attachment to the Calvinistic faith, and abilities as a statesman, raised him to the leadership of the Huguenot party after the death of that prince. g. William I. of Orange, "the Silent." See under MAURICE. u. (mother's half-brother.) Maurice of Nassau. See. uP. William III. of England. Wellington, the Duke of; greatest of modern English generals, a firm statesman, and a terse writer. He broke the Mahratta power in India æt. 35; then became Secretary for Ireland. Æt. 39 was appointed to command the British army in Spain, and he had won Waterloo and completed his military career æt. 46. B. Marquess of Wellesley (see under STATESMEN), Governor. General of India, statesman and scholar. [B.] Baron Cowley, diplomatist. [F.] Earl of Mornington, of musical ability. N. Earl Cowley, diplomatist, English ambassador to France. S. S. p. Frederick William, Stadtholder in the most flourishing days of the Republic. Turenne (see), the great French general. SP. William III. of England. CHAPTER X. LITERARY MEN. THOSE who are familiar with the appearance of great libraries, and have endeavoured to calculate the number of famed authors, whose works they include, cannot fail to be astonished at their multitude. The years go by: in every year, every nation produces literary works of sterling value, and stores of books have accumulated for centuries. Among the authors, who are the most eminent? This is a question I feel incompetent to answer. It would not be difficult to obtain lists of the most notable literary characters of particular periods, but I have found none that afford a compact and trustworthy selection of the great writers of all times. Mere popular fame in after ages is an exceedingly uncertain test of merit, because authors become obsolete. Their contributions to thought and language are copied and re-copied by others, and at length they become so incorporated into the current literature and expressions of the day, that nobody cares to trace them back to their original sources, any more than they interest themselves in tracing the gold converted into sovereigns, to the nuggets from which it was derived or to the golddiggers who discovered the nuggets. Again: a man of fair ability who employs himself in literature turns out a great deal of good work. There is always a chance that some of it may attain a reputation very far superior to its real merits, because the author may have something to narrate which the world wants to hear; or he may have had particular experiences which qualify him to write works of fiction, or otherwise to throw out views, singularly apposite to the wants of the time but of no importance in after years. Here, also, fame misleads. Under these circumstances, I thought it best not to occupy myself over-much with older times; otherwise, I should have been obliged to quote largely in justification of my lists of literary worthies: but rather to select authors of modern date, or those whose reputation has been freshly preserved in England. I have therefore simply gone through dictionaries, extracted the names of literary men whom I found the most prominent, and have described those who had decidedly eminent relations in my appendix. I have, therefore, left out several, whom others might with reason judge worthy to have appeared. My list is a very incongruous collection; for it includes novelists, historians, scholars, and philosophers. There are only two peculiarities common to all these men; the one is a desire of expressing themselves, and the other a love of ideas, rather than of material possessions. Mr. Disraeli, who is himself a good instance of hereditary literary power, in a speech at the anniversary of the Royal Literary Fund, May 6, 1868, described the nature of authors. His phrase epitomizes what has been graphically delineated in his own novels, and, I may add, in those of Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, now Lord Lytton (who, with his brother Sir Henry Bulwer, and in his son "Owen Meredith," is a still more remarkable example of hereditary literary gifts than Mr. Disraeli). He said: "The author is, as we must ever remember, a peculiar organization. He is a being with a predisposition which with him is irresistible-a bent which he cannot in any way avoid; whether it drags him to the abstruse researches of erudition, or induces him to mount into the fervid and turbulent atmosphere of imagination." The majority of the men described in the appendix to this chapter justify the description by Mr. Disraeli. Again, that the powers of many of them were of the highest order, no one can doubt. Several were prodigies in boyhood, as Grotius, Lessing, and Niebuhr; many others were distinguished in youth; Charlotte Brontë published "Jane Eyre" æt. 22; Chateaubriand was of note at an equally early age; Fénélon made an impression when only 15; Sir Philip Sydney was of high mark before he was 21, and had acquired his great fame, and won the heart of the nation in a few more years, for he was killed in battle when only 32. I may add, that there are occasional cases of great literary men having been the reverse of gifted in youth. Boileau is the only instance in my appendix. He was a dunce at school, and dull till he was 30. But, among other literary men of whom I have notes, Goldsmith was accounted a dull child, and he was anything but distinguished at Dublin University. He began to write well æt. 32. Rousseau was thought a dunce at school, whence he ran away æt. 16. It is a striking confirmation of what I endeavoured to prove in an early chapter-that the highest order of reputation is independent of external aids-to note, how irregularly many of the men and women have been educated whose names appear in my appendix-such as Boileau, the Brontë family, Chateaubriand, Fielding, the two Gramonts, Irving, Carsten Niebuhr, Porson (in one sense), Roscoe, Le Sage, J. C. Scaliger, Sévigné, and Swift. I now give my usual table, but I do not specify with confidence the numbers of eminent literary people contained in the thirty-three families it includes. They have many literary relations of considerable merit, but I feel myself unable, for the reasons stated at the beginning of this chapter, to sort out those that are "eminent " from among them. The families of Taylor, both those of Norwich and those of Ongar, have been inserted as being of great hereditary interest, but only a few of their members (see AUSTEN) are not summed up in the following table. TABLE I. SUMMARY OF RELATIONSHIPS OF 52 LITERARY PERSONS. GROUPED INTO 33 FAMILIES. Two or three relations (or three or four in the family). Four or more relations (or five or more in the family). Alison Fielding 2. Grotius Hallam B. F. u. g. gB. gF. gG. g. uS. B. b. F. f. 2 S. s. LE Porson . 2. Schlegel 2. Stael 2. Stephen 4. Stephens Sidney. [Taylors of Norwich.] [Taylors of Ongar.] G. F. 2 U. US. n. F. 2 U. B. G. F. U. f. US. UP. F. B. 2 S. F. g. f. B. Us. p. F. g. u. uS. b. n. P. PS. &c. |