Читать книгу A memoir of the life, writings, and mechanical inventions of Edmund Cartwright - Jane Margaret Strickland - Страница 4

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Until the departure of Sir William Jones for India, in the spring of 1783, Mr. Cartwright enjoyed the gratification of an intimacy and correspondence with that highly gifted man, whose untimely death was considered by him as a private affliction, as well as a public misfortune. Several of Sir William Jones’s letters to Dr. Cartwright have been published in his life by Lord Teignmouth.^[11] The following, which is dated from the Temple, 24th March, 1783, may not be unacceptable to the reader:—

“Allow me, dear Sir, so far to disobey you as to acknowledge the receipt of two very obliging letters, and to thank you most cordially for the friendly expressions which they contain. I am, indeed, much hurried, partly by serious business, partly by troublesome though necessary forms, and have no time to write the thousandth part of what I could say if I had the happiness of being with you. I have no thoughts at present of collecting my political or literary tracts, but am equally flattered by your obliging offer. There is a press at Malda, and another at Calcutta, where I hope to print some eastern varieties; and if I can bring the Persian epic poem to Europe in an English dress, I shall be as far below Lycurgus as Firdusi is below Homer, but shall think the analogy just, and my country will be obliged to me. The family in Hampshire, to whom I read your sweet poems at Christmas, heard them with delight. I am, dear Sir, your much obliged, and ever faithful

“William Jones.”

During Mr. Cartwright’s residence in the Vale of Belvoir, the circle of his intimates became enriched by the addition of one whose works contain, perhaps, the most inexhaustible source of interest of all the productions of that bright constellation of British poets which has illumined the close of the last, and beginning of the present century. About the year 1783, the Rev. George Crabbe became a near neighbour to Mr. Cartwright, and subsequently a valued friend. Although in after life they happened to be much separated, they still kept up a correspondence by letter for nearly forty years, and most interesting is it to contemplate in the correspondence of Mr. Crabbe a mind unchanged through all the vicissitudes of life, and retaining the same unaffected simplicity when arrived at eminence, that had adorned it in obscurity and retirement. He had already published, with his name, “The Village,” and “The Library,” both of which poems had met with the approbation of Dr. Johnson, Mr. Burke, and other literary judges of the day. The time had not then arrived for the public in general to appreciate justly the promise which these poems held out of still better things, and Mr. Cartwright has been often heard to express his surprise that they had not received more notice, as well as his regret that Mr. Crabbe did not exercise his powerful genius on some more extended work. He had subsequently the gratification of seeing the public, as it were, awakened to a due sense of his friend’s extraordinary merit. Twenty-five years afterwards, Mr. Crabbe published a new edition of his earlier pieces, with the addition of the “Parish Register,” a poem in which his graphic pen has given the deepest interest to the humblest scenes, by the mere power of faithful delineation; and which can hardly fail to be read with undiminished delight as long as any sympathy with truth and nature, any perception of genuine pathos, shall exist.^[12]

As his subsequent poems are so well known, and have been so justly admired, it may not be uninteresting (though somewhat anticipating the order of time) to introduce in this place an amusing description, given by Mr. Crabbe, of the notoriety they had brought upon him.

FROM MR. CRABBE TO DR. CARTWRIGHT.

“June, 1813.

“Now, my dear sir, I begin to think that I am, as it were, a great man!—a man to be spoken of—not so much as Nicholson, who killed his master, or Peg Nicholson, who would have killed his Majesty, but still spoken of, in an honest way, enough to have it called fame; for, look ye, I have letters addressed to me, as an author, from strangers and strange admirers, and is not that fame? Oh! that Hatchard’s current were as flattering. No less than four letters from gentlemen and ladies lie at this time before me; and I make my boast of them to you, as I intended to do to Sir Walter Scott, whose letter of the 18th I have to reply to, and I will let him know what a man I am. A gentleman from town insists that I have my picture painted, and prints taken for my books. Again, a lady invites me (she knows not my age, nor I hers) into the mountainous countries, that I may witness the sublime of nature, and describe it in that beautiful^[13] **** Well, thirdly, another lady offers me a narrative for a new work, which, if related in my pathetic^[14] **** and lastly, I have a young poet’s request for an opinion of his verses, mixed, you may be sure, with notable things said of my own.”

The selections that have been made from the correspondence of Dr. Cartwright’s early friends, are introduced chiefly for the purpose of shewing that there was nothing in the pursuits of the first half of his life calculated to lead his mind to study the theory of mechanics, or in his habits to bring him acquainted with their practical application. His pursuits had been purely literary, and his associates were as unknowing as himself in everything relating to manufactures. He was not only esteemed for the elegance of his attainments, but he had also at that time a fair prospect of advancement in his profession, and of attaining a competency sufficient for the liberal support of his station in society. A circumstance, altogether accidental, now occurred to occasion an entire change in all his views, and to turn his mind into a different direction, from which it never afterwards diverged, but continued, even as life advanced, to pursue its object with undiminished intenseness.

[1] The family of Cartwright had been long established in Nottinghamshire. From the three sons of Hugh Cartwright, in the time of Henry VII., descended the families of Cartwright of Marnham, (originally of Norwell,) of Ayho, in the county of Northampton, and of Ossington. Frequent intermarriages had taken place between the two families of Marnham and Ossington, both of whom had suffered in their fortunes by their adherence to the cause of Charles the First. The Ossington branch became extinct in the male line in George Cartwright, Esq., who died in 1762, leaving four daughters (Mary, married to Sir Charles Buck, Bart.; Dorothy, to Henry, Lord Middleton; Jane, to Sir Digby Legard; and Anne, to Sir John Whiteford, Bart.), by whom the estate at Ossington was sold to William Dennison, Esq.

[2] George III.

[3] Falconer, author of the “Shipwreck.”

[4] Mr. Cartwright had been elected a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford.

[5] Mr. James Montgomery.

[6] In the Essay on Imitations of the Ancient Ballad, (written in 1830,) prefixed to the third part of “Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border,” Sir Walter Scott bears the following testimony to the poetical merit of “Armine and Elvira:”—

“We need only stop to mention another very beautiful piece of this fanciful kind, by Dr. Cartwright, called ‘Armine and Elvira,’ containing some excellent poetry, expressed with unusual felicity. I have a vision of having met this accomplished gentleman in my very early youth, and am the less likely to be mistaken, as he was the first living poet I recollect to have seen.^[A] His poem had the distinguished honour to be much admired by our celebrated philosopher, Dugald Stewart, who was wont to quote, with much pathos, the picture of resignation in the following stanza:—

‘And while his eye to heaven he raised,

Its silent waters stole away.’ ”

It is hardly necessary to remark the slight mistake relative to Mr. Cartwright’s early pursuits. He never was a student of medicine at any university.

In some modern periodical work, along with a contemptuous notice of “Armine and Elvira,” it has been erroneously stated that Dr. Cartwright was the author of several novels. There is not the least reason to believe that he ever wrote a novel in his life.

[A] “If I am right in what must be a very early recollection, I saw Mr. Cartwright (then a student of medicine at the Edinburgh University) at the house of my maternal grandfather, John Rutherford, M.D.”

[7] Mr. Whitchurch, of Melton Mowbray.

[8] See Johnson’s Life.

[9] Boswell, in his “Life of Dr. Johnson,” having recorded a conversation in which the latter expressed his belief that Shiells was the sole compiler of the work in question, a correction of this statement appeared in the “Monthly Review” for May, 1792, and which Mr. Boswell candidly inserted in a subsequent edition of his work. The statement there corresponds exactly with Griffiths’ confidential account of the matter; and the editor of Johnson’s Life candidly adds, “this explanation appears to me very satisfactory.”

[10] Elizabeth, relict of John, Viscount Tyrconnel, and sister to Mr. Cartwright’s father.

[11] See Teignmouth’s Memoirs of Sir W. Jones, p. 216, et seq.

[12] The editor of this little Memoir cannot forbear expressing the high gratification derived from perusing the interesting Life of Mr. Crabbe, published by his son in 1834.

[13] These blanks are in the original letter.

[14] Blanks in the original letter.