WILLIAM BODHAM DONNE.* THE letters brought together in this volume

make excellent reading, and the editor is to be congratulated on the tact with which she has selected and arranged her materials. The book is a real correspondence. It contains not only the letters of William Bodham Donne, hut letters written to him by a group of friends all intimate with one another, and especially devoted to himself : Edward FitzGerald, FitzGerahrs friend and father-in-law Bernard Barton, Richard Chenevix Trench, James Spedding, William Blakesley, Fanny Kemble, and her brothers Charles and John. They write to one another about everything; and to read their letters is to be transported into their midst, and to enjoy the atmosphere of leisurely culture and refined—but not over-refined—common-sense, which is said to be rarer in our own day than it was fifty or sixty years ago.

William Bodham Donne was a cousin of the poet Cowper, and, like his kinsman, he had the gift of winning and keeping the affection of all who came in close contact with him. He was like him also in his talent for writing charming letters. Humour, scholarship, affection, serious thought, playful anecdote and epigram, flow easily from him in a full, but not over-full, stream. Yet nothing could be less like Cowper in his troubled depths than the lucid sanity and good-tempered balance of Donne's mind. His editor speaks of "a naturally fiery temper well under control " ; but the letters show only the control, none of the temper,—except in so far as something of the nature of temper in the depths may be always taken for granted where there is every indication on the surface of strong feeling, good sense, and critical vivacity.

Donne had left Cambridge without taking a degree, having scruples about signing the Thirty-nine Articles, and he seems never to have thought about a profession. He had a moderate private fortune, and literary habits and the duties of a country gentleman to occupy him. When he came to London in 1829 to be introduced to the Kembles, he was invited by John Sterling to write articles for the Athenkeum, with results that moved his friends to intense admiration. It is at this point that the correspondences and some of the great friendships begin. Trench writes to Kemble after reading Donna's article on Sir Thomas Browne :— "It is wonderful. I did not dream that he possessed such power. Admiring, as I always did, his genial criticism and

s Bodham Donne and Si. Friends. Edited by Catherine B. Johnson. London Methuen and Co. [10s. Gd. net.]

perception of Beauty, which I believed was unerring, which in him seemed more an instinct than anything more artificial, I yet believed his mind was rather for the interpretation than the creation of Beauty. I joyfully recant my heresy."

At the same time Donne is writing to Trench :—

" What an enchanting family is Kemble's! Mr. Charles Kemble was absent much to my sorrow at the time of my visit, but I left Mrs. Kemble with no common feelings of regret. I never met with any one whose education and circumstances have been necessarily artificial with so young a heart, and such birth- freshness of feeling and thought. I think too that his sister [Fanny] is his sister by more ties of affinity and worthiness than birth and parentage."

It was the year of Fanny Kemble's famous debut, the appearance in Juliet that retrieved the fortunes of her family :—" Miss Kemble's 'Juliet' creates such a sensation in London that Drury Lane, I understand, is saved from empti- ness, and blank cheques, by the overflowing of Covent Garden." In the following year Donne is welcoming the sonnets of Charles Tennyson and estimating the writer :— " He has an imagination of the right mould—a strong graft on Wordsworth and a fine outgrowth of healthy feeling." J. M. Kemble writes from Cambridge a description of

Much Ado About Nothing done by "a party of large and

logger-headed fellow-commoners," Monckton Milnes playing Beatrice, and Hallam—Arthur Hallam—" and myself setting our faces and turning our eyes into stupidity that we might present some distant resemblance of Verges and Dogberry." Towards the end of 1830 Donne married his cousin, Catherine Hewitt, and necessities of income making him turn his mind seriously to literary work, he became a frequent con- tributor to reviews. Edward FitzGerald first appears in 1836, though he and Donne must have been friends earlier than that. FitzGerald stays with the Donnes at Mattishall, and Donne writes of him to Trench :—

" His life and conversation are the most perfectly philosophic of any I know. They approach in grand quiescence to some of the marvels of contentment in Plutarch. He is Diogenes without his dirt. He confesses to so much ease, as to make it a question whether if be cannot find, he should not create for himself some salutary trouble, and consults me if he should marry, or open a Banker's book. I advise him however to let well alone."

Twenty years later, when FitzGerald decided not to leave well alone, Donne wrote the news of his marriage to Fanny

Kemble in a letter which is confessedly an imitation of that in which Ma.datne de Sevigne announces the intended marriage of La Grande Mademoiselle to the Duo de Lauzun, but which is not the less good for being an imitation. It is too long to quote as a whole, but for the sake of the glimpse it gives by the way of the points at which many matters and many people stand at the moment, one extract must be allowed :-

I am going to affirm, what when rumoured of yore, I have often denied ; to contradict my own prophetic soul ; to approve in a measure what I have repeatedly avowed to be improbable, impossible, absurd, out of the way, out of the question, gossip, humbug, twaddle—in short, I am now going to announce not— that I am come into a fortune, nor that Maurice has been burnt at Smithfield, nor that Trench has been hung, instead of the Bell, in the new clock-tower, nor that Mrs. Trench has gone off with the Bishop of Oxford, nor Mrs. Fairbairn with Charles [Kemble], nor anything indeed that you can fancy or dream, or have ever expected or longed for—but simply that Edward Fitzgerald is at this moment, or in a very few days or hours will be= Benedict the married man " Then comes the da capo "sons me ferez grand plaisir, el

vous oommencerez par le commencement," and a description of Lucy Barton, whom he as well as FitzGerald have known from girlhood ; and the writer ends by confessing that "he is not clear but that both have consulted and concluded wisely. May God bless them both, and this I am sure you will echo from the bottom of your warm heart." As every- body knows, the sequel showed that they had not "concluded

wisely," and the least sympathetic appearances of FitzGerald

are those that he makes among his friends when he comes to London with his wife soon after marriage. It is pleasanter to

go back to the beginning, and take him up again in 1837, when he is writing to Donne in a vein of apology for having seemed to press it upon him as a duty to invite Alfred Tennyson

to stay with him, Donne, for reasons not given, having, it would seem, not wished to invite Tennyson :—

" When I spoke to you of inviting him, you comprehend, I am sure, the tone in which I did so : half jokingly, not seriously desiring you to fulfil a duty. Letters look very grave, while all the while there is a smile on the writer's lips, nor will lines of

writing represent the modulations of the voice that is speaking half in jest and half in earnest." . .

Here comes a suggestion that one might be more intelligible in such moods if one wrote in waving lines, and accordingly the question, "Why do you not ask Alfred. Tennyson to your home ? " is written in undulating script, and then FitzGerald goes on :— "This would at least characterise the wondering and uncertain mood of mind in which we often are: in which I am more than half my life, I believe. Seriously, however, I think you will be much enriched with his acquaintance, and he with yours, and one wishes to bind together all good spirits and to dispose an electric' chain of intelligence throughout the country. But I suppose I spoke of this chiefly from an instinctive desire we all have to share good things with those we love."

It is this note of full affection, struck repeatedly by one and another of the circle of friends in correspondence, that makes

the book so pleasant. It can hardly be said to yield much in the way of good stories, nor any detachable witticisms. But it is good talk and good company throughout.

From 1852 to 1857, W. B. Donne was librarian to the London Library, and lived—as was then the plan of the institution—in rooms over the library. He had been a widower for some years, and when this appointment was given hint he

left his children under the care of his mother, and brought an old housekeeper to take care of him in St. James's Square. He was at the same time acting as Deputy Examiner of Plays, in lieu of John Kemble, who was away in Germany.

When Kemble died he succeeded him in the office of Examiner and resigned the librarianship. He found his work no sinecure, complaining in the vein—half serious and half jesting—which should be represented by the weft type that he had fallen upon unhappy days, in which 'Men 'were really expected to do the work of their office :—

" I am fallen on evil times: I am paid no more, indeed rather less, than my predecessor in the Examinership, but I am set to do as much work as the whole series, since there was a censor, ever performed. I descend into the bowels of the earth : I mount upon such pinnacles as Satan stands on in Paradise Regained ' : I inhale evil smells : I cross dangerous places : sometimes I fall into the water and sometimes into the fire,' and all for .R.500 a year, besides injuring my mind by reading nonsense and periling my soul by reading wickedness. And the Household Words' must take up the parable against me and maintain me to be a superannuated spectre.' I wish the editor or author could be enforced to follow me up or down some of the ladders and staircases I have recently trodden, and that I were before him in one case or behind him in the other. Wouldn't I fall by accident."

It was his business to see to the safety of staircases and

galleries as well as to the expurgating of manuscripts, and he took it to heart when a poor " property " man fractured his skull by falling from the top of a stone staircase, against the construction of which he had protested in vain for years.

His standard of propriety and the line he drew at profanity would leave very few of the plays of our day unmutilated. And yet it is difficult to see that the drama has gained much either in virility or humour by the change of taste.