child Maria, who helps Telmo to create the atmosphere of impending disaster; while the episodes, particularly those of the return of D. João and the death of Maria, are full of power, and the language is Portuguese of the best.
Entering parliament in 1837, Garrett soon made his mark as an orator. In that year he delivered many notable discourses in defence of liberal ideas. He also brought in a literary copyright bill, which, when it became law in 1851, served as a precedent for similar legislation in England and Prussia. In 1840 he made his famous speech known as Porto Pyreu, in which he skilfully turned the well-known anecdote of the “mad Athenian” against his opponents. While attending with assiduity to his duties as a deputy, he wrote, about this time, the drama D. Filippa de Vilhena, founded on an incident in the revolution of 1640, for representation by the pupils of the conservatoire, and the session of 1841 saw another of his oratorical triumphs in his speech against the law of tithes. In July 1843 an excursion to Santarem resulted in his prose masterpiece Viagens na minha terra, at once a novel and a miscellany of literary, political and philosophic criticism, written without plan or method, easy, jovial and epigrammatic. He took no part in the civil war that followed the revolution of Maria da Fonte, but continued his literary labours, producing in 1848 the comedy A Sobrinha do Marquez, dealing with the times of Pombal, and in 1849 an historical memoir on Mousinho da Silveira. He spent much of the year 1850 in finishing his Romanceiro, a collection of folk-poetry of which he was the first to perceive the value; and in June 1851 he was created a viscount. In the following December he drew up the additional act to the constitutional charter, and his draft was approved by the ministers at a cabinet meeting in his house. Further, he initiated the Conselho Ultramarino; and the Law of the Misericordias, with its preamble, published in 1852, was entirely from his pen. In the same year he became for a short time minister of foreign affairs. In 1853 he brought out Folhas Cahidas, a collection of short poems ablaze with passion and exquisite in form, of which his friend Herculano said: “if Camoens had written love verses at Garrett’s age, he could not have equalled him.” His final literary work was a novel, Helena, which he left unfinished, and on the 10th of February 1854 he made his last notable speech in the House. He died on the 9th of December 1854, and on the 3rd of May 1903 his remains were translated to the national pantheon, the Jeronymos at Belem, where they rest near to those of Camoens. As poet, novelist, journalist, orator and dramatist, he deserves the remark of Rebello da Silva: “Garrett was not a man of letters only but an entire literature in himself.”
Besides his strong religious faith, Garrett was endowed with a deep sensibility, a creative imagination, rare taste and a singular capacity for sympathy. Thus, though a learned man and an able jurist, he was bound to be first and always an artist. His artistic temperament explains his many-sided activity, his expansive kindliness, his seductive charm, especially for women, his patriotism, his aristocratic pretensions, his huge vanity and dandyism, and the ingenuousness that absolves him from many faults in an irregular life. From his rich artistic nature sprang his profound, sincere, sensual and melancholy lyrics, the variety and perfection of his scenic creations, the splendour of his eloquence, the truth of his comic vein, the elegance of his lighter compositions. Two books stand out in bold relief from among his writings: Folhas Cahidas, and that tragedy of fatality and pity, Frei Luiz de Sousa, with its gallery of noble figures incarnating the truest realism in an almost perfect prose form. The complete collection of his works comprises twenty-four volumes and there are several editions.
Authorities.—Gomes de Amorim, Garrett, memorias biographicas (3 vols., Lisbon, 1881–1888); D. Romero Ortiz, La Litteratura Portuguesa en el siglo XIX (Madrid, 1869), pp. 165-221; Dr Theophilo Braga, Garrett e o romantismo (Oporto, 1904), and Garrett e os dramas romanticos (Oporto, 1905), with a full bibliography; Innocencio da Silva, Diccionario bibliographico Portuguez, vol. iii. pp. 309-316, and vol. x. pp. 180-185. See Revue encyclopédique Larousse, No. 284, for a bibliography of the foreign translations of Garrett. Frei Luiz de Sousa was translated by Edgar Prestage under the title Brother Luiz de Sousa (London, 1909). (E. Pr.)
GARRETTING, properly Galletting, a term in architecture
for the process in which the “gallets” or small splinters of stone
are inserted in the joints of coarse masonry to protect the
mortar joints; they are stuck in while the mortar is wet.
GARRICK, DAVID (1717–1779), English actor and theatrical
manager, was descended from a good French Protestant family
named Garric or Garrique of Bordeaux, which had settled in
England on the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. His father, Captain Peter Garrick, who had married Arabella Clough, the
daughter of a vicar choral of Lichfield cathedral, was on a
recruiting expedition when his famous third son was born at Hereford on the 19th of February 1717. Captain Garrick, who had
made his home at Lichfield, where he had a large family, in 1731
rejoined his regiment at Gibraltar. This kept him absent from
home for many years, during which letters were written to him
by “little Davy,” acquainting him with the doings at Lichfield.
When the boy was about eleven years old he paid a short visit
to Lisbon where his uncle David had settled as a wine merchant.
On his father’s return from Gibraltar, David, who had previously
been educated at the grammar school of Lichfield, was,
largely by
the advice of Gilbert Walmesley, registrar of the ecclesiastical
court, sent with his brother George to the “academy” at
Edial, just
opened in June or July 1736 by Samuel Johnson, the senior by
seven years of David, who was then nineteen. This seminary
was, however, closed in about six months, and on the 2nd of
March 1736/7 both Johnson and Garrick left Lichfield for
London—Johnson, as he afterwards said, “with twopence
halfpenny in his pocket,” and Garrick “with three-halfpence in
his.” Johnson, whose chief asset was the MS. tragedy of Irene,
was at first the host of his former pupil, who, however,
before the
end of the year took up his residence at Rochester with John
Colson (afterwards Lucasian professor at Cambridge). Captain
Garrick died about a month after David’s arrival in London.
Soon afterwards, his uncle, the wine merchant at Lisbon, having
left David a sum of £1000, he and his brother entered into
partnership as wine merchants in London and Lichfield, David
taking up the London business. The concern was not
prosperous—though Samuel Foote’s assertion that he had known Garrick
with three quarts of vinegar in the cellar calling himself a wine
merchant need not be taken literally—and before the end of 1741
he had spent nearly half of his capital.
His passion for the stage completely engrossed him; he tried his hand both at dramatic criticism and at dramatic authorship. His first dramatic piece, Lethe, or Aesop in the Shades, which he was thirty-seven years later to read from a splendidly bound transcript to King George III. and Queen Charlotte, was played at Drury Lane on the 15th of April 1740; and he became a well-known frequenter of theatrical circles. His first appearance on the stage was made in March 1741, incognito, as harlequin at Goodman’s Fields, Yates, who was ill, having allowed him to take his place during a few scenes of the pantomime entitled Harlequin Student, or The Fall of Pantomime with the Restoration of the Drama. Garrick subsequently accompanied a party of players from the same theatre to Ipswich, where he played his first part as an actor under the name of Lyddal, in the character of Aboan (in Southerne’s Oroonoko). His success in this and other parts determined his future career. On the 19th of October 1741 he made his appearance at Goodman’s Fields as Richard III. and gained the most enthusiastic applause. Among the audience was Macklin, whose performance of Shylock, early in the same year, had pointed the way along which Garrick was so rapidly to pass in triumph. On the morrow the latter wrote to his brother at Lichfield, proposing to make arrangements for his withdrawal from the partnership, which, after much distressful complaint on the part of his family, met by him with the utmost consideration, were ultimately carried into effect. Meanwhile, each night had added to his popularity on the stage. The town, as Gray (who, like Horace Walpole, at first held out against the furore) declared, was “horn-mad” about him. Before his Richard had exhausted its original effect, he won new applause as Aboan, and soon afterwards as Lear and as Pierre in Otway’s Venice Preserved, as well as in several comic characters (including that of Bayes).
