He shows himself to have had strong prejudices for or against people, and he never scruples to record his opinions quite frankly. Of Thornton Hunt and his relations to the pretty wife of G. H. Lewes and to Lewes himself, he remarks that the legal husband 'asserted his belief in Communistic principles,' the two men only quarrelling over the expense of the double family! This Lewes is that historian of philosophy, be it remembered, with whom 'George Eliot' lived, though he was undivorced. For some reason or other, Samuel Carter Hall, author and editor of the Art Journal, was Linton's pet aversion. He asserts—I know not with what truth—that Charles Dickens made him sit for the portrait of 'Pecksniff.' Robert Owen, the founder of 'New Harmony' and of other socialistic and co-operative enterprises, he stigmatizes as impracticable, and 'a dry and unimaginative creature.' On the other hand, he has many pleasant and generous things to say about Ruskin, 'the poet beyond all verse-makers of his time,' and 'a man of the noblest nature'; Derwent Coleridge, with whom he rambled around Keswick, and who appeared to him to be 'a sensible, well-informed, genial and liberal clergyman'; Harriet Martineau, who lived near enough to be on visiting terms, 'a good-looking, comely, interesting old lady, very deaf, but cheerful and eager for news which she did not always catch correctly'; and many another, including the Americans, Whittier (of whom he wrote a life), Longfellow, and Emerson.
Linton's biographies of 'European Republicans'—mostly reprints of magazine articles—are graphic and sympathetic. His sketch of Mazzini's career I cannot say is the best extant, but it is good, and is the result of a warm and life-long personal friendship. His great work—for such it truly is—'The Masters of Wood-Engraving,' is not only the best of a series of publications he issued on the history and technique of his own art, but is, and always will be, the text-book of the subject. Wood-engraving is now almost entirely superseded by the various photographic 'processes.'
His other purely literary productions ranged from a volume of children's stories, 'The Flower and the Star,' to 'Poems and Translations.' The children of days of long ago, when really good books for them were scarce, must have hung delighted over the apparently impromptu fairy-tales about the flowers of the sky and the stars of the earth commingling; and how the dear little boy Dreamy Eyes, and his sisters Softcheek and Brightface, sought and found them 'under the golden oak-buds of the great oak,' and under the bushes clothed with delicate young leaves of the honeysuckle, or in the evening glow, where the great red sun went down, like a ball of fire, behind the sea. Linton was a true poet. His muse was a lyric rather than an epic or dramatic one.
'Youth came: I lay at beauty's feet;
She smiled, and said my song was sweet.'
His first volume of poetry was entitled 'The Plaint of Freedom,' and one of its themes evoked a tribute in verse from W. S. Landor. 'Claribel,' seldom quoted now, was his second venture. 'Grenville's Last Fight,' published in this collection, is a spirited ballad of a sea-fight in the Western Main, when the Spanish fleet attacked the solitary English man-of-war, 'drove on us like so many hornets' nests, thinking their multitudes would bear us down,' and yet failed to conquer her, because her captain sank her rather than surrender.
Other pieces, too long to include here, are short enough to be set to music, and would be worth more than the sentimental or garish theatre stuff too many young ladies indulge in nowadays; such as—
'Oh, happy days of innocence and song,
When Love was ever welcome, never wrong,
When words were from the heart, when folk were fain
To answer truth with truthfulness again;
Oh, happy days of innocence and song.'
And again, 'The Silenced Singer'—silenced on account of the consummation of his hope in the winning of his mate, when the nest was built, and he had 'closed in the round of his content.'
And, once again, 'Mind Your Knitting,' after the style of Beranger, relating how the blind old mother heard the soft footfall of a lover, and noted the cessation of her daughter's clicking needles' task. 'Tis the cat that you hear moving!'
'You speak false to me;
I'd like Robert better, loving
You more openly.
Lucy! mind your knitting.'