As for the poet Moore, of whom also we may have spoken in terms which may seem of too great disparagement to those who have loved to linger in his
“Vale of Cashmere
With its roses, the brightest that earth ever gave.
Its temples, and grottos, and fountains as clear
As the love-lighted eyes that hang over their wave,”
no matter what may become of these brilliant orientalisms, or of his life of Byron, or of his diaries, and his “Two-penny Post Bag,” it is certain that his name will be gratefully kept alive by his sparkling, patriotic, and most musical Irish melodies; and under that sufficient monument we leave him.
As for Landor—surely the pages in which we dealt with him were not too long: a strange, strong bit of manhood—as of one fed on collops of bear’s meat; a big animal nature, yet wonderfully transfused by a vivid intellectuality—fine and high—that pierced weighty subjects to their core; and yet—and yet, singing such heart-shivering tributes as that to Rose Aylmer: coarse as the bumpkins on the sheep wolds of Lincoln, and yet with as fine subtleties in him as belonged to the young Greeks who clustered about the writer of the Œdipus Tyrannus.
The “First Gentleman.”
King George IV. was an older man than any of those we have commented on; indeed, he was a prematurely old man at sixty-five—feeling the shivers and the stings of his wild life: I suppose no one ever felt the approaches of age more mortifyingly. He had counted so much on being the fine gentleman to the last—such a height, such a carriage, such a grace! It was a dark day for him when his mirror showed wrinkles that his cosmetics would not cover, and a stoop in the shoulders which his tailors could not bolster out of sight. Indeed, in his later years he shrunk from exposure of his infirmities, and kept his gouty step out of reach of the curious, down at Windsor, where he built a cottage in a wood; and arranged his drives through the Park so that those who had admired this Apollo at his best should never know of his shakiness. Thither went his conclave of political advisers—sometimes Canning, the wonderful orator—sometimes the Duke of Wellington, with the honors of Waterloo upon him—sometimes young Sir Robert Peel, just beginning to make his influence felt; oftener yet, Charles Greville, whose memoirs are full of piquant details about the royal household—not forgetting that army of tailors and hair-dressers who did their best to assuage the misery and gratify the vanities of the gouty king. And when he died—which he hated exceedingly to do—in 1830, there came to light such a multitude of waistcoats, breeches, canes, snuff-boxes, knee-buckles, whips, and wigs, as I suppose were never heaped before around any man’s remains. The first gentleman in Europe could not, after all, carry these things with him. His brother, William IV., who succeeded him, was a bluff old Admiral—with not so high a sense of the proprieties of life as George; but honester even in his badnesses (which were very many) and, with all his coarseness and vulgarity, carrying a brusque, sailor-like frankness that half redeemed his peccadilloes. In those stormy times which belonged to the passage of the Reform Bill of 1832, he showed nerve and pluck, and if he split the air pretty often with his oaths, he never offended by a wearying dilettanteism, or by foppery. In the year 1837 he died; and then and there began—within the memory of a good many of us old stagers—that reign of his young niece Victoria, daughter of his brother, the Duke of Kent (who had died seventeen years before)—which reign still continues, and is still resplendent with the virtues of the Sovereign and the well-being of her people.
Under these several royal hands, the traditional helpfulness to men of letters had declared itself in pensions and civil appointments; Southey had come to his laureateship, and his additional pension; we found the venerable Wordsworth making a London pilgrimage for a “kissing of hands,” and the honor of a royal stipend; Walter Scott had received his baronetcy at the hands of George IV., and that dilettante sovereign would have taken Byron (whom we shall presently encounter) patronizingly by the hand, except the fiery poet—scenting slights everywhere—had flamed up in that spirit of proud defiance, which afterward declared itself with a fury of denunciation in the Irish Avatar (1821).