Eighteenth Century Vignettes. Dobson Austin
Spence it is that we get the best account of Pope's precocious early years and studies; of his boyish epic of Alcander, Prince of Rhodes, with its under-water scene, and its four books of one thousand lines; of the manner of his translation of Homer and his plan for the 'Essay on Man;' and of a number of facts concerning the trustworthiness of which there can be no reasonable doubt. Nor can there be any doubt as to the bulk of his purely critical utterances. Many of these, and especially such as deal with individual authors, are now become trite and faded. However novel may have been the announcement under George the Second, we now learn without a shock of surprise that Chaucer is an unequalled taleteller, that Bacon was a great genius, that Milton's style is exotic. But, upon his own craft, Pope's axioms are still sometimes worth hearing. 'A poem on a slight subject,' he says, 'requires the greater care to make it considerable enough to be read.' 'After writing a poem one should correct it all over, with one single view at a time. Thus, for language: if an elegy, "These lines are very good, but are they not of too heroical a strain?" and so vice versa' 'There is nothing so foolish as to pretend to be sure of knowing a great writer by his style.' 'Nil admirari is as true in relation to our opinions of authors as it is in morality; and one may say, O, admiratores, servum pecus! fully as justly as O, Imitator es!' 'The great secret how to write well is to know thoroughly what one writes about, and not to be affected.' This last, however, is scarcely more than an Horatian commonplace.
With the aid of Spence's 'Anecdotes' we gain admission to the little villa by the Thames where, during the spring of 1744, wasted by an intolerable asthma, but waiting serenely for the end, Pope lay sinking slowly. Many of his sayings, and the sayings of those who visited his sick-room, have their only chronicle in this collection. About three weeks before his death, he printed his 'Ethic Epistles,' copies of which he gave away to different persons. 'Here am I, like Socrates,' he told Spence, 'distributing my morality to my friends, just as I am dying.' On Sunday, the 6th of May, he lost his mind for several hours, – a circumstance which sets him wondering 'that there should be such a thing as human vanity.' Already his spirit was escaping fitfully to the Unknown. There are false colours on the objects about him; he looks at everything 'as through a curtain;' he sees 'a vision.' Most of all he suffers from his inability to think. But the old love of letters still survives; he quotes his own verses; and when in his waking moments Spence reads to him the 'Daphnis and Chloe' of Longus, he marvels how the infected mind of the Regent Orleans can have relished so innocent a book. As to his condition he has no illusions. On the 15th, after having been visited by Thompson the quack, who had been treating him (as Ward treated Fielding) for dropsy, and professed to find him better, he described himself to Lyttelton as 'dying of a hundred good symptoms!' 7
'On every catching and recovery of his mind,' Spence tells us, 'he was always saying something kindly either of his present or his absent friends' – 'as if his humanity had outlived his understanding.' Many of the well-known figures of the day still came and went about his bedside – Bolingbroke from Battersea, tearful and melancholy, full-blown Warburton, Lyttelton above-mentioned, Marchmont, blue-eyed Martha Blount; and it was 'very observable' how the entry of the lady seemed to give him temporary strength, or a new turn of spirits. To the last he continued to struggle manfully with his malady. On the 27th, to the dismay of his friends, he had himself brought down to the room where they were at dinner; on the 28th his sedan chair was carried for three hours into the garden he loved so well, then filled with the blossoms of May and smelling of the coming summer. On the 29th he took the air in Bushey Park, and a little later in the day received the sacrament, flinging himself fervently out of bed to receive it on his knees. 'There is nothing that is meritorious, he said afterwards, 'but virtue and friendship, and indeed friendship itself is only a part of virtue.' On the next day, the 30th of May, 1774, he died. 'They did not know the exact time,' writes the faithful friend to whom we owe so many of these 'trivial, fond records,' – 'for his departure was so easy that it was imperceptible even to the standers-by.'
IV. CAPTAIN CORAM'S CHARITY
AMONG a ragged regiment of books, very dear to their owner, but in whose dilapidated company no reputable volume would greatly care to travel through Coventry, is a sheepskin-clad tract entitled 'Mémoires Relating to the State of the Royal Navy of England, For Ten Years, Determin'd December 1688.' It dates from those antiquated days when even statistics had their air of scholarship and their motto from 'Tully' or 'the Antients' (Quid Didcius Otio Litterato?– it is in this case); and the year of issue is 1690. The name of the author does not appear, but his portrait by Kneller does; and he was none other than the diarist Samuel Pepys, sometime Secretary to the Admiralty under the second Charles and his successor. 8
In itself the little volume is an extremely instructive one, as much from the light it throws upon the prominent part played by its writer in the reconstruction of the Caroline navy, as from its exposure of the lamentable mismanagement which permitted toad-stools as big as Mr. Secretary's fists to flourish freely in the ill-ventilated holds of his Majesty's ships-of-war. But the special attraction of the particular copy to which we are referring lies in certain faded inscriptions which it contains. On March 14, 1724, it was presented by one 'C. Jackson' to 'Tho. Coram,' by whom in turn it was transferred to a Mr. Mills, being accompanied by a holograph note which is pasted at the end: 'To Mr Mills These Worthy Sir I happend to find among my few Books, Mr Pepys, his mémoires [there has evidently been a struggle over the spelling of the name], wch I thought might be acceptable to you & therefore pray you to accept of it. I am wth much Respect Sir your most humble Scrfc Thomas Coram. June 10th, 1746.' It is not a lengthy document, but, with its unaffected wording and its simple reference to 'my few Books,' it gives a pleasant impression of the brave old mariner to whom, even at the present day, so many hapless mortals owe their all; and whose ruddy, kindly face, with its curling white hair, still beams on us from Hogarth's canvas at the Foundling.
Captain Coram must have been seventy-eight years old when he wrote the above letter, for he had been born, at Lyme Regis in Dorsetshire, as far back as 1668. Of his boyhood nothing is known; but in 1694 he was working as a shipwright at Taunton, Massachusetts. His benevolent instincts seem to have developed early, for in December, 1703, he conveyed to the Taunton authorities some fifty-nine acres of land as the site for a church or schoolhouse.
In the deed of gift he is described as 'of Boston, in New England, sometimes residing in Taunton, in the County of Bristol, Shipwright.' He also gave a library to Taunton; and, from the fact that the Common Prayer Book used in the church of that town was presented to him for the purpose by Mr. Speaker Onslow, must have been successful in enlisting in his good offices the sympathies of others. In course of time he became master of a ship; and, in 1719, a glimpse of his life, of which there are scant details, shows him being plundered and maltreated by wreckers at Cuxhaven, while a passenger on a vessel called the 'Sea Flower,' upon which occasion the affidavit describes him as 'of London, Mariner and Shipwright.' At this date he was engaged in the supply of stores to the navy. He must have prospered fairly in his calling, for he soon afterwards retired from a sea-faring fife in order to live upon his means, and occupy himself entirely with charitable objects. In the Plantations, as they were then called, he took great interest; being notably active as regards the colonization of Georgia and the improvement of the Nova Scotian cod fisheries. Lord Walpole of Wolterton (Horace Walpole's uncle), who had met him, testified warmly to his honesty, his disinterestedness, and his knowledge of his subject. Neither an educated nor a polished man (and not always a judicious one), he was indefatigable in the pursuit of his purpose, and his singleminded philanthropy was beyond the shadow of a doubt. 'His arguments,' said his intimate friend Dr. Brocklesby, 'were nervous, though not nice – founded commonly upon facts, and the consequences that he drew, so closely connected with them, as to need no further proof than a fair explanation. When once he made an impression, he took care it should not wear out; for he enforced it continually by the most pathetic remonstrances. In short, his logic was plain sense; his eloquence, the natural language of the heart.'
His crowning enterprise was the obtaining of a charter for the establishment of the Foundling Hospital. Going to and fro at Rotherhithe, where in his latter days he lived, he was constantly coming upon half-clad infants, 'sometimes alive, sometimes dead, and sometimes dying,' who had been abandoned by their parents to the mercy of the streets; and he determined to
This must have been a commonplace. 'Like the sick man, we are just expiring with all sorts of good symptoms,' says Swift, in the 'Conduct of the Allies,' 1711.
The copy hero described also contains – but apparently only inserted by a former owner – the scroll book-plate of Pepys.