HENLEY, JOHN (1692–1759), English clergyman, commonly known as “Orator Henley,” was born on the 3rd of August 1692 at Melton-Mowbray, where his father was vicar. After attending the grammar schools of Melton and Oakham, he entered St John’s College, Cambridge, and while still an undergraduate he addressed in February 1712, under the pseudonym of Peter de Quir, a letter to the Spectator displaying no small wit and humour. After graduating B.A., he became assistant and then headmaster of the grammar school of his native town, uniting to these duties those of assistant curate. His abundant energy found still further expression in a poem entitled Esther, Queen of Persia (1714), and in the compilation of a grammar of ten languages entitled The Complete Linguist (2 vols., London, 1719–1721). He then decided to go to London, where he obtained the appointment of assistant preacher in the chapels of Ormond Street and Bloomsbury. In 1723 he was presented to the rectory of Chelmondiston in Suffolk; but residence being insisted on, he resigned both his appointments, and on the 3rd of July 1726 opened what he called an “oratory” in Newport Market, which he licensed under the Toleration Act. In 1729 he transferred the scene of his operations to Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Into his services he introduced many peculiar alterations: he drew up a “Primitive Liturgy,” in which he substituted for the Nicene and Athanasian creeds two creeds taken from the Apostolical Constitutions; for his “Primitive Eucharist” he made use of unleavened bread and mixed wine; he distributed at the price of one shilling medals of admission to his oratory, with the device of a sun rising to the meridian, with the motto Ad summa, and the words Inveniam viam aut faciam below. But the most original element in the services was Henley himself, who is described by Pope in the Dunciad as
“Preacher at once and zany of his age.”
He possessed some oratorical ability and adopted a very theatrical style of elocution, “tuning his voice and balancing his hands”; and his addresses were a strange medley of solemnity and buffoonery, of clever wit and the wildest absurdity, of able and original disquisition and the worst artifices of the oratorical charlatan. His services were much frequented by the “free-thinkers,” and he himself expressed his determination “to die a rational.” Besides his Sunday sermons, he delivered Wednesday lectures on social and political subjects; and he also projected a scheme for connecting with the “oratory” a university on quite a utopian plan. For some time he edited the Hyp Doctor, a weekly paper established in opposition to the Craftsman, and for this service he enjoyed a pension of £100 a year from Sir Robert Walpole. At first the orations of Henley drew great crowds, but, although he never discontinued his services, his audience latterly dwindled almost entirely away. He died on the 13th of October 1759.
Henley is the subject of several of Hogarth’s prints. His life, professedly written by A. Welstede, but in all probability by himself, was inserted by him in his Oratory Transactions. See J. B. Nichols, History of Leicestershire; I. Disraeli, Calamities of Authors.
HENLEY, WILLIAM ERNEST (1849–1903), British poet,
critic and editor, was born on the 23rd of August 1849 at Gloucester,
and was educated at the Crypt Grammar School in that
city. The school was a sort of Cinderella sister to the Cathedral
School, and Henley indicated its shortcomings in his article
(Pall Mall Magazine, Nov. 1900) on T. E. Brown the poet, who
was headmaster there for a brief period. Brown’s appointment,
uncongenial to himself, was a stroke of luck for Henley, for whom,
as he said, it represented a first acquaintance with a man of
genius. “He was singularly kind to me at a moment when I
needed kindness even more than I needed encouragement.”
Among other kindnesses Brown did him the essential service
of lending him books. To the end Henley was no classical
scholar, but his knowledge and love of literature were vital.
Afflicted with a physical infirmity, he found himself in 1874, at
the age of twenty-five, an inmate of the hospital at Edinburgh.
From there he sent to the Cornhill Magazine poems in irregular
rhythms, describing with poignant force his experiences in
hospital. Leslie Stephen, then editor, being in Edinburgh,
visited his contributor in hospital and took Robert Louis Stevenson,
another recruit of the Cornhill, with him. The meeting
between Stevenson and Henley, and the friendship of which it
was the beginning, form one of the best-known episodes in recent
literature (see especially Stevenson’s letter to Mrs Sitwell,
Jan. 1875, and Henley’s poems “An Apparition” and “Envoy
to Charles Baxter”). In 1877 Henley went to London and
began his editorial career by editing London, a journal of a
type more usual in Paris than London, written for the sake of
its contributors rather than of the public. Among other distinctions
it first gave to the world The New Arabian Nights of
Stevenson. Henley himself contributed to his journal a series
of verses chiefly in old French forms. He had been writing
poetry since 1872, but (so he told the world in his “advertisement”
to his collected Poems, 1898) he “found himself about
1877 so utterly unmarketable that he had to own himself beaten
in art and to addict himself to journalism for the next ten years.”
After the decease of London, he edited the Magazine of Art from
1882 to 1886. At the end of that period he came before the public
as a poet. In 1887 Mr Gleeson White made for the popular series
of Canterbury Poets (edited by Mr William Sharp) a selection
of poems in old French forms. In his selection Mr Gleeson White
included a considerable number of pieces from London, and only
after he had completed the selection did he discover that the
verses were all by one hand, that of Henley. In the following
year, Mr H. B. Donkin in his volume Voluntaries, done for an
East End hospital, included Henley’s unrhymed rhythms
quintessentializing the poet’s memories of the old Edinburgh
Infirmary. Mr Alfred Nutt read these, and asked for more;
and in 1888 his firm published A Book of Verse. Henley was
by this time well known in a restricted literary circle, and the
publication of this volume determined for them his fame as a
poet, which rapidly outgrew these limits, two new editions of
this volume being called for within three years. In this same
year (1888) Mr Fitzroy Bell started the Scots Observer in Edinburgh,
with Henley as literary editor, and early in 1889 Mr Bell
left the conduct of the paper to him. It was a weekly review
somewhat on the lines of the old Saturday Review, but inspired
in every paragraph by the vigorous and combative personality
of the editor. It was transferred soon after to London as the
National Observer, and remained under Henley’s editorship until
1893. Though, as Henley confessed, the paper had almost as
many writers as readers, and its fame was mainly confined to
the literary class, it was a lively and not uninfluential feature
of the literary life of its time. Henley had the editor’s great gift
of discerning promise, and the “Men of the Scots Observer,” as
Henley affectionately and characteristically called his band of
contributors, in most instances justified his insight. The paper
found utterance for the growing imperialism of its day, and
among other services to literature gave to the world Mr Kipling’s
Barrack-Room Ballads. In 1890 Henley published Views and
Reviews, a volume of notable criticisms, described by himself
as “less a book than a mosaic of scraps and shreds recovered
from the shot rubbish of some fourteen years of journalism.”
The criticisms, covering a wide range of authors (except Heine
and Tolstoy, all English and French), though wilful and often
one-sided were terse, trenchant and picturesque, and remarkable
for insight and gusto. In 1892 he published a second volume of
poetry, named after the first poem, The Song of the Sword, but
on the issue of the second edition (1893) re-christened London
Voluntaries after another section. Stevenson wrote that he
had not received the same thrill of poetry since Mr Meredith’s
“Joy of Earth” and “Love in the Valley,” and he did not know
that that was so intimate and so deep. “I did not guess you
were so great a magician. These are new tunes; this is an
undertone of the true Apollo. These are not verse; they are
poetry.” In 1892 Henley published also three plays written
with Stevenson—Beau Austin, Deacon Brodie and Admiral
Guinea. In 1895 followed Macaire, afterwards published in
a volume with the other plays. Deacon Brodie was produced in
Edinburgh in 1884 and later in London. Beerbohm Tree produced
Beau Austin at the Haymarket on the 3rd of November 1890
