have been determined. In the third place, it is painful to recollect that when we are dealing with the most difficult parts of duty, those which we transact within ourselves, the appetite for self-indulgence should be pampered by encouragement from without. We are already apt enough to conjure into solid probabilities the veriest phantasms of the mind, provided only they present an agreeable appearance. Here is a premium set upon this process alike dangerous and alluring. The known subtlety of those mental introspections excuses many failures in those who do not create their own embarrassments; but for those who do, such a system appears capable of colouring error, which might have been blameless, with the darker hues of wilfulness and guilt. W. E. GLADSTONE. SYDNEY DOBELL. A PERSONAL SKETCH. In the winter of 1860, as I sat alone, writing, in what David Gray described as the "dear old ghastly bankrupt garret at No. 66," Lucinda from the kitchen came panting upstairs with a card, on which was inscribed the name of "Sydney Dobell;" and in less than five minutes afterwards I was conversing eagerly, and face to face, with the man who had been my first friend and truest helper in the great world of letters. It was our first meeting. David Gray, whom Dobell had assisted with a caressing and angelic patience, never knew him at all, but was at that very moment lying sick to death in the little cottage at Merkland, pining and hoping against hope for such a meeting. "How about Dobell?" he wrote a little later, in answer to my announcement of the visit. "Did your mind of itself, or even against itself, recognize through the clothes a man-a poet? Has he the modesty and make-himself-at-home manner of Milnes?" What answer I gave to these eager inquiries I do not remember, nor would it be worth recording, for I myself at that time was only a boy, with little or no experience of things and men. But even now, across the space of dull and sorrowful years, comes the vision of as sweet and shining a face as ever brought joy and comfort this side of the grave; of a voice musical and low, "excellent" in all its tones as the voice of the tenderest woman; of manners at once manly and caressing, bashful and yet bold, with a touch of piteous gentleness which told a sad tale of feeble physical powers and the tortured sense of bodily despair. I saw him once or twice afterwards, and had a glimpse of that fellow-sufferer, his wife. He was staying with some friends on the hills of Hampstead, and thither I trudged to meet him, and to listen to his sparkling poetic speech. I recall now, with a curious sense of pain, that my strongest feeling concerning him, at that time, was a feeling of wonder at the gossamer-like frailness of his physique and the almost morbid refinement of his conversation. These two characteristics, which would be ill-comprehended by a boy in the rude flush of health and hope, and with a certain audacity of physical well-being, struck me strangely then, and came back upon my heart with terrible meaning now. Combined with this feeling of wonder and pity was blended, of necessity, one of fervent gratitude. Some little time previous to our first meeting, I had come, a literary adventurer, to London; with no capital but a sublime self-assurance which it has taken many long years to tame into a certain obedience and acquies'cence. About the same time, David Gray had also set foot in the great City. And Sydney Dobell had helped us both, as no other living man could or would. For poor Gray's wild yet gentle dreams, and for my coarser and less conciliatory ambition, he had nothing but words of wisdom and gentle remonstrance. None of our folly daunted him. He wrote, with the heart of an angel, letters which might have tamed the madness in the heart of a devil. He helped, he warned, he watched us, with unwearying care. In the midst of his own solemn sorrows, which we so little understood, he found heart of grace to sympathise with our wild struggles for the unattainable. At a period when writing was a torture to him, he devoted hours of correspondence to the guidance and instruction of two fellow-creatures he had never seen. To receive one of his gracious and elaborate epistles, finished with the painful care which this lordly martyr bestowed on the most trifling thing he did, was to be in communication with a spirit standing on the very heights of life. I, at least, little comprehended the blessing then. But it came, with perfect consecration, on David Gray's dying bed; it made his last days blissful, and it helped to close his eyes in peace. No one who knew Sydney Dobell, no one who had ever so brief a glimpse of him, can read without tears the simple and beautiful Memorials, now just published, of his gracious, quiet and uneventful life. Predestined to physical martyrdom, he walked the earth for fifty years, at the bidding of what to our imperfect vision seems a pitiless and inscrutable Destiny. Why this divinely gifted being, whose soul seemed all goodness, and whose highest song would have been an inestimable gain to humanity, should have been struck down again and again by blows so cruel, is a question which pricks the very core of that tormenting conscience which is in us all. Ill-luck dogged his footsteps; Sickness encamped wherever he found a home. His very goodness and gentleness seemed at times his bane. At an age when other men are revelling in mere existence he was being taught that mere existence is torture. We have read of Christian martyrs, of all the fires through which they passed; but surely no one of them ever fought with such tormenting flames as did this patient poet, whose hourly cry was of the kindness and goodness of God. From first to last, no word of anger, no utterance of fierce arraignment, passed is lips. "The best of men That e'er wore earth about him was a sufferer- And like that "best of men," Sydney Dobell troubled himself to make no complaint, but took the cup of sorrow and drained it to the bitter dregs. Such a record of such a life stops the cry on the very lips of blasphemy, and makes us ask ourselves if that life did not possess, direct from God, some benediction, some comfort, unknown to us. So it must have been. "Looking up," as a writer* on the subject has beautifully put it, “he saw the heavens opened." These pathetic glimpses seemed comfort enough. Doubtless to some readers of this magazine the very name of Sydney Dobell is unfamiliar. To all students of modern poetry it is of course more or less known, as that of one of the chief leaders of the school of verse known by its enemies as " the Spasmodic." With Philip James Bailey and Alexander Smith, Dobell reigned for a lustrum, to the great wonder and confusion of honest folk, who pinned their faith on Tennyson's 'Gardener's Daughter' and Longfellow's 'Psalm of Life.' His day of reign was that of Gilfillan's 'Literary Portraits,' and of the lurid apparition, Stanjan Bigg; of the marvellous monologue, and the invocation without an end; of the resurrection of a Drama which had never lived, to hold high jinks and feasting with a literary Mycerinus who was about to die. It was a period of poetic incandescence; new suns, not yet spherical, whirling out hourly before the public gaze, and vanishing instantly into space, to live on, however, in the dusky chronology of the poetic astronomer, Gilfillan. The day passed, the school vanished. Where is the school now? "Where are the snows of yesteryear?" Yet they who underrate that school know little what real poetry is. It was a chaos, granted; but a chaos capable, under certain conditions, of being shaped into such creations as would put to shame many makers of much of our modern verse. As it is, we may discover in the writings of Sydney Dobell and his circle solid lumps of pure poetic ore, of a quality scarcely discoverable in modern literature this side of the Elizabethan period. Sydney Dobell was born at Cranbrook, in Kent, on April 5, 1824. Both on the paternal and maternal side, he was descended from people remarkable for their Christian virtues and strong religious instincts; and from his earliest years he was regarded by his parents as having "a special and even apostolic mission." The story of his child-life, indeed, is one of those sad records of unnatural precocity, caused by a system of early forcing, which have of late years become tolerably familiar to the public. He seems never to have been strong, and his * Matthew Browne, in the Contemporary Review. naturally feeble constitution was undermined by habits of introspection. It is painfully touching now to read the extracts from his father's note-book, full of a quaint Puritan simplicity and an over-mastering spiritual faith. Here is one : "I used frequently to talk to him of how delightful and blessed it would be if any child would resolve to live as pure, virtuous, and holy a life, as dedicated to the will and service of God, as Jesus. I used to say to him that if one could ever be found again who was spotless and holy, it was with me a pleasing speculation and hope that such a character might, even in this life, be called as a special instrument of our Heavenly Father for some great purpose with His Church, or with the Jews." The seed thus sown by the zealous parent bore fruit afterwards in a disposition of peculiar sweetness, yet ever conscious of the prerogatives and prejudices of a Christian warrior. Out of the many who are called, Sydney Dobell believed himself specially chosen, if not to fulfil any divine mission "with the Church or with the Jews," at least to preach and sing in the God-given mantle of fire, which men call genius. In his leading works, but especially in 'Balder,' he preached genius-worship; of all forms of hero-worship, devised by students of German folios, the most hopeless and the most hope-destroying. Thenceforward isolation became a habit, introspection an intellectual duty. With all his love for his fellow-men, and all his deep sympathy with modern progress, he lacked to the end a certain literary robustness, which only comes to a man made fully conscious that Art and Literature are not Life itself, but only Life's humble handmaids. He was too constantly overshadowed with his mission. Fortunately, however, that very mission became his only solace and comfort, when his days of literary martyrdom came. He went to the stake of criticism with a smile on his face, almost disarming his torturers and execution ers. When Sydney was three years old, his father failed in business as a hide-merchant, and, removing to London, started as a wine-merchant. "About this time," says the biographer, "Sydney was described as of very astonishing understanding, as preferring mental diversion to eating and drinking, and very inventive with tales." Strange moods of sorrow and self-pity began to trouble his life at the age of four. At eight, it was recorded of him that he "had never been known to tell an untruth." From seven years of age he imitated the paternal habit, and used "little pocket-books," to note down his ideas, his bits of acquired knowledge, his simple questions on spiritual subjects. For example: "Report of the Controversy of Porter and Bagot. Mr. Porter maintains that Jesus Christ lived in heaven with God before the beginning of the world." At the age of ten, he was an omnivorous reader, and the habit of verse-writing was growing steadily upon him. I know nothing more pitiful in literature than the story of his precocity, in all its cruel and touching details. At twelve years of age he was sufficiently matured to fall in love, the object of his passion being Emily Fordham, the lady who only nine years afterward became his wife. By this time his father had removed to Cheltenham, and had set up in business there. Sydney and the rest of the children still remained at home, and thus missed all the invigorating influences of a public school; for the father belonged to the sect of Separatists, which holds as cardinal the doctrine of avoiding those who hold adverse, or different, religious views. The account of that dreary life of drudgery and over-work at Cheltenham may be sadly passed over; it is a life not good to think of, and its few gleams of sunshine are too faint and feeble to detain the reader long. From the date of his removal to Cheltenham he acted as his father's clerk. The account of the period extending from his twelfth year to the date of his marriage is one of hard uncongenial toil, varied by scripture-readings of doubtful edification, and a passion morbid and almost pedantic in the old-fashioned quaintness of its moods. The biographer's record may form, as we are told, "a one-sided and painful picture," but we suspect that it is a true one, truer, that is to say, than the idea in its author's memory of "light, buoyant, various, and vigorous activity." The truth is, the parents of the poet blundered in blindness, a blindness chiefly due to their remarkable religious belief. His father especially, despite all his kindness of heart, was strenuous to the verge of bigotry. One can scarcely remark without a smile the inconsistency with which one who was "a publican," and by profession a vendor of convivial and intoxicating liquors, held aloof from the non-elect among his fellow-creatures. "Business is not brisk," he wrote; "I can't account for it, except as usual, in our retired life and habits." The idea of a sad-eyed Separatist dealing in fiery ports and sherries, shutting out the world and yet lamenting when "business was not brisk," is one of those grim, cruel, heartbreaking jokes, in which Humanity is so rich, and of which the pathetic art of the humourist offers the only bearable solution. At the age of twenty, Sydney Dobell was married to an invalid like himself, and one like himself of a strong Puritan bias. The humourist must help us again, if we are to escape a certain feeling of nausea at the details of this courtship and union, with its odd glimpses of personal yearning, its fervent sense of the "mission," and its dreary scraps from the Old Testament. The young couple settled down together in a little house at Cheltenham; and though for a time they avoided all society and still adhered to the tenets of the elect, this was the beginning of a broader and a healthier life. All might perhaps have been well, and the poet have cast quite away the cloud of his early training, but for one of those cruel accidents which make life an inscrutable puzzle. Just as Sydney Dobell was beginning to live, just as his mind was growing more robust, and his powers more coherent and peaceful, he was struck by rheumatic fever, caught during a temporary removal to a Devonshire farmhouse. As if that were not enough, his wife, always frail, broke down almost at the same time. From that time forward, the poet and his wife were fellow-sufferers, each watching by turns over the attacks of the other. It may be said without exaggeration, that neither enjoyed one day of thoroughly |