,vvlOS-ANGFLfj> ' a- oM-LIBBARY/9/ ^OJilVOJO^ ' ' *- ? -/ ^imwui^ ''o-mmy^' ,S-OFCAilf(%, o - . -^ 'V -is tV_4.o =fT)| "<- ? ^ CALAMITIES OF AUTHORS ; INCLUDING SOME INQUIRIES RESPECTING THEIR MORAL AXD LITERARY CHARACTERS* BY THE AUTHOR OF CURIOSITIES OF LITERATURE." " Such a superiority do the pursuits of Literature possess -ibove every other occupation, that even he who attains but :t mediocrity in them, merits the pre-eminence above thoifi that excel the most in the common and vulgar professiors.' Hume. VOL. II. LONDON: PR1NTKD FOR JOHN MURRAY, FLEET STREET . W.BLACKWOOD, EDINBURGH; AND J. CUMMING, DUBLIN. 1812. Printed by Nichols, Son, and Bentley, Red Lion Passage, Fleet Street, London. CONTENTS OF VOL. II. Page Literary Ridicule, illustrated bv some Account of a Literary Satire 1 Literary Hatred, exhibiting a Conspiracy against an Author 49 Undue Severity of Criticism 75 A Voluminous Author without Judgment 97 Genius and Erudition, the Victims of immoderate Vanity 1<23 Genius, the Dupe of its Passions 161 Literary Disappointments disorderingthe Intellect 175 ''Rewards of Oriental Students 219 .? IV CONTENTS. Page Danger incurred by giving the Result of Literary Enquiries 238 A National Work which could find no Patronage 261 Miseries of successful Authors 272 The Illusions of Writers in Verse 294 THE CALAMITIES OF AUTHORS. LITERARY RIDICULE. Illustrated by some Account op a Literary Satire. RIDICULE may be considered as a spe- cies of eloquence ; it has all its vehemence, all its exaggeration, or its diminution; it is irresistible ! Its business is not with truth, but with its appearances ; and it is this similitude, in perpetual comparison with the original, raising contempt, which produces the ridiculous. There is nothing real in Ridicule ; the more exquisite, the more it exerts the ima- VOL. II. B 2 LITERARY RIDICULE. gination. But, when directed towards an individual, by preserving an unity of cha- racter in all its parts, it produces a fictitious personage, so modelled on the prototype, that we know not to distinguish the true one from the false. Even with an intimate knowledge of the real object, the ambigu- ous image slides into our mind, for we are at least as much influenced in our opinions by our imagination, as by our judgment. Hence some great characters have come down to us, spotted with the taints of in- delible wit; and a Satirist of this class, sporting with distant resemblances and fanciful analogies, has made the fictitious accompany for ever the real character. From a pique with Akenside, on some reflections against Scotland, Smollett exhibited a man of great genius and virtue as a most ludicrous personage ; and who LITERARY RIDICULE. 3 could discriminate, in the ridiculous phy- sician in Peregrine Pickle, what is real, and what is fictitious*. * OfAKENsiDE few particulars have been re- corded, for the friend who best knew him was of so cold a temper in regard to the publick, that he has not, in his account, revealed a solitary feature in the character of the Poet. Yet Akenside's mind and manners were of a fine romantic cast, drawn from the moulds of classical antiquity. Such was the charm of his converse, that he has even heated the cold and sluggish mind of Sir John Hawkins, who has, with unusual vivacity, described a day spent with him in the country. As I have mentioned the fictitious physician in Peregrine Pickle, let the same page shew the real one. I shall transcribe Sir John's forgotten words omitting his " neat and elegant dinner." " Akenside's conversation was of the most delightful kind, learned, instructive,' and, without any affectation of wit, cheerful and enter- taining. One of the pleasantest days of my life I passed with him, Mr. Dyson, and another friend, at Putney where the enlivening sunshine of a sum- B2 4 LITERARY RIDICULE. Besides, the banterers and ridiculers* possess this hard advantage over sturdy honesty or nervous sensibility their mer's day, and the view of an unclouded sky, were the least of our gratifications. In perfect good hu- mour with himself and all about him, he seemed to feel a joy that he lived, and poured out his gratu- lations to the great Dispenser of all felicity, in ex- pressions that Plato himself might have uttered on such an occasion. In conversations with select friends, and those whose studies had been nearly the same with his own, it was an usual thing with him, in libations to the memory of eminent men among the antients, to bring their characters into view, and expatiate on those particulars of their lives, that had rendered them famous." Observe the arts of the ridiculer ! he seized on the romantic enthusiasm of Akenside, and turned it to the cookery of the Antients ! * This word, not frequently used, is necessary to the language. We have no other substitute for the French Railleur. It is admitted into Johnson's Dic- tionarv. LITERARY RIDICULE. 5 amusing fictions affect the world more than the plain tale that would put them down. They have been exciting our risible emotions, while they were reducing their adversary to contempt otherwise they would not be distinguished from gross slanderers. When the Wit has gained over the laughers on his side, he has struck a blow which puts his adversary hors tie combat. A grave reply can never wound ridicule, which, assuming all forms, has really none. Witty calumny and licentious raillery are airy nothings that float about us, invulnerable from their very nature, like those chimeras of hell which the sword of vEneas could not pierce yet these shadows of truth, these false images, these fictitious realities, have made heroism tremble, turned the elo- quence of wisdom into folly, and bowed down the spirit of honour itself. 6 LITERARY RIDICULE. Not that the legitimate use of Ridicule *s denied : the wisest men have been some of the most exquisite ridiculers ; from So- crates to the Fathers, and from the Fathers to Erasmus, and from Erasmus to Butler and Swift. Ridicule is more efficacious than Argument; when that keen instru- ment cuts, what cannot be untied. I will give some instances. " The Rehearsal" wrote down the unnatural taste for the rhyming heroic tragedies, and brought the nation back from sound to sense, from rant to passion. More important events may be traced in the history of Ridicule. When a certain set of intem- perate Puritans, in the reign of Elizabeth, the ridiculous reformists of abuses in Church and State, congregated themselves under the literary Nom de guerre of Mar- tin Mar-prelate, a stream of libels ran LITERARY RIDICULE. 7 throughout the nation. The grave dis- courses of the Archbishop and the Prelates could never silence the hardy and concealed libellers. They employed a moveable printing-press, and the publishers perpe- tually shifting their place, long escaped detection*. They declared their works were " printed in Europe, not far from some of the bouncing Priests ;" or they were " printed over sea, in Europe, with- in two furlongs of a bouncing Priest, at * Never did sedition travel so fast, nor conceal itself so closely. The press which printed these books was first set up near Kingston in Surrey, thence conveyed into Northamptonshire, thence to Norton, and afterwards to Coventry ; thence into another part of Warwickshire, whence the letters were sent to another press at Manchester, where the snake was at length scotched by the Earl of Derby, hard at work on one of their most popular libels. See Sir G. Pauls Life of Whitgift. 8 LITERARY RIDICULE. the cost and charges of Martin Mar-pre- late, Gent." It was then that Tom Nash, whom I am about to introduce to the reader's more familiar acquaintance, the most exquisite banterer of that age of genius, turned on them their own wea- pons, and annihilated them into silence when they found themselves paid in their own base coin. He rebounded their po- pular ribaldry on themselves, with such replies as " Pap with a hatchet, or a fig for my god-son, or, crack me this nut. To be sold, at the sign of the Crab-tree Cudgel, in Thwack-coat lane." Not less biting was his " Almonol for a Parrot, or an Alms for Martin." Nash first silenced Martin Mar-prelate, and the Govern- ment afterwards hanged him ; Nash might be vain of the greater honour. A Ridiculer then is the best champion to meet another LITERARY RIDICULE. O. Ridiculer ; their scurrilities magically undo each other. But the abuse of ridicule is not one of the least calamities of literature, when it withers genius, and gibbets whom it ought to enshrine. Never let us forget that Socrates before his judges asserted, that " his persecution originated in the licensed raillery of Aristophanes, which had so unduly influenced the popular mind during several years !" And thus a ficti- tious Socrates, not the great moralist, was condemned. Armed with the most licen- tious ridicule, the Aretine of our own country and times, has proved that its chief magistrate was not protected by the shield of domestic and public virtues ; a false and distorted image of an intelligent monarch could cozen the gross many, and aid the purposes of the subtile few. 10 LITERARY RIDICULE. There is a plague-spot in ridicule, and the man who is touched with it, can be sent forth as the jest of his country. The family of the Malevoli, who flourished even in the days of Terence, for he has preserved their name by a dedication ad- dressed to them, are still the patrons, if not the relatives, of the Ridiculers. The literary reign of Elizabeth, so fer- tile in every kind of genius, exhibits a remarkable instance, in the controversy between the witty Tom Nash and the learned Gabriel Harvey. It will illus- trate the nature of the fictions of ridicule ; expose the materials of which its shafts are composed ; and the secret arts by which ridicule can level a character which seems to be placed above it. Gabriel Harvey was an author of con- siderable rank, but with two learned bro- LITERARY RIDICULE. 11 thers, as Wood tells us, " had the ill luck to fall into the hands of that noted and restless buffoon Tom Nash." Harvey is not unknown to the lover of poetry, from his connexion with Spenser, who loved and revered him. He is the Hobynol whose poem is prefixed to the Faery Queen, who introduced Spenser to Sir Philip Sidney : and, besides his inti- macy with the literary characters of his times, he was a Doctor of Laws, an eru- dite scholar, and distinguished as a Poet. Such a man could hardly be contemptible ; and yet, when some little peculiarities become aggravated, and his works are touched by the caustic of the most adroit banterer of that age of wit, no character has descended to us with such grotesque deformity, and is exhibited in so ludicrous an attitude. 12 LITERARY RIDICULE. Harvey was a pedant, but pedantry was part of the erudition of an age when our national literature was passing from its infancy ; he introduced hexameter verses into our language, and pompously laid claim to an invention which, designed for the reformation of English verse, was practised till it was found sufficiently ridi- culous. His style was infected with his pedantic taste, and the hard outline of his satirical humour betrays the scholastic cynic, not the airy and fluent wit. He had, perhaps, the foibles of a man who was clearing himself from obscurity ; he prided himself on his family alliances, while he fastidiously looked askaunce on the trade of his father, a rope-manufac- turer. He was somewhat rich in his ap- parel, according to the rank in society he held ; and, hungering after the notice LIXERARY RIDICULE. 13 of his friends, they fed him on soft son- net and relishing dedication, till Har- vey ventured to publish a collection of panegyrics on himself and thus gravely stepped into a niche erected to Vanity. At length he and his two brothers, one a divine and the other a physician, be- came students of astronomy ; but then an astronomer usually ended in an almanack maker, and above all, in an astrologer; an avocation which tempted a man to be- come a prophet. Their " Sharpe and learned judgment on Earthquakes" drove the people out of their senses (says Wood) ; but when nothing happened of their pre- dictions, the brothers received a severe castigation from those great enemies of pro- phets, the wits. The buffoon, Tarle- ton, celebrated for his extempore humour, jested on them at the theatre ; Elderton, 14 LITER4RY RIDICULE. a drunken ballad-maker, " consumed his ale-crammed nose to nothing in bear-bait- ing them with bundles of ballads." One on the Earthquake commenced with " Quake ! quake ! quake !" They made the people laugh at their false terrors, or, as Nash humorously describes their fan- ciful panic, " when they sweated and were not a haire the worse." Thus were the three learned brothers beset by all the town-wits ; Gabriel had the hardihood, with all undue gravity, to charge pell- mell among the whole knighthood of drollery ; a circumstance probably alluded to by Spenser, in a Sonnet addressed to Harvey : " Harvey, the happy above happier men, I read ; that sitting like a looker-on Of this worlde's stage, dost note with critique pen The sharp dislikes of each condition; And, as one carelesse of suspition, LITERARY RIDICULE. 15 Ne fawnest for the favour of the great ; Ne fear -est foolish reprehension Of faulty men, which daunger to thee threat, But freely doest of what thee list, entreat, Like a great lord of peerlesse liberty. " The " foolish reprehension of faulty men, threatening Harvey with danger," describes that gregarious herd of town- wits in the age of Elizabeth ; Kit Marlow, Robert Greene, Dekker, Nash, &c. ; men of no moral principle, of high passions, and the most pregnant Lucianic wits who ever flourished at one period*. Unfortu- nately for the learned Harvey, his " cri- tique pen," which is strange in so polished * Harvey, in the title-page of his " Pierce's Su- pererogation," has placed an emblematic wood-cut, expressive of his own confidence, and his contempt of the wits. It is a lofty palm-tree, with its durable and impenetrable trunk j at its feet lie a heap of 16 LITERARY RIDICULE. a mind and so curious a student, indulged a sharpness of invective which would have been peculiar to himself, had his adver" sary, Nash, not quite outdone him. Mar- syas did not endure a more memorable flaying from the divinity of wit, than was inflicted on Harvey by Nash. He was ridiculed to his grave ! Their pamphlets foamed against each other, till Nash, in his vehement invective, involved the whole generation of the Harveys, made one brother more ridiculous than the other, and even attainted the fair name of Ga- briel's respectable sister. Gabriel, indeed, after the death of Robert Greene, the serpents, darting their tongues, and filthy toads, in vain attempting to pierce or to pollute it. The Ita- lian motto, wreathed among the branches of the palm, declares, 11 vostro malignare non giova nulla ; Your malignity avails nothing. LITERARY RIDICULE. 1 J crony of Nash, sitting like a vampire on his grave, sucked blood from his corpse, in a memorable narrative of the de- baucheries and miseries of this town-wit. I throw into the note the most awful sa- tirical address I ever read*. It became necessary to dry up the floodgates of these rival ink-horns, by an order of the Arch- * Among those Sonnets, in Harvey's " Foure Letters, and certaine Sonnets, especially touch- ing Robert Greene and other parties by him abused, 159*2," there is one, which, with great originality of conception, has an equal vigour of style, and causticity of satire, on Robert Greene's death. John Harvey the physician, who had died before, is thus made to address the town-wit, and the libeller of himself and his family. If Gabriel was the writer of this singular Sonnet, as he un- doubtedly is of the verses to Spenser, subscribed Ho- bynol, it must be confessed he is a Poet, which he never appears in his English hexameters : VOL. II. C 18 LITERARY RIDICULE. bishop of Canterbury. The order is a remarkable fragment of our literary his- tory, and is thus expressed ; " that all Nashe's bookes and Dr. Harvey's bookes be taken wheresoever they may be found, and that none of the said bookes be ever printed hereafter." This extraordinary circumstance ac- John Harvey the Physician's Welcome to Robert Greene ! " Come, fellow Greene, come to thy gaping grave, Bid Vanity and Foolery farewell, That ouerlong hast plaid the mad-brained knaue, And ouerloud hast rung the bawdy bell. Vermine to vermine must repair at last ; No fitter house for busie folke to dwell ; Thy conny-catching pageants are past *, Some other must those arrant stories tell : * Greene had written " The Art of Coney-catching," a great adept in the arts of a town-life. LITERARY RIDICULE. 19 counts for the excessive rarity of Har- vey's " Foure Letters, 15.02," and that li- terary scourge of Nash's, " Have with you to Saffron-Walden (Harvey's resi- dence), or Gabriel Harvey's hunt is vp, 1596*;" pamphlets now as costly as if they consisted of leaves of gold. I now proceed to give some account of this literary invective. Nash, who, in his other works, writes in a style as flowing as Addison's, without an obsolete vestige, has rather injured the present composition, by the evident burlesque he affects of These hungry wormes thinke long for their repast ; Come on ; I pardon thy offence to me ; It was thy living ; be not so aghast ! A Fool and a Physitian may agree ! And for my brothers never vex thyself ; They are not to disease a buried elfe." C 2 20 LITERARY RIDICULE. Harvey's pedantic idiom ; and for this Mr. Malone has hastily censured him, without recollecting the aim of this mo- dern Lucian*. The delicacy of irony; the sous-entendu, that subtilty of indicating what is not told ; all that poignant satire, which is the keener for its polish, were not practiced by our first vehement satir- * Nash was a great favourite with the Wits of his day. One calls him " our true English Aretine," another, " Sweet satyric Nash," a third describes his Muse as " armed with a gag-tooth (a tusk), and his pen possessed with Hercules's furies.*' He is well characterised in " The Return from Parnassus." " His style was witty, tho' he had some gall ; Something he might have mended, so may all ! Yet this I say, that for a mothers wit, Few men have ever seen the like of it." Nash abounds with " Mother-wit ;" but he was also educated at the University, with every advantage of classical studies. LITERARY RIDICULE. 21 ists ; but a bantering masculine humour, a style stamped in the heat of fancy, with all the life-touches of strong individuality, characterise these licentious wits. They wrote then as the old Jabliers told their tales, naming every thing by its name; our refinement cannot approve, but it cannot diminish their real nature, and among our elaborate graces, their naivete must be still wanting;. In this literary satire Nash has inter- woven a kind of ludicrous biography of Harvey ; and seems to have anticipated the character of Martinus Scriblerus. I leave the grosser parts of this invective untouched ; for my business is not with slander, but with ridicule. He opens as a skilful lampooner; he knew well that ridicule, without the ap- 22 LITERARY RIDICULE. pearance of Truth, was letting fly an ar- row upwards, touching no one. Nash accounts for his protracted silence by adroitly declaring, that he had taken these two or three years to get perfect in- telligence of Harvey's " Life and conversation ; one true point whereof well sat downe will more excruciate him than knocking him about the ears with his own style in a hundred sheets of paper." And with great humour says, " As long as it is, since he writ against me, so long have I given him a lease of his life, and he hath only held it by my mercy ; and now let him thank his friends for this heavy load of disgrace I lay upon him, since I do it but to shew my sufficiency ; and they urging what a triumph he had over me, hath made me ransack my standish more than I would." LITERARY RIDICULE. 23 In the history of such a literary hero as Gabriel, the birth has ever been attended by portents. Gabriel's mother " dreamt a dream," that she was delivered " of an immense elder-gun, that can shoot nothing but pellets of chewed paper, and thought, instead of a boy, she was brought to bed of one of those kistrell birds, called a Wind-sucker." At the moment of his birth came into the world " a calf with a double tongue and eares, longer than any asse's, with his feet turned backwards." Facetious analogies of Gabriel's literary genius ! He now paints to the life the grotesque portrait of Harvey ; so that the man him- self stands alive before us. " He was of an adust swarth choleric dye, like restie bacon, cfr a dried scate-fish ; his skin riddled and 24 LITERARY RIDICULE. crumpled like a piece of burnt parchment, with channels and creases in his face, and wrinkles and frets of old age." Nash dex- terously attributes this premature old age to his own talents, exulting humour- ously, " I have brought him low, and shrewdly broken him ; look on his head, and you shall find a gray haire for euerie line I have writ against him ; and you shall haue all his beard white too by the time he hath read ouer this booke." To give a finishing to the portrait, and to reach the climax of personal con- tempt, he paints the sordid misery in which he lived at Saffron- Walden : " Enduring more hardness than a camell, who will Hue four dayes without water, and feedes on nothing but thistles and wormwood, as he feeds on his estate on trotters, sheep- LITERARY RIDICULE. 25 porknells, and buttered rootes, in an hexa- meter meditation." In his Venetian velvet and pantofles of Pride, we are told, " He looks, indeed, like a case of tooth- pickes, or a lute-pin stuck in a suit of apparell. An Vsher of a dancing schoole, he is such a basia de vmbra de vmbra de los pedes ; a kisser of the shadow of your feetes shadow he is !" This is, doubtless, a portrait resembling the original, with its Cervantic touches; Nash would not have risked what the eyes of his readers would instantly have proved to be fictitious ; and, in fact, though the Grangerites know of no portrait of Ga- briel Harvey, they will find a wooden cut of him by the side of this description ; it is, indeed, in a most pitiable attitude, ex- pressing that gripe of criticism which 26 LITERARY RIDICULE. seized on Gabriel " upon the news of the going in hand of my booke." The ponderosity and prolixity of Ga- briel's " period of a mile/' are described with a facetious extravagance, which may be given as a specimen of the eloquence of Ridicule. Harvey intituled his various pamphlets " Letters." " More letters yet from the Doctor ? Out upon it, here's a packet of Epistling, as bigge as a packe of woollen cloth, or a stack of salt fish. Carrier, didst thou bring it by wayne, or by horsebacke ? By wayne, Sir, and it hath crackt me three axle-trees. Ileavie newes ! Take them again ! I will never open them. My cart (quoth he deep-sighing) hath cryde creake under them fortie times euerie furlong ; wherefore if you be a good man rather make mud-walls with them, mend highways, or damme up quagmires with them. LITERARY RIDICULE. 27 " When I came to unrip and unbumbast this Gargantuan bag pudding, and found nothing in it but dogs tripes, swines livers, oxe galls, and sheepes guts, I was in a bit- terer chafe than anie cooke at a long sermon, when his meat burnes. "O 'tis an vnsconscionable vast gor-bellied volume, bigger bulkt than a Dutch hoy, and more cumbersome than a pay re of Switzer's galeaze breeches.'' And in the same ludicrous style he writes, "One epistle thereof to John Wolfe (Harvey's Printer) I took and weighed in an Ironmon- ger's scale, and it counter poyseth a cade * of herrings with three Holland cheeses. It was rumoured about the Court that the guard meant to trie masteries with it before the Queene, and instead of throwing the sledge, or * A cade is 500 herrings ; a great quantity of an article of no value ! 28 LITERARY RIDICULE. the hammer, to hurie it foorth at the armes end for a wager. " Sixe and thirtie sheets it comprehendeth, which with him is but sixe and thirtie full points (periods) ; for he makes no more difference 'twixt a sheet of paper and a full pointe, than there is twixt two black puddings for a pen- nie, and a pennie for a pair of black puddings. Yet these are but the shortest prouerbesof his wit, for he never bids a man good morrow, but he makes a speech as long as a proclama- tion, nor drinkes to anie, but he reads a lecture of three howers long, de Arte bibendi. O 'tis a precious apothegmatical pedant." It was the foible of Harvey to wish to conceal the humble avocation of his Father: this forms a perpetual source of the bitterness or the pleasantry of Nash, who, indeed, calls his pamphlet '* a full answer to the eldest son of the halter- maker/' which, he says, " is death to Gabriel LITERARY RIDICULE. 20 to remember; wherefore from time to time he doth nothing but turmoile his thoughts how to invent new pedigrees, and what great nobleman's bastard he was likely to be, not whose sonne he is reputed to be. Yet he would not have a shoo to put on his foote if his father had not traffiqued with the hangman. Harvey nor his brothers cannot bear to be called the sonnes of a rope-maker, which by his private confes- sion to some of my friends, was the only thing that most set him afire against me. Turne over his two bookes he hath published against me, wherein he hath clapt paper God's plentie, if that could press a man to death, and see if, in the waye of answer, or otherwise, he once mention the word rope-maker, or come within forty foot of it ; except in one place of his first booke, where he nameth it not 30 LITERARY RIDICULE. neither, but goes thus cleanly to worke : ' and may not a good sonne have a repro- bate for his father ?* a periphrase of a rope- maker, which, if I should shryue myself, I never heard before." According to Nash, Gabriel took his oath before a justice that his father was an honest man, and kept his sons at the Universities a long time. (( I confirmed it, and added, Ay ! which is more, three proud sonnes, that when they met the hangman, their father's best cus- tomer, would not put off their hats to him" Such repeated raillery on this foible of Harvey touched him more to the quick, and raised the public laugh, than any other point of attack ; for it was merited. Another foible was, perhaps, the finical richness of Harvey's dress, adopting the Italian fashions on his return from Italy, LITERARY RIDICULE. . 31 " when he made no bones of taking the wall of Sir Philip Sidney, in his black Venetian velvet." On this the fertile in- vention of Nash raises a scandalous anec- dote concerning Gabriel's wardrobe ; " a tale of his hobby-horse reuelling and domi- neering at Audley-end, when the Queen was there ; to which place Gabriel came ruffling it out, hufty tufty, in his suit of veluet " which he had " untrussed, and pelted the outside from the lining of an old velvet saddle he had borrowed!'' " The rotten mould of that worm-eaten relique, he means, when he dies, to hang it over his tomb for a monument *." Harvey was * This unlucky Venetian velvet coat of Harvey's had also produced a." quippe for an Vpstart Courtier, or a quaint dispute between Veluet-breeches and Cloth-breeches," which poor Harvey declares was 32 LITERARY RIDICULE. proud of his refined skill in " Tuscan au- thors," and too fond of their worse conceits. Nash alludes to his travels in Italy, " to fetch him two pennyworth of Tuscan- ism, quite renouncing his natural Eng- lish accents and gestures, wrested himself wholly to the Italian punctilios, painting himself like a courtezan, till the Queen de- clared, " he looked something like an Italian!" At which he roused his plumes, pricked his ears, and run away with the bridle betwixt his teeth." These were ma- licious tales, to make his adversary con- temptible, whenever the merry wits at court were willing to sharpen themselves on him. " one of the mo3t licentious and intolerable invec- tives." This blow had been struck by Greene on the " Italianated" Courtier. LITERARY RIDICULE. 33 One of the most difficult points of at- tack was to break through that bastion of sonnets and panegyrics with which Har- vey had fortified himself by the aid of his friends, against the assaults of Nash. Harvey had been commended by the learned or the ingenious. Our Lucian, with his usual adroitness, gets rid of the suf- frage of the Great, since he could not deny Harvey's intimacy with Spenser and Sid- ney, by this malicious sarcasm, " it is a miserable thing for a man to be said to have had friends, and now to have neer a one left !" As for the others, whom Harvey calls " his gentle and liberall friends," Nash boldly caricatures the grotesque crew, as " tender itchie brained infants, that cared not what they did, so they might come in print; worthless whippets, and jackstraws, who meeter it in his VOL. II. D 34 LITERARY RIDICULE. commendation, whom he would compare with the highest." The works of these young writers he describes by an image exquisitely ludicrous and satirical : " These mushrumpes, who pester the world with their pamphlets, are like those barbarous people in the hot countries, who, when they have bread to make, doe no more than clap the dowe upon a post on the outside of their houses, and there leave it to the sun to bake; so their indigested conceipts, far rawer than anie dowe, at all adventures upon the post they clap, pluck them off who will, and think they have made as good a batch of poetrie as may be." Of Harvey's list of friends he observes, " To a bead-roll of learned men and lords, he appeals, whether he be an asse or no?" Harvey had said, "Thomas Nash, from the top of his wit looking down upon simple LITERARY RIDICULE. 35 creatures, calleth Gabriel Harvey a dunce, a foole, an ideot, a dolt, a goose-cap, an asse, and so forth ; for some of the residue is not to be spoken but with his owne mannerly mouth; but he should have shewed particu- larlie which wordes in my Letters were the wordes of a dunce ; which sentences the sen- tences of a foole ; which arguments the argu- ments of an ideot; which opinions the opi- nions of a dolt; which judgments the judgments of a goose-cap; which conclusions the con- clusions of an asse *." Thus Harvey reasons, till he becomes unreasonable ; one would have imagined that the literary satires of our English Lucian had been voluminous enough, without the mathematical demonstra- tion. The banterers seem to have put poor * Pierce's Supererogation, or a new praise of the Old Asse, 1593. D 2 36 LITERARY RIDICULE. Harvey nearly out of his wits ; he and his friends felt their blows too profoundly ; they were much too thin-skinned, and the solemn air of Harvey in his graver moments at their menaces is extremely ludicrous. They frequently called him Gabrielissime Gabriel, which quintessence of himself seems to have mightily affected him. They threatened to confute his letters till eternity which seems to have put him in despair. The following passage, descriptive of Gabriel's distresses, may excite a smile. " This grand confuter of my letters says, 'Ga- briel, if there be any wit or industrie in thee, now I will dare it to the vttermost; write of what thou wilt, in what language thou wilt, and I will confute it, and ansvvere it. Take Truth's part, and I will proouve truth to be no truth, marching ovt of thy dung-voiding mouth.' LITERARY RIDICULE. 37 He will never leave me as long as he is able to lift a pen, ad infinitum ; if I reply, he has a rejoinder ; and for my brief triplication, he is prouided with a quadruplication, and so he mangles my sentences, hacks my arguments, wrenches my words, chops and changes my phrases, even to the disjoyning and disloca- tion of my whole meaning." Poor Harvey ! he knew not that there was nothing real in Ridicule ; no end to its merry malice ! Harvey's taste for hexameter verses, which he so unnaturally forced into our language, is admirably ridiculed. Har- vey had shewn his taste for these metres, by a variety of poems, to whose subjects Nash thus sarcastically alludes : " It had grown with him into such a dicti- onary custom, that no may-pole in the street, no wether-cocke on anie church-steeple, no ar- bour, no lavvrell, no yevve-tree, he would ouer- 3 8 LITERARY RIDICULE. skip, without hayling in this manner. After supper, if he chancst to play at cards with a queen of harts in his hands, he would run upon men's and women's hearts all the night." And he happily introduces here one of the miserable hexameter conceits of Harvey, " Stout hart and sweet hart, yet stoutest hart to be stooped." Harvey's Encomium Lauri thus ridi- culously commences '< What might I call this tree ? A lawrell ? O bonny lawrell, Needes to thy bowes will I bow this knee, and vayle my bonettoj" which Nash most happily burlesques by describing Harvey under a yew-tree at Trinity-hall, composing verses on the wea- ther-cock of Allhallows in Cambridge : LITERARY RIDICULE. 39 f* O thou wether-cocke that stands on the top of All-hallows, Come thy waies down, if thou darst, for thy crowne, and take the wall on us." " The hexameter verse (says Nash) I graunt to be a gentleman of an auncient house, (so is many an English beggar), yet this clyme of our's hee cannot thrive in v ; our speech is too craggy for him to set his plough in ; hee goes twitching and hopping in our language, like a man running vpon quagmires, vp the hill in one syllable and down the dale in another, retaining no part of that stately smooth gate which he vaunts himself with amongst the Greeks and Latins." The most humourous part in this Scribleriad, is a ludicrous narrative of Harvey's expedition to the metropolis, for the sole purpose of writing his " Pierce's Supererogation," pitted against Nash's 40 LITERARY RIDICULE. " Pierce Pennilesse." The facetious Nash describes the torpor and pertinacity of his genius, by telling us he had kept Harvey at work, " For seaven and thirtie weekes space while he lay at his printer's, Wolfe, never stirring out of doors, or being churched all that while and that in the deadest season that might bee, hee lying in the ragingest furie of the last plague where there dyde above 1600 a weeke in London, ink-squittring and sara- cenically printing against mee. Three quar- ters of a year thus immured hee remained, with his spirits yearning empassionment, and agonised fury, thirst of revenge, neglecting soul and bodies health to compasse it sweat- ing and dealing upon it most intentively." The narrative proceeds with the many pe- rils which Harvey's printer encountered, by expence of diet, and printing for this bright genius and his friends, whose works i( would LITERARY RIDICULE. 41 rust and iron-spot paper to have their names breathed over it ;" and that Wolfe designed " to get a privilege betimes, for- bidding of all others to sell waste-paper but himselfe." The climax of the nar- rative, after many misfortunes, end with Harvey being arrested by the Printer, and confined to Newgate, where " his sword is taken from him, to his perpetual disgrace." So much did Gabriel endure for having written a book against Tom Nash ! But Harvey might deny some of these ludicrous facts Will he deny, cries Nash and here he has woven every tale the most watchful malice could collect, var- nished for their full effect. Then he adds, " You see I have brought the Doctor out of request at Court ; aud it shall cost me a fall, but I will get him hovvted out of the 42 LITERARY RIDICULE. Vniuersitie too, ere 1 giue him ouer." He tells us Harvey was brought on the Stage at Trinity-college, in the exquisite Comedie of Pedantius, where, under " the finical fine schoolmaster, the just manner of his phrase, they stufft his mouth with, and the whole buf- fianisme throughout his bookes, they bol- stered out his part with euen to the carrying of his gowne, his nice gate in his pantofles, or the affected accent of his speech Let him deny that there was a shewe made at Clare- hall of him and his brothers, called Tarrarantantara turba tumultuosa Trigonum Tri-Harueyorum Tri-harmonia ; and another shewe of the little minnow his brother, at Peters house, called Duns furens, Dick Haruey in a frensie. Whereupon Dick came and broke the col- lege glass windows, and Dr. Perne caused him to be set in the stoekes till the shewe was ended." LITERARY RIDICULE. 43 . This "Duns furens, Dick Harvey in a frensie," was himself a learned professor, the brother of one who ranked high in so- ciety and literature. Nash describes him as " Pigmey Dick, that lookes like a pound of goldsmiths' candles, who had like to com- mit folly last year with a milk-maid, as a friend of his very soberly informed me. Little, and little- wittied Dick that hath vowed to live and die in defence of Brutus and his Trojans*." An Herculean feat of this " Duns furens," Nash tells us, was his setting Aristotle with his heels upwards on the school gates at Cambridge, and put- ting asses ears on his head, which Tom * He had written an antiquarian work on the de- scent of Brutus on our island. The party also, who at the University attacked the opinions of Aristotle, were nick-named the Trojans, as determined enennes of the Greeks. 44 LITERARY RIDICULE. here records in perpetuam rei memoriant. But Wood, our grave and keen literary antiquary, observes, " To let pass other matters these vain men (the wits) report of Richard Harvey, his works shew him quite another person than what they make him to be." Nash then forms a ludicrous contrast between " witless Gabriel and ruffling Richard." The astronomer Richard was continually baiting the great bear in the firmament, and in his lectures set up athe- istical questions, which Nash maliciously adds, " as 1 am afraid the earth would swallow me, if I should but rehearse." And at his close Nash bitterly regrets he has no more room ; i( else I should make Gabriel a fugitive out of England, being the rauenousest siouen that ever lapt por- redge in noblemen's houses, where he has LITERARY RIDICULE. 45 had already, out of two, his mittimus of Ye may be gone ! for he was a sower of sedi- tious paradoxes amongst kitchin-boys." Nash seems to have considered himself as terrible as an Archilochus, whose satires were so fatal as to induce the sati- rized, after having read them, to hang themselves. How ill poor Harvey passed through these wit-duels, and how profoundly the wounds inflicted on him and his brothers were felt, appears by his own confessions. In his " Foure Letters," after some curious observations on invectives and satires, from those of Archilochus, Liician, and Aretine, to Skelton and Scoggin, and " the whole venemous and viperous brood of old and new raylers," he proceeds to blame even his beloved friend the gentle Spenser, for the severity of his " Mother Hubbard's 46 LITERARY RIDICULE. tale," a satire on the court. " I must needes say, Mother Hubbard in heat of choller, for- getting the pure sanguine of her Sweete Feary Queene, artfully ouershott her malcon- tent-selfe; as elsewhere I have specified at large, with the good leaue of vnspotted friend- snip. Sallust and Clodius learned of Tully to frame artificiall declamations and patheticall invectives against Tully himselfe; if Mother Hubbard, in the vaine of Chawcer, happen to tel one canicular tale, father Elderton and his son Greene, in the vaine of Skelton or Scoggin, will counterfeit an hundred dogged fables, libles, slaunders, lies, for the whet- stone. But many will sooner lose their Hues than the least jott of their reputation. What mortal feudes, what cruel bloodshed, what terrible slaughterdome have been committed for the point of honour and some few courtly ceremonies." LITERARY RIDICULE. 47 The incidents so plentifully narrated in this Lucianic biography, the very nature of this species of satire throws into doubt ; yet they still seem shadowed out from some truths ; but the truths who can un- ravel from the fictions? And thus a narrative is consigned to posterity, which involves illustrious characters in an inex- tricable net-work of calumny and genius. In these copious extracts I have not no- ticed the more criminal insinuations against the Harveys. Writers of this class have alienated themselves from hu- man kind, they have broken that golden bond which holds them to society; and they live among us like a polished ban- ditti. I have left the grosser slanders un- touched ; I would only trace the effects of Ridicule, and detect its artifices, by which the most dignified characters may be 48 LITERARY RIDICULE. deeply injured, at the pleasure of a Ridi- culer, by aggravating and taunting real im- perfections, and fastening imaginary ones upon them ; and thus the wild mirth of Ridicule, from idle sport or ill humour, strikes at the most brittle thing in the world, a man's good reputation, for deli- cate matters which are not under the pro- tection of the law ; but in which so much of the happiness of man is concerned. LITERARY HATRED. Exhibiting a Conspiracy against an Author. In the peaceful walks of literature, we are startled at discovering genius, with the mind, and, if we conceive the instru- ment it guides to be a stiletto, with the hand, of an Assassin ; irascible, vindictive, armed with indiscriminate satire, and never pardoning the merit of rival genius, but fastening on it throughout life, till, in the moral retribution of human nature, these very passions, by their ungratified cravings, have tended to annihilate the being who fostered them. These passions among literary men, are with none more inextinguishable than among provincial writers. Their bad feelings acquire a re- VOL. If. E 50 LITERARY HATRED. doubled energy from their local contraction. To one of this unhappy turn of temper, the proximity of men of genius seems to produce a familiarity which excites hatred or contempt ; the man afflicted with this disordered passion, imagines he is urging his own claims to genius, by denying them to their possessor. But to devote a whole life in harassing the industry or the genius which he has not obtained; in- stead of running the open career with them, as a competitor, with the same ra- pidity,on!y skulking close on them as an as- sassin this character, indeed, with a purer mind, would have been genius or industry. As it is, the heart of this unhappy being, raging like a volcano, at length burns out, and, in its extinct state, only leaves the recollection of its ravages on itself. LITERARY HATRED. 51 Such a character waS the Author now before us. Dr. Gilbert Stuart seems early in life to have devoted himself to li- terature; but his habits were irregular, and his passions fierce. The celebrity of Ro- bertson, Blair, and Henry, with other Scottish writers, diseased his mind with a most envious rancour. He confined ail his literary efforts to the pitiable motive of destroying theirs ; and the fact is, that he was prompted to every one of his histo- rical works by the mere desire of discredit- ing some work of Robertson ; and his nu- merous critical labours, were directed to an- nihilate all the genius of his country. How he converted his life into its own scourge, wasted talents he might have cultivated into perfection, lost every trace of humanity, and finally perished, devoured by his own fiend- like passions; shall be illustrated by the fol- e 2 52 LITERARY HATRED. lowing narrative, collected from a corre- spondence now lying before me, which the Author carried on for several years with his publisher in London. I shall copy out at some length, the hopes and disap- pointments of the literary adventurer the colours are not mine; I am dipping my pencil in the pallet of the artist himself. In June 1773 was commenced the project of " The Edinburgh Magazine and Review." Stuart's letters breathe the spirit of rapturous confidence, and the first volumes were executed with more talent than the periodical publications of those times had shewn. Stuart had com- bined the sedulous attention of the intel- ligent Smellie, who was also the printer ; and the Review department was divided among them and some very honourable critics ; Professor Baron, Dr. Blacklock, LITERARY HATRED. 53 and Professor Richardson. But the genius of Stuart had not yet betrayed itself to his colleagues; the hardiness of his opinions, his offensive attacks on the Clergy (and that in a country of Presbyters), and the flowing acrimony of his literary libels, in- deed, presented a new feature in Scottish literature, but of such ugliness and horror, that every honourable man soon averted his face from this Boutefeu. He designed to ornament his first number with " A print of my Lord Monboddo in his quad- ruped form. I must therefore most earnestly beg that you will purchase for me a copy of it in some of the Macaroni-print shops. It is not to be procured at Edinburgh. They are afraid to vend it here. We are to take it on the footing of a figure of an animal, not yet described j and are to give a grave, 54 LITERARY HATRED. yet satirical account of it, in the manner of Buffon. It would not be proper to allude to his Lordship, but in a very distant manner." It was not, however, ventured on ~ and the non-descript animal was still con- fined to the windows of " the macaroni- print shops ;" it was however the bloom of the Author's fancy, and promised all the mellow fruits it afterwards produced. In September this ardour did not abate. " The proposals are issued ; the subscriptions in the booksellers shops astonish ; correspond- ents flock in ; and, what will surprise you, the timid proprietors of the Scots Magazine have come to the resolution of dropping their work. You stare at all this, and so do I too." Thus he flatters himself he is to annihi- late his rival, without even striking the first blow ; the appearance of his first number, is to be the moment when their last is to come forth ! Authors, like the LITERARY HATRED. 55 discoverers of mines, are the most sanguine creatures in the world ; Gilbert Stuart afterwards flattered himself Dr. Henry was lying at the point of death, from the scalping of his tomahawk pen but of this anon ! On the publication of the first number in November 1/73, all is exultation; and an account is facetiously expected that " a thousand copies had emigrated from the Row, and Fleet-street." There is a serious composure in the letter of December, which seems to be occasioned by the tempered answer of his London Correspondent. The work was more suited to the meridian of Edinburgh ; and from causes sufficiently obvious, its personality and causticity. Stuart, how- ever, assures his friend, that " the second number you will find better than the first, and the third better than the second." 56' LITERARY HATRED. The ne:;t letter is dated March 4, 1774, in which I find our Author still in good spirits. " The Magazine rises, and promises much, in this quarter. Our Artillery has silenced all opposition. The rogues of the ' uplifted hands' decline the combat." These rogues are the Clergy; and some others, who had " uplifted hands" from the vituperative nature of their adversary; for he teils us, that " now the Clergy are silent, the Town-council have had the presumption to oppose us ; and have threatened Creech (the publisher in Edin- burgh) with the terror of making him a con- stable, for his insolence. A pamphlet on the abuses of Heriot's hospital, including a direct proof of perjury in the Provost, was the punishment inflicted in return. And new papers are forging to chastise them in regard to the poor's rate, which is again started; the improper choice of Professors ; and violent LITERARY HATRED. 57 stretches of the impost. The Liberty of the Press in its fullest extent is to be employed against them. 1 ' Such is the language of Reform, and the spirit of a Reformist ! A little private malignity, thus ferments a good deal of public spirit but patriotism must be inde- pendent, to be pure. If the Edinburgh Review continues to succeed in its sale, as Stuart fancies, Edinburgh itself may be in some danger. His perfect contempt of his contemporaries is amusing ; " Monboddo's second volume is published, and, with Kaimes, will appear in our next; the former is a childish performance ; the latter rather better. We are to treat them with a o-ood deal of freedom. I observe an amazing falling off in the English Reviews. We beat them hollow. I fancy they have no assistance but from the Dissenters, a dull body of men. The Monthly will not easily 58 LITERARY HATRED. recover the death of Havvkesworth ; and I suspect that Langhorne has forsaken them for 1 see no longer his pen." We are now hastening to the sudden, and the moral catastrophe of our tale. The thousand copies the author flattered his genius with emigrating to London, remained here in an innocent state, little disturbed by public enquiry ; the per- sonal animosity against almost every lite- rary character in Scotland, which had inflamed the sale, became naturally the latent cause of its extinction ; for its life there had but a feverish existence, and its florid complexion carried with it the seeds of its dissolution. Stuart at length quarrelled with his coadjutor Smellie, for altering his Reviews, and whose prudential dexterity was such, that in an article de- signed to level Lord Kaimes with Lord LITERARY HATRED. 59 Monboddo, the whole libel was completely metamorphosed into a panegyric. They were involved in a law-suit about " a blas- phemous paper." And now the enraged Zoilus complains of " his hours of peevishness and dissatisfaction." He ac- knowledges that " a circumstance had happened, which had broke his peace and ease altogether for some weeks." And now he resolves that this great work shall quietly sink into a mere compilation from the London periodical works. Such then is the progress of malignant genius ! The Author, like Phalaris, is writhing in that machine of tortures he had invented for others. We now come to a very remarkable passage - it is the frenzied language of disappointed wickedness ! 60 LITERARY HATRED. " 17 June, 1774; " It is an infinite disappointment to me, that the Magazine does not grow in London ; I thought the soil had been richer. But it is my constant fate to be disappointed in every thing I attempt ; I do not think I ever had a wish that was gratified ; and never dreaded an event that did not come. With this felicity of fate, I wonder how the devil I could turn projector. I am now sorry that I left London ; and the moment that I have money enough to carry me back to it, I shall set off. I mor- tally detest and abhor this place, and every body in it. Never was there a city where there was so much pretension to knowledge, and that had so little of it. The solemn foppery, and the gross stupidity of the Scottish literati, are perfectly insupportable. I shall drop my idea of a Scots Newspaper. Nothing will do in this country that has common sense in it ; only cant, hypocrisy, and superstition, will LITERARY HATRED. 6l flourish here. A curse on the country y and all the men j women, and children of it. 1 " Again " The publication is too good for the country. There are very few men of taste or erudition on this side the Tweed. Yet every idiot one meets with, lays claim to both. Yet the success of the Magazine is in reality greater than we could expect, consi- dering that we have every Clergyman in the kingdom to oppose it; and that the Magistracy of the place are every moment threatening its destruction." And, therefore, this recreant Scot, ana- thematizes the Scottish people ! for not rendering fashionable, blasphemy, ca- lumny, and every species of literary cri- minality. Such are the monstrous pas- sions that swell out the poisonous breast of genius, deprived of every moral restraint ; and such was the demoniac irritability 6*2 LITERARY HATRED. which prompted a wish in Collot d' Her- bois to set fire to the four quarters of the eity of Lyons ; while, in his " tender mercies," the kennels of the streets were running with the blood of its inhabitants remembering still that the Lyonese had, when he was a miserable actor, hissed him off the stage ! Stuart curses his country, and retreats to London. Fallen, but not abject ; re- pulsed, but not altered ; degraded, but still haughty. No change of place could operate any in his heart. He was born in literary crime, and he perished in it. It was now " The English Review" was instituted, with his idol Whitaker, the his- torian of Manchester, and others. He says, " to Whitaker he assigns the palm of history in preference to Hume and Robert- son." I have heard that he considered LITERARY HATRED. 6$ himself higher than Whitaker, and ranked himself with Montesquieu. He negotiated for Whitaker and himself a doctor of laws degree; and they were now in the titular possession of all the fame which a dozen pieces could bestow ! But to return to " The English Review," in which broke forth all the genius of Stuart in an un- natural warfare of Scotchmen in London against Scotchmen at Edinburgh. " The bitter herbs," which seasoned it against Blair, Robertson, Gibbon, and the first authors of the age, at first provoked the public appetite, which afterwards indig- nantly rejected the palatable garbage. I am now to exhibit the singular spec- tacle of a Literary Conspiracy. It was conducted by Stuart, with a pertinacity of invention, perhaps not to be paralleled 64 LITERARY HATRED. in literary history. That he succeeded for a considerable time in destroying the peace of mind of such an industrious au- thor as Dr. Henry ; that Stuart stopped the sale of a work on which Henry had expended much of his fortune and his life ; that when the Historian, covered with ob- loquy and ridicule, in despair left Edin- burgh for London, still encountering the same hostility perhaps was never even known to its victim. The multiplied forms of this Proteus of the Malevoli, were still but one Devil ; fire or water, or a bull or a lion ; still it was the same Pro- teus, the same Stuart. From this correspondence I am enabled to collect the commencement and the end of this literary conspiracy, with all its in- termediate links. It first appears that, LITERARY HATRED. 6$ " 25 Nov. 1773. " We have been attacked from different quarters, and Dr. Henry in particular has given a long and a dull defence of his Sermon. I have replied to it, with a degree of spirit, altogether unknown in this country. The reverend historian was perfectly astonished ; and has actually invited the Society for pro- pagating Christian Knowledge to arm in his cause ! I am about to be persecuted by the whole Clergy, and 1 am about to persecute them in my turn. They are hot and zealous ; I am cool and dispassionate, like a determined sceptic: since I have entered the lists, I must fight ; I must gain the victory, or perish like a man." " 13 Dec. 1773. " David Hume wants to review Henry ; but that task is so precious that I will undertake it myself. Moses, were he to ask it as a favour, should not have it ; yea, not even the man after God's own heart." VOL. II. F 66 LITERARY HATRED. " 4 March, 1774. "This month Henry is utterly demolished; his sale is stopt, many of his copies are re- turned ; and his old friends have forsaken him ; pray in what state is he in London ? Henry has delayed his London journey ; you cannot easily conceive how exceedingly he is hum- bled * * It may be curious to present Stuart's idea of the literary talents of Henry. Henry's unhappy turn for humour, and a style little accordant with historical dignity, lie fairly open to the critic's anamadver- sion. But the research and application of the writer, which, at that day, were considerable, extracted high commendations. But we are told that " he neither furnishes entertainment nor instruction. Diffuse, vulgar, and ungrammatical, he strips history of all her ornaments. As an antiquary, he wants accuracy and knowledge ; and, as an historian, he is destitute of fire, taste, and sentiment. His work is a gazette, in which we find actions and events, without their causes ; and in which we meet with the names, LITERARY HATRED. 6*7 " I wish I could transport myself to London to review him for the Monthly. A fire there, and in the Critical, would perfectly annihi- late him. Could you do nothing in the latter? To the former I suppose David Hume has transcribed the Criticism he intended for us. It is precious, and would divert you. I keep a proof of it in my cabinet, for the amusement of friends. This great philosopher begins to doat*." Stuart prepares to assail Henry, on his arrival in London, from various quarters without the characters, of personages. He has amassed all the refuse and lumber of the times he would record." Stuart never imagined that the time would arrive, when the name of Henry wOttld be familiar to English readers, and by many that of Stuart would not be recollected. * The Critique on Henry, in the Monthly Review, was written by Hume and, because the philosopher was candid, he is here said to have doated. F2 68 EITERARY HATRED. to lower the value of his history in the estimation of the purchasers. "21 March, 1774. " To-morrow morning Henry sets off for London, with immense hopes of selling his History. I wish he had delayed till our last Review of him had reached your city. But I really suppose that he has little probability of getting any gratuity. The trade are too sharp to give precious gold for perfect non- sense. I wish sincerely that I could enter Holborn the same hour with him. He should have a repeated fire to combat with. I in- treat that you may be so kind as to let him feel some of your thunder. I shall never forget the favour. If Whitaker is in London, he could give a blow. Paterson will give him a knock. Strike by all means. The wretch will tremble, grow pale, and return with a consciousness of his debility. I intreat I may hear from you a day or two after you have seen LITERARY HATRED. 69 him. He will complain grievously of me to Strahan and Rose. I shall send you a paper about him ; an advertisement from Parnassus, in the manner of Boccalini." "March, 1774. " Dr. Henry has by this time reached you. I think you ought to pay your respects to him in the Morning Chronicle. If you would only transcribe his jests, it would make him perfectly ridiculous. See for example, what he says of St. Dunstan. A word to the wise.'* "March 27, 1774. *' I have a thousand thanks to give you for your insertion of the paper in the London Chronicle ; and for the part you propose to act in regard to Henry. I could wish that you knew for certain his being in London be-* fore you strike the first blow. An inquiry at Cadell's will give this. When you have an enemy to attack, I shall in return give my best assistance, and aim at him a mortal blow, and 70 LITERARY HATRED. rush forward to his overthrow, though the flames of hell should start up to oppose me. " It pleases me, beyond what I can express, that Whitaker has an equal contempt for Henry. The idiot threatened, when he left Edinburgh, that he would find a method to manage the Reviews, and that he would oppose their panegyric to our censure. Hume has behaved ill in the affair, and I am preparing to chastise him. You may expect a series of papers in the Magazine, pointing out a multitude of his errors, and ascertaining his ignorance of English history. It was too much for my temper to be assailed both by infidels and believers. My pride could not submit to it. I shall act in my defence with a spirit which it seems they have not expected.'* " Jl April, 1774. " I received, with infinite pleasure, the annunciation of the great man into the ca- pital. It is forcible and excellent ; and you LITERARY. HATRED. 71 have my best thanks for it. You improve amazingly. The poor creature will be stu* pified with amazement. Inclosed is a paper for him. Boccalini will follow. I shall fall *ipon a method to let David know Henry's transaction about his Review. It is mean to the last degree. But what could one expect from the most ignorant and the most con- temptible man alive ? Do you ever see Mac- farlane ? He owes me a favour for his History of George III. and would give a fire for the Packet. The idiot is to be Moderator for the ensuing Assembly. It shall not, however, be without opposition. " Would the paragraph about him from the inclosed leaf of the Edinburgh Review be any disgrace to the Morning Chronicle ?" "20th May, 1774. " Boccalini I thought of transmitting, when the Rev d Historian, for whose use it was in- tended, made his appearance at Edinburgh. 72 LITERARY HATRED. But it will not be lost. He shall most cer- tainly see it. David's critique was most ac- ceptable. It is a curious specimen in one view of.yisolent vanity, and in another of con- tenwptible meanness. The old Historian be- gins to doat, and the new one was never out of dotage." "3 April, 1775. " I see every day that what is written to a man's disparagement is never forgot nor for- given. Poor Henry is on the point of death, and his friends declare that I have killed him. I received the information as a compliment, and begged they would not do me so much honour." But Henry and his History long sur- vived Stuart and his critiques ; and Ro- bertson, Blair, and Kaimes, with others he assailed, have all taken their due ranks in public esteem. What niche does Stu- LITERARY HATRED. 73 art occupy ? His historical works possess the shew, without the solidity, of research ; hardy paradoxes, and an artificial style of momentary brilliancy, are none of the last- ing materials of history. This shadow of " Montesquieu, " for he conceived him only to be his fit rival, derived the last consolations of life from an obscure corner of a Burton ale-house there, in rival po- tations, with two or three other disap- pointed authors, they regaled themselves on ale they could not always pay for, and recorded their own literary celebrity, which had never taken place. Some time before his death, his asperity was almost softened by melancholy ; with a broken spirit, he reviewed himself; a victim to that unrighteous ambition of literary fame, where he sought to build his grandeur with the ruins of his fellow countrymen ; 74 LITERARY HATRED. having prematurely wasted talents which might have been directed to literary emi- nence. And Gilbert Stuart died as he had lived, a victim to intemperance, phy- sical and moral ! UNDUE SEVERITY OF CRITICISM. Dr. Kenrick Scott of Amwell. We have witnessed the malignant influence of illiberal criticism, not only on literary men, but over literature it- self, since it is the actual cause of sup- pressing works which lie neglected, though completed by their authors. The arts of literary condemnation, as they may be practised by men of wit and arrogance, are well known ; and it is much less diffi- cult than criminal, to scare the modest man of learning, and to rack the man of genius, through all his tremors, in that bright vision of Authorship sometimes in- dulged in the calm of their studies; a generous emotion to inspire a gene- rous purpose! With suppressed indig- nation, shrinking from the press, such j6 UNDUE SEVERITY OF CRITICISM. have condemned themselves to a Carthusian silence; but the public will gain as little by silent Authors, as by a community of lazy monks; or a choir of singers who insist they have lost their voice. That undue severity of criticism which diminishes the number of good authors, is a greater calamity than even that mawkish pane- gyric, which may invite indifferent ones ; for the truth is, a bad book produces no great evil in literature ; it dies soon, and naturally ; and the feeble birth only dis- appoints its unlucky parent, with a score of idlers, who are the dupes of their rage after novelty. A bad book never sells unless it be addressed to the passions, and, in that case, the severest criticism will never impede its circulation ; malignity and cu- riosity being passions so much stronger and less delicate than taste or truth. UNDUE SEVERITY OF CRITICISM. 77 And who are the authors marked out for the attack ? Scarcely one of the po- pulace of scribblers ; for Wit will not lose one silver shaft on game, which, struck, no one would take up. It must level at the Historian, whose novel researches throw a light in the depths of antiquity; on the Poet, who, addressing himself to the imagination, perishes if that sole avenue to the heart be closed on him. Such are some who have received the criticism which has sent some nervous authors to their graves, and embittered the life of many whose talents we all regard*. * So sensible was even the calm Newton to critical attacks, that Whiston tells us he lost his favour, which he had enjoyed for twenty years, for contra- dicting Newton in his old age ; for no man was of " a more fearful temper." Whiston declares that he would not have thought proper to have published his 78 UNDUE SEVERITY OF CRITICISM. But this species of Criticism, though ungenial and nipping at first, does not always kill the tree which it has frozen over. In the calamity before us, Time, that great Autocrat, in its tremendous march, who destroys Authors, also annihilates Critics ; and acting in this instance with a new kind of benevolence, takes up some work against Newton's Chronology in his life-time, " because I knew his temper so well, that I should have expected it would have killed him j as Dr. Bentley, Bishop Stillingfleet's chaplain, told me, that he believed Mr. Locke's thorough confutation of the Bishop's metaphysics about the Trinity, hastened his end." Pope writhed in his chair from the light shafts which Cibber darted on him ; yet they were not tipped with the poison of the Java- tree. Dr. Hawkesworth died of Criticism ; a malady which some would make contagious among authors. Singing-birds cannot live in a storm. UNDUE SEVERITY OF CRITICISM. 79 who have been violently thrown down, to fix them in their proper place ; and Time, daily enfeebling unjust Criticism, has given the promise of his century to a va- lued, though an injured, Author. It is> however, lamentable enough that authors must participate in that courage which faces the cannon's mouth, or cease to be authors ; for military enter- prise is not the taste of modest, retired, and timorous characters. The late Mr. Cumberland used to say, that authors must not be thin-skinned, but shelled like the Rhinoceros ; there are, however, more delicately tempered animals among them ; new-born lambs, who shudder at a touch, and die under a pressure. As for those great authors (though the greatest shrink from ridicule) who still re- tain public favour, they must be patient, 80 UNDUE SEVERITY OF CRITICISM. proud, and fearless patient, of that ob- loquy which still will stain their honour by the malicious memories of literary echoers, who retain to an epithet the de- cisions of the malignant and witty Critic ; proud, while they are sensible that their literary offspring is not " Deform'd, unfinish'd, sent before its time Into this breathing world, scarce half made up.'* Shakespeare's Richard III. And fearless, of all Critics, when they recollect the reply of Bentley to one who threatened to write him down, that " no author was ever written down but by himself: , An author must consider himself as an arrow shot into the world ; his impulse must be stronger than the current of air that carries him on else he falls ! UNDUE SEVERITY OF CRITICISM. 8l The character I had proposed to illus- trate this calamity was the caustic Dr. Kenrick, who, about thirty years ago, during several years, was, in his " London Review," one of the great disturbers of literary repose. The turn of his criti- cism ; the airiness, or the asperity of his sarcasm ; the arrogance with which he treated some of our great authors, would prove very amusing ; and serve to display a certain talent of Criticism. The life of Kenrick too would have afforded some wholesome instruction of the morality of a Critic. But the rich materials are not at hand ! He was a man of talents, who ran a race with the press ; could criticise all the genius of the age faster than it was produced ; could make his own malignity look like wit, and turn the wit of others into absurdity, by placing it topsy-turvy. vol. ii. c 82 UNDUE SEVERITY OF CRITICISM. As thus, when he attacked " The Tra- veller" of Goldsmith, which he called " a flimsy poem," he discussed the subject as a grave, political pamphlet, condemn- ing the whole system, as raised on false principles. " The Deserted Village" was sneeringly pronounced to be " pretty ;" but then it had " neither fancy, dignity, genius, or fire." When he reviewed John- son's " Tour to the Hebrides," he decrees that the whole book was written " by one who had seen but little," and, therefore, could not be very interesting. His viru- lent attack on Johnson's Shakespeare, may be preserved for its total want of literary decency ; and his " Love in the Suds, a town eclogue," where he has placed Garrick with an infamous character, may be useful to shew how far witty malignity will advance in the violation of moral de- UNDUE SEVERITY OF CRITICISM. 83 cency. He libelled all the genius of the age, and was proud of it*. Johnson and Akenside preserved a stern silence ; but poor Goldsmith, the child of Nature, could not resist attempting to execute martial law, by caning the Critic; for which being blamed, he published a de- fence of himself in the papers. I shall transcribe his feelings on Kenrick's ex- cessive and illiberal criticism. " The law gives us no protection against this injury. The insults we receive before the public, by being more open, are the more * In one of his own publications he quotes, with great self-complacency, the following lines on him- self: " The Wits who drink water and suck sugar-candy, Impute the strong spirit of Kenrick to brandy ; They are not so much out j the matter in short is, He sips aqua-vita, and spits aqua-fortis." G 2 84 UNDUE SEVERITY OF CRITICISM. distressing ; by treating them with silent con- tempt, we do not pay a sufficient deference to the opinion of the world. By recurring to legal redress, we too often expose the weak- ness of the law, which only serves to increase our mortification by failing to relieve us. In short, every man should singly consider him- self as a guardian of the liberty of the press, and, as far as his influence can extend, should endeavour to prevent its licentiousness be- coming at last the grave of its freedom." Here then is another calamity arising from the present, which authors bring on themselves by their excessive anxiety, which has thrown them into some ex- tremely ridiculous attitudes ; and sur- prisingly influenced even authors of good sense and temper. Scott of Am well, the Quaker and Poet, was, doubtless, a mo- dest and amiable man, for Johnson de- UNDUE SEVERITY OF CRITICISM. 85 clared " he loved him." When his poems were collected, they were reviewed in the Critical Review ; very offensively to the Poet; for the Critic, alluding to the numerous embellishments of the volume, observed, that " There is a profusion of ornaments and finery about this book, not quite suitable to the plainness and simplicity of the Barclean system ; but Mr. Scott is fond of the Muses, and wishes, we suppose, like Captain Mac- heath, to see his ladies well dressed." Such was the cold affected witticism of the Critic, whom I intimately knew and I believe he meant little harm ! His friends imagined even that this was the solitary attempt at wit he had ever made in his life ; for after a lapse of years, he would still recur to it as an evidence of the felicity of his fancy, and the keenness 86 UNDUE SEVERITY OF CRITICISM. of his satire. The truth is, he was a physician, whose name is prefixed as the editor to a great medical compilation, and who never pretended that he had any taste for poetry. His great art of poetical Cri- ticism was always, as Pope expresses a character, " to dwell in decencies ;" his acumen, to detect that terrible poetic crime false rhymes, and to employ inde- finite terms, which, as they had no precise meaning, were applicable to all things ; to commend, occasionally, a passage not always the most exquisite ; sometimes to hesitate, while, with delightful candour, he seemed to give up his opinion ; to hazard sometimes a positive condemna- tion on parts which often unluckily proved the most favourite with the poet and the reader. Such was this poetical Reviewer, whom no one disturbed \n his UNDUE SEVERITY OF CRITICISM. 87 periodical course, till the circumstance of a plain Quaker becoming a poet, and fluttering in the finical ornaments of his book, provoked hi in from that calm state of innocent mediocrity, into miserable humour, and illiberal Criticism. The effect, however, this pert criti- cism had on poor Scott, was indeed a calamity. It produced an inconsiderate " Letter to the Critical Reviewers." Scott was justly offended at the stigma of Quakerism, applied to the Author of a literary composition ; but too gravely accuses the critic of his scurrilous allusion to Macheath, as comparing him to a highwayman he seems, however, more provoked at the odd account of his poems ; he says, " You rank all my poems together as bad, then discriminate some as good, and, to complete all, re- 88 UNDUE SEVERITY O? CRITICISM. commend the volume as an agreeable and amusing collection." Had the Poet been personally acquainted with this tantalizing Critic, he would have comprehended the nature of the Criticism and certainly would never have replied to it. The Critic, employing one of his inde- finite terms, had said of " Amwell," and some of the early " Elegies," that " they had their share of poetical merit ;" he does not venture to assign the proportion of that share, but " the Amoebean and oriental eclogues, odes, epistles, &c. now added, are of a much weaker feature, and many of them incorrect" Here Scott loses all his dignity as a Quaker and a Poet he asks what the Critic means by the affected phrase much weaker feature ; the style, he says, was designed to be somewhat less elevated ; and thus addresses the Critic : UNDUE SEVERITY OF CRITICISM. 89 " You may, however, be safely defied to pronounce them with truth, deficient either in strength, or melody of versification ! They were designed to be, like Virgil's, de- scriptive of Nature, simple and correct. Had you been disposed to do me justice, you mio-ht have observed that in these eclogues I had drawn from the great prototype Nature, much imagery that had escaped the notice of all my predecessors. You might also have remarked, that when I introduced images that had been already introduced by others, still the arrangement or combination of those images was my own. The praise of originality you might at least have allowed me." As for their incorrectness! Scott points that accusation with a note of admiration, adding, " with whatever de- fects my works may be chargeable, the last is that of Incorrectness" QO UNDUE SEVERITY OF CRITICISM. We are here involuntarily reminded of Sir Fretful in the Critic, " I think the interest rather declines in the fourth act. " Rises ! you mean, my dear friend !" Perhaps the most extraordinary examples of the irritation of a Poet's mind, and a man of amiable temper, are those parts of this letter in which the Author quotes large portions of his poetry, to refute the degrad- ing strictures of the Reviewer. This was a fertile principle, admitting of very copious extracts ; but the ludicrous attitude is that of an Adonis inspecting himself at his mirror, That provoking see-saw of Criticism, which our learned physician usually adop- ted in his Critiques, was particularly tantalizing to the Poet of Amwell. The Critic condemns, in the gross, a whole set UNDUE SEVERITY OF CRITICISM. 91 of eclogues ; but immediately asserts of one of them, that " the whole of it has great poetical merit, and paints its subject in the warmest colours." When he came to re- view the odes, he discovers that " he does not meet with those polished numbers, nor that freedom and spirit, which that species of poetry requires ;" and quotes half a stanza, which he declares is " abrupt and insipid." " From twenty-seven odes !" ex- claims the writhing Poet " are the whole of my lyric productions to be stigmatized for four lines which are flatter than those that preceded them ?" But what the Critic could not be aware of, the Poet tells us he designed them to be just what they are. " I knew they were so, when they were first written ; but they were thought sufficiently elevated for the place." And then he enters into an inquiry what 02 UNDUE SEVERITY OF CRITICISM. the Critic can mean by " polished num- bers, freedom, and spirit." Tiie passage is curious. " By your first criticism, polished numbers, if you mean melodious versification, this per- haps the general ear will not deny me. If you mean classical, chaste diction, free from tautologous repetitions of the same thoughts in different expressions ; free from bad rhymes, unnecessary epithets, and incongruous meta- phors ; I believe you may be safely challenged to produce many instances wherein I have failed. " By freedom, your second criterion, if you mean daring transition, or arbitrary and de- sultory disposition of ideas, however this may be required in the greater ode, it is now, I believe, for the first time, expected in the lesser ode. If you mean that careless, dif- fuse composition, that conversation-verse, or verse loitering into prose, now so fashion- UNDUE SEVERITY OF CRITICISM. 9$ able, this is an excellence which I am not very ambitious of attaining. But if you mean strong, concise, yet natural easy expression, I apprehend the general judgment will decide in my favour. To the general ear, and the general judgment, then do I appeal, as to an impartial tribunal." Here several odes are transcribed. " By spirit, your third criticism, I know nothing you can mean but enthusiasm; that which transports us to every scene, and interests us in every sentiment. Poetry with- out this cannot subsist; every species demands its proportion, from the greater ode, of which it is the principal characteristic, to the lesser, in which a small portion of it only has hitherto been thought requisite. My productions, I apprehend, have never before been deemed destitute of this essential constituent. What- ever I have wrote, I have felt, and I believe others have felt it also." Q4 UNDUE SEVERITY OF CRITICISM. On " the epistles" which had been con- demned in the gross, suddenly the Critic turns round courteously to the Bard, declaring " they are written in an easy and familiar style, and seem to flow from a good and a benevolent heart." But then sneeringly adds, that one of them being entitled te An Essay on Painting, addressed to a young Artist," had better have been omitted, because it had been so fully treated in so masterly a maimer by Mr. Hay ley." This was letting fall a spark in a barrel of gunpowder. Scott imme- diately analyses his brother poet's poem, to shew they have nothing in common ; and then compares those similar passages the subject naturally produced, to shew that " his poem does not suffer greatly in the comparison." " You may," he adds, UNDUE SEVERITY OF CRITICISM. 95 after giving copious extracts from both poems, " persist in saying that Mr. Hay ley's are the best. Your business then is to prove it." This, indeed, had been a veiy hazardous affair for our medical Critic, whose poetical feelings were so equable, that he acknowledges " Mr. Scott's poem is just and elegant," but " Mr. Hay ley's is likewise just and elegant ;" therefore, if one man has written a piece " just and elegant," there is no need of another on the same subject " just and elegant." To such an extreme point of egotism was a modest and respectable Author most cruelly driven, by the callous playfulness of a poetical Critic, who himself had no sympathy for poetry of any quality or any species, and whose sole art consisted in turning about the canting dictionary of g6 UNDUE SEVERITY OF CRITICISM. Criticism. Had Homer been, a modern candidate for poetical honours, from him Homer had not been distinguished, even from the mediocrity of Scott of Amwell, whose poetical merits are not, however, slight. In his Amcebean eclogues, he may be distinguished as the poet of Botanists. A VOLUMINOUS AUTHOR WITHOUT JUDGMENT. Vast erudition, without the tact of good sense, in a Voluminous Author, what a calamity ! for to such a mind no subject can present itself for which he is unprepared to write on, and none at the same time, which he can ever reasonably. The name and the works of William Prykne, have often come under the eye of the reader ; but it is even now difficult to discover his real character ; for Prynne stood so completely insulated amidst all parties, that he was ridiculed by his friends, and execrated by his enemies. The exuberance of his fertile pen, and strangeness and manner of his subjects, VOL. II. H gS A VOLUMINOUS AUTHOR and his pertinacity in voluminous publica- tion, are known, and are nearly unparal- leled in literary history. Could the man himself be separated from the author, Prynne would not ap- pear ridiculous ; but the unlucky author of nearly two hundred works*, and who, * That all these works should not be wanting to posterity, Pkynke deposited the complete collection in the library of Lincoln's Inn, about forty volumes in folio and quarto. Noy, the Attorney-General, Prynne's great adversary, was provoked at the So- ciety's acceptance of these ponderous volumes, and promised to send them the voluminous labours of Taylor the water-poet, to place by their side ; he judged, as Wood says, that " Prynne's books were worth little or nothing ; that his proofs were no ar- guments, and his affirmations no testimonies." But honest Anthony, in spite of his prejudices against Prynne, confesses, that though " by the generality of scholars they are looked upon to be rather rhap- WITHOUT JUDGMENT. QO, as Wood quaintly computes, " must have written a sheet every day of his life, reck- oning from the time that he came to the use of reason and the state of man," has involved his life in his authorship ; the greatness of his character loses itself in his voluminous works; and whatever Prynne may have been, in his own age and to pos- terity, he was fated to endure all the calamities of an author who has turned learning into absurdity, and zealous in- dustry into chimerical speculation. sodical and confused, than polite or concise ; yet, for Antiquaries, Critics, and sometimes for Divines, they are useful." Such erudition as Prynne's always retains its value the author who could quote a hundred authors on " the unloveliness of love-locks," will always make a good literary chest of drawers, well filled, for those who can make better use of their contents than himself. H <2 100 A VOLUMINOUS AUTHOR Yet his activity in public life, and the firmness and intrepidity of his characters were as ardent as in his study his soul was Roman ; and Eachard says, that Charles II. who could not but admire his earnest honesty, his copious learning, and the public persecutions so unmercifully inflicted on him, and the ten imprison- ments he had endured from all parties, dignified him with the title of " the Cato of the Age ;" and one of his own party facetiously described him as " William the Conqueror ;" a title he had most hardly earned by his inflexible and invincible na- ture. Twice he had been cropped of his ears ; for at the first time the executioner having spared the two fragments, the in- human judge on his second trial having discovered them with astonishment, or- dered them to be most unmercifully cut WITHOUT JUDGMENT. 101 close then burnt on his cheek, ruin- ously fined, and imprisoned in a remote solitude *, but had they torn him limb by * Prynne seems to have considered being de- barred from pen, ink, and books, as an act more barbarous than the loss of his ears. See his curious book of " A New Discovery of the Prelate's Ty- ranny j" it is a complete collection of every thing re- lating to Prynne, Bastwick, and Burton ; three po- litical fanatics, who seem impatiently to have courted the fate of Marsyas. Prynne, in his voluminous argument, proving the illegality of the sentences he had suffered, in his ninth point, thus gives way to all the feelings of Martinus Scriblerus. " Point 9th, that the prohibiting of me pen, ink, paper, and books, is against law." He employs an argument to prove that the abuse of any lawful thing never takes away the use of it ; therefore the law doei not de- prive gluttons or drunkards of necessary meat and drink ; this analogy he applies to his pen, ink, and books, of which they could not deprive him, though they migh punish him for their abuse. He asserts 102 A VOLUMINOUS AUTHOR limb, Prynne had been in his mind a very polypus, which cut into pieces, still loses none of its individuality. His conduct on the last of these occa- sions, when sentenced to be stigmatized, and to have his ears cut close, must be noticed. Turning to the executioner, he calmly invited him to do his duty " Come, that the popish prelates, in the reign of Mary, were the first who invented this new torture of depriving a scribbler of pen and ink. He quotes a long pas- sage from Ovid's Tristia, to prove, that though ex- iled to the Isle of Pontus for his wanton books of love, pen and ink were not denied him to compose new poems ; that St. John, banished to the Isle of Patmos by the persecuting Domitian, still was al- lowed pen and ink, for there he wrote the Revela- tions and he proceeds with similar facts. Pr ynne's books abound with uncommon facts on common topics, for he had no discernment ; and he seems to have written to convince himself, and not the public. WITHOUT JUDGMENT. 103 friend, come, burn me ! cut me ! I fear not ! I have learned to fear the fire of hell, and not what man can do unto me ; come, scar me ! scar me !" In Prynne this was not ferocity, but heroism ; Bastwick was intrepid out of spite, and Burton from fa- naticism. The executioner had been urged not to spare his victims; and he performed his office with extraordinary severity, cruelly heating his iron twice, and cutting one of Prynne's ears so close, as to take away a piece of the cheek. Prynne stirred not in the torture; and when it was done, smiled, observing, " The more I am beaten down, the more I am lift up." After this punishment, in going to the Tower by water, he composed the follow- ing verses on the two letters branded on his cheek, S. L. for Schismatical Libeller, but which Prynne chose to translate 104 A VOLUMINOUS AUTHOR " Stigmata Laudis," the stigmas of his enemy, the Archbishop Laud. " Stigmata maxillis referens insignia Laudis, Exultans remeo, victima grata Deo." The heroic man who could endure agony and insult, and even thus commemorate his sufferings, with no unpoetical conception, almost degrades his own sublimity when the Poetaster sets our teeth on edge by his verse. " Bearing Laud's stamps on my cheeks I retire Triumphing, God's sweet sacrifice by fire." The triumph of this unconquered being was, indeed, signal. History scarcely ex- hibits so wonderful a reverse of fortune, and so strict a retribution, as occurred at this eventful period. He, who had borne from the Archbishop, and the Lords in the Star Chamber, the most virulent in- WITHOUT JUDGMENT. 105 vectives, wishing them at that instant se- riously to consider, that some who sat there on the bench might yet stand pri- soners at the bar, and need the favour they now denied at length saw the prediction completely verified. What were the feel- ings of Laud, when Prynne, returning from his prison of Mount Orgueil, in triumph, the road strewed with boughs, amidst the acclamations of the people entering the apartment in the Tower which the venerable Laud now in his turn occu- pied, while the unsparing Puritan sternly performed his office of rifling his papers *, * The interesting particulars of this interview have been preserved by the Archbishop himself and it is curious to observe how Laud could now utter the same tones of murmur and grief to which Prynne himself had recently given way. Studied insult in these cases accompanies power in the hands of a faction. I shall collect these particulars from " The 106* A VOLUMINOUS AUTHOR and persecuted the unfortunate Prelate till he led him to the block. Prynne, to use History of the Troubles and Tryal of Archbishop Laud, ' ' and refer to Vicars's " God in the Mount, or a Parlia- mentarie Chronicle," p. 344,for the Puritanic triumphs. " My implacable enemy, Mr. Pryn, was picked out as a man whose malice might be tmsted to make the search upon me, and he did it exactly. The manner of the search upon me was thus : Mr. Pryn came into the Tower so soon as the gates were open commanded the Warder to open my door he came into my chamber, and found me in bed Mr. Pryn, seeing me safe in bed, falls first to my pockets to rifle them it was expressed in the warrant that he should search my pockets. Did they remember, when they gave this warrant, how odious it was to Parliaments, and some of themselves, to have the pockets of men searched ? I rose, got my gown upon my shoulders, and he held me in the search till past nine in the morning (he had come in betimes in the morning in the month of May). He took from me twenty-one bundles of papers, which I had pre- WITHOUT JUDGMENT. 107 bis own words, for he could be eloquent when moved by passion, " had struck pared for my defence, &e. a little book or diary, containing all the occurrences of my life, and my book of private devotions ; both written with my own hand. Nor could 1 get him to leave this last ; he must needs see what passed between God and me. The last place he rifled was a trunk which stood by my bed-side ; in that he found nothing but about forty pounds in money, for my necessary ex]ences, which he meddled not with, and a bundle of some gloves. This bundle he was so careful to open, as that he caused each glove to be looked into ; upon this I tendered him one pair of the gloves, which he refusing, I told him he might take them, and fear no bribe, for he had already done me all the mischief he could, and I asked no favour of him ; so he thanked me, took the gloves and bound up my pa- pers, and went his way." Pkynne had a good deal of cunning in his character, as well as fortitude. He had all the subterfuges and quirks which, per- haps, form too strong a feature in the character of 108 A VOLUMINOUS AUTHOR proud Canterbury to the heart ; and had undermined all his prelatical designs to " an utter Barrister of Lincoln's Inn." One of his tricks was secretly printing extracts from the diary of Laud, and placing a copy in the hands of every Member of the House, which was a sudden stroke on the Archbishop, when at the bar, that at the moment overcame him. Once when Prynne was printing one of his libels, he attempted to deny being the author, and ran to the printing-house to distribute the forms, but it was proved he had corrected the proof and the revise. Another time, when he had written a libel- lous letter to the Archbishop, Noy, the Attorney- General, sent for Prynne from his prison, and de- manded of him whether the letter was of his own hand-writing ? Prynne said he must see and read the letter before he could determine ; and when Noy gave it to him, Prynne tore it to pieces, and threw the fragments out of the window, that it might not be brought in evidence against him. Noy had pre- served a copy, but that did not avail him, as Prynne well knew that the misdemeanor was in the letter WITHOUT JUDGMENT. 109 advance the Bishop's pomp and power * ;" Prynne triumphed but, even this aus- tere Puritan soon grieved over the cala- mities he had contributed to inflict on the nation ; and, with a humane feeling, he once wished, that " when they had cut off his ears, they had cut off his head." He closed his political existence by becom- ing an advocate for the Restoration ; but, with his accustomed want of judgment, and intemperate zeal, had nearly injured the cause by his premature activity. At the Restoration some difficulty occurred to dispose of " Busie Mr. Prin," as White- locke calls him. It is said he wished to be one of the Barons of the Exchequer, itself ; and Noy gave up the prosecution, as there was now no remedy. * Breviate of the Bishop's intolerable usurpations, p. 35. 110 A VOLUMINOUS AUTHOR but he was made the Keeper of the Records m the Tower, " purposely to employ his head from scribbling against the State and Bishops;" where they put him to clear the Augean stable of our national antiquities, and see whether they could weary out his restless vigour. Prynnb had, indeed, written till he found no an- tagonist would reply; and now he rioted in leafy folios, and proved himself to be one of the greatest paper-worms which ever crept into old books and mouldy records. The literary character of Prynne is de- scribed by the happy epithet which An- thony Wood applies to him, " Volu- minous Prynne * ;" and it may be illus- * Prynne's great characteristic is opposed to that axiom of Hesiod so often quoted, that " half is better than the whole;" a secret which the matter- of-fact-men rarely discover. Wanting judgment, WITHOUT JUDGMENT. Ill trated by his singular book, " Histrio- mastix," where we shall have occasion to observe how an Author's exuberant learn- ing, like corn heaped in a granary, grows and the tact of good sense, these detailers have no power of selection from their stores, to make one prominent fact represent the hundred minuter ones that may follow it. Voluminously feeble, they imagine expansion i3 stronger than compression; and know not to generalize, while they only can deal in particulars. Prynne's speeches were just as volu- minous as his writings ; always deficient in judgment, and abounding in knowledge he was always weary- ing others, but never could himself. He once made a speech to the House, to persuade them the King's concessions were sufficient ground for a treaty ; it contains a complete narrative of all the transactions between the King, the Houses, and the Army, from the beginning of the Parliament ; it takes up 140 octavo pages, and kept the House so long to- gether, that the debates lasted from Monday morning, till Tuesday morning ' 112 A VOLUMINOUS AUTHOR rank and musty, by a want of power to ventilate and stir about the heavy mass. This paper-worm may first be viewed in his study, as painted by the picturesque Anthony Wood ; an artist in the Flemish school : " His custom, when he studied, was to put on a long quilted cap, which came an inch over his eyes, serving as an umbrella to de- fend them from too much light, and seldom eating any dinner, would be every three hours maunching a roll of bread, and now and then refresh his exhausted spirits with ale brought to him by his servant," a custom to which Butler alludes, " Thou that with ale, or viler liquors, Didst inspire Withers, Prynne, and Vicars, And teach, tho' it were in despight Of Nature and their stars to write." WITHOUT JUDGMENT. 1 1 The " Histriomastix, the Player's Scourge, or Actor's Tragedie," is a ponder- ous quarto, ascending to about 1 100 pages ; a Puritan's invective against Plays and Players, accusing them of every kind of crime, including libels against Church and State * ; but it is more remarkable for the incalculable quotations and refer- ences foaming over the margins. Prynne scarcely ventures on the most trivial opinion, without calling to his aid what- ever had been said in all nations and in all ages ; and Cicero and Master Stubbs, Pe- trarch and Minutius Felix, Isaiah and Froissart's Chronicle, oddly associate in the ravings of erudition. Who, indeed, * Hume, in his history, has given some account of this enormous quarto ; to which I refer the reader, vol. VI. chap. LII. VOL. II. I 114 A VOLUMINOUS AUTHOR but the Author who " seldom dined," could have quoted perhaps a thousand writers, in one volume*? A wit of the times remarked of this Helluo librorum, that " Nature makes ever the dullest beasts most laborious, and the greatest feeders ;" and Prynnb has been reproached with a weak digestion, for " returning things unaltered, which is a symptom of a feeble stomach." When we examine this volume, often alluded to, the birth of the monster seems prodigious and mysterious ; for it combines * Milton admirably characterises Prynne's absurd learning, as well as his character, in his treatise on " The likeliest means to remove Hirelings out of the Church," as " a late hot querist for tythes, whom ye may know by his wits lying ever beside him in the margin, to be ever beside his wits in the text. A fierce Reformer once - } now rankled with a contrary heat." WITHOUT JUDGMENT. 115 too contrary qualities ; it is so elaborate in its researches among the thousand authors quoted, that these required years to ac- cumulate, and yet the matter is often temporary, and levelled at fugitive events and particular persons. Such learning looks like inspiration, and the very for- mation of this mighty volume seems para- doxical ; but the secret history of this book is as extraordinary as the book itself and forms a remarkable proof how the want of sense, in a work of immense erudition, involved the author, and whoever was con- cerned in his book, in total ruin. The author was pilloried, fined, and imprisoned ; his publisher condemned in the penalty of five hundred pounds, and barred for ever from printing and selling books, and the licenser removed and punished. Such was the fatality attending the book of a man, I 2 11 6* A VOLUMINOUS AUTHOR whose literary voracity produced one of the most tremendous indigestions, in a malady of writing. It was on examining Prynne's trial I dis- covered the secret history of the " Histrio- mastix." Prynne was seven years in writing this work, and, what is almost in- credible, it was near four years passing through the press. During that interval the eternal scribbler was daily gorging him- self with voluminous food, and daily fat- tening his cooped-up capon. The tem- porary sedition and libels were the gradual Mosaic inlayings through this shapeless mass. It appears that the volume of 1100 quarto pages originally consisted of little more than a quire of paper ; but Prynne found insuperable difficulties in procuring WITHOUT JUDGMENT. 117 a licenser, even for this infant Hercules. Dr. Goode deposed that " About eight years ago Mr. Prynne brought to him a quire of paper to license, which he refused ; and he recollected the circumstance by having held an argument with Prynne on his severe reprehension of the un- lawfulness of a man to put on Women's ap- parel, which, the good-humoured Doctor as- serted, was not always unlawful ; for suppose Mr. Prynne yourself, as a Christian, was per- secuted by Pagans, think you not if you dis- guised yourself in your maid's apparel, you did well ? Prynne sternly anwered that he thought himself bound rather to yield to death than to do so." Another licenser, Dr. Harris, deposed, that about seven years ago, Mr. Prynne came to him to license a trea- tise concerning stage-plays; but he would not 118 A VOLUMINOUS AUTHOR allow of the same - and adds, " So this man did deliver this book when it was young and tender, and would have had it then printed ; but it is since grown seven times bigger, and seven times worse." Prynne not being able to procure these licensers, had recourse to another, Buck- ner, chaplain to the Archbishop of Can- terbury. It was usual for the licenser to examine the MS. before it went to the press ; but Prynne either tampered with Buckner, or so confused his intellects by keeping his multifarious volume in the press for four years and sometimes, I suspect, by numbering folios for pages, as appears in the work, that the examination of the licenser gradually relaxed ; and he declares in his defence that he had only licensed part of it. The bookseller, Sparks, was, indeed, a noted publisher of what was WITHOUT JUDGMENT. 110 then called " Unlawful and unlicensed books ;" and he had declared that it was " an excellent book, which would be called in, and then sell well." He confesses the book had been more than three years in the press, and had cost him three hundred pounds. The speech of Noy, the Attorney-Ge- neral, conveys some notion of the work itself; sufficiently curious as giving the feelings of those times against the Pu- ritans. " Who he means by his modern innovators in the Church, and by cringing and ducking to altars, a fit term to bestow on the Church ; he learned it of the Canters, being used among them. The musick in the Church, the cha- ritable term he giveth it, is not to be a noise of men, but rather a bleating of brute beasts; choristers bellow the tenor, as it were oxen ; 120 A VOLUMINOUS AUTHOR bark a counterpoint as a kennel of dogs ; roar out a treble, like a sort of bulls ; grunt out a bass, as it were a number of hogs. Bishops he calls, the silk and satin divines ; says Christ was a Puritan, in his Index. He falleth on those things that have not relation to stage- plays, musick in the Church, dancing, New- years gifts, &c. then upon altars, images, hair of men and women, Bishops and bonfires. Cards and tables do offend him, and perukes do fall within the compass of his theme. His end is to persuade the people that we are re- turning back again to Paganism, and to per- suade them to go and serve God in another country, as many are gone already, and set up new laws and fancies among themselves. Consider what may come of it !" The decision of the Lords of the Star- chamber was dictated by passion as much as justice Its severity exceeded the crime WITHOUT JUDGMENT. 121 of having produced an unreadable volume of indigested erudition ; and the scribbler was too hardly used, scarcely to escape with life. Lord Cottington, amazed at the mighty vol iime 3 too bluntly affirmed that Prynne did not write this book alone ; " he either assisted the devil, or was assisted by the devil." But secretary Cooke delivered a sensible and temperate speech-; remarking on all its false erudition, that, " By this vast book of Mr. Prynne's, it ap- peareth that he hath read more than he hath studied, and studied more than he hath con- sidered. He calleth his book * Histriomastix ;' but therein he sheweth himself like unto Ajax Anthropomastix, as the Grecians called him, the scourge of all mankind, that is, the whip- per and the whip." Such is the history of a man, whose greatness of character was clouded over and 122 A VOLUMINOUS AUTHOR. lost in a fatal passion for scribbling ; such is the history of a voluminous author, whose genius was such that he could write a folio much easier than a page; and " seldom dined" that he might quote " Squadrons of Authorities *." * The very expression Prynne himself uses, see p. 668 of the Histriomastix ; where having gone through " three squadrons," he commences a fresh chapter thus : " The fourth squadron of authorities is the venerable troope of 70 several renowned ancient fathers ;" and he throws in more than he promised, all which are quoted volume and page, as so many " play-confounding arguments." He has, perhaps, quoted from three to four hundred authors on a single point. GENIUS AND ERUDITION, THE VICTIMS OF IMMODERATE VANITY. The name of Toland is more familiar than his character, yet his literary portrait has great singularity; he must be classed among the " Authors by Profession," an honour secured by near fifty publications ; and we shall discover that he aimed to combine with the literary character, one peculiarly his own. With higher talents and more learning than have been con- ceded to him, there ran in his mind an original vein of thinking. Yet his whole life exhibits in how small a degree great intellectual powers, when scattered through all the forms which Vanity suggests, will contribute to an Author's social comforts, 124 GENIUS AND ERUDITION, or raise him in public esteem. Toland was fruitful in his productions, and still more in his projects ; yet it is mortifying to estimate the result of all the intense activity of the life of an author of genius, which terminates in being placed among these Calamities. Toland's birth was probably illegiti- mate; a circumstance which influenced the formation of his character. Baptised in ridicule, he had nearly fallen a victim to Mr. Shandy's system of Christian names, for he bore the strange ones of Janus Junius, which, when the school- roll was called over every morning, afforded perpetual merriment, till the Master blest him with plain John, which the' boy adopted, and lived in quiet, I must say something on the names themselves, perhaps as ridiculous! May they not have influenced the character of Toland, THE VICTIMS OF IMMODERATE VANITY. 125 since they certainly describe it * ? He had all the shiftings of the double-faced Janus, and the revolutionary politics of the ancient Junius. His Godfathers sent him into the world in cruel mockery, to remind their Irish boy of the fortunes that await the desperately bold: nor did Toland forget the strong-marked designa- tions ; for to his most objectionable work, the Latin tract entitled Pantheisticon, descriptive of what some have considered as an Atheistical society, he subscribes these appropriate names, which at the time were imagined to be fictitious. Toland ran away from school and popery. When in after-life he was re- proached with native obscurity, he osten- * For some notices of " the influence of names," I must refer to " Curiosities of Literature," edition 1807, oot being in the preceding ones. 126 GENIUS AND ERUDITION, tatiously produced a testimonial of his birth and family, hatched up at a convent of Irish Franciscans in Germany, where the good Fathers subscribed, with their ink tinged with their rhenish, to his most ancient descent, referring to the Irish history! which they considered as a parish register, fit for the suspected son of an Irish Priest ! Toland, from early life, was therefore dependent on patrons ; but illegitimate birth creates strong and determined cha- racters, and Toland had all the self-inde- pendence, the force, and the originality of one. He was a seed thrown by chance, that is to grow of itself wherever it falls. This child of fortune studied at four Universities ; at Glasgow; Edinburgh, and Leyden ; from the latter he passed to Ox- ford, and, in the Bodleian Library, col- lected the materials for his after-studies. THE VICTIMS OF IMMODERATE VANITY. 1^7 He loved study, and even at a later period declares, that " No employment or condition of life shall make me disrelish the lasting entertainment of books." In his " Description of Epsom," he observes that the taste for retirement, reading, and contemplation, promotes the true relish for select company, and says, " Thus I remove at pleasure, as I grow weary of the country or the town, as I avoid a crowd or seek company. Here then let me have books and bread enough without depen- dance ; a bottle of hermitage and a plate of olives for a select friend ; with an early rose to present a young lady as an emblem of dis- cretion no less than of beauty." The mind of Toland was originally finely constructed. At Oxford appeared that predilection for paradoxes and over-curious speculations, 128 GENIUS AND ERUDITION, which formed afterwards the marking feature of his literary character. He has been unjustly contemned as a sciolist; he was the correspondent of Leibnitz, Le Clerc, and Bayle, and was a learned Au- thor when scarcely a man. He first pub- lished a Dissertation on the strange tra- gical death of Regulus, and proved it an idle fiction. A greater paradox might have been his projected speculation on Job, to demonstrate that only the dialogue was genuine ; the rest being the work of some idle Rabbin, who had invented a monstrous story to account for the extraordinary afflictions of that model of a divine mind. Speculations of so much learning and in- genuity are uncommon in a young man ; but Toland was so unfortunate as to value his own merits, before those who did not care to hear of them. THE VICTIMS OF IMMODERATE VANITY. 129 Hardy vanity was to recompense him, perhaps he thought, for that want of for- tune and connections, which raised duller spirits above him. Vain, loquacious, in- considerate, and daring, he assumed the dictatorship of a coffee-house, and ob- tained easy conquests, which he mistook for glorious ones, over the graver fellows, who had for many a year awfully petri- fied their own colleges. He gave more violent offence by his new opinions on Re- ligion. An anonymous person addressed two letters to this new Heresiarch, solemn and monitory *. Toland's answer is as honourable as that of his monitor's. This passage is forcibly conceived : * These letters will interest every religious person ; they may he found in Toland's posthumous works, vol. II. p. 295. VOL. II. K 130 GENIUS AND ERUDITION, " To what purpose should I study here or elsewhere, were I an Atheist or Deist, for one of the two you take me to be ? What a con- tradiction to mention virtue, if I believed there was no God, or one so impotent that could not, or so malicious, that would not reveal himself ! Nay, tho' I granted a Deity yet, if nothing of me subsisted after death, what laws could bind, what incentives could move me to common honesty ? Annihilation would be a sanctuary for all my sins, and put an end to my crimes with myself. Believe me I am not so indifferent to the evils of the present life, but, without the expectation of a better, I should soon suspend the mechanism of my body, and resolve into inconscious atoms. 1 ' This early moment of his life proved to be its crisis, and the first step he took de- cided his after-progress. His first great THE VICTIMS OF IMMODERATE VANITY. 13 1 work of " Christianity not Mysterious," produced immense consequences. To- land persevered in denying that it was designed as any attack on Christianity, but only on those substractions, additions, and other alterations, which have cor- rupted that pure institution. The work, at least, .like its title, is" Mysterious*.'* To land passed over to Ireland, but his book having got there before him, the author beheld himself anathematised ; the pulpits thundered, and it was dangerous * Toland pretends to prove that " there is no- thing in the Christian Religion, not only which is contrary to reason, but even which is above it." He made use of some arguments (says Le Clerc) that were drawn from Locke's Treatise on Human Understanding. Locke was a Christian, whom all Christians ought to reverence ; and had his strength not entirely deserted him before he died, he would K 2 132 GENIUS AND ERUDITION, to be seen conversing with him. A Jury who confessed they could not comprehend a page of his book, condemned it to be burnt. Toland now felt a tenderness for his person ; and the humane Molyneux, the friend of Locke, while he censures the imprudent vanity of our author, gladly witnessed the flight of " the poor gentle- man." But South, indignant at our English moderation respecting his own controversy with Sherlock on some doc- trinal points of the Trinity, congratulates the Archbishop of Dublin on the Irish have composed a work which might have impressed on our minds a noble idea of Christianity. I have seen in MS. a finished treatise by Locke, on Religion,, addressed to Lady Shaftesbury ; Locke gives it as a translation from the French. I regret my account is so imperfect j but the possessor may, perhaps, be induced to give it to the public. THE VICTIMS OF IMMODERATE VANITY. 1^3 persecution ; and equally witty and in- tolerant, he writes on Toland, " Your Parliament presently sent him packing, and, without the help of a faggot, soon made the kingdom too hot for him." Toland was accused of an intention to found a sect, as South calls them, of " Mahometan-Christians." Many were stigmatised as Tolandists ; but the dis- ciples of a man who never procured for their Prophet a bit of dinner or a new wig, for he was frequently wanting both, were not to be feared as enthusiasts. The persecution from the church only rankled in the breast of Toland, and excited un- extinguishable revenge. He now breathed awhile from the bonfire of Theology ; and our Janus turned his political face. He edited Mil- ton's voluminous politics, and Harring- 134 GENIUS AND ERUDITION, ton's fantastical Oceana, and, as his " Christianity not Mysterious" had stamped his Religion with something worse than Heresy, so in Politics he was branded as a Commonwealth's man. To- land had evidently strong nerves ; for him, opposition produced Controversy, which he loved, and controversy produced books, by which he lived. But let it not be imagined that Toland affected to be considered as no Christian, or avowed himself as a Republican. " Civil and religious Toleration" (he says) " have been the two main objects of all my writings." He declares himself to be only a primitive Christian, and a pure Whig. But an Author must not be permitted to understand himself so much clearer than his readers. His mysterious conduct may be detected in his want of moral integrity. THE VICTIMS OF IMMODERATE VANITY. I35 He had the art of explaining away his own words, as in his first controversy about the word Mystery in Religion, and he exults in his artifice ; for, in a letter where he is soliciting the Minister for employment, he says, " The Church is much exasperated against me ; yet as that is the heaviest article, so it is undoubtedly the easiest conquered, and I know the in- fallible method of doing it." And, in a letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury, he promises to reform his religion to that Prelate's liking ! He took the Sacrament as an opening for the negotiation * ! But * What can be more explicit than his recantation at the close of his Findicius Liberins. After telling us that he had withdrawn from sale, after the second edition, his " Christianity not Mysterious, when I perceived what real or pretended offence it had given," he concludes thus: " Being now arrived to 136* GENIUS AND ERUDITION, we are concerned chiefly with his literary character, whose quick growth and fertility resemble him to a planter of poplars. He was so confirmed an Author, that he never published one book without promising another ; refers to others in MS, and some of his most curious works are posthumous. years that will not wholly excuse inconsiderateness in resolving, or precipitance in acting, I firmly hope that my persuasion and practice will show me to be a true Christian, that my due conformity to the public worship may prove me to be a good Churchman, and that my untainted loyalty to King William will argue me to be a staunch Commonwealthsman; that I shall continue all my life a friend to Religion, an enemy to superstition, a supporter of good Kings, and a dtposer of tyrants !" Observe, this Vindicius Liberius was published on his return from one of his poliiicul tours in Ger- many ; his views were then of a very diticrent nature from those of controversial divinity, but it was THE VICTIMS OF IMMODERATE VANITY. 137 He was a great artificer of title-pages; covering them with a promising luxuri- ance, and in this way recommended his works to the booksellers. He had an odd taste for running inscriptions of whimsical crabbed terms; the gold-dust of erudi- tion to gild over a title; such as " Tetra- absolutely necessary to allay the storm the Church had raised against him. We begin now to understand a little better the character of To land these literary adventurers, with heroic pretensions, can practise the meanest artifices, and shrink themselves into nothing to creep out of a hole. How does this recantation agree with the " Nazarenus," and the other theological works which Tolano was publish- ing all his life ? Posterity only can judge of men's characters it takes in at a glance the whole of a life ; but contemporaries only view a part, often appa- rently unconnected and at variance, when in fact it is neither. This recantation is full of the spirit of Janus Junius Toland ! 138 GENIUS AND ERUDITION, dymus Hodegus Clidopharus" "Adei- sidaemon, or the Unsuperstitious." He pretends these affected titles indicated their several subjects, which they evidently did not, for each hard term he fully ex- plains in a page of plain English. The genius of Toland could descend to lite- rary quackery. He had the art of propagating books ; his small life of Milton produced several ; besides the complacency he felt in extract- ing long passages from Milton against the Bishops. In this life his attack of the authenticity of the Eikon Basillhe of Charles I. branched into another on suppo- sititious writings, and this included the spurious gospels ! Association of ideas is a nursing mother to the fertility of au- thorship. The spurious gospels opened a fresh theological campaign ; and produced THE VICTIMS OF IMMODERATE VANITY. 139 his " Amyntor ;" there was no end in pro- voking an Author, who, in writing the life of a Poet, could contrive to put the authenticitv of the Testament to the proof! Amidst his philosophical labours, his vanity induced him to seize on all tempo- rary topics to which his facility and inge- nuity gave currency ; the choice of his subjects forms an amusing catalogue, for he had " Remarks" and " Projects" as fast as events were passing. He wrote on " The Art of Governing by Parties," on " Anglia Libera," " Reasons for Naturaliz- ing the Jews," on u The Art of Canvassing at Elections," " On raising a National Bank without Capital," " The State Anatomy," " Dunkirk or Dover," &c. &c. These, and many like these, set oft' with catching titles, proved to the author, that 140 GENIUS AND ERUDITION, a man of genius may be capable of writing on all topics at all times, and make the country his debtor, without benefiting his own creditors*. There was a moment in Toland' s life when he felt, or thought he felt, fortune in his grasp. He was then floating on * In examining the original papers of Toland, which are preserved, I found some of his agreements with booksellers. For his description of Epsom he was to receive only four guineas in case 1000 were sold. He received ten guineas for his pamphlet on Naturalizing the Jews, and ten guineas more in case Bernard Lin- tott sold 2000. The words of this agreement run thus : " Whenever Mr. Toland calls for ten guineas, after the first of February next, I promise to pay them, if 1 cannot shew that 200 of the copies remain unsold." What a sublime person is an Author ! What a misery is Authorship ! The great Philosopher who creates systems that are to alter the face of his country, must stand at the counter to count out 200 unsold copies ! THE VICTIMS OF IMMODERATE VANITY. 141 the ideal waves of the South-sea bubble ; the poor author, elated with a notion that he was rich enough to print at his own cost, dispersed copies of his absurd " Pan- theisticon." He describes a society of Pantheists, who worship the universe as God ; a mystery much greater than those he attacked in Christianity. Their prayers are passages from Cicero and Seneca, and they chaunt long poems instead of psalms ; so that in their zeal they endured a little tediousness. The next objectionable cir- cumstance, in this wild ebullition of phi- losophical wantonness, is the apparent burlesque of some liturgies ; and a wag having inserted, in some copies, an impious prayer to Bacchus. Toland suffered for the folly of others, as well as his own*. * Des Maiseaux frees Toland from this calumny, and hints at his own personal knowledge of the au- 142 GENIUS AND ERUDITION, With all this bustle of authorship, amidst temporary publications which re- quired such prompt ingenuity, and elabo- rate works which matured the fruits of early studies, Toland was still not a se- dentary writer. I found him often travel- ling on the Continent, and wondered how a guinealess author could so easily trans- port himself from Flanders to Germany, and appear at home in the Courts of Ber- lin, Dresden, and Hanover. I discovered a concealed feature in the character of our ambiguous philosopher. thor but he does not know what, a foreign writer authenticates, that this blasphemous address to Bac- chus is a parody of a prayer in the Romish ritual, wrote two centuries before by a very proper society of Pantheists, a club of drunkards ! With the South- sea bubble, vanished Toland's desire of printing books at his own risk, and thus relieved the world from the weight of more Pantheistkons ! THE VICTIMS OF IMMODERATE VANITY. 143 In the only life we have of Toland, by Des Maiseaux, prefixed to his posthu- mous works, he tells us, that Toland was at the Court of Berlin, but " an incident too ludicrous to be mentioned, obliged him to leave that place sooner than he expected." Here is an incident in a narrative clearly marked out, but never to be supplied! This incident had however an important result, since it sent Toland away in haste; and we wish to know why he was there ? But this chronological biographer *, " good easy man," suspects nothing more ex- * Warburton has well described Des Maiseaux : " All the Life-writers we have had are, indeed, strange insipid creatures. The verbose tasteless Frenchman seems to lay it down as a principle that every life must be a book, and what is worse, it proves a book without a life ; for what do we know of Boileau after all his tedious stuff?" 144 GENIUS AND ERUDITION, traordinary when he tells us Toland was at Berlin or Hanover, than when he finds him at Epsom ; imagines Toland only went to the electoral Princess Sophia, and the Queen of Prussia, who were " Ladies of sublime genius," to entertain them by vexing some grave German divines, with philosophical conferences, and paradoxical conundrums; all the ravings of Toland's idleness *. * One of these philosophical conferences, has been preserved by Beausobre,who was indeed the party con- cerned. He inserted it in the " Bibliotheque Ger- Tnanique," a curious literary journal, in 50 volumes, written by L'Enfant, Beausobre, and Formey. It is very copious, and very curious, and is preserved in the General Dictionary, art. Toland. The parties, after a warm contest, were very wisely interrupted by the Queen, when she discovered they had exhausted their learnieg, and were beginning to rail at each other. THE VICTIMS OF IMMODERATE VANITY. 145 This secret history of Toland can only be picked out by fine threads. He pro- fessed to be a literary character he had opened a periodical " literary correspond- ence," as he terms it, with Prince Eugene ; he was a favourite with the Electoral Prin- cess Sophia, and the Queen of Prussia, to whom he addressed his " Letters to Serena." Was he a political agent ? Yet how was it that Toland was often driven home by distressed circumstances ? He seems not to have been a practical politician, for he managed his own affairs very ill ; or was the political intriguer rather a suspected, than a confidential servant of all his masters and mistresses ? for it is evident no one cared for him ! The absence of moral integrity was probably never disguised by the loquacious vanity of this literary ad- venturer. VOL. II. L 146 GENIUS AND ERUDITION, In his posthumous works, are several " Memorials" for the Earl of Oxford, which throw a new light over an union of politi- cal Espionage with the literary character, and finally concluding in producing that extraordinary one, which the political ima- gination of Toland has created in all the obscurity and heat of his reveries. In one of these " Memorials," forcibly written and full of curiosity, Toland re- monstrates with the minister for his marked neglect of him ; opens the scheme of a political tour, where, like Guthrie, he would be content with his quarterage. He defines his character: for the independ- ent Whig affects to spurn at the office, though he might not shrink at the duties of a spy. " Whether such a person, Sir," he says> (< who is neither Minister nor Spy, and as a lover THE VICTIMS OF IMMODERATE VANITY. 147 t>f learning will be welcome every where, may not prove of extraordinary use to my Lord Trea- surer, as well as to his predecessor Burleigh, who employed such, I leave his Lordship and you to consider." Still this character, whatever title may designate it, is inferior in dignity and im- portance to that one which is now to be discovered. It pourtrays Toland where his life-writer has not given a touch from his brush ; it is a political curiosity. " I laid an honester scheme of serving my country, your Lordship, and myself; for, seeing it was neither convenient for you, nor a thing at all desired by me, that I should appear in any public post, I sincerely pro- posed, as occasions should offer, to commu- nicate to your Lordship my observations on the temper of the Ministry, the dispositions of the people, the condition of our enemies, or L2 148 GENIUS AND ERUDITION, allies abroad, and what I might think most ex- pedient in every conjuncture ; which advice you were to follow in whole, or in part, or not at all, as your own superior wisdom should direct. My general acquaintance, the se- veral languages I speak, the experience I have acquired in foreign affairs, and being en- gaged in no interest at home, besides that of the public, should qualify me in some measure for this province. All wise Minis- ters HAVE EVER HAD SUCH PRIVATE MONI- TORS. As much as I thought myself fit, or was thought so by others, for such general observations, so much have I ever abhorred, my Lord, those particular observers we call Spies ; but I despise the calumny no less than I detest the thing. Of such general obser- vations, you should have perused a far greater number than I thought fit to present hitherto, had I discovered, by due effects, that they were acceptable from me ; for they must un- THE VICTIMS OF IMMODERATE VANITY. 149 avoidably be received from some body, unless a Minister were omniscient yet I soon had good reason to believe I was not designed for the man ; whatever the original sin could be that made me incapable of such a trust, and which I now begin to suspect. Without di- rect answers to my proposals, how could I know whether I helped my friends elsewhere, or betrayed them contrary to my intentions ! and accordingly I have for some time been very cautious and reserved. But if your Lordship will enter into any measures with me, to procure the good of my country, I shall be more ready to serve your Lordship in this, or in some becoming capacity, than any other Minister. They who confided to my manage- ment affairs of a higher nature, have found me exact as well as secret. My impenetrable negotiation at Vienna (hid under the pretence of curiosity) was not only applauded by the Prince that employed me, but also propor- 150 GENIUS AND ERUDITION, tionably rewarded. And here, my Lord, give me leave to say that I have found England miserably served abroad since this change ; and our Ministers at home are sometimes as great strangers to the genius as to the per- sons of those with whom they have to do. At < you have placed the most unacceptable man in the world, one that lived in a scanda- lous misunderstanding with the Minister of the States at another Court, one that has been the laughing-stock of all Courts, for his senseless haughtiness, and most ridiculous airs, and one that can never judge aright, unless by accident, in any thing." The discarded, or the suspected private Monitor of the Minister, warms into the tenderest language of political amour, and mourns their rupture but as the quar- rels of Lovers. THE VICTIMS OF IMMODERATE VANITY. 151 " I cannot, from all these considerations, but in the nature of a Lover, complain of your present neglect, and be solicitous for your future care." And again, " I have made use of the simile of a Lover, and as such, indeed, I thought fit, once for all, to come to a thorough explanation, resolved, if my affection be not killed by your unkindness, to become indissolubly your's." Such is the nice artifice of colouring with a pretended love of the country, the sordidness of a political intriguer, and giving clean names to filthy things. But this view of the political face of our Janus is not complete till we discover the levity he could carry into politics when not dis- guised by more pompous pretensions. I shall give two extracts from letters com- posed in a different spirit. 152 GENIUS AND ERUDITION, " I am bound for Germany, though first for Flanders, and next for Holland. I believe I shall be pretty well accommodated for this voyage, which I expect will be very short. Lord ! how near was my old woman being a Queen ! and your humble servant being at his ease.'''' His old woman was the Electoral Prin- cess Sophia; and his ease is what pa- triots distinguish as the love of their country ! Again " The October Club, if rightly managed, will be rare stuff to work the ends of any party. I sent such an account of these wights to an old gentlewoman of my acquaintance, as, in the midst of fears (the change of Ministry) will make her laugh." After all his voluminous literature, and his refined politics, Toland lived and died the life of an Author by Profession, THE VICTIMS OF IMMODERATE VANITY. 153 in an obscure lodging at a country car- penter's, in great distress. He had stiir one patron left, who was himself poor, Lord Molesworth ; who promised him, if he lived, " Bare necessaries ; these are but cold comfort to a man of your spirit and desert ; but 'tis all I dare promise! 'Tis an ungrate- ful age, and we must bear with it the best we may till we can mend it." And his Lordship tells of his unsuccess- ful application to some Whig Lord for Toland ; and concludes, " 'Tis a sad monster of a man, and not worthy of further notice." I have observed that Toland had strong nerves ; he neither feared controversies, nor that which closes all. Having exa- mined his papers which have been pre- 154 GENIUS AND ERUDITION, served, I can sketch a minute picture of the last days of our " Author by Pro- fession." At the carpenter's lodgings, he drew up a list of all his books they were piled on four chairs, to the amount of 155 most of them works which evince learned studies. Some of his MSS. are transcribed in Greek*. To this list he * As Toland's erudition has been lightly es- teemed, I subjoin, for the gratification of the curious, a few of these authors. Spanhemii Opera ; Clerici Pentateuchus ; Constantini Lexicon Graeco- Latinum ; Fabricii Codex Apocryphus Vet. et Nov. Test. ; Synesius de Regno ; Historia imaginum coe- lestium Gosselini, 16 volumes; Caryophili Disscrta- tiones; Vonde Hardt Ephemerides Philologicae; Tris- megisti Opera ; Recoldus, et alia Mahomedica ; all the Works of Buxtorf ; Salviani Opera ; Reland de Relig. Mahomedica; Galli Opuscula Mythological Apollodori Bibliotheca ; Palingenius ; Apuleius ; and THE VICTIMS OF IMMODERATE VANITY. 155 adds, " I need not recite those in the closet with the unbound books and pamphlets ; every Classical Author of Antiquity. As he was then employed in his curious history of the Druids, of which only a specimen is preserved, we may trace his researches in the following books : Luydii Archae- ologia Britannica ; Old Irish Testament, &c. ; Mac- curtin's history of Ireland ; O'Flaherty's Ogygia j Epistolarum Hibernicarum ; Usher's Religion of the ancient Irish j Brand's Isles of Orkney and Zetland; Pezron's Antiquit^s des Celtes. There are some singular papers among these frag- ments. One title of a work is u Priesthood without Priestcraft ; or Superstition distinguished from Reli- gion, Dominion from Order, and Bigotry from Reason, in the most principal Controversies about Church-government, which at present divide and deform Christianity." He has composed DANGER OF GIVING THE disputes, places him on an equality with any King; the duty was to his country. But Selden, alive to the call of rival genius, when Grotius published, in Hol- land, his Mare liberum, gave the world his Mare clausum ; when Selden had to encounter Grotius, and to proclaim to the universe " the Sovereignty of the Seas," how contemptible to him appeared the mean persecutions of a crowned head, and how little his own meaner resentment ! To this subject, the fate of Dr. Hawkes- worth is somewhat allied. It is well known that this author, having distin- guished himself by his pleasing composi- tions in the Adventurer, was chosen to draw up the narrative of Cook's discoveries in the South Seas ; from the elegant mo- ralist, whose fictions had charmed by the most beautiful imagination, the pictures RESULT OF LITERARY ENQUIRIES. 257 of a new world, the description of new manners in an original state of society, and the incidents arising from an adventure which could find no parallel, in the annals of mankind, but under the solitary genius of Columbus all these were conceived to offer a history, to which the moral and contemplative powers of Hawkesworth only were equal. Our author's fate, and that of his work, are known: he incurred all the danger of giving the result of his enquiries ; he indulged his imagination till it burst into pruriency, and discussed moral theorems, till he ceased to be moral. The shock it gave to the feelings of our author, was fatal and the error of a mind, intent on enquiries which, perhaps, he thought innocent, and which the world condemned as criminal, terminated in death itself. Hawkesworth was a vain man, VOL. II. s 558 DANGER OF GIVING THE and proud of having raised himself by his literary talents from his native obscurity; of no learning, he drew all his science from the Cyclopaedia; and, 1 have heard, could not always have construed the Latin mottos of his own paper, which were furnished by Johnson ; but his sensibility was abun- dant and ere his work was given to the world, he felt those tremblings, and those doubts, which anticipated his fate. That he was in a state of mental agony, respect- ing the reception of his opinions, and some other parts of his work, will, I think, be discovered in the following letter, hitherto unpublished. It was addressed, with his MSS. to a Peer, to be examined before they were sent to the press an occupa- tion probably rather too serious for the noble critic. RESULT OF LITERARY ENGtUIRIES. 259 " London, March 2, 1761. " I think myself happy to be permitted to put my MSS. into your Lordship s hands, be- cause, though it increases my anxiety and my fears, yet it will at least secure me from what I should think a far greater ?nisfor- tune than any other that can attend my per- formance ; the danger of addressing to the king any sentiment, allusion, or opinion, that could make such an address improper. I have now the honour to submit the work to your Lordship, with the dedication ; from which the duty I owe to his Majesty, and, if I may be permitted to add any thing to that, the duty I owe to myself, have concurred to exclude the servile, extravagant, and indiscriminate adulation, which has so often disgraced alike those by whom it has been given and re- ceived. I remain, &c. &c." This elegant epistle justly describes that delicacy in style, which has been so rarelj'' s2 260 RESULT OF LITERARY ENCtUIRIES. practised by an indiscriminate dedicator but in respect to the MSS. themselves, not less feelingly touches on the " far greater misfortune than any other, of ad- dressing sentiments, allusions, and opi- nions" which were addressed, and over- whelmed the fortitude and intellect of this unhappy author ! A NATIONAL WORK WHICH COULD FIND NO PATRONAGE. The author who is now before us is De Lolme ! I shall consider the foreign author, who flew to our country as the asylum of Eu- rope, who composed a noble work on .our Constitution, and, having imbibed its spi- rit, acquired even the language of a free country, as an English author. I do not know an example in our literary history that so loudly accuses our tardy and phlegmatic feeling respecting authors, as the treatment De Lolme experienced in this country. His book on our consti- tution still enters into the studies of an English patriot, and is not the worse for 262 A NATIONAL WORK flattering and elevating the imagination, painting every thing beautiful, to encou- rage our love as well as our reverence for the most perfect system of governments. It was a noble as well as ingenious effort in a foreigner it claimed national atten- tion but could not obtain even indivi- dual patronage. The fact is mortifying to record, that the author who wanted every aid, received less encouragement than if he had solicited subscriptions for a raving novel, or an idle poem. De Lolme was compelled to traffick with booksellers for this work ; and, as he was a theoretical rather than a practical politician, he was a bad trader, and acquired the smallest re- muneration. He lived, in the country to which he had rendered a national service, in extreme obscurity and decay ; and the walls of the Fleet too often enclosed the WHICH COULD FIND NO PATRONAGE. 2o"3 English Montesquieu. He never appears to have received a solitary attention *, and became so disgusted with authorship, that he preferred silently to endure its poverty, rather than its other vexations. He ceased almost to write. Of De Lolme I have heard little recorded, but his high-mindedness ; a strong sense that he stood degraded be- neath that rank in society which his book entitled him to enjoy. The cloud of po- verty that covered him, only veiled with- out concealing its object ; with the manners and dress of a decayed gentleman, he still shewed the few who met him, that he cherished a spirit perpetually at variance with the adversity of his circumstances. * Except from the hand of literary charity ; he was more than once relieved by the Literary Fund. Such are the authors only whom it is wise to pa- tronise. 264 A NATIONAL WORK Our author, in a narrative prefixed to his work, is the proud historian of his own injured feelings ; he smiled in bitter- ness on his contemporaries, confident it was a tale reserved for posterity. After having written the work whose systematic principles refuted those politi- cal notions which prevailed at the aera of the American Revolution, and whose truth has been so fatally demonstrated in our own times, in two great revolutions, which have shewn all the defects and all the mischief of nations rushing into a state of freedom, before they are worthy of it the author candidly acknowledges he counted on some sort of encouragement, and little expected to find the mere publi- cation had drawn him into great incon- venience. WHICH COULD FIND NO PATRONAGE. 26*5 '* When my enlarged English edition was ready for the press, had I acquainted Mi- nisters that I was preparing to boil my tea- kettle with it, for want of being able to af- ford the expences of printing it;" Minis- ters, it seems, would not have considered that he was lighting his fire with " myrrh, and cassia, and precious ointment." In defect of encouragement from great men, and even from Booksellers, De Lolme had recourse to a Subscrip- tion ; and, by the manner he was re- ceived, and the indignities he endured, all which are narrated with great sim- plicity, it shewed that whatever his know- ledge of our Constitution might be, " his knowledge of the country was, at that time, very incomplete." At length, when he shared the profits of his work with the Booksellers, these were i( but 266 A NATIONAL WORK scanty and slow." After all, our author sarcastically, in congratulating himself, seems pleased that, however, he " Was allowed to carry on the above bu- siness of selling my book, without any objec- tion being formed against me, from my not having served a regular apprenticeship, and without being molested by the Inquisition." And further he adds, " Several authors have chosen to relate, in writings published after death, the personal advantages by which their performances had been followed ; as for nie, I have thought otherwise and to see it printed while I am yet living." This, indeed, is the language of irrita- tion! and De Lolme degrades himself in the loudness of his complaint. But if the philosopher lost his temper, that misfor- tune will not, however, take away the WHICH COULD FIND NO PATRONAGE. 26*7 dishonour of the occasion that produced it. The country's shame is not lessened be- cause that author who had raised its glory throughout Europe, and instructed the nation in its best lesson, grew indignant at the ingratitude of his pupil. De Lolme ought not to have congratulated himself that he had been allowed the liberty of the press unharassed by an Inquisition this sarcasm is senseless! or his book is a mere fiction ! THE MISERIES OF SUCCESSFUL AUTHORS. Hume is an Author so celebrated, a philosopher so serene, and a man so ex- tremely amiable, if not fortunate, that we may be surprised to meet his name in- scribed in a catalogue of Literary Calami- ties. Look into his literary life, and you will discover that the greater portion was mortified and angried ; and that the stoic so lost his temper, that had not circum- stances intervened which did not depend on himself, Hume had abandoned his country, and changed his name ! " The first success of most of my writings was not such as to be an object of vanity." His " Treatise of Human MISERIES OF SUCCESSFUL AUTHORS. %6Q Nature" fell, dead-born, from the press. It was cast anew, with another title, and was at first little more successful. His own favourite " Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals" came unnoticed and unobserved in the world. When he published the first portion of his " His- tory," which made even Hume himself sanguine in his expectations, he tells his own tale. " I thought that I was the only historian that had at once neglected present power, in- terest, and authority, and the cry of popular prejudices; and, as the subject was suited to every capacity, I expected proportional ap- plause. But miserable was my disappoint- ment ! All classes of men and readers united in their rage against him who had presumed to shed a generous tear for the fate of Charles I. and the Earl of Strafford." " What was 270 MISERIES OF SUCCESSFUL AUTHORS. -still more mortifying, the book seemed to sink into oblivion, and in a twelvemonth not more than 45 copies were sold." Even Hume, a stoic hitherto in his lite- rary character, was struck down, and dis- mayed he lost all courage to proceed and, had the war not prevented him, " he had resolved to change his name, and never more to have returned to his native country." But an Author, though born to suffer martyrdom, does not always expire; he may be flayed like St. Bartholomew, and yet he can breathe without a skin ; stoned, like St. Stephen, and yet write on with a broken head; and he has been even known to survive the flames, notwith- standing the most precious part of an Au- thor, which is obviously his book, has been burnt in an Auto daje. Hume once MISERIES OF SUCCESSFUL AUTHORS. 271 more tried the press in "The Natural His- tory of Religion." It proved but another martyrdom ! Still was the fall (as he terms it) of the first volume of his History haunting his nervous imagination, when he found himself yet strong enough to hold a pen in his hand, and ventured to produce a second, which " helped to buoy up its unfortunate brother." But the third part, containing the reign of Elizabeth, was particularly obnoxious, and he was doubtful whether he was asrain to be led to the stake. But Hume, a little hardened by a little success, grew, to use his own words, " callous against the im- pressions of public folly," and completed his History, which was now received " with tolerable, and but tolerable suc- cess." 272 MISERIES OF SUCCESSFUL AUTHORS. At length, in the sixty-fifth year of his age, our Author began, a year or two be- fore he died, as he writes, to see " many symptoms of my literary reputation, break- ing out at last with additional lustre, though I know that I can have but few years to enjoy it." What a provoking consolation for a philosopher, who, according to the result of his own system, was close upon a state of annihilation ! To Hume let us add the illustrious name of Dryden. It was after preparing a second edition of Virgil, that the great Dryden, who had lived, and was to die in harness, found himself still obliged to seek for daily bread. Scarcely relieved from one heavy task, he was compelled to hasten to another; and his efforts were now stimulated by a domestic feeling; the expected return of MISERIES OF SUCCESSFUL AUTHORS. 2J3 his Son in ill-health from Rome. In a letter to his bookseller he pathetically writes, " if it please God that I must die of over- study, I cannot spend my life better than in preserving his." It was on this occa- sion, on the verge of his seventieth year, as he describes himself in the dedication of his Virgil,, that, " worn out with study, and oppressed with fortune," he contracted to supply the bookseller with 10,000 verses at sixpence a line ! What was his entire dramatic life, but a series of vexation and hostility, from his first play to his last? On those very boards whence Drvden was to have de- rived the means of his existence and his fame, he saw his foibles aggravated, and his morals aspersed. Overwhelmed by the keen ridicule of Buckingham, and malici- ously mortified by the triu mph which Settle, VOL. II. t 274 MISERIES OF SUCCESSFUL AUTHORS. his meanest rival, was allowed to obtain over him still to encounter the cool ma- lignant eye of Langbaine, who read poetry only to detect plagiarism. Contemporary genius is inspected with too much familia- rity to be felt with reverence ; and the angry prefaces of Dryden only excited the little revenge of the wits. How could such sympathise with injured, but with lofty feelings ? They spread two reports of him, which may not be true, but which hurt him with the public. It was said that, being jealous of the success of Creech, for his version of Lucretius, he advised him to attempt Horace, in which Dryden knew he would fail and a contemporary haunter of the theatre, in a curious letter * on "The Winter Diversions," says of Con- * A letter found among the papers of the late Mr Windham, which Mr. Malone has preserved.. MISERIES OF SUCCESSFUL AUTHORS. 275 greve's angry Preface to the Double Dealer, that, " The critics were severe upon this play, which gave the author occasion to lash them in his epistle dedicatory so that 'tis generally thought he has done his business, and lost him- self ; a thing he owes to Mr. Dryden's trea- clierous friendship, who, being jealous of the applause he had got by his Old Bachelor, deluded him into a foolish imitation of his own way of writing angry prefaces." This lively critic is still more vivacious on the great Dryden who had then produced his " Love Triumphant,'' which, the critic says, " Was damned by the universal cry of the town, nemine contradicente but the conceited poet. He says in his prologue, that ' this is the last the town must expect from him : he had done himself a kindness had he tuken his leave T 2 2f6 MISERIES OF SUCCESSFUL AUTHORS. before." He then describes the success of Sou- therner Fatal Marriage, or the Innocent Adul- tery; and concludes, "This kind usage will en- courage desponding minor poets, and vex huffing Dry den and Congreve to madness.' 1 '' I have quoted thus much of this letter, that we may have before us a true image of those feelings which contemporaries en- tertain of the greater geniuses of their age ; how they seek to level them ; and in what manner men of genius are doomed to be treated slighted, starved, and abused. Dryden and Congreve ! the one the finest genius, the other the most exquisite wit of our nation, are to be vexed to mad- ness! their failures are not to excite sympathy, but contempt or ridicule! How the feelings and the language of con- temporaries differ from that of posterity ! And yet let us not exult in our purer and MISERIES OF SUCCESSFUL AUTHORS. 277 more dignified feelings we are, indeed, the posterity of Dryden and Congreve ; but we are the contemporaries of others who must patiently hope for better treat- ment from our sons than they have re- ceived from the fathers. Dryden was no master of the pathetic yet never were compositions more pathetic than the Prefaces this great man has trans- mitted to posterity ! Opening all the feel- ings of his heart, we live among his do- mestic sorrows. Johnson censures Dryden for saying he has few thanks to pay his stars that he was born anions; English- men *. We have just seen that Hume * There is an affecting remonstrance of Dryden to Hyde, Earl of Rochester, on the state of his poverty and neglect in which is this remarkable passage : " It is enough for one age to have neglected Mr. Cowley, and starved Mr. Butler." 278 MISERIES OF SUCCESSFUL AUTHORS. went farther, and sighed to fly to a re- treat beyond that country which knew not to reward genius. What, if Dryden felt the dignity of that character he supported, dare we blame his frankness ? If the age be ungenerous, shall contemporaries escape the scourge of the great author, who feels he is addressing another age more favour- able to him ? Johnson, too, notices his " Self-com- mendation ; his diligence in reminding the world of his merits, and expressing, with very little scruple, his high opinion of his own powers." Dryden shall answer in his own words ; with all the simplicity of Montaigne, he expresses himself with the dignity that would have become Milton or Gray : " It is a vanity common to all writers to over- value their own productions ; and it is better MISERIES OF SUCCESSFUL AUTHORS. 279 for me to own this failing in myself, than the world to do it for me. For what other reason have I spent my life in such an unprofitable study ? Why am I grown old in seeking so barren a reward as fame ? The same parts and ap- plication which have made me a Poet, might have raised me to any honours of the gown, which are often given to men of as little learn- ing, and less honesty, than myself." How feelingly Whitehead paints the situation of Dryden in his old age : " Yet lives the man, how wild soe'er his aim, Would madly barter Fortune's smiles for Fame ? Well pleas'd to shine, through each record- ing page, The hapless Dryden of a shameless age ! " Ill-fated Bard ! v\ here'er thy name appears, The weeping verse a sad memento bears ; Ah ! what avail'd the enormous blaze between Thy dawn of glory and thy closing scene ! 280 MISERIES OF SUCCESSFUL AUTHORS. When sinking Nature asks our kind repairs, Unstrung the nerves, and silver' d o'er the hairs ; When stay'd Reflection came uncall'd at last, And grey Experience counts each folly past!" Mickle's version of the Lusiad offers an affecting instance of the melancholy fears which often accompany the progress of works of magnitude, undertaken by men of genius. Five years he had buried him- self in a farm-house, devoted to the solitary- labour ; and he closes his preface with the fragment of a poem, whose stanzas have perpetuated all the tremblings and the emotions, whose unhappy influence the author had experienced through the long work. Thus pathetically he addresses the Muse << Well thy meed repays thy worthless toil ; Upon thy houseless head pale Want descends MISERIES OF SUCCESSFUL AUTHORS. 28l In bitter shower; and taunting Scorn still rends And wakes thee trembling from thy golden dream : In vetchy bed, or loathly dungeon ends Thy idled life '' And when, at length, the great and anxious labour was completed, the author was still more unhappy than under the former influence of his foreboding terrors. The work is dedicated to the Duke of Buccleugh. Whether his Grace had been prejudiced against the poetical labour, by Adam Smith, who had as little comprehen- sion of the nature of poetry as becomes a political economist, or from whatever cause, after possessing it for six weeks, the Duke had never condescended to open the volume. It is to the honour of Mickle that the De- dication is a simple respectful inscription, in which the Poet had not compromised 282 MISERIES OF SUCCESSFUL AUTHORS. his dignity and that in the second edition he had the magnanimity of not with- drawing the dedication to this statue-like patron. Neither was the critical reception of this splendid labour of five devoted years, grateful to the sensibility of the author : he writes to a friend, " Though my work is well received at Ox- ford, I will honestly own to you, some thing s have hurt me. A few grammatical slips in the introduction have been mentioned ; and some things in the notes about Virgil, Milton, and Homer, have been called the arrogance of criticism. But the greatest offence of all is what I say of Blank verse." He was, indeed, after this great work was given to the public, as unhappy as at any preceding period of his life ; and Mickle too, like Hume and Dryden, could feel a wish to forsake his native MISERIES OF SUCCESSFUL AUTHORS. 283 land ! He still found his " head house- less ;" and " the vetchy bed" and " loathly dungeon" still haunted his dreams. " To write for the Booksellers, is what I never will do/' exclaimed this man of genius, though struck by poverty. He projected an edition of his own poems by subscrip- tion. " Desirous of giving an edition of my works, in which I shall bestow the utmost at- tention, which, perhaps, will be my final fare- well to that blighted spot (worse than the most bleak mountains of Scotland) yclept Parnassus; after this labour is finished, if Governor Johnstone cannot or does not help me to a little independence, / will certainly bid adieu to Europe, to unhappy suspense^ and perhaps aho to the chagrin of soul which I feel to accompany it" Such was the language which cannot 284 MISERIES OF SUCCESSFUL AUTHORS. now be read without exciting our sympathy for the Author of the version of an epic, which, after a solemn devotion of no small portion of the most valuable years of life, had been presented to the. world, with not sufficient remuneration or notice of the Author, to create even Hope in the sanguine temperament of a Poet. Mickle was more honoured at Lisbon than in his own country. So imperceptible are the gradations of public favour to the feelings of genius, and so vast an interval separates that Author, who does not immediately address the tastes or the fashions of his age, from the reward or the enjoyment of his studies. Shall we account, among the lesser Calamities of Literature, that of a man of genius dedicating his days to the composi- tion of a voluminous and national work, MISERIES OF SUCCESSFUL AUTHORS. 285 and when that labour is accomplished, the hope of fame, perhaps other hopes as ne- cessary to reward past toil, and open to future enterprize, are all annihilated, or the unfinished work interrupted on its publication ? Yet this work neglected, or not relished, perhaps even the sport of witlings, afterwards is placed among the treasures of our language, when the Au- thor is no more ! but what is posthumous gratitude, could it reach even the ear of an angel ? The calamity is unavoidable ; but this circumstance does not lessen it. New works must for a time be submitted to popular favour ; but posterity is the in- heritance of genius. The man of ge- nius, however, who has composed this great work, calculates his vigils, is best acquainted with its merits, and is not 286 MISERIES OF SUCCESSFUL AUTHORS. without an anticipation of the future feel- ing of his country ; he '' But weeps the more, because he weeps in vain." Such is the fate which has awaited on many great works ; and the heart of genius has died away on its own labours. I need not go so far back as the Elizabethan age to illustrate a calamity which will excite the sympathy of every man of letters ; but the great work of a man of no ordinary genius presents itself on this occassion. This great work is " The Polyolbion" of Michael Drayton; a poem unrivalled for its magnitude and its character. The genealogy of poetry is always suspicious ; yet I think it owed its birth to Leland's magnificent view of his intended work on Britain, and was probably nourished by the " Britannia" of Camden, who inhe- MISERIES OF SUCCESSFUL AUTHORS. 287 rited the mighty industry, without the poetical spirit, of Leland; Drayton em- braced both. This singular combination of topographical erudition and poetical fancy, constitutes a national work an union that some may conceive not for- tunate, no more than " the slow length" of its Alexandrine metre, for the purposes of mere delight. Yet what therne can be more elevating than a bard chaunting to his " Father-land ;" as the Hollanders called their country ? Our tales of ancient glory, our worthies who must not die, our towns, our rivers, and our mountains, all glancing before the picturesque eye of the Naturalist and the Poet. It is, indeed, a labour of Hercules ; but it was not unac- companied by the lyre of Apollo. This national work was ill received ; and the great author dejected, never par- 288 MISERIES OF SUCCESSFUL AUTHORS. doned his contemporaries, and even lost his temper. Drayton and his poe.ical friends beheld indignantly the trifles of the hour overpowering the neglected Po- lyolbion. One poet tells us that " they prefer The fawning lines of every pamphleter :" Geo. Withers. And a contemporary, records the utter neglect of this great Poet : 55 Cole, William, Rev. his character i. 236 __ his melancholy confession on his length- ened literary labours i. 240 _ his misery how to dispose of his col- lections i. 272. n. Collins, the poet, quits the university suddenly with romantic hopes of becoming an author ii. 195 publishes his " Odes" without success, and afterwards indignantly burns the edition ii. 199 index. 337 Pag Collins, defended from some reproaches of irresolu- tion, made by Johnson ii. 201 anecdote of his life in the Metropolis ii, 203 anecdotes of, when under the influence of a disordered intellect ii. 209 his monument described ii. 210 two Sonnets descriptive of Collins ii. 214 his poetical character defended ii. 215 Contemporaries, how they seek to level genius ii. 274 Cotgrave, Randle, falls blind in the labour of his Dic- tionary i. 195 Cowel, incurs by his curious work " The Interpreter" the censure of the King and the Commons on opposite principles ii. 241 Cowley, original letter from i. 83. n. his essays form a part of his confessions i. 84 describes his feelings at Court i. 87 his melancholy attributed to his Ode to Bru- tus, by which he incurred the disgrace of the Court i. 95 his remarkable lamentation for having written poetry i. 98 his Epitaph composed by himself i. 99 Critic, poetical, without any taste, how he contrived to criticise poems ii. 85 Criticism, illiberal, some of its consequences stated, . ii. 75 VOL. II. Z $3$ INDEX. D. Page Davies, Myles, a Mendicant Author, his life i. 73 Dedication, a, written against all dedications, by War- burton, in which he himself is guilty of the charges he brings against them i. 312. n. " composed by a patron to himself. . . . i. 65. n. Dedications, practised in an extraordinary way i. 64. n. De Lolme's work on the Constitution could find no patronage, and the Author's bitter complaints . ,.ii. 261 relieved by the Literary Fund ii. 263. n. Dennis, John, distinguished as " The Critic i. 129 his " Original Letters," and " Remarks on Prince Arthur," his best productions i. 1 30 anecdotes of his brutal vehemence . .. i. 134 curious caricature of his personal man- ners i. 136. n. ' a specimen of his anti-poetical notions i. 1 40. n. his phrenzy on the Italian Opera i. 145 acknowledges that he is considered as ill-natured, and complains of public neglect i. 146 more really the victim of his criticisms than the genius he insulted i. 149 Drake, John, Dr. a political writer, his miserable life . i. xiii Drayton's national work, " The Polyolbion," ill re- ceived, and the Author greatly dejected ii. 287 INDEX. . 339 Page Drayton's angry preface addressed " To any that will read it" ii. 290 Dryden, in his old age, complains of dying of over- study ii. 273 - his dramatic life a series of vexation and hostility ii. 273 regrets he was born among Englishmen . . . . ii. 277 remarkable confession of the Poat. ........ ii. 279 E. Exercise, to be substituted for medicine by literary men, and which is the best i. 189. n. G. Gayton, Edward, the author of " Pleasant Notes on Don Quixote," his character i. 3J4 Goldsmith's remonstrance on illiberal criticism from which the law gives no protection ii. 83 Granger's complaint of not receiving half the pay of a scavenger i. 260. n. Grey, Dr. Zackary, the father of our commentators, ridiculed and abused i. 292 the probable origin of his new mode of illustrating Hudibras i. 291 z 2 340 INDEX. Page Greene, Robert, &tovm-\t\t,a.Y!efui satirical address to, ii. 17. n. , pathetic letter written on his death- bed i>- 235. n. Guthrie offers his services as a Hackney writer to a minister i. 5 H. Harvey, Gabriel, his character ii. 1 his device against his antagonists . ii. 15. n. ' his portrait ii. 25 severely satirised by Nash for his prolix periods cannot endure to be considered as the son of a rope-maker his pretended sordid manners his affectation of Italian fashions his friends ridi- culed his pedantic taste for hexameter verses, &c. ii. 21 his curious remonstrance with Nash, ii. 34 his lamentations on invectives ii. 45 his books, and Nash's, suppressed by order of the Archbishop of Canterbury for their mutual virulence ii. 17 Hawkesworth, Dr. letter on presenting his MS. of Cook's Voyages for examination, the publication of which overwhelmed his fortitude and intellect , . ii 259 INDEX. 34I Page Henley, Orator, this buffoon an indefatigable student, an elegant poet, and wit j, 153 his poem of " Esther Queen of Per- sia " i. 154 sudden change in his character i. 161 seems to have attempted to pull down the Church and the University i. 165 some idea of his lectures i. 167. n. . hi s projects to supply an Universal School , i, 170 specimens of his buffoonery on solemn occasions i, 175 _ his " Defence of the Oratory" i. 175. n. once found his match in two dispu- tants i. 179 specimen of the diary of his " Oratory Transactions" i. 180 his character i. 1 83 Henry, Dr. the Historian, the sale of his work, on which he had expended much of his fortune and his life, stopped, and himself ridiculed, by a conspiracy raised against him ii. 64 caustic review of his history ii. 66. n. Heron, Rolert, draws up the distresses of a man of letters living by literary industry in the confine- ment of a sponging-house, from his original letter.,!. 219 342 INDEX. Page Herrick, Robert, petulant invective against Devonshire ii.302 Howel, nearly lost his life by excessive study i. 198 Hume, his literary life how mortified with disappoint- ments ii. 268 wished to change his name and his country . . ii. 270 I and J. James I. literary character of. ii. 245 Icon Libell&rum. See Atlvena Britannice. Kenrieh, Dr. a caustic critic, treats our great Au- thors with the most amusing arrogance ii. 81 , 1 . an epigram on himself, by himself . . ii. 83. n. L. Inland the antiquary an accomplished scholar . . . . ii. 175 , his " Strena," or New Year's Gift to Henry VIII. an account of his studies, and his magnificent projects u. 179 index. 343 Page Leland, doubts that his labours will reach posterity . . ii. 134 he values " the furniture" of his mind ii. 185 his bust striking from its physiognomy ii. 188 the ruins of his mind discovered in his library ii. 190 the inscription on his tomb probably had been composed by himself, before his insanity ii. 192 Literary History, an idea of. i. 3 1 8 one of the important results of phi- losophy and taste i. 319 Labours, a poem on, by an Enthusiast i. 255 the Reply of Dr. Bentley, remark- able for its vigour i. 237 Property, difficulties to ascertain its nature . i 30 history of i. 28 value of i. 26. n. Logan, the history of his litsrary disappointments, dies broken-hearted i. 21 1 ' his idea of a great Author i. 217 M. M 1 C'ormick, diaries, a literary martyr i. 226 HP Donald, or Matthew Bramble, his tragical reply to an enquiry after his tragedy i. 208 344 INDEX. Page Macdiarmid, John, died of over-study and exhaustion i. 198 Martin Mar-Prelate's libels issuing from a moveable press carried about the country ii. 7. n. Melancholy persons frequently the most delightful companions ii. 206. n. Michle's pathetic Address to his Muse ii. 280 his disappointments after the publication of the Lusiad induce him to wish to abandon his native country ii. 282 Milton, more esteemed by foreigners than at home. . . i. 317 Minutice Literarice, one may know too much of books, and too little of their use i. 320 1 defence of i. 321 Mortimer, Thomas, his complaint '"* old age of the preference given to young adventurers i. 201 N. Nash, Tom, the misery of his literary life i. 49 threatens his patrons i. 53 his character as a Lucianic Satirist .... ii. 19 silences Mar-Prelate with his own weapons ii. 8 his " Have with you to Saffron Walden" a singular literary invective against Gabriel Harvey . ii. 19 Newton, of a fearful temper in criticism ii. 77. n INDEX. 345 o. Page Ockley, Simon, among the first of our authors who exhibited in the East a great nation in his " His- tory of the Saracens" ii. 219 his sufferings expressed in a remark- able preface dated from gaol ii. 220 dines with the Earl of Oxford, with an original letter of apology for his uncourtly be- haviour ii. 229 exults in prison for the leisure it af- fords for study ii- 235. n. neglected, hut employed by Ministers ii. 236 Oldmixon asserts Lord Clarendon's History to have been interpolated, while himself falsifies Daniel's Chronicle i. 10. n. P. Pattison, a young Poet, his despair in an address to Heaven, and a pathetic letter. i. 280 Peele, George, died like most poets, whom it is hard to trace to their graves i. 314 346 INDEX. Page Poets, mediocre Critics are the real origin of mediocre ii. 234 Nat. Lee describes their wonderful suscepti- bility of praise ii. 298 provincial, their situation at variance with their feelings ii. 301 Prior, curious character of, from a Whig satire ii. 307 felicitated himself that his natural inclination for poetry had been checked ii. 310 Proclamation issued by James I. against Cowel's book <( The Interpreter," a curious document in literary history ii. 246 Prynne, a voluminous author without judgment, but the character of the man not so ridiculous as the author " 98 his intrepid character ii. 100 - his curious argument against beiDg debarred from pen and ink ii. 101. n. his interview with Laud in the Tower. . . . ii. 105. n. had a good deal of cunning in his character ii. 107. n. . grieved for the Revolution in which he him- self had been so conspicuous a leader ii. 109 his speeches as voluminous as his writings ii. 1 11. n. seldom dined ii. 1 12. n. account of his famous " Histriomastix" .... ii. 1 13 Milton admirably characterises Prynne's absurd learning ii. 1 1 4. n. INDEX. 347 Page Prynne, how the Histriomastix was at once an ela- borate work of many years, and yet a temporary satire the secret history of the book being as ex- traordinary as the book itself. ii. 115 Purclias's Pilgrim condemned to rest in prison. . . . i. 261. n. R. Ridicule described ; it creates a fictitious personage . . . . ii. 1 RitsoTi, Joseph, the late poetical antiquary, carried criticism to insanity i. 128 the influence of his temper on his person i. 136. n. Jtitson, Isaac, a young Scotch writer, perishes by attempting to exist by the efforts of hie pen i. 203 his extemporary rhapsody descriptive of his melancholy fate i. 206 Rushworth dies of a broken heart, having neglected his own affairs for his Historical Collections. . . . i. 262. n. Ryves, Eliza, her extraordinary literary exertions and melancholy end i. 296 her pathetic verses anticipating her death i. 305 S. Sale, the learned, often wanted a meal while trans- lating the Koran , ii. 228, n. 348 INDEX. Page Scot, Reginald, persecuted for his work again9t Witchcraft ii. 153 Scott of Amwell, the Quaker and Poet, offended at being compared to Capt. Macheath by the affected witticism of a Reviewer ii. 84 his extraordinary " Letter to the Critical Reviewers," in which he enumerates his own poetical beauties ii. 87 Selden, compelled to recant his opinions, and not suf- fered to reply to his calumniators ii- 254 refuses James I. to publish his defence of the Sovereignty of the Seas, till Grotius provoked his reply ii. 255 Settle, Elkanah, the ludicrous close of a scribbler's life ii. 332 Smollett, confesses the incredible labour and chagrin he had endured as an author i. 20 Steele, his paradoxical character ii. 161 why he wrote a laughable comedy after his " Christian Hero" ii. 165 - his ill choice in a wife of an uncongenial cha- racter ii. 1C7 specimens of his " Love dispatches" ii. 168. n. finely contrasts his own character with that of Addison's ii. 173. n. extraordinary anecdote of the intercourse with Addison while writing the Spectator ii. 174. n. INDEX. 349 Page Stillingfleet, Bishop, his end supposed to have been hastened by Locke's confutation of his metaphy- sical notions ii. 78. n. StocMale, Perceval, his character ; an extraordinary instance of the illusions of writers in verse ii. 313 draws a parallel between Charles XII. and himself ii. S30 Stowe, the Chronicler, petitions to be a licensed beggar i. 62 1 ridiculed and persecuted .... ii. 251 Strutt, the late antiquary, a man of genius and ima- gination i. 263. n. his spirited letters on commencing his career of Authorship. ... i. 268. n. Stuart, Gilbert, Dr. his envious character; desirous of destroying the literary works of his country- men ii. 51 projects the Edinburgh Magazine and Review, its design ii. 52 his horrid feelings excited by his dis- appointments 1 ii. 59 raises a literary conspiracy against Dr. Henry ii. 63 dies miserably ii. 73 Subscriptions once inundated our literature with worthless works i. 63 350 INDEX. T. Page Totand, a lover of study ii. 137 defends himself from the aspersion of athe- ism or deism 130 accused of an intention to found a sect ii- 133 had the art of explaining away his own words ii. 135 a great artificer of title-pages ii. 137 his " Pantheisticon" ii. 141 projects a new office of a private monitor to the minister " 147 of the books lie r*>d and his MSS ii. 154. n. his panegyrical epitaph composed by himself ii. 157 Locke's admirable foresight of his character ii 159 Timson's bickerings with Dryden i. 29. n. W. Walpole, Horace, his literary character . i. 101 instances of his pointed vivacity against authors i. 103. n. why he attacked the fame of Sid- ney, and defended Richard ill.' i. 1 10 INDEX. 351 Page Walpole, Horace, his literary mortifications, ac- knowledged by himself from his original letters.. .. i. 113 how Gray treated him when in- vited to Strawberry-hill i. 1 13. n. extraordinary letter of, expressing his contempt of his most celebrated contemporaries i. 121 Warburton, an idea of his literary character i. 312 Wharton, Henry, sunk under his historical studies .. i. 197 White, James, affecting account of his death i. 228 Wood, Anthony, his character i. 245 - an apology for the Athenae Oxoni- enses i. 310 . the writers of a party whom he ab- horred frequently refer to him in their own favour i. 318 FINIS. Nichols, Son, and Uentley, Printers, Red Lion Passage, Fleet Street, London. 1^ X wnaam 3 1158 01263 0868 ^0,f CALIF0% UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY AA 000 025 586 9 . = ( t