The first sign he gave of returning intellect, was an exclamation on seeing a hare run across the road as they were taking an airing in Richmond park. On his recovery, his mother provided him a private tutor in Greek and Latin, of the name of Ayles, formerly a fellow of King's College, Cambridge; while she herself, and his nurse, a faithful servant in the family for more than fifty years, encouraged his early propensity for English literature; the former by reading to him and the other by making him recite passages out of tragedies, of which the good woman was passionately fond.
In August, 1757, his mother placed him at Eton where he remained about six years, at the end of which time he was removed to Trinity Hall, Cambridge. Like many others, he acknowledges the illusion of considering our school-boy days as the happiest of life. The infirmities, which his sickness had brought on, made him extremely sensible to the jibes and rough treatment of the bigger boys, and the accidental neglect of a Greek lesson exposed him to a flogging which he never quite forgave. One of his tutors at Eton was Dr. Roberts, author of Judah Restored, a poem, in which the numbers of the Paradise Lost are happily imitated. By him, the young scholar was confirmed in that love of composing verse which he could trace hack to his ninth year. There is little promise in the specimens he gives of his earlier attempts. His English ode on the birth of the present King, inserted in the Cambridge collection, is an indifferent performance, even for a boy. At the university, he describes himself to have studied diligently, to have given many of his hours to drawing and painting, and to have formed friendships which were dissolved only by death. On Thornton, a member of the same hall, the most favoured of these associates, whom he lost when a young man, he wrote an elegy, which is one of the best of his works. With him he improved himself in the Spanish and Italian languages, the latter of which they studied under Isola, a teacher at Cambridge, afterwards creditably known by an edition of the Gerusalemme Liberata. Hayley entered his name at the Middle Temple on the 13th of June, 1766, and in the following year quitted Cambridge without a degree. He now made some ineffectual attempts towards fixing his choice of a profession in life; but at last poetry, and especially the drama, were suffered to engross him. In October, 1769, he married Eliza, the daughter of Dr. Ball, Dean of Chichester. This lady had been the confidant of his attachment to another. The match was on his part entered on rather from disappointment than love; and was made contrary to the advice of his surviving parent, who represented to him the danger there was lest his wife should inherit an incurable insanity under which her mother long laboured. Many years after, he put her away, fancying himself no longer able to endure a waywardness of temper, which, as he thought, amounted nearly to the calamity that had been apprehended. In the summer of 1774, he retired with his wife and mother from Great Queen-street, where they had hitherto resided, to his paternal estate at Eartham in Sussex; but in the ensuing winter his mother went back to London for medical advice and there died.
He had endeavoured, but in vain, to bring several of his tragedies on the stage. Garrick, with some hollow compliments, rejected one, called the Afflicted Father, of which the story appears to have been too shocking for representation. It was that a father had supplied his son, under sentence of death, with poison, and when too late found that he was pardoned. Another called the Syrian Queen, which he had imitated from the Rodogune of Corneille, was refused with more sincerity by Colman. A third met no better reception from Harris. "Persuaded," as he says, "by his own sensations that he had a considerable portion of native poetic fire in his mind, he resolved to display it in a composition less subject to the caprice of managers, yet more arduous in its execution. In short, he determined to begin an epic poem." He chose for his subject the extorting of Magna Charta from King John. The death of his friend Thornton in 1780, who had watched the progress of this essay with much solicitude for its success, chiefly induced him to relinquish a design, which was in truth ill fitted to his powers. In the Essay on Epic Poetry, he recommended it to Mason, who was not much better able to accomplish it than himself. I am unwilling to detain my reader by an account of the numerous poems, which he either did not complete or did not commit to the press. His unpublished verses, as he told me a few years before his death, amounted to six times the number of those in print.
His first publication was the Epistle on Painting to Romney, in 1778. The two next in the following year were anonymous, the one A Congratulatory Epistle to Admiral Keppel on his Acquittal; the other An Essay on the Ancient Greek Model (as he called it) to Bishop Lowth, remonstrating against the contention which the bishop had entered into with Warburton, and which he thought unworthy so excellent a prelate. In 1780, he produced besides the Verses on the death of Mr. Thornton, an Ode to Howard, and the Epistles on History addressed to Gibbon, which gained him the intimacy of the historian and the philanthropist. The success of these works encouraged him to project the Triumphs of Temper, the most popular of all his poems, which he published in 1781. The next year saw the publication of his Essay on Epic Poetry; in the notes to which he introduced much information on the poetry of Italy and Spain, then less known among us than at present; and he endeavoured to rouse the spirits of Wright the painter at Derby, by an ode, which was printed for private circulation. In 1784, he published a volume of plays, consisting of tragedies and comedies, the latter of which were in rhyme. The gratification of seeing his dramas represented on the stage, which he had before solicited in vain, was now offered by Colman, who proposed through the author's bookseller to bring out a tragedy and comedy, Lord Russell, and The Two Connoisseurs, at the Haymarket. "A comedy in rhyme," the manager observed, "was a bold attempt; but when so well executed as in the present instance, he thought, would be received with favour, especially on a stage of a genius somewhat similar to that of a private theatre for which it was professedly written." Both tragedy and comedy were well received, but with so little emolument to the poet, that he had to pay for his own seat at the representation. Marcella, the other tragedy, was also acted, in 1789, when it was condemned at one house, and in three nights after applauded at the other. The author accounted for this whimsical change of fortune by supposing the piece to have been played only on a few hours' preparation by the manager at Drury-Lane, in order to get the start of Harris and prevent his success by having the play damned before it appeared on his theatre.
Hayley was, however, now in great favour with the public; the first edition of his plays was sold in a fortnight; and through the intervention of his friend Thomas Payne, the bookseller, he re-purchased for 500_l._ from Dodsley the copyright of all he had written. It would have been well if his poetical career had closed here; for whatever he did afterwards in this way met either with disregard or contempt. Such was the fate of a Poem on the Anniversary of the Revolution in 1788; of an imitation of a German opera, called the Trial of the Rovers, which he sold to Harris for 100_l._ but which failed at Covent-Garden in 1789; of Eudora, a tragedy, acted with no better success in 1790; of the National Advocates, intended to commemorate the triumph of Erksine in his defence of Horne Tooke in 1795; of an Elegy on Sir William Jones in the same year; of an Essay on Sculpture in 1800; of Ballads on Animals, the most empty of his productions that I have seen, in 1802; of the Triumphs of Music in 1804; of Stanzas to the Patriots in Spain in 1808; and of another volume of plays in 1811.
Yet he still continued to secure to himself some share of attention by several works in prose. In the Essay on Old Maids, published in 1785, there is an agreeable combination of learning, sprightliness, and arch humour. He now and then approaches to irreverence on sacred subjects, but, as I am persuaded without any ill intention; the dedication of the book to Mrs. Carter gave much offence to that lady. His Dialogues on Johnson and Chesterfield, in 1787, contrast the character of these writers in a lively manner and with some power of discrimination, but the partiality of the author is very evident. He had himself "sacrificed" too successfully to the Graces to be a fair umpire between the rough scholar and the polished nobleman. The Young Widow, or the History of Cornelia Sedley, a novel, was published without his name (as the last-mentioned two books had also been) in 1789. For this he received 200_l_. from Mr. Nichols. The purchaser found his bargain a hard one: for the novel had little to recommend it, being deficient in probability of incident and character. He made up for the loss by presenting his bookseller with another anonymous work entitled the "Eulogies of Howard, a Vision," in prose.[1] His "Life of Milton," was intended for an edition of the poet to be published by Nichols the King's printer; but an abridgement of it only was employed in 1794, for the purpose, some passages being not thought courtly enough for the royal eye. He afterwards published it without mutilation. The design of this work, to which he devoted two years of diligent application, was to vindicate Milton from the asperity of Johnson—a task, which according to the general opinion, has since been more ably executed by Doctor Symmons. He had, however, reason to be satisfied with this undertaking, as it led to an acquaintance and friendship with Cowper, who was at the same time engaged in writing notes to Milton. Eight years after, it fell to his lot to write a Life of Cowper himself. This proved to him the most lucrative of all his literary engagements; but its success was owing principally not to the narrative but to the private letters of Cowper which accompanied them. Of the Life and Letters he added another volume in 1804; and in 1809 wrote the Life of Romney, which, having no such attraction, did not recommend itself to the public notice.
From the time that he left London, in 1774, till his death, a period of 46 years, he was seldom long absent from his home, first at Eartham, and afterwards at Felpham, a pleasant village on the sea-shore, distant only a few miles from his former residence. Cowper, who visited him at Eartham, in 1792, speaks of the house as "the most elegant mansion he had ever inhabited, surrounded by the most delightful pleasure grounds he had ever seen," and observes "he had no conception that a poet could be the owner of such a paradise." The house was built, and the pleasure grounds laid out by himself. Here I saw him in the next summer but one after Cowper's visit. His habits appeared to me such as they were long afterwards described by Mrs. Opie—those of extreme retirement, of abstemiousness, and of family devotion. He was at that time employed on his Life of Milton, and in educating his son, a promising boy, who under the age of fourteen, had began to translate the Epistles of Horace into tolerable blank verse. On accompanying me the next morning out of "Paradise," the lad spoke to me with some sorrow of his father's refusal to let him "join a pack of hounds in the neighbourhood." He died in his 20th year, a victim probably to the secluded life and the studious habits to which his parent had so early devoted him. His mother, a servant in the family, as I was told by Anna Seward, declared him to be the son of a young orphan, named Howell, who having been benevolently received by Hayley into his house, and through his means promoted in the military service of the East India Company, soon after perished by shipwreck. But the features of the boy told a different story, and one more consonant to that of the poet, by whom he was always acknowledged for his son. He was, for some time the pupil of Mr. Flaxman, who augured highly of his abilities, and who, if the young man had lived, would certainly have done all that could be done by example and instruction to render him illustrious in his art and respectable as a man.
Considering his independence on any profession, the ease of his manners, his talents for conversation, and his knowledge of modern languages, it may be wondered that Hayley did not mix more in society, or visit other countries besides his own. Once, indeed, when a young man he made an excursion to Scotland; and, in the summer of 1790, passed three weeks at Paris with his friends, Carwardine and Romney, from whence, much to the scandal of the neighbourhood, he brought back a French governess for his son. Mrs. Hayley had then left him, or rather had been gently forced out of his house; and, afterwards when she begged for leave to return, was denied it. From his own account of the matter, and from the letters that passed between them, some of which he has published in his Memoirs, it is difficult to acquit him of blame, and not to wish that he had endured with more patience the foibles of a woman, who, though irreproachable in her own conduct, was more indulgent than she need have been to his frailties. He appears, however, to have been anxious for her happiness after they were separated. She died in London in 1797, and received from her husband, the empty honours of a funeral sermon and an epitaph. He was loth to quit his home except on some errand of friendship, when he was ever ready to run to the Land's End. I remember his quoting to me the following line out of Aeschylus, on the advantage of a master's presence in his own family.
[Greek: "Omma gar domon nomixo despton paronsian".]
He seems to have taken delight in the instruction of youth; besides his own boy, he undertook to educate gratuitously two sons of his friend, Mr. Carwardine, and one of his neighbour Lord Egremont. On the death of Warton, he declined some advances that were made him through his friends, towards an offer of the laureatship. Nothing but a high sense of independence could have prompted this refusal; for, though no courtier, he was not wanting in loyalty; and the stipend would have been a welcome addition to an income which barely sufficed his own moderate wants and his liberal contributions to the necessities of others.