itude, for the
partial breaking up of the circle of friends--Allen, Horner, Smith,
Brougham, Lord Webb Seymour--in which he had previously mixed. In the
same year he became a volunteer, an act of patriotism the more
creditable, that he seems to have been sincerely convinced of the
probability of an invasion, and of the certainty of its success if it
occurred. But I have no room here for anything but a rapid review of the
not very numerous or striking events of his life. Soon, however, after
the date last mentioned, he met with two afflictions peculiarly trying
to a man whose domestic affections were unusually strong. These were the
deaths of his favourite sister in May 1804, and of his wife in October
1805. The last blow drove him nearly to despair; and the extreme and
open-mouthed "sensibility" of his private letters, on this and similar
occasions, is very valuable as an index of character, oddly as it
contrasts, in the vulgar estimate, with the supposed cynicism and
savagery of the critic. In yet another year occurred the somewhat
ludicrous duel, or beginning of a duel, with Moore, in which several
police constables did perform the friendly office which Mr. Winkle
vainly deprecated, and in which Jeffrey's, not Moore's, pistol was
discovered to be leadless. There is a sentence in a letter of Jeffrey's
concerning the thing which is characteristic and amusing: "I am glad to
have gone through this scene, both because it satisfies me that my
nerves are good enough to enable me to act in conformity to my notions
of propriety without any suffering, and because it also assures me that
I am really as little in love with life as I have been for some time in
the habit of professing." It is needless to say that this was an example
of the excellence of beginning with a little aversion, for Jeffrey and
Moore fraternised immediately afterwards and remained friends for life.
The quarrel, or half quarrel, with Scott as to the review of "Marmion,"
the planning and producing of the _Quarterly Review, English Bards and
Scotch Reviewers_, not a few other events of the same kind, must be
passed over rapidly. About six years after the death of his first wife,
Jeffrey met, and fell in love with, a certain Miss Charlotte Wilkes,
great-niece of the patriot, and niece of a New York banker, and of a
Monsieur and Madame Simond, who were travelling in Europe. He married
her two years later, having gone through the very respectable probation
of cros