CHAPTER VI.
We had sight of George III. in our last chapter, and we shall catch sight of him again from time to time; for he was a persistent lingerer, and a most obstinate liver. We had glimpses, too, of that cheery, sunny-faced, eloquent, ill-balanced man, Charles James Fox, whom we ought to remember as a true friend to America, in those critical days when taxation was swelling into tyranny. William Pitt, whom we also saw, and to whom we would have been delighted to listen, would never have won greatly upon American sympathies; too cold, too austere, too classic, too fine. Sheridan, on the other hand, would, and did, conquer hearts everywhere; but unfortunately spending his forces in great paroxysms of effort; one while the greatest comedist, and again the greatest orator, always the greatest spendthrift; and anon the greatest debtor, who only pays his debts by dying.
Sterne covered better his deficiencies of money and of soul. Who could have put more or truer feeling into the story of the poor ill lieutenant of the inn, whom Corporal Trim (at Uncle Toby's instance) had gone to see, and of whom he makes report? And uncle Toby says he will fetch him home and set him afoot in his regiment.
"Never," says Trim, "can he march."
"But he shall march," says uncle Toby.
"He will die in his tracks," says Trim.
"He shall not die," says Toby, with an oath—which oath, says Sterne, the recording angel washed away, so soon as it was uttered. The Rev. Laurence Sterne, it is to be feared, counted too largely upon the swash of such tender recording angels. Only a host of them, with best lachrymal equipment, could float away poor Sterne's misdeeds!
We touched upon the sad life and fate of the marvellous boy, Chatterton—not a great poet, but with an exuberant poetic glow within him which gave new brightness to old Romanticism, and which kindled in after days many a fancy into flame—up and down the pages of later and bolder poets. Were his forgeries perhaps instigated by the Ossianic mystification?
Macpherson and other Scots.
James Macpherson.