WORD PORTRAITS
OF
FAMOUS WRITERS
WORD PORTRAITS
OF
FAMOUS WRITERS
EDITED BY
MABEL E. WOTTON
‘What manner of man is he?’
Twelfth Night
LONDON
RICHARD BENTLEY & SON
Publishers in Ordinary to Her Majesty the Queen
1887
Printed by R. & R. Clark, Edinburgh.
INTRODUCTION
“The world has always been fond of personal details respecting men who have been celebrated.” These were the words of Lord Beaconsfield, and with them he prefixed his description of the personal appearance of Isaac D’Israeli; but we hardly need the dictum of our greatest statesman to convince ourselves that at all events every honest literature-lover takes a very real interest in the individuality of those men whose names are perpetually on his lips. It is not enough for such a one merely to make himself familiar with their writings. It does not suffice for him that the Essays of Elia, for instance, can be got by heart, but he feels that[Pg viii] he must also be able to linger in the playground at Christ’s with the “lame-footed boy,” and in after years pace the Temple gardens with the gentle-faced scholar, before he can properly be said to have made Lamb’s thoughts his own. At the best it is but a very incomplete notion that most of us possess as to the actual personality of even the most prominent of our British writers. The almost womanly beauty of Sidney, and the keen eyes and razor face of Pope, would, perhaps, be recognised as easily as the well-known form of Dr. Johnson; but taking them en masse even a widely-read man might be forgiven if, from amongst the scraps of hearsay and curtly-recorded impressions on which at rare intervals he may alight, he cannot very readily conjure up the ghosts of the very men whose books he has studied, and to whose haunts he has been an eager pilgrim.
Such a power the following pages have[Pg ix] attempted to supply. They contain an account of the face, figure, dress, voice, and manner of our best-known writers ranging from Geoffrey Chaucer to Mrs. Henry Wood,—drawn in all cases when it is possible by their contemporaries, and when through lack of material this endeavour has failed, the task of portrait-painting has devolved either on other writers who owed their inspiration to the offices of a mutual friend, or on those whose literary ability and untiring research have qualified them for the task. Infinite toil has not always been rewarded, and it would be easy to supply at least half a dozen names whose absence is to be regretted. Beaumont and Fletcher are as much read as Thomas Otway, and William Wotton has perhaps as much right of entrance as his famous opponent Richard Bentley, but as a small child pointed out when the book was first proposed: “You can’t find what isn’t there.”[Pg x] And the worth of the book naturally consists in keeping to the lines already indicated.
An asterisk placed under the given reference means that the writer of that particular portrait (who is not necessarily the writer of that particular book) did not actually see his subject, but that he is describing a picture, or else that he is building up one from substantiated evidence. Sometimes, as in the case of Suckling, this distinction leads to the same book supplying two portraits, only one of which is at first hand.
When a date is placed at the foot of a description, it refers to the appearance presented at that time, and not to the period when the words were penned.
British writers only are named, and amongst them there is of course no living author.
Chaucer’s birth-date has been given as About 1340, for the traditional year of 1328[Pg xi] is based on little more than the inscription on his tomb, which was not placed there until the middle of the sixteenth century, while according to his own deposition as witness, his birth could not have taken place until about twelve years later.
In only one other instance has there been a departure from recognised precedent, and that is in the case of Thomas de Quincey. In defiance of almost every compiler and present-day writer, I have entered the name in the Q’s and spelt it as here written. The reason for this is threefold: First, he himself invariably spelt his name with a small d. Second, Hood, Wordsworth, and Lamb, and, I believe, all his other contemporaries did the same. Third, de Quincey himself was so determined about the matter that he actually dropped the prefix altogether for some little time, and was known as Mr. Quincey. “His name I write with a small d[Pg xii] in the de, as he wrote it himself. He would not have wished it indexed among the D’s, but the Q’s,” wrote the Rev. Francis Jacox, who was one of his Lasswade friends, and in spite of his recent and skilful biographers, it must be conceded that after all the little man had the greatest right to his own name.
I am glad to take this opportunity of thanking those who have helped me, and who will not let me speak my thanks direct. It is a pleasant thought that while working amongst the literary men of the past, I have received nothing but kindness from those of to-day. First and foremost to Mr. George Augustus Sala, to whom I am infinitely indebted; also to Mrs. Huntingford, Mrs. and Mr. Frederick Chapman, Mr. Henry M. Trollope, Dr. W. F. Fitz-Patrick, and Mr. S. C. Hall: to all these, as well as to my own personal friends, I offer my hearty and sincere thanks.
M. E. W.
CONTENTS
Joseph Addison 1 Harrison Ainsworth 4 Jane Austen 7 Francis, Lord Bacon 10 Joanna Baillie 12 Benjamin, Lord Beaconsfield 15 Jeremy Bentham 17 Richard Bentley 20 James Boswell 21 Charlotte Brontë 24 Henry, Lord Brougham 27 Elizabeth Barrett Browning 34 John Bunyan 36 Edmund Burke 39 Robert Burns 42 Samuel Butler 47 George, Lord Byron 47 Thomas Campbell 51 Thomas Carlyle 55 Thomas Chatterton 58 Geoffrey Chaucer 61 Philip, Lord Chesterfield 63 William Cobbett 66 Hartley Coleridge 70 Samuel Taylor Coleridge 74 William Collins 77 William Cowper 79 George Crabbe 81 Daniel De Foe 83 Charles Dickens 86 Isaac D’Israeli 91 John Dryden 94 Mary Anne Evans (George Eliot) 98 Henry Fielding 102 John Gay 105 Edward Gibbon 107 William Godwin 110 Oliver Goldsmith 112 David Gray 114 Thomas Gray 116 Henry Hallam 118 William Hazlitt 120 Felicia Hemans 125 James Hogg 128 Thomas Hood 130 Theodore Hook 134 David Hume 136 Leigh Hunt 139 Elizabeth Inchbald 143 Francis, Lord Jeffrey 144 Douglas Jerrold 147 Samuel Johnson 150 Ben Jonson 152 John Keats 155 John Keble 158 Charles Kingsley 164 Charles Lamb 168 Letitia Elizabeth Landon 172 Walter Savage Landor 174 Charles Lever 177 Matthew Gregory Lewis 179 John Gibson Lockhart 180 Sir Richard Lovelace 181 Edward, Lord Lytton 183 Thomas Babington Macaulay 187 William Maginn 190 Francis Mahony (Father Prout) 195 Frederick Marryat 199 Harriet Martineau 202 Frederick Denison Maurice 205 John Milton 207 Mary Russell Mitford 211 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu 215 Thomas Moore 217 Hannah More 220 Sir Thomas More 224 Caroline Norton 227 Thomas Otway 231 Samuel Pepys 232 Alexander Pope 234 Bryan Waller Procter 236 Thomas de Quincey 238 Ann Radcliffe 243 Sir Walter Raleigh 244 Charles Reade 248 Samuel Richardson 251 Samuel Rogers 254 Dante Gabriel Rossetti 256 Richard Savage 262 Sir Walter Scott 264 William Shakespeare 267 Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley 275 Percy Bysshe Shelley 277 Richard Brinsley Sheridan 282 Sir Philip Sidney 284 Horace Smith 286 Sydney Smith 287 Tobias Smollett 289 Robert Southey 290 Edmund Spenser 293 Arthur Penrhyn Stanley 296 Sir Richard Steele 299 Laurence Sterne 302 Sir John Suckling 304 Jonathan Swift 305 William Makepeace Thackeray 308 James Thomson 311 Anthony Trollope 313 Edmund Waller 317 Horace Walpole 319 Izaac Walton 323 John Wilson 324 Ellen Wood (Mrs. Henry Wood) 330 William Wordsworth 332 Sir Henry Wotton 335 |
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