THE AUTHOR OF THE " INGOLDSBY LEGENDS."* THESE two volumes
are little more than an enlarged re-issue of a memoir which was prefixed to one series of the Ingoldsby Legends. The chief excuse for the present work seems to be that Mr. Dalton Barham has been presented with a number of his father's letters. We are told that the former memoir has been rewritten, and en- riched by the addition of more copious details, while many stories have been improved by the substitution of names for initials. No doubt all these changes make the life completer than it was, but the radical defect of the old life has not been removed. When Mr. Dalton Barham tells us modestly enough that " it is only in a literary point of view—only as a writer whose wit and humour have attracted more than common notice—only, in short, as Thomas Ingoldsby, that Mr. Barham is brought before the public at all," he shows that he is pretty well aware of this failing. The real truth is that neither as Thomas Ingoldsby nor as Mr. Barham is the subject of the memoir ever brought before us. We have a few of the occurrences of an uneventful life—birth, school- ing, marriage, professional advancement, publication of books, social intercourse, illness, and death. We learn from letters and diaries that at one time Mr. Barham was busy with a novel, at another time he had just finished one of the poems with which his name is connected. We hear of a good many dinners and of a good many jokes made at the dinners. Mr. Barham was a friend of Theodore Hook and of Sydney Smith, and heard from their own mouths the sayings which even now make the fortune of diners-out. With the help of such material, the book before us is pleasant reading, but it is not a biography.
In the midst of such a brilliant group as that composed of the great humourists of the earlier part of the century, Barham's own figure retires somewhat into the background. The sayings attributed to him in this memoir are few. The works by which he is best known are distinguished rather by fluency of versifica- tion and happiness of rhyme, than by any higher qualities. If it be true that he was indebted- to a friend for nearly all the subjects of his legends, the praise of invention, which otherwise would have been one of his chief claims, must be denied him. The humour which marks some of the most conspicuous pieces, such as the " Jackdaw of Rheims," " St. Nicholas and the Devil," and others which will probably suggest themselves to our readers, was apt to degenerate into buffoonery or vulgarity, while the abrupt- ness of his transitions was fatal to any artistic feeling. Still the Ingoldsby Legends keep up their popularity, and Barham is entitled to the credit of having found many imitators, but never a rival. This will perhaps be considered his best title to distinction. It is clear that in spoken wit he could not vie with several of his contemporaries. The appreciative manner in which he relates the jokes of Sydney Smith and Theodore Hook is significant of his own inferiority. Probably his best saying is the one uttered when he was at college. His tutor reprimanded him for his constant absence from morning chapel. Barham urged as his excuse that the hour was too late for him. " Too late ?', exclaimed the tutor in astonishment. " Yes, air, too late," re- peated Barham, " I cannot sit up till seven o'clock in the morning. I am a man of regular habits, and unless I get to bed by four or five at latest, I am really fit for nothing next day." If we con- trast this answer with some of Hook's University jokes, we can see what was the relative position of the two men. There is a quiet fun about Barham's reply which is altogether wanting in the reckless impertinence of Theodore Hook. The undergraduate who told the Vice-Chancellor that he was ready to sign forty • The Life caul Letters of the Rea Richard Harris Barham, darner of the " In9okiski Legesuli." By his Son. 2 vols. London: Bentley. 1810.
articles if necessary, who wore his bands under his coat-tails and exhibited them in that place to the horrified gaze of a Don, who on being shown the Proctor's robe of office observed that it was Manchester velvet and inquired the price per yard, might be taken as the very type and embodiment of mischief. Mr. Dalton Barham has already written a life of Theodore Hook, and in this work he tries to give an idea of those improvisations for which Hook was most celebrated. But although he is severe on the " miserable and meagre attempt in Coningsby," we cannot think that his own attempt is more successful. It is not his fault that most of Hook's sayings are familiar to us already, for he may have been the first to publish them, either in his own Life of Hook or in the earlier issue of this memoir. But the long sketch of an extempore burletta, composed and sung by Hook at an evening party, is far more stupid than anything attributed by Mr. Disraeli to Lucian Gay.
As minor canon of St. Paul's, Barham naturally came in con- tact with one who, in more than one sense, was a major canon, Sydney Smith. A very characteristic letter from him is published in this memoir. He writes to Barham, " Many thanks, my dear sir, for your kind present of game. If there is a pure and elevated pleasure in this world, it is the roast pheasant and bread sauce—barn-door fowls for Dissenters, but for the real Churchman, the thirty-nine-times-articled clerk, the pheasant, the pheasant !" We may have met before with Sydney Smith's recom- mendation to Rogers, who was about to sit for his portrait, to be drawn saying his prayers with his face in his hat. But there are other stories in these volumes which are more certain to be original. Barham's own adventure with a man who believed that he constantly received visits from the spirit of a child he had lost, is the more remarkable as it preceded the age of spiritualism. It was while dining with this gentleman that Barham endeavoured to upset his theory of apparitions, but the only reply to such arguments, was a confident expression of opinion that Barham's unbelief would meet with a check in the course of that very night. The words were scarcely uttered, when there was the sound of a falling body in the hall. The believer looked round with an air of calm triumph, but the sceptic went out into the hall to test the miracle. " He returned with his own hat, which had been dislodged, probably by the wind, which happened to be very high, from the wall. ' You see, gentlemen, I am no false prophet,' said the host quietly. Well,' urged Mr. Barham, half annoyed at the aptitude of the accident, ' if that be the handiwork of your familiar, I should take it as a favour if you would represent to him or her, as the case may be, that as the hat happens to be my best,'—' Oh,' interrupted the seer, ' if you are still disposed to treat the matter with levity, we will drop it at once.' " From the tone of many of the Ingoldsby Legends, as well as from the stories which Barham had a partiality for telling, it might have been thought that he had a leaning towards the supernatural or unaccountable. One of the tales of the kind in the present volumes is related by a man who was secretary to the Speaker of the House of Commons, and who dreamt one night that he was sentenced to be hanged. He awoke in great agony just when he was in the act of being pinioned, and of course was overjoyed to find that it was all a dream. But on going to sleep again he went through exactly the same scene, and this time he reached the foot of the gallows, and was just preparing to mount. The crowd, the fatal tree, the cord, the face of the hangman were brought before him with such terrible distinctness, that he had to get out of bed and walk about the room for a few minutes before he could compose his mind. A third time he slept, and a third time he dreamt as before, and now he was led up to the scaffold, was placed upon the drop, had the rope fitted round his neck by the hangman, whose features he recognized from having seen them in his second dream ; the cap was drawn over his face, and he felt the trap giving way under his feet when he awoke, as in the very act of suffocation, with a loud scream, which was heard by people in the next room. So fearfully vivid was the dream, that the man was in a state of nervous excitement the whole morning ; he could hardly eat his breakfast, he could not discuss a matter of business with a friend, and at last he had to throw himself on his friend's compassion. But what was his horror when, on taking up his letters, he found one asking anxiously about him, the writer adding, "It is exceedingly absurd, but I really cannot shake off from my recollection an unpleasant dream I had last night, in which I thought I saw you hanged." Does it spoil the story to add that the dream did not come true ?
Among the shorter anecdotes with which the book abounds, we must quote one of a Scotch clergyman who was suspended by the Ecclesiastical Assembly for stating that he considered Pontius Pilate to be a very ill-used man, as he had done more for Christianity than all the other nine Apostles put together. This was told Barham by Sir Walter Scott, who was retained for the defence of the clergyman. An Irish story, told by Theodore Hook, may come next. A gentleman was driving his servant in a cab, and said to him, half jocularly, half in anger, " If the gallows had its due, you rascal, where would you be now ?" " Faith, then, your honour," was the reply, "it's riding in this cab I'd be all alone by myself, may be." This might fairly apply to the peer mentioned just before who played heavily at Crockford's, received all his winnings in cash, gave h cheque- for his losings, and then sent at once to stop payment of the cheque at his bankers. Barham's own remark to a man who was guilty of some signal piece of baseness is, no doubt, too strong to be applied to a peer of the realm. We do not know who the delinquent was, or what he had done ; but he pleaded for a gentler treatment at Barham's hands, saying that some day he might come to change his opinion. "Perhaps I may, Sir," was the answer, " for if I should find any one who holds a more contemptible opinion of you than I do myself, I should lay down my own and take up his." We may conclude with the account of a traveller who, being in a wild country where he could find no provisions for himself or his dog, cut off the dog's tail and boiled it for his own supper, giving the dog the bone. There is no lack of similar material in Mr. Dalton Barbam's volumes, and our readers will find them lively and entertaining. However, they are spun out by the insertion of much that is trivial and unnecessary, and their graver faults must not be lost sight of in the amusement they have- afforded.
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