curious and various stores, to astonish his college associates; he already numbered among his friends the most distinguished literary and scientific men of Edinburgh. In 1796-98 he was tutor to the sons of Mr Campbell of Fairfield, whom he accompanied to the University of St Andrews. There he pursued his own researches in Oriental learning, and was licensed to preach; in 1799 he published Discoveries and Settlements of the Europeans in Northern and Western Africa. He also contributed to the Edinburgh Magazine, to 'Monk' Lewis's Tales of Wonder, and to Scott's Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. So ardent was he in assisting Sir Walter that once he walked between forty and fifty miles, and back again, for the sole purpose of visiting an old person who possessed an ancient historical ballad. He cherished a strong desire to visit foreign countries; but when his friends sought from Government on his behalf some appointment for him connected with the learning and languages of the East, the only situation they could obtain for him was that of assistant-surgeon at Madras; and in five or six months Leyden qualified himself for this new profession and obtained a diploma in medicine. In December 1802, summoned to join the Christmas fleet of Indiamen, Leyden finished his poem, the Scenes of Infancy, describing his native Teviotdale, and left Scotland for ever. After his arrival at Madras his health gave way, and he was obliged to remove to Prince of Wales Island. He remained there for some time, visiting Sumatra and the Malayan Peninsula, and amassing the curious information concerning the language, literature, and descent of the Indo-Chinese tribes, which enabled him to lay a most valuable dissertation before the Asiatic Society at Calcutta. An appointment as professor in the Bengal College was soon exchanged for a more lucrative post, that of a judge in Calcutta ; but his spare time was still devoted to Oriental manuscripts and antiquities. 'I may die in the attempt,' he wrote to a friend, 'but if I die without surpassing Sir William Jones a hundredfold in Oriental learning, let never a tear for me profane the eye of a Borderer.' The possibility of an early death in a distant land often crossed the mind of the ambitious student; in his Scenes of Infancy he expressly anticipates a fate he had then no reason to expect: The silver moon at midnight cold and still, tion who should set foot upon Java. When the success of the well-concerted movements of the invaders had given them possession of the town of Batavia, Leyden displayed the same ill-omened precipitation, in his haste to examine a library, or rather a warehouse of books. The apartment had not been regularly ventilated, and either from this circumstance, or already affected by the fatal sickness peculiar to Batavia, Leyden, when he left the place, had a fit of shivering, and declared the atmosphere was enough to give any mortal a fever. The presage was too just: he took his bed, and died in three days (August 28, 1811), on the eve of the battle which gave Java for a while to the British Empire.' Scott alluded to his death in the Lord of the Isles: Scarba's Isle, whose tortured shore Scenes sung by him who sings no more, His bright and brief career is o'er, And mute his tuneful strains ; Quenched is his lamp of varied lore, That loved the light of song to pour : A distant and a deadly shore Has Leyden's cold remains referring here to Leyden's ballad The Mermaid, the scene of which is laid at Corrievreckan; it was published with his Cout of Keeldar in the Border Minstrelsy. Scott too generously said of the opening of the Mermaid that for mere melody of sound it had seldom been excelled in English poetry. Leyden's learning was portentous; he dealt not merely with Sanskrit and Prakrit, Persian and Pushtu, Hindustani and Bengali, but with the tongues of the Dekkan, of the Maldives, of Macassar and Bali, and with various forms of Malay. He translated important works from and into several of these tongues. At home he had edited the Complaynt of Scotlande, Scottish Descriptive Poems (including Albania, heretofore unpublished; see page 440). But he was more powerful as a scholar than as a poet, though his ballads and shorter poems have more inspiration than his longest piece, the Scenes of Infancy. Ode to an Indian Gold Coin. Slave of the dark and dirty mine! What vanity has brought thee here? How can I love to see thee shine So bright, whom I have bought so dear? The tent-ropes flapping lone I hear For twilight converse, arm in arm ; The jackal's shriek bursts on mine ear When mirth and music wont to cheer. By Cherical's dark wandering streams, Of Teviot loved while still a child, Where loves of youth and friendships smiled, Uncursed by thee, vile yellow slave! Fade, day-dreams sweet, from memory fade! The perished bliss of youth's first prime, That once so bright on fancy played, Revives no more in after-time. Far from my sacred natal clime, I haste to an untimely grave; The daring thoughts that soared sublime Are sunk in ocean's southern wave. Slave of the mine! thy yellow light A gentle vision comes by night My lonely widowed heart to cheer: Her eyes are dim with many a tear, That once were guiding stars to mine; Her fond heart throbs with many a fear! I cannot bear to see thee shine. For thee, for thee, vile yellow slave, I crossed the tedious ocean-wave, To roam in climes unkind and new. Dark and untimely, met my view— A wanderer's banished heart forlorn, Of sun-rays tipt with death has borne? From love, from friendship, country, torn, To memory's fond regrets the prey; Vile slave, thy yellow dross I scorn! Go mix thee with thy kindred clay! From 'The Mermaid.' On Jura's heath how sweetly swell The murmurs of the mountain bee! How softly mourns the writhed shell Of Jura's shore, its parent sea! But softer floating o'er the deep, The mermaid's sweet sea-soothing lay, That charmed the dancing waves to sleep, Before the bark of Colonsay. Aloft the purple pennons wave, As, parting gay from Crinan's shore, From Morven's wars, the seamen brave Their gallant chieftain homeward bore. In youth's gay bloom, the brave Macphail Still blamed the lingering bark's delay: For her he chid the flagging sail, The lovely maid of Colonsay. 'And raise,' he cried, "the song of love, 'When on this ring of ruby red Shall die,' she said, 'the crimson hue, Know that thy favourite fair is dead, Or proves to thee and love untrue.' Now, lightly poised, the rising oar Disperses wide the foamy spray, And echoing far o'er Crinan's shore, Resounds the song of Colonsay: 'Softly blow, thou western breeze, Softly rustle through the sail! Soothe to rest the furrowy seas, Before my love, sweet western gale! 'Where the wave is tinged with red, And the russet sea-leaves grow, Mariners, with prudent dread, Shun the shelving reefs below. 'As you pass through Jura's sound, Bend your course by Scarba's shore; Shun, O shun, the gulf profound, Where Corrievreckan's surges roar ! 'If from that unbottomed deep, With wrinkled form and wreathèd train, O'er the verge of Scarba's steep, The sea-snake heave his snowy mane. 'Unwarp, unwind his oozy coils, Sea-green sisters of the main, And in the gulf where ocean boils, The unwieldy wallowing monster chain. 'Softly blow, thou western breeze, Thus all to soothe the chieftain's woe, He seemed her parting sigh to hear. The lonely deck he paces o'er, Impatient for the rising day, And still from Crinan's moonlight shore, He turns his eyes to Colonsay. The moonbeams crisp the curling surge, That sea-maid's form, of pearly light, Was whiter than the downy spray, And round her bosom, heaving bright, Her glossy yellow ringlets play. Borne on a foamy crested wave, She reached amain the bounding prow, Then clasping fast the chieftain brave, She, plunging, sought the deep below. Ah! long beside thy feignèd bier, The monks the prayer of death shall say; But downward like a powerless corse, The murmurs sink by slow degrees, No form he saw of mortal mould; It shone like ocean's snowy foam; Her ringlets waved in living gold, Her mirror crystal, pearl the comb. Her pearly comb the siren took, And careless bound her tresses wild; Like music from the greenwood tree, 'Fair is the crystal hall for me Shall sing, when we for love are met. 'How sweet to dance with gliding feet Along the level tide so green, Responsive to the cadence sweet That breathes along the moonlight scene! 'And soft the music of the main Rings from the motley tortoise-shell, While moonbeams o'er the watery plain Seem trembling in its fitful swell.' Proud swells her heart! she deems at last To lure him with her silver tongue, And, as the shelving rocks she passed, She raised her voice, and sweetly sung. In softer, sweeter strains she sung, O sad the Mermaid's gay notes fell, And ever as the year returns, The charm-bound sailors know the day; For sadly still the Mermaid mourns The lovely chief of Colonsay. Leyden's Poetical Remains, with a Memoir, were published in 1819; at his centenary in 1875 two separate editions appeared, besides a reprint of the Scenes of Infancy, with a Life by the Rev. W. W. Tulloch. Scott's Memoir of him appeared in the Edinburgh Annual Register for 1811; and there is much about him in Archibald Constable and his Literary Correspondents (1873), as well as in Lockhart's Life of Scott. George Crabbe, in Byron's judgment 'Nature's sternest painter, yet the best,' was born at Aldeburgh in Suffolk, on the Christmas Eve of 1754. His father was collector of salt-duties, a clever, strong, violent man, who though poor exerted himself to give his boy a good education; he lived to witness his son's growing fame, and, with parental fondness, to transcribe in his own handwriting the poem of The Library. The mother was a meek, religious woman; of three younger brothers, one perished miserably with his whole crew, captain of a slaver whose cargo mutinied triumphantly, and another was lost sight of in Honduras. George got some schooling at Bungay and Stowmarket, and from 1768 to 1774 was surgeon's apprentice at Wickham-Brock and at Woodbridge. In his first place he had to help the ploughboy; in his second he fell in love with Sarah Elmy (Mira '), who lived with her uncle, a wealthy yeoman, at Parham. Then a spell of drudgery in his father's warehouse; nine months in London, picking up surgery cheaply; some three years' struggling practice at Aldeburgh; and at last. in April 1780, with three pounds in his pocket, he sailed again for London, resolved to try his fortune in literature. Eight years before he had written verses for Wheble's Magazine; he had published Inebriety, a Poem (Ipswich, 1775); and now his Candidate soon found a publisher, unluckily a bankrupt one. A season of penury dire as Chatterton's was borne by Crabbe with pious bravery; he had to pawn clothes and instruments; appeals to Lords Thurlow, North, Shelburne met no response; and early in 1781 he saw himself threatened with arrest for debt, when he made his case known to Burke. Forty-one years later he told Lockhart at Edinburgh how, having delivered his letter at Burke's door, he paced Westminster Bridge all night long until daybreak. Burke proved a generous patron; from the hour of their meeting Crabbe was a made man, and as guest at GEORGE CRABBE. From an Engraving after the Portrait by T. Phillips, R.A. Beaconsfield, he met Fox, Dr Johnson, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and others of the statesman's great friends. Lord Thurlow-who now, as in the case of Cowper, came with tardy notice and ungraceful generosity-invited him to breakfast, and at parting presented him with a bank-note for £100. Dodsley that same year brought out the Library; and the very next winter Crabbe took orders, and was licensed to the curacy of his native parish of Aldeburgh. In 1782 Burke procured for him the post of chaplain to the Duke of Rutland at Belvoir Castle; thenceforward he was never in fear of want, but he seems to have felt all the ills of dependence on the great, and in 'The Patron' and other poems has strongly depicted them. In 1783 appeared The Village, already read and corrected by Johnson and Burke. Its success was instant and complete. Some of the descriptions in the poem-as that of the parish workhouse-were copied into all the periodicals, and at once took that place in our national literature they still retain. Thurlow presented him with two small Dorset livings in his gift, and congratulated him, with an oath, on his being as like Parson Adams as twelve to a dozen. In 1783 Crabbe married Miss Elmy; and in 1785, taking the curacy of Stathern, near Belvoir Castle, he bade adieu to the ducal mansion and transferred himself to the village parsonage. In 1787 he exchanged his two small Dorset livings for two of greater value in the Vale of Belvoir, one of them the rectory of Muston, and there he lived for a time; but the poet in him remained silent for many years. After thirteen happy years (17921805) in Suffolk, at Parham, Great Glenham, and Rendham, he returned to Muston, his Leicestershire rectory; and his wife having died there in 1813, exchanged it the next year for Trowbridge in Wiltshire. In 1807 he published his Parish Register, which secured an unprecedented success. The poem had been previously submitted to Fox; parts of it-especially the story of Phoebe Dawson -were among the last things that interested the great Whig on his deathbed. The Borough (1810) is similar in substance but more connected; the Tales in Verse (1812) contain perhaps his finest illustrations of life and character. Crabbe spent a great part of his income at Trowbridge (800 a year) in charity. He was still eagerly active in literary work, and in 1817-18 was engaged on his last notable undertaking, The Tales of the Hall (1819); for which and the remaining copyright of all the earlier poems Mr Murray gave £3000. In this connection Tom Moore has given an amusing illustration of his brother-poet's simplicity in money matters. Thomas Campbell commented on his mildness in literary argument, strange in so stern a poet of nature, and on his 'vigilant shrewdness that almost eluded you by keeping its watch so quietly.' The Tales of the Hall were received with the approval due to an old favourite, but without enthusiasm. In 1822 the now venerable poet paid a visit to Sir Walter Scott in Edinburgh. He arrived the day Scott at Leith welcomed George IV. to Scotland; and it was in Scott's joy at greeting Crabbe as guest that he sat down on and smashed the glass out of which the king had a little before drunk his health, and which Scott had carried off in the skirt of his coat. It was noted that Crabbe soon got wearied of the New Town, but could amuse himself for ever in the Old. His latter years were spent in clerical duties, in social intercourse, and in fossil-hunting; at threescore and ten he was still busy, cheerful, and affectionate. He died at Trowbridge on 3rd February 1832. The Village, the Parish Register, and the shorter tales of Crabbe were his most popular poems. The Tales of the Hall are less interesting, though Edward FitzGerald loved them; they deal with the higher ranks of life, and with them the poet of the poor was hardly at home. Yet some of the episodes are in his best style: Sir Owen Dale, Ruth, Ellen, and other stories are marked with Crabbe's sign-manual-a fidelity to nature which redeems verses otherwise dull enough. His field of observation was narrow, his gift of description somewhat limited, but his pictures have a strong dramatic effect-they are visibly drawn direct from the life. They are often too true; human nature exhibited in its naked reality and with all its defects shocks our vanity and mortifies our pride. The life-experience of the poet gave the bent to his genius. He well knew how untrue and absurd were the pictures of rural life which regularly figured in poetry. His own youth was painfulspent amidst want and misery, changing only from gloom to passion; though in later years he had more of the amenities of refined and intellectual society at his command than Cowper, yet he did not, like Cowper, attempt to paint their manifold charms. When he took up his pen, his mind turned to Aldeburgh and its wild amphibious race-to the parish workhouse, where the wheel hummed doleful through the day-to erring damsels and luckless swains, the prey of overseers or justices or to the haunts of desperate poachers and smugglers, Gipsies and gamblers, where vice and misery stalked undisguised in their darkest forms. He stirred up the dregs of human society, and while exhibiting to the life the hideous and hateful features, yet worked them into moving poetry. Like his own Sir Richard Monday, he never forgot the parish. True, village-life in England in its worst form, with the old poor-laws and game-laws, with a nonresident clergy, displayed a scale of marked contrasts, some bright, some gloomy, and Crabbe drew them all. His Isaac Ashford is as honourable to the humbler English poor as Scott's Jeanie Deans or Dandie Dinmont are to Scottish character. The faithful maid who watched over her dying sailor is a noble tribute to the power of true love amongst the lowly; 'The Parting Hour' and 'The Patron' are equally honourable to the poor and to the middle classes. But no doubt Crabbe was in general a gloomy painter of life; he was irrepressibly driven to depict the unlovely and unamiable; whether for poetic effect or from painful experience, he makes the evil in life predominate over the good; by nature or by force of circumstances, he was a pessimist-a realist, in the sense we associate with the work, in prose and verse, of moderns like Thomas Hardy. Even his pathos and tenderness are generally linked to something harsh, startling, or humiliating, to disappointed hopes or unavailing sorrow. The minuteness with which he dwells on such aspects of life sometimes makes his descriptions tedious and apparently unfeeling; he drags forward every defect, every vice and failing, not for the purpose of educing something good out of the evil, but, as it would seem, merely for the sake of completing the picture. In his higher flights, where scenes of strong passion, vice, or remorse are depicted, Crabbe is a moralist-poet, purifying the heart by terror and pity, and by appalling realisations of the misery and desolation that mark the track of unbridled passion. His story of Sir Eustace Grey in this kind is told with almost terrific power, and with a lyrical cry in its verse. His usual vehicle is the Popian coupletHorace Smith dubbed him 'a Pope in worsted stockings'-much less flowing and melodious than its model, and often ending in points and quibbles. Thus his thrifty housewife, Widow Goe, falls down in sickness, 'Heaven in her eye, and in her hand her keys; the apothecary 'carries fate and physic in his eye.' This kind of thing does really heighten the effect of his humorous and homely descriptions; but it is too much of a mannerism, and it mars the finer passages. As a painter of English scenery Crabbe is as original and forcible as in character-sketching. His seascapes are peculiarly striking; and he invests even sterile marshes and barren sands with interest. His objects are seldom picturesque; but he noted every weed and plant— the purple bloom of the heath, the dwarfish flowers among the wild gorse, the slender grass of the sheep-walk, and even the pebbles, seaweed, and shells amid 'the glittering waters on the shingles rolled;' and he passionately loved the sea. It will be remembered by all readers of Lockhart's Life of Scott how on his deathbed Scott insisted again and again on having something by Crabbe read to him, and how, though his memory had lost its grip, he listened always with pleasure to passages his son-in-law read to him from his old favourite. Cardinal Newman declared Tales of the Hall to be a poem, whether in conception or in execution, one of the most touching in our language;' proclaimed in The Idea of a University that he read it on its first publication 'with extreme delight, and had never lost his love of it;' and in successive editions still testified that on a re-reading he was 'even more touched by it than heretofore.' Parish Workhouse and Apothecary. Theirs is yon house that holds the parish poor, Whose walls of mud scarce bear the broken door; There, where the putrid vapours, flagging, play, And the dull wheel hums doleful through the day; There children dwell who know no parents' care; Parents who know no children's love dwell there; Heart-broken matrons on their joyless bed, Forsaken wives, and mothers never wed; Dejected widows with unheeded tears, And crippled age with more than childhood-fears; The lame, the blind, and, far the happiest they! The moping idiot and the madman gay. Here too the sick their final doom receive, Here brought amid the scenes of grief to grieve, Where the loud groans from some sad chamber flow, Mixed with the clamours of the crowd below; Here sorrowing they each kindred sorrow scan, And the cold charities of man to man : |