It remains only to add, that Mr. Rogers has embellished his works with the same exquisite taste as his house. They are splendid specimens of typography, and are rich in the most beautiful designs by Stothard and Turner, from the most celebrated burins of the day. I believe more than fifty thousand copies of them have been circulated.
Cottage at Sloperton
THOMAS MOORE.
The author of Lalla Rookh, like most of the race of genius, is one whom his own genius has ennobled. The man who has not to thank his ancestors for what he enjoys of wealth, station, or reputation, has all the more to thank himself for. The heralds, says Savage Landor, will give you a grandfather if you want one, but a genuine poet has no need of a grandfather; he is his own grandfather, his own shield-bearer, and stands forth to the world in the proud attitude of debtor to none but God and himself, the shield-bearer and the grandfather of others. Thomas Moore was born in a humble house in Dublin, the son of humble but respectable parents. He has made his own way in the world, and given to those parents the honor of having produced a distinguished son. That is as it should be. People should honor their parents, it is rarely that parents can honor their children. They can not bequeath their genius to them; it is not always that they can succeed in engrafting on them their virtues; and if parents be glorious in reputation and in goodness, if the children do not walk worthy of that glory, the glory itself is only a blaze that exposes them to the world; lights up and aggravates every blemish to the general eye. How truly is honor, true honor, in nine cases out of ten, a self-acquisition. Wealth you may entail, station you may entail; but well won honor is a thing which, like salvation, every man must achieve for himself. Poets in general know no ancestry. In their poetic character they are as truly and newly created as Adam himself. Who cares a button for the ancestors of Byron, of Milton, of Shakspeare, of Goëthe, or of Schiller? These men start out to our eyes in the blaze of their own genius, which darkens all around them. They are creations of God, and not of man. They are sent forth into the world, and not born into it. Their ancestors are not the ancestors of their genius. They are the progenitors of the earthy caterpillar,—the butterfly, the Psyche of genius, is born of itself. With the splendid spirit which breaks forth sometimes from an old line, that line commonly has nothing more to do than the earth on which we tread, the common mother of us all, has to do with our soul and its celestial powers. These come out of the hand of God, gifts to us and the world; luminaries burning in a divine isolation; priests after the order of Melchisedec, whose ancestry and whose posterity are not known. God has vindicated to himself the origination of Genius and Christianity. They both came into the world independent of governments and princes; they spring out of the habitations of the poor, and walk among the poor: they disdain to confer on worldly pride the honor of their alliance, but they do their mission in the strength of their sender, and mount to heaven.
These are great truths that every man of genius should see, acknowledge, and act upon. His birth is higher than that of any prince, even be it more lowly than that of the Son of God, in a stable and a manger, with a stalled ox instead of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and an ass instead of a prime minister, attending as witnesses. Nobles can confer no nobility on him: he bears his patent of honor in his own bosom; the escutcheon of genius in his broad and exalted brow. He should remember this; and the world will not then forget it. He should think of himself as sent forth by God, doing God's work in the earth, and having to render up to God the account of his embassy. With this idea within him and before him, his work will be done the more nobly; and the public which is made what it is by him,—effeminate through his effeminacy, corrupt through his corruption, wise through his wisdom, will soon place him in his true rank, above all heaps of metal and spadefuls of earth, and honor him as the only true noble, the only man who has no need of heraldic lies and fictitious grandfathers. These are great truths that the children of men of genius too should bear in mind. They should feel that they can not inherit genius, but they may possess it in some new shape, an equal gift of heaven. This will keep alive in them the spirit of honorable action; and they may come to live, not in the moonshine of their ancestral lights, but in a genuine warm sunshine of their own. The honor of a distinguished parent is not our honor but our foil, if we do not seek to establish an alliance with it by our own exertion, and above all, by goodness.
For want of poets and poets' children entertaining these rational ideas, what miseries have from age to age awaited them! In the course of my peregrinations to the birthplaces and the tombs of poets, how often have these reflections been forced upon me. Humble, indeed, are frequently their birthplaces; but what is far worse, how wretched are often the places of their deaths! How many of them have died in the squalid haunts of destitution, and even by their own hand. How many of them have left their families to utter poverty; how many of those caressed in their lives, lie without a stone or a word of remembrance in their graves! Scott, with all his glory and his monuments in other places, has not even a slab bearing his name laid upon his breast. Chatterton's very bones have been dispersed to make a market. Motherwell, amid all the proud cenotaphs in the Necropolis at Glasgow, such men as Major Monteith having whole funeral palaces to themselves, has not even a cubic foot of stone, or a mere post with his initials, to mark his resting-place. But still more melancholy is the contemplation of the beginning and the end of Robert Tannahill, the popular song-writer of Paisley. Tannahill was no doubt stimulated by the fame of Burns. True, he had not the genius of Burns, but genius he had, and that is conspicuous in many of those songs which during his lifetime were sung with enthusiasm by his countrymen. Tannahill was a poor weaver at Paisley. The cottage where he lived is still to be seen, a very ordinary weaver's cottage in an ordinary street; and the place where he drowned himself may be seen too at the outside of the town. This is one of the most dismal places in which a poet ever terminated his career. Tannahill, like Burns, was fond of a jovial hour amid his comrades in a public-house. But weaving of verse and weaving of calico did not agree. The world applauded, but did not patronize; poverty came like an armed man; and Tannahill in the frenzy of despair resolved to terminate his existence. Outside of Paisley there is a place where a small stream passes under a canal. To facilitate this passage, a deep pit is sunk, and a channel for the waters is made under the bottom of the canal. This pit is, I believe, eighteen feet deep. It is built round with stone, which is rounded off at its mouth, so that any one falling in can not by any possibility get out, for there is nothing to lay hold of. Any one once in there might grasp and grasp in vain for an edge to seize upon. He would sink back and back till he was exhausted and sunk forever. No doubt Tannahill in moments of gloomy observation had noted this. And at midnight he came, stripped off his coat, laid down his hat, and took the fatal plunge. No cry could reach human ear from that horrible abyss; no effort of the strongest swimmer could avail to sustain him: soon worn out he must go down, and amid the black, boiling torrent be borne through the subterranean channel onward with the stream. Thus died Robert Tannahill, and a more fearful termination was never put to a poetical career. This place is called Tannahill's hole, and cats and dogs drowned in it, from its peculiar fitness for inevitable drowning, float about on the surface, and add to the revolting shudder which the sight of it creates.
Such are some of the dominant tendencies of poetic fate which made Wordsworth exclaim,
"We poets in our youth begin in gladness,
But thereof come in the end despondency and madness;"