HERMAN MERIVALE.
[To THE EDITOR OF TEE "SPECTATOR."] Sra,—May I, as a lifelong friend of the late Herman Merivale, send you a few lines in tribute to his memory ? I knew him first, intimately, when I was still a boy and he was a young man, doing so well at the Bar that he might doubtless have risen to high honours had not the career of Letters proved more attractive to him. The intimate friendship then begun in his rooms in Garden Court endured without a break to the time of his death.
He was probably best known, as to work of the pen, by his plays. But to many who remember him, and especially to readers of the Spectator, it will be no news that he was an essayist full of scholarship and brightness, and a writer of verse in many moods, which assuredly deserved the sometimes misused name of poetry. His one novel, " Faucit of Balliol"—whereof perhaps the most discriminating, as well as the most appreciative, review appeared in the Spectator—contained so much of observation, wit, humour, and other fine qualities, that, save for misfortunes of health, it might well have been the precursor of other and yet better novels of his writing.
The side of his public and semi-public life least known, although it had considerable importance for others besides himself, was probably that concerned with politics, into which he threw himself with characteristic ardour when in the earlier "eighties" he was a resident at Eastbourne. There his strong convictions, backed by wide and ready resource both as a writer and as a speaker, and also by an undeniable personal magnetism, soon made him a man of mark on his own side, that of the Liberals So much was this the case that he was elected, unanimously and without fees, a member of the Devonshire Club. He also became chairman of the Liberal Council in his district, and filled that office until, being at one with the then Lord Hartington in dissension from Mr. Gladstone's Home-rule scheme, he resigned.
In his later years misfortunes came heavy on him, and in facing them his combative qualities stood him in much stead. His latest complete work, "Bar, Stage, and Platform," has much of the charm that belonged to his conversation in private. life. Its autobiographical form gave full scope to the habit of digression which he confessed in its early pages, and which he may have owed in some sort to his intense admiration for Thackeray both as man and as writer. But Herman Merivale never borrowed an opinion or a style, and his passages of divaga- tion have a very individual attraction. Those of us who in his death mourn the loss of a dearly loved friend, as well as that of a fine dramatist and author in poetry and in prose, may draw consolation from some haunting lines of his in the great speech of Death as Friend which occurs in The White Pilgrim.
[We publish with great pleasure this tribute to a remark- able member of a remarkable family. Mr. Merivale's striking personality was commemorated in the verses on his death published by us last week ; but we may recall here that at one period of his life, and before ill-health and the heavy misfor- tunes alluded to by our correspondent had pressed so hardly upon him, Mr. Herman Merivale was a valued contributor to our columns.—En. Spectator.]
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