THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER OF JULIUS CHARLES HARE BY G. F. McFARLAND, M.A. PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AT ST. LAWRENCE UNIVERSITY, NEW YORK XCEPT in several special connections the name of Julius ECharles Hare (1795-1855) means little today. C. R. Sanders devoted a chapter to Archdeacon Hare in his pioneeer study, Coleridge and the Broad Church Movement (1942), and R. H. Super in his life of Walter Savage Landor (1954) worked out in detail Julius Hare's relation to the publication of the Imaginary Conversations. Earnest readers of Carlyle have encountered his name in a number of generally unflattering references in The Life of John Sterling, and fans of Victorian memoirs may re­ member Hare as the beastly Uncle Julius who carriage-whipped a boy and acquiesced in the murder of a pet cat in Augustus J. C. Hare's story-telling autobiography.1 Nevertheless, I am certain that many scholars working the areas of nineteenth-century English literature and church history have been unable to avoid Hare's frequently indefinite involve­ ment with a remarkable number of eminent personalities: Wordsworth, Niebuhr, Tieck, Winthrop Praed, De Quincey, Thomas Arnold, Frederick Maurice, Connop Thirlwall, Daniel Macmillan, Arthur Stanley, Charles Kingsley, and Alfred Tennyson. Despite such pointed or suggestive notice, Julius Hare remains a shadowy figure, rather odd, frequently baffling, much too German, and not very interesting. When one does encounter him, Julius Hare is playing a supporting role in someone else's drama, yet more often than not he is billed as either an enthusiastic and influential disciple of Coleridge, or a leading figure in the Broad Church Movement, or an erudite but uncritical and volatile lover of German litera­ ture. Only Sanders and Super have gone further and attempted to define his real significance. That others have left Hare buried in old generalizations is not surprising; detailed exploration, 1 The Story of My Life (London, 1896-1900), 6 vols. 42 CAREER OF JULIUS CHARLES HARE 43 though often tempting perhaps, would have been frustrated by the lack of real evidence concerning his personal relations with literary men of his own time and by the uncertainty surrounding the canon of his own writings. To be sure his nephew's auto­ biography and the same author's account of Maria Leycester Hare, Julius's sister-in-law,1 contain a great deal of family in­ formation, but little of that has proved directly useful in deter­ mining the exact extent of Hare's literary pursuits. This essay, therefore, pretends to be no more than a report of my findings in a search for fuller and more accurate information concerning Julius Hare's early literary career as translator, critic, scholar, and friend of genius. Julius Hare's parents were Francis Hare-Naylor, a grandson of the famous pluralist Bishop Hare of the early eighteenth century, and Georgiana Shipley, a daughter of Bishop Jonathan Shipley, the friend of both Dr. Johnson and Benjamin Franklin.8 Their marriage had been blessed by neither family, and con­ sequently the lovers left England in the hope of managing to Jive well on their small means on the Continent, particularly in Italy. In sunny self-banishment they cultivated their interests : Ceorgiana read widely in the classical and modern languages and improved the drawing and painting that she had learned from Sir Joshua Reynolds 3 ; Hare-Naylor followed closely the political developments at home and in France (where his sym­ pathies lay) and gathered materials for a history of the Swiss Republic. And they had four sons Francis George, Augustus William, Julius Charles, and Marcus Theodore. When Hare- Naylor came into his estate, in the worst days of the French Revolution, the family returned to England, settling at Hurst- monceux, Sussex, where they tried to make the curtailed in­ heritance as profitable as it had once been. They enjoyed the fashionable Whig society of the turn of the century and added 1 A. J. C. Hare, Memorials of a Quiet Life (London, 1872), 2 vols. 2 See James Madison Stifler, My Dear Girl, The Correspondence of Benjamin Franklin with Polly Stevenson, Georgiana and Catherine Shipley (New York: George H. Doran Company, 1927) for an account of Franklin's relations with the Shipleys. 3 Reynolds's portrait of her first-born, entitled " Master Hare," hangs in the Louvre..