An eminent statesman who was governor of New Jersey, 1776–90. “Philosophic Solitude,” a poem; “Review of the Military Operations in North America,” 1757; “Digest of the Laws of New York.”

Personal

  Livingston appears to have had but little vanity, either as a private or public man. His real learning and the quaint style of the day, sometimes give his writings an air of formality, which might be mistaken for pedantry; but on a close examination, his character bears few, if any traces of affectation. His conversation was entirely free of egotism. As governor, he despised, and altogether threw off the state, which his predecessors under the crown had assumed, and thus early adapted himself to the rapidly changing tastes of the people. Nor does this appear to have sprung so much from necessity as inclination. He was plain and indifferent, almost to slovenliness, in his dress…. In his family, Livingston was a fond husband, and a generous father, ready at all times to make every sacrifice which the welfare of his children demanded; while at the same time it is not to be denied that a temper, originally irritable, and rendered more so by the difficulties and responsibility of his situation, was sometimes less restrained in his domestic circle, than where it was checked by the presence of strangers. An extreme sensitiveness to noise; an occasional unwillingness to converse when not excited by society; and a sensibility more quickly manifested with regard to trifling vexations than serious evils, sometimes threw a gloom over the fireside of Liberty Hall…. He was considerably above the middle stature, and in early life, so very thin as to receive from some female wit of New-York, perhaps in allusion to his satirical disposition, the nickname of the “whipping-post.” In later years he acquired a more dignified corpulency. Speaking of himself, in the language of one of his opponents in the American Whig (1768), he says, “The Whig is a long-nosed, long-chinned, ugly-looking fellow.”… Of his scholarship, it may be said that it was distinguished in days when scholarship was more common. Greek he abandoned early in life, but of the Latin he retained a familiar knowledge; the French and Dutch he read with great facility, writing them both with considerable ease, though without elegance. With the literature of his own language, he was intimately acquainted. In polemical divinity, a study now fallen into considerable disrepute, he was also well read. His religious taste and readings tinge most of his literary productions, which often borrow point and eloquence from the rich treasure-house of scriptural allusions and quotations. His skill in literature was not confined to the closet or his own gratification; we have seen it rendering more effective his exertions directed to Holland; and in his own country, he was active in supplying the want of instruction in the different States, to do which he was more than once requested; while at the same time as trustee ex-officio of Princeton and Rutgers Colleges, he exercised a supervision over the literary interests of New Jersey.

  In person he was, in middle life, tall and spare, later slightly corpulent; in dress, careless, almost slovenly, but his biographer informs us that he was a capital fisherman and wrote a bad hand, two unerring marks of a gentleman. He was an excellent Latin scholar, read and wrote French and Dutch with ease, and was thoroughly acquainted with English literature…. Among the men of this historic period, no one affords a more interesting study than this staunch, original and devoted friend of the liberties and rights of man.

  At the head of the New Jersey delegation stood her famous war governor, William Livingston, who had reached his sixty-fifth year. He had been an eminent member of the New York bar as early as 1752, and was one of the most caustic and forcible essayists in the country; he was also one of the few poets of his time. It was next to impossible for him to make a speech that was not seasoned with dry humor and stinging satire. He was probably the best classical scholar in the assemblage. He had through a long career of active public and political service acquitted himself with honor.

Philosophic Solitude, 1747

  This poem is obviously the effort of a rhyming apprentice, still in bondage to the methods of his master, Alexander Pope; yet he catches the knack of his master, with a cleverness proving the possibility of original work, on his own account, by and by. It illustrates, likewise, a trait of human nature, that this young lawyer and politician, having given himself to a practical career in the thick of the world’s affairs, and one made tumultuous by his own aggressive spirit, should have begun it by depicting, in enthusiastic verse, his preference for a life of absolute retirement and serene meditation…. He would have books for his most intimate friends…. The voluptuous languors of this poem, report a quality in the author that did not control him; and henceforward, through nearly half a century, his real life was a battle for stern and great ideas.

  A poem on “Philosophic Solitude” which reproduces the trick of Pope’s antitheses and climaxes with the imagery of the “Rape of the Lock,” and the didactic morality of the “Imitations from Horace” and the “Moral Essays.”

  Written in the conventional eighteenth-century manner, but is smooth and pretty.