says he, "I am a poor desolate man; it hath pleased God I am not yet visited, though my family is, and one of my children dead." "How do you mean then," said I "that you are not visited?" "Why," says he "that is my house," pointing to a very little, low, boarded house, "and there my poor wife and two children live," said he, "if they may be said to live; for my wife and one of the children are visited, but I do not come at them." And with that word I saw the tears run very plentifully down his face; and so they did down mine too, I assure you. "But," said I, "why do you not come at them? How can you abandon your own flesh and blood?" "Oh, sir," says he, "the Lord forbid; I do not abandon them; I work for them as much as I am able; and, blessed be the Lord, I keep them from want." And with that I observed he lifted up his eyes to heaven with a countenance that presently told me I had happened on a man that was no hypocrite, but a serious, religious, good man; and, his ejaculation was an expression of thankfulness, that in such a condition as he was in, he should be able to say his family did not want. "Well," says I, "honest man, that is a great mercy, as things go now with the poor. But how do you live then, and how are you kept from the dreadful calamity that is now upon us all?" "Why, sir," says he, "I am a waterman, and there is my boat," says he, "and the boat serves me for a house; I work in it in the day, and I sleep in it in the night, and what I get I lay it down upon that stone," says he, showing me a broad stone on the other side of the street, a good way from his house; "and then," says he, "I halloo and call to them till I make them hear, and they come and fetch it." "Well, friend," says I, "but how can you get money as a waterman? Does anybody go by water these times?" "Yes, sir," says he, "in the way I am employed there does. Do you see there," says he, "five ships lie at anchor," pointing down the river a good way below the town; "and do you see," says he, "eight or ten ships lie at the chain there, and at anchor yonder," pointing above the town. "All those ships have families on board, of their merchants and owners, and such-like, who have locked themselves up, and live on board, close shut in, for fear of the infection; and I tend on them to fetch things for them, carry letters, and do what is absolutely necessary, that they may not be obliged to come on shore; and every night I fasten my boat on board one of the ship's boats, and there I sleep by myself, and, blessed be God, I am preserved hitherto." "Well," said I, "friend, will they let you come on board after you have been on shore here, when this has been such a terrible place, and so infected as it is?" "Why, as to that," said he, “I very seldom go up the ship side, but deliver what I bring to their boat, or lie by the side and they hoist it on board: if I did I think they are in no danger from me, for I never go into any house on shore, or touch anybody, no, not of my own family; but I fetch provisions for them." "Nay," says I, "but that may be worse, for you must have those provisions of somebody or other; and since all this part of the town is so infected, it is dangerous so much as to speak with anybody; for the village," said I, "is as it were the beginning of London, though it be at some distance from it." "That is true," added he, "but you do not understand me right. I do not buy provisions for them here; I row up to Greenwich, and buy fresh meat there, and sometimes I row down the river to Woolwich and buy there; then I go to single farm houses on the Kentish side, where I am known, and buy fowls, and eggs and butter, and bring to the ships as they direct me, sometimes one, sometimes the other. I seldom come on shore here; and I came only now to call my wife and hear how my little family do, and give them a little money which I received last night." Poor man," said I, "and how much hast thou gotten for them?" "I have gotten four shillings," said he, "which is a great sum, as things go now with poor men; but they have given me a bag of bread, too, and a salt fish, and some flesh; so all helps out." "Well," said I, "and have you given it them yet?" "No," said he, "but I have called, and my wife has answered that she cannot come out yet, but in half an hour she hopes to come, and I am waiting for her. Poor woman!" says he, "she is brought sadly down; she has had a swelling, and it is broke, and I hope she will recover, but I fear the child will die; but it is the Lord!" Here he stopt, and wept very much. "Well, honest friend," said I, "thou hast a sure comforter, if thou hast brought thyself to be resigned to the will of God; he is dealing with us all in judgment." "Oh, sir," says he, "it is infinite mercy if any of us are spared; and who am I to repine!" "Say'st thou so," said I, "and how much less is my faith than thine?" And here my heart smote me, suggesting how much better this poor man's foundation was, on which he stayed in the danger, than mine; that he had nowhere to fly; that he had a family to bind him to attendance, which I had not; and mine was mere presumption, his a true dependence, and a courage resting on God; and yet, that he used all possible caution for his safety. I turned a little way from the man, while these thoughts engaged me; for, indeed, I could no more refrain from tears than he. At length, after some further talk, the poor woman opened the door, and called, Robert, Robert;" he answered and bid. her stay a few moments, and he would come; so he ran down the common stairs to his boat, and fetched up a sack in which was the provisions he had brought from the ships; and when he returned, he hallooed again; then he went to the great stone which he showed me, and emptied the sack, and laid all out, everything by themselves, and then retired; and his wife came with a little boy to fetch them away; and he called, and said such a captain had sent such a thing, and such a captain such a thing, and at the end adds, "God has sent it all, give thanks to Him." When the poor woman had taken up all, she was so weak she could not carry it at once in, though the weight was not much neither; so she left the biscuit, which was in a little bag, and left a little boy to watch it, till she came again. "Well, but," says I to him, "did you leave her four shillings, too, which you said was your week's pay?" "Yes, yes," says he, "you shall hear her own it." So he calls again, "Rachel, Rachel," which, it seems was her name, "did you take up the money?" "Yes," said she. "How much was it?" said he. "Four shillings and a groat," said she. "Well, well," says he, "the Lord keep you all;" and so he turned to go away. Ás I could not refrain from contributing tears to this man's story, so neither could I refrain my charity for his assistance; so I called him; "Hark thee, friend," said I, "come hither, for I believe thou art in health, that I may venture thee;" so I pulled out my hand, which was in my pocket before. "Here," says I, "go and call thy Rachel once more, and give her a little more comfort from me. God will never forsake a family that trusts in him as thou dost;" so I gave him four other shillings, and bid him go lay them on the stone, and call his wife. I have no words to express the poor man's thankfulness, neither could he express it himself but by tears running down his face. He called his wife, and told her God had moved the heart of a stranger, upon hearing their condition, to give them all that money, and a great deal more such as that he said to her. The woman, too, made signs of the like thankfulness, as well to heaven as to me, and joyfully picked it up; and I parted with no money all that year that I thought better bestowed. JOHNSON AND HIS CIRCLE THE expression "Johnson and his Circle" precisely describes the literary group of the age succeeding Pope, for the great lexicographer was in reality the center of a group of brilliant men who were held together by the magnet of his outstanding personality. Johnson was preeminent by virtue of his personality, not of his writings. The Dictionary was indeed an invaluable contribution to English culture, but as a literary artist Johnson was mediocre, certainly not to be compared with Goldsmith, whose graceful fluency and delicate touch ennobled any commonplace of life, or with Edmund Burke, whose eloquence was of the supreme order. Irene is a labored tragedy, Rasselas a novel quite devoid of personality or humor, The Rambler and The Idler colorless and heavy when compared with The Tatler and The Spectator, and while the Lives of the Poets have stood fairly well the test of time, they are certainly not rich as biographical documents and as criticism are limited by the author's excessive common sense and his distrust of the imagination. In short, Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) would hardly be recognized to-day as a considerable figure in literary history were it not for one fortunate circumstance, the surpassingly faithful biography which the vicarious James Boswell has furnished, a biography which records the daily minutiae of Johnson's life and which has preserved the flow of conversation in which Johnson was supreme. It is the picturesque, rugged personality of Johnson, brave, kindly, loyal, intolerant, querulous, and his incomparable familiar talk that, thanks to Boswell, perpetuate the recognition of his supremacy. The conversations are immortal literary monuments of the spoken word. "He had early laid it down as a fixed rule," he told Sir Joshua Reynolds, "to do his best on every occasion, and in every company; to impart whatever he knew in the most forcible language he could put it in; and that by constant practice, and never suffering any careless expressions to escape him, or attempting to deliver his thoughts without arranging them in the clearest manner, it became habitual to him." This flow of incomparable talk from the lips of a self-made commoner attests the full liberation of the bourgeois in letters, just as Johnson's dignified but blunt refusal to dedicate the Dictionary to the Earl of Chesterfield marks the passing of literary patronage. "There is no arguing with Johnson," lamented Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1774), who was often the victim of the Doctor's hardest knocks, "for if his pistol misses fire, he knocks you down with the butt-end of it." Yet Johnson respected the snub-nosed, pockmarked Irish lad, and honored his genius though he ridiculed his vanity and his folly. Born in a humble Irish parsonage, of which he has left a vivid picture in The Deserted Village, pupil of an old soldier who filled his head with fairy tales and ghost stories, a menial sizar at Trinity College, Dublin, indolent and rebellious, the huckster of his own ballads at public-houses, a gambling medical student at Edinburgh and Leyden, an importunate wanderer over the continent, keeping soul and body together with his flute, an actor, chemist's assistant and bookseller's hack in London, and then suddenly a man of fame with the publication of The Traveller in 1764, a charter member of the immortal literary club of which Johnson was the dictator, yet ever in debt despite his triumphs and his income, and dying at forty-five with a mind ill at ease, such in brief is the story of Goldsmith's life. One day during his absence at the club it was proposed to write epitaphs upon him; whereupon Garrick wrote: Here lies poet Goidsmith, for shortness called Noll, Who wrote like an angel, but talked like poor Poll. If Goldsmith could not talk like Johnson, he could indeed write like an angel, and the charm of his verse and prose has lost none of its potency with the passing years, and delights readers who turn a deaf ear to much that the eighteenth century has to offer. The one great prose writer of the late eighteenth century was Edmund Burke (17291797). Americans will always reverence him because he championed the cause of the colonies and fought our battles in an hostile Parliament. Irish born, educated at Trinity College, he came to London to study law, but could not hold himself to regimen and wandered much, only settling into serious work at thirty-five. He then became a most profound student of political affairs and is the ideal exponent of the scholar in politics. That he became the leader of the Whig party is solely a tribute to his own ability, for he had no backing. For over thirty years his voice was raised on every great public question: the rights of the colonies, political corruption at home, the exploitation of India, England's attitude toward the French Revolution. In all of these outstanding issues he played a leading rôle, ever the consistent champion of national honor, of political and social integrity, and of liberty within the constitution. Burke's orations have never been equaled in the English tongue. They are the joint product of imaginative genius and of the genius for hard work. "I think I know America," he once remarked. "If I do not, my ignorance is incurable, for I have spared no pains to understand it"; and Matthew Arnold has observed that "what makes Burke stand out so splendidly among politicians is that he treats politics with his thought and imagination." His magnificent invective, his resource of figure and illustration, his swelling periods and the stately music of his prose are unsurpassed. "LIFE," says Seneca, "is a voyage, in the progress of which we are perpetually changing our scenes; we first leave childhood behind us, then youth, then the years of ripened manhood, then the better and more pleasing part of old age." The perusal of this passage having incited in me a train of reflections on the state of man, the incessant fluctuation of his wishes, the gradual change of his disposition to all exwith which he floats along the stream of ternal objects, and the thoughtlessness with which he floats along the stream of time, I sunk into a slumber amidst my meditations, and on a sudden found my ears filled with the tumult of labour, the shouts of alacrity, the shrieks of alarm, the whistle of winds, and the dash of waters. My astonishment for a time repressed my curiosity; but soon recovering myself so far as to inquire whither we were going, and what was the cause of such clamor and confusion, I was told that we were launching out into the "ocean of life"; that we had already passed the straits of infancy, in which multitudes had perished, some by the weakness and fragility of their vessels, and more by the folly, perverseness, or negligence of those who undertook to steer them; and that we were now on the main sea, abandoned to the winds and billows, without any other means of security than the care of the pilot, whom it was always in our power to choose among great numbers that offered their direction and assistance. I then looked round with anxious eagerness; and, first turning my eyes behind me, saw a stream flowing through flowery islands, which every one that sailed along seemed to behold with pleasure, but no sooner touched than the current which, though not noisy or turbulent, was yet irresistible bore him away. Beyond these islands all was darkness, nor could any of the passengers describe the shore at which he first embarked. Before me, and on each side, was an expanse of waters violently agitated, and covered with so thick a mist that the most perspicacious eye could see but a little way. It appeared to be full of rocks and whirlpools, for many sunk expectedly while they were courting the gale with full sails, and insulting those whom they had left behind. So numerous, indeed, were the dangers, and so thick the darkness, that no caution could confer security. Yet there were many who, by false intelligence, betrayed their followers into whirlpools, or by violence pushed those whom they found in their way against the rocks. The current was invariable and insurmountable; but though it was impossible to sail against it, or to return to the place that was once passed, yet it was not so violent as to allow no opportunities for dexterity or courage, since, though none could retreat back from danger, yet they might often avoid it by oblique direction. It was, however, not very common to steer with much care or prudence; for, by some universal infatuation, every man appeared to think himself safe, though he saw his consorts every moment sinking round him; and no sooner had the waves closed over them, than their fate and their misconduct were forgotten. The voyage was pursued with the same jocund confidence; every man congratulated himself upon the soundness of his vessel, and believed himself able to stem the whirlpool in which his friend was swallowed, or glide over the rocks on which he was dashed; nor was it often observed that the sight of a wreck made any man change his course: if he turned aside for a moment, he soon forgot the rudder, and left himself again to the disposal of chance. This negligence did not proceed from indifference, or from weariness of their present condition; for not one of those who thus rushed upon destruction, failed, when he was sinking, to call loudly upon his associates for that help which could not now be given him; and many spent their last moments in cautioning others against the folly by which they were intercepted in the midst of their course. Their benevolence was sometimes praised, but their admonitions were unregarded. The vessels in which we had embarked, being confessedly unequal to the turbulence of the stream of life, were visibly impaired in the course of the voyage; so that every passenger was certain that, how long soever he might, by favorable accidents or by incessant vigilance, be preserved, he must sink at last. This necessity of perishing might have been expected to sadden the gay, and intimidate the daring, at least to keep the melancholy and timorous in perpetual torments, and hinder them from any enjoyment of the varieties and gratifications which nature offered them as the solace of their labors; yet, in effect, none seemed less to expect destruction than those to whom it was most dreadful. They all had the art of concealing their danger from themselves; and those who knew their inability to bear the sight of the terrors that embarrassed their way, took care never to look forward, but found some amusement for the present moment, and generally entertained themselves by play |