As in some solitude the summer rill
Refreshes, where it winds, the faded green,
And cheers the drooping flowers, unheard, unseen.”
When a biographer can accredit the subject of his narrative with a disposition to hide his bounty, he is usually apt enough to catch at so catching a quality. Wellington, we are told, though his name so rarely figured on subscription lists, was very liberal in his charities, and was not unfrequently victimized by impostors. During the Irish famine he is said to have distributed at least £10,000 among the relief committees; but “he never said a word about it at Exeter Hall.” Free gifts by stealth are often characteristic of such natures as Byron’s; of whom, for instance, we read that, soon after Lord Falkland’s death, the poet reminded the unfortunate widow that he was to be godfather to her infant [Byron a sponsor!—but let that pass]; and that after the “christening” he inserted a five-hundred pound note in a breakfast cup; but in so cautious a manner that it was not discovered until he had left the house. Montesquieu was even hard and harsh in his repudiation of thanks from those he helped; his kindness was accordingly (to speak by quibble) less than kind; insomuch that one critic recognises in him “un de ces dieux bienfaiteurs de l’humanité, mais qui n’en partagent point la tendresse.” Grimm is another example of a satirical tongue with an open hand, only the hand was opened behind his own back: il sut être bienveillant en secret. Amid James Watt’s donations in aid of sound and useful learning, testifies one biographer, were not wanting others prescribed by true religion, for the consolation of the poor, and relief of the afflicted; but these works were done in secret, and with injunctions that his name should not be made known. Goethe seems to have preserved profound secrecy with respect to some signal exercises of his beneficence. Cowper tells Unwin, in one of his letters, that a recent endeavour of that good pastor to relieve the indigent of his flock would probably have succeeded better “had it been an affair of more notoriety than merely to furnish a few poor fellows with a little fuel to preserve their extremities from the frost.” “Men really pious delight in doing good by stealth;[30] but nothing less than an ostentatious display of bounty will satisfy mankind in general.” The Olney bard, in after years, had pleasant dealings with a signal exemplar of the benefactor by stealth. He was made the almoner of a charitable stranger, to whom he thus refers in a letter to John Newton: “Like the subterraneous flue that warms my myrtles, he does good and is unseen. His injunctions of secrecy are still as rigorous as ever, and must therefore be observed with the same attention.” A year later: “I shall probably never see him,” writes Cowper, in relating a fresh tide of benefactions; but “he will always have a niche in the museum of my reverential remembrance.” Even without that, the Unknown had his reward.
“Charity ever
Finds in the act reward, and needs no trumpet
In the receiver.”
