sensibility was too mutual, and lasted for some years, till, she died. It was in parting from her that he first sketched his Pastoral Ballad.' Shenstone had the fortitude to refuse marriage; his spirit could not endure that she should participate in that life of deprivations to which he was doomed, by an inconsiderate union with poetry and poverty. But he loved, and his heart was not locked up in the ice of celibacy. He says in a moment of humour, 'It is long since I have considered myself as undone. The world will not perhaps consider me in that light entirely till I have married my maid.' Thomson met a reciprocal passion in his Amanda, while the full tenderness of his heart was ever wasting itself like waters in a desert. As we have been made little acquainted with this part of the history of the poet of the Seasons, I give his own description of these deep feelings from a manuscript letter written to Mallet. To turn my eyes a softer way, to you know who-absence sighs it to me. What is my heart made of? a soft system of low nerves, too sensible for my quiet-capable of being very happy or very unhappy, I am afraid the last will prevail. Lay your hand upon a kindred heart, and despise me not. I know not what it is, but she dwells upon my thought in a mingled sentiment, which is the sweetest, the most intimately pleasing the soul can receive, and which I would wish never to want towards some dear object or another. To have always some secret darling idea to which one can still have recourse amidst the noise and nonsense of the world, and which never fails to touch us in the most exquisite manner, is an art of happiness that fortune cannot deprive us of. This may be called romantic; but whatever the cause is, the effect is really felt. Pray, when you write, tell me when you saw her, and with the pure eye of a friend, when you see her again, whisper that I am her most humble servant.' Even Pope was enamoured of a scornful lady; and as Johnson observed, 'polluted his will with female resentment.' Johnson himself, we are told by Miss Seward, who knew him, 'had always a metaphysical passion for one princess or other, the rustic Lucy Porter, or the haughty Molly Aston, or the sublimated methodistic Hill Boothby; and lastly, the more charming Mrs Thrale. Even in his advanced age, at the height of his celebrity, we hear his cries of lonely wretchedness. I want every comfort; my life is very solitary and very cheerless. Let me know that I have yet a friend-let us be kind to one another.' But the 'kindness' of distant friends is like the polar sun, too far removed to warm. A female is the only friend the solitary can nave, because her friendship is never absent. Even tnose who have eluded individual tenderness, are tortured by an aching void in their feelings. The stoic Akenside, in his books of 'Odes,' has preserved the history of a life of genius in a series of his own feelings. One entitled, At Study,' closes with these memorable lines;

Me though no peculiar fair
Touches with a lover's care;
Though the pride of my desire
Asks immortal friendship's name,
Asks the palm of honest fame

And the old heroic lyre;

Though the day have smoothly gone,
Or to lettered leisure known,

Or in social duty spent ;
Yet at eve my lonely breast
Seeks in vain for perfect rest,
Languishes for true content.'

If ever a man of letters lived in a state of energy and excitement which might raise him above the atmosphere of social love, it was assuredly the enthusiast, Thomas Hollis, who, solely devoted to literature and to republicanism, was occupied in furnishing Europe and America with editions of his favourite authors. He would not marry, lest marriage should interrupt the labours of his platonic politics. But his extraordinary memoirs, while they show an intrepid mind in a robust frame, bear witness to the self-tormentor who had trodden down the natural bonds of domestic life. Hence the deep dejection of his spirits;' those incessant cries, that he has no one to advise,' assist, or cherish those magnanimous pursuits in him.' At length he retreated into the country, in utter hopelessness. I go not into the country for attentions to agriculture as such, nor attentions of interest of any kind, which I have ever despised as such; but as a used man, to pass the remainder of a life in tolerable sanity and quiet, after having given up the flower of it, voluntarily, day, week, month, year after year successive to each other, to public

service, and being no longer able to sustain, in body or
mind, the labours that I have chosen to go through with-
out falling speedily into the greatest disorders, and it might
be imbecility itself. This is not colouring, but the exact
plain truth,' and Gray's,

'Poor moralist, and what art thou?
A solitary fly!

Thy joys no glittering female meets,
No hive hast thou of hoarded sweets.'

Assuredly it would not be a question whether these literary characters should have married, had not Montaigne, when a widower, declared that he would not marry a second time, though it were wisdom itself;'-but the airy Gascon has not disclosed how far Madame was concerned in this anathema.

If the literary man unites himself to a woman whose taste and whose temper, are adverse to his pursuits, he must courageously prepare for a martyrdom. Should a female mathematician be united to a poet, it is probable that she would be left to her abstractions; to demonstrate to herself how many a specious diagram fails when brought into its mechanical operation; or while discovering the infinite varieties of a curve, may deduce her husband's. If she becomes as jealous of his books as other wives are of the mistresses of their husbands, she may act the virago even over his innocent papers. The wife of Bishop Cooper, while her husband was employed on his Lexicon, one day consigned the volume of many years to the flames; and obliged that scholar to begin a second siege of Troy in a second Lexicon. The wife of Whitelocke often destroyed his Mss and the marks of her nails have come down to posterity in the numerous lacerations still gaping in his 'Memorials.' The learned Sir Henry Saville, who devot ed more than half his life, and near ten thousand pounds, to his magnificent edition of St Chrysostom, led a very uneasy life between that Saint and Lady Saville; what with her tenderness for him and her own want of amusement, Saint Chrysostom incurred more than one danger. One of those learned scholars who translated the Scriptures, kept a diary of his studies and his domestic calamities, for they both went on together; busied only among his books, his wife, from many causes, plunged him 100 debt; he was compelled to make the last sacrifice of a Inerary man, by disposing of his library. But now, he wubout books, and she worse and worse in temper, discontents were of fast growth between them. Our man of study, found his wife, like the remora, a little fish, sticking at the bottom of his ship impeding its progress. He desperately resolved to fly from the country and his wife. There is à cool entry in the diary, on a warm proceeding, one morning; wherein he expresses some curiosity to know the cause of his wife being out of temper! Simplicity of a patient scholar* The present matrimonial case, however, terminated in unexpected happiness; the wife, after having forced her husband to be deprived of his library, to be daily chronicling her caprices, and finally, to take the serious resolution of abandoning his country, yet, living in good old times, religion and conscience united them again; and, as the connubial diarist ingeniously describes this second marriage of himself and his wife, made it be with them, as surgeons say it is with a fractured bone, if once well set, the stronger for a fracture.' A new consolation for do mestic ruptures!

Observe the errors and infirmities of the greatest men of genius in their matrimonial connections. Milton carried wives; his first wife was the object of sudden fancy. He nothing of the greatness of his mind, in the choice of his left the metropolis, and unexpectedly returned a married man; united to a woman of such uncongenial dispositions, that the romp was frightened at the literary habits of the great poet, found his house solitary, beat his nephews, and ran away after a single month's residence! to this circumstance, we owe his famous treatise on Divorce, and a party, (by no means extinct.) who, having made as ill choices in their wives, were for divorcing, as fast as they had been for marrying, calling themselves Miltonast. When we find that Moliere, so skilful in human life, mare ried a girl from his own troop, who made him experience

*The entry may amuse. Hodie, nescio qua intemper's uxorem meam agitavit, nam pecuniam latam projecí humi, ac sic irata discessit. This day, I know not the cause of the ill-temper of my wife; when I gave her money for daily passion. For some, this Flemish picture must be too farmexpences, she flung it upon the ground and departed m fiar to please, too minute a copy of vulgar life.

all those bitter disgusts and ridiculous embarrassments which he himself played off at the Theatre; that Addison's fine taste in morals and in life, could suffer the ambition of a courtier to prevail with himself to seek a Countess, whom he describes under the stormy character of Oceana, who drove him contemptuously into solitude, and shortened his days; and, that Steele, warm and thoughtless, was united to a cold precise Miss Prue,' as he calls her, and from whom he never parted without bickerings; in all these cases we censure the great men, not their wives.* Rousseau has honestly confessed his error: he had united himself to a low illiterate woman-and when he retreated into

solitude, he felt the weight which he carried with him. He laments that he had not educated his wife; In a docile age, I could have adorned her mind with talents and know ledge which would have more closely united us in retirement. We should not then have felt the intolerable tædium of a tete à tete; it is in solitude one feels the advantage of living with another who can think.' Thus Rousseau confesses the fatal error, and indicates the right principle.

But it seems not absolutely necessary for the domestic happiness of the literary character, that his wife should be a literary woman. The lady of Wieland was a very pleasing domestic person, who without reading her husband's works, knew he was a great poet. Wieland was apt to exercise his imagination in a sort of angry declamation and bitter amplifications; and the writer of this account in perfect German taste, assures us, that many of his felicities of diction were thus struck out at a heat :' during this frequent operation of his genius, the placable temper of Mrs Wieland overcame the orgasm of the German bard, merely by her admiration and her patience. When the burst was over, Wieland himself was so charmed by her docility, that he usually closed with giving up all his opinions. There is another sort of homely happiness, aptly described in the plain words of Bishop Newton: He found the study of sacred and classic authors ill agreed with butchers' and bakers' bills; and when the prospect of a bishopric opened on him, more servants, more entertainments, a better table, &c.' it became necessary to look out for some clever sensible woman to be his wife, who would lay out his money to the best advantage, and be careful and tender of his health; a friend and companion at all hours, and who would be happier in staying at home than be perpetually gadding abroad.' Such are the wives, not adapted to be the votaries, but who may be the faithful companions through life, even of a man of genius.

6

That susceptibility, which is love in its most compliant forms, is a constitutional faculty in the female character, and hence its docility and enthusiasm has varied with the genius of different ages. When universities were opened to the sex, have they not acquired academic glory? Have not the wives of military men shared in the perils of the field, and as Anna Comnena, and our Mrs Hutchinson, become even their historians? In the age of love and sympathy the female receives an indelible character from her literary associate; his pursuits are even the objects of her thoughts; he sees his tastes reflected in his family, much less by himself, whose solitary labours often preclude him from forming them, than by that image of his own genius in his house-the mother of his children. Antiquity abounds with many inspiring examples of this cameleon reflection of the female character. Aspasia, from the arms of Pericles, borrowing his genius, could instruct the archons how to govern the republic; Portia, the wife of the republican Brutus, devouring the burning coals, showed a glorious suicide which Brutus had approved; while Paulina, the wife of Seneca, when the veins of that philosopher were commanded to be opened, voluntarily chose the same death; the philosopher commanded that her flowing blood should be stopped, but her pallid features ever after showed her still the wife of Seneca! The wife of Lucan is said to have transcribed and corrected the Pharsalia after the death of her husband; the tender mind of the wife had caught the energy of the bard by its intercourse; and when he was no more, she placed his bust on her bed, that she might never close her eyes without being soothed by his image. The picture of a literary wife of antiquity has descended to us, touched by the domestic pencil of a man of genius. It is the susceptible Calpburnia, the lady of the younger Pliny; her affection to me has given her a turn to books-her passion will in

crease with our days, for it is not my youth or my person, which time gradually impairs, but my reputation and my glory, of which she is enamoured.' Could Mrs Hutchinson have written the life of her husband, had she not reflected from the patriot himself, all his devotedness to the country, had she not lent her whole soul to every event which concerned him? This female susceptibility was strong in the wife of Klopstock; our novelist Richardson, who could not read the Messiah in the original, was de sirous of some account of the poem, and its progress. She writes to him that no one can inform him better than herself, for she knows the most of that which is not published, being always present at the birth of the young verses, which begin by fragments here and there, of a subject of which his soul is just then filled. Persons who live as we do have no need of two chambers; we are always in the same; I with my little work, still, still,-only regarding sometimes my husband's sweet face, which is so venerable at that time, with tears of devotion and all the sublimity of the subject-my husband reading me his young verses and suffering my criticisms.' Meta Mollers writes with enthusiasm, and in German English; but he is a pitiful critic who has only discovered the oddness of her language. Gesner declared that whatever were his talents, the person who had most contributed to develope them was his wife. She is unknown to the public; but the history of the mind of such a woman can only be truly discovered in the Letters of Gesner and his Family.' While Gesner gave himself up entirely to his favourite arts, drawing, painting, etching, and composing poems, his wife would often reanimate a genius that was apt to despond in its attempts, and often exciting him to new productions, her certain and delicate taste was attentively consulted by the poet-painter-but she combined the most practical good sense with the most feeling imagination; this forms the rareness of the character-for this same woman, who united with her husband in the education of their children, to relieve him from the interruptions of common business, carried on alone the concerns of his house in la librairie. Her correspondence with her son, a young artist travelling for his studies, opens what an old poet comprehensively terms a gathered mind.' Imagine a woman attending the domestic economy, and the commercial details yet withdrawing out of this business of life into that of the more elevated pursuits of her husband, and the cares and counsels she bestowed on her son to form the artist and the man.

her.

To know this incomparable woman we must hear 'Consider your father's precepts as oracles of wisdom; they are the result of the experience he has collected, not only of life, but of that art which he has acquir ed simply by his own industry.' She would not have her son suffer his strong affection to herself to absorb all other sentiments. Had you remained at home, and been habituated under your mother's auspices to employments merely domestic, what advantage would you have acquired ? I own we should have passed. some delightful winter evenings together; but your love for the arts, and my ambition to see my sons as much distinguished for their talents as their virtues, would have been a constant source of regret at your passing your time in a manner so little worthy of you.' How profound is her observation on the strong but confined attachments of a youth of genius. I have frequently remarked, with some regret, the excessive attachment you indulge towards those who see and feel as you do yourself, and the total neglect with which you seem to treat every one else. I should reproach a man with such a fault who was destined to pass his life in a small and unvarying circle; but in an artist, who has a great object in view, and whose country is the whole world, this disposi tion seems to me likely to produce a great number of incenveniences-alas! my son, the life you have hitherto led in your father's house has been in fact a pastoral life, and not such a one as was necessary for the education of a man whose destiny summons him to the world.'-And when her sou, after meditating on some of the most glorious productions of art, felt himself as he says, 'disheartened and cast down at the unattainable superiority of the artist, and that it was only by reflecting on the immense labour and continued efforts which such master pieces must have required, that I regained my courage and my ardour,' sho observes, this passage, my dear son, is to me as precious as gold, and I send it to you again, because I wish you to impress it strongly on your mind. The remembrance of this may also be a useful preservative from too great con• See Curiosities of Literature, for various anecdotes of 'Li-fidence in your abilities, to which a warm imagination may terary Wives.

sometimes be liable, or from the despondence you might

occasionally feel from the contemplation of grand originals Continue, therefore, my dear son, to form a sound judgment and a pure taste from your own observations; your mind, while yet young and flexible, may receive whatever impressions you wish. Be careful that your abilities do not inspire in you too much confidence, lest it should happen to you as it has to many others, that they have never possessed any greater merit than that of having good abilities.' One more extract to preserve an incident which may touch the heart of genius. This extraordinary woman whose characteristic is that of strong sense with delicacy of feeling, would check her German sentimentality at the moment she was betraying those emotions in which the imagination is so powerfully mixed up with the associated feelings. Arriving at their cottage at Sihlwald, she proceeds-On entering the parlour three small pictures, painted by you, met my eyes. I passed some time in contemplating them. It is now a year, thought I since I saw him trace these pleasing forms; he whistled and sang, and I saw them grow under his pencil; now he is far, far from us. In short, I had the weakness to press my lips on one of these pictures. You well know, my dear son, that I am not much addicted to scenes of a sentimental turn; but to-day, while I considered your works, I could not restrain from this little impulse of maternal feelings. Do not, however, be apprehensive that the tender affection of a mother will ever lead me too far, or that I shall suffer my mind to be too powerfully impressed with the painful sensations to which your absence gives birth. My reason convinces me that it is for your welfare that you are now in a place where your abilities will have opportunities of unfolding, and where you can become great in your Such was the incomparable wife and mother of the Gesners! Will it now be a question whether matrimony is incompatible with the cultivation of the arts? A wife who reanimates the drooping genius of her husband, and a mother who is inspired by the ambition of seeing her sons eminent, is she not the real being which the ancients only personfied in their Muse?

art.'

CHAPTER XIV.
LITERARY FRIENDSHIPS.

Among the virtues which literature inspires, is that of the most romantic friendship. The deliriumof love, and even its lighter caprices, are incompatible with the pursuits of the student; but to feel friendship like a passion, is necessary to the mind of genius, alternately elated and depressed, ever prodigal of feeling, and excursive in knowledge.

The qualities which constitute literary friendship, compared with those of men of the world, must render it as rare as true love itself, which it resembles in that intellectual tenderness of which both so deeply participate. Two atoms must meet out of the mass of nature, of such purity, that when they once adhere, they shall be as one, resisting the utmost force of separation. This literary friendship begins in the dews of their youth,' and may be said not to expire on their tomb. Engaged in similar studies, if one is found to excel, he shall find in the other the tector of his fame. In their familiar conversations, the promemory of the one associates with the fancy of the other; and to such an intercourse, the world owes some of the finer effusions of genius, and some of those monuments of labour which required more than one giant hand.

In the poem Cowley composed on the death of his friend Harvey, this stanza opens a pleasing scene of two young literary friends engaged in their midnight studies.

'Say, for you saw us, ye immortal lights

How oft unwearied have we spent the nights,
Till the Ladæan stars, so famed for love,
Wondered at us from above.

We spent them not in toys, in lust, or wine;
But search of deep philosophy,

Wit, eloquence, and poetry;

Arts which I loved, for they, my friend, were thine.' Milton has not only given the exquisite Lycidas to the memory of one young friend, but his Epitaphium Damonis to another.

Now, mournfully cries the youthful genius, as versified by Langhorne,

To whom shall I my hopes and fears impart,
Or trust the cares and follies of my heart?

The Sonnet of Gray on West, is another beautiful instance of that literary friendship of which we have several instances in our own days, from the school or the college; and which have rivalled in devoted affections any which these pages can record.

Such a friendship can never be the lot of men of the world, for it takes its source in the most elevated feelings; it springs up only in the freshness of nature, and is gathered in the golden age of human life. It is intellectual, and it gaities and factious assemblies. The friendships of the loves solitude; for literary friendship has no convivial men of society move on the principle of personal interest, or to relieve themselves from the listlessness of existence; but interest can easily separate the interested, and as weariness is contagious, the contact of the propagator is watched. Men of the world may look on each other with the same countenances, but not with the same hearts. Literary friendship is a sympathy, not of manners, but of feelings. In the common mart of life may be found intimacies which terminate in complaint and contempt; the more they know one another, the less is their mutual es teem; the feeble mind quarrels with one still more imbecile than himself; the dissolute riot with the dissolute, and despicable. while they despise their companions, they too have become

That perfect unity of feeling, that making of two mdividuals but one being is displayed in such memorable friendships as those of Beaumont and Fletcher; whose labours were so combined that no critic can detect the closely united, that no biographer can compose the me mingled production of either; and whose lives were so moirs of the one without running into the life of the other. Their days were as closely interwoven as their verses. Montaigne and Charron, in the eyes of posterity, are ri vals, but such literary friendship knows no rivalry; such was Montaigne's affection for Charron, that he requested him by his will to bear the arms of the Montaignes; and Charron evinced his gratitude to the manes of his departed friend, by leaving his fortune to the sister of Montaigne. How pathetically Erasmus mourns over the death of his beloved Sir Thomas More-In Moro mihi videor extinc us,' I seem to see myself extinct in More.'-It was a melancholy presage of his own death, which shortly after followed. The Doric sweetness and simplicity of old Isaac Walton, the angler, were reflected in a mind as clear and generous, when Charles Cotton continued the feelings, rather than the little work of Walton. Metas

tasio and Farinelli called each other il Gemello, the Twin and both delighted to trace the resemblance of their lives and fates, and the perpetual alliance of the verse and the voice. Goguet, the author of The Origin of the Arts and Sciences,' bequeathed his MSS. and his books to his friend Fugere, with whom he had long united his affec tions and his studies, that his surviving friend might pro ceed with them; but the author had dred of a slow and painful disorder, while Fugere had watched by the side of his dying friend, in silent despair; the sight of those MSS. and books was his death-stroke; half his soul which had once given them animation was parted from him, and a few weeks terminated his own days. When Loyd heard of the death of Churchill, he neither wished to survive him nor did. The Abbé de St Pierre gave an interesting proof of literary friendship for Varignon the geome trician; they were of congenial dispositions, and St Pierre, when he went to Paris, could not endure to part with Va rignon, who was too poor to accompany him; and St Pierre was not rich. A certain income, however moderate, was necessary for the tranquil pursuits of geometry. St Pierre presented Varignon with a portion of his small income, accompanied by that delicacy of feeling which men of genius who know each other can best conceive: 'I do not give it you,' said St Pierre, as a salary, but an annuity, that thus you may be independent and quit me when you dislike me.' The same circumstance occurred between Akenside and Dyson, who, when the poet was in great danger of adding one more illustrious name to the Calamities of Authors, interposed between him and illfortune, by allowing him an annuity of three hundred a year, and when he found the fame of his literary friend attacked, although not in the habit of composition, Dyson published an able and a curious defence of Akenside's poetical and philosophical character. The name and character of Dyson have been suffered to die away, with out a single tribute of even biographical sympathy; but in the record of literary glory, the patron's name should be inscribed by the side of the literary character; for the

public incurs an obligation whenever a man of genius is bigotry of an ascetic? Rochefoucauld, says the eloquent protected. Dugald Stewart, in private life was a conspicuous examThe statesman Fouquet, deserted by all others, wit-ple of all those moral qualities of which he seemed to deny nessed La Fontaine hastening every literary man to the prison-gate; many have inscribed their works to their disgraced patron, in the hour