27 From The London Quarterly Review. Is the pursuit of literature as a profession conducive to the enjoyment of long life? It is a question of much interest, and in answer a good deal may be said on both sides. In the books at the head of this article we have a strong argument on the affirmative side. In them a vet eran of the press, who saw the light in the first year of this nineteenth century, draws forth from a well-stored memory, and with a hand that has not lost its cunning, recollections of the days gone by, and of the brilliant host of writers whom he has met, missed, and mourned. But while Mr. Hall himself is a fine example of literary longevity, a considerable portion of his contemporaries passed away in early or middle life. And such, we fear, is the fate of a large proportion of the brainworkers, the genuine "press men," of the present day. In the case of some who flourished fifty or sixty years ago, the fault of their fewness of days was entirely their own. Fast living was then rather the rule than the exception among literary men, as well as among the higher classes of society, and numerous were the admirers and victims of the Anacreontic style. Maginn a man of vast learning and manifold powers, a valued contributor to Blackwood and Fraser in their palmiest days, who with unprincipled versatility wrote at the same time slashing articles in the Tory Age and the Radical True Sun - died, a miserable wreck, at the age of forty-eight. Theodore Hook the marvellous improvizer of verses in any number upon any topic, the ready wit and daring practical joker — was an old man when he should have been in his prime, and died at fifty-three," done up," as he himself phrased it, "in purse, in mind, and in body too." And these were but samples of many minor martyrs to the bad customs, slaves to the "free But manners and customs have changed since those days; and though the literary man is, on the average, not more longevous than formerly, the shortness of his career is due rather to hard work than to fast living. In many cases, in the full bloom of youthful enthusiasm he realizes an honorable ambition by getting on to the staff of a daily paper; then has to work by night, and every night, under pressure of the waiting monster that must "go to press "in the small hours of the morning, and, just when his brain should be regain. ing its spent vigor by repose, has to tax it to the uttermost in order to write bril liantly, or at all events freshly and interestingly, on topics which he has treated again and again till he is tired to death of them. It must be indeed a tough texture that will stand the strain; and of late years a host of promising young writers have been sacrificed on the altar of this Moloch of journalism. Then, as to the struggle for existence; was it greater amongst the literary men of fifty years ago than it is now? It could not be greater, and we incline to think it was much less. For, though there was then, as always, much hardship for the bulk of rising authors, there was a less crowded market - if not higher prices, better chances -a more certain income, for the vigorous ones who could fight their way to the front. Then, as now, the young author had to get a commission on the staff of a magazine or review, to gain a name amongst men, and to find food for himself and his little knot of dependents, whilst he was preparing the magnum opus which was to wake up the deaf and callous world and shake it out of its heartless insouciance. Battling against want and cold and debt and disease, sometimes he would win the victory, and command such work and such pay as he had scarcely ventured to dream of before. More often he has sunk, after a weary fight of ten or fifteen years, exhausted just as his last charge had carried the day; and the world has showered freely on his obse. quies the applause and sympathy which it had dealt out to him, when alive, with such a niggardly hand. Butler and Chatterton, | Lamb's faithful warning to Bernard Barin their antitypes, like "the poor," we ton holds good now as when it first was have "always with" us, at our very written: doors. We will not dwell on the pecuniary phase of an author's life. But it must not be ignored, since it is the big burden of daily care which gets between him and heaven, and shuts into eclipse all shine of sun and star; dwarfing his high aspirations, stunting the noble growths of his intellect, and chilling his genial warmth of heart. For when the author by profession, we mean, not amateur or occasional - finds his home threatened with disaster, the very existence of wife and chil dren, or mother and sisters, trembling in the scale, he can no longer keep to the fond illusion that he is a prophet commissioned to propound his own particular views to an eager and astonished world. Perforce he has to learn from the indispensable middleman what the public is supposed to want or wish for what will "take" and what will "pay." And so, without hinting even to himself that he is flagging in his high purposes, or putting off the fulfilment of his noble plans, he submits, and cannot but submit, to be ground down to the ideas and arrangements of those whom he knows to be his inferiors in the inner and higher life, but who have the upper hand of him in that important outer life which swallows up so much thought and energy. Too often, drudgery and care combined wear out the tissues of the brain, and the author sinks under sudden paralysis, or slowly dwindles into numbness and imbecility. The latter is seldom the fate of the ladies: authoresses, as a rule, keep bright and nimble to the last, and live pretty long lives. Still there are notable instances of early decay; and while on the one hand we have the longevity of Hannah More, Amelia Opie, Barbara Hofland, Mary Somerville, Lady Morgan, Mary Russell Mitford, Harriet Martineau, Mrs. Bray (92), and others, these are counterbalanced by the comparatively short lives of Felicia Hemans, Grace Aguilar, Emma Tatham, "Ruth Elliott," Mary Robinson, rational plan of support but what the chance Throw yourself on the world without any Throw yourself rather from the steep Tarpeian employ of booksellers would afford you!!! rock-slap, dash, headlong upon iron spikes. ... Come not within their grasp. I have known many authors want for bread, some repining, others enjoying the blest security of a counting-house, all agreeing they had rather have been tailors, weavers-what not? than the things they were. I have known some starved, some go mad, one dear friend "dying in a workhouse." O, you know not-may you never know!—the miseries of subsisting by authorship. Still, the profession of letters always will have supreme attraction for the young and talented. And the perusal of these interesting volumes of Mr. S. C. Hall will certainly not detract from the charm. What a crowd of illustrious names moves in his pages! Orators, statesmen, poets, philanthropists he has conversed or corresponded with, or at least rubbed against, two generations of the most famous of them, and can tell us much that we wanted to know about the appearance, manners, disposition, and character of these remarkable personages. His recollections carry him back to the earliest days of the century, and he notes down many a feature of London life that has long disappeared from view. The ancient tinder-box, the oil street-lamps, the old watchmen or "Charlies," the mail-coaches, the footpads, the pillions, the pattens, the many-caped hackney coachmen, the sedan-chairs, the turnpikes, the pillory, the stocks each of these departed glories has a few words of mention, in connection or contrast with the inventions and improvements that have superseded them. His retrospect has strongly impressed him with the opinion that the present age is in most respects better off than the preceding ones those terrible "hanging" times, when in the space of but seven years, from 1819 to 1825, there were five hundred and seventy-nine executions, most of them being for such offences as cattle, horse, For man and woman alike Charles and sheep stealing, arson, forgery, bur etc. -- glary, uttering false notes, sacrilege; was still on the staff of the Morning those wine-bibbing times, when Pitt and Chronicle, schooling himself for future Dundas are said to have entered the Dutch painting by the minute observation House of Commons in such an after- of detail required in a press reporter. dinner condition that the one could not Bulwer Lytton had just issued his "Eusee the speaker at all, while the other was gene Aram,” and was succeeding — with so far privileged as to see two speakers little success Campbell in the editor. in the chair; those profane times, when ship of the New Monthly. Macaulay had oaths of the coarsest kind garnished the made his mark as an essayist and Parlia conversation of men of all ranks, and mentary orator, and was about to go over were not repressed even by the presence to India for a time, to brood over and of ladies. evolve a grand scheme of law for our Eastern empire. Thackeray was travelling and constantly exercising that ready pencil which was not to gain him riches or renown, while his pen lay almost untried, his power unguessed even by himself. Carlyle was trying to find a London bib Yet there were some things in those old days which the veteran now misses with regret notably the courtesy which caused a man to shrink from taking the wall of a lady, or keeping his hat on in her presence, or offering her his arm while a cigar fumed in his mouth. Vaux-liopole who would venture on the publicahall Gardens, too, he considers to be badly replaced by the detestable music-halls, and he holds the cruelty of cock-fighting to be far surpassed by the wholesale heartlessness of pigeon-shooting. It is not with the change of manners, for better or worse, that we purpose now to deal, but rather to take the opportunity of glancing rapidly over the popular literature of the last fifty years, availing ourselves occasionally of the help of Mr. Hall's valuable "Retrospect" and of his beautiful"Book of Memories." Fifty years ago, most of those who had made great names as authors in the brilliant period of letters which succeeded the close of the long war with the first Napoleon, were either dying off, or sinking into that torpid state which has been the fate and the dread of many a man of genius. Lord Byron, the unscrupulous poet of passion, who had burst the icy bounds within which the English Muse had for long years been frozen up, had died of fever at Missolonghi. Sir Walter Scott had just breathed his last sigh at Abbotsford, and left the domain of his torical romance free for any master who could conquer and rule it as he had done. Thomas Campbell was eking out his pension by editing magazines a task for which he was specially unfitted — and otherwise putting his Pegasus to the drudgery of a bookseller's hack. Of the coming men, Charles Dickens tion of the first of his works in his later or grotesque style — the famous "Sartor Resartus." Tennyson, the coming poet of the cycle, was just making his second essay as an author, and beginning to win a small but ever-widening circle of readers. The early part of these fifty years was especially notable for its wealth of talewriters. In 1837 Dickens made his appearance with the "Pickwick Papers," which at once gave him a reputation and attained a success which has scarcely been paralleled by any subsequent fiction, with the exception of Mrs. Stowe's “Uncle Tom's Cabin." Though vastly inferior to his later writings, "Pickwick" developed his talent for minute description and bumorous characterization, extending a vi tality even to inanimate things; and its telling effect was aided not a little by the ingenious illustrations by Seymour and "Phiz," which clothed in tangible embodiment comicalities which might have seemed vague and vapid by themselves. A host of readers looked out for the monthly parts of this boneless tale, with an intensity of eagerness unknown to the present generation, and Sam Weller, with his racy cockneyisms and startling anec dotes and comparisons, was welcomed to many a table as "a fellow of infinite jest and humor," an English Sancho Panza equal in originality to Cervantes' renowned creation. But there was little in ness. "Pickwick" to warn the world of the their eldest son. Who would decline such an tragic power which lay in the grasp of invitation? Who did not know how the inthe young author; and when "Oliver imitable story-teller made happiness for young Twist" burst into life, it came as a sur- and old?-his voice ringing out welcomes like prise to the public, disappointing those joybells in sweet social tune, his conjuring, bis scraps of recitations, his hearty sympathetic who cared for nothing but amusement, receptions pleasantly mingling and following but convincing the reading world that a each other, while his wife-in those happy writer of intense earnestness had devel- days the "Kate" of his affections-illumined oped from the chrysalis of the comic like sweet sunshine her husband's efforts to penny-a-liner. Then followed in due time promote enjoyment all around. It was underthe mixed humor and pathos of "Nicho-stood that after an early supper there was to las Nickleby" and "Martin Chuzzlewit," be "no end, of dancing. This was no overleading up to the most perfect of his dressed juvenile party, but a hilarious gatherworks, the quasi-autobiographic "David ing of young boys and girls; not overlaid, as in our present days they too often are, with Copperfield." We will not attempt to assign to these and his subsequent books finery and affectation, but bounding in their their relative place in the classics of the young fresh life to enjoy a full tide of happiland; but any one who is doubtful of the advance made by Dickens beyond previous writers of the domestic novel, has but to compare "David Copperfield" or "Bleak House" with the tales of that class which had previously held sway in the circulating library. In the one there is life life in all its details, etched with the hand of a master, and worked up into a dramatic ensemble, that is permanently photographed on the sensitive plate of memory; in the other there is but a faint and washy copy of insipid scenes, or a patchy presentment of impossible catastrophes. The former are the perfection of realism tempered with romance; but in enduing these and the other children of his soul with such intensity of life, their author parted with a large portion of his own vital energy, and his brain, taxed too heavily with the conception and realization of human affairs in all their mixed humor and tragedy, and with the "readings" which drained his very heart, sank suddenly beneath the pressure of engage ments to which his nobler and better self, untempted by greed of money or applause, should have given a resolute no. And here, reverting to Mr. Hall's volumes, we note that, although that gentleman knew the great novelist as a boy, who, with bright, intelligent face, brought "penny-a-line" matter to the office where the elder Dickens was employed as a Parliamentary reporter, he prefers to leave the subject almost untouched, as he "can write of Dickens nothing new, nothing important, nothing valuable." But he gives, under another head, Mrs. Hall's pleasant picture of the author's home in the earlier, happier days of his married life. In what is now "the long-ago time" Mr. and Mrs. Charles Dickens invited their friends to a juvenile party in honor of the birthday of We pass on to another style of fiction, in which another master of the art was making his early essays. Mr. Lytton Bulwer afterwards Sir Edward Lytton Bulwer Lytton, and finally Lord Lytton - had attracted much notice by his novels of passion and fashion combined. His earlier works are not always of the most healthy tendency; but he rose to higher ground in his historical romances, and the domestic tales of his later years - "The Caxtons," " My Novel," and "What will He do with It?" show a large advance in moral power and in exquisite delineation of, character. His women especially are wonderfully fine and agreeable when compared with the bulk of the females whom Dickens portrayed. In Thackeray we come to one who will probably live in his works as long as any imaginative writer of this half-century. Comparatively late in producing his really good. work, this great master of satire spent year after year in sketches and studies, trials and essays, which were but prevenient shadows of the perfect forms which were to take their place. It would be absurd here to compare the two great novelists of these times, Dickens and Thackeray, and to dispute about their respective merits. They were totally dif ferent in matter and form, in spirit and body. Dickens could no more have conceived the symmetric beauty of "Esmond," or have added the nice touches of honor and delicacy which abound in that masterpiece, than Thackeray could have irradiated with a flood of light and love and pathos the poor homes and ragged children and world-despised men women whom Dickens's pencil set forth with a magic born of the highest genius. A noble pair of brothers! The one, laboring, with touch upon touch, line upon and |