Devereux — Complete by Baron Edward Bulwer Lytton Lytton (ebook offline txt) 📗

in fishing once when he was a little boy, he felt a great fish at the end of his line, which he drew up almost to the ground, but it dropped in, and the disappointment, he adds, vexes him to this day, and he believes it to be the type of all his future disappointments:* it is wonderful how reluctantly a very active mind sinks into rest.”

* In this letter Swift adds, “I should be ashamed to say this if you [Lord Bolingbroke] had not a spirit fitter to bear your own misfortunes than I have to think of them;” and this is true. Nothing can be more striking, or more honourable to Lord Bolingbroke, than the contrast between Swift’s letters and that nobleman’s upon the subject of their mutual disappointments. I especially note the contrast, because it has been so grievously the cant of Lord Bolingbroke’s decriers to represent his affection for retirement as hollow, and his resignation in adversity as a boast rather than a fact. Now I will challenge any one thoroughly and dispassionately to examine what is left to us of the life of this great man, and after having done so, to select from all modern history an example of one who, in the prime of life and height of ambition, ever passed from a very active and exciting career into retirement and disgrace, and bore the change—long, bitter, and permanent as it was—with a greater and more thoroughly sustained magnanimity than did Lord Bolingbroke. He has been reproached for taking part in political contests in the midst of his praises and “affected enjoyment” of retirement; and this, made matter of reproach, is exactly the subject on which he seems to me the most worthy of praise. For, putting aside all motives for action, on the purity of which men are generally incredulous, as a hatred to ill government (an antipathy wonderfully strong in wise men, and wonderfully weak in fools), the honest impulse of the citizen, and the better and higher sentiment, to which Bolingbroke appeared peculiarly alive, of affection to mankind,—putting these utterly aside,—it must be owned that resignation is the more noble in proportion as it is the less passive; that retirement is only a morbid selfishness if it prohibit exertions for others; that it is only really dignified and noble when it is the shade whence issue the oracles that are to instruct mankind; and that retirement of this nature is the sole seclusion which a good and wise man will covet or commend. The very philosophy which makes such a man seek the quiet, makes him eschew the inutility of the hermitage. Very little praiseworthy to me would have seemed Lord Bolingbroke among his haymakers and ploughmen, if among haymakers and ploughmen he had looked with an indifferent eye upon a profligate Minister and a venal parliament; very little interest in my eyes would have attached itself to his beans and vetches, had beans and vetches caused him to forget that if he was happier in a farm, he could be more useful in a senate, and made him forego, in the sphere of a bailiff, all care for re-entering that of a legislator.—ED.

“Yet why should retirement be rest? Do you recollect in the first conversation we ever had together, we talked of Cowley? Do you recollect how justly, and even sublimely, he has said, ‘Cogitation is that which distinguishes the solitude of a God from that of a wild beast’?”

“It is finely said,” answered Bolingbroke; “but Swift was born not for cogitation but action; for turbulent times, not for calm. He ceases to be great directly he is still; and his bitterness at every vexation is so great that I have often thought, in listening to him, of the Abbe de Cyran, who, attempting to throw nutshells out of the bars of his window, and constantly failing in the attempt, exclaimed in a paroxysm of rage, ‘Thus does Providence delight in frustrating my designs!’”

“But you are fallen from a far greater height of hope than Swift could ever have attained: you bear this change well, but not I hope without a struggle.”

“You are right,—not without a struggle; while corruption thrives, I will not be silent; while bad men govern, I will not be still.”

In conversation of this sort passed the time, till we arrived at Pope’s villa.

We found the poet in his study,—indued, as some of his pictures represent him, in a long gown and a velvet cap. He received Bolingbroke with great tenderness, and being, as he said, in robuster health than he had enjoyed for months, he insisted on carrying us to his grotto. I know nothing more common to poets than a pride in what belongs to their houses; and perhaps to a man not ill-natured, there are few things more pleasant than indulging the little weaknesses of those we admire. We sat down in a small temple made entirely of shells; and whether it was that the Creative Genius gave an undue charm to the place, I know not: but as the murmur of a rill, glassy as the Blandusian fountain, was caught, and re-given from side to side by a perpetual echo, and through an arcade of trees, whose leaves, ever and anon, fell startingly to the ground beneath the light touch of the autumn air; as you saw the sails on the river pass and vanish, like the cares which breathe over the smooth glass of wisdom, but may not linger to dim it, it was not difficult to invest the place, humble as it was, with a classic interest, or to recall the loved retreats of the Roman bards, without smiling too fastidiously at the contrast.

“Sweet Echo, sweetest nymph, that liv’st unseen, Within thy airy shell, By slow Meander’s margin green, Or by the violet embroidered vale Where the lovelorn nightingale Nightly to thee her sad song mourneth well; Sweet Echo, dost thou shun those haunts of yore, And in the dim caves of a northern shore Delight to dwell!”

“Let the compliment to you, Pope,” said Bolingbroke, “atone for the profanation of weaving three wretched lines of mine with those most musical notes of Milton.”

“Ah!” said Pope, “would that you could give me a fitting inscription for my fount and grotto! The only one I can remember is hackneyed, and yet it has spoilt me, I fear, for all others.

“‘Hujus Nympha loci, sacri custodia fontis Dormio dum blandae sentio murmur aquae; Parce meum, quisquis tanges cava marmora, somnum Rumpere; sive bibas, sive lavere, tace.’”*

* Thus very inadequately translated by Pope (see his Letter to Edward Blount, Esq., descriptive of his grotto):—

“Nymph of the grot, these sacred springs I keep, And to the murmur of these waters sleep: Ah, spare my slumbers; gently tread the cave, And drink in silence, or in silence lave.”

It is, however, quite impossible to convey to an unlearned reader the exquisite and spirit-like beauty of the Latin verses.—ED.

“We cannot hope to match it,” said Bolingbroke, “though you know I value myself on these things. But tell me your news of Gay: is he growing wiser?”

“Not a whit; he is forever a dupe to the spes credula; always talking of buying an annuity, that he may be independent, and always spending as fast as he earns, that he may appear munificent.”

“Poor Gay! but he is a common example of the improvidence of his tribe, while you are an exception. Yet mark, Devereux, the inconsistency of Pope’s thrift and carelessness: he sends a parcel of fruit to some ladies with this note, ‘Take care of the papers that wrap the apples, and return them safely; they are the only copies I have of one part of the Iliad.’ Thus, you see, our economist saves his paper, and hazards his epic!”