The name of John Sterling is that of a man who, with no great literary claims of his own, managed to connect it durably and in a double fashion with literature, first as the subject of an immortal biography by Carlyle, secondly as the name-giver of the famous Sterling Club, which about 1838, and hardly numbering more members than the century did years, included a surprising proportion of the most rising men of letters of the day, while all but a very few of its members were of literary mark. John Sterling himself was the son of a rather eccentric father, Edward Sterling, who, after trying soldiering with no great, and farming with decidedly ill, success, turned to journalism and succeeded brilliantly on the Times. His son was born in the Isle of Bute on 20th July 1806, was educated, first privately, then at Glasgow, and when about nineteen went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he fell in with a famous and brilliant set. He migrated from Trinity College to Trinity Hall, took no degree, wrote a little for the then young Athenæum, was engaged in a romantic and in all ways rather unfortunate business of encouraging a rebellion in Spain, but married instead of taking active part in it, and went to the West Indies. When he came home he, it is said under Coleridgean influence, took orders, but soon developed heterodox views and gave up active duty. He lived, though under sentence of death by consumption, till 1843, spending much time abroad, but writing a little, chiefly for periodicals.
The chief characteristic of Sterling in life and thought appears to have been a vacillating impulsiveness, while in letters his production, small in bulk, is anything but strong in substance or form. But, like some other men who do not, in the common phrase, "do much," he seems to have been singularly effectual as a centre of literary friendship and following. The Sterling Club included not merely Tennyson, John Stuart Mill, Carlyle, Allan Cunningham, Lord Houghton, Sir Francis Palgrave, Bishop Thirlwall, who all receive separate notice elsewhere, but others who, being of less general fame, may best be noticed together here. There were the scholars Blakesley, Worsley, and Hepworth Thompson (afterwards Master of Trinity); H. N. Coleridge, the poet's nephew, son-in-law, and editor; Sir Francis Doyle, afterwards Professor of Poetry at Oxford, the author of some interesting reminiscences in prose, and in verse of some of the best songs and poems on military subjects to be found in the language, such as "The Loss of the Birkenhead," the "Private of the Buffs," and above all the noble and consummate "Red Thread of Honour"; Sir Edmund Head, Fellow of Merton and Governor-General of Canada, and a writer on art (not to be confounded with his namesake Sir Francis, the agreeable miscellanist, reviewer, and travel writer, who was also a baronet and also connected with Canada, where he was Governor of the Upper Province at the time of the Rebellion of 1835). There was Sir George Cornewall Lewis, a keen scholar and a fastidious writer, whose somewhat short life (1806-63) was chiefly occupied by politics; for he was a Poor-Law Commissioner, a Member of Parliament, and a holder of numerous offices up to those of Chancellor of the Exchequer and Secretary of State. Lewis, who edited the Edinburgh for a short time, wrote no very long work, but many on a great variety of subjects, the chief perhaps being On the Influence of Authority in Matters of Opinion, 1850 (a book interesting to contrast with one by a living statesman forty-five years later), the Inquiry into the Credibility of the Ancient Roman History (1855), and later treatises on The Government of Dependencies and the Best Form of Government. He was also an exact verbal scholar, was, despite the addiction to "dry" subjects which this list may seem to show, the author of not a few jeux d'esprit, and was famous for his conversational sayings, the most hackneyed of which is probably "Life would be tolerable if it were not for its amusements."
But even this did not exhaust the Sterling Club. There was another scholar, Malden, who should have been mentioned with the group above; the second Sir Frederick Pollock, who wrote too little but left an excellent translation of Dante, besides some reminiscences and other work; Philip Pusey, elder brother of the theologian, and a man of remarkable ability; James Spedding, who devoted almost the whole of his literary life to the study, championship, and editing of Bacon, but left other essays and reviews of great merit; Twisleton, who undertook with singular patience and shrewdness the solution of literary and historical problems like the Junius question and that of the African martyrs; and lastly George Stovin Venables, who for some five and thirty years was the main pillar in political writing of the Saturday Review, was a parliamentary lawyer of great diligence and success, and combined a singularly exact and wide knowledge of books and men in politics and literature with a keen judgment, an admirably forcible if somewhat mannered style, a disposition far more kindly than the world was apt to credit him with, and a famous power of conversation. All these men, almost without exception, were more or less contributors to periodicals; and it may certainly be said that, but for periodicals, it is rather unlikely that some of them would have contributed to literature at all.
Not as a member of the Sterling Club, but as the intimate friend of all its greatest members, as a contributor, though a rather unfrequent one, to papers, and as a writer of singular and extraordinary quality but difficult to class under a more precise head, may be noticed Edward FitzGerald, who, long a recluse, unstintedly admired by his friends but quite unknown to the public, became famous late in life by his translation of Omar Khayyám, and familiar somewhat after his death through the publication of his charming letters by Mr. Aldis Wright. He was born on 31st March 1809, near Woodbridge in Suffolk, the neighbourhood which was his headquarters for almost his entire life, till his death on a visit to a grandson of the poet Crabbe at Merton in Norfolk, 14th June 1883. He went to school at Bury, and thence to Cambridge, where he laid the foundation of his acquaintance with the famous Trinity set of 1825-30. But on taking his degree in the last named year and leaving college, he took to no profession, but entered on the life of reading, thinking, gardening, and boating, which he pursued for more than half a century. Besides his Trinity contemporaries, from Tennyson and Thackeray downwards, he had Carlyle for an intimate friend, and he married the daughter of Bernard Barton, the poet-Quaker and friend of Lamb. He published nothing till the second half of the century had opened, when Euphranor, written long before at Cambridge, or with reference to it, appeared. Then he learnt Spanish, and first showed his extraordinary faculty of translation by Englishing divers dramas of Calderon. Spanish gave way to Persian, and after some exercises elsewhere the famous version, paraphrase, or whatever it is to be called, of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám appeared in 1859, to be much altered in subsequent editions.
FitzGerald's works in the collected edition of 1889 fill three pretty stout volumes, to which a considerable number of letters (he was first of all and almost solely a letter-writer and translator) have been added. In his prose (no disrespect being intended to Euphranor, a dialogue Berkeleian in form and of great beauty, and other things) he interests us doubly as a character and as a critic, for the letters contain much criticism. Personally FitzGerald was a man of rather few and not obtrusive, but deep and warm sympathies, slow to make new friends but intensely tenacious of and affectionate towards the old, with a very strong distaste for crowds and general society, and undoubtedly somewhat of what the French call a maniaque, that is to say, a slightly hypochondriac crotcheteer. These characteristics, which make him interesting as a man, are still more interestingly reflected in his criticism, which is often one-sided and unjust, sometimes crotchety (as when he would not admit that even his beloved Alfred Tennyson had ever been at his best since the collection of 1842), but often also wonderfully delicate and true.
As a translator he stands almost alone, his peculiar virtue, noticeable alike in his versions from the Spanish and Greek, being so capitally and once for all illustrated in that of Omar Khayyám that in narrow space it is not necessary to go beyond this. From the purist and pedantic point of view FitzGerald, no doubt, is wildly unfaithful. He scarcely ever renders word for word, and will insert, omit, alter, with perfect freedom; yet the total effect is reproduced as perhaps no other translator has ever reproduced it. Whether his version of the Rubaiyat, with its sensuous fatalism, its ridicule of asceticism and renunciation, and its bewildering kaleidoscope of mysticism that becomes materialist and materialism that becomes mystical, has not indirectly had influences, practical and literary, the results of which would have been more abhorrent to FitzGerald than to almost any one else, may be suggested. But the beauty of the poem as a poem is unmistakable and altogether astounding. The melancholy richness of the rolling quatrain with its unicorn rhymes, the quaint mixture of farce and solemnity, passion and playfulness, the abundance of the imagery, the power of the thought, the seduction of the rhetoric, make the poem actually, though not original or English, one of the greatest of English poems.
Of the periodical too, if not entirely, was Richard Harris Barham, "Thomas Ingoldsby," the author of the most popular book of light verse that ever issued from the press. His one novel, My Cousin Nicholas, was written for Blackwood; the immortal Ingoldsby Legends appeared in Bentley and Colburn. Born at Canterbury in 1788, of a family possessed of landed property, though not of much, and educated at St. Paul's School and Brasenose College, Barham took orders, and, working with thorough conscience as a clergyman, despite his light literature, became a minor canon in St. Paul's Cathedral. He died in 1845. Hardly any book is more widely known than the collected Ingoldsby Legends, which originally appeared in the last eight years of their author's life. Very recently they have met with a little priggish depreciation, the natural and indeed inevitable result, first of a certain change in speech and manners, and then of their long and vast popularity. Nor would any one contend that they are exactly great literature. But for inexhaustible fun that never gets flat and scarcely ever simply uproarious, for a facility and felicity in rhyme and rhythm which is almost miraculous, and for a blending of the grotesque and the terrible which, if less fine than Praed's or Hood's, is only inferior to theirs—no one competent to judge and enjoy will ever go to Barham in vain.
The same difficulty which beset us at the end of the last chapter recurs here, the difficulty arising from the existence of large numbers of persons of the third or lower ranks whose inclusion may be desired or their exclusion resented. At the head, or near it, of this class stand such figures as that of Douglas Jerrold, a sort of very inferior Hook on the other side of politics, with a dash (also very inferior) of Hood, whose Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures and similar things were very popular at and a little before the middle of the century, but whose permanent literary value is of the smallest, if indeed it can be said to exist. But of these—not a few of them more worthy if less prominent in their day than Jerrold—there could be no end; and there would be little profit in trying to reach any. The successful "contributor," by the laws of the case, climbs on the shoulders of his less successful mates even more than elsewhere; and the very impetus which lands him on the height rejects them into the depths.