It's amazing how many people you could be friends with if only they'd make the first approach.
"Die? oh, no," he exclaimed--"not die now, after having lived and suffered so long and so much! Die? yes, had I died years ago; but now to die would be, indeed, to give way to the sarcasm of destiny. No, I want to live; I shall struggle to the very last; I will yet win back the happiness of which I have been deprived. Before I die I must not forget that I have my executioners to punish, and perhaps, too, who knows, some friends to reward. Yet they will forget me here, and I shall die in my dungeon like Faria." As he said this, he became silent and gazed straight before him like one overwhelmed with a strange and amazing thought. Suddenly he arose, lifted his hand to his brow as if his brain were giddy, paced twice or thrice round the dungeon, and then paused abruptly by the bed.
Next morning, Monday, after disposing of the embalmed head to a barber, for a block, I settled my own and comrade's bill; using, however, my comrade's money. The grinning landlord, as well as the boarders, seemed amazingly tickled at the sudden friendship which had sprung up between me and Queequeg--especially as Peter Coffin's cock and bull stories about him had previously so much alarmed me concerning the very person whom I now companied with.
Dickens's assumption of the literary purple was as amazing as anything else about him. Accepting the homage of the luminaries of the literary, artistic and polite worlds as if it had been his natural due, he arranges for the settlement of his family, decrees, like another Edmund Kean, that his son is to go to Eton, carries on the most complicated negotiations with his publishers and editors, presides and orates with incomparable force at innumerable banquets, public and private, arranges elaborate villegiatures in the country, at the seaside, in France or in Italy, arbitrates in public on every topic, political, ethical, artistic, social or literary, entertains and legislates for an increasingly large domestic circle, both juvenile and adult, rules himself and his time-table with a rod of iron. In his letter-writing alone, Dickens did a life's literary work. Nowadays no one thinks of writing such letters; that is to say, letters of such length and detail, for the quality is Dickens's own. He evidently enjoyed this use of the pen. Page after page of Forster's _Life_ (750 pages in the _Letters_ edited by his daughter and sister-in-law) is occupied with transcription from private correspondence, and never a line of this but is thoroughly worthy of print and preservation. If he makes a tour in any part of the British Isles, he writes a full description of all he sees, of everything that happens, and writes it with such gusto, such mirth, such strokes of fine picturing, as appear in no other private letters ever given to the public. Naturally buoyant in all circumstances, a holiday gave him the exhilaration of a schoolboy. See how he writes from Cornwall, when on a trip with two or three friends, in 1843. "Heavens! if you could have seen the necks of bottles, distracting in their immense variety of shape, peering out of the carriage pockets! If you could have witnessed the deep devotion of the post-boys, the maniac glee of the waiters! If you could have followed us into the earthy old churches we visited, and into the strange caverns on the gloomy seashore, and down into the depths of mines, and up to the tops of giddy heights, where the unspeakably green water was roaring, I don't know how many hundred feet below.... I never laughed in my life as I did on this journey. It would have done you good to hear me. I was choking and gasping and bursting the buckles off the back of my stock, all the way. And Stanfield"--the painter--"got into such apoplectic entanglements that we were obliged to beat him on the back with portmanteaus before we could recover him." Entry: A
Fox himself was elected for Westminster with fewer votes than Admiral Lord Hood, but with a majority over the ministerial candidate, Sir Cecil Wray. The election was marked by an amazing outflow of caricatures and squibs, by weeks of rioting in which Lord Hood's sailors fought pitched battles in St James's Street with Fox's hackney coachmen, and by the intrepid canvassing of Whig ladies. The beautiful duchess of Devonshire (Georgiana Spencer) is said to have won at least one vote for Fox by kissing a shoemaker who had a romantic idea of what constituted a desirable bribe. The high bailiff refused to make a return, and the confirmation of Fox's election was delayed by the somewhat mean action of the ministry. He had, however, been chosen for Kirkwall, and could fight his cause in the House. In the end he recovered damages from the high bailiff. In his place in parliament he sometimes supported Pitt and sometimes opposed him with effect. His criticism on the ministers' bill for the government of India was sound in principle, though the evils he foresaw did not arise. Little excuse can be made for his opposition to Pitt's commercial policy towards Ireland. But as Fox on this occasion aided the vested interests of some English manufacturers he secured a certain revival of popularity. His support of Pitt's Reform Bill was qualified by a just dislike of the ministers' proposal to treat the possession of the franchise by a constituency as a property and not as a trust. His unsuccessful opposition to the commercial treaty with France in 1787 was unwise and most injurious to himself. He committed himself to the proposition that France was the natural enemy of Great Britain, a saying often quoted against him in coming years. It has been excused on the ground that when he said France he meant the aggressive house of Bourbon. A statesman whose words have to be interpreted by an esoteric meaning cannot fairly complain if he is often misunderstood. In 1788 he travelled in Italy, but returned in haste on hearing of the illness of the king. Fox supported the claim of the prince of Wales to the regency as a right, a doctrine which provoked Pitt into declaring that he would "unwhig the gentleman for the rest of his life." The friendship between him and the prince of Wales (see GEORGE IV.) was always injurious to Fox. In 1787 he was misled by the prince's ambiguous assurances into denying the marriage with Mrs Fitzherbert. On discovering that he had been deceived he broke off all relations with the prince for a year, but their alliance was renewed. During these years he was always in favour of whatever measures could be described as favourable to emancipation and to humanity. He actively promoted the impeachment of Warren Hastings, which had the support of Pitt. He was always in favour of the abolition of the slave trade (which he actually effected during his short tenure of office in 1806), of the repeal of the Test Acts, and of concessions to the Roman Catholics, both in Great Britain and in Ireland. Entry: A
At the death of the elder Benjamin (1817), his son Isaac had moved from the King's Road, Gray's Inn (now Theobald's Road), to No. 6 Bloomsbury Square. Here he entertained the many distinguished friends, literary and political, who had been drawn to him by his "Curiosities" and other ingenious works, and here his son Benjamin also had their acquaintance and conversation. In Bloomsbury Square lived the Austens, and to their house, a great resort of similar persons, Mrs Austen cordially welcomed him. Murray's friendship and associations helped him in like manner, no doubt; and thus was opened to Disraeli the younger a world in which he was to make a considerable stir. The very much smaller society of that day was, of course, more comprehensible to sight and hearing, when once you were within its borders, than the society of this. Reverberations of the gossip of St James's and Mayfair extended to Bloomsbury in those days. Yet Disraeli's range of observation must have been not only brief but limited when he sat down at twenty or twenty-one to write _Vivian Grey_. It is therefore a probable conjecture that Mrs Austen, a clever woman of the world, helped him from her knowledge. His own strongly perceptive imagination (the gift in which he was to excel every other politician of his time) and the bent of political reading and aspiration from boyhood completed his equipment; and so the wonder that so young a man in Disraeli's social position should write a book like _Vivian Grey_ is accounted for. It was published in 1826. The success of this insolently clever novel, the immediate introduction of its author to the great world, and the daring eccentricities of dress, demeanour, and opinion by which he fixed attention on himself there, have always been among the most favourite morsels of Disraeli's history. With them it began, and successive generations of inquirers into a strange career and a character still shrouded and baffling refer to them as settled starting-points of investigation. What was the man who, in such a society and with political aspirations to serve, could thrive by such vagaries as these, or in spite of them? If unaffected, what is to be thought of them as keys to character? If affected, what then? Inquiry still takes this shape, and when any part of Disraeli's career is studied, the laces and essences, the rings over gloves, the jewelled satin shirt-fronts, the guitareries and chibouqueries of his early days are never remote from memory. The report of them can hardly be doubted; and as the last relation was made (to the writer of this article) not with intent to ridicule Mr Disraeli's taste but to illustrate his conquering abilities, the story is repeated here. One of Disraeli's first friends in the world of fashion and genius was Sir Edward Lytton Bulwer. "And," said Sir Henry Bulwer ("Pelham's" brother), "we heard so much at the time of Edward's amazingly brilliant new friend that we were the less inclined to make his acquaintance." At length, however, Sir Edward got up a little dinner-party to convince the doubters. It was to meet at the early hour of those days at one of the Piccadilly hotels. "There was my brother, Alexander Cockburn, myself and (I think) Milnes; but for a considerable time no Mr Disraeli. Waiting for Mr Disraeli did not enhance the pleasure of meeting him, nor when he did arrive did his appearance predispose us in his favour. He wore green velvet trousers, a canary-coloured waistcoat, low shoes, silver buckles, lace at his wrists, and his hair in ringlets." The description of the coat is forgotten. "We sat down. Not one of us was more than five-and-twenty years old. We were all--if you will allow me to include myself--on the road to distinction, all clever, all ambitious, and all with a perfect conceit of ourselves. Yet if on leaving the table we had been severally taken aside and asked which was the cleverest of the party, we should have been obliged to say 'the man in the green velvet trousers.'" This story is a little lamp that throws much light. Here we see at their sharpest the social prejudices that Disraeli had to fight against, provocation of them carried to its utmost in every way open to him, and complete conquest in a company of young men less likely to admit superiority in a wit of their own years, probably, than any other that could have been brought together at that time. Entry: BEACONSFIELD
As an essayist Hazlitt is even more effective than as a critic. Being enabled to select his own subjects, he escapes dependence upon others either for his matter or his illustrations, and presents himself by turns as a metaphysician, a moralist, a humorist, a painter of manners and characteristics, but always, whatever his ostensible theme, deriving the essence of his commentary from himself. This combination of intense subjectivity with strict adherence to his subject is one of Hazlitt's most distinctive and creditable traits. Intellectual truthfulness is a passion with him. He steeps his topic in the hues of his own individuality, but never uses it as a means of self-display. The first reception of his admirable essays was by no means in accordance with their deserts. Hazlitt's political sympathies and antipathies were vehement, and he had taken the unfashionable side. _The Quarterly Review_ attacked him with deliberate malignity, stopped the sale of his writings for a time and blighted his credit with publishers. Hazlitt retaliated by his _Letter to William Gifford_ (1819), accusing the editor of deliberate misrepresentation. In downright abuse and hard-hitting, Hazlitt proved himself more than a match even for Gifford. By the writers in _Blackwood's Magazine_ Hazlitt was also scurrilously treated.[1] He had become estranged from his early friends, the Lake poets, by what he uncharitably but not unnaturally regarded as their political apostasy; and he had no scruples about recording his often very unfavourable opinions of his contemporaries. He displayed, moreover, an exasperating facility in grounding his criticisms on facts that his victims were unable to deny. His inequalities of temper separated him for a time even from Leigh Hunt and Charles Lamb, and on the whole the period of his most brilliant literary success was that when he was most soured and broken. Domestic troubles supervened; he had gone to live in Southampton Buildings in September 1819, and his marriage, long little more than nominal, was dissolved in consequence of the infatuated passion he had conceived for his landlord's daughter, Sarah Walker, a most ordinary person in the eyes of every one else. It is impossible to regard Hazlitt as a responsible agent while he continued subject to this influence. His own record of the transaction, published by himself under the title of _Liber Amoris, or the New Pygmalion_ (1823), is an unpleasant but remarkable psychological document. It consists of conversations between Hazlitt and Sarah Walker, drawn up in the spring of 1822, of a correspondence between Hazlitt and his friend P. G. Patmore between March and July, and an account of the rupture of his relations with Sarah. The business-like dissolution of his marriage under the law of Scotland is related with amazing naïveté by the family biographer. Rid of his wife and cured of his mistress, he shortly afterwards astonished his friends by marrying a widow. "All I know," says his grandson, "is that Mrs Bridgewater became Mrs Hazlitt." They travelled on the continent for a year and then parted finally. Hazlitt's study of the Italian masters during this tour, described in a series of letters contributed to the _Morning Chronicle_, had a deep effect upon him, and perhaps conduced to that intimacy with the cynical old painter Northcote which, shortly after his return, engendered a curious but eminently readable volume of _The Conversations of James Northcote, R.A._ (1830). The respective shares of author and artist are not always easy to determine. During the recent agitations of his life he had been writing essays, collected in 1826 under the title of _The Plain Speaker: opinions on Books, Men and Things_ (1826). _The Spirit of the Age; or Contemporary Portraits_ (1825), a series of criticisms on the leading intellectual characters of the day, is in point of style perhaps the most splendid and copious of his compositions. It is eager and animated to impetuosity, though without any trace of carelessness or disorder. He now undertook a work which was to have crowned his literary reputation, but which can hardly be said to have even enhanced it--_The Life of Napoleon Buonaparte_ (4 vols., 1828-1830). The undertaking was at best premature, and was inevitably disfigured by partiality to Napoleon as the representative of the popular cause, excusable in a Liberal politician writing in the days of the Holy Alliance. Owing to the failure of his publishers Hazlitt received no recompense for this laborious work. Pecuniary anxieties and disappointments may have contributed to hasten his death, which took place on the 18th of September 1830. Charles Lamb was with him to the last. Entry: HAZLITT
DUQUE DE ESTRADA, DIEGO (1589-?), Spanish memoir writer, soldier and adventurer, son of Juan Duque de Estrada, also a soldier of rank, was born at Toledo on the 15th of August 1589. Having been left an orphan when very young, he was educated by a cousin. While still young he was betrothed to his cousin's daughter. One night he found an intruder in the house, a gentleman with whom he was acquainted, and in a fit of jealousy killed both him and the young lady. The prevailing code of honour was considered a sufficient justification for Duque de Estrada's violence, but the law looked upon the act as a vulgar assassination, and he had to flee. After leading a vagabond life in the south of Spain, he was arrested at Ecija, was brought to Toledo, and was there put to the torture with extreme ferocity, in order to extort a general confession as to his life during the past months. He had the strength not to yield to pain, and was finally able to escape from prison, partly by the help of a nun in a religious house which faced the prison, and partly by the intervention of friends. He made his way to Naples, where he entered the service of the duke of Osuna (q.v.), at that time viceroy. Duque de Estrada saw a good deal of fighting both with the Turks and the Venetians; but he is mainly interesting because he was employed by the viceroy in the conspiracy against Venice. He was one of the disguised Spanish soldiers who were sent into the town to destroy the arsenal, and who were warned in time that the conspiracy had been betrayed, and therefore escaped. After the fall of his patron, Duque de Estrada resumed his vagabond life, served under Bethlen Gabor in Transylvania, and in the Thirty Years' War. In 1633 he entered the order of San Juan de Dios, and died at some time after 1637 in Sardinia, where he is known to have taken part in the defence of the island against an attack by the French. He left a book of memoirs, entitled _Comentarios de el desengeñado de si Mismo prueba de todos estados, y eleccion del Mejor de ellos_--"The Commentaries of one who knew his own little worth, the touchtstone of all the state of man, and the choice of the best." They were written at different times, and part has been lost. The style is incorrect, and it would be unsafe to trust them in every detail, but they are amazingly vivid, and contain a wonderful picture of the moral and intellectual state of a large part of Spanish society at the time. Entry: DUQUE
As an actress Nell Gwyn was largely indebted to Dryden, who seems to have made a special study of her airy, irresponsible personality, and who kept her supplied with parts which suited her. She excelled in the delivery of the risky prologues and epilogues which were the fashion, and the poet wrote for her some specially daring examples. It was, however, as the mistress of Charles II. that she endeared herself to the public. Partly, no doubt, her popularity was due to the disgust inspired by her rival, Louise de Kéroualle, duchess of Portsmouth, and to the fact that, while the Frenchwoman was a Catholic, she was a Protestant. But very largely it was the result of exactly those personal qualities that appealed to the monarch himself. She was _piquante_ rather than pretty, short of stature, and her chief beauty was her reddish-brown hair. She was illiterate, and with difficulty scrawled an awkward E. G. at the bottom of her letters, written for her by others. But her frank recklessness, her generosity, her invariable good temper, her ready wit, her infectious high spirits and amazing indiscretions appealed irresistibly to a generation which welcomed in her the living antithesis of Puritanism. "A true child of the London streets," she never pretended to be superior to what she was, nor to interfere in matters outside the special sphere assigned her; she made no ministers, she appointed to no bishoprics, and for the high issues of international politics she had no concern. She never forgot her old friends, and, as far as is known, remained faithful to her royal lover from the beginning of their intimacy to his death, and, after his death, to his memory. Entry: GWYN
The strongest influences in his development about this time were the liberating philosophy of Coleridge, the mystical visions of Swedenborg, the intimate poetry of Wordsworth, and the stimulating essays of Carlyle. On Christmas Day 1832 he took passage in a sailing vessel for the Mediterranean. He travelled through Italy, visited Paris, spent two months in Scotland and England, and saw the four men whom he most desired to see--Landor, Coleridge, Carlyle and Wordsworth. "The comfort of meeting such men of genius as these," he wrote, "is that they talk sincerely." But he adds that he found all four of them, in different degrees, deficient in insight into religious truth. His visit to Carlyle, in the lonely farm-house at Craigenputtock, was the memorable beginning of a lifelong friendship. Emerson published Carlyle's first books in America. Carlyle introduced Emerson's Essays into England. The two men were bound together by a mutual respect deeper than a sympathy of tastes, and a community of spirit stronger than a similarity of opinions. Emerson was a sweet-tempered Carlyle, living in the sunshine. Carlyle was a militant Emerson, moving amid thunderclouds. The things that each most admired in the other were self-reliance, directness, moral courage. A passage in Emerson's Diary, written on his homeward voyage, strikes the keynote of his remaining life. "A man contains all that is needful to his government within himself.... All real good or evil that can befall him must be from himself.... There is a correspondence between the human soul and everything that exists in the world; more properly, everything that is known to man. Instead of studying things without, the principles of them all may be penetrated into within him.... The purpose of life seems to be to acquaint man with himself.... The highest revelation is that God is in every man." Here is the essence of that intuitional philosophy, commonly called Transcendentalism. Emerson disclaimed allegiance to that philosophy. He called it "the saturnalia, or excess of faith." His practical common sense recoiled from the amazing conclusions which were drawn from it by many of its more eccentric advocates. His independence revolted against being bound to any scheme or system of doctrine, however nebulous. He said: "I wish to say what I feel and think to-day, with the proviso that to-morrow perhaps I shall contradict it all." But this very wish commits him to the doctrine of the inner light. All through his life he navigated the Transcendental sea, piloted by a clear moral sense, warned off the rocks by the saving grace of humour, and kept from capsizing by a good ballast of New England prudence. Entry: EMERSON
The friendship, consecrated by the most delightful of biographies, and one of the most gorgeous feasts in the whole banquet of letters, was not so ill-assorted as has been inconsiderately maintained. Boswell's freshness at the table of conversation gave a new zest to every maxim that Johnson enunciated, while Boswell developed a perfect genius for interpreting the kind of worldly philosophy at which Johnson was so unapproachable. Both men welcomed an excuse for avoiding the task-work of life. Johnson's favourite indulgence was to talk; Boswell's great idea of success to elicit memorable conversation. Boswell is almost equally admirable as a reporter and as an interviewer, as a collector and as a researcher. He prepared meetings for Johnson, he prepared topics for him, he drew him out on questions of the day, he secured a copy of his famous letter to Lord Chesterfield, he obtained an almost verbatim report of Johnson's interview with the king, he frequented the tea-table of Miss Williams, he attended the testy old scholar on lengthy peregrinations in the Highlands and in the midlands. "Sir," said Johnson to his follower, "you appear to have only two subjects, yourself and me, and I am sick of both." Yet thorough as the scheme was from the outset, and admirable as was the devotedness of the biographer, Boswell was far too volatile a man to confine himself to any one ambition in life that was not consistent with a large amount of present fame and notoriety. He would have liked to Boswellize the popular idol Wilkes, or Chatham, or Voltaire, or even the great Frederick himself. As it was, during his continental tour he managed in the autumn of 1765 to get on terms with Pasquale di Paoli, the leader of the Corsican insurgents in their unwise struggle against Genoa. After a few weeks in Corsica he returned to London in February 1766, and was received by Johnson with the utmost cordiality. In accordance with the family compact referred to, he was now admitted advocate at Edinburgh, and signalized his return to the law by an enthusiastic pamphlet entitled _The Essence of the Douglas Cause_ (November 1767), in which he vigorously repelled the charge of imposture from the youthful claimant. In the same year he issued a little book called _Dorando_, containing a history of the Douglas cause in the guise of a Spanish tale, and bringing the story to a conclusion by the triumph of Archibald Douglas in the law courts. Editors who published extracts while the case was still _sub judice_ were censured severely by the court of session; but though his identity was notorious the author himself escaped censure. In the spring of 1768 Boswell published through the Foulis brothers of Glasgow his _Account of Corsica, Journal of a Tour to that Island, and Memoirs of Pascal Paoli_. The liveliness of personal impression which he managed to communicate to all his books gained for this one a deserved success, and the _Tour_ was promptly translated into French, German, Italian and Dutch. Walpole and others, jeered, but Boswell was talked about everywhere, as Paoli Boswell or Paoli's Englishman, and to aid the mob in the task of identifying him at the Shakespeare jubilee of 1769 he took the trouble to insert a placard in his hat bearing the legend "Corsica Boswell." The amazing costume of "a Corsican chief" which he wore on this occasion was described at length in the magazines. Entry: BOSWELL