Burton, unhappily, had no share at all, and the loss of training and discipline told heavily on him all his life. His lawless and wandering childhood, so full of incident and so destitute of charm, is described with uncompromising veracity in Lady Burton’s portly volumes. He was as far removed from the virtues of Lord Fauntleroy as from the brilliant and elaborate naughtiness of the Heavenly Twins; but he has the advantage over all these little people in being so convincingly real. He fought until he was beaten “as thin as a shotten herring.” He knocked down his nurse—with the help of his brother and sister—and jumped on her. He hid behind the curtains and jeered at his grandmother’s French. He was not pretty, and he was not picturesque.
“A piece of yellow nankin would be bought to dress the whole family, like three sticks of barley sugar.”
He was not amiable, and he was not polite, and he was not a safe child on whom to try experiments of the “Harry and Lucy” order, as the following anecdote proves:
“By way of a wholesome and moral lesson of self-command and self-denial, our mother took us past Madame Fisterre’s (the pastry cook’s) windows, and bade us look at all the good things; whereupon we fixed our ardent affections on a tray of apple puffs. Then she said: ‘Now, my dears, let us go away; it is so good for little children to restrain themselves.’ Upon this we three devilets turned flashing eyes and burning cheeks on our moralizing mother, broke the window with our fists, clawed out the tray of apple puffs, and bolted, leaving poor Mother a sadder and a wiser woman, to pay the damages of her lawless brood’s proceedings.”
It is the children’s age when such a story—and many more like it—are gleefully narrated and are gladly read. Yet if we must exchange the old-time reticence for unreserved disclosures, if we must hear all about an author’s infancy from his teething to his first breeches, and from his A B C’s to his Greek and Latin, it is better to have him presented to us with such unqualified veracity. He is not attractive when seen in this strong light, but he is very much alive.
A FORGOTTEN POET.
There has been a vast deal of moralizing on the brevity of fame ever since that far-away day when mankind became sufficiently sophisticated to covet posthumous distinction. Yet, in reality, it is not so surprising that people should be forgotten as that they should be remembered, and remembered often for the sake of one swift, brave deed that cost no effort, or of a few lovely words thrown to the world in a moment of unconscious inspiration, when the writer little dreamed he was forging a chain strong enough to link him with the future. Occasionally, too, a species of immortality is conferred upon respectable mediocrity by the affection or the abhorrence it excites. The men whom Pope rhymed about because he hated them, the men to whom Lamb wrote so delightfully because he loved them, all live for us in the indestructible land of letters. It would be a hard matter to reckon up the sum of indebtedness which is thus innocently incurred by those who have no coin of their own for payment.
Not long ago a writer of distinction was idling his way pleasantly through a volume of Mrs. Browning’s poetry, when his attention was arrested by a quotation which stood at the head of that rather nebulous effusion, “A Rhapsody of Life’s Progress.” It was but a single line,
“Fill all the stops of life with tuneful breath,”
and it was accredited to Cornelius Mathews, author of “Poems on Man.” A foot-note,—people were more generous in the matter of foot-notes forty years ago than now—gave the additional and somewhat startling information that “Poems on Man” was “a small volume by an American poet, as remarkable in thought and manner for a vital sinewy vigour as the right arm of Pathfinder.” This was stout praise. “The right arm of Pathfinder.” We all know what sinewy vigor was there; but of Cornelius Mathews, it would seem, no man knew anything at all. Yet his poems had traveled far when they lay in Mrs. Browning’s path, and of her admiration for them she had left us this unstinted proof. Moreover the one line,