The Project Gutenberg eBook, A Little English Gallery, by Louise Imogen Guiney This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you'll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Title: A Little English Gallery Author: Louise Imogen Guiney Release Date: February 21, 2017 [eBook #54219] Language: English Character set encoding: UTF-8 ***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A LITTLE ENGLISH GALLERY*** E-text prepared by Emmy, MFR, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made available by Internet Archive (https://archive.org) Note: Images of the original pages are available through Internet Archive. See https://archive.org/details/littleenggallery00guinrich cover Louise Imogen Guiney portrait A LITTLE ENGLISH GALLERY BY LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY emblem NEW YORK HARPER AND BROTHERS MDCCCXCIV Copyright, 1894, by HARPER & BROTHERS. ——— All rights reserved. TO EDMUND GOSSE THIS FRIENDLY TRESPASS ON HIS FIELDS PREFATORY NOTE The studies in this book are chosen from a number written at irregular intervals, and from sheer interest in their subjects, long ago. Portions of them, or rough drafts of what has since been wholly remodelled from fresher and fuller material at first hand, have appeared within five years in The Atlantic Monthly, Macmillan’s, The Catholic World, and Poet-Lore; and thanks are due the magazines for permission to reprint them. Yet more cordial thanks, for kind assistance on biographical points, belong to the Earl of Powis; the Rev. R. H. Davies, Vicar of old St. Luke’s, Chelsea; the Rev. T. Vere Bayne, of Christchurch, and H. E. D. Blakiston, Esq., of Trinity College, Oxford; T. W. Lyster, Esq., of the National Library of Ireland; Aubrey de Vere Beauclerk, Esq.; Miss Langton, of Langton-by-Spilsby; the Vicars of Dauntsey, Enfield Highway, and Montgomery, and especially those of High Ercall and Speke; and the many others in England through whose courtesy and patience the tracer of these unimportant sketches has been able to make them approximately life-like. CONTENTS CHAP. PAGE I.LADY DANVERS (1561-1627) 1 II.HENRY VAUGHAN (1621-1695) 53 III.GEORGE FARQUHAR (1677-1707) 119 IV.TOPHAM BEAUCLERK (1739-1780) AND BENNET LANGTON (1741-1800) 171 V.WILLIAM HAZLITT (1778-1830) 229 M I LADY DANVERS 1561-1627 R. MATTHEW ARNOLD somewhere devotes a grateful sentence to the women who have left a fragrance in literary history, and whose loss of long ago can yet inspire men of to-day with indescribable regret. Lady Danvers is surely one of these. As John Donne’s dear friend, and George Herbert’s mother, she has a double poetic claim, like her unforgotten contemporary, Mary Sidney, for whom was made an everlasting epitaph. If Dr. Donne’s fraternal fame have not quite the old lustre of the incomparable Sir Philip’s, it is, at least, a greater honor to own Herbert for son than to have perpetuated the race of Pembroke. Nor is it an inharmonious thing to remember, in thus calling up, in order to rival it, the sweet memory of “Sidney’s sister,” that Herbert and Pembroke have long been, and are yet, married names. Magdalen, the youngest child of Sir Richard Newport, and of Margaret Bromley, his wife, herself daughter of that Bromley who was Privy-Councillor, Lord Chief-Justice, and executor to Henry VIII., was born in High Ercall, Salop; the loss or destruction of parish registers leaves us but 1561-62 as the probable date. Of princely stock, with three sisters and an only brother, and heir to virtue and affluence, she could look with the right pride of unfallen blood upon “the many fair coats the Newports bear” over their graves at Wroxeter. It was the day of learned and thoughtful girls; and this girl seems to have been at home with book and pen, with lute and viol. She married, in the flower of her youth, Richard Herbert, Esquire, of Blache Hall, Montgomery, black-haired and black-bearded, as were all his line; a man of some intellectual training, and of noted courage, descended from a distinguished brother of the yet more distinguished Sir Richard Herbert of Edward IV.’s time, and from the most ancient rank of Wales and England. At Eyton in Salop, in 1581, was born their eldest child, Edward, afterwards Lord Herbert of Cherbury, a writer who is still the puzzle and delight of Continental critics. He is said to have been a beautiful boy, and not very robust; his first speculation with his infant tongue was the piercing query: “How came I into this world?” But his next brother, Richard, was of another stamp; and went his frank, flashing, fighting way through Europe, “with scars of four-and-twenty wounds upon him, to his grave” at Bergen-op-Zoom, with William, the third son, following in his soldierly footsteps. Charles grew up reserved and studious, and died, like his paternal uncle, a dutiful Fellow of New College, Oxford. The fifth of these Herberts, “a soul composed of harmonies,” as Cotton said of him, and destined to make the name beloved among all readers of English, was George, the poet, the saintly “parson of Fuggleston and Bemerton.” Henry, his junior, with whom George had a sympathy peculiarly warm and long, became in his manhood Master of the Revels, and held the office for over fifty years. “You and I are alone left to brother it,” Lord Herbert of Cherbury once wrote him, in a mood more tender than his wont, when all else of that radiant family had gone into dust. The youngest of Magdalen Newport’s sons was Thomas, “a posthumous,” traveller, sailor, and master of a ship in the war against Algiers. Elizabeth, Margaret, and Frances were the daughters, of whom Izaak Walton says, with satisfaction, that they lived to be examples of virtue, and to do good to their generation. None of them made an illustrious match. Margaret married a Vaughan. Frances secured unto herself the patronymic Brown, and was happily seconded by Elizabeth, George Herbert’s “dear sick sister,” who became Mistress Jones. In the south chancel transept of Montgomery Church, where Richard Herbert the elder had been buried three years before, there was erected in 1600, at his wife’s cost, a large canopied alabaster altar-tomb, with two portrait-figures recumbent. All around it, in the quaint and affectionate boast of the age, are the small images of these seven sons and three daughters; “Job’s number and Job’s distribution,” as she once remarked, and as her biographers failed not to repeat after her. But their kindred ashes are widely sundered, and “as content with six foot as with the moles of Adrianus.” This at Montgomery is the only known representation of the Lady Magdalen. Her effigy lies at her husband’s left, the palms folded, the eyes open, the full hair rolled back from a low brow, beneath a charming and simple head-dress. Nothing can be nobler than the whole look of the face, like her in her prime, and reminding one of her son’s loving epithet, “my Juno.” The short-sighted inscription upon the slab yet includes her name. Never had an army of brilliant and requiring children a more excellent mother. “Severa parens,” her gentle George called her in his scholarly verses; and such she was, with the mingled sagacity and joyousness which made up her character. If we are to believe their own testimony, the leading members of her young family were of excessively peppery Cymric temperaments, and worthy to call out that “manlier part” of her which Dr. Donne, who had every opportunity of observing it in play, was so quick to praise. There is a passage in a letter of Sir Thomas Lacy, addressed to Edward Herbert, touching upon “the knowledge I had how ill you can digest the least indignity.” “Holy George Herbert” himself, in 1618, commended to his dear brother Henry the gospel of self-honoring: “It is the part of a poor spirit to undervalue himself and blush.” And physical courage went hand in hand with this blameless haughtiness of the Herberts, a pretty collateral proof of which may be adduced from a message of Sir Henry Jones to his brother-in-law, the other Henry just mentioned, concerning a gift for his little nephew. “If my cozen, William Herbert your sonne . . . be ready for the rideing of a horse, I will provide him with a Welch nagg that shall be as mettlesome as himself.” There is no doubt that all this racial fire was fostered by one woman. “Thou my root, and my most firm rock, O my mother!” George cried, long after in the Parentalia, aware that he owed to her his high ideals, and the strength of character which is born of self-discipline. “God gave her,” says one of her two devoted annalists, who we wish were not so brief and meagre of detail—“God gave her such a comeliness as though she was not proud of it, yet she was so content with it as not to go about to mend it by any art.” Her fortune was large, her benevolence wide-spreading. All the countryside knew her for the living representative of the ever-hospitable houses of Newport and Bromley. “She gave not on some great days,” continues [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] Dr. Donne, “or at solemn goings abroad; but as God’s true almoners, the sun and moon, that pass on in a continual doing of good; as she received her daily bread from God, so daily she distributed it, and imparted it to others.” In these years of her wifehood and widowhood at Montgomery Castle (the “romancy place” dating from the eleventh century, and ruined, like the fine old house at High Ercall, during the Civil Wars), and afterwards at Oxford and London, she reared her happy crew of boys and girls in an air of generosity and honor; training them to habits of hardiness and simplicity, and to the equal relish of work and play. “Herself with her whole family (as a church in that elect lady’s house, to whom John wrote his second Epistle) did every Sabbath shut up the day at night with a general, with a cheerful singing of psalms.” One may guess at young Richard’s turmoil in-doors, and at the little Elizabeth’s soft, patient ways, and think of George (on Sundays at any rate) as the child of content, “the contesseration of elegances” worthy Archdeacon Oley called him. The fair and stately matron moving over them and among them was not without her prejudices. “I was once,” Edward testifies, “in danger of drowning, learning to swim. My mother, upon her blessing, charged me never to learn swimming; telling me, further, that she had learned of more drowned than saved by it.” Though the given reason failed to impress him, he adds, the commandment did; so that the accomplished Crichton of Cherbury, who understood alchemy, broke his way through metaphysics, and rode the Great Horse; the ambassador, author, and beau, to whom Ben Jonson sent his greeting: “What man art thou that art so many men, All-virtuous Herbert?” even he lacked, on principle, the science of keeping himself alive in an alien element, because it had been pronounced less risky to die outright! It was a pretty paradox, and one which sets down our high-minded Magdalen as quite feminine, quite human. Her Edward was matriculated in 1595 at University College, Oxford, for which he seemed to retain no great partiality; he bequeathed his books, like a loyal Welshman, to Jesus College, instead, and his manuscripts to the Bodleian Library. In 1598, when he was little more than seventeen, he was wedded to his cousin Mary Herbert, of St. Gillian in Monmouthshire. Her age was one-and-twenty; she was an heiress, enjoined by her father’s will to marry a Herbert or forfeit her estates; she was also almost a philosopher. There was no wild affection on either side, but the marriage promised rather well, both persons having resources; and no real catastrophe befell either in after-life. Much as she desired the match for worldly motives, the chief promoter of it was too solicitous for her tall dreamer of a son, who underwent the pleasing peril of having Queen Bess clap him on the cheek, not to take the whole weight of conjugal direction on her own shoulders. Without undue officiousness, but with the masterly foresight of a shrewd saint, she moved to Oxford from Montgomery with her younger children and their tutors, in order to handle Mistress Herbert’s husband during his minority. “She continued there with him,” says Walton, in his Life of George Herbert, “and still kept him in a moderate awe of herself, and so much under her own eye as to see and converse with him daily; but she managed this power over him without any such rigid sourness as might make her company a torment to her child, but with such a sweetness and compliance with the recreations and pleasures of youth as did incline him willingly to spend much of his time in the company of his dear and careful mother.” It was during this stay that she contracted the chivalrous friendship which has embalmed her tranquil memory. Dr. John Donne (not ordained until 1614, and indeed not Dr. Donne then at all, but “Jack Donne,” his profaner self) had been at Cadiz with Essex, and had wandered over the face of Europe; and he came back, accidentally, to Oxford during the most troubled year of his early prime. It was no strange place to him, who had been, at eleven, the Pico della Mirandola of Hart Hall, and whose relatives seem to have resided always in the town. There and then, however, he cast his bright eye upon Excellence, and in his own phrase, “—dared love that, and say so, too, And forget the He and She.” We can do no better than cite a celebrated and beautiful passage, once more from Walton: “This amity, begun at this time and place, was not an amity that polluted their souls, but an amity made up of a chain of suitable inclinations and virtues; an amity like that of St. Chrysostom to his dear and virtuous Olympias, whom, in his letters, he calls his saint; or an amity, indeed, more like that of St. Hierom to his Paula, whose affection to her was such that he turned poet in his old age, and then made her epitaph, wishing all his body were turned into tongues that he might declare her just praises to posterity.” How these words remind one of the sweet historic mention which Condivi gives to the relations between Vittoria Colonna and Michelangelo! The little English idyl of friendship and the great Italian one run parallel in much. Donne’s trenchant Satires, some of the earliest and very best in the language, were already written, and he was not without the hint of fame. Born in 1573, he was but eight years the senior of Edward Herbert, and not more than a dozen years the junior of Edward Herbert’s mother. To her two sons, also, who were to figure as men of letters, he was sincerely attached from the first, and had a marked and lasting influence on their minds. Donne had the superabundance of mental power which Mr. Minto has pointed out as the paradoxical cause of his failure to become a great poet. He was a three-storied soul, as the French say: a spirit of many sides and moods, a life-long dreamer of good and bad dreams. To his restless, incisive intelligence his contemporaries, with Jonson and Carew at their head, bowed in hyperboles of acclaim. He had a changeful conscience, often antagonized and often appeased. There was a strain in him of strong joy, for he was descended through his mother from pleasant John Heywood the dramatist, and from the father [10] [11] [1] [12] [13] [2] [14] [15] [16] of that great and merry-hearted gentleman, Sir Thomas More. If ever man needed vitality to buoy him over sorrows heavy and vast, it was Donne in his “yeasting youth.” Thrown, through no fault but his own, from his old footholds of religion and occupation, and unable, despite his versatile and alert genius, to grind a steady living from the hard mills of the world, he was in the midst of a bitter plight when the friends worthy of him found a heavenly opportunity which they did not let go by, and made his acceptance of their favor a rich gift unto themselves. Foremost among these, besides Lady Herbert, were Sir Robert Drury of Drury Lane, and a kinsman, Sir Francis Woolly, of Pirford, Surrey, fated to die in his youth, both of whom gave the Donnes, for some nine consecutive years, the use of their princely houses. John Donne had been in the service of the Chancellor, Lord Ellesmere, and lost place and purse by the opposition to his marriage with his “lectissima dilectissimaque,” Anne More, who was Lady Ellesmere’s niece, the daughter of Sir George More of Loxly, Lieutenant of the Tower, and probably a distant cousin of his own. No reverses, however, could beat the pathetic cheer out of him. “Anne Donne, undone,” was one of his inveterate teary jests over the state of things at home. He wrote once, with sickness, poverty, and despair at his elbow: “If God should ease us with burials, I know not how to perform even that. But I flatter myself that I am dying, too, for I cannot waste faster than by such griefs.” Five of his twelve children passed before their father to the grave, the good domestic daughter Constance upholding him always, and keeping the house together. But just as hope dawned with his appointment to the Lectureship of Lincoln’s Inn, heavenward suddenly, with her youngest-born, in 1617, went his dear and faithful wife, whom he laid to rest in St. Clement Danes. About the time when the remorseful old queen died disdainfully on her chamber-floor at Richmond, the necessities of this family called for daily succors, and with a simple and noble delicacy they were supplied. Nor did they cease. Magdalen Herbert was a “bountiful benefactor,” Donne “as grateful an acknowledger.” His first letter to her from Mitcham in Surrey, dated July 10, 1607, is made up of terse, tender thanks, in his heart’s own odd language. He sends her an enclosure of sonnets and hymns, “lost to us,” says Walton, movingly, “but doubtless they were such as they two now sing in heaven.” Dr. Grosart, with a great show of justice, claims that the sequence called La Corona, and familiar to latter-day readers, are the identical sonnets passed from one to the other. During this same month of July we know that, paying a call in his “London, plaguey London,” and finding his friend abroad, Dr. Donne consoled himself by leaving a courtliest message: “Your memory is a state-cloth and presence which I reverence, though you be away;” and went back after to his “sallads and onions” at Mitcham, or to his solitary lodgings near Whitehall. The attachment, close and deferent on both sides, was continued without a breach, and with the intention, at least, of “almost daily letters.” Thoreau, quoting Chaucer, so saluted Mrs. Emerson: “You have helped to keep my life on loft.” No meaner service than this was his dear lady’s to John Donne, often heretofore astray in the slough of doubt and dissipation; she fed more than his little children, clothed more than his body, and fostered anew in him that faith in humanity which is the well-spring of good works. He was not a poet of Leigh Hunt’s innocent temperament, who could accept benefits gladly and gracefully from any appreciator; his soul dwelt too remote and proud in her accustomed citadels. But this loving help, thrust upon him, he took with dignity, and after 1621, when he was able, in his own person, to befriend others, he gave back gallantly to mankind the blessings he once received from two or three. It was something for Magdalen Herbert to have saved a master-name to English letters, and kept in his unique place the poet, interesting beyond many, whose fantastic but real force swayed generations of thinking and singing men; it was something, also, to have won in return the words which were his gold coin of payment. Nowhere is Donne’s sentiment more genuine, his workmanship more happy and less complex, than in the verses dedicated to her blameless name. They have a lucidity unsurpassed among the yet straightforward lyrics of their day. Drayton’s self, who died in the same year with Donne, might have addressed to the lady of Eyton so much of his noble extravagance; “Queens hereafter shall be glad to live Upon the alms of thy superfluous praise.” Yet in these eulogies, as in most of the graver contemporaneous poems of the sort, there is little personality to be detected; the homage has rather a floating outline, an unapproaching music, exquisite and awed. Donne gives, sometimes, the large Elizabethan measure: “Is there any good which is not she?” In the so-called Elegy, The Autumnal, written on leaving Oxford, he starts off with a well-known cherishable strophe: “No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace As I have seen in one autumnal face.” The entire poem is a monody on the encroachments of years, and neatly chronological: “If we love things long-sought, age is a thing Which we are fifty years in compassing; If transitory things, which soon decay, Age must be loveliest at the latest day.” It strikes the modern ear as maladroit enough that a woman in her yet sunshiny forties, and a most comely woman to boot, should have required prosody’s ingenious excuses for wrinkles and kindred damages. Was life so hard as that in [17] [3] [18] [4] [19] [20] [21] [22] “the spacious days”? Shakespeare, in agreement with Horace, had already reminded his handsome “Will” of the pitiless and too expeditious hour, “When forty winters shall besiege thy brow, And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field!” which also seems, to a nice historical sense, somewhat staggering. The close of Donne’s little homily is perfect, and full of the winning melancholy which was part of his birthright in art, whenever he allowed himself direct and homely expression: “May still My love descend! and journey down the hill, Not panting after growing beauties; so I shall ebb on with them who homeward go.” Such was John Donne’s first known tribute to his friend. She must have been early and thoroughly familiar with his manuscripts, which were passed about freely, Dr. Grosart thinks, prior to 1613, and which burned what Massinger would call “no adulterate incense” to herself. Her bays are to be gleaned off many a tree, and she must have cast a frequent influence on Donne’s work, which is not traceable now. He seems to have had a Crashaw-like devotion to the Christian saint whose inheritance “Bethina was, and jointure Magdalo,” not unconnected with the fact that some one else was Magdalen also; never does he tire of dwelling on the coincidence and the difference. In one of his quaintly moralizing songs, he goes seeking a “true-love” primrose, where but on Montgomery Hill! for he is hers, by all chivalrous tokens, as much as he may be. Again he cites, and almost with humor: “that perplexing eye Which equally claims love and reverence.” And his platonics make their honorable challenge at the end of some fine lines: “So much do I love her choice, that I Would fain love him that shall be loved of her!” There was prescience in that couplet. As early, at least, as 1607-8, the widow’s long privacy ended, probably while she was at her “howse at Charing Cross,” watching over the progress of her son George at Westminster School; and he that was “loved of her” was the grandson of the last Lord Latimer of the Nevilles, junior brother of a nobleman who perished with Essex in 1602, and brother and heir of that Sir Henry Danvers who was created Earl of Danby in 1625 for his services in Ireland, and who literally left a green memory as the founder of the pleasant Physic Gardens at Oxford. The name of Danvers, the kindly step-father, is one of the noteworthy omissions of Lord Herbert of Cherbury’s Autobiography. But George Herbert was devoted to him, as his many letters show, and turned to him, never in vain, during his restless years at Cambridge; and into his circle of relatives, with romantic suddenness, he afterwards married. Sir John Danvers, of Dauntsey, Wilts, was twenty years younger than his wife. It is worth while to quote the very deft and courtly statement of the case made at the last by Dr. Donne: “The natural endowments of her person were such as had their part in drawing and fixing the affections of such a person as by his birth and youth and interest in great favors at court, and legal proximity to great possessions in the world, might justly have promised him acceptance in what family soever, or upon what person soever, he had directed. . . . He placed them here, neither diverted thence, nor repented since. For as the well-tuning of an instrument makes higher and lower strings of one sound, so the inequality of their years was thus reduced to an evenness, that she had a cheerfulness agreeable to his youth, and he had a sober staidness conformable to her more advanced years. So that I would not consider her at so much more than forty, nor him at so much less than thirty, at that time; but as their persons were made one and their fortunes made one by marriage, so I would put their years into one number, and finding a sixty between them, think them thirty apiece; for as twins of one hour they lived.” In the August of 1607, a masque by John Marston was given in the now ruined castle of Ashby-de-la-Zouch, eighteen miles from Leicester, as an entertainment devised by Lord Huntingdon and his young wife, the Lady Elizabeth Stanley, to welcome her mother, Alice, Countess-Dowager of Derby, “the first night of her honor’s arrival at the house of Ashby.” Fourteen noble ladies took part in the masque, and among them was “Mris Da’vers.” The name may, perhaps, be recognized as that of the subject of this sketch, for Sir John Danvers was not knighted until the following year; and it has been so recognized by interested scholars who have searched Nichols’s Progresses of James I. And yet we cannot be too sure that we have her before us, in the wreaths and picturesque draperies of the amateur stage; for there was another Mistress Da’vers at court, whose purported letter, dated February 3, 1613, signed with her confusing Christian names of “Mary Magdaline,” gave great trouble, thirty years ago, to the experts of the Camden Society. Besides, a letter of the good gossipy Chamberlain, dated March 3, 1608-9, mentions as if it were then a piece of fresh news: “Young Davers is likewise wedded to the widow Herbert, Sir Edward’s mother, of more than twice his age.” This would seem to preclude the possibility of the fair masquer being the same person. The mother of many Herberts, the “more than forty” bride, was by nature a home-keeping character. Among the [23] [24] [25] [5] [26] [6] [27] correspondence relating to Lord Herbert of Cherbury, privately printed in 1886 by the Earl of Powis, are a few pages which give us invaluable glimpses of the London household. Lady Danvers’s eldest son, who set off upon his travels soon after her second marriage, and who applied himself vigorously to the various diversions of body and mind catalogued in the Autobiography, found himself often pinched for money. In such a strait, not unfamiliar to other fine gentlemen of his day, he invariably appealed to the services of the step-father who was his junior, in England. The latter, writing how “wee are all some what after the olde manner, and doe hartely wish you well,” seems to have busied himself to some avail, in concert with his brother-in-law, Sir Francis Newport (the first Lord Newport), in securing letters of credit to Milan, Turin, the Netherlands, and elsewhere, and in explaining at length, in his long involved sentences, how matters could be bettered. Whether or not the absent Knight of the Bath had reason to suspect Sir John’s disinterested action when it came to the handling of pounds and pence, he does not seem, then or after, to have burdened him with any great harvest of thanks. But Sir John’s faithful wife knew how to defend him, in a script of May 12, 1615, which may be quoted precisely as it stands in the Herbert papers. “To my best beloved sonn, S’r Edward Herbert, Knight, “My deare Sonn, it is straunge to me to here you to complayne of want of care of you in your absence when my thoughts are seldom removed from you which must assuredly set me aworkinge of any thinge may doe you good, & for writinge the one of us yf not both never let messenges pass without letter, your stay abroad is so short in any one place & we so unhappy in givinge you contentment as our letters com not to your hands which we are sorry for. And to tel you further of S’r John Da’vers Love which I dare sweare is to no man more, he is & hath beene so careful to keep you from lake of money now you are abroad as your Baylife faylinge payment as they continually doe & pay no man, he goeth to your Merchaunt, offers him self & all the powers he can make to supply you as your occasions may require, mistake him not, but beleeve me there was never a tenderer hart or a lovinger minde in any man then is in him towards you who have power to com’aund him & all that is his. Now for your Baylifs I must tell you they have not yet payed your brothers all their Anuities due at Midsom’er past & but half due at Christmas last and no news of the rest, this yf advauntage were taken might be preiuditiall to you and it is ill for your Brothers & very ill you have such officers. “I hope it will bringe you home & that is all the good can com of this. your sister Johnes hath long beene sicke & within this 8 dayes hath brought a boy she is so weake as she is much feared by those aboute her. my Lady Vachell lyes now adyeinge the bell hath twice gone for her. your wife & sweet children are well & herein I send you little Florence letter to see what comfort you may have of your deare children, let them, my Dear sonn, draw you home & affoorde them your care and me your comfort that desire more to see you then I desire any thinge ells in the world, and now I end with my dayly prayer for your health and safe retorne to Your ever lovinge mother, Magd: Da’vers. “I have received the Pattent of your Br: William, & S’r John hath beene with the ambassatore who stayes for S’r James Sandaline his cominge.” A sympathizing reader, aware of sequences, may wonder whence Sir John drew “all the powers he can make”! The dignified letter, with its undulating syntax and thrifty punctuation, harmonizes with all we know of this delightful woman, who could so reproach what she deemed a shortcoming, without a touch of temper. How affectionate is the reference to the “little Florence” who died young, and to the other children, sufficiently precious to all that household, except to the wool-gathering chevalier their father, far away! Their innocent faces peer again through a sweet postscript of their grand-uncle: (“Dick is here, Ned and Bettye at Haughmond,”) written in the winter, from Eyton, to the truant at the Hague. This same genial Sir Francis Newport, “imoderately desyring to see you,” confides to his nephew, during what he complains of as “a verye drye and hott time” for Shropshire farmers, that “mye syster your mother is confident to take a iourney into these pts this somer, the rather, I think, because yo’r brother Vaugh’n is dead & if yo’ have a willing harte you maye come tyme enough to acco’pany her heare, & would not then the companye bee much the better?” But we fear the little excursion never came off. Edward Herbert’s next visit to his home, presumably after a four-years’ absence, was in 1619; and in May of that year he accepted the office of Ambassador to France, and spread his ready wing again to the Continent. And the Athenæ Oxoniensis will not let us forget that the too spirited envoy had to be temporarily recalled in 1621, because he had “irreverently treated” De Luynes, the powerful but good- for-nothing Constable of France. It is not insignificant that this was the year in which George Herbert wrote to his mother in one of his consoling moods, bidding her be of good cheer, albeit her health and wealth were gone, and the conduct of her children was not very satisfying! We know that Lady Danvers had the “honor, love, obedience, troops of friends” which became her, and that she lost none of her influence, none of her serene charm. Her poet was much with her in his advancing age. In July, 1625, while the plague was raging in London, Donne reminded Sir Henry Wotton of the leisure he enjoyed, golden as Cicero’s, by dating his letter “from S’r John Davor’s house at Chelsey, of w’ich house & my Lord Carlil’s at Hanworth I make up my Tusculum.” Many a peaceful evening must they have passed upon the terraces, within sound of the [28] [29] [30] [7] [31] [32] [8] [9] [33] [34] solemn songs always dear to both. Visitors yet more illustrious came there from the city; for the noble hostess had once the privilege of reviving the great Lord Bacon, who had fainted in her garden. We learn, with sympathy, that “sickness, in the declination of her years, had opened her to an overflowing of melancholy; not that she ever lay under that water, but yet had, sometimes, some high tides of it.” Death chose Dr. Donne’s ministering angel before him, after thirty years of mutual fealty. Her restless son Edward, now at home, was already eminent, and wearing his little Irish title of Baron Castleisland; her thoughtful Charles was long dead; her brother, also, was no more; her daughters were matrons, and dwelling in prosperity. With but one unfulfilled wish, that of seeing her favorite George married and in holy orders, and after a life which left a wake of sunshine behind it in the world, very patiently and hopefully Magdalen Newport, Lady Danvers, entered upon eternity, in the early June of 1627. On the eighth day of the month, in St. Luke’s, the parish church of Chelsea, she was buried: “Old age with snow-bright hair, and folded palm,” the final earthly glimpse of her still traditionally beautiful. On the first of July her faithful liegeman, now Dean of St. Paul’s and Vicar of St. Dunstan-in-the-West, preached her funeral sermon there, before a crowd of the great ones of London, the clergy, and the poor. Izaak Walton’s kind face looked up from a near pew, whence he saw Dr. Donne’s tears, and felt his breaking voice, the voice of one who did not belie his friend, nigh the end of his own pilgrimage. In present grief and among graver memories, he had the true perception not to forget how joyous she had been. “She died,” he said, “without any change of countenance or posture, without any struggling, any disorder, . . . and expected that which she hath received: God’s physic and God’s music, a Christianly death. . . . She was eyes to the blind, and feet to the lame, . . . naturally cheerful and merry, and loving facetiousness and sharpness of wit.” His own fund of mirth and strength was fast going; and a haunting line of his youth, “And all my pleasures are like yesterday,” must have reverted to him many and many a time. Morbid and persistent thoughts beset him from this hour, probably, more than ever, until he had the effigy of himself, painted as he was, laid in his failing sight; morbid and persistent thoughts of the ruin which befalls the bright bodies of humanity, sometimes surging up in his loneliness, and crowding out the better vision which yet may “grace us in the disgrace of death.” His inward eye was drawn strongly to his friend’s sepulchre, sealed and sombre before him, and to what had been her, “going into dust now almost a month of days, almost a lunar year . . . which, while I speak, is mouldering and crumbling into less and less dust.” But he ended in a wholesomer strain, subdued and calm: “This good soul being thus laid down to sleep in His peace, ‘I charge you, O daughters of Jerusalem, that ye wake her not!’” The rare little duodecimo which contains Lady Danvers’s funeral sermon was printed soon after, “together with other Commemorations of Her, by her Sonne G. Herbert,” and offered to the public at the Golden Lion in Paul’s Churchyard. The commemorations are in Greek and Latin. Strangely enough, nowhere is the sweet and sage poet of The Temple so set upon his prosody, so given to awkward pagan conceits, so out of tune with the ideals of classic diction. But he, who tenderly loved his mother, has given to us, in the Memoriæ Matris Sacrum, several precious personal fragments, and one more precious whole picture of daily habits in the lines beginning Corneliæ sanctæ: her morning prayer, her bath, and the plaiting of her glossy hair; her housewifely cares, her fit replies, her writing to her friends, her passion for music, her gentle helpfulness; the long felicity of a glad and stainless life, “Quicquid habet tellus, quicquid et astra, fruens.” Dr. Donne died in 1631, whatever was yet of earth in his spirit healed and chastened by long pain. His last remembrance to some he loved was his own seal of Christ on the Anchor, “engraven very small on heliotropium stones, and set in gold, for rings.” Many of those to whom his heart would have turned, the “autumnal beauty” scarce second among them, had preceded him out of England. But in travelling towards his Maker, he had that other sacred hope to “ebb on with them,” and gloriously overtake them, as he traced the epitaph which covered him in old St. Paul’s: “Hic licet in occiduo cinere, aspicit eum cujus nomen est Oriens.” The tie between himself and her was not unremembered in the next generation; for we find John Donne the younger dedicating his father’s posthumous work to Francis, Lord Newport, and when making his will, in 1662, bequeathing also to the same Lord Newport “the picture of St. Anthony in a round frame.” And thus, in a revived fragrance, the annals of true friendship close. These rapid, ragged strokes of a pen make the only possible biography of Lady Danvers. When Walton wrote of her, he had the entire correspondence with Dr. Donne before him. “There were sacred endearments betwixt these two excellent persons,” he assures us, but disappointingly hurries on into the highway of his subject. It is curious that it seems impossible now to trace these breathing relics, or others from the same source; for George Herbert, in the second elegy of the Parentalia, has much to say, and very sweetly, of the industry of his mother’s “white right hand,” and of the “many and most notable letters, flying over all the world.” Much detail is utterly lost which men who agree with Prosper Mérimée that all Thucydides would not be worth an authentic memoir of Aspasia, or even of one of the slaves of Pericles, might be glad to remember. A copy of a song, a reminiscence of the glow and stir of the days through which she moved, a guess through a mist at the blond head, the half-imperious carriage, the open hand, as she went her ways, like Dante’s lovely lady, sentendosi laudare,—these are all we have of the daughter of England’s golden age. It would be easy, were it also just, to throw a dash of color into her shadowy history. One would like to verify the scene at Eyton, while the news of the coming Armada roused the lion in Drake, and struck terror into the Devon towns; and to hear the young wife, with three lisping Herberts at her knee, beguile them with mellow contralto snatches of a [10] [11] [35] [36] [12] [37] [38] [39] [13] [40] [14] [41] Robin Hood ballad, or with the sweet yesterday’s tale of Zutphen, where their country’s dearest gave his cup of water to a dying comrade. A decade later, before their handsome bluff father, her other healthful boys stood up to wrestle, and twang their arrows at forty paces; or a rosy daughter stole to his side, and asked him of mishaps in Ireland, or of the giant laughter bubbling from the “oracle of Apollo” in a London street. It is to be believed that one who watched events through the insurrection of Essex, through Raleigh’s dramatic trial, reprieve, and execution, through the national mourning for the Prince of Wales, through the fever for colonization, the savage sea-fights, the great intrigues in behalf of the Queen of Scots, the religious divisions, the muttering parliamentary thunders, the stress and heat of the exciting dawn of the seventeenth century, was not unmindful of all it meant to be alive, there and then. Magdalen Newport’s girlhood fell on Lyly’s Euphues, fresh from the printers; the Arcadia made the talk of Oxford, in her prime; the dusky splendor of Marlowe’s Faustus was abroad before her second marriage. She was, surely, aware of Shakespeare, and of the wonder-folio of 1623; of the newest delighting madrigals and antiphons set forth by one Robert Jones, when every soul in England had the gift of music; of rascal Robert Greene’s lovable lyrics, of Wyatt’s, Campion’s, and Drayton’s. She wrote no verses, indeed, but her familiars wrote them; her every step jostled a Muse. We may assume that no growth nor loss in literary circles escaped that tender “perplexing eye.” Perhaps it glistened from a bench, in the pioneer British theatre, on the actors of Volpone, and followed silently, behind the royal group, the first mincings of the first dear Fool in King Lear, one day-after-Christmas at Whitehall. Last of all, for whim’s sake, how any sociologist would enjoy having the honest opinion of young Lady Herbert, or that of little Mistress Donne, concerning the person they could but thank and praise! Utinam vivisset Pepys! It is a cheat of history that it preserves no clearer tint or trace of this chosen passer-by. Such, in truth, she was, and the quiet vanishing name clings to her: the woman of durable gladness, happily born and taught, like the soul whereof Sir Henry Wotton, who must have known her well, made his immortal song. Of the gracious figure of Sir John Danvers we may be said to lose sight; for he seems less gracious, as by a Hindoo trick, as soon as it is written that his wife departed unto her reward. Comment on his character is equal comment upon hers, and adds new force to the classic episode of a lady philanthropist espousing a ne’er-do-weel and a featherbrain. Aubrey, always happy over a little ultra-contemporary gossip, calls it “a disagreeable match,” disappointing to the bridegroom’s kindred; but adds that “he married her for love of her wit.” Now, wit is an admirable magnet, but it is to be suspected that there was also, and in the immediate vicinity, “metal more attractive,” as Hamlet says. In the Chelsea parish-books is an entry, the first of its kind, certifying that Sir John Danvers had settled his account with “the poore,” a matter of thirty pounds’ loan (in which the vicar must have connived), for the year ending in January of 1628. If the payment were, by any hap, in advance, it may have fallen in Lady Danvers’s own lifetime; and if so, it is quite as likely that she paid it, with an admonition! Her “high tides of melancholy,” of whose true cause she certainly would not have complained to Dr. Donne, had something to do with this young spendthrift, who must have had his wheedling way, sooner or later, with such of her ample revenues as were yet extant. Perhaps Lord Herbert of Cherbury was both shrewd and charitable, in suppressing mention of his new relative. The longer one looks into the matter, the less curious seems his unexplained silence concerning this late graft of a family hitherto always respectable and always loyal. There are gleams of subsequent private history in the tell-tale records at Chelsea. We are not incurably astonished to learn that as early as May of 1629 was christened Elizabeth, daughter of Sir John Danvers and Elizabeth his wife. This Lady Elizabeth, arriving providentially with her Dauntsey wealth, having borne him four children, died, as did his mother, in 1636; and left him even as she found him, none too monogamous. In 1648 Sir John Danvers again appeared at the venerable altars where his first saint never had a memorial, loving, honoring, and cherishing a Mrs. Grace Hewes, Hawes, or Hewet, of Kemerton in Gloucestershire, and, as it is to be surmised, leading her tame fortune by a ribbon. His debts and difficulties, not of one but of all time, sprout perennially in the registers. His indefatigable name, oftener than any rival’s whatsoever, figures as borrowing and paying interest on a forty-pound note, which, like a Hydra-head, was always forthcoming so soon as it was demolished. This disgraceful business was the man’s chief concern: for the older he grew the deeper and deeper he sank into entanglements, particularly after the death of the King. It was never doubted, in his day, but that this was a judgment on the former Gentleman Usher who affixed hand and seal to the warrant of his sovereign’s execution. His own family, it is said, as well as the royalist Herberts and Newports, dropped his acquaintance; and who knows whether Mrs. Grace Hewet was faithful? At his favorite Chelsea, in the April of 1655, and in about the seventy-fourth year of his age, Sir John Danvers ended his career by more conventional agencies than the rope and the knife, which might have befallen him in the Stuart triumph of the morrow. His manor fell an immediate forfeit to the crown. In 1661, the dead republican was attainted, and all of his estate which was unprotected was declared regal booty. The year before his own burial at Dauntsey he laid there, “to the great grief of all good men,” the body of his elder son Henry, who had just attained his majority. The Earl of Danby had died, “full of honors, wounds, and days,” in 1643, while this Henry, his nephew, was still a hopeful child; and on him alone he had taken pains to settle his possessions. But Henry, in turn, was persuaded to bequeath the major part of them to his father’s ever-gaping pocket, the remainder reverting to one of his two surviving sisters. The third Lady Danvers, who lived until 1678, had also a son Charles, who petitioned the crown for his paternal rights, but died in old age, with neither income nor issue. Clarendon quietly indicts Sir John Danvers as a “proud, formal, weak man,” such as Cromwell “employed and contemned at once.” George Bate gives him a harder character, saying that he “proved his brother to be a delinquent in the Rump Parliament, whereby he might overthrow his will, and so compass the estate himself. He sided with the sectarian party, was one of the King’s judges, and lived afterwards some years in his sin, without repentance.” But the same accuser adds the saving fact that Dr. Thomas Fuller, like Aubrey, was Sir John’s friend, and, by his desire, preached many times at Chelsea, “where, I am sure, he was instructed to repent of his misguided and wicked [42] [43] [44] [15] [45] [46] [16] [47] [17] [48]