THE LOVES OF AN ECCENTRIC AUTHOR.
Few persons will associate with the author of “Sandford and Merton” the romantic, disappointed feelings of an ardent, rejected lover, who sought, in an Utopian scheme, for consolation in a “real vexation.” Yet such was Thomas Day, to whom English boys owe that work which, next to “Robinson Crusoe,” is the best book for them in our language. “Robinson Crusoe” leads on the young to enterprise; it inculcates fortitude and ingenuity; “Sandford and Merton” impresses honour, unworldly views, proper estimates of life, and manly habits. And the author of this unequalled book was as honourable, as generous, as brave as his own hero. Seldom is so much to be said of any author. Witness his first action on coming of age. His mother had married again; her husband, a certain Mr. Phillips, had persecuted Day from his very infancy; yet Day, on obtaining his majority, and believing his mother when she said that she was pinched and wretched on her jointure of three hundred a year, augmented her income a hundred a year, and settled it on her husband, in order that that one pet misery might no longer be a grievance, as his stepfather was an inconvenience to his mother.
Whilst an unformed youth, Day fell in love. Laura was then the fashionable name of the adored; and to Laura, Day wrote verses such as this:
Thee, Laura, thee, by fount, on mazy stream,
Or thicket rude, impress’d by human feet,
I sigh, unheeded, to the moon’s pale beam;
Thee, Laura, thee, the echoing hills repeat.
But Laura, whilst accepting his addresses, loved him not. She receded—if not at the church doors, not far from it, metaphorically—and Day was left wounded; and the wound was long unhealed.
He began to rail at women, and to trace the root of all the frivolity and heartlessness with which he invested them, to their education. It was an age of transition, and Day was one of those who strove to found on the downright John Bull nature a fabric of Roman heroism. To begin, he adopted an old deistical philosophy, and engrafted on it a large philanthropy. For the sufferings of refinement he was to allow no compassion. The poor found a ready sympathy in him; but the sensitive, and those who had not actually to sustain cold and hunger, were totally disregarded; and our hero, partly from conceit, and partly from the tone of the times, avowed a contempt for all polished society. He thought it, however, a duty to the world that he should marry; but, to have such a wife as he pictured, he must, he confessed, have one made on purpose for him.
Independent, and, indeed, for those days, rich, on a clear twelve hundred a year, Mr. Day resolved to take his future bride from the lowest class; destitution was to be one of her credentials; a total reliance on him absolutely indispensable. Scarcely of age, with a powerful form, a thoughtful and somewhat melancholy face, good features, though seamed with the small-pox, he might have attracted many a young belle, or, at any rate, her mother, to view his merits in a fair light. He chose, however, to carry out an experiment, and these were its details, these its localities.
Behold him, first, consulting with a Mr. Bicknell, a barrister in London, and his intimate friend; like himself, too, a man of taintless morals. Next we see the friends travelling down to Shrewsbury, and passing through the wards of the Foundling Hospital in that town. Two little girls, each twelve years old, are selected; one is fair—an Anglo-Saxon beauty—with flaxen hair and blue eyes. The little creature is christened “Lucretia.” The other has dark auburn or, rather, chestnut tresses, a clear dark complexion, a blooming cheek. She is forthwith styled “Sabrina.”
Certain written conditions satisfied the hospital committee; they were these:—Within a twelvemonth one of the children should be given into the protection of some respectable tradeswoman, bound apprentice, with a fee of one hundred pounds; on her marriage, if she behaved well, four hundred pounds were to be added to this modest dot. The girl who should be retained, was to be carefully educated, and, if Mr. Day should not marry her himself, she was to have five hundred pounds as her marriage portion. Having arranged this, Mr. Day carried off his little wards to France. They were to receive no ideas except from him; no servant, French or English, was to approach them.
Of course they nearly drove him mad. They had the small-pox, and they cried and screamed incessantly; they quarrelled; they kept him for nights sitting by their bedside; our philosopher began to feel and to perceive the realities of life; especially when crossing the Rhine on a stormy day—the boat was upset. He rescued his wards by his expertness as a swimmer; but, perhaps, had they gone to the bottom, much trouble to all parties would have been avoided.
We next see him at Lichfield; it was spring. Those flat, dewy meadows, in which the city stands, were all besprent with flowers; the Trent meandered through fringes of the bog ranunculus; the purple hue of the trees which precedes their bursting forth into one universal green, was disappearing. There are some delicious spots near this cathedral town, and one of these is Stowe Vale; in this spot Mr. Day took up his residence. But to his mind, disdainful even of the luxuries which Nature herself proffers to us, it was not Stowe’s vernal loveliness, nor holy thoughts centering around Lichfield’s Gothic spires, nor reverence for Samuel Johnson, who still visited his native place, nor a wish to court the country families clustering around: it was the communion of minds like his own which tempted him to Stowe Vale.
Like his own! Yes; there was Richard Lovell Edgeworth—a young, gay-hearted man, yet imbued with the philosophy which Day esteemed above all others: the philosophy of Hume and Adam Smith. Day sternly carried out his principles; Edgeworth dashed into them the Epicurean tincture which accorded with his worldly, pleasant nature. There was Darwin, who, when his son was found immersed in the Derwent—dead—a suicide—had nothing more passionate on his lips