Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, March 1885

Oh, seize again thy golden quill,
And with its point my bosom thrill,
With magic touch explore my heart,
And bid the tear of passion start.
Thy golden quill Apollo gave,
Drenched first in bright Aonia's wave.
He snatched it fluttering through the sky,
Borne on the vapor of a sigh;
It fell from Cupid's burnished wing
As forcefully he drew the string,
Which sent his keenest, surest dart,
Through a rebellious, frozen heart,
That had, till then, defied his power,
And vacant beat through each dull hour.
Be worthy, then, the sacred loan!
Seated on Fancy's air-built throne;
Immerse it in her rainbow hues,
Nor, what the Godheads bid, refuse.
Apollo Cupid shall inspire,
And aid thee with their blended fire;
The one poetic language give,
The other bid thy passion live,
With soft ideas fill thy lays,
And crown with Love thy wintry days!

The shuttlecock of correspondence, thus fairly started, was diligently tossed to and fro in the World by the two pseudonymous writers; Della Crusca “seized his quill” again and again, and his ideal passion for the invisible Anna Matilda gained in fervor of expression with every fortnight. It is obvious that here was just that element of mystery, of romance, which creates a furore and sets a fashion.

The lady who signed herself “Anna Matilda” was Mrs. Hannah Cowley, the wife of an absent East India captain, then in her forty-fifth year, and known to-day as the authoress of the Belle's Stratagem, a play which still, and deservedly, keeps the stage. Her biographer records the beginning of her literary career as follows: “In the year 1776, some years after her marriage, a sense of power for dramatic writing suddenly struck her whilst sitting with her husband at the theatre. 'So delighted with this?' said she to him; 'why, I could write as well myself.' She then wrote The Runaway. Many will recollect the extraordinary success with which it was brought out.” Her habits of composition were not, perhaps, likely to result in poetry of much excellence. “Catching up her pen immediately as the thought struck her, she always proceeded with the utmost facility and celerity. Her pen and paper were so immediately out of sight again, that those around her could scarcely tell when it was she wrote. She was always much pleased with the description of Michael Angelo making the marble fly around him, as he was chiselling with the utmost swiftness, that he might shape, however roughly, his whole design in unity with one clear conception.” Her preparatory note to her collected “Anna Matilda” poems bears out this account. “The beautiful lines of The Adieu and Recall to Love struck her so forcibly that, without rising from the table at which she read, she answered them. Della Crusca's elegant reply surprised her into another, and thus the correspondence most unexpectedly became settled. Anna Matilda's share in it had little to boast; but she has one claim of which she is proud, that of having been the first to point out the excellence of Della Crusca; if there can be merit in discerning what is so very obvious.” She further apologizes for one of her poems to Della Crusca, on the ground that it was written while sitting for her portrait, the painter interrupting her with “Smile a little,” or “More to the right.” Only that class of mind which grows incredulous when informed that orators prepare their speeches, will expect much from such methods of workmanship.

Nevertheless, to Mrs. Cowley appears to belong the credit, or discredit, of giving to the Della Cruscan poetry a certain turn or development which did much to make it popular. A hint of this development may be seen in the description of the pen, which was “borne on the vapor of a sigh.” It took final shape in such phrases as these: —

Hushed be each ruder note! Soft silence spread
With ermine hand thy cobweb robe around.

Was it the shuttle of the Morn,
That wove upon the cobweb'd thorn
Thy airy lay?

Or in the gaudy spheroids swell
Which the swart Indian's groves illume.

Gauzy zephyrs fluttering o'er the plain,
In Twilight's bosom drop their filmy rain.

Bid the streamy lightnings fly
In liquid peril from thine eye.

Summer tints begemmed the scene,
And silky ocean slept in glossy green.

A large and amusing assortment of this ambitious verbiage, which subsequently became in the eyes of the critics the sole “differentia” of Della Cruscan verse, may be seen in the notes to Gifford's Baviad. It was, however, an after-development, proceeding from a gradual consciousness of flagging powers; the feeling which induced Charles Reade's Triplet to “shove his pen under the thought, and lift it by polysyllables to the true level of fiction.”

The other members of the Florence coterie, who, as I have said, were now back in England, speedily began to swell the Della Cruscan chorus in the columns of the World and the Oracle. Bertie Greathead as “Reuben” became Della Crusca's rival, on paper, in the affections of Anna Matilda; and Parsons, signing himself “Benedict,” in memory of a sojourn in the Benedictine convent of Vallombrosa, deluged with sonnets an imaginary Melissa. Whether Mrs. Piozzi contributed anything beyond tea-party patronage, appears to be doubtful; but, as was only to be expected, London already possessed a score of indigenous rhymesters, eager to pursue the triumph and partake the gale. One of the principal of these was Edward Jerningham, alias “The Bard,” who is commemorated in Macaulay's neat sentence: “Lady Miller who kept a vase wherein fools were wont to put verses, and Jerningham who wrote verses fit to be put into the vase of Lady Miller.” His brother, Sir William, of Cossy Hall, in Norfolk, kept an album which rivalled in celebrity the vase of Bath Easton, and “The Bard” had been a determined poetaster for the last thirty years. He is described as “a mighty gentleman, who looks to be painted, and is all daintification in manner, speech, and dress, singing to his own accompaniment on the harp, whilst he looks the gentlest of all dying Corydons.” Fashionable poets seldom suffer from lack of appreciation. Burke wrote of Jerningham's poem The Shakespeare Gallery, “I have not for a long time seen anything so well finished. The author has caught new fire by approaching in his perihelion so near to the sun of our poetical system.” I think we may be certain, after reading The Shakespeare Gallery, that the patron of Crabbe did not read it.

Another Della Cruscan songstress was Mrs. Robinson, alias “Laura Maria,” known to the public as a former mistress of the Prince of Wales, and authoress of various novels. In rapidity of composition she emulated Mrs. Cowley. “Conversing one evening with Mr. Richard Burke” (the Burke family appear to have been sometimes unfortunate in their poetical acquaintances) “respecting the facility with which modern poetry was composed, Mrs. Robinson repeated nearly the whole of those beautiful lines, 'To him who will understand them.' This improvisatore produced in her auditor not less surprise than admiration, when solemnly assured by its author that this was the first time of its being repeated. Mr. Burke entreated her to commit the poem to writing, a request which was readily complied with; and Mrs. Robinson had afterwards the gratification of finding this offspring of her genius inserted in the Annual Register, with a flattering encomium from the pen of the eloquent and ingenious editor.” She was one of Merry's most ardent admirers.

Winged Ages picture to the dazzled view
Each marked perfection of the sacred few,
Pope, Dryden, Spenser, all that Fame shall raise,
From Chaucer's gloom, till Merry's lucid days.

Her Della Cruscan poems were published under the signature of “Laura,” and she was followed by Cesario, Carlos, Adelaide, Orlando, Arno, and fifty more whose identity can no longer be determined.

A year after his first appearance in the World, Della Crusca printed his poems in a volume, and Anna Matilda speedily followed suit. But this was not enough for the reading public. They further greedily absorbed a collection of Della Cruscan verse, published as The Poetry of the “World,” by Major Topham, the creator and editor of that paper, who, in a dedication to Sheridan, observes: “Of their merit, I am free to say I know no modern poems their superior. I am more happy that your opinion has confirmed mine.” It will be well to make allowance for changing literary fashions before we make too sure that Sheridan is here misrepresented. The Poetry of the “World” afterwards ran through at least four editions as The British Album. As we read the publisher's advertisement of this work, which still abounds on second-hand bookstalls —immorimur studiis lapsoque renascimur ævo– we seem to be walking in the Bond Street of the Prince Regent. “Two beautiful volumes this day published, embellished with genuine portraits of the real Della Crusca and Anna Matilda, engraved in a very superior manner from faithful pictures, under the title of The British Album, being a new edition, revised and corrected by their respective authors, of the celebrated poems of Della Crusca, Anna Matilda, Arley, Laura, Benedict, and the elegant Cesario, “the African Boy;” and others, signed The Bard, by Mr. Jerningham; General Conway's elegy on Miss C. Campbell; Marquis of Townshend's verses on Miss Gardiner; Lord Derby's lines on Miss Farren's portrait.” It is unfortunate that the only pseudonym in the list which it is of much interest to decipher, should still remain a mystery. It is to “Arley” that we owe the admittedly excellent ballad of “Wapping old Stairs,” which first appeared in the World for November 29th, 1787, and shines, a solitary pearl, in the pages of the British Album.

The Della Cruscan mania was at its height – “bedridden old women and girls at their samplers began to rave,” – when Gifford, in search of a quarry for a seasonable satire, came before the town with the Baviad. Of this poem I shall say but little, as it is better known than the writings which it satirised. It contains passages of a certain coarse and rank vigor not difficult of attainment by a student of Dryden and Juvenal. There is, in fact, a sort of Billingsgate raciness about the Baviad; and the notes, which are better written than the poem, contain much amusing matter. The imputation made against the Della Cruscan love-poetry of licentious warmth is, however, wholly absurd – as absurd as the charge made by Mathias, the author of The Pursuits of Literature, that Merry —

Proves a designer works without design,
And fathoms Nature with a Gallic line;

a notion which arose merely from the fact that he identified himself with the anarchists of France, and wrote odes for the Revolution Society, thereby acquiring the name, as Madame d'Arblay tells us, of “Liberty Merry,” and no doubt also the reputation for free-thinking then associated with everything French. As for detecting any breach of decorum in the mannered and falsetto gallantries of insincere Reubens addressing imaginary Annas, the idea was only possible to a satirist who started with the determination to fling all the mud he could find; and, it must be added, when he flung it at irreproachable characters such as Mrs. Piozzi, he did but excite a certain revulsion of sympathy for the victims. Nor was this Gifford's only misrepresentation. He asserted, in order to bring in an apt quotation from Martial, that the interview which finally took place between Merry and Mrs. Cowley, produced mutual disgust. This is not the testimony of Della Crusca himself in the poem of The Interview.

My song subsides, yet ere I close
The lingering lay that feeds my woes,
Ere yet forgotten Della Crusca runs
To torrid gales or petrifying suns,
Ere, bowed to earth, my latest feeling flies,
And the big passion settles on my eyes;
Oh, may this sacred sentiment be known,
That my adoring heart is Anna's own!

Such is the immortality of poetic attachments —

For ever wilt thou love and she be fair.

That the poet was shortly afterward “married to another,” is sufficient to explain the cessation of the correspondence, from which Gifford argues that the interview resulted in aversion. And he might further have reflected that when a poet is reduced to talk of “petrifying suns” his correspondence has been known to cease for lack of ideas.

The satirised poets did their best to retaliate on Gifford by abusive sonnets in the newspapers; and Mr. Jerningham wrote a feebly vituperative poem on Gifford and Mathias. The Della Cruscans had, undeniably, the worst of the battle. The efficacy of Gifford's satire in putting an end to the school is, however, more than doubtful. It is true that it afterwards came to be considered, naturally enough, that he had given the Della Cruscans their death-blow. Scott, for instance, writing in 1827, observes that the Baviad “squabashed at one blow a set of coxcombs who might have humbugged the world long enough”; but that is not the evidence of contemporary witnesses. Seven years after the publication of the Baviad, Mathias, in the preface to The Pursuits of Literature, remarks that “even the Baviad drops from Mr. Gifford's pen have fallen off like oils from the plumage of the Florence and Cruscan geese. I am told that Mr. Greathead and Mr. Merry yet write and speak, and Mr. Jerningham (poor man!) still continues 'sillier than his sheep.”

This statement is in far better accordance both with the facts and the probabilities of the case. Satire, even first-rate satire, does not kill follies. They gradually die of inanition, or are crowded out by newer fashions. Laura Matilda's dirge in the Rejected Addresses is a standing monument of the vitality of Della Cruscanism more than twenty years after its supposed death-blow.

The career as stage-writers of Merry, Greathead, and Jerningham, their bad tragedies and bad farces, do not belong to my present subject. Of the subsequent history of one or two of them a word may, however, be said. Jerningham lived to publish, as late as 1812, two editions of a flaccid poem, called The Old Bard's Farewell, after which he disappears from life and literature. Mrs. Cowley, perhaps the most interesting of the group, died in rural and religious retirement at Tiverton, in 1809. Mrs. Piozzi, as is well known, outlived all her contemporaries, and witnessed the popularity of a modern literature of which she had no very high opinion.

As for Della Crusca, he married, in 1791, Miss Brunton, an actress, whose sister became Countess of Craven, and who had played the heroine in his tragedy of Lorenzo. His reply to the remonstrances of his aunt on the mésalliance shall be quoted, to show that he had his lucid intervals. “She ought,” he said, “to be proud that he had brought a woman of such virtue and talents into the family. Her virtue his marrying her proved; and her talents would all be thrown away by taking her off the stage.” Nevertheless, he afterwards weakly yielded to his relations, and withdrew her from the stage against her own inclination, thereby depriving himself of a source of income with which, as a gambler and bon vivant, he could ill afford to dispense. He accordingly quitted England, and must have betaken himself to France, an adventure which befell him in Paris, in September, 1792, being thus amusingly given by Horace Walpole: —

In the midst of the massacre of Monday last, Mr. Merry, immortalized, not by his verses, but by those of the Baviad, was mistaken for the Abbé Maury, and was going to be hoisted to the lanterne. He cried out that he was Merry, the poet: the ruffians, who probably had never read the scene in Shakespeare, yet replied, “Then we will hang you for your bad verses”; but he escaped better than Cinna, I don't know how, and his fright cost him but a few “gossamery tears,” and I suppose he will be happy to re-cross the “silky ocean,” and shed dolorous nonsense in rhyme over the woes of this happy country.

But England was not to see much more of Merry. English society was probably not so kind to the Radical husband of an actress as it had been to the bachelor of fashion. He withdrew, with his wife, to America, in 1796, and died, three years afterwards, of apoplexy, in his garden at Baltimore.

Merry did not fail to find in his own day apologists of some pretensions to taste. I find in the notes to George Dyer's poem, The Poet's Fate, published in 1797 – which contains early and interesting laudations not only of his school-fellows Lamb and Coleridge, but also of Wordsworth and Southey – the following reference to Merry: – “But, after all, though the hero of the Baviad betrayed glitter and negligence – though he misled the taste of some, too much inclined to admire and imitate defects, yet Merry's writings possess poetical merits; and the spirit of liberty and benevolence which breathes through them is ardent and sincere.” The criticism may be incorrect, but it is worth noting, because it is the criticism of a contemporary. Had it not been for Coleridge's fervently expressed admiration for Bowles's sonnets, which so perplexes critics who do not judge literature from a historical point of view, the world would have continued to sneer at him, with Byron, as “simple Bowles,” and to know him only by Byron's line. The fact is, literary history will never be intelligently written, till it is studied in the spirit of the naturalist, to whom the tares are as interesting as the wheat. We may, perhaps, give the Della Cruscans, with their desperate strainings after poetic fire and poetic diction, the credit of having done something to shake the supremacy of versified prose; of having forwarded, however feebly, the poetic emancipation which Wordsworth and Coleridge were to consummate. The false extravagance of Della Crusca may have cleared the way for the truthful extravagance of Keats. It is, I am aware, customary to attribute the regeneration of English poetry to the French Revolution, which “shook up the sources of thought all over Europe,” but the critics who use these glib catch-words are in no hurry to point out a concrete chain of logical connection between Paris mobs and sequestered poets. Plain judges will ever consider it a far cry from The Rights of Man to Christabel. At all events, Dyer was right in deprecating the savagery of Gifford's satire. The question will apply to other schools and fashions besides that of the “elegant Cesario's,” whom Leigh Hunt designated par excellence as “the plague of the Butterflies.” And here, I think, we touch upon the moral which I promised at the outset.