Abbildungen der Seite
PDF
EPUB
[ocr errors]

same time for his journey: so that, instead of finding the great Wizard of the North in his enchanted castle at Abbotsford, he was obliged to go to him in Castle Street, Edinburgh. Sir Walter was of course ever and always at the royal banquets, but took care to confide Parson Crabbe to Mr. Lockhart's kind superintendence. Here he met the chieftains and the clans; Glengary, and Lord Errol, and the Macleod, and the Frazer, and the Gordon, and the Ferguson; and lived for six weeks surrounded with plaids and tartans, and Gaels, and harps, and pibrochs; and Sir Walter the life and soul of the whole. Crabbe cared little for Holyrood or Arthur's Seat, or the New Town; but he liked the old lanes and dirty streets of old Edinburgh, and repeatedly haunted a place called "Cobbler's Lane." He dined with Mackenzie, the Man of Feeling,' and met Professor Wilson, whom he calls" that extraordinary man," and the Ettrick Shepherd, who amused him by drinking ale, "when all of us were sipping champagne ; and then he went over to the Whig party, to Lord Advocate Jeffery, and Mr. John Murray, and Professor Leslie, and all the other northern constellations. He made sad work of Scotch topography, he confounded the Inchcolm of the Frith of Forth, with the Icolmkill of the Hebrides; but so did John Kemble. Then he did not know that people in Scotland talked any thing but Suffolk; so, the morning after his arrival, the following scene took place. "When he came into the breakfast-parlour, Sir Walter had not appeared, and Mr. Crabbe had before him two or three portly personages, all in the full Highland garb. These gentlemen were talking a language he did not understand, so he never doubted that they were foreigners. The Celts, on their part, conceived Mr. Crabbe, dressed as he was in rather an old fashioned style of clerical propriety, with buckles in his shoes for instance, to be some learned Abbé, who had come on a pilgrimage to the shrine of Waverley; and the result was, when a little afterwards Sir Walter and his family entered the room, they found the Poet and these worthy lairds, hammering away with pain and labour, to make themselves mutually understood, in most execrable French. Great was the relief, and potent the laughter, when the host interrupted the colloquy with his plain English Good morning.'' It surprised Mr. Lockhart to find that Crabbe had never heard of Allan Ramsay; and for the first time he read "The Gentle Shepherd." He seemed to feel the excellencies of Dunbar's poetry. He thought there was a great interval between Ramsay and Burns; and so there is. But his chief amusement was in rambling at night-time among the lanes and closes of old Edinburgh, where he was detected in this fancy by his host; and a friendly caddie was hired to follow him at a distance, and see that the Poet came to no harm among the braw Scotch lassies and their gude men.

When he returned, he had a very severe fit of the "tic doloureux,” a terrific disease which had visited him for a year or two before, though he would never acknowledge its name. He returned to Trowbridge, and his life passed in the same tranquil tenor as before. He occasionally visited London, or rather Hampstead, where the kind and enlightened family of the Hoares were always ready to welcome him to their fragrant garden and hospitable table. He visited Mr. Wilberforce, and Miss Baillie, and Mrs. Siddons, and Miss Edgeworth; he dined, as usual, with Mr. Rogers and Lord Holland; he met Wordsworth, and our Bard of the royal laurels; and he conversed with the author of the Rejected Addresses,' who describes him " as Pope in worsted stockings." When he was tired of Hampstead he went to the Hummums; and when wearied of both, returned with delight to his home and to his children's children. In the year 1830 he

[ocr errors]

went with the family of the Hoares to Hastings, where a gig ran over him, but providentially without injury. And here it was, on a cold November morning, that he took his last farewell of his favourite element, the sea. On returning to town he made a morning call on Miss Baillie, in Cavendish-square; he was affected even to tears on parting from the family; and when he got into the carriage he said, with great emotion, "I shall never meet this party again." In the society of his son's family, at Pucklechurch, the good old man found his true delight. The children ardently loved him; to children he was always affectionate and attentive; to his own he was a parent who had no superior. "Here," says his son, "in the morning, even in the roughest weather, he bent his way, always preferring to be alone, to some of our quarries of blue lias abounding in fossils, stopping to cut up a shrub not quite common, that grew in his path, and he would return loaded with them. The dirty fossils were placed in our best bed-room, to the great diversion of the female part of my family; the herbs stuck in the borders among my choicest flowers, that he might see them when he came again. I never displaced one of them." How loved, how revered, how tenderly and affectionately regarded he was by his family, we may conceive by the following passage, too interesting to omit. "We dreaded his departure. It was justly remarked by one of his nieces, that he left a feeling of more melancholy vacancy when he quitted a house, than any other person. I hope,' said she, one day very earnestly, that my uncle will not come into Suffolk this year, for I shall dread his going away all the time he is with us.' He generally left the young people all in tears, feeling strongly and not having the power to conceal it; the stooping form, the trembling step, the tone and manner of his farewell, especially for the last few years, so hurried, so foreboding, so affectionate, overcame us all."

[ocr errors]

He grew

He now grew evidently weaker; age was making slow but certain advances on his debilitated frame. He was afraid even to go to Pucklechurch, lest his infirmities should cause trouble to the family. Yet he visited his Hampstead friends at Clifton, towards the close of 1831, and was there during the destructive and infamous riots at Bristol. When he parted from them, it was for the last time; he appeared at his return improved in health and strength; alas! these appearances were most deceitful! Yet he preached in a voice loud, firm, and impressive. His son said to him, " Why, Sir, I will venture a good sum that you are assisting me ten years hence." "Ten weeks," was his answer, and that was almost literally the period when he ceased to assist any one. stouter, and took his meals with a keen appetite, and walked more upright than he had done for three years before; but on the 29th January 1832, he caught a sharp cold, accompanied with oppression and pain and fever; he was bled, and appeared better, but the symptoms changed so rapidly that by the next morning all hope was over. He was aware of his situation, and his affectionate and anxious biographer adds, "I feared that his spirits would be woefully depressed; that the love of life might remain in all its force, and that the dread of death might be strong and distressing. I now state with feelings of indescribable delight, that I had been foreboding a weight of evil which was not, and that we had only to lament his bodily sufferings, and our incalculable loss; during the days that preceded his departure, we had not one painful feeling arising from the state of his mind. That was more firm than I ever remembered under any circumstances. He knew there was no chance of his recovery, and yet he talked at intervals of his death, and of certain consequent arrangements, with a strong com

placent voice, and bade us all adieu without the least faltering of the tongue, or moisture of the eye. One of his characteristics, exuberance of thought, seemed sometimes, even when it pleased, as if it oppressed him; and in this last illness, when he was awake, his mind worked with astonishing rapidity. It was not delirium, for on our recalling his attention to present objects, he would speak with perfect rationality; but when uninterrupted, the greater portion of his waking hours was passed in rapid soliloquies, on a variety of subjects, the chain of which (from his imperfect utterance) we were unable to follow. We seldom interrupted the course that nature was taking, or brought him to the effort of connected discourse, except to hear how we could assist, or relieve him. But as in no instance, except in a final lapse of memory, did we discover the least irrationality, so there was no despondency; on the contrary, the cheerful expressions which he had been accustomed to use were heard from time to time, nay even that elevation of the inner side of the eyebrows, which occasionally accompanied some humourous observation in the days of his health, occurred once or twice, after every hope of life was over. But if we were thankful for the firmness of his mind, we had to lament the strength of his constitution. I was not aware how powerful it was, till tried by this disease. I said, 'It is your great strength which causes this suffering;' he replied, 'But it is a great price to pay for it.' Thus passed into the Land of Spirits, the soul of the righteous man. He died loved, lamented, and respected by all. His parishioners and friends. erected a handsome monument to his memory,* and the little girls cried out weeping, "We shall never see poor Mr. Crabbe go up into the pulpit again with his white head."

We think that we ought not to bid farewell to this interesting volume, without expressing our humble admiration of the feeling and good sense with which it has been composed. Undoubtedly Mr. Crabbe has put a restraint upon himself, in including in so brief a memoir the history of his father's long and honourable life. Yet we think he has done his duty wisely and well. He has given us a faithful and finished portrait; and what could he do more? Nothing can be more prejudicial to the fame of those who are the subjects of biography, than the huge and cumbersome volumes which their misguided admirers are heaping upon their memory; they are only marks of the want of skill, in the writer, to detect and bring to light the leading and characteristic features of the person they describe. Gray's history, it is true, was composed chiefly of his Letters. But who can write-who has written-such letters as Gray? Dr. Johnson's biography has swelled into many volumes; but so may, and so ought, the biography of all who can delight and instruct as the old Lexicographer could, and pour out his wisdom and his wit at will. This memoir appears to us to be most judicious. We have perused it with increasing interest and delight, and as the vernal season advances, and nature awakes again to life, and as we take our (now, alas! solitary,) rambles through the very lanes and woods trodden so lately by the feet, and immortalized by the pen of the Poet, our mind will often revert with pleasure to the history we have just recalled. The county in which Mr. Crabbe spent his early life, possesses many learned, many venerable, and many excellent and conscientious pastors of flocks still we hope and believe attached to them; but years may roll on, and even ages may glide away, before another man, gifted as GEORGE CRABBE was, and knowing how to ennoble and adorn those gifts by the use of them, appears in the land.-Hail, and farewell!

*The inscription was inserted in the Gentleman's Magazine for December.

[graphic][merged small][subsumed][subsumed]

SAND, IN THE PARISH OF SIDBURY, DEVON.

« ZurückWeiter »