Over his grave, in the churchyard of Bushey, Hertfordshire, a tombstone has been erected. Upon one side it bears the following inscription in Roman capitals,—"William Jerdan, F.S.A.; born at Kelso, April 16, 1782, died at Bushey, July 17, 1869. Founder of the Literary Gazette, and its Editor for 34 years;" on the other side, "Erected as a tribute to his memory by his Friends and Associates in the Society of Noviomagus, 1874."
Some twelve months later were borne to their last resting-place, at Willesden, the remains of another editorial critic, whose career had been concurrently prolonged with that of Jerdan. This was the well-known Cyrus Redding, who, born at Penrhyn in 1785, died in June, 1870. He, like Jerdan, had outlived his generation and himself,—
"Oblitusque suorum, obliviscendus et illis";—
and only two carriages followed him to the grave! He used to relate how above one thousand persons followed his father, a popular Nonconformist divine, to the tomb. "There is a line to be drawn," as the Athenæum remarked, "between fuss and neglect."
II.—THOMAS CAMPBELL.
"There's Tom Campbell in person, the poet of Hope,
Brimful of good liquor, as gay as the pope;
His shirt collar's open, his wig is awry,
There's his stock on the ground, there's a cock in his eye.
Half gone his last tumbler—clean gone his last joke,
And his pipe, like his college, is ending in smoke.
What he's saying who knows, but perhaps it may be
Something tender and soft of a bouncing ladye."
—So for Maginn, who cites these rollicking verses as coming from "a friend." At this point, says he, "the song becomes scurrilous and abusive"; he suppresses, therefore, "the culpable verses,"—to my own huge regret, at least, I must confess,—and proceeds to the conclusion, "which is panegyrical":—
"Well, though you are yoked to a dull Magazine,
Tom, I cannot forget it, what once you have been;
Though you wrote of Lord Byron an asinine letter;
Though your dinners are bad, and your talk is no better;
Yet the Song of the Baltic—Lochiel's proud lay—
The Seamen of England—and Linden's red day—
Must make up for the nonsense you write and you speak,
Did you talk it, and write in seven days in the week!"
Our portrait is indeed, as Maginn terms it, "exquisite and taken at the witching hour"; but gives us the poet other than as Byron described him, "dressed to sprucery,—with a blue coat and new wig,—and looking as if Apollo had sent him a birthday suit or a wedding-garment." Still, the slight and facile sketch opposite, is happier, in my judgment, than Maclise's finished "three-quarter," where the poet holds his pencil-case like a syringe,—or even, I should say, to the fine likeness by Sir Thomas Lawrence (now finally housed in our National Portrait Gallery), if I were not
