threshold of a possibility, were honoured by a sonnet from Tennyson, proving that however it may have been in ancient days,' the functions of poet and prophet are by no means combined in our own.

a

In those days-that is, about the years 1829-30-there existed journal entitled the Athenæum, from which the present journal of that name borrowed little beyond its title. The original Athenæum numbered among its contributors many who have since attained to eminence both in Church and State, and some whose early death literature and politics alike deplore. To its pages, John Kemble was a frequent contributor of both prose and verse. In the summer of 1829 he visited Germany for the first time, and laid the foundation of the intimacies which ripened in subsequent years. About the same period also commenced in earnest his study of the Anglo-Saxon language and its cognate dialects. Whatever he undertook seriously he mastered rapidly, and in little more than two years he had established his reputation as one of the rising philologers of the day. His studies were hardly interrupted by his visit to Spain in the autumn of 1830. Its object was not, as has been absurdly stated, a conspiracy' against the reigning family, but co-operation with a section of the Spanish Liberals, against the unconstitutional government of Ferdinand. Such attempts should be measured by their motives, and not by their event. Had Monmouth succeeded, he might have been regarded by posterity with as much favour as William of Orange. There was nothing, except in the inadequacy of the means to the end, for which a Sydney or Russell need have blushed. Rash and inconsiderate the attempt might be at that juncture to dethrone a tyrant and to restore a constitutional government to Spain: but those who engaged in it were as devoid of factious motives, as they who designate the attempt a conspiracy' are of knowledge of the real facts of the case. On his return to England, Kemble resumed his researches in Teutonic philology with renewed ardour. His days were mostly spent in the

British Museum, or in Cathedral and Collegiate libraries, where he transcribed incessantly Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, or drew from their hiding-places the charters which he afterwards published in the Codex Diplomaticus Evi Saxonici. The first public result of his studies was his lectures at Cambridge on AngloSaxon Language and Literature, illustrated by the poem of Beowulf. An idle story has been recently cir culated of the total failure of these lectures; and some one, professing himself a pupil of Kemble's at the time, has attempted to show that they were still-born from the first. We have taken some pains to ascertain from credible sources the real facts; and although our version may not be quite so amusing as that which has been put forth in one journal and copied credulously by others, it has the slight advantage of being true. The first lecture, so far from being still-born or a scarecrow to the audience, was of a highly popular character. The audience was numerous, the applause was frequent, and at the close of his discourse the lecturer himself was warmly congratulated on his success by his friends. As a course, the lectures were neither popular nor meant to be so.

When complimented upon the full attendance at the first lecture, Kemble curtly replied, 'I'll soon thin them;' and thin them he certainly did after the second or third lecture. Indeed, except to professed and zealous linguistic students, his development of the power of the letters in the Teutonic languages was about as inviting as a dissertation on algebraic symbols would have been. Thinned, however, as the lecture-room may have been, it was never emptied; but, on the contrary, some of the most distinguished members of the University were among Kemble's auditors to the last. One result of the lectures was to establish upon a permanent basis his reputation as a philologer; and the eloquent expounder of Jacob Grimm's doctrines was thenceforward accounted at home, as he had previously been acknowledged abroad, as the first of living AngloSaxon scholars.

It was in the lecture-room, indeed, that Kemble's various gifts

1857.]

were most conspicuously displayed. He inherited the noble features and the clear and emphatic articulation of his family; his voice was remarkably powerful and melodious; and he had not only the pen of a ready writer, but also the ready eloquence and the self-possessed demeanour of a well-graced speaker. Of poetry, and especially of impassioned poetry, he was an admirable reader; while his wide acquaintance with general literature furnished an ample fund of illustration for the dryer details of archæology. We confess to have often resisted slumber when antiquaries were discoursing, and to have experienced, in perusing their Transactions, that weariness of the flesh which Solomon connects with the reading of many books. But in the lecture-room, the voice, manner, and matter of Kemble barred and baffled all inclination to nod, and adorned the dry bones of antiquity with the interest of a well-told tale. The secret of his attractiveness as a lecturer was, besides the charm of his delivery, the historical garb with which he invested every topic of discussion. In describing an urn, a weapon, or an armlet, he possessed something of the picturesque power of Sir Thomas Browne. The mere specimen before him was as nothing in comparison with the importance of the class to which it belonged: the consideration of the class led him to the wider analogies of the genus; the hearer was ushered into some wide ethnological avenue opening upon distant prospects of primeval antiquity, and the spearhead of some forgotten warrior became the stepping-stone to vistas of those races whom the populous North poured from her frozen loins to renew the effete civilization of the pagan world.

We have said that classical studies occupied but little of Kemble's time at the University: not that he ever abandoned them, but he pursued them there as he pursued the law afterwards, irregularly and capriciously. But the solid foundations laid at Bury School under the admirable tuition of Dr. Benjamin Heath Malkin, were never undermined; and in later years he raised upon them a solid structure of deep and

615

curious classical lore. He was profoundly versed in writings which are seldom read even by professed scholars in the Byzantine histo rians, in the Latin writers of the Lower Empire, and in the chronicles which bridge over the space between the eras of barbarism and ignorance and the revival of learning. These studies were indeed merely auxiliary to the great object of his laboursthe history of the Celtic and Teutonic races of Europe; but though auxiliary, they were pursued with all the ardour of a primary investigation; for it was a necessity of Kemble's mind to leave nothing unknown which labour could achieve, as it was a characteristic of his lectures and his more important works to take nothing for granted, to indulge in no theories, and to set down nothing with his pen, for which he could not produce a satisfactory voucher.

Perhaps, with the exception of Porson, there has never been a more acute decipherer of manuscripts than John Kemble. It was marvellous to see what he could make out of the most time-worn and illegible documents; neither damp nor the worm, nor mutilation nor obsolete characters, defeated him. His exact grammatical knowledge guided him through the chaos, and preserved him from rash conjecture and assumption. His acquaintance not only with the general language of the Anglo-Saxon people, but also with its various dialects, aided him in the work of deciphering; and of the charters which he published, he truly averred that few AngloSaxon scholars but himself could construe them even when printed.

Nor was his skill as an excavator less remarkable than his powers as a reader. In the summer of 1854, he was employed by the managers of the Royal Museum at Hanover to open and explore the funeral barrows on the Lüneburg heath and the adjoining districts. For nearly five months, he turned out daily every morning at the head of a gang of labourers armed with shovels and pickaxes. The skill— indeed, the certainty almost-with which, amid leagues of wild moorland, he detected the resting-places of the dead, impressed his simple

fellow-labourers with feelings akin to awe, and procured for him in more than one village of that remote district the reputation of being a sorcerer! It was not every barrow that was a receptacle of bones, urns, and weapons; still less was it a churchyard or the adjacent fields that yielded these sepulchral harvests. Those grim pagan warriors shunned, even in death, Christian fellowship; and the Christians, on their part, scrupulously excluded from their sacred enclosures whatsoever savoured of pagan superstition. Some encroachments the plough had made on the Lüneburg heath: the crest of a tumulus had sometimes been levelled for a cabbage-garden, or successive cuttings of peat obliterated the traces of a soldier's sepulchre.' But none of these mutations or disguises baffled the search of this shrewd spoiler of tombs. As soon as his practised eye had fixed upon a likely spot, the compass was laid as near as possible to its supposed centre, and on the western side generally the work of excavation was commenced. The Celtic and Anglo-Saxon department of the Hanoverian Museum attests by its opulence in urns, armour, and ornaments, the success of the excavator. The system on which these treasures are arranged displays his minute acquaintance with the history of those early but by no means rude artists. The traces of an unrecorded intercourse with the more civilized regions of Europe are visible among these spolia opima of the dead. The craftsmen of many a Roman and many a Grecian city were employed in welding, decorating, and polishing for barbarian customers many of these weapons and ornaments; and many an Italian Mercator,' with his bevy of slaves and mules, must have penetrated into these obscure regions long before Germanicus pushed his outposts to the Elbe, and long after the Cæsars had migrated from the Tiber to the Bosphorus.

It is sad to contrast the amount of Kemble's written works -though if we include all he printed, even these are considerable-with the knowledge he had hived up, and with the years he devoted to these

honourable but unremunerative toils. Toil indeed he did, from morn to dewy eve, at his favourite pursuits, without a murmur, or apparently a suspicion of his own self-devotion to science. To him the acquisition of knowledge was its own exceeding great reward.' Nor was he less liberal of his stores than indefatigable in accumulating them. He would give his time, his knowledge, even his pen, to labourers in the same field with himself; from some he received in return the befitting acknowledgment, from others, perhaps from the majority, the usual meed of extraordinary serviceobloquy and ingratitude. More than one daw struts even now in plumes borrowed from Kemble. Unfortunately for himself and for literature, Kemble seldom put pen to paper until the whole scheme of a book, and a considerable portion of its contents, had clearly developed and impressed themselves on his mind. When once mapped out, the progress of his composition was rapid, and probably never were manuscripts sent to the press with fewer erasures, or with less need for correction in type. The book, indeed, had been twice written, once on the tablets of memory, and afterwards upon paper.

Kemble's acknowledged works bear but a small proportion to the number of his anonymous contributions in print to the history, philology, and antiquities of the Teutonic races, and he has left more matter in manuscript than he ever put forth either with his name or without. To the Foreign Quarterly Review he contributed a very remarkable paper on Jäkel's Comparative Philology: in the Review, which he edited himself from 1835 to 1844, The British and Foreign, he printed, among others, the articles on Freydank's Poems; the Empire and the Church; and the Incunabula Gentis Anglicana. He published also several papers in the Archeologia and in the Cambridge Philological Museum; and have the gratification of adding that latterly he was one of the contributors also to Fraser's Magazine. He wrote with facility both in German and English, and his StammTafel of the West Saxons, and some

we

1857.]

notices of the sepulchral antiquities of the Northern nations, published among the Transactions of the Archæological Society of Hanover, are not more remarkable for their learning and originality, than for the purity of their diction. It would well repay the pains of collecting and editing these anonymous pieces to publish them in a single volume. Surely some English archæologist will, while the memory of the author is still fresh in the minds of his friends and fellow-labourers, undertake this pious office.

A

As Kemble walked generally on the by-roads of history, it may not be superfluous to annex a list of his works. In 1833 he published The Anglo-Saxon Poems of Beowulf, The Traveller's Song, and The Battle of Finnesburgh, with a revised and amended Text, together with a Glossary and Historical Preface. The work reached a second edition in 1837, when he added to it a second volume, containing A Translation of the AngloSaxon Poem of Beowulf, with a Glossary and Notes. In 1839 he commenced the publication of his collection of Anglo-Saxon charters, the Codex Diplomaticus Evi Saxonici, a portion of the works printed by the Historical Society, now become excessively rare. few weeks before his decease he had made arrangements for a new edition of these charters, with considerable additions, a new classification of them, illustrative notes, and an index. In 1843 he printed for the Aelfric Society, the Poetry of the Vercelli Codex, Anglo-Saxon and Latin, with an English translation; and in 1848, for the same Society also, The Dialogue of Salomon and Saturnus, with an Historical Introduction and an English Translation. In 1849 he published his Saxons in England, in two volumes, 8vo, which, as it is founded principally upon the original materials of the Codex Diplomaticus, will always remain a text-book of Anglo-Saxon history. The work would have been completed in two volumes more, but unfortunately, like so many other of his designs, the conclusion remained in his memory, but was not committed to paper. In the same year he pub

617

lished for the Camden Society Twysden's Considerations upon the Government of England, with a learned and interesting introduction. At the opening of the present year appeared, in an octavo volume, his State Papers and Correspondence illustrative of the Social and Political State of Europe, from the Revolution to the Accession of the House of Hanover; a work which proved that his acquaintance with history was by no means confined to the remote eras of the northern races. His last publication, nearly coeval with his decease, was an Historical Introduction to his friend Mr. Larking's Knights Hospitallers in England, printed for the Camden Society. It is worthy of notice and remembrance that this introduction was written horis subsecivis, at a time when its author had few, if any, books at hand for consultation; and that, if we except the extracts from the Report of Prior Philip de Thame itself, it was a work of memory rather than research. Kemble's learning, however, was so wellordered, as well as so abundant, that he could lay his hand on what he wanted, on all occasions, and was almost independent of the immediate help of books.

We have endeavoured to sketch faithfully the intellectual and literary career of John Mitchell Kemble. How imperfect the outline is of one so remarkable in many ways, no one can be more sensible than ourselves. To those who knew him not it will convey a shadowy resemblance at the most; but to some who knew him well it may serve to recal a few of his proper lineaments. It is, however, much to be desired that, while the remembrance of him is yet lively, some friendly hand should draw a more complete portrait of a scholar so fully and variously accomplished. Some of the materials for such a portrait exist in the private journals and letters of the deceased, others in the recollections of his friends, and some also in his own contributions to the press. And besides these, he has left a considerable mass of manuscripts which await and will repay the care of a competent editor.

We have shown that Kemble succeeded in every pursuit which he embraced earnestly: that his know

ledge was both extensive and profound; and that he devoted himself to a sequestered path in literature without a sigh for worldly wealth or honour, and that having once put his hand to the plough he never looked back. We lament to add that his labours were nearly unremunerative, and so far from attaining to the competence or the station which a more prudent exercise of his abilities would have ensured, he derived little more from years of toil than a barren reputation. He experienced to the full, indeed, the evils which Gibbon deplored only in the retrospect, of not embracing a profession at the proper age. He had not grafted his private consequence on the importance of a great professional body;' not reaped the benefits of those firm connexions which are cemented by hope and interest, by gratitude and emulation, by the mutual exchange of services and favours.' On the contrary, as he himself expressed it in his last address to a meeting of archæologists, he had adopted a study which has but little attractions for the great mass of mankind, and must be pursued with little sympathy and no profit.' We trust, however, that the guerdon which eluded Kemble in his life-time, will not be withheld from those who now represent him. If civem servare were anciently deemed worthy of a crown, a nation so justly proud as England is of its ancient laws, worthies, and deeds in peace and war, may be fairly expected to afford some substantial tribute to the memory of one who did so much to preserve and illustrate the muniments of her language and her polity, of her early literature and her primeval arts.

He may indeed be said to have died in his vocation. Appointed to superintend the department of Celtic and Anglo-Saxon antiquities in the Art Treasures Exhibition at Manchester, he set about collecting specimens of them with his wonted energy. The time between his first undertaking this commission and that when the section must be arranged and opened to the public was unavoidably short; but short

as it was, Kemble would have been prepared with an unrivalled collection of remains. It is most disingenuous to insinuate that he left his work so incomplete that the design of having a Celtic and AngloSaxon department was abandoned; considering the few weeks he had been able to devote to it, he had effected more than probably any other single person could have achieved in the time; for collections were thrown open to him which were closed to all others, and every museum in England was ready to intrust him with its choicest treasures. The enterprising and liberal managers of the Manchester Exhibition have testified their sense of their irreparable loss: and during Kemble's brief sojourn at Dublin, his learning, his eloquence, and his winning manners attracted universal admiration, and procured for him many new and sterling friends. His remains were followed to the grave by some of the most distinguished literary and scientific men in that capital, and his last extemporary discourse upon Archæology will soon be published by the Royal Irish Academy, both in a separate form and among their periodical Transactions.

On reviewing what we have written, we are tempted to apply to Kemble, with some modifications, a few sentences from Johnson's Life of Savage. For of Kemble, as well as of Savage, it may be truly said, that

his mind was in an uncommon degree vigorous and active. His judgment was accurate, his apprehension quick, and his memory so tenacious that he was frequently observed to know what he had learned from others in a short time, better than those by whom he was informed; and could frequently recollect incidents, with all their combination of circumstances, which few could have regarded at the present time, but which the quickness of his apprehension impressed upon him. He had the art of escaping from his own reflections, and accommodating himself to every new

scene.

He mingled in cursory conversation with the same steadiness of attention as others apply to a lecture, and amidst the appearance of thoughtless gaiety lost no new idea that was started, nor any hint that could be improved.