When a man mayn’t wollop his own jackass.
But before Erskine died, it had become law.
William Murray, Earl of Mansfield, was the eleventh of the fourteen children of Viscount Stormont, of the castle of Scone, in Perthshire. So poor was his lordship, that, as we are told by Mansfield’s biographer, the only fare he could provide for those fourteen mouths—which though high-born, were every whit as hungry as if they had been peasants’—was oatmeal porridge. The family was Jacobite in politics, so its fortunes were little likely to improve; but by the influence of Bishop Atterbury, who was at heart a Jacobite too, little Willie was admitted to Westminster School. He made good use of his time there; and by listening to the debates in Westminster Hall he became enamoured of the law, and resolved to devote himself to it. Difficulties enough lay before him; but by the aid of an indomitable perseverance, a gentle manner, and a voice so musical that none could listen to it unmoved, he conquered them all. Throughout his legal career he was noted for strict integrity and justice. He advocated free trade and religious toleration, and used every effort in his power to decrease the waste of time and money in the business of law-courts; but his greatest title to honour is that he was the first to decide that no slave could remain a slave on English soil.
Early in this century, the year after Waterloo was fought, Hampstead was familiar with the forms of three men to whom life gave only scorn, insult, and disappointment, yet whose memory lingers about it and makes it hallowed ground. In 1816, Leigh Hunt lived at Hampstead in a part called the Vale of Health; and there Keats, who lodged in the village, and Shelley were his frequent visitors. Each of the three was more or less a martyr. For the crime of describing the Prince Regent—whose memory as George IV. is not highly honoured—as an ‘Adonis of fifty,’ Hunt was thrown into prison; while the political reviews and journals abused his graceful poems and scholarly essays as if they had been firebrands, to extinguish which every exertion must be made. They succeeded in torturing him, in reducing him to poverty and dependence, but they did not succeed in changing Leigh Hunt’s convictions. He would not bow down to the Adonis of fifty.
Shelley was rather a visitor than a resident at Hampstead Heath; but Keats composed not a few of his poems here. The sorrows of his sorrowful life had not yet reached their climax in 1816. Already he was struggling with poverty, disease, and hopeless, passionate love; but he had not yet published those poems which were to rouse such wrath in the bosoms of a few critics, and such delight in thousands of readers. But at Hampstead most of them were written. Here he breathed life into the long dead myth of Endymion, surrounding it with such a wealth of description as seems scarcely possible to a youth of such limited experience. Can commonplace Hampstead Heath, the chosen resort of Bank-holiday excursionists, be the prototype of that Grecian valley where the goddess of night stooped to kiss Endymion! Here were written the sad story of The Pot of Basil and the legend of The Eve of St Agnes; here, in 1819, was composed that most exquisite Ode to a Nightingale, which, even were it his only production, might place Keats among our greater poets.
The memory loves to trace the footsteps of departed greatness; but even did no such recollections as these endear Hampstead Heath, it would still be precious as a spot where half-asphyxiated Londoners may inhale a fresh untainted breeze, and children may romp to their hearts’ content. ‘I like Hampstead Heath much better than Switzerland,’ says a small boy in one of Du Maurier’s sketches in Punch. ‘But you haven’t seen Switzerland,’ objects his sister, a practical young lady a year or two older. ‘O yes; I have seen it on the map,’ is his reply. And if he had really visited Switzerland, the little fellow would perhaps still have preferred the broken, sandy soil, the grass and ferns, of Hampstead Heath.
Du Maurier is the Heath’s own artist. He lives on its borders, and most of the backgrounds of his out-of-door sketches are borrowed from its scenery. He may daily be seen there—till lately accompanied by his dog Chang, the great St Bernard whose portrait has so often appeared in the pages of Punch. But, alas! Chang is no more; he has fallen a victim to consumption and heart-disease, and Hampstead weeps for him. Seldom has any dog been so widely lamented. ‘He is mourned by a large circle of friends,’ said the World, ‘and the family of which he was so long a member is inconsolable for his loss.’
BY MEAD AND STREAM.
BY CHARLES GIBBON.