The church of the Guillemins was soon crowded by the friends and relatives of the murdered prince. All concurred in execrating the author or authors of this horrid deed. Suspicion at first fell upon Sir Aubert de Canny, who had good reason for hating the deceased duke. Louis of Orleans, some years previously, had carried off his wife, Marietta D'Enghein, and kept her openly until she had borne him a son, afterward the celebrated Dunois. Immediate orders were issued by the king for the arrest of the Knight of Canny. Great sympathy was felt for the widowed Valentina, and her young and fatherless children. No one expressed himself more strongly than the Duke of Burgundy. He sent a kind message to Valentina, begging her to look on him as a friend and protector. While contemplating the body of his victim, he said, "Never has there been committed in the realm of France a fouler murder." His show of regret did not end here: with the other immediate relatives of the deceased prince, he bore the pall at the funeral procession. When the body was removed to the church of the Celestines, there to be interred in a beautiful chapel Louis of Orleans had himself founded and built, Burgundy was observed by the spectators to shed tears. But he was destined soon to assume quite another character, by an almost involuntary act. The provost of Paris, having traced the flight of the assassins, had ascertained beyond doubt that they had taken refuge at the hotel of this very Duke of Burgundy. He presented himself at the council, and undertook to produce the criminals, if permitted to search the residences of the princes. Seized with a sudden panic, the Duke of Burgundy, to the astonishment of all present, became his own accuser: Pale and trembling, he avowed his guilt: "It was I!" he faltered; "the devil tempted me!" The other members of the council shrunk back in undisguised horror. Jean-sans-peur, having made this astounding confession, left the council-chamber, and started, without a moment's delay, for the Flemish frontier. He was hotly pursued by the friends of the murdered Louis; but his measures had been taken with too much prompt resolution to permit of a successful issue to his Orleanist pursuers. Once among his subjects of the Low Countries, he might dare the utmost malice of his opponents.
In the mean time, the will of the deceased duke was made public. His character, like Cæsar's, rose greatly in the estimation of the citizens, when the provisions of his last testament were made known. He desired that he should be buried without pomp in the church of the Celestines, arrayed in the garb of that order. He was not unmindful of the interests of literature and science; nor did he forget to make the poor and suffering the recipients of his bounty. Lastly, he confided his children to the guardianship of the Duke of Burgundy: thus evincing a spirit unmindful of injuries, generous, and confiding. This document also proved, that even in his wild career, Louis of Orleans was at times visited by better and holier aspirations.
Valentina mourned over her husband long and deeply; she did not long survive him; she sunk under her bereavement, and followed him to the grave ere her year of widowhood expired. At first the intelligence of his barbarous murder excited in her breast unwonted indignation. She exerted herself actively to have his death avenged. A few days after the murder, she entered Paris in "a litter covered with white cloth, and drawn by four white horses." All her retinue wore deep mourning. She had assumed for her device the despairing motto:
"Rien ne m'est plus,
Plus ne m'est rien."
Proceeding to the Hôtel St. Pôl, accompanied by her children and the Princess Isabella, the affianced bride of Charles of Orleans, she threw herself at the king's knees, and, in a passion of tears, prayed for justice on the murderer of his brother, her lamented lord. Charles was deeply moved: he also wept aloud. He would gladly have granted her that justice which she demanded, had it been in his power to do so; but Burgundy was too powerful. The feeble monarch dared not offend his overgrown vassal. A process at law was all the remedy the king could offer.
Law was then, as now, a tedious and uncertain remedy, and a rich and powerful traverser could weary out his prosecutor with delays and quibbles equal to our own. Jean-sans-peur returned in defiance to Paris to conduct the proceedings in his own defense. He had erected a strong tower of solid masonry in his hôtel; here he was secure in the midst of his formidable guards and soldiery. For his defense, he procured the services of Jean Petit, a distinguished member of the University of Paris, and a popular orator. The oration of Petit (which has rendered him infamous), was rather a philippic against Louis of Orleans, than a defense of Jean-sans-peur. He labors to prove that the prince deserved to die, having conspired against the king and kingdom. One of the charges – that of having, by incantations, endeavored to destroy the monarch – gives us a singular idea of the credulity of the times, when we reflect that these absurd allegations were seriously made and believed by a learned doctor, himself a distinguished member of the most learned body in France, the University of Paris. The Duke of Orleans conspired "to cause the king, our lord, to die of a disorder, so languishing and so slow, that no one should divine the cause of it; he, by dint of money, bribed four persons, an apostate monk, a knight, an esquire, and a varlet, to whom he gave his own sword, his dagger, and a ring, for them to consecrate to, or more properly speaking, to make use of, in the name of the devil," &c. "The monk made several incantations… And one grand invocation on a Sunday, very early, and before sunrise on a mountain near to the tower of Mont-joy… The monk performed many superstitious acts near a bush, with invocations to the devil; and while so doing he stripped himself naked to his shirt and kneeled down: he then struck the points of the sword and dagger into the ground, and placed the ring near them. Having uttered many invocations to the devils, two of them appeared to him in the shape of two men, clothed in brownish-green, one of whom was called Hermias, and the other Estramain. He paid them such honors and reverence as were due to God our Saviour – after which he retired behind the bush. The devil who had come for the ring took it and vanished, but he who was come for the sword and dagger remained – but afterward, having seized them, he also vanished. The monk, shortly after, came to where the devils had been, and found the sword and dagger lying flat on the ground, the sword having the point broken – but he saw the point among some powder where the devil had laid it. Having waited half-an-hour, the other devil returned and gave him the ring; which to the sight was of the color of red, nearly scarlet, and said to him: 'Thou wilt put it into the mouth of a dead man in the manner thou knowest,' and then he vanished."
To this oration the advocate of the Duchess of Orleans replied at great length. Valentina's answer to the accusation we have quoted, was concise and simple. "The late duke, Louis of Orleans, was a prince of too great piety and virtue to tamper with sorceries and witchcraft." The legal proceedings against Jean-sans-peur seemed likely to last for an interminable period. Even should they be decided in favor of the family of Orleans, the feeble sovereign dared not carry the sentence of the law into execution against so powerful an offender as the Duke of Burgundy. Valentina knew this; she knew also that she could not find elsewhere one who could enforce her claims for justice – justice on the murderer of her husband – the slayer of the father of her defenseless children. Milan, the home of her girlhood, was a slaughter-house, reeking with the blood of her kindred. Five years previously her father, Giovanni-Galeazzo Visconti, had died of the plague which then desolated Italy. To avoid this terrible disorder he shut himself up in the town of Marignano, and amused himself during his seclusion by the study of judicial astrology, in which science he was an adept. A comet appeared in the sky. The haughty Visconti doubted not that this phenomenon was an announcement to him of his approaching death. "I thank God," he cried, "that this intimation of my dissolution will be evident to all men: my glorious life will be not ingloriously terminated." The event justified the omen.
By his second marriage with Katharina Visconti, daughter of his uncle Bernabos, Giovanni Galeazzo left two sons, still very young, Giovanni-Maria and Philippo-Maria, among whom his dominions were divided, their mother acting as guardian and regent.
All the ferocious characteristics of the Visconti seemed to be centred in the stepmother of Valentina. The Duchess of Milan delighted in executions; she beheaded, on the slightest suspicions, the highest nobles of Lombardy. At length she provoked reprisals, and died the victim of poison. Giovanni-Maria, nurtured in blood, was the worthy son of such a mother. His thirst for blood was unquenchable; his favorite pursuit was to witness the torments of criminals delivered over to bloodhounds, trained for the purpose, and fed only on human flesh. His huntsman and favorite, Squarcia Giramo, on one occasion, for the amusement of his master, threw to them a young boy only twelve years of age. The innocent child clung to the knees of the duke, and entreated that he might be preserved from so terrible a fate. The bloodhounds hung back. Squarcia Giramo seizing the child, with his hunting-knife cut his throat, and then flung him to the dogs. More merciful than these human monsters, they refused to touch the innocent victim.
Facino Cane, one of the ablest generals of the late duke, compelled the young princes to admit him to their council, and submit to his management of their affairs; as he was childless himself, he permitted them to live, stripped of power, and in great penury. To the sorrow and dismay of the Milanese, they saw this salutary check on the ferocious Visconti about to be removed by the death of Facino Cane. Determined to prevent the return to power of the young tyrant, they attacked and massacred Giovanni-Maria in the streets of Milan. While this tragedy was enacting, Facino Cane breathed his last.
Philippo-Maria lost not a moment in causing himself to be proclaimed duke. To secure the fidelity of the soldiery, he married, without delay, the widow of their loved commander. Beatrice di Tenda, wife of Facino Cane, was an old woman, while her young bridegroom was scarcely twenty years of age: so ill-assorted a union could scarcely be a happy one. Philippo-Maria, the moment his power was firmly secured, resolved to free himself from a wife whose many virtues could not compensate for her want of youth and beauty. The means to which he resorted were atrocious: he accused the poor old duchess of having violated her marriage vow, and compelled, by fear of the torture, a young courtier, Michel Orombelli, to become her accuser. The duke, therefore, doomed them both to be beheaded. Before the fatal blow of the executioner made her his victim, Beatrice di Tenda eloquently defended herself from the calumnies of her husband and the base and trembling Orombelli. "I do not repine," she said, "for I am justly punished for having violated, by my second marriage, the respect due to the memory of my deceased husband; I submit to the chastisement of heaven; I only pray that my innocence may be made evident to all; and that my name may be transmitted to posterity pure and spotless."
Such were the sons of Giovanni-Galeazzo Visconti, the half-brothers of the gentle Valentina of Orleans. When she sank broken-hearted into an early grave – her husband unavenged, her children unprotected – she felt how hopeless it would be to look for succor or sympathy to her father's house; yet her last moments were passed in peace. Her maternal solicitude for her defenseless orphans was soothed by the conviction that they would be guarded and protected by one true and faithful friend. Their magnanimous and high-minded mother had attached to them, by ties of affection and gratitude more strong, more enduring than those of blood, one well fitted by his chivalrous nature and heroic bravery to defend and shelter the children of his protectress. Dunois – "the young and brave Dunois" – the bastard of Orleans, as he is generally styled, was the illegitimate son of her husband. Valentina, far from slighting the neglected boy, brought him home to her, nurtured and educated him with her children, cherishing him as if he had indeed, been the son of her bosom. If the chronicles of the time are to be believed, she loved him more fondly than her own offspring. "My noble and gallant boy," she would say to him, "I have been robbed of thee; it is thou that art destined to be thy father's avenger; wilt thou not, for my sake, who have loved thee so well, protect and cherish these helpless little ones?"
Long years after the death of Valentina the vengeance of heaven did overtake Jean-sans-peur of Burgundy: he fell the victim of treachery such as he had inflicted on Louis of Orleans; but the cruel retaliation was not accomplished through the instrumentality or connivance of the Orleanists: Dunois was destined to play a far nobler part. The able seconder of Joan of Arc – the brave defender of Orleans against the besieging English host – he may rank next to his illustrious countrywoman, "La Pucelle," as the deliverer of his country from foreign foes. His bravery in war was not greater than his disinterested devotion to his half-brothers. Well and nobly did he repay to Valentina, by his unceasing devotion to her children, her tender care of his early years. Charles of Orleans, taken prisoner by the English at the fatal battle of Agincourt, was detained for the greater part of his life in captivity: his infant children were unable to maintain their rights. Dunois reconquered for them their hereditary rights, the extensive appanages of the house of Orleans. They owed every thing to his sincere and watchful affection.
Valentina's short life was one of suffering and trial; but she seems to have issued from the furnace of affliction "purified seven times." In the midst of a licentious court and age, she shines forth a "pale pure star." Her spotless fame has never been assailed. Piety, purity, and goodness, were her distinguishing characteristics. She was ever a self-sacrificing friend, a tender mother, a loving and faithful wife. Her gentle endurance of her domestic trials recalls to mind the character of one who may almost be styled her contemporary, the "patient Griselda," so immortalized by Chaucer and Boccacio. Valentina adds another example to the many which history presents for our contemplation, to show that suffering virtue, sooner or later, meets with its recompense, even in this life. The broken-hearted Duchess of Orleans became the ancestress of two lines of French sovereigns, and through her the kings of France founded their claims to the Duchy of Milan. Her grandson, Louis the Twelfth, the "father of his people," was the son of the poet Duke of Orleans. On the extinction of male heirs to this elder branch, the descendant of her younger son, the Duke of Angoulême, ascended the throne as Francis the First. Her great-grand-daughter was the mother of Alphonso, Duke of Ferrara, the "magnanimo Alfonso" of the poet Tasso. His younger sister, Leonora, will ever be remembered as the beloved one of the great epic poet of Italy – the ill-starred Torquato Tasso.
The mortal remains of Valentina repose at Blois; her heart is buried with her husband, in the church of the Celestines at Paris. Over the tomb was placed the following inscription:
'Cy gist Loys Duc D'Orleans.
Lequel sur tons duez terriens,
Fut le plus noble en son vivant
Mais ung qui voult aller devant,
Par envye le feist mourir.'
M.N.
THE SNOWY MOUNTAINS IN NEW ZEALAND
The "Wellington Independent" gives the following account of a recent expedition made by the Lieutenant-Governor to the Middle Island: After leaving the Wairau, having traversed the Kaparatehau district, his Excellency and his attendants reached the snowy mountains to the southward, about four short days' journey from the Wairau, and encamped at the foot of the Tapuenuko mountain, which they ascended. Previously to starting into the pass which is supposed to exist between the Wairau and Port Cooper plains, his Excellency ascended the great snowy mountain which forms the principal peak of the Kaikoras, and which attains an elevation of at least 9000 feet, the upper part being heavily covered with snow to a great depth. He succeeded in reaching the top of the mountain, but so late as to be unable to push on to the southern edge of the summit, when an extensive view southwards would have been obtained. In returning, a steep face of the hill (little less than perpendicular), down which hung a bed of frozen snow, had to be crossed for a considerable distance. Mr. Eyre, who had led the party up the dangerous ascent, was in advance with one native, the others being 200 feet before and behind him, on the same perpendicular of the snow. He heard a cry, and looking round, saw Wiremu Hoeta falling down the precipice, pitching from ledge to ledge, and rolling over and over in the intervals, till he fell dead, and no doubt smashed to pieces at a depth below of about 1500 feet, where his body could be seen in a sort of ravine, but where it was impossible to get at it. His Excellency narrowly escaped from similar destruction, having lost both feet from under him, and only saving himself by the use of an iron-shod pole which he carried. Another of the natives had a still narrower escape, having actually fallen about fifteen yards, when he succeeded in clutching a rock and saving himself. The gloom which this unfortunate event caused, and the uncertainty of crossing the rivers while the snows are melting, induced his Excellency to return.
GENIUS
Self-communion and solitude are its daily bread; for what is genius but a great and strongly-marked individuality – but an original creative being, standing forth alone amidst the undistinguishable throng of our everyday world? Genius is a lonely power; it is not communicative; it is not the gift of a crowd; it is not a reflection cast from without upon the soul. It is essentially an inward light, diffusing its clear and glorious radiance over the external world. It is a broad flood, pouring freely forth its deep waters; but with its source forever hidden from human ken. It is the creator, not the creature it calls forth glorious and immortal shapes; but it is called into being by none – save God. —Women in France during the Eighteenth Century.
[From Household Words.]
FRANCIS JEFFREY
Jeffrey was a year younger than Scott, whom he outlived eighteen years, and with whose career his own had some points of resemblance. They came of the same middle-class stock, and had played together as lads in the High School "yard" before they met as advocates in the Court of Session. The fathers of both were connected with that court; and from childhood, both were devoted to the law. But Scott's boyish infirmity imprisoned him in Edinburgh, while Jeffrey was let loose to Glasgow University, and afterward passed up to Queen's College, Oxford. The boys, thus separated, had no remembrance of having previously met, when they saw each other at the Speculative Society in 1791.
The Oxford of that day suited Jeffrey ill. It suited few people well who cared for any thing but cards and claret. Southey, who came just after him, tells us that the Greek he took there he left there, nor ever passed such unprofitable months; and Lord Malmesbury, who had been there but a little time before him, wonders how it was that so many men should make their way in the world creditably, after leaving a place that taught nothing but idleness and drunkenness. But Jeffrey was not long exposed to its temptations. He left after the brief residence of a single term; and what in after life he remembered most vividly in connection with it, seems to have been the twelve days' hard traveling between Edinburgh and London, which preceded his entrance at Queen's. Some seventy years before, another Scotch lad, on his way to become yet more famous in literature and law, had taken nearly as many weeks to perform the same journey; but, between the schooldays of Mansfield and of Jeffrey, the world had not been resting.
It was enacting its greatest modern incident, the first French Revolution, when the young Scotch student returned to Edinburgh and changed his College gown for that of the advocate. Scott had the start of him in the Court of Session by two years, and had become rather active and distinguished in the Speculative Society before Jeffrey joined it. When the latter, then a lad of nineteen, was introduced (one evening in 1791), he observed a heavy-looking young man officiating as secretary, who sat solemnly at the bottom of the table in a huge woolen night-cap, and who, before the business of the night began, rose from his chair, and, with imperturbable gravity seated on as much of his face as was discernible from the wrappings of the "portentous machine" that enveloped it, apologized for having left home with a bad toothache. This was his quondam schoolfellow Scott. Perhaps Jeffrey was pleased with the mingled enthusiasm for the speculative, and regard for the practical, implied in the woolen nightcap; or perhaps he was interested by the Essay on Ballads which the hero of the nightcap read in the course of the evening: but before he left the meeting he sought an introduction to Mr. Walter Scott, and they were very intimate for many years afterward.
The Speculative Society dealt with the usual subjects of elocution and debate prevalent in similar places then and since; such as, whether there ought to be an Established Religion, and whether the Execution of Charles I. was justifiable, and if Ossian's poems were authentic? It was not a fraternity of speculators by any means of an alarming or dangerous sort. John Allen and his friends, at this very time, were spouting forth active sympathy for French Republicanism at Fortune's Tavern under immediate and watchful superintendence of the Police; James Mackintosh was parading the streets with Horne Tooke's colors in his hat; James Montgomery was expiating in York jail his exulting ballad on the fall of the Bastile; and Southey and Coleridge, in despair of old England, had completed the arrangements of their youthful colony for a community of property, and proscription of every thing selfish, on the banks of the Susquehanna; but the speculative orators rarely probed the sores of the body politic deeper than an inquiry into the practical advantages of belief in a future state? and whether it was for the interest of Britain to maintain the balance of Europe? or if knowledge could be too much disseminated among the lower ranks of the people?
In short, nothing of the extravagance of the time, on either side, is associable with the outset of Jeffrey's career. As little does he seem to have been influenced, on the one hand, by the democratic foray of some two hundred convention delegates into Edinburgh in 1792, as, on the other, by the prominence of his father's name to a protest of frantic high-tory defiance; and he was justified, not many years since, in referring with pride to the fact that, at the opening of his public life, his view of the character of the first French revolution, and of its probable influence on other countries, had been such as to require little modification during the whole of his subsequent career. The precision and accuracy of his judgment had begun to show itself thus early. At the crude young Jacobins, so soon to ripen into Quarterly Reviewers, who were just now coquetting with Mary Woolstonecraft, or making love to the ghost of Madame Roland, or branding as worthy of the bowstring the tyrannical enormities of Mr. Pitt, he could afford to laugh from the first. From the very first he had the strongest liberal tendencies, but restrained them so wisely that he could cultivate them well.
He joined the band of youths who then sat at the feet of Dugald Stewart, and whose first incentive to distinction in the more difficult paths of knowledge, as well as their almost universal adoption of the liberal school of politics, are in some degree attributable to the teaching of that distinguished man. Among them were Brougham and Homer, who had played together from boyhood in Edinburgh streets, had joined the Speculative on the same evening six years after Jeffrey (who in Brougham soon found a sharp opponent on colonial and other matters), and were still fast friends. Jeffrey's father, raised to a deputy clerk of session, now lived on a third or fourth flat in Buchanan's Court in the Lawn Market, where the worthy old gentleman kept two women servants and a man at livery; but where the furniture does not seem to have been of the soundest. This fact his son used to illustrate by an anecdote of the old gentleman eagerly setting to at a favorite dinner one day, with the two corners of the table cloth tied round his neck to protect his immense professional frills, when the leg of his chair gave way, and he tumbled back on the floor with all the dishes, sauces, and viands a-top of him. Father and son lived here together, till the latter took for his first wife the daughter of the Professor of Hebrew in the University of St. Andrew, and moved to an upper story in another part of town. He had been called to the bar in 1794, and was married eight years afterward. He had not meanwhile obtained much practice, and the elevation implied in removal to an upper flat is not of the kind that a young Benedict covets. But distinction of another kind was at length at hand.
One day early in 1802, "in the eighth or ninth story or flat in Buccleugh Place, the elevated residence of the then Mr. Jeffrey," Mr. Jeffrey had received a visit from Horner and Sydney Smith, when Sydney, at this time a young English curate temporarily resident in Edinburgh, preaching, teaching, and joking with a flow of wit, humanity, and sense that fascinated every body, started the notion of the Edinburgh Review. The two Scotchmen at once voted the Englishman its editor, and the notion was communicated to John Archibald Murray (Lord Advocate after Jeffrey, long years afterward), John Allen (then lecturing on medical subjects at the University, but who went abroad before he could render any essential service), and Alexander Hamilton (afterward Sanscrit professor at Haileybury). This was the first council; but it was extended, after a few days, till the two Thomsons (John and Thomas, the physician and the advocate), Thomas Brown (who succeeded to Dugald Stewart's chair), and Henry Brougham, were admitted to the deliberations. Horner's quondam playfellow was an ally too potent to be obtained without trouble; and, even thus early, had not a few characteristics in common with the Roman statesman and orator whom it was his greatest ambition in after life to resemble, and of whom Shakspeare has told us that he never followed any thing that other men began.
"You remember how cheerfully Brougham approved of our plan at first," wrote Jeffrey to Horner, in April, in the thick of anxious preparations for the start, "and agreed to give us an article or two without hesitation. Three or four days ago I proposed two or three books that I thought would suit him; when he answered with perfect good humor, that he had changed his view of our plan a little, and rather thought now that he should decline to have any connection with it." This little coquetry was nevertheless overcome; and before the next six months were over, Brougham had become an efficient and zealous member of the band.
It is curious to see how the project hung fire at first. Jeffrey had nearly finished four articles, Horner had partly written four, and more than half the number was printed; and yet well-nigh the other half had still to be written. The memorable fasciculus at last appeared in November, after a somewhat tedious gestation of nearly ten months; having been subject to what Jeffrey calls so "miserable a state of backwardness" and so many "symptoms of despondency," that Constable had to delay the publication some weeks beyond the day first fixed. Yet as early as April had Sydney Smith completed more than half of what he contributed, while nobody else had put pen to paper; and shortly after the number appeared, he was probably not sorry to be summoned, with his easy pen and his cheerful wit, to London, and to abandon the cares of editorship to Jeffrey.
No other choice could have been made. The first number settled the point. It is easy to discover that Jeffrey's estimation in Edinburgh had not, up to this time, been in any just proportion to his powers; and that, even with those who knew him best, his playful and sportive fancy sparkled too much to the surface of his talk to let them see the grave, deep currents that ran underneath. Every one now read with surprise the articles attributed to him. Sydney had yielded him the place of honor, and he had vindicated his right to it. He had thrown out a new and forcible style of criticism, with a fearless, unmisgiving, and unhesitating courage. Objectors might doubt or cavil at the opinions expressed; but the various and comprehensive knowledge, the subtle, argumentative genius the brilliant and definite expression, there was no disputing or denying. A fresh, and startling power was about to make itself felt in literature.
"Jeffrey," said his most generous fellow laborer, a few days after the Review appeared, "is the person who will derive most honor from this publication, as his articles in this number are generally known, and are incomparably the best; I have received the greater pleasure from this circumstance, because the genius of that little man has remained almost unknown to all but his most intimate acquaintances. His manner is not at first pleasing; what is worse, it is of that cast which almost irresistibly impresses upon strangers the idea of levity and superficial talents. Yet there is not any man, whose real character is so much the reverse; he has, indeed, a very sportive and playful fancy, but it is accompanied with an extensive and varied information, with a readiness of apprehension almost intuitive, with judicious and calm discernment, with a profound and penetrating understanding." This confident passage from a private journal of the 20th November, 1802 may stand as a remarkable monument of the prescience of Francis Horner.
Yet it was also the opinion of this candid and sagacious man that he and his fellows had not gained much character by that first number of the Review. As a set-off to the talents exhibited, he spoke of the severity – of what, in some of the papers, might be called the scurrility – as having given general dissatisfaction; and he predicted that they would have to soften their tone, and be more indulgent to folly and bad taste. Perhaps it is hardly thus that the objection should have been expressed. It is now, after the lapse of nearly half a century, admitted on all hands that the tone adopted by these young Edinburgh reviewers was in some respects extremely indiscreet; and that it was not simply folly and bad taste, but originality and genius, that had the right to more indulgence at their hands. When Lord Jeffrey lately collected Mr. Jeffrey's critical articles, he silently dropped those very specimens of his power which by their boldness of view, severity of remark, and vivacity of expression, would still as of old have attracted the greatest notice; and preferred to connect with his name, in the regard of such as might hereafter take interest in his writings, only those papers which, by enforcing what appeared to him just principles and useful opinions, he hoped might have a tendency to make men happier and better. Somebody said by way of compliment of the early days of the Scotch Review, that it made reviewing more respectable than authorship; and the remark, though essentially the reverse of a compliment, exhibits with tolerable accuracy the general design of the work at its outset. Its ardent young reviewers took a somewhat too ambitious stand above the literature they criticised. "To all of us," Horner ingenuously confessed, "it is only matter of temporary amusement and subordinate occupation."
Something of the same notion was in Scott's thoughts when, smarting from a severe but not unjust or ungenerous review of Marmion, he said that Jeffrey loved to see imagination best when it is bitted and managed, and ridden upon the grand pas. He did not make sufficient allowance for starts and sallies and bounds, when Pegasus was beautiful to behold, though sometimes perilous to his rider. He would have had control of horse as well as rider, Scott complained, and made himself master of the ménage to both. But on the other hand this was often very possible; and nothing could then be conceived more charming than the earnest, playful, delightful way in which his comments adorned and enriched the poets he admired. Hogarth is not happier in Charles Lamb's company, than is the homely vigor and genius of Crabbe under Jeffrey's friendly leading; he returned fancy for fancy to Moore's exuberance, and sparkled with a wit as keen; he "tamed his wild heart" to the loving thoughtfulness of Rogers, his scholarly enthusiasm, his pure and vivid pictures; with the fiery energy and passionate exuberance of Byron, his bright, courageous spirit broke into earnest sympathy; for the clear and stirring strains of Campbell he had an ever lively and liberal response; and Scott, in the midst of many temptations to the exercise of severity never ceased to awaken the romance and generosity of his nature.
His own idea of the more grave critical claims put forth by him in his early days, found expression in later life. He had constantly endeavored, he said, to combine ethical precepts with literary criticism. He had earnestly sought to impress his readers with a sense, both of the close connection between sound intellectual attainments, and the higher elements of duty and enjoyment; and of the just and ultimate subordination of the former to the latter. Nor without good reason did he take this praise to himself. The taste which Dugald Stewart had implanted in him, governed him more than any other at the outset of his career; and may often have contributed not a little, though quite unconsciously, to lift the aspiring young metaphysician somewhat too ambitiously above the level of the luckless author summoned to his judgment seat. Before the third year of the review had opened, he had broken a spear in the lists of metaphysical philosophy even with his old tutor, and with Jeremy Bentham, both in the maturity of their fame; he had assailed, with equal gallantry, the opposite errors of Priestley and Reid; and, not many years later, he invited his friend Alison to a friendly contest, from which the fancies of that amiable man came out dulled by a superior brightness, by more lively, varied, and animated conceptions of beauty, and by a style which recommended a more than Scotch soberness of doctrine with a more than French vivacity of expression.
For it is to be said of Jeffrey, that when he opposed himself to enthusiasm, he did so in the spirit of an enthusiast; and that this had a tendency to correct such critical mistakes as he may occasionally have committed. And as of him, so of his Review. In professing to go deeply into the principles on which its judgments were to be rested, as well as to take large and original views of all the important question to which those works might relate – it substantially succeeded, as Jeffrey presumed to think it had done, in familiarizing the public mind with higher speculations, and sounder and larger views of the great objects of human pursuit; as well as in permanently raising the standard, and increasing the influence, of all such occasional writings far beyond the limits of Great Britain.
Nor let it be forgotten that the system on which Jeffrey established relations between his writers and publishers has been of the highest value as a precedent in such matters, and has protected the independence and dignity of a later race of reviewers. He would never receive an unpaid-for contribution. He declined to make it the interest of the proprietors to prefer a certain class of contributors. The payment was ten guineas a sheet at first, and rose gradually to double that sum, with increase on special occasions; and even when rank or other circumstances made remuneration a matter of perfect indifference, Jeffrey insisted that it should nevertheless be received. The Czar Peter, when working in the trenches, he was wont to say, received pay as a common soldier. Another principle which he rigidly carried out, was that of a thorough independence of publishing interests. The Edinburgh Review was never made in any manner tributary to particular bookselling schemes. It assailed or supported with equal vehemence or heartiness the productions of Albemarle-street and Paternoster-row. "I never asked such a thing of him but once," said the late Mr. Constable, describing an attempt to obtain a favorable notice from his obdurate editor, "and I assure you the result was no encouragement to repeat such petitions." The book was Scott's edition of Swift; and the result one of the bitterest attacks on the popularity of Swift, in one of Jeffrey's most masterly criticisms.
He was the better able thus to carry his point, because against more potent influences he had already taken a decisive stand. It was not till six years after the Review was started that Scott remonstrated with Jeffrey on the virulence of its party politics. But much earlier even than this, the principal proprietors had made the same complaint; had pushed their objections to the contemplation of Jeffrey's surrender of the editorship; and had opened negotiations with writers known to be bitterly opposed to him. To his honor, Southey declined these overtures, and advised a compromise of the dispute. Some of the leading Whigs themselves were discontented, and Horner had appealed to him from the library of Holland House. Nevertheless, Jeffrey stood firm. He carried the day against Paternoster-row, and unassailably established the all-important principle of a perfect independence of his publishers' control. He stood as resolute against his friend Scott; protesting that on one leg, and the weakest, the Review could not and should not stand, for that its right leg he knew to be politics. To Horner he replied, by carrying the war into the Holland House country with inimitable spirit and cogency. "Do, for Heaven's sake, let your Whigs do something popular and effective this session. Don't you see the nation is now divided into two, and only two parties; and that between these stand the Whigs, utterly inefficient, and incapable of ever becoming efficient, if they will still maintain themselves at an equal distance from both. You must lay aside a great part of your aristocratic feelings, and side with the most respectable and sane of the democrats."
The vigorous wisdom of the advice was amply proved by subsequent events, and its courage nobody will doubt who knows any thing of what Scotland was at the time. In office, if not in intellect, the Tories were supreme. A single one of the Dundases named the sixteen Scots peers, and forty-three of the Scots commoners; nor was it an impossible farce, that the sheriff of a county should be the only freeholder present at the election of a member to represent it in Parliament, should as freeholder vote himself chairman, should as chairman receive the oaths and the writ for himself as sheriff, should as chairman and sheriff sign them, should propose himself as candidate, declare himself elected, dictate and sign the minutes of election, make the necessary indenture between the various parties represented solely by himself, transmit it to the Crown-office, and take his seat by the same night's mail to vote with Mr. Addington! We must recollect such things, when we would really understand the services of such men as Jeffrey. We must remember the evil and injustice he so strenuously labored to remove, and the cost at which his labor was given. We must bear in mind that he had to face day by day, in the exercise of his profession, the very men most interested in the abuses actively assailed, and keenly resolved, as far as possible, to disturb and discredit their assailant. "Oh, Mr. Smith," said Lord Stowell to Sydney, "you would have been a much richer man if you had come over to us!" This was in effect the sort of thing said to Jeffrey daily in the Court of Session, and disregarded with generous scorn. What it is to an advocate to be on the deaf side of "the ear of the Court," none but an advocate can know; and this, with Jeffrey, was the twenty-five years' penalty imposed upon him for desiring to see the Catholics emancipated, the consciences of dissenters relieved, the barbarism of jurisprudence mitigated, and the trade in human souls abolished.
The Scotch Tories died hard. Worsted in fair fight they resorted to foul; and among the publications avowedly established for personal slander of their adversaries, a pre-eminence so infamous was obtained by the Beacon, that it disgraced the cause irretrievably. Against this malignant libeler Jeffrey rose in the Court of Session again and again, and the result of its last prosecution showed the power of the party represented by it thoroughly broken. The successful advocate, at length triumphant even in that Court over the memory of his talents and virtues elsewhere, had now forced himself into the front rank of his profession; and they who listened to his advocacy found it even more marvelous than his criticism, for power, versatility, and variety. Such rapidity yet precision of thought, such volubility yet clearness of utterance, left all competitors behind. Hardly any subject could be so indifferent or uninviting, that this teeming and fertile intellect did not surround it with a thousand graces of allusion, illustration, and fanciful expression. He might have suggested Butler's hero, with the difference that each trope flew to its proper mark, each fancy found its place in the dazzling profusion, and he could at all times, with a charming and instinctive ease, put the nicest restraints and checks on his glowing velocity of declamation. A worthy Glasgow baillie, smarting under an adverse verdict obtained by these facilities of speech, could find nothing so bitter to advance against the speaker as a calculation made with the help of Johnson's Dictionary, to the effect that Mr. Jeffrey, in the course of a few hours, had spoken the whole English language twice over!
" – who could not ope
His mouth but out there flew a trope,"
But the Glasgow baillie made little impression on his fellow citizens; and from Glasgow came the first public tribute to Jeffrey's now achieved position, and legal as well as literary fame. He was elected Lord Rector of the University in 1821 and 1822. Some seven or eight years previously he had married the accomplished lady who survives him, a grand-niece of the celebrated Wilkes; and had purchased the lease of the villa near Edinburgh which he occupied to the time of his death, and whose romantic woods and grounds will long be associated with his name. At each step of his career a new distinction now awaited him, and with every new occasion his unflagging energies seemed to rise and expand. He never wrote with such masterly success for his Review as when his whole time appeared to be occupied with criminal prosecutions, with contested elections, with journeyings from place to place, with examinings and cross-examinings, with speeches, addresses, exhortations, denunciations. In all conditions and on all occasions, a very atmosphere of activity was around him. Even as he sat, apparently still, waiting to address a jury or amaze a witness, it made a slow man nervous to look at him. Such a flush of energy vibrated through that delicate frame, such rapid and never ceasing thought played on those thin lips, such restless flashes of light broke from those kindling eyes. You continued to look at him, till his very silence acted as a spell; and it ceased to be difficult to associate with his small but well-knit figure even the giant-like labors and exertions of this part of his astonishing career.
At length, in 1829, he was elected Dean of the Faculty of Advocates; and thinking it unbecoming that the official head of a great law corporation should continue the editing of a party organ, he surrendered the management of the Edinburgh Review. In the year following, he took office with the Whigs as Lord Advocate, and replaced Sir James Scarlett in Lord Fitzwilliam's borough of Malton. In the next memorable year he contested his native city against a Dundas; not succeeding in his election, but dealing the last heavy blow to his opponent's sinking dynasty. Subsequently he took his seat as Member for Perth, introduced and carried the Scotch Reform bill, and in the December of 1832 was declared member for Edinburgh. He had some great sorrows at this time to check and alloy his triumphs. Probably no man had gone through a life of eager conflict and active antagonism with a heart so sensitive to the gentler emotions, and the deaths of Mackintosh and Scott affected him deeply. He had had occasion, during the illness of the latter, to allude to him in the House of Commons; and he did this with so much beauty and delicacy, with such manly admiration of the genius and modest deference to the opinions of his great Tory friend, that Sir Robert Peel made a journey across the floor of the house to thank him cordially for it.
The House of Commons nevertheless was not his natural element, and when, in 1834, a vacancy in the Court of Session invited him to his due promotion, he gladly accepted the dignified and honorable office so nobly earned by his labors and services. He was in his sixty-second year at the time of his appointment, and he continued for nearly sixteen years the chief ornament of the Court in which he sat. In former days the judgment-seats in Scotland had not been unused to the graces of literature; but in Jeffrey these were combined with an acute and profound knowledge of law less usual in that connection; and also with such a charm of demeanor, such a play of fancy and wit sobered to the kindliest courtesies, such clear sagacity, perfect freedom from bias, consideration for all differences of opinion; and integrity, independence, and broad comprehensiveness of view in maintaining his own; that there has never been but one feeling as to his judicial career. Universal veneration and respect attended it. The speculative studies of his youth had done much to soften all the asperities of his varied and vigorous life, and now, at its close, they gave to his judgments a large reflectiveness of tone, a moral beauty of feeling, and a philosophy of charity and good taste, which have left to his successors in that Court of Session no nobler models for imitation and example. Impatience of dullness would break from him, now and then; and the still busy activity of his mind might be seen as he rose often suddenly from his seat, and paced up and down before it; but in his charges or decisions nothing of this feeling was perceptible, except that lightness and grace of expression in which his youth seemed to linger to the last, and a quick sensibility to emotion and enjoyment which half concealed the ravages of time.
If such was the public estimation of this great and amiable man, to the very termination of his useful life, what language should describe the charm of his influence in his private and domestic circle? The affectionate pride with which every citizen of Edinburgh regarded him rose here to a kind of idolatry. For here the whole man was known – his kind heart, his open hand, his genial talk, his ready sympathy, his generous encouragement and assistance to all that needed it. The first passion of his life was its last, and never was the love of literature so bright within him as at the brink of the grave. What dims and deadens the impressibility of most men, had rendered his not only more acute and fresh, but more tributary to calm satisfaction, and pure enjoyment. He did not live merely in the past as age is wont to do, but drew delight from every present manifestation of worth, or genius, from whatever quarter it addressed him. His vivid pleasure where his interest was awakened, his alacrity and eagerness of appreciation, the fervor of his encouragement and praise, have animated the hopes and relieved the toil alike of the successful and the unsuccessful, who can not hope, through whatever checkered future may await them, to find a more, generous critic, a more profound adviser, a more indulgent friend.