Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

foreign papers and wrote on foreign politics. The journal at this point will recommend itself by the details of a momentous period in European history, and needs no comment. Residence in London was attended with the ordinary advantages. Robinson was now a fixture for a time, and the capital contained or attracted those whom he most desired to know, and who, in many cases, directed or affected the current of his later years. In March 1808 he was approaching the end of his thirty-second year. In that month he saw for the first time Southey and Wordsworth. He attended Coleridge's lectures on Shakespeare before he became acquainted with Coleridge himself, but Wordsworth had taught the latter to desire Robinson's acquaintance. But it was not until November 14th, 1810, that they met --an episode in the shape of a journey to Spain, on Mr. Robinson's part, preventing the accomplishment of their mutual wishes. Thither also he went as correspondent of the Times, and there too he encountered some perils and met with some adventures that we shall leave the journalist himself to describe. He returned to England early in the winter of 1809, and in September of that year ceased to be foreign editor of the paper-not quite yet the Leading Journal.'

As yet Crabb Robinson was a gentleman at large, a busy one indeed, but not fixed in any recognised vocation. He had been, as we have seen, an attorney's clerk: in the spring of 1808 he had entered himself a member of the Middle Temple, but puts on record that he had even then not the remotest intention of studying the law. The only preparation he made for a legal career at that date was exercising himself in business-speaking by attending at the Surrey Institution. Surely no son of Themis was ever more reluctant to embrace his des

tined parent: and yet in his sixteenth year he records the deep impression made upon him by hearing Erskine in a disputed will

case.

The trial lasted two days. I have a recollection of many of the circumstances, after more than fifty-four years: but of nothing do I retain so perfect a recollec tion as of the figure and voice of Erskine. tion in his eye; and so completely had he There was a charm in his voice, a fascinawon my affection, that, I am sure, had the verdict been given against him, I should have burst out crying. Of the facts and of the evidence I do not pretend to recollect anything beyond my impressions and sen

sations.

I profited by Erskine. I remarked his great artifice, if I may call it so; and, in a smaller way, I afterwards practised it. It lay in his frequent repetitions. He had one or two leading arguments and main facts, on which he was constantly dwelling. But he had marvellous skill in varying his phraseology, so that no one was sensible of tautology in the expressions. Like the doubling of a hare, he was perpetually coming to his old place. Other great ad

vocates, I have remarked, were ambitious

of a variety of arguments.

In most young men this vivid impression and this strong emotion would have been the turning point of their lives: that it was not so for Crabb Robinson was probably owing to the extraordinary capacity of his intellect for embracing various, and almost inconsistent led to the practice of the law. objects. He was driven rather than harness was flung by his sister: The barb that at last pierced his

I had now made up my mind to study for the bar. This resolution was formed through an apparently insignificant occurrence. It was on the 1st of March [1811] when my sister (who, with my brother, had been on a visit to London) was about to leave, that Mr. Collier received an application from York to send down a reporter for the State trials there. He requested me to go, but I declined on the ground of the objection taken to reporters being called to the bar. Speaking of this to my sister [in-law], she said, ' For a man who has the repute of having sense, you act very like a fool. You decline reporting, because that might be an obstacle to your being called to the bar, and yet you take no steps to

wards being called to the bar. Now, do one or the other; either take to newspaper employment or study the law at once, and lose no more time.' There was no reply to such a remonstrance.

In looking back on his life, Mr. Robinson used to say, that two of the wisest acts he had done were going to the bar and quitting the bar. All that need be told of

either act is best stated in his own words:

A great change took place this year through my quitting the bar at the end of the summer circuit. My object in being called to the bar was to acquire a gentlemanly independence, such at least as would enable a bachelor of no luxurious or expensive habits to enjoy good society at leisure. And having about 200l. per annum, with the prospect of something more, I was not afraid to make known to my friends that, while I deemed it becoming in me to continue in the profession till I was fifty years of age, and until I had a net income of 50l. per annum, I had made up my mind not to continue longer, unless there were other inducements besides those of mere money-making.

The collective wisdom of the Seven Sages could not have given him better advice than he gave himself. His gain by retiring was out of all proportion to his loss. He lost possibly a serjeant's gown or a judge's ermine, and several thousand pounds more than he had put into his purse. He gained the object of his sane and modest wishes-freedom from task-work, a good position in such society as he liked, exemption from the ills that attend on eminence-envy, jealousy, deferred hopes, and haply final disappointment. When William Cowper and Joseph Hill, then both young students in the Temple, called on Mr. De Grey, during a vacation, him they did not find at home, but on his desk they saw a parchment bound folio in which he was copying precedents or reports, instead of making use of his holiday. De Grey, in due time, became Chief Justice, and now,' wrote Cowper to Hill, he may take his ease, at

[ocr errors]

VOL. LXXX.-NO. CCCCLXXVIII,

least, poor man, if the gout or stone will let him.'

The editor gives a very interesting description of the active benevolence of Crabb Robinson, and we shall extract it without further preliminary than the remark that his charity, like his other virtues, was uniformly accompanied by his most conspicuous quality-wisdom. There are open-handed people who often do as much harm by indiscreet bounty, as others by indiscreet withholding of gifts. Crabb Robinson weighed maturely both the person and the season-and he had rarely occasion to lament that his aid was ill bestowed:

In the early part of his life, simple habits and a very limited expenditure were necessary to make both ends meet.' But when his means became considerable, he had no desire to change materially his mode of living. He did not court the kind of rank and station which are attained by a costly establishment and a luxurious table. He had not a single expensive habit; but he said, 'My parsimony does not extend to others.' He would rather help some widow to bring up her children, or some promising young man to obtain superior educational advantages. But he had his own method of giving. It was rather in the spirit of generosity than of charity in the narrower sense of the word. He had

his pensioners among the poor, but he had a wholesome fear of encouraging a spirit of dependence, and was conscientiously on his guard against that kind of liberality which

is easily taken in. There were friends to whom he used to say, 'If you know of any case in which money will do good, come to me.' And he did not like to be much thanked; he felt humiliated by it, when

[ocr errors]

he had simply followed the natural dictates of kindness and goodwill. He was especially fond of promoting the enjoyment of In the happiness of the young,' he said, in a letter to his brother, we, the aged, if we are not grossly selfish, shall be able to take pleasure.'

the young.

There was often peculiar delicacy in his acts of generosity. In one of his tours, he found his old friend Charlotte Servière somewhat narrowed in her circumstances, and, calling at Frankfort on his way back, he begged her to do him the favour of relieving him of a part of too large a balance which his tour had left in his hands, and to excuse a pecuniary gift from

PP

an old friend. He would not let her ex

press the gratitude she felt; but on leaving the house on a subsequent visit, he could not prevent the old servant from seizing him by the hand, and saying, 'I thank you for the great joy you have given to the Fräulein. Some who are now thriving in fortune, and holding a prominent place in the literary world, will remember the little 'sealed notes,' containing a valuable inclosure, for which he would fain have it believed that a volume or two of the author's works, or a ticket to a course of lectures, was ample return. Nor was his generosity by any means confined to pecuniary gifts and personal exertions.

of intellectual power. His richly stored memory answered to every call made upon it; his understanding was strong, his curiosity was lively, his interest in some of the great questions of the time as keen as it had ever been. In the little that he printed after he ceased contributing to the Times there appears no just cause or impediment against his writing much. His that we do not know: but we do pen may not have been a ready one, not scruple to assert that he had the power of clothing his thoughts in clear, forcible, and elegant language: and we refer those who doubt or deny our assertion to his defence of Thomas Clarkson against the suppressions and misrepresen tations of the brothers Wilberforce.

Free from professional trammels, and from anxiety for the morrow, Mr. Robinson in his fifty-fourth year had attained the rò kaλov of his moderate desires, and the freedom he had earned he enjoyed for the long period of thirty-nine years. To become masters of their own For such exceptional abstinence time is often among the severest in an age when to write and to trials of busy men-but this is a print is nearly as common as to eat peril to which men, having had and drink, perhaps more than one no avocation except their profession reason may be assigned. First, or their calling, are alone liable. though he read incessantly in the The mere lawyer, the mere phy- early hours of the morning and the sician, the merchant whose only watches of the night, though books reading has been his ledger and were the inseparable companions of day-book, bring with them to their his daily walks and his frequent 'retired leisure' no compensations travels-he was anything rather for their habitual and healthy ac- than a systematic student, and tivity. The slight sketch we have much readers-those, that is to say, made of the diarist is sufficient to who wander in 'a maze without a show that he at least was not likely plan '-are rarely sedulous writers. to be hurt by his emancipation from Again, Mr. Robinson's interests work. His legal career was in fact were nearly absorbed by topics of a parenthesis in his life. He re- the moment, and as in his early sumed his proper vocation when he youth so in his later years, newsbecame again what the world calls papers, pamphlets and reviews enan idle man.' And now had he grossed the larger share of his been disposed to place his name on a attention. On fixed points he was title-page, or had he yielded to the patient in research and scrupuurgency of his friends, it was not too lously accurate: but such points late to do so, though middle life were rare with him, and he did was far behind him, and he was not hesitate admitting that history approaching the period when donari possessed few attractions for him, rule is ordinarily a prudent, if not or that the journal of the day, and a necessary step. To those who the current number of a Review were saw and conversed with him in his more welcome than two-thirds of sixtieth or seventieth year, and for the books that lined his study walls. some years onward, there was no ap-Probably, however, his delight in parent decline, much less any decay conversation, in the oral communi

cation and reception of knowledge was the real cause of his pen's inactivity. In this respect, as in some others we could mention, he was more an ancient Athenian than a modern Englishman. He would have been quite at home in the Porch or the Garden: he would have delighted in the logomachies of the philosophers; and he perhaps might not have been very constant to either Epicurus or Zeno, since nothing delighted him more than the study of the different phases under which truth may be presented. He took more interest in ethical and theological problems than in the solution of them. He was somewhat of a chartered libertine' in philosophical speculations. Defining creeds and limiting articles had few charms for him. He liked well the ardor certaminis, the animation of the chase, but did not greatly care for being in at the death' of a disputed question.

Let it not, however, be supposed that the versatility we have spoken of precluded or was incompatible with sincerity and seriousness of mind on the subjects of highest importance to mankind. In his journal he occasionally disappoints or surprises us by apparent indifference to the great political changes that he witnessed. He does not display any particular exultation when Catholics were emancipated or Parliament was reformed. But on the subject of the abolition of slavery, he was an eager and an uncompromising partisan, and he naturally hailed with delight the repeal of the Test and Corporation Act. We have copied his account of his early Jacobinism; but although he ceased to be a Jacobin, he never regretted or was alarmed at the progress of social and political freedom. On all religious questions his voice was for war against every ncedless barrier to the liberty of speech: against the outworks and

entrenchments by which priests have masked or narrowed the approaches to the pure and humane doctrines of the Gospel: against all that weakens a truth or maketh a lie' in the province of theology. In his journal are found continual traces of his sympathy with every form of religious earnestness. He regarded Roman Catholicism and Calvinism as the two most objectionable forms of Christianity; but he had not in his composition a particle of persecuting zeal, and he could recognise some virtues in the discipline of Rome, and some in the doctrine of Geneva. Perhaps he did not fully comprehend the character or position of the Anglican Church-and indeed they are easier to admire than to describe. Yet he had studied some of that Church's most eminent divines and was wont to avow his admiration of Barrow's power of reasoning, and Taylor's power of eloquence. He was a constant attendant, after his first introduction to it, on the teaching of Robertson of Brighton, and numbered him on the list of his friends; the energy of Arnold commanded and received his applause; he highly esteemed Irving without following him into the eccentric maze of his doctrines, and the piety and learning, the virtues and the eloquence of James Martineau and John James Tayler were his frequent themes of conversation.

We must now close this very imperfect sketch of the Diary. The readers of it will have more reason to complain of our omissions from it, than of the space we have given to it in the foregoing remarks. Should any one read these volumes without interest, or lay them down with weariness, let him be assured he would have been no co-mate for their author, since he is present in spirit in nearly every page. For persons of different and, in our judgment at least, happier mould, they need not our commendation.

We had purposed to make some mention of what may be termed Mr. Robinson's public works-works on which his name is indelibly inscribed -University Hall and the Flaxman Gallery, and of his conversational powers, but for all these points we cannot do better than to refer generally to Mr. De Morgan's appendix, extracting from it only the concluding sentences. After saying that 'the elements of H. C. R.'s conversational powers were a quick and witty grasp of meaning, a wide knowledge of letters and men of letters, a sufficient, but not too exacting, perception of the relevant, and an extraordinary power of memory,' he proceeds, some pages further on: The elements of his powers of conversation have been enumerated, but all put together will not explain the charm of his society. For this we must refer to other points of his character, which, unassisted, are compatible with dullness and taciturnity. A wide range of sympathies, and sympathies which were instantaneously awake when occasion arose, formed a great part of the

[blocks in formation]

His house was a centre of attraction for minds from the most opposite points in the wide horizon of opinion. Softened by his genial spirit, and animated by his cheerful flow of kindly and interesting talk, Tories and Liberals, High Churchmen and Dissenters, found themselves side by side at his hospitable board, without suspecting that they were enemies, and learned there, if they had never learned it before, how much deeper and stronger is the common human heart, which binds us all in one, than those intellectual differences which are the witness of our weakness and fallibility, and sometimes the expression of our obstinacy and self-will.

[graphic]
« AnteriorContinuar »