see how thorough and successful my preparation has been." I told him that he reminded me of the great Abernethy, who, early in the century, had stood at the head of the medical profession in England. In one of his works he had laid it down as an invariable rule that no more than eight ounces of animal food should be taken in a single day. From time to time he would give a dinner to the most promising of his hospital students. "Now, my lads," he used to say, as they sat down to a well-spread table, "hang the eight-ounce rule;" and they did suspend it for that night, at least. I went on to say that I always wished, at these Greenwich dinners, that every guest were provided with the placard which in certain towns I had seen hung outside the omnibuses when there was room for no more passengers, "Full inside." Furnished with it, a man, when he had had enough, could enjoy a quiet talk with those sitting near him without being worried at every moment by the waiter thrusting dishes and bottles of wine over his shoulder. At one of these Saturday Review dinners, the cook had forgotten to bring up the rear of the long line of dainties with those boiled beans and bacon in which the man of oaths took special delight. This happened before I had begun to write for the paper, so that I did not witness the strange scene which followed. The landlord was sent for, and on him was opened a battery of the strongest and most original profanity, worthy of the rage of a man who, having dined on turtle-soup, fish of a dozen varieties, fowl, flesh, and venison, felt that, without beans and bacon, all was vanity and vexation of spirit. The memory of such a man should surely be honored in Boston. Scarcely less strange a pillar of the Anglican Church was my kind friend the second editor. In his early manhood he had filled the pulpit in the Unitarian chapel in London in which Mr. Moncure Conway so long officiated in later years. A Unitarian, I believe, he remained till the end of his life. Like Lord Chancellor Eldon, he was a buttress rather than a pillar of the Church, for he was never seen inside. His were the palmy days of the Saturday Review. He was supported by a large and strong staff of reviewers. Matthew Arnold once said to me that it was easy to see that every subject was entrusted to a writer who was master of it. Among the contributors were E. A. Freeman and J. R. Green, the historians, Sir Henry Maine and Lord Justice Bowen, Sir James Stephen and his brother Mr. Leslie Stephen, and Professor Owen. It was in the Saturday Review that Mr. Freeman and some of the younger writers of his school so often exposed the blunders into which Mr. Froude was always falling. In this exposure, Mr. Green, I have little doubt, often bore his part. I was told that when he was still a young writer, unhappily he did not live to be an old one, - at an evening party, the lady of the house brought him up to introduce him to Mr. Froude. The great man looked coldly at him for a moment, and then exclaimed, "Saturday Reviewer! Don't want to know him." It is a pity that Mr. Froude could not have laid to heart the lessons that were taught him by his reviewers, however bitter was the language in which they were imparted. Of strict accuracy he seemed incapable by nature; just as Johnson's friend, Bennet Langton, "had no turn to economy," so Mr. Froude had no turn to truthfulness. Where nature had fallen short, inclination and study did little to remedy the deficiency. He was not, perhaps, aware of his failings. I once sent him a few notes about some errors in his Life of Carlyle. He replied, The utmost care will not prevent mistakes. Printers blunder when no blunders could be anticipated, and the eye passes over them unconsciously." In this defense of himself against the suspicion of carelessness he was so careless as to send his letter unsigned. 66 My friend the editor, from whom I have been led away by this digression, however severe was the formidable Review which he so ably conducted, was himself the most kindly and gentle of men. He was rarely to be seen anywhere but in his office and his home. He never went to a club, and he never dined out except on a Saturday when the week's work was done. His daughter, under the name of Ross Niel, had published a few volumes of poetical plays, written with great taste and spirit. His one relief from work was music. Every evening he played on the violoncello, while she accompanied him on the piano. However late his task was finished, and every Thursday night it went on to the small hours of the morning, - he soothed his tired nerves by this little concert. How the nerves of the authors were soothed, who were often so mercilessly criticised, is matter for conjecture. He once sent me for review the longest modern novel I have ever seen. It could scarcely have fallen short of Richardson's Clarissa. It was so long that some of the volumes I made no pretense of reading. I did not even cut their leaves. To my surprise, my article was not inserted, though I received for it the usual payment. The author an old soldier had just had a play brought out at one of the London theatres, and had received some compliments in the Saturday Review. He wrote so grateful a letter of acknowledgment that my friend owned to me that he had not the heart to ridicule his foolish novel, and so had committed my article to the wastepaper basket. One day he told me of a vexatious blunder into which he had fallen. I had sent him an article on school histories, in which I maintained that Goldsmith's History of Greece with all its errors, written as it was by a man of genius, was a far better book for young people than Dr. Smith's History with all its ac curacy and all its dullness. Dr. Smith was a big man in the literary world of London, not by his schoolbooks, though they brought him in many thousands of pounds every year, but as the editor of the Quarterly Review, that famous Review which, years earlier, was thought to have "snuffed out" poor Keats's soul. He had long wished to know my friend, and had asked a common acquaintance to let them meet at his dinner-table. The dinner was fixed for a certain Saturday. On the morning of that very day appeared my article. It had been in type for some weeks. That it contained an attack on Dr. Smith's History had altogether escaped my friend's memory. The awkward blunder which he had made he discovered an hour or two before the dinner-party. It was with a heavy heart that he went to meet this brother editor. It was impossible to allude to the article, and explain his entire innocence of any wish to give offense. He felt sure it would be believed that it was a premeditated slight. The meeting was a cool one. Dr. Smith, he told me with a smile, never expressed the slightest wish to see him again. My friend had also an amusing story to tell of the editor of the Westminster Review, one Mr. H- a successor, though not the immediate successor, of John Stuart Mill in that post. Mr. HH-published a book on theology, in which he supported his views by citations from the Greek fathers. Of Greek, however, he knew next to nothing, and so he sought the aid of a learned friend in his translations of these passages. Unfortunately, it too frequently happened that learning and his theological theories were at variance. In those cases it was learning that had to yield. The fathers were made to say, not what they had said, but what they ought to have said, and what undoubtedly they would have said had each of them been a Mr. H. He begged my friend, who was at this time assistant editor of the Sat urday Review, and whom he had long known, to get his book noticed in that journal. All he asked for was a review, -whether favorable or unfavorable he cared not a jot. The work was accordingly sent to a learned critic, who, without any pity, mercilessly exposed the writer's monstrous blunders. So severe was the criticism that the assistant editor did all he could to keep it from appearing. Just as, in the Reign of Terror, a friendly clerk in the office of the Committee of Public Safety often saved a man's life by keeping the paper containing his case at the bottom of the pile, so the assistant editor for many weeks kept this review at the bottom of the pile of articles that were awaiting insertion. The only result was a succession of bitter reproaches from the author for his indifference to an old friend, who asked for nothing but a review, and cared not whether it was friendly or hostile. last the review was printed. Mr. Hat once quarreled with his old friend, and never spoke to him again. At, It was not till about the year 1869 that I became a contributor to the Saturday Review; but when I had once begun to write there were few numbers for some years in which I had not an article. The editor discovered in me a certain vein of humor, and for the most part sent me books to review which deserved little more than ridicule. What havoc I made among the novelists and the minor poets! I amused my readers because I was first amused myself by the absurdities which I everywhere found in these writers, and by the odd fancies which rose in my mind as I read their works. At last, however, my humor began to fail. It was over the minor poets that I first became dejected. Even in their tragedies I no longer found anything amusing. I entreated my friendly editor to hand them over to a fresher hand. With the novelists I struggled on for some while; but finally even they could no longer raise a natural laugh. My mirth was becoming forced, and I let them follow the poets. Now and then, it is true, I lighted upon a pretty story. I recall with pleasure Mrs. Parr's Dorothy Fox and Mrs. Walford's Mr. Smith. Whenever I met modest worth, I hope I always did it jus One result of all this novel-reading was a total incapacity, lasting for many years, of reading any novels except those which were the favorites of my younger days. To read a novel became so inseparably connected, in my mind, with three pounds ten shillings (about seventeen dollars), the usual payment for a Saturday Review article, that without the one I could not undertake the other. All in vain have friends urged me to read the works of Black, Blackmore, Hardy, Howells, Henry James, Stevenson, and Kipling. Not a single story of any one of these writers have I ever read, or am I likely ever to read. Perhaps, however, I should be less confident on this matter, for I have just been induced to listen to Miss Jewett's A Marsh Island. It pleased me so much that I see it is possible that stories may solace the hours of my old age, as it draws on, as they charmed those of my youth. Among my autographs there are not a few letters from those who had suffered from my reviews. They were forwarded to me by the editor; for my name was not known, as the contributions were anonymous. An enraged poetess warned me that the day would come when women would have their rights. Then the dastardly man who insolently compared the flights of a swan to the waddlings of the domestic duck would have to meet her whom he had thus wronged, face to face, pistol in hand. She was far fiercer than a brother poet who had insisted on being reviewed. "When I read my own poems," he wrote to the editor, "and remember that they are written by a man not yet twenty-one, I am astounded at my own genius. Other men would say ability; but genius I say, and genius I He wrote too late. My review of After-Throbs appeared the very day on which I received his letter, and it was not balm that it contained. Unhappy poet! may his genius have long ceased to astound him, but may it be the object of the ardent if somewhat perplexed admiration of a dutiful and loving wife! Now and then my reviews brought me letters of a different character. One was from a grand-niece of Sir Walter Scott, who was grateful for the resentment I had shown when a popular female novelist, with a great parade of conferring a benefit on the world, began to serve up a miserable hash of his stories, each in a penny number some twenty or thirty pages long. In her abridgment of Rob Roy she had been so shameless as to make one of the purest of writers guilty of a coarse jest. There was something in this abridgment which led me to suspect that it had not been made from the original, but in the very wantonness of indolence from the dramatized version. I turned to the play, and my suspicions were confirmed, for there I found this same coarse jest. "It is," wrote Scott's niece, "a real pleasure to me to thank you, those who would have done so far better than I being all dead. There is something touching in the fact that Sir Walter's fame lives in children; we must be men and women to thoroughly appreciate him, 1 I have changed the names of the poet and his works, so that he may not be recognized. but it is as children that we learn to love him and his creations." The following letter came to me from the west coast of Ireland : : DEAR MR. LITERARY CRITIC, — I'd rather like to make your acquaintance in the flesh, as I have done long since in the spirit for you seem to have a good deal of fun in you, and some feeling; I say some feeling with caution, for in many ways you are utterly without heart, witness the cruel way you cut up those poor lady-novelists. You hash their grammar their best and most finely-turned phrases, their plots, their spelling, everything is made mince-meat of, without mercy, and without remorse. In the review I have just laid down after some minutes of quiet enjoyment of Mrs.'s novel, how you ravened like a wolf among her pet descriptions (there's a bit of metaphor for you now to carp at), and then you were coarse, not to say brutal, when you said that you could have seen her heroine hanged with much complacency. I often think you are a sour discontented old bachelor with a natural antipathy to the sex when suddenly you turn round and by a little sentence betray more feeling than I could give you credit for, which makes me suppose you are lord of a happy household of girls and boys with quite a fund of general benevolence in your composition. Now it was not to tell you all this I have taken the trouble on this blessed Valentine's Day to sit down and write to you. It is to tell you (and here, if you have got so far, you smile sardonically) I too am among the foolish women. have written a book of verses and published them. I have put dashes purposely between each word to give you time to breathe - and I want to know will you review it? or has it come to you? or would you if I sent you a copy? You said in one of your late Saturdays that though nearly every one who can rhyme very tries his or her hand at a sonnet few succeed. I send you four sonnets. Do you think them any good? Some reviewer in this sweet little Ireland, peaceful, prosperous, happy Ireland - said I - said I had been following in Mrs. Browning's footsteps, of course I love and honour her and admire her with all my heart, but I never had the presumption to fancy I could follow her even afar off. One day after I had read these remarks, the thought stuck to me, till I wrote these things I send you. When first her sonnets from the Portuguese were given me -I lived on them. I don't know if this letter will ever reach its destination. I have a very vague idea about a reviewer in the Saturday. He is a sort of myth- and yet a very palpable reality. . . . I'd almost rather be cut up than passed over in contemptuous silence, and I don't think any one with a soul worth calling a soul would let it be "snuffed out by an article." I'm perfectly sure Keats never deserved that line of Byron's poor fellow there was "death in his hand long before the review in the Quarterly was put into it. Farewell. May you live to write many more critiques - but not on me - clever, satirical, abusive, amusing, admirable, as yours sometimes are. I say sometimes - as I before said some for you are not infallible. Truly yours, I cannot call to mind whether we received this lady's poems. Her letter shows that she might have done something better than write sonnets. Anybody can write sonnets, though few can read them. The following letter was written to one of my uncles, a young barrister, by Major John Cartwright, a radical of the old school. So early as 1774 he had published a Letter in Defence of American Independence. He was at that time an officer in the navy. Fond as he was of his profession, he threw it up rather than take part in the war against our colonies. He entered the militia, and rose to the rank of major. Three years before the date of his letter, he had been present at a meeting held in Birmingham for the purpose of electing a "legislatorial attorney," who was to knock at the door of the House of Commons, and claim the right to look after the interests of that great town in Parliament. With all its population, its industry, and its wealth, it was unrepresented. In its case, and in the case of many another English town in those evil days, taxation went without representation. The major and four gentlemen who stood by his side at the meeting were put on their trial at the Warwick assizes for misdemeanor. Another of my uncles had been on the platform, but he was young and insignificant enough to escape prosecution. His brother, the barrister, was one of Cartwright's counsel. On the morning of the trial, the old fellow said to him, "I hope they will send me to prison. It will be the best thing for the cause, for I am sure to die there. I hope they will send me to prison." The judge was too wise to make such a martyr. Cartwright's four friends were punished with imprisonment, but he himself was let off with a fine of a hundred pounds. From one of the pockets of his waistcoat, which, after the fashion of the previous century, he wore of a great size, he drew out a large canvas bag, from which he slowly counted one hundred pounds in gold. "He believed, he said, they were all good sovereigns." Even the judge himself was amused by his composed manner and his dry tone. Cartwright outlived his trial three years, dying at the age of eighty-four. His statue stands before his house in Burton Crescent, London. His niece, Mrs. Penrose, under the assumed name of Mrs. Markham, used to be well known to the children of my younger days by her histories. |