The Press. — London, England, 1857-12-05 00:00:00

1184 But, if the King apprehended danger from the mob of Paris, Neuilly would have beck too near. He should have gone farther off. In such anticipated contingencies, Fontainebleau, a kingly residence, too far away to be reached by a mob, and yet near enough to Paris for the purposes of personal administration of affairs, is (as Mirabeau ably indicated) the proper place for a French sovereign in difficulty. The essay upon the calumnies of Lord Holland upon Marie Antoinette is of first-rate importance. We are sorry that the whole of Mr. Croker's article on Lord Holland is not in this volume, but enough of it is printed to crush for ever the historical pretensions of his lordship. On another subject—the charge that Mr. Pitt's Government had fomented the early proceedings of the French Revolution— Mr. Croker writes : We have consulted political friends and colleagues of Mr. Pitt; we have had access to the public and private correspondence of our ministers and ambassadors at the principal courts of Europe, and especially at Paris ;—and we can conscientiously declare that we have not found the slightest ground for suspecting that England fomented, directly or indirectly, any of the revolutionary disturbances of France; but that, on the contrary, the English sove reign and ministers viewed them with unfeigned regret—a feeling from the most public manifestation of which they were only restrained by their respect and regard for the French monarch himself; by their reluctance to incur the risk of offending the susceptibility of the French people ; and by their anxiety not to afford the ill-disposed in either country the slightest excuse for accusing Louis of having asked, or the King of England of having offered, any inter ference in the internal affairs of France. And in this edition there is the following note appended on that passage : I consulted individually on this point Lords Grenville Westmorland, Spencer, and Chatham, the only survivors of Mr. Pitt's Cabinet; and Lords Wellesley, Liverpool, Rarrowby, Mulgrave, Sidmouth, and Farnb , ,rough, Messrs. Canning, Rose, and Huskisson, and indeed every other person then living who had held high office in Mr. Pitt's first administration, and, as might be expected, all solemnly denied that there was the slightest colour for any such imputation. On the literary value of the histories by Thiers we regret to differ from Mr. Croker. The early works by Thiers are of compara tively little importance, but his history of the " Consulate and the Empire" is a production of costly labour, and it contains a variety of matter most ably narrated•. Allowance in all cases must be made for national feelings, whether the writer be English or French, Alison or Thiers. It is the earlier works of Thiers to which the criticism in this volume is chiefly applied. But as he has advanced in his work Thiers has undoubtedly taken more pains, and its literary value is considerable. There are admissions, also, in its pages which we believe to be of great value. He has written of the Church of Rome with great boldness, and has revealed much of the working of her machinery. We doubt whether any of our contemporaries would take such extreme views of M.lfhiers as Mr. Croker has done; and it is certainly open to any Jesuit, when facts are quoted from Thiers, to say, "Oh ! look at Mr. Croker's opinions " upon Thiers." We do not like the manner, either, in which Mr. Croker refers to Sir Archi bald Alison. That emiaent writer had a sincere desire to tell the truth, and his history has had prodigious success. He hat to struggle, also, against the enormous size of his work, and there are many passages in it of powerful and effective composition. But the controversial value of these essays is beyond question, and we think that they should find a place in every historical library. The " French Revolution ' was such a pro digious change, and led to such awful conse quences, that its history ought to he accurately known; and Mr. Croker has contributed largely to a right understanding of it. The Life of Alexander Pope. Includinv, Extracts from his Correspondence. By Robert Carruthers. London : Bohn. THERE are few men about whom so little is known in proportion to what has been written as Alexander Pope. The stream of criticism which has flowed without a moment's stagna tion for upwards of a century has not run itself clear. The last biography is just as opaque as the first. In fact, we may say more so; for the successive discoveries which have been mndo (hiring this long period have only serve -I • • elements of complexity. Be- 'I'HE PRESS, DECEMBER 5,1857. fore MSS. had been collated. and family papers ransacked, the poet's biographers took a good deal for granted, a good deal upon hearsay, and constructed a narrative in which the events of his life were dovetailed into consistency, and read clearly enough. But before the rays of critical inquiry the struc ture has begun to gape at all its joints and is fast coining to pieces, without the prospect of leaving anything so compact in its place. As has happened in many other branches of research, knowledge has destroyed certainty. We know so little because we know so much. And whatever may result from the promised revelations of Mr. Croke*•, we must he content to admit that the labours of three of the most able and accomplished scholars and critics of the eighteenth century, and three very earnest and industrious inquirers of the nineteenth century, have failed to elucidate any of the most difficult passages in the poet's ife. Much of this difficulty is attributable to the inverted order in which his biographers have succeeded one another. Had Mr. Carruthers or the Atheneum critic lived a hundred years ago, and Johnson or Warton at the present day, the subject would have fared better. The laborious and indefatigable antiquary—who knows the importance of minute facts, and the value of the faintest allusions, and traces up a rumour to its source with the saga city of an Indian who tracks his enemy for a hundred miles by the aid of a broken twig or a ruffled leaf—would have been invaluable at a time when the scent was warm, when many unprejudiced contemporaries of the poet were yet alive, when tradition must have been co pious, and a mind habituated to severe- in quiry could scarcely have failed to elicit the truth. On the other hand, Johnson's remarks on human nature, and Warton's essay upon poetry, would have been as valuable now as then, and a hundred years hence as now. Unfortunately for us—whether fortunately or not for Pope we cannot tell—the era of elegant criticism preceded that of industrious in. quiry; and the banquet to which we now sit down is as unsatisfactory as an actual dinner in which the melons and claret should arrive before the soup and the sherry. In almost every relation of life Pope is more or less mysterious. As a friend, as a lover•, as an upright man, or as an honourable gentle. man, he is equally difficult to grasp. In the one virtue, indeed, of filial piety he shines with a hallowed light that has never been dimmed by doubt. But his dealings with the wits and the lords, the beauties and the book sellers, which for ever• revolve around his name, are enveloped in a :mist of perplexity which bids fair to continue impenetrable. There is the great Addison controversy, for instance. After a careful perusal of Mr. Car ruther's republication, and a comparison with Bowles and Roscoe, we do not hesitate to assert that it has not advanced one step be yond the days of Johnson. There is just enough material to exercise our logic, without being enough to satisfy our reason. A plau sible case may still be made out on either side by a skilful special pleader ; but that is all. Whether it was Addison who translated the first book of the Iliad instead of Tickell, or whether he paid ten guineas to Gildon to abuse Pope, are questions for which the pros and cons. are very evenly balanced. And Mr. Carruthers does no more than enumerate them, and not always that distinctly. With regard to an other great mystery of his life—the publication of his correspondence—much fresh evidence has been accumulated during the last fifty years; and critics seem generally agreed that Johnson's surmise was right, and that the so called surreptitious edition of Curll was put forth at Pope's own instigation. Our reason for disagreeing with this opinion we must reserve till the remainder of Mr. Car•ruther's volumes shall make their appearance, and the correspondence with them. The subject is so intricate that to thoroughly explain it to our readers a separate notice would be required. It may be sufficient to say hero that all the facts which have transpired seem to us insutfi ! cient to sustain the superstructure which it is sought to erect upon them, and that the latest r annotators in their zeal for accumulating dis coveries seem to have overlooked the relation they might bear to each other, and the general effect of the whole. Of the calumnies with which the name of Martha Blount has been associated, we can only observe that Mr. Carruthers and the Athenreunt have succeeded to perfection in un ravelling a rope of sand. On this point Bowles was a monomaniac, and received the most sensible treatment at the hands of Lord Byron. While we are on the subject of Pope's "lady friends" we may as well insert Mr. Car ruther's interesting account of " Eriuna," which we understand is really original, and the result of his own inquiries:— An episode of a tender nature was interposed amidst the labours of annotation and translation. In the autumn of 172'i Pope commenced a correspondence with a young lady whose name has not hitherto transpired. A series of twelve letters, written in the poet's most complimentary and admiring strain, was published by I)odsley in 1769, printed from the originals. The lady to whom they were addressed appeared to reside in Hertfordshire; she occa. sionally wrote verses, and was intimate with Mrs. Howard. She sat for her portrait as one of Jervas's shepherdesses or Kneller's beauties, and Pope (who had, he said, been " so mad with the idea of her as to steal the picture and pass whole days in sitting before it!") was ready with a poetical offering:— Though sprightly Sappho force our love and praise, A softer wonder my pleated soul surveys, The mild Erinna blushing in her bays! So while the sun's broad beam yet strikes the sight, All mild appears the moon's more sober light; Serene in virgin majesty she shines, And, unobserv'd, the glaring sun declines. A reference to the death of' the young lady's relative, joined to the dates and localities mentioned in the correspon dence, furnish a clue to the names of the parties, and we have no doubt that the " great and good man" was the Lord Chancellor Cowper, who died on the 10th of October, 1723, and that the lady was Lord Cowper's niece, Judith Cowper (afterwards Mrs. Madan), only daughter of Spencer Cowper, one of the Judges of the Court of Com mon Pleas. Pope's eulogium on the lady's illustrious kinsman—though all the Cowpers were Whigs—was appro priate even from him, when we remember that Lord Cowper hail generously opposed the banishment of Atter. bury and the bill fur taxing the Roman Catholics—events nearly contemporaneous with the date of this correspon dence. The poet afterwards, in one of his Imitations of Horace (Ep. ii., book ii.), alluded in a complimentary style to Cowper's " manner," or deportment, which was remarkable for grace and dignity. Judith Cowper came of a poetical race, and she early began to write verses. She is mentioned by Hayley as having " at the age of eighteen discovered a striking talent for poetry in the praise of her contemporary poets, Pope and Hughes." This refers to a piece entitled " fhe Progress of Poetry," in which she characterises Popo in a strain of unmingied eulogitun : High on the radiant list see Pope appears, With all the fire of youth and strength of years. Where er supreme he points the nervous line, Nature and art in bright conjunction shine. How just the turns, how regular the draught, How smooth the language, how reined the thought! Secure beneath the shade of early bays, He dared the thunder of greet Homer's lays; A sacred heat inform'd his heaving breast., And Homer in his genius stands confe,sed To heights sublime he rais'd the ponderous lyre, And our cold isle grew warm with Grecian fire. The fairy tale which Pope had proposed to his fair cor respondent was not attempted, as we have seen, in conse quence of the death of her uncle. But there was another sad perhaps a stronger cause for declining the task. The last letter in the correspondence (misplaced in the printed arrangement) is dated November 9th, and in less than a month from this time, on the 7th of December, 1723, Miss Cowper was married to Martin Madan, afterwards Colonel Madan, Groom of the Bedchamber to Frederick Prince of Wales, and M.P. for Wotton Basset. This event seems to have closed the poetry and poetical correspon dence of Judith Cowper. There are no more letters to or from Pope, but the lady, her husband, and other members of her family, were among the subscribers to the " Odyssey." Judith was twenty.one at the period of her marriage, anti she survived to the age of seventy•nino. She had many children, including Martin Madan, the fa mous preacher and too famous theological writer, whose " Thelypthora," or defence of polygamy, ocoasioned such grief and scandal to his poetical cousin, William Cowper. Another son died Bishop of Peterborough. Mra. Madan seems to have been a serious person, though not a devotee, like het daughter, Mrs. Major Cowper, the poet's cor respondent. Shortly before her death we find Cowper writing to John Newton, " Mrs. Madan is happy; she will be found ripe, fall when she may." She died in Stafford row, Westminster, where she had long lived, in December, 1781. One letter of Cowper's to his ' dear aunt" Madan is in his published correspondence. She knew his melan choly story, and must have admired his fine talents, and gentle, affectionate nature : his first volume was in the press at the time of her death. She was a connecting link between two schools of poetry—between the era of Swift and Pope and that of Cowper and Burns. in a few more years her nephew was to rival if not dethrone her early idol, and was to carry the new faith into almost every English family and English heart. Mr. Carruthers and the rival Popist of the if theme/tut are at issue on the question of Pope's duplicity towards the Duchess of Marlborough. This fine old lady, who retained to her death much of that indomitable spirit