John Langhorne (poet)
John Langhorne was an English
- In Eden's vale where early fancy wrought
- Her wild embroidery on the ground of thought.[1]
He died on 1 April 1779, in Blagdon, Somerset.
Life
John Langhorne's father was also a clergyman and died when his son was four. His mother made sure he had a school education, first in Winton village and then in Appleby, but there were not sufficient funds to send him to university. From the age of 18, he supported himself by teaching at various places in Yorkshire and finally was appointed tutor to the nine sons of Robert Cracroft at Hackthorn Hall in Lincolnshire. Having taken deacon's orders, he left in 1761 and, after a curate's appointment in Dagenham, became curate and lecturer at St. John's, Clerkenwell in 1764, and was appointed assistant preacher at Lincoln's Inn at the end of the following year.
Langhorne now began to put his literary talents to use, particularly as a reviewer for the Monthly Review, where his sarcastic style earned him many enemies. He was more generous in the case of William Collins, whose poetry at that period was largely disregarded. Langhorne brought out a first edition of his collected poems in 1765, subsequent re-editions of which eventually helped establish Collins' reputation. Then in 1766 Langhorne brought out his own Poetical Works and that same year became rector of Blagdon. Now at last he was in a position to marry Ann Cracroft, with whom he had been corresponding since his employment at Hackthorn Hall, but she died giving birth to a son - John Theodosius Langhorne - on 4 May 1768.
Following his wife's death, Langhorne left Blagdon to stay for a while with his elder brother William at
Writing
John Langhorne wrote with great diligence and produced a large number of works in both prose and verse which were much read at the time but very quickly went out of fashion again. His poetry was summed up by a later writer as characterised by "a delicious sweetness, an harmonious flow of diction, tender and lovely sentiment, and a pathos, mild, delicate, graceful and elegant.".[3] But even friendly writers had to admit that "his chief faults are redundant decoration and an affectation of false and unnecessary ornament".[4] On account of this, his literary and political enemies made of him a new candidate for inclusion in Alexander Pope's satire The Dunciad. In Charles Churchill's "The Candidate", Langhorne is characterised as "simple in his lay" and a sleeping partner "with Dullness on her throne". Hugh Kelly's "Thespis" condemns his "recreant name/ to drive with Flecknoe down the sink of fame".[5] His heavy drinking was also frequently mentioned.[6]
Two of Langhorne's works in particular were singled out later for praise. The "Fables of Flora" (1771) have the novel approach of using interactions between plants to deliver moral lessons, although there are rare precedents in Aesop's Fables, of which the best-known example is "The Oak and the Reed". Langhorne's floral debates, however, are related at greater length with overwrought and often ludicrous imagery:
- Where prostrate vales, and blushing meads,
- And bending mountains own his sway,
- While Persia's lord his empire leads
- And bids the trembling world obey,
- While blood bedews the straining bow,
- And conquest rends the scatter'd air.[7]
Turning to The Country Justice,
Wordsworth might well be impressed, since that agenda was his own. Another critic, however, sees Langhorne as anticipating something of Wordsworth's nature mysticism too, as it is foreshadowed in his "
- If Religion claims thy care,
- Religion, fled from books, is there.
- For first from Nature's works we drew
- Our knowledge and our virtue too.[10]
It is in performances like these that we find the value of the transitional poets of the second half of the 18th century as they abandon Augustan models for their own resources.
References
- ^ Proemium to the 1766 Poetical Works
- ^ "Langhorne, John" in the Dictionary of National Biography 1885-1900
- ^ Anonymous article in The Star, 20 August 1823
- ^ The "Life" prefixed to Cooke's edition of the poems (1798), pp.17-18
- ^ Quoted in the introduction to Cooke's edition (1798), pp.7,9
- ^ See the pieces by ‘A gentleman of University College', Percival Stockdale and M. Macgreggor at Spencerians
- ^ "The queen of the meadow and the crown imperial", lines 33-8
- ^ Robert Chambers, Cyclopaedia of English Literature, New York 1830, vol.4, p.156
- ^ Letter to S. C. Hall, 15 January 1837; in Peacock, Critical Opinions of William Wordsworth (1950) p.298
- ^ Quoted by J.Churton Collins in Poets Country, London 1907, pp.204-6
External links
- Works by or about John Langhorne at Internet Archive
- Works by John Langhorne at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
- Works by John Langhorne at Project Gutenberg