They that with smiles lit up the hall, And cheered with song the hearth- And nought beyond, O earth! Besides her sister's Memoir of Mrs Hemans in the seven-volume edition of her works published in 1839, there are Memorials by H. F. Chorley (1836); recollections by Mrs Laurence (1836); the Poetical Remains, with a Memoir by Delta (1836); and the Pectical Works, with Memoir by W. M. Rossetti (1873). See also Espinasse's Lancashire Worthies (1874), Mrs C. J. Hamilton's Women Writers (1892), and Mrs L. B. Walford's Twelve English Authoresses (1892). Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802-38), better known as 'L. E. L.,' from the initials which were her nom de guerre, is reputed to have been, with the possible exception of Moore only, the most popular English poet in the period between Byron's decline and Tennyson's rise. But at the present day the most approved anthologies of English Lyrics and English Verse give no specimen of her work, and there are histories of modern English literature that do not even mention her name; to hardly any English writer has Fame proved so fickle. Among her poetical works were The Fate of Adelaide (1821), The Improvisatrice (1824), The Troubadour (1825), The Golden Violet (1827), The Venetian Bracelet (1829), and The Vow of the Peacock (1835). She wrote two or three novels, beginning with Romance and Reality (1830); Ethel Churchill (1837) was her most successful tale. There was also a tragedy on Castruccio Castracani (1837); but 'L. E. L.' was perhaps best known and beloved for her innumerable contributions to the Literary Gazette, edited by her warm friend Jerdan, and other magazines and annuals. She was born at Hans Place, Chelsea, and was the daughter of an army-agent. Lively, susceptible, and romantic, she early commenced writing poetry, and after her father's death she not only maintained herself but assisted her relations by her literary labours. Unkind tongues caused the breaking off of an engagement (said to have been with John Forster); and in 1838 she was married to George Maclean, the governor of what is now part of the Gold Coast Colony, and in the same year she sailed for Cape Coast Castle with her husband. She had spent barely two months in her African home, but had resumed her literary work, when one morning, after writing overnight some cheerful and affectionate letters to her friends in England, she was found dead in her room, having in her hand a bottle from which she was reported to have swallowed an overdose of poison as a relief from spasms. Her friends at home did not all accept this, the official verdict. It was known that she was disappointed in her husband's character (though as an administrator he was energetic and successful), and she felt lonely and unhappy in her married life. The doubt has never been dispelled. The Athenæum obituary of Mrs Maclean' in the first week of January 1839 recognised that her ceaseless composition had 'necessarily precluded the thought and cultivation essential to the production of poetry of the highest order. Hence, with all her fancy and feeling, her principal works . . . bear a strong family likeness to each other in their recurrence to the same sources of allusion and the same veins of imagery-in the conventional rather than natural colouring of their descriptions, and in the excessive though not unmusical carelessness of their versification.' The critic greeted her last published verses, 'The Polar Star,' printed after her death in Colburn's New Monthly Magazine, as an earnest of deeper seriousness, wider knowledge, and more careful technique. Her novels resemble her poems in being stories of sentiment, and reflect in some degree the conversation of their authoress, which sparkled always brightly with quick fancy and a badinage which astonished those matter-of-fact persons who expected to find in the manners and discourse of the poetess traces of the weary heart, the broken lute, and the disconsolate willow-tree which were so frequently her themes of song.' Her fluency was a truly fatal gift; the very variety of her subjects and of her measures is suspicious; the sentiment, whether poetically far-fetched or commonplace, is usually conventional; and in her Troubadours and Laras, her Hindoo Brides and Bayadères, her Lays of Scottish and Spanish minstrels and German minnesingers, there are echoes of Scott, Byron, Southey, and Moore, along with notes that suggest her less popular contemporary, Mrs Hemans, and anticipations of Longfellow. She remains a landmark in the history of popular taste in literature and its vagaries. Her poems are seldom bought and seldomer studied, but 'L. E. L.' is still largely represented in quotation books; and fragments of her verse still float about disembodied, such as: Dreams of truth, The Eden birds of early youth Genius, like all heavenly light, O, silence is Love's own peculiar eloquence of bliss. How often woman's heart must turn Of deep yet passionate tenderness! Sappho's Song. Farewell, my lute!—and would that I Had never waked thy burning chords! Poison has been upon thy sigh, And fever has breathed in thy words. Yet wherefore, wherefore should I blame Thy power, thy spell, my gentlest lute? I should have been the wretch I am, Had every chord of thine been mute. It was my evil star above, Not my sweet lute, that wrought me wrong; It was not song that taught me love, But it was love that taught me song. If song be past, and hope undone, And pulse, and head, and heart are flame; But, no!-I will not name thy name; Ah! little do those features wear Yet something on that brow has wrought Thou blessed season of our spring, When Care looks back on that bright leaf That only change for fruit-and ours. Though false, though fleeting, and though vain, Glad being, with thy downcast eyes, A world lit up by fancy's sun! Ah! little like our actual one. That dove will die, that child will weep, Is this their destinie? Ever amid the sweets of life Some evil thing must be. Ay, moralise,-is it not thus We've mourn'd our hope and love? The Polar Star. A star has left the kindling sky- I miss its bright familiar face, It rose upon our English sky, It seemed to answer to my thought, And with its welcome presence brought The voyage it lights no longer, ends How can I but recall the friends Thy radiant place unknown; I seem to stand beside a grave, Farewell! ah, would to me were given A power upon thy light! What words upon our English heaven Thy loving rays should write! Kind messages of love and hope Upon thy rays should be; Thy shining orbit should have scope Scarcely enough for me. Oh, fancy vain, as it is fond, And little needed too; My friends, I need not look beyond My heart to look for you. 'L. E. L.'s' Life and Remains, published by Laman Blanchard in two volumes in 1841, reached a second edition in 1855; and William Bell Scott brought out an edition of her poems, with a Memoir, in 1873. A French estimate of her may be found in Le Fèvre Deumier's Célébrités Anglaises (1895). Anna Jameson (1794-1860), art critic, the eldest of the four daughters of Brownell Murphy, miniaturist, was born at Dublin and brought up in England at Whitehaven, at Newcastle, and in or near London. From sixteen a governess, in 1825 she married Robert Jameson, a barrister, who from 1829 held appointments in Dominica and Canada. They never got on well together, and from that date, with the exception of a dismal visit to Canada 1836-38), she lived apart from him. Her numerous writings include The Diary of an Ennuyée (1826), memoranda made during a tour in France and Italy; Loves of the Poets (1829); Lives of Celebrated Female Sovereigns (1831); Characteristics of Women (1832); Beauties of the Court of Charles II. (1833); Visits and Sketches at Home and Abroad (1834); Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada (1838); Pictures of the Social Life of Germany, as represented in the Dramas of the Princess Amelia of Saxony (1840). Works so various cannot all be of like temper or equal interest, but there was good ground for Professor Wilson's warm eulogium on Mrs Jameson as 'one of the most eloquent of our female writers; full of feeling and fancy; a true enthusiast with a glowing soul.' Her most famous contributions to literature were in the department of art criticism, and her Handbook to the Public Galleries of Art (1842) and Companion to Private Galleries of Art in and near London (1844) were long standard works. Memoirs of the Early Italian Painters and Memoirs on Art, Literature, and Social Morals (1845 and 1846) gave more scope to her literary gifts and artistic sympathies. But she is now mainly remembered as authoress of Sacred and Legendary Art (2 vols. 1848), dealing with the evangelists, apostles, and other scriptural characters, with the early saints and doctors, as represented in art. To this succeeded Legends of the Monastic Orders (1850), practically a second series; Legends of the Madonna 1852), a third; and The History of Our Lord as exemplified in Works of Art, a fourth, which was finished after her death by Lady Eastlake. So that her magnum opus constituted a history of Christian art, and of the Church through art, down to the seventeenth century. Her Commonplace Book was issued in 1854; and her niece, Geraldine Macpherson, published Memoirs of the Life of Anna Jameson in 1878. She took a keen interest in philanthropic enterprises, warmly supported the Sisters of Mercy, promoted the training of nurses, and, before most of her contemporaries, advocated the thorough education of women so as to qualify them for various employment. Mrs Jameson's work has not quite lost either its value or its popularity, though new art canons have had their vogue and Raphael has yielded the palm to Botticelli. Her criticism is some of it out of date, and at her best and even for her own day her technical knowledge of art was very defective. She was an art critic of the pre-Ruskinian period, and of quite pre-Morellian methods and principles. Her legends she took from the obvious sources, quite uncritically, as in duty bound-from the Legenda Aurea, from Ribadeneyra, or from Alban Butler, as was most convenient or picturesque ; her historical equipment was that of an accomplished, sympathetic, well-read, and industrious but not profoundly or really learned woman. Her sensibilities often ran away with her judgment, or she wandered off into the history of the picture and then talked of all it suggested to her rather than of the picture itself. Therein lies part of her charm ; she wrote out of the fullness of her heart, and became one of the most popular and attractive teachers on subjects for which the movement associated with Tractarianism had prepared the English public. Her technical weakness in nowise affects the beauty of her stories; her work was for many much more than a history. Longfellow wrote to her God bless you for this book! How very precious it is to me! Indeed, I can hardly try to express to you the feelings of affection with which I have cherished it from the first moment it reached us. It most amply supplies the cravings of the religious nature.' Sir Gerard Noel. Our Chef de Voyage-for so we chose to entitle him who was the planner and director of the excursion-was one of the most accomplished and most eccentric of human beings: even courtesy might have termed him old at seventy; but old age and he were many miles asunder, and it seemed as though he had made some compact with Time, like that of Faust with the Devil, and was not to surrender to his inevitable adversary till the last moment. Years could not quench his vivacity nor stale his infinite variety.' He had been one of the Prince's wild companions in the days of Sheridan and Fox, and could play alternately blackguard and gentleman, each in perfection; but the high-born gentleman ever prevailed. He had been heir to an enormous income, most of which had slipped through his fingers unknownst, as the Irish say, and had stood in the way of a coronet, which somehow or other had passed over his head to light on that of his eldest son. He had lived a life which would have ruined twenty iron constitutions, and had suffered what might well have broken twenty hearts of common stuff; but his self-complacency was invulnerable, his animal spirits inexhaustible, his activity indefatigable. The eccentricities of this singular man have been matter of celebrity; but against each of these stories it would be easy to place some act of benevolence, some trait of gentlemanly feeling, which would at least neutralise their effect. He often told me that he had early in life selected three models after which to form his own character and conduct-namely, De Grammont, Hotspur, and Lord Herbert of Cherbury; and he certainly did unite, in a greater degree than he knew himself, the characteristics of all three. . . On looking round after Donna Anna's song, I was surprised to see our Chef de Voyage bathed in tears; but, no whit disconcerted, he merely wiped them away, saying, with a smile, It is the very prettiest, softest thing to cry to one's self!' Afterwards, when we were in the carriage, he expressed his surprise that any man should be ashamed of tears. For my own part,' he added, when I wish to enjoy the very high sublime of luxury, I dine alone, order a mutton cutlet cuite à point, with a bottle of Burgundy on one side and Ovid's Epistle of Penelope to Ulysses on the other. And so I read, and eat, and cry to myself.' And then he repeated with enthusiasm— 'Hanc tua Penelope lento tibi mittit, Ulysse : Nil mihi rescribas, attamen ipse veni ; his eyes glistening as he recited the lines. (From the Memoirs of Mrs Jameson.) It was shortly after her husband's departure for the West Indies that Mrs Jameson made a tour on the Continent with her father and her father's patron, the Sir Gerard of the above reminiscence. From the 'Commonplace Book.' It is a common observation, that girls of lively talents are apt to grow pert and satirical. I fell into this danger when about ten years old. Sallies at the expense of certain people, ill-looking, or ill-dressed, or ridiculous, or foolish, had been laughed at and applauded in company, until, without being naturally malignant, I ran some risk of becoming so from sheer vanity. The fables which appeal to our high moral sympathies may sometimes do as much for us as the truths of science. So thought our Saviour when He taught the multitude in parables. A good clergyman who lived near us, a famous Persian scholar, took it into his head to teach me Persian - I was then about seven years oldand I set to work with infinite delight and earnestness. All I learned was soon forgotten; but a few years afterwards, happening to stumble on a volume of Sir William Jones's works-his Persian Grammar-it revived my Orientalism, and I began to study it eagerly. Among the exercises given was a Persian fable or poem-one of those traditions of our Lord which are preserved in the East. The beautiful apologue of 'St Peter and the Cherries,' which Goethe has versified or imitated, is a well-known example. This fable I allude to was something similar, but I have not met with the original these forty years, and must give it here from memory. 66 'Jesus,' says the story, 'arrived one evening at the gates of a certain city, and He sent His disciples forward to prepare supper, while He Himself, intent on doing good, walked through the streets into the market-place. And He saw at the corner of the market some people gathered together looking at an object on the ground; and He drew near to see what it might be. It was a dead dog, with a halter round his neck, by which he appeared to have been dragged through the dirt; and a viler, a more abject, a more unclean thing never met the eyes of man. And those who stood by looked on with abhorrence. Faugh!" said one, stopping his nose; "it pollutes the air." "How long," said another, "shall this foul beast offend our sight?" "Look at his torn hide," said a third; "one could not even cut a shoe out of it." "And his ears," said a fourth, "all draggled and bleeding!" "No doubt," said a fifth, "he hath been hanged for thieving! And Jesus heard them, and looking down compassionately on the dead creature, He said, “Pearls are not equal to the whiteness of his teeth!" Then the people turned towards Him with amazement, and said among themselves : "Who is this? This must be Jesus of Nazareth, for only He could find something to pity and approve even in a dead dog;" and being ashamed, they bowed their heads before Him, and went each on his way.' I can recall at this hour the vivid yet softening and pathetic impression left on my fancy by this old Eastern story. It struck me as exquisitely humorous, as well as exquisitely beautiful. It gave me a pain in my conscience, for it seemed thenceforward so easy and so vulgar to say satirical things, and so much nobler to be benign and merciful, and I took the lesson so home that I was in great danger of falling into the opposite extreme-of seeking the beautiful even in the midst of the corrupt and the repulsive. From the 'Legends of the Madonna.' Of the pictures in our galleries, public or private—of the architectural adornments of those majestic edifices which sprang up in the Middle Ages (where they have not been despoiled or desecrated by a zeal as fervent as that which reared them), the largest and most beautiful portion have reference to the Madonna-her character, her person, her history. It was a theme which never tired her votaries-whether, as in the hands of great and sincere artists, it became one of the noblest and loveliest, or, as in the hands of superficial, unbeliev ing, time-serving artists, one of the most degraded. All that human genius, inspired by faith, could achieve of best-all that fanaticism, sensualism, atheism, could perpetuate of worst, do we find in the cycle of those representations which have been dedicated to the glory of the Virgin. And, indeed, the ethics of the Madonnaworship, as evolved in art, might be not unaptly likened to the ethics of human love: so long as the object of sense remained in subjection to the moral idea-so long as the appeal was to the best of our faculties and affec tions-so long was the image grand or refined, and the influences to be ranked with those which have helped to humanise and civilise our race; but so soon as the object became a mere idol, then worship and worshippers, art and artists, were together degraded. From 'The Loves of the Poets.' The theory which I wish to illustrate, as far as my limited powers permit, is this, that where a woman has been exalted above the rest of her sex by the talents of a lover, and consigned to enduring fame and perpetuity of praise, the passion was real, and was merited; that no deep or lasting interest was ever founded in fancy or in fiction; that truth, in short, is the basis of all excellence in amatory poetry as in everything else; for where truth is, there is good of some sort, and where there is truth and good, there must be beauty, there must be durability of fame. Truth is the golden chain which links the terrestrial with the celestial, which sets the seal of Heaven on the things of this earth, and stamps them to immortality. Poets have risen up and been the mere fashion of a day, and have set up idols which have been the idols of a day. If the worship be out of date and the idols cast down, it is because those adorers wanted sincerity of purpose and feeling; their raptures were feigned; their incense was bought or adulterate. In the brain or in the fancy, one beauty may eclipse another-one coquette may drive out another, and, tricked off in airy verse, they float away unregarded like morning vapours, which the beam of genius has tinged with a transient brightness; but let the heart be once touched, and it is not only wakened but inspired; the lover kindled into the poet presents to her he loves his cup of ambrosial praise; she tastes-and the woman is transmuted into a divinity. When the Grecian sculptor carved out his deities in marble, and left us wondrous and godlike shapes, the time I was at Venice I was in a rage with Canaletti. I could not come upon a palace, or a church, or a corner of a canal which I had not seen in one or other of his pictures. At every moment I was reminded of him. But how has he painted Venice! Just as we have the face of a beloved friend reproduced by the daguerreotype, or by some bad conscientious painter-some fellow who gives us eyes, nose, and mouth by measure of compass, and leaves out all sentiment, all countenance; we cannot deny the identity, and we cannot endure it. Where in Canaletti are the glowing evening skies-the transparent gleaming waters-the bright green of the vineshadowed Traghetto-the freshness and the glory-the dreamy, aërial, fantastic splendour of this city of the sea? Look at one of his pictures-all is real, opaque, solid, stony, formal; even his skies and water-and is that Venice? 'But,' says my friend, if you would have Venice, seek it in Turner's pictures!' True, I may seek it, but shall I find it? Venice is like a dream-but this dream upon the canvas, do you call this Venice? The exquisite precision of form, the wondrous beauty of detail, the clear, delicate lines of the flying perspective --so sharp and defined in the midst of a flood of brightness-where are they? Canaletti gives us the forms without the colour or light; Turner, the colour and light without the forms. But if you would take into your soul the very soul and inward life and spirit of Venice-breathe the same air-go to Titian; there is more of Venice in his Cornaro Family' or his 'Pesaro Madonna' than in all the Canalettis in the corridor at Windsor. Beautiful they are, I must needs say it; but when I think of enchanting Venice, the most beautiful are to me like prose translations of poetry-petrifactions, materialities: We start, for life is wanting there!' I know not how it is, but certainly things that would elsewhere displease, delight us at Venice. It has been said, for instance, Put down the church of St Mark anywhere but in the Piazza, it is barbarous :' here, where east and west have met to blend together, it is glorious. And again, with regard to the sepulchral effigies in our churches, I have always been of Mr Westmacott's principles and party; always on the side of those who denounce the intrusion of monuments of human pride insolently paraded in God's temple; and surely cavaliers on prancing horses in a church should seem the very acme of such irreverence and impropriety in taste; but here the impression is far different. 0 those awful, grim, mounted warriors and doges, high over our heads against the walls of the San Giovanni e Paolo and the Frari!-man and horse in panoply of state, colossal, lifelike-suspended, as it were, so far above us that we cannot conceive how they came there, or are kept there, by human means alone. It seems as though they had been lifted up and fixed on their airy pedestals as by a spell. At whatever hour I visited those churches-and that was almost daily--whether at morn, or noon, or in the deepening twilight, still did those marvellous effigies-man and steed, and trampled Turk; or mitred doge, upright and stiff in his saddlefix me as if fascinated; and still I looked up at them, wondering every day with a new wonder, and scarce repressing the startled exclamation, 'Good heavens ! how came they there?' And not to forget the great wonder of modern times-I hear people talking of a railway across the Lagune, as if it were to unpoetise Venice; as if this new approach were a malignant invention to bring the siren of the Adriatic into the 'dull catalogue of common things; and they call on me to join the outcry, to echo sentimental denunciations, quoted out of Murray's Hand-book; but I cannot-I have no sympathy with them. To me that tremendous bridge, spanning the sea, only adds to the wonderful one wonder more; to great sources of thought one yet greater. Those persons, methinks, must be strangely prosaic au fond who can see poetry in a Gothic pinnacle, or a crumbling temple, or a gladiator's circus, and in this gigantic causeway and its seventy-five arches, traversed with fiery speed by dragons, brazen-winged, to which neither alp nor ocean can oppose a barrier, nothing but a commonplace. I must say I pity them. I see a future fraught with hopes for Venice 'Twining memories of old time With new virtues more sublime!' To the last extract, which is from The House of Titian' in her Memoirs and Essays (1846), Mrs Jameson adds in a footnote: 'Guardi gives the local colouring of Venice better than Canaletti; Bonnington better than either, in one or two examples that remain to us.' See also the Commonplace Book (1854) and the Life of her by her niece above mentioned. The series of the Sacred and Legendary Art volumes were republished in handsome form in 1889 and 1890. Mary Somerville (1780–1872) was a worthy younger contemporary of Caroline Herschel, and was perhaps the most remarkable woman of her time. She attained to all but the very highest proficiency in physical science, was a member of various learned societies at home and abroad, received the approbation and esteem of Laplace, Humboldt, Wollaston, Playfair, Herschel, and other eminent contemporaries, and at the age of ninetytwo was still engaged in solving mathematical problems! Born in her uncle's manse of Jedburgh, she was the daughter of Sir William George Fairfax, Vice-Admiral of the Red, Lord Duncan's captain at the battle of Camperdown in 1797. Brought up at Burntisland, she had before she was fourteen studied Euclid and Algebra, but concealed as much as possible her acquirements. In 1804 she was married to her cousin, Captain Samuel Greig, son of a Russian admiral, and himself Russian consul in London. Captain Greig died two years after their union; and in 1812 his widow married another cousin, Dr William Somerville (1769-1860), Inspector of the Army Medical Board. His father, the minister of Jedburgh, was author of two historical works-histories of the Revolution and of the reign of Queen Anne, |