FIRST POETIC EFFUSION ON AMERICAN SOIL.

circumstances of my situation compel me, I would not print it, even, perhaps, during my life, I so much doubt of its success."

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Thomson, with a disconsolate air, replied, that, as he was a gentleman whom he had never offended, he wondered he should seek an opporSuch was that painful state of tunity to trifle with his misfortunes. fear and doubt experienced by the "No," said Quin, raising his voice, author of the Jerusalem Delivered, "I say I owe you a hundred pounds, when he gave it to the world—a and there it is;" and, suiting the state of suspense, among the chil-action to the word, immediately laid dren of imagination, of which none a bank-note of that value before are more liable to participate in than the too sensitive artist.

THOMSON AND QUIN.

Thomson, the poet, when he first came to London, was in very narrow circumstances, and was many times put to his shifts even for a dinner. Upon the publication of his Seasons, one of his creditors arrested him, thinking that a proper opportunity to get his money.

The report of this misfortune reached the ears of Quin, who had read the Seasons, but never seen their author; and he was told that Thomson was in a sponging-house in Holborn. Thither Quin went, and being admitted into his chamber, "Sir," said he, "you don't know me, but my name is Quin." Thomson said, that though he could not boast of the honour of a personal acquaintance, he was no stranger either to his name or his merit, and invited him to sit down. Quin then told him he was come to sup with him, and that he had already ordered the cook to provide supper, which he hoped he would excuse.

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When supper was over, and the glass had gone briskly about, Mr. Quin told him it was 'now time to enter upon business." Thomson declared he was ready to serve him as far as his capacity would reach, in anything he should command (thinking he was come about some affair relating to the drama). "Sir," says Quin, "you mistake me. I am in your debt. I owe you a hundred pounds, and I am come to pay you."

him.

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Thomson, astonished, begged he would explain himself. 'Why," says Quin, "I will tell you. Soon after I had read your Seasons, I took it into my head, that, as I had something to leave behind me when I died, I would make my will. Among the rest of my legatees, I set down the author of the Seasons for a hundred pounds; and, this day hearing that you were in this house, I thought I might as well have the pleasure of paying the money myself, as order my executors to pay it, when perhaps you might have less need of it; and this, Mr. Thomson, is my business."

RIVAL REMEMBRANCE.

Mr. Gifford to Mr. Hazlitt. "What we read from your pen we remember no more."

Mr. Hazlitt to Mr. Gifford. "What we read from your pen we remember before."

FIRST POETIC EFFUSION ON

AMERICAN SOIL.

The Bangor Whig, in 1850, gave the following statement, as derived from the archives of the ancient Historical Society in Boston :

"The first poetic effusion ever produced on American soil originated in a circumstance which was handsomely explained by one of the full bloods of the Jibawa, or, as we call them, Chippewas. All those who have witnessed the performances of the Indians of the far west, recently in our city, must recollect

the cradle, and the mode in which The second passage is scarcely the Indians bring up their children. less significant:"Soon after our forefathers landed "But in the case of Lord Byron, at Plymouth, some of the young disappointment met him at the people went out into a field where very threshold of life. His moIndian women were picking straw-ther, to whom his affections first berries, and observed several cradles hung upon the boughs of trees, with the infants fastened into them—a novel and curious sight to any European. A gentle breeze sprang up, which waved the cradle to and fro. A young man, one of the party, peeled off a piece of birch bark, and upon the spot wrote the following lines, which have been repeated thousands of times, by thousands of American mothers, very few of whom ever knew or cared for its origin :

And down comes lullaby, baby, and

all.'"

naturally and with order turned, either repelled them rudely, or capriciously trifled with them. In speaking of his early days to a friend at Genoa, a short time before his departure for Greece, he traced his first feelings of pain and humiliation to the coldness with which his mother had received his caresses in infancy, and the frequent taunts on his personal deformity with which she wounded him."

This passage, found on the 146th page, is only excelled in dreadfulness by the following, on the 198th page:

"He had spoken of his mother to Lord Sligo, and with a feeling

that seemed little short of aversion. 'Some time or other,' said Byron, LORD BYRON'S MOTHER. I will tell you why I thus feel Lord Byron was afflicted with a towards her." A few days after, club foot, and when young he sub- when they were bathing together mitted to some very painful opera- in the Gulf of Lepanto, he referred tions to have the deformity re- to his promise, and pointing to his moved, but with no success. His naked leg, exclaimed, 'Look there! mother was a proud, passionate, and it is to her false delicacy at my wicked woman, in whom even the birth I owe that deformity; and yearnings of natural affection yet, as long as I can remember, she seemed stifled. Let us see the has never ceased to taunt and reinfluence his mother exerted on proach me with it. Even a few this brilliant and powerful mind. days before we parted for the last time, on my leaving England, she, in one of her fits of passion, uttered an imprecation on me, praying that I might prove as ill-formed in mind as I am in body!' His look and manner, in relating the frightful circumstance, can only be conceived by those who have seen him in a similar state of excitement."

The readers of Byron's Life must have shuddered to hear him speak of his mother. Moore, the biographer of Byron, speaks three times of this fact, and the passages are so remarkable that we will transcribe them literally. The first is brief, but significant:

"On the subject of his deformed foot," says Moore, in his Byron (vol. i. p. 21), "Byron described the feeling of horror and humiliation that came over him when his mother, in one of her fits of passion, called him a 'lame brat!'"

What an imprecation from the lips of a woman, and that woman a mother-" Praying that I might prove as ill-formed in mind as I am in body!"

HANNAH MORE AND ANN YEARSLEY.

HANNAH MORE AND ANN YEARSLEY.

"I was well acquainted with Ann Yearsley," says Cottle, "and my friendship for Hannah More did not blind my eyes to the merits of her opponent. Candour exacts the acknowledgment that the Bristol milkwoman was a very extraordi nary individual. Her natural abilities were eminent, united with which she possessed an unusually sound masculine understanding, and altogether evinced, even in her countenance, the unequivocal marks of genius.

"It has been customary to charge her with ingratitude (at which all are ready to take fire), but without sufficient cause, as the slight services I rendered her were repaid with a superabundant expression of thankfulness. What then must have been the feelings of her heart towards Mrs. Hannah More, to whom her obligations were so surpassing?

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the generous and influential support of Mrs. H. More; and the profits of the sale amounted to some hundreds of pounds.

"The money thus obtained the milkwoman wished to receive herself, for the promotion of herself in life, and the assistance of her two promising sons, who inherited much of their mother's talent. Hannah More, on the contrary, in conjunction with Mrs. Montague, thought it most advisable to place the money in the funds, in the joint names of herself and Mrs. Montague, as trustees for Ann Yearsley, so that she might receive a small permanent support through life.

"The great error on the part of the milkwoman was in not prevailing on some friend thus to interfere, and calmly to state her case; instead of which, in a disastrous moment, she undertook to plead her own cause, and, without the slightest intention of giving offence, called on her patroness. "The merits of the question in- Ann Yearsley's suit, no doubt, was volved in the dissension between urged with a zeal approaching to Ann Yearsley and Mrs. Hannah impetuosity, and not expressed in More lie in a small compass, and that measured language which prothey deserve to be faithfully stated. priety might have dictated, and The public are interested in the any deficiency in which could not refutation of charges of ingrati- fail to offend her polished and tude, which, if substantiated, would powerful patroness. tend to repress assistance towards

"Ann Yearsley obtained her obthe humbler children of genius.ject, but she lost her friend. Her The baneful effects arising from a name, from that moment, was charge of ingratitude in Ann Years- branded with ingratitude; and seley towards her benefactress might vere indeed was the penalty enbe the proximate means of doom-tailed on her by this act of indising to penury and death some un-cretion. Her good name, with the born Chatterton, or of eclipsing the sun of a future Burns.

"Hannah More discovered that the woman who supplied her family daily with milk was a respectable poetess. She collected her productions, and published them for her benefit, with a recommendatory address. The poems, as they deserved, became popular, doubtless, in a great degree, through

rapidity of the eagle's pinion, was forfeited. Her talents, in a large circle, at once became questionable, or vanished away. Her assumed criminality also was magnified into audacity, in daring to question the honour or oppose the wishes of two such women as Mrs. Hannah More and Mrs. Montague. And thus, through this disastrous turn of affairs, a dark veil was suddenly

thrown over prospects so late the A poem, whether in verse or prose,

most unsullied and exhilarating; and the favourite of fortune sank to rise no more.

conceived in this spirit, and impar tially written, would be the epic of the age." And in this spirit it was that he conceived the plan of his own French Revolution, a History.

POPE'S" ESSAY ON MAN."

"In a rough attack upon Warburton," says D'Israeli, "respecting Pope's privately printing fifteen hundred copies of the Patriot King

"Gloom and perplexities in quick succession oppressed the Bristol milk woman, and her fall became more rapid than her ascent. The eldest of her sons, William Cromartie Yearsley, who had bidden fair to be the prop of her age, and whom she had apprenticed to an eminent engraver, with a pre-of Bolingbroke, which I conceive to mium of one hundred guineas, pre- have been written by Mallet, I find maturely died; and his surviving a particular account of the manner brother soon followed him to the in which the Essay on Man was grave. Ann Yearsley, now a child- written, over which Johnson seems less and desolate widow, retired, to throw great doubts. heart-broken, from the world, on "The writer of this angry epistle, the produce of her library, and in addressing Warburton, says, ' If died many years after, in a state you were as intimate with Pope as of almost total seclusion, at Melk-you pretend, you must know the sham. An inhabitant of the town truth of a fact which several others, lately informed me that she was as well as I, who never had the never seen, except when she took honour of a personal acquaintance her solitary walk in the dusk of with Lord Bolingbroke or Mr. Pope, the evening. She lies buried in have heard. The fact was related Clifton Church-yard." to me by a certain senior fellow of one of our universities, who was very intimate with Mr. Pope.

WRITING FOR THE PRESENT

CARLYLE.

THOMAS

"He started some objections one The editor of the London Monthly day, at Mr. Pope's house, to the Magazine relates an anecdote cha- doctrine contained in the ethic racteristic of Carlyle, and from Epistles; upon which Mr. Pope told which others may take a useful him that he would soon convince hint. "We recollect," says the edi-him of the truth of it, by laying the tor, "walking with Mr. Thomas Carlyle down Regent Street, when he remarked, that we poets had all of us mistaken the argument that we should treat.

argument at large before him; for which purpose he gave him a large prose manuscript to peruse, telling him, at the same time, the author's name. From this perusal, whatever "The past," he said, "is too cool other conviction the doctor might for this age of progress. Look at receive, he collected at least thisthis throng of carriages, this multi-that Mr. Pope had from his friend tude of men and horses, of women not only the doctrine, but even the and children. Every one of these finest and strongest ornaments of his had a reason for going this way, rather than that. If we could penetrate their minds, and ascertain their motives, an epic poem would present itself, exhibiting the business of life as it is, with all its passions and interests, hopes and fears.

ethics.

"Now, if this fact be true,-as I question not but you know it to be so,-I believe no man of candour will attribute such merit to Mr. Pope as you would insinuate, for acknowledging the wisdom and the

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ORIGIN OF JOAN OF ARC.

177

thoughtful; and sightless, looking." This work the poet has composed in prose; but in the leisure of a prison the diction became more poetical in thoughts and in words than the language at that time had yet attained to, and for those who read the black letter, it still retains its impressive eloquence.

friendship of the man who was his instructor in philosophy, nor, consequently, that this acknowledgment, and the dedication of his own system, put into a poetical dress by Mr. Pope, laid his lordship under the necessity of never resenting any injury done to him afterwards. Mr. Pope said no more than the literal truth in calling Lord Bolingbroke his guide, philosopher, and friend." ORIGIN OF "JOAN OF ARC." The existence of this very manu- Mr. Southey, the poet laureate, script volume was authenticated by gives the following as the origin Lord Bathurst, in a conversation of the publication of his poem of with Dr. Blair and others, where Joan of Arc:he said "he had read the manuscript "Towards the close of the year in Lord Bolingbroke's hand-writing, 1794, the poem was announced to and was at a loss whether most to be published by subscription, in a admire the elegance of Lord Bolingbroke's prose, or the beauty of Mr. Pope's verse."-(See the letter of Dr. Blair in Boswell's Life of Johnson.)

DUNGEON COMPOSITIONS.

It was behind the bars of a gloomy window in the Tower, where "every hour appeared to be a hundred winters," that Chaucer, recently from exile, and sore from persecution, was reminded of a work popular in those days, and which had been composed in a dungeon,-the Consolations of Philosophy, by Boethius -and which he himself had formerly translated. He composed his Testament of Love, substituting for the severity of an abstract being the more genial inspiration of love itself. But the fiction was a reality, and the griefs were deeper than the fancies.

quarto volume, at one pound one shilling. Soon afterwards, I became acquainted with my fellow-townsman, Joseph Cottle, who had just commenced business as a printer and bookseller in the city of Bristol. One evening I read to him part of the poem, without any thought of making a proposal concerning it, or expectation of receiving one. He offered me fifty guineas for the copyright, and fifty copies for my subscribers, which was more than the list amounted to; and the offer was accepted as readily as it was proposed.

"It rarely happens that a young author meets with a bookseller as inexperienced and as ardent as himself; and it would be still more extraordinary if such mutual indiscretion did not bring with it cause for regret to both. But this transaction was the commencement of an intimacy which has continued, without the slightest displeasure, to this day.

"At that time few books were printed in the country; and it was seldom indeed that a quarto volume

In this chronicle of the heart the poet moans over "the delicious hours he was wont to enjoy," of his "richesse,” and now of his destitution-the vain regret of his abused confidence the treachery of all that "summer brood" who never ap-issued from a provincial press. A proach the lost friend in "the win- fount of new types was ordered for ter hour" of an iron solitude. The what was intended to be the handpoet energetically describes his con- somest book that Bristol had ever dition there he sat, "witless, yet sent forth; and when the paper

M