library and influenced the Intimations of Immortality ode.
Chapter 14
The author argues Vaughan has greater imaginative rush and fire, clarity, conciseness, restraint, and sense of color and form than Herbert. Herbert's metaphors, like homing bees and the female scarf, are said to pass over to Vaughan. Yet the author notes Vaughan's best is not Herbert's best, nor his worst Herbert's worst.
Chapter 14
The chapter says Vaughan leans forward to touch Cowper and Keble, and Mr. Churton Collins traces him in Tennyson. His lines on Rachel resemble Milton's Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester, and his lark salutation is likened to Bowles or young Coleridge. Rochester's songs and Clough's verse are also compared to Vaughan's.
Chapter 14
The author argues Vaughan was an original thinker who compromises many authors who never heard of him, and calls him an ancestor rather than a follower. The author says Vaughan has had less lasting appreciation than Herbert, though Vaughan himself would gladly have stepped aside for his exemplar.
Chapter 14
The author argues Vaughan shares with Keats the habit of coining verbs and adjectives from nouns (e.g., "it bloods," "angel'd," "mountained wave") and the "overflow"—crowding sense and voice past the line's breathing-place into the next line. The author notes Vaughan inherited the overflow from Ben Jonson and that it roughens his decasyllabics.
Chapter 15
The author argues it is not from lack of skill but because between his repressed speech and his extreme emotions no art could make out to live. Though he had the possibilities of a great elegiac poet and many memorable laments, there is no sustained masterpiece among them, nothing to equal Cowley's Ode on the Death of Mr. William Hervey.
Chapter 15
Daphnis, the eclogue to the memory of Thomas Vaughan, is the only one of these elegies which, possessing a surplus of beautiful lines, is not even in the least satisfying. By contrast, To the Pious Memory of C. W. is praised for masculine dignity and its heroic ending, "Good-morrow to dear Charles! for it is day."
Chapter 15
The author argues the label is an epic blunder: Vaughan makes the most charming secular reading of religious poets, a favorite for those who find Herbert too decorative, Crashaw too hectic, Cowper too fearful, and Faber too fluent. Against Dr. Johnson's saw that theology cannot clothe itself in attractive numbers, the author replies that Johnson simply was ignorant of Vaughan.
Chapter 15
The author argues that Vaughan's piety is simple and manly, colored with mild thought, and free from emotional consciousness—a quality she says no English poet except Spenser shares. She adds that those devoted to continual polemics do not count Vaughan among themselves, since his double purpose is to make life pleasant to others and to praise God.
Chapter 16
She says Vaughan's true 'note' is—Vaughan himself, full of distinction and a golden idiosyncrasy. She compares reading him to coming alone to a village churchyard with trees at sunset, the west dying in lilac and rose behind a low ivied Norman tower, with south windows open, the young choir within, and the organist rehearsing the psalm of 'pleasures for evermore.'
Chapter 16
The footnote says anthologies were more likely to admit Vaughan after Dr. John Brown and Principal Shairp drew attention to him, but not always: Winstanley, the Theatrum Poetarum, Johnson's Lives, and Southey's collections omit him; Palgrave's Golden Treasury gives a song and a half; Ellis furnishes eighteen lines; Willmott gives him four pages against Crashaw's thirty-five and Herbert's thirty-seven.
Chapter 16
Mr. Frank Millson's 1868 letter to Archbishop Trench disputes the assumption that the 1655 edition is the 1650 book with a new title-page and additions. He notes the 1650 edition has 110 pages, while the second has the same 110 pages plus 84 pages of new matter and a table of first lines, with sheets beginning at A rather than new printer's marks.
Chapter 16
In one of his prefaces, Vaughan criticizes the crowd of Herbertists by saying they "aim more at verse than at perfection." The chapter presents this as Vaughan neatly hitting at imitators of Herbert, and adds that where there are noble resemblances, both sides have a right to be heard, citing Mrs. Thoreau's remark that Mr. Emerson imitates Henry.
Chapter 17
Vaughan openly wears jewels belonging to Jonson. Jonson wrote, "Go seek thy peace in war: Who falls for love of God shall rise a star!" The chapter says no spirited Englishman between 1642 and the Restoration was likely to forget it, and that the passage clung to Vaughan's mind, since he later assimilated it into a line all for peace: "Do thou the works of day, and rise a star."
Chapter 17
While playing Guyomar in Dryden's The Indian Emperor, Farquhar lunged at Vasquez with a genuine sword instead of a stage weapon and nearly killed the actor. The man eventually recovered, but the mental horror and pain of believing he had slain a fellow-creature turned the course of his life. He left the stage and would not return, though about eight years later he played Sir Harry Wildair in Dublin for his own benefit.
Chapter 17
The chapter describes a working record of barely nine years, representing secure and continuous artistic advance, from Love and a Bottle through The Beaux' Stratagem, written in spring 1707. It says this should have brought its patient originator something better than the privilege of dying young, "broken-hearted," as he confessed to Wilkes, "and without a shilling." Farquhar lived 1677 to 1707.
Chapter 17
Farquhar had only the trifling income of an officer's pay to support his wife and two little daughters. He sought no political preferment, and his patrons did not advance him, though men of letters were then being crowded into public service. He received fifteen guineas, then a handsome sum, for a play, and he complained when French acrobats drew attention away from The Twin Rivals.
Chapter 18
The chapter says the Earl of Ormonde, his general, prompted Farquhar to sell his commission to pay debts and agreed to give him a captaincy, or more probably urged him to leave the army on a pledge of other preferment. Farquhar performed his part, but Ormonde delayed fatally, his mind straying to larger matters. The author says the unkept promise hurt him to the heart, and he sank from that hour.
Chapter 18
Farquhar penned a touching testament to Wilkes: 'Dear Bob, I have not anything to leave thee to perpetuate my memory but two helpless girls. Look upon them sometimes! and think of him who was, to the last moment of his life, thine.' He died on or about April 29, 1707, aged thirty, while his last and best comedy played at the Haymarket.
Chapter 18
The author argues that although critics including Hazlitt, Macaulay, and Thackeray gave Farquhar least mention of the four, he is in reality the best playwright among them, and it credits a discreditable period if he is taken as its representative. The author says he had Vanbrugh's vivacity, Congreve's grace, and Wycherley's knack of climax, and that his dialogue is not 'low' to modern tastes.
Chapter 18
The chapter argues the major blot is not its libertinism but its concomitant utter heartlessness. It quotes Erasmus's account of Dean Colet calling arrogance worse than a hundred concubines, and contrasts Congreve's slight touches of tenderness with Vanbrugh's universally cynical characters and Etherege's Man of Mode, a tissue of untruth, hardness, and scorn.
Chapter 19
The chapter says Farquhar's heroines are an innovation because they are maids, not wedded wives; free-spoken yet shining with morning freshness among the tiger-lilies of Restoration drama. Their suitors are called real gentlemen and only pretended impostors, always men and never yahoos, whose talk has no malevolence: they sneer at no virtue and tamper with none.
Chapter 19
The chapter says Farquhar lacked imagination: he could turn ordinary experience to account but required the support of ordinary associations and could not project his spirit beyond them, quoting Leigh Hunt. Instead it praises his insight of another order — sympathy and charity — which distinguishes him from all his fellows.
Chapter 19
The chapter says Farquhar lingers over men and women in middle life with complacence foreign to his colleagues, to whom mothers, guardians, and husbands were ridiculous. Justice Balance and Lady Bountiful are attractive as a hearth-fire; Fairbank the goldsmith draws sentiment; even Squire Sullen is divorced without derision, in harmless laughter. His rogues are merely roguish.
Chapter 19
The chapter reports that critics and biographers have unquestioningly accepted a tradition that Farquhar's chief characters are disguised versions of himself. The author argues the real Farquhar—reserved, plainly dressed, and deliberately high-minded—differed from his restless, jocund creations, and notes Farquhar took pains to disclaim such identification, warning that he wrote a comedy, not a libel.
Chapter 20
The chapter cites the passage "I could not love thee, dear, so much, Loved I not Honour more!" as Farquhar's most memorable word on behalf of wedlock, noting its accidental beauty and the courage it took to write in its time. It adds that Vanbrugh had earlier spoken for marriage in 1698, and that Steele soon became the champion of domestic life.
Chapter 20
The chapter states that Farquhar's outstanding characteristic, distinguishing him from his brocaded dramatis personae, is his known lasting devotion to his family's welfare and his admirable behavior regarding his early and extraordinary marriage. It also notes his diffidence and studiousness in a bacchanalian society, and a scrupulous sensitivity so strong that a boyhood inadvertence kept him from ever fencing again.
Chapter 20
Farquhar issued a miscellany called Love and Business, a collection of occasional verse and epistolary prose. The author argues the amatory letters are likely a work of fiction founded on real moods and incidents of the previous two years, rather than genuine love-letters, since they are disconnected, vary in tone, and veil the recipient's traits.
Chapter 21
A widow named Margaret, of whom little is known, conceived a passionate attachment to Farquhar. It was represented to him from several quarters that she was kindly disposed and had estates and revenues, making the match advantageous to his career. He proposed and was accepted, and it soon transpired that the bride was quite as penniless as himself.
Chapter 21
Hunt hints the robbed friend may have been Farquhar's future wife. Guiney notes this creates contradictions: if she was robbed, she must have had wealth, so the report of her riches could not have been a lie. Alternatively, the robbery may have been invented to quicken Farquhar's sympathy and soften the revelation of her poverty.
Chapter 21
Guiney says the consensus of all witnesses, with no contrary voice, affirms that Farquhar, having been trapped, bore himself like a gentleman. Two children were born to them, brightening but also saddening his brief and diligent life. Under added anxieties he addressed to their mother, from first to last, no word of reproach for her fraud.
Chapter 21
Farquhar used to declare that the dread his family might suffer want was far more bitter to him than death. This fear is presented as a central anxiety of his final years, and the chapter notes that his widow is supposed to have died before 1719 in penury, while a benefit was later held for her and aid arranged for their orphaned daughters.
Chapter 22
Dying of consumption, Farquhar wrote and finished his masterly comedy The Beaux' Stratagem over six weeks, sustained by fortitude under bitter disappointment. He was told to give up hope as he neared the end of the second act, yet that act closes with the rattling catechism between Cherry and Archer and the best verse he ever made, and the third opens with Mrs. Sullen's hearty laugh.
Chapter 22
The author argues Farquhar modeled himself on Congreve's comedy and perfected its mechanism, but never attained Congreve's scholarly elegance of proportion and consummate diction. Yet Farquhar was no purely literary dramatist: he had technical knowledge and skill, and brought existing stage types out of disreputable moonlight into healthful comic air, adding a leaven of homely lovableness that keeps his masterpieces on the stage.
Chapter 22
The author argues Farquhar's original intellect has only relative value and calls him Goldsmith's tutor rather than Congreve's disciple. Goldsmith knew Farquhar's work, shared his Trinity sizar status and reported buffoonery, desired to act Scrub, and his Tony, Young Marlow, Hastings, and Miss Hardcastle echo Farquhar's types; a passage in The Vicar of Wakefield may trace to Farquhar too.
Chapter 22
The author says Farquhar's Discourse upon Comedy did pioneer work for the theory, later expounded by more authoritative critics, that observing or not observing the dramatic unities is at the will of the wise, and that playwrights should look to Shakespeare rather than Aristotle for guidance. The author praises its clear, homespun, forceful style and says it should be reprinted.
Chapter 23
The author argues Farquhar failed to transfer to paper the Ulster dialect he knew in boyhood, so the rogue Teague in The Twin Rivals speaks an impossible brogue. He used it passably for Torlough Macahone but lamentably for Dugard in his last comedy. The author calls it an inartistic mistake that Farquhar made no loving study of his own people.
Chapter 23
The author argues that had Farquhar lived longer or a little later, his turn for skirmishing psychology and his mellowness and unction would have placed him among the essayists and novelists, since those qualities have fullest play in subjective writing. Instead he followed an ill outgoing fashion in aesthetics, and the author begrudges him to the period he adorned.
Chapter 23
According to Mr. Henry Best's Personal and Literary Memorials, advance rumors of the French Revolution found Langton an aristocrat in the fullest sense. But not long after, from conviction, he became a thorough Liberal and remained so, though he suffered great unpopularity in his native county because of the change.
Chapter 25
Johnson was wont to announce that he valued Langton for his piety, his ancient descent, his amiable behavior, and his mastery of Greek. He would ask, "Who in this town knows anything of Clenardus, sir, but you and I?" The chapter adds Johnson's praises: "Earth does not bear a worthier gentleman" and "Sit anima mea cum Langtono!"
Chapter 25
The chapter describes a queerness of constitution leaving Langton at his lowest ebb every afternoon about two o'clock: forgetful, weary, confused, without an idea in his head, until a little food restored him. At dinner-parties he usually rose fasting, such was the perpetual flow of his conversation and the incessant claim made upon him.
Chapter 25
Johnson grumbled and fumed, politely applying to the Misses Langton the title of "three dowdies!" and shouting, in a feudal warmth, that "an ancient estate, sir! an ancient estate should always go to males." Croker conjectures that this business—Langton settling his estate by will upon his sisters, whose tutor he had been—may have been what threatened to break a fealty of some sixteen years' standing.
Chapter 26
Langton wrote down various Scriptural texts recommending tolerance, humility, long-suffering, and other meek ingredients not predominant in Johnson's social composition. Johnson thanked him earnestly, then turned suspicious and demanded, "What's your drift, sir?" When he questioned Langton, all Langton could say amounted to this: that Johnson sometimes contradicted people in conversation. Johnson asked what harm it does any man to be contradicted.
Chapter 26
Beauclerk had an infallible eye for the values of blunders, and incongruity came home to him like a blessing. His speech was pointed, like a foil but without the button—a dangerous little weapon, somewhat unfair, yet carried with such consummate flourish that those it pricked could almost cheer it. Johnson deplored Beauclerk's "predominance over his company," though the tyranny was gracefully exercised.
Chapter 26
Johnson leaned on Langton in more intimate ways than he could on Beauclerk, making comfortable confidences to the scrupulous nature instinctively right: "Men of harder minds than ours will do many things from which you and I would shrink; yet, sir, they will, perhaps, do more good in life than we." Beauclerk, more volatile, took more liberties with Johnson than any man alive, and Johnson was more disposed to envy his talents.
Chapter 26
Johnson told Beauclerk, "you never open your mouth but with the intention to give pain, and you often give me pain, not from the power of what you say, but from seeing your intention." The author presents this as one of the amusing exchanges between the two men, whose differences he compares to a Spanish great galleon and an English man-o'-war.
Chapter 27
The author argues Johnson's influence, though potent, was "negative enough": it kept Beauclerk from a few questionable things and preserved outward decorum toward customs and established institutions, but failed to incite him to make of his talents the "illustrious figure" Langton vainly anticipated. Beauclerk also counseled Johnson to devote himself to poetry and drop dogma and didactics.
Chapter 27
Beauclerk married Lady Diana Spencer, eldest daughter of the second Duke of Marlborough, on March 12, 1768, once she obtained a divorce from Frederick, Lord Bolingbroke. She was in her thirty-fifth year, Beauclerk twenty-nine. Johnson was disturbed and at first offended by the whole affair, but never withdrew from the agreeable society of Beauclerk's wife.
Chapter 27
The courtship and honeymoon were signalized by the forfeit of Beauclerk's place in the exacting Club "for continued inattendance," and he did not regain it for a considerable period. The author notes this as nothing wonderful given the Club's demands. Selwyn's correspondent reported the couple in town at Topham's house giving dinners after the wedding.
Chapter 27
The chapter cites Miss Burney's Diary: Burke, at Sir Joshua's in 1782, spoke of Beauclerk's singular ill-treatment of his wife and the "necessary relief" her widowhood brought. The chapter notes no one in the company contradicted him and Burke was not liable to slander. Against this, Beauclerk's will, made five days before death, left everything to his wife and named her an executor.
Chapter 28
Beauclerk died at his Great Russell Street house on March 11, 1780, aged forty-one, after failing since 1777. Johnson said he would walk the diameter of the earth to save him, and told Lord Althorp the loss was one the whole nation might not repair. He wrote "Poor dear Beauclerk! nec, ut soles, dabis joca!" praising his wit, folly, acuteness, and malice alike.
Chapter 28
His collection of thirty thousand books was sold at auction; the chapter calls the advertisement royal reading. Goldsmith's History of the Earth and Animated Nature was knocked down for two and threepence. Lot 3444 was his own Oxford copy of The Rambler, printed at Edinburgh in 1751. Langton received the Reynolds portrait of Johnson, painted at Beauclerk's cost, and thoughtfully effaced its Latin inscription.
Chapter 28
Topham Beauclerk asked to be buried beside his mother, Lady Beauclerk, or at her feet, in the old chapel of Garston near Liverpool. She had died in 1766. Johnson called it "an instance of tenderness which I should hardly have expected." Beauclerk rests there, in the place of his choice, without an epitaph.
Chapter 29
He held Johnson in sincerest esteem but looked askance at his liberal views, and suspected him of being secretly a Papist. He once offered Johnson a living of some value nearby, suggesting he qualify for Orders; Johnson gravely refused. Johnson called him an exuberant public talker whose declamation prevented county business, and coined "anfractuosities" for his reluctance to sit for portraits.
Chapter 29
Langton planned to educate his boys and girls at home, giving them a thorough acquaintance with the learned languages, with no social engagements allowed to interfere. But society's incursions, the King's teasing question "How does Education go on?", and the couple's own agreeableness shook Minerva's seat, and the plan withdrew. He did teach them: "Next best to knowing is to be sensible that you do not know."
Chapter 29
Johnson told Boswell in 1777 that Langton did not go on well: his table was rather coarse and he kept his children too much about him. Langton had fallen into confirmed extravagance, and Johnson urged him to keep account-books, even at the cost of his Aristophanes, saying a thief might as well plead no turn for honesty. His will shows he had lent Langton £750.
Chapter 29
Langton took lodgings in Fleet Street in the winter of 1785 to sit beside the dying Johnson and hold his hand. He was not alone: the Hooles, Mr. Sestre, and several others kept constant vigil. Miss Burney met Langton in the passage on December 11th, two days before the end, and wrote that neither could look at the other.
Chapter 30
Told that all was over three-quarters of an hour earlier, Langton went upstairs and tried to pen a letter to Boswell. The chapter calls it more touching than tears. He began describing the solemn spectacle of Johnson's remains, but the sentence broke off hopelessly choked and confused, unable to find terms to express it.
Chapter 30
The will, drawn up in June 1800 and kept in Somerset House, left everything to his dear wife as sole executrix: real and personal estate, books, wines, prints, horses, and his right of navigation in the river Wey. George Langton was separately provided for, with some £8000 for the eight younger children. The chapter infers his affairs were in a prodigious tangle, and notes no Christian formulas appear in it.
Chapter 30
The author calls them Gay Heart and Gentle Heart, whose idolatrous devotion drove away Johnson's blue-devils. Their happy prime was in the Oxford Longs and at the founding of the Club in 1764, when neither had any valid claim to celebrity. The chapter recounts their three a.m. rousing of Johnson and the romps, and argues their bearing toward him corroborates his great and warm nature.
Chapter 30
In 1821, familiar with none of the elder dramatists except Shakespeare, Hazlitt borrowed their folios and shut himself up for six weeks at Winterslow Hut on Salisbury Plain. He returned to town steeped in the theme, having written the beautiful and authoritative Lectures. The chapter notes that appreciation of the Elizabethans, propagated by Lamb's Specimens in 1808, was then the work only of pioneers.
Chapter 32
Patmore attributes Hazlitt's 'unpremeditated art'—terse, profound, original, and always at full speed—to two facts: first, he never by choice wrote on any topic in which he did not feel a deep personal interest; second, on questions he did feel, he had thought and meditated in silence for years before contemplating writing. Unlike Walpole's historian, he brought a mind already made up.
Chapter 32
On his last autumn afternoon, Hazlitt said, "I have had a happy life"—words the author says no one else would have dared to say for him. The author argues this was true if happiness is computed by souls rather than by the incidents that befall them, and notes he wrote almost always in what Jeffrey called "a happy intoxication."
Chapter 33
Hazlitt described himself around 1798 as "dumb, inarticulate, helpless, like a worm by the wayside," weeping with vexation at being unable to write, and happy if he could produce as many pages in eight years. In 1817 the floodgates broke with Characters of Shakespeare's Plays, and he became the readiest of writers, his pages going to printers rapidly in first draft.
Chapter 33
The author argues Hazlitt owed the French Revolution and the white heat of hope it spread over Europe the renewal of his very impetus: his moral probity, mental vigor, and physical cheer. His measure of men and things was fixed by its standard, and while other enthusiasts wavered, he never turned his back on it or on Napoleon, its child and champion.
Chapter 33
Most of Hazlitt's portraits are lost or nearly so: fading and cracking pigments ruined them, the Manchester woman and his father's head are barely distinguishable on blackened canvases, and the child Hartley Coleridge perished from damp. The portrait of Charles Lamb in the Venetian doublet, begun 1804, survives in serious primitive browns as the best-known example of an English artist not in the catalogues.
Chapter 33
The chapter says Hazlitt was at the mercy of an excitable, extra-sensitive organization: an accidental failure to return his salute in the street, or especially a servant's gaze as he entered a house, plunged him into excess of wrath and misery. Under stress of a fancied hurt he would say and write malicious things about those he most honored, though at other times he was full of scrupulous good faith and generosity.
Chapter 34
The author argues the calumny is false, citing Hazlitt's hearty musical laugh, his grave sweet smile, and essays like On Going a Journey and The Fight, with its De-Foe-like details. Hazlitt's paradoxes, such as 'the only way to be reconciled with old friends is to part with them for good,' are called ebullitions of pure fun and true philosophy, not malice. The author concedes his humor has quality if not quantity.
Chapter 34
Hazlitt was a great pedestrian whose pocket bulged with a book, and he took keen pleasure in recording the hour, place, mood, and weather of ecstatic first readings. Examples include Love for Love in a tavern parlor between Farnham and Alton, Tom Jones in his father's house, Milton and Burke bought at Shrewsbury, and the New Eloïse at Llangollen on his twentieth birthday over sherry and cold chicken.
Chapter 34
For sixteen years before he died, from the day he formed his resolution, Hazlitt never touched spirits of any kind. His habit of excessive tea-drinking, like Dr. Johnson's, was to keep down sad thoughts. The chapter also notes he was profuse of money when he had it but, according to Mr. Patmore, lacked heart to live well, and that he never corresponded, walked arm in arm, or dedicated a book to anybody.
Chapter 34
The author states that until his Life of Napoleon was well in hand, Hazlitt affirmed that the anonymous Principles of Human Action, completed at twenty in a style the author calls that of the azoic age, was his best work. He also took pride in Characteristics in the Manner of Rochefoucauld's Maxims, which the author calls his one dreary book.
Chapter 35
The author cites Mr. R. H. Hutton's complaint that Arnold ranked his men but did not portray them. Hazlitt, whose search is all for character regardless of historic position, falls into the opposite extreme: he portrays his men but does not rank them. The author argues he would view breaking his subjects into single file as arrogance and rank impiety.
Chapter 35
The author quotes Hazlitt's reflection that we try to stifle the sense we have of living writers' merit, not because they are new or modern, but because we are not sure they will ever be old. The author also cites Professor Wilson's remark that to get Hazlitt's praise you must die for it, and it is almost worth dying for.
Chapter 35
The author argues Hazlitt's manner is essentially pictorial, with an eye for idiosyncrasy in individuals and races, and that his vein of original thought works best applied to affairs, deeds, and men. Yet the author says his genius for assortment and sense of relative values was undeveloped, and he was in no wise a constructive critic.
Chapter 35
The author argues it is difficult to be severe with Hazlitt because he was so outspokenly severe toward himself; every criticism and every defense can be taken from his own mouth. Even Liber Amoris, the author says, shows not only his weakness but his essential uprightness and innocence, with his vindication written in essays like Depth and Superficiality and The Pleasures of Hating.
Chapter 36
The author argues Hazlitt had no apprehension of the supernatural and was very unspiritual. While an admirable arbiter of truly intellectual matters, he is all at sea discussing emotional poetry or purely poetic poetry; its fantastic, mystical touch routs his wits. His stern article on Shelley's Posthumous Poems and his impatience with Coleridge at his best exemplify this limitation.
Chapter 36
The author argues Hazlitt lacked both mental discipline and moral governance, and had an imperfect development. He cannot build up his work piecemeal or clinch his loosely thrown generalizations, and lacks the spirit of co-operation and of marching in line. Despite his personal value he stands detached, episodic, and represents nothing, missing the equipoise and inter-relationship of a classic.
Chapter 36
The author says liberalism was Hazlitt's birthright, tracing it to his childhood years in America and the sunny atmosphere of the young republic. He champions the underdog against class privilege, but cannot do so in a laughing Horatian way: he cannot keep cool or mind his object, his temper breaks like a rocket, and morals are too much in his mind, spoiling his manners.
Chapter 36
The Edinburgh Review argued Hazlitt lacked great leading principles of taste to give singleness to his aims, and had no central points around which his feelings could revolve. It said there was insufficient distinction between his intellectual and imaginative faculties: he confounds truths of imagination with those of fact, processes of argument with those of feeling, and immunities of intellect with those of virtue. The author calls this an admirable arraignment going to the heart of the matter.
Chapter 37
The author quotes Hazlitt's own confession of gallant directness: 'I say what I think; I think what I feel.' The author calls this fatal confusion the thing that makes Hazlitt's course now rapid and clear, then clogged with vagaries as if his rudder ran into sea-weed. It deflects his judgments and leads him, in a modern critic's phrase, to praise the right things for the wrong reasons.
Chapter 37
The author argues Hazlitt is the most ingenuous and agreeable egoist since the seventeenth-century men, content to be the always young looker-on who falls back on his own capacious entity. The author says this same circumstance lends his pages their curious blur and stain while stamping his individuality, giving admirers a hearty relish for his company. His 'I' has a strong constituency in the other twenty-five initials.
Chapter 37
The author describes Hazlitt's habit of recording plain, near things—his childhood garden at Walworth, his mother Grace Loftus gazing at the sunset, his tears over Mrs. Siddons—as deliberate naturalism: a rebellion against didactics and 'tall talk.' The author calls it the milestone of a return, parallel with Wordsworth's, to the fearless contemplation of plain and near things, and asks whether it is not somewhat peculiar in a professing logician.
Chapter 37
Hazlitt threw away his brush because he foresaw only middling success, and in fits of self-dissatisfaction cut many canvases to shreds. Northcote, however, believed his lack of patience had spoiled a great painter. The author says Hazlitt was too full of worship of the masters to be an attentive artisan, and that this sacrifice left only sweetness and the capacity to rejoice in another's success.
Chapter 38
The author argues Hazlitt's style is incredible and not, like Lamb's, of one warp and woof: it soars to the rhetorical sublime and drops to hard Saxon slang. It is for all the world, not only specialists, and its range incorporates the utmost of many men. The author compares it to the Indian juggler's four brass balls—daring, varied, magical—with the astounding result founded on the toil of a lifetime.
Chapter 38
The author argues Hazlitt wanted to impress not that he was knowing or deserving of renown, but that he had rectitude and a consuming passion for good: he spoke truth in and out of season, honored the excellent at his own risk, and fought for principle. The author compares such souls to Roman martyrs who need not have been saints, holding that despite acknowledged imperfections they remain our exemplars.
Chapter 38
The footnote says Hazlitt's favorite metaphor, "Like the tide which flows on to the Propontic, and knows no ebb," was a single explicit line of his, while a reference to Othello in Act III would have shown four lines. The note suggests Mrs. Hazlitt the first undertook to verify her husband's quotations for him.
Chapter 39
The author argues that Fielding, jeered at aboard ship at Redcliffe, felt no personal resentment but saw a picture of human cruelty and inhumanity. By contrast, "poor Hazlitt could not bear even an unintentional slight without imputing diabolical malice to the offender." Yet the author adds that in his saner hours Hazlitt could endure public discomfort and deplore the habit rather than the act.
Chapter 39
An unpublished letter to Hunt complains bitterly of kind Basil Montagu, who had put off a proffered visit from Hazlitt because other guests were expected. Hazlitt wrote that this soured him on friendship. The author argues Hazlitt confounded cause and effect: he was unwelcome in gatherings where his genius was unappreciated, and Montagu later was among the most loyal who nursed Hazlitt in his last illness.
Chapter 39
The chapter says Hazlitt's particular Fight was the great one between Neate of Bristol and Tom Hickman the Gasman, with Neate the victor. It notes that on May 20, 1823, Neate met Spring of Hertfordshire for the championship and went under. The author adds that literature set close to the ropes in those days, citing Maginn and Hood.
Chapter 39
It is a short book subtitled 'A Foot-note to French History,' published by Harper & Brothers with a portrait and map in small 16mo cloth for $1.00. Reviewers describe it as a concise, spirited account of La Rochejaquelein's life and the Vendée War, a dramatic side-issue of the French Revolution.
Chapter 40
The Boston Beacon calls the book a masterpiece of concise narration, praising its ardor, vivacity, and graceful style. The Evangelist says its thorough study would fit out a post-octavo, and the N. Y. Tribune notes she wrote La Rochejaquelein's life on a small scale with spirit and enthusiasm.
Chapter 40
For both Guiney's book and Woolson's novels, Harper & Brothers states the works will be sent by mail, postage prepaid, to any part of the United States, Canada, or Mexico on receipt of the price. They are also for sale by all booksellers.
Chapter 40
The Springfield Republican praises intense picturesqueness and the poetry of landscape; the Chicago Tribune calls characterization her forte, with original, breathing, finely contrasted creations. The N. Y. Times sees analogies to George Eliot, and the Tribune says she individualizes speakers without rabid realism or literary formality.
Chapter 40
Text used: Project Gutenberg eBook #54219 (Public domain in the United States). Generated from the full text; cards paraphrase the source.
Version: Public domain edition. Retrieved 2026-10-25. Cards reviewed 2026-10-25.
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