"And so you claim a verse of me, good friend,
As from the inspiration of the place;
Well then,—from pastoral trash may taste defend
Your pleasant Leasowes, and the human race!
The Gentle Shepherd's day has had an end,
Nor even could melodious Shenstone here
(False and inflated, we must all allow),
Excite one glowing thought or pensive tear
Unless indeed of wrath or pity now:
Yet dearly can I love these tumbling hills
With roughly wooded winding glens between,
Set with clear trout pools link'd by gurgling rills
And all so natural and calm and green,
That served to enervate your Poetaster
But only strengthen now their Iron Master."
I will also record a hospitable sojourn in old days at Northwood Park, the splendid abode of Isle-of-Wight Ward (grandfather to my school and college friend Ward of the Aristotle class and Oxonian persecution), where I once spent a week in my father's time: and similarly a visit at Lord Spencer's perfect villa near Ryde: and at other pleasant homes, made to me frequently welcome, the chief being Wotton, the classic mansion of one of my oldest friends.
Also long ago,—see a former page,—I purposely dismissed with only a word our lengthened visits in my father's day at Inveraray Castle with the old Duke of Argyll, and Holkar Hall with Lord George Cavendish, as private domesticities,—whilst a casual other few as at Ardgowan, Rozelle, Herriard, Losely, and the like, gratefully on my memory, shall be thus briefly recorded here: Ardgowan is the magnificent abode of my friend Sir Michael Shaw-Stewart, after whose grandmother as my sponsor I am named Farquhar; Rozelle, the hospitable mansion of Captain Hamilton, where I sojourned many days, meeting the élite of Ayr, and among them the aged niece of Burns in the poet's own country; Herriard House, my old school-friend Frank Ellis's heritage under his name of Jervoise, and Losely—"of the manuscripts," where I have often visited my late excellent friend James More Molyneux.
Of course, like everybody else who may be lifted a trifle above the crowd, I have experienced, almost annually, the splendid hospitalities of the Mansion House and most of the City Companies: may they long continue, and not be spunged away by Radical meanness! all classes are united and gratified thereby, for the poorest get the luxurious leavings, and the feasts are paid for by benefactors long departed from the scenes of their successful merchandise. All that seeming prodigality and luxury have good uses. But I will mention (of course without the hint of a name or place) one only instance of excessive splendour, quite needless and to my mind vulgar. A great magnate (not a royalty, I need hardly say) invited four guests to dine with his home party; the four were my father and mother, my brother Dan and myself, humble guests enough; and yet behind each of twelve chairs stood a gorgeous flunkey in powder and bright livery, with my lord's gentleman superadded in undertaker's evening trim, while the Earl himself wore his star and garter! Of course too the buffet and the table were loaded, with resplendent plate. That, scene of ostentation has been on the gray matter of my brain ever since young manhood, and I relieve myself now of the reminiscence for the first and last time. In another page I speak of Prince Astor's pure gold service when I dined with him at New. York; and I have grateful memory of the almost palatial splendour wherewith a rich publisher entertained his guest at his castle under Arthur's Seat; but in every case (and I might name others) my heart's aspiration has been, "Give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with food convenient for me." Mr. Vanderbilt was not happy with his millions; neither probably is poor Jack without a shot in his locker.
CHAPTER XXX.
SOCIAL AND RURAL.
In such a record of personals as this, it is fortunate both for the author and his readers if he has never been one of those literary lions who are merely histrionic creatures of society. It is a privilege not to have to reproduce the common small-talk of ball-rooms and garden-parties, nor to be obliged to make the most, after a semi-libellous fashion, of after-dinner scandals, or gossip in the smoking-room. Not having heard them he cannot well report racy anecdotes, whereof sundry memoirs have been too full. In the happier condition of a partial anchoritism I have escaped clubs, London seasons, and country mansion gaieties; as a youth and to middle manhood a stammerer, I would not willingly court the humiliations of chattering society, and thereafter, up to to-day, a domestic country gentleman of literary pursuits, I have avoided (as far as possible) fashionable gatherings of every sort, social, theological, or political. Not that I abjure—it is far otherwise—any kind of genial intercourse with my fellows; a few friends are my delight, but I never would belong to a club, though sometimes specially tempted by indulgence as to terms (more than once having been offered a free and immediate entry), nor to any society or charity that expected of me personal publicity or active service,—albeit, once, and once only, I had to figure as a reluctant chairman at Exeter Hall. Privacy has ever been my preference; whence it will clearly be inferred how much I have had to sacrifice in the way of self-denial when forced by circumstances to enact the "old man eloquent" before assembled hundreds, sometimes thousands, as a public reader. People who have made themselves acquainted with my "Proverbial Philosophy" may remember that my Essay on Speaking contrasts the misery of the man who cannot speak with the happiness of the emancipated orator, and I have experienced them both; whilst it may be seen in what I have written about silence and seclusion how cordially and perhaps foolishly, as "wearing my heart on my sleeve," I have shown that I greatly love to be alone, especially in what I am known to call "holy silence;" in fact, as ill-nature may like to put it, I prefer my own quiet company to that disturbed by the talk of other people. So much, then, as to one cause for the scantiness in this self-memoir of expected spicy anecdotes and perilous revelations. Not but that I could make considerable mischief, and perhaps help my publisher in sales, if I chose to make the most of the many celebrities, both American and English, with whom I have had intercourse both at Albury and elsewhere. My humble hospitalities and the constant welcome I have given to strangers, have been like their author, proverbial; but that is no reason why our converse, free and frank as private fellowship commands, should be produced in print; naturally the host was ever generous, and the guest—equally, of course—appreciative.
Perhaps though, not quite always: and I am tempted here to say just one unpleasant word about the only one of my many American guests, hospitably, nay almost affectionately treated, who wrote home to his wife too disparagingly of his entertainer, his son having afterwards had the bad taste to publish those letters in his father's Life. One comfort, however, is that in "The Memoirs of Nathaniel Hawthorne," that not very amiable genius praises no one of his English hosts (except, indeed, a perhaps too open-handed London one), and that he was not known (any more than Fenimore Cooper, whom years ago I found a rude customer in New York) for a superabundance of good nature. When at Albury, Hawthorne seemed to us superlatively envious: of our old house for having more than seven gables; of its owner for a seemingly affluent independence, as well as authorial fame; even of his friends when driven by him to visit beautiful and hospitable Wotton; and in every word and gesture openly entering his republican and ascetic protest against the aristocratic old country; even to protesting, when we drove by a new weather-boarded cottage, "Ha, that's the sort of house I prefer to see; it's like one of ours at home." That we did not take to each other is no wonder. This, then, is my answer to the unkindly remarks against me in print of one who has shown manifestly a flash of genius in "The Scarlet Letter;" but, so far as I know, it was well-nigh a solitary one.
One further curious illustration of an uncongenial guest is this: Alexander Smith wrote a "Life Drama," full of sparkling poetic gems, which at once made him popular, apparently with justice enough. I asked him down to Albury, made much of him, praised warmly sundry morceaux of his (which I had marked in my copy), and to my astonishment received the brusque reply, "O, you like those, do you? I shall alter them in next edition:" as I found afterwards he did. He was a common-looking man, with a rough manner, and a squint. As he seemed upset,—though why I could not guess,—I tried in other ways to please him; as, by a ramble in the woods and a drive in the waggonette: but all would not do,—his day came to an end as gloomily as it began. Long after, I stumbled upon the reason. I had then for the first time read Bailey's "Festus," and found some passages therein very similar to Alexander's; thereafter, other little bits from some other poets (I think Tennyson was one) struck me. Little wonder, then, that I heard no more of Smith,—who clearly had thought himself found out,—and so received my first ignorance of his plagiaristic tendency as if I had known all about it: and years after Aytoun had (as I was told) avenged justice by that cleverest of spasmodic poetries, "Firmilian, by Percy Jones"—a burlesque on Alexander Smith, and a book which the world has too willingly let die. Let no one, however, after all this, fancy that I am unaware of Alexander Smith's true merit. He very neatly fitted into his mosaic word-pictures the titbits he had culled in his commonplace-book out of many poets, and so utilised them. A self-made and self-taught man, "elbow to elbow," as he told me, "with Jack, Tom, and Harry in a workshop," as a designer of patterns, he had well and wisely made the most of his scant opportunities of culture, and it is only a pity that he did not allude to something of this in a preface.