Pen, Pencil, And Poison - A Study In Green

It has constantly been made a subject of reproach against artists
and men of letters that they are lacking in wholeness and
completeness of nature. As a rule this must necessarily be so.
That very concentration of vision and intensity of purpose which is
the characteristic of the artistic temperament is in itself a mode
of limitation. To those who are preoccupied with the beauty of
form nothing else seems of much importance. Yet there are many
exceptions to this rule. Rubens served as ambassador, and Goethe
as state councillor, and Milton as Latin secretary to Cromwell.
Sophocles held civic office in his own city; the humourists,
essayists, and novelists of modern America seem to desire nothing
better than to become the diplomatic representatives of their
country; and Charles Lamb's friend, Thomas Griffiths Wainewright,
the subject of this brief memoir, though of an extremely artistic
temperament, followed many masters other than art, being not merely
a poet and a painter, an art-critic, an antiquarian, and a writer
of prose, an amateur of beautiful things, and a dilettante of
things delightful, but also a forger of no mean or ordinary
capabilities, and as a subtle and secret poisoner almost without
rival in this or any age.

This remarkable man, so powerful with 'pen, pencil and poison,' as
a great poet of our own day has finely said of him, was born at
Chiswick, in 1794. His father was the son of a distinguished
solicitor of Gray's Inn and Hatton Garden. His mother was the
daughter of the celebrated Dr. Griffiths, the editor and founder of
the Monthly Review, the partner in another literary speculation of
Thomas Davis, that famous bookseller of whom Johnson said that he
was not a bookseller, but 'a gentleman who dealt in books,' the
friend of Goldsmith and Wedgwood, and one of the most well-known
men of his day. Mrs. Wainewright died, in giving him birth, at the
early age of twenty-one, and an obituary notice in the Gentleman's
Magazine tells us of her 'amiable disposition and numerous
accomplishments,' and adds somewhat quaintly that 'she is supposed
to have understood the writings of Mr. Locke as well as perhaps any
person of either sex now living.' His father did not long survive
his young wife, and the little child seems to have been brought up
by his grandfather, and, on the death of the latter in 1803, by his
uncle George Edward Griffiths, whom he subsequently poisoned. His
boyhood was passed at Linden House, Turnham Green, one of those
many fine Georgian mansions that have unfortunately disappeared
before the inroads of the suburban builder, and to its lovely
gardens and well-timbered park he owed that simple and impassioned
love of nature which never left him all through his life, and