Intentions
out light-green shoots. This bank rises rather suddenly on the right
to a clustering grove, penetrable to no star, at the entrance of
which sits the stunned Thessalian king, holding between his knees
that ivory-bright body which was, but an instant agone, parting the
rough boughs with her smooth forehead, and treading alike on thorns
and flowers with jealousy-stung foot—now helpless, heavy, void of all
motion, save when the breeze lifts her thick hair in mockery.
From between the closely-neighboured boles astonished nymphs press
forward with loud cries—
And deerskin-vested satyrs, crowned with ivy twists, advance;
And put strange pity in their horned countenance.
Laelaps lies beneath, and shows by his panting the rapid pace of
death. On the other side of the group, Virtuous Love with ‘vans
dejected’ holds forth the arrow to an approaching troop of sylvan
people, fauns, rams, goats, satyrs, and satyr-mothers, pressing their
children tighter with their fearful hands, who hurry along from the
left in a sunken path between the foreground and a rocky wall, on
whose lowest ridge a brook-guardian pours from her urn her
grief-telling waters. Above and more remote than the Ephidryad,
another female, rending her locks, appears among the vine-festooned
pillars of an unshorn grove. The centre of the picture is filled by
shady meadows, sinking down to a river-mouth; beyond is ‘the vast
strength of the ocean stream,’ from whose floor the extinguisher of
stars, rosy Aurora, drives furiously up her brine-washed steeds to
behold the death-pangs of her rival.
Were this description carefully re-written, it would be quite admirable.
The conception of making a prose poem out of paint is excellent. Much of
the best modern literature springs from the same aim. In a very ugly and
sensible age, the arts borrow, not from life, but from each other.
His sympathies, too, were wonderfully varied. In everything connected
with the stage, for instance, he was always extremely interested, and
strongly upheld the necessity for archæological accuracy in costume and
scene-painting. ‘In art,’ he says in one of his essays, ‘whatever is
worth doing at all is worth doing well’; and he points out that once we
allow the intrusion of anachronisms, it becomes difficult to say where
the line is to be drawn. In literature, again, like Lord Beaconsfield on
a famous occasion, he was ‘on the side of the angels.’ He was one of the
first to admire Keats and Shelley—‘the tremulously-sensitive and poetical
Shelley,’ as he calls him. His admiration for Wordsworth was sincere and
profound. He thoroughly appreciated William Blake. One of the best
copies of the ‘Songs of Innocence and Experience’ that is now in
existence was wrought specially for him. He loved Alain Chartier, and
Ronsard, and the Elizabethan dramatists, and Chaucer and Chapman, and
Petrarch. And to him all the arts were one. ‘Our critics,’ he remarks
with much wisdom, ‘seem hardly aware of the identity of the primal seeds
of poetry and painting, nor that any true advancement in the serious
study of one art co-generates a proportionate perfection in the other’;
and he says elsewhere that if a man who does not admire Michael Angelo
talks of his love for Milton, he is deceiving either himself or his
listeners. To his fellow-contributors in the _London Magazine_ he was
always most generous, and praises Barry Cornwall, Allan Cunningham,
Hazlitt, Elton, and Leigh Hunt without anything of the malice of a
friend. Some of his sketches of Charles Lamb are admirable in their way,
and, with the art of the true comedian, borrow their style from their
subject:—
What can I say of thee more than all know? that thou hadst the gaiety
of a boy with the knowledge of a man: as gentle a heart as ever sent
tears to the eyes.
How wittily would he mistake your meaning, and put in a conceit most
seasonably out of season. His talk without affectation was
compressed, like his beloved Elizabethans, even unto obscurity. Like
grains of fine gold, his sentences would beat out into whole sheets.
He had small mercy on spurious fame, and a caustic observation on the
_fashion for men of genius_ was a standing dish. Sir Thomas Browne
was a ‘bosom cronie’ of his; so was Burton, and old Fuller. In his
amorous vein he dallied with that peerless Duchess of many-folio
odour; and with the heyday comedies of Beaumont and Fletcher he
induced light dreams. He would deliver critical touches on these,
like one inspired, but it was good to let him choose his own game; if
another began even on the acknowledged pets he was liable to
interrupt, or rather append, in a mode difficult to define whether as
misapprehensive or mischievous. One night at C-’s, the above
dramatic partners were the temporary subject of chat. Mr. X.
commended the passion and haughty style of a tragedy (I don’t know
which of them), but was instantly taken up by Elia, who told him
‘_That_ was nothing; the lyrics were the high things—the lyrics!’
One side of his literary career deserves especial notice. Modern
journalism may be said to owe almost as much to him as to any man of the
early part of this century. He was the pioneer of Asiatic prose, and
delighted in pictorial epithets and pompous exaggerations. To have a
style so gorgeous that it conceals the subject is one of the highest
achievements of an important and much admired school of Fleet Street
leader-writers, and this school _Janus Weathercock_ may be said to have
invented. He also saw that it was quite easy by continued reiteration to
make the public interested in his own personality, and in his purely
journalistic articles this extraordinary young man tells the world what
he had for dinner, where he gets his clothes, what wines he likes, and in
what state of health he is, just as if he were writing weekly notes for
some popular newspaper of our own time. This being the least valuable
side of his work, is the one that has had the most obvious influence. A
publicist, nowadays, is a man who bores the community with the details of
the illegalities of his private life.
Like most artificial people, he had a great love of nature. ‘I hold
three things in high estimation,’ he says somewhere: ‘to sit lazily on an
eminence that commands a rich prospect; to be shadowed by thick trees
while the sun shines around me; and to enjoy solitude with the
consciousness of neighbourhood. The country gives them all to me.’ He
writes about his wandering over fragrant furze and heath repeating
Collins’s ‘Ode to Evening,’ just to catch the fine quality of the moment;
about smothering his face ‘in a watery bed of cowslips, wet with May
dews’; and about the pleasure of seeing the sweet-breathed kine ‘pass
slowly homeward through the twilight,’ and hearing ‘the distant clank of
the sheep-bell.’ One phrase of his, ‘the polyanthus glowed in its cold
bed of earth, like a solitary picture of Giorgione on a dark oaken
panel,’ is curiously characteristic of his temperament, and this passage
is rather pretty in its way:—
The short tender grass was covered with marguerites—‘such that men
called _daisies_ in our town’—thick as stars on a summer’s night.
The harsh caw of the busy rooks came pleasantly mellowed from a high
dusky grove of elms at some distance off, and at intervals was heard
the voice of a boy scaring away the birds from the newly-sown seeds.
The blue depths were the colour of the darkest ultramarine; not a
cloud streaked the calm æther; only round the horizon’s edge streamed
a light, warm film of misty vapour, against which the near village
with its ancient stone church showed sharply out with blinding
whiteness. I thought of Wordsworth’s ‘Lines written in March.’
However, we must not forget that the cultivated young man who penned
these lines, and who was so susceptible to Wordsworthian influences, was
also, as I said at the beginning of this memoir, one of the most subtle
and secret poisoners of this or any age. How he first became fascinated
by this strange sin he does not tell us, and the diary in which he
carefully noted the results of his terrible experiments and the methods
that he adopted, has unfortunately been lost to us. Even in later days,
too, he was always reticent on the matter, and preferred to speak about
‘The Excursion,’ and the ‘Poems founded on the Affections.’ There is no
doubt, however, that the poison that he used was strychnine. In one of
the beautiful rings of which he was so proud, and which served to show
off the fine modelling of his delicate ivory hands, he used to carry
crystals of the Indian _nux vomica_, a poison, one of his biographers
tells us, ‘nearly tasteless, difficult of discovery, and capable of
almost infinite dilution.’ His murders, says De Quincey, were more than
were ever made known judicially. This is no doubt so, and some of them
are worthy of mention. His first victim was his uncle, Mr. Thomas
Griffiths. He poisoned him in 1829 to gain possession of Linden House, a
place to which he had always been very much attached. In the August of
the next year he poisoned Mrs. Abercrombie, his wife’s mother, and in the
following December he poisoned the lovely Helen Abercrombie, his
sister-in-law. Why he murdered Mrs. Abercrombie is not ascertained. It
may have been for a caprice, or to quicken some hideous sense of power
that was in him, or because she suspected something, or for no reason.
But the murder of Helen Abercrombie was carried out by himself and his
wife for the sake of a sum of about £18,000, for which they had insured
her life in various offices. The circumstances were as follows. On the
12th of December, he and his wife and child came up to London from Linden
House, and took lodgings at No. 12 Conduit Street, Regent Street. With
them were the two sisters, Helen and Madeleine Abercrombie. On the
evening of the 14th they all went to the play, and at supper that night
Helen sickened. The next day she was extremely ill, and Dr. Locock, of
Hanover Square, was called in to attend her. She lived till Monday, the
20th, when, after the doctor’s morning visit, Mr. and Mrs. Wainewright
brought her some poisoned jelly, and then went out for a walk. When they
returned Helen Abercrombie was dead. She was about twenty years of age,
a tall graceful girl with fair hair. A very charming red-chalk drawing
of her by her brother-in-law is still in existence, and shows how much
his style as an artist was influenced by Sir Thomas Lawrence, a painter
for whose work he had always entertained a great admiration. De Quincey
says that Mrs. Wainewright was not really privy to the murder. Let us
hope that she was not. Sin should be solitary, and have no accomplices.
The insurance companies, suspecting the real facts of the case, declined
to pay the policy on the technical ground of misrepresentation and want
of interest, and, with curious courage, the poisoner entered an action in
the Court of Chancery against the Imperial, it being agreed that one
decision should govern all the cases. The trial, however, did not come
on for five years, when, after one disagreement, a verdict was ultimately
given in the companies’ favour. The judge on the occasion was Lord
Abinger. _Egomet Bonmot_ was represented by Mr. Erle and Sir William
Follet, and the Attorney-General and Sir Frederick Pollock appeared for
the other side. The plaintiff, unfortunately, was unable to be present
at either of the trials. The refusal of the companies to give him the
£18,000 had placed him in a position of most painful pecuniary