Westminster Abbey. Cary, who at sixteen published poetry, was very widely read in Italian and French, as well as in the classics and English literature. In 1805 he published the Inferno of Dante in blank verse, and an entire translation of the Divina Commedia in the same measure in 1814. He afterwards translated the Birds of Aristophanes and the Odes of Pindar, and wrote a series of short memoirs in continuation of Johnson's Lives of the Poets, which, with Lives of the early French poets, appeared anonymously in the London Magazine. First brought into notice by Coleridge, whom Cary had met on the seashore at Littlehampton, the English Dante passed through four editions during the life of the translator, and it still ranks as one of the principal translations. It has some of the inevitable defects of a foreign tongue and an alien measure, but has many merits, and is more English and more easily read than the metrical translations that endeavour, by terza rima or otherwise, more closely to imitate the rhythm of the original. Francesca of Rimini. I began: 'Bard! willingly I would address those two together coming, Which seem so light before the wind.' He thus: 'Note thou, when nearer they to us approach, Then by that love which carries them along, Entreat; and they will come.' Soon as the wind Swayed them toward us, I thus framed my speech: 'O wearied spirits! come and hold discourse With us, if by none else restrained.' As doves, By fond desire invited, on wide wings And firm, to their sweet nest returning home, Cleave the air, wafted by their will along; Thus issued, from that troop where Dido ranks, They, through the ill air speeding, with such force My cry prevailed, by strong affection urged. 'O gracious creature, and benign! who goest Visiting, through this element obscure, Us, who the world with bloody stain imbrued; If for a friend the King of all we owned, Our prayer to him should for thy peace arise, Since thou hast pity on our evil plight. Of whatsoe'er to hear or to discourse It pleases thee, that will we hear, of that Freely with thee discourse, while e'er the wind, As now, is mute. The land that gave me birth Is situate on the coast, where Po descends To rest in ocean with his sequent streams. 'Love, that in gentle art is quickly learnt, Entangled him by that fair form, from me Ta'en in such cruel sort, as grieves me still: Love, that denial takes from none beloved, Caught me with pleasing him so passing well, That, as thou see'st, he yet deserts me not. Love brought us to one death: Caina waits The soul who spilt our life.' Such were their words; At hearing which downward I bent my looks, And held them there so long that the bard cried : 'What art thou pondering?' I, in answer, thus: 'Alas! by what sweet thoughts, what fond desire, Must they at length to that ill pass have reached!' Then turning, I to them my speech addressed, And thus began: Francesca! your sad fate, All trembling kissed. The book and writer both Ugolino and his Sons. A small grate Within that mew, which for my sake the name My sons-for they were with me-weep and ask Now had they wakened; and the hour drew near I wept not so all stone I felt within. Through agony I bit; and they who thought I did it through desire of feeding, rose O' the sudden, and cried: 'Father, we should grieve Far less if thou wouldst eat of us: thou gavest These weeds of miserable flesh we wear; Fall one by one 'twixt the fifth day and sixth : Called on them who were dead. Then fasting got The story is told by Ugolino's ghost. During the contests between Guelphs and Ghibellines in 1289, Count Ugolino della Gherardesca, with two sons and two grandsons, was shut up by Archbishop Ruggiero, and left to perish of starvation in what has since been called the Tower of Hunger at Pisa. Ugolino, who had repeatedly allied himself with the Guelfic cities, and had for a time suppressed the Ghibelline party in Pisa in the hope of becoming despot of the city, was finally overthrown by his enemies, headed by the archbishop. Dante describes the count and the archbishop as being deservedly tormented together, 'pent in one hollow of the ice.' This is how Cary renders the passage of Dante that was in Gray's mind when he wrote the first stanza of his Elegy, and was imitated by Byron in the third canto of Don Juan: Now was the hour that wakens fond desire David Ricardo (1772–1823), author of several original treatises on economics, was bred to his own business by his father, a Jewish stockbroker originally from Holland, but through reading Smith's Wealth of Nations in 1799 was stirred to think and write on political economy. His first works were on The High Price of Bullion (1810), Proposals for an Economical and Secure Currency (1816), and Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817). The last work, that on which his reputation rests, is remarkable for its close logical argument and its acumen rather than for any literary merit; it is indeed very hard reading. But it was justly considered the most important treatise on that science, with the single exception of Smith's Wealth of Nations. As such it made an epoch in the science of political economy, and became the text-book of the classical or abstract economic school. His special aim and achievement was to expound the theory of rent as the excess of the produce of the land over the cost of production of that land. And from this thesis came new statements as to wages and value, and as to the incidence of taxation. Ricardo afterwards wrote pamphlets on the Funding System and on Protection to Agriculture. He had amassed great wealth as a stockbroker, and, retiring from business, he entered Parliament as representative for the borough of Portarlington; but he seldom spoke in the House, and only on subjects connected with his favourite studies. He died at his seat of Gatcombe Park in Gloucestershire. His works were edited with a Life by M'Culloch (1846); his letters to Malthus were edited by Bonar in 1887, and those to M'Culloch by Hollander in 1896. James Mill (1773-1836), born a shoemaker's son near Montrose, studied for the ministry at Edinburgh, but in 1802 settled in London as a literary man. He edited and wrote for various periodicals, and in 1806 commenced his History of British India (1817-18). In 1819 the directors of the East India Company made him (though a Radical) assistant-examiner with charge of the revenue department, and in 1832 head of the examiner's office, where he had the control of all the departments of Indian administration. Many of his articles (on government, jurisprudence, colonies, &c.) for the Encyclopædia Britannica were reprinted. In 1821-22 he published his Elements of Political Economy, in 1829 an Analysis of the Human Mind, and in 1835 the Fragment on Mackintosh. He was no mere disciple of Bentham, but a man of profound and original thought, as well as of great reading. In psychology and ethics he carried the association principle further than it had yet been applied. In political economy he followed Ricardo. His mind was eminently logical; he was a special enemy to all vagueness in thought and argument, to all looseness in statement. He was an unsparing critic, and Mackintosh's credit suffered from Mill's attack. His conversation gave a powerful stimulus to many young men like his own son and Grote; he ranked as one of the main moulders of philosophical radicalism, as his views and Grote's came to be called; and he took a leading part in founding University College, London. Throughout life he cherished high ideals for himself and others, and he was a strenuous and unselfish reformer. Clearness and precision are the main merits of his literary style. It was to Mill's disadvantage that when he wrote he had no direct knowledge of India, its peoples and customs; he applied his own precise political principles as a standard for judging men dealing with a civilisation he imperfectly understood. But, as is generally admitted, his History of India remains a great work in spite of the technical blunders specialists have pointed out, and in spite of his somewhat pronounced prejudices. The book dwelt perhaps overmuch on abuses, but it helped to bring about changes in administration; as might be expected, Mill summed up strongly against Warren Hastings. This is his account of The Case of Nuncomar. A few days after this suspicious but ineffectual proceeding, a new prosecution was instituted against Nuncomar. At the suit of a native, he was taken up on a charge of forgery, and committed to the common gaol. He was tried before the Supreme Court, by a jury of Englishmen, convicted, and hanged. No transaction, perhaps, of this whole administration more deeply tainted the reputation of Hastings than the tragedy of Nuncomar. At the moment when he stood forth as the accuser of the Governor-general, he was charged with a crime alleged to have been committed five years before, tried, and executed; a proceeding which could not fail to generate the suspicion of guilt, and of an inability to encounter the weight of his testimony, in the man whose power to have prevented, or to have stopped (if he did not cause), the prosecution, it is not easy to deny. As Hastings, aware of the sinister interpretations to which the destruction of an accuser, in circumstances so extraordinary, would assuredly expose him, chose rather to sustain the weight of those suspicions than to meet the charges by preventing or suspending the fate of the accuser, it is a fair inference, though mere resentment and spite might hurry some men to as great an indiscretion, that from the accusations he dreaded something worse than those suspicions. Mr Francis, in his examination before the House of Commons on the 16th of April 1788, declared that the effect of this transaction upon the inquiries carried on by the Board into the accusations against the Governor was 'to defeat them; that it impressed a general terror on the natives with respect to preferring accusations against men in great power; and that he and his coadjutors were unwilling to expose them to what appeared to him and these coadjutors, as well as themselves, a manifest danger.' The severest censures were very generally passed upon this trial and execution; and it was afterwards exhibited as matter of impeachment against both Mr Hastings, and the Judge who presided in the tribunal. The crime for which Nuncomar was made to suffer was not a capital offence by the laws of Hindustan, either Moslem or Hindu; and it was represented as a procedure full of cruelty and injustice, to render a people amenable to the most grievous severities of a law with which they were unacquainted, and from which, by their habits and associations, their minds were totally estranged. It was affirmed that this atrocious condemnation and execution were upon an expost-facto law, as the statute which created the Supreme Court and its powers was not published till 1774, and the date of the supposed forgery was in 1770; that the law which rendered forgery capital did not extend to India, as no English statute included the colonies, unless where it was expressly stated in the law; that Nuncomar, as a native Indian, for a crime committed against another Indian, not an Englishman, or even a European, was amenable to the native, not the English tribunals; that the evidence adduced was not sufficient to warrant condemnation; and that, although the situation in which the prisoner was placed with regard to a man of so much power as the Governor-general should have suggested to the Judge peculiar circumspection and tenderness, there was every appearance of precipita tion, and of a predetermination to find him guilty and to cut him off. In the defence which was set up by Sir Elijah Impey, the Chief Judge, in his answer at the bar of the House of Commons on the 12th of December 1787, he admitted that a native inhabitant of the provinces at large was not amenable to the English laws or to the English tribunals; and it was not as such, he affirmed, that Nuncomar was tried. But he maintained that a native inhabitant of the English town of Calcutta, which was English property, which had long been governed by Englishmen and English laws, was amenable to the English tribunals, and justly, because he made it his voluntary choice to live under their protection; and that it was in this capacity, namely, that of an inhabitant of Calcutta, that Nuncomar suffered the penalties of the English laws. If the competency of the jurisdiction was admitted, the question of evidence, where evidence was complicated and contradictory, could not admit of any very clear and certain decision; and the Judge opposed the affirmation of its insufficiency by that of the contrary. He denied the doctrine that an English penal statute extended to the colonies only when that extension was expressed. The allegation of precipitation and unfairness, still further of corruption, in the treatment of the accused, he not only denied with strong expressions of abhorrence, but by a specification of circumstances endeavoured to disprove. . . . Of the evidence it may fairly be observed, that though the forgery was completely proved by the oaths of the witnesses to the prosecution, it was as completely disproved by the oaths of the witnesses to the defence: that there was no such difference in the character of the parties or their witnesses as to throw the balance greatly to either of the sides; and that the preponderance, if any, was too weak to support an act of so much importance and delicacy as the condemnation of Nuncomar. Even after the judgment, the case was not without a remedy; the execution might have been stayed till the pleasure of the King was known, and a pardon might have been obtained. This too the Court absolutely refused, and proceeded with unrelenting determination to the execution of Nuncomar; who, on the 5th of August, with a tranquillity and firmness that never were surpassed, submitted to his fate, not only amid the tears and lamentations, but the cries and shrieks of an extraordinary assemblage of his countrymen. For Mill's life and teachings, see his son John Stuart Mill's Autobiography and Professor Bain's James Mill (1882). Andrew Cherry (1762–1812), actor, dramatist, and author of 'The Bay of Biscay,' was the son of a Limerick printer and bookseller. Having at seventeen abandoned his father's business for the stage, he attained some eminence as an actor at Drury Lane, and managed theatres in Swansea and Monmouth. Of his nine or ten plays several were fairly successful, but only The Soldier's Daughter can be said to 'hold the stage.' On the other hand, at least three of his songs bid fair to prove imperishable-The Bay of Biscay,' 'The Green little Shamrock of Ireland,' and 'Tom Moody, the Whipper-in.' There is probably no piece in English literature so familiar to everybody as 'The Bay of Biscay' whose author's name is so utterly unknown; not one in ten thousand who know the song by heart have any idea who wrote it (as is the case with not a few of our most popular songs), or ever heard of Andrew Cherry or his works. Nor is it always easy to see why some songs have attained Lysaght-Tone-Reynolds-Dermody-Hone and maintained their exceptional popularity, though doubtless it depends well-nigh as often on the music as on the words. In this case the composer, John Davy, is also little known. 'Tom Moody' ends with the following characteristic stanza: Thus Tom spoke his friends ere he gave up his breath: Tally-ho! Tally-ho! Edward Lysaght (1763-1811), wit and songwriter, was the son of a proprietor at Brickhill in County Clare; graduated B.A. at Trinity College, Dublin, and M.A. at Oxford; studied law at the Middle Temple; and was called both to the Irish and to the English Bar. Ultimately he practised in Dublin only, where he was a commissioner of bankruptcy, was a successful political pamphleteer, and had a brilliant reputation in literary and social circles. He died in poverty. Among his songs are 'Our Ireland,' 'The man who led the van Of the Irish Volunteers,' and 'Kate of Garnavilla.' 'Kitty of Coleraine' has been claimed for him on doubtful grounds; and 'The Sprig of Shillelah,' usually printed as his, appears to have been by another hand. Some of his best verses were addressed to his godchild Lady Morgan (see page 780). Theobald Wolfe Tone, born a coachmaker's son in Dublin, 20th June 1763, studied there at Trinity College and at the Middle Temple in London, and was called to the Irish Bar in 1789, but acted as secretary of the Catholic Committee, helped to organise the United Irishmen in 1791, and four years later had to flee to America and thence to France. He laboured there incessantly to induce the Directory to invade Ireland, and held a command in Hoche's expedition to Bantry Bay in 1796. In 1798 he again embarked in a small French squadron, which was captured after a fierce fight at the mouth of Lough Swilly. Tone was taken to Dublin, tried, and condemned to be hanged as a traitor, but cut his throat in prison, 19th November 1798. His fragmentary autobiography and journals describing the greater part of his career were edited by his son and published in America in 1826. Written with considerable spirit and vividness, their revelation of an adventurer and a character of reckless audacity has largely helped to make Tone the chief popular hero of rebellious Nationalism in Ireland. They are reprinted in Barry O'Brien's Autobiograpy of Wolfe Tone (1893). Contrasted estimates of Tone may be found in Madden's United Irishmen (3rd series, 1846), and the Duke of Argyll's article in the Nineteenth Century for 1890. 759 George Nugent Reynolds (1770?-1802), author of many songs ('Kathleen O'More' one of them), of a long epic, and of a musical-dramatic piece on the French invasion of Ireland in 1796, was the son of a proprietor at Letterfyan in County Leitrim. His loyalty was suspected by the Government, so that he was removed from his magistracy, and he had come to England to study law a year before his death. He has had the misfortune to have credited to him a number of pieces demonstrably by other authors; thus from 1830 on his friends persistently asserted that Campbell's 'Exile of Erin' was his production. Thomas Dermody (1775-1802), who has been called 'the Irish Chatterton' rather from his sad fate than from the originality of his poetry, was the son of a schoolmaster at Ennis in County Clare. He showed extraordinary aptitude for the classics and a precocious facility in writing English verses of all kinds; but having run away to Dublin, he lost the friends his abilities conciliated by irrepressible idleness and drunkenness, and threw away several chances of a good education. Having enlisted, he behaved well during a spell of foreign service, but, back in England, he swiftly sank into ruinous dissipation, and died in misery. The two or three collections of poems published in his lifetime were after his death collected as The Harp of Erin (2 vols. 1807) by J. G. Raymond, who also published his Life (2 vols. 1806). William Hone (1780–1842), famous as 'infidel' author, publisher, and Radical reformer, was born at Bath the son of strictly religious parents, at ten became a London lawyer's clerk, and at twenty started a book and print shop which soon failed. Already a pronounced democrat, he struggled to make a living by writing for various papers, started The Traveller (1815), and next The Reformist's Register (1817); and made himself notorious by a series of squibs and satires against the Government, some of which, such as The Political Litany, unmistakably contained parodies of the Catechism, the Athanasian Creed, and the litany. He was accordingly prosecuted, but in December 1817 he was acquitted after three separate trials for publishing things calculated to injure public morals and bring the Prayer-book into contempt. Among his later satires, illustrated by George Cruikshank (long his most intimate friend), were The Political House that Jack built, The Queen's Matrimonial Ladder, The Man in the Moon, and The Political Showman. The Apocryphal New Testament (1820) was not designed to promote the reverent study of Scripture; and the Quarterly Review denounced him as 'a poor illiterate creature' and 'a wretch as contemptible as he is wicked'—unjustly, as the sequel showed. Ancient Mysteries dealt largely with the old miracle-plays, and showed some curious reading. But his Miscellanies, The Every-day Book (1826), The Table-book (1827-28), and The Year-book (1829) were recommended by Southey to all interested in our national and local customs as having rendered good service in an important department of literature; they constitute a calendar of popular English amusements, sports, pastimes, ceremonies, manners, customs, and events incident especially to several days of the year. Charles Lamb was as commendatory-'I like you and your book, ingenuous Hone,' was the beginning of verses to him; the Every-day Book was, indeed, dedicated to Lamb. Scott and Christopher North were also hearty in praise of these miscellanies, filled with curious lore. Yet in the end Hone found himself in a debtor's prison, from which his friends extricated him to start him in a coffee-house-also a predestined failure. In 1830 he edited Strutt's Sports and Pastimes, and he contributed to the Penny Magazine and the Patriot. By this time he had become a generally popular personage, old grudges having been forgotten; in the later years of his life he became devout, and used, indeed, to preach for orthodox independent ministers. Among the sixty-four publications given under his name in the Dictionary of National Biography (most of them written, compiled, or edited by himself) are two autobiographical works on his own early life and his conversion in later years. William Stewart Rose (1775-1843), the translator of Ariosto, was the second son of the Treasurer of the Navy. Educated at Eton, he sat in Parliament 1796-1800, and then till 1824 was reading-clerk of the House of Lords; but his tastes were wholly literary. To gratify his father, he began A Naval History of the Late War (vol. i. 1802), which he never completed. Later works were verse translations from the French of the first part of Amadis de Gaul (1803) and of Le Grand's text of Partenopex de Blois (1807); Letters to Henry Hallam, Esq., from the North of Italy (2 vols. 1819), and a free metrical version of Casti's Animali Parlanti (1819), to whose cantos he prefixed introductory addresses to his friends Ugo Foscolo, Hockham Frere, Sir Walter Scott, and others. In 1823 he published a condensed translation of Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato, and commenced his famous version of the Orlando Furioso (vol. viii. 1831). This is not merely Rose's best work-it is still the best extant English translation of Ariosto, the only one which preserves much of the spirit of the original. It was finished at Sir Walter Scott's request. Rose was also author of a poem on The Crusade of St Louis (1810), Rhymes (1837), of epistles to his friends, and of tales and sonnets; and he was an occasional contributor to the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews. Ill-health latterly compelled him to withdraw from society. Hoole in his translation of Ariosto had adopted the heroic couplet, whereas the original ottava rima was reproduced by Rose with some success, as may be seen from these stanzas: Let him make haste his feet to disengage, Nor lime his wings, whom Love has made a prize; And here and there pursue their devious course: Noel Thomas Carrington (1777-1830) was the son of a Plymouth grocer, who served in the navy, taught a school at Maidstone, and for ten years managed successfully a private academy at Plymouth Dock. From his youth he wrote poems, mainly in praise of Devonshire, its scenery, customs, and traditions. His best-known pieces were The Banks of Tamar (1820) and Dartmoor (1826). His collected poems, with a Life, were published in 1830. The extract is on the disappearance from earth of the pixies : They are flown, And night is strangely mute! the hymnings high- |