Yet, indeed, so short-winded is fame in many a case, there may be sons and daughters of this generation who know not the name of Mrs. Trimmer, once so familiar in every well-ordered schoolroom; while her History of the Robins stands still on our publishers’ lists. One of the group of literary-minded ladies who had the privilege of sitting at Dr. Johnson’s feet, she married a Brentford man, and went to live across the river, where she brought up a round dozen of children on the best of principles. She seems to have been a model of virtues from her youth. When at Kew she carried on a contest of early rising with a friend on the opposite bank, the first up hanging a handkerchief out of her window as triumphant token. Mrs. Barbauld’s popularity as a writer for the young stirred Mrs. Trimmer to publish her lessons to her own large family, which won great success, helped by her earnest Evangelical Churchmanship, whereas the author of Evenings at Home was no better than a Unitarian. After the example of Raikes of Gloucester, Mrs. Trimmer took a prominent part in starting Sunday-schools in her own neighbourhood, and was consulted by Queen Charlotte on this matter. Other causes she had at heart were kindness to animals, and “the injured African”; it may have been one of her sons who objected on principle to being caned at school because he understood the instrument to be the fruit of slave labour. She corresponded with Hannah More, and such kindred spirits. It exalted her as an extraordinary honour and privilege when the books of a mere female writer like herself were admitted on the list of the S.P.C.K., which has since found plenty of work for women’s pens. She edited The Family Magazine, forerunner of many such, “each number consisting of a sermon, generally abridged from the works of some learned divine of the Church of England, and of descriptions of foreign countries, in which care was taken to make the lower orders see the comforts and advantages belonging to this favoured land, and also to render them contented with its laws and government.” How many readers would be won now for a magazine conducted on such lines, even if spiced by the “Instructive Tales” of its editor? The good lady died in 1810, and was buried at Ealing, the parish church of Brentford, which, though the county town of Middlesex, ranked ecclesiastically as a mere dependent of its neighbour.
About Kew, in her time, there were spirits less loyal and orthodox. Across the river in her youth she may have heard the roars of the mob greeting Wilkes’ repeated hustings triumphs at Brentford—a din that must have reached the royal ears, if George III. did not keep clear of Kew for the nonce. At one of those abortive elections, every road to the poll was blocked by a crowd that would allow no one to pass unless wearing the popular idol’s blue cockade. Wilkes and George might well be nicknamed the “Two Kings of Brentford.” And for ten years or so New Brentford, as the village was then called, had a firebrand parson who would not commend himself to Mrs. Trimmer. Her future home, indeed, was at Old Brentford, now being swallowed up in Ealing.
The Brentford political parson was John Horne, afterwards better known as Horne Tooke. Son of a London poulterer, whom he styled to his Eton school-fellows “a Turkey merchant,” Horne was not the best man to hold a living which his friends bought for him about the time of the King’s accession. He is said to have done his duty at least as conscientiously as most parsons of his day; and he seems to have been on the way to become a popular preacher, if he had not been distracted by other avocations. He had studied for the Bar, had suffered as usher in a school; and he practised medicine en amateur among his parishioners, no doubt with “a lurch to quackery,” as is Dr. O. W. Holmes’ reproach against divines straying into his own field. He took pupils at Brentford, one of them the Elwes afterwards so notorious as a miser; and with more than one he travelled on the Continent, leaving behind him, let us trust, an orthodox curate. Then the cry of “Wilkes and liberty!” set him on commencing as politician and pamphleteer; and for years he revelled in the hot water of faction. He canvassed for Wilkes with such zeal that he is accused of saying “in a cause so just and holy he would dye his black coat red.” We hear once of all the constables in London being drafted to Brentford, where the turbulent elections did not go off without bloodshed as well as much beer-tapping. A man lost his life, as was alleged, at the hands of bullies in the pay of the Court party; and that bellicose parson exerted himself to bring the accused to justice, who were convicted but pardoned by the Ministry.
Before long the reverend champion of liberty quarrelled with Wilkes, against whom in his private character Horne pointed an acrimonious pen, to the chuckling delight of their political opponents. He started a newspaper for publishing parliamentary debates, which led to a famous collision between the officers of the House and the City magistrates, and indirectly to the tacit acceptance of a liberty of reporting, hitherto practised by stealth. He next broke a lance against that unknown knight, Junius. It was a more daring adventure when he touched the Government’s shield by hotly espousing the cause of the American Colonists, and writing of the Lexington victims as “murdered” by the King’s troops, for which he had to stand his trial and be convicted of a libel.
By this time the parson had resigned his living, and thrown off the gown that hampered his robustious exertions as an agitator, but he remained a resident at Brentford till circumstances took him into Surrey. A Mr. Tooke of Purley had invoked his assistance for a dispute about common rights in that neighbourhood; and Horne proved such a doughty advocate in this case that close intimacy sprang up between the two men. The younger assumed Tooke’s name, and from his house dated the philological and grammatical treatise, Diversions of Purley, by which he is best known. In the end there seems to have been some cooling of their affection, for Mr. Tooke left his supposed heir only a small legacy, along with the welcome opportunity for a lawsuit. But Horne Tooke’s real father had left him means to live comfortably at Wimbledon till 1812, long enough to take part with a new generation of Radicals, in which the names of Sir Francis Burdett and Major Cartwright came to the front. He succeeded in slipping into Parliament, strangely enough, as representative of a rotten borough, Old Sarum; and his “election” led to a Bill disqualifying the clergy as members, though a generation would pass before the lease of rotten boroughs was cancelled by such reform as Horne Tooke had loudly advocated at the cost of again standing a trial for high treason.
Another noisy reformer, if he be not better described as a pig-headed lover of the past, who was Tory and Radical by turns, had a glimpse of Kew, about or soon after the time that Horne Tooke left Brentford. In the farther corner of Surrey there was then living a sturdy little peasant who, with a smattering of the three R’s, went to work in the fine gardens of Waverley Abbey, then got another job of clipping and weeding at the Bishop’s Palace of Farnham. He could hardly have entered his teens, though the date is not made clear in his story, when a gardener came that way who had just left the King’s Gardens at Kew, and gave such a glowing account of them that nothing would serve the boy but setting off to seek a place there. This was not a lad to let the grass grow under his feet, when he had a purpose in mind; and he at once left an episcopal service in hand for a royal one in the bush. It was William Cobbett, who now made his first acquaintance with the writings of an old sojourner in his own country nook, the sullen dependent of Sir William Temple at Moor Park, Jonathan Swift, whose downright diction this boy lived to copy through his long series of Political Registers.
The next morning, without saying a word to anyone, off I set; with no clothes except those upon my back, and with thirteen halfpence in my pocket. I found that I must go to Richmond, and I accordingly went on, from place to place, inquiring my way thither. A long day (it was in June) brought me to Richmond in the afternoon. Two pennyworth of bread and cheese and a pennyworth of small beer, which I had on the road, and one halfpenny that I had lost somehow or other left three pence in my pocket. With this for my whole fortune, I was trudging through Richmond, in my blue smock-frock and my red garters tied under my knees, when staring about me, my eye fell upon a little book in a bookseller’s window, on the outside of which was written: “Tale of a Tub; price 3d.” The title was so odd that my curiosity was excited. I had the three pence, but, then I could have no supper. In I went, and got the little book, which I was so impatient to read, that I got over into a field at the upper corner of Kew Gardens, where there stood a haystack. On the shady side of this, I sat down to read. The book was so different from anything I had ever read before: it was something so new to my mind, that, though I could not at all understand some of it, it delighted me beyond description; and it produced what I have always considered a sort of birth of intellect. I read on till it was dark, without any thought about supper or bed. When I could see no longer, I put my little book in my pocket, and tumbled down by the side of the stack, where I slept till the birds in Kew Gardens awaked me in the morning; when off I started to Kew, reading my little book. The singularity of my dress, the simplicity of my manner, my confident and lively air, and, doubtless his own compassion besides, induced the gardener, who was a Scotsman, I remember, to give me victuals, find me lodging, and set me to work.
In his fragmentary reminiscence of that experience, Cobbett does not say how long he stayed at Kew; but we presently find him at home again, soon to set out on further escapades. He tells us how the boy princes, attracted by the oddity of his dress, stopped to laugh at him as he was sweeping the grass round the Pagoda. I have somewhere read a story that King George himself took notice of the young rustic as carrying a book with him to work, and was so pleased by his talk as to desire that he should be kept on; but I do not remember any statement to this effect in Cobbett’s own writings. In later life, the doughty demagogue became something of a nursery gardener himself, carrying on near Kensington, by the Kew road, a seed-farm from which he was zealous to propagate a kind of acacia he introduced, and also, with less success, the cultivation of maize under the name of “Cobbett’s corn.” All through life he kept up his interest in gardening, as shown by more than one of the works whose style has been happily compared to a kitchen-garden’s relation with a flower-garden.
THE POPPY BEDS