GRIMM'S GHOST. LETTER IV. THE ARTISTS' LETTER-BOX. Miss Lucy Paterson to Mr. J. OH! my dear Mr. J―, you are the sweetest man! I do not compliment you, in the least, when I say that I had rather have one of your miniatures than five Cartoons from Hampton Court Palace. Raphael might have been all very well in his day; but this I will say, a party of us went to the Toy at Hampton Court last Sunday, and, notwithstanding all that Mr. Holloway may say to the contrary, I myself have no great opinion of Raphael. For instance, there are three great brawny men leaning over the edge of a boat no bigger than a bathing-tub. Harry Marmoset knows something of boats; he belongs to the Funny Club: and he tells me, upon his honour, that he and Jack Juniper were in a boat a great deal bigger than that; that Jack dropped his white hat overboard, off Isleworth; and that, when they both leant over the bow to reach it, the boat upset, and they were "regularly capsized." So much for Raphael as a painter! Then again, he daubs such a set of giants, that all the lines in their faces look like so much cordage. How different, my dear Sir, is your elegant department of the art! Such a sliding over of natural defects till they even pass for beauties! Such a melting down of superfluous fat! Such a shaving of shoulder-bones! Such a reform in the upper house! Such an abolition of all superfluous wrinkles! What is Lawson's depilatory to the hair-pencil of divine Mr. J-? There's Mrs. Hunch, with a back like the Bonassus! if you have not made her as slim as a swan! Then, to say the truth, there are my own collar-bones, standing out, under my chin, like the cross-bones over the church-door of St. Peter le Poor; you have totally enveloped them in a soft skin of a dazzling whiteness. Where now are the couple of gooseberries, as that rude boy, my brother George, used to denominate my eyes?changed to two orbs of blue, floating in liquid fire! I don't wonder that you have more business than you can get through with. You are quite right-painters should not speak their minds, any more than poets. It's all very well in a family-party; but at Somersethouse people's faces should be upon their best behaviour. How ingeniously have you got over that ocular indecision of mine, which my friends call an agreeable squint, although I suspect my enemies of making the adjective one syllable longer. My elbow too, leaning upon a marble pedestal, is whiter than the driven snow; Nature, I am sorry to say, has given it the hue of the red snow at the North Pole. A blue morocco bound book hangs negligently in my taper fingers, indorsed "Psyche, by Mrs. Tighe." Pray who is Psyche? It's a very ugly-looking word: I would not attempt to pronounce it for the best bonnet in the Soho bazaar. I suppose it is somebody or something of Lord Byron's. Have you read his three last cantos of Don Juan? I have: but don't mention it to Harry Marmoset; I promised him that I would not. I don't think them so good as the two first; when I say not so good, I mean not so bad: for they say that the goodness of Lord Byron depends upon his badness. The fact is, I read very little; because, when I do read, I have contracted a habit of muttering the words, and of running my head backwards and forwards along the lines. Nobody ever told me of it, till that rude boy George mentioned it yesterday. I was reading the Poet Laureat's Vision of Judgment, and the lines were so very long, that George told me my nose swung like a pendulum. I don't mean to go on with it, till Southey shortens the lines. At all events I shall wait for the octavo edition. But to return to the miniature. Harry Marmoset tells me that you are doing his also. How interesting! Pray do make haste, my dear Mr. J. and finish us both in time for the Exhibition. Harry knows a stationer in Fetter-lane who sells India-rubber to one of the hanging committee. Harry means to make interest with him, to get the two miniatures hung, answering one another, tête-à-tête, “like King William and his Queen," as some great poet sings. This will be pure! Our attitudes have been studied to produce that effect. He leers over his left shoulder; I sigh over my right. Quite in the Novel line "Their eyes accidentally met; his looked unutterable things; her's dropped down, while a blush suffused her lovely cheek." Oh! what shall I do to pass the time till the Exhibition opens? We mean to go a party on the very first day. Sir Hildebrand Hornsey, from Doctors' Commons, that's one; his second daughter, Cecilia, that's two; Jack Juniper, of Liquorpondstreet, that's three; Sally and Jane Tick, from Hoxton-square, that's five. Poor Elizabeth won't be able to go; a monkey at Bartholomew fair has nibbled off the tip of her little finger. Stay! where was I?-oh, five! Well, then there's myself, six; and my brother George, seven,-a nice snug little hackneycoach party. party. We mean to go up stairs at once to the miniatureroom, without waiting below to look at the statues. Indeed İ don't think it proper. I wonder they don't dress them. There should be a meeting of auxiliary ladies in the Egyptian Hall, to subscribe for flannel and broad-cloth. I'll speak to papa, to speak to Mrs. Fry, to speak to the Lord Mayor. Well, then, we shall elbow our way up to the two miniatures; and if they do but look in Somerset-house as they look in Frith-street, every body will set it down for a match; and then papa must give his consent. Oh dear! dear! when will the Exhibition open! MODERN PILGRIMAGES-AUBURN. "If, when the robin warbles from her bough To yon fair star that gilds the twilight trees, No pulse of pleasure ;—hence, for ever hence, Oh, shun this bank! it is the Poet's haunt !"-ANSTER. I HAVE heard and read of many great names, have worshipped and envied them; yet it must be owned, with more feelings of selfishness and ambition, than of admiration and regard. Statesmen and scholars, in fortune and in adversity, in trying and in eminent stations of life, have passed in the mirror of history before me; they have excited much emulation, but little tenderness. The memory of a man of the world, however renowned he may have been, is a mere abstraction, associated with deeds and events as unsubstantial and invisible, when once over, as the names to which they are attached. The author of this law, or of that theory, has no farther grasp on our sympathies, than as we are acquainted with the scope and matter of these ideal productions. And even then, they act so generally, and on such multitudes, that we feel bound but to bestow on them a mite of consideration. Real fame or existence in the thoughts of posterity is not meted in proportion to superiority of genius or exertion, but by the associations which call up and hallow a name ;—" the local habitation and the name" is every thing, and this is acquired by chance as much as by merit. The paramount association is certainly that of having been attached to a particular and exclusive spot of earth. Över field and forest, and the beauties of landscape, we seek for a name to join with them-we look for the genius loci, the genius of the place; and there is a void in the prospect, a vacuity in the contemplation, when we cannot conjure up some proud title of ancient race, or earned renown, to be the animating spirit of the scene. We experience a contrary wish, yet corroborative of the same principle, over the pages of history or memoir-the names are presented to us, and we must conjure up the scenes they have mingled in. But here the just course is invertedtoo much is required of the imagination, whose province, in bestowing real pleasure, is more to embellish than to create. It is this want of link with the soil, of attachment to a particular spot, which gives the life of a metropolitan that ideal insignificance so happily embodied in the term Cockney. From having a village, a mountain, or a desert for a dwelling or birth-place, we may derive some pride: whatever honours they bestow, few lay claim to ;-but what honour is to be drawn from being one of ten mil VOL. II. No. 11.-1821. 3 P lions, except, indeed, the vaunt be addressed to foreigners? What native of London can enter that city with the same endearing recollections with which the native of the village revisits his long-absent home, or apostrophize his gloomy mansion in the Minories or Strand with "Hail! ye blest haunts of my childhood, Yet in the possession of all the real associations that adorn and dignify life, the inhabitant of our great metropolis yields to none. Not only with wealth and power, with universal munificence and philanthropy, does his name stand united; but he can show on the same roll of nativity with himself, the names of genius of every cast and in every station-poets, philosophers, and statesmen, the beings who most embellished, and instructed, and benefited the world. But in the matter of glory and such feelings, great towns resemble the old fable of the lion's den-they take, but they never repay; they absorb all the honour of producing and possessing so much greatness, yet they shed little lustre on their less eminent inhabitants. They even narrow the glory of their most renowned names; they circumscribe the shrine of genius, and confine it to the petty circumference of a tablet or a tomb. What an unpleasant mixture of feeling does our Poet's Corner excite, as if the mighty spirits of our country were bottled up and strung against a wall! Each must keep within his own square foot of marble, and make no more than his share of impression on the beholder. How different are the sentiments excited by the poet's resting-place upon the Avon! Shakspeare is the animating spirit of the place; his image seems stamped on the aspect of each old brick house,-is seen mirrored in his own beautiful stream, and stirring in the lofty elms that overshade its banks. Above all poets Goldsmith was least qualified to have been the inhabitant of a great city, and to become identified with it. He should have dwelt in the rural scenes which he has so beautifully described, and sported his peach-coloured coat at the village church. But his evil fortune has handed him down to us, misplaced by the side of that giant of words-Johnson, held up merely as a foil to him-an object of laughter and pity. And although the situation shows his simplicity of genius and heart in the strongest and most amiable light, yet it is painful to contemplate the poet of " The Hermit" as poor Goldy in the pages of Boswell. His epitaph too in Westminster Abbey, beautiful as it is, is false in the chief point-the place of his birth. He was not born at Fernes or Pallas, according to the monument, but at Elphin, in the county of Roscommon. But it is not at his birthplace or his tomb that the name of the poet is held most sacred. His memory has found, I dare say, a more grateful shrine, in a country where he long resided with his brother-which he frequently mentions in his works with affection and regret, and from whence, it is more than probable, he took the scene of his " Deserted Village." About three miles from Ballymahon, a very central town in the sister-kingdom, is the mansion and village of Auburn, so called by their present possessor, Captain Hogan. Through the taste and improvement of this gentleman, it is now a beautiful spot, although, some fifteen years since, it presented a very bare and unpoetical aspect. This, however, was owing to a cause which serves strongly to corroborate the assertion, that Goldsmith had this scene in view when he wrote his poem. The then possessor, General Napier, turned all his tenants out of their farms, that he might enclose them in his own private domain. Littleton, the mansion of the General, stands not far off, a complete emblem of the desolating spirit lamented by the poet,dilapidated, and converted into a barrack. The chief object of attraction is Lishoy, once the parsonagehouse of Henry Goldsmith, that brother to whom the poet dedicated his "Traveller," and who is represented as the villagepastor, "Passing rich on forty pounds a year." When I was in the country, the lower chambers were inhabited by pigs and sheep, and the drawing-rooms by oats. Captain Hogan, however, has, I believe, got it since into his possession, and has, of course, improved its condition. Though at first strongly inclined to dispute the identity of Auburn, Lishoy-house overcame my scruples. As I clambered over the rotten gate, and crossed the grass-grown lawn or court, the tide of association became too strong for casuistry: here the poet dwelt and wrote, and here his thoughts fondly recurred, when composing his "Traveller," in a foreign land. Yonder was the decent church, that literally "topped the neighbouring hill." Before me lay the little hill of Knockrue, on which he declares, in one of his letters, he had rather sit with a book in hand, than mingle in the proudest assemblies. And, above all, startlingly true, beneath my feet was Yonder copse, where once the garden smil'd, A painting from the life could not be more exact. The stubborn currant-bush lifts its head above the rank grass, and the proud hollyhock flaunts where its sisters of the flower-knot are no more. In the middle of the village stands the old " hawthorn tree," built up with masonry, to distinguish and preserve it; it is old |