1853.]

concerned at the mischief their ill-tempers will be continually doing in our public affairs, whenever they have any concern in them.

It appears by reference to the original manuscript in Franklin's hand, which lies before us as we write, that the blanks in this extract should be filled by the names of Lee, Izard, and Adamses, respectively, which were erased (for no good reason, in our judgment) by Temple Franklin, the original editor. Mr. Sparks, not having the manuscript, was obliged to print from Temple Franklin, and of course could not supply the deficiency. The commentary which follows evidently applies to Lee and Izard

alone. Yet it is due to John Adams to say, that his pure patriotism was untainted by selfishness or malice. He was the last man in the world to be associated with Franklin. His dogged puritanism, even to the close of his long life, never learned that pliability and firmness may be joined in the same nature without detriment to principle. He always wanted to drive public opinion instead of leading it; and, ruining the party which followed him, he spent the last five-and twenty years of his life in retirement apart from station or influence on the policy of the country which his genius had done so much to create.

An unpublished letter, from Franklin to Vergennes exhibits still more glaringly the false position in which Adams contrived to place himself, his colleague, and his constituents at home with the French court, and the dexterity with which the Doctor extricated himself and the Congress. We print it entire.

Passy, August 3, 1780. SIR, It was, indeed, with very great pleasure that I received the letter your Excellency did me the honour of writing to me, communicating that of the Presi dent of Congress, and the resolutions of that body relative to the succours then expected for the sentiments therein expressed are so different from the language held by Mr. Adams in his late letters to your Excellency, as to make it clear that it was from his particular indiscretion alone, and not from any instructions received by him, that he has given such just cause of displeasure, and that it is impossible his conduct therein should be approved by his constituents.

305

I am glad he has not admitted me to any participation of those writings, and that he has taken the resolution he expresses of not communicating with me, or making use of my intervention in his future correspondence; a resolution that I believe he will keep, as he has never yet communicated to me more of his business in Europe than I have seen in newspapers. I live upon terms of civility with him, not of intimacy. I shall, as you desire, lay before Congress the whole correspondence which you have sent me for that purpose.

With the greatest and most sincere respect, I am, Sir, Yours, &c. &c., B. FRANKLIN.

An allusion has already been made to Franklin's labours in

Europe in behalf of the treasury of the Federation (a branch of duty from which his successors will be relieved). These manuscripts give a high idea of the difficulties in which he was frequently placed, and of his skill in relieving himself. Congress drew upon him, his colleagues drew upon him, and, in fact, everybody's hand was in his pocket. Yet he contrived to keep his credit untainted: not, however, without occasionally striking a hard blow for it. Among other loans, was one made in Holland in 1781, with which Colonel Laurens and a Mr. Jackson were also concerned. Jackson, it seems, a young man, wanted to carry the money to America, probably for the sake of the éclat at home(still the same eye to interests there). A portion of the correspondence which ensued is published by Temple Franklin and Mr. Sparks. But the following, by far the raciest of the whole, is not in those collections. The Doctor could hit a hard blow when he chose.

Passy, July 10, 1781. SIR,-Last night I received your fourth letter on the same subject.

You are anxious to carry the money with you, because it will reanimate the credit of America.

My situation, and long acquaintance with affairs relating to the public credit, enable me, I think, to judge better than you can do, who are a novice in them, what employment of it will most conduce to that end; and I imagine the retaining it to pay the Congress drafts has infinitely the advantage.

You repeat that the ship is detained by my refusal. You forget your having written to me expressly, that she waited for my convoy.

1853.]

office shall be known-(that it shall not be called chancellerie, when the commercial convention with France, negotiated by this very Dr. Franklin, provides that it shall be a chancellerie)-in the midst of all thisstuff, shall we call it-there is an important direction, that consuls shall collect and transmit to Washington all knowledge which in their judgment may be useful to their countrymen, in order that the Government may print and distribute it annually at the public cost.

If well done, a compilation made up in this way, from all parts of the globe, cannot fail to be of great value; and we hope that the new administration, in its consular appointments, has had regard to the capacity of the appointee to perform this service to knowledge. The efforts of the American Government already in this way have been highly creditable. Its exploring expeditions have traced the coasts of a new continent in the Southern hemisphere; and in the Northern it has gone side by side with British courage and enterprise-while the results of both have been distributed at the national expense. Its corps of engineers, under Fremont, Emory, Stansbury, and other captains, has with incredible perseverance, and at the public cost, made large additions to geographical knowledge. The enterprise of Maury has gone far

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

A spired by a noble passion, and who expends himself with unwearied energy and dauntless perseverance on the accomplishment of his object, will not fail, whatever his errors may have been, to win sympathy and admiration. Perhaps the more we do homage to the high qualities implied by such a career, the more we shall reprobate the follies and the faults which have marred its grandeur, foiled its success, and dragged its virtues through the dirt. Such a man was the painter for whose journals Mr. Taylor has performed the friendly labour of an editor, so far as such labour was

MAN whose life has been in

307

towards discovering the laws which govern the currents of air, and has succeeded in materially shortening the long voyages through the Pacific and Southern Atlantic; and his labours are given freely to the world by an appreciating Government. The gift of Smithson, an Englishman, in energetic hands, is making large contributions to knowledge. Owen, Foster, and Whitney, and other geologists, make elaborate reports upon the geology of a country which, within the memory of children, was inhabited only by the Indian. Through the agency of the Patent-office, two bulky volumes sent without expense, to every part of the country, each year, give an account of the discoveries in agriculture and the inventions in mechanism during the preceding twelve months. The combined engineers of the army and navy are engaged upon a survey of the coasts, both of the Atlantic and Pacific; and their accurate and beautiful charts are furnished to navigators at about the cost of the paper and print. To this the Government now propose to add the annual collection of information furnished by the various consuls. How valuable such a document may be made, if properly compiled, it is needless to say. Let it be done in such a way as to be worthy the enterprising and enlightened nation which is about to undertake it.

OF B. R. HAYDON.*

required, for Haydon had himself reduced into a regular autobiographic narrative the records of five and thirty years of his life. In this recital no one can refuse to recognise and admire a true genius, a courage that never failed, an industry that, though vehement and impassioned, was well sustained; as clearly will be seen and felt the causes why these qualities did not secure to their possessor the rewards which ordinary experience attaches to them. Haydon is as candid as he is egotistical; cares as little to conceal his want of wisdom as his want of modesty. Very likely he thought himself so grand a hero that he could

afford to let the world know his weak points, and scorning the proverb which says, that no man is a hero to his valet, expected the world to worship him after he had admitted them to a confidence which no man extends even to his valet. Let the Imotive to the revelation have been what it may philanthropical, defiant, or simply self-complacent-the revelation is complete; we never read a book which left upon the mind a more detailed and definite impression; and though Mr. Taylor has not been able to compress his materials into less than three closelyprinted volumes, such was the vigour of Haydon's intellect, so keen was his faculty of observation, he lived with, or met with, so many interesting persons, and he was himself so singular a mixture, that lovers of biography-and who does not enjoy it above most other literature ?-will be disposed rather to envy Mr. Taylor the opportunity of perusing the twenty-six folio volumes of journals, than to complain of him forover-loading his pages. The liveliness with which Haydon records all that happens to him or interests him; the terseness, point, and occasionally picturesque language of his remarks and descriptions; the interesting conversations with men of eminence and talent-and these constitute the charm and amusement of the volumes-we must forego; but the moral of Haydon's story will not, we trust, be quite lost, or so weakened as to be entirely unimpressive, in the compendious narrative to which the laws of space confine us.

Benjamin Robert Haydon was born in the year 1786, at Plymouth, where his father kept a bookseller's shop. Like most men who attain eminence in any pursuit, he recalled, in after life, early indications of the taste which became the master-passion of his being; and records how his mother calmed his infant rage by a book of pictures, from which he would not part the rest of that day. At a more authentic period of his history, his schoolmaster, Dr. Bidlake, finding he had a love for art, took him, he says, from study to attend his own caprices in painting; and in his father's binding oflice, the head man was a Neapolitan, a fine

6

muscular lazzaroni-like fellow,' who used to talk to the boy of the wonders of Italy, of Raffaele and the Vatican, and, baring his arm, would say to him, 'Don't draw de landscape, draw de feegoore, Master Benjamin.' And Master Benjamin tells us that he began to try the 'feegoore,' and to read anatomical books, by advice of a brother of Northcote, also a Plymouth man, and to fancy himself a genius, and an historical painter, and to look in the glass, and think he had an intellectual head. Then,' he says, 'I forgot all about it, and went and played cricket, never touched a brush for months, rode a black pony about the neighbourhood, pinned ladies' gowns together on marketdays, and waited to see them split; knocked at doors at night, and ran away; swam and bathed, heated myself, worried my parents, and at last was laid on my back by the measles.' With enforced quiet came back his passion for art, and never again forsook him, though he was sent to a new school, with an express understanding that he was not to learn drawing, because his father intended him for business. He spent his pocket money in caricatures, which he copied, and was found one holiday afternoon, inducing a supernatural quietness in the school by forming a drawing-class, and stalking about as master. Another time he drew, on the school-room wall, with a burnt stick, so spirited a represen tation of a hunt he had witnessed, that the master had it preserved for some weeks. And so the natural bent of his mind went on displaying itself, and his cleverness as a juvenile amateur was duly applauded by papa and mamma, and the drawings shown about to friends and relations, till the time came for deciding upon an occupation for life; and the father, knowing something more of the world than the son, had no notion of letting a good business go out of the family for a boy's whim; and the boy, hating and spurning the occupation and all connected with it, was bound apprentice to his father for seven years, and submitted with silent sullenness, till, in a burst of ill-temper, he insulted a customer who wanted to beat down the price of a book, and

1853.]

so made his exit, once and for ever, and brought matters to a crisis. Discussion and remonstrance were in vain, the boy was resolved to be a painter, and an illness, which left him blind for six weeks, and permanently impaired his sight, did not shake his resolution. Plaster casts of the Discobolus and Apollo, the first he had ever seen, and which he purchased out of a two-guinea piece given him by his godfather, lent fuel to the flame; and Reynolds's Discourses, with their encouragement to industry, and their doctrine that all men could, by this quality, attain excellence in art, gave feasibility to his purpose.

I came down to breakfast with Reynolds under my arm, and opened my fixed intentions in a style of such energy that I demolished all arguments. My mother regarding my looks, which probably were more like those of a maniac than of a rational being, burst into tears. My father was in a passion, and the whole house was in an uproar. Everybody that called during the day was had up to bait me, but I attacked them so fiercely that they were glad to leave me to my own reflections. In the evening I told my mother my resolution calmly, and left her. My friend Reynolds (a watch-maker) backed me. I hunted the shop for anatomical works, and seeing Albinus among the books in the catalogue of Dr. Farr's sale at Plymouth hospital, but knowing it was no use asking my father to buy it for me, I determined to bid for it, and then appeal to his mercy. I went to the sale, and the book was knocked down to me at 21. 108. I returned home, laid the case before my dear mother, who cried much at this proof of resolution, but promised to get my father to consent. When the book came home, my father paid with black looks. Oh, the delight of hurrying it away to my bed-room, turning over. the plates, copying them out, learning the origin and insertion of the muscles, and then getting my sister to hear me! She and I used to walk about the house, with our arms round each other's neck, -she saying, 'How many heads to the deltoid? Where does it rise?' 'Where is it inserted?' and I answering. By these means, in the course of a fortnight, I got by heart all the muscles of the body.

That purchase of Albinus, leaving the payment to his father, and the desperate energy with which he set to work to master what to most youths would be a dry uninviting

309

study, are, both in audacious recklessness and unflagging earnestness of purpose, too significant types of all Haydon's subsequent career to be omitted in the barest outline of his history. They mark at once a determined and an unscrupulous nature, and indicate the springs of both his successes and his misfortunes as clearly as any actions of his we shall have to record. It is almost needless to add that the lad beat down all opposition, and that he was finally permitted to seek fame and fortune in his darling pursuit. He left Plymouth for London on the 13th of May, 1804, being then a few months more than seventeen years old.

The very morning of his arrival in town, Haydon rushed eagerly to the Academy Exhibition, then held at Somerset House. He got there, after first mistaking the New Church' in the Strand for the building he was in search of; and making up to the historical pictures, of which Opie's 'Gil Blas,' and a 'Shipwrecked Sailor-boy,' by Westall, were attracting most attention, measured himself at once with the favourites, and marched away to purchase casts, with the characteristic verdict, I don't care for you.' Then followed months of intense and uninterrupted study. His personal ambition to be a great painter was ennobled by dreams of doing honour to his country, and rescuing art from the character of littleness and incapacity then impressed upon it. At this time he made acquaintance with John Bell's work on the Bones, Joints, and Muscles; and it formed from that time his own text-book, and afterwards the Manual of his school. From Prince Hoare, to whom his uncle had given him a letter, he received introductions to Opie, Northcote, and Fuseli, then the keeper of the Academy. The last of these impressed Haydon with admiration for his genius and varied accomplishments, without misleading him by false vague theories and exaggerated practice in art; gave his mind a stimulus, and expanded his range of ideas, without demoralising him by profanity, licentious wit, or infidelity; and much of the taste for reading and especial en