A year younger than Jefferson, Henley shared a similar passion for books and learning. Born in Devonshire in 1744, he had been educated at Caleb Ashworth’s Dissenting Academy, completing his four years of academic studies in 1766. Two years later he was received into the ministry and obtained a position with a congregation of Protestant Dissenters near Cambridge. He eventually became affiliated with the Church of England, being admitted to Queen’s College, Cambridge, in 1770. Here, he ingratiated himself with Cambridge’s intelligentsia. He became friends with John Lettice, the poet and divine of Sidney Sussex College; Thomas Martyn, botanist and fellow of Sidney Sussex College; and the poet Thomas Gray, then Regius Professor of History.32
Once the professorship at William and Mary became vacant, Governor Botetourt appealed to Edward Montagu, Master of Chancery and Virginia’s agent in London, for a man of ability and integrity for the college. After consulting with the Bishop of London, Montagu recommended Henley. He received the King’s bounty on January 8, 1770, and reached Virginia that April to take the position at William and Mary.
Coming to Virginia, Henley brought with him an excellent library. His collection of books reveals a wide range of intellectual interests. Henley himself described the library as a “collection of books, consisting of scarce and valuable editions (many on large paper, and in the best bindings) of the Greek and Roman classics, and the principal writers in the Italian, French, and English languages. Together with a large collection of engravings, etchings, and mezzotints, by the greatest masters; many of which were proofs, and the rest choice impressions.”33
The titles he is known to have had confirm the description. His works of English literature show he was both a scholar and a collector. He had a copy of the rare ten-book first edition of Paradise Lost and a sixteenth-century edition of William Langland’s Vision of Pierce Plowman. Other works in his library show his interest in modern literary trends. He owned several books treating such subjects as aesthetics, antiquities, botany, and literary criticism. Henley’s knowledge of botany nicely complemented his study of literature. He would later annotate multiple editions of Shakespeare, and a number of his annotations gloss arcane references to botanical lore.34
Before American independence, Henley returned to England, where he established a fine reputation not only as an annotator of literary texts but also as an antiquarian and teacher. During the 1780s, he and Jefferson exchanged several letters, which testify to the friendship they developed in Williamsburg. One time Henley stated, “Different as our situations are from what they once were, I shall ever look back with sincere pleasure on the friendship with which you honoured me.” Another time he articulated his pleasure with Jefferson’s friendship and stated that “neither length of time, change of situation, nor the convulsions which have torn asunder the bands that once held our united countries” had in the least altered his feelings of friendship.35
Jefferson left no details of their personal interactions, but statements made by British friends attest to Henley’s pleasant company and affirm his bookishness. As a young man, the botanist and antiquarian Dawson Turner had breakfast with Henley and long remembered his agreeable conversation: “It was impossible for any man to be more amusing and instructive in conversation, or of greater amenity of manner, than Dr. Henley.” Seeing Turner was fond of books, Henley gave him some useful book-buying advice.36
“Let me offer you, as a young man, a piece of advice,” Henley suggested. “Never buy a bad book; never buy a bad edition of a good book; and never buy a bad copy of a good edition.” This advice, which modern readers and book collectors might take to heart, affirms the care Henley took assembling his own library.
Jefferson, too, talked books with Henley, as his accounts indicate. He became familiar with the professor’s fine collection and, on a few occasions, talked him into selling a few items from it.37 Henley’s writings reveal the literary interests they shared and thus indicate what else they may have discussed. Henley published works discussing Virgil’s Aeneid and the elegies of Tibullus, but he is best known as the editor and annotator of William Beckford’s Vathek. In his annotations to Vathek, Henley cited Milton more than a dozen times, making separate references to Comus, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regain’d, and Samson Agonistes.38 Henley also glossed Beckford’s obscure Oriental allusions. His notes to Vathek indicate his familiarity with Arabic, a language Jefferson had been interested in at least since he purchased his copy of the Qur’an as a law student. Henley fueled Jefferson’s interest in Orientalism.
Henley’s presence in Virginia and his burgeoning friendship with Jefferson may also help explain why Jefferson recommended the works of Thomas Percy to Skipwith. Overall, Jefferson included four titles by Percy on the list. Besides Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, he also recommended Five Pieces of Runic Poetry, Percy’s prose translation of samples from Icelandic and Old Norse verse; Miscellaneous Pieces Relating to the Chinese, the first volume of which contains “A Dissertation on the Language and Characters of the Chinese”; and Hau Kiou Choaan; or, The Pleasing History, an anonymous Chinese novel written between the Ming and Ching dynasties that is considered a masterpiece of Chinese literature. Percy’s English version, in turn, is a landmark of European scholarship: it represents the first long work of Chinese narrative fiction translated into any European language.39
The presence of Percy’s Miscellaneous Pieces Relating to the Chinese on the Skipwith list also suggests why Jefferson was thinking about a Chinese roof for his garden temple. In its second volume, Percy described the art of laying out gardens among the Chinese and provided a description of the Emperor’s garden and pleasure houses near Peking. Of the four Percy titles he recommended to Skipwith, Jefferson had yet to acquire for himself at least three of them. The presence of Percy on the list of recommended authors suggests Henley’s influence on Jefferson.
In his Williamsburg library Henley had multiple works by Percy. While in Virginia he wrote a lengthy critique of Percy’s Key to the New Testament and also initiated a correspondence with him. Besides sending Percy a copy of his critique, Henley sent him some specimens of Indian oratory, including the speech of Chief Logan. Whereas Henley encouraged Jefferson’s interest in Oriental languages, Jefferson introduced him to Indian oratory. Upon encountering Logan’s speech for the first time in late 1774, Jefferson became its champion and began sharing it with others, including Henley, who recognized its literary value. Henley also saw social value in Logan’s speech: it gave him a perfect excuse to initiate a correspondence with Percy, who was interested in literature from many different parts of the world.
Henley’s letter allowed Percy to expand the breadth of his literary knowledge from the banks of the Yangtze to the banks of the Ohio. Thanking him, Percy called Logan’s speech “a masterpiece of its kind.” Percy shared the speech with others and reported to Henley that it was “exceedingly admired by all who have seen it. It is the eloquence of sentiment, and penetrates through the soul,—infinitely more forcible than the eloquence of language.” Percy welcomed other specimens of Native American literature Henley had to share: “Should any other pieces of Indian composition, whether of rhetoric or song, fall in your way, you would confer a very great obligation upon me, by favoring me with translations of them.”40
Outside his intellectual circle, Henley made a reputation for himself in Virginia as a troublemaker. He and fellow professor Thomas Gwatkin vehemently protested against a proposed American episcopate. Though Henley was more affable privately, he could still be something of an instigator even in literary conversation. After one particular discussion with Henley, William Beckford playfully accused him, “You are answerable for having set me to work upon a Story so horrid that I tremble whilst relating it, and have not a nerve in my frame but vibrates like an Aspen.” Henley, in turn, took great pleasure in Beckford’s tongue-in-cheek accusation. He responded, “My soul rejoices to know that your imagination hath been wrapped in the thickest gloom: never is the lightening so g
lorious as when it flashes from the darkest clouds.”41
Henley’s presence enhanced Jefferson’s periodic trips to Williamsburg at a time when he was becoming increasingly reluctant to leave Monticello. There is no evidence to show whether Henley visited Monticello, but he did come to know and like Mrs. Jefferson. Much as William Small had done before, Henley exemplified the intimate relationship between science and literature that persisted during the Enlightenment. Whereas Small was a scientist who knew about literature, Henley was a litterateur who knew about science. Henley made less of an impact on Jefferson mainly because the two became friends at a time when Jefferson’s intellectual abilities were already well developed. Henley reached Virginia at a time when Jefferson sought peers, not mentors, a time when Jefferson himself was becoming a mentor, when he was starting to imagine his home as the new center of Virginia’s intellectual community.
CHAPTER 10
Rude Bard of the North
Among the literary works Jefferson read for pleasure, few pleased him more than those James Macpherson assembled as the poems of Ossian, the legendary third-century Gaelic warrior-poet. Writing before the authenticity of these works came under close scrutiny, Jefferson praised Macpherson “for the collection, arrangement and elegant translation, of Ossian’s poems.”1 Fragments of Ancient Poetry, Collected in the Highlands of Scotland, and Translated from the Galic or Erse Language, Macpherson’s first Ossianic publication, appeared in 1760. The enthusiasm that greeted this work prompted Macpherson to research the traditional poetry of the Scottish Highlands further and to publish two additional titles, both ostensibly ancient Gaelic verse rendered into English prose. Fingal, An Ancient Epic, in Six Books, which also contained a number of shorter works attributed to Ossian, appeared in 1762. Temora, another Ossianic epic, appeared the following year.
The general trajectory of these three volumes stretches from the genuine to the artificial. Fragments approaches traditional Gaelic lays in terms of form and content, whereas Temora is more heavily indebted to the Greek and Roman epic tradition for its themes, diction, and imagery. Regardless of their authenticity, these prose-poems achieved tremendous popularity in their day. Collected editions began appearing by the mid-1760s and continued being republished for decades.
Jefferson’s enthusiasm was not unique. Around the same time he began reading Ossian, many other Virginians were developing their appreciation of the legendary bard. Colonel William Fleming, for one, owned a copy of Ossian’s Poems. Additional copies were available for purchase at the Virginia Gazette office in the 1770s. Still, Jefferson’s fondness for Ossian outstripped that of his friends and neighbors. He became so enthralled that by the early months of 1773 he was reading Ossian on a daily basis, a habit he intended to continue into the foreseeable future. The last week of February 1773, he wrote that Ossian’s poems “have been, and will I think during my life continue to be to me, the source of daily and exalted pleasure. The tender, and the sublime emotions of the mind were never before so finely wrought up by human hand. I am not ashamed to own that I think this rude bard of the North the greatest Poet that has ever existed.”2
His commonplace book provides the best indication of how he read Ossian. From the first book of Fingal, Jefferson transcribed the following:
As two dark streams from high rocks meet, and mix and roar on the plain; loud, rough, and dark in battle meet Lochlin and Innis-fail: chief mixed his strokes with chief, and man with man; steel clanging sounded on steel, helmets are cleft on high; blood bursts and smokes around. Strings murmur on the polished yews. Darts rush along the sky. Spears fall like the circles of light that gild the stormy face of the night. As the troubled noise of the ocean when roll the waves on high; as the last peal of the thunder of heaven, such is the noise of the battle. Tho’ Cormac’s hundred bards were there to give the war to song; feeble were the voices of a hundred bards to send the deaths to future times. For many were the falls of the heroes; and wide poured the blood of the valiant.3
Throughout Ossian’s poetry, Macpherson incorporated much figurative language—metaphor, simile, epic simile. This and other passages Jefferson transcribed show his appreciation of these figures of speech. The similes Macpherson put in Ossian’s mouth often compare the actions of warriors on the battlefield with natural phenomena. The initial simile in this passage, for example, compares the clash of two chieftains with the confluence of two rivers. The passage also reflects Macpherson’s characteristic yet paradoxical use of noise. While describing the clash and clang of shield and sword, Ossian’s voice maintains a profound sense of quiet. Time and again, Fingal emphasizes the bard’s importance on the battlefield. Fallen heroes need someone to sing their song, and Macpherson made the poet as essential to war as the warrior. This particular passage closes on an elegiac note, a sentiment that pervades the Ossianic works and helped them to capture the popular imagination during the eighteenth century.
Melancholy was a component of much verse written and published during the final third of the eighteenth century. Macpherson had a keen ability to recognize literary trends and capitalize on them. Shaping his materials for publication, he combined traditional Gaelic motifs with elements from popular English prose and verse. This, the era of the graveyard school of English verse, was a time when poets made a point of cultivating sadness for purposes of pleasure. Before encountering the poems of Ossian, Jefferson had already developed a fondness for the graveyard school. He had been reading the verse of Edward Young, the author of Night Thoughts, at least since he had acquired a four-volume edition of Young’s Works in the mid-1760s.4 In addition to their debt to contemporary English verse, the poems of Ossian embody the sentimentalism characteristic of British novels that were being written and widely read around this time. The sentimental, melancholy tone of Jefferson’s excerpts from Ossian affirms his enjoyment of these literary trends.
After transcribing lines from the last book of Fingal into his commonplace book, he excerpted a passage from “Conlath and Cuthona,” a work in which Ossian relates a story of tragic lovers.5 Closing the poem, Ossian conveys how the people he has lost continue to haunt his memory. Jefferson recorded the work’s concluding lines: “Oh that I could forget my friends till my footsteps cease to be seen! till I come among them with joy! and lay my aged limbs in the narrow house!” The narrow house: Macpherson’s circumlocution for the grave frequently recurs in the poems of Ossian. It recurs multiple times in Jefferson’s works, too: in his literary commonplace book, his correspondence, and other belletristic writings.
Within his commonplace book Jefferson added Greek footnotes to his transcriptions from Ossian. These notes may have been inspired by Hugh Blair’s lengthy essay, “A Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian.” Published with collected editions of Ossian, Blair’s essay devotes some forty pages comparing this legendary Gaelic poet with Homer. Jefferson need not have been influenced by Blair. For years he had been inscribing the margins of his books with excerpts from Herodotus as a means of comparing similar ideas from different times, cultures, and languages. With the notes to Ossian he made in his commonplace book, Jefferson went his source one better. Whereas Macpherson added notes to his text from Alexander Pope’s English translation of the Iliad, Jefferson quoted the original Greek. Furthermore, he located Latin passages in Virgil and Statius to parallel his excerpts from Ossian.
Editions of Temora included some “original specimens” of traditional Gaelic verses from which the works of Ossian were supposedly derived. These samples whetted Jefferson’s linguistic appetite. He longed to learn Scottish Gaelic in order to read Ossian in the original and hoped to obtain samples of Ossianic verse from the editor. The critical essays accompanying the various editions mentioned other Ossianic verse in manuscript; Jefferson grew anxious to supplement his collection.
He decided to take advantage of an influential Scottish contact. James Macpherson’s brother Charles had visited North America earlier. During his time in Virginia, he had stayed with Je
fferson briefly. In 1773, Jefferson renewed their acquaintance, hoping that Charles could put him in contact with his better known brother in order to obtain copies of Ossian’s texts in the original Gaelic.
His carefully worded letter to Charles Macpherson spells out his request in specific terms. Unaware of any printed Gaelic editions of Ossian’s works, Jefferson asked that if an edition were in print he would appreciate a copy. If not, then he wanted his brother James to arrange for a manuscript copy of the Gaelic originals. Jefferson even stipulated handwriting style, quality of paper, and exterior decoration: “I would chuse it in a fair, round, hand, on fine paper, with a good margin, bound in parchment as elegantly as possible, lettered on the back and marbled or gilt on the edges of the leaves. I should not regard expence in doing this.”6 Jefferson’s desire for such an elegant volume affirms his fondness for Ossian. Never one to judge a book by its cover, he nevertheless understood that a handsome cover enhanced the quality of its contents and contributed to the reading experience. He wanted a volume that was textually accurate but one that was a handsome keepsake as well.
He also asked Charles to supply him with the necessary materials to learn Gaelic, including a grammar, a dictionary, and a catalogue of books written in the language. Closing his letter, Jefferson expressed hope that more of Ossian’s works would be published but asserted that even if new editions were planned for the near future, he could not wait for them and wished to have manuscript copies of any and all available texts as soon as possible. Cost was no object: “The glow of one warm thought is to me worth more than money.”7
Jefferson was hoping for a speedy response, but his letter was delayed and did not reach Edinburgh for several months. The touching personal events he experienced during the intervening time affirmed the ongoing relevance of Ossian. The sentiments expressed in the poems soon became all too real: sadness darkened the halls of Monticello this year.
The Road to Monticello Page 18