Part 8 (2/2)
At the Abbey--where there are daily morning services--you shall listen to the silver periods of Bishop Kurd, whom his admirers call fondly ”the Beauty of Holiness”; at St. James's you can attend the full-blown lectures, ”more unctuous than ever he preached,” of Bishop Beilby Porteus; or you may succeed in procuring a card for a select hearing, at Edgar Buildings, of Lady Huntingdon's eloquent chaplain, Mr. Whitefield.
With the gathering shades of even, you may pa.s.s, if so minded, to Palmer's Theatre in Orchard Street, and follow Mrs. Siddons acting Belvidera in Otway's _Venice Preserv'd_ to the Pierre of that forgotten Mr. Lee whom f.a.n.n.y Burney put next to Garrick; or you may join the enraptured audience whom Mrs. Jordan is delighting with her favourite part of Priscilla Tomboy in _The Romp_. You may a.s.sist at the concerts of Signer Venanzio Rauzzini and Monsieur La Motte; you may take part in a long minuet or country dance at the Upper or Lower a.s.sembly Rooms, which Bunbury will caricature; you may even lose a few pieces at the green tables; and, should you return home late enough, may watch a couple of stout chairmen at the door of the ”Three Tuns” in Stall Street, hoisting that seasoned toper, Mr. James Quin, into a sedan after his evening's quantum of claret. What you do to-day, you will do to-morrow, if the bad air of the Pump Room has not given you a headache, or the waters a touch of vertigo; and you will continue to do it for a month or six weeks, when the lumbering vehicle with the leathern straps and crane-necked springs will carry you back again over the deplorable roads (”so _sidelum_ and _jumblum_,” one traveller calls them) to your town-house, or your country-box, or your city-shop or chambers, as the case may be. Here, in due course, you will begin to meditate upon your next excursion to THE BATH, provided always that you have not dipped your estate at ”E.O.”, or been ruined by milliners' bills;--that your son has not gone northwards with a sham Scotch heiress, or your daughter been married at Charicombe, by private license, to a pinchbeck Irish peer. For all these things--however painful the admission--were, according to the most credible chroniclers, the by-no-means infrequent accompaniment or sequel of an unguarded sojourn at the old jigging, card-playing, scandal-loving, pleasure-seeking city in the loop of ”the soft-flowing Avon.”
It is an inordinate paragraph, outraging all known rules of composition!
But then--How seductive a subject is eighteenth-century Bath!--and how rich in memories is M. Barbeau's book!
A WELCOME FROM THE ”JOHNSON CLUB”
To William John Courthope, _March 12, 1903_
When Pope came back from Trojan wars once more, He found a Bard, to meet him on the sh.o.r.e, And hail his advent with a strain as clear As e'er was sung by BYRON or by FRERE.[57]
You, SIR, have travelled from no distant clime, Yet would JOHN GAY could welcome you in rhyme; And by some fable not too coldly penned, Teach how with judgment one may praise a Friend.
There is no need that I should tell in words Your prowess from _The Paradise of Birds_;[58]
No need to show how surely you have traced The Life in Poetry, the Law in Taste;[59]
Or mark with what unwearied strength you wear The weight that WARTON found too great to bear.[60]
There Is no need for this or that. My plan Is less to laud the Matter than the Man.
This is my brief. We recognise in you The mind judicial, the untroubled view; The critic who, without pedantic pose, Takes his firm foothold on the thing he knows; Who, free alike from pa.s.sion or pretence, Holds the good rule of calm and common sense; And be the subject or perplexed or plain,-- Clear or confusing,--is throughout urbane, Patient, persuasive, logical, precise, And only hard to vanity and vice.
More I could add, but brevity is best;-- These are our claims to honour you as Guest.
Notes:
[57] _Alexander Pope: his Safe Return from Troy. A Congratulatory Poem on his Completing his Translation of Homer's Iliad._ (In _ottava rima_.) By Mr. Gay, 1720(?). Frere's burlesque, _Monks and Giants_--it will be remembered--set the tune to Byron's _Beppo_.
[58] _The Paradise of Birds_, 1870.
[59] _Life in Poetry, Law in Taste_, two series of Lectures delivered in Oxford, 1895-1900. 1901.
[60] _A History of English Poetry_. 1895 (in progress).
THACKERY'S ”ESMOND”
At this date, Thackeray's _Esmond_ has pa.s.sed from the domain of criticism into that securer region where the cla.s.sics, if they do not actually ”slumber out their immortality,” are at least preserved from profane intrusion. This ”n.o.ble story”[61]--as it was called by one of its earliest admirers--is no longer, in any sense, a book ”under review.”
The painful student of the past may still, indeed, with tape and compa.s.s, question its details and proportions; or the quick-fingered professor of paradox, jauntily turning it upside-down, rejoice in the results of his perverse dexterity; but certain things are now established in regard to it, which cannot be gainsaid, even by those who a.s.sume the superfluous office of anatomising the accepted. In the first place, if _Esmond_ be not the author's greatest work (and there are those who, like the late Anthony Trollope, would willingly give it that rank), it is unquestionably his greatest work in its particular kind, for its sequel, _The Virginians_, however admirable in detached pa.s.sages, is desultory and invertebrate, while _Denis Duval_, of which the promise was ”great, remains unfinished. With _Vanity Fair_, the author's masterpiece in another manner, _Esmond_ cannot properly be compared, because an imitation of the past can never compete in verisimilitude or on any satisfactory terms with a contemporary picture.
Nevertheless, in its successful reproduction of the tone of a bygone epoch, lies _Esmond's_ second and incontestable claim to length of days.
Athough fifty years and more have pa.s.sed since it was published, it is still unrivalled as the typical example of that cla.s.s of historical fiction, which, dealing indiscriminately with characters real and feigned, develops them both with equal familiarity, treating them each from within, and investing them impartially with a common atmosphere of illusion. No modern novel has done this in the same way, nor with the same good fortune, as Esmond; and there is nothing more to be said on this score. Even if--as always--later researches should have revised our conception of certain of the real personages, the value of the book as an imaginative _tour de force_ is unimpaired. Little remains therefore for the gleaner of to-day save bibliographical jottings, and neglected notes on its first appearance.
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