Blackwood's Edinburgh magazine, Vol. 93, No. 571, May, 1863

by Various

PART XVI.

NO. XXII.—ON CERTAIN PRINCIPLES OF ART IN WORKS OF IMAGINATION.

Every description of literature has its appropriate art. This truth is immediately acknowledged in works of imagination. We speak, in familiar phrase, of the Dramatic Art, or the Art of Poetry. But the presence of art is less generally recognised in works addressed to the reason. Nevertheless, art has its place in a treatise on political economy, or in a table of statistics. For in all subjects, however rigidly confined to abstract principles or positive facts, the principles and facts cannot be thrown together pell-mell; they require an artistic arrangement. Expression itself is an art. So that even works of pure science cannot dispense with art, because they cannot dispense with expression. What is called method in Science is the art by which Science makes itself intelligible. There is exquisite art in the arrangement of a problem in Euclid. If a man have a general knowledge of the fact that all lines drawn from the centre of a circle to the circumference are equal, but has never seen that fact proved by Euclid, let him attempt to prove it in his own way, and then compare his attempt with the problem in Euclid which demonstrates the fact, and he will at once acknowledge the master’s art of demonstration. Pascal is said to have divined, by the force of his own genius, so large a number of Euclid’s propositions, as to appear almost miraculous to his admirers, and wholly incredible to his aspersers. Yet that number did not exceed eighteen. In fact, art and science have their meeting-point in method.

And though Kant applies the word genius (ingenium) strictly to the cultivators of Art, refusing to extend it to the cultivators of Science, yet the more we examine the highest orders of intellect, whether devoted to science, to art, or even to action, the more clearly we shall observe the presence of a faculty common to all such orders of intellect, because essential to completion in each—a faculty which seems so far intuitive or innate (ingenium) that, though study and practice perfect it, they do not suffice to bestow—viz., the faculty of grouping into order and symmetrical form, ideas in themselves scattered and dissimilar. This is the faculty of Method; and though every one who possesses it is not necessarily a great man, yet every great man must possess it in a very superior degree, whether he be a poet, a philosopher, a statesman, a general; for every great man exhibits the talent of organisation or construction, whether it be in a poem, a philosophical system, a policy, or a strategy. And without method there is no organisation nor construction. But in art, method is less perceptible than in science, and in familiar language usually receives some other name. Nevertheless, we include the meaning when we speak of the composition of a picture, the arrangement of an oration, the plan of a poem. Art employing method for the symmetrical formation of beauty, as science employs it for the logical exposition of truth: but the mechanical process is, in the last, ever kept visibly distinct; while, in the first, it escapes from sight amid the shows of colour and the curves of grace.

And though, as I have said, Art enters into all works, whether addressed to the reason or to the imagination, those addressed to the imagination are works of Art par emphasis, for they require much more than the elementary principles which Art has in common with Science. The two part company with each other almost as soon as they meet on that ground of Method which is common to both,—Science ever seeking, through all forms of the ideal, to realise the Positive—Art, from all forms of the Positive, ever seeking to extract the Ideal. The beau ideal is not in the reason—its only existence is in the imagination. To create in the reader’s mind images which do not exist in the world, and leave them there, imperishable as the memories of friends with whom he has lived, and of scenes in which he has had his home, obviously necessitates a much ampler and much subtler Art than that which is required to make a positive fact clear to the comprehension. The highest quality of Art, as applied to literature, is therefore called “the Creative.” Nor do I attach any importance to the cavil of some over ingenious critics, who have denied that genius in reality creates; inasmuch as the forms it presents are only new combinations of ideas already existent. New combinations are, to all plain intents and purposes, creations. It is not in the power of man to create something out of nothing. And though the Deity no doubt can do so now—as those who acknowledge that the Divine Creator preceded all created things, must suppose that He did before there was even a Chaos—yet, so far as it is vouchsafed to us to trace Him through Nature, all that we see in created Nature is combined out of what before existed. Art, therefore, may be said to create when it combines existent details into new wholes. No man can say that the watch which lies before me, or the table on which I write, were not created (that is, made) by the watchmaker or cabinetmaker, because the materials which compose a watch or a table have been on the earth, so far as we know of it, since the earth was a world fit for men to dwell in. Therefore, neither in Nature nor in Art can it be truly said that that power is not creative which brings into the world a new form, though all which compose a form, as all which compose a flower, a tree, a mite, an elephant, a man, are, if taken in detail, as old as the gases in the air we breathe, or the elements of the earth we tread. But the Creative Faculty in Art requires a higher power than it asks in Nature; for Nature may create things without life and mind—Nature may create dust and stones which have no other life and mind than are possessed by the animalcules that inhabit them. But the moment Art creates, it puts into its creations life and intellect; and it is only in proportion as the life thus bestowed endures beyond the life of man, and the intellect thus expressed exceeds that which millions of men can embody in one form, that we acknowledge a really great work of Art—that we say of the Artist, centuries after he is dead, “He was indeed a Poet,” that is, a creator: He has created a form of life which the world did not know before, and breathed into that form a spirit which preserves it from the decay to which all of man himself except his soul is subjected. Achilles is killed by Paris; Homer re-creates Achilles—and the Achilles of Homer is alive to-day.

By the common consent of all educated nations, the highest order of Art in Literature is the Narrative, that is the Epic; and the next to it in eminence is the Dramatic. We are, therefore, compelled to allow that the objective faculty—which is the imperative essential of excellence in either of these two summits of the ‘forked Parnassus’—attains to a sublimer reach of art than the subjective—that is, in order to make my scholastic adjectives familiar to common apprehension, the artist who reflects vividly and truthfully, in the impartial mirror of his mind, other circumstances, other lives, other characters than his own, belongs to a higher order than he who, subjecting all that he contemplates to his own idiosyncrasy, reflects but himself in his various images of nature and mankind. We admit this when we come to examples. We admit that Homer is of a higher order of art than Sappho; that Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’ is of a higher order of art than Shakespeare’s Sonnets; ‘Macbeth’ being purely objective—the Sonnets being the most subjective poems which the Elizabethan age can exhibit.

But it is not his choice of the highest order of art that makes a great artist. If one man says “I will write an epic,” and writes but a mediocre epic, and another man says “I will write a song,” and writes an admirable song—the man who writes what is admirable is superior to him who writes what is mediocre. There is no doubt that Horace is inferior to Homer—so inferior that we cannot apportion the difference. The one is epic, the other lyrical. But there is no doubt also that Horace is incalculably superior to Tryphiodorus or Sir Richard Blackmore, though they are epical and he is lyrical. In a word, it is perfectly obvious, that in proportion to the height of the art attempted must be the powers of the artist, so that there is the requisite harmony between his subject and his genius; and that he who commands a signal success in one of the less elevated spheres of art must be considered a greater artist than he who obtains but indifferent success in the most arduous.

Nevertheless, Narrative necessitates so high a stretch of imagination, and so wide a range of intellect, that it will always obtain, if tolerably well told, a precedence of immediate popularity over the most exquisite productions of an inferior order of the solid and staple qualities of imagination—so much so that, even where the first has resort to what may be called the brick and mortar of prose, as compared with the ivory, marble, and cedar of verse, a really great work of Narrative in prose will generally obtain a wider audience, even among the most fastidious readers, than poems, however good, in which the imagination is less creative, and the author rather describes or moralises over what is, than invents and vivifies what never existed. The advantage of the verse lies in its durability. Prose, when appealing to the imagination, has not the same characteristics of enduring longevity as verse;—first and chiefly, it is not so easily remembered. Who remembers twenty lines in ‘Ivanhoe’? Who does not remember twenty lines in the ‘Deserted Village’? Verse chains a closer and more minute survey to all beauties of thought expressed by it than prose, however elaborately completed, can do. And that survey is carried on and perpetuated by successive generations. So that in a great prose fiction, one hundred years after its date, there are innumerable beauties of thought and fancy which lie wholly unobserved; and in a poem, also surveyed one hundred years after its publication, there is probably not a single beauty undetected. This holds even in the most popular and imperishable prose fictions, read at a time of life when our memory is most tenacious, such as ‘Don Quixote’ or ‘Robinson Crusoe,’ ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ or the ‘Arabian Nights.’ We retain, indeed, a lively impression of the pleasure derived from the perusal of those masterpieces; of the salient incidents in story; the broad strokes of character, wit, or fancy; but quotations of striking passages do not rise to our lips as do the verses of poets immeasurably inferior, in the grand creative gifts of Poetry, to those fictionists of prose. And hence the Verse Poet is a more intimate companion throughout time than the Prose Poet can hope to be. In our moments of aspiration or of despondency, his musical thoughts well up from our remembrance. By a couple of lines he kindles the ambition of our boyhood, or soothes into calm the melancholy contemplations of our age.

Cæteris paribus, there can be no doubt of the advantage of verse over prose in all works of the imagination. But an artist does not select his own department of art with deliberate calculation of the best chances of posthumous renown. His choice is determined partly by his own organisation, and partly also by the circumstances of his time. For these last may control and tyrannise over his own more special bias. For instance, in our country, at present, it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that there is no tragic drama—scarcely any living drama at all; whether from the want of competent actors, or from some disposition on the part of our public and our critics not to accord to a successful drama the rank which it holds in other nations, and once held in this, I do not care to examine; but the fact itself is so clear, that the Drama, though in reality it is, in itself, the highest order of poem, next to the Epic, seems to have wholly dropped out of our consideration as belonging to any form of poetry whatsoever. If any Englishman were asked by a foreigner to name even the minor poets of his country who have achieved reputation since the death of Lord Byron, it would not occur to him to name Sheridan Knowles—though perhaps no poet since Shakespeare has written so many successful dramas; nay, if he were asked to quote the principal poets whom England has produced, I doubt very much whether Ben Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, or Otway, would occur to his mind as readily as Collins or Cowper. We have forgotten, in short, somehow or other, except in the single instance of Shakespeare, that dramas in verse are poems, and that where we have a great dramatist, who can hold the hearts of an audience spell-bound, we have a poet immeasurably superior, in all the great qualities of poetry, to three-fourths of the lyrical, and still more of the didactic versifiers who, lettered and bound as British poets, occupy so showy a range on our shelves. It is not thus anywhere except in our country. Ask a Frenchman who are the greatest poets of France, he names her dramatists immediately—Corneille, Racine, Molière. Ask a German, he names Goethe and Schiller; and if you inquire which of the works of those great masters in all variety of song he considers their greatest poems, he at once names their dramas. But to return; with us, therefore, the circumstances of the time would divert an author, whose natural bias might otherwise lead him towards dramatic composition, from a career so discouraged; and as the largest emoluments and the loudest reputation are at this time bestowed upon prose fiction, so he who would otherwise have been a dramatist becomes a novelist. I speak here, indeed, from some personal experience, for I can remember well, that when Mr Macready undertook the management of one of those two great national theatres, which are now lost to the national drama, many literary men turned their thoughts towards writing for the stage, sure that in Mr Macready they could find an actor to embody their conceptions; a critic who could not only appreciate, but advise and guide; and a gentleman with whom a man of letters could establish frank and pleasant understanding. But when Mr Macready withdrew from an experiment which probably required more capital than he deemed it prudent to risk in the mere rental of a theatre, which in other countries would be defrayed by the State, the literary flow towards the drama again ebbed back, and many a play, felicitously begun, remains to this day a fragment in the limbo of neglected pigeon-holes.

The circumstances of the time, therefore, though they do not arrest the steps of genius, alter its direction. Those departments of art in which the doors are the most liberally thrown open, will necessarily most attract the throng of artists, and it is the more natural that there should be a rush toward novel-writing, because no man and no woman who can scribble at all, ever doubt that they can scribble a novel. Certainly, it seems that the kinds of writing most difficult to write well, are the easiest to write ill. Where are the little children who cannot write what they call poetry, or the big children who cannot write what they call novels?—

“Scribimus indocti doctique poemata passim,”

says Horace of the writers of his day. In our day the saying applies in most force to that class of poemata, which pretends to narrate the epic of life in the form of prose. For the docti as well as the indocti—men the most learned in all but the art of novel-writing—write novels, no less than the most ignorant; and often with no better success. One gentleman wishing to treat us with a sermon, puts it into a novel; another gentleman, whose taste is for political disquisition, puts it into a novel; High Church and Low Church and no Church at all, Tories and Radicals, and speculators on Utopia, fancy that they condescend to adapt truth to the ordinary understanding, when they thrust into a novel that with which a novel has no more to do than it has with astronomy. Certainly it is in the power of any one to write a book in three volumes, divide it into chapters, and call it a novel; but those processes no more make the work a novel, than they make it a History of China. We thus see many clever books by very clever writers, which, regarded as novels, are detestable. They are written without the slightest study of the art of narrative, and without the slightest natural gift to divine it. Those critics who, in modern times, have the most thoughtfully analysed the laws of æsthetic beauty, concur in maintaining that the real truthfulness of all works of imagination—sculpture, painting, written fiction—is so purely in the imagination, that the artist never seeks to represent the positive truth, but the idealised image of a truth. As Hegel well observes, “that which exists in nature is a something purely individual and particular. Art, on the contrary, is essentially destined to manifest the general.” A fiction, therefore, which is designed to inculcate an object wholly alien to the imagination, sins against the first law of art; and if a writer of fiction narrow his scope to particulars so positive as polemical controversy in matters ecclesiastical, political, or moral, his work may or not be an able treatise, but it must be a very poor novel.

Religion and politics are not, indeed, banished from works of imagination; but to be artistically treated, they must be of the most general and the least sectarian description. In the record of the Fall of Man, for instance, Milton takes the most general belief in which all Christian nations concur,—nay, in which nations not Christian still acknowledge a myth of reverential interest. Or again, to descend from the highest rank of poetry to a third rank in novel-writing; when Mr Ward, in his charming story of ‘Tremaine,’ makes his very plot consist in the conversion of an infidel to a belief in the immortality of the soul, he does not depart from the artistic principle of dealing, not with particulars, but with generals. Had he exceeded the point at which he very wisely and skilfully stops, and pushed his argument beyond the doctrine on which all theologians concur, into questions on which they dispute, he would have lost sight of art altogether. So in politics—the general propositions from which politics start—the value of liberty, order, civilisation, &c.—are not only within the competent range of imaginative fiction, but form some of its loftiest subjects; but descend lower into the practical questions that divide the passions of a day, and you only waste all the complicated machinery of fiction, to do what you could do much better in a party pamphlet. For, in fact, as the same fine critic, whom I have previously quoted, says, with admirable eloquence:—

“Man, enclosed on all sides in the limits of the finite, and aspiring to get beyond them, turns his looks towards a superior sphere, more pure and more true, where all the oppositions and contradictions of the finite disappear—where his intellectual liberty, spreading its wings, without obstacles and without limits, attains to its supreme end. This region is that of art, and its reality is the ideal. The necessity of the beau-ideal in art is derived from the imperfections of the real. The mission of art is to represent, under sensible forms, the free development of life, and especially of mind.”

What is herein said of Art more especially applies to the art of narrative fiction, whether it take the form of verse or prose. For, when we come to that realm of fiction which, whether in verse or prose, is rendered most alluring to us, either by the fashion of our time or the genius of the artist, it is with a desire to escape, for the moment, out of this hard and narrow positive world in which we live; to forget, for a brief holiday, disputes between High and Low Church, Tories and Radicals—in fine, to lose sight of particulars in the contemplation of general truths. We can have our real life, in all its harsh outlines, whenever we please it; we do not want to see that real life, but its ideal image, in the fable land of art. There is another error common enough in second-rate novelists, and made still more common because it is praised by ordinary critics—viz., an attempt at the exact imitation of what is called Nature; one writer will thus draw a character in fiction as minutely as he can, from some individual he has met in life—another perplexes us with the precise patois of provincial mechanics—not as a mere relief to the substance of a dialogue, but as a prevalent part of it. Now I hold all this to be thoroughly antagonistic to art in fiction—it is the relinquishment of generals for the servile copy of particulars.... It cannot be too often repeated that art is not the imitation of nature; it is only in the very lowest degree of poetry—viz., the Descriptive, that the imitation of nature can be considered an artistic end. Even there, the true poet brings forth from nature more than nature says to the common ear or reveals to the common eye. The strict imitation of nature has always in it a something trite and mean—a man who mimics the cackle of the goose or the squeak of a pig, so truthfully, that for the moment he deceives us—attains but a praise that debases him. Nor this because there is something in the cackle of the goose, and the squeak of pig, that in itself has a mean association; for as Kant says truly, “Even a man’s exact imitation of the song of the nightingale displeases us when we discover that it is a mimicry, and not the nightingale.” Art does not imitate nature, but it founds itself on the study of nature—takes from nature the selections which best accord with its own intention, and then bestows on them that which nature does not possess—viz., the mind and the soul of man.

Just as he is but a Chinese kind of painter, who seeks to give us, in exact prosaic detail, every leaf in a tree, which, if we want to see only a tree, we could see in a field much better than in a picture; so he is but a prosaic and mechanical pretender to imagination who takes a man out of real life, gives us his photograph, and says, “I have copied nature.” If I want to see that kind of man I could see him better in Oxford Street than in a novel. The great artist deals with large generalities, broad types of life and character, and though he may take flesh and blood for his model, he throws into the expression of the figure a something which elevates the model into an idealised image. A porter sate to Correggio for the representation of a saint; but Correggio so painted the porter, that the porter, on the canvass, was lost in the saint.

Some critics have contended that the delineation of character artistically—viz., through the selection of broad generalities in the complex nature of mankind, rather than in the observation of particulars by the portraiture of an individual—fails of the verisimilitude and reality—of the flesh-and-blood likeness to humanity—which all vivid delineation of human character necessarily requires. But this objection is sufficiently confuted by a reference to the most sovereign masterpieces of imaginative literature. The principal characters in Homer—viz., Achilles, Hector, Ulysses, Nestor, Paris, Thersites, &c.—are so remarkably the types of large and enduring generalities in human character, that, in spite of all changes of time and manners, we still classify and designate individuals under those antique representative names. We call such or such a man the Ulysses, or Nestor, or Achilles, or Thersites of his class or epoch. Virgil, on the contrary, has, in Æneas, but a feeble shadow reflected from no bodily form with which we are familiar, precisely because Æneas is not a type of any large and lasting generality in human character, but a poetised and half-allegorical silhouette of Augustus. There is, indeed, an antagonistic difference between fictitious character and biographical character. In biography, truth must be sought in the preference of particulars to generals; in imaginative creations truth is found in the preference of generals to particulars. We recognise this distinction more immediately with respect to the former. In biography, and indeed in genuine history, character appears faithful and vivid in proportion as it stands clear from all æsthetic purposes in the mind of the delineator. The moment the biographer or historian seeks to drape his personages in the poetic mantle, to subject their lives and actions to the poetic or idealising process, we are immediately and rightly seized with distrust of his accuracy. When he would dramatise his characters into types, they are unfaithful as likenesses. In like manner, if we carefully examine, we shall see that when the Poet takes on himself the task of the Biographer, and seeks to give minute representations of living individuals, his characters become conventional—only partially accurate—the accuracy being sought by exaggerating trivial peculiarities into salient attributes, rather than by the patient exposition of the concrete qualities which constitute the interior nature of living men. Satire or eulogy obtrudes itself unconsciously to the artist; and mars the catholic and enduring truthfulness which, in works of imagination, belongs exclusively to the invention of original images for æsthetic ends.

Goethe, treating of the drama, has said, that “to be theatrical a piece must be symbolical; that is to say, every action must have an importance of its own, and it must tend to one more important still.” It is still more important, for dramatic effect, that the dramatis personæ should embody attributes of passion, humour, sentiment, character, with which large miscellaneous audiences can establish sympathy; and sympathy can be only established by such a recognition of a something familiar to our own natures, or to our conception of our natures, as will allure us to transport ourselves for the moment into the place of those who are passing through events which are not familiar to our actual experience. None of us have gone through the events which form the action of Othello or Phèdre; but most of us recognise in our natures, or our conceptions of our natures, sufficient elements for ardent love or agonising jealousy, to establish a sympathy with the agencies by which, in Othello and Phèdre, those passions are expressed. Thus, the more forcibly the characters interest the generalities of mankind which compose an audience, the more truthfully they must represent what such generalities of mankind have in common—in short, the more they will be types, and the less they will be portraits. Some critics have supposed that, in the delineation of types, the artist would fall into the frigid error of representing mere philosophical abstractions. This, however, is a mistake which the poet who comprehends and acts upon the first principle of his art—viz., the preference of generals to particulars—will be the less likely to commit, in proportion as such generals are vivified into types of humanity. For he is not seeking to personate allegorically a passion; but to show the effects of the passion upon certain given forms of character under certain given situations: And he secures the individuality required, and avoids the lifeless pedantry of an allegorised abstraction, by reconciling passion, character, and situation with each other; so that it is always a living being in whom we sympathise. And the rarer and more unfamiliar the situation of life in which the poet places his imagined character, the more in that character itself we must recognise relations akin to our own flesh and blood, in order to feel interest in its fate. Thus, in the hands of great masters of fiction, whether dramatists or novelists, we become unconsciously reconciled, not only to unfamiliar, but to improbable, nay, to impossible situations, by recognising some marvellous truthfulness to human nature in the thoughts, feelings, and actions of the character represented, granting that such a character could be placed in such a situation. The finest of Shakespeare’s imaginary characters are essentially typical. No one could suppose that the poet was copying from individuals of his acquaintance in the delineations of Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, Iago, Angelo, Romeo. They are as remote from portraiture as are the conceptions of Caliban and Ariel. In fine, the distinctive excellence of Shakespeare’s highest characters is that, while they embody truths the most subtle, delicate, and refining in the life and organisation of men, those truths are so assorted as to combine with the elements which humanity has most in common. And it is obvious to any reader of ordinary reflection, that this could not be effected if the characters themselves, despite all that is peculiar to each, were not, on the whole, typical of broad and popular divisions in the human family.

Turning to prose fiction, if we look to the greatest novel which Europe has yet produced (meaning by the word novel a representation of familiar civilised life)—viz., ‘Gil Blas’—we find the characters therein are vivid and substantial, capable of daily application to the life around us, in proportion as they are types and not portraits—such as Ambrose Lamela, Fabricio, the Archbishop of Toledo, &c.; and the characters that really fail of truth and completion are those which were intended to be portraits of individuals—such as Olivares, the Duke de Lerma, the Infant of Spain, &c. And if it be true that, in Sangrado, Le Sage designed the portrait of the physician Hecquet (the ingenious author of the “Système de la Trituration),” and, in the poetical charlatan Triaquero, aimed at a likeness of Voltaire, all we can say is, that no two portraits can be more unfaithful to the originals; and whatever belongs to the characters worthy the genius of the author is to be found in those strokes and touches by which the free play of humour involuntarily destroys the exactitude of portraiture. Again, with that masterpiece of prose romance or fantasy ‘Don Quixote,’ the character of the hero, if it could be regarded as that of an individual whom Cervantes found in life, would be only an abnormal and morbid curiosity subjected to the caricature of a satirist. But regarded as a type of certain qualities which are largely diffused throughout human nature, the character is psychologically true, and artistically completed; hence we borrow the word “Quixotic” whenever we would convey the idea of that extravagant generosity of enthusiasm for the redress of human wrongs, which, even in exciting ridicule, compels admiration and conciliates love. The grandeur of the conception of ‘Don Quixote’ is its fidelity to a certain nobleness of sentiment, which, however latent or however modified, exists in every genuinely noble nature. And hence, perhaps, of all works of broad humour, ‘Don Quixote’ is that which most approximates the humorous to the side of the sublime.

The reflective spirit of our age has strongly tended towards the development of a purpose in fiction, symbolical in a much more literal sense of the word than Goethe intended to convey in the extract I have quoted on the symbolical nature of theatrical composition. Besides the interest of plot and incident, another interest is implied, more or less distinctly or more or less vaguely, which is that of the process and working out of a symbolical purpose interwoven with the popular action. Instead of appending to the fable a formal moral, a moral signification runs throughout the whole fable, but so little obtrusively, that, even at the close, it is to be divined by the reader, not explained by the author. This has been a striking characteristic of the art of our century. In the former century it was but very partially cultivated, and probably grows out of that reaction from materialism which distinguishes our age from the last. Thus—to quote the most familiar illustrations I can think of—in Goethe’s novel of ‘Wilhelm Meister,’ besides the mere interest of the incidents, there is an interest in the inward signification of an artist’s apprenticeship in art, of a man’s apprenticeship in life. In ‘Transformation,’ by Mr Hawthorne, the mere story of outward incident can never be properly understood, unless the reader’s mind goes along with the exquisite mysticism which is symbolised by the characters. In that work, often very faulty in the execution, exceedingly grand in the conception, are typified the classical sensuous life, through Donato; the Jewish dispensation, through Miriam; the Christian dispensation, through Hilda, who looks over the ruins of Rome from her virgin chamber amidst the doves.

To our master novelists of a former age—to Defoe, Fielding, Richardson, and Smollett—this double plot, if so I may call it, was wholly unknown. Swift, indeed, apprehended it in ‘Gulliver’s Travels,’ which I consider the greatest poem—that is, the greatest work of pure imagination and original invention—of the age in which he lived; and Johnson divined it in ‘Rasselas,’ which, but for the interior signification, would be the faulty and untruthful novel which Lord Macaulay has, I venture to opine, erroneously declared it to be. Lord Macaulay censures ‘Rasselas’ because the Prince of Abyssinia does not talk like an Abyssinian. Now, it seems to me that a colouring faithful to the manners of Abyssinia, is a detail so trivial in reference to the object of the author of a philosophical romance, that it is more artistic to omit than to observe it. Rasselas starts at once, not from a positive but from an imagined world—he starts from the Happy Valley to be conducted (in his progress through actual life, to the great results of his search after a happiness more perfect than that of the Happy Valley) to the Catacombs. This is the interior poetical signification of the tale of ‘Rasselas’—the final result of all departure from the happy land of contented ignorance is to be found at the grave. There, alone, a knowledge happier than ignorance awaits the seeker beyond the catacombs. For a moral so broad, intended for civilised readers, any attempt to suit colouring and manners to Abyssinian savages would have been, not an adherence to, but a violation of, Art. The artist here wisely disdains the particulars—he is dealing with generals.

Thus Voltaire’s ‘Zadig’ is no more a Babylonian than Johnson’s ‘Rasselas’ is an Abyssinian. Voltaire’s object of philosophical satire would have been perfectly lost if he had given us an accurate and antiquarian transcript of the life of the Chaldees; and, indeed, the worst parts in ‘Zadig’ (speaking artistically), are those in which the author does, now and then, assume a quasi antique oriental air, sadly at variance with meanings essentially modern, couched in irony essentially French.

But the writer who takes this duality of purpose—who unites an interior symbolical signification with an obvious popular interest in character and incident—errs, firstly, in execution, if he render his symbolical meaning so distinct and detailed as to become obviously allegorical—unless, indeed, as in the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress,’ it is avowedly an allegory; and, secondly, he errs in artistic execution of his plan, whenever he admits a dialogue not closely bearing on one or the other of his two purposes, and whenever he fails in merging the two into an absolute unity at the end.

Now, the fault I find chiefly with novelists is their own contempt for their craft. A clever and scholarlike man enters into it with a dignified contempt. “I am not going to write,” he says, “a mere novel.” What, then, is he going to write? What fish’s tail will he add to the horse’s head? A tragic poet might as well say, “I am not going to write a mere tragedy.” The first essential to success in the art you practise is respect for the art itself. Who could ever become a good shoemaker if he did not have a profound respect for the art of making shoes? There is an ideal even in the humblest mechanical craft. A shoemaker destined to excel his rivals will always have before his eye the vision of a perfect shoe, which he is always striving to realise, and never can. It was well said by Mr Hazlitt, “That the city prentice who did not think the Lord Mayor in his gilded coach was the greatest of human beings would come to be hanged.” Whatever our calling be, we can never rise in it unless we exalt, even to an exaggerated dignity, the elevation of the calling itself. We are noble peasants or noble kings just in proportion as we form a lofty estimate of the nobility that belongs to peasants or the nobility that belongs to kings.

We may despair of the novelist who does not look upon a novel as a consummate work of art—who does not apply to it, as Fielding theoretically, as Scott practically, did, the rules which belong to the highest order of imagination. Of course he may fail of his standard, but he will fail less in proportion as the height of his standard elevates his eye and nerves his sinews.

The first object of a novelist is to interest his reader; the next object is the quality of the interest. Interest in his story is essential, or he will not be read; but if the quality of the interest be not high, he will not be read a second time. And if he be not read a second time by his own contemporaries, the chance is that he will not be read once by posterity. The degree of interest is for the many—the quality of interest for the few. But the many are proverbially fickle, the few are constant. Steadfast minorities secure, at last, the success of great measures, and confirm, at last, the fame of great writings.

I have said that many who, in a healthful condition of our stage, would be dramatists, become novelists. But there are some material distinctions between the dramatic art and the narrative—distinctions as great as those between the oratorical style and the literary. Theatrical effects displease in a novel. In a novel much more than in a drama must be explained and accounted for. On the stage the actor himself interprets the author; and a look, a gesture, saves pages of writing. In a novel the author elevates his invention to a new and original story; in a drama, I hold that the author does well to take at least the broad outlines of a story already made. It is an immense advantage to him to find the tale he is to dramatise previously told, whether in a history, a legend, a romance, or in the play of another age or another land; and the more the tale be popularly familiarised to the audience, the higher will be the quality of the interest he excites. Thus, in the Greek tragedy, the story and the characters were selected from the popular myths. Thus Shakespeare takes his story either from chronicles or novels. Thus Corneille, Racine, and Voltaire take, from scenes of antiquity the most familiarly known, their fables and their characters. Nor is it only an advantage to the dramatist that the audience should come to the scene somewhat prepared by previous association for the nature of the interest invoked; it is also an advantage to the dramatist that his invention—being thus relieved from the demand on its powers in what, for the necessities of the dramatic art, is an unimportant if not erroneous direction of art—is left more free to combine the desultory materials of the borrowed story into the harmony of a progressive plot—to reconcile the actions of characters, whose existence the audience take for granted, with probable motives—and, in a word, to place the originality there where alone it is essential to the drama—viz., in the analysis of the heart, in the delineation of passion, in the artistic development of the idea and purpose which the drama illustrates through the effects of situation and the poetry of form.

But in the narrative of prose fiction an original story is not an auxiliary or erroneous, but an essential, part of artistic invention; and even where the author takes the germ of his subject and the sketch of his more imposing characters from History, he will find that he will be wanting in warmth of interest if the tale he tells be not distinct from that of the history he presses into his service—more prominently brought forward, more minutely wrought out—and the character of the age represented, not only through the historical characters introduced, but those other and more general types of life which he will be compelled to imagine for himself. This truth is recognised at once when we call to mind such masterpieces in historical fiction as ‘Ivanhoe,’ ‘Kenilworth,’ ‘Quentin Durward,’ and ‘I Promessi Sposi.’

In the tragic drama, however, historical subjects appear to necessitate a different treatment from that which most conduces to the interest of romantic narrative. There is a dignity in historical characters which scarcely permits them to be transferred to the stage without playing before the audience the important parts which they played in life. When they enter on the scene they excite a predominating interest, and we should not willingly see them deposed into secondary agencies in the conduct of the story. They ought not to be introduced at all, unless in fitting correspondence with our notions of the station they occupied and the influence they exercised in the actual world; and thus, whether they are made fated victims through their sufferings, or fateful influences through their power, still, in the drama, it is through them that the story moves: them the incidents affect—them the catastrophe involves—whether for their triumph or their fall.

The drama not necessitating an original fable nor imaginary characters, that which it does necessitate in selecting a historical subject is, the art of so arranging and concentrating events in history as to form a single action, terminating in a single end, wrought through progressive incidents clearly linked together. It will be seen that the dramatic treatment is, in this respect, opposed to the purely historical treatment; for in genuine history there are innumerable secondary causes tending to each marked effect, which the dramatist must wholly eliminate or set aside. He must, in short, aim at generals to the exclusion of particulars.

And thus, as his domain is the passions, he must seek a plot which admits of situations for passion, and characters in harmony with such situations. Great historical events in themselves are rarely dramatic—they are made so on the stage by the appeal to emotions with which, in private life, the audience are accustomed to sympathise. The preservation of the Republic of Venice from a conspiracy would have an interest in history from causes appealing to political reasoning, that would be wholly without interest on the stage. The dramatist, therefore, places the preservation of Venice in the struggle of a woman’s heart between the conflicting passions, with which, in private life, the audience could most readily sympathise. According as Belvidera acts, as between her husband and her father, Venice will be saved or lost. This is dramatic treatment—it is not historical. All delineations of passion involve the typical; because whoever paints a passion common to mankind presents us with a human type of that passion, varied, indeed, through the character of an individual and the situations in which he is placed; but still, in the expression of the passion itself, sufficiently germane to all in whom that passion exists, whether actively or latently, to permit the spectator to transfer himself into the place and person of him who represents it. Hence the passions of individuals, though affecting only themselves, or a very confined range of persons connected with them, command, in reality, a far wider scope in artistic treatment than the political events affecting millions in historical fact. For political events, accurately and dispassionately described, are special to the time and agents—they are traced through the logic of the reason, which only a comparative few exercise, and even the few exercise it in the calm of their closets, they do not come into the crowd of a theatre for its exercise. But the passions of love, ambition, jealousy—the conflict between opposing emotions of affection and duty—expressed in the breast of an individual, are not special,—they are universal. And before a dramatic audience the safety of a state is merged or ignored in the superior interest felt in the personation of some emotion more ardent than any state interest, and only more ardent because universal amongst mankind in all states and all times. If the domestic interest be the strongest of which the drama is capable, it is because it is the interest in which the largest number of human breasts can concur, and in which the poet who creates it can most escape from particulars into generals. In the emancipation of Switzerland from the Austrian yoke, history can excite our interest in the question whether William Tell ever existed—and in showing the large array of presumptive evidence against the popular story of his shooting the apple placed on his son’s head. But in the drama William Tell is the personator of the Swiss liberties; and the story of the apple, in exciting the domestic interest of the relationship between father and son, is that very portion of history which the dramatic artist will the most religiously conserve,—obtaining therein one incalculable advantage for his effect—viz., that it is not his own invention, and therefore of disputable probability; but, whether fable or truth in the eyes of the historical critic, so popularly received and acknowledged as a truth, that the audience are prepared to enter into the emotions of the father, and the peril of the son.

It is, then, not in the invention of a story, nor in the creation of imaginary characters, that a dramatist proves his originality as an artist, but in the adaptation of a story, found elsewhere, to a dramatic purpose; and in the fidelity, not to historical detail, but to psychological and metaphysical truth with which he reconciles the motives and conduct of the characters he selects from history, to the situations in which they are placed, so as to elicit for them, under all that is peculiar to their nature or their fates, the necessary degree of sympathy from emotions of which the generality of mankind are susceptible.

But to the narrator of fiction—to the story-teller—the invention of fable and of imaginary character is obviously among the legitimate conditions of his art; and a fable purely original has in him a merit which it does not possess in the tragic or comic poet.

On the other hand, the skilful mechanism of plot, though not without considerable value in the art of narrative, is much less requisite in the Novelist than in the Dramatist. Many of the greatest prose fictions are independent of plot altogether. It is only by straining the word to a meaning foreign to the sense it generally conveys, that we can recognise a plot in ‘Don Quixote,’ and scarcely any torture of the word can make a plot out of ‘Gil Blas.’ It is for this reason that the novel admits of what the drama never should admit—viz., the operation of accident in the conduct of the story: the villain, instead of coming to a tragic close through the inevitable sequences of the fate he has provoked, may be carried off, at the convenient time, by a stroke of apoplexy, or be run over by a railway train. Nevertheless, in artistic narrative, accident, where it affects a dénouement, should be very sparingly employed. Readers, as well as critics, feel it to be a blot in the story of ‘Rob Roy’ when the elder brothers of Rashleigh Osbaldistone are killed off by natural causes unforeseen and unprepared for in the previous train of events narrated, in order to throw Rashleigh into a position which the author found convenient for his ultimate purpose.

A novel of high aim requires, of course, delineation of character, and with more patient minuteness, than the drama; and some novels live, indeed, solely through the delineation of character; whereas there are some tragedies in which the characters, when stripped of theatrical costume, are very trivial, but which, despite the poverty of character, are immortal, partly from the skill of the plot, partly from the passion which is wrought out of the situations, and principally, perhaps, from the beauty of form—the strength and harmony of the verse. This may be said of the French drama generally, and of Racine in especial. The tragic drama imperatively requires passion—the comic drama humour or wit; but a novel may be a very fine one without humour, passion, or wit—it may be made great in its way (though that way is not the very highest one) by delicacy of sentiment, interest of story, playfulness of fancy, or even by the level tenor of everyday life, not coarsely imitated, but pleasingly idealised. Still mystery is one of the most popular and effective sources of interest in a prose narrative, and sometimes the unravelling of it constitutes the entire plot. Every one can remember the thrill with which he first sought to fathom the dark secret in ‘Caleb Williams’ or ‘The Ghost-Seer.’ Even in the comic novel, the great founder of that structure of art has obtained praise for perfection of plot almost solely from the skill with which Tom Jones’s parentage is kept concealed; the terror, towards the end, when the hero seems to have become involved in one of the crimes from which the human mind most revolts, and the pleased surprise with which that terror is relieved by the final and unexpected discovery of his birth, with all the sense of the many fine strokes of satire in the commencement of the tale, which are not made clear to us till the close.

To prose fiction there must always be conceded an immense variety in the modes of treatment—a bold licence of loose capricious adaptation of infinite materials to some harmonious unity of interest, which even the most liberal construction of dramatic licence cannot afford to the drama. We need no lengthened examination of this fact; we perceive at once that any story can be told, but comparatively very few stories can be dramatised. And hence some of the best novels in the world cannot be put upon the stage; while some, that have very little merit as novels, have furnished subject-matter for the greatest plays in the modern world. The interest in a drama must be consecutive, sustained, progressive—it allows of no longueurs. But the interest of a novel may be very gentle, very irregular—may interpose long conversations in the very midst of action—always provided, however, as I have before said, that they bear upon the ulterior idea for which the action is invented. Thus we have in ‘Wilhelm Meister’ long conversations on art or philosophy just where we want most to get on with the story—yet, without those conversations, the story would not have been worth the telling; and its object could not, indeed, be comprehended—its object being the accomplishment of a human mind in the very subjects on which the conversations turn. So, in many of the most animated tales of Sir Walter Scott, the story pauses for the sake of some historical disquisition necessary to make us understand the altered situations of the imagined characters. I need not say that all such delays to the action would be inadmissible in the drama. Hence an intelligent criticism must always allow a latitude to artistic prose fiction which it does not accord to the dramatic, nor indeed to any other department of imaginative representation of life and character. I often see in our Reviews a charge against some novel, that this or that is “a defect of art,” which is, when examined, really a beauty in art—or a positive necessity which that department of art could not avoid—simply because the Reviewer has been applying to the novel rules drawn from the drama, and not only inapplicable, but adverse, to the principles which regulate the freedom of the novel. Now, in reality, where genius is present, art cannot be absent. Unquestionably, genius may make many incidental mistakes in art, but if it compose a work of genius, that work must be a work of art on the whole. For just as virtue consists in a voluntary obedience to moral law, so genius consists in a voluntary obedience to artistic law. And the freedom of either is this, that the law is pleasing to it—has become its second nature. Both human virtue and human genius must err from time to time; but any prolonged disdain, or any violent rupture, of the law by which it exists, would be death to either. There is this difference to the advantage of virtue (for, happily, virtue is necessary to all men, and genius is but the gift of few), that we can lay down rules by the observance of which any one can become a virtuous man; but we can lay down no rules by which any one can become a man of genius. No technical rules can enable a student to become a great dramatist or a great novelist; but there is in art an inherent distinction between broad general principles and technical rules. In all genuine art there is a sympathetic, affectionate, and often quite unconscious adherence to certain general principles. The recognition of these principles is obtained through the philosophy of criticism; first, by a wide and patient observation of masterpieces of art, which are to criticism what evidences of fact are to science; and next, by the metaphysical deduction, from those facts, of the principles which their concurrence serves to establish. By the putting forth of these principles we cannot make bad writers good, nor mediocre writers great; but we may enable the common reader to judge with more correctness of the real quality of merit, or the real cause of defect, in the writers he peruses; and by directing and elevating his taste, rectify and raise the general standard of literature. We may do more than that—we may much facilitate the self-tuition that all genius has to undergo before it attains to its full development, in the harmony between its freedom and those elements of truth and beauty which constitute its law. As to mere technical rules, each great artist makes them for himself; he does not despise technical rules, but he will not servilely borrow them from other artists; he forms his own. They are the by-laws which his acquaintance with his special powers lays down as best adapted to their exercise and their sphere. Apelles is said to have made it a by-law to himself to use only four colours in painting: probably Apelles found his advantage in that restraint, or he would not have imposed it on his pallet. But if Zeuxis found that he, Zeuxis, painted better by using a dozen colours than by confining himself to four, he would have used a dozen, or he would not have been Zeuxis.

On careful and thoughtful examination we shall find, that neither in narrative nor dramatic fiction do great writers differ on the principles of art in the works which posterity accepts from them as great—whereas they all differ more or less in technical rules. There is no great poetic artist, whether in narrative or the drama, who, in his best works, ever represents a literal truth rather than the idealised image of a truth—who ever condescends to servile imitations of nature—who ever prefers the selection of particulars, in the delineation of character or the conception of fable, to the expression of generals—who does not aim at large types of mankind rather than the portraiture of contemporaries—or, at least, wherever he may have been led to reject these principles, it will be in performances that are allowed to be beneath him. But merely technical rules are no sooner laid down by the critics of one age, than they are scornfully violated by some triumphant genius in the next. Technical rules have their value for the artist who employs them, and who usually invents and does not borrow them. Those that he imposes on himself he seldom communicates to others. They are his secret—they spring from his peculiarities of taste; and it is the adherence to those rules which constitutes what we sometimes call his style, but more properly his manner. It is by such rules, imposed on himself, that Pope forms his peculiar cæsura, and mostly closes his sense at the end of a couplet. When this form of verse becomes trite and hackneyed, up rises some other poet, who forms by-laws for himself, perhaps quite the reverse. All that we should then ask of him is success: if his by-laws enable him to make as good a verse as Pope’s in another way, we should be satisfied; if not—not. One main use in technical rules to an author, if imposed on himself, or freely assented to by himself, is this—the interposition of some wholesome impediment to the over-facility which otherwise every writer acquires by practice. And as this over-facility is naturally more apt to be contracted in prose than in verse, and in the looseness or length of the novel or romance, than in any other more terse and systematic form of imaginative fiction—so I think it a wise precaution in every prolific novelist to seek rather to multiply, than emancipate himself from, the wholesome restraints of rules; provided always that such rules are the natural growth of his own mind, and confirmed by his own experience of their good effect on his productions. For if Art be not the imitator of Nature, it is still less the copyist of Art. Its base is in the study of Nature—not to imitate, but first to select, and then to combine, from Nature those materials into which the artist can breathe his own vivifying idea; and as the base of Art is in the study of Nature, so its polish and ornament must be sought by every artist in the study of those images which the artists before him have already selected, combined, and vivified; not, in such study, to reproduce a whole that represents another man’s mind, and can no more be born again than can the man who created it; but again to select, to separate, to recombine—to go through the same process in the contemplation of Art which he employed in the contemplation of Nature; profiting by all details, but grouping them anew by his own mode of generalisation, and only availing himself of the minds of others for the purpose of rendering more full and complete the realisation of that idea of truth or beauty which has its conception in his own mind. For that can be neither a work of art (in the æsthetic sense of the word) nor a work of genius in any sense of the word, which does not do a something that, as a whole, has never been done before; which no other living man could have done; and which never, to the end of time, can be done again—no matter how immeasurably better may be the other things which other men may do. ‘Ivanhoe’ and ‘Childe Harold’ were produced but the other day; yet already it has become as impossible to reproduce an ‘Ivanhoe’ or a ‘Childe Harold’ as to reproduce an ‘Iliad.’ A better historical romance than ‘Ivanhoe,’ or a better contemplative poem than ‘Childe Harold,’ may be written some day or other; but, in order to be better, it must be totally different. The more a writer is imitated the less he can be reproduced. No one of our poets has been so imitated as Pope, not because he is our greatest or our most fascinating poet, but because he is the one most easily imitated by a good versifier. But is there a second Pope, or will there be a second Pope, if our language last ten thousand years longer?

THE LIFE OF GENERAL SIR HOWARD DOUGLAS, BART.[^[3]]

When the announcement first appeared that a biography of the late Sir Howard Douglas was in progress, the impression made upon our minds was anything but favourable to the enterprise. Of the good and gifted man himself, as he mixed in general society, our recollections were indeed of the most pleasurable kind. He stood before us with his kindly manner, his noble appearance, his high bearing, his generous nature, the perfect model of what an English officer and gentleman ought to be. And casting our eyes across the room to the shelf on which his ‘Naval Gunnery’ and ‘Military Bridges’ were ranged, we thought of him as a man of science more than ordinarily well read in his profession. But not all our desire to find in connection with him materials for a consecutive history, helped us to any other conclusion than this, that the story of his life, if told at length, must be a dull one. We acknowledge, less with shame than with satisfaction and some surprise, that we were quite mistaken. Sir Howard Douglas’s career had more of romance about it than that of many a man who has filled a much larger space in the world’s observation. It was successful as far as it carried him, because a sound judgment controlled good abilities, and directed them to a wise end. And, above all, it reads this lesson to coming generations, that he who honestly seeks the wellbeing of others rarely fails, sooner or later, to secure his own. Nor must we omit to render to Sir Howard’s biographer the commendation which he deserves. Mr Fullom has executed his task well; neither overlaying his narrative with details, which sometimes weary, nor keeping back anything which might conduce to its completeness, he has given us one of the pleasantest books which, for some time past, has come under our notice.

The house of Douglas has from the earliest times been renowned in Scottish story. Its alliance with the royal family began in the fourteenth century, when the Lord of Dalkeith took to wife Mary the fifth daughter of James I. On this same Lord of Dalkeith the earldom of Morton was not long afterwards conferred by his brother-in-law, James II. From father to son, or from uncle to nephew, the earldom passed through twelve generations, and narrowly escaped coming in the thirteenth to the father of Sir Howard. But Charles Douglas, if he missed a coronet, won for himself a baronetcy and great distinction as a British sailor. He it was who, when Arnold and Montgomery besieged Quebec, forced his squadron through the ice on the St Lawrence and relieved the place. He it was who first of all constructed a flotilla for himself, and then swept the Canadian lakes of the rebel gunboats; and by-and-by, on the 12th of April 1782, he caught, as if by inspiration, that idea, the application of which enabled Admiral Rodney to break the enemy’s line, and to save at a critical moment the honour of the British fleet.

Of this Sir Charles Douglas, Howard was the eldest son by a second marriage. Sir Charles’s first wife, a foreign lady, had brought him two sons and a daughter, so that Howard’s prospects, so far as title and fortune were concerned, could not have been in his infancy very bright: and they would have been entirely overcast by the early death of his mother, had not her place been well supplied by a maternal aunt. Under the roof of this lady, Mrs Bailey of Olive Bank, near Musselburgh, the little fellow grew and prospered, repaying all the tenderness with which he was reared by his affectionate and gentle disposition, as well as by his industry and success over his books.

Howard’s brothers both entered the navy. This was natural, and it was perhaps equally so that Howard should desire to follow their example; but Sir Charles considered that, if his three sons were all to embrace the same profession, the chances were that they would only stand in each other’s way. He gave directions, therefore, that Howard should be educated for a different walk in life, and the boy ascended in due time from the charge of the governess to the grammar-school. Yet the child’s tastes were entirely naval all the while. He built toy ships, and sailed them on a pond in the garden; he made friends of the fisher-lads and cabin-boys along the coast, and became so initiated into the mysteries of their craft that none among them could better manage than he a fishing-boat or a ship’s yawl. It thus became clear to Sir Charles Douglas, who visited his sister in 1789, previously to assuming the command on a foreign station, that nature had designed his youngest son for a career similar to his own, and he made up his mind to take Howard with him, and to rate him as a midshipman on board the flag-ship. But the coveted flag he was never destined to hoist. A sudden illness carried him off while the guest of his sister, and Howard’s lot was cast for him in the army.

The Royal Academy at Woolwich was more easily entered in those days than it is now. A pass examination was, however, required; and young Douglas, strange to say, in spite of his marked bias for practical mechanics, failed in the elements of geometry. But he had made so good a figure in other respects, and appeared so cast down by the circumstance, that the examiner, Dr Hutton, encouraged him to try again; and three weeks spent with a clever crammer sufficed to bring him up to the mark. He therefore presented himself a second time, passed, and was admitted.

There is one defect in Mr Fullom’s history which puts his readers to considerable inconvenience—he is not very accurate in his dates. We do not quite make out, for example, when young Douglas made his way into the Academy, or how long he continued a cadet; but we are told, what is extremely probable in itself, that he was much beloved by his contemporaries, and that he soon took the lead among them both in the playground and in the class-room. His passion for naval affairs continued as strong as ever, and he indulged it by frequent boat excursions on the Thames. He swam, also, like a duck, and paid many a furtive visit to Deptford dockyard, where he studied by fits and starts the art of shipbuilding. His vacations he spent in Scotland, passing to and from Leith in one of the smacks;—an intense delight to him, because he was instructed by the crews in the arts of knotting and splicing, of plaiting points and gaskets, of making gammets, and heaving the lead. It is not often that a youth displays such unmistakable aptitude for a career which he is not destined to follow; and it still more rarely happens that the amusements of the boy, whom circumstances in after life place in a groove apparently wide apart from them, turn out to have been by no means the least useful branches of his education, either to himself or to others.

After completing his college course, Douglas received a lieutenant’s commission, and in 1795 assumed the command of a small artillery corps in the north of England. His headquarters were in Tynemouth Castle, and he had detachments at Sunderland, Hartlepool, and Berwick-upon-Tweed. His entire force in gunners fell short of fifty men; yet this was at a time when the risk of invasion appeared to be imminent, and Douglas and his gunners were necessarily exposed to bear the brunt of it. The young lieutenant felt how perfectly inefficient his force was, and cast about to devise some means of increasing it. He asked first for a reinforcement of artillerymen, which could not be afforded. He then suggested to the general officer of the district the propriety of drilling a portion of his infantry to the great-gun exercise; and himself, with unwearied diligence, instructed thirty men from each of the regiments quartered within many miles of Tynemouth. He was not, however, satisfied even with this—the thought struck him that he might enlist the sympathies of the fishermen and coasting sailors in the cause which he had at heart; and having obtained through General Balfour the sanction of the Government, he invited them to form themselves into companies of volunteer artillery. Upwards of five hundred fine fellows answered to the call; and the thoughtful lad had soon the satisfaction of knowing that danger, if it did come, would not find him unprepared, and that the merit of having provided a remedy for a great and acknowledged evil was entirely his own.

It is not to be supposed that the young man was so given up to serious matters as to turn away from the recreations common to his age and profession: on the contrary, Douglas seems to have been at Tynemouth the gayest of the gay. He danced well, rode well, established a yacht in which he made many adventurous cruises, and won the hearts of young and old by his frank and graceful manners. But sterner work awaited him, and the romance of his existence began.

Early in August 1795 he received orders to take charge of a detachment of troops, which, with women and children, were to proceed from Woolwich to Quebec. He joined the Phillis transport at Gravesend, and found himself the senior officer, with six subalterns besides himself on board. To him the prospect of a voyage across the Atlantic was a positive delight. What cared he about the inadequacy of accommodation, or the wretched nature of the food which was then issued to soldiers embarked? His thoughts were entirely given up to the great object of his boyish fancy—the actual navigation of a ship out of sight of land, and all the enterprise and excitement incident thereto. Never neglecting his own proper duties, he accordingly found time to make himself one of the crew, and, sharing their labours, and evincing perfect intelligence of all that was required, he won more than the goodwill, the confidence and respect of every one on board.

The Phillis was a slow sailer. She encountered various changes of weather, behaving, upon the whole, tolerably well, though sometimes uneasy and always uncomfortable. At last, however, a tempest overtook her about forty leagues to the east of the southern entrance of the Gulf of St Lawrence, and the sea swept over her decks, knocking the boats from their fastenings. The gale lasted all that day and throughout the night; but a lull came in the morning, and the women and children, who had been kept below, were allowed to come on deck. The same evening the officers entertained the skipper, and all were rejoicing in the prospect of escape from danger, when the mate suddenly broke into the cabin and requested the captain to follow him. Douglas guessed from the manner of the two men that something must be wrong. He ran up the companion-stair, and heard—for he could see nothing—the roar of breakers close ahead. The ship had drifted before the wind, and was already in imminent danger. Immediately the soldiers were ordered up, and, with their assistance, the best bower anchor was let go. But though it seemed to check the vessel for a moment, it soon began to drag; and, with breakers on the bow, practised eyes discovered that there was land on both quarters—that the ship was embayed.

It was evident, under such circumstances, that the single chance of saving the lives of those on board was to force the Phillis, if possible, round a projecting reef on her lee bow. But this could be done only by making more sail, and to go aloft at that moment and shake out reefs was a service of the utmost hazard. The seamen ordered to do so hung back, whereupon Douglas sprang into the shrouds, and, followed by two cabin-boys, accomplished the operation. The consequence was that the Phillis bore up and cleared the point, though very narrowly; but it was a mere respite from danger. The storm grew more and more tremendous. The boats could with difficulty be moved, and one of them (the long-boat) was scarce got over the side ere she went to pieces. The ship was now upon the rocks, and another boat was lowered chiefly by the exertions of the soldiers. But she in her turn seemed in danger of being broken to pieces; whereupon Douglas, followed by two officers, sprang in, hoping to fend her off from the ship’s side. Already she was more than half full of water, which compelled the three youths to spring back, in doing which Douglas missed his footing and fell into the sea. Happily he had divested himself of most of his clothing, and his skill as a swimmer stood him in good stead, for he rose upon the top of a wave, and one of his friends, seizing his collar at the moment, dragged him on to the deck.

Shipwreck under any circumstances is an awful thing. The wreck of the Phillis went on, so to speak, through two days and as many nights. Men and women went overboard; children died from exposure in their mothers’ arms. One poor fellow struck out in despair for the land, and was lost among the breakers. The first raft which the survivors constructed carried two of their number to the shore, who, regardless of the fate of their companions, immediately deserted. A second raft was put together, and on that Mr Douglas reached the land. He had carried a rope with him, and began immediately to construct a bridge. Fortunately the wind lulled at this moment, and the wreck was cleared of its living occupants. But scarcely was this done ere the Phillis went to pieces without an opportunity having been afforded of securing the means of subsistence even for a single day.

The sufferings of these poor people on the barren cliff to which they escaped were dreadful. Happily the waves brought ashore some pieces of cloth as well as a cask of wine and a quantity of smoked pork. But the sailors seized the wine and drank it; and the first night was spent in cold and misery, for the snow lay deep on the ground, and there was no fuel with which to make a fire. All lay down and slept—a sleep from which they would probably never have wakened had not Douglas been roused by a fearful scream, to which the wife of his servant gave utterance. She had gone mad from privations and excitement, and died shrieking to the last, so that her voice was heard over the wind and rain. She had outlived all the women who went on board at Gravesend, and not a child survived.

Mr Douglas was at this time barely nineteen years of age, yet such was the force of his character that all about him, seamen as well as soldiers, looked to him for instructions. He rescued a second cask of wine from being broached this time by soldiers, though not without a struggle. “We are all equals now,” said the leader of the mutineers; “we’ll take no orders from you or anybody else.” “Won’t you!” cried Douglas, springing at his throat with a knife; “you are under my command; and if you don’t obey, by heavens, I’ll kill you!” The man yielded; the small stock of provisions and wine was secured, and after a vain attempt to penetrate through the forest, the whole party returned again to the cliff—there to wait till either help should come from the sea, or famine do its work and destroy them.

A feeling of despair was beginning to gain the mastery, when one day the cry was heard, “A sail! a sail!” They had already set up a spar, and hoisted a piece of cloth upon it; but the object was small, and might not be discerned from a distance, and then what a fate awaited them! It was not, however, so ordered. The sail approached; she was a small schooner trading between St John and Great Jarvis; and the crew gave back the cheer which the poor castaways raised in their agony, crowding at the same time to the beach. They were all taken off and carried to the place whither the schooner was bound, and spent the winter, roughly but not unhappily, among the honest fishermen who had there established themselves.

The winter seemed long, the days being very short in that latitude. Not ungrateful, but tired of the monotony, Douglas purchased a whale-boat, and, having fitted it with a deck, determined, as soon as the season should advance a little, to risk a voyage to the West Indies. Several of his brother officers agreed to share the danger with him, and they got a St Lawrence pilot and a seaman from Newfoundland to join them. But a succession of heavy gales hindered them from starting till April was far spent. At last, just as their preparations were completed, there arrived in the harbour a schooner bound from Halifax to St John, the commander of which had heard of their misfortunes, and gone out of his way to offer them assistance. Adventurous as they were, Douglas and his friends did not hesitate to abandon their own project, and to avail themselves of the superior accommodation thus placed at their disposal. They were accordingly conveyed in the first instance to St John, Mr Douglas doing seaman’s duty throughout the voyage, and by-and-by to Halifax, whither, after discharging cargo, the schooner returned.

The Duke of Kent, the father of her present Majesty, was at that time Governor and Commander-in-Chief in Nova Scotia. He had heard of the fate of the Phillis, and of the sufferings of the crew and passengers, and sent an aide-de-camp to request that such of the officers as might be in a state to be moved, should present themselves at Government House. Douglas and his friend Mr Forbes obeyed the summons, and were most kindly treated by the Royal Duke. But their destination was Quebec, whither, as soon as means of transport could be found, they proceeded. The reception awarded them there, and especially Mr Douglas, was gratifying in the extreme. The important services rendered by the father to the colony had not yet passed out of men’s minds, and they believed that they saw in the son qualities which proved him worthy of his parentage. He was taken at once, so to speak, to the hearts of the people, and had the still higher gratification to find that the authorities, civil and military, entertained a just appreciation of his talents, and were determined to make use of them.

There was an alarm of a French fleet hovering near the coast, and not a single cruiser lay in the St Lawrence. The Governor became anxious, and having often observed Mr Douglas guiding with remarkable adroitness a sailing-boat in boisterous weather about the bay, he bethought him that the nautical skill of the young officer might be applied to better purposes than those of mere amusement. Douglas was sent for, and asked if he would be disposed to take command of an armed coaster, and go off as far as the Banks of Newfoundland in search of the enemy. He accepted the trust without a moment’s hesitation; and, carrying with him, in addition to a good crew, artillerymen enough to man his ten guns, he hoisted his pennant on board a schooner of 250 tons burden, and stood out to sea. Though never coming up with the French fleet—which, indeed, had steered in a different direction—he found more than one opportunity of showing how well qualified he was, under trying circumstances, to manage a ship of war, and probably to fight her. And many a time in after life he used to tell the story, adding that, “after all, a naval life was that for which nature had peculiarly fitted him.”

So passed a year in Lower Canada, at the close of which the roster of service carried Mr Douglas to Toronto, where he still found vent for his marine propensities on Lake Ontario. He became likewise a great sportsman, as well with the gun as with the fishing-rod, and made frequent incursions into the forests in search of game. This brought him more than once in contact with the Red men, over whom, by his cool courage and endurance of fatigue, he acquired a remarkable ascendancy. Among other circumstances worth noticing was his encounter in the bush with a young white girl, of surpassing beauty, who had lived among the Indians from her infancy. He states in his note-book that she had been carried off by a party of warriors who had ravaged a settlement, and that they treated her, as she grew up, with the utmost kindness and respect. “A strange chance discovered her to her brother, and he entreated her to return home; but she refused, declaring that she was perfectly happy, and could not support a different existence.”

In the autumn of 1798, tidings reached Mr Douglas of the death of the elder of his half-brothers. The event rendered necessary his immediate return to England, and he took a passage in the last ship of the season, a little brig, timber-laden and bound for Greenock. It seems to have been his destiny never to go to sea without encountering danger and difficulty. One night, shortly after clearing the Bay of St Lawrence, Mr Douglas was awakened by the vessel giving a sudden lurch, for which he could not account otherwise than by supposing she had struck on some sunken rock. He jumped out of bed, and, staying only to throw a greatcoat about him, ran upon deck. A brisk gale was blowing, and the brig, having got into the trough of the sea, staggered under single-reefed topsails, main-top-gallant-sails, and jib, and fore-and-aft main-sail, with the wind on the beam. The mate, whose watch it was, had got drunk, and gone below, and the helmsman seemed quite at a loss how to guide the rudder. Douglas saw that there was not a moment to be lost. He took the command of the ship, called up all hands, issued with clearness and promptitude orders which were instantly obeyed, and kept the vessel from foundering. The tumult brought the captain on deck, who stood by astonished and speechless. No sooner, however, had he satisfied himself of the untrustworthiness of the mate, than he directed the vessel to be put about, and would have returned to Quebec had not Mr Douglas volunteered to do mate’s duty during the remainder of the passage. There could be no hesitation on the captain’s part, after what he had just seen, to accede to this proposal: so the brig held her course, and arrived safe in the Clyde, where, with protestations of mutual respect and esteem, he and his friendly skipper parted.

Mr Douglas had not been long in Scotland before he fell in love, and soon afterwards married Miss Anne Dundas, a young lady of great personal beauty and cultivated mind. He obtained his promotion likewise in 1799; and having done duty for a while as adjutant of a battalion, he was subsequently posted to the horse-artillery. But better things than the command of a troop were in store for him. The military authorities had established at High Wyckham a cadet school, with a senior department attached to it, in which officers might be instructed for the Staff; and General Zamy, an old aide-de-camp of Frederick the Great, being appointed commandant, it was proposed to Captain Douglas that he should undertake the superintendence of the Staff College. Captain Douglas was not unnaturally reluctant to give up the proper line of his profession, but finding the Duke of York bent upon the arrangement, and being tempted to accede to it by the offer of a step of rank, he passed from the artillery into the line as a major, and took the place for which both his natural talents and acquired information eminently fitted him.

From 1804 up to 1814 Douglas continued to be connected with the educational department of the army. It would be impossible to overestimate the importance of the services which he rendered. He not only instructed candidates for Staff employment by lessons gathered from the past, but deduced, from his own clear perception of things, hints and suggestions which were then entirely new. He had many differences because of this habit with General Zamy, who, like veterans in general, was slow to believe that the tactics and strategy of his own youth could be improved upon. But in 1806 the old man retired, and Douglas, with the rank of lieutenant-colonel, took his place at the head of the establishment. A fresh impulse was immediately given to the course of study. Not surveying only, but pontooning, artillery, and the theory of the whole art of war, were taught, and those brilliant Staff officers sent out who in the Peninsular struggle gave to the Great Duke such efficient support. Sir Howard, however—for he had by this time succeeded by the death of another brother to the baronetcy—yearned for active employment in the field. He applied for and obtained permission to join Sir John Moore’s army, which he overtook just as the retreat from Benevente began; and he shared its fortunes both in the painful marches which it accomplished, and in the battle near Corunna, which enabled it to re-embark without dishonour. By-and-by, when the expedition to the Scheldt was fitted out, Sir Howard prevailed upon the Duke of York to appoint him to the Staff of Lord Chatham’s army as Deputy Quartermaster-General. The enterprise grievously failed; and the loss by disease among the troops and ships’ companies engaged was very severe. But even under such circumstances Sir Howard proved of great service to his chief: for having kept a journal of each day’s proceedings as it occurred, he was able to show, when examined concerning the causes of the failure, that by far the largest share of blame rested with the navy, or rather with the officer whom the Admiralty had placed at its head.

For two years subsequently to his return from Walcheren, Sir Howard led a quiet and useful life as head of the Military College. In 1811, however, a fresh opportunity was found for employing him abroad. The Government of that day put a far higher value on the services of the Spanish guerillas than they deserved, and were incredulous of Lord Wellington’s assurances, that on the regular armies of Spain no dependence could be placed. It seemed to Lord Liverpool and his colleagues that the Spaniards, if properly armed and supplied, were capable by their own valour of driving the French beyond the Pyrenees; and they made choice of Sir Howard Douglas to go among them, because they believed that he possessed talents and energy enough to awaken them to a sense of their duty. He received instructions, therefore, towards the end of July, to proceed without delay to Lord Wellington’s headquarters, and to arrange with him all details respecting his future proceedings. Perhaps there is no interval in the long and useful career of Sir Howard Douglas which afforded him more frequent opportunities of doing good service to his country than that which, extending over little more than a year, was spent by him in Spain; but the tale is one which will not bear condensation.

After conferring with Lord Wellington on the Portuguese frontier, Sir Howard rode across the country to Oporto, and thence took a passage by sea to Corunna. He entered there into relations with Spanish juntas, Spanish generals, and the chiefs of guerilla bands, and found them all, with the exception of one or two individuals belonging to the latter class, even more impracticable than he had been led to expect. He gave them first arms, money, clothing, and had the mortification to learn that the best battalions and batteries, as soon as they became fit for war, were shipped off for South America. He turned next to the irregulars, and succeeded in getting a levy en masse set on foot, which very much perplexed, and gave constant occupation to, the French troops scattered over that and the adjoining provinces. But the circumstance which more than any other affected his own fortunes, was a combined attack on the fortified convent of St Cintio Rey by Sir Home Popham’s squadron from the sea, and the guerilla band of Don Gaspar on shore. It was while watching the effect of the Venerable’s fire that Sir Howard became struck with the ignorance of the first principles of gunnery which manifested itself both among officers and men, and that he conceived the idea of applying, should leisure ever be afforded him, a proper remedy to the evil. From that idea emanated his first great treatise, to which the British navy owes so much, and of which the rulers of the British navy, the Lords of the Admiralty, did not condescend, for many months after it had been submitted to them, even to acknowledge the receipt.

There can be no doubt that to Sir Howard’s activity in Galicia the successful issues of Lord Wellington’s campaign, in the early summer of 1812, were greatly owing. Had he not managed to find employment for two whole divisions of French infantry, these, with a division of cavalry, must have joined Marmont’s army; in which case the battle of Salamanca would have either not been fought at all, or it might have ended less triumphantly than it did. But no man can work impossibilities; and the time arrived when, having accomplished the main purpose of his mission, Sir Howard received orders to return to England. He could not quit the Peninsula, however, without once again communicating with Lord Wellington, whom he found just about to undertake the siege of the Castle of Burgos. To Douglas’s practised eye the place appeared of immense strength in proportion to the means disposable for its reduction; and a private reconnaissance led him to conclude that the whole plan of attack was faulty. In both opinions he stood alone; yet such was the respect in which his judgment was held, that the chiefs of artillery and engineers communicated what he had said to Lord Wellington, and Lord Wellington sent for him. The following is Mr Fullom’s account of this interview:—“‘Well, Sir Howard, you have something to say about the siege?’ ‘I think the place is stronger than we supposed, my Lord.’ ‘Yes, by G—; but our way is to take the hornwork, and from there breach the wall, and then assault over the two advanced profiles.’ ‘I would submit to your Lordship whether our means are equal to such an attack?’ ‘I am not satisfied about our ammunition,’ replied Lord Wellington. ‘The enemy’s guns are 24-pounders, my Lord, and we have only three 18-pounders and five 24-pound howitzers. The 18-pounders will not breach the wall, and our fire must be overpowered, unless your Lordship brings up some guns from the ships at Santander.’ ‘How would you do that?’ ‘With draught oxen as far as the mountains, and then drag them on by hand; we can employ the peasantry, and put a hundred men to a gun.’ ‘It would take too long.’ ‘I think the place may be captured, with our present means, from the eastern front, my Lord,’ returned Sir Howard; and he disclosed his plan, with his reasons for thinking it the most practicable. Lord Wellington made no remark. Possibly he saw the defects of his own plan, but it had been deliberately adopted, and he was not convinced that it ought to be abandoned.”

Mr Fullom has not told this anecdote quite correctly. Sir Howard was more closely questioned as to the mode of conveyance for the guns, and answered more pertinently, than is here set down. He suggested that the 24-pounders should be dismounted, the guns placed in the boles of trees hollowed out, and the carriages run forward by themselves. Thus the narrowest track through woods and round rocks would suffice for the conveyance of the former, while the latter, being comparatively light, would offer no formidable resistance wherever men or bullocks could travel. Lord Wellington, however, adhered to his own plan, and sustained the only reverse which marks the progress of an experience in war extending wellnigh over a quarter of a century. It is just towards both parties to observe, that the baffled hero was too magnanimous not to acknowledge his error. “Douglas was right,” he exclaimed, as he mounted his horse to begin the retreat; “he was the only man who told me the truth.”

Sir Howard returned to England, and there resumed his occupations as a military instructor; but his mind was full of a project for forcing attention to gunnery on the chiefs of the navy; and the disastrous results of the first frigate-actions in the American war not a little quickened his zeal. He had a more herculean task before him, however, than he himself imagined. Strange to say, his disinclination to the study of pure mathematics had never been overcome; and now he found himself obliged to master all the arcana of the science, so far as these had any relation to the movement of a vessel through water under all possible contingencies. While pursuing these studies he effected such improvements in the reflecting circle and semicircle for land and marine surveying as attracted the attention of the Royal Society, which immediately elected him a member; and then he gave himself up steadily to the object for which all this abstruse study had been only the preparation. He produced a treatise in which every point connected with the theory and practice of artillery was handled. He discussed not only the power and range of various kinds of ordnance, with the uses of their several parts, and the effects of transit, windage, recoil, and suchlike, but he explained how a school of naval gunnery could be established, and submitted the whole in MS. for the consideration of the Lords of the Admiralty. Weeks and months passed by, however, without bringing him so much as a written acknowledgment of its receipt; and then, and not till then, he wrote privately to his friend Sir Graham Moore. Sir Graham made such apology as the case would admit of, and did his best to fix upon the subject the attention of his colleagues; but a year elapsed before any decided steps were taken. At last the scheme was adopted; and in 1819, Sir Howard, having first of all obtained the sanction of the Government, gave his valuable treatise to the world. It attracted at once the attention of scientific men both at home and abroad, and led to frequent correspondence between the author and all persons capable of appreciating and taking an interest in so important a matter.

Promoted to the rank of Major-General, Sir Howard was nominated in 1824 to the Governorship of New Brunswick, and to the command of the troops stationed there, and in Nova Scotia, Cape Breton, Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland, and Bermuda. Mr Fullom tells an amusing story of Sir Howard being met on the pier at Halifax by Mr Justice Haliburton, which fails in this respect, that it happens unfortunately not to be accurate. It was not Sam Slick, but his cousin of the same name, who in 1796 had served in the Fusiliers, and in 1824 greeted his old comrade as Governor of New Brunswick. But there is so much of vraisemblance in the matter, that the anecdote may very well remain where it is. On the other hand, Mr Fullom’s narrative of Sir Howard’s administration of the province is not only correct to the letter, but extremely interesting. It came to pass while he was there that one of those fires occurred, of the appalling effects of which we in this old world of Europe can form no conception. It was an unusually dry summer, the third of a succession of such, when first in the town, and by-and-by far off in the forest, flames suddenly broke out. Government House was the first to be burned down; then whole streets ignited at once; and just as a line began to be drawn between what remained of the town and the ashes of dwellings consumed, a lurid glare, seen afar off, gave warning that even a worse calamity was in progress.

“Several days elapsed before the fire subsided, and then it became masked by a smoke which darkened the whole country. But night proved that it had not burned out; for showers of flame shot up at intervals, and trees stood glaring in the dark, while the mingled black and red of the sky seemed its embers overhead. Thus a week passed, when Sir Howard determined to penetrate the forest, and visit the different settlements. A friend has described his parting with Lady Douglas and his daughters, whose pale faces betrayed their emotion, though they forbore to oppose his design, knowing that nothing would keep him from his duty. But this was not understood by others, and the gentlemen of the town gathered round his rough country waggon at the door, and entreated him to wait a few days, pointing to the mountains of smoke, and declaring that he must be suffocated if he escaped being burned. He thanked them for their good feeling, grasped their hands, and mounted the waggon. It dashed off at a gallop, and wondering eyes followed it to the woods, where it disappeared in the smoke.

“The devastation he met exceeded his worst fears; for the settlements he went to visit no longer existed. The fire seems to have burst in every quarter at once; for it broke out at Miramichi the same moment as at Fredericktown, though one hundred and fifty miles lay between. But here its aspect was even more dreadful, and its ravages more appalling, as Miramichi stood in the forest completely girt round except where escape was shut off by the river. Many were in bed when they heard the alarm; many were first startled by the flames, or were suffocated in their sleep, leaving no vestige but charred bones; others leaped from roof or window, and rushed into the forest, not knowing where they went, or took fire in the street, and blazed up like torches. A number succeeded in gaining the river, and threw themselves in boats or on planks, and pushed off from the banks, which the fire had almost reached, and where it presently raged as fiercely as in the town. One woman was aroused from sleep by the screams of her children, whom she found in flames, and caught fire herself as she snatched up an infant and ran into the river, where mother and child perished together. Then came the hurricane, tearing up burning trees and whirling them aloft, lashing the river and channel to fury, and snapping the anchors of the ships, which flew before it like chaff, dashing on the rocks, and covering the waves with wreck. Blazing trees lighted on two large vessels, and they fired like mines, consuming on the water, which became so hot in the shallows that large salmon and other fish leaped on shore, and were afterwards found dead in heaps along the banks of the river. What can be said of such horrors, combining a conflagration of one thousand miles with storm and shipwreck, and surprising a solitary community at midnight? Happily the greater number contrived to reach Chatham by the river; but floating corpses showed how many perished in the attempt, and nearly three hundred lost their lives by fire or drowning.”

No small portion of Sir Howard’s time henceforth was spent in devising means for the relief of the unfortunate people whom this calamity had ruined. He made strong appeals to the benevolence of the British public, which were not disregarded, and he advanced from his own funds more than he could well spare. Nor was he inattentive to other matters. He made a voyage from harbour to harbour throughout the extent of his military command, and, with his usual luck, twice narrowly escaped shipwreck. Indeed, so completely was his name up as a Jonah, that the captain of the Niemen frigate, with whom he had been a passenger, took the alarm.

“The following day” (the day after one of these mishaps) “brought Captain Wallace to dine with the Governor, and it came out that he had been hearing tales about his Excellency which he did not consider to his advantage, for he suddenly asked him if he had not once been shipwrecked. Sir Howard replied by telling the story, and the captain’s face became longer as he proceeded, though he made no remark till the close. He then observed that his regard for him was very great, and he valued their interchange of hospitality in port and ashore, but should never like to take him to sea again; for he had been twenty years afloat without mishap, except on the two occasions when they had been together; and he should now look upon his appearance in his ship as a passenger as a very bad omen indeed.”

On both occasions the ship had struck for lack of proper beacons, and Sir Howard at once applied the remedy. He caused lighthouses to be built where they were most required; and in order to improve the internal communications of the province, he made roads, and proposed a plan for connecting by a canal the Bay of Fundy with the Gulf of St Lawrence. Meanwhile he was not neglectful of the intellectual wants of the colonists, as yet very imperfectly attended to. He founded, endowed, and, after a good deal of opposition, obtained a charter for the University of Fredericktown, of which, in 1829, he became the first Chancellor, giving at the same time his own name to the College. These were works of peace; and he was equally careful in guarding against the chances of war. The treaty of 1783 had left the boundary-line between Great Britain and the United States very imperfectly defined; and as the inhabitants of the latter country increased in number, they began to encroach on the territories of the former. A good many squatters had forced themselves into New Brunswick, and been driven away, till at last a person named Baker, bolder than the rest, took possession of an outlying portion of land, and hoisted the American standard. The proceeding was much approved by the Government of Maine, and strong parties of the militia were turned out in anticipation of a collision with the garrison of Fredericktown.

Sir Howard Douglas, however, knew better than to precipitate hostilities. He contented himself with sending a civil message to Baker, requesting him to withdraw; and when no attention was paid to it, he gave such orders to the troops as would bring them to the frontier in a few hours should their presence be required. This done, a parish constable was desired to perform his duty; and the man, coming upon Baker without any fuss or parade, cut down the flag-staff, seized the squatter, and carried him off in a waggon to the capital of the province. All Maine was thrown into a ferment. The Governor threatened, and demanded that Baker should be set at liberty. Sir Howard refused so much as to see the messenger intrusted with this demand, justly alleging that he could hold communication on such subjects only with the Central Government at Washington. The result was, that Baker, being put upon his trial, was found guilty, and sentenced to pay a fine; which fine, after an enormous amount of bluster, was duly paid. For his firm yet judicious conduct throughout this awkward affair Sir Howard received the approbation of the Home Government, becoming at the same time more than ever an object of enthusiastic admiration to the people whom he governed.

While approving all that their representative had done, the British Government saw that it would be impossible with safety to leave the boundary question longer unsettled. Arrangements were accordingly made with the United States for referring the points at issue to arbitration; and the King of the Netherlands being accepted as arbitrator, Sir Howard was requested to return to Europe, and to watch proceedings. The King’s decision gave, however, little satisfaction to either party. England, indeed, would have acquiesced in it, though feeling herself wronged; but America failed to get all that she coveted, and refused to be bound. It remained for her, by sharp practice at a future period, to gain her end; and for England, under the management of Lord Ashburton and Sir Robert Peel, to be made a fool of. The part played by Sir Howard Douglas during the progress of this negotiation was every way worthy of his high reputation; but that which strikes us most is the sagacity with which, so early as 1828, he foretold events in the States themselves, which have since come to pass. In a paper addressed to the Secretary for the Colonies, which points out endless grounds of quarrel between the Federal Government and the Governments of the several States, he thus expresses himself:—

“Here we may see the manner in which the Union will be dissolved—viz., the secession of any State which, considering its interest, property, or jurisdiction menaced, may no longer choose to send deputies to Congress. This is a great defect in the Bond of Union, which has not, perhaps, been very generally noticed, cloaked as it is under article 1st, section 5th of the Constitution, which states ‘that where there are not present, of either House, members sufficient to form a quorum to do business, a smaller number may be authorised, for the purpose of forming one, to compel the attendance of absent members.’ But this appears only to be authorised for the purpose of forming a quorum, and only extends over members actually sworn in, who, being delegated to Congress by the States they represent, are subjected to whatever rules of proceeding and penalties each House may provide, with the concurrence of two-thirds of its members. But there is nothing obligatory upon the several ‘Sovereign States’ to send members to Congress, or to prevent those sent from being withdrawn. The ‘Sovereign States’ have never bound themselves to do either; so that the process of dissolution in this way is very simple, and the danger imminent of a separation being thus effected, whenever the interests of any particular State or States are touched by the Government, or brought into discussion in Congress, although those interests may be outvoted by the preponderating influence of other States having different interests. But the State or States which are to suffer will not, it is clear, send members to vote their own injury or ruin; and it may safely be pronounced, from what I have shown in this paper, that this is the manner in which the American Union will come to a natural death.”

Sir Howard returned to England from the Hague, to find the Government bent on equalising the duties on foreign and colonial timber, and thereby depriving the people of New Brunswick of one of the most lucrative branches of their trade. He could not sit still and see done what he himself regarded as an act of great injustice. He made immense exertions, therefore, personally and through the press, to defeat the Ministerial measure, and he succeeded. It was impossible, under such circumstances, to return to New Brunswick, and he therefore resigned the government. Not even their satisfaction at the victory which he had achieved for them could reconcile the New Brunswickers to the loss of their Governor; and they marked their gratitude for all that he had done by presenting him with a magnificent service of plate. Indeed, it is very touching to remember how, up to the latest day of his life, every person connected with New Brunswick, on visiting England, sought him out as if he had been a private friend, and laid open to him matters, not of public only, but of private business. The Whig Ministers, on the other hand, naturally piqued at their defeat, left him for four years without any employment. Hence it was not till 1835, when Sir Robert Peel acceded to office, that Sir Howard received the appointment of Lord High Commissioner of the Ionian Islands. It was again his fate to be mixed up with calamities brought on by natural causes, and with political difficulties of no common order. There arrived one day from Ireland, at Government House, a Right Rev. Dr Hynes, a protégé of Daniel O’Connell, who introduced himself to Sir Howard as Bishop of Corfu, and handed him a letter from Lord Glenelg, at that time Colonial Secretary.

“‘You seem not to be aware that there is already a Bishop in Corfu,’ remarked Sir Howard. Dr Hynes intimated that he was a Catholic Bishop appointed by the Pope. ‘I know of but one Bishop here, sir,’ replied Sir Howard, ‘and no other could be recognised.’ Dr Hynes remonstrated, and pointed out the importance to England of the Roman Catholic interest in the islands; but Sir Howard could not be persuaded that the British Government was not strong enough to hold its ground without this bulwark. The prelate appealed to the letter of the Minister of the Colonies, but was shown that this was no recognition, nor could such be given without the sanction of the Ionian Senate. He declared he would assume his functions, and abide the consequences; but met a firmness surpassing his own, and learned that he would not be permitted to remain on the island. He denied that he could be expelled, and warned the Lord High Commissioner that his conduct must be answered in England. ‘I have only to say,’ was the reply, ‘that you will be removed by the police if you are not gone within twenty-four hours.’”

The Bishop was unable to resist such an argument as this, and Papal aggression received a temporary check in Corfu. But Sir Howard had another battle to fight, and he fought it to a successful issue. Wherever he exercised authority, his great object seems to have been to promote the physical and moral wellbeing of society, and he applied himself with this view to compile a sound code of laws for the Ionians. Nothing could be more offensive to those who profited by bad laws; and the priests in particular, set on by the Patriarch of Constantinople, as he was set on by Russia, offered all the opposition in their power. Sir Howard’s mode of defeating this move of the Hellenistic faction proved at once novel and effective. He waited till the preparations for revolt (for open revolt was meditated) were complete; and then surrounded the house where the chief conspirators sat, arrested them all, and took possession of papers which placed the complicity of the Patriarch beyond doubt. These he sent to the British Minister at Constantinople, who obtained without difficulty the deposition of the Patriarch, and the setting up of a successor less disposed to become a tool in the hands of Russia.

Of the great earthquake which shook Zante to its centre the memory will not soon pass away. It began just as Sir Howard entered the harbour on one of his tours of inspection, and continued, with shocks recurring at narrow intervals, for a whole fortnight. The people, paralysed with terror, knew not what to do, or whither to betake themselves, till the Lord High Commissioner appeared among them, calm and collected. He gave the necessary orders for extricating the wounded from the ruins: he directed men, women, and children where to go; caused temporary barracks to be erected for their shelter; and appeared to them as a guardian angel in their hour of need. His good offices on that occasion, as well as a brief experience of the working of his laws, brought about a thorough change of opinion both with regard to them and to him. When he resigned his office, which he was obliged to do in consequence of the not very generous conduct towards him of Lord John Russell, then Colonial Secretary, he left scarce one enemy in the island, and had the honour of having an obelisk erected to him, by vote of the Senate, bearing this inscription: “Howard Douglas, Cavalier, and General, High Commissioner, Benefactor of the Ionian Islands.”

Sir Howard sat in Parliament for Liverpool during Sir Robert Peel’s last administration, and spoke and voted on all occasions like a sound yet thoughtful Conservative. In 1847 he retired from the House of Commons, and thenceforth applied his energies to the service of the country as a writer on professional and scientific subjects. His treatise on ‘Naval Gunnery’ had already gone through several editions, as did his volume on ‘Fortification;’ and he now compiled and published his ‘Military Bridges,’ perhaps the most generally interesting, if not the most important, of all his works. But it was not thus alone that he continued to be useful. His opinions were sought and freely given to each successive Government on every question connected with the improvement of arms, the selection of points to be fortified, the management of the navy, and the steps to be taken for putting the country in a state of defence. It is extremely interesting to know that, like the great Duke of Wellington, Sir Howard laid aside all party feeling whenever the honour or interests of the country came to be considered; and that he possessed, as he deserved, the entire confidence of Whigs not less than of Tories. His opinions as to the relative value of iron and wooden ships are well known; he was entirely opposed to the former, though he did not object to the process of casing the latter with mail; while in his ‘Naval Warfare with Steam’ he advocated a system of tactics which should bring the management of fleets very much into the same category with the management of armies in the day of battle.

Thus, honoured and beloved, Sir Howard grew old, without losing one jot of the elasticity of spirit which had characterised him in earlier days. He was very happy also in his family till death began to cut it short, and blow after blow fell so heavily, that, brave as he was, he sometimes reeled. In 1854 a grandson, the bearer of his own name, died; then came tidings of the decease of his eldest son, Charles, far away; then his second son left him; then two of his daughters, Mrs Harcourt and Mrs Murray Gartshore. The loss of Mrs Gartshore affected him very deeply; and well it might, for she was one of those gifted and beautiful creatures who shed light around them wherever they go, seeming too pure and noble for earth. And scarcely were his tears dry when Lady Douglas, his companion for fifty-seven years, followed her daughters. Two daughters and one son alone remained to him, and one of these daughters was a widow; the other kept his house, and was, indeed, everything to him. But she likewise was taken from him, in a manner as trying as could be to his Christian patience and courage. She had been in apparent health and cheerful with him at dinner one day, and next morning was found dead in her bed. If the old man’s head had fallen into the dust, who could have wondered? But it did not. “No one can tell,” he observed to Mr Bateman, the medical gentleman who was called in, “what a loss she is to me: she has devoted herself to me; but I must do what is to be done. She will sleep beside her mother, where I will soon join them.”

In this manner the sun went gradually down till it sank beneath the horizon. Not that he suffered himself to be unmanned by sorrow; quite otherwise. But the physical frame felt the shock, and yielded to it perceptibly.

“Sir Howard enjoyed excellent health up to Miss Douglas’s death. All his teeth were sound; he walked three or four miles a-day, and obtained eight hours’ sleep at night. But that event gave his system a shock, and the controversy about armour-ships wore it more, showing his friends a marked change. His sleep was less regular and composed, and he frequently recited the lines of our great poet—

‘Oh, sleep! oh, gentle sleep!

Nature’s soft nurse, how have I frighted thee,

That thou no more wilt weigh mine eyelids down,

And steep my senses in forgetfulness?

Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast

Seal up the ship-boy’s eyes, and rock his brains

In cradle of the rude imperious surge,

And in the visitation of the winds,

Who take the ruffian billows by the top,

Curling their monstrous heads, and hanging them

With deafening clamours in the slippery clouds,

That with the hurly death itself awakes.’

“But he hid his sorrows, appearing calm and cheerful, though his manner was subdued and his conversation less animated. His vivacity revived at times, particularly when he spoke of Scotland, the theme he liked best; or when he recalled his early life in America, and described the pathless forests, the villages of wigwams, or the falls of Niagara, reciting Thomson’s lines—

‘Smooth to the shelving brink a copious flood

Rolls fair and placid,’ &c.

“He derived little benefit from the Folkstone breezes on his last visit, though enjoying his walks on the promenade, which he pronounced the noblest platform in Europe. Its attractions were just to his taste, for he could here see the coast of France, against which he had raised such bulwarks, watch the yachts and shipping in harbour and Channel, and glance around at the military strollers. Shorncliff Camp was within reach, as well as the Military School at Hythe, in which he took great interest, highly appreciating General Hay. He supported the Volunteer movement, and aided in its organisation, addressing a letter of advice to the National Rifle Association through his friend General Hay, and receiving an acknowledgment in his election as an honorary member. So well did he keep abreast with the age. He showed the same interest in the movements at the Camp, and attended any display, though not always to commend. He particularly censured a sham fight, representing an attack on an enemy who had landed in a bay near Hythe. The troops were marched down, and skirmishers thrown out on the beach, when the whole body fell back on the heights, holding them to cover their retreat. ‘What an absurd proceeding!’ remarked Sir Howard to Mr Bateman, who was by his side; ‘the movement ought to be exactly reversed. They should have brought down every man and gun as quickly as possible if the enemy had landed, and attacked him, and driven him into the sea. There would be some sense in that.’

“Sir Howard looked a soldier to the last, retaining his erect bearing, and walking with a firm step, though cautiously, and with looks bent on the ground. His sight had begun to fail, and cataracts were forming on both his eyes, but he did not submit them to medical treatment. ‘They will last my time,’ he remarked to the author. He contrived to write by never raising his pen, forming the letters by habit, and all were plain to one acquainted with his hand. A career of threescore years and ten left his character much what it first appeared, with all its elements of dash, vigour, enterprise, aptitude, and perception, its habits of industry, its generous instincts, and its warm sympathies. Neither heart nor mind showed the wear of life, and he is the same at eighty-five as at seventeen; inspiring the Volunteers at Hythe as he inspired them at Tynemouth, and exercising the inventive genius which scared the rats in improving the screw propeller. The hand that caught up the child in the shipwreck, obeyed the same impulse still; and Mr Bateman saw him walking up the street at Folkstone with a loaded basket which he had taken from a poor little girl. ‘My dear, give that to me,’ he said, as he saw her bending under the weight; ‘I am better able to carry it than you.’ The words were reported by a lady who heard them in passing, as the General of eighty-five and the poor child of five walked away together.”

We are not going to draw an elaborate character of one whose life may be said to have formed his epitaph. Sir Howard Douglas needs no panegyrist to tell the world what he was. Chivalrous, truthful, high-minded, brave, he secured the esteem, not less than he commanded the respect, of all who approached him. Had circumstances so ordered it that he had ever directed the movement of troops in the field, we take it upon us to say, that among English generals few would have attained to higher eminence than he. As it was, he did more for the British army, and navy too, in his books and by his teaching, than either army or navy, or the heads of both branches of the service, have ever had the grace to acknowledge. To these more shining qualities of head and temperament he added the faith and humility of a Christian man: a humility which was far too real to be obtruded on careless observers; a faith which had not one shade of hypocrisy or fanaticism about it. Rest to his noble spirit! it will be long before we look upon his like again.