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Title: The love-letters of Mr. H. & Miss R., 1775-1779
Author: Sir Herbert Croft
Editor: Gilbert Burgess
Release date: March 25, 2026 [eBook #78297]
Language: English
Original publication: Chicago: Stone & Kimball, 1895
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78297
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LOVE-LETTERS OF MR. H. & MISS R., 1775-1779 ***
The Love Letters
of
Mr. H. & Miss R.
The Love-Letters of
Mr. H. & Miss R.
1775-1779
EDITED BY
GILBERT BURGESS
[Illustration]
CHICAGO
STONE & KIMBALL
MDCCCXCV
INTRODUCTION
The strange and pathetic story that is told in the love letters that
passed between Mr. Hackman and Miss Reay, excited widespread attention
and sympathy during the spring of the year 1779, and interest in the
affair was revived in the following year by the publication of an
anonymous book in which some of these letters, in a garbled form, were
inserted.
The originals, or copies of the originals—for Hackman was sufficiently
romantic to have kept copies of his own letters—were given to Kearsly,
the publisher, by Mr. Frederick Booth, Hackman’s brother-in-law,
in consequence of Kearsly having issued a pamphlet, on the 24th of
April, 1779, called “The Case and Memoirs of the late Revd. Mr. James
Hackman,” which was full of errors. In the _Public Advertiser_ of the
24th of April, 1779, Booth, in view of the advertised publication
of the “Case and Memoirs” by Kearsly, announced positively that no
materials for a life of Hackman could possibly be obtained except
through him, as all the necessary letters and documents were in his
possession. Croft’s edition of the letters was issued by the same
publisher in the spring of the following year. It is not quite clear
whether Booth was approached by Kearsly or by Croft; but that he
(Booth) was satisfied with the latter’s work is evident from the fact
that it elicited no further protest from him.
Sir Herbert Croft, Bart., was born at Dunster Park, Berkshire, on
November 1, 1751. In March, 1771, he matriculated at University
College, Oxford,[1] where Scott—afterwards Lord Stowell—was his
tutor.[2] He then entered Lincoln’s Inn, but want of means did not
allow him to continue in the profession of the law, so in 1782 he
returned to Oxford, and decided for the Church. In April, 1785, he
took the degree of B.C.L., and in 1786 he received the vicarage of
Prittlewell,[3] in Essex. During his sojourn at Lincoln’s Inn, he
wrote many tracts and pamphlets; he also tried to compile an English
dictionary, but he found that £100 a year—the amount he had available
for that purpose—was hardly sufficient.
[1] Nichols’ “Literary Illustrations,” v. 202.
[2] “Dict. Nat. Biog.” (Stephen.)
[3] _Gentleman’s Magazine_, 1816, pt. i. 470.
He also wrote the life of Young for Johnson’s series of the Lives
of the Poets.[4] Croft was somewhat eccentric in the management of
his finances, and was always begging money or preferment from his
friends; there is a letter in the British Museum[5] from him to Bishop
Douglas,[6] in which he complains of having been cold-shouldered by
Pitt, whose favour he had tried to gain by offering to insert verses
in favour of that politician in a book he was writing. There is also
a letter,[7] dated 13th of October, 1796, to Bishop Douglas’ son, the
Rev. W. Douglas, written from Exeter Gaol, “the common prison—_pudet
hoc approbria_!” as Croft says, where he was imprisoned for a debt of
£40, which he hopes Mr. Douglas will send at once. Croft subsequently
lived in France with the eccentric Lady Mary Hamilton.
[4] Among Croft’s other works were: “A Brother’s Advice to his
Sisters,” 1775. “Fanaticism and Treason,” “The Literary Fly,” 1780.
“The Abbey of Kilhampton,” 1780—a series of anticipatory epitaphs
upon prominent living personages. “Sunday Evenings,” 1784, religious
discourses, which Dr. Johnson disapproved of on account of their levity
of style (Boswell’s Johnson, Morley’s edition, iv. 231), and a curious
French work, “Horace éclairci par la ponctuation,” Paris, 1810.
[5] Egerton MSS. 2185, fol. 172.
[6] John Douglas, Bishop of Salisbury. (_Gent. Mag._ 1807, pt. i. 475.)
[7] Egerton MSS. 2186, fol. 88-93.
On the death of Chatterton, Croft obtained from the poet’s sister,
Mrs. Newton, his letters and manuscripts, and, foreseeing that the
Hackman-Reay correspondence would have a large sale, he decided to
include the Chatterton matter in the volume, which he entitled “Love
and Madness.” He clumsily put his papers into the form of a letter from
Hackman, which was marked No. 49 in the original book, and is included
in the Appendix to the present volume. The difference in the style of
this letter from that of all the others was so apparent that suspicion
fell upon the authenticity of other parts of the volume.
John Nichols[8] mentions “Love and Madness” as having passed through
seven editions. “These letters,” he continues, “are given as the
correspondence of Mr. Hackman and Miss Reay.... They are enlivened
with a variety of anecdotes, chiefly of a literary kind. Among other
miscellaneous matters, the story of that extraordinary genius, Thomas
Chatterton, is introduced at great length, with critical observations
on his writings; an account of his publication of ‘Poems,’ said to
have been written by one Rowley, a monk, about 300 years ago; of his
other schemes of authorship, and, finally, of his unhappy exit, in the
eighteenth year of his age.... If this be all ‘borrowed personage,’ as
Mr. Walpole expressed it, it is so ingenious a fiction, that the author
will be praised, perhaps, for his abilities even by those who may find
themselves inclined to impeach his honesty.”
[8] “Literary Illustrations,” v. 203.
In the _Monthly Magazine_ for November, 1799, Robert Southey brought a
charge against Croft of having obtained the papers and letters relating
to Chatterton from the unfortunate poet’s sister, Mrs. Newton, under
false pretences. Croft, who was at that time in Denmark, sent a very
foolish and evasive reply to the same Magazine,[9] in which he said
that he must first arrange Southey’s abuse, for that gentleman wrote
prose somewhat like bad poetry, and poetry somewhat like bad prose. He
entirely ignored the main charge brought against him, and his vulgar
attack upon Southey brought him justly into contempt among the literary
men of the day.
[9] _Gentleman’s Magazine_, February, March and April, 1800.
The Rev. Charles Cuthbert Southey, who edited his father’s “Life and
Correspondence,” writes to Grosvenor C. Bedford, upon this subject.
“Sir Herbert Croft had obtained possession from Mrs. Newton
(Chatterton’s sister) of all her brother’s letters and MSS. under
promise of speedily returning them; instead of which, some months
afterwards, he incorporated and published them in a pamphlet, entitled
‘Love and Madness.’
“At the use thus surreptitiously made of her brother’s writings, Mrs.
Newton more than once remonstrated; but, beyond the sum of £10, she
could obtain no redress. Mr. Cottle[10] and my father now took the
matter up, and the former wrote to Sir H. Croft, pointing out to him
Mrs. Newton’s reasonable claim, and urging him by a timely concession
to prevent that publicity which otherwise would follow.
[10] A well-known Bristol bookseller.
“He received no answer; and my father then determined to print by
subscription all Chatterton’s works, including those ascribed to
Rowley, for the benefit of Mrs. Newton and her daughter. He accordingly
sent proposals to the _Monthly Magazine_, in which he detailed the
whole case between Mrs. Newton and Sir Herbert Croft, and published
their respective letters. The public sympathised rightly on the
occasion, for a handsome subscription followed. Sir Herbert Croft was
residing in Denmark at the time these proposals were published, and he
replied to my father’s statement by a pamphlet full of much personal
abuse.”
However, Mr. Cottle and Southey published the edition in three volumes
8vo, and the editors had the satisfaction of paying over to Mrs.
Newton and her daughter upwards of £300.
Southey again brought charges against Croft in the _Gentlemen’s
Magazine_ for March 1800. He says “Sir Herbert does not deny his
promises to the family of after assistance, nor that when Mrs. Newton
applied for it, he required a certificate of her character from the
Clergyman of the Parish.”
In a note to the ninth edition of “Love and Madness,” Croft excuses
himself for having pretended that Mr. Hackman had visited Bristol to
find out facts about Chatterton, by referring to an extract from the
fourteenth letter in “Love and Madness.”
The passage he mentions is as follows:
“Robinson Crusoe now—what nature! It affects us throughout, exactly in
the way you mentioned. But, shall I finish my dissertation? come—as
writing to you gives me so much pleasure, and as I cannot do anything
to you but write this morning, I know you will excuse me. Did you
ever hear to what Crusoe owed his existence? You remember Alexander
Selkirk’s strange sequestration at Juan Fernandez. It is mentioned, I
believe, in Walter’s account of Anson’s voyage, when Captain Woodes
Rogers met with him and brought him to England, he employed the famous
Daniel de Foe to revise his papers. That fertile genius improved upon
the materials, and composed the celebrated story of Robinson Crusoe.
The consequence was that Selkirk, who soon after made his appearance
in print, was considered as a bastard of Crusoe, with which spurious
offspring the press too often teems. In De Foe, undoubtedly, this was
not honest. Had Selkirk given him his papers, there could have been no
harm in working them up his own way. I can easily conceive a writer
making his own use of a known fact, and filling up the outlines which
have been sketched by the bold and hasty hand of fate. A moral may
be added, by such means, to a particular incident; characters may be
placed in their just and proper lights; mankind may be amused (and
amusements, sometimes, prevent crimes), or, if the story be criminal,
mankind may be bettered, through the channel of their curiosity. But I
would not be dishonest, like De Foe; nor would I pain the breast of a
single individual connected with this story.”
Yet Croft, who thus denounces Defoe, announced subsequently that he
himself had acted with precisely the same dishonesty in the matter of
Mr. Hackman’s correspondence. A further light is thrown upon the matter
by an advertisement to the eighth edition of “The Case and Memoirs;”
the author, who, on the evidence of a rhymed lampoon in one of the
papers of the day, was one Manasseh Dawes,[11] a barrister and literary
hack, says that, being a gentleman, he wishes to keep that character
inviolate; consequently, he thinks it necessary to declare that all the
facts are genuine, as he will testify and explain, if necessary, on
an application to him at Mr. Kearsly’s (the publisher), and he hopes
that, therefore, his numerous readers will not now suppose that he has
“intruded anything on the public with intent to catch the penny of
curiosity, at the expense of truth and candour.”
[11] _Public Advertiser_, June 3, 1779.
When this was written Kearsly had possession of the real facts of the
case, and was able to invite investigation.
The enormous success of “Love and Madness” tempted Croft to declare
himself the author of the Chatterton excerpt, and also to hint that
of the entire work only the outline was true. The word outline is
easily expansible, and, considering that the letter about Chatterton,
and two or three other obvious additions, formed half the volume,
he was, perhaps, justified in claiming his portion. Croft says that
he dedicates the ninth edition to Johnson, because the Doctor had
expressed his appreciation of the work. But Boswell records[12]
that Johnson censured and much disapproved of “Love and Madness,”
on account of the mingling of the fact with the fiction—that is to
say, the inclusion of the Chatterton papers among the Hackman-Reay
correspondence.
[12] Boswell’s Johnson (Henry Morley), iv. 134.
As several of the connecting links in the narrative are missing, I
have endeavoured to weave the letters into a coherent narrative; in
one or two instances I have been obliged to suppress certain passages,
by reason of their having been written at a time when there was a
greater license of expression than is permissible nowadays. I have
also omitted, in two of the letters, references to Chatterton which
Croft introduced to give verisimilitude to his assertion that the long
letter containing the life of the poet was written by Hackman.
No record of Croft’s own work tallies at all with the idea that he
created such a romance. But, apart from the controversy, the story and
the letters seem to me to be a veritable “human document” of strong
interest. And, after exhaustive investigation, I am convinced that
such a document is only explainable on the grounds of a real living
correspondence and that these letters are, without doubt, those that
passed between Hackman and Miss Reay.
_April_, 1895.
CONTENTS
PART I
PAGE
+At Hinchinbrook+ 19
PART II
+In Ireland+ 75
PART III
+In London+ 117
+Appendix+ 183
PART I
_AT HINCHINBROOK_
James Hackman, who figures as Mr. H. in this collection of letters,
was born at Gosport, in the year 1752. His father was a retired Naval
Lieutenant, with a modest income, which, however, was large enough to
enable him to give his son a good general education, and to send him
subsequently to St. John’s College, Cambridge.
On leaving the University, James Hackman was apprenticed to a mercer
in his native town but soon tiring of trade, he persuaded his father
to buy him an ensigncy in the 68th Regiment of Foot. He was then
quartered upon a recruiting party at Huntingdon, where he first made
the acquaintance of the famous (or infamous) Earl of Sandwich, who
was the First Lord of the Admiralty at that time. Cradock, in his
“Memoirs,” writes that a friend of Lord Sandwich’s was a candidate for
the Chemistry Professorship at Cambridge, and that, as Cradock had been
solicited for his vote and interest, the Earl invited him to travel
in his coach, and to stay with him at his seat, Hinchinbrook, on his
return journey to London. Cradock continues:
“We went together and passed a very pleasant evening with a numerous
party at the Rose Tavern, and having voted next morning, we returned to
Hinchinbrook. Lord Sandwich, on meeting his neighbour, Major Reynolds,
in the gateway with another officer, insisted on their alighting, and
taking a family dinner at his house. The Major apologised for his
intrusion, hoped his Lordship would excuse the liberty he had taken in
bringing a brother officer with him, and then introduced his friend,
Captain Hackman. The party merely consisted of Lord Sandwich, Miss Ray,
and a lady with her, the two gentlemen, and myself. Dinner was soon
served, and coffee called for. We played two rubbers at whist. Lord
Sandwich held with Miss Ray, against Major Reynolds and myself; Captain
Hackman requesting that he might only look over the cards.”
The Miss Ray (or Reay, as the name should be written) mentioned by
Cradock, was living at Hinchinbrook, under the protection of Lord
Sandwich, to the easily imaginable distress of Lady Sandwich.
At the age of fourteen, Miss Reay had been apprenticed to a
mantua-maker in Clerkenwell, and was subsequently introduced by her
father, a stay-maker, to a customer of his, a woman of infamous
profession, who, thinking that the girl was exceedingly pretty and
intelligent, mentioned her to the dissolute Lord Sandwich. The Earl
fell in love with Miss Reay the moment he saw her, and immediately took
her under his protection. He gave her a good education, and had her
thoroughly trained in music, of which art he was passionately fond; he
himself, Cradock tells us, was no mean performer upon the kettle-drums!
Oratorios and concerts were frequently given at Hinchinbrook, in which
Miss Reay, owing to her beautiful voice, took part; her personal charm
and manner must have been exceptionally attractive, for it is related
that she even captivated a Bishop’s lady, who was terribly exercised
at finding herself seated directly opposite to her at a dinner-party.
Hackman was so fascinated by Miss Reay that he could not keep away
from the neighbourhood of Hinchinbrook, and, being a handsome,
high-spirited young fellow, he soon became a welcome and frequent guest
at the house. The result was that he fell desperately in love with his
host’s mistress, and it was not long before his love was reciprocated,
and a clandestine correspondence ensued. The first two letters he sent
to Miss Reay are written from Huntingdon.
* * * * *
_Dec. 4, 1775._
+Dear Martha+,
Ten thousand thanks for your billet by my corporal Trim yesterday. The
fellow seemed happy to have been the bearer of it, because he saw it
made _me_ happy. He will be as good a soldier to Cupid as to Mars, I
dare say. And Mars and Cupid are not now to begin their acquaintance,
you know. Whichever he serve, you may command him of course, without a
compliment; for Venus, I need not tell _you_, is the mother of Cupid,
and mistress of Mars.
At present the drum is beating up under my window for volunteers to
Bacchus. In plain English, the drum tells me dinner is ready; for a
drum gives us bloody-minded heroes an appetite for eating, as well as
for fighting; nay, we get up by the beat of it, and it every night
sends, or ought to send, us to bed and to sleep. To-night it will be
late before I get to one or the other, I fancy—indeed, the thoughts
of you would prevent the latter. But the next disgrace to refusing a
challenge, is refusing a toast. The merit of a jolly fellow and of a
sponge is much about the same. For my part, no glass of any liquor
tastes as it should to me, but when I kiss my Martha on the rim.
Adieu—whatever hard service I may have after dinner, no quantity
of wine shall make me let drop or forget my appointment with you
to-morrow. We certainly were not seen yesterday, for reasons I will
give you.
Though you should persist in never being mine,
Ever, ever
Yours.
+Huntingdon+, _Dec._ 6th, 1775.
+My Dearest Martha+,
No, I will not take advantage of the sweet, reluctant, amorous
confession which your candour gave me yesterday. If to make me happy be
to make my Martha otherwise; then, happiness, I’ll none of thee.
And yet I _could_ argue. Suppose he _has_ bred you up—suppose you
_do_ owe your numerous accomplishments, under genius, to him—are you
therefore his property? Is it as if a horse that he has bred up should
refuse to carry him? Suppose you therefore _are_ his property—will the
fidelity of so many years weigh nothing in the scale of gratitude?
Years—why, can obligations (suppose they had _not_ been repaid an
hundred fold) do away the unnatural disparity of years? Can they bid
five-and-fifty stand still (the least that you could ask), and wait for
five-and-twenty? Many women have the same obligations (if indeed there
be many of the _same_ accomplishments) to their fathers. They have the
additional obligation to them (if, indeed, it be an obligation) of
existence. The disparity of years is sometimes even less. But, must
they therefore take their fathers to their bosoms? Must the jessamine
fling its tender arms around the dying elm?
To my little fortunes you are no stranger. Will you share them with me?
And you shall tell his Lordship that gratitude taught you to pay every
duty to him, till love taught you there were other duties which you
owed to H.
Gracious heaven, that you _would_ pay them!
But, did I not say I would not take advantage? I will not. I will
even remind you of your children; to whom I, alas! could only show at
present the _affection_ of a father.
Martha weighs us in the scales. If gratitude out-balance love—so.
If you command it, I swear by love, I’ll join my regiment to-morrow.
If love prevail, and insist upon his dues, you shall declare the
victory and the prize. I _will_ take no advantage.
Think over this. Neither will I take you by surprise. Sleep upon
it, before you return your answer. Trim shall make the old excuse
to-morrow. And, thank heaven! to-night you sleep alone.
Why did you sing that sweet song yesterday, though I so pressed you?
Those words and your voice were too much.
No words can say how much I am yours.
* * * * *
Omiah, who is mentioned by Miss Reay in the following letter was a
native of Otaheite, who was brought to England in 1775 by Captain
Ferneaux in the _Adventure_, the consort of Captain Cook’s ship the
_Resolution_. Lord Sandwich took him up, and showed him all the sights.
He went to Court and was introduced to George III., with whom he shook
hands and said “How do you do?”
* * * * *
_To MR. HACKMAN._
+Hinchinbrook+, _Dec. 7, 1775_.
+My Dear H.+
Here has been a sad piece of work ever since I received yours
yesterday. But don’t be alarmed. We are not discovered to the prophane.
Our tender tale is only known to—(whom does your fear suggest?)—to love
and gratitude, my H. And they ought both, for twenty reasons, to be
_your_ friends, I am sure.
They have been trying your cause, ever since the departure of honest
Trim yesterday. Love, though in my opinion not so blind, is as good
a justice as Sir John Fielding. I argued the matter stoutly, my head
on his lordship’s side of the question, my heart on yours. At last
they seemed to say, as if the oath of allegiance, which I had taken to
gratitude, at a time when, Heaven knows, I had never heard of love,
should be void, and I should be at full liberty to devote myself, body
and soul, to—but call on me to-morrow before dinner, and I’ll tell
you their final judgment. This I will tell you now—love sent you the
tenderest wishes, and gratitude said I could never pay you all I owe
you for your noble letter of yesterday.
Yet—oh, my H. think not meanly of me ever for this. Do not _you_ turn
advocate against me. I will not pain you—’tis impossible you ever
should.
Come then to-morrow: and surely Omiah will not murder love! Yet I
thought the other day he caught our eyes conversing. Eyes speak a
language all can understand. But is a child of Nature to nip in the
bud that favourite passion which his mother Nature planted, and still
tends? What will Oberea and her coterie say to this, Omiah, when you
return from making the tour of the globe? They’ll blackball you, depend
on it.
What would Rousseau say to it, my H.?
You shall tell me to-morrow. I will not write another word, lest
conscience, who is just now looking over my left shoulder, should
snatch my pen, and scratch out _to-morrow_.
_To MISS REAY._
+Huntingdon+, _Dec. 7, 1775_.
+My Dearest Soul+,
I hope to heaven Trim will be able to get this to you to-night. Not I
only, but my whole future life, shall thank you for the dear sheet of
paper I have just received. Blessings, blessings! But I could write and
explain and offer up vows and prayers till the happy hour arrives.
Yet, hear me, Martha. If I have thus far deserved your love, I will
deserve it still. As a proof I have not hitherto pressed you for
anything conscience disapproves: you shall not do to-morrow what
conscience disapproves. You shall not make me happy (oh, how supremely
blest!) under the roof of your benefactor and my host. It were not
honourable. Our love, the inexorable tyrant of our hearts, claims his
sacrifices, but does not bid us insult his Lordship’s walls with it.
How civilly did he invite me to Hinchinbrook in October last, though an
unknown recruiting officer! How politely himself first introduced me to
himself! Often has the recollection made me struggle with my passion.
Still it shall restrain it on this side honour.
So far from triumphing or insulting, heaven knows—if Lord Sandwich
indeed love you, if indeed it be aught beside the natural preference
which age gives to youth—heaven knows how much I pity him. Yet, as I
have either said or written before, it is only the pity I should feel
for a father whose affections were unfortunately and unnaturally fixed
upon his own daughter.
Were I your seducer, Martha, and not your lover, I should not write
thus, nor should I have talked or acted, or written as I have. Tell
it not in Gath, nor publish it in the streets of Askalon, lest the
Philistines should be upon me. I should be drummed out of my regiment
for a traitor to intrigue. And can you really imagine I think so
meanly of your sex? Surely you cannot imagine I think so meanly of you.
Why, then, the conclusion of your last letter but one? A word thereon.
Take men and women in the lump, the villany of those and the weakness
of these—I maintain it to be less wonderful that an hundred or so
should fall in the world, than that even one should stand. Is it
strange the serpent conquered Eve? The devil against a woman is fearful
odds. He has conquered men, women’s conquerors; he has made even angels
fall.
Oh, then, ye parents, be merciful in your wrath. Join not the base
betrayers of your children, drive not your children to the bottom of
the precipice, because the villains have driven them half way down,
where (see, see!) many have stopped themselves from falling further
by catching hold of some straggling virtue or another which decks the
steep-down rock. Oh, do not force their weak hands from their hold,
their last, last hold! The descent from crime to crime is natural,
perpendicular, headlong enough of itself; do not increase it.
“Can women, then, no way but backward fall?”
Shall I ask your pardon for all this, Martha? No, there is no occasion,
you say.
But to-morrow, for _to-morrow_ led me out of my strait path over this
fearful precipice, where I, for my part, trembled every step I took
lest I should topple down headlong. Glad am I to be once more on
_plain_ ground again with my Martha.
To-morrow, about eleven, I’ll be with you; but let me find you in
your riding-dress and your mare ready. I have laid a plan, to which
neither honour nor delicacy (and I always consult both before I propose
anything to _you_) can make the least objection. This once, trust to
me: I’ll explain all to-morrow. Pray be ready in your _riding-dress_.
Need I add, in that you know I think becomes you most? No, love would
have whispered that.
Love shall be of our party. He shall not suffer the cold to approach
you; he shall spread his wings over your bosom; he shall nestle in your
dear arms, he shall.
When will to-morrow come? What torturing dreams must I not bear
to-night?
I send you some lines which I picked up somewhere, I forget where. But
I don’t think them much amiss.
CELIA’S PICTURE.
To paint my Celia, I’d devise
Two summer suns in place of eyes;
Two lunar orbs should then be laid
Upon the bosom of the maid;
Bright Berenice’s auburn hair
Should, where it ought, adorn my fair;
Nay, all the signs in heaven should prove
But tokens of my wond’rous love.
All, did I say? Yes, all, save one;
Her yielding waist should want a zone.
_To MISS REAY._
+Huntingdon+, _Dec. 8, 1775_.
Then I release my dearest soul from her promise about to-day. If you
do not see that all which _he_ can claim by gratitude, I doubly claim
by love, I have done, and will for ever have done. I would purchase my
happiness at any price, but at the expense of yours.
Look over my letters, think over my conduct, consult your own heart,
and read these two long letters of your writing, which I return you.
Then, tell me whether we love or not. And, if we love (as witness
both our hearts), shall gratitude, _cold_ gratitude, bear away the
heavenly prize that’s only due to love like ours? Shall my right be
acknowledged, and must he possess the casket? Shall I have your soul,
and shall he have your hand, your eyes, your bosom, your lips, your——
Gracious God of Love! I can neither write nor think. Send one line,
half a line to
Your own, own
H.
* * * * *
_To MR. HACKMAN._
+Hinchinbrook+, _Dec. 10, 1775_.
Your two letters of the day before yesterday, and what you said to me
yesterday in my dressing-room, have drove me mad. To offer to sell
out, and take the other step to get money for us both, was not kind.
You know how such tenderness distracts me. As to marrying me, that you
should not do upon any account. Shall the man I value be pointed at
and hooted for selling himself to a Lord, for a commission, or some
such thing, to marry his cast mistress? My soul is above my situation.
Besides, I will not take advantage, Mr. Hackman, of what may be
only perhaps (excuse me) a youthful passion. After a more intimate
acquaintance with me of a week or ten days, your opinion of me might
very much change. And yet, you _may_ love as sincerely as I——
But I will transcribe you a song which I do not believe you ever heard
me sing, though it is my favourite. It is said to be an old Scots
ballad, nor is it generally known that Lady A. L. wrote it. Since we
have understood each other, I have never sung it before you, because it
is so descriptive of our situation, how much more so since your cruelly
kind proposal of yesterday! I wept, like an infant over it this morning.
AULD ROBIN GRAY.
When the sheep are in fold, and the cows are at home,
And all the weary world to rest is gone,
The woes of my heart fall in showers from mine e’e
While my good man lays sound by me.
Young Jamie lov’d me well, and he sought me for his bride,
He had but a crown, he had no more beside;
To make the crown a pound, young Jamie went to sea,
And the crown and the pound were both for me,
He had na been gone but a year and a day,
When my father broke his arm, and our cow was stole away;
When my mother she fell sick, and my Jamie at the sea,
And auld Robin Gray came wooing to me.
My father could na work, and my mother could na spin,
I toiled night and day, but their bread I could na win;
Auld Rob maintain’d them both, and, with tears in his e’e,
Said, “Jenny, for their sakes, oh! marry me.”
My heart it said no, and I wish’d for Jamie back,
But the wind it blew sore, and his ship prov’d a wreck;
His ship prov’d a wreck: Ah! why did not Jenny dee!
Why was she left to cry “Woe is me!”
My father argu’d sore, though my mother did na speak;
She look’d in my face till my heart was fit to break;
So auld Robin got my hand, but my heart was in the sea,
And now Robin Gray is good man to me.
I had na been a wife but of weeks only four,
When sitting right mournfully at my own door,
I saw my Jamie’s ghost, for I could not think ’twas he,
Till he said, “Jenny, I’m come home to marry thee.”
Sore did we weep, and little did we say,
We took but one kiss, then tore ourselves away;
I wish I was dead, but I am not like to dee,
But long shall be left to cry “Woe is me!”
I gang like a ghost, and I do not care to spin,
I fain would think on Jamie, but that would be a sin;
must e’en do my best a good wife to be,
For auld Robin Gray has been kind to me.
My poor eyes will only suffer me to add, for God’s sake, let me see my
_Jamie_ to-morrow. Your name also is Jamie.
_To MISS REAY._
+Huntingdon+, _Dec. 13, 1775_.
+My Life and Soul!+
But I will never more use any preface of this sort, and I beg you will
not. A correspondence begins with dear, then my dear, dearest, my
dearest, and so on, till at last panting language toils after us in
vain.
No language can explain my feelings. Oh, M. yesterday, yesterday!
Language, thou liest; there is no such word as _satiety_, positively
no such word. Oh thou, beyond my warmest dreams bewitching! What
charms! What——
But words would poorly paint our joys. When, when?—yet _you_ shall
order, govern everything. Only remember, I am _sure_ of those we trust.
Are you now convinced that Heaven made us for each other? By that
Heaven, by the paradise of your dear arms, I will be only yours!
Have I written sense? I know not what I write. This scrap of paper (it
is all I can find) will hold a line or two more. I must fill it up to
say that, whatever evils envious fate designed me, after those few
hours of yesterday, I never will complain nor murmur.
Misfortune, I defy thee now. M. loves me, and H.’s soul has its content
most absolute. No other joy like this succeeds in unknown fate.
_To MISS REAY._
+Huntingdon+, _Dec. 24, 1775_.
Talk not to me of the new year. I am a new man. I will be sworn to it I
am not the same identical James Hackman that I was three months ago.
You have created me—yes, I know what I say—created me anew.
As to thanking you for the bliss I taste with you, to attempt it would
be idle. What thanks can express the Heaven of Heavens!——
But I will obey you in not giving such a loose to my pen as I gave the
day before yesterday. That letter, and the verses it contained, which
were certainly too highly coloured, pray commit to the flames. Yet,
pray too, as I begged you yesterday, do not imagine I thought less
chastely of you because I wrote them. By Heaven! I believe your mind as
chaste as the snow which, while I write, is driving against my window.
You know not _what_ I think of you. One time, perhaps, you may.
The lines I repeated to you this morning are not mine. I think of them
quite as you do. Surely an additional merit in them is, that to the
uninitiated, in whom they might, perhaps, raise improper ideas, they
are _totally unintelligible_.
_To MR. HACKMAN._
+Hinchinbrook+, _Christmas Day, 1775_.
My old friend the Corporal looked as if he had been tarred and
feathered yesterday, when he arrived with your _dear_ billet. Omiah
took up the sugar-caster, when he saw him through the parlour window,
and powdered a fresh slice of pudding, by way of _painting_ the snowy
Corporal. Omiah’s simplicity is certainly very diverting, but I should
like him better, and take more pains with him, if I did not think
he suspected something. The other day I am sure he came to spy the
nakedness of the land. Thank heaven! our caution prevented him.
Respecting the poetry which you repeated to me the other day, I know
not whether, as you say, those to whom it could do any harm could
possibly understand it. For _uninitiated_ means, I believe, not yet
admitted into the mysteries, those who have not yet taken the veil;
or, _I_ should rather say, those who have not yet thrown off the veil.
Why was I not permitted by my destiny to keep on mine, till my H., my
_Mars_, _seized me in his ardent arms_? How gladly _to his_ arms would
I have given up my very soul!
Cruel fortune, that it cannot be so to-day! But we forgot, when we
fixed on to-day, that it would be Christmas Day. I must do penance at
a most _unpleasant_ dinner, as indeed is every meal and every scene
when you are absent, and that, without the consolation of having first
enjoyed your company. To-morrow, however, at the usual time and place.
Your discontinuing your visits here, since the first day of our
happiness, gratifies the delicacy of us both. Yet, may it not, my
H., raise suspicions elsewhere? Your agreeable qualities were too
conspicuous not to make you missed. Yet, you are the best judge.
My poor, innocent, helpless babes! Were it not on your account,
your mother would not _act_ the part she does. What is Mrs. Yates’s
sustaining a character well for _one_ evening? Is it so trying as to
play a part, and a base one too, morning, noon, and night? _Night!_ But
I will not make my H. uneasy.
At least, allow that I have written you a long scrawl. Behold, I have
sent you a tolerable good substitute for myself. It is reckoned very
like. I need not beg you not to show it. Only remember, the painter’s
Martha is not to rob your own Martha of a certain quantity of things
called and known by the name of kisses, which I humbly conceive to be
her due, though she has been disappointed of them to-day.
So, having nothing further to add at present, and the post being just
going out, I remain with all truth,
Dear Sir,
Your most humble servant,
+Martha+.
There is a pretty conclusion for you. Am I not a good girl? I shall
become a most elegant correspondent in time, I see. This paragraph is
the postscript, you know, and should therefore have been introduced by
a well-flourished P.S., the Sir Clement Cottrel upon these occasions.
_To MISS REAY._
+Huntingdon+, _Dec. 28, 1775_.
Your condescension in removing my most _groundless_ cause of jealousy
yesterday was more than I deserved. How I exposed myself by my violence
with you! But, I tell you, my passions are all gunpowder. Though,
thank God! no Othello yet am I.
One not easily jealous; but, being wrought,
Perplex’d in the extreme.
and that God knows how I love you, worship you, idolise you.
How _could_ I think you particular to such a thing as B.? You said you
forgave me to-day, and I hope you did. Let me have it again from your
own dear lips to-morrow, instead of the next day. Everything shall be
ready, and the guitar, which I wrote for, is come down, and I will
bring the song and you shall sing it, and play it, and I will beg you
to forgive me, and you shall forgive me, and five hundred ands besides.
Why, I would be jealous of this sheet of paper, if you kissed it with
too much rapture.
What a fool! No, my Martha, rather say what a lover!
Many thanks for your picture. It _is_ like. Accept this proof that I
have examined it.
’Tis true, creative man, thine art can teach
The living picture every thing but speech!
True, thou hast drawn her, as she is, all fair,
Divinely fair! her lips, her eyes, her hair!
Full well I know the smile upon that face,
Full well I know those features’ every grace!
But, what is this, my Martha’s mortal part,
There _is_ a subject beggars all thine art;
Paint but her _mind_, by Heav’n! and thou shalt be,
Shalt be my more than pagan deity.
Nature may possibly have cast, of _old_,
Some other beauty in as fair a mould;
But all in vain you’ll search the world to find
Another beauty with so fair a mind.
_To MISS REAY._
+Huntingdon+, _Jan. 1, 1776_.
Lest I should not see you this morning, I will scribble this before I
mount honest Crop, that I may leave it for you.
This is a new year. May every day of it be happy to my Martha. May—but
do not you know there is not a wish of bliss I do not wish you?
A _new_ year, I like not this word. There may be new lovers. I lie,
there may not. Martha will never change her H., I am sure she will
never change him for a truer lover.
A new year—’76. Where shall we be in ’77? Where in ’78? Where in ’79?
Where in ’80?
In misery or bliss, in life or death, in heaven or hell, wherever
_you_ are, there may H. be also!
The soldier whom you desired me to beg off, returns thanks to his
unknown benefactress. Discipline must be kept up in our way; but I am
sure you will do me the justice to believe I am no otherwise a friend
to it.
* * * * *
The closing paragraph of this letter contains an instance of Miss
Reay’s kindness of heart. She was never liked in London, owing to her
connection with the unpopular Lord Sandwich, and she was accused of
selling appointments in the Navy. In 1773, Lord Sandwich brought an
action against the _Evening Post_, for having made a similar accusation
against him, and obtained £2000 damages. In a contemporary pamphlet
there is a story bearing on this point, told about Miss Reay’s kindly
intercession with the Earl on behalf of a much neglected naval officer.
This unfortunate gentleman had been a lieutenant for over thirty years,
and was complaining one day to a friend about the little prospect he
had of promotion. His friend advised him to write to Miss Reay, which
he accordingly did, with the result that she placed his letter before
the Earl, with the emphatic remark that thirty years’ service, in her
apprehension, gave an officer a better title to promotion than his
being the son of a Duke.
* * * * *
_To MISS REAY._
+Huntingdon+, _Feb. 8, 1776_.
Since the thaw sent me from Hinchinbrook the day before yesterday,
I have written four times to you, and believe verily I shall write
four-and-forty times to you in the next four days. The bliss I have
enjoyed with you these three weeks has increased not diminished my
affection. Three weeks and more in the same house with my Martha!—it
was more than I deserved. And yet to be obliged to resign you every
night to another! By these eyes, by your still dearer eyes, I do not
think I slept three hours during the whole three weeks. Yet, yet, ’twas
bliss. How lucky that I was pressed to stay at Hinchinbrook the night
the snow set in! Would it had snowed till doomsday! But then you must
have been _his_ every night till doomsday. Now my happy time may come.
Though I had not strength to resist when under the same roof with you,
ever since we parted the recollection that it was _his_ roof has made
me miserable. Whimsical that he should bid _you_ press me, when I at
first refused his solicitation. Is H. guilty of a breach of hospitality?
I must not question. I must not think. I must not write. But we will
meet, as we fixed.
Does Robin Gray suspect? Suspect! And is H. a subject for suspicion?
_To MISS REAY._
+Huntingdon+, _Feb. 16, 1776_.
Every time I see you I discover some new charm, some new
accomplishment. Before heaven, there was not a tittle of flattery in
what I told you yesterday. Nothing _can_ be flattery which I say of
you, for no invention, no poetry, no anything can come up to what I
_think_ of you.
One of our kings said of the citizens of his good city of London,
that when he considered their riches, he was in admiration at their
understandings; when he considered their understandings, he was in
admiration at their riches. Just so do I with regard to your person
and your mind, but for a different reason. Nature was in one of her
extravagant moods when she put you together. She might have made two
captivating women out of you—by my soul, half-a-dozen! Your turn for
music and excellence in it would be a sufficient stock of charms for
the most disagreeable woman to set up with in life. Music has charms to
do things most incredible; music——
Now shall I, with the good-humoured, digressive pen of our favourite
Montaigne in his entertaining Essays, begin with love, and end with a
treatise upon the gamut?
Yet to talk of music is to talk of you. Martha and music are the same.
What is music _without_ you? And harmony has tuned your mind, your
person, your every look and word and action.
Observe, when I write to you I never pretend to write sense. I have no
head; you have made me all heart from top to bottom. Sense—why, I am
out of my senses, and have been these six weeks. Were it possible my
scrawls to you could ever be read by any one but you I should be called
a madman. I certainly am either curst or blest (I know not which) with
passions wild as the torrent’s roar. Notwithstanding I take this simile
from water, the element out of which I am formed is fire. Swift had
water in his brain. I have a burning coal of fire; your hand can light
it up to rapture, rage, or madness. Men, real men, have never been
wild enough for my admiration; it has wandered into the ideal world
of fancy. Othello (but he should have put _himself_ to death in his
wife’s sight, _not_ his wife), Zanga, are _my_ heroes. Milk-and-water
passions are like sentimental comedy. Give me (you see how, like your
friend Montaigne, I strip myself of my skin, and show you all my veins
and arteries, even the playing of my heart), give _me_, I say, tragedy,
affecting tragedy, in the world, as well as in the theatre. I would
massacre all mankind sooner than lose you.
This is mere madness;
And thus awhile the fit will work on him;
Anon, as patient as the female dove
When that her golden couplets are disclosed,
His silence will sit drooping.
Inconsistent being! While I am ranting thus about tragedy and blood
and murder, behold, I am as weak as a woman. My tears flow at but the
idea of losing you; yes, they do not drop only, they pour. I sob like
a child. Is this Othello? Is this Zanga? We know not what we are, nor
what we may become.
This I know, that I am and ever will be yours and only yours.
I send you Ossian. You will see what a favourite he is with me by some
drawings and pieces of (what your partiality will call) poetry, which
accompany the bard of other times. Should you quit this world before
me, which fate forbid, often shall I hear your spirit (if I can be weak
enough to survive you) calling me from the low-sailing cloud of night.
They abuse Macpherson for calling them translations. If he alone be the
author of them, why does he not say so, and claim the prize of fame;
I protest _I_ would. They who do not refuse their admiration to the
compositions, still think themselves justified to abuse Macpherson, for
pretending _not_ to be the author of what they still admire. Is not
this strange?
As we could not meet this morning (how long must our meetings depend on
others, and not on ourselves?) I was determined, you see, to have a
long conversation with you.
Pray seal, in future, with better wax, and more care. Something colder
than one of my kisses might have thawed the seal of yesterday. But I
will not talk of _thawing_. Had the frost and snow continued, I had
still been with you at Hinchinbrook.
The remainder of this (my second sheet of paper, observe) shall be
filled with what I think a valuable curiosity. The officer whom you
saw with me on Sunday, is lately come from America. He gave it me, and
assures me it is original. It will explain itself. Would I might be in
your dear, little, enchanted dressing-room, while you read it!—
_A Speech of a Shawanese Chief to Lord Dunmore._
“I appeal to any white man to-day, if ever he entered Logan’s cabin
hungry, and he gave him not meat; if he ever came cold or naked, and
I gave him not clothing. During the last long and bloody war, Logan
remained idle, ignominious, in his cabin, an advocate for peace. Such
was my love of the whites, that those of mine own country pointed at
me as they passed by, and said ‘Logan is the friend of white men.’ I
had even thought to live with you. But the injuries of one among you
did away that thought, and dragged me from my cabin of peace. Colonel
Cressop, the last spring, in cold blood, cut off all the relations of
Logan, sparing neither women nor children. There runs not a drop of
the blood of Logan in the veins of any human creature. This called on
me for revenge. I have sought it. I have killed many. Revenge has been
fully glutted.
“For my country—I rejoice at the beams of peace. But, harbour not the
thought that mine is the joy of fear. Logan never felt fear. He will
not turn his heel to save his life.
“Who is there to mourn for Logan? Not one.”
* * * * *
In the following letter there was an obvious addition by Croft, which I
have already noticed in the Introduction.
* * * * *
_To MISS REAY._
+Huntingdon+, _Feb. 22, 1776_.
How silly we were, both of us, not to recollect your favourite Jenny?
and did not Jamie think of her either?
... Though my mother did na speak,
She look’d in my face, till my heart was fit to break.
Was not this exactly the instance we wanted?
Something more has occurred to me on the same subject. Rather than not
write to you, or than write to you as _descriptively_ as recollection
sometimes tempts me, I know you would have me write nonsense.
In Hervey’s “Meditations” are two passages as fine as they are simple
and natural.
“A beam or two finds its way through the grates, and reflects a feeble
glimmer from the nails of the coffins.” “Should the haggard skeleton
lift a clattering hand.” In the latter I know not whether the epithet
_haggard_ might not be spared.
Governor Holwell, in the account of the sufferings at the black hole at
Calcutta, when he speaks of the length of time he supported Nature by
catching the drops, occasioned by the heat, which fell from his head
and face, adds these words—“You cannot imagine how unhappy I was when
any one of them escaped my tongue!” What a scene! The happiness, the
existence of a fellow-creature, dependent upon being able to catch
a drop of his own sweat! Shakspeare’s fancy could not have invented,
nor ever did invent, any thing more sublime; for this is Nature, and
Nature itself is sublimity. People write _upon_ a particular situation;
they do not put themselves _in_ the situation. We only see the writer,
sitting in his study, and working up a story to amuse or to frighten;
not the identical Tom Jones, not Macbeth himself.
Can you become the very being you describe? Can you look round, and
mark only that which strikes in your new character, and forget all
which struck in your own? Can you bid your comfortable study be the
prison of innocence, or the house of mourning? Can you transform your
garret of indigence into the palace of pleasure? If you cannot, you
had better clean shoes than endeavour by writings to interest the
imagination. We cannot even bear to see an author only peeping over the
top of every page to observe how we like him. The player I would call a
corporal actor, the writer a mental actor. Garrick would in vain have
put his face and his body in all the situations of Lear, if Shakspeare
had not before put his mind in them all. In a thousand instances we
have nothing to do but to copy Nature, if we can only get her to sit
to our pencil. And yet how few of the most eminent masters are happy
enough to hit off her difficult face exactly!
Every person of taste would have been certain that Mr. Holwell was one
of the sufferers in the black hole, only from the short passage I have
noticed.
* * * * *
Faldoni and Teresa might have been prevented from making proselytes, if
they ever have made any, by working up their most affecting story so
as to take off the edge of the dangerous example. But not in the way
Mr. Jerningham has done it, who tells us, not less intelligibly than
pathetically.
All-ruling love, the god of youth, possess’d
Entire dominion of Faldoni’s breast;
An equal flame did sympathy impart
(A flame destructive) to Teresa’s heart:
As on one stem two opening flowers respire,
So grew their life (entwin’d) on one desire.
Are you not charmed? Perhaps you never saw the poem. I have it here,
and will bring it you as a curiosity. The melancholy tale will
not take up three words, though Mr. J. has bestowed upon it 335
melancholy lines. The catastrophe happened near Lyons, in the month of
June, 1770. Two lovers (Faldoni and Teresa Meunier) meeting with an
invincible obstacle to their union, determined to put an end to their
existence with pistols. The place they chose for the execution of their
terrible project was a chapel that stood at a little distance from the
house. They even decorated the altar for the occasion. They paid a
particular attention to their own dress. Teresa was dressed in white,
with rose-coloured ribbands. The same coloured ribbands were tied to
the pistols. Each held the ribband that was fastened to the other’s
trigger, which they drew at a certain signal.
Arria and Pætus (says Voltaire) set the example; but then it must be
considered they were condemned to death by a tyrant. Whereas love was
the only inventor and perpetrator of this deed.
Yet, while I talk of taking off the dangerous edge of their example,
they have almost listed me under their bloody banners.
On looking over the sermon I have written, I recollect a curious
anecdote of Selkirk.
(By-the-bye, Wilkes, I suppose, would say that none but a Scotchman
could have lived so many years upon a desert island.)
He tamed a great number of kids for society, and with them and the
numerous offspring of two or three cats that had been left with him, he
used often to dance. From all which my inference is this—Martha will
not surely deprive herself of H.’s society, but will let him find her
_there_ to-morrow, especially since, in Mr. J.’s _expressive_ language:
As on one stem two opening flowers respire,
So grow our lives (entwin’d) on one desire.
_To MR. HACKMAN._
+Hinchinbrook+, _Feb. 23, 1776_.
Where were you this morning, my life? I should have been froze to death
I believe with the cold, if I had not been waiting for _you_. I am
uneasy, very uneasy. What could prevent you? You own appointment, too.
Why not write, if you could not come? Then, I had a dream last night, a
sad dream, my H.
... For thee I fear, my love;
Such ghastly dreams last night surprised my soul.
You may reply, perhaps, with my favourite Iphis—
Heed not these black illusions of the night,
The mockings of unquiet slumbers.
Alas! I cannot help it. I am a weak woman, not a soldier.
I thought you had a duel with a person whom we have agreed never to
mention. I thought you killed each other. I not only saw his sword, I
_heard_ it pass through my H.’s body. I saw you both die; and with you
love and gratitude. Who is there, thought I, to mourn for Martha! Not
one!
You may call me foolish; but I am uneasy, miserable, wretched! Indeed,
indeed I am. For God’s sake, let me hear from you!
_To MR. HACKMAN_.
+Hinchinbrook+, _Feb. 24, 1776_.
That business, as I told you it would last night, obliges him (Lord
Sandwich) to go to town. I am to follow for the winter. Now, my H. for
the royal black bob and the bit of chalk; or for any better scheme you
will plan. Let me know, to-morrow, where you think Lady Grosvenor’s
scheme will be most practicable on the road, and there I will take
care to stop. I take my Bible oath I would not deceive you, and more
welcome shall you be to my longing arms than all the Dukes or Princes
in Christendom. If I am not happy for one whole night in my life, it
will now be your fault.
Is not this kind and thoughtful? Why did it never occur to you, so
often as we have talked of my being obliged to leave this dear place—to
me _most_ dear, since it has been the scene of my acquaintance, my
happiness, with H.
But, am I to leave behind me that dearest H.? Surely your recruiting
business must be nearly over now. You _must_ go to town. Though things
cannot often be contrived at the Admiralty, they may, they _may_—they
_shall_ happen elsewhere.
Fail not to-morrow, and do not laugh at me any more about my dream. If
it was a proof of my weakness, it was a proof also of my love.
I wish the day on which I am to set out from hence could be conjured
about a month further back or so. Now, you ask _why_? Look in your last
year’s almanack. Was not the _shortest day_ somewhere about that time?
Come give me a kiss for that, I am sure I deserve it. Oh! fye, Mr. H.,
not twenty. You are too generous in your payments. I must insist upon
returning you the overplus the next time we meet—that is to-morrow, you
know.
_To MISS REAY._
+Huntingdon+, _Feb. 26, 1776_.
Why will not the wished-for day, or rather night, arrive? And here, I
have not seen you since I know not when, not for two whole days.
But I wrote you a long letter yesterday why it would be dangerous to
meet; and all in rhyme. The beginning, I assure you, was not poetry,
but truth. If the conclusion was coloured too highly, you must excuse
it. The pencil of love executed it, and the sly rogue will indulge
himself sometimes. Let the time come, I will convince you his pencil
did not much exaggerate.
Just now I was thinking of your birthday, about which I asked you the
other day. It is droll that yours and mine should be so near together.
And thus I observe thereon:
Your poets, cunning rogues, pretend
That men are made of clay;
And that the heavenly potters make
Some five or six a day.
No wonder, Martha, I and you
Don’t quite detest each other;
Or that my soul is link’d to yours,
As if it were its brother:
For in one year we both were made,
Nay almost in one day
So, ten to one, we both came from
One common heap of clay.
What? If I were not cast in near
So fine a mould as you,
My heart (or rather, Martha, yours)
Is tender, fond and true.
Corporal Trim sets off to-day for our head-quarters. My plan is laid
so that no discovery _can_ take place. Gods, that two such souls as
yours and mine should be obliged to descend to arts and plans! Were it
not for your dear sake, I’d scorn to do anything I would not wished
discovered.
_To MR. HACKMAN_,
+Hinchinbrook+, _Feb. 27, 1776_.
All your plans are useless. The corporal has made his forced march to
no purpose. The fates are unkind. It is determined that I am to go up
_post_. So, we cannot possibly be happy together, as we hoped to have
been had our own horses drawn me up, in which case I must have _slept_
upon the road. I am not clear old Robin Grey will not stay and attend
me. Why cannot my Jamie? Cruel fortune! But in town we _will_ be happy.
When, again, shall I enjoy your dear society, as I did during that, to
me at least, blessed snow? Nothing but my dear children could prevent
our going with Cook to seek for happiness in worlds unknown. There must
be some corner of the globe where mutual affection is respected.
Do not forget to meet me. Scratch out _forget_. I know how much you
think of me: too much for your peace, nay, for your health. Indeed, my
H., you do not look well. Pray be careful.
Whatever wound thy tender health,
Will kill thy Martha’s, too.
Omiah is in good humour with me again. What kind of animal should a
naturalist expect from a native of Otaheite and a Huntingdonshire
dairymaid? If my eyes do not deceive me, Mr. Omiah will give us a
specimen. Will you bring me some book to-morrow to divert me, as I post
it to town, that I may forget, if it be possible, I am posting from you?
* * * * *
But the lovers contrived to meet after all, for Hackman’s next letter
is written from the inn at Hockerill, where they had spent the night
together.
* * * * *
_To MISS REAY._
+Hockerill+, _March 1, 1776_.
It is your strict injunction that I do not offend you by suffering
my pen to speak of last night. I will not, my M., nor should I, had
you not enjoined it. You once said a nearer acquaintance would make
me change my opinion of you. It has. I _have_ changed my opinion. The
more I know you, the more chastely I think of you. Notwithstanding last
night (what a night!) and our first, too, I protest to God, I think of
you with as much purity as if we were going to be married. You take my
meaning, I am sure, because they are the thoughts which I know you wish
me to entertain of you.
You got to town safe, I hope. _One_ letter may find me before I shall
be able to leave Huntingdon, whither I return to-day, or, at least, to
Cambridge. I am a fool about Crop, you know; and I am now more tender
of him because he has carried _you_. How little did we think that
morning we should ever make each other so happy!
Do not forget to write, and don’t forget the key against I come to
town. As far as seeing you, I will use it sometimes, but never for
an opportunity to indulge our passion. That positively shall never
again happen under _his_ roof. How did we applaud each other for not
suffering his walls at Hinchinbrook to be insulted with the first scene
of it! And how happy were we both, after we waked from our dream of
bliss, to think how often we had acted otherwise during the time the
snow shut me up at Hinchinbrook!—a snow as dear to me as to yourself.
My mind is torn, rent, with ten thousand thoughts and resolutions about
you and about myself.
When we meet, which shall be as we fixed, I may perhaps mention _one_
idea to you.
Pray let us contrive to be together some evening that your favourite
“Jephtha” is performed.
Enclosed is a song which came into my hands by an accident since we
parted. Neither the words nor the music, I take it, will displease you.
Adieu.
SONG.
When your beauty appears
In its graces and airs,
All bright as an angel new dropp’d from the sky;
At distance I gaze, and am awed by my fears,
So strangely you dazzle my eye!
But when, without art,
Your kind thoughts you impart,
When your love runs in blushes thro’ every vein;
When it darts from your eyes, when it pants in your heart,
Then I know you’re a woman again.
“There’s a passion and pride
In our sex,” she replied,
“And thus, might I gratify both, I would do;
As an angel appear to each lover beside,
But still be a woman to you.”
* * * * *
However, Hackman found the temptation to follow Miss Reay to London
too great to resist; and the two impassioned notes that follow were
written in the course of the same day from a coffee house near Charing
Cross:
* * * * *
+Cannon Coffee House, Charing cross+, _March 17, 1776_.
No further than this can I get from you, before I assure you that every
word I said just now came from the bottom of my heart. I never shall be
happy, never shall be in my senses, till you consent to marry me. And
notwithstanding the dear night at Hockerill, and the other which your
ingenuity procured me last week in D. Street, I swear, by the bliss of
blisses, I never will taste it again till you are my wife.
_To MISS REAY_,
+Cannon Coffee House+, _March 17, 1776_.
Though you can hardly have read my last scrawl, I must pester you with
another. I had ordered some dinner; but I can neither eat, nor do
anything else. “Mad!” I may be mad, for what I know. I am sure I am
wretched.
For God’s sake, for my life and soul’s sake, if you love me, write
directly hither, or at least to-night to my lodgings, and say what is
that _insuperable_ reason on which you dwelt so much. “Torture shall
not force you to marry me.” Did you not say so! Then you hate me; and
what is life worth?
Suppose you had not the dear inducement of loving me (_if_ you love me!
Damnation blot out that _if!_) and being adored by me, still, do you
not wish to relieve yourself and me from the wretched parts we act? My
soul was not formed for such meanness. To steal in at a back door, to
deceive, to plot, to lie—Perdition! the thought of it makes me despise
myself.
Your children—Lord Sandwich—(if we have not been ashamed of our
conduct, why have we cheated conscience all along by “he” and “his,”
and “Old Robin Gray?” Oh! how we have descended, Martha!)—Lord
Sandwich, I say, cannot but provide for your dear boys. As to your
sweet little girl, I will be a father to her, as well as a husband
to you. Every farthing I have I will settle on you both. I will, God
knows, and you shall find what I will do for you both, when I am able.
Good God, what would I _not_ do!
Write, write; I say, write. By the living God, I will have this
_insuperable reason_ from you, or I will not believe you love me.
* * * * *
Miss Reay answered his notes immediately; but it is evident from the
tone of her reply that she was afraid lest Hackman’s presence in
London should awaken the suspicions of Lord Sandwich, even if they
had not already been aroused by the hints of the faithful Omiah, who
seems to have suspected the existence of the intrigue from its very
commencement. Croker, in his “Memoirs,” says that Miss Reay was, at
this period, in a very nervous and unsettled frame of mind.
“Miss Reay, towards the latter part of the time that I frequented
the Admiralty, did not continue to speak of her situation as before,
complained of greatly being alarmed by ballads that had been sung, or
cries that had been made directly under the windows that look into the
Park, and that such was the fury of the mob, that she did not think
either Lord Sandwich or herself were safe whenever they went out; and
I must own that I heard some strange insults offered, and that I, with
some of the servants suddenly rushed out, but the offenders instantly
ran away and escaped. One evening afterwards when sitting with Miss
Reay in the great room above stairs, she appeared to be much agitated,
and at last said, ‘she had a particular favour to ask of me; that as
her situation was very precarious, and no settlement had been made upon
her, she wished I would hint something of the kind to Lord Sandwich.’ I
need not express my surprise, but I instantly assured her, ‘that no one
but herself could make such a proposal, as I knew Lord Sandwich never
gave any one an opportunity of interfering with him on so delicate a
subject.’ She urged that her wish was merely to relieve Lord Sandwich
as to great expense about her, for as her voice was then at the
best, and Italian musick was particularly her _forte_ she was given
to understand that she might succeed at the Opera House, and as Mr.
Giardini then led, and I was intimate with Mrs. Brooke, and Mrs. Yates,
she was certain of a most advantageous engagement. I then instantly
conjectured who one of the advisers must have been; and afterwards
found that three thousand pounds and a free benefit had been absolutely
held out to her; though not by the two ladies, who managed the stage
department.”
* * * * *
_To MR. HACKMAN._
+Admiralty+, _March 17, 1776_.
And does my H. think I wanted such a letter as this to finish my
affliction? Oh, my dear Jamie, you know not how you distress me.
And do you imagine that I have _willingly_ submitted to the artifices
to which I have been obliged, for your sake, to descend? What has been
_your_ part, from the beginning of the piece, to _mine?_ I was obliged
to act even to _you_. It was my business not to let you see how unhappy
the artifices to which I have submitted made me; and that they did
embitter even our happiest moments.
But fate stands between us. We are doomed to be wretched. And I, every
now and then, think some terrible catastrophe will be the consequence
of our connection. “Some dire event,” as Storgé prophetically says in
Jephtha, “hangs over our heads;”—
Some woeful song we have to sing
In misery extreme—O never, never
Was my forboding mind distress’d before
With such incessant pangs!
Oh, that it were no crime to quit this world like Faldoni and Teresa,
and that we might be happy together in some other world, where gold and
silver are unknown! By your hand I could even die with pleasure. I know
I could.
“Insuperable reason.” Yes, my H., there is, and you force it from me.
Yet, better to tell you than to have you doubt my love, that love which
is now my religion. I have hardly any God but you. I almost offer up my
prayers _to_ you, as well as _for_ you.
Know, then, if you were to marry me, you would marry some hundred
pounds’ worth of debts; and _that_ you never shall do.
Do you remember a solemn oath which you took in one of your letters,
when I was down at Hinchinbrook? and how you told me afterwards it
_must_ be so, because you had so solemnly sworn it?
In the same solemn and dreadful words I swear that I never will marry
you, happy as it would make me, while I owe a shilling in the world.
Jephtha’s vow is past.
What your letter says about my poor children made me weep; but it shall
not make me change my resolution.
It is a further reason why I should not. “If I do not marry you, I do
not love you!” Gracious powers of love! Does my H. say so? My _not_
marrying you is the strongest proof I can give you of my love. And
Heaven, you know, has heard my vow. Do _you_ respect it, and never
tempt me to break it—for not even _you_ will _ever_ succeed. Till I
have some better portion than debts, I _never_ will be yours.
Then what is to be done? you ask. Why, I will tell you, H. Your
determination to drop all particular intercourse till marriage has made
us one, flatters me more than I can tell you, because it shows the
opinion you entertain of me in the strongest light; it almost restores
me to _my own_ good opinion. The copy of verses you brought me on that
subject is superior to anything I ever read. They shall be thy Martha’s
morning prayer, and her evening song. While you are in Ireland——
Yes, my love, in Ireland. Be ruled by me. You shall immediately join
your regiment there. You know it is your duty. In the meantime,
something may happen: Heaven will not desert two faithful hearts that
love like yours and mine. There are joys; there is happiness in store
for us yet. I feel there is. And (as I said just now) _while you are
in Ireland_, I will write to you _every_ post, _twice_ by _one_ post,
and I will think of you, and I will dream of you, and I will kiss your
picture, and I will wipe my eyes, and I will kiss it again, and then I
will weep again. And——
Can I give a stronger instance of my regard for you, or a stronger
proof that you ought to take my advice, than by thus begging my only
joy to leave me? I will not swear I shall survive it; but, I beseech
you, go!
Fool that I am! I undo with one hand all that I do with the other. My
tears, which drop between every word I write, prevent the effect of my
reasoning; which, I am sure, is just.
Be a man, I say—you _are_ an angel. Join your regiment; and, as sure as
I love you (nothing can be _more_ sure), I will recall you from what
will be banishment as much to me as to you, the first moment that I can
marry you with honour to myself, and happiness to my H.
But, I must not write thus. Adieu!
Ill suits the voice of love when glory calls,
And bids thee follow Jephtha to the field.
_To MISS REAY._
+Cannon Coffee House+,
_March 17, 1776_.
And I will respect the vow of Jephtha, and I will follow to the field.
At least, I will think of it all to-night, for I am sure I shall not
sleep, and will let you know the success of my struggle, for a struggle
it will be to-morrow. I will wait for you at the same place in the
Park, where I shall see you open the Admiralty door. Should it rain, I
will write. It was my intention to have endeavoured to see you now, but
I changed my mind, and wrote this, and I am glad I did. We are not in a
condition to see each other. Cruel debts! Rather, cruel vow! for, would
you but have let me, I would have contrived some scheme about your
debts. I _could_ form a plan. My Gosport matters—my commission.
Alas! you frown, and I must stop. Why would not fortune smile upon my
two lottery tickets? Heaven knows I bought them on your account. Upon
the back of one of them I wrote, in case of my sudden death, “This
is the property of Miss _Reay_.” On the back of the other, that it
belonged to your daughter. For what am I still reserved?
_To MR. HACKMAN._
+Admiralty+, _March 17, 1776_.
Why, why do you write to me so often? Why do you see me so often? when
you acknowledge the necessity of complying with my advice.
You tell me, if I bid you, you will go. I have bid you, begged you to
go.—I _do_ bid you go. Go, I conjure you, go! But let us not have any
more partings. The last was too, too much. I did not recover myself all
day. And your goodness to my little white-headed boy! He made me burst
into tears this morning by talking of the good-natured gentleman, and
producing your present.
Either stay, and let our affection discover and ruin us—or go.
On the bended knees of love I entreat you, H., my dearest H., to go.
* * * * *
This earnest appeal induced Hackman to obey her wishes, and he departed
for Ireland immediately.
PART II
_IN IRELAND_
_To MISS REAY._
+Ireland+, _March 26, 1776_.
Ireland! England! good heavens! that Martha should be in one part of
the world and her H. in another! Will not our destinies suffer us to
breathe the same air? Mine will not, I most firmly believe, let me
rest, till they have hunted me to death.
Will you not give me your approbation for obeying you thus?
Approbation! And is that the coin to pass between _us?_
Yet, I will obey you further. I will restrain my pen as much as
possible. I will scratch the word love out of my dictionary. I will
forget: I lie—I never _can_, nor ever _will_ forget you, or any thing
which belongs to you. But I will, as you wisely advise, and kindly
desire me, write as much as possible on other subjects. Everything
entertaining that I can procure I will. I will _Twissify_, and write
Tours—or anything but love-letters. This morning pardon me: I am unable
to trifle; I _must_ be allowed to talk of love, of Martha.
And, when I _am_ able, you must allow me to put in a word or two
sometimes for myself. To-day, however, I will not make _you_ unhappy by
telling you how truly so _I_ am.
The truth is—my heart is full; and though I thought, when I took up
my pen, I could have filled a quire of paper with it, I now have not
a word to say. Were I sitting by your side now (oh, that I were!) I
should only have power to recline my cheek upon your shoulder, and to
wet your handkerchief with my tears.
My own safety, but for your sake, is the last of my considerations.
Our passage was rather boisterous, but not dangerous. Mrs. F. (whom I
mentioned to you, I believe, in the letter that I wrote just before
we embarked) has enabled me to make you laugh with an account of her
behaviour, were either of us in a humour to laugh.
Why did you cheat me so about that box?
Had I known I should find, upon opening it, that the things were for
me, I would never have brought it. But that _you_ knew. Was it kind, my
Martha, to give me so many _daily_ memorandums of you, when I was to
be at such a distance from you? Oh, yes, it was, it was, _most_ kind.
And that, and you, and all your thousand and ten thousand kindnesses I
never will forget. The purse shall be my constant companion, the shirts
I will wear by night, one of the handkerchiefs I was obliged to use in
drying my eyes as soon as I opened the box, the——
God, God bless you in this world—that is, give you your H., and grant
you an easy passage to eternal blessings in a better.
If you go before me, may the stroke be so instantaneous that you may
not have time to cast one longing, lingering look on H.!
_To MISS REAY._
+Ireland+, _April 8, 1776_.
Yours, dated April the first, would have diverted me had I been some
leagues nearer to you. It contained true wit and humour. I truly thank
you for it, because I know with how much difficulty you study for any
thing like wit or humour in the present situation of your mind. But
you do it to divert me; and it is done for one, who, though he cannot
laugh at it, as he ought, will remember it, as he ought. Yet, with what
a melancholy tenderness it concluded! _There_ spoke your heart.
Your situation, when you wrote it, was something like that of an
actress, who should be obliged to play a part in a comedy, on the
evening of a day, which, by some real catastrophe, had marked her out
for the capital figure of a _real_ tragedy.
Perhaps I have said something like this in the long letter that I have
written since. Never mind.
Pray be careful how you seal your letters. The wax always robs me of
five or six words. Leave a space for your seal. Suppose that should
be the part of your letter which tells me you still love me. If the
wax cover it, I see it not—I find no such expression in your letter—I
grow distracted—and immediately set out for Charing Cross, to ask you
whether you do indeed still love me.
In the hospitality of this country I was not deceived. They have a
curse in their language, strongly descriptive of it—“May the grass
grow at your door!” The women, if I knew not _you_, I should find
sensible and pretty. But I am deaf, dumb, blind, to everything, and
to every person but _you_. If I write any more this morning, I shall
certainly sin against your commands.
Why do you say nothing of your dear children? I insist upon it that you
buy my friend a taw, and two dozen of marbles; and place them to the
account of
Your humble servant.
_To MISS REAY._
+Ireland+, _May 3, 1776_.
My last, I hope, did not offend you. The bank note I was obliged to
return; although I thank you for it, more than words can tell.
Shall I, whom you will not marry, because you will not load me with
your debts, increase those debts; at least prevent you from diminishing
them, by robbing you of fifty pounds? Were I capable of it, I should be
unworthy of your love. But be not offended that I returned it. Heaven
knows how willingly a quire of such things should have accompanied it,
had heaven made me so rich.
Be not anxious about me. Talk not of the postage which your dear
letters cost me. Will you refuse to make your H. happy? And think you
that I can pay too dear for happiness?
But, Lord! you rave. I am rich—as rich as a Jew; and without taking
into the calculation the treasure I possess in your love. Why, you talk
of what I allow _that relation_, poor soul! That does not swallow up
all my lands and hereditaments at Gosport. Then there’s my pay, and
twenty other ways and means besides, I dare say, could I but recollect
them. Go to—I tell you I _am_ rich. So, let me know you got the silver
paper safe, and that I am a good boy.
Rich! To be sure I am; why, I can afford to go to plays. I saw Catley
last night, in your favourite character. By the way, I will tell you a
story of her, when she was on your side the water.
Names do not immortalise praiseworthy anecdotes; _they_ immortalise
names. Some difference had arisen between Miss Catley and the managers,
concerning the terms upon which she was to be engaged for the season.
One of the managers called upon her, at her little lodgings in Drury
Lane, to settle them. The maid was going to show the gentleman
upstairs, and to call her mistress. “No, no,” cries the actress,
who was in the kitchen, and heard the manager’s voice, “there is no
occasion to show the gentleman into a room. I am busy below [to the
manager] making apple-dumplings for my brats. You know whether you
have a mind to give me the money I ask, or not. I am none of your fine
ladies, who get a cold or the tooth-ache, and cannot sing. If you have
a mind to give me the money, say so; my mouth shall not open for a
farthing less. So good morning to you, and do not keep the girl there
in the passage; for I want her to put the dumplings in the pot, while
I nurse the child.” The turnips of Fabricius, and Andrew Marvel’s cold
leg of mutton are worthy to be served up on the same day with Nan
Catley’s apple-dumplings.
Come; I am not unhappy, or I could not talk of other people and write
thus gaily. Nothing can make me truly unhappy but a change in your
sentiments of me. By the Almighty God of heaven, I know my own feeling
so thoroughly, that I do not think I could survive such a thing.
As you love me, scold me not about the poplin which you will receive
next week. It cost me nothing; I may surely give what was given to me!
_To MISS REAY._
+Ireland+, _May 29, 1776_.
Do you think that to make such proposals, as your last contained, is
the way to reconcile me to this worse than banishment? You refused to
come into my scheme of marriage. Nothing shall tempt me to come into
_your_ scheme. Persist in your idea of going on the stage, and, as I
live, I will come over and make a party to damn you the first night of
your appearance. Since you will not share my fortunes, I will not share
your earnings.
The story which you mention at Flamborough, of Boardingham, who was
murdered by his wife and her lover, is most shocking. The reflections
you draw from it are most just, and what you say of our situation most
true. The woman must have been beyond a savage. Yet their feelings,
when she and Aikney were at the gallows together (supposing anything
like love remained), must have been exquisite. I protest I would
willingly embrace with M. the cruellest death which torture could
invent (provided she were on a bed of roses) than lead the happiest
life without her. What visions have I conjured up! My pen drops from my
hand. Well, I must not think.
_To MISS REAY._
+Ireland+, _June 18, 1776_.
My Laura is not angry with me, I hope, for the three or four _tender_
letters I have written to her since the beginning of this month. And
yet, yours of yesterday seems to say you are. If I bear my situation
like a man, will you not allow me to feel it like a man?
Misfortune, like a creditor severe,
But rises in demand for her delay.
She makes a scourge of past prosperity,
To sting me more and double my distress.
But you say I must not write thus. If I can help it, I will not.
Shall I write about the weather or politics? The sun shines to-day,
yesterday it rained. If you wish to appear learned, tell the next
company you go into that the distresses of this country will soon
oblige England to grant her a free trade or something very much like
it; and add, that her grievances are more real now than when in 1601
she complained to Elizabeth of the introduction of trials by jury.
Another slice of politics. Assert boldly that “Junius” was written by
Grenville’s secretary. This is a _fact_, notwithstanding what Wilkes
relates of Lord Germaine’s bishop.
Is this the style of letter-writing you allow me? Try again, then.
The favours I have received from the worthy man I mentioned in a letter
or two ago are by his goodness every day increased. Some superior souls
have affected to hate mankind. Here is one who, with an understanding
and an experience inferior to none, never loses an opportunity of
befriending a fellow-creature. I am afraid sometimes that misfortune
will one day or other play him some confounded dog’s trick, because he
takes such pleasure in thwarting every scheme that she lays for any
one’s ruin.
Yet even this amiable character is not without his defects. The
following lines I sent him this morning after playing at vingtun in
company with him last night:
To Hackman, says a certain friend
(Both idle, rhyming bards),
“——, with good manners and best sense,
Can’t bear to lose at cards.
With such a head”—“And such a heart,”
Adds Hackman, “’tis high treason.
But I, who knew that heart so well,
Have found, I think, the reason.
Friend to the poor, his purse their box,
He always would be winner;
For then they win. But, should he lose,
The poor, too, lose a dinner.”
This country’s facetious Dean said, that his friend Arbuthnot could do
everything but walk. My friend can do everything but lose at cards.
Feeling, and all the commanding powers of the mind, were never perhaps
before so mixed together. A tale of sorrow will make his little eyes
wink, wink, wink, like a green girl’s. Before the company came last
night, I showed him “Auld Robin Gray,” and, though he had seen it
before, he could not get over “My mother could na speak,” without
winking For the credit of your side of the water, he is an Englishman.
His agreeable wife, by her beauty and accomplishments, does credit
to this country. She is remarkable also for her feeling, though in
a different way. You shall relate an anecdote of distress, or read
a story of ill-usage, and while his eyes are winking for the object
of ill-usage or the distress, hers shall be striking fire with rage
against the author of it. “Good God!” she exclaims, “if that villain
was but in my power!” And I sometimes think she is going to ring for
her hat and cloak, that she may sally forth, and pull his house about
his ears. Bound up together (as they are, and as I hope they will long
continue) they form a complete system of humanity.
It would have gratified me much to have been with you when Garrick
took his farewell of the stage. Do you remember the last paper in the
_Idler_ upon its being the _last?_ The reflection that it was the
_last_ time Garrick would ever play, was, in itself, painful. How, my
Laura, my Martha, my life, shall I bear it, if I ever should be doomed
to take my last leave, my last look of you!
_To MR. HACKMAN._
+England+, _June 25, 1776_.
Let me give you joy of having found such kind and agreeable friends
in a strange land. The account you sent of the gentleman and lady,
especially of the latter, quite charmed me. Neither am I without my
friends. A lady, from whom I have received particular favours, is
uncommonly kind to me. _For the credit of your side of the water,
she is an Irishwoman. Her agreeable husband, by his beauty and
accomplishments, does credit to this country. He is remarkable also for
his feelings._
Adieu! This will affect you, I dare say, in the same manner your
account affected me.
_To MISS REAY._
+Ireland+, _July 1, 1776_.
Your little billet, of the 25th of last month, was a proper reproof for
the contents of one of mine. Until I saw the joke I was truly unhappy.
If you had not written the long and kind letter the next day, which
came in the same packet, I should have been miserable. Yet, I wish you
happy, _most_ happy; but I cannot bear the thoughts of your receiving
happiness from any hands (man, woman, or child) but mine. Had my
affections not been fixed, as they are unalterably elsewhere, the wife
of my _friend_, with all her charms, would never fix them. I have but
two masters, Love and Honour. If I did not consider you as my wife, I
would add, you know I have but _one_ mistress.
A friend of mine is going to England (happy fellow I shall think
him, to be in the same country with you). He will call at the Cannon
Coffee House for me. Do send me, thither, the French book you mention,
_Werther_. If you do not, I positively never will forgive you.
Nonsense, to say it will make me unhappy, or that I shall not be able
to read it! Must I pistol myself, because a thick-blooded German has
been fool enough to set the example, or because a German novelist has
feigned such a story? If _you_ do not lend it me, I will most assuredly
procure it some time or another; so, you may as well have the merit of
obliging me. My friend will send a small parcel for you to D. Street.
The books I send you, because I know you have not got them, and because
they are so much cheaper here. If you are afraid of emptying my purse
(which, by the way, is almost worn out), you shall be my debtor for
them. So send me a note of hand, _value received_. The other things are
surely not worth mentioning.
_To MR. HACKMAN._
+England+, _August 20, 1776_.
For God’s sake! where are you? What is the matter? Why don’t you write?
Are you ill? God forbid! Am I not with you to nurse you? If you are,
why don’t you let somebody else write to me? Better that all should be
discovered, than suffer what I suffer. It is more than a month since I
heard from you. A month used to bring me eight or ten letters. When I
grew uneasy, it was in vain, as I said in my last, that I endeavoured
to find your friend who brought the parcel (for I would certainly have
seen him, and asked him about you). What is become of all my letters
for this last month? Did you get what I returned by your friend? Do
you like the purse? The book you mentioned is just the only book you
should never read. On my knees I beg that you will never, never read
it! Perhaps you _have_ read it. Perhaps!—I am distracted. Heaven only
knows to whom I may be writing this letter!
Madam, or Sir,
If you are a woman, I _think_ you will, if you are a man, and ever
loved, I am _sure_ you will, oblige me with one line to say what is
become of Mr. Hackman, of the 68th Regiment. Direct to Mrs. ——, D.
Street, London. Any person whose hands my letter may fall into, will
not think this much trouble; and, if they send me good news, heaven
knows how a woman, who loves, if possible, too well, will thank them.
_To MISS REAY._
+Ireland+, _Sept. 10, 1776_.
As I am no sportsman, there is no merit, you may think, in devoting a
morning to this employment. Nor do I claim any merit. It is only making
myself happy.
Now, I hope, you are quite at ease about me. My health, upon my honour,
upon our love, is almost re-established. Were I not determined to keep
on _this_ side the truth, I would say _quite_. The four letters I have
written to you, since I received your frantic sheet of paper, have
explained and made up everything. How can I sufficiently thank you for
all your letters? Especially for that of this week? Never did you pen a
better. Did I know anybody employed in a work, where that letter could
properly appear, he should insert it in your own words.
Excuse me, I am unwillingly called away.
What I said this morning about your letter, brings to my recollection
something of that sort. Shall I tell it you? I will.
James Hirst, in the year 1711, lived servant with the Honourable Edward
Wortley. It happened, one day, in re-delivering a parcel of letters
to his master, by mistake he gave him one which he had written to his
sweetheart, and kept back one of Mr. Wortley’s. He soon discovered
the mistake, and hurried back to his master; but unfortunately for
poor James, it happened to be the first that presented itself to Mr.
Wortley, and, before James returned, he had given way to a curiosity
which led him to open it, and read the love-told story of an enamoured
footman. It was in vain that James begged to have it returned. “No,”
says Mr. Wortley, “James, you shall be a great man, this letter shall
appear in the _Spectator_.”
Mr. Wortley communicated the letter to his friend, Sir Richard Steel.
It was accordingly published in his own words, and is that letter, No.
71, volume the first of the _Spectator_, beginning “Dear Betty.”
James found means to remove that unkindness of which he complains in
his letter; but, alas! before their wishes were completed, a speedy end
was put to a passion, which would not discredit much superior rank, by
the unexpected death of Betty. James, out of the great regard and love
of Betty, after her death, married the sister. He dies, not many years
since, in the neighbourhood of Wortley, near Leeds, Yorkshire.
To marry you is the utmost of my wishes; but, remember, I do not engage
to marry your sister, in case of your death.... Death! How can I think
of such a thing, though it be but in joke.
_To MISS REAY._
+Ireland+, _September 15, 1776_.
The commands of your last letter, for the reasons you give, I have
immediately obeyed. My enquiries about the young Englishman you
mention amount to this. He is liked tolerably well here. He would be
liked more, if he took more pains to be liked. His contempt for some
people in the world, whom others despise perhaps as well as himself,
is sometimes too conspicuous. Accident has given me an opportunity to
see and know a great deal of him; and with certainty. His heart is
certainly not bad. His abilities are as certainly not equal to what he
once confesses to have thought them; perhaps they are superior to the
opinion he now entertains of them. He has ambition and emulation enough
to have almost supplied any want of genius, and to have made him almost
anything, had he fallen into proper hands. But his schoolmasters knew
nothing of his human heart, nor over much of the head. Though indolent
to a degree, a keen eye might have discovered, may still discover,
industry at the bottom; a good cultivator might have turned it, may
still turn it, to good account. His friendships are warm, sincere,
decided—his enmities the same. He complains now and then, that some of
his friends will pretend to know him better than they know themselves,
and better than they know anything else. “They would play upon him;
they would seem to know his stops; they pretend to be able to sound
him from his lowest note to the top of his compass; and there is much
music, excellent voice, in a little pipe, yet cannot they make it
speak. Do they think,” he demands, “that he is easier to be played upon
than a pipe?” Why, really, I do not think this is the case at present,
whatever it may have been. Secrecy is not brought _into_ the world,
it is acquired _in_ the world. An honest heart can only acquire it by
experience. The character which he had certainly gotten among some of
his intimates has been of service both to them and to himself. They
made a point of secrecy, after they chose to discover a want of it
in him; and now he has made a point of it himself. My dearest secret
(_you_ know what that is) should now sooner be trusted to him than to
any of his former accusers. The loudest of them, to my knowledge, was
little calculated to judge; for though he might not absolutely think
him a coward, he certainly did not suspect his friend of courage,
till sufficient proof of it was given under his own eye. Now, in my
opinion, true courage and resolution are this gentleman’s marking
characteristics. This is no great compliment; for, without them, I
would not give a farthing for any man.
Such, in my judgment, is the young gentleman about whom you wished me
to inquire, and with whom I have happened to live a good deal. His
principal merit is that my amiable friend (the mention of whose wife
just jogged your jealousy) sincerely loves him. That worthy man seldom
threw away his attachment where it is not deserved. Nor do I know
anything in the gentleman whose character I have been sketching which
gives me more pleasure, or which it would give him more pleasure to
have noticed, than the love and respect which I am sure he feels for my
friend; unless perhaps, his affectionate sense of the obligations which
I believe I have told you he lies under to a Mr. B——.
So much for business. Now for an article of news. The latter end of
last month a lady and her servant, as they were riding in Phœnix Park,
were stopped by a man on foot, very genteelly dressed in white clothes
and a gold-laced hat. He demanded the lady’s money, which she gave
him, amounting to twenty-six guineas. The person put the cash into one
of his pockets, and took from the other a small diamond hoop-ring,
which he presented to the lady, desiring her to wear it for the sake
of an extraordinary robber who made it a point of honour to take no
more from a beautiful lady than he could make a return for in value. He
then, with great agility, vaulted over the wall and disappeared.
This you may perhaps call an Irish way of robbing. There certainly was
something original in it. The gentleman seems clearly to imagine that
an exchange is no robbery.
As to your threat, I will answer it in the same style. “I _will_ love
you—and, if——!” But neither my answer, nor your threat is original.
Reading this morning a history of this country, I found the following
anecdote: In 1487, a dreadful war was carried on in Ulster, between the
chieftain O’Neal, and the neighbouring chieftain of Tirconnel. This war
had nothing more considerable for its immediate cause than the pride
of O’Neal, who demanded that his enemy should recognise his authority
by paying tribute. The laconic style, in which the demand was made
and rejected, would not have disgraced a nobler contest. “Send me
tribute—or _else!_——” was the message of O’Neal. To which was returned,
with the same princely brevity, “I owe you none—and _if——!_” But I talk
nonsense, this does not prove _your threat_ to have been borrowed; for
I dare say, you never heard of O’Neal till this moment. It only proves
that two people may express themselves alike.
Should any man who loved like me (if any man ever did love like me)
have spoke of his love in terms like those I used to speak of mine,
follows it therefore that I have borrowed either his passion or his
language? Were it possible for you to think so, I never would forgive
you. Pray copy the music you mention in your next.
_To MISS REAY._
+Ireland+, _September 18, 1776_.
How happens it that I have not sooner noticed what you say, in a letter
the beginning of last month, about the new punishment of working upon
the Thames? Politicians may write more learnedly upon the matter,
but I will defy Beccaria to write more feelingly or humanely. There
certainly is much truth in what you say. Experience, however, will be
the best test. Perhaps my true reason for noticing your sensible letter
thus late, was to introduce a scene which passed in the quicksilver
mines of Idra, a still more unpleasant abode than Mr. Campbell’s
academy. This used to be Colonel G.’s method, you remember, of
introducing his home-made jokes. Not that my story is home-made. I take
it from some Italian letters which a brother officer lent me, written
by Mr. Everard, and I give it you almost in his own words, except
in one or two passages, where I think he has lost an opportunity of
surprising the reader.
“The pleasure I always take in writing to you, wherever I am, and
whatever I am doing, in some measure dispels my present uneasiness,
and uneasiness caused at once by the disagreeable aspect of everything
around me, and the more disagreeable scene to which I have been witness.
“Something, too, I have to tell you of Count Alberti. You remember him
one of the gayest, most agreeable persons at the Court of Vienna, at
once the example of the men and the favourite of the fair sex. I often
heard you repeat his name with esteem as one of the few that did honour
to the present age; as possessed of generosity and pity in the highest
degree; as one who made no other use of fortune but to alleviate the
distress of mankind. But first of all, the scene I mentioned.
“After passing several parts of the Alps, and having visited Germany, I
thought I could not well return home without visiting the quicksilver
mines at Idra, and seeing those dreadful subterranean caverns where
thousands are condemned to reside, shut out from all hopes of ever
again beholding the cheerful light of the sun, and obliged to toil out
a miserable life under the whips of imperious taskmasters. Imagine to
yourself a hole in the side of a mountain of about five yards over.
Down this you are let in a kind of a bucket more than an hundred
fathom, the prospect growing still more gloomy, yet still widening, as
you descend. At length, after swinging in terrible suspense for some
time in this precarious situation you at length reach the bottom and
tread on the ground, which, by its hollow sound under your feet and
the reverberations of the echo, seems thundering at every step you
take. In this gloomy and frightful solitude you are enlightened by the
feeble gleam of lamps here and there disposed, so that the wretched
inhabitants of these mansions cannot go from one part to another
without a guide. And yet, let me assure you, that though they by custom
could see objects very distinctly by these lights, I could scarce
discern for some time anything, not even the person who came with me to
show me these scenes of horror.
“From this description, I suppose, you have but a disagreeable idea
of the place; yet let me assure you that it is a palace if we compare
the habitation with the inhabitants. Such wretches mine eyes never yet
beheld. The blackness of their visages only serves to cover an horrid
paleness caused by the noxious qualities of the mineral which they
are employed to procure. As they in general consist of malefactors
condemned for life to this task, they are fed at the public expense,
but they seldom consume much provision. They lose their appetites in
a short time, and commonly, in about two years, expire from a total
contraction of the joints of the body.
“In this horrid mansion I walked after my guide for some time,
pondering on the strange tyranny and avarice of mankind, when I was
accosted by a voice behind me, calling me by name, and enquiring after
my health with the most cordial affection. I turned and saw a creature
all black and hideous, who approached me with a most piteous accent,
demanding, ‘Ah! Mr. Everard, do not you know me?’ Good God! what was
my surprise, when, through the veil of his wretchedness, I discovered
the features of my old and dear friend, Count Alberti! I flew to him
with affection, and, after a tear of condolence, asked how he came
there? To this he replied that, having fought a duel with a General of
the Austrian infantry against the Emperor’s command, and having left
him for dead, he was obliged to fly into one of the forests of Istria,
where he was first taken, and afterwards sheltered by some banditti,
who had long infested that quarter. With these he had lived nine
months, till, by a close investiture of the place in which they were
concealed, and after a very obstinate resistance, in which the greatest
part of them fell, he was secured and carried to Vienna, in order to
be broken alive on the wheel. When he arrived at the capital, he was
quickly known, and several of the associates of his accusation and
danger witnessing his innocence, his punishment of the rack was changed
into that of perpetual confinement and labour in the mines of Idra. A
sentence, in my opinion, a thousand times worse than death.
“As Alberti was giving me this account, a young woman came up to him,
who, at once I saw, had been born for better fortune. The dreadful
situation of the place was not able to destroy her beauty, and even in
this scene of wretchedness she seemed to have charms to grace the most
brilliant assembly.
“This lady was daughter to one of the first families in Germany,
and, having tried every means to procure her lover’s pardon without
effect, was at last resolved to share his miseries, as she could not
relieve them. With him she accordingly descended into these mansions,
from which few ever return; and with him she is contented to live,
forgetting the gaieties of life; with him to toil, despising the
splendours of opulence, and contented with the consciousness of her own
constancy.
“I am, dear Sir,
“Yours, &c.”
Now can I tell all the feelings of your dear heart. Now see I your
fancy busy with her magic pencil; and affecting is the picture it has
begun. Begun; for your weeping eyes will not suffer you to finish it.
Can not you, through all your tears, distinguish Alberti and his wife
dying in each other’s arms after about half a year? What a scene!
Is there any sum of money you would not give to have this tragedy end
happily? That, of course, is impossible. But Everard speaks of the poor
souls in his next letter, which I may perhaps send you in _my next_.
Come, Martha, be a good girl, and you shall have it now, though it will
not give you _much_ consolation.
“My last to you was expressive, and perhaps too much so, of the gloomy
situation of my mind. I own the deplorable condition of the worthy
man described in it was enough to add double severity to the hideous
mansions. At present, however, I have the happiness to inform you,
that I was spectator of the most affecting scene I ever yet beheld.
Nine days after I had written my last a person came post from Vienna
to the little village near the mouth of the greater shaft. He was also
followed by a second, and he by a third. The first enquiry was after
the unfortunate Count; and I, happening to overhear the demand, gave
them the best information. Two of these were the brother and cousin
of the lady, the third was an intimate friend and fellow-soldier of
the Count. They came with his pardon, which had been procured by the
General with whom the duel had been fought, who was perfectly recovered
from his wounds. I led them with all the expedition of joy down to
his dreary abode, and presented to him his friends, and informed him
of the happy change in his circumstances. It would be impossible to
describe the joy that brightened up his grief-worn countenance; nor
was the young lady’s emotion less vivid at seeing her friends, and
hearing of her husband’s freedom: some hours were employed in mending
the appearance of this faithful couple, nor could I without a tear
behold him taking leave of the former wretched companions of his toil.
To one he left his mattock; to another his working clothes; to a third
his little household utensils, such as were necessary for him in that
situation. We soon emerged from the mine, and he once again revisited
the sight of the sun, which he had totally despaired of ever seeing. A
post-chaise was ready the next morning to take them to Vienna, whither,
I am since informed by a letter from himself, they are returned. The
Empress has taken them into favour; his fortune and rank are restored;
and he and his fair partner now have the pleasing satisfaction of
feeling happiness with double relish, because they once knew what it
was to be miserable.”
Says not our friend Sterne, that the circumstance of his being at
Rennes at the very time the Marquis reclaimed his forfeited nobility
and his sword, was an incident of good fortune which will never happen
to any traveller but a sentimental one? I believe it; and may every
other incident of good fortune befall all such travellers.
Did I not say this second part of the story would not afford you
_much_ consolation? Excuse me for such a falsity. That was only to
surprise you. Well I knew what would be my Martha’s feelings.
Are you as deep in astrology as when you wrote last to me? On the page
I have to spare I will send you some hasty lines which I scribbled
the other day to ridicule the weakness of a Dr. W., who is as great
a—fool at least as Dryden, and never fails to cast the nativity of his
children:
Kind heaven has heard the parent’s prayer,
Each gossip hails the son and heir.
“Pray let the Doctor see,”
“My master, ma’am? Your labour past;
He’s got among the stars, to cast
His son’s nativity.”
Three hours elaps’d, our sage descends,
With “Well, and how’s the child, my friend?”
“He’s happy, sir, ere this.”
“Happy! why yonder stars ne’er shed
Benigner influence on the head
Of happier, I guess.
“Worth, virtue, wisdom, honour, wealth,
Man’s best and only riches, health,
Assuredly await
Heav’n’s favour’d child—or never more
Say I have knowledge to explore
The secret page of fate.
“’Twas there I read my happy boy
Full seventy summers should enjoy,
“Ere”—when nurse sobb’d and said,
“Good lack! the babe to whom kind heaven
So many bounteous gifts hath given,
_These two hours hath been—Dead_.”
_To MISS REAY._
+Ireland+, _January 26, 1777_.
One of Lord Harcourt’s suite will carry this to England. His lordship
was relieved from guard yesterday by the arrival of a new Lord
Lieutenant. As politics have not much to do with love, I shall not
trouble you with a history of the late reign, or with a prophecy of
what will be the present. Only let our great actors take care they do
not play the farce of America in Ireland. My spirits, I thank you, are
now tolerable well. But you know I am, at least I know I have been ever
since you have known me, a strange comical fellow. Neither one thing
nor t’other. Sometimes in the garret, but, much oftener, down in the
cellar. If Salvator Rosa, or Rousseau, wanted to draw a particular
character, I am their man. But you and I shall yet be happy together,
I know; and then my spirits and passions will return into their usual
channels. Why do you complain of the language of my letters? Suppose
they were not tender. What would you say, what would you think, then?
Must not love speak the language of love? Nay, do not we see every day
that love and religion have mutual obligations, and continually borrow
phrases from each other? Put Jamie or Jenny, instead of Christ, and see
what you will make of Mr. Rowe’s most solemn poems, or of Dr. Watts’
hymns. Let me transcribe you a letter written by another person to a
lady.
“Sir Benjamin telling me you were not come to town at three o’clock
makes me in pain to know how your son does, and I can’t help inquiring
after him and dear Mrs. Freeman. The Bishop of Worcester was with me
this morning before I was dressed. I gave him my letter to the Queen,
and he has promised to second it, and seemed to undertake it very
willingly: though, by all the discourse I had with him (of which I will
give you a particular account when I see you) I find him very partial
to her. The last time he was here, I told him you had several times
desired you might go from me, and I have repeated the same thing again
to him. For you may easily imagine I would not neglect doing you right
on all occasions. But I beg it again, for Christ Jesus’s sake, that
you would never name it any more to me; for, be assured, if you should
ever do so cruel a thing as to leave me, from that moment I shall never
enjoy one quiet hour. And, should you do it without asking my consent
(which if I ever give you, may I never see the face of heaven) I will
shut myself up, and never see the world more, but live where I may be
forgotten by human kind.”
What think you of this letter? If it should have been written by a
woman to a woman, surely you will allow H. to write a little tenderly
to his own Martha! This was really the case. It is transcribed from
“An Account of the Conduct of the Dowager Duchess of Marlborough,”
printed for W. Smith, Dame Street, Dublin, 1742, which I bought at
Wilson’s in Dane Street yesterday. This pamphlet contains others as
loving. This I find, page 40. It was written to Lady Marlborough by her
mistress (one would have thought the word _mistress_ in one sense did
belong to one of the parties) when she was only Princess of Denmark.
It refers to the quarrel between the Princess and her royal sister and
brother-in-law, because she would not part with her favourite, upon
Lord Marlborough’s having displeased the king. These two female lovers
always corresponded, under the names of Mrs. Freeman and Mrs. Morley,
at the particular desire of the Princess, who fixed upon the names. And
this, after she was Queen Anne. Be assured, my Martha, that, although
I write to you with almost the same madness of affection, I will never
imitate her example, for all its royalty, and exchange you for a
mushroom of your own raising.
* * * * *
From this date Hackman’s letters have a morbid vein running through
them. He mentions that he has received several letters from Miss Reay,
but none of them, however, seem to have been preserved.
* * * * *
_To MISS REAY_,
+Ireland+, _Feb. 6, 1777_.
_My_ last was merry, you know. I cannot say as much for _your_ last.
To-day you must suffer me to indulge my present turn of mind in
transcribing something which was left behind her by a Mrs. Dixon, who
poisoned herself not long since at Inniskillen. It was communicated to
me by a gentleman, after a dinner yesterday, who is come hither about
business, and lives in the neighbourhood of Inniskillen.
The unhappy woman was not above nineteen years of age. She had been
married about two years, and lived with her husband all that time with
seeming ease and cheerfulness.
She was remarkably cheerful all the fatal day, had company to dine with
her, made tea for them, in the evening set them down to cards, retired
to her chamber, and drank her cup of arsenic.
She left a writing on her table, in which is obscurely hinted the sad
circumstance which urged her impatience to this desperate act.
Enclosed is an exact copy even to the spelling.
“This is to let all the world know, that hears of me, that it is no
crime I ever committed occasions this my untimely end; but despair of
ever being happy in this world, as I have sufficient reasons to think
so. I own it is a sinful remedy, and very uncertain to seek happiness,
but I hope that God will forgive my poor soul; Lord have mercy on it!
But all I beg is to let none reproach my friends with it, or suspect my
virtue or my honour in the least, though I am to be no more.
“Comfort my poor unhappy mother, and brothers and sisters, and let
all mothers take care, and never force a child as mine did me; but I
forgive her, and hopes God will forgive me, as I believe she meant my
good by my marriage.
“Oh! that unfortunate day I gave my hand to one, whilst my heart was
another’s, but hoping that time and prudence would at length return my
former peace and tranquillity of mind, which I wanted for a long time;
but oh, it grieves me to think of the length of eternity; and the Lord
save me from eternal damnation! Let no one blame Martin Dixon (her
husband), for he is in no fault of it.
“I have a few articles which I have a greater regard for than anything
else that’s mine, on account of him that gave them to me (but _he_ is
not to be mentioned), and I have some well-wishers that I think proper
to give them to.
“First, to Betty Balfour, my silver buckles; to Polly Deeryn, my
diamond ring; to Betty Mulligan, my laced suit, cap, handkerchief, and
ruffles; to Peggy Delap, a new muslin handkerchief not yet hemmed,
which is in my drawer, and hope for my sake those persons will accept
of these trifles as a testimony of my regard for them.
“I would advise Jack Watson [her brother] to behave himself in an
honest and obedient manner in respect to his mother and family, as he
is all she has to depend upon now.
“I now go in God’s name, though against His commands, without wrath or
spleen to any one upon earth. The very person I die for, I love him
more than ever, and forgive him. I pray God grant him more content
and happiness than he ever had, and hope he will forgive me, only to
remember such a one died for him.
“There was, not long ago, some persons pleased to talk something
against my reputation, as to a man in this town; but now, when I ought
to tell the truth, I may be believed. If ever I knew him, or any other
but my husband, may I never enter into glory; and them I forgive who
said so; but let that man’s wife take care of them that told her so;
for they meant her no good by it.
“With love to one, friendship to few, and goodwill to all the world, I
die, saying, Lord have mercy on my soul; with _an advice to all people
never to suffer a passion of any sort to command them as mine did in
spite of me_. I pray God to bless all my friends and acquaintance,
and begs them all to comfort my mother, who is unhappy in having such
a child as I, who is ashamed to subscribe myself an unworthy and
disgraceful member of the Church of Scotland.
“+Jane Watson+, otherwise +Dixon+.”
My pen shall not interrupt your meditations hereon by making a single
reflection. We both of us have made, I dare say, too many on it. She,
too, was _Jenny_ and had her _Robin Gray_.
_To MISS REAY._
+Ireland+, _April 20, 1777_.
Now you see there is something in dreams. But why is not your alarming
letter more particular about your complaint? Do they nurse you as
tenderly as I would? Are they careful about your medicines? For God’s
sake tell them all round what happened lately here to Sir William
Yorke, the Chief Justice.
Sir William was grievously afflicted with the stone. In his severe fits
he used to take a certain quantity of laudanum drops. On calling for
his usual remedy, during the most racking pains of his distemper, the
drops could not be found. The servant was despatched to his apothecary;
but, instead of laudanum drops, he asked for laudanum. A quantity of
laudanum was accordingly sent, with a special charge not to give Sir
William more than twenty-four drops. But the fellow, forgetting the
caution, gave the bottle into his master’s hand, who, in his agony,
drank up the whole contents, and expired in less than an hour.
Why, my dearest love, did you conceal your illness from me so long?
Now, you may have revealed the situation of your health to me too late.
God forbid! If I write more, I shall write like a madman. A gentleman
takes this who sails for England to-day. To-morrow or next day the
Colonel will be here. If Lord Sandwich, as I have reason to expect, has
influenced him to refuse me leave of absence, I will most certainly
sell out directly, which I have an opportunity to do. At any rate, I
will be with you in a few days. If I come without a commission you must
not be angry. To find you both displeased and ill, will be too much
for your poor H. For my sake, be careful. Dr. —— I insist upon your
not having any longer. His experience and humanity are upon a par.
Positively you must contrive some method for me to see you. How can
love like mine support existence if you should be ill, and I should not
be permitted to see you. But I can neither think nor write any more.
* * * * *
Hackman then sold out and left at once for England, arriving in London
in the beginning of May 1777.
PART III
_IN LONDON_
_To MISS REAY_,
+Cannon Coffee House+, _May 4, 1777_.
Did you get the incoherent scrawls I wrote you yesterday and the day
before? Yours I have this instant read and wept over. Your feeble
writing speaks you weaker than you own. Heavens, am I come hither only
to find I must not see you! Better I had staid in Ireland. Yet, do I
now breathe the air with you. Nothing but your note last night could
have prevented me, at all hazards, from forcing my way to your bedside.
In vain did I watch the windows afterwards, to gather information
from the passing lights whether you were better or worse. For God of
heaven’s sake send me an answer to this!
_To MR. HACKMAN._
+Admiralty+, _May 4, 1774_.—3 o’clock.
My dear mistress bids me write this from her mouth: “These are the
last words I speak. My last thoughts will be upon you, my dearest, dear
H. In the next world we shall meet. Live and cherish my memory. Accept
the contents of this little box. Be a friend to my children. My little
girl.”
_TO THE SAME._
+Admiralty+, _May 4, 1777_.—5 o’clock.
+My Dear Soul+,
At the hazard of my life I write this to tell you Heaven has spared my
life to your prayers. The unfinished note, which my hasty maid—I cannot
go on.
“Sir,
My dear Mistress bids me say, Sir, that her disorder has taken a turn
within this hour, and the physicians have pronounced her out of all
danger. Honoured Sir, I humbly crave your pardon for sending away my
scribble just now, which I am afraid has made you uneasy; but indeed,
Honoured Sir, I thought it was all over with my poor dear mistress;
and then, I am sure I should have broke my heart. For, to be sure, no
servant ever had a better, nor a kinder mistress. Sir, I presume to see
your honour to-morrow. My mistress fainted away as she began this, but
is now better.
“_Admiralty.—6 o’clock._”
_To MISS REAY._
+Cannon Coffee House+, _June 27, 1777_.
5 o’clock.
As I want both appetite and spirit to touch my dinner, though it
has been standing before me these ten minutes, I can claim no merit
in writing to you. May you enjoy that pleasure in your delightful
situation on the banks of the Thames, which no situation, no thing upon
earth, can in your absence afford me!
Do you ask me what has lowered my spirits to-day? I will tell you. Do
not be angry, but I have been to see the last of poor Dodd. Yes, “poor
Dodd!” though his life was justly forfeited to the laws of his country.
The scene was affecting—it was the first of the kind I had ever seen,
and shall certainly be the last. Though, had I been in England when
Peter Tolosa was deservedly executed in February, for killing Duarzey,
a young French woman with whom he lived, I believe I should have
attended the last moments of a man, who could murder the object of his
love. For the credit of my country, this man (does he deserve the name
of _man?_) was a Spaniard.
Do not think I want tenderness because I was present this morning. Will
you allow yourself to want tenderness, because you have been present
at Lear’s madness, or Ophelia’s? Certainly not. Believe me (you _will_
believe me, I am sure) I do not make a profession of it, like George
S. Your H. is neither _artiste_ nor _amateur_, nor do I, like Paoli’s
friend and historian, hire a window by the year, which looks upon the
Grassmarket at Edinburgh.
Raynal’s book you have read, and admire. For its humanity it merits
admiration. The Abbé does not countenance an attendant on scenes at
this sort by his writings, but he does by his conduct. And I would
sooner take Practice’s word than Theory’s. Upon my honour Raynal and
Charles Fox, notwithstanding the rain, beheld the whole from the top of
an unfinished house, close by the stand in which I had a place.
However meanly Dodd behaved formerly, in throwing the blame of his
application to the chancellor on his wife, he certainly died with
resolution. More than once to-day I have heard that resolution ascribed
to his hope that his friend Hawes, the humane founder of the Humane
Society, would be able to restore him to life. But I give him more
credit. Besides, Voltaire observes that the courage of a dying man is
in proportion to the number of those who are present, and St. Everemond
(the friend of the French M.) discovered that _les Anglais surpassent
toutes les nations à mourir_. Let me surpass all mankind in happiness,
by possessing my _Ninon_ for life, and I care not how I die.
Some little circumstances struck me this morning, which, however you
may refuse to forgive me for so spending my morning, I am sure you
would not forgive me were I to omit. Before the melancholy procession
arrived, a sow was driven into the space left for the sad ceremony,
nor could the idea of the approaching scene, which had brought the
spectators together, prevent too many from laughing, and shouting, and
enjoying the poor animal’s distress, as if they had only come to Tyburn
to see a sow baited.
After the arrival of the procession, the preparation of the unhappy
victim mixed something disagreeably ludicrous with the solemnity. The
tenderest could not but feel it, though they might be sorry that they
_did_ feel it. The poor man’s wig was to be taken off, and the nightcap
brought for the purpose was too little, and could not be pulled on
without force. _Valets de chambre_ are the greatest enemies to heroes.
Every guinea in my pocket would I have given that he had not worn a
wig, or that (wearing one) the cap had been bigger.
At last arrived the moment of death. The driving away of the cart was
accompanied with a noise which best explained the feelings of the
spectators for the sufferer. Did you never observe, at the sight or
relation of anything shocking, that you closed your teeth hard, and
drew in your breath hard through them, so as to make a sort of hissing
sound? This was done so universally at the fatal moment that I am
persuaded the noise might have been heard at a considerable distance.
For my own part, I detected myself, in a certain manner, accompanying
his body with the motion of my own.
Not all the resuscitating powers of Mr. Hawes can, I fear, have any
effect; it was so long before the mob would suffer the hearse to drive
away with his body.
Thus ended the life of Dr. Dodd. How shocking, that a man, with whom
I have eaten and drunk, should leave the world in such a manner! A
manner which, from familiarity, has almost ceased to shock us, except
when our attention is called to a Perreau or a Dodd. How many men,
how many women, how many young, and, as they fancy, tender females,
with all their sensibilities about them, hear the sounds, by which at
this moment I am disturbed, with as much indifference as they hear
muffins and matches cried along the street! _The last dying speech
and confession, birth, parentage, and education._ Familiarity has
even annexed a kind of humour to the cry. We forget that it always
announces the death (and what a death!) of one fellow being; sometimes
of half-a-dozen, or even _more_.
A lady talks with greater concern of cattle-day than of hanging-day.
And her maid contemplates the mournful engraving at the top of a dying
speech with more indifference than she regards the honest tar hugging
his sweetheart at the top of “Black-eyed Susan.” All that strikes
us is the ridiculous tone in which the halfpenny balladmonger singer
chants the _requiem_. We little recollect that, while we are smiling
at the voice of the charmer, wives or husbands (charm she never so
wisely), children, parents, or friends, perhaps all these and more than
these, as pure from crimes as we, and purer still, perhaps, are weeping
over the crime and punishment of the darling and support of their
lives. Still less do we at this moment (for the printer always gets the
start of the hangman, and many a man has bought his own dying speech
on his return to Newgate by virtue of a reprieve)—still less do we ask
ourselves, whether the wretch, who, at the moment we hear this (which
ought to strike us as an) awful sound, finds the halter of death about
his neck, and now takes the longing farewell, and now hears the horses
whipped and encouraged to draw from under him for ever the cart which
he now, now, now feels depart from his lingering feet—whether this
wretch really deserved to die more than we. Alas! were no spectators
to attend executions but those who deserve to live, Tyburn would be
honoured with much thinner congregations.
* * * * *
Well, I have made an uncomfortable sort of a meal on tea, and now
I will continue my conversation with you. _Conversation_—a plague
on words, they will bring along with them ideas. This is all the
conversation we must have together for some days. Have I deserved the
misery of being absent from my M.? To bring proofs of my love would be
to bring proofs of my existence. They must end together. Oh, Martha,
does the chaste resolution which I have so religiously observed ever
since I offered you marriage deserve no smiles from fortune? Is then
my evil genius never to relent? Had I not determined to deserve that
success which it is not for mortals to command, I should never have
struggled with my passions as I did the first time we met after your
recovery. What a struggle! The time of year, the time of day, the
situation, the danger from which you were hardly recovered, the number
of months since we had met, the languor of your mind and body, the bed,
the everything. Ye cold-blooded, white-livered sons and daughters of
chastity, have ye no praises to bestow on such a forbearance as that?
Yet, when your strength failed you, and grief and tenderness dissolved
you in my arms; when you reclined your cheek upon my shoulder, and your
warm tears dropt into my bosom, then who could refrain? then——
What then, ye clay-cold hypercritics in morality?
Then, even then, “I took but one kiss, and I tore myself away.”
Oh that I could take only one look at this moment!
Your last says _the sun will shine_. Alas! I see no signs of it. Our
prospects seem shut up for ever.
With regard to the stage, we will talk of it. My objections are
not because I doubt your success. They are of a different kind—the
objections of love and delicacy. Be not uneasy about my selling out.
The step was not so imprudent. What think you of orders? More than once
you know you have told me I have too much religion for a soldier. Will
you condescend to be a poor parson’s wife?
But I shall write to-morrow at this rate.
_To MISS REAY._
_July 7, 1777._
Since last night I have changed my mind, totally changed it. I charge
you not to see Mrs. Yates this morning. Write her word that your mind
is changed. Never will I consent to be supported by your labours.
Never, never shall your face, your person, your accomplishments be
exposed for so much an hour. By heaven! I will not forgive you if you
do not give up all thoughts of such a thing.
* * * * *
Miss Reay seems, after all, to have abandoned her intention of going on
the stage, although she was studying at the time with Signora Galli, an
Italian opera-singer, who had been appointed companion to Miss Reay by
Lord Sandwich. It is probable that Galli was also instructed to play
the part of spy over Miss Reay’s actions. The following four letters
from Hackman cover a period of twelve months, during which time he was
preparing to enter the Church.
_To MISS REAY._
+Croydon+, _Sept. 20, 1777_.
That you have taken to drawing gives me particular pleasure. Depend
upon it, you will find it suit your genius. But, in truth, your genius
seizes everything. While your old friend is eating his corn I sit down
to tell you this, which I would not say to your face lest you should
call it flattery, though you well know flattery is a thing in which
_we_ never deal. My opinion of the great man’s style of painting who
condescends to improve you in drawing is exactly yours. Posterity will
agree with us. The subjects you recommended to his pencil are such as I
should have expected from my M.’s fancy. While I walked my horse hither
this morning two or three subjects of different sorts occurred to me.
All of them would not suit his style. But I know one or two of them
would not displease you if well executed. Some of them I will send you.
Louis XIV. when a boy, viewing the battle of St. Anthony from the top
of Charonne. In 1650, I think.
Richard Cromwell, when the Prince de Conti, Condé’s brother, told him
in conversation, at Montpelier, without knowing him, that Oliver was a
great man, but that Oliver’s son was a miscreant for not knowing how to
profit by his father’s crimes.
Milton, when the idea first struck him of changing his mystery into an
epic poem.
Demosthenes declaiming in a storm.
William the Conqueror and his rebellious son Robert discovering each
other in a battle, after they had encountered hand to hand for some
time.
Charles XII. tearing the Vizir’s robe with his spur.
And again, after lying in bed ten months at Demotica.
... Though my mother could na speak,
She look’d in my face till my heart was like to break.
The Abra of Prior’s Solomon.
When she, with modest scorn, the wreath return’d,
Reclin’d her beauteous neck, and inward mourn’d.
Our Elizabeth, when she gave her Essex a box on the ear.
Chatterton’s Sir Charles Bawdin parting from his wife.
Then tir’d out with raving loud,
She fell upon the floor;
Sir Charles exerted all his might,
And _march’d_ from out the door.
The Conference of Augustus, Anthony and Lepidus (you are deep in
Goldsmith, I know). Do you remember the scene? Equally suspicious of
treachery, they agreed to meet on a little island near Mutina. Lepidus
first past over. Finding every thing safe, he made the signal. Behold
them, yonder, seated on the ground, on the highest part of a desolate
island, unattended, fearful of one another, marking out cities and
nations, dividing the whole world between them, and mutually resigning
to destruction, agreeably to lists which each presented, their dearest
friends and nearest relations. Salvator Rosa would not make me quarrel
with him for doing the background. Your friend, if any one living,
could execute the figures.
Let me suggest one more subject. Monmouth’s decapitation, in the
time of James II. History speaks well of his face and person. The
circumstances of his death are these: He desired the executioner to
dispatch him with more skill than he had dispatched Russel. This only
added to the poor fellow’s confusion, who struck an ineffectual blow.
Monmouth raised his face from the block, and with a look (which I
cannot describe, but the painter must give) reproached his failure. By
the turn of the head, the effect of the blow might be concealed, and
left to fancy; which might collect it from the faces of the nearest
spectators. The remainder of the scene is too shocking for the eye,
almost for the ear. But, I know not how, whenever I am away from you,
nothing is too shocking for _me_. Monmouth again laid down his head.
The executioner struck again _and again_, to as little purpose; and, at
last, threw down the axe. The sheriff obliged the man, whose feelings
all must pity and respect, to renew his attempt. Two strokes more
finished the butchery.
Were it possible to tear off this last subject without destroying half
my letter, I really would. It will make you shudder too much. But,
you see, it is not possible; and you prefer such a letter as this, I
know, to none. The paper only affords me room to say my horse is ready.
Every step he carries me from you will be a step from happiness. My
imagination _would_ busy herself just now about the manner in which I
should behave, if I were to die as ignominiously as Monmouth. But, as I
feel no inclination for rebellion, fancy threw away her pains.
_To MISS REAY._
_Feb. 5, 1778._
Oh! my dearest Martha, what I have gone through since I wrote to you
last night it is impossible for me to describe. Thank God, you were
not in town! Suffice it that my honour and life are both as you wish
them. Now, mine of last night is more intelligible. How strange, that
the kindest letter that you almost ever wrote me, should come to me
precisely at the time I was obliged to make up my mind to quit the
world, or, what is more, _much more_, to quit you! Yet, so it was.
The story my letter mentioned, of a friend who had received such an
affront as no human being could away with, was my own. Your feelings
agreed with me, I am sure. Duelling is not what I defend. In general,
almost always, it may be avoided. But cases may be put, in which it
can be avoided only by worse than death, by everlasting disgrace
and infamy. Had I fallen, I know where my last thoughts would have
lingered; and you and your children would have had some tokens of my
regard. Be assured the matter is for ever at an end, and at an end as
properly as even you can wish. How happy shall we be in ’79 or ’80 (for
before that time we shall surely be blest with each other!), to have
those friends about us who where privy to this day, and to talk over
the possibility of it!
H., in all thy future life, sacred be every fifth of February!
My mind is too much agitated to write any more this evening. To-morrow
I will be more particular. My last I am sure could not alarm you;
though, had anything happened, it would have prepared you. Do not be
alarmed by this. Upon my honour (with which you know I never preface
a falsity) I am not hurt; nor, as it since turns out, is the other
gentleman, at least, not materially.
One trifling circumstance I must mention. As I was determined either to
kill or be killed (unless sufficient apologies should be made), _the
only proper and least pernicious idea of duelling_, I did not see why
I should not recruit my strength as much as possible. So, about three
o’clock, I took some cold saddle of mutton and brandy and water at my
friend’s. After which I went home to seal up some things for you, where
my friend was to call for me. When I saw him coming to my door between
four and five, I had just wrung the affectionate hand of the man I
most value, and committed to his care you and your dear little girl,
and my dear sister, &c. &c. Love, honour, revenge, and all my various
feelings would, in spite of myself, parch my tongue. As I took my hat
out of my dressing-room, I filled a wineglass of water, and drank half
of it, to moisten my mouth. When I saw that glass again, about an hour
ago, on returning to that home, which I never again thought to see, in
order to write to her of whom I thought I had taken my last leave in
this world—when I took that glass again into my hand, recollected my
feelings on setting it down, and emptied the remainder of its contents,
a libation of gratitude to the superintending Providence of Heaven, oh!
M., no pen, not even yours, can paint my feelings!
Only remember, in all our future life, each fifth of February be ever
sacred!
_To MISS REAY._
_March 2, 1778._
Your going out of town so suddenly has not served to mend my spirits.
But I will be as merry as I can. Were I to be _very_ miserable after
my late miraculous adventure, I should be guilty of _sullenness_
against Providence. The minute account I gave you of it last week,
was, I assure you, dictated by my feelings before they had forgotten
the affecting circumstances. Your observations are truly just and
striking. Unpardonable as the affront which I had received appears to
mortal eyes, I should not readily, I fear, have found an answer to the
question of the enquiring angel, on entering the world of spirits,
“What brings you hither?”
Did I not tell you on Saturday the particulars of the poor fellow who
suffered this day se’nnight for murdering Mrs. Knightly? They are
singular. He was an Italian, I understand. Such a thing is not credible
but of an Italian.
Mrs. Knightly’s account was, that on the 18th of January Ceppi
came into her room (she being in bed), locked the door, sat himself
in a chair, and told her he was come to do her business. She, not
understanding this, asked him to let her get out of bed, which he did.
He then took from his pocket two pistols. She went towards the door
in order to get out, but he set his back against it. She, to appease
him, told him he might stay to breakfast. He answered he would have
none, but would give her a good one. She then called out to alarm the
house, ran towards the bed, and said, “Pray do not shoot me!” and drew
up close to the curtains. He followed, and discharged the pistol,
after which he threw himself across the bed and fired the other pistol
at himself, which did not take effect. During this a washerwoman ran
upstairs, and with a poker broke the bottom panel of the door, through
which Mrs. Knightly was drawn half naked, and Ceppi, following, ran
downstairs, but was pursued and taken. In his defence, he said he had
proposed honourable terms of marriage to her, but that she had refused
and deserted him; that he was overcome with grief and love, and that
his design was not to hurt her, but to shoot himself in her presence.
It appears, I am afraid, from all the circumstances, that, whatever his
despair meant with regard to his own life, he certainly was determined
to take away hers. How unaccountably must Nature have formed him.
Besides the criminality and brutality of the business, the folly of
it strikes _me_. What! because the person, on whom I have fixed _my_
affections, has robbed me of happiness by withdrawing _hers_, shall I
let her add to the injury by depriving me of existence also in this
world, and of everything in the next? In my opinion, to run the chance
of being murdered by the new object of her affections or of murdering
him, is as little reconcileable to common sense as to common religion.
How much less so to commit complicated murder, which must cut off all
hopes in other worlds.
Yet, could I believe (which I own I cannot, from the evidence in this
case) that the idea of destroying her never struck him till his finger
was at the trigger; that his only intention was to lay the breathless
body of an injured lover at her feet—had this been the fact, however
I might have condemned the deed, I certainly should have wept over the
momentary phrenzy which committed it. But, as nothing appears to have
past which could at all make him change his plan, I must (impossible as
it seems) suppose him to have deliberately formed so diabolical a plan;
and must rejoice that he was not of the same country, while I lament
that he was of the same order of beings with myself.
* * * * *
If the favour I mentioned to you on Saturday be at all out of course,
pray do not ask it. Yet the worthy veteran I want to serve has now and
then seen things happen not altogether _in_ course. When he called this
morning to learn how I had succeeded, I observed to him, while we were
talking, that he was bald. “Yes,” said he, shaking his grey hairs, “it
will happen so by people’s continually stepping over one’s head.”
He little suspected the channel of my application, but he asked me this
morning whether £50, if he could scrape it together, properly slid into
Miss Reay’s hand, might not forward his views. My answer was, that I
had no acquaintance with the lady, but I knew _for certain_ that she
had never in her life soiled her fingers with the smallest present of
this sort.
Happy, blest, to know you, to love you, and be loved by you!
_To MISS REAY._
+Hockerill+, _September 5, 1778_.
Here did I sit, more than two years ago, in this very room, perhaps in
this very chair, thanking you for bliss, for paradise, all claim to
which I soon after voluntarily resigned, because I hoped they would
soon be mine by claims more just, if possible, than those of love.
Two years—how have I borne existence all the while! But delicacy and
respect for you enjoined forbearance; and Hope led me on from day to
day, deceiving Time with distant prospects which I thought at hand.
When will the tedious journey end? When will my weary feet find rest?
When shall I sleep away my fatigues on the down-soft pillow of the
bosom of love? Should hope continue to deceive me, you never shall
make me happy, till you make me your husband. Yet, as we sate upon the
grass, under the trees near the water, just before you returned me
my stick, because you thought the gentleman coming along the path by
the mill was a certain person—yet, had I then loosened another button
or two of my favourite habit which was already opened by the heat;
had I then (you remember, my Laura, the conversation and the scene)
forgotten my resolution, forgotten everything, and rioted in all your
glowing charms, which only love like mine could withstand—who is he
that would dare to blame me? Who would dare to say I had done what he
would not have done? But the scene must be shifted. Sally Harris, you
know, arrived only at the dignity of Pomona at Hockerill. Had my Martha
her due, mankind at large would admit her double claim to the titles of
Minerva and of Venus.
To sleep _here_ is impossible. As well expect the miser to sleep in a
place where he once hung in raptures over a hidden treasure which is
now lost. This letter I have an opportunity to send to our old friend,
for you, without taking it to town. Let me fill up the remainder of my
paper with an almost incredible anecdote I learned from a gentleman
who joined me on the road this morning and travelled some miles with
me. It happened last week, I think. Peter Ceppi you remember. Surely
that Providence which prevents the propagation of monsters, does not
suffer such _monstrous_ examples as these to propagate.
One Empson, a footman to Dr. Bell, having in vain courted for some
time a servant belonging to Lord Spencer, at last caused the banns to
be put up at church, without her consent, which she forbad. Being thus
disappointed, he meditated revenge; and having got a person to write a
letter to her, appointing a meeting, he contrived to waylay her, and
surprise her in Lord Spencer’s park. On her screaming, he discharged
a pistol at her, and made his escape. The ball wounded her, but not
mortally.
Oh love, love, canst thou not be content to make fools of thy slaves,
to make them miserable, to make them what thou pleasest! Must thou
also goad them on to crimes! Must thou also convert them into devils,
hell-hounds!
_To MISS REAY._
+Craven Street+, _Jan. 28, 1779_.
The short note I wrote to you last night, immediately on my reaching
town, you received. But why no answer to it? Why do you not say when
we shall meet? I have ten thousand things to tell you. My situation
in Norfolk is lovely. Exactly what you like. The parsonage-house may
be made very comfortable at a trifling expense. How happily shall we
spend our time there! How glad am I that I have taken orders, and
what obligations have I to my dear B. to Mr. H. and Dr. V.! Now, my
happiness can be deferred no longer. My character and profession are,
now, additional weights in the scale. Oh, then, consent to marry me
directly. The day I lead you to the altar will be the happiest day of
my existence.
Thanks, a thousand thanks for your tender and affectionate letters
while I was in Norfolk. Be assured Galli could mean nothing by what
she said. She is our firm friend, I am persuaded. About an hour ago I
called there; but she was out. Presently, I shall go again with this,
in the hope of hearing something about you.
Oh, Martha! every day I live I do but discover more and more how
impossible it is for me to live without you.
Do not forget the 5th of next month. We _must_ keep that day sacred
together.
* * * * *
There seems to be a mistake in the date of this letter, as Hackman was
not ordained deacon until Wednesday, February 24, 1779; he became a
priest at a general ordination on the following Sunday, and received
the living of Wiveton, in Norfolk, on March 1 of the same year, the
day on which he wrote the last letter he ever sent to Miss Reay. Full
of hope and happiness he looks forward to the new life that is before
them, and he expresses his thankfulness for Signora Galli’s kindness.
But there is no doubt that this woman, whose conduct throughout was
sinister, is morally responsible for the events that followed.
* * * * *
_To MISS REAY._
_March 1, 1779._
Though we meet to-morrow, I must write you two words to-night, just to
say that I have all the hopes in the world that ten days at the utmost
will complete the business. When that is done, your only objection is
removed along with your debts; and we may, surely, then be happy, and
be so _soon_. In a month, or _six weeks at furthest_, from this time, I
might certainly call you mine. Only remember that my _character_, now
I have taken orders, makes expedition necessary. By to-night’s post
I shall write into Norfolk about the alterations at _our_ parsonage.
To-morrow! Galli’s friendship is more than I can ever return.
* * * * *
But Miss Reay, either out of consideration for the future welfare of
her children, or because she found that she was no longer in love with
Hackman, gave him to understand, through the agency of Signora Galli,
that, after all, she could not consent to marry him. Hackman, almost
crazy with disappointed love, wrote immediately to a friend in the
country, who replied advising Hackman not to believe anything that
Galli had said; he also offered to come to town if he could be of any
assistance. Hackman then wrote, in answer, the following letter.
_March 20, 1779._
Your coming to town, my dear friend, will answer no end. Galli has been
such a friend to me, it is not possible to doubt her information. What
interest has she to serve? Certainly none. Look over the letters, with
which I have so pestered you for these two years, about this business.
Look at what I have written to you about Galli since I returned from
Ireland. She can only mean _well_ to me. Be not apprehensive. Your
friend will take no step to disgrace himself. What I shall do I know
not. Without her I do not think I can exist. Yet I will be, you shall
see, _a man_, as well as a lover. Should there be a rival, and should
he merit chastisement, I know you will be my friend. But I will have
ocular proof of everything before I believe.
Yours ever.
* * * * *
A fortnight later Hackman wrote again to the same friend.
* * * * *
It signifies not. Your reasoning I admit. Despair goads me on. Death
only can relieve me. By what I wrote yesterday you must see my
resolution was taken. Often have I made use of my key to let myself
into the Admiralty, that I might die at her feet. She gave it me as the
key of love; little did she think it would ever prove the key of death.
But the loss of Lady Hinchinbrook keeps Lord Sandwich within.
My dear Charles, is it possible for me to doubt Galli’s information?
Even _you_ were staggered by the account I gave you of what passed
between us in the Park. What then have I to do, who only lived when she
loved me, but to cease to live now she ceases to love? The propriety of
suicide, its cowardice, its crime, I have nothing to do with them. All
I pretend to prove or to disprove is my misery, and the possibility of
my existing under it.
Till within this month, till Galli’s information, I thought of
self-murder as you think of it. Nothing now is left for me but to
leap the world to come. If it be a crime, as I too much fear, and
we are accountable for our passions, I must stand the trial and the
punishment. My invention can paint no punishment equal to what I suffer
here.
Think of those passions, my friend; those passions of which you have
so often, since I knew Miss Reay, spoken to me and written to me. If
you will not let me fly from my misery, will you not let me fly from my
passions? They are a pack of bloodhounds which will inevitably tear me
to pieces. My carelessness has suffered them to overtake me, and now
there is no possibility, but this, of escaping them. The hand of Nature
heaped upon every species of combustible in my bosom. The torch of
love has set the heap on fire. I must perish in the flames. At first I
might perhaps have extinguished them; now they rage too fiercely. _If_
they can be smothered, they can never be got under. Suppose they should
consume any other person beside myself? And who is he, that will answer
for passions such as mine? At present, I am innocent....
* * * * *
Hackman dined the next day with Mr. Frederick Booth and his sister.
He went afterwards to the Admiralty in the hope of catching a glimpse
of Miss Reay, and, seeing Lord Sandwich’s carriage standing there, he
guessed that she was going out in it and would probably call on Signora
Galli, who had rooms in the Haymarket. So he walked to the Cannon
Coffee House, in order that he might see the carriage pass. Miss Reay
soon drove up and he followed the carriage from the Haymarket to Covent
Garden Theatre, where “Love in a Village” was being performed. The
moment Miss Reay and Galli alighted, the handsome Lord Coleraine came
forward to meet them, whereupon Hackman, mad with jealousy, decided to
commit suicide. He went away and, having bought a brace of pistols (in
case one should miss fire) he returned to the Opera House. Croker says:
“The ladies sat in a front box, and three gentlemen, all connected with
the Admiralty, occasionally paid their compliments to them. Mr. Hackman
was sometimes in the lobby, sometimes in an upper side-box, and more
than once at the Bedford Coffee House to take brandy and water, but
still seemed unable to gain any information.” When the opera was over,
Miss Reay was standing in the vestibule waiting for the carriage to be
announced, and it is related, in the “Life and Correspondence of M. G.
Lewis,” that “Mrs. Lewis happened to make some remark on a beautiful
rose which Miss Reay wore in her bosom. Just as the words were uttered
the flower fell to the ground. The poor girl, who had been depressed
in spirits before, was evidently affected by this incident, and said,
in a slightly faltering voice, ‘I trust I am not to consider this as an
evil omen!’”
Hackman, who was watching her, tried to push his way through the crowd,
but was unable to do so, until Lord Sandwich’s carriage being called,
Miss Reay tried to get to the door. A Mr. Macnamara, of Lincoln’s Inn,
seeing the difficulty she was in, offered his arm to her and led her
towards her carriage.
This seems to have added fresh fuel to the jealousy which was consuming
Hackman, so forcing his way up to Miss Reay, he drew one pistol out
of his pocket and shot her in the forehead, shooting himself with
the other the instant after, and they fell together on the pavement.
Hackman, to his infinite despair, found that he had not inflicted a
mortal wound upon himself, so he beat his head frantically with the
butt-end of the pistol as he lay upon the ground, crying out the while
“Kill me! Kill me!” He was prevented from doing himself any further
injury by Mr. Mahon, an apothecary, of Russell Street, and both he and
his unfortunate victim were removed to the Shakespeare Tavern, where, a
medical examination having been made, it was found that Miss Reay was
dead. A letter to Mr. Booth, Hackman’s brother-in-law, was found in one
of his pockets, which shows that Hackman’s original intention was to
kill himself, and that the murder was only the result of a momentary
impulse.
* * * * *
_April 7, 1779._
+My Dear Frederick+,
When this reaches you I shall be no more, but do not let my unhappy
fate distress you too much. I strove against it as long as possible,
but it now overpowers me. You know where my affections were placed;
my having by some means or other lost hers (an idea which I could not
support) has driven me to madness. The world will condemn, but your
heart will pity me. God bless you, my dear Frederick! Would I had a
sum of money to leave you to convince you of my great regard. You were
almost my only friend. I have hid one circumstance from you which gives
me great pain. I owe Mr. W. of Gosport one hundred pounds, for which he
has the writings of my houses; but I hope in God, when they are sold,
and all other matters collected, there will be nearly enough to settle
your account. May Almighty God bless you and _yours_ with comfort and
happiness, and may you ever be a stranger to the pangs I now feel! May
Heaven protect my beloved woman and forgive this act, which alone could
relieve me from a world of misery I have long endured! Oh, if it should
be in your power to do her any act of friendship remember your faithful
friend,
+James Hackman.+
* * * * *
When Hackman had so far recovered as to be able to speak he inquired
anxiously of Mr. Bond the surgeon as to the condition of Miss Reay.
Being informed that she was dead he earnestly implored him to prevent
her corpse being exposed to the gaze of the public.
The news of the tragedy was at once carried to the Admiralty, and
Croker says that Lord Sandwich “stood, as it were, petrified, till
suddenly seizing a candle, he ran upstairs and threw himself on the
bed, and in an agony exclaimed, ‘Leave me for awhile to myself; I
could have borne anything but this.’ The attendants remained for a
considerable time at the top of the staircase, till his lordship rang
the bell and ordered that they should all go to bed.”
Sir John Fielding, the magistrate, was sent for, about three o’clock
the next morning, from Brompton. He arrived two hours later, and
finding that Hackman’s wounds were not dangerous, he ordered the
surgeon to take him to Tothill Fields prison. The corpse of Miss
Reay was removed to an undertaker’s in Leicester Square, and she was
subsequently buried near her mother in the parish church of her native
village, Elstree, in Hertfordshire, where, says Leigh Hunt, “she had
been a lowly and happy child, running about with her blooming face, and
little thinking what trouble it was to cost her.”
On the following day there was an article in the _Morning Post_ upon
the tragedy, which contained a eulogistic reference to Miss Reay:
“There was scarce any polite art at which she was not an adept, nor
any part of female literature with which she was not conversant. All
the world are acquainted with the universal sweetness of her vocal
powers; but it was the peculiar pleasure of a few only to know that
her conversation, her feelings, and indeed her general deportment, all
participated of an unparalleled delicacy which had characterised her
through life.”
Miss Reay’s personality must have been singularly fascinating, as
otherwise she could never have kept her hold upon her dissipated
“protector” for so many years. Croker relates that Lord Sandwich after
her death went away into the country, “but, after a great length of
time, he was persuaded by our open-hearted friend, Admiral Walsingham,
to meet a select party at his house. All passed off exceedingly well
for a while, and his lordship appeared more cheerful than could have
been expected; but, after coffee, as Mr. and Mrs. Bates were present,
something was mentioned about music, and one of the company requested
that Mrs. Bates would favour them with “Shepherds, I have lost my
love.” This was unfortunately the very air that had been introduced
by Miss Reay at Hinchinbrook and had been always called for by Lord
Sandwich. Mr. Bates immediately endeavoured to prevent its being sung,
and by his anxiety increased his distress; but it was too late to
pause. Lord Sandwich struggled for a while to overcome his feelings,
but they were so apparent that at last he went up to Mrs. Walsingham
and in a very confused manner said he hoped she would excuse his not
staying longer at that time, but that he had just recollected some
pressing business which required his return to the Admiralty, and
bowing to all the company, rather hastily left the room.”
Unpopular as the Earl was, there was general sympathy felt for him as
the following quatrain from the _Gentleman’s Magazine_ shows:
Britannia weeps, since S——’s heart can feel,
That heart long tempered of the hardest steel!
These tears most generous—we may all aver
To weep for him who never felt for her.
On the morning of April 8, Hackman wrote to his friend, the Rev.
Charles Porter, of Clapham, to whom he afterwards entrusted these
letters and the fragments of manuscript, which he wrote while in
Newgate, asking him to bring him some poison.
* * * * *
+Tothill Fields+, _April 8, 1779_.
I am alive—and she is dead. I shot her and not myself. Some of her
blood and brains is still upon my clothes. I do not ask you to speak
to me. Only come hither, and bring me a little poison; such as is
strong enough. Upon my knees, I beg, if your friendship for me ever was
sincere, do, _do_, bring me some poison.
* * * * *
On Friday, April 9, at half-past nine in the morning, Mr. Hackman was
brought up to Sir John Fielding’s private office, by the governor
of Tothill Fields prison. A contemporary account says that “the
surgeons, constables, and witnesses attended, and were severally
sworn to their depositions taken on Thursday last. Mr. Bond read over
these depositions to the prisoner, who wept very much, and was quite
convulsed each time the name of the deceased was mentioned. He did
not attempt to palliate his offence; but said he eagerly wished to
die. Upon the whole, it was impossible to behold him without pity,
notwithstanding the enormity of his offence. He was committed to
Newgate, and Sir John Fielding desired that a person might be set over
the prisoner to prevent him destroying himself. Lord Essex and several
other noblemen and gentlemen were present at the above examination.”
The same day he wrote to Mr. Porter, who had refused, at first, to
visit him.
* * * * *
_April 9, 1779._
Your note just now, and the long letter I received at the same time,
which should have found me the day before yesterday, have changed my
resolution. The promise you desire, I most solemnly give you. I will
make no attempt upon my life. Had I received your comfortable letter
when you meant I should, I verily do not think this would have happened.
Pardon what I wrote to you about the poison. Indeed, I am too composed
for any such thing now. Nothing should tempt me. My death is all the
recompense I can make to the laws of my country. Dr. V. has sent me
some excellent advice, and Mr. H. has refuted all my false arguments.
Even such a being as I find friends.
Oh, that my feelings and his feeling would let me see my _dearest_
friend. Then I would tell you how this happened.
* * * * *
Two days before his trial, he wrote again.
_To THE SAME._
+Newgate+, _April 14, 1779_.
My best thanks for all your goodness since this day se’nnight. Oh,
Charles, this is about the time. I cannot write.
* * * * *
My trial comes on either Friday or Saturday. It will be indeed a trial.
God (whom I have so outraged) can alone tell how I shall go through it.
My resolution is not fixed as yet about pleading guilty. The arguments
by which they tell me I may escape that death which is so much my due,
I certainly will not suffer to be used.
* * * * *
Whatever the world may think, you, I know, believe that I had no
intention against her till the _very instant_. The account I wrote to
you of the shocking business since it happened, was the real truth.
All Tuesday, after I had finished my letter to you, I, in vain sought
for an opportunity to destroy myself in her presence. So, again, on
the Wednesday, all the morning. In the afternoon, after dining at
poor Booth’s, I saw Lord Sandwich’s coach pass by the Cannon Coffee
House, where I was watching for it. I followed it to Galli’s (inhuman,
and yet not guilty, Galli!) From her house I saw it take them to the
play. Now, I was determined; and went to my lodgings for my pistols,
where I wrote a letter to Booth which I put into my pocket, intending
to send it; but, as I forgot it, the letter was found there. When I
returned to Covent Garden, I waited for the conclusion of the play,
in the Bedford Coffee House. What a figure must I have been! Indeed,
I overheard one gentleman say to a friend, that I looked as if I was
out of my senses. Oh, how I wished for the play to be over! I had
charged my pistols with the kindest letter she ever wrote me, a letter
which made me the happiest of mortals, and which had ever since been
my talisman. At last, arrived the end of the play, and the beginning
of my tragedy. I met them in the stone passage, and had then got the
pistol to my forehead, but she did not see me (nor did any one, I
suppose). And the crowd separated us. This accident I considered as the
immediate intervention of Providence. I put up my pistol, turned about,
and should (I most firmly believe) have gone out the other way, and
have laid aside my horrid resolution, had I not looked round and seen
Mr. Macnamara (whom I immediately construed into the favoured lover
described by Galli) offer her a hand, which I thought was received
with particular pleasure. The stream of my passions, which had been
stopped, now overwhelmed me with redoubled violence. It hurried me
after them. Jealousy suggested a new crime; and nerved anew the arm of
despair. I overtook them at the carriage, and—and, at about the time I
am now writing this, felt more than all the tortures of all the damned
together.
What shall I not feel at the necessary recital of the tragedy at my
trial!
* * * * *
On Friday, April 16, Hackman’s trial came on before Judge Blackstone,
“for feloniously, wilfully, and with malice aforethought, shooting Miss
Reay in the forehead.” Mr. Fielding and Mr. Howarth prosecuted for the
Crown; Hackman was defended by Mr. Davenport. After all the witnesses
had been heard, Judge Blackstone called upon Hackman to make his
defence. In a nervous and affecting manner, which produced a painful
impression on all present, he made the following speech:
+My Lord+,
I should not have troubled the Court with the examination of witnesses
to support the charge against me, had I not thought that the pleading
guilty to the indictment would give an indication of contemning death,
not suitable to my present condition; and would, in some measure, make
me accessary to a second peril of my life. And I likewise thought that
the justice of my country ought to be satisfied by suffering my offence
to be proved, and the fact to be established by evidence.
I stand here the most wretched of human beings, and confess myself
criminal in a high degree. I acknowledge _with shame and repentence_
that my determination against my own life was formal and complete. I
protest, with that regard to truth which becomes my situation, that the
will to destroy her, who was ever dearer to me than life, was never
mine until a momentary frenzy overcame me, and induced me to commit the
deed I deplore. The letter which I meant for my brother-in-law, after
my decease, will have its due weight, as to this point, with good men.
Before this dreadful act, I trust nothing will be found in the tenor
of my life which the common charity of mankind will not readily
excuse. I have no wish to avoid the punishment which the laws of my
country appoint for my crime; but, being already too unhappy to feel a
punishment in death, or a satisfaction in life, I submit myself to the
disposal and judgment of Almighty God, and to the consequences of this
enquiry into my conduct and intention.
* * * * *
Mr. Davenport urged Hackman’s acquittal on a point of law—that of
insanity, and also pleaded that the letter to Mr. Booth, which was
found in Hackman’s pocket, proved that it was not his previous
intention to kill Miss Reay. Judge Blackstone, in the course of his
summing-up, said that to constitute murder it was not necessary that
there should be a long form of deliberation; that the bare wilfully
shooting at one man and killing another was wilful murder; that it was
also wilful murder if a man, in attempting to shoot himself, should
kill another; that the prisoner had rested his defence on the ground
of insanity, but it was not every fit or start of passion that would
justify the killing of another, but it must be the total loss of
reason, and incapability of reason in every part of life. With regard
to the letter found in the prisoner’s pocket, his lordship said he was
sorry to say that it argued a coolness and deliberation which in no way
accorded with the ideas of insanity. On the whole, he left it to the
jury to consider of the fact and not the point of law, adding that,
if in discharge of their consciences, they were convinced that the
prisoner was totally dispossessed of his reason and understanding, they
would acquit; if not, they must find him guilty. The jury consulted
for a few minutes, then brought in a verdict of guilty; and Baron
Massieres, the Recorder’s assistant, immediately pronounced sentence of
death. Hackman behaved with perfect fortitude, and, bowing to the court
and jury, retired. Lord Sandwich, who had great personal influence with
George III., wrote to Hackman, that if he wished to live, “the man whom
he has most injured will use all his interest to procure his life.”
But Hackman replied that “the murderer of her whom he preferred, far
preferred, to life, suspects the hand from which he has just received
such an offer as he neither desires nor deserves. His wishes are for
death, not for life. One wish he has. Could he be pardoned in this
world by the man he has most injured—oh, my Lord, when I meet her in
another world, enable me to tell her (if departed spirits are ignorant
of earthly things) that you forgive us both, that you will be a father
to her dear infants!”
J.H.
* * * * *
During the trial, Hackman’s brother-in-law, Mr. Booth, who was too
agitated to remain in court, waited outside until the verdict should
be delivered. The officious Boswell was the first person to inform him
that the death sentence had been passed upon his relative. “How did
Hackman behave?” asked Booth, eagerly.
“As well, sir,” answered Boswell, with an echo of the Johnsonian
pomposity in his words, “as you or any of his friends could wish; with
decency, propriety, and in such a manner as to interest every one
present. He might have pleaded that he shot Miss Reay by accident, but
he fairly told the truth, that in a moment of frenzy he did intend it.”
“Well,” said Booth, “I would rather have found him guilty with truth
and honour, than escape by a mean evasion.”
“Which” (says the chronicler of the above conversation, the author of a
pamphlet containing a full report of the trial) “was a sentiment truly
noble, bursting from a heart rent with anguish!”
Boswell says, in his “Life of Johnson,” that “the Doctor was much
interested by my account of what passed, and particularly with his
prayer for the mercy of heaven. He said, in a solemn, fervid tone, ‘I
hope he _shall_ find mercy.’”
Horace Walpole wrote the same day to the Rev. Mr. Cole:
“I do not know whether our clergy are growing Mahometans or not: they
certainly are not what they profess themselves; but as you and I should
not agree, perhaps, in assigning the same defects to them, I will not
enter on a subject which I have promised you to drop. All I allude to
now is the shocking murder of Miss Reay by a divine. In my own opinion
we are growing more fit for Bedlam than for Mahomet’s paradise. The
poor criminal, I am persuaded, is mad, and the misfortune is the law
does not know how to define the shades of madness; and thus there are
twenty out-pensioners of Bedlam, for one that is confined.”
The Countess of Upper Ossory, in a letter to George Selwyn, mentions
that Hackman and Miss Reay were the sole topic of the town. She adds
that Hackman’s behaviour during his trial was wonderfully touching.
The following disconnected papers, which were written by Hackman in the
condemned cell, show that as the date of his execution grew nearer, he
became resigned to his fate, and earnestly desired to die.
* * * * *
+Newgate+, Saturday Night.
_April 17, 1779_.
+My Dear Charles+,
The clock has just struck eleven. All has, for some time, been quiet
within this sad abode. Would that all were so within my sadder breast!
That gloominess of my favourite, Young’s “Night Thoughts” which was
always so congenial to my soul, would have been still heightened had
he ever been wretched enough to hear St. Paul’s clock thunder through
the still ear of night in the condemned walls of Newgate. The sound is
truly solemn, it seems the sound of death.
Oh that it were death’s sound! How greedily would my impatient ears
devour it!
And yet, but one day more. Rest, rest, perturbed spirit, till then.
And then!
My God, my creator, my first father! Thou who madest me as I am, with
these feelings, these passions, this heart! Thou who art all might, and
all mercy! Well Thou knowest I did not, like too many of Thy creatures,
persuade myself there was no God before I persuaded myself I had a
right over my life. Oh, then, my Father, put me not eternally from Thy
paternal presence! It is not punishments, nor pains, nor hell I fear:
what man can bear, I can. My fear is to be deemed ungrateful to Thy
goodness, to be thought unworthy of Thy presence, to be driven from the
light of Thy countenance.
Well Thou knowest I could not brook the thoughts of wanting gratitude
to things beneath me in Thy creation, to a dog, a horse, almost to
things inanimate, a tree, a book, and thinkest Thou that I could bear
the charge of want of gratitude to _Thee!_
And might, oh might I resign the joys of the other world, which neither
eye can see, nor tongue can speak, nor imagination dream, for an
eternal existence of love and bliss with her, whom——
Presumptuous murderer! The bliss you ask were paradise.
My Father who art in heaven, I bow before Thy mercy, and patiently
abide my sentence.
These papers, which will be delivered to you after my death, my dear
friend, are not letters. Nor know I what to call them. They will
exhibit, however, the picture of a heart which has ever been yours more
than any other man’s.
+Newgate+, Sunday, _April 18, 1779_.
Four in the Morning.
O, Charles, Charles—torments, tortures! Hell, and worse than hell!
When I finished my last scrap of paper, I thought I felt myself
composed, resigned. Indeed I was so—I am so now.
I threw my wearied body—wearied, Heaven knows, more than any
labourer’s, with the workings of my mind—upon the floor of my dungeon.
Sleep came uncalled, but only came to make me more completely cursed.
The world was past, the next was come; but, after that, no other world.
All was revealed to me. My eternal sentence of mental misery (from
which there was no flight), of banishment from the presence of my
Father, or more than poetry ever feigned or weakness feared, was past,
irrevocably past.
Her verdict, too, of punishment was pronounced. Yes, Charles—she, she
was punished—and by whose means punished?
Even in her angel mind were failings, which it is not wonderful I
never saw, since Omniscience, it seemed, could hardly discern them. O,
Charles, these foibles, so few, so undiscernible, were still, I thought
in my dream, to be expiated. For my hand sent her to heaven before her
time, with all her few foibles on her head.
Charles, I saw the expiation—these eyes beheld her undergo the heavenly
punishment.
That past, she was called, I thought, to the reward of her ten thousand
virtues.
Then, in very deed, began my hell, my worse than woman ever dreamed
of hell. Charles, I saw her, as plainly as I see the bars of my
dungeon, through which the eye of day looks upon me now for almost the
last time. Her face, her person were still more divine than when on
earth—they were cast anew, in angel moulds. Her mind, too, I beheld as
plainly as her face, and all its features. That was the same—that was
not capable of alteration for the better.
But, what saw I else? That mind, that person, that face, that
angel—was in the bosom of another angel. Between us was a gulf, a gulf
impassible! I could not get to her, neither could she come to me.
Nor did she wish it. There was the curse.
Charles, she saw me, where I was, steeped to the lips in misery. She
saw me; but without a tear, without one sigh.
One sigh from her, I thought, and I could have borne all my sufferings.
A sigh, a tear! She smiled at all my sufferings. Yes, she, even she,
enjoyed the tortures, the wrackings of my soul. She bade her companion
angel, too, enjoy them. She seemed to feast upon my griefs; and only
turned away her more than damning eyes to turn them on her more than
blest companion.
Flames and brimstone, corporeal sufferance, were paradise to such
eternal mental hell as this.
Oh! how I rejoiced, how I wept, sobbed with joy, when I awoke, and
discovered it was only a dream, and found myself _in the condemned cell
of Newgate_.
* * * * *
Mr. H. and Dr. V., neither of whom you know, I believe, are exceedingly
kind to me. The latter writes to me, the former sees me, continually.
Your poor Hackman finds more friends than he merits.
+Newgate+, Sunday, _April 18, 1779_.
Five o’clock in the afternoon.
Since I wrote to you this morning I have more than once taken up my
pen. For what can I do, that affords me more pleasure than writing to
such a friend as you are, and have been, to me?
_Pleasure!_ Alas! what business has such a wretch as I with such a
word as that? However, pouring myself out to you thus upon paper is, in
some measure, drawing off my sorrows; it is not thinking.
Cruel Galli! And yet I can excuse her. She knew not of what materials
I was made. Lord Sandwich wished to preserve a treasure which any one
would have prized. Galli was employed to preserve the treasure. And she
suspected not that my soul, my existence were wrapped up in it.
O, my dear Charles, that you could prevail upon yourself to visit this
sad place! And yet, our mutual feelings would render the visit useless.
So it is better thus.
Now, perhaps, you are enjoying a comfortable and happy meal. There,
again, my misfortunes! Of happiness and comfort, for the present, I
have robbed you. H. has murdered happiness.
But this is the hour of dinner. How many are now comfortable and happy?
While I——
How many, again, with everything to make them otherwise, are at this
moment miserable!
The meat is done too little, or too much. (Should the pen of fancy
ever take the trouble to invent letters for me, I should not be
suffered to write to you thus, because it would seem _unnatural_.
Alas! they know not how gladly a wretch like me forgets himself).
The servant, I say, has broken something—some friend (as the phrase
is) does not make his promised appearance, and, consequently, is not
eye-witness of the unnecessary dishes which the family pretends to
be able to afford—or some _friend_ (again) drops in unexpectedly,
and surprises the family with no more dishes upon the table than are
necessary.
Ye home-made wretches, ye ingenious inventors of ills, before ye suffer
yourselves to be soured and made miserable, for the whole remainder
of this Sunday, by some trifle or another, which does not deserve the
name of accident, look here—behold, indeed, that misery of which your
discontentedness complains!
Peep through the grate of this my only habitation, ye who have
town-houses and country-houses. Look into my soul—recollect in how few
hours I am to die, die in what manner, die for what offence!
I was obliged to lay down my pen. Such a picture as this, in which
myself made the principal figure, was rather too much.
* * * * *
Good God! to look back over the dreadful interval between to-day and
last October two years. What a tale would it make of woe! Take warning
from me, my fellow-creatures, and do not love like H.
Still +Sunday+. 7 o’clock.
When these loose, incoherent papers shall come into your hands, after
my death, it will afford you some consolation to know my temper of mind
at last.
Charles, as the awful moment approaches, I feel myself more and more
and more composed, and calm and resigned.
It always, you know, was my opinion that man could bear a great load of
affliction better than a small one. I thought so then—now I am sure of
it. This day se’nnight, I was mad, perfectly mad. This afternoon I am
all mildness.
This day se’nnight! To look back is death, is hell. It is almost worse
than to look forward.
But—is there not a God? Did not that God create me? Does not that God
know my heart, my whole heart? Oh! yes, yes, yes!
To-morrow, then. And let to-morrow come. I am prepared.
God (who knows my heart, and will judge me, I trust, by that heart)
knows it is not with a view to diminish my own guilt, the magnitude and
enormity whereof I acknowledge—but let those, who survive me, flatter
themselves that all the guilt of mankind goes to the grave, to the
gallows (gracious Heaven!) with H.
I shall leave behind me culprits _of the same kind as myself_—culprits
who will not make my trifling atonement of an ignominious death.
Oh, may they see their crimes, and weep over them before they are
confronted with the injured parties at the footstool of the throne of
the God of heaven!
These are crimes (as indeed are all the crimes of men, however
noiseless or inaudible) with which the listening angel flies up to
Heaven’s chancery, but these are not they upon which the recording
angel drops a tear as he notes them down. The pencil of eternity
engraves such crimes as these on adamantine tablets, which shall
endure to the end of time. Mine, mine, perhaps may head the list.
Be merciful, O God! be merciful!
Reflection in this world is almost worst than the worst which offended
Omnipotence can inflict upon me in the next. I must fly from it.
And are there not crimes as bad as mine? It is far from my intention to
argue away the badness of my crime; but there surely are, and worse.
Let that gallant, gay, young gentleman yonder hold up his hand. Yes,
sir; you I first arraign. Not for breach of friendship, not for false
oaths to credulous virgins, not for innocence betrayed—these are no
longer crimes; these are the accomplishments of our age. Sir, you are
indicted for slow and deliberate murder. Put not on that confident
air, that arrogant smile of contempt and defiance. Demand not with a
sneer to have the witnesses produced, who were present when you struck
the stroke of death. Call not aloud for the blood-stained dagger,
the dry-drawn bowl, the brain-splashed pistol—are these the only
instruments of death? You know they are not. Murder is never at a loss
for weapons.
Sir, produce your wife. See, see! what indignation flashes in his
eyes! A murderer, and the murderer of his wife! May the calumniator——
Sir, no imprecations, no oaths; those are what betrayed that wife. You
did not plant a dagger in her breast; but you planted there grief,
disease, death. She, sir, who gave you all, was destroyed, was murdered
by your ill-usage. And not suddenly, not without giving her time to
know what was to happen. She saw the lingering stroke, she perceived
the impossibility to avoid it; she felt it tenfold from the hands of a
much-loved husband.
* * * * *
Were these scraps of paper to be seen by any other eye than yours,
common people would wonder that, in proportion as the moment drew
nearer, I got further and further from myself. It may be contrary
to the rules of critics, but so it is. To think, or to write about
myself, is death, is hell. My feelings will not suffer me to date these
different papers any more.
Let me pay a small tribute of praise. How often have you and I
complained of familiarity’s blunting the edge of every sense on which
she lays her hand? At her bidding, beauty fades even in the eye of
love; and the son of pity smiles at sorrow’s bleeding breast. In
her presence, who is he that still continues to behold the scene of
delight, or that still hears the voice of mourning? What, then, is the
praise of that gaoler, who in the midst of misery, and crimes, and
death, sets familiarity at defiance, and still preserves the feelings
of a man? The author of the life of Savage gives celebrity to the
Bristol gaoler, by whose humanity the latter part of that strange man’s
life was rendered more comfortable. Shall no one give celebrity to the
present keeper of Newgate? Mr. Akerman marks every day of his existence
by more than one such deed as this. Know, ye rich and powerful, ye
who might save hundreds of your fellow-creatures from starving by the
sweepings of your tables—know that, among the various feelings of
almost every wretch who quits Newgate for Tyburn, a concern neither
last nor least is that which he feels upon leaving the gaol of which
_this man_ is the keeper.
But I can now no longer fly from myself. In a few short hours, the hand
which is now writing to you, the hand which——
I will not distress either you or myself. My life I owe to the laws of
my country, and I will pay the debt. How I felt for poor Dodd! Well,
you shall hear that I died like a man and a Christian. I cannot have
a better trust than in the mercy of an all-just God. And, in your
letters, when you shall these unhappy deeds relate, tell of me as I am.
I forget the passage, it is in Othello.
You must suffer me to mention the tenderness and greatness of mind of
my dear Booth. The last moments of my life cannot be better spent than
in recording this complicated act of friendship and humanity. When we
parted, a task too much for us both, he asked me if there was anything
for which I wished to live. Upon his pressing me, I acknowledged I was
uneasy, very uneasy, lest Lord Sandwich might withdraw an allowance of
fifty pounds a year, which I knew he made to her father. “Then,” said
Booth, squeezing my hand, bursting into tears, and hurrying out of the
room, “I will allow it him.” The affectionate manner in which he spoke
of my sister would have charmed you. God for ever bless and prosper
him! And my sister and you!
* * * * *
While he was in Newgate he received, says the author of Hackman’s “Case
and Memoirs,” many anonymous letters, one, as the handwriting showed,
was from Galli, saying:
“O! Mr. Hackman, for God’s sake, die in the Roman Catholick faith!”
He also had a letter from a woman he did not know, saying that she had
long privately loved him, but that her love was hopeless because she
was poor, without beauty, and had nothing to boast of. The author of
the “Case and Memoirs” goes on to say that Hackman also received many
letters from “those superabundant good Christians called Methodists,
who, negligent of themselves, affect the highest concern for the future
welfare of others.... Bedlam is the place for such men to rave in,
rather than the chamber of an invalid, or the apartments of a condemned
prisoner.”
Hackman spent the evening preceding his execution with his friend,
Mr. Porter; he went to bed at eleven, and slept for some hours. At
five he arose, and after he was dressed, drank a “bason of tea” and
remained in prayer until half-past seven. Mr. Porter and Mr. Vilette,
the prison chaplain, then went to him, and led him to the chapel, where
they remained until nine. By this time the sheriffs were waiting,
and Hackman was taken to the press-yard, where a rope was fastened
round his shoulders and under his arms. He was, however, spared the
additional degradation of having a rope put round his neck, and his
hands were not tied at the wrists. He was then brought out and put into
a coach, and, accompanied by the two clergymen and a sheriff’s officer,
the dreary progress to Tyburn commenced. Owing to the enormous crowds
that blocked the streets he did not arrive there until eleven o’clock.
In a second coach were seated the Earl of Carlisle and Boswell—the
latter, however, did not deem it expedient to mention this fact to
Dr. Johnson. As soon as he was in the cart, which in those days took
the place of a fixed platform, he spent some time in prayer, kneeling
down with his face towards Paddington. His friends then took leave of
him, and it is recorded that he behaved with the utmost fortitude,
although Mr. Porter was so moved by his emotions that he had to be
supported. Hackman, desiring that he might drop his handkerchief as a
signal when he was ready, kneeled down again, and, amid the silence
and suspense of the largest crowd that had ever witnessed an execution
at Tyburn, prayed for five minutes. When he dropped the handkerchief
it fell underneath the cart, causing a delay of half a minute while
the executioner and his assistants scrambled for it. Then the horses
were whipped up, and James Hackman paid the last earthly penalty for
the crime of having loved Martha Reay so passionately that he was
irresistibly impelled to murder her. In his last moments he scribbled a
few words in pencil to his friend, Mr. Porter:
“Farewell for ever in this world! I die a sincere Christian and
penitent, and everything I hope that you can wish me. Would it prevent
my example’s having any bad effect if the world should know how I abhor
my former ideas of suicide, my crime ... will be the best judge. Of her
fame I charge you to be careful. My poor sister will....”
APPENDIX
The following account of the life of Chatterton, which Croft prefaces
with a few sentences in clumsy imitation of Hackman’s style, is copied
from a reprint of “Love and Madness,” which was issued by an Ipswich
bookseller in 1810. It is more connected and concise than the versions
in the earlier editions.
* * * * *
The task you have set me about Chatterton is only a further proof of
your regard for me. You know the warmth of my passions, and you think
that if I do not employ myself they may flame out and consume me. Well,
then, I will spend a morning or two in arranging what I have collected
respecting the author of Rowley’s poems. Every syllable you will read I
assure you shall be _authentic_.
Did you start at “The author of Rowley’s poems?” My mind does not now
harbour a doubt that Chatterton wrote the whole, whatever I thought
when we read them together at H. The internal evidence of the matter
shall not puzzle you, but you shall tell me whether you do not think
it easier for Chatterton to have imitated the style of Rowley’s age
(which he has not done exactly, if you believe those who think as I
think), than for Rowley to write in a style which did not exist till
so many ages after his time. To suppose him to have found half, and to
have added to them, or to consider him as a cat’s paw in the business
to some contemporary Rowley, in order to extricate a fictitious Rowley
from oblivion, would in my humble opinion be nonsense. For my own
part, though he might find some old MSS., I cannot believe he found
a syllable which he has attributed to Rowley. Who will engage to
prove from internal evidence the antiquity of _any one_ of Rowley’s
compositions? What he did find certainly suggested to him the idea of
pretending to have found more; but how shall we persuade credulity to
believe that all Rowley’s poems were copied from old MSS., when the
only MSS. produced in confirmation of the story are indisputably proved
to be modern? Is any one fool enough to believe C. was the only blind,
subterraneous channel through which these things were to emerge to-day,
and float for ever down the stream of fame? This (without mentioning
other objections to such a ridiculous belief) were to suppose two
people to determine on the same strange conduct, and two people (the
real and the foster father) to keep with equal fidelity the same
secret. And would the foster father have been as fond and careful of
another’s secret, as of the offspring of his own invention?
It is not clear to me that C.’s life (if such a scrap of existence
can be called a life) does not exhibit circumstances still more
extraordinary, if possible, than his being the author of Rowley’s
poems. But I possess not the abilities which Johnson displayed in his
famous life of Savage, nor is this a formal life of Chatterton; though
such a thing might well employ even the pen of Johnson. This is only an
idle letter to my dear M. Oh, my M., you, who contributed so liberally
last year to extricate from distress the abilities of a——; what would
you not have done for Chatterton!
Thomas Chatterton, destined to puzzle at least, if not to impose upon,
the ablest critics and antiquarians which the most polished age of
England has produced, was born at Bristol, Nov. 20, 1752. His father
had been master of the free school in Pile Street in that city, and
was sexton of St. Mary Redcliffe Church. History condescends not to
relate anything more of such an ignoble family, than that they had been
sextons of the same church for near a century and a half.
It seems to have been determined by fortune that this poor lad—I ought
rather to say this extraordinary human being—should have no obligation
but to genius and himself. His father, as he was a schoolmaster, and
reported to have been a tolerable poet for a sexton, might perhaps have
given his son a free-school education, had he lived to see him old
enough for instruction. The sexton died very soon after, if not before,
the birth of his son; who indisputably received no other education than
what he picked up at a charity school at a place called St. Augustine’s
Back in Bristol. Reading, writing, and accounts, composed the whole
circle of sciences which were taught at this university of our Bristol
Shakespeare.
On July 1, 1767, he was articled clerk to an attorney of Bristol, whom
I have not been able to find out. From him, I understand, has been
procured a strange, mad MS. of Chatterton, which he called his _will_.
When the new bridge at Bristol was finished, there appeared, in
Farly’s _Bristol Journal_, an account of the ceremonies on opening
the old bridge (the piece is prefixed to the volume of Chatterton’s
“Miscellanies”), preceded by these words: “To the Printer. Oct. 1,
1768. The following description of the ‘fryars’ first passing over the
old bridge, taken from an old MS., may not at this time be unacceptable
to the generality of your readers. Yours, Dunhelmus Bristoliensis.”
Curiosity at last traced the insertion of this curious memoir to
Chatterton. To the threats of those who treated him (agreeably to his
age and appearance) as a child, he returned nothing but haughtiness
and a refusal to give any account. To milder usages and many promises,
the boy, after some time, confessed that he had received that and
other MSS. from his father, which he had found in an iron chest
placed by William Canynge (the founder of the church of which C.’s
family had so long been sextons) in a muniment room over the northern
portico of St. Mary Redcliffe. Warton (in his history of English
poetry) says when this appeared he was about seventeen. Days are more
material in C.’s life than years in the lives of others. He wanted,
you see, something of sixteen. One fact is curious, that, though
it was not possible for him to have picked up Latin at a charity
school where Latin was not taught, his note to the printer has, for
no apparent reason, a Latin signature, Dunhelmus Bristoliensis. This
Latin certainly was not Rowley’s. It must have been C.’s. The memoir
procured C. the acquaintance of some gentlemen of Bristol, who,
because they condescended to receive from him the compositions which
he brought them, without giving him much, if anything, in return,
fondly imagined themselves the patrons of genius. Mr. Catcott and Mr.
Barrett, a pewterer and a surgeon, of his obligations to whom he speaks
in his letters, were his principal, if not his only, patrons. To these
gentlemen he produced, between October 1768 and April 1770 (besides
many things which he confessed to be his own, and many which, in the
interval, appeared in the _Town and Country Magazine_), all Rowley’s
poems, except the “Ballad of Charitie.” Of these only two, I think, and
those the shortest, he pretended to be the original MSS. The rest were
transcripts, in his own hand, of some of which he acknowledged himself
the author. Concerning these curiosities no distinct or satisfactory
account, by friend or enemy, by threat or promise, could ever be
drawn from him. For these curiosities how much he received from his
Bristol patrons does not appear. His patrons do not boast of their
generosity to him. They (Catcott at least) received no inconsiderable
sum for Rowley’s poems; nor has the sale of them turned out badly.
In consequence of the money got by poems which Chatterton certainly
brought to light, and which I firmly believe C. to have written, his
mother acknowledges to have received the immense sum of five guineas,
by the hands of Mr. Catcott; and Mr. Barrett, without fee or reward,
cured the whitlowed finger of the sister. Talk no more of the neglect
of genius in any age or country, when _in this age and country_
Rowley’s poems have produced such fortunes to the author and his
family. Should I ever appear in print on this subject, I would publicly
call upon the gentlemen concerned in this transaction to state their
accounts.
Has not the world a right to know what Catcott fairly bought of
Chatterton (he does not pretend to have bought all), and what was the
fair purchase-money of these inestimable treasures? Let us know what
the editors of Rowley’s poems gave and received for them, and what the
sale of them has produced? Is the son to be declared guilty of forgery?
Are his forgeries to be converted into (I believe, no inconsiderable
sums of) money? And is the mother and sister’s share to be five guineas?
Either mean envy of C.’s extraordinary genius, or manly abhorrence of
his detestable death, leads almost every person, who talks or writes
about this boy, to tell you of his shocking profligacy and his total
want of principle.
When C. left this world in August, 1770, he wanted as many months as
intervene between August and November to complete his eighteenth year.
If into so small a space he had contrived to crowd much profligacy and
much want of principle, some perhaps may be ascribed to his youth,
and to want of friends. Johnson, I remember, defends even the life of
Savage, which differed from Chatterton’s in more circumstances than its
length, by some such observation as this: that the sons of affluence
are improper judges of his conduct, and that few wise men will venture
to affirm they should have lived better than Savage in Savage’s
situation. Do _profligate_ and _unprincipled_, some of the tenderest
epithets vouchsafed unto poor Chatterton, mean dishonest or undutiful,
an unkind brother or an unfeeling child? The dullest enemies of his
genius can produce no proofs of any such crime. Some of the papers that
I shall send you will contain the fullest proof of the negative. Do
they mean that, being a young man, he was addicted to women, like all
youths of strong imaginations? Do the epithets mean that he exhibited
those damnable proofs of his crimes which Bougainville exported into
the country of Omiah? The proofs (if there were any, which his
bedfellow at his first lodging in town denies) only show that he was
unlucky. The crimes must be admitted. Do they mean that, writing to
procure bread for himself, his mother, and his sister, he wrote on any
side and on any subject which would afford bread?
Let me now make you acquainted with the indisputable history of this
boy till he left Bristol. As he says, in his “Story of Canynge.”
In all his sheepen gambols, and child’s play,
At every merry-making, fair or wake,
I kenn a purpled light of wisdom’s ray;
He ate down learning with the wastle cake,
As wise as any of the aldermen,
He’d wit enough to make a mayor at ten.
Beattie has hardly been able to invent a more striking picture of his
minstrel than is exhibited of Chatterton in a letter written by his
sister, last year, to a gentleman who desired her to recollect every
circumstance concerning him, however trifling it might seem to her. The
letter is lent to me, with many charges of care. Pray be careful of it.
In transcribing it, you will naturally preserve the false spelling and
stops. Let Chatterton’s sister tell her own story in her own way. The
anxiety shown in this letter to prove “he was a lover of truth from the
earliest dawn of reason,” is owing to what these two poor women (the
mother and sister) have heard about deceit, imposter and _forgery_.
For Chatterton’s sake the English language should add another word
to its dictionary; and should not suffer the same term to signify a
crime for which a man suffers the most ignominious punishment, and the
deception of ascribing a false antiquity of two or three centuries to
compositions, for which the author’s name deserves to live for ever.
Suffer me to ask what the prudery of our critics would have said
had the song to Ælla, or the chorus to Godwin, been produced by Mr.
Warton’s nephew, or by a relation of Mr. Walpole? Should we then have
been stunned in this manner with repetitions of imposter and forgery?
The sins of the forgery and the imposter would then have been boasted
by the child’s most distant relations, unto the third and fourth
generations. Is lady A. L. accused of _forgery_ for her “Auld Robin
Gray?” Is Macpherson’s name mentioned in the same sentence with this
unfeeling word _forgery_, even by those who believe Macpherson and
Ossian to be the same? “When a rich man speaketh,” says the son of
Sirach (you see I have not taken orders in vain), “every man holdeth
his tongue: and lo! what he says is extolled to the clouds: but if a
poor man speak, they say, ‘What fellow is this?’”
A gentleman, who saw these two women last year, declares that, in his
opinion, they might easily have been persuaded that injured justice
demanded their lives at Tyburn, for being the mother and sister of him
who was suspected to have _forged_ the poems of Rowley. Such terror had
the humanity of certain curious enquirers impressed upon their minds,
by worrying them to declare the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but
the truth about the _forgery_. Strange-fated Chatterton! Hadst thou
possessed fewer and less eminent abilities, the world would now give
thee credit for more and for greater.
With regard to the fact, the mother and sister, either believe, or
pretend to believe, that all Rowley’s poems came out of the old chest
in the church. The case is, not one of the three knows anything of
the matter. Most readily I admit that, if Chatterton be an impostor
(_i.e._, the wonderful human being I firmly believe him), he imposed
upon every soul who knew him. This, with me, is one trait of his
greatness.
It has been thought that murders and other crimes are pointed out to
discovery by the finger of Providence. But “God’s revenge against
murder” is, in fact, only the sociableness of man’s disposition. That
we may have been wisely formed for this purpose, among others, I do not
deny. But Tyburn would see fewer executions were man a less sociable
animal. It is not good for him to be alone. Joy or sorrow, villainy
or otherwise, _we must have society, we must communicate it_. Man, in
spite of grammar, is a noun adjective. Does any one admire Junius for
saying that his secret should die with him, and for keeping his word?
But this was only saying he would not enlarge the circle of those to
whom his secret was already known, for that he was, as he says, “the
sole depositary of his own secret,” I cannot think.
The original letters are clearly written in a female hand. But Junius
is now known.
Let any man, at any time of life, make an experiment of not
communicating to a single individual, during twelve months, a single
scheme, a single prospect, a single circumstance respecting himself.
Let him try how it is to lock up everything, trifling or serious, sad
or merry, within his own solitary breast. There are easier tasks. This
boy did it during his whole life.
Very few such men as John the Painter[13] have appeared in the world,
from whom his secret was only stolen by the traitorous hand of
friendship. No such human being as this boy, at any period of life,
has ever been known, or possibly ever will be known. The Spartan lad
was far inferior, and that was the effect of education. Psalmanazar
and D’Eon are not to be compared with him. That, at his timid and
sociable age, when other children are almost afraid to be left alone,
Chatterton should wrap his arms round him, stand aloof from the whole
world, and never lean upon a single individual for society in his
schemes (in schemes, too, neither odious nor criminal), is with me
almost more wonderful than the schemes which I firmly believe him,
without any assistance, to have planned and executed. It shall make
a trait in the character of a general, if he have strength of mind
enough not to communicate his plans to his first favourite, till the
communication is no longer dangerous. Shall not a boy of eighteen, of
seventeen, of _sixteen_, have merit for secrecy much more singular?
[13] Do not smile at my lugging in John the Painter till you consider
how it applies. His secrecy was wonderful, yet less wonderful that
Chatterton’s in exact proportion as his secret was more criminal, and
more nearly concerned his life. But you will not deny it to be _odd_,
what I know for a fact, that among his papers were some observations
on Rowley’s poems. If they have not been destroyed, they might surely
be published. They could not endanger our dockyards, though written by
John the Painter. Cannot you give a hint of this kind, some day, at
your house? Most probably _he_ has them.
In one part of the sister’s letter, you will not fail to recollect
Dryden, who speaks of the alliance between understanding and madness. I
am sure that “Love and Madness” are near relations.
* * * * *
“Conscious, of my own inability’s to write to a man of letters. And
reluctant to engage in the painful recollection of the particulars of
the life of my poor deceased brother. Together with the ill-state of
health I’ve enjoyed since it has been required of me, are Sir, the
real causes of my not writing sooner. But I am invited to write as to a
friend, inspired with the sacred name, I will forget the incorrectness
of my epistle and proceed.
“My brother very early discover’d a thurst for preheminence, I remember
before he was 5 years old he would always preside over his play mates
as their master and they his hired servants. He was dull in learning
not knowing many letters at 4 years old, and always objected to read in
a small book. He learnt the Alphabet from an old Folio musick book of
father’s my mother was then tearing up for waste paper, the capitals at
the beginning of the verses. I assisted in teaching him. I recollect
nothing remarkable till he went into the school, which was in his 8th
year. Excepting his promising my mother and me a deal of finery when
he grew up as a reward of her care. About his 10th year he began (with
the trifle my mother allowed him for pocket money) to hire books from
the circulating library and we were informed by the usher made rapid
progress in arithmetick. Between his 11th and 12th year he wrote a
caterlogue of the books he had read to the number of 70. History and
divinity were the chief subjects, his school mates informed us he
retired to read at the hours allotted for play. At 12 years old he was
confirmed by the bishop, he made very sencible serious remarks on the
awfullness of the ceremony and his own feelings and convictions during
it. Soon after this in the week he was door-keeper he made some verses
on the last day, I think about 18 lines, paraphrased the 9 chapter of
Job and not long after some chapters in Isaiah. He had been gloomy from
the time he began to learn, but we remark’d he was more cheerfull after
he began to write poetry. Some saterical peicis we saw soon after. His
intimates in the school were but few and they solid lads and except the
next neighbour’s sons I know of none acquaintance he had out. He was 14
the 20th of Novr. and bound apprentice the 1st of July following. Soon
after his apprenticeship he corresponded with one of his school mates
that had been his bedfellow, and was I believe bound to a merchant
at New York. He read a letter at home that he wrote to his friend, a
collection of all the hard words in the English language, and requested
him to answer it. He was a lover of truth from the earlyest dawn of
reason, and nothing would move him so much as being bely’d. When in
the school we were informed by the usher, his master depended on his
verasity on all occations. Till this time he was remarkably indifferent
to females, one day he was remarking to me the tendency sever study
had to sour the temper and declared he had always seen all the sex
with equal indifference but those that nature made dear, he thought of
makeing an acquaintance with a girl in the neighbourhood, supposeing it
might soften the austerity of temper study had ocationed, he wrote a
poem to her and they commenced corrisponding acquaintance. About this
time the parchments belonging to my father that was left of covering
his boys books, my brother carried to the office. He would often speak
in great raptures of the undoubted success of his plan for future life.
He was introduced to Mr. Barret, Mr. Catcot, his ambition increas’d
daily. His spirits was rather uneven. Some time so gloom’d that for
many days together he would say very little and that by constraint. At
other times exceeding chearfull. When in spirits he would injoy his
rising fame. Confident of advancement he would promise my mother and me
should be partakers of his success. Mr. Barret lent him many books on
surgery and I believe he bought many more as I remember to have packt
them up to send to him when in London and no demand was ever made for
them. About this time he wrote several saterical poems. One in the
papers of Mr. Catcot’s putting the pewter plates in St. Nicholas tower.
He began to be universally known among the young men. He had many cap
acquaintance but I am confident but few intimates. At about 17, he
became acquainted with Mr. Clayfield, distiller in Castle-street, who
lent him many books on astronomy. Mr. Cator likewise assisted him with
books on that subject, from thence he applyd himself to that study. His
hours in the office was from 8 in the morning to 8 in the evening. He
had little of his masters business to do. Sometimes not 2 hours in the
day, which gave him an opportunity to pursue his genius. He boarded at
Mr. Lambert’s, but we saw him most evenings before 9 o’clock and would
in general stay to the limits of his time which was 10 o’clock. He was
seldom 2 evenings together without seeing us. I had almost forgotten
to add, we had heard him frequently say that he found he studied best
towards the full of the moon and would often sit up all night and write
by moon light. A few months before he left Bristol he wrote letters
to several booksellers in London I believe to learn if there was any
probability of his getting an employment there but that I cannot affirm
as the subject was a secret at home. He wrote one letter to Sir Horace
Warpool, and except his corrispondence with Miss Rumsey, the girl I
before mentioned, I know of no other. He would frequently walk the
colledge green with the young girls that statedly paraded there to
show their finery. But I really believe he was no debauchee (tho some
have reported it), the dear unhappy boy had faults enough I saw with
concern. He was proud and exceedingly impetious but that of venality he
could not be accused justly with. Mrs. Lambert informed me not 2 months
before he left Bristol, he had never been once found out of the office
in the stated hours as they frequently sent the footman and other
servants there to see. Nor but once stayd out till 11 o’clock; then he
had leave, as we entertained some friends at our house at Christmas.
“Thus Sir have I given you, as before the great searcher of hearts the
whole truth as far as my memory have been faithful the particulars of
my dear brother. The task have been painfull, and for want of earlier
recollection much have been nay the greatest part have been lost. My
mother joins with me in best respects which conclude me.
“Sir,
“Your very humble servant,
“+Mary Newton+.
“+Bristol, Somersetshire Square+,
“_Sept. 22, 1778_.”
Chatterton remained in the attorney’s office at Bristol till April
1770. The life he led there you may collect from Mrs. Newton’s letter.
In addition to that, she and her mother relate that his Sundays were
generally spent in walking alone into the country round Bristol, as far
as the day would allow his return before night. From these excursions
he never failed to bring home with him drawings of churches, or of
something which had struck him. That he had a turn of drawing you will
see by the figure of a warrior (perhaps Ælla) presenting a church on
his knee, which shall accompany this letter (and you are now a judge of
drawing, you know). It was one of his first attempts.
But any single self-acquired accomplishment ceases to surprise, when
we recollect his other acquisitions of heraldry, architecture, music,
astronomy, surgery, &c. Our surprise has been long since called
forth. Had Chatterton, without any instruction but reading, writing,
and accounts, _before he was 18_, arrived at the ability of _only_
putting together, in prose or in verse, something which was deemed
worth insertion in the most worthless magazine, it would have been
surprising. What master would not be astonished to discover such a
talent in a servant (grown grey in the acquisition of it) who had only
learnt to read and write? Stephen Duck, and others, have been lifted to
independence, to wealth, for little more. The author of our existence
can alone determine to what He has made his creatures equal.
That Chatterton should acquire particular things, without instruction,
is not singular, since it was with him a favourite maxim that man
was equal to _anything_ and that _everything_ might be acquired by
diligence and abstinence. Was anything of this sort mentioned in his
hearing? All boy as he was, he would only observe that the person in
question merited praise; but that God had sent His creatures into the
world with arms long enough to reach anything, if they would be at the
trouble of extending them. This idea he could not but feel confirmed
by what he knew of a Mr. Burgum (I think), Mr. Catcott’s partner, who
taught himself Latin and Greek.
How very strongly the idea, that a human being may accomplish anything,
had taken possession of Chatterton. He desires his sister to improve
herself in copying music, drawing, and _everything which requires
genius_; as if genius were no less common to man and woman than a pair
of eyes or a nose. He gave all his fellow-creatures credit for what he
felt so plainly himself.
When Voltaire tells us, in his history of Charles XII., that on such
a day he quitted Stockholm, _to which he never returned_, we are
interested enough, even in such a savage, to feel something like
concern. In April 1770 Chatterton quitted Bristol (from which place
he never had before been absent further than he could walk in half a
Sunday, and to which place _he never returned_), to try his fortune in
London.
He lodged first at Shoreditch, afterwards (when his employment made
it necessary for him to frequent public places, I suppose) in Brook
Street, Holborn. The man and woman where he first lodged are still
living in the same house. He is a plaisterer. They and their nephew,
niece, and Mrs. Ballance, who lodged in the house, and desired them to
let Chatterton (her relation) lodge there also. The little collected
from them you shall have in their own words. But the life he led did
not afford them any opportunities to observe him, could they have
imagined that such a being was under the same roof with them, or that
they would be asked for their observations upon him, after an interval
of so many years. Mrs. Ballance says he was as proud as Lucifer. He
very soon quarrelled with her for calling him “Cousin _Tommy_,” and
asked her if she ever heard of a poet’s being called _Tommy?_ But she
assured him she knew nothing of poets, and only wished he would not set
up for a gentleman. Upon her recommending it to him to get into some
office, when he had been in town two or three weeks, he stormed about
the room like a madman, and frightened her not a little by telling
her, he hoped, with the blessing of God, very soon to be sent prisoner
to the Tower, which would make his fortune. He would often look
steadfastly in a person’s face without speaking, or seeming to see the
person, for a quarter of an hour or more, till it was quite frightful,
during all which time (she supposes, from what she has since heard)
that his thoughts _were gone about something else_. When Beckford died,
he was perfectly frantic, and out of his mind, and said he was ruined.
He frequently said he should settle the nation before he had done; but
how could she think her poor cousin Tommy was so great a man as she now
finds he was? His mother should have written word of his greatness, and
then, to be sure, she would have humoured the gentleman accordingly.
Mr. Walmsley saw nothing of him, but that there was something manly
and pleasing about him, and that he did not dislike the wenches. Mrs.
Walmsley’s account is that she never saw any harm of him, that he
never _mislisted_ her; but was always very civil whenever they met in
the house by accident; that he would never suffer the room, in which
he used to read and write, to be swept, because, he said, poets hated
brooms; that she told him she did not anything that _poet folks_ were
good for, but to sit in a dirty cap and gown in a garret, and at last
to be starved; that, during the nine weeks he was at her house, he
never stayed out after the family hours, except once, when he did not
come home all night, and had been, she heard, _poeting_ a song about
the streets. The night, Mrs. Ballance says, she knows he lodged at a
relation’s; Mr. Walmsley’s house was shut up when he came home.
The niece says, for her part, she always took him more for a mad boy
than anything else, he would have such flights and _vagaries_; that,
but for his face, and her knowledge of his age, she should never have
thought him a boy, he was so manly, _and so much himself_; that no
women came after him, nor did she know of any connection; but still
that he was a sad rake, and terribly fond of women, and would sometimes
be saucy to her; that he ate what he chose to have with his relation
(Mrs. B.) who lodged in the house, but he never touched meat, and drank
only water and seemed to live on the air.
The niece adds that he was good-tempered, and agreeable, and obliging,
but sadly proud and haughty; nothing was too good for him, nor was
anything too good for his grandmother, &c., at a time when she (the
niece) knew he was almost in want; that he used to sit up almost all
night, reading and writing, and that her brother said he was afraid to
lie with him; for, to be sure, he was a _spirit_, and never slept; for
he never came to bed until it was morning, and then, for what he saw,
never closed his eyes.
The nephew (Chatterton’s bedfellow, during the first six weeks he
lodged there) says, that, notwithstanding his pride and haughtiness,
it was impossible to help liking him; that he lived chiefly upon a bit
of bread, or a tart, and some water, but he once or twice saw him take
a sheep’s tongue out of his pocket; that Chatterton, to his knowledge,
never slept while they lay together; that he never came to bed until
very late, sometimes three or four o’clock, and was always awake when
he (the nephew) waked, and got up at the same time, about five or
six; that almost every morning the floor was covered with pieces of
paper not so big as sixpences, into which he had torn what he had been
writing before he came to bed. In short, they all agree that no one
would have taken him, from his behaviour, &c., to have been a poor boy
of seventeen, and a sexton’s son: they never saw such another person
before nor since—he appeared to have something wonderful about him.
They say he gave no reason for quitting their house. They found the
floor of his room covered with little pieces of paper, the remains of
his _poeting_, as they term it.
And yet poor Edwin was no vulgar boy;
Deep thought oft seem’d to fix his infant eye.
Dainties he heeded not, not gaude, nor toy,
Save one short pipe of rudest minstrelsy.
Silent, when glad; affectionate, though shy:
And now his look was most demurely sad;
And now he laugh’d aloud, yet none knew why.
The neighbours stared and sigh’d, yet bless’d the lad
_Some deem’d him wondrous wise, and some believ’d him mad._
Mrs. Angel, to whose house he removed from Shoreditch, I have in
vain endeavoured repeatedly to find out. A person in distressed
circumstances, as I understand her to be, is slow to believe that an
inquiry after her hiding-place is only set on foot by the curiosity of
honest enthusiasm. Little versed in the history of mankind, she cannot
imagine how any one can be curious or concerned about a person, so
many years after his death, for whom in his lifetime no one cared a
farthing. Every stranger is to her imagination a bailiff in disguise.
In every hasty tread she hears “the monster Bumbailiano, keeper of
the dark and black cave.” Poor hunted animal! If thou wert kind to
Chatterton; if, by thy charitable means, his young hairs were brought
down with somewhat less of sorrow to the grave, never may the monster
lay his cruel paw upon thy shoulder!
Could Mrs. Angel be found, much might not be learnt from her short
knowledge of Chatterton, for he remained nine weeks in Shoreditch—at
least, not much more, perhaps, than has been gotten from Mrs. Walmsley
and her family. Mrs. Wolfe, a barber’s wife, within a few doors of the
house in which Mrs. Angel lived, remembers him, and remembers his
death. She speaks also of his proud and haughty spirit, and adds, that
he appeared both to her and Mrs. Angel as if he were born for something
great. Mrs. Angel told her, after his death, that, as she knew he had
not eaten anything for two or three days, she begged he would take
some dinner with her on the 24th of August; but he was offended at her
expressions, which seemed to hint that he was in want, and assured her
he was not hungry.
Ah! who can tell how hard it is to climb
The steep where Fame’s proud temple shines afar!
Ah! who can tell how many a soul sublime
Hath felt the influence of malignant star,
And wag’d with fortune an eternal war!
Check’d by the scoff of pride, and envy’s frown,
And poverty’s unconquerable bar,
In life’s low vale remote hath pin’d alone,
_Then dropt into the grave, unpitied and unknown_!
Such was the short and incredible life of Thomas Chatterton. Over
his death, for the sake of the world (he is out of the reach of our
pity or concern), I would willingly draw a veil. But this must not
be. They who are in a condition to patronise merit, and they who
feel a consciousness of merit which is not patronised, may form their
own resolutions from the catastrophe of his tale: those, to lose no
opportunity of befriending genius; these, to seize every opportunity
of befriending themselves; and, upon no account, to harbour the most
distant idea of quitting the world, however it may be unworthy of them,
lest despondency should at last deceive them into so unpardonable
a step. Chatterton, as appears by the coroner’s inquest, swallowed
arsenic in water on the 24th of August, 1770, and died in consequence
thereof the next day. He was buried in a shell in the burying-ground
of Shoe-land workhouse. His taking such a rash and unjustifiable step
is almost as strange as his fathering his poems upon Rowley. That he
should have been driven to it by _absolute_ want (though I do not say
it was _not_ so) is not very possible, since he never indulged himself
in meat and drank nothing but water. The coroner has no minutes of the
melancholy business, and is unable to recall any of the circumstances
at this distance of time to his memory. The witnesses before the
inquest, as appears by his memorandum, were Frederick Angel, Mary
Foster, and William Hamsley, none of whom I have been able to find
out. That his despair should fix on August, that it should not have
staid at least till the gloomier months of winter, must surprise
those who are sensible of the influence of such a climate as ours.
Recollecting what Mrs. Newton says of the effect which the moon had
upon her brother, I searched for the moon’s changes in August 1770.
Much cannot be presumed from them. The moon was at the full on the
6th, and in the last quarter the 14th. The 20th, at eleven at night,
there was a new moon. The fatal day was the 24th. But who can bear to
dwell upon, or argue about, the self-destruction of such a being as
Chatterton? The motives for everything he did are past finding out.
His room, when it was broke open after his death, was found, like
the room he quitted at Mrs. Walmsley’s, covered with little scraps
of paper. What a picture he would have made, with the fatal cup by
his bedside, destroying plans of future Ællas and Godwins, and of
unfinished books of The Battle of Hastings? M. I have had the (call
it what you will) to spend half an hour in the room. It was half an
hour of most exquisite sensations. My visit of devotion was paid in
the morning, I remember; but I was not myself again all day. To look
round the room; to say to myself, here stood his bed; there the poison
was set; in that window he loitered for some hours before he retired
to his last rest, envying the meanest passenger, and wishing he could
exchange his own feelings and intellects for their manual powers and
insensibility! Then, abhorrence of his death, abhorrence of the world,
and I know not how many different and contradictory but all distracting
ideas! Nothing should tempt me to undergo such another half-hour.
Bristol, stand forth! Too just are even these rhymes
Without a trial to condemn thy crimes.
Come forward, answer to thy cursed name;
Stand, if thou dare, before the bar of fame.
Bristol, hold up thine hand, that damned hand
Which scatters misery over half the land,
The land of Genius!
We come now to the question of most difficulty, but of least
consequence. What could induce Chatterton to lay such a plan? Was it
the credit of imposing upon the world, which he was determined never
to claim, since he never owned the imposition? My answer is, that I
neither know nor care; and the conjectures of the _rustiest fellow_ of
the Antiquarian Society cannot give an answer much more to the purpose.
Are the motives of men’s and women’s conduct so plain that he who runs
may read them? How much less obvious are we to expect the motives of
a boy’s conduct? Chatterton, with some, with many things about him,
superior to most, to all men, was still but a boy. Though he did see
seventeen before his death, he must have been _literally_ a boy when he
laid the foundation of his plans. If Macpherson and Ossian be the same,
if Chatterton thought them to be the same, Chatterton is an original
in poetry only, not in suppositiousness. Good men are satisfied with
the applause of their own consciences, and scatter charity with the
invisible hand of bounty. May not great men be formed in the same
mould? May not obscurity appear to enlarge an ideal as well as a real
object? God would, perhaps, be something less of God were He visible.
But, as I said, I neither know nor care what was Chatterton’s motive.
Am I still asked for it? Like many a man in conversation, I will
get off by telling a story. D’Alembert, in his pamphlet upon the
destruction of the Jesuits, relates that one of the Order, who had
spent twenty years upon a mission in Canada, did not believe even the
existence of a God. Notwithstanding this, he had, numerous times run
the hazard of his life in defence of that religion which he preached
with success among the savages. To a friend, who expressed surprise at
the warmth of his zeal, the missionary observed: “Ah, you have no idea
of the pleasure there is in having 20,000 men to listen to you, and in
persuading them what you do not believe yourself.”
By what was the scheme suggested to Chatterton’s invention? This
question, it is, perhaps, still more impossible to answer, nor do I
pretend to answer it. If you can ground any conjecture on a few facts I
will mention, so: Psalmanazar died about the time Chatterton’s scheme
was born, and bequeathed his methodistical memoirs to the world.
Walpole, about the same time, endeavoured to turn a whole national
current of belief with respect to Richard III., and not long before,
acknowledged the imposition he had put upon the public in the preface
to “Otranto.” The Douglas cause was, about the same time, in high
agitation. Ossian, with Blair’s dissertation, in which the name of
_Ælla_ is mentioned, had not long made its appearance. “The Concubine,”
in Spenser’s manner, appeared in 1767. Percy’s “Reliques” had not long
been published. Page xxiv. of the first volume (second edition, 1767),
mention is made of “Colgrin, son of that _Ælla_ who was elected King
of the Saxons in the room of Hengist.” Chatterton must have admired
“Hardyknute” (vol. ii. p. 94), which Mrs. Wardlaw _pretended_ to have
found on “shreds of paper employed for what is called the bottoms of
clues,” and must have seen through the _pretended_ extract of a letter
from _Canton_ to James Carland, Esq., at the end of the third volume,
which vouches for the _truth_ of Percy’s _Hau Kiou Choaau_, there
advertised as _translated from the Chinese_. On the 21st of January,
1769, the _invisible_ Junius printed his first letter. In May 1769,
Mrs. Montague published her Essay on Shakespeare, from which it is not
impossible that Chatterton’s _tindery_ ambition might catch the fire
of rivalry. Farrer’s Essay on the learning of Shakespeare had appeared
about a twelvemonth. In the wonderful extent of his reading, Chatterton
could not be ignorant of Parnell’s imposition on Pope, by means of
a pretended Leonine translation of some of his lines in the Rape of
the Lock, or of Parnell’s Fairy Tale, _in the Ancient English style_.
Better memories may, perhaps, recollect other things of this kind. That
Chatterton had Walpole and Ossian in some measure present to his mind,
is manifest from his fixing upon the same person (Mr. W.) to introduce
Rowley to the world, whom Macpherson chose for Ossian. And, surely, to
prove Earl Godwin a good man and true, in spite of history, is much
such an attempt as Mr. Walpole’s concerning Richard. The first stanza
of Canynge’s prologue to Godwin, is little more than a versification of
the ingenious supposition in the article _Godwin_, in the “Biographia
Britannica,” and is rather the language of our _distant_ age, than of
a man writing _three hundred years nearer_ Godwin, who was not then
_ungently_ treated in _so many_ histories as now.
Whilomme, by pensmen, much ungentle name
Has upon Godwin Earl of Kent been laid,
Thereby bereaving him of faith and fame.
The unforgiving clergymen have said,
That he was known to no holy wurche,
But this was all his fault, he gifted not the church.
It may be said that hardly one of the schemes which I have mentioned
succeeded. Let me, in my turn, tell what Fontenelle, in his
“Dialogues,” puts into the mouth of the Russian Pretender. When he is
asked how he dared to assert a claim, for which two or three impostors
had suffered the cruellest death, he answers, it was upon that very
circumstance he grounded the probability of passing for a true man and
no impostor.
Of the impossibility to prove imitation I am well aware. But for
intentional imitation I do not here contend. The originality of his
sublime genius would not have stooped from its height to imitate any
man that ever existed. By the nature of his plan, the folding-doors
of imitation were effectually shut against Chatterton. His hands were
tied up from picking and stealing. What other poet, ancient or modern,
except Homer (and even Homer had his ancients, perhaps), can produce
an octavo volume, in the whole course of which, after a search of
some years, the best and oldest heads are not able to detect him with
certainty more than six or eight times? And those coincidences must of
course have been the effect more of memory than design.
If Chatterton did endeavour to catch the public by other baits besides
genius who can blame him?
Ill-fated Chatterton! Why didst thou not attend to _Orestes_ “On the
Poverty of Authors”? (_Town and Country Magazine_, Aug. 1769, p.
399.) How couldst thou imagine that even thy parts would prevent thy
adding one to his long but faithful list of the starved children of
genius? Could thy penetrating sight discover no truth in his borrowed
observation, that “We more readily assist the lame and the blind than
a poor man of genius; for every one is sensibly affected with the
apprehension of blindness or lameness; but who is in the least dread of
the accidents which attend on genius?”
Here let me stop a moment to rescue the world from blame it does not
merit. The world is not accountable for the death of every man of
abilities who has perished, however miserably, in an alehouse, or a
prison. Profligacy and genius, ability and prodigality, are not, as
many imagine, the same things. But genius too often thinks it necessary
to be profligate, and profligacy often demands to pass for genius.
To behold genius confined in a prison, or skulking in an alehouse,
and not to lend relief, were infamous, provided the spectator could
be sure he was lending _effectual relief_. But if to rescue from one
prison, be only to give an opportunity to visit another—whose humanity
is sturdy enough to bear such insults even from a friend or from a
child? Churchill reproached the world with suffering Lloyd to pine in
the Fleet, and Johnson has moistened many an eye with the sufferings of
Savage. But the world, if it be ever accountable, is only accountable
for the death of such a being as Chatterton, who (let his enemies
or enviers persist, as they choose, in asserting what they cannot
prove) was not extravagant, was not profligate, was not unprincipled.
All his profligacy consisted in quitting the attorney’s office, and
penning Ælla—“when he should have engrossed.” His only extravagance
was lavishing unnecessary presents upon his grandmother, mother,
and sister, a few shillings, the earnings of his genius, which might
otherwise, perhaps, have saved him from starving. Unprinciples belongs
to those who accuse him of crimes without a shadow of proof.
One other question remains to be answered. It may be asked why
Chatterton’s own “Miscellanies” are inferior to Rowley? Let me ask
another question. _Are_ they inferior? Genius, abilities, application,
we _may_ bring into the world with us; these rare ingredients _may_ be
mixed up in our compositions by the hand of Nature; but Nature herself
cannot create a human being possest of a complete knowledge of the
world almost the moment he is born into it. Is the knowledge of the
world, which his “Miscellanies” contain, no proof of his astonishing
quickness in seizing everything he chose? Is it remembered when, and at
what age, Chatterton for the first time quitted Bristol, and how few
weeks he lived afterwards? Chatterton’s “Letters” and “Miscellanies”
exhibit an insight into men, manners, and things, for the want of
which in their writings, authors who have died old men, with more
opportunities to know the world (who could have fewer than Chatterton?)
have been thought to make amends by other merits.
Again, in his own character, he painted for booksellers and bread; in
Rowley’s, for fame and eternity. Why are a boy’s _tasks_ at school
inferior to what he writes for his amusement? Then it is not impossible
that he might designedly underwrite himself. He certainly did when he
wrote “Ladgate’s answer to the Song of Ælla.” After all, he was no
modern; the boy was born an ancient; and he knew mankind well enough to
see that, in the present age, there was a greater facility of emergence
from obscurity to fame, through the channel of curiosity, for a monk
of the fifteenth century than for a sexton’s son of the eighteenth.
Shame upon that age, which still persists in bearing testimony to his
knowledge of it!
With regard to Chatterton’s face and person, all agree that he was
a manly, good-looking boy, that there was something about him which
instantaneously prepossessed you in his favour. Mr. Barrett and Mr.
Catcott, as well as all who remember him, speak particularly of his
eye. Catcott says he could never look at it long enough to see what
sort of an eye it was; but it seemed to be a kind of hawk’s eye, he
thinks; you could see his soul through it. Mr. Barrett says he took
particular notice of his eyes from the nature of his profession. He
never saw such. One was still more remarkable than the other. You might
see the fire roll at the bottom of them, as you sometimes do in a black
eye, but never in grey ones, which his were. Mr. Barrett adds, that
he used often to send for him from the charity school (which is close
to his house) and differ from him in opinion on purpose to make him
earnest, and to see how wonderfully his eye would strike fire, kindle,
and blaze up....
So ends what I have to say about Chatterton, when I shall have just
observed that his _innocent_ imposition on the world is exactly the
story of M. Angelo’s buried statue of Cupid; and, finally, that Miss
More is oftener boasted of by Bristol, and has acquired more fame and
wealth for an “Ode to Garrick’s Dog” than Chatterton for all Rowley’s
poems. Prefix to this letter, if you please, the _comforting_ discovery
of Lord Shaftesbury in his “Characteristics,” that “an ingenious man
never starves unknown.” Such a being as Chatterton should not have been
suffered to starve at all. But _comfort_ like this is to be expected
from “Knights and Barons.”
Bards may be Lords, but ’tis not in the cards,
Play as you will, to turn Lords into Bards.
The employment has been of the service to me that you meant it should.
In some measure I have forgotten myself, and, as much as it was
possible, forgotten my M. during the hours I have spent upon this
business. If the story be not told as regularly as it might, the
situation of my mind with regard to you must be my excuse. Besides,
were I cold enough to tell such a tale as Chatterton’s with as much
regularity as I put a common occurrence upon paper I should despise
myself. All I shall further add is, that I do not hold out Chatterton
as the first character in the world. An army of Macedonian and Swedish
butchers, indeed, fly before him; nor does my memory supply me with
any human being who, at such an age, with such disadvantages, has
produced such compositions. Under the heathen mythology superstition
and admiration would have explained all by bringing Apollo upon earth.
Nor would the god ever have descended with more credit to himself.
But, after all, the world is only indebted to Chatterton for a few
inimitable poems. If barbarity and fanaticism be suffered to destroy
mankind, genius will write in vain, when there is none to read. To
preserve our fellow-creatures is still a greater praise than to
instruct or amuse them. Perhaps, all circumstances considered, the
first character that ever existed was Bartholomew las Casas.
Let me conclude these tedious sheets of paper with a most capital
subject for a painter, from Chatterton’s _tournament_, which you
may add to the subjects I have before suggested to you. It will
surprise you to find how _very_ modern it is. The advocates to Rowley
must explain this to you, if they can, and if Rowley has still any
advocates; for I do assure you, as you will find by turning to the
poem, that I have only altered _four_ words, and those _only_ by
changing them for Chatterton’s words of explanation in his notes to the
poem.
When battle, steaming with new-quicken’d gore,
Bending with spoils and bloody dropping head,
Did the dark wood of ease and rest explore,
Seeking to lie on pleasure’s downy bed—
Pleasure, dancing from her wood,
Wreath’d with flowers of eglantine,
From his visage wash’d the blood,
Hid his sword and gaberdine.
The manner in which you account for the self-destruction of that most
wonderful boy, Chatterton, is physical, I assure you, as well as
sensible. Tissot, in his “Essay on the Diseases Incident to Literary
Persons,” starts some ideas very much like yours, only they are wrapped
up in harder words. You shall see:
* * * * *
“When the mind, long time occupied, has forcibly impressed an action
upon the brain, she is unable to repress that forcible action. The
shock continues after its cause; and, re-acting upon the mind, makes it
experience ideas which are truly delirious: for they no longer answer
to the external impressions of objects, but to the internal disposition
of the brain, some parts of which are now become incapable to receive
new movements transmitted to it by the senses.”
“The brain of Pascal was so vitiated by passing his life in the
laborious exercises of study, thought, and imagination, that certain
fibres, agitated by incessant motion, made him perpetually feel a
sensation which seemed to be excited by a gulph of fire situated on one
side of him; and his reason, overpowered by the disorder of his nerves,
could never banish the idea of this fiery abyss. Spinello painted the
fall of the rebel angels, and gave so fierce a countenance to Lucifer,
that he was struck with horror himself; and during the remainder of his
life, his imagination was continually haunted by the figure of that
dæmon, upbraiding him with having made his portrait so hideous. Gasper
Barlæis, the orator, poet, and physician, was not ignorant of these
dangers. He warned his friend Hughens against them: but, blind with
regard to himself, by immoderate studies he so weakened his brain, that
he thought his body was made of butter, and carefully shunned the fire,
lest it should melt him; till at last, worn out with his continual
fears, he leapt into a well. Peter Jurieu, so famous in theological
dispute, and for his “Commentary on the Apocalypse,” disordered his
brain in such a manner that, though he thought like a man of sense in
other respects, he was firmly persuaded his frequent fits of the cholic
were occasioned by a constant engagement between seven horsemen, who
were shut up in his belly. There have been many instances of literature
persons who thought themselves metamorphosed into lanterns; and who
complained of having lost their thighs.”
* * * * *
No one can deny that Chatterton must have gone through as much wear
and tear of the imagination as any person whom Tissot mentions. But I
would give a good deal, were it possible for me never again to think
about Chatterton, or about his death, as long as I live, for I never do
without being miserable.
What you let fall about the propensity of the English to suicide, is
not true; though a very popular idea. And yet I will relate to you, in
the words of another person, an instance of English suicide much more
cool and deliberate than any you ever heard, I daresay. It is a fact,
and happened in 1732.
Richard Smith, a bookbinder, and prisoner for debt within the
liberties of the King’s Bench, persuaded his wife to follow his
example, in making away with herself, after they had murdered their
little infant. This wretched pair were, in the month of April, found
hanging in their bedchamber at about a yard’s distance from each
other; and in a separate apartment the child lay dead in a cradle.
They left two papers inclosed in a short letter to their landlord,
whose kindness they implored in favour of their dog and cat. They even
left money to the porter, who should carry the inclosed papers to
the person to whom they were addressed. In one of these the husband
thanked that person for the marks of friendship he had received at
his hands; and complained of the ill-offices he had undergone from a
different quarter. The other papers, subscribed by the husband and
wife, contained the reasons which induced them to act such a tragedy on
themselves and their offspring. This letter was altogether surprising
for the calm resolution, the good humour, and the propriety, with
which it was written. They declared that they withdrew themselves from
poverty and rags; evils that, through a train of unlucky accidents,
were become inevitable. They appealed to their neighbours for the
industry with which they had endeavoured to earn a livelihood. They
justified the murder of their child by saying, it was less cruelty to
take her with them, than to leave her friendless in the world, exposed
to ignorance and misery. They professed their belief and confidence
in an Almighty God, the fountain of goodness and beneficence, who
could not possibly take delight in the misery of His creatures:
they therefore, resigned up their lives to Him without any terrible
apprehensions; submitting themselves to those ways, which, in His
goodness, He should appoint after death. These unfortunate suicides had
been always industrious and frugal, invincibly honest, and remarkable
for conjugal affection.
* * * * *
This tragedy I have shown you, because I think France, lively France,
in whose language suicide is an _Anglicism_, can supply me with an
anecdote as authentic of something still more cool and more deliberate,
since the motives to the crime (to which no motive can be sufficiently
strong) were so much weaker.
On the day before Christmas Day, 1773, about eleven o’clock, two
soldiers came to the Cross-Bow Inn, at St. Dennis, and ordered a
dinner. Bordeaux, one of the soldiers, went out and bought a little
paper of powder and a couple of bullets, observing to the person
who sold them to him, that as St. Dennis seemed to be so pleasant a
place, he should not dislike to spend the remainder of his life there.
Returning to the inn, he and his companion passed the day together
very merrily. On Christmas Day they again dined as merrily, ordered
wine, and about five o’clock in the afternoon were found at the fire,
on breaking open the door, sitting on the opposite sides of a table,
whereon were three empty champaign bottles, the following will and
letter, and a half-crown. They were both shot through the head; two
pistols lay upon the floor. The noise of the pistols brought up the
people of the house, who immediately sent for M. de Rouilleres, the
Commandant of the _Maréchaussée_ at St. Dennis.
The will I translated myself from a formal copy, which was taken for a
friend of mine at St. Dennis in 1774.
+The Will.+
A man, who knows he is to die, should take care to do everything which
his survivors can wish him to have done. We are more particularly in
that situation. Our intention is to prevent uneasiness to our host, as
well as to lighten the labours of those whom curiosity, under pretence
of form and order, will bring hither to pay us visits.
Humain is the bigger, and I, Bourdeaux, am the lesser of the two.
He is drum-major of _mestre de camp des dragons_, and I am simply a
dragoon of Belzunce.
Death is a passage I address to the gentleman of the law of St. Dennis
(who, with his first clerk as assistant, must come hither for the
sake of justice) the principle; which, joined to the reflexion that
everything must have an end, put these pistols into our hands. The
future presents nothing to us but what is agreeable. Yet that future is
short and must end.
Humain is but twenty-four years of age; as for me, I have not yet
completed four lustres. No particular reason forces us to interrupt our
career, except the disgust we feel at existing for a moment under the
continual apprehension of ceasing to exist. An eternity is the point of
re-union; a longing-after which leads us to prevent the despotic act of
fate. In fine, disgust of life is our sole inducement to quit it.
If all those who are wretched would dare to divest themselves of
prejudice, and to look their destruction in the face, they would see
it is as easy to lay aside existence as to throw off an old coat, the
colour of which displeases. The proof of this may be referred to our
experience.
We have enjoyed every gratification in life, even that of obliging our
fellow-creatures. We could still procure to ourselves gratifications:
but all gratifications must have a period. That period is our poison.
We are disgusted at the perpetual sameness of the scene. The curtain is
dropped: and we leave our parts to those who are weak enough to feel an
inclination to play them a few hours longer.
Two or three grains of powder will soon break the springs of this
moving mass of flesh, which our haughty fellow-creatures stile the King
of Beings.
Messrs. the officers of justice, our carcases are at your discretion!
We despise them too much to give ourselves any trouble about what
becomes of them.
As to what we shall leave behind, for myself, Bordeaux, I give to M.
de Rouilleres, commandant of the _maréchaussée_ at St. Dennis, my
steel-mounted sword. He will recollect, that, last year, about this
very day, as he was conducting a recruit, he had the civility to grant
me a favour for a person of the name of St. Germain, who had offended
him.
The maid of the inn will take my pocket and neck handkerchiefs, as well
as the silk stockings which I now have on, and all my other linen.
The rest of our effects will be sufficient to pay the expense of the
useless law proceedings of which we shall be the subject.
The half crown upon the table will pay for the last bottle of wine
which we are going to drink.
+Bourdeaux.
Humain.+
At +St. Dennis+, _Christmas Day, 1773_.
Of the following letter from Bordeaux to his lieutenant in the regiment
of Belzunce, I have not seen the French; I cannot therefore answer for
the translation, which does not appear to have been done carefully.
Another friend supplied me with it. You shall have it as I had it from
him.
* * * * *
“+Sir+,
“During my residence at Guise, you honoured me with your friendship. It
is time that I thank you. You have often told me I appeared displeased
with my situation. It was sincere, but not absolutely true. I have
since examined myself more seriously, and acknowledge myself entirely
disgusted with every state of man, the whole world, and myself. From
these discoveries a consequence should be drawn: if disgusted with the
whole, renounce the whole. The calculation is not long. I have made it
without the aid of geometry. In short, I am on the point of putting an
end to the existence that I have possessed for nearly twenty years,
fifteen of which it has been a burden to me; and, from the moment that
I write, a few grains of powder will destroy this moving mass of
flesh, which we vain mortals call the King of Beings.
“I owe no one an excuse. I deserted, that was a crime; but I am going
to punish it; and the law will be satisfied.
“I asked leave of absence from my superiors, to have the pleasure of
dying at my ease. They never condescended to give me an answer. This
served to hasten my end.
“I wrote to Bord to send you some detached pieces I left at Guise,
which I beg you to accept. You will find they contain some well-chosen
literature. These pieces will solicit for me a place in your
remembrance.
“Adieu, my dear lieutenant; continue your esteem for St. Lambert and
Dorat. As for the rest, skip from flower to flower, and acquire the
sweets of all knowledge, and enjoy every pleasure.
“Pour moi, j’arrivé au trou
Qui n’échappe ni sage ni fou,
Pour aller je ne scais où.”
“If we exist after this life, and it is forbidden to quit it without
permission, I will endeavour to procure one moment to inform you of it;
if not, I should advise all those who are unhappy, which is by far the
greatest part of mankind, to follow my example.
“When you receive this letter, I shall have been dead at least
twenty-four hours.”
“With esteem, &c.,
“+Bourdeaux+.”
Is there any thing like this in English story?
_If we exist after this life._ Ah, my brave Bourdeaux, that is the
question; and a question which even you could not answer in the
_negative_.
... There’s the retrospect
That makes calamity of so long life,
For who would bear the whips and scorns o’ th’ time,
_The pangs of despised love_,
(Which I could never bear.)
... The law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
Which patient merit of th’ unworthy takes?
But that the dread of something after death
Puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have,
Than fly to others that we know not of.
The pains these two poor fellows took (or rather Bourdeaux, for he
seems to have been the principal) to prevent any trouble or uneasiness
to their survivors, lead me to reflect how very uniformly the contrary
is the conduct of suicides with us. One would sometimes almost fancy
that they studied how they might commit the abominable crime so as
to be found by those whom the discovery would most affect. Have they
wives, children? It must be done sometimes in their presence, in bed
with them; often in their hearing; almost always in such a manner that
they may be the first spectators of it. Mr. Y., Lord F., Mr. S., Lord
C., Mr. B., are cruel instances of this. Oh, for Omnipotence, to call
such savages back to life, and chain them to the hardest tasks of
existence! Is not the crime of suicide sufficient, without adding to it
the _murder_, or a heartbroken wife or child? Hence you may, perhaps,
draw an argument that every suicide is a madman. For my part, I have no
doubt of it; and if Humain had fallen into the hands of a friend less
mad than Bourdeaux, he might have lived to have fought another day.
And here ends a long, dull letter, about a short, entertaining
conversation (on your part at least).
_Printed by_ +Ballantyne, Hanson & Co.+
_London and Edinburgh._
Transcriber’s notes
New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the public
domain.
The text contains words in a somewhat strange spelling. This might
be due to it being older, or the use of dialect. In one letter in
particular errors might very well have been made intentionally: e.g.
“sencible”, “ocation”, “corrispondence”, “verasity” and more. These are
not corrected. There are however errors that seem most probably due to
printing errors. These have been corrected. Below is a list.
Corrections
Page 27 “Come then to morrow” changed to “Come then to-morrow”;
Page 29 “t” added to “regimen” in “I should be drummed out of my
regiment”;
Page 32 period instead of comma after “Her yielding waist should want
a zone”;
Page 34 “’ee” changed to “e’e” in “The woes of my heart fall in showers
from mine e’e”;
Page 50 “Had the frost and snow contiued” changed to “Had the frost and
snow continued”;
Page 52 “fellow creature” hyphenated in “The happiness, the existence of
a fellow-creature”, as elsewhere in the text;
Page 57 period added after “Hinchinbrook, Feb. 24, 1776”, as customary
in the rest of the text;
Page 65 “Charing-cross” de-hyphenated in “Cannon Coffee House, Charing
cross, March 17, 1776.”, as elsewhere in the text;
Page 65 “coffee-house” de-hyphenated in “from a coffee house near
Charing Cross”, as elsewhere in the text;
Page 69 “Storgè” changed to “Storgé” in “as Storgé prophetically says
in Jephtha”;
Page 89 “by-the-way” de-hyphenated in “(which, by the way, is almost
worn out)”, as is customary;
Page 99 “afte swinging in terrible suspense” changed to “after swinging
in terrible suspense”;
Page 105 “new” changed to “knew” in “because they once knew what it was
to be miserable”;
Page 106 “some some” changed to “some” in “I will send you some hasty
lines”;
Page 114 comma removed after “April” in “Ireland, April 20, 1777.”;
Page 119 comma changed to period after “I have been to see the last of
poor Dodd”;
Page 122 “might have been heard at a considerable disstance” changed to
“might have been heard at a considerable distance”;
Page 124 “weeeping” changed to “weeping” in “are weeping over the crime
and punishment”;
Page 133 period inserted at the end of the sentence “One trifling
circumstance I must mention”;
Page 135 hyphen assumed missing in “enquiring”;
Page 135 comma added after “on entering the world of spirits”;
Page 147 period added at the end of the sentence “now they rage too
fiercely”;
Page 148 “brandy-and-water” de-hyphenated in “at the Bedford Coffee
House to take brandy and water”, as elsewhere in the text;
Page 165 period added after the date in “Newgate, Saturday Night. April
17, 1779”;
Page 173 “fellow creatures” hyphenated in “Take warning from me, my
fellow-creatures”, as elsewhere in the text;
Page 177 “fellow creatures” hyphenated in “ye who might save hundreds of
your fellow-creatures”, as elsewhere in the text;
Page 185 “to day” in “through which these things were to emerge to-day”
hyphenated, as elsewhere in the text;
Page 202 capital “H” at the beginning of the sentence “He was proud and
exceedingly impetious”;
Page 203 period added after “sent the footman and other servants there
to see”;
Page 210 period added at the end of the poem, in the line “and some
believ’d him mad”;
Page 219 period added after “Mr” in “upon the same person (Mr. W.)”;
Page 233 “Commandent of the Maréchaussée at St. Dennis” changed to
“Commandant of the Maréchaussée at St. Dennis”;
Page 236 one of two occurences of “about” removed from “to give
ourselves any trouble about about what becomes of them.”;
Page 238 “and enjoy overy pleasure” changed to “and enjoy every
pleasure”.
Formating conventions
_Word_ means that “Word” is in italic;
+Word+ means that “Word” is in small capitals.
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