tience which he knew he was not master of, she ger from him; but Hervey does not tell why had listened to the nonsense of all the impertinent he himself did not convey proper informafools that wanted to talk to him, and had taken tion. No doubt he was busy enough. all that trouble off his hands; and that, as to all At the brillant and enjouement of the Court, there last, however, the truth reached Houghton; would be an end of it when she was gone; there and on Wednesday the 16th, Sir Robert would be no bearing a drawing-room when the arrived at St. James's. He was alone with only body that ever enlivened it, and one that always enlivened it was no longer there. Poor woman, how she always found something obliging, agreeable, and pleasing to say to everybody! Comme elle soutenoit sa dignité avec grace, avec politesse, avec douceur.”” That afternoon the Queen took a solemn leave of the King, her daughters, and the young Duke of Cumberland. Hervey's minute narrative leaves no doubt that she never saw the Prince of Wales during her illness at all--henee the sting of Pope's last tribute to her memory-(the italics are his own) :- "Hang the sad Verse on Carolina's urn, And hail her Passage to the Realms of Rest- Hervey's account of her farewell to the the Queen for a few minutes, during which she "committed the King, the family, and the country to his care." As he came out he found the Princesses in the ante-chamber surrounded by "some wise, some pious, and some very busy people," who, to the essential duty of having in some prelate to pity or scorn of Hervey, were urging the perform sacred offices:" "And when the Princess Emily made some difficulty about taking upon her to make this proposal to the King or Queen, Sir Robert (in the presence of a dozen people who really wished this divine physician for the Queen's soul might be sent for, upon the foot of her salvation) very prudently added, by way of stimulating the Princess Emily, Pray, madam, let this farce be played: the Archbishop will act it very well. You may bid him be as short as you will. It will do the Queen no hurt, no more than any good; and it call us all atheists if we don't pretend to be as great will satisfy all the wise and good fools, who will fools as they are.' After this eloquent and discreet persuasion-the whole company staring with "It is not necessary to examine whether the the utmost astonishment at Sir Robert Walpole, Queen's reasoning was good or bad in wishing the some in admiration of his piety, and others of his King, in case she died, should marry again :-it is prudence--the Princess Emily spoke to the King, certain she did wish it; had often said so when the King to the Queen, and the Archbishop (Pothe was present, and when he was not present, ter) was sent for; but the King went out of the and when she was in health, and gave it now as room before his episcopal Grace was admitted. her advice to him when she was dying upon which his sobs began to rise and his tears to fall with double vehemence. Whilst in the midst of this passion, wiping his eyes and sobbing between every word, with much ado he got out this answer: Non, j'aurai des maitresses.' To which the Queen made no other reply than Ah! mon Dieu! cela n'empêche pas.' I know this episode will hardly be credited, but it is literally true. The Queen after this said she believed she should not die till Wednesday, for that she had The Queen desired the Archbishop to take care of Dr. Butler, her Clerk of the Closet; and he was the only body I ever heard of her recommending particularly and by name all the while she was ill. Her servants in general she recommended to the King, saying he knew whom she liked and disliked, but did not, that I know of, name any body to him in particular."-Vol. II., p. 529. This special concern as to the great aubeen born on a Wednesday, married on a Wed-thor of the analogy is one of the few circumnesday, and brought to bed of her first child on a Wednesday; she had heard the first news of the stances in Hervey's detail that it is at all Indeed it is one late King's death on a Wednesday, and been agreeable to dwell upon. crowned on a Wednesday. This I own showed of very few satisfactory details that occur in a weakness in her, but one which might be ex- this book respecting her Majesty's intercused, as most people's minds are a little weakened on these occasions, and few people, even of the strongest minds, are altogether exempt from some little taint of that weakness called superstition. Many people have more of it than they care to let others know they have, and some more of it than they know themselves." ference with the ecclesiastical patronage of the Crown. Lord Mahon (History, ii. p. 172) exalts her "discerning and praiseworthy" selection of Bishops; but nothing can be more offensive than Hervey's whole account of her exertions on behalf of Hoadley, whom she forced up step by step in spiteWalpole all this while was in Norfolk-(not to mention the repugnance of the clerhis colleague the Duke of Newcastle is said gy and the nation)—of the King's own unto have wished to conceal the Queen's dan-usual stiffness on the avowed ground that "the man did not believe one word of the The Queen died at ten on the night of "Princess Caroline was sent for, and Lord Hervey, but before the last arrived the Queen was just dead. All she said before she died was a your girls: I was for the wife against the mistress, but I will be for the mistress against the daughters. And accordingly he advised the King, and pressed him, to send for Madame Walmoden immediately from Hanover; said he must look forward for his own sake, for the sake of his family, and for the sake of all his friends, and not ruin his health by indulging vain regret and grief for what was past recall. The King listened to this way of reasoning more kindly every time it was repeated; but Sir Robert Walpole tried this manner of talking to the Princesses, not quite so pride of Emily and the tenderness of Caroline were so shocked, that he laid the foundation of an aversion to him in both, which I believe nobody will live to see him ever get over."-Vol. II., pp. 544, 545. I have now got an asthma. Open the win-judiciously, respectfully, or successfully; for the dow. Then she said Pray. Upon which the Princess Emily began to read some prayers, of which she scarce repeated ten words before the Queen expired. The Princess Caroline held looking glass to her lips, and finding there was not the least damp upon it cried, 'Tis over;' and said not one word more, nor shed as yet one tear, on the arrival of a misfortune, the dread of which had cost her so many. The king kissed the face and hands of the lifeless body several times, but in a few minutes left the Queen's apartment, and went to that of his daughters, accompanied only by them. Then advising them to go to bed and take care of themselves, he went to his own side; and as soon as he was in bed sent for Lord Hervey to sit by him, where, after talking some time, and more calmly than one could have expected, he dismissed Lord H. and sent for one of his pages; and as he ordered one of them, for some time after the death of the Queen, to lie in his room, and that I am very sure he believed many stories of ghosts and witches and appari- where he stayed till five o'clock in the morning, 540. During the interval before the interment the King remained invisible, except to his daughters, to Hervey, and for a moment occasionally to Walpole. Meantime, in the antechamber, the great subject of discussion is, in what female hand the power is now to be vested. Newcastle and Grafton, both admirers of the Princess Emily, are in great hopes that at the King's age may allow that favored daughter to replace the mother in his confidence; but "Sir Robert, in his short, coarse way, said he should look to the King's mistress as the most sure means of influence. I'll bring Madam Walmoden over, and I'll have nothing to do with VOL. XIV. No. II. he 13 Lord Hervey wrote the Queen's epitaph in Latin and in English, and therein extolled her "firm faith in the doctrines of Christianity and rigid practice of its precepts." She was buried in Westminster Abbey; and George II., on his death-bed, twenty-three years afterwards, directed that his remains should be placed close by hers-a side of each of the coffins to be removed, in order that the cerements might be in actual contact. This story has been doubted; but within these few years it became the duty of one of the Chapter (the Rev. H. H. Milman) to superintend some operation within that long-sealed vault, and the royal coffins were found on the same raised slab of granite, exactly in the condition described--the sides that were abstracted still leaning against the wall behind. Walmoden arrived in England, and was Soon after the Queen's death Madame created Countess of Yarmouth-the last peerage of exactly that class. In 1740 Hervey became Lord Privy Seal. He died in 1743, aged forty-seven; and was survived until 1757 by the Princess Caroline, who then died, aged forty-five. Hitherto modern readers have in general, it is probable, connected at best frivolous ideas with Lord Hervey's name; henceforth, whatever may be thought of his moral character, justice will at least be done. to the graphic and caustic pen of Pope's victim. From 1733 he was a constant correspondent of the Rev. Dr. Conyers Middleton, whose Life of Cicero is inscribed to him in long and pompous dedication, enumerating not only every intellectual power and accomplishment, but every grace and virtue that could contrast with Pope's portraiture. a It will not least amuse the reader to turn [ own father, and Pulteney, and Chatham. to that specimen of pedantic adulation: Walpole had besides access to almost all but Lord Hervey fully deserved all that our own materials. We believe the fact to Middleton says of his scholarship. The have been that both of those clever spirits scraps from Livy and Tacitus, with which were rebuked in the presence of Lord Cheshis memoirs are garnished, were according terfield. You have but to turn from the to the taste and habit of that day; and we most brilliant page either of them ever are by no means to set them down for wrote to any one of his, and the impression proofs either of shallowness or affectation, of his immense superiority-of the compreas we should do if we met them in a mo- hensive, solid, and balanced understanding, dern page. He was qualified to hold his which with him had wit merely for an adown in corresponding with Middleton on junct and instrument-is immediate and any question of classical research-for ex- irresistible. ample, that still mysterious one of the gradual changes in the composition of the Senate during the Republic. It is not true, however, that Hervey made the translations inserted in Middleton's "Cicero." Lady Hervey, in justice to the Doctor, contradicted that story in one of her letters to Mr. Morris. She says, all her husband did was to purify the MS. by striking out "a number of low, vulgar, college expressions." Infidelity, no doubt, was a strong bond between his Lordship and the incumbent of Hanscombe, who, in writing to his friend about signing the Thirty-nine Articles as a step to that benefice, says " While I am content to acquiesce in the ill, I should be glad to taste a little of the good, and to have some amends for the ugly ascent and consent which no man of sense can approve. -(Lady Hervey's Letters, p. 61.) It is probable that, if Queen Caroline and Lord Hervey had lived, Dr. Middleton would in due time have signed again as a Bishopelect. A more puzzling point is the frequent repetition of most contemptuous allusions, both in Walpole and in Hervey, to the personal appearance of Chesterfield. All the portraits represent a singularly refined and handsome countenance. We have them of his youth, his middle life, and his age, even his extreme old age-and by painters of the most opposite schools, from Rosalba to Gainsborough-but in all the identity of feature is preserved and making every allowance for pictorial flattery and Herveian spleen, it is hardly possible to understand the violent contrast of such a description as this by our present author : "With a person as disagreeable as it was possible for a human figure to be without being deformed, he affected following many women of the first beauty and the most in fashion. He was very short, disproportioned, thick, and clumsily made; had a broad, rough-featured, ugly face, with black teeth, and a head big enough for a Polyphemus. Ben Ashurst told Lord Chesterfield once that he was like a stunted giant.”—Vol. I., p. 96. We feel that we have already given suffi- But Hervey makes George II. himselfcient space to this book-though it seems and his majesty was of short stature-speak to us one of very rare distinction in its with the same sort of disparagement. The class-otherwise we would fain have extract- subject of conversation in vol. ¡I., p. 360, is ed some of the author's minor portraits. Lord Carteret's having told the Queen (it Those of the Speaker Onslow, Sir Joseph was shortly before her last illness) that "he Jekyll, the Duke of Argyle and his brother had been giving her fame that very mornIslay, and many more, are remarkable speci-ing:"mens, and, we believe, done without the least exaggeration. Not so that of Lord Chesterfield. Indeed the slighting style in which Hervey (like Horace Walpole) uniformly speaks of his talents seems quite astonishing. It is true that Hervey had never seen the writings on which chiefly we form our high notion of the man; but Hervey heard the speeches of which we have but poor reports, and Horace Walpole's "hero of ruelles" is admitted even by Horace Walpole to have made the best speech he ever heard—adding that he had heard his "The King said, Yes, I dare say he will paint said the Queen; good things come out of dirt you in fine colors, that dirty liar! Why not? sometimes: I have ate very good asparagus raised out of dung.' Lord Hervey said he knew three people that were now writing the History of his Majesty's Reign, who could possibly know nothing of the secrets of the palace and his Majesty's closet, and yet would, he doubted not, pretend to make their whole history one continued dissection lingbroke, Chesterfield, and Carteret.—They will of both. You mean,' said the King, Lords Boall three have about as much truth in the as the Mille et Une Nuits. Not but I shall like to read Bolingbroke's, who, of all those rascals and knaves the man who really was at that moment that have been lying against me these ten years, giving their Majesties such " "fame" as has certainly the best parts and the most know- neither would perhaps have much coveted. ledge. He is a scoundrel, but he is a scoundrel of a higher class than Chesterfield. Chesterfield is a little tea-table scoundrel, that tells little womanish lies to make quarrels in families; and tries to make women lose their reputations, and make their husbands beat them, without any object but to give himself airs; as if anybody could believe a woman could like a dwarf-baboon.'” Mr. Croker remarks, that Bolingbroke never wrote Memoirs-that Carteret's, if they ever were written, have perished-that Chesterfield has left us nothing of this sort but a few Characters, including those of but a few Characters, including those of George II. and his Queen, which are in fact drawn with admirable candor-done, no doubt, in his old age-and that it is curious enough to have all this criticism on three books of Memoirs that do not exist from Who could have dreamed, a hundred years since, that posterity would owe its impressions of the society and policy of George II. mainly to the spurious Walpole and the Sporus Hervey? Which, of us can guess now who may, in 1948, be the leading authorities for the characters and manners of our own day-the dessous des cartes of the courts and cabinets of William IV. and Queen Victoria ? Some haunter of Christie's rooms and the French play, who occasionally shows his enamelled studs below the gangway? Some "Patch" or "Silliander," whom our Lady Mary (if we had one) would bid-as she bade Hervey— "Put on white gloves, and lead folks out, From the Edinburgh Review. COLERIDGE AND SOUTHEY. 1. Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey. By JOSEPH COTTLE. London, 1847. 2. Biographia Literaria; or Biographical Sketches of my Literary Life and Opinions. By Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Second Edition, prepared for publication in part by the late Henry Nelson Coleridge, completed and published by his Widow. London, 1847. 3. A Memoir of the Life and Writings of William Taylor of Norwich, containing his correspondence of many years with Robert Southey, Esq. Compiled and edited by J. W. ROBBERDS, F.G.S. of Norwich. London, 1843. ridge should be known and remembered for good as well as for evil,-for something better than a long train of humiliating weaknesses and neglected duties. THE lives of Coleridge and Southey are yet to be written. For that of Coleridge a large quantity of materials has from time to time been thrown before the public; much of which relatives must have wished Among the additions to Mr. Cottle's withheld. Perhaps the best thing now re- new edition are a number of letters from maining for the family, would be to find a Southey. Indeed, almost the whole of kind and discerning friend, to whom might what relates to him is new; and of all Mr. be entrusted the relating truly, but with- Cottle's disclosures concerning Coleridge, out exaggeration, the unhappy passages of the opinion of him, as expressed in these his life. It is impossible to read five pages letters, is the most painful. The disapproof Mr. Cottle's reminiscences, without see- bation, severely as it is delivered, does ing that he has one of the kindest hearts Southey no discredit; no impartial person joined to one of the worst judgments of any can deny its justice. At the same time, he man that ever lived. His revelations, to never can have wished that his harsh judgwhich there is a very large addition in this ment should go forth alone and be supposed new edition, appear to leave no longer any to represent his estimate of the whole of choice to those, who, from affection to his Coleridge's character, or all his feelings toperson or admiration of his genius, must wards him. Above all, most assuredly he desire that the life and character of Cole-never could have imagined, that a confi dential correspondence with their common friend and benefactor would have been published to the world, while any children of Coleridge were alive to be pained by their uncle's testimony against their father. He cannot have anticipated, that Mr. Cottle would think this proper.' Except for the unseasonable publication of these passages, we should thank Mr. Cottle, without any abatement, for giving us so many of Southey's letters. His life might be almost written from his correspondence with William Taylor for the period comprised in it. And his extensive correspondence with other friends will supply his biographer with materials for the rest. This is a fortunate thing for Southey, for his letters are the perfection of letter writing, or nearly so; clear, lively, unaffected, largely dashed with humor, and entering into whatever he is writing or reading. But, what is still more in his favor, he is not seen here as the fierce controversialist or uncharitable politician. On the contrary, the kind and friendly heart beams out continually from them; so that, while fresh from the perusal of them, our sympathy with his attachments disposes us to leave him a little more latitude for the capriciousness of his antipathies than of old, and we are willing to put a lenient construction upon those unpleasant faults of temper, and provoking prejudices and errors into which people are pretty sure of falling, when they shut themselves up with their women, their admirers, and their books. 'Am I the better or the worse,' he asks in one of his letters to Mr. Taylor, for growing alone like a single oak?' In many respects worse, there can be no doubt. We meet in his letters with many a harsh criticism on contemporaries, of whom, if he had - known them, he would have judged differently; and many broodings on political events, which he would have discarded, had he but come a little oftener to London, and let himself be hustled in its streets and contradicted at its dinner tables. Such passages might have provoked us to anger, if we had still to deal with Southey living; but he is gone:-the grave has closed over a writer and a man of whom England has reason to be proud, and our angry controversies are buried with him. The new edition of Coleridge's Biographia Literaria' was begun and carried some way by his nephew, the late Henry Nelson Coleridge, and has been since completed by a lady who is noet's daughter, and nephew's widow. Of such a work we would speak with the respect due alike to her position, her talents, and her feelings. She describes, in a few touching words, the task, which had thus descended on her, as one "full of affecting remembrances, and brought upon me by the deepest sorrow of my life." A biographical sketch, begun by her husband, but which does not proceed farther than Coleridge's twenty-fourth year, and which even so far has the appearance of only a skeleton sketch, is appended to the work. To this Mrs. Nelson Coleridge has only added a brief chronological account of her father's publications. But she has prefixed a long Introduction,' in answer to various attacks. We abstain from particular criticism. The publication of Mr. Cottle's second edition of his 'Reminiscences,' a few days after the appearance of the new edition of the Biographia Literaria,' must have painfully convinced her, how disqualified even the gifted daughter of a gifted parent may be for the strict responsibilities of a judge, in a case like the present,-no less, how vain her affectionate endeavors to clear the memory of her father from all, and even heavy blame. It appears that when Mr. Cottle was engaged in preparing the first edition of his book, he consulted Southey about it. Southey's letters on this occasion are now published. He wrote as follows, 14th of April, 1836, and again, on the 30th of September, to the same effect :— 66 of Coleridge' for separate publication, you are If you are drawing up your Recollections most welcome to insert anything of mine which you might think proper: but it is my wish that nothing of mine may go into the hands of any person concerned in bringing forward Coleridge's MSS. "I know that Coleridge, at different times of his of me. life, never let pass an opportunity of speaking ill lamented the exposure of duplicity which must Both Wordsworth and myself have often result from the publication of his letters, and of what he has delivered by word of mouth to the worshippers by whom he was always surrounded. To Wordsworth and me it matters little. Coleridge received from us such substantial services as few men have received from those whose friend ship they had forfeited. This, indeed, was not the case with Wordsworth, as it was with me, for he knew not in what manner Coleridge had latterly spoken of him. But I continued all possible offices of kindness to his children, long after I regarded his own conduct with that utter disapprobation which alone it can call forth from all who had any sense of duty and moral obligation." After this it is vain for relatives any |