第19章 REGENT STREET(1)

On the commercial side the _Athenaeum_still lacked success;nor was like to find it under the highly uncommercial management it had now got into.This,by and by,began to be a serious consideration.For money is the sinews of Periodical Literature almost as much as of war itself;without money,and under a constant drain of loss,Periodical Literature is one of the things that cannot be carried on.In no long time Sterling began to be practically sensible of this truth,and that an unpleasant resolution in accordance with it would be necessary.By him also,after a while,the _Athenaeum_was transferred to other hands,better fitted in that respect;and under these it did take vigorous root,and still bears fruit according to its kind.

For the present,it brought him into the thick of London Literature,especially of young London Literature and speculation;in which turbid exciting element he swam and revelled,nothing loath,for certain months longer,--a period short of two years in all.He had lodgings in Regent Street:his Father's house,now a flourishing and stirring establishment,in South Place,Knightsbridge,where,under the warmth of increasing revenue and success,miscellaneous cheerful socialities and abundant speculations,chiefly political (and not John's kind,but that of the _Times_Newspaper and the Clubs),were rife,he could visit daily,and yet be master of his own studies and pursuits.

Maurice,Trench,John Mill,Charles Buller:these,and some few others,among a wide circle of a transitory phantasmal character,whom he speedily forgot and cared not to remember,were much about him;with these he in all ways employed and disported himself:a first favorite with them all.

No pleasanter companion,I suppose,had any of them.So frank,open,guileless,fearless,a brother to all worthy souls whatsoever.Come when you might,here is he open-hearted,rich in cheerful fancies,in grave logic,in all kinds of bright activity.If perceptibly or imperceptibly there is a touch of ostentation in him,blame it not;it is so innocent,so good and childlike.He is still fonder of jingling publicly,and spreading on the table,your big purse of opulences than his own.Abrupt too he is,cares little for big-wigs and garnitures;perhaps laughs more than the real fun he has would order;but of arrogance there is no vestige,of insincerity or of ill-nature none.

These must have been pleasant evenings in Regent Street,when the circle chanced to be well adjusted there.At other times,Philistines would enter,what we call bores,dullards,Children of Darkness;and then,--except in a hunt of dullards,and a _bore-baiting_,which might be permissible,--the evening was dark.Sterling,of course,had innumerable cares withal;and was toiling like a slave;his very recreations almost a kind of work.An enormous activity was in the man;--sufficient,in a body that could have held it without breaking,to have gone far,even under the unstable guidance it was like to have!

Thus,too,an extensive,very variegated circle of connections was forming round him.Besides his _Athenaeum_work,and evenings in Regent Street and elsewhere,he makes visits to country-houses,the Bullers'and others;converses with established gentlemen,with honorable women not a few;is gay and welcome with the young of his own age;knows also religious,witty,and other distinguished ladies,and is admiringly known by them.On the whole,he is already locomotive;visits hither and thither in a very rapid flying manner.

Thus I find he had made one flying visit to the Cumberland Lake-region in 1828,and got sight of Wordsworth;and in the same year another flying one to Paris,and seen with no undue enthusiasm the Saint-Simonian Portent just beginning to preach for itself,and France in general simmering under a scum of impieties,levities,Saint-Simonisms,and frothy fantasticalities of all kinds,towards the boiling-over which soon made the Three Days of July famous.But by far the most important foreign home he visited was that of Coleridge on the Hill of Highgate,--if it were not rather a foreign shrine and Dodona-Oracle,as he then reckoned,--to which (onwards from 1828,as would appear)he was already an assiduous pilgrim.Concerning whom,and Sterling's all-important connection with him,there will be much to say anon.

Here,from this period,is a Letter of Sterling's,which the glimpses it affords of bright scenes and figures now sunk,so many of them,sorrowfully to the realm of shadows,will render interesting to some of my readers.To me on the mere Letter,not on its contents alone,there is accidentally a kind of fateful stamp.A few months after Charles Buller's death,while his loss was mourned by many hearts,and to his poor Mother all light except what hung upon his memory had gone out in the world,a certain delicate and friendly hand,hoping to give the poor bereaved lady a good moment,sought out this Letter of Sterling's,one morning,and called,with intent to read it to her:--alas,the poor lady had herself fallen suddenly into the languors of death,help of another grander sort now close at hand;and to her this Letter was never read!

On "Fanny Kemble,"it appears,there is an Essay by Sterling in the _Athenaeum_of this year:"16th December,1829."Very laudatory,Iconclude.He much admired her genius,nay was thought at one time to be vaguely on the edge of still more chivalrous feelings.As the Letter itself may perhaps indicate.

"_To Anthony Sterling,Esq.,24th Regiment,Dublin_.

"KNIGHTSBRIDGE,10th Nov.,1829.