‘Wolves in sheep’s clothing! bitter words and big;
But who applies them? first the speaker scan;
A suckling Tory! an apostate Whig!
Indeed a very silly, weak young man!‘What such an one may either think or say,
With sober people matters not one pin;
In their opinion his own senseless bray
Proves him the ass wrapt in a lion’s skin!’
Better is the following address to a certain Dr. E.:
‘A bullying, brawling, champion of the Church,
Vain as a parrot screaming on her perch;
And like that parrot screaming out by rote,
The same stale, flat, unprofitable note;
Still interrupting all debate
With one eternal cry of “Church and State!”
With all the High Tory’s ignorance increased,
By all the arrogance that makes the priest;
One who declares upon his solemn word
The Voluntary system is absurd;
He well may say so, for ’twere hard to tell
Who would support him did not law compel.’
A prophet, it is said, is not honoured in his own country. Bernard Barton was happily the rare exception that proves the rule. I remember being at the launching of a vessel, bought and owned by a Woodbridge man, called the Bernard Barton; it was the first time I had ever seen a ship launched, and I was interested accordingly. The ultimate fate of the craft is unknown to history. On one occasion she was reported in the shipping list amongst the arrivals at some far-off port as the Barney Burton. Such is fame!
Of his local reputation Bernard was not a little proud. His little town was vain of him. It was something to go into the bank and get a cheque cashed by the poet. The other evening I went to the house of a Woodbridge man who has done well in London, and lives in one of the few grand old houses which yet adorn Stoke Newington Green—just a stone’s throw from where Samuel Rogers dwelt—and there in the drawing-room were Bernard Barton’s own chair and cabinet preserved with as much pious care as if he had been a Shakespeare or a Milton. Bernard Barton made no secret of his vocation, and when the time had come that he had delivered himself of a new poem, it was his habit to call on one or other of his friends and
discuss the matter over a bottle of port—port befitting the occasion; no modern liquor of that name—
‘Not such as that
You set before chance comers,
But such whose father grape grew fat
On Lusitanian summers.’
And then there was a good deal of talk, as was to be expected, on things in general, for B. B. loved his joke and was full of anecdote—anecdote, perhaps, not always of the most refined character. But what could you expect at such happy times from a man brimful of human nature, who had to pose all life under the double weight of decorum imposed on him, in the first place as a Quaker, and in the second place as a banker’s clerk?
Bernard Barton, as I recollect him, was somewhat of a dear old man—short in person, red in face, with dark brown hair. He was, as I have said, a clerk in a bank, but his poetry had elevated him, somehow, to the rank of a provincial lion, and at certain houses, where the dinner was good and the wine was ditto, he ever was a welcome guest. I dined with him at the house of a friend in Woodbridge, and it seemed to me that he cared more for good feeding and a glass of wine and a
pinch of snuff than the sacred Nine. Of course at that time I had not been educated up to the fitting state of mind with which the philosopher of our day proceeds to the performance of the mysteries of dinner. Dining had at that time not been elevated to the rank of a science, to the study of which the most acute intellects devote their highest energies; nor had flowers then been invoked to lend an additional grace to the dining-table. Besides, dinners such as Mr. Black gives at Brighton, scientific dinners, such as those feasts with which Sir Henry Thompson regales his friends, were unknown. Nevertheless, now and then we managed to dine comfortably off roast beef or lamb, a slice of boiled or roast fowl, a bit of plum-pudding or fruit tart, a crust of bread and cheese, with—tell it not in Gath, publish it not in the streets of Askalon—sherry and Madeira at dinner, and a few glasses of fine old fruity port after. Some Shakespearian quotations—unknown to me then, for Shakespeare was little quoted in purely evangelical circles, either in Church or Dissent—a reference to Sir Walter Scott’s earlier German translations, formed about the sum and substance of the conversation which took place between the poet and my host; all the rest was