A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IVMcCarthy, Justin H. (Justin Huntly)
History
A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV
McCarthy, Justin H. (Justin Huntly)
Great Britain -- History -- 1714-1837; Great Britain -- Politics and government -- 1714-1837
Abernethy, were among the celebrities whose
deaths rather than their works belong to the time when William the Fourth
was King.
[Sidenote: 1754-1834--Coleridge and Hannah More]
Poetry, romance, and art suffered many heavy losses during the same time.
We have already chronicled the death of Walter Scott. One who had known
him and had been kindly welcomed by him, James Hogg, the Ettrick
Shepherd, died three years after Scott in 1835. The death of George
Crabbe was one of the memorable events of the reign. Crabbe might well
be described in the words which a later singer set out for his own
epitaph, as "the poet of the poor." Crabbe pictured the struggles, the
sufferings, the occasional gleams of happiness which are common to the
lives of the poor with a realism as vigorous and as vivid as the prose of
Charles Dickens himself could show, and he had touches here and there of
exquisitely tender poetic feeling which were not unworthy of Keats or
Wordsworth. Nothing was nobler in the life of Burke than his early
appreciation and generous support of Crabbe. Hannah More died in 1833.
The fame of this remarkable woman has somewhat faded of late years, and
even the {283} most successful of her writings find probably but few
readers among the general public. She has, however, won for herself a
distinct place in history, not less by her life itself than by her work
in various fields of literature. In her early days she had been an
associate of Samuel Johnson, Burke, and Goldsmith, and Reynolds, and she
had known Macaulay from his childhood. She was always a writer with a
purpose, whether she wrote a religious tract or an ethical essay, a
tragedy or a novel. She always strove to be a teacher, and the
intellectual gifts with which she had been endowed were only valued by
her in so far as they enabled her to serve the education and the moral
progress of humanity. "The rapt One of the godlike forehead, the
heaven-eyed creature," as Wordsworth described Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
died in 1834. Coleridge belonged to an order of intellect far higher
than that to which Crabbe or Hannah More had any claim. He was indeed a
man of genius in all but the very highest meaning of the word. He was
poet, philosopher, teacher, and critic, and in each department, had he
worked in that alone, he must have won renown. Perhaps if he had not
worked in so many fields he might have obtained even a more exalted
position than that which history must assuredly assign to him. His
influence as a philosopher is probably fading now, although he
unquestionably inspired whole schools of philosophic thought, and the
world remembers him rather as the author of "The Ancient Mariner" than as
the metaphysical student and teacher. As a critic, in the highest sense
of the word, he will always have the praise that should belong to the
first who aroused the attention of Englishmen to the great new school of
thoughtful criticism which was growing up in Germany under the influence
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