We shall conclude our extracts with a description of Pisa, the second birth-place of art in modern times; and in speaking of which, the learned Lecturer has indulged a vein of melancholy enthusiasm, which has the more striking effect as it is rare with him.
‘The Cathedral of Pisa, built by Buskettus, an architect from Dulichium, was the second sacred edifice (St. Mark’s, in Venice, being the first) raised after the destruction of the Roman power in Italy. It has received the honour of being allowed by posterity to have taken the lead in restoring art; and indeed the traveller, on entering the city gates, is astonished by a scene of architectural magnificence and singularity not to be equalled in the world. Four stupendous structures of white marble in one group—the solemn Cathedral, in the general parallelogram of its form, resembling an ancient temple, which unites and simplifies the arched divisions of its exterior; the Baptistry, a circular building, surrounded with arches and columns, crowned with niches, statues, and pinnacles, rising to an apex in the centre, terminated by a statue of the Baptist; the Falling Tower, which is thirteen feet out of the perpendicular, a most elegant cylinder, raised by eight rows of columns surmounting each other, and surrounding a staircase; the Cemetery, a long square corridor, 400 by 200 feet, containing the ingenious works of the improvers of painting down to the sixteenth century. This extraordinary scene, in the evening of a summer’s day, with a splendid red sun setting in a dark-blue sky, the full moon rising in the opposite side, over a city nearly deserted, affects the beholder’s mind with such a sensation of magnificence, solitude, and wonder, that he scarcely knows whether he is in this world or not.’
After the glossiness, and splendour, and gorgeous perfection of Grecian art, the whole seems to sink into littleness and insignificance, compared with the interest we feel in the period of its restoration, and in the rude, but mighty efforts, it made to reach to its former height and grandeur;—with more anxious thoughts, and with a more fearful experience to warn it—with the ruins of the old world crumbling around it, and the new one emerging out of the gloom of Gothic barbarism and ignorance—taught to look from the outspread map of time and change beyond it—and if less critical in nearer objects, commanding a loftier and more extended range, like the bursting the bands of death asunder, or the first dawn of light and peace after darkness and the tempest!
WILSON’S LIFE AND TIMES OF DANIEL DEFOE
Vol. l.] [January 1830.
This is a very good book, but spun out to too great a length. Mr. Wilson will not bate an inch of his right to be tediously minute on any of the topics that pass in review before him, whether they relate to public or private matters, the author’s life and writings, or the answers to them by Tutchin and Ridpath. He is indeed so well furnished with materials, and so full of his subject, that instead of studying to reduce the size of his work, he very probably thinks he has shown forbearance in not making it longer. We could not wish a more distinct or honest chronicler. There is scarcely a sentence, or a sentiment in his work, that we disapprove, unless we were to quarrel with what is said in dispraise of the Beggar’s Opera. In general, his opinions are sound, liberal, and enlightened, and as clear and intelligible in the expression as the intention is upright and manly. The style is plain and unaffected, as is usually the case where a writer thinks more of his subject than of himself. Mr. Wilson appears as the zealous and consistent friend of civil and religious liberty; and not only never swerves from, or betrays his principles, but omits no opportunity of avowing and enforcing them. He has ‘excellent iteration in him.’ If he repeats the old story over again, that liberty is a blessing, and slavery a curse,—if he depicts persecution and religious bigotry in the same unvarying and odious colours, and never sees the phantom of divine right without proceeding to have a tilting-bout with it,—as honest Hector Macintire could not be prevented by his uncle, Mr. Jonathan Oldbuck, from encountering a seal whenever he saw one,—we confess, notwithstanding, that we like this pertinacity better than some people’s indifference or tergiversation. The biographer of Defoe, like Defoe himself, is a Whig, and of the true stamp; that is, he is a staunch and incorruptible advocate of Whig principles, and of the great aims the leaders of the Revolution had in view, as opposed to the absurd and mischievous doctrines of their adversaries; though this does not bribe his judgment, but rather makes him more anxious in pointing out and lamenting the follies, weaknesses, and perversity of spirit, which sometimes clogged their proceedings, defeated their professed objects, and turned the cause of justice and freedom into a by-word, and the instrument of a cabal.
Mr. Wilson cannot be charged with going too copiously or indiscriminately into the details of Defoe’s private life. The anecdotes and references of this kind are ‘thinly scattered to make up a show,’—rari nantes in gurgite vasto. Little was known before on this head, and the author, with all his diligence and zeal, has redeemed little from obscurity and oblivion. But he makes up for the deficiency of personal matter, by a superabundance of literary and political information. All that is to be gleaned of Defoe’s individual history might be stated in a short compass.
Daniel Defoe, or Foe, as the name was sometimes spelt, was born in London in the year 1661, in the parish of St. Giles’s, Cripplegate. His father, James Foe, was a butcher; and his grandfather, Daniel, the first person among his ancestors of whom any thing is positively known, was a substantial yeoman, who farmed his own estate at Elton, in Northamptonshire. The old gentleman kept a pack of hounds, which indicated both his wealth and his principles as a royalist; for the Puritans did not allow of the sports of the field, though his grandson (contra bonos mores) sometimes indulged in them. In alluding to this circumstance, Defoe says, ‘I remember my grandfather had a huntsman, who used the same familiarity (that of giving party names to animals) with his dogs; and he had his Roundhead and his Cavalier, his Goring and his Waller; and all the generals in both armies were hounds in his pack, till, the times turning, the old gentleman was fain to scatter his pack, and make them up of more dog-like sirnames.’ It was probably from this relative that Defoe inherited a freehold estate, of which he was not a little vain; and which seems to have influenced his opinions in his theory of the right of popular election, and of the British constitution. His father was a person of a different cast—a rigid dissenter; and from him his son appears to have imbibed the grounds of his opinions and practice. He was living at an advanced age in 1705. The following curious memorandum, signed by him at this period, throws some light on his character, as well as on that of the times:—‘Sarah Pierce lived with us, about fifteen or sixteen years since, about two years, and behaved herself so well, that we recommended her to Mr. Cave, that godly minister, which we should not have done, had not her conversation been according to the gospel. From my lodgings, at the Bell in Broad Street, having lately left my house in Throgmorton Street, October 10, 1705. Witness my hand, James Foe.’
Young Defoe was brought up for the ministry, and educated with this view at the dissenting academy of Mr. Charles Morton, at Newington-Green, where Mr. Samuel Wesley, the father of the celebrated John Wesley, and who afterwards wrote against the dissenters, was brought up with him. Whether from an unsettled inclination, or his father’s inability to supply the necessary expenses, he never finished his education here. He not long after joined in Monmouth’s rebellion in 1685, and narrowly escaped being taken prisoner with the rest of the Duke’s followers. It is supposed he owed his safety to his being a native of London, and his person not being known in the west of England, where that movement chiefly took place. He now applied himself to business, and became a kind of hose-factor. He afterwards set up a Dutch tile-manufactory at Tilbury, in Essex, and derived great profit from it; but his being sentenced to the pillory for his Shortest Way with the Dissenters, (one of the truest, ablest, and most seasonable pamphlets ever published,) and the heavy fine and imprisonment that followed, involved him in distress and difficulty ever after. He occasionally, indeed, seemed to be emerging from obscurity, and to hold his head above water for a time, (and at one period had built himself a handsome house at Stoke-Newington, which is still to be seen there,) but this show of prosperity was of short continuance; all of a sudden, we find him immersed in poverty and law as deeply as ever; and it would appear that, with all his ability and industry, however he might be formed to serve his country or delight mankind, he was not one of those who are born to make their fortunes,—either from a careless, improvident disposition, that squanders away its advantages, or a sanguine and restless temper, that constantly abandons a successful pursuit for some new and gilded project. Defoe took an active and enthusiastic part in the Revolution of 1688, and was personally known to King William, of whom he was a sort of idolater, and evinced a spirit of knight-errantry in defence of his character and memory whenever it was attacked. He was released from prison (after lying there two years) by the interference and friendship of Harley, who introduced him to Queen Anne, by whom he was employed on several confidential missions, and more particularly in effecting the Union with Scotland. His personal obligations to Harley fettered his politics during the four last years of Queen Anne, and threw a cloud over his popularity in the following reign, but fixed no stain upon his character, except in the insinuations and slanders of his enemies, whether of his own or the opposite party. It was not till after he had retired from the battle, covered with scars and bruises, but without a single trophy or reward, in acknowledgment of his indefatigable and undeniable services in defence of the cause he had all his life espoused—when he was nearly sixty years of age, and struck down by a fit of apoplexy—that he thought of commencing novel-writer, for his amusement and subsistence. The most popular of his novels, Robinson Crusoe, was published in the year 1719, and he poured others from his pen, for the remaining ten or twelve years of his life, as fast, and with as little apparent effort, as he had formerly done lampoons, reviews, and pamphlets.
We are in the number of those who, though we profess ourselves mightily edified and interested by the researches of biography, are not always equally gratified by the actual result. Few things, in an ordinary life, can come up to the interest which every reader of sensibility must take in the author of Robinson Crusoe. ‘Heaven lies about us in our infancy;’ and it cannot be denied, that the first perusal of that work makes a part of the illusion:—the roar of the waters is in our ears,—we start at the print of the foot in the sand, and hear the parrot repeat the well-known sounds of ‘Poor Robinson Crusoe! Who are you? Where do you come from; and where are you going?’—till the tears gush, and in recollection and feeling we become children again! One cannot understand how the author of this world of abstraction should have had any thing to do with the ordinary cares and business of life; or it almost seems that he should have been fed, like Elijah, by the ravens. What boots it then to know that he was a hose-factor, and the owner of a tile-kiln in Essex—that he stood in the pillory, was over head and ears in debt, and engaged in eternal literary and political squabbles? It is, however, well to be assured that he was a man of worth as well as genius; and that, though unfortunate, and having to contend all his life with vexations and disappointments, with vulgar clamour and the hand of power, yet he did nothing to leave a blot upon his name, or to make the world ashamed of the interest they must always feel for him. If there is nothing in a farther acquaintance with his writings to raise our admiration higher, (which could hardly happen without a miracle,) there is a great deal to enlarge the grounds of it, and to strengthen our esteem and confidence in him. To say nothing of the incessant war he waged with crying abuses, with priestcraft and tyranny, and the straight line of consistency and principle which he followed from the beginning to the end of his career,—he was a powerful though unpolished satirist in verse, (as his True-born Englishman sufficiently proves);—was master of an admirable prose style;—in his Review, (a periodical paper which was published three times a week for nine years together,) led the way to that class of essay-writing, and those dramatic sketches of common life and manners, which were afterwards so happily perfected by Steele and Addison;—in his Essays on Trade, anticipated many of those broad and liberal principles which are regarded as modern discoveries;—in his Moral Essays, and some of his Novels, undoubtedly set the example of that minute description and perplexing casuistry, of which Richardson so successfully availed himself;—was among the first to advocate the intellectual equality, and the necessity of improvements in the education of women;—suggested the project of Saving Banks, and an Asylum for Idiots;—among other notable services and claims to attention, by his thoughts on the best mode of watching and lighting the streets of the metropolis, might be considered as the author of the modern system of police;—and even in party matters, and the heats and rancorous differences of jarring sects, generally seized on that point of view which displayed most moderation and good sense, and in his favourite conclusions and arguments, was half a century before his contemporaries, who, for that reason, made common cause against him.