There is no reason to suppose that Armstrong found anything in the condition of his friend to fulfil the anxious wishes of his letter. In the following year, Smollett died, leaving to his widow little beyond the empty consolations of his great fame. From her very narrow purse she supplied the means of erecting the stone that marks the spot where he lies; and the pen of his companion, whose letter we have just given, furnished an appropriate inscription. The niggardly hands of government remained as firmly closed against the relief of Mrs. Smollett as they had been in answer to her husband's own application for himself; an application which must have cost a severe struggle to his proud spirit, and of which his most intimate literary friends were probably never aware. He sought favors for others, says Dr. Moore; but "for himself he never made an application to any great man in his life!" He was not intemperate, nor yet was he extravagant, but by nature hospitable and of a cheerful temperament; his housekeeping was never niggardly, so long as he could employ his pen. Thus his genius was too often degraded to the hackney-tasks of booksellers; while a small portion of those pensions which were so lavishly bestowed upon ministerial dependants and placemen would have enabled him to turn his mind to its congenial pursuits, and probably to still further elevate the literary civilization of his country. But if there be satisfaction in the thought that a neglect similar to that which befell so bright a genius as his could no longer occur in England, there is food likewise for reflection in the change that has come over the position in which men of letters lived in those days towards the public, and even towards each other. Let any one read the account of the ten or a dozen authors whom Smollett describes himself, in "Humphrey Clinker," as entertaining at dinner on Sundays,—that being the only day upon which they could pass through the streets without being seized by bailiffs for debt. Each character is drawn with a distinctive minuteness that leaves us no room to doubt its possessing a living original; yet how disgusting to suppose that such a crew were really to be seen at the board of a brother writer! and in what bad taste does their host describe and ridicule their squalor! That such things were in those times cannot be doubted. Even in this century, in the golden days of book-making, we are told how Constable and how Ballantyne, the great publisher and the great printer of Edinburgh,—"His Czarish Majesty," and "the Dey of All-jeers," as Scott would call them,—delighted at their Sunday dinners to practise the same exercises as those which Smollett relates,—how they would bring together for their diversion Constable's "poor authors," and start his literary drudges on an after-dinner foot-race for a new pair of breeches, and the like! While it cannot justify the indifference with which Shelburne treated his request, we cannot but perceive that Smollett's contemptuous ridicule of his unfortunate or incapable Grub-Street friends must rob him of much of the sympathy which would otherwise accompany the ministerial neglect with which the claims of literature were visited in his person.
* * * * *
BLOODROOT
"Hast thou loved the wood-rose, and left it on its stalk?"
Beech-trees, stretching their arms, rugged, yet beautiful,
Here shade meadow and brook; here the gay bobolink,
High poised over his mate, pours out his melody.
Here, too, under the hill, blooms the wild violet;
Damp nooks hide, near the brook, bellworts that modestly,
Pale-faced, hanging their heads, droop there in silence; while
South winds, noiseless and soft, bring us the odor of
Birch twigs mingled with fresh buds of the hickory.
Hard by, clinging to rocks, nods the red columbine;
Close hid, under the leaves, nestle anemones,—
White-robed, airy and frail, tender and delicate.
Ye who, wandering here, seeking the beautiful,
Stoop down, thinking to pluck one of these favorites,
Take heed! Nymphs may avenge. List to a prodigy;—
One moon scarcely has waned since I here witnessed it.
One moon scarcely has waned, since, on a holiday,
I came, careless and gay, into this paradise,—
Found here, wrapped in their cloaks made of a leaf, little
White flowers, pure as the snow, modest and innocent,—
Stooped down, eagerly plucked one of the fairest, when
Forth rushed, fresh from the stem broken thus wickedly,
Blood!—tears, red, as of blood!—shed through my selfishness!
THE DIFFERENTIAL AND INTEGRAL CALCULUS.
[Greek: Polla ta deina, konden anthropon deinoteron pelei … periphradaes anaer!]