Kitabı oku: «A History of Nineteenth Century Literature (1780-1895)», sayfa 4
Except that both were very much of their time, it would be impossible to imagine a more complete contrast than that which exists between Beckford and Bage. The former was, as has been said, one of the richest men in England, the creator of two "Paradises" at Fonthill and Cintra, the absolute arbiter of his time and his pleasures, a Member of Parliament while he chose to be so, a student, fierce and recluse, the husband of a daughter of the Gordons, and the father of a mother of the Hamiltons, the collector, disperser, bequeather of libraries almost unequalled in magnificence and choice. Robert Bage, who was born in 1728 and died in 1801, was in some ways a typical middle-class Englishman. He was a papermaker, and the son of a papermaker; he was never exactly affluent nor exactly needy; he was apparently a Quaker by education and a freethinker by choice; and between 1781 and 1796, obliged by this reason or that to stain the paper which he made, he produced six novels: Mount Henneth, Barham Downs, The Fair Syrian, James Wallace, Man as he is, and Hermsprong. The first, second, and fourth of these were admitted by Scott to the "Ballantyne Novels," the others, though Hermsprong is admittedly Bage's best work, were not. It is impossible to say that there is genius in Bage; yet he is a very remarkable writer, and there is noticeable in him that singular fin de siècle tendency which has reasserted itself a century later. An imitator of Fielding and Smollett in general plan, – of the latter specially in the dangerous scheme of narrative by letter, – Bage added to their methods the purpose of advocating a looser scheme of morals and a more anarchical system of government. In other words, Bage, though a man well advanced in years at the date of the Revolution, exhibits for us distinctly the spirit which brought the Revolution about. He is a companion of Godwin and of Mary Wollstonecraft; and though it must be admitted that, as in other cases, the presence of "impropriety" in him by no means implies the absence of dulness, he is full of a queer sort of undeveloped and irregular cleverness.
The most famous, though not the only novel of Richard Cumberland; Henry, shows the same tendency to break loose from British decorum, even such decorum as had really been in the main observed by the much-abused pens of Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne himself; but it has little purpose and indeed little vigour of any kind. Cumberland clung as close as he could to the method of Fielding, including the preliminary dissertation or meditation, but he would be a very strange reader who should mistake the two.
The school of Bage and Cumberland, the former of whom bears some little resemblance to his countrywoman George Eliot, was, with or without Bage's purpose, continued more or less steadily; indeed, it may be said to be little more than a variant, with local colour, of the ordinary school of novel-writing. But it was not this school which was to give tone to the period. The "tale of terror" had been started by Horace Walpole in the Castle of Otranto, and had, as we have seen, received a new and brilliant illustration in the hands of Beckford. But the genius of the author of Vathek could not be followed; the talent of the author of the Castle of Otranto was more easily imitated. How far the practice of the Germans (who had themselves imitated Walpole, and whose work began in the two last decades of the century to have a great reflex influence upon England) was responsible for the style of story which, after Mrs. Radcliffe and Monk Lewis had set the fashion, dominated the circulating libraries for years, is a question not easy and perhaps not necessary to answer positively. I believe myself that no foreign influence ever causes a change in national taste; it merely coincides therewith. But the fact of the set in the tide is unmistakable and undeniable. For some years the two authors just mentioned rode paramount in the affections of English novel readers; before long Miss Austen devoted her early and delightful effort, Northanger Abbey, to satirising the taste for them, and quoted or invented a well-known list of blood-curdling titles;2 the morbid talent of Maturin gave a fresh impulse to it, even after the healthier genius of Scott had already revolutionised the general scheme of novel-writing; and yet later still an industrious literary hack, Leitch Ritchie, was able to issue, and it may be presumed to find readers for, a variety of romance the titles of which might strike a hasty practitioner of the kind of censure usual in biblical criticism as a designed parody of Miss Austen's own catalogue. The style, indeed, in the wide sense has never lost favour. But in the special Radcliffian form it reigned for some thirty years, and was widely popular for nearly fifty.
Anne Radcliffe, whose maiden name was Ward, was born on 9th July 1764 and died on 7th February 1822. One of her novels, Gaston de Blondeville, was published posthumously; but otherwise her whole literary production took place between the years 1789 and 1797. The first of these years saw The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne, a very immature work; the last The Italian, which is perhaps the best. Between them appeared A Sicilian Romance (1790), The Romance of the Forest (1791), and the far-famed Mysteries of Udolpho in 1795. Matthew Gregory Lewis, who, like Beckford, was a West-Indian landowner and member for Hindon, and was well-to-do if not extremely wealthy, was nine years younger than Mrs. Radcliffe, and did not produce his famous Monk till the same year which saw Udolpho. He published a good deal of other work in prose, verse, and drama; the most noteworthy of the second class being Tales of Terror, to which Scott contributed, and the most noteworthy of the third The Castle Spectre. Lewis, who, despite some foibles, was decidedly popular in the literary and fashionable society of his time, died in 1818 at the age of forty-five on his way home from the West Indies. Although he would have us understand that The Monk was written some time before its actual publication, Lewis' position as a direct imitator of Mrs. Radcliffe is unmistakable; and although he added to the characteristics of her novels a certain appeal to "Lubricity" from which she was completely free, the general scheme of the two writers, as well as that of all their school, varies hardly at all. The supernatural in Mrs. Radcliffe's case is mainly, if not wholly, what has been called "the explained supernatural," – that is to say, the apparently ghostly, and certainly ghastly, effects are usually if not always traced to natural causes, while in most if not all of her followers the demand for more highly spiced fare in the reader, and perhaps a defect of ingenuity in the writer, leaves the devils and witches as they were. In all, without exception, castles with secret passages, trap-doors, forests, banditti, abductions, sliding panels, and other apparatus and paraphernalia of the kind play the main part. The actual literary value is, on the whole, low; though Mrs. Radcliffe is not without glimmerings, and it is exceedingly curious to note that, just before the historical novel was once for all started by Scott, there is in all these writers an absolute and utter want of comprehension of historical propriety, of local and temporal colour, and of all the marks which were so soon to distinguish fiction. Yet at the very same time the yearning after the historical is shown in the most unmistakable fashion from Godwin down to the Misses Lee, Harriet and Sophia (the latter of whom in 1783 produced, in The Recess, a preposterous Elizabethan story, which would have liked to be a historical novel), and other known and unknown writers.
Another lady deserves somewhat longer notice. Hannah More, once a substantially famous person in literature, is now chiefly remembered by her association with great men of letters, such as Johnson in her youth, Macaulay and De Quincey in her old age. She was born as early as 1745 near Bristol, and all her life was a Somerset worthy. She began – a curious beginning for so serious a lady, but with reforming intentions – to write for the stage, published The Search after Happiness when she was seventeen, and had two rather dreary tragedies, Percy and the Fatal Secret, acted, Garrick being a family friend of hers. Becoming, as her day said, "pious," she wrote "Sacred Dramas," and at Cowslip Green, Barley Wood, and Clifton produced "Moral Essays," the once famous novel of C[oe]lebs in Search of a Wife, and many tracts, the best known of which is The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain. She died at a great age on 7th September 1833. Hannah More is not to be spoken of with contempt, except by ignorance or incompetence. She had real abilities, and was a woman of the world. But she was very unfortunately parted in respect of time, coming just before the days when it became possible for a lady to be decent in literature without being dull.
If a book and not a chapter were allowed about this curious, and on the whole rather neglected and undervalued, Fifth Act of the eighteenth century, many of its minor literary phenomena would have to be noticed: such as the last state of periodicals before the uprising of the Edinburgh Review, and the local literary coteries, the most notable of which was that of Norwich, with the Aldersons, Sayers the poet, who taught Southey and others to try blank verse in other measures than the decasyllabic, William Taylor, the apostle of German literature in England, and others. But, as it is, we must concentrate our attention on its main lines.
In these lines the poetical pioneers, the political and other satirists, the revolutionary propagandists, and the novelists of terror, are the four classes of writers that distinguish the period 1780 to 1800; and perhaps they distinguish it sufficiently, at least for those with whom historical genesis and connection atone to some extent for want of the first order of intrinsic interest. In less characteristic classes and in isolated literary personalities the time was not extremely rich, though it was not quite barren. We can here only notice cursorily the theological controversialists who, like Paley, Horsley, and Watson, waged war against the fresh outburst of aggressive Deism coinciding with the French Revolution: the scholars, such as, in their different ways, Dr. Parr, the Whig "moon" of Dr. Johnson; Porson, the famous Cambridge Grecian, drinker, and democrat; Taylor the Platonist, a strange person who translated most of the works of Plato and was said to have carried his discipleship to the extent of a positive Paganism; Gilbert Wakefield, a miscellaneous writer who wrote rapidly and with little judgment, but with some scholarship and even some touches of genius, on a great variety of subjects; Jacob Bryant, mythologist, theologian, and historical critic, a man of vast learning but rather weak critical power; and many others. Of some of these we may indeed have more to say later, as also of the much-abused Malthus, whose famous book, in part one of the consequences of Godwin, appeared in 1798; while as for drama, we shall return to that too. Sheridan survived through the whole of the time and a good deal beyond it; but his best work was done, and the chief dramatists of the actual day were Colman, Holcroft, Cumberland, and the farce-writer O'Keefe, a man of humour and a lively fancy.
One, however, of these minor writers has too much of what has been called "the interest of origins" not to have a paragraph to himself. William Gilpin, who prided himself on his connection with Bernard Gilpin, the so-called "Apostle of the North" in the sixteenth century, was born at Carlisle. But he is best known in connection with the New Forest, where, after taking his degree at Oxford, receiving orders, and keeping a school for some time, he was appointed to the living of Boldre. This he held till his death in 1814. Gilpin was not a secularly-minded parson by any means; but his literary fame is derived from the series of Picturesque Tours (The Highlands, 1778; The Wye and South Wales, 1782; The Lakes, 1789; Forest Scenery, 1791; and The West of England and the Isle of Wight, 1798) which he published in the last quarter of the century. They were extremely popular, they set a fashion which may be said never to have died out since, and they attained the seal of parody in the famous Dr. Syntax of William Combe (1741-1823), an Eton and Oxford man who spent a fortune and then wrote an enormous amount of the most widely various work in verse and prose, of which little but Syntax itself (1812 sqq.) is remembered. Gilpin himself is interesting as an important member of "the naturals," as they have been oddly and equivocally called. His style is much more florid and less just than Gilbert White's, and his observation correspondingly less true. But he had a keen sense of natural beauty and did much to instill it into others.
In all the work of the time, however, great and small, from the half-unconscious inspiration of Burns and Blake to the common journey-work of book-making, we shall find the same character – incessantly recurring, and unmistakable afterwards if not always recognisable at the time – of transition, of decay and seed-time mingled with and crossing each other. There are no distinct spontaneous literary schools: the forms which literature takes are either occasional and dependent upon outward events, such as the wide and varied attack and defence consequent upon the French Revolution, or else fantastic, trivial, reflex. Sometimes the absence of any distinct and creative impulse reveals itself in work really good and useful, such as the editing of old writers, of which the labours of Malone are the chief example and the forgeries of Ireland the corresponding corruption; or the return to their study æsthetically, in which Headley, a now forgotten critic, did good work. Sometimes it resulted in such things as the literary reputation (which was an actual thing after a kind) of persons like Sir James Bland Burges, Under-Secretary of State, poetaster, connoisseur, and general fribble. Yet all the while, in schools and universities, in London garrets and country villages, there was growing up, and sometimes showing itself pretty unmistakably, the generation which was to substitute for this trying and trifling the greatest work in verse, and not the least in prose, that had been done for two hundred years. The Lyrical Ballads of 1798, the clarion-call of the new poetry, so clearly sounded, so inattentively heard, might have told all, and did tell some, what this generation was about to do.
CHAPTER II
THE NEW POETRY
The opening years of the eighth decade of the eighteenth century saw, in unusually close conjunction, the births of the men who were to be the chief exponents, and in their turn the chief determining forces, of the new movement. The three greatest were born, Wordsworth in 1770, Scott in 1771, and Coleridge in 1772; Southey, who partly through accident was to form a trinity with Wordsworth and Coleridge, and who was perhaps the most typical instance of a certain new kind of man of letters, followed in 1774; while Lamb and Hazlitt, the chief romantic pioneers in criticism, Jeffrey and Sydney Smith, the chief classical reactionaries therein, were all born within the decade. But the influence of Scott was for various reasons delayed a little; and critics naturally come after creators. So that the time-honoured eminence of the "Lake Poets" – Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey – need not be disturbed.
The day of the birth of William Wordsworth was the 7th of April, the place Cockermouth. His father was an attorney, and, as Lord Lonsdale's agent, a man of some means and position; but on his death in 1783 the eccentric and unamiable character of the then Lord Lonsdale, by delaying the settlement of accounts, put the family in considerable difficulties. Wordsworth, however, was thoroughly educated at Hawkshead Grammar School and St. John's College, Cambridge, where he took his B.A. degree in 1791. He travelled in France, and for a time, like many young men, was a fervent Republican; but, like all the nobler of those who had "hailed the dawn of the French Revolution," he lived to curse its noon. He published early, his first volume of poems bearing the date 1793; but, though that attention to nature which was always his chief note appeared here, the work is not by any means of an epoch-making character. He was averse from every profession; but the fates were kind to him, and a legacy of £900 from his friend Raisley Calvert made a man of such simple tastes as his independent, for a time at least. On the strength of it he settled first at Racedown in Dorset, and then at Alfoxden in Somerset, in the companionship of his sister Dorothy; and at the second of the two places in the neighbourhood of Coleridge. Massive and original as Wordsworth's own genius was, it is almost impossible to exaggerate the effect, both in stimulus and guidance, of the influence of these two; for Dorothy Wordsworth was a woman of a million, and Coleridge, marvellous as were his own powers, was almost more marvellous in the unique Socratic character of his effect on those who possessed anything to work upon. The two poets produced in 1798 the Lyrical Ballads, among the contents of which it is sufficient to mention Tintern Abbey and The Ancient Mariner; and they subsequently travelled together in Germany. Then Wordsworth returned to his native lakes and never left them for long, abiding first at or near Grasmere, and from 1813 at his well-known home of Rydal Mount. When Lord Lonsdale died in 1802, his successor promptly and liberally settled the Wordsworth claims. The poet soon married his cousin Mary Hutchinson; and Lord Lonsdale, not satisfied with atoning for his predecessor's injustice, procured him, in the year of his migration to Rydal, the office of Distributor of Stamps for Westmoreland – an office which was almost a sinecure, and was, for a man of Wordsworth's tastes, more than amply paid. It is curious, and a capital instance to prove that the malignity of fortune has itself been maligned, that the one English poet who was constitutionally incapable of writing for bread never was under any necessity to do so. For full sixty years Wordsworth wandered much, read little, meditated without stint, and wrote, though never hurriedly, yet almost incessantly. The dates of his chief publications may be best given in a note.3 For some years his poems were greeted by the general public and by a few of its critical guides with storms of obloquy and ridicule; but Wordsworth, though never indifferent to criticism, was severely disdainful of it, and held on his way. From the first the brightest spirits of England had been his passionate though by no means always undiscriminating admirers; and about the end of the first quarter of the century the public began to come round. Oxford, always first to recognise, if not always first to produce, the greatest achievements of English literature, gave him its D.C.L. in 1839. He received a pension of £300 a year in 1842 from Sir Robert Peel, who, unlike most English Prime Ministers, cared for men of letters; the laureateship fell to him in right of right on Southey's death in 1843, and he died on the 23rd of April 1850, having come to fourscore years almost without labour, and without many heavy sorrows.
Of his character not much need be said. Like that of Milton, whom he in many ways resembled (they had even both, as Hartley Coleridge has pointed out, brothers named Christopher), it was not wholly amiable, and the defects in it were no doubt aggravated by his early condition (for it must be remembered that till he was two and thirty his prospects were of the most disquieting character), by the unjust opposition which the rise of his reputation met with, and by his solitary life in contact only with worshipping friends and connections. One of these very worshippers confesses that he was "inhumanly arrogant"; and he was also, what all arrogant men are not, rude. He was entirely self-centred, and his own circle of interests and tastes was not wide. It is said that he would cut books with a buttery knife, and after that it is probably unnecessary to say any more, for the fact "surprises by itself" an indictment of almost infinite counts.
But his genius is not so easily despatched. I have said that it is now as a whole universally recognised, and I cannot but think that Mr. Matthew Arnold was wrong when he gave a contrary opinion some fifteen years ago. He must have been biassed by his own remembrance of earlier years, when Wordsworth was still a bone of contention. I should say that never since I myself was an undergraduate, that is to say, for the last thirty years, has there been any dispute among Englishmen whose opinion was worth taking, and who cared for poetry at all, on the general merits of Wordsworth. But this agreement is compatible with a vast amount of disagreement in detail; and Mr. Arnold's own estimate, as where he compares Wordsworth with Molière (who was not a poet at all, though he sometimes wrote very tolerable verse), weighs him with poets of the second class like Gray and Manzoni, and finally admits him for his dealings with "life," introduces fresh puzzlements into the valuation. There is only one principle on which that valuation can properly proceed, and this is the question, "Is the poet rich in essentially poetical moments of the highest power and kind?" And by poetical moments I mean those instances of expression which, no matter what their subject, their intention, or their context may be, cause instantaneously in the fit reader a poetical impression of the intensest and most moving quality.
Let us consider the matter from this point of view.4
The chief poetical influences under which Wordsworth began to write appear to have been those of Burns and Milton; both were upon him to the last, and both did him harm as well as good. It was probably in direct imitation of Burns, as well as in direct opposition to the prevailing habits of the eighteenth century, that he conceived the theory of poetic diction which he defended in prose and exemplified in verse. The chief point of this theory was the use of the simplest and most familiar language, and the double fallacy is sufficiently obvious. Wordsworth forgot that the reason why the poetic diction of the three preceding generations had become loathsome was precisely this, that it had become familiar; while the familiar Scots of Burns was in itself unfamiliar to the English ear. On the other hand, he borrowed from Milton, and used more and more as he grew older, a distinctly stiff and unvernacular form of poetic diction itself. Few except extreme and hopeless Wordsworthians now deny that the result of his attempts at simple language was and is far more ludicrous than touching. The wonderful Affliction of Margaret does not draw its power from the neglect of poetic diction, but from the intensity of emotion which would carry off almost any diction, simple or affected; while on the other hand such pieces as "We are Seven," as the "Anecdote for Fathers," and as "Alice Fell," not to mention "Betty Foy" and others, which specially infuriated Wordsworth's own contemporaries, certainly gain nothing from their namby-pamby dialect, and sometimes go near to losing the beauty that really is in them by dint of it. Moreover, the Miltonic blank verse and sonnets – at their best of a stately magnificence surpassed by no poet – have a tendency to become heavy and even dull when the poetic fire fails to fuse and shine through them. In fact it may be said of Wordsworth, as of most poets with theories, that his theories helped him very little, and sometimes hindered him a great deal.
His real poetical merits are threefold, and lie first in the inexplicable, the ultimate, felicity of phrase which all great poets must have, and which only great poets have; secondly, in his matchless power of delineating natural objects; and lastly, more properly, and with most special rarity of all, in the half-pantheistic mysticism which always lies behind this observation, and which every now and then breaks through it, puts it, as mere observation, aside, and blazes in unmasked fire of rapture. The summits of Wordsworth's poetry, the "Lines Written at Tintern Abbey" and the "Ode on Intimations of Immortality," – poems of such astonishing magnificence that it is only more astonishing that any one should have read them and failed to see what a poet had come before the world, – are the greatest of many of these revelations or inspirations. It is indeed necessary to read Wordsworth straight through – a proceeding which requires that the reader shall be in good literary training, but is then feasible, profitable, and even pleasant enough – to discern the enormous height at which the great Ode stands above its author's other work. The Tintern Abbey lines certainly approach it nearest: many smaller things – "The Affliction of Margaret," "The Daffodils," and others – group well under its shadow, and innumerable passages and even single lines, such as that which all good critics have noted as lightening the darkness of the Prelude—
Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone —
must of course be added to the poet's credit. But the Ode remains not merely the greatest, but the one really, dazzlingly, supremely great thing he ever did. Its theory has been scorned or impugned by some; parts of it have even been called nonsense by critics of weight. But, sound or unsound, sense or nonsense, it is poetry, and magnificent poetry, from the first line to the last – poetry than which there is none better in any language, poetry such as there is not perhaps more than a small volume-full in all languages. The second class of merit, that of vivid observation, abounds whereever the poems are opened. But the examples of the first are chiefly found in the lyrics "My Heart Leaps up," "The Sparrow's Nest"; the famous daffodil poem which Jeffrey thought "stuff," which some say Dorothy wrote chiefly, and which is almost perfect of its kind; the splendid opening of the "Lines to Hartley Coleridge," which connect themselves with the "Immortality Ode"; the exquisite group of the "Cuckoo," the best patches of the Burns poems, and the three "Yarrows"; the "Peel Castle" stanzas; and, to cut a tedious catalogue short, the hideously named but in parts perfectly beautiful "Effusion on the Death of James Hogg," the last really masterly thing that the poet did. In some of these we may care little for the poem as a whole, nothing for the moral the poet wishes to draw. But the poetic moments seize us, the poetic flash dazzles our eyes, and the whole divine despair or not more divine rapture which poetry causes comes upon us.
One division of Wordsworth's work is so remarkable that it must have such special and separate mention as it is here possible to give it; and that is his exercises in the sonnet, wherein to some tastes he stands only below Shakespeare and on a level with Milton. The sonnet, after being long out of favour, paying for its popularity between Wyatt and Milton by neglect, had, principally it would seem on the very inadequate example of Bowles (see infra), become a very favourite form with the new Romantics. But none of them wrote it with the steady persistence, and none except Keats with the occasional felicity, of Wordsworth. Its thoughtfulness suited his bent, and its limits frustrated his prolixity, though, it must be owned, he somewhat evaded this benign influence by writing in series. And the sonnets on "The Venetian Republic," on the "Subjugation of Switzerland," that beginning "The world is too much with us," that in November 1806, the first "Personal Talk," the magnificent "Westminster Bridge," and the opening at least of that on Scott's departure from Abbotsford, are not merely among the glories of Wordsworth, they are among the glories of English poetry.
Unfortunately these moments of perfection are, in the poet's whole work, and especially in that part of it which was composed in the later half of his long life, by no means very frequent. Wordsworth was absolutely destitute of humour, from which it necessarily followed that his self-criticism was either non-existent or constantly at fault. His verse was so little facile, it paid so little regard to any of the common allurements of narrative-interest or varied subject, it was so necessary for it to reach the full white heat, the absolute instant of poetic projection, that when it was not very good it was apt to be scarcely tolerable. It is nearly impossible to be duller than Wordsworth at his dullest, and unluckily it is as impossible to find a poet of anything like his powers who has given himself the license to be dull so often and at such length. The famous "Would he had blotted a thousand" applies to him with as much justice as it was unjust in its original application; and it is sometimes for pages together a positive struggle to remember that one is reading one of the greatest of English poets, and a poet whose influence in making other poets has been second hardly to that of Spenser, of Keats, or of the friend who follows him in our survey.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in Devonshire, at Ottery St. Mary, of which place his father was vicar, on the 21st October 1772. The family was merely respectable before his day, but since it has been of very unusual distinction, intellectual and other. He went to Christ's Hospital when he was not quite ten years old, and in 1791 was admitted to an exhibition at Jesus College, Cambridge, with his thoughts already directed to poetry by the sonnets of Bowles above mentioned, and with a reputation, exaggerated perhaps, but certainly not invented, in Lamb's famous "Elia" paper on his old school. Indeed, high as is Coleridge's literary position on the strength of his writing alone, his talk and its influence on hearers have been unanimously set higher still. He did very well at first, gaining the Browne Medal for Greek Verse and distinguishing himself for the Craven Scholarship; but he speedily fell in love, in debt, it is suspected in drink, and it is known into various political and theological heresies. He left Cambridge and enlisted at Reading in the 15th Light Dragoons. He obtained his discharge, however, in three or four months, and no notice except a formal admonition appears to have been taken of his resuming his position at Cambridge. Indeed he was shortly after elected to a Foundation Scholarship. But in the summer of 1794 he visited Oxford, and after he had fallen in with Southey, whose views were already Jacobinical, the pair engaged themselves to Pantisocracy5 and the Miss Frickers. This curious and often told story cannot be even summarised here. Its immediate result was that Coleridge left the University without taking a degree, and, though not at once, married Sarah Fricker on October 1795. Thenceforward he lived on literature and his friends, especially the latter. He tried Unitarian preaching and newspaper work, of which at one time or another he did a good deal. The curious ins and outs of Coleridge's strange though hardly eventful life have, after being long most imperfectly known, been set forth in fullest measure by Mr. Dykes Campbell. It must suffice here to say that, after much wandering, being unable or unwilling to keep house with his own family, he found asylums, first with some kind folk named Morgan, and then in the house of Mr. Gillman at Hampstead, where for years he held forth to rising men of letters, and where he died on the 25th June 1834. His too notorious craving for opium had never been conquered, though it had latterly been kept in some check.
