Robinson, HENRY CRABB

Robinson, HENRY CRABB, born of middle-class parentage at Bury St Edmunds on 13th May 1775, was educated there and at Devizes, and then was articulated to a Colchester attorney (1790-95). He studied five years at Jena, Weimar, &c. (1800-5), making friends or acquaintances of nearly all the great German spirits of the day, and during 1807-9 was engaged on the Times—in Spain, the first war-correspondent. In 1813, at the age of thirty-eight, he was called to the bar, from which, having risen to be leader of the Norfolk circuit, he retired in 1828 with £500 a year. 'In looking back on his life, Mr Robinson used to say that two of the wisest acts he had done were going to the bar and quitting the bar.' Thenceforth he lived chiefly in London, with frequent tours both at home and abroad till 1863, giving and receiving much hospitality, until at the ripe age of ninety-one he died unmarried on 5th February 1867. A dissenter and a Liberal, he was one of the founders of the London University (1828), an early member of the Athenæum Club (1824). Withal he was a splendid talker, who 'talked about everything but his own good deeds,' a buoyant companion, an earnest thinker, a prodigious reader, content not to publish but to keep a diary. 'I early found,' he says, 'that I had not the literary ability to give me such a place among English authors as I should have desired; but I thought that I had an opportunity of gaining a knowledge of many of the most distinguished men of the age, and that I might do some good by keeping a record of my interviews with them. True [which was not quite true], I want in an eminent degree the Boswell faculty; still, the names recorded in his great work are not so important as Goethe, Schiller, Herder, Wieland, the Duchesses Amelia and Louisa of Weimar, Tieck, as Madame de Staël, La Fayette, Abbé Grégoire, Benjamin Constant, as Wordsworth, Southey, Coleridge, Lamb, Rogers, Hazlitt, Mrs Barbauld, Clarkson, &c., &c., &c., for I could add a great number of minor stars. And yet what has come of all this? Nothing. What will come of it? Perhaps nothing.' Yes, something has come of it—the three delightful volumes, edited in 1869 by Dr Sadler, of his Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence, which will last as long as literature itself.