| "The letters are original, though sometimes in bad taste, and generally verbose." |
| Edinburgh Review. |
I had not been a long time at College before I received a large packet from home, enclosing a number of letters from my uncle, Frederick, and Lucy. One of them was folded in an odd fashion—directed in a stiff and inky hand, and surmounted with a mass of red sealing wax, on which was rudely impressed the ragged outline of the Granby arms. This was one of my uncle's pedantic, prolix, advisory, and generous epistles, and I was soon placed in possession of the following neatly written sentences.
Chalgrave, ——.
My Dear Boy:—When Erasmus visited Sir Thomas More, that obstinate sophist, and that martyr to a scolding wife, (how nobly he bore her!) he said that he could always write a pleasing letter when his hand was the secretary of his heart. En passant, Erasmus made a gallant speech on this memorable visit. In admiring the kind fashion of saluting females with a kiss, on your arrival or departure from an entertainment, he said, and that philosophically, that this habit preserved health, in calling a constant and blushing glow to the cheek, and that in his moments of sickness he could wish no happier situation than to be placed near an English nunnery, where if he could not be kissed for charity he might yet live in hopes of it. Now my hand is the obedient secretary, and my heart is anxious to dictate its duties. How true, yet how simple is this conceit! and how far superior to the monkish verbosity, and strangled sentiment of those bad novels which you read merely because they are new. The heart is the écritoire of the letter writer, and have you never paused with feelings of admiration and delight over the affectionate and eloquent letters of a woman? She writes from the heart, and pours out the swelling torrent of all her thoughts and feelings. Man thinks what to write, and will fritter away feeling and sacrifice nature in the struggle for easy periods and mellifluous cadences. It is not learning that shadows with tints of tenderness the beautiful letters of Tully—nor is it philosophy which lends that nameless grace, and elastic interest, to the epistles of Pliny. 'Tis nature whose affections, like the rainbow, beautify and hallow the roughness of every spot over which it spans its creative arch. A letter, says Tully, cannot blush, "epistola enim non erubescit," if it could, it would never have this characteristic when I addressed it to you. I cannot write aught that will suffuse either your cheek or mine, though I might whisper something about your fair cousin, Isa Gordon. You love her, Lionel? and she may return your affection, but you must owe it to your distinction. Isa is no sickly and prurient-hearted girl who can solely love the person, for she demands the intellectual man, and in the hymeneal chaplet which is to adorn her brow, the laurel must twine its emblematic vanities. Let this hope excite you to study—let this holy object imp your eagle wing, for on every page of your books you must see her name urging and stimulating the slumbering energies of your ambition. I would not have you free from love, nor untouched, as Spenser calls it, by its pensive discontent, for no young man can prosper without its stirring and startling excitements. I myself, "vixi puellis idoneus," and I know that it softens the asperities of temper—gentles the turbulence of youth—breaks down the outworks of vice, and detracts no more from the firmness of mind than the polish of the diamond does from its solidity. You may read philosophy and think of woman—dwell on poetry and find your taste expanding into delicacy and elevation by dreaming of her gentleness, and I suppose that even in the crabbed study of the law, you may find her image peeping over black letter, or smiling through yellow parchment. When I was at college poor Ridon whom Johnstone shot, ('twas a fair duel) being in love, translated most of that portion of Coke upon Littleton which relates to females, into poetry of all styles, and measures. Only think of his drawing poetical conceits from this dull book, and scattering them on the margin of the leaden volume, like so many flowers prodigally thrown into a grave-yard! I have this rare copy, and in a page blotted with notes, references, and quæres, these crippled lines, have stumbled themselves into the text.
| "Tenant per la curtesie d'Englettere." |
| Chap. iv. sect. 35. |
| A feme that has lands Enters Hymen's bands, And has heirs in the nuptial tye; Then these lands shall descend, When her life's at an end, To her Lord in curtesy. |
This species of poetry was all that he ever wrote, and he was wont to say, that he thought it was his duty to the sex, to use the language of rhyme, and thus make the law respectful.
I do not know how to advise you about the study of law. I once looked into it, and though it may be a garden teeming with the elegancies of Poestum, I could not bear that rough dragon of pedantry, Coke, who guarded its threshold. It is a sort of hustle-cap game, between judges and lawyers, and a perilous mystery wherein common sense cannot trust itself, without that peculiar and dogged impudence, which bears all the vulgarity, without the courage, of effrontery. Now there is philosophy in every thing, and if you will acquire decent effrontery I will call it, for your sake, dignity and learning; and I will even believe that it requires some mind to understand a plain statute, and some genius to pervert it. Yet I cannot look with a sarcastic eye on the hallowed relics of the legal institutions of antiquity. Go back, my dear boy, to the redundant fountains of ancient literature—and you will find that Plato and Tully, have long ago, looked up for the pure seat of law only to the bosom of God, and that the Norman gibberish and dog-latin, which were quoted to burn witches and sustain kings, though they may make you a lawyer skilled in precedents, can never make you the scourge of knavery, the fearless champion of innocence, nor the enlightened advocate of your country's rights. Old Sir Roger L'Estrange wrote a mournful valedictory, when he left the riots and Apician nights of the Inns for the labors and stolid gravity of the bar, and, amid many sarcasms on the profession, he has thus happily sketched the character of an honest lawyer.
"He can prosecute a suit in equity without seeking to create a whirlpool where one order shall beget another, and the poor client be swung around (like a cat before execution,) from decree to rehearing—from report to exception, and vice versâ, till his fortunes are shipwrecked, and himself drowned, for want of white and yellow earth to wade through on. He does not play the empiric with his client, and put him on the rack to make him bleed more freely; casting him into a swoon with frights of a judgment, and then reviving him again with a cordial writ of error, or the dear elixir of an injunction, to keep the brangle alive, as long as there are any vital spirits in the pouch. He can suffer his neighbors to live quiet about him without perpetual alarms of actions and indictments, or conjuring up dormant titles to every commodious seat, and making land fall five years purchase, merely for lying within ten miles of him."
Devote most of your leisure hours to the study of Virginian antiquities, for it is a noble field, and one which glows into beauty beneath cultivation. Williamsburg itself is a hoary and whitened monument of ancient pomp and power, and there still dwells around it the trembling twilight of former greatness. There is something distinctive, learned, and patriotic, in the character of a home antiquary, which will lift you far above the little pedants, who have dipped the wing in Kennet, or tasted of the shallow learning of Athenian Stuart. Do you not remember the indignant, yet pathetic lines which Warton wrote in a blank leaf of Dugdale's Monasticon, and the spirited scorn with which he repels the sneers of ignorance and dulness? The antiquary is neither a visionary, nor an enthusiast, for his pursuits teach the holiest love of country, and call into action the softest and gentlest affections of the human heart, while his guileless life occasionally shines forth with the chastened light of virtue and learning. Virginia is a land whose thrilling history beggars all romance—every fragment of which, like a broken vase, will multiply perfume. Who knows aught of that gallant band, who so fearfully revenged the massacre of 1622?—the bold patriots who resisted the illegal restrictions on trade—the intrepid spirits who, led by Bacon, anticipated by a century our national æra, or that chivalric corps, who, under Vernon, rotted on the pestilential shores of Carthagena? Who dwells with the patriot's pride, on that unconquerable strength of infant freedom which made historic Beverley the Hampden of the colony? Or who troubles himself to inquire into the blood-stained life of that Westmoreland Parke, who seized the throne of Antigua, and who died in the last dyke of a bootless though fiercely fought field? Who cares to remember the enlightened and learned botanist Clayton, whose modest book, written in the purest Latin, gained for himself and country, a once proud though now forgotten fame? And who will believe that the wise, pious, and eloquent Bishop Porteus was born, and gambolled away his boyhood on the sunny shores of the majestic York-river? They are all forgotten! and we neglect the vivid and truthful romance of our own beautiful land, to learn the nursery tales of fickle Greece, and factious Rome. In the shifting of the social scene, naught has been left to remind us of the busy drama once acted in Virginia, and even garrulous tradition now doubts its existence, while our feet hourly trample on the sepulchered silence of all that once adorned, dignified, and elevated human nature.