“God bless you, mamma. This is a famous place for your complaint, if it comes on again. The cures are miraculous. Love to Ellen. She sha’n’t come German over me when we meet. I don’t think I ever should have learnt it, only G---- gave himself such airs about it.”
The letter is not a masterpiece, but it is good-natured and wholesome. The “Fred,” who had been playing truant so enviably in Paris, was afterwards the Lieutenant Frederick Marryat who perished in the wreck of the _Avenger_.
His departure for America is a convenient date at which to stop and survey Marryat’s literary work. After 1837, he did some things as good as anything he had done before, and some at once unlike what he had already written, and yet excellent of their kind. “Poor Jack” and “Percival Keene” have touches of the old sea life, and flashes of fun, not inferior to his earlier writing. The “Phantom Ship” has a character of its own; the children’s stories of his last years are excellent. All these are later than 1837. Still, if he had ceased to write entirely in that year, his place in literature would be as high as it is. We should have “The King’s Own,” “Peter Simple,” “Mr. Midshipman Easy,” “Japhet,” “Jacob Faithful,” and “Snarley Yow,” and with these we should possess the best of him. In those eight busy years Marryat had poured out the harvest of his experience profusely. His beginning in literature had been singularly fortunate. The time was favourable to writers of any originality certainly. A brilliant magazine article made a reputation. There was a marked readiness to recognize ability and reward it. What amount of praise and pudding would be given in these days for another essay on Milton it would be useless to guess, but undoubtedly it could hardly be greater than the share which fell to Macaulay for his early effort. Carlyle made a place for himself by a few articles. The wind which blew for them blew for others also. As has almost always been the case in great literary periods, the readiness of the reader to recognize and admire was as strong as the productive power of the writer. The audience met the playwright half way. Sir Walter Scott had prepared the market for the novelist. He had enormously increased the taste for novels, and whoever could write at all was the surer of a hearing, because “Waverley” had made stories a necessity to readers. There is among the more atrabilious kind of men of letters a secret belief that the sum of popularity is a fixed quantity, of which whatever is earned by one man is necessarily lost by another. That one nation’s gain is another’s loss in commerce, was an accepted axiom with economists of the days of darkness before Adam Smith. It has been given up on maturer consideration, and is assuredly no more true in literature than international trade. A great writer who gains a great popularity increases the chance of the smaller men. Sir Walter and Jane Austen helped the Mrs. Meeke in whom Macaulay delighted.