  “The use and end of this Work I do not so much design for curiosity, or satisfaction of those that are the lovers of learning, but chiefly for a more grave and serious purpose: which is, that it will make learned men wise in the use and administration of learning.”—Lord Bacon, “Of Learning.” PREFACE.The Quarrels of Authors may be considered as a continuation of the Calamities of Authors; and both, as some Memoirs for Literary History. These Quarrels of Authors are not designed to wound the Literary Character, but to expose the secret arts of calumny, the malignity of witty ridicule, and the evil prepossessions of unjust hatreds. The present, like the preceding work, includes other subjects than the one indicated by the title, and indeed they are both subservient to a higher purpose—that of our Literary History. There is a French work, entitled “Querelles LittÉraires,” quoted in “Curiosities of Literature,” many years ago. Whether I derive the idea of the present from the French source I cannot tell. I could point out a passage in the great Lord Bacon which might have afforded the hint. But I am inclined to think that what induced me to select this topic was the interest which Johnson has given to the literary quarrels between Dryden and Settle, Dennis and Addison, &c.; and which Sir Walter Scott, who, amid the fresh creations of fancy, could delve for the buried truths of research, has thrown into his narrative of the quarrel of Dryden and Luke Milbourne. From the French work I could derive no aid; and my plan is my own. I have fixed on each literary controversy to illustrate some principle, to portray some character, and to investigate some topic. Almost every controversy which occurred opened new views. With the subject, the character The Philosophy of Literary History was indeed the creation of Bayle. He was the first who, by attempting a critical dictionary, taught us to think, and to be curious and vast in our researches. He ennobled a collection of facts by his reasonings, and exhibited them with the most miscellaneous illustrations; and thus conducting an apparently humble pursuit with a higher spirit, he gave a new turn to our Johnson wrote under many disadvantages; but, with scanty means, he has taught us a great end. Dr. Birch was the contemporary of Johnson. He excelled his predecessors; and yet he forms a striking contrast as a literary historian. Birch was no philosopher, and I adduce him as an instance how a writer, possessing the most ample knowledge, and the most vigilant curiosity—one practised in all the secret arts of literary research in public repositories and in private collections, and eminently skilled in the whole science of bibliography—may yet fail with the public. The diligence of Birch has perpetuated his memory by a monument of MSS., but his, touch was mortal to genius! He palsied the character I have freely enlarged in the notes to this work; a practice which is objectionable to many, but indispensable perhaps in this species of literary history. The late Mr. Cumberland, in a conversation I once held with him on this subject, triumphantly exclaimed, “You will not find a single note through the whole volume of my ‘Life.’ I never wrote a note. The ancients never wrote notes; but they introduced into their text all which was proper for the reader to know.” I agreed with that elegant writer, that a fine piece of essay-writing, such as his own “Life,” required notes no more than his novels and his comedies, among which it may be classed. I observed that the ancients had no literary history; this was the result of the discovery of printing, the institution of national libraries, the general literary intercourse of Europe, and some other causes which are the growth almost of our own times. The ancients have written history without producing authorities. Mr. Cumberland was then occupied on a review of Fox’s History; and of Clarendon, which lay open before him,—he had been complaining, with all the irritable feelings of a dramatist, of the frequent suspensions, and the tedious minuteness of his story. I observed that notes had not then been discovered. Had Lord Clarendon known their use, he had preserved the unity of design in his text. His Lordship has unskilfully filled it with all that historical furniture his diligence had collected, and with those minute discussions which his anxiety for truth, and his lawyer-like mode of scrutinising into facts and substantiating evidence, amassed. Had these been cast into notes, and were it now possible to pass them over in the present text, how would the story of the noble historian clear up! If this observation be just, it will apply with greater force to literary history itself, which, being often the mere history of the human mind, has to record opinions as well as events—to discuss as well as to narrate—to show how accepted truths become suspicious—or to confirm what has hitherto rested in obscure uncertainty, and to balance contending opinions and opposite facts with critical nicety. The multiplied means of our knowledge now opened to us, have only rendered our curiosity more urgent in its claims, and raised up the most diversified objects. These, though accessories to the leading one of our inquiries, can never melt together in the continuity of a text. It is to prevent all this disorder, and to enjoy all the usefulness and the pleasure of this various knowledge, which has produced the invention of notes in literary history. All this forms a sort of knowledge peculiar to the present more enlarged state of literature. Writers who delight in curious and rare extracts, and in the discovery of new facts and new views of things, warmed by a fervour of research which brings everything nearer to our eye and close to our touch, study to throw contemporary feelings in their page. Such rare extracts and such new facts Bayle eagerly sought, and they delighted Johnson; but all this luxury of literature can only be produced to the public eye in the variegated forms of notes. WARBURTON, AND HIS QUARRELS;INCLUDING AN ILLUSTRATION OF |
| He, with an all-sufficient air |
Not encouraged by the reception his first literary efforts received, but having obtained some preferment from his patron, we now come to a critical point in his life. He retreated from the world, and, during a seclusion of near twenty years, persevered in uninterrupted studies. The force of his character placed him in the first order of thinking beings. This resolution no more to court the world for literary favours, but to command it by hardy preparation for mighty labours, displays a noble retention of the appetite for fame; Warburton scorned to be a scribbler!
Had this great man journalised his readings, as Gibbon has
But if Warburton read so much, it was not to enforce opinions already furnished to his hands, or with cold scepticism to reject them, leaving the reader in despair. He read that he might write what no one else had written, and which at least required to be refuted before it was condemned. He hit upon a SECRET PRINCIPLE, which prevails through all his works, and this was Invention; a talent, indeed, somewhat dangerous to introduce in researches where Truth, and not Fancy, was to be addressed. But even with all this originality he was not free from imitation, and has even been accused of borrowing largely without hinting at his obligations. He had certainly one favourite model before him: Warburton has delineated the portrait of a certain author with inimitable minuteness, while he caught its general effect; we feel that the artist, in tracing the resemblance of another, is inspired by all the flattery of a self-painter—he perceived the kindred features, and he loved them!
This author was Bayle! And I am unfolding the character of Warburton, in copying the very original portrait:—
“Mr. Bayle is of a quite different character from these Italian sophists: a writer, whose strength and clearness of reasoning can be equalled only by the gaiety, easiness, and delicacy of his wit; who, pervading human nature with a glance, struck into the province of Paradox, as an exercise for the restless vigour of his mind: who, with a soul superior to the sharpest attacks of fortune, and a heart practised to the best philosophy, had not yet enough of real greatness to overcome that last foible of superior geniuses, the temptation of honour, which the Academic Exercise of Wit is conceived to bring to its professors.”
Here, then, we discover the SECRET PRINCIPLE which conducted Warburton through all his works, although of the most opposite natures. I do not give this as an opinion to be discussed, but as a fact to be demonstrated.
The faculties so eminent in Bayle were equally so in Warburton. In his early studies he had particularly applied himself to logic; and was not only a vigorous reasoner, but
This was a new characteristic of investigation; it led him on to pursue his profounder inquiries beyond the clouds of antiquity; for what he could not discover, he CONJECTURED and ASSERTED. Objects, which in the hands of other men were merely matters resting on authentic researches, now received the stamp and lustre of original invention. Nothing was to be seen in the state in which others had viewed it; the hardiest paradoxes served his purpose best, and this licentious principle produced unlooked-for discoveries. He humoured his taste, always wild and unchastised, in search of the monstrous and the extravagant; and, being a wit, he delighted in finding resemblances in objects which to more regulated minds had no similarity whatever. Wit may exercise its ingenuity as much in combining things unconnected with each other, as in its odd assemblage of ideas; and Warburton, as a literary antiquary, proved to be as witty in his combinations as Butler and Congreve in their comic images. As this principle took full possession of the mind of this man of genius, the practice became so familiar, that it is possible he might at times have been credulous enough to have confided in his own reveries. As he forcibly expressed himself on one of his adversaries, Dr. Stebbing, “Thus it is to have to do with a head whose sense is all run to system.” “His Academic Wit” now sported amid whimsical theories, pursued bold but inconclusive arguments, marked out subtile distinctions, and discovered incongruous resemblances; but they were maintained by an imposing air of conviction, furnished with the most prodigal erudition, and they struck out many ingenious combinations. The importance or the curiosity of the topics awed or delighted his readers; the principle, however licentious, by the surprise it raised, seduced the lovers of novelties. Father Hardouin had studied as hard as Warburton, rose as early, and retired to rest as late, and the obliquity of his intellect resembled that of Warburton—but he was a far inferior genius; he only discovered that the classical works of antiquity, the finest compositions
In this secret principle of resolving to invent what no other had before conceived, by means of conjecture and assertion, and of maintaining his theories with all the pride of a sophist, and all the fierceness of an inquisitor, we have the key to all the contests by which this great mind so long supported his literary usurpations.
The first step the giant took showed the mightiness of his stride. His first great work was the famous “Alliance between Church and State.” It surprised the world, who saw the most important subject depending on a mere curious argument, which, like all political theories, was liable to be overthrown by writers of opposite principles.
The intrepidity of this vast genius appears in the plan of his greater work. The omission of a future state of reward and punishment, in the Mosaic writings, was perpetually urged as a proof that the mission was not of divine origin: the ablest defenders strained at obscure or figurative passages, to force unsatisfactory inferences; but they were looking after what could not be found. Warburton at once boldly acknowledged it was not there; at once adopted all the objections of the infidels: and roused the curiosity of both parties by the hardy assertion, that this very omission was a demonstration of its divine origin.
The first idea of this new project was bold and delightful, and the plan magnificent. Paganism, Judaism, and Christianity, the three great religions of mankind, were to be marshalled in all their pomp, and their awe, and their mystery. But the procession changed to a battle! To maintain one great paradox, he was branching out into innumerable ones. This great work was never concluded: the author wearied himself, without, however, wearying his readers; and, as his volumes appeared, he was still referring to his argument, “as far as it is yet advanced.” The demonstration appeared in great danger of ending in a conjecture; and this work, always beginning and never ending, proved to be the glory and misery of his life.
The same SECRET PRINCIPLE led him to turn the poetical narrative of Æneas in the infernal regions, an episode evidently imitated by Virgil from his Grecian master, into a minute description of the initiation into the Eleusinian Mysteries. A notion so perfectly new was at least worth a commonplace truth. Was it not delightful to have so many particulars detailed of a secret transaction, which even its contemporaries of two thousand years ago did not presume to know anything about? Father Hardouin seems to have opened the way for Warburton, since he had discovered that the whole Æneid was an allegorical voyage of St. Peter to Rome! When Jortin, in one of his “Six Dissertations,” modestly illustrated Virgil by an interpretation inconsistent with Warburton’s strange discovery, it produced a memorable quarrel. Then Hurd, the future shield, scarcely the sword,
At length a rising genius demonstrated how Virgil could not have described the Eleusinian Mysteries in the sixth book of the Æneid. One blow from the arm of Gibbon shivered the allegorical fairy palace into glittering fragments.
When the sceptical Middleton, in his “Essay on the Gift of Tongues,” pretended to think that “an inspired language would be perfect in its kind, with all the purity of Plato and the eloquence of Cicero,” and then asserted that “the style of the New Testament was utterly rude and barbarous, and abounding with every fault that can possibly deform a language,” Warburton, as was his custom, instantly acquiesced; but hardily maintained that “this very barbarism was one certain mark of a divine original.”
We now pursue the SECRET PRINCIPLE, operating on lighter topics; when, turning commentator, with the same originality as when an author, his character as a literary adventurer is still more prominent, extorting double senses, discovering the most fantastical allusions, and making men of genius but of confined reading, learned, with all the lumber of his own unwieldy erudition.
When the German professor Crousaz published a rigid examen of the doctrines in Pope’s “Essay on Man,” Warburton volunteered a defence of Pope. Some years before, it appears that Warburton himself, in a literary club at Newark, had produced a dissertation against those very doctrines! where he asserted that “the Essay was collected from the worst passages of the worst authors.” This probably occurred at the time he declared that Pope had no genius! Bolingbroke really WROTE the “Essay on Man,” which Pope versified.
But this serves not as an apology for Warburton, who now undertook an elaborate defence of what he had himself condemned, and for which purpose he has most unjustly depressed Crousaz—an able logician, and a writer ardent in the cause of religion. This commentary on the “Essay on Man,” then, looks much like the work of a sophist and an adventurer! Pope, who was now alarmed at the tendency of some of those principles he had so innocently versified, received Warburton as his tutelary genius. A mere poet was soon dazzled by the sorcery of erudition; and he himself, having nothing of that kind of learning, believed Warburton to be the Scaliger of the age, for his gratitude far exceeded his knowledge.
There appears in Warburton’s conduct respecting the editions of the great poets which he afterwards published, something systematic; he treated the several editors of those very poets, Theobald, Hanmer, and Grey, who were his friends, with the same odd sort of kindness: when he was unknown to the world, he cheerfully contributed to all their labours, and afterwards abused them with the liveliest severity.
Warburton employed no little art
At length the memorable edition appeared: all the world knows its chimeras.
Warburton designates himself as “a critic by profession;” and tells us, he gave this edition “to deter the unlearned writer from wantonly trifling with an art he is a stranger to, at the expense of the integrity of the text of established authors.” Edwards has placed a N.B. on this declaration:—“A writer may properly be called unlearned, who, notwithstanding all his other knowledge, does not understand the subject which he writes upon.” But the most dogmatical absurdity was Warburton’s declaration, that it was once his design to have given “a body of canons for criticism, drawn out in form, with a glossary;” and further he informs the reader, that though this has not been done by him, if the reader will take the trouble, he may supply himself, as these canons of criticism lie scattered in the course of the notes. This idea was seized on with infinite humour by Edwards, who, from these very notes, has framed a set of “Canons of Criticism,” as ridiculous as possible, but every one illustrated by authentic examples, drawn from the labours of our new Stagirite.
At length, when the public had decided on the fact of Warburton’s edition, it was confessed that the editor’s design had never been to explain Shakspeare! and that he was even conscious he had frequently imputed to the poet meanings which he never thought! Our critic’s great object was to display his own learning! Warburton wrote for Warburton, and not for Shakspeare! and the literary imposture almost rivals the confessions of Lander or Psalmanazar!
The same SECRET PRINCIPLE was pursued in his absurd edition of Pope. He formed an unbroken Commentary on the “Essay on Criticism,” to show that that admirable collection of precepts had been constructed by a systematical method, which it is well known the poet never designed; and the same instruments of torture were here used as in the “Essay on Man,” to reconcile a system of fatalism to the doctrines of Revelation.
Warburton was probably aware that the SECRET PRINCIPLE which regulated his public opinions might lay him open, at numerous points, to the strokes of ridicule. It is a weapon which every one is willing to use, but which seems to terrify every one when it is pointed against themselves. There is no party or sect which have not employed it in their most serious controversies: the grave part of mankind protest against it, often at the moment they have been directing it for their own purpose. And the inquiry, whether ridicule be a test of truth, is one of the large controversies in our own literature. It was opened by Lord Shaftesbury, and zealously maintained by his school. Akenside, in a note to his celebrated poem, asserts the efficacy of ridicule as a test of truth: Lord Kaimes had just done the same. Warburton levelled his piece at the lord in the bush-fighting of a note; but came down in the open field with a full discharge of his artillery on the luckless bard.
Warburton designates Akenside under the sneering appellative of “The Poet,” and alluding to his “sublime account” of the use of ridicule, insultingly reminds him of “his Master,” Shaftesbury, and of that school which made morality an object of taste, shrewdly hinting that Akenside was “a man of taste;” a new term, as we are to infer from Warburton, for
I shall stop one moment, since it falls into our subject, to record this great literary battle on the use of ridicule, which has been fought till both parties, after having shed their ink, divide the field without victory or defeat, and now stand looking on each other.
The advocates for the use of Ridicule maintain that it is a natural sense or feeling, bestowed on us for wise purposes by the Supreme Being, as are the other feelings of beauty and of sublimity;—the sense of beauty to detect the deformity, as the sense of ridicule the absurdity of an object: and they further maintain, that no real virtues, such as wisdom, honesty, bravery, or generosity, can be ridiculed.
The great Adversary of Ridicule replied that they did not dare to ridicule the virtues openly; but, by overcharging and distorting them they could laugh at leisure. “Give them other names,” he says, “call them but Temerity, Prodigality, Simplicity, &c., and your business is done. Make them ridiculous, and you may go on, in the freedom of wit and humour (as Shaftesbury distinguishes ridicule), till there be never a virtue left to laugh out of countenance.”
The ridiculers acknowledge that their favourite art may do mischief, when dishonest men obtrude circumstances foreign to the object. But, they justly urge, that the use of reason itself is full as liable to the same objection: grant Spinoza his false premises, and his conclusions will be considered as true. Dyson threw out an ingenious illustration. “It is so equally
Warburton urged the strongest case against the use of ridicule, in that of Socrates and Aristophanes. In his strong and coarse illustration he shows, that “by clapping a fool’s coat on the most immaculate virtue, it stuck on Socrates like a San Benito, and at last brought him to his execution: it made the owner resemble his direct opposite; that character he was most unlike. The consequences are well known.”
Warburton here adopted the popular notion, that the witty buffoon Aristophanes was the occasion of the death of the philosopher Socrates. The defence is skilful on the part of Dyson; and we may easily conceive that on so important a point Akenside had been consulted. I shall give it in his own words:—
“The Socrates of Aristophanes is as truly ridiculous a character as ever was drawn; but it is not the character of Socrates himself. The object was perverted, and the mischief which ensued was owing to the dishonesty of him who persuaded the people that that was the real character of Socrates, not from any error in the faculty of ridicule itself.”—Dyson then states the fact as it concerned Socrates. “The real intention of the contrivers of this ridicule was not so much to mislead the people, by giving them a bad opinion of Socrates, as to sound what was at the time the general opinion of him, that from thence they might judge whether it would be safe to bring a direct accusation against him. The most effectual way of making this trial was by ridiculing him; for they knew, if the people saw his character in its true light, they would be displeased with the misrepresentation, and not endure the ridicule. On trial this appeared: the play met with its deserved fate; and, notwithstanding the exquisiteness of the wit, was absolutely rejected. A second attempt succeeded no better; and the abettors of the poet were so discouraged from pursuing their design against Socrates, that it was not till ABOVE TWENTY YEARS after the publication of the play that they brought their accusation against him! It was not, therefore, ridicule that did, or could destroy Socrates: he was rather sacrificed for the right use of it himself, against the Sophists, who could not bear the test.”
Thus, then, stands the argument.—Warburton, reasoning on the abuses of ridicule, has opened to us all its dangers. Its advocate concedes that Ridicule, to be a test of Truth, must not impose on us circumstances which are foreign to the object. No object can be ridiculed that is not ridiculous. Should this happen, then the ridicule is false; and, as such, can be proved as much as any piece of false reasoning. We may therefore conclude, that ridicule is a taste of congruity and propriety not possessed by every one; a test which separates truth from imposture; a talent against the exercise of which most men are interested to protest; but which, being founded on the constituent principles of the human mind, is often indulged at the very moment it is decried and complained of.
But we must not leave this great man without some notice of that peculiar style of controversy which he adopted, and which may be distinguished among our Literary Quarrels. He has left his name to a school—a school which the more liberal spirit of the day we live in would not any longer endure. Who has not heard of The Warburtonians?
That SECRET PRINCIPLE which directed Warburton in all his works, and which we have attempted to pursue, could not of itself have been sufficient to have filled the world with the name of Warburton. Other scholars have published reveries, and they have passed away, after showing themselves for a time, leaving no impression; like those coloured and shifting shadows on a wall, with which children are amused; but Warburton was a literary Revolutionist, who, to maintain a new order of things, exercised all the despotism of a perpetual dictator. The bold unblushing energy which could lay down the most extravagant positions, was maintained by a fierce dogmatic spirit, and by a peculiar style of mordacious contempt and intolerant insolence, beating down his opponents from all quarters with an animating shout of triumph, to encourage those more serious minds, who, overcome by his genius, were yet often alarmed by the ambiguous tendency of his speculations.
The Warburtonian School was to be supported by the most licentious principles; by dictatorial arrogance,
To establish this new government in the literary world, this great Revolutionist was favoured by Fortune with two important aids; the one was a Machine, by which he could wield public opinion; and the other a Man, who seemed born to be his minister or his viceroy.
The machine was nothing less than the immortal works of Pope; as soon as Warburton had obtained a royal patent to secure to himself the sole property of Pope’s works, the public were compelled, under the disguise of a Commentary on the most classical of our Poets, to be concerned with all his literary
Fanciful as was the genius of Warburton, it delighted too much in its eccentric motions, and in its own solitary greatness, amid abstract and recondite topics, to have strongly attracted the public attention, had not a party been formed
| To his tame jackal, parson Towne. Verses on Warburton’s late Edition. |
This Warburtonian party reminds one of an old custom among our elder poets, who formed a kind of freemasonry among themselves, by adopting younger poets by the title of their sons.—But that was a domestic society of poets; this, a revival of the Jesuitic order instituted by its founder, that—
| By him supported with a proper pride, Churchill’s “Fragment of a Dedication.” |
The character of a literary sycophant was never more perfectly exhibited than in Hurd. A Whig in principle, yet he had all a courtier’s arts for Warburton; to him he devoted all his genius, though that, indeed, was moderate; aided him with all his ingenuity, which was exquisite; and lent his cause a certain delicacy of taste and cultivated elegance, which, although too prim and artificial, was a vein of gold running through his mass of erudition; it was Hurd who aided the usurpation of Warburton in the province of criticism above
Such, then, was Warburton, and such the quarrels of this great author. He was, through his literary life, an adventurer, guided by that secret principle which opened an immediate road to fame. By opposing the common sentiments of mankind, he awed and he commanded them; and by giving a new face to all things, he surprised, by the appearances of discoveries. All this, so pleasing to his egotism, was not, however, fortunate for his ambition. To sustain an authority which he had usurped; to substitute for the taste he wanted a curious and dazzling erudition; and to maintain those reckless decisions which so often plunged him into perils, Warburton adopted his system of Literary Quarrels. These were the illegitimate means which raised a sudden celebrity, and which genius kept alive, as long as that genius lasted; but Warburton suffered that literary calamity, too protracted a period of human life: he outlived himself and his fame. This great and original mind sacrificed all his genius to that secret principle we have endeavoured to develope—it was a self-immolation!
The learned Selden, in the curious little volume of his “Table-Talk,” has delivered to posterity a precept for the learned, which they ought to wear, like the Jewish phylacteries, as “a frontlet between their eyes.” No man is the wiser for his learning: it may administer matter to work in, or objects to work upon; but wit and wisdom are born with a man. Sir Thomas Hanmer, who was well acquainted with Warburton, during their correspondence about Shakspeare, often said of him:—“The only use he could find in Mr. Warburton was starting the game; he was not to be trusted in
Warburton, it is probable, was not really the character he appears. It mortifies the lovers of genius to discover how a natural character may be thrown into a convulsed unnatural state by some adopted system: it is this system, which, carrying it, as it were, beyond itself, communicates a more than natural, but a self-destroying energy. All then becomes reversed! The arrogant and vituperative Warburton was only such in his assumed character; for in still domestic life he was the creature of benevolence, touched by generous passions. But in public life the artificial or the acquired character prevails over the one which nature designed for us; and by that all public men, as well as authors, are usually judged by posterity.
POPE,
AND HIS MISCELLANEOUS QUARRELS.
Pope adopted a system of literary politics—collected with extraordinary care everything relative to his Quarrels—no politician ever studied to obtain his purposes by more oblique directions and intricate stratagems—some of his manoeuvres—his systematic hostility not practised with impunity—his claim to his own works contested—Cibber’s facetious description of Pope’s feelings, and Welsted’s elegant satire on his genius—Dennis’s account of Pope’s Introduction to him—his political prudence further discovered in the Collection of all the Pieces relative to the Dunciad, in which he employed Savage—the Theobaldians and the Popeians; an attack by a Theobaldian—The Dunciad ingeniously defended, for the grossness of its imagery, and its reproach of the poverty of the authors, supposed by Pope himself, with some curious specimens of literary personalities—the Literary Quarrel between Aaron Hill and Pope distinguished for its romantic cast—a Narrative of the extraordinary transactions respecting the publication of Pope’s Letters; an example of Stratagem and Conspiracy, illustrative of his character.
Pope has proudly perpetuated the history of his Literary Quarrels; and he appears to have been among those authors, surely not forming the majority, who have delighted in, or have not been averse to provoke, hostility. He has registered the titles of every book, even to a single paper, or a copy of verses, in which their authors had committed treason against his poetical sovereignty.
Pope’s literary quarrels were the wars of his poetical ambition, more perhaps than of the petulance and strong irritability of his character. They were some of the artifices he adopted from the peculiarity of his situation.
Thrown out of the active classes of society from a variety of causes sufficiently known,
To keep his name alive before the public was one of his early plans. When he published his “Essay on Criticism,” anonymously, the young and impatient poet was mortified with the inertion of public curiosity: he was almost in despair.
But his systematic hostility did not proceed with equal impunity: in this perpetual war with dulness, he discovered that every one he called a dunce was not so; nor did he find the dunces themselves less inconvenient to him; for many successfully substituted, for their deficiencies in better qualities, the lie that lasts long enough to vex a man; and the insolence that does not fear him: they attacked him at all points, and not always in the spirit of legitimate warfare.
Pope was pursued through life by the insatiable vengeance of Dennis. The young poet, who had got introduced to him, among his first literary acquaintances, could not fail, when the occasion presented itself, of ridiculing this uncouth son of Aristotle. The blow was given in the character of Appius, in the “Art of Criticism;” and it is known Appius was instantaneously recognised by the fierce shriek of the agonised critic himself. From that moment Dennis resolved to write down every work of Pope’s. How dangerous to offend certain tempers, verging on madness!
The political prudence of Pope was further discovered in the “Collection of all the Pieces relative to the Dunciad,” on which he employed Savage: these exemplified the justness of the satire, or defended it from all attacks. The precursor of the Dunciad was a single chapter in “The Bathos; or, the Art of Sinking in Poetry;” where the humorous satirist discovers an analogy between flying-fishes, parrots, tortoises, &c., and certain writers, whose names are designated by initial letters. In this unlucky alphabet of dunces, not one of them but was applied to some writer of the day; and the loud clamours these excited could not be appeased by the simplicity of our poet’s declaration, that the letters were placed at random: and while his oil could not smooth so turbulent a sea, every one swore to the flying-fish or the tortoise, as he had described them. It was still more serious when the Dunciad appeared. Of that class of authors who depended for a wretched existence on their wages, several were completely ruined, for no purchasers were to be found for the works of some authors, after they had been inscribed in the chronicle of our provoking and inimitable satirist.
It is in this collection by Savage I find the writer’s admirable satire on the class of literary prostitutes. It is entitled “An Author to be Let, by Iscariot Hackney.” It has been ably commended by Johnson in his “Life of Savage,” and on his recommendation Thomas Davies inserted it in his “Collection of Fugitive Pieces;” but such is the careless curiosity of modern re-publishers, that often, in preserving a decayed body, they are apt to drop a limb: this was the case with Davies; for he has dropped the preface, far more exquisite than the work itself. A morsel of such poignant relish betrays the hand of the master who snatched the pen for a moment.
This preface defends Pope from the two great objections justly raised at the time against the Dunciad: one is, the grossness and filthiness of its imagery; and the other, its reproachful allusions to the poverty of the authors.
The indelicacies of the Dunciad are thus wittily apologised for:—
“They are suitable to the subject; a subject composed, for the most part, of authors whose writings are the refuse of
The reflections on the poverty of its heroes are thus ingeniously defended:—“Poverty, not proceeding from folly, but which may be owing to virtue, sets a man in an amiable light; but when our wants are of our own seeking, and prove the motive of every ill action (for the poverty of bad authors has always a bad heart for its companion), is it not a vice, and properly the subject of satire?” The preface then proceeds to show how “all these said writers might have been good mechanics.” He illustrates his principles with a most ungracious account of several of his contemporaries. I shall give a specimen of what I consider as the polished sarcasm and caustic humour of Pope, on some favourite subjects.
“Mr. Thomas Cooke.—His enemies confess him not without merit. To do the man justice, he might have made a tolerable figure as a Tailor. ’Twere too presumptuous to affirm he could have been a master in any profession; but, dull as I allow him, he would not have been despicable for a third or a fourth hand journeyman. Then had his wants have been avoided; for, he would at least have learnt to cut his coat according to his cloth.
“Why would not Mr. Theobald continue an attorney? Is
“When Mrs. Haywood ceased to be a strolling-actress, why might not the lady (though once a theatrical queen) have subsisted by turning washerwoman? Has not the fall of greatness been a frequent distress in all ages? She might have caught a beautiful bubble, as it arose from the suds of her tub, blown it in air, seen it glitter, and then break! Even in this low condition, she had played with a bubble; and what more is the vanity of human greatness?
“Had it not been an honester and more decent livelihood for Mr. Norton (Daniel De Foe’s son of love by a lady who
“Had it not been more laudable for Mr. Roome, the son of an undertaker, to have borne a link and a mourning-staff, in the long procession of a funeral—or even been more decent in him to have sung psalms, according to education, in an Anabaptist meeting, than to have been altering the Jovial Crew, or Merry Beggars, into a wicked imitation of the Beggar’s Opera?”
This satire seems too exquisite for the touch of Savage, and is quite in the spirit of the author of the Dunciad. There is, in Ruffhead’s “Life of Pope,” a work to which Warburton contributed all his care, a passage which could only have been written by Warburton. The strength and coarseness of the imagery could never have been produced by the dull and feeble intellect of Ruffhead: it is the opinion, therefore, of Warburton himself, on the Dunciad. “The good purpose intended by this satire was, to the herd in general, of less efficacy than our author hoped; for scribblers have not the common sense of other vermin, who usually abstain from mischief, when they see any of their kind gibbeted or nailed up, as terrible examples.”—Warburton employed the same strong image in one of his threats.
One of Pope’s Literary Quarrels must be distinguished for its romantic cast.
In the Treatise on the Bathos, the initial letters of the bad writers occasioned many heartburns; and, among others, Aaron Hill suspected he was marked out by the letters A.H. This gave rise to a large correspondence between Hill and Pope. Hill, who was a very amiable man, was infinitely too susceptible of criticism; and Pope, who seems to have had a personal regard for him, injured those nice feelings as little as possible. Hill had published a panegyrical poem on Peter the Great, under the title of “The Northern Star;” and the bookseller had conveyed to him a criticism of Pope’s, of which Hill publicly acknowledged he mistook the meaning. When the Treatise of “The Bathos” appeared, Pope insisted he had again mistaken the initials A.H.—Hill gently attacked Pope in “a paper of very pretty verses,” as Pope calls them. When the Dunciad appeared, Hill is said “to have published pieces, in his youth, bordering upon the bombast.” This was as light a stroke as could be inflicted; and which Pope, with great good-humour, tells Hill, might be equally
Where, in literary history, can be found the parallel of such an offer of self-immolation? This was a literary quarrel like that of lovers, where to hurt each other would have given pain to both parties. Such skill and desire to strike, with so much tenderness in inflicting a wound; so much compliment, with so much complaint; have perhaps never met together, as in the romantic hostility of this literary chivalry.
A NARRATIVE
OF THE EXTRAORDINARY TRANSACTIONS RESPECTING THE PUBLICATION OF POPE’S LETTERS.
Johnson observes, that “one of the passages of Pope’s life which seems to deserve some inquiry, was the publication of his letters by Curll, the rapacious bookseller.”
It is well known that the origin of Pope’s first letters given to the public, arose from the distresses of a cast-off mistress of one of his old friends (H. Cromwell),
This single volume was successful; and when Pope, to do justice to the memory of Wycherley, which had been injured by a posthumous volume, printed some of their letters, Curll, who seemed now to consider that all he could touch was his own property, and that his little volume might serve as a foundation-stone, immediately announced a new edition of it, with Additions, meaning to include the letters of Pope and Wycherley. Curll now became so fond of Pope’s Letters, that he advertised for any: “no questions to be asked.” Curll was willing to be credulous: having proved to the world he had some originals, he imagined these would sanction even spurious one. A man who, for a particular purpose, sought to be imposed on, easily obtained his wish: they translated letters of Voiture to Mademoiselle Rambouillet, and despatched them to the eager Bibliopolist to print, as Pope’s to Miss Blount. He went on increasing his collection; and, skilful in catering for the literary taste of the town, now inflamed their appetite by dignifying it with “Mr. Pope’s Literary Correspondence!”
But what were the feelings of Pope during these successive surreptitious editions? He had discovered that his genuine letters were liked; the grand experiment with the public had been made for him, while he was deprived of the profits; yet for he himself to publish his own letters, which I shall prove he had prepared, was a thing unheard of in the nation. All this was vexatious; and to stop the book-jobber and open the market for himself, was a point to be obtained.
While Curll was proceeding, wind and tide in his favour, a new and magnificent prospect burst upon him. A certain person, masked by the initials P.T., understanding Curll was preparing a Life of Pope, offered him “divers Memoirs gratuitously;” hinted that he was well known to Pope; but the poet had lately “treated him as a stranger.” P.T. desires an answer from E.C. by the Daily Advertiser, which was complied with. There are passages in this letter which,
| Hard as thy heart, and as thy birth obscure. |
He always hinted at noble relatives; but Tyers tells us, from the information of a relative, that “his father turns out, at last, to have been a linen-draper in the Strand:” therefore P.T. was at least telling a story which Pope had no objection should be repeated.
The second letter of P.T., for the first was designed only to break the ice, offers Curll “a large Collection of Letters from the early days of Pope to the year 1727.” He gives an excellent notion of their value: “They will open very many scenes new to the world, and make the most authentic Life and Memoirs that could be.” He desires they may be announced to the world immediately, in Curll’s precious style, that he “might not appear himself to have set the whole thing a-foot, and afterwards he might plead he had only sent some letters to complete the Collection.” He asks nothing, and the originals were offered to be deposited with Curll.
Curll, secure of this promised addition, but still craving for more and more, composed a magnificent announcement, which, with P.T.’s entire correspondence, he enclosed in a letter to Pope himself. The letters were now declared to be a “Critical, Philological, and Historical Correspondence.”—His own letter is no bad specimen of his keen sense; but after what had so often passed, his impudence was equal to the better quality.
“Sir,—To convince you of my readiness to oblige you, the inclosed is a demonstration. You have, as he says, disobliged a gentleman, the initial letters of whose name are P.T. I have some other papers in the same hand, relating to your family, which I will show, if you desire a sight of them. Your letters to Mr. Cromwell are out of print; and I intend to print them very beautifully, in an octavo volume. I have more to say than is proper to write; and if you will give me a meeting, I will wait on you with pleasure, and close all differences between you and yours,
“E. Curll.”
Pope, surprised, as he pretends, at this address, consulted with his friends; everything evil was suggested against Curll. They conceived that his real design was “to get Pope to look
“Whereas A.P. hath received a letter from E.C., bookseller, pretending that a person, the initials of whose name are P.T., hath offered the said E.C. to print a large Collection of Mr. P.’s letters, to which E.C. required an answer: A.P. having never had, nor intending to have, any private correspondence with the said E.C., gives it him in this manner. That he knows no such person as P.T.; that he believes he hath no such collection; and that he thinks the whole a forgery, and shall not trouble himself at all about it.”
Curll replied, denying he had endeavoured to correspond with Mr. Pope, and affirms that he had written to him by direction.
It is now the plot thickens. P.T. suddenly takes umbrage, accuses Curll of having “betrayed him to ‘Squire Pope,’ but you and he both shall soon be convinced it was no forgery. Since you would not comply with my proposal to advertise, I have printed them at my own expense.” He offers the books to Curll for sale.
Curll on this has written a letter, which takes a full view of the entire transaction. He seems to have grown tired of what he calls “such jealous, groundless, and dark negotiations.” P.T. now found it necessary to produce something more than a shadow—an agent appears, whom Curll considered to be a clergyman, who assumed the name of R. Smith. The first proposal was, that P.T.’s letters should be returned, that he might feel secure from all possibility of detection; so that P.T. terminates his part in this literary freemasonry as a nonentity.
Here Johnson’s account begins.—“Curll said, that one evening a man in a clergyman’s gown, but with a lawyer’s band, brought and offered to sale a number of printed volumes, which he found to be Pope’s Epistolary Correspondence; that he asked no name, and was told none, but gave the price demanded, and thought himself authorised to use his purchase to his own advantage.” Smith, the clergyman, left him some copies, and promised more.
Curll now, in all the elation of possession, rolled his thunder in an advertisement still higher than ever.—“Mr. Pope’s Literary Correspondence regularly digested, from 1704 to 1734:” to lords, earls, baronets, doctors, ladies, &c., with their respective answers, and whose names glittered in the advertisement. The original MSS. were also announced to be seen at his house.
But at this moment Curll had not received many books, and no MSS. The advertisement produced the effect designed; it roused public notice, and it alarmed several in the House of Lords. Pope doubtless instigated his friends there. The Earl of Jersey moved, that to publish letters of Lords was a breach of privilege; and Curll was brought before the House.
This was an unexpected incident; and P.T. once more throws his dark shadow across the path of Curll to hearten him, had he wanted courage to face all the lords. P.T. writes to instruct him in his answers to their examination; but to take the utmost care to conceal P.T.; he assures him that the lords could not touch a hair of his head if he behaved firmly; that he should only answer their interrogatories by declaring he received the letters from different persons; that some were given, and some were bought. P.T. reminds one, on this occasion, of Junius’s correspondence on a like threat with his publisher.
“Curll appeared at the bar,” says Johnson, “and knowing himself in no great danger, spoke of Pope with very little reverence. ‘He has,’ said Curll, ‘a knack at versifying; but in prose I think myself a match for him.’ When the Orders of the House were examined, none of them appeared to have been infringed: Curll went away triumphant, and Pope was left to seek some other remedy.” The fact, not mentioned by Johnson, is, that though Curll’s flourishing advertisement had announced letters written by lords, when the volumes were examined not one written by a lord appeared.
The letter Curll wrote on the occasion to one of these dark familiars, the pretended clergyman, marks his spirit and sagacity. It contains a remarkable passage. Some readers will be curious to have the productions of so celebrated a personage, who appears to have exercised considerable talents.
15th May, 1735.
“Dear Sir,—I am just again going to the Lords to finish Pope. I desire you to send me the sheets to perfect the first
297 fifty books, and likewise the remaining three hundred books; and pray be at the Standard Tavern this evening, and I will pay you twenty pounds more. My defence is right; I only told the lords I did not know from whence the books came, and that my wife received them. This was strict truth, and prevented all further inquiry. The lords declared they had been made Pope’s tools. I put myself on this single point, and insisted, as there was not any Peer’s letter in the book, I had not been guilty of any breach of privilege. I depend that the books and the imperfections will be sent; and believe of P.T. what I hope he believes of me. “For the Rev. Mr. Smith.”
The reader observes that Curll talks of a great number of books not received, and of the few which he has received, as imperfect. The fact is, the whole bubble is on the point of breaking. He, masked in the initial letters, and he, who wore the masquerade dress of a clergyman’s gown with a lawyer’s band, suddenly picked a quarrel with the duped bibliopolist: they now accuse him of a design he had of betraying them to the Lords!
The tantalized and provoked Curll then addressed the following letter to “The Rev. Mr. Smith,” which, both as a specimen of this celebrated personage’s “prose,” in which he thought himself “a match for Pope,” and exhibiting some traits of his character, will entertain the curious reader.
Friday, 16 May, 1735.
“Sir,—1st, I am falsely accused. 2. I value not any man’s change of temper; I will never change my VERACITY for falsehood, in owning a fact of which I am innocent. 3. I did not own the books came from across the water, nor ever named you; all I said was, that the books came by water. 4. When the books were seized, I sent my son to convey a letter to you; and as you told me everybody knew you in Southwark, I bid him make a strict inquiry, as I am sure you would have done in such an exigency. 5. Sir, I have acted justly in this affair, and that is what I shall always think wisely. 6. I will be kept no longer in the dark; P.T. is Will o’ the Wisp; all the books I have had are imperfect; the first fifty had no titles nor prefaces; the last five bundles seized by the Lords contained but thirty-eight in each bundle, which amounts to one hundred and ninety, and fifty, is in all but two hundred
298 and forty books. 7. As to the loss of a future copy, I despise it, nor will I be concerned with any more such dark suspicious dealers. But now, sir, I’ll tell you what I will do: when I have the books perfected which I have already received, and the rest of the impression, I will pay you for them. But what do you call this usage? First take a note for a month, and then want it to be changed for one of Sir Richard Hoare’s. My note is as good, for any sum I give it, as the Bank, and shall be as punctually paid. I always say, gold is better than paper. But if this dark converse goes on, I will instantly reprint the whole book; and, as a supplement to it, all the letters P.T. ever sent me, of which I have exact copies, together with all your originals, and give them in upon oath to my Lord Chancellor. You talk of trust—P.T. has not reposed any in me, for he has my money and notes for imperfect books. Let me see, sir, either P.T. or yourself, or you’ll find the Scots proverb verified, Nemo me impune lacessit. “Your abused humble servant,
“E. Curll.
“P.S. Lord —— I attend this day. Lord Delawar I sup with to-night. Where Pope has one lord, I have twenty.”
After this, Curll announced “Mr. Pope’s Literary Correspondence, with the initial correspondence of P.T., R.S. &c.” But the shadowy correspondents now publicly declared that they could give no title whatever to Mr. Pope’s letters, with which they had furnished Curll, and never pretended any; that therefore any bookseller had the same right of printing them: and, in respect to money matters between them, he had given them notes not negotiable, and had never paid them fully for the copies, perfect and imperfect, which he had sold.
Thus terminated this dark transaction between Curll and his initial correspondents. He still persisted in printing several editions of the letters of Pope, which furnished the poet with a modest pretext to publish an authentic edition—the very point to which the whole of this dark and intricate plot seems to have been really directed.
Were Pope not concerned in this mysterious transaction, how happened it that the letters which P.T. actually printed were genuine? To account for this, Pope promulgated a
Dr. Johnson, although he appears not to have been aware of the subtle intricacy of this extraordinary plot, has justly drawn this inference: “To make the copies perfect was the only purpose of Pope, because the numbers offered for sale by the private messengers, showed that hope of gain could not have been the motive of the impression. It seems that Pope, being desirous of printing his letters, and not knowing how to do, without imputation of vanity, what has in this country been done very rarely, contrived an appearance of compulsion; when he could complain that his letters were surreptitiously printed, he might decently and defensively publish them himself.”
I have observed, how the first letter of P.T. pretending to be written by one who owed no kindness to Pope, bears the evident impression of his own hand; for it contains matters not exactly true, but exactly what Pope wished should appear in his own life. That he had prepared his letters for publication, appears by the story of the two MS. books—that the printed ones came by water, would look as if they had been sent from his house at Twickenham; and, were it not absurd to pretend to decipher initials, P.T. might be imagined to indicate the name of the owner, as well as his place of abode.
Worsdale, an indifferent painter, was a man of some humour in personating a character, for he performed Old Lady Scandal in one of his own farces. He was also a
Such is the intricate narrative of this involved transaction. Pope completely succeeded, by the most subtile manoeuvres imaginable; the incident which perhaps was not originally expected, of having his letters brought before the examination at the House of Lords, most amply gratified his pride, and awakened public curiosity. “He made the House of Lords,” says Curll, “his tools.” Greater ingenuity, perplexity, and secrecy have scarcely been thrown into the conduct of the writer, or writers, of the Letters of Junius.
POPE AND CIBBER;
CONTAINING
A VINDICATION OF THE COMIC WRITER.
Pope attacked Cibber from personal motives—by dethroning Theobald, in the Dunciad, to substitute Cibber, he made the satire not apply—Cibber’s facetious and serious remonstrance—Cibber’s inimitable good-humour—an apology for what has been called his “effrontery”—perhaps a modest man, and undoubtedly a man of genius—his humorous defence of his deficiency in Tragedy, both in acting and writing—Pope more hurt at being exposed as a ridiculous lover than as a bad man—an account of “The Egotist, or Colley upon Cibber,” a kind of supplement to the “Apology for his life,” in which he has drawn his own character with great freedom and spirit.
Pope’s quarrel with Cibber may serve to check the haughtiness of genius; it is a remarkable instance how good-humour can gently draw a boundary round the arbitrary power, whenever the wantonness of satire would conceal calumny. But this quarrel will become even more interesting, should it throw a new light on the character of one whose originality of genius seems little suspected. Cibber showed a happy address in a very critical situation, and obtained an honourable triumph over the malice of a great genius, whom, while he complained of he admired, and almost loved the cynic.
Pope, after several “flirts,” as Cibber calls them, from slight personal motives, which Cibber has fully opened,
Cibber triumphed in the arduous conflict—though sometimes he felt that, like the Patriarch of old, he was wrestling, not with an equal, but one of celestial race, “and the hollow of his thigh was out of joint.” Still, however, he triumphed, by that singular felicity of character, that inimitable gaietÉ de coeur, that honest simplicity of truth, from which flowed so warm an admiration of the genius of his adversary; and that exquisite tact in the characters of men, which carried down this child of airy humour to the verge of his ninetieth year, with all the enjoyments of strong animal spirits, and all that innocent egotism which became frequently a source of his own raillery.
It was, indeed, the singularity of his personal character which so long injured his genius, and laid him open to the perpetual attacks of his contemporaries,
In the “Apology for his Life,” Cibber had shown himself a generous and an ill-treated adversary, and at all times was prodigal of his eulogiums, even after the death of Pope; but, when remonstrance and good temper failed to sheathe with their oil the sharp sting of the wasp, as his weakest talent was not the ludicrous, he resolved to gain the laughers over,
| And has not Colley, too, his Lord and w—e? |
It seems that Pope had once the same! But a ridiculous story, suited to the taste of the loungers, nettled Pope more than the keener remonstrances and the honest truths which Cibber has urged. Those who write libels, invite imitation.
Besides the two letters addressed by Cibber to Pope, this quarrel produced a moral trifle, or rather a philosophical curiosity, respecting Cibber’s own character, which is stamped with the full impression of all its originality.
The title, so expressive of its design, and the whim and good-humour of the work, which may be considered as a curious supplement to the “Apology for his Life,” could scarcely have been imagined, and most certainly could not have been executed, but by the genius who dared it. I give the title in the note.
I will attempt to collect some specimens of this extraordinary production, because they harmonise with the design of the present work, and afford principles, in regard to preserving an equability of temper, which may guide us in Literary Quarrels.
Frankly observes, on Cibber’s declaration that he is not uneasy at Pope’s satire, that
Author. This is pushing me pretty home indeed; but I wont give out. For as it is not at all inconceivable, that a blockhead of my size may have a particular knack of doing some useful thing that might puzzle a wiser man to be master of, will not that blockhead still have something in him to be conceited of? If so, allow me but the vanity of supposing I may have had some such possible knack, and you will not wonder (though in many other points I may still be a blockhead) that I may, notwithstanding, be contented with my condition.
Frankly. Is it not commendable, in a man of parts, to be warmly concerned for his reputation?
Author. In what regards his honesty or honour, I will make some allowance; but for the reputation of his parts, not one tittle.
Frankly. How! not to be concerned for what half the learned world are in a continual war about.
Author. So are another half about religion; but neither Turk or Pope, swords or anathemas, can alter truth! There it stands! always visible to reason, self-defended and immovable! Whatever it was, or is, it ever will be! As no attack can alter, so no defence can add to its proportion.
Frankly. At this rate, you pronounce all controversies in wit to be either needless or impertinent.
Author. When one in a hundred happens not to be so, or to make amends for being either by its pleasantry, we ought in justice to allow it a great rarity. A reply to a just satire or criticism will seldom be thought better of.
Frankly. May not a reply be a good one?
Author. Yes, but never absolutely necessary; for as your work (or reputation) must have been good or bad, before it was censured, your reply to that censure could not alter it: it would still be but what it was. If it was good, the attack could not hurt it: if bad, the reply could not mend it.
Frankly. But slander is not always so impotent as you seem to suppose it; men of the best sense may be misled by it, or, by their not inquiring after truth, may never come at it; and the vulgar, as they are less apt to be good than ill-natured, often mistake malice for wit, and have an uncharitable joy in commending it. Now, when this is the case, is not a tame silence, upon being satirically libelled, as liable to be thought guilt or stupidity, as to be the result of innocence or temper?—Self-defence is a very natural and just excuse for a reply.
Author. Be it so! But still that does not always make it necessary; for though slander, by their not weighing it, may pass upon some few people of sense for truth, and might draw great numbers of the vulgar into its party, the mischief
Frankly. The single-sheet critics will find you employment.
Author. Indeed they wont. I’m not so mad as to think myself a match for the invulnerable.
Frankly. Have a care; there’s Foulwit; though he can’t feel, he can bite.
Author. Ay, so will bugs and fleas; but that’s only for sustenance: everything must feed, you know; and your creeping critics are a sort of vermin, that if they could come to a king, would not spare him; yet, whenever they can persuade others to laugh at their jest upon me, I will honestly make one of the number; but I must ask their pardon, if that should be all the reply I can afford
This “boy of seventy odd,” for such he was when he wrote “The Egotist,” unfolds his character by many lively personal touches. He declares he could not have “given the world so finished a coxcomb as Lord Foppington, if he had not found a good deal of the same stuff in himself to make him with.” He addresses “A Postscript, To those few unfortunate Readers and Writers who may not have more sense than the Author:” and he closes, in all the fulness of his spirit, with a piece of consolation for those who are so cruelly attacked by superior genius.
“Let us then, gentlemen, who have the misfortune to lie thus at the mercy of those whose natural parts happen to be stronger than our own—let us, I say, make the most of our sterility! Let us double and treble the ranks of our thickness, that we may form an impregnable phalanx, and stand every way in front to the enemy! or, would you still be liable to less hazard, lay but yourselves down, as I do, flat and quiet upon your faces, when Pride, Malice, Envy, Wit, or Prejudice let fly their formidable shot at you, what odds is it they don’t all whistle over your head? Thus, too, though we may want the artillery of missive wit to make reprisals, we may at least in security bid them kiss the tails we have turned to them. Who knows but, by this our supine, or rather prone serenity, their disappointed valour may become their own vexation? Or let us yet, at worst, but solidly stand our ground, like so many defensive stone-posts, and we may defy the
“Your impenetrable humble servant,
“C. C.”
After all, one may perceive, that though the good-humour of poor Cibber was real, still the immortal satire of Pope had injured his higher feelings. He betrays his secret grief at his close, while he seems to be sporting with his pen; and though he appears to confide in the falsity of the satire as his best chance for saving him from it, still he feels that the caustic ink of such a satirist must blister and spot wherever it falls. The anger of Warburton, and the sternness of Johnson, who seem always to have considered an actor as an inferior being among men of genius, have degraded Cibber. They never suspected that “a blockhead of his size could do what wiser men could not,” and, as a fine comic genius, command a whole province in human nature.
POPE AND ADDISON.
The quarrel between Pope and Addison originated in one of the infirmities of genius—a subject of inquiry even after their death, by Sir William Blackstone—Pope courts Addison—suspects Addison of jealousy—Addison’s foible to be considered a great poet—interview between the rivals, of which the result was the portrait of Atticus, for which Addison was made to sit.
Among the Literary Quarrels of Pope one acquires dignity and interest from the characters of both parties. It closed by producing the severest, but the most masterly portrait of one man of genius, composed by another, which has ever been hung on the satiric Parnassus for the contemplation of ages. Addison must descend to posterity with the dark spots of Atticus staining a purity of character which had nearly proved immaculate.
The friendship between Pope and Addison was interrupted by one of the infirmities of genius. Tempers of watchful delicacy gather up in silence and darkness motives so shadowy in their origin, and of such minute growth, that, never breaking out into any open act, they escape all other eyes but those of the parties themselves. These causes of enmity are too subtle to bear the touch; they cannot be inquired after, nor can they be described; and it may be said that the minds of such men have rather quarrelled than they themselves: they utter no complaints, but they avoid each other. All the world perceived that two authors of the finest genius had separated from motives on which both were silent, but which had evidently operated with equal force on both. Their admirers were very general, and at a time when literature divided with politics the public interest, the best feelings of the nation were engaged in tracking the obscure commencements and the secret growth of this literary quarrel, in which the amiable and moral qualities of Addison, and the gratitude and honour of Pope, were equally involved. The friends of either party pretended that their chiefs entertained a reciprocal regard for each other, while the illustrious characters themselves were
At this day, removed from all personal influence and affections, and furnished with facts which contemporaries could not command, we take no other concern in this literary quarrel but as far as curiosity and truth delight us in the study of human nature. We are now of no party—we are only historians!
Pope was a young writer when introduced to Addison by the intervention of that generously-minded friend of both, Steele. Addison eulogised Pope’s “Essay on Criticism;” and this fine genius covering with his wing an unfledged bardling, conferred a favour which, in the estimation of a poet, claims a life of indelible gratitude.
Pope zealously courted Addison by his poetical aid on several important occasions; he gave all the dignity that fine poetry could confer on the science of medals, which Addison had written on, and wrote the finest prologue in the language for the Whig tragedy of his friend. Dennis attacked,
Not that, however, Pope had not found his affections weakened: the dark hints scattered in his letters show that something was gathering in his mind. Warburton, from his familiar intercourse with Pope, must be allowed to have known his literary concerns more than any one; and when he drew up the narrative,
Still Addison publicly bestowed great encomiums on Pope’s Iliad, although he had himself composed the rival version, and in private preferred his own.
But in this narrative I have dropt some material parts. Pope believed that Addison had employed Gildon to write against him, and had encouraged Phillips to asperse his character.
Was Addison, then, jealous of Pope? Addison, in every respect, then, his superior; of established literary fame when Pope was yet young; preceding him in age and rank; and fortunate in all the views of human ambition. But what if Addison’s foible was that of being considered a great poet? His political poetry had raised him to an undue elevation, and the growing celebrity of Pope began to offend him, not with the appearance of a meek rival, with whom he might have held divided empire, but as a master-spirit, that was preparing to reign alone. It is certain that Addison was the most feeling man alive at the fate of his poetry. At the representation of his Cato, such was his agitation, that had Cato been condemned, the life of Addison might, too, have been shortened. When a wit had burlesqued some lines of this dramatic poem, his uneasiness at the innocent banter was
To the facts already detailed, and to this disposition in Addison’s temper, and to the quick and active suspicions of Pope, irritable, and ambitious of all the sovereignty of poetry, we may easily conceive many others of those obscure motives, and invisible events, which none but Pope, alienated every day more and more from his affections for Addison, too acutely perceived, too profoundly felt, and too unmercifully avenged. These are alluded to when the satirist sings—
| Damn with faint praise; assent with civil leer; |
Accusations crowded faster than the pen could write them down. Pope never composed with more warmth. No one can imagine that Atticus was an ideal personage, touched as it is with all the features of an extraordinary individual. In a word, it was recognised instantly by the individual himself; and it was suppressed by Pope for near twenty years, before he suffered it to escape to the public.
It was some time during their avowed rupture, for the exact period has not been given, that their friends promoted a meeting between these two great men. After a mutual lustration, it was imagined they might have expiated their error, and have been restored to their original purity. The interview did take place between the rival wits, and was productive of some very characteristic ebullitions, strongly corroborative of the facts as they have been stated here. This extraordinary interview has been frequently alluded to. There can be no doubt of the genuineness of the narrative but I know not on what authority it came into the world.
The interview between Addison and Pope took place in the presence of Steele and Gay. They met with cold civility. Addison’s reserve wore away, as was usual with him, when wine and conversation imparted some warmth to his native phlegm. At a moment the generous Steele deemed auspicious, he requested Addison would perform his promise in renewing his friendship with Pope. Pope expressed his desire: he said he was willing to hear his faults, and preferred candour and severity rather than forms of complaisance; but he spoke in a manner as conceiving Addison, and not himself, had been the aggressor. So much like their humblest inferiors do great men act under the influence of common passions: Addison was overcome with anger, which cost him an effort to suppress; but, in the formal speech he made, he reproached Pope with indulging a vanity that far exceeded his merit; that he had not yet attained to the excellence he imagined; and observed, that his verses had a different air when Steele and himself corrected them; and, on this occasion, reminded Pope of a particular line which Steele had improved in the “Messiah.”
When Addison had quite finished schooling his little rebel, Gay, mild and timid (for it seems, with all his love for Pope, his expectations from the court, from Addison’s side, had tethered his gentle heart), attempted to say something. But Pope, in a tone far more spirited than all of them, without reserve told Addison that he appealed from his judgment, and did not esteem him able to correct his verses; upbraided him as a pensioner from early youth, directing the learning which had been obtained by the public money to his own selfish desire of power, and that he “had always endeavoured to cut down new-fledged merit.” The conversation now became a contest, and was broken up without ceremony. Such was the notable interview between two rival wits, which only ended in strengthening their literary quarrel; and sent back the enraged satirist to his inkstand, where he composed a portrait, for which Addison was made to sit, with the fine chiar’ oscuro of Horace, and with as awful and vindictive features as the sombre hand of Juvenal could have designed.
BOLINGBROKE AND MALLET’S POSTHUMOUS QUARREL WITH POPE.
Lord Bolingbroke affects violent resentment for Pope’s pretended breach of confidence in having printed his “Patriot King”—Warburton’s apology for Pope’s disinterested intentions—Bolingbroke instigates Mallet to libel Pope, after the poet’s death—The real motive for libelling Pope was Bolingbroke’s personal hatred of Warburton, for the ascendancy the latter had obtained over the poet—Some account of their rival conflicts—Bolingbroke had unsettled Pope’s religious opinions, and Warburton had confirmed his faith—Pope, however, refuses to abjure the Catholic religion—Anecdote of Pope’s anxiety respecting a future state—Mallet’s intercourse with Pope: anecdote of “The Apollo Vision,” where Mallet mistook a sarcasm for a compliment—Mallet’s character—Why Leonidas Glover declined writing the Life of Marlborough—Bolingbroke’s character hit off—Warburton, the concealed object of this posthumous quarrel with Pope.
On the death of Pope, 1500 copies of one of Lord Bolingbroke’s works, “The Patriot King,” were discovered to have been secretly printed by Pope, but never published. The honest printer presented the whole to his lordship, who burned the edition in his gardens at Battersea. The MS. had been delivered to our poet by his lordship, with a request to print a few copies for its better preservation, and for the use of a few friends.
Bolingbroke affected to feel the most lively resentment for what he chose to stigmatise as “a breach of confidence.” “His thirst of vengeance,” said Johnson, “incited him to blast the memory of the man over whom he had wept in his last struggles; and he employed Mallet, another friend of Pope, to tell the tale to the public with all its aggravations. Warburton, whose heart was warm with his legacy, and tender by the recent separation,” apologised for Pope. The irregular conduct which Bolingbroke stigmatised as a breach of trust, was attributed to a desire of perpetuating the work of his friend, who might have capriciously destroyed it. Our poet could have no selfish motive; he could not gratify his vanity by publishing the work as his own, nor his avarice by
The vindictive rage of Bolingbroke; the bitter invective he permitted Mallet to publish, as the editor of his works; and the two anonymous pamphlets of the latter, which I have noticed in the article of Warburton; are effects much too disproportionate to the cause which is usually assigned. Johnson does not develope the secret motives of what he has energetically termed “Bolingbroke’s thirst of vengeance.” He and Mallet carried their secret revenge beyond all bounds: the lordly stoic and the irritated bardling, under the cloak of anonymous calumny, have but ill-concealed the malignity of their passions. Let anonymous calumniators recollect, in the midst of their dark work, that if they escape the detection of their contemporaries, their reputation, if they have any to lose, will not probably elude the researches of the historian;—a fatal witness against them at the tribunal of posterity.
The preface of Mallet to the “Patriot King” of Bolingbroke, produced a literary quarrel; and more pamphlets than perhaps I have discovered were published on this occasion.
Every lover of literature was indignant to observe that the vain and petulant Mallet, under the protection of Pope’s
| Guide, philosopher, and friend! |
should have been permitted to have aspersed Pope with the most degrading language. Pope is here always designated as “This Man.” Thus “This Man was no sooner dead than Lord Bolingbroke received information that an entire edition of 1500 copies of these papers had been printed; that this very Man had corrected the press, &c.” Could one imagine that this was the Tully of England, describing our Virgil? For Mallet was but the mouthpiece of Bolingbroke.
After a careful detection of many facts concerning the parties now before us, I must attribute the concealed motive
But how did the puny Mallet stand connected with these great men? By the pamphlets published during this literary quarrel he appears to have enjoyed a more intimate intercourse with them than is known. In one of them he is characterised “as a fellow who, while Mr. Pope lived, was as diligent in licking his feet, as he is now in licking your lordship’s; and who, for the sake of giving himself an air of importance, in being joined with you, and for the vanity of saying ‘the Author and I,’—‘the Editor and me,’—has sacrificed all his pretensions to friendship, honour, and humanity.”
THE APOLLO VISION.
“The editor (Mallet) being in company with the person to whom Mr. Pope has consigned the care of his works (Warburton), and who, he thought, had some intention of writing Mr. Pope’s life, told him he had an anecdote, which he believed nobody knew but himself. I was sitting one day (said he) with Mr. Pope, in his last illness, who coming suddenly out of a reverie, which you know he frequently fell into at that time, and fixing his eyes steadfastly upon me; ‘Mr. M. (said he), I have had an odd kind of vision. Methought I saw my own head open, and Apollo came out of it; I then saw your head open, and Apollo went into it; after which our heads closed up again.’ The gentleman (Warburton) could not help smiling at his vanity; and with some humour replied, ‘Why, sir, if I had an intention of writing your life, this
This exhibits a curious instance of an author’s egotism, or rather of Mallet’s conceit, contriving, by some means, to have his name slide into the projected Life of Pope by Warburton, who appears, however, always to have treated him with the contempt Pope himself evidently did.
“The Apollo Vision” was a stinging anecdote, and it came from Warburton either directly or indirectly. This was followed
In one of these pamphlets, too, Bolingbroke was mortified at his dignity being lessened by the writer, in comparing his lordship with their late friend Pope.—“I venture to foretell,
LINTOT’S ACCOUNT-BOOK.
An odd sort of a literary curiosity has fallen in my way. It throws some light on the history of the heroes of the Dunciad; but such minutiÆ literariÆ are only for my bibliographical readers.
It is a book of accounts, which belonged to the renowned Bernard Lintot, the bookseller, whose character has been so humorously preserved by Pope, in a dialogue which the poet has given as having passed between them in Windsor Forest. The book is entitled “Copies, when Purchased.” The power of genius is exemplified in the ledger of the bookseller as much as in any other book; and while I here discover, that the moneys received even by such men of genius as Gay, Farquhar, Cibber, and Dr. King, amount to small sums, and such authors as Dennis, Theobald, Ozell, and Toland, scarcely amount to anything, that of Pope much exceeds 4000l.
I am not in all cases confident of the nature of these
I transcribe Pope’s account. Here it appears that he sold “The Key to the Lock” and “Parnell’s Poems.” The poem entitled, “To the Author of a Poem called Successio,” appears to have been written by Pope, and has escaped the researches of his editors. The smaller poems were contributed to a volume of Poetical Miscellanies, published by Lintot.
MR. POPE.
| £ | s. | d. | ||
| 19 Feb. 1711-12. | ||||
| Statius, First Book | } | 16 | 2 | 6 |
| Vertumnus and Pomona | } | |||
| 21 March, 1711-12. | ||||
| First Edition Rape | 7 | 0 | 0 | |
| 9 April, 1712. | ||||
| To a Lady presenting Voiture | } | |||
| Upon Silence | } | 3 | 16 | 6 |
| To the Author of a Poem called Successio | } | |||
| 23 Feb. 1712-13. | ||||
| Windsor Forest | 32 | 5 | 0 | |
| 23 July, 1713. | ||||
| Ode on St. Cecilia’s day | 15 | 0 | 0 | |
| 20th Feb. 1713-14. | ||||
| Additions to the Rape | 15 | 0 | 0 | |
| 1 Feb. 1714-15. | ||||
| Temple of Fame | 32 | 5 | 0 | |
| 30 April, 1715. | ||||
| Key to the Lock | 10 | 15 | 0 | |
| 17 July, 1716. | ||||
| Essay on Criticism | 15 | 0 | 0 | |
| 13 Dec. 1721. | ||||
| Parnell’s Poems | 15 | 0 | 0 | |
| 23 March, 1713. | ||||
| Homer, vol. i. | 215 | 0 | 0 | |
| 650 books on royal paper | 176 | 0 | 0 | |
| 9 Feb. 1715-16. | ||||
| Homer, vol. ii. | 215 | 0 | 0 | |
| 7 May, 1716. | ||||
| 650 royal paper | 150 | 0 | 0 | |
| This article is repeated to the sixth volume of of Homer. To which is to be added another sum of 840l., paid for an assignment of all the copies. The whole of this part of the account amounting to | 3203 | 4 | 0 | |
| Copy-moneys for the Odyssey, vols. i. ii. iii., and 750 of each vol. royal paper, 4to. | 615 | 6 | 0 | |
| Ditto for the vols. iv. v. and 750 do. | 425 | 18 | 7½ | |
| £4244 | 8 | 7½ |
MR. GAY.
| £ | s. | d. | |
| 12 May, 1713. | |||
| Wife of Bath | 25 | 0 | 0 |
| 11 Nov. 1714. | |||
| Letter to a Lady | 5 | 7 | 6 |
| 14 Feb. 1714. | |||
| The What d’ye call it? | 16 | 2 | 6 |
| 22 Dec. 1715. | |||
| Trivia | 43 | 0 | 0 |
| Epistle to the Earl of Burlington | 10 | 15 | 0 |
| 4 May, 1717. | |||
| Battle of the Frogs | 16 | 2 | 6 |
| 8 Jan. 1717. | |||
| Three Hours after Marriage | 43 | 2 | 6 |
| The Mohocks, a Farce, 2l. 10s. | |||
| (Sold the Mohocks to him again. | |||
| Revival of the Wife of Bath | 75 | 0 | 0 |
| £234 | 10 | 0 |
MR. DENNIS.
| £ | s. | d. | |
| Feb. 24, 1703-4. | |||
| Liberty Asserted, one half share | 7 | 3 | 0 |
| 10 Nov. 1708. | |||
| Appius and Virginia | 21 | 10 | 0 |
| 25 April, 1711. | |||
| Essay on Public Spirit | 2 | 12 | 6 |
| 6 Jan. 1711. | |||
| Remarks on Pope’s Essay | 2 | 12 | 6 |
Dennis must have sold himself to criticism from ill-nature, and not for pay. One is surprised that his two tragedies should have been worth a great deal more than his criticism. Criticism was then worth no more than too frequently it deserves; Dr. Sewel, for his “Observations on the Tragedy of Jane Shore,” received only a guinea.
I had suggested a doubt whether Theobald attempted to translate from the original Greek: one would suppose he did by the following entry, which has a line drawn through it, as if the agreement had not been executed. Perhaps Lintot submitted to pay Theobald for not doing the Odyssey when Pope undertook it.
MR. THEOBALD.
| £ | s. | d. | |
| 23 May, 1713. | |||
| Plato’s PhÆdon | 5 | 7 | 6 |
| For Æsculus’s Trag. | 1 | 1 | 6 |
| being part of Ten Guineas. | |||
| 12 June, 1714. | |||
| La Motte’s Homer | 3 | 4 | 6 |
April 21, 1714. Articles signed by Mr. Theobald, to translate for B. Lintot the 24 books of Homer’s Odyssey into English blank verse. Also the four Tragedies of Sophocles, called Œdipus Tyrannus, Œdipus Coloneus, TrachiniÆ, and Philoctetes, into English blank verse, with Explanatory
332 Notes to the twenty-four Books of the Odyssey, and to the four Tragedies. To receive, for translating every 450 Greek verses, with Explanatory Notes thereon, the sum of 2l. 10s. To translate likewise the Satires and Epistles of Horace into English rhyme. For every 120 Latin lines so translated, the sum of 1l. 1s. 6d.
These Articles to be performed, according to the time specified, under the penalty of fifty pounds, payable by either party’s default in performance.
Paid in hand, 2l. 10s.
It appears that Toland never got above 5l., 10l., or 20l., for his publications. See his article in “Calamities of Authors,” p. 155. I discovered the humiliating conditions that attended his publications, from an examination of his original papers. All this author seems to have reaped from a life devoted to literary enterprise, and philosophy, and patriotism, appears not to have exceeded 200l.
Here, too, we find that the facetious Dr. King threw away all his sterling wit for five miserable pounds, though “The Art of Cookery,” and that of “Love,” obtained a more honourable price. But a mere school-book probably inspired our lively genius with more real facetiousness than any of those works which communicate so much to others.
| £ | s. | d. | |
| 18 Feb. 1707-8. | |||
| Paid for Art of Cookery | 32 | 5 | 0 |
| 16 Feb. 1708-9. | |||
| Paid for the First Part of Transactions | 5 | 0 | 0 |
| Paid for his Art of Love | 32 | 5 | 0 |
| 23 June, 1709. | |||
| Paid for the Second Part of the Transactions | 5 | 0 | 0 |
| 4 March, 1709-10. | |||
| Paid for the History of Cajamai | 5 | 0 | 0 |
| 10 Nov. 1710. | |||
| Paid for King’s Gods | 50 | 0 | 0 |
| 1 July, 1712. | |||
| Useful Miscellany, Part I | 1 | 1 | 6 |
| Paid for the Useful Miscellany | 3 | 0 | 0 |
Lintot utters a groan over “The Duke of Buckingham’s Works” (Sheffield), for “having been jockeyed of them by Alderman Barber and Tonson.” Who can ensure literary celebrity? No bookseller would now regret being jockeyed out of his Grace’s works!
The history of plays appears here somewhat curious:—tragedies, then the fashionable dramas, obtained a considerable
Is it not a little mortifying to observe, that among all these customers of genius whose names enrich the ledger of the bookseller, Jacob, that “blunderbuss of law,” while his law-books occupy in space as much as Mr. Pope’s works, the amount of his account stands next in value, far beyond many a name which has immortalised itself!
POPE’S EARLIEST SATIRE.
We find by the first edition of Lintot’s “Miscellaneous Poems,” that the anonymous lines “To the Author of a Poem called Successio,” was a literary satire by Pope, written when he had scarcely attained his fourteenth year. This satire, the first probably he wrote for the press, and in which he has succeeded so well, that it might have induced him to pursue the bent of his genius, merits preservation. The juvenile composition bears the marks of his future excellences: it has the tune of his verse, and the images of his wit. Thirty years afterwards, when occupied by the Dunciad, he transplanted and pruned again some of the original images.
The hero of this satire is Elkanah Settle. The subject is one of those Whig poems, designed to celebrate the happiness of an uninterrupted “Succession” in the Crown, at the time the Act of Settlement passed, which transferred it to the Hanoverian line. The rhymer and his theme were equally contemptible to the juvenile Jacobite poet.
The hoarse and voluminous Codrus of Juvenal aptly designates this eternal verse-maker;—one who has written with such constant copiousness, that no bibliographer has presumed to form a complete list of his works.
When Settle had outlived his temporary rivalship with Dryden, and was reduced to mere Settle, he published party-poems, in folio, composed in Latin, accompanied by his own translations. These folio poems, uniformly bound, except that the arms of his patrons, or rather his purchasers, richly
Settle, in his latter state of wretchedness, had one standard elegy and epithalamium printed off with blanks. By the ingenious contrivance of inserting the name of any considerable person who died or was married, no one who had gone out of the world or was entering into it but was equally welcome to this dinnerless livery-man of the draggled-tailed Muses. I have elsewhere noticed his last exit from this state of poetry and of pauperism, when, leaping into a green dragon which his own creative genius had invented, in a theatrical booth, Codrus, in hissing flames and terrifying-morocco folds, discovered “the fate of talents misapplied!”
| TO THE AUTHOR OF A POEM ENTITLED “SUCCESSIO.”
|
THE ROYAL SOCIETY.
The Royal Society at first opposed from various quarters—their Experimental Philosophy supplants the Aristotelian methods—suspected of being the concealed Advocates of Popery, Arbitrary Power, and Atheism—disappointments incurred by their promises—the simplicity of the early Inquirers—ridiculed by the Wits and others—Narrative of a quarrel between a Member of the Royal Society and an Aristotelian—Glanvill writes his “Plus Ultra,” to show the Improvements of Modern Knowledge—Character of Stubbe of Warwick—his Apology, from himself—opposes the “Plus Ultra” by the “Plus Ultra reduced to a Nonplus”—his “Campanella revived”—the Political Projects of Campanella—Stubbe persecuted, and menaced to be publicly whipped; his Roman spirit—his “Legends no Histories”—his “Censure on some Passages of the History of the Royal Society”—Harvey’s ambition to be considered the Discoverer of the Circulation of the Blood, which he demonstrates—Stubbe describes the Philosophy of Science—attacks Sprat’s Dedication to the King—The Philosophical Transactions published by Sir Hans Sloane ridiculed by Dr. King—his new Species of Literary Burlesque—King’s character—these attacks not ineffectually renewed by Sir John Hill.
The Royal Society, on its first establishment, at the era of the Restoration, encountered fierce hostilities; nor, even at later periods, has it escaped many wanton attacks. A great revolution in the human mind was opening with that establishment; for the spirit which had appeared in the recent political concussion, and which had given freedom to opinion, and a bolder scope to enterprise, had now reached the literary and philosophical world; but causes of the most opposite natures operated against this institution of infant science.
In the first place, the new experimental philosophy, full of inventions and operations, proposed to supplant the old scholastic philosophy, which still retained an obscure jargon of terms, the most frivolous subtilties, and all those empty and artificial methods by which it pretended to decide on all topics. Too long it had filled the ear with airy speculation, while it starved the mind that languished for sense and knowledge. But this emancipation menaced the power of the followers of Aristotle, who were still slumbering in their undisputed authority,
Some there were, in that unsettled state of politics and religion, in whose breasts the embers of the late Revolution were still hot: they were panic-struck that the advocates of popery and arbitrary power were returning on them, disguised as natural philosophers. This new terror had a very ludicrous origin:—it arose from some casual expressions, in which the Royal Society at first delighted, and by which an air of mystery was thrown over its secret movements: such was that “Universal Correspondence” which it affected to boast of; and the vaunt to foreigners of its “Ten Secretaries,” when, in truth, all these magnificent declarations were only objects of their wishes. Another fond but singular expression, which the illustrious Boyle had frequently applied to it in its earliest state, when only composed of a few friends, calling it “The Invisible College,” all concurred to make the
Others, again, were impatient for romantic discoveries; miracles were required, some were hinted at, while some were promised. In the ecstasy of imagination, they lost their soberness, forgetting that they were but the historians of nature, and not her prophets.
But a source of the ridicule which was perpetually flowing against the Royal Society, was the almost infantine simplicity of its earliest members, led on by their honest zeal; and the absence of all discernment in many trifling and ludicrous researches, which called down the malice of the wits;
In founding this infant empire of knowledge, a memorable literary war broke out between Glanvill, the author of the treatise on “Witches,” &c., and Stubbe, a physician, a man of great genius. It is the privilege of genius that its controversies enter into the history of the human mind; what is but temporary among the vulgar of mankind, with the curious and the intelligent become monuments of lasting interest. The present contest, though the spark of contention flew out of a private quarrel, at length blazed into a public controversy.
The obscure individual who commenced the fray, is forgotten in the boasted achievements of his more potent ally; he was a clergyman named Cross, the Vicar of Great Chew, in Somersetshire, a stanch Aristotelian.
Glanvill, a member of the Royal Society, and an enthusiast for the new philosophy, had kindled the anger of the peripatetic,
When Glanvill entered the house, he perceived that he was to begin an acquaintance in a quarrel, which was not the happiest way to preserve it. The Vicar of Great Chew sat amid his congregated admirers. The peripatetic had promised them the annihilation of the new-fashioned virtuoso, and, like an angry boar, had already been preluding by whetting his tusks. Scarcely had the first cold civilities passed, when Glanvill found himself involved in single combat with an assailant armed with the ten categories of Aristotle. Cross, with his Quodam modo, and his Modo quodam, with his Ubi and his Quando, scattered the ideas of the simple experimentalist, who, confining himself to a simple recital of facts and a description of things, was referring, not to the logic of Aristotle, but to the works of nature. The imperative Aristotelian was wielding weapons, which, says Glanvill, “were nothing more than like those of a cudgel-player, or fencing-master.”
The last blow was still reserved, when Cross asserted that Aristotle had more opportunities to acquire knowledge than the Royal Society, or all the present age had, or could have, for this definitive reason, “because Aristotle did, totam peragrare Asiam.” Besides, in the Chew philosophy, where novelty was treason, improvements or discoveries could never exist. Here the Aristotelian made his stand; and at length, gently hooking Glanvill between the horns of a dilemma, the entrapped virtuoso threw himself into an unguarded affirmation; at which the Vicar of Great Chew, shouting in triumph, with a sardonic grin, declared that Glanvill and his Royal Society had now avowed themselves to be atheistical! This made an end of the interview, and a beginning of the quarrel.
Glanvill addressed an expostulatory letter to the inhuman Aristotelian, who only replied by calling it a recantation, asserting that the affair had finished with the conviction.
On this, Glanvill produced his “Plus Ultra,”
Cross, maddened that he could not get his bundle of peripatetic ribaldries printed, wrote ballads, which he got sung as it chanced. But suppressed invectives and eking rhymes could but ill appease so fierce a mastiff: he set on the poor F.R.S. an animal as rabid, but more vigorous than himself—both of them strangely prejudiced against the modern improvements of knowledge; so that, like mastiffs in the dark, they were only the fiercer.
This was Dr. Henry Stubbe, a physician of Warwick—one of those ardent and versatile characters, strangely made up of defects as strongly marked as their excellences. He was one of those authors who, among their numerous remains, leave little of permanent value; for their busy spirits too keenly delight in temporary controversy, and they waste the efforts of a mind on their own age, which else had made the next their own. Careless of worldly opinions, these extraordinary men, with the simplicity of children, are mere beings of sensation; perpetually precipitated by their feelings, with slight powers of reflection, and just as sincere when they act in contradiction to themselves, as when they act in contradiction to others. In their moral habits, therefore, we are often struck with strange contrasts; their whole life is a jumble of actions; and we are apt to condemn their versatility of principles as arising from dishonest motives; yet their temper has often proved more generous, and their integrity purer, than those who have crept up in one unvarying progress to an eminence which they quietly possess, without any of the
The extraordinary character of Stubbe produced as uncommon a history. Stubbe had originally been a child of fortune, picked up at Westminster school by Sir Henry Vane the younger, who sent him to Oxford; where this effervescent genius was, says Wood, “kicked, and beaten, and whipped.”
Literary coteries were then held at coffee-houses;
Such was the adversary of the Royal Society! It is quite in character that, under the government of Cromwell, he himself should have spread a taste for what was then called “The New Philosophy” among our youth and gentlemen, with the view of rendering the clergy contemptible; or, as he says, “to make them appear egregious fools in matters of common discourse.” He had always a motive for his actions, however opposite they were; pretending that he was never moved by caprice, but guided by principle. One of his adversaries, however, has reason to say, that judging him by his “printed papers, he was a man of excellent contradictory parts.” After the Restoration, he furnished as odd, but as forcible a reason, for opposing the Royal Society. At that time the nation, recent from republican ardours, was often panic-struck by papistical conspiracies, and projects of arbitrary power; and it was on this principle that he took part against the Society. Influenced by Dr. Fell and others, he suffered them to infuse these extravagant opinions into his mind. No private ends appear to have influenced his changeable conduct; and in the present instance he was sacrificing his personal feelings to his public principles; for Stubbe was then in the most friendly correspondence with the illustrious Boyle, the father of the Royal Society, who admired the ardour of Stubbe, till he found its inconvenience.
Stubbe opened his formidable attacks, for they form a series, by replying to the “Plus Ultra” of Glanvill, with a title as quaint, “The Plus Ultra reduced to a Non-plus, in animadversions on Mr. Glanvill and the Virtuosi.” For a pretence for this violent attack, he strained a passage in Glanvill; insisting that the honour of the whole faculty of which he was a member was deeply concerned to refute Glanvill’s assertion, that “the ancient physicians could not cure a cut finger.”—This Glanvill denied he had ever affirmed or thought;
This tremendous attack appeared in Stubbe’s “Campanella Revived, or an Enquiry into the History of the Royal Society; whether the Virtuosi there do not pursue the projects of Campanella, for reducing England into Popery; relating the quarrel betwixt H.S. and the R.S., &c. 1670.”
Such was the dread which his reiterated attacks caused the Royal Society, that they employed against him all the petty persecutions of power and intrigue. “Thirty legions,” says Stubbe, alluding to the famous reply of the philosopher, who
Stubbe was not only himself a man of science, but a caustic satirist, who blends much pleasantry with his bitterness. In
Sprat, in his dedication to the king, had said that “the establishment of the Royal Society was an enterprise equal to the most renowned actions of the best princes.” One would imagine that the notion of a monarch founding a society for the cultivation of the sciences could hardly be
“Never Prince acquired the fame of great and good by any knickknacks—but by actions of political wisdom, courage, justice,” &c.
Stubbe shows how Dionysius and Nero had been depraved by these mechanic philosophers—that
“An Aristotelian would never pardon himself if he compared this heroical enterprise with the actions of our Black Prince or Henry V.; or with Henry VIII. in demolishing abbeys and rejecting the papal authority; or Queen Elizabeth’s exploits against Spain; or her restoring the Protestant religion, putting the Bible into English, and supporting the Protestants beyond sea. But the reason he (Sprat) gives why the establishment of the Royal Society of experimentators equals the most renowned actions of the best princes, is such a pitiful one as Guzman de Alfarache never met with in the whole extent of the Hospital of Fools—‘To increase the power, by new arts, of conquered nations!’ These consequences are twisted like the cordage of Ocnus, the God of Sloth, in hell, which are fit for nothing but to fodder asses with. If our historian means by every little invention to increase the powers of mankind, as an enterprise of such renown, he is deceived; this glory is not due to such as go about with a dog and a hoop, nor to the practicers of legerdemain, or upon the high or low rope; not to every mountebank and his man Andrew; all which, with many other mechanical and experimental philosophers, do in some sort increase the powers of mankind, and differ no more from some of the virtuosi, than a cat in a hole doth from a cat out of a hole; betwixt which that inquisitive person Asdryasdust Tossoffacan found a very great resemblance. ’Tis not the increasing of the powers of mankind by a pendulum watch, nor spectacles whereby divers may see under water, nor the new ingenuity of apple-roasters, nor every petty discovery or instrument, must be put in comparison, much less preferred, before the protection and enlargement of empires.”
Had Stubbe’s death not occurred, this warfare had probably continued. He insisted on a complete victory. He had forced the Royal Society to disclaim their own works, by an announcement that they were not answerable, as a body, for the various contributions which they gave the world: an advertisement which has been more than once found necessary to be renewed. As for their historian Sprat, our intrepid Stubbe very unexpectedly offered to manifest to the parliament that this courtly adulator, by his book, was chargeable with high treason; if they believed that the Royal Society were really engaged so deeply as he averred in the portentous CÆsarean Popery of Campanella. Glanvill, who had “insulted all university learning,” had been immolated at the pedestal of Aristotle. “I have done enough,” he adds, “since my animadversions contain more than they all knew; and that these have shown that the virtuosi are very great impostors, or men of little reading;” alluding to the various discoveries which they promulgated as novelties, but which Stubbe had asserted were known to the ancients and others of a later period. This forms a perpetual accusation against the inventors and discoverers, who may often exclaim, “Perish those who have done our good works before us!” “The Discoveries of the Ancients and Moderns” by Dutens, had this book been then published, might have assisted our keen investigator; but our combatant ever proudly met his adversaries single-handed.
The “Philosophical Transactions” were afterwards accused of another kind of high treason, against grammar and common sense. It was long before the collectors of facts practised the art of writing on them; still later before they could philosophise, as well as observe: Bacon and Boyle were at first only imitated in their patient industry. When Sir Hans Sloane was the secretary of the Royal Society, he, and most of his correspondents, wrote in the most confused manner imaginable. A wit of a very original cast, the facetious Dr. King,
The new species of literary burlesque which King seems to have invented, consists in selecting the very expressions and absurd passages from the original he ridiculed, and framing out of them a droll dialogue or a grotesque narrative, he adroitly inserted his own remarks, replete with the keenest irony, or the driest sarcasm.
Wotton, in summing up his “Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning,” was doubtful whether knowledge would improve in the next age proportionably as it had done in his own. “The humour of the age is visibly altered,” he says, “from what it had been thirty years ago. Though the
SIR JOHN HILL,
WITH
THE ROYAL SOCIETY, FIELDING, SMART, &c.
A Parallel between Orator Henley and Sir John Hill—his love of the Science of Botany, with the fate of his “Vegetable System”—ridicules scientific Collectors; his “Dissertation on Royal Societies,” and his “Review of the Works of the Royal Society”—compliments himself that he is NOT a Member—successful in his attacks on the Experimentalists, but loses his spirit in encountering the Wits—“The Inspector”—a paper war with Fielding—a literary stratagem—battles with Smart and Woodward—Hill appeals to the Nation for the Office of Keeper of the Sloane Collection—closes his life by turning Empiric—Some Epigrams on Hill—his Miscellaneous Writings.
In the history of literature we discover some who have opened their career with noble designs, and with no deficient powers, yet unblest with stoic virtues, having missed, in their honourable labours, those rewards they had anticipated, they have exhibited a sudden transition of character, and have left only a name proverbial for its disgrace.
Our own literature exhibits two extraordinary characters, indelibly marked by the same traditional odium. The wit and acuteness of Orator Henley, and the science and vivacity of the versatile Sir John Hill, must separate them from those who plead the same motives for abjuring all moral restraint, without having ever furnished the world with a single instance that they were capable of forming nobler views.
This orator and this knight would admit of a close parallel;
Pressed by the wants of life, they lost its decencies. Henley attempted to poise himself against the University; Hill against the Royal Society. Rejected by these learned bodies, both these Cains of literature, amid their luxuriant ridicule of eminent men, still evince some claims to rank among them. The one prostituted his genius in his “Lectures;” the other, in his “Inspectors.” Never two authors were more constantly pelted with epigrams, or buffeted in literary quarrels. They have met with the same fate; covered with the same odium. Yet Sir John Hill, this despised man, after all the fertile absurdities of his literary life, performed more for the improvement of the “Philosophical Transactions,” and was the cause of diffusing a more general taste for the science of botany, than any other contemporary. His real ability extorts that regard which his misdirected ingenuity, instigated by vanity, and often by more worthless motives, had lost for him in the world.
At the time that Hill was engaged in several large compilations for the booksellers, his employers were desirous that the honours of an F.R.S. should ornament his title-page. This versatile genius, however, during these graver works, had suddenly emerged from his learned garret, and, in the shape of a fashionable lounger, rolled in his chariot from the Bedford to Ranelagh; was visible at routs; and sate at the theatre a tremendous arbiter of taste, raising about him tumults and divisions;
Such was the declaration of war, in a first act of hostility; but the pitched-battle was fought in “A Review of the Works of the Royal Society, in eight parts,” 1751. This literary satire is nothing less than a quarto volume, resembling, in its form and manner, the Philosophical Transactions themselves; printed as if for the convenience of members to enable them to bind the “Review” with the work reviewed. Voluminous pleasantry incurs the censure of that tedious trifling which it designs to expose. In this literary facetia, however, no inconsiderable knowledge is interspersed with the ridicule. Perhaps Hill might have recollected the successful attempts of Stubbe on the Royal Society, who contributed that curious knowledge which he pretended the Royal Society wanted; and with this knowledge he attempted to combine the humour of Dr. King.
Hill’s rejection from the Royal Society, to another man would have been a puddle to step over; but he tells a story, and cleanly passes on, with impudent adroitness.
Hill, however, though he used all the freedom of a satirist, by exposing many ridiculous papers, taught the Royal Society a more cautious selection. It could, however, obtain no forgiveness from the parties it offended; and while the respectable men whom Hill had the audacity to attack, Martin Folkes, the friend and successor of Newton, and Henry Baker, the naturalist, were above his censure,—his own reputation remained in the hands of his enemies. While Hill was gaining over the laughers on his side, that volatile populace soon discovered that the fittest object to be laughed at was our literary Proteus himself.
The most egregious egotism alone could have induced this
A humorous warfare of wit opened between Fielding, in his Covent-Garden Journal, and Hill, in his Inspector. The Inspector had made the famous lion’s head, at the Bedford, which the genius of Addison and Steele had once animated, the receptacle of his wit; and the wits asserted, of this now inutile lignum, that it was reduced to a mere state of blockheadism. Fielding occasionally gave a facetious narrative of a paper war between the forces of Sir Alexander Drawcansir, the literary hero of the Covent-Garden Journal, and the army of Grub-street; it formed an occasional literary satire. Hill’s lion, no longer Addison’s or Steele’s, is not described without humour. Drawcansir’s “troops are kept in awe by a strange mixed monster, not much unlike the famous chimera of old. For while some of our Reconnoiterers tell us that this monster has the appearance of a lion, others assure us that his ears are much longer than those of that generous beast.”
Hill ventured to notice this attack on his “blockhead;” and, as was usual with him, had some secret history to season his defence with.
“The author of ‘Amelia,’ whom I have only once seen, told me, at that accidental meeting, he held the present set of writers in the utmost contempt; and that, in his character of Sir Alexander Drawcansir, he should treat them in the most unmerciful manner. He assured me he had always excepted me; and after honouring me with some encomiums, he proceeded to mention a conduct which would be, he said, useful to both; this was, the amusing our readers with a mock fight; giving blows that would not hurt, and sharing the advantage in silence.”
Thus, by reversing the fact, Hill contrived to turn aside the frequent stories against him by a momentary artifice, arresting or dividing public opinion. The truth was, more probably, as Fielding relates it, and the story, as we shall see, then becomes quite a different affair. At all events, Hill incurred the censure of the traitor who violates a confidential intercourse.
| And if he lies not, must at least betray. Pope. |
Fielding lost no time in reply. To have brought down the Inspector from his fastnesses into the open field, was what our new General only wanted: a battle was sure to be a victory. Our critical Drawcansir has performed his part, with his indifferent puns, but his natural facetiousness.
“It being reported to the General that a hill must be levelled, before the Bedford coffee-house could be taken, orders were given; but this was afterwards found to be a mistake; for this hill was only a little paltry dunghill, and had long before been levelled with the dirt. The General was then informed of a report which had been spread by his lowness, the Prince of Billingsgate, in the Grub-street army, that his Excellency had proposed, by a secret treaty with that Prince, to carry on the war only in appearance, and so to betray the common cause; upon which his Excellency said with a smile:—‘If the betrayer of a private treaty could ever deserve the least credit, yet his Lowness here must proclaim himself either a liar or a fool. None can doubt but that he is the former, if he hath feigned this treaty; and I think few would scruple to call him the latter, if he had rejected it.’ The General then declared the fact stood thus:—‘His Lowness came to my tent on an affair of his own. I treated him, though a commander in the enemy’s camp, with civility, and even kindness. I told him, with the utmost good-humour, I should attack his Lion; and that he might, if he pleased, in the same manner defend him; from which, said I, no great loss can happen on either side—’”
The Inspector slunk away, and never returned to the challenge.
During his inspectorship, he invented a whimsical literary stratagem, which ended in his receiving a castigation more lasting than the honours performed on him at Ranelagh by the cane of a warm Hibernian. Hill seems to have been desirous of abusing certain friends whom he had praised in the Inspectors; so volatile, like the loves of coquettes, are the literary friendships of the “Scribleri.” As this could not be done with any propriety there, he published the first number of a new paper, entitled The Impertinent. Having thus relieved his private feelings, he announced the cessation of this new enterprise in his Inspectors, and congratulated the public on the ill reception it had given to the Impertinent, applauding them for their having shown by this that “their indignation was superior to their curiosity.” With impudence all his own, he adds—“It will not be easy to say too much in favour of the candour of the town, which has despised a piece that cruelly and unjustly attacked Mr. Smart the poet.” What innocent soul could have imagined that The Impertinent and The Inspector were the same individual? The style is a specimen of persiflage; the thin sparkling thought; the pert vivacity, that looks like wit without wit; the glittering bubble, that rises in emptiness;—even its author tells us, in The Inspector, it is “the most pert, the most pretending,” &c.
Smart, in return for our Janus-faced critic’s treatment, balanced the amount of debtor and creditor with a pungent Dunciad The Hilliad. Hill, who had heard of the rod in pickle, anticipated the blow, to break its strength; and, according to his adopted system, introduced himself and Smart, with a story of his having recommended the bard to his bookseller, “who took him into salary on my approbation. I betrayed him into the profession, and having starved upon it, he has a right to abuse me.” This story was formally denied by an advertisement from Newbery, the bookseller.
“The Hilliad” is a polished and pointed satire. The hero is thus exhibited on earth, and in heaven.
On earth, “a tawny sibyl,” with “an old striped curtain—”
| And tatter’d tapestry o’er her shoulders hung— |
with “moon-struck madness,” awards him all the wealth and fame she could afford him for sixpence; and closes her orgasm with the sage admonition—
| The chequer’d world’s before thee; go, farewell! |
But in heaven, among the immortals, never was an unfortunate hero of the vindicative Muses so reduced into nothingness! Jove, disturbed at the noise of this thing of wit, exclaims, that nature had never proved productive in vain before, but now,
| On mere privation she bestow’d a frame, |
Pallas hits off the style of Hill, as
| The neutral nonsense, neither false nor true— |
But Phoebus shows there may still be something produced from inanity.
| E’en blank privation has its use and end— |
The careless style of the fluent Inspectors, beside their audacity, brought Hill into many scrapes. He called Woodward, the celebrated harlequin, “the meanest of all characters.” This Woodward resented in a pamphlet-battle, in which Hill was beaten at all points.
I will here notice a characteristic incident in Hill’s literary life, of which the boldness and the egotism is scarcely paralleled, even by Orator Henley. At the time the Sloane Collection of Natural History was purchased, to form a part of our grand national establishment, the British Museum, Hill offered himself, by public advertisement, in one of his Inspectors, as the properest person to be placed at its head. The world will condemn him for his impudence. The most reasonable objection against his mode of proceeding would be, that the thing undid itself; and that the very appearance, by public advertisement, was one motive why so confident an offer should be rejected. Perhaps, after all, Hill only wanted to advertise himself.
But suppose that Hill was the man he represents himself to be, and he fairly challenges the test, his conduct only appears eccentric, according to routine. Unpatronised and unfriended men are depressed, among other calamities, with their quiescent modesty; but there is a rare spirit in him who dares to claim favours, which he thinks his right, in the most public manner. I preserve, in the note, the most striking passages of this extraordinary appeal.
At length, after all these literary quarrels, Hill survived his literary character. He had written himself down to so low a degree, that whenever he had a work for publication, his employers stipulated, in their contracts, that the author should conceal his name; a circumstance not new among a certain race of writers.
In an Apology for the character of Sir John Hill, published after his death, where he is painted with much beauty of colouring, and elegance of form, the eruptions and excrescences of his motley physiognomy, while they are indicated—for they were too visible to be entirely omitted in anything pretending to a resemblance—are melted down, and even touched into a grace. The Apology is not unskilful, but the real purpose appears in the last page; where we are informed that Lady Hill, fortunately for the world, possesses all his valuable recipes and herbal remedies!
BOYLE AND BENTLEY.
A Faction of Wits at Oxford the concealed movers of this Controversy—Sir William Temple’s opinions the ostensible cause; Editions of classical Authors by young Students at Oxford the probable one—Boyle’s first attack in the Preface to his “Phalaris”—Bentley, after a silence of three years, betrays his feelings on the literary calumny of Boyle—Boyle replies by the “Examination of Bentley’s Dissertation”—Bentley rejoins by enlarging it—the effects of a contradictory Narrative at a distant time—Bentley’s suspicions of the origin of the “Phalaris,” and “The Examination,” proved by subsequent facts—Bentley’s dignity when stung at the ridicule of Dr. King—applies a classical pun, and nicknames his facetious and caustic Adversary—King invents an extraordinary Index to dissect the character of Bentley—specimens of the Controversy; Boyle’s menace, anathema, and ludicrous humour—Bentley’s sarcastic reply not inferior to that of the Wits.
The splendid controversy between Boyle and Bentley was at times a strife of gladiators, and has been regretted as the opprobrium of our literature; but it should be perpetuated to its honour; for it may be considered, on one side at least, as a noble contest of heroism.
The ostensible cause of the present quarrel was inconsiderable; the concealed motive lies deeper; and the party feelings of the haughty Aristarchus of Cambridge, and a faction of wits at Oxford, under the secret influence of Dean Aldrich, provoked this fierce and glorious contest.
Wit, ridicule, and invective, by cabal and stratagem, obtained a seeming triumph over a single individual, but who, like the Farnesian Hercules, personified the force and resistance of incomparable strength. “The Bees of Christchurch,” as this conspiracy of wits has been called, so musical and so angry, rushed in a dark swarm about him, but only left their fine stings in the flesh they could not wound. He only put out his hand in contempt, never in rage. The Christchurch men, as if doubtful whether wit could prevail against learning, had recourse to the maliciousness of personal satire. They amused an idle public, who could even relish sense and Greek, seasoned as they were with wit and satire, while Boyle was
To detect the origin of the controversy, we must find the seed-plot of Bentley’s volume in Sir William Temple’s “Essay upon Ancient and Modern Learning,” which he inscribed to his alma mater, the University of Cambridge. Sir William, who had caught the contagion of the prevalent literary controversy of the times, in which the finest geniuses in Europe had entered the lists, imagined that the ancients possessed a greater force of genius, with some peculiar advantages—that the human mind was in a state of decay—and that our knowledge was nothing more than scattered fragments saved out of the general shipwreck. He writes with a premeditated design to dispute the improvements or undervalue the inventions of his own age. Wotton, the friend of Bentley, replied by his curious volume of “Reflections on Ancient and Modern Learning.” But Sir William, in his ardour, had thrown out an unguarded opinion, which excited the hostile contempt of Bentley. “The oldest books,” he says, “we have, are still in their kind the best; the two most ancient that I know of, in prose, are ‘Æsop’s Fables’ and ‘Phalaris’s Epistles.’”—The “Epistles,” he insists, exhibit every excellence of “a statesman, a soldier, a wit, and a scholar.” That ancient author, who Bentley afterwards asserted was only “some dreaming pedant, with his elbow on his desk.”
Bentley, bristled over with Greek, perhaps then considered that to notice a vernacular and volatile writer ill assorted with the critic’s Fastus. But about this time Dean Aldrich had set an example to the students of Christchurch of publishing editions of classical authors. Such juvenile editorships served as an easy admission into the fashionable literature of Oxford. Alsop had published the “Æsop;” and Boyle, among other “young gentlemen,” easily obtained the favour of the dean, “to desire him to undertake an edition of the ‘Epistles of Phalaris.’” Such are the modest terms Boyle employs in his reply to Bentley, after he had discovered the unlucky choice he had made of an author.
For this edition of “Phalaris” it was necessary to collate a MS. in the king’s library; and Bentley, about this time, had become the royal librarian. Boyle did not apply directly to Bentley, but circuitously, by his bookseller, with whom the doctor was not on terms. Some act of civility, or a Mercury more “formose,” to use one of his latinisms, was probably
When Boyle’s “Phalaris” appeared, he made this charge in the preface, that having ordered the Epistles to be collated with the MS. in the king’s library, the collator was prevented perfecting the collation by the singular humanity of the library-keeper, who refused any further use of the MS.; pro singulari su humanitate negavit: an expression that sharply hit a man marked by the haughtiness of his manners.
Bentley, on this insult, informed Boyle of what had passed. He expected that Boyle would have civilly cancelled the page; though he tells us he did not require this, because, “to have insisted on the cancel, might have been forcing a gentleman to too low a submission;”—a stroke of delicacy which will surprise some to discover in the strong character of Bentley. But he was also too haughty to ask a favour, and too conscious of his superiority to betray a feeling of injury. Boyle replied, that the bookseller’s account was quite different from the doctor’s, who had spoken slightingly of him. Bentley said no more.
Three years had nearly elapsed, when Bentley, in a new edition of his friend Wotton’s book, published “A Dissertation on the Epistles of the Ancients;” where, reprehending the false criticism of Sir William Temple, he asserted that the “Fables of Æsop” and the “Epistles of Phalaris” were alike spurious. The blow was levelled at Christchurch, and all “the bees” were brushed down in the warmth of their summer-day.
It is remarkable that Bentley kept so long a silence; indeed, he had considered the affair so trivial, that he had preserved no part of the correspondence with Boyle, whom no doubt he slighted as the young editor of a spurious author. But Boyle’s edition came forth, as Bentley expresses it, “with
The statement of Bentley produced, in reply, the famous book of Boyle’s “Examination of Bentley’s Dissertation.” It opens with an imposing narrative, highly polished, of the whole transaction, with the extraordinary furniture of documents, which had never before entered into a literary controversy—depositions—certificates—affidavits—and private letters. Bentley now rejoined by his enlarged “Dissertation on Phalaris,” a volume of perpetual value to the lovers of ancient literature, and the memorable preface of which, itself a volume, exhibits another Narrative, entirely differing from Boyle’s. These produced new replies and new rejoinders. The whole controversy became so perplexed, that it has frightened away all who have attempted to adjust the particulars. With unanimous consent they give up the cause, as one in which both parties studied only to contradict each other. Such was the fate of a Narrative, which was made out of the recollections of the parties, with all their passions at work, after an interval of three years. In each, the memory seemed only retentive of those passages which best suited their own purpose, and which were precisely those the other party was most likely to have forgotten. What was forgotten, was denied; what was admitted, was made to refer to something else; dialogues were given which appear never to have been spoken; and incidents described which are declared never to have taken place; and all this, perhaps, without any purposed violation of truth. Such were the dangers and misunderstandings which attended a Narrative framed out of the broken or passionate recollections of the parties on the watch to confound one another.
Bentley’s Narrative is a most vigorous production: it heaves with the workings of a master-spirit; still reasoning with such force, and still applying with such happiness the stores of his copious literature, had it not been for this literary quarrel, the mere English reader had lost this single opportunity of surveying that commanding intellect.
Boyle’s edition of “Phalaris” was a work of parade, designed to confer on a young man, who bore an eminent name, some distinction in the literary world. But Bentley seems to have been well-informed of the secret transactions at Christchurch. In his first attack he mentions Boyle as “the young gentleman of great hopes, whose name is set to the edition;” and asserts that the editor, no more than his own “Phalaris,” has written what was ascribed to him. He persists in making a plurality of a pretended unity, by multiplying Boyle into a variety of little personages, of “new editors,” our “annotators,” our “great geniuses.”
But Boyle assuming the honours of an edition of “Phalaris,” was but a venial offence, compared with that committed by the celebrated volume published in its defence.
If Bentley’s suspicions were not far from the truth, that “the ‘Phalaris’ had been made up by contributions,” they approached still closer when they attacked “The Examination of his Dissertation.” Such was the assistance which Boyle received from all “the Bees,” that scarcely a few ears of that rich sheaf fall to his portion. His efforts hardly reach to the mere narrative of his transactions with Bentley. All the varied erudition, all the Attic graces, all the inexhaustible wit, are claimed by others; so that Boyle was not materially concerned either in his “Phalaris,” or in the more memorable work.
The Christchurch party now formed a literary conspiracy against the great critic; and as treason is infectious when the faction is strong, they were secretly engaging new associates; Whenever any of the party published anything themselves,
They procured Keil, the professor of astronomy, in so grave a work as “The Theory of the Earth,” to have a fling at Bentley’s boasted sagacity in conjectural criticism. Wotton, in a dignified reproof, administered a spirited correction to the party-spirit; while his love of science induced him generously to commend Keil, and intimate the advantages the world may derive from his studies, “as he grows older.” Even Garth and Pope struck in with the alliance, and condescended to pour out rhymes more lasting than even the prose of “the Bees.”
But of all the rabid wits who, fastening on their prey, never drew their fangs from the noble animal, the facetious Dr. King seems to have been the only one who excited Bentley’s anger. Persevering malice, in the teasing shape of caustic banter, seems to have affected the spirit even of Bentley.
At one of those conferences which passed between Bentley and the bookseller, King happened to be present; and being called on by Boyle to bear his part in the drama, he performed it quite to the taste of “the Bees.” He addressed a letter to Dean Aldrich, in which he gave one particular: and, to make up a sufficient dose, dropped some corrosives. He closes his letter thus:—“That scorn and contempt which I have naturally for pride and insolence, makes me remember that which otherwise I might have forgotten.” Nothing touched Bentley more to the quick than reflections on “his pride and insolence.” Our defects seem to lose much of their character, in reference to ourselves, by habit and natural disposition; yet we have always a painful suspicion of their existence; and he who touches them with no tenderness is never pardoned. The invective of King had all the bitterness
| Proscripti Regis Rupili pus atque venenum. The filth and venom of Rupilius King. |
The particular incident which King imperfectly recollected, made afterwards much noise among the wits, for giving them a new notion of the nature of ancient MSS. King relates that Dr. Bentley said—“If the MS. were collated, it would be worth nothing for the future.” Bentley, to mortify the pertness of the bookseller, who would not send his publications to the Royal Library, had said that he ought to do so, were it but to make amends for the damage the MS. would sustain by his printing the various readings; “for,” added Bentley, “after the various lections were once taken and printed, the MS. would be like a squeezed orange, and little worth for the future.” This familiar comparison of a MS. with a squeezed orange provoked the epigrammatists. Bentley, in retorting on King, adds some curious facts concerning the fate of MSS. after they have been printed; but is aware, he says, of what little relish or sense the Doctor has of MSS., who is better skilled in “the catalogue of ales, his Humty-Dumty, Hugmatee, Three-threads, and the rest of that glorious list, than in the catalogue of MSS.” King, in his banter on Dr. Lister’s journey to Paris, had given a list of these English beverages. It was well known that he was in too constant an intercourse with them all. Bentley nicknames King through the progress of his Controversy, for his tavern-pleasures, Humty-Dumty, and accuses him of writing more in a tavern than in a study. He little knew the injustice of his charge against a student who had written notes on 22,000 books and MSS.; but they were not Greek ones.
All this was not done with impunity. An irritated wit only finds his adversary cutting out work for him. A second letter, more abundant with the same pungent qualities, fell on the head of Bentley. King says of the arch-critic—“He thinks meanly, I find, of my reading; yet for all that, I dare say I have read more than any man in England besides him
Bentley, with his peculiar idiom, had censured “all the
Some ambiguous threats are scattered in the volume, while others are more intelligible. When Bentley, in his own defence, had referred to the opinions which some learned foreigners entertained of him—they attribute these to “the foreigners, because they are foreigners—we, that have the happiness of a nearer conversation with him, know him better; and we may perhaps take an opportunity of setting these mistaken strangers right in their opinions.” They threaten him with his character, “in a tongue that will last longer, and go further, than their own;” and, in the imperious style of Festus, add:—“Since Dr. Bentley has appealed to foreign universities, to foreign universities he must go.” Yet this is light, compared with the odium they would raise against him by the menace of the resentments of a whole society of learned men.
“Single adversaries die and drop off; but societies are immortal:
In reply to this literary anathema, Bentley was furnished, by his familiarity with his favourite authors, with a fortunate application of a term, derived from Phalaris himself. Cicero had conveyed his idea of CÆsar’s cruelty by this term, which he invented from the very name of the tyrant.
“There is a certain temper of mind that Cicero calls Phalarism; a spirit like Phalaris’s. One would be apt to imagine that a portion of it had descended upon some of his translators. The gentleman has given a broad hint more than once in his book, that if I proceed further against Phalaris, I may draw, perhaps, a duel, or a stab upon myself; a generous threat to a divine, who neither carries arms nor principles fit for that sort of controversy. I expected such usage from the spirit of Phalarism.”
In this controversy, the amusing fancy of “the Bees” could not pass by Phalaris without contriving to make some use of that brazen bull by which he tortured men alive. Not satisfied in their motto, from the Earl of Roscommon, with wedging “the great critic, like Milo, in the timber he strove to rend,” they gave him a second death in their finis, by throwing Bentley into Phalaris’s bull, and flattering their vain imaginations that they heard him “bellow.”
“He has defied Phalaris, and used him very coarsely, under the assurance, as he tells us, that ‘he is out of his reach.’ Many of Phalaris’s enemies thought the same thing, and repented of their vain confidence afterwards in his bull. Dr. Bentley is perhaps, by this time, or will be suddenly, satisfied that he also has presumed a little too much upon his distance; but it will be too late to repent when he begins to bellow.”
Bentley, although the solid force of his mind was not favourable to the lighter sports of wit, yet was not quite destitute of those airy qualities; nor does he seem insensible to the literary merits of “that odd work,” as he calls Boyle’s volume, which he conveys a very good notion of:—“If his
His reply to “Milo’s fate,” and the tortures he was supposed to pass through when thrown into Phalaris’s bull, is a piece of sarcastic humour which will not suffer by comparison with the volume more celebrated for its wit.
“The facetious examiner seems resolved to vie with Phalaris himself in the science of Phalarism; for his revenge is not satisfied with one single death of his adversary, but he will kill me over and over again. He has slain me twice by two several deaths! one, in the first page of his book; and another, in the last. In the title-page I die the death of Milo, the Crotonian:—
| ——Remember Milo’s end, Wedged in that timber which he strove to rend. |
“The application of which must be this:—That as Milo, after his victories at six several Olympiads, was at last conquered and destroyed in wrestling with a tree, so I, after I had attained to some small reputation in letters, am to be quite baffled and run down by wooden antagonists. But in the end of his book he has got me into Phalaris’s bull, and he has the pleasure of fancying that he hears me begin to bellow. Well, since it is certain that I am in the bull, I have performed the part of a sufferer. For as the cries of the tormented in old Phalaris’s bull, being conveyed through pipes lodged in the machine, were turned into music for the entertainment of the tyrant, so the complaints which my torments express from me, being conveyed to Mr. Boyle by this answer, are all dedicated to his pleasure and diversion. But yet, methinks, when he was setting up to be Phalaris junior, the very omen of it might have deterred him. As the old tyrant himself at last bellowed in his own bull, his imitators ought to consider that at long run their own actions may chance to overtake them.”—p. 43.
Wit, however, enjoyed the temporary triumph; not but that some, in that day, loudly protested against the award.
Garth, catching the feeling of the time, sung—
| And to a Bentley ’tis we owe a Boyle. |
Posterity justly appreciates the volume of Bentley for its stores of ancient literature; and the author, for that peculiar sagacity in emending a corrupt text, which formed his distinguishing characteristic as a classical critic; and since his book but for this literary quarrel had never appeared, reverses the names in the verse of the “Satirist.”
PARKER AND MARVELL.
Marvell the founder of “a newly-refined art of jeering buffoonery”—his knack of nicknaming his adversaries—Parker’s Portrait—Parker suddenly changes his principles—his declamatory style—Marvell prints his anonymous letter as a motto to “The Rehearsal Transprosed”—describes him as an “At-all”—Marvell’s ludicrous description of the whole posse of answers summoned together by Parker—Marvell’s cautious allusion to Milton—his solemn invective against Parker—anecdote of Marvell and Parker—Parker retires after the second part of “The Rehearsal Transprosed”—The Recreant, reduced to silence, distils his secret vengeance in a posthumous libel.
One of the legitimate ends of satire, and one of the proud triumphs of genius, is to unmask the false zealot; to beat back the haughty spirit that is treading down all; and if it cannot teach modesty, and raise a blush, at least to inflict terror and silence. It is then that the satirist does honour to the office of the executioner.
| As one whose whip of steel can with a lash |
The quarrel between Parker and Marvell is a striking example of the efficient powers of genius, in first humbling, and then annihilating, an unprincipled bravo, who had placed himself at the head of a faction.
Marvell, the under-secretary and the bosom-friend of Milton, whose fancy he has often caught in his verse, was one of the greatest wits of the luxuriant age of Charles II.; he was a master in all the arts of ridicule; and his inexhaustible spirit only required some permanent subject to have rivalled the causticity of Swift, whose style, in neatness and vivacity, seems to have been modelled on his.
Such are the vigour and fertility of Marvell’s writings, that our old Chronicler of Literary History, Anthony Wood, considers him as the founder of “the then newly-refined art (though much in mode and fashion almost ever since) of sportive and jeering buffoonery;”
The celebrated work here to be noticed is Marvell’s “Rehearsal Transprosed;” a title facetiously adopted from Bayes in “The Rehearsal Transposed” of the Duke of Buckingham. It was written against the works and the person of Dr. Samuel Parker, afterwards Bishop of Oxford, whom he designates under the character of Bayes, to denote the incoherence and ridiculousness of his character. Marvell had a peculiar knack of calling names,—it consisted in appropriating
Parker himself must have his portrait, and if the likeness be justly hit off, some may be reminded of a resemblance. Mason applies the epithet of “Mitred Dullness” to him: but although he was at length reduced to railing and to menaces, and finally mortified into silence, this epithet does not suit so hardy and so active an adventurer.
The secret history of Parker may be collected in Marvell,
But the age of sectarism and thin gruel was losing all its coldness in the sunshine of the Restoration; and this “preciousest young man,” from praying and caballing against
It is the after-conduct of Parker that throws light on this rapid change. On speculative points any man may be suddenly converted; for these may depend on facts or arguments which might never have occurred to him before. But when we watch the weathercock chopping with the wind, so pliant to move, and so stiff when fixed—when we observe this “preciousest grueller” clothed in purple, and equally hardy in the most opposite measures—become a favourite with James II., and a furious advocate for arbitrary power; when we see him railing at and menacing those, among whom he had committed as many extravagances as any of them;
The quarrel between Parker and Marvell originated in a preface,
Of two volumes of wit and broad humour, and of the most galling invective, one part flows so much into another, that the volatile spirit would be injured by an analytical process. But Marvell is now only read by the curious lovers of our literature, who find the strong, luxuriant, though not the delicate, wit of the wittiest age, never obsolete: the reader shall not, however, part from Marvell without some slight transplantations from a soil whose rich vegetation breaks out in every part.
Of the pleasantry and sarcasm, these may be considered as specimens. Parker was both author and licenser of his own work on “Ecclesiastical Polity;”
“He is such an At-all, of so many capacities, that he would excommunicate any man who should have presumed to intermeddle with any one of his provinces. Has he been an author? he is too the licenser. Has he been a father? he will stand too for godfather. Had he acted Pyramus, he
The satirist describes Parker’s arrogance for those whom Parker calls the vulgar, and whom he defies as “a rout of wolves and tigers, apes and buffoons;” yet his personal fears are oddly contrasted with his self-importance: “If he chance but to sneeze, he prays that the foundations of the earth be not shaken.—Ever since he crept up to be but the weathercock of a steeple, he trembles and cracks at every puff of wind that blows about him, as if the Church of England were falling.” Parker boasted, in certain philosophical “Tentamina,” or essays of his, that he had confuted the atheists: Marvell declares, “If he had reduced any atheist by his book, he can only pretend to have converted them (as in the old Florentine wars) by mere tiring them out, and perfect weariness.” A pleasant allusion to those mock fights of the Italian mercenaries, who, after parading all day, rarely unhorsed a single cavalier.
Marvell blends with a ludicrous description of his answerers great fancy:—
“The whole Posse Archidiaconatus was raised to repress me; and great rising there was, and sending post every way to pick out the ablest ecclesiastical droles to prepare an answer. Never was such a hubbub made about a sorry book. One flattered himself with being at least a surrogate; another was so modest as to set up with being but a paritor; while the most generous hoped only to be graciously smiled upon at a good dinner; but the more hungry starvelings generally looked upon it as an immediate call to a benefice; and he that could but write an answer, whatsoever it were, took it for the most dexterous, cheap, and legal way of simony. As is usual on these occasions, there arose no small competition and mutiny among the pretenders.”
It seems all the body had not impudence enough, and had too nice consciences, and could not afford an extraordinary expense in wit for the occasion. It was then
“The author of the ‘Ecclesiastical Polity’ altered his lodgings to a calumny-office, and kept open chamber for all comers, that he might be supplied himself, or supply others,
Parker had accused Marvell with having served Cromwell, and being the friend of Milton, then living, at a moment when such an accusation not only rendered a man odious, but put his life in danger.
“J.M. was, and is, a man of great learning and sharpness of wit, as any man. It was his misfortune, living in a
Marvell, when he lays by his playful humour and fertile fancy for more solemn remonstrances, assumes a loftier tone, and a severity of invective, from which, indeed, Parker never recovered.
Accused by Parker of aiming to degrade the clerical character, Marvell declares his veneration for that holy vocation, and that he reflected even on the failings of the men, from whom so much is expected, with indulgent reverence:—
“Their virtues are to be celebrated with all encouragement; and if their vices be not notoriously palpable, let the eye, as it defends its organ, so conceal the object by connivance.” But there are cases when even to write satirically against a clergyman may be not only excusable, but necessary:—“The man who gets into the church by the belfry or the window, ought never to be borne in the pulpit; and so the man who illustrates his own corrupt doctrines with as ill a conversation, and adorns the lasciviousness of his life with an equal petulancy of style and language.”—In such a concurrence of misdemeanors, what is to be done? The example and the consequence so pernicious! which could not be, “if our great pastors but exercise the wisdom of common shepherds, by parting with one to stop the infection of the whole flock, when his rottenness grows notorious. Or if our clergy would but use the instinct of other creatures, and chastise the blown deer out of their herd, such mischiefs might easily be
And he frames an ingenious apology for the freedom of his humour, in this attack on the morals and person of his adversary:—
“To write against him (says Marvell) is the odiousest task that ever I undertook, and has looked to me all the while like the cruelty of a living dissection; which, however it may tend to public instruction, and though I have picked out the noxious creature to be anatomised, yet doth scarce excuse the offensiveness of the scent and fouling of my fingers: therefore, I will here break off abruptly, leaving many a vein not laid open, and many a passage not searched into. But if I have undergone the drudgery of the most loathsome part already (which is his personal character), I will not defraud myself of what is more truly pleasant, the conflict with, if it may be so called, his reason.”
It was not only in these “pen-combats” that this Literary Quarrel proceeded; it seems also to have broken out in the streets; for a tale has been preserved of a rencontre, which shows at once the brutal manners of Parker, and the exquisite wit of Marvell. Parker meeting Marvell in the streets, the bully attempted to shove him from the wall: but, even there, Marvell’s agility contrived to lay him sprawling in the kennel; and looking on him pleasantly, told him to “lie there for a son of a whore!” Parker complained to the Bishop of Rochester, who immediately sent for Marvell, to reprimand him; but he maintained that the doctor had so called himself, in one of his recent publications; and pointing to the preface, where Parker declares “he is ‘a true son of his mother, the Church of England:’ and if you read further on, my lord, you find he says: ‘The Church of England has spawned two bastards, the Presbyterians and the Congregationists;’ ergo, my lord, he expressly declares that he is the son of a whore!”
Although Parker retreated from any further attack, after the second part of “The Rehearsal Transprosed,” he in truth only suppressed passions to which he was giving vent in secrecy and silence. That, indeed, was not discovered till a posthumous work of his appeared, in which one of the most striking parts is a most disgusting caricature of his old antagonist. Marvell was, indeed, a republican, the pupil of Milton, and adored his master: but his morals and his manners were Roman—he lived on the turnip of Curtius, and he would have bled at Philippi. We do not sympathise with the fierce republican spirit of those unhappy times that scalped the head feebly protected by a mitre or a crown. But the private virtues and the rich genius of such a man are pure from the taint of party. We are now to see how far private hatred can distort, in its hideous vengeance, the resemblance it affects to give after nature. Who could imagine that Parker is describing Marvell in these words?—
“Among these insolent revilers of great fame for ribaldry was one Marvell. From his youth he lived in all manner of wickedness; and thus, with a singular petulancy from nature, he performed the office of a satirist for the faction, not so much from the quickness of his wit, as from the sourness of his temper. A vagabond, ragged, hungry poetaster, beaten at every tavern, where he daily received the rewards of his impudence in kicks and blows.
And elsewhere he calls him “a drunken buffoon,” and asserts that “he made his conscience more cheap than he had formerly made his reputation;” but the familiar anecdote of Marvell’s political honesty, when, wanting a dinner, he declined the gold sent to him by the king, sufficiently replies to the calumniator. Parker, then in his retreat, seems not to have been taught anything like modesty by his silence, as Burnet conjectured; who says, “That a face of brass must grow red when it is burnt as his was.” It was even then that the recreant, in silence, was composing the libel, which his cowardice dared not publish, but which his invincible malice has sent down to posterity.
D’AVENANT
AND A CLUB OF WITS.
Calamities of Epic Poets—Character and Anecdotes of D’Avenant—attempts a new vein of invention—the Critics marshalled against each other on the “Gondibert”—D’Avenant’s sublime feelings of Literary Fame—attacked by a Club of Wits in two books of Verses—the strange misconception hitherto given respecting the Second Part—various specimens of the Satires on Gondibert, the Poet, and his Panegyrist Hobbes—the Poet’s silence; and his neglect of the unfinished Epic, while the
The memoirs of epic poets, in as far as they relate to the history of their own epics, would be the most calamitous of all the suitors of the Muses, whether their works have reached us, or scarcely the names of the poets. An epic, which has sometimes been the labour of a life, is the game of the wits and the critics. One ridicules what is written; the other censures for what has not been written:—and it has happened, in some eminent instances, that the rudest assailants of him who “builds the lofty rhyme,” have been his ungenerous contemporaries. Men, whose names are now endeared to us, and who have left their ????? ?S ???, which Hobbes so energetically translates “a possession for everlasting,” have bequeathed an inheritance to posterity, of which they have never been in the receipt of the revenue. “The first fruits” of genius have been too often gathered to place upon its tomb. Can we believe that Milton did not endure mortification from the neglect of “evil days,” as certainly as Tasso was goaded to madness by the systematic frigidity of his critics? He who is now before us had a mind not less exalted than Milton or Tasso; but was so effectually ridiculed, that he has only sent us down the fragment of a great work.
One of the curiosities in the history of our poetry, is the Gondibert of D’Avenant; and the fortunes and the fate of this epic are as extraordinary as the poem itself. Never has
That hardiness of enterprise which had conducted him through life, brought the same novelty, and conferred on him the same vigour in literature.
D’Avenant attempted to open a new vein of invention in
But our poet, whose manly genius had rejected one great absurdity, had the folly to adopt another. The first reformers are always more heated with zeal than enlightened by sagacity. The four-and-twenty chapters of an epic, he perceived, were but fantastical divisions, and probably, originally, but accidental; yet he proposed another form as chimerical; he imagined that by having only five he was constructing his poem on the dramatic plan of five acts. He might with equal propriety have copied the Spanish comedy which I once read, in twenty-five acts, and in no slender folio. “Sea-marks (says D’Avenant, alluding to the works of antiquity) are chiefly useful to coasters, and serve not those who have the ambition of discoverers, that love to sail in untried seas;” and yet he was attempting to turn an epic poem into a monstrous drama, from the servile habits he had contracted from his intercourse with the theatre! This error of the poet has, however, no material influence on the “Gondibert,” as it has come down to us; for, discouraged and ridiculed, our adventurer never finished his voyage of discovery. He who had so nobly vindicated the freedom of the British Muse from the meanness of imitation, and clearly defined what such a narrative as he intended should be, “a perfect glass of nature, which gives us a familiar and easy view of ourselves,” did not yet perceive that there is no reason why a poetical narrative should be cast into any particular form, or be longer or shorter than the interest it excites will allow.
More than a century and a half have elapsed since the first publication of “Gondibert,” and its merits are still a subject of controversy; and indubitable proof of some inherent excellence not willingly forgotten. The critics are marshalled on each side, one against the other, while between these formidable
The “Gondibert” has poetical defects fatal for its popularity; the theme was not happily chosen; the quatrain has been discovered by capricious ears to be unpleasing, though its
A delightful invention in this poem is “the House of Astragon,” a philosophical residence. Every great poet is affected by the revolutions of his age. The new experimental philosophy had revived the project of Lord Bacon’s learned retirement, in his philosophical romance of the Atalantis; and subsequently in a time of civil repose after civil war, Milton, Cowley, and Evelyn attempted to devote an abode to science itself. These tumults of the imagination subsided in the establishment of the Royal Society. D’Avenant anticipated this institution. On an estate consecrated to philosophy stands a retired building on which is inscribed, “Great Nature’s Office,” inhabited by sages, who are styled “Nature’s Registers,” busily recording whatever is brought to them by “a throng of Intelligencers,” who make “patient observations” in the field, the garden, the river, on every plant, and “every fish, and fowl, and beast.” Near at hand is “Nature’s Nursery,” a botanical garden. We have also “a Cabinet of Death,” “the Monument of Bodies,” an anatomical collection, which leads to “the Monument of vanished Minds,” as the poet finely describes the library. Is it not striking to find, says Dr. Aikin, so exact a model of the school of LinnÆus?
This was a poem to delight a philosopher; and Hobbes, in a curious epistle prefixed to the work, has strongly marked its distinct beauties. “Gondibert” not only came forth with the elaborate panegyric of Hobbes, but was also accompanied by the high commendatory poems of Waller and Cowley; a cause which will sufficiently account for the provocations it inflamed among the poetical crew; and besides these accompaniments, there is a preface of great length, stamped with all the force and originality of the poet’s own mind; and a postscript, as sublime from the feelings which dictated it as from the time and place of its composition.
In these, this great genius pours himself out with all that “glory of which his large soul appears to have been full,” as Hurd has nobly expressed it.
A club of wits caballed and produced a collection of short poems sarcastically entitled “Certain Verses written by several of the Author’s Friends, to be reprinted in the Second Edition of ‘Gondibert,’” 1653. Two years after appeared a brother volume, entitled “The Incomparable Poem of Gondibert vindicated from the Wit-Combats of Four Esquires; Clinias, Dametas, Sancho and Jack Pudding;”
| ??t?e? ?a? ???d?? ???d?. Vatum quoque gratia, rara est. AnglicÈ, One wit-brother Envies another. |
Of these rare tracts, we are told by Anthony Wood and all subsequent literary historians, too often mere transcribers of title-pages, that the second was written by our author himself. Would not one imagine that it was a real vindication, or at least a retort-courteous on these obliging friends. The irony of the whole volume has escaped their discovery. The second tract is a continuation of the satire: a mock defence, where the sarcasm and the pretended remonstrance are sometimes keener than the open attack. If, indeed, D’Avenant were the author of a continuation of a satire on himself, it is an act of felo de se no poet ever committed; a self-flagellation by an iron whip, where blood is drawn at every stroke, the most penitent bard never inflicted on himself. Would D’Avenant have bantered his proud labour, by calling it “incomparable?” And were it true, that he felt the strokes of their witty malignity so lightly, would he not have secured his triumph by finishing that “Gondibert,” “the monument of his mind?” It is too evident that this committee of wits hurt the quiet of a great mind.
As for this series of literary satires, it might have been expected, that since the wits clubbed, this committee ought to have been more effective in their operations. Many of their papers were, no doubt, more blotted with their wine than their ink. Their variety of attack is playful, sarcastic, and malicious. They were then such exuberant wits, that they could make even ribaldry and grossness witty. My business with these wicked trifles is only as they concerned the feelings of the great poet, whom they too evidently hurt, as well as the great philosopher who condescended to notice these wits, with wit more dignified than their own.
Unfortunately for our “jeered Will,” as in their usual court-style they call him, he had met with “a foolish mischance,” well known among the collectors of our British portraits. There was a feature in his face, or rather no feature at all, that served as a perpetual provocative: there was no precedent of such a thing, says Suckling, in “The Sessions of the Poets”—
| In all their records, in verse or in prose, |
Besides, he was now doomed—
| Nor could old Hobbes |
The preface of “Gondibert,” the critical epistle of Hobbes,
| UPON THE PREFACE.
|
This stroke, in the mock defence, is thus warded off, with a slight confession of the existence of “the mouse.”
| Why do you bite, you men of fangs |
Among the personal foibles of D’Avenant appears a desire to disguise his humble origin; and to give it an air of lineal descent, he probably did not write his name as his father had done. It is said he affected, at the cost of his mother’s honour, to insinuate that he was the son of Shakspeare, who used to bait at his father’s inn.
| Denham, come help me to laugh, At old Daph, Whose fancies are higher than chaff. |
Daph swells afterwards into “Daphne;” a change of sex inflicted on the poet for making one of his heroines a man; and this new alliance to Apollo becomes a source of perpetual allusion to the bays—
| Cheer up, small wits, now you shall crowned be,— |
One of the club inquires about the situation of Avenant—
| ——where now it lies, |
Because, as seven cities disputed for the birth of Homer, so after ages will not want towns claiming to be Avenant—
| Some say by Avenant no place is meant, |
D’Avenant had been knighted for his good conduct at the siege of Gloucester, and was to be tried by the Parliament, but procured his release without trial. This produces the following sarcastic epigram:—
| UPON FIGHTING WILL.
|
Of the malignancy of their wit, we must preserve one specimen. They probably harassed our poet with anonymous
| A LETTER SENT TO THE GOOD KNIGHT.
|
These literary satires contain a number of other “pasquils,” burlesquing the characters, the incidents, and the stanza, of the Gondibert: some not the least witty are the most gross, and must not be quoted; thus the wits of that day were poetical suicides, who have shortened their lives by their folly.
D’Avenant, like more than one epic poet, did not tune to his ear the names of his personages. They have added, to show that his writings are adapted to an easy musical singer, the names of his heroes and heroines, in these verses:—
| Hurgonil, Astolpho, Borgia, Goltha, Tibalt, |
And “epithets that will serve for any substantives, either in this part or the next.”
Such are the labours of the idlers of genius, envious of the nobler industry of genius itself!—How the great author’s spirit was nourished by the restoratives of his other friends, after the bitter decoctions prescribed by these “Four,” I fear we may judge by the unfinished state in which “Gondibert” has come down to us. D’Avenant seems, however, to have guarded his dignity by his silence; but Hobbes took an opportunity of delivering an exquisite opinion on this Club of Wits, with perfect philosophical indifference. It is in a letter to the Hon. Edward Howard, who requested to have his sentiments on another heroic poem of his own, “The British Princes.”
“My judgment in poetry hath, you know, been once already censured, by very good wits, for commending
The stately “Gondibert” was not likely to recover favour in the court of Charles the Second, where man was never regarded in his true greatness, but to be ridiculed; a court where the awful presence of Clarendon became so irksome, that the worthless monarch exiled him; a court where nothing was listened to but wit at the cost of sense, the injury of truth, and the violation of decency; where a poem of magnitude with new claims was a very business for those volatile arbiters of taste; an epic poem that had been travestied and epigrammed, was a national concern with them, which, next to some new state-plot, that occurred oftener than a new epic, might engage the monarch and his privy council. These were not the men to be touched by the compressed reflections and the ideal virtues personified in this poem. In the court of the laughing voluptuary the manners as well as the morals of these satellites of pleasure were so little heroic, that those of the highest rank, both in birth and wit, never mentioned each other but with the vulgar familiarity of nicknames, or the coarse appellatives of Dick, Will, and Jack! Such was the era when the serious “Gondibert” was produced, and such were the judges who seem to have decided its fate.
THE
PAPER-WARS OF THE CIVIL WARS.
The “Mercuries” and “Diurnals,” archives of political fictions—“The Diurnals,” in the pay of the Parliament, described by Butler and Cleveland—Sir John Birkenhead excels in sarcasm, with specimens of his “Mercurius Aulicus”—how he corrects his own lies—Specimens of the Newspapers on the side of the Commonwealth.
Among these battles of logomachy, in which so much ink has been spilt, and so many pens have lost their edge—at a very solemn period in our history, when all around was distress and sorrow, stood forwards the facetious ancestors of that numerous progeny who still flourish among us, and who, without a suspicion of their descent, still bear the features of their progenitors, and inherit so many of the family humours. These were the Mercuries and Diurnals—the newspapers of our Civil Wars.
The distinguished heroes of these Paper-Wars, Sir John Birkenhead, Marchmont Needham, and Sir Roger L’Estrange, I have elsewhere portrayed.
The London Journals in the service of the Parliament were usually the Diurnals. These politicians practised an artifice which cannot be placed among “the lost inventions.” As these were hawked about the metropolis to spur curiosity, often languid from over-exercise, or to wheedle an idle spectator into a reader, every paper bore on its front the inviting heads of its intelligence. Men placed in the same circumstances will act in the same manner, without any notion of imitation; and the passions of mankind are now addressed by the same means which our ancestors employed, by those who do not suspect they are copying them.
These Diurnals have been blasted by the lightnings of
| Register’d by fame eternal, |
But Cleveland has left us two remarkable effusions of his satiric and vindictive powers, in his curious character of “A Diurnal Maker,” and “A London Diurnal.” He writes in the peculiar vein of the wit of those times, with an originality of images, whose combinations excite surprise, and whose abundance fatigues our weaker delicacy.
“A Diurnal-Maker is the Sub-Almoner of History; Queen Mab’s Register; one whom, by the same figure that a North-country pedler is a merchantman, you may style an author. The silly countryman who, seeing an ape in a scarlet coat, blessed his young worship, and gave his landlord joy of the hopes of his house, did not slander his compliment with worse application than he that names this shred an historian. To call him an Historian is to knight a Mandrake; ’tis to view him through a perspective, and, by that gross hyperbole, to give the reputation of an engineer to a maker of mousetraps. When these weekly fragments shall pass for history, let the poor man’s box be entitled the Exchequer, and the alms-basket a Magazine. Methinks the Turke should license Diurnals, because he prohibits learning and books.” He characterises the Diurnal as “a puny chronicle, scarce pin-feathered with the wings of time; it is a history in sippets; the English Iliads in a nutshell; the Apocryphal Parliament’s Book of Maccabees in single sheets.”
But Cleveland tells us that these Diurnals differ from a Mercurius Aulicus (the paper of his party),—“as the Devil and his Exorcist, or as a black witch doth from a white one, whose office is to unravel her enchantments.”
The Mercurius Aulicus was chiefly conducted by Sir John Birkenhead, at Oxford, “communicating the intelligence and affairs of the court to the rest of the kingdom.” Sir John was a great wag, and excelled in sarcasm and invective; his facility is equal to repartee, and his spirit often reaches to wit: a great forger of tales, who probably considered that a romance was a better thing than a newspaper.
“The Londoners in print this week have been pretty copious. They say that a troop of the Marquess of Newcastle’s horse have submitted to the Lord Fairfax. (They were part of the German horse which came over in the Danish fleet.)
As Sir John was frequently the propagator of false intelligence, it was necessary at times to seem scrupulous, and to correct some slight errors. He does this very adroitly, without diminishing his invectives.
“We must correct a mistake or two in our two last weeks. We advertised you of certain money speeches made by Master John Sedgwick: on better information, it was not John, but Obadiah, Presbyter of Bread-street, who in the pulpit in hot weather used to unbutton his doublet, which John, who wanteth a thumbe, forbears to practise. And when we told you last week of a committee of Lawyers appointed to put their new Seale in execution, we named, among others, Master George Peard.
This paper was immediately answered by Marchmont Needham, in his “Mercurius Britannicus,” who cannot boast the playful and sarcastic bitterness of Sir John; yet is not the dullest of his tribe. He opens his reply thus:
“Aulicus will needs venture his soule upon the other half-sheet; and this week he lies, as completely as ever he did in two full sheets; full of as many scandals and fictions, full of as much stupidity and ignorance, full of as many tedious untruths as ever. And because he would recrute the reputation of his wit, he falls into the company of our Diurnals very furiously, and there lays about him in the midst of our weekly pamphlets; and he casts in the few squibs, and the little wildfire he hath, dashing out his conceits; and he takes it ill that the poore scribblers should tell a story for their living; and after a whole week spent at Oxford, in inke and paper, to as little purpose as Maurice spent his shot and powder at Plimouth, he gets up, about Saturday, into a jingle or two, for he cannot reach to a full jest; and I am informed that the three-quarter conceits in the last leafe of his Diurnall cost him fourteen pence in aqua vitÆ.”
Sir John never condescends formally to reply to Needham, for which he gives this singular reason:—“As for this libeller, we are still resolved to take no notice till we find him able to spell his own name, which to this hour Britannicus never did.”
In the next number of Needham, who had always written it Brittanicus, the correction was silently adopted. There was no crying down the etymology of an Oxford malignant.
I give a short narrative of the political temper of the times,
At the first breaking out of the parliament’s separation from the royal party, when the public mind, full of consternation
These “Diurnals” sometimes used such language as the following, from The Weekly Accompt, January, 1643:—
“This day afforded no newes at all, but onely what was heavenly and spiritual;” and he gives an account of the public fast, and of the grave divine Master Henderson’s sermon, with his texts in the morning; and in the afternoon, another of Master Strickland, with his texts—and of their spiritual effect over the whole parliament!
Such news as the following was sometimes very agreeable:—
“From Oxford it is informed, that on Sunday last was fortnight in the evening, Prince Rupert, accompanied with some lords, and other cavaliers, danced through the streets openly, with music before them, to one of the colleges; where, after they had stayed about half an houre, they returned back again, dancing with the same music; and immediately there followed a pack of women, or curtizans, as it may be supposed, for they were hooded, and could not be knowne; and this the party who related affirmed he saw with his own eyes.”
On this the Diurnal-maker pours out severe anathemas—and one with a note, that “dancing and drabbing are inseparable companions, and follow one another close at the heels.” He assures his readers, that the malignants, or royalists, only fight like sensual beasts, to maintain their dancing and drabbing!—Such was the revolutionary tone here, and such the arts of faction everywhere. The matter was rather peculiar to our country, but the principle was the same as practised in France. Men of opposite characters, when acting for the same concealed end, must necessarily form parallels.
POLITICAL CRITICISM
ON LITERARY COMPOSITIONS.
Anthony Wood and Locke—Milton and Sprat—Burnet and his History—Prior and Addison—Swift and Steele—Wagstaffe and Steele—Steele and Addison—Hooke and Middleton—Gilbert Wakefield—Marvel and Milton—Clarendon and May.
Voltaire, in his letters on our nation, has hit off a marked feature in our national physiognomy. “So violent did I find parties in London, that I was assured by several that the Duke of Marlborough was a coward, and Mr. Pope a fool.”
A foreigner indeed could hardly expect that in collecting the characters of English authors by English authors (a labour which has long afforded me pleasure often interrupted by indignation)—in a word, that a class of literary history should turn out a collection of personal quarrels. Would not this modern Baillet, in his new Jugemens des SÇavans, so ingeniously inquisitive but so infinitely confused, require to be initiated into the mysteries of that spirit of party peculiar to our free country!
All that boiling rancour which sputters against the thoughts, the style, the taste, the moral character of an author, is often nothing more than practising what, to give it a name, we may call Political Criticism in Literature; where an author’s literary character is attacked solely from the accidental circumstance of his differing in opinion from his critics on subjects unconnected with the topics he treats of.
Could Anthony Wood, had he not been influenced by this political criticism, have sent down Locke to us as “a man of a turbulent spirit, clamorous, and never contented, prating and troublesome?”
A more illustrious instance of party-spirit operating against works of genius is presented to us in the awful character of Milton. From earliest youth to latest age endowed with all the characteristics of genius; fervent with all the inspirations of study; in all changes still the same great literary character as Velleius Paterculus writes of one of his heroes—“Aliquando fortunÂ, semper animo maximus:” while in his own day, foreigners, who usually anticipate posterity, were inquiring after Milton, it is known how utterly disregarded he lived at home. The divine author of the “Paradise Lost” was always connected with the man for whom a reward was offered in the London Gazette. But in their triumph, the lovers of monarchy missed their greater glory, in not separating for ever the republican Secretary of State from the rival of Homer.
That the genius of Milton pined away in solitude, and that all the consolations of fame were denied him during his life, from this political criticism on his works, is generally known; but not perhaps that this spirit propagated itself far beyond the poet’s tomb. I give a remarkable instance. Bishop Sprat, who surely was capable of feeling the poetry of Milton, yet from political antipathy retained such an abhorrence of his name, that when the writer of the Latin Inscription on the poet John Philips, in describing his versification, applied to it the term Miltono, Sprat ordered it to be erased, as
The Spirit of Party has touched with its plague-spot the character of Burnet; it has mildewed the page of a powerful mind, and tainted by its suspicions, its rumours, and its censures, his probity as a man. Can we forbear listening to all the vociferations which faction has thrown out? Do we not fear to trust ourselves amid the multiplicity of his facts? And when we are familiarised with the variety of his historical portraits, are we not startled when it is suggested that “they are tinged with his own passions and his own weaknesses?” Burnet has indeed made “his humble appeal to the great God of Truth” that he has given it as fully as he could find it; and he has expressed his abhorrence of “a lie in history,” so much greater a sin than a lie in common discourse, from its lasting and universal nature. Yet these hallowing protestations have not saved him! A cloud of witnesses, from different motives, have risen up to attaint his veracity and his candour; while all the Tory wits have ridiculed his style, impatiently inaccurate, and uncouthly negligent, and would sink his vigour and ardour, while they expose the meanness and poverty of his genius. Thus the literary and the moral character of no ordinary author have fallen a victim to party-feeling.
But this victim to political criticism on literature was himself criminal, and has wreaked his own party feelings on the Papist Dryden, and the Tory Prior; Dryden he calls, in the
| I hope you would not have me die |
It was the same spirit which would not allow that Garth was the author of his celebrated poem—
| Garth did not write his own Dispensary, |
as Pope ironically alludes to the story of the times:—a contemporary wit has recorded this literary injury, by repeating it.
| From perils of a hundred jails, |
When Steele published “The Crisis,” Swift attacked the author in so exquisite a piece of grave irony, that I am tempted to transcribe his inimitable parallels of a triumvirate composed of the writer of the Flying Post, Dunton the literary projector, and poor Steele: the one, the Iscariot of hackney scribes; the other a crack-brained scribbling bookseller, who boasted he had a thousand projects, fancied he had
“Among the present writers on the Whig side, I can recollect but three of any great distinction, which are the Flying Post, Mr. Dunton, and the Author of
So far this fine ironical satire may be inspected as a model; the polished weapon he strikes with so gracefully, is allowed by all the laws of war; but the political criticism on the literary character, the party feeling which degrades a man of genius, is the drop of poison on its point.
Steele had declared in the “Crisis” that he had always maintained an inviolable respect for the clergy. Swift (who perhaps was aimed at in this instance, and whose character, since the publication of “The Tale of a Tub,” lay under a suspicion of an opposite tendency) turns on Steele with all the vigour of his wit, and all the causticity of retort:—
“By this he would insinuate that those papers among the Tatlers and Spectators, where the whole order is abused, were not his own. I will appeal to all who know the flatness of his style, and the barrenness of his invention, whether he doth not grossly prevaricate? Was he ever able to walk without his leading-strings, or swim without bladders, without being discovered by his hobbling or his sinking?”
Such was the attack of Swift, which was pursued in the Examiner, and afterwards taken up by another writer. This is one of the evils resulting from the wantonness of genius: it gives a contagious example to the minor race; its touch opens a new vein of invention, which the poorer wits soon break into; the loose sketch of a feature or two from its rapid hand is sufficient to become a minute portrait, where not a hair is spared by the caricaturist. This happened to Steele, whose literary was to be sacrificed to his political character; and this superstructure was confessedly raised on the malicious hints we have been noticing. That the Examiner was the seed-plot of “The Character of Richard St—le, Esq.,” appears by its opening—“It will be no injury, I am persuaded, to the Examiner to borrow him a little (Steele), upon promise of returning him safe, as children do their playthings, when their mirth is over, and, they have done with them.”
The author of the “Character of Richard St—le, Esq.,” was Dr. Wagstaffe, one of those careless wits
Steele was doomed even to lose the friendship of Addison amid political discords; but on that occasion Steele showed that his taste for literature could not be injured by political animosity. It was at the close of Addison’s life, and on occasion of the Peerage Bill, Steele published “The Plebeian,” a cry against enlarging the aristocracy. Addison replied with “The Old Whig,” Steele rejoined without alluding to the person of his opponent. But “The Old Whig” could not restrain his political feelings, and contemptuously described “little Dicky, whose trade it was to write pamphlets.”
| Remember, O my friends! the laws, the rights, |
Thus delicately he detects the anonymous author, and thus energetically commends, while he reproves him!
Hooke (a Catholic), after he had written his “Roman History,” published “Observations on Vertot, Middleton, &c., on the Roman Senate,” in which he particularly treated Dr. Middleton with a disrespect for which the subject gave no occasion: this was attributed to the Doctor’s offensive letter from Rome. Spelman, in replying to this concealed motive of the Catholic, reprehends him with equal humour and bitterness for his desire of roasting a Protestant parson.
Our taste, rather than our passions, is here concerned; but the moral sense still more so. The malice of faction has long produced this literary calamity; yet great minds have not always degraded themselves; not always resisted the impulse of their finer feelings, by hardening them into insensibility, or goading them in the fury of a misplaced revenge. How delightful it is to observe Marvell, the Presbyterian and Republican wit, with that generous temper that instantly discovers the alliance of genius, warmly applauding the great work of Butler, which covered his own party with odium and ridicule. “He is one of an excellent wit,” says Marvell, “and whoever dislikes the choice of his subject, cannot but commend the performance.”
Clarendon’s profound genius could not expand into the same liberal feelings. He highly commends May for his learning, his wit and language, and for his Supplement to Lucan, which he considered as “one of the best epic poems in the English language;” but this great spirit sadly winces in the soreness of his feelings when he alludes to May’s “History of the Parliament;” then we discover that this late “ingenious person” performed his part “so meanly, that he seems to have lost his wit when he left his honesty.” Behold the political criticism in literature! However we may incline to respect the feelings of Clarendon, this will not save his judgment nor
Thus have authors and their works endured the violations of party feelings; a calamity in our national literature which has produced much false and unjust criticism.
HOBBES, AND HIS QUARRELS;
INCLUDING
AN ILLUSTRATION OF HIS CHARACTER.
Why Hobbes disguised his sentiments—why his philosophy degraded him—of the sect of the Hobbists—his Leviathan; its principles adapted to existing circumstances—the author’s difficulties on its first appearance—the system originated in his fears, and was a contrivance to secure the peace of the nation—its duplicity and studied ambiguity illustrated by many facts—the advocate of the national religion—accused of atheism—Hobbe’s religion—his temper too often tried—attacked by opposite parties—Bishop Fell’s ungenerous conduct—makes Hobbes regret that juries do not consider the quarrels of authors of any moment—the mysterious panic which accompanied him through life—its probable cause—he pretends to recant his opinions—he is speculatively bold, and practically timorous—an extravagant specimen of the anti-social philosophy—the SELFISM of Hobbes—his high sense of his works, in regard to foreigners and posterity—his
The history of the philosopher of Malmesbury exhibits a large picture of literary controversy, where we may observe how a persecuting spirit in the times drives the greatest men to take refuge in the meanest arts of subterfuge. Compelled to disguise their sentiments, they will not, however, suppress them; and hence all their ambiguous proceedings, all that ridicule and irony, and even recantation, with which ingenious minds, when forced to their employ, have never failed to try the patience, or the sagacity, of intolerance.
The character of Hobbes will, however, serve a higher moral design. The force of his intellect, the originality of his views, and the keenest sagacity of observation, place him in the first order of minds; but he has mortified, and then degraded man into a mere selfish animal. From a cause we shall discover, he never looked on human nature but in terror or in contempt. The inevitable consequence of that mode of thinking, or that system of philosophy, is to make the philosopher the abject creature he has himself imagined; and it is then he libels the species from his own individual experience.
Hobbes was one of those original thinkers who create a new era in the philosophical history of their nation, and perpetuate their name by leaving it to a sect.
The eloquent and thinking Madame de StaËl has asserted that “Hobbes was an Atheist and a Slave.” Yet I still think that Hobbes believed, and proved, the necessary existence of a Deity, and that he loved freedom, as every sage desires it. It is now time to offer an apology for one of those great men who are the contemporaries of all ages, and, by fervent inquiry, to dissipate that traditional cloud which hangs over one of “those monuments of the mind” which Genius has built with imperishable materials.
The author of the far-famed “Leviathan” is considered as a vehement advocate for absolute monarchy. This singular production may, however, be equally adapted for a republic; and the monstrous principle may be so innocent in its nature, as even to enter into our own constitution, which presumes to be neither.
As “The Leviathan” produced the numerous controversies of Hobbes, a history of this great moral curiosity enters into our subject.
Hobbes, living in times of anarchy, perceived the necessity of re-establishing authority with more than its usual force. But how were the divided opinions of men to melt together, and where in the State was to be placed absolute power? for a remedy of less force he could not discover for that disordered state of society which he witnessed. Was the sovereign or the people to be invested with that mighty power which was to keep every other quiescent?—a topic which had been discussed for ages, and still must be, as the humours of men incline—was, I believe, a matter perfectly indifferent to our philosopher, provided that whatever might be the government, absolute power could somewhere be lodged in it, to force men to act in strict conformity. He discovers his perplexity in the dedication of his work. “In a way beset with those that contend on one side for too great liberty, on the other side for too much authority, ’tis hard to pass between the points of both unwounded.” It happened that our cynical Hobbes had no respect for his species; terrified at anarchy, he seems to have lost all fear when he flew to absolute power—a sovereign remedy unworthy of a great spirit, though convenient for a timid one like his own. Hobbes considered men merely as animals of prey, living in a state of perpetual hostility, and his solitary principle of action was self-preservation at any price.
He conjured up a political phantom, a favourite and fanciful notion, that haunted him through life. He imagined that the many might be more easily managed by making them up into an artificial One, and calling this wonderful political unity the Commonwealth, or the Civil Power, or the Sovereign, or by whatever name was found most pleasing; he personified it by the image of “Leviathan.”
At first sight the ideal monster might pass for an innocent conceit; and there appears even consummate wisdom in erecting a colossal power for our common security; but Hobbes assumed that Authority was to be supported to its extreme pitch. Force with him appeared to constitute right, and unconditional submission then became a duty: these were consequences quite natural to one who at his first step degraded man by comparing him to a watch, and who would not have him go but with the same nicety of motion, wound up by a great key.
To be secure, by the system of Hobbes, we must at least lose the glory of our existence as intellectual beings. He would persuade us into the dead quietness of a commonwealth of puppets, while he was consigning into the grasp of his “Leviathan,” or sovereign power, the wire that was to communicate a mockery of vital motion—a principle of action without freedom. The system was equally desirable to the Protector Cromwell as to the regal Charles. A conspiracy against mankind could not alarm their governors: it is not therefore surprising that the usurper offered Hobbes the office of Secretary of State; and that he was afterwards pensioned by the monarch.
A philosophical system, moral or political, is often nothing more than a temporary expedient to turn aside the madness of the times by substituting what offers an appearance of relief; nor is it a little influenced by the immediate convenience of the philosopher himself; his personal character enters a good deal into the system. The object of Hobbes in
The system of Hobbes could not be limited to politics: he knew that the safety of the people’s morals required an Established Religion. The alliance between Church and State had been so violently shaken, that it was necessary to cement them once more. As our philosopher had been terrified in his politics by the view of its contending factions, so, in religion, he experienced the same terror at the hereditary rancours of its multiplied sects. He could devise no other means than to attack the mysteries and dogmas of theologians, those after-inventions and corruptions of Christianity, by which the artifices of their chiefs had so long split them into perpetual
When Hobbes wrote against mysteries, the mere polemics sent forth a cry of his impiety; the philosopher was branded with Atheism;—one of those artful calumnies, of which, after
To me it appears that Hobbes, to put an end to these religious wars, which his age and country had witnessed, perpetually kindled by crazy fanatics and intolerant dogmatists, insisted that the crosier should be carried in the left hand of
The temper of our philosopher, so ill-adapted to contradiction, was too often tried; and if, as his adversary, Harrington, in the “Oceana,” says, “Truth be a spark whereunto objections are like bellows,” the mind of Hobbes, for half a century, was a very forge, where the hammer was always beating, and the flame was never allowed to be extinguished. Charles II. strikingly described his worrying assailants. “Hobbes,” said the king, “was a bear against whom the Church played their young dogs, in order to exercise them.”
“The Leviathan” was ridiculed by the wits, declaimed against by the republicans, denounced by the monarchists, and menaced by the clergy. The commonwealth man, the dreamer of equality, Harrington, raged at the subtile advocate for despotic power; but the glittering bubble of his fanciful “Oceana” only broke on the mighty sides of the Leviathan, wasting its rainbow tints: the mitred Bramhall, at “The Catching of Leviathan, or the Great Whale,” flung his harpoon, demonstrating consequences from the principles of Hobbes, which he as eagerly denied. But our ambiguous philosopher had the hard fate to be attacked even by those who were labouring to the same end.
| I don’t like thee, Dr. Fell, |
A curious incident in the history of the mind of this philosopher, was the mysterious panic which accompanied him to his latest day. It has not been denied that Hobbes was subject to occasional terrors: he dreaded to be left without company; and a particular instance is told, that on the Earl of Devonshire’s removal from Chatsworth, the philosopher, then in a dying state, insisted on being carried away, though on a feather-bed. Various motives have been suggested to account for this extraordinary terror. Some declared he was afraid of spirits; but he was too stout a materialist!
Such a materialist was then liable to terrors; and though,
Persecution terrified Hobbes, and magnanimity and courage were no virtues in his philosophy. He went about hinting that he was not obstinate (that is, before the Bench of Bishops); that his opinions were mere conjectures, proposed as exercises for the powers of reasoning. He attempted (without meaning to be ludicrous) to make his opinions a distinct object from his person; and, for the good order of the latter, he appealed to the family chaplain for his attendance at divine service, from whence, however, he always departed at the sermon, insisting that the chaplain could not teach him anything. It was in one of these panics that he produced his “Historical Narrative of Heresy, and the Punishment thereof,” where, losing the dignity of the philosophic character, he creeps into a subterfuge with the subtilty of the lawyer; insisting that “The Leviathan,” being published at a time when there was no distinction of creeds in England (the Court of High Commission having been abolished in the troubles), that therefore none could be heretical.
No man was more speculatively bold, and more practically timorous;
A genius more luminous, sagacity more profound, and morals less tainted, were never more eminently combined than in this very man, who was so often reduced to the most abject state. But the anti-social philosophy of Hobbes terminated in preserving a pitiful state of existence. He who considered nothing more valuable than life, degraded himself by the meanest artifices of self-love,
To such a state of degradation had the selfish philosophy reduced one of the greatest geniuses; a philosophy true only for the wretched and the criminal.
Hobbes, indeed, had a full feeling of the magnitude of his labours, both for foreigners and posterity, as he has expressed it in his life. He disperses, in all his works, some Montaigne-like notices of himself, and they are eulogistic. He has not omitted any one of his virtues, nor even an apology for his deficiency in others. He notices with complacency how Charles II. had his portrait placed in the royal cabinet; how it was frequently asked for by his friends, in England and in France.
His greatest imperfection was a monstrous egotism—the fate of those who concentrate all their observations in their own individual feelings. There are minds which may think too much, by conversing too little with books and men. Hobbes exulted he had read little; he had not more than half-a-dozen books about him; hence he always saw things in his own way, and doubtless this was the cause of his mania for disputation.
He wrote against dogmas with a spirit perfectly dogmatic. He liked conversation on the terms of his own political system, provided absolute authority was established, peevishly referring to his own works whenever contradicted; and his friends stipulated with strangers, that “they should not dispute with the old man.” But what are we to think of that pertinacity of opinion which he held even with one as great as himself? Selden has often quitted the room, or Hobbes been driven from it, in the fierceness of their battle.
His little qualities were the errors of his own selfish philosophy; his great ones were those of nature. He was a votary to his studies:
| And now complete my four-and-eighty years, |
Of the works of Hobbes we must not conclude, as Hume tells us, that “they have fallen into neglect;” nor, in the style with which they were condemned at Oxford, that “they are pernicious and damnable.” The sanguine opinion of the author himself was, that the mighty “Leviathan” will stand for all ages, defended by its own strength; for the rule of justice, the reproof of the ambitious, the citadel of the Sovereign, and the peace of the people.
The genius of Hobbes was of the first order; his works abound with the most impressive truths, in all the simplicity of thought and language, yet he never elevates nor delights. Too faithful an observer of the miserable human nature before him, he submits to expedients; he acts on the defensive; and because he is in terror, he would consider security to be the happiness of man. In Religion he would stand by an established one; yet thus he deprives man of that moral freedom which God himself has surely allowed us. Locke has the glory of having first given distinct notions of the nature of toleration. In Politics his great principle is the establishment of Authority, or, as he terms it, an “entireness of sovereign power:” here he seems to have built his arguments with such eternal truths and with such a contriving wisdom as to adapt his system to all the changes of government. Hobbes found it necessary in his day to place this despotism in the hands of his colossal monarch; and were Hobbes now living, he would not relinquish the principle, though perhaps he might vary the application; for if Authority, strong as man can create it, is not suffered to exist in our free constitution, what will become of our freedom? Hobbes would now maintain his system by depositing his “entireness of sovereign power” in the Laws of his Country. So easily shifted is the vast political machine of the much abused “Leviathan!” The Citizen of Hobbes, like the Prince of Machiavel, is alike innocent, when the end of their authors is once detected, amid those ambiguous means by which the hard necessity of their times constrained their mighty genius to disguise itself.
It is, however, remarkable of Systems of Opinions, that the founder’s celebrity has usually outlived his sect’s. Why are systems, when once brought into practice, so often discovered to be fallacies? It seems to me the natural progress of
HOBBES’S QUARRELS
WITH
DR. WALLIS THE MATHEMATICIAN.
Hobbes’s passion for the study of Mathematics began late in life—attempts to be an original discoverer—attacked by Wallis—various replies and rejoinders—nearly maddened by the opposition he encountered—after four years of truce, the war again renewed—character of Hobbes by Dr. Wallis, a specimen of invective and irony; serving as a remarkable instance how the greatest genius may come down to us disguised by the arts of an adversary—Hobbes’s noble defence of himself; of his own great reputation; of his politics; and of his religion—a literary stratagem of his—reluctantly gives up the contest, which lasted twenty years.
The Mathematical War between Hobbes and the celebrated Dr. Wallis is now to be opened. A series of battles, the renewed campaigns of more than twenty years, can be described by no term less eventful. Hobbes himself considered it as a war, and it was a war of idle ambition, in which he took too much delight. His “Amata Mathemata” became his pride, his pleasure, and at length his shame. He attempted to maintain his irruption into a province he ought never to have entered in defiance, by “a new method;” but having invaded the powerful natives, he seems to have almost repented the folly, and retires, leaving “the unmanageable brutes” to themselves:
| Ergo meam statuo non ultra perdere opellam |
His language breathes war, while he sounds his retreat, and confesses his repulse. The Algebraists had all declared against the Invader.
| Wallisius contra pugnat; victusque videbar |
And,
| Pugna placet vertor— |
So that we have sufficient authority to consider this Literary Quarrel as a war, and a “Bellum Peloponnesiacum” too, for it lasted as long. Political, literary, and even personal feelings were called in to heat the temperate blood of two Mathematicians.
| What means this tumult in a Vestal’s veins? |
Hobbes was one of the many victims who lost themselves in squaring the circle, and doubling the cube. He applied, late in life, to mathematical studies, not so much, he says, to learn the subtile demonstrations of its figures, as to acquire those habits of close reasoning, so useful in the discovery of new truths, to prove or to refute. So justly he reasoned on mathematics; but so ill he practised the science, that it made him the most unreasonable being imaginable, for he resisted mathematical demonstration, itself!
His great and original character could not but prevail in everything he undertook; and his egotism tempted him to raise a name in the world of Science, as he had in that of Politics and Morals. With the ardour of a young mathematician, he exclaimed, “Eureka!” “I have found it.” The quadrature of the circle was indeed the common Dulcinea of the Quixotes of the time; but they had all been disenchanted. Hobbes alone clung to his ridiculous mistress. Repeatedly confuted, he was perpetually resisting old reasonings and producing new ones. Were only genius requisite for an able mathematician, Hobbes had been among the first; but patience and docility, not fire and fancy, are necessary. His reasonings were all paralogisms, and he had always much to say, from not understanding the subject of his inquiries.
When Hobbes published his “De Corpore Philosophico,” 1655, he there exulted that he had solved the great mystery. Dr. Wallis, the Savilian professor of mathematics at Oxford,
In the following year the campaign was opened by Hobbes with “S??G???; or, marks of the absurd Geometry, rural Language, Scottish Church-politics, and Barbarisms, of John Wallis.” Quick was the routing of these fresh forces; not one was to escape alive! for Wallis now took the field with “Hobbiani Puncti dispunctio! or, the undoing of Mr. Hobbes’s Points; in answer to Mr. Hobbes’s S??G???, id est, Stigmata Hobbii.” Hobbes seems now to have been reduced to great straits; perhaps he wondered at the obstinacy of his adversary. It seems that Hobbes, who had been used to other studies, and who confesses all the algebraists were against him, could not conceive a point to exist without quantity; or a line could be drawn without latitude; or a superficies be without depth or thickness; but mathematicians conceive them without these qualities, when they exist abstractedly in the mind; though, when for the purposes of science they are produced to the senses, they necessarily have all the qualities. It was understanding these figures, in the vulgar way, which led Hobbes into a labyrinth of confusions and absurdities.
“I alone am mad, or they are all out of their senses: so that no third opinion can be taken, unless any will say that we are all mad.”
Four years of truce were allowed to intervene between the next battle; when the irrefutable Hobbes, once more collecting his weak and his incoherent forces, arranged them, as well as he was able, into “Six Dialogues,” 1661. The utter annihilation he intended for his antagonist fell on himself. Wallis borrowing the character of “The Self-tormentor” from Terence, produced “Hobbius Heauton-timorumenos (Hobbes
This attack of Wallis is of a very opposite character to the arid discussion of abstract blunders in geometry. He who began with points, and doubling the cube, and squaring the circle, now assumes a loftier tone, and carrying his personal and moral feelings into a mere controversy between two idle mathematicians, he has formed a solemn invective, and edged it with irony. I hope the reader has experienced sufficient interest in the character of Hobbes to read the long, but curious extract I shall now transcribe, with that awe and reverence which the old man claims. It will show how even the greatest genius may be disguised, when viewed through the coloured medium of an adversary. One is, however, surprised to find such a passage in a mathematical work.
“He doth much improve; I mean he doth, proficere in pejus; more, indeed, than I could reasonably have expected he would have done;—insomuch, that I cannot but profess some relenting thoughts (though I had formerly occasion to use him somewhat coarsely), to see an old man thus fret and torment himself to no purpose. You, too, should pity your antagonist; not as if he did deserve it, but because he needs it; and as Chremes, in Terence, of his Senex, his self-tormenting Menedemus—
| Cum videam miserum hunc tam excruciarier |
“Consider the temper of the man, to move your pity; a person extremely passionate and peevish, and wholly impatient of contradiction. A temper which, whether it be a greater fault or torment (to one who must so often meet with what he is so ill able to bear), is hard to say.
“And to this fretful humour you must add another as bad, which feeds it. You are therefore next to consider him as one highly opinionative and magisterial. Fanciful in his conceptions, and deeply enamoured with those phantasmes, without a rival. He doth not spare to profess, upon all occasions, how incomparably he thinks himself to have surpassed all, ancient, modern, schools, academies, persons, societies, philosophers, divines, heathens, Christians; how despicable he thinks all their writings in comparison of his; and what hopes he hath, that, by the sovereign command of some absolute prince, all other doctrines being exploded, his new dictates should be
“The admirable sweetness of your own nature has not given you the experience of such a temper: yet your contemplation must have needs discerned it, in those symptoms which you have seen it work in others, like the strange effervescence, ebullition, fumes, and fetors, which you have sometimes given yourself the content to observe, in some active acrimonious chymical spirits upon the injection of some contrariant salts strangely vexing, fretting, and tormenting itself, while it doth but administer sport to the unconcerned spectator. Which temper, being so eminent in the person we have to deal with, your generous nature, which cannot but pity affliction, how much soever deserved, must needs have some compassion for him: who, besides those exquisite torments wherewith he doth afflict himself, like that
| ——quo Siculi non invenere Tyranni |
is unavoidably exposed to those two great mischiefs; an incapacity to be taught what he doth not know, or to be advised when he thinks amiss; and moreover, to this inconvenience, that he must never hear his faults but from his adversaries; for those who are willing to be reputed friends must either not advertise what they see amiss, or incommode themselves.
“But, you will ask, what need he thus torment himself? What need of pity? If he have hopes to be admitted the sole dictator in philosophy, civil and natural, in schools and pulpits, and to be owned as the only magister sententiarum, what would he have more?
“True, if he have; but what if he have not? That he had some hopes of such an honour, he hath not been sparing to let us know, and was providing against the envy that might attend it (nec deprecabor invidiam, sed augendo, ulciscar, was his resolution); but I doubt these hopes are at an end. He did not find (as he expected) that the fairies and hobgoblins
“I forbear to mention (lest I might seem to reproach that age which I reverence) the disadvantages which he may sustain by his old age. ’Tis possible that time and age, in a person somewhat morose, may have riveted faster that preconceived opinion of his own worth and excellency beyond others. ’Tis possible, also, that he may have forgotten much of what once he knew. He may, perhaps, be sometimes more secure than safe; while trusting to what he thinks a firm foundation, his footing fails him; nor always so vigilant or quicksighted as to discern the incoherence or inconsequence of his own discourses; unwilling, notwithstanding, to make use of the eyes of other men, lest he should seem thereby to disparage his own; but certainly (though his will may be as good as ever) his parts are less vegete and nimble, as to invention at least, than in his younger
“While he had endeavoured only to raise an expectation, or put the world in hopes of what great things he had in hand (to render all philosophy as clear and certain as Euclid’s Elements), if he had then died, it might, perhaps, have been thought by some that the world had been deprived of a great philosopher, and learning sustained an invaluable loss, by the abortion of so desired a piece. But since that Partus Montis is come to light, and found to be no more than what little animals have brought forth, and that deformed enough and unamiable, he might have sooner gone off the stage with more advantage than now he is like to do; such is the misfortune for a man to outlive his reputation!
“By this time, perhaps, you may see cause to pity him while you see him falling. But if you consider him tumbling headlong from so great a height, ’twill make some addition to that compassion which doth already begin to work. You are therefore next to consider that when, upon the account of geometry, he was unsafely mounted to that height of vanity, he did unhappily fall into the hands of two mathematicians, who have used him so unmercifully as would have put a person of greater patience into passion, and meeting with such a temper, have so discomposed him that he hath ever since
This invective and irony from this celebrated mathematician, so much out of the path of his habitual studies, might have proved a tremendous blow; but the genius of Hobbes was invulnerable to mere human opposition, unless accompanied by the supernatural terrors of penal fires or perpetual dungeons. Our hero received the whole discharge of this battering train, and stood invulnerable, while he returned the fire in “Considerations upon the Reputation, Loyalty, Manners, and Religion of Thomas Hobbes, of Malmesbury, written by way of Letter to a learned person, Dr. Wallis,” 1662.
It is an extraordinary production. His lofty indignation retorts on the feeble irony of his antagonist with keen and caustic accusations; and the green strength of youth was still seen in the old man whose head was covered with snows.
From this spirited apology for himself I shall give some passages. Hobbes thus replied to Dr. Wallis, who affected to consider the old man as a fit object for commiseration.
“You would make him contemptible, and move Mr. Boyle to pity him. This is a way of railing too much beaten to be thought witty: besides, ’tis no argument of your contempt to spend upon him so many angry lines, as would have furnished you with a dozen of sermons. If you had in good earnest despised him, you would have let him alone, as he does Dr. Ward, Mr. Baxter, Pike, and others, that have reviled him as you do. As for his reputation beyond the seas, it fades not yet; and because, perhaps, you have no means to know it, I will cite you a passage of an epistle written by a learned Frenchman
In reply to Wallis’ sarcastic suggestion that an idle person should collect together Hobbes’s arrogant and supercilious speeches applauding himself, under one title, Hobbius de se, he says—
“Let your idle person do it; Mr. Hobbes shall acknowledge them under his hand, and be commended for it, and you scorned. A certain Roman senator having propounded something in the assembly of the people, which they, misliking, made a noise at, boldly bade them hold their peace, and told them he knew better what was good for the commonwealth than all they; and his words are transmitted to us as an argument of his virtue; so much do truth and vanity alter the complexion of self-praise. You can have very little skill in morality, that cannot see the justice of commending a man’s self, as well as of anything else, in his own defence; and it was want of prudence in you to constrain him to a thing that would so much displease you.
“When you make his age a reproach to him, and show no cause that might impair the faculties of his mind, but only age, I admire how you saw not that you reproached all old men in the world as much as him, and warranted all young men, at a certain time which they themselves shall define, to call you fool! Your dislike of old age you have also otherwise sufficiently signified, in venturing so fairly as you have done to escape it. But that is no great matter to one that hath so many marks upon him of much greater reproaches. By Mr. Hobbes’s calculation, that derives prudence from experience, and experience from age, you are a very young man; but, by your own reckoning, you are older already than
“During the late trouble, who made both Oliver and the people mad but the preachers of your principles? But besides the wickedness, see the folly of it. You thought to make them mad, but just to such a degree as should serve your own turn; that is to say, mad, and yet just as wise as yourselves. Were you not very imprudent to think to govern madness?”—p. 15.
“The king was hunted as a partridge in the mountains, and though the hounds have been hanged, yet the hunters were as guilty as they, and deserved no less punishment.
He closes with a very odd image of the most cynical contempt:—
“Mr. Hobbes has been always far from provoking any man, though, when he is provoked, you find his pen as sharp as yours. All you have said is error and railing; that is, stinking wind, such as a jade lets fly when he is too hard girt upon a full belly. I have done. I have considered you now, but will not again, whatsoever preferment any of your friends shall procure you.”
These were the pitched battles; but many skirmishes occasionally took place. Hobbes was even driven to a ruse de guerre. When he found his mathematical character in the utmost peril, there appeared a pamphlet, entitled “Lux Mathematica, &c., or, Mathematical Light struck out from the clashings between Dr. John Wallis, Professor of Geometry in the celebrated University of Oxford (celeberrima Academia), and Thomas Hobbes, of Malmesbury; augmented with many and shining rays of the Author, R.R.” 1672.
Here the victories of Hobbes are trumpeted forth, but the fact is, that R.R. should have been T.H. It was Hobbes’s own composition! R.R. stood for Roseti Repertor, that is, the Finder of the Rosary, one of the titles of Hobbes’s mathematical discoveries. Wallis asserts that this R.R. may still serve, for it may answer his own book, “Roseti Refutator, or, the Refuter of the Rosary.”
Poor Hobbes gave up the contest reluctantly; if, indeed, the controversy may not be said to have lasted all his life. He acknowledges he was writing to no purpose; and that the medicine was obliged to yield to the disease.
| Sed nil profeci, magnis authoribus Error |
He seems to have gone down to the grave, in spite of all the reasonings of the geometricians on this side of it, with a firm conviction that its superficies had both depth and thickness.
JONSON AND DECKER.
Ben Jonson appears to have carried his military spirit into the literary republic—his gross convivialities, with anecdotes of the prevalent taste in that age for drinking-bouts—his “Poetaster” a sort of Dunciad, besides a personal attack on the frequenters of the theatres, with anecdotes—his Apologetical Dialogue, which was not allowed to be repeated—characters of Decker and of Marston—Decker’s Satiromastix, a parody on Jonson’s “Poetaster”—Ben exhibited under the character of “Horace Junior”—specimens of that literary satire; its dignified remonstrance, and the honourable applause bestowed on the great bard—some foibles in the literary habits of Ben, alluded to by Decker—Jonson’s noble reply to his detractors and rivals.
This quarrel is a splendid instance how genius of the first order, lavishing its satirical powers on a number of contemporaries, may discover, among the crowd, some individual who may return with a right aim the weapon he has himself used, and who will not want for encouragement to attack the common assailant: the greater genius is thus mortified by a victory conceded to the inferior, which he himself had taught the meaner one to obtain over him.
Jonson, in his earliest productions, “Every Man in his Humour,” and “Every Man out of his Humour,” usurped that dictatorship, in the Literary Republic, which he so sturdily and invariably maintained, though long and hardily disputed. No bard has more courageously foretold that posterity would be interested in his labours; and often with very dignified feelings he casts this declaration into the teeth of his adversaries: but a bitter contempt for his brothers and his contemporaries was not less vehement than his affections for those who crowded under his wing. To his “sons” and his admirers he was warmly attached, and no poet has left behind him, in MS., so many testimonies of personal fondness, in the inscriptions and addresses, in the copies of his works which he presented to friends: of these I have seen more than one fervent and impressive.
Drummond of Hawthornden, who perhaps carelessly and imperfectly minuted down the heads of their literary conference
Such a genius would become more tyrannical by success, and naturally provoked opposition, from the proneness of mankind to mortify usurped greatness, when they can securely do it. The man who hissed the poet’s play had no idea that he might himself become one of the dramatic personages. Ben then produced his “Poetaster,” which has been called the Dunciad
In “The Poetaster,” Ben, with flames too long smothered, burst over the heads of all rivals and detractors. His enemies seem to have been among all classes; personages recognised
One of the dramatic personages in this epilogue inquires
| I never saw the play breed all this tumult. |
The author replies:
| ——————I never writ that piece |
And he proceeds to tell us, that to obviate this accusation he had placed his scenes in the age of Augustus.
| To show that Virgil, Horace, and the rest |
But instead of their “sitting down and blushing,” we find—
| That they fly buzzing round about my nostrils; |
Names were certainly not necessary to portraits, where every day the originals were standing by their side. This
There is a passage in the play itself where Jonson gives the true cause of “the tumult” raised against him. Picturing himself under the character of his favourite Horace, he makes the enemies of Horace thus describe him, still, however, preserving the high tone of poetical superiority.
“Alas, sir, Horace is a mere sponge. Nothing but humours and observations he goes up and down sucking from every society, and when he comes home squeezes himself dry again. He will pen all he knows. He will sooner lose his best friend than his least jest. What he once drops upon paper against a man, lives eternally to upbraid him.”
Such is the true picture of a town-wit’s life! The age of Augustus was much less present to Jonson than his own; and Ovid, Tibullus, and Horace were not the personages he cared so much about, as “that society in which,” it was said, “he went up and down sucking in and squeezing himself dry:” the formal lawyers, who were cold to his genius; the sharking captains, who would not draw to save their own swords, and would cheat “their friend, or their friend’s friend,” while they would bully down Ben’s genius; and the little sycophant histrionic, “the twopenny
All these personages will account for “the tumult” which excites the innocent astonishment of our author. These only resisted him by “filling every ear with noise.” But one of the “screaming grasshoppers held by the wings,” boldly turned on the holder with a scorpion’s bite; and Decker, who had been lashed in “The Poetaster,” produced his “Satiromastix, or the untrussing of the humorous Poet.” Decker was a subordinate author, indeed; but, what must have been very galling to Jonson, who was the aggressor, indignation proved such an inspirer, that Decker seemed to have caught some portion of Jonson’s own genius, who had the art of making even Decker popular; while he discovered that his own laurel-wreath had been dexterously changed by the “Satiromastix” into a garland of “stinging nettles.”
In “The Poetaster,” Crispinus is the picture of one of those impertinent fellows who resolve to become poets, having an equal aptitude to become anything that is in fashionable request. When Hermogenes, the finest singer in Rome, refused to sing, Crispinus gladly seizes the occasion, and whispers the lady near him—“Entreat the ladies to entreat me to sing, I beseech you.” This character is marked by a ludicrous peculiarity which, turning on an individual characteristic, must have assisted the audience in the true application. Probably Decker had some remarkable head of hair,
In two elaborate scenes, poor Decker stands for a full-length. Resolved to be a poet, he haunts the company of Horace: he meets him in the street, and discovers all the variety of his nothingness: he is a student, a stoic, an architect: everything by turns, “and nothing long.” Horace impatiently attempts to escape from him, but Crispinus foils him at all points. This affectionate admirer is even willing to go over the world with him. He proposes an ingenious project, if Horace will introduce him to MÆcenas. Crispinus offers to become “his assistant,” assuring him that “he would be content with the next place, not envying thy reputation with thy patron;” and he thinks that Horace and himself “would soon lift out of favour Virgil, Varius, and the best of them, and enjoy them wholly to ourselves.” The restlessness of Horace to extricate himself from this “Hydra of Discourse,” the passing friends whom he calls on to assist him, and the glue-like pertinacity of Crispinus, are richly coloured.
A ludicrous and exquisitely satirical scene occurs at the trial
| His brain and stomach of their tumorous heats. |
These consist of certain affectations in style, and adulteration of words, which offended the Horatian taste: “the basin” is called quickly for and Crispinus gets rid easily of some, but others were of more difficult passage:—
| ‘Magnificate!’ that came up somewhat hard! |
But all was not yet over: “Prorumpt” made a terrible rumbling, as if his spirit was to have gone with it; and there were others which required all the kind assistance of the Horatian “light vomit.” This satirical scene closes with some literary admonitions from the grave Virgil, who details to Crispinus the wholesome diet to be observed after his surfeits, which have filled
| His blood and brain thus full of crudities. |
Virgil’s counsels to the vicious neologist, who debases the purity of English diction by affecting new words or phrases, may too frequently be applied.
| You must not hunt for wild outlandish terms |
Virgil adds something which breathes all the haughty spirit of Ben: he commands Crispinus:
| ——————Henceforth, learn |
and dismisses him
| To some dark place, removed from company; |
“The Satiromastix” may be considered as a parody on “The Poetaster.” Jonson, with classical taste, had raised his scene in the court of Augustus: Decker, with great unhappiness, places it in that of William Rufus. The interest of the piece arises from the dexterity with which Decker has accommodated those very characters which Jonson has satirised in his “Poetaster.” This gratified those who came every day to the theatre, delighted to take this mimetic revenge on the arch bard.
In Decker’s prefatory address “To the World,” he observes, “Horace haled his Poetasters to the bar;
“Let that mad dog Detraction bite till his teeth be worn to the stumps; Envy, feed thy snakes so fat with poison till they burst; World, let all thy adders shoot out their Hydra-headed forked stings! I thank thee, thou true Venusian Horace, for these good words thou givest me. Populus me sibilat, at mihi plaudo.”
The whole address is spirited. Decker was a very popular
In Decker’s Satiromastix, Horace junior is first exhibited in his study, rehearsing to himself an ode: suddenly the Pindaric rapture is interrupted by the want of a rhyme; this is satirically applied to an unlucky line of Ben’s own. One of his “sons,” Asinius Bubo, who is blindly worshipping his great idol, or “his Ningle,” as he calls him, amid his admiration of Horace, perpetually breaks out into digressive accounts of what sort of a man his friends take him to be. For one, Horace in wrath prepares an epigram: and for Crispinus and Fannius, brother bards, who threaten “they’ll bring your life and death on the stage, as a bricklayer in a play,” he says, “I can bring a prepared troop of gallants, who, for my sake, shall distaste every unsalted line in their fly-blown comedies.” “Ay,” replies Asinius, “and all men of my rank!” Crispinus, Horace calls “a light voluptuous reveller,” and Fannius “the slightest cobweb-lawn piece of a poet.” Both enter, and Horace receives them with all friendship.
The scene is here conducted not without skill. Horace complains that
| ————————When I dip my pen |
To the querulous satirist, Crispinus replies with dignified gravity—
| Horace! to stand within the shot of galling tongues |
At this the galled Horace winces. Crispinus continues, that it is in vain Horace swears, that
| ———————He puts on |
Fannius, too, joins, and shows Ben the absurd oaths he takes, when he swears to all parties, that he does not mean them. How, then, of five hundred and four, five hundred
| Should all point with their fingers in one instant, |
Horace is awkwardly placed between these two friendly remonstrants, to whom he promises perpetual love.
Captain Tucca, a dramatic personage in Jonson’s Poetaster, and a copy of his own Bobadil, whose original the poet had found at “Powles,” the fashionable lounge of that day, is here continued with the same spirit; and as that character permitted from the extravagance of its ribaldry, it is now made the vehicle for those more personal retorts, exhibiting the secret history of Ben, which perhaps twitted the great bard more than the keenest wit, or the most solemn admonition which Decker could ever attain. Jonson had cruelly touched on Decker being out at elbows, and made himself too merry with the histrionic tribe: he, who was himself a poet, and had been a Thespian! The blustering captain thus attacks the great wit:—“Do’st stare, my Saracen’s head at Newgate? I’ll march through thy Dunkirk guts, for shooting jests at me.” He insists that as Horace, “that sly knave, whose shoulders were once seen lapp’d in a player’s old cast cloak,” and who had reflected on Crispinus’s satin doublet being ravelled out; that he should wear one of Crispinus’s
Ben’s person was, indeed, not gracious in the playfulness of love or fancy. A female, here, thus delineates Ben:—
“That same Horace has the most ungodly face, by my fan; it looks for all the world like a rotten russet-apple, when ’tis bruised. It’s better than a spoonful of cinnamon-water next my heart, for me to hear him speak; he sounds it so i’ th’ nose, and talks and rants like the poor fellows under Ludgate—to see his face make faces, when he reads his songs and sonnets.”
Again, we have Ben’s face compared with that of his favourite, Horace’s—“You staring Leviathan! look on the sweet visage of Horace; look, parboil’d face, look—he has not his face punchtfull of eyelet-holes, like the cover of a warming-pan.”
Joseph Warton has oddly remarked that most of our poets were handsome men. Jonson, however, was not poetical on that score; though his bust is said to resemble Menander’s.
Such are some of the personalities with which Decker recriminated.
Horace is thrown into many ludicrous situations. He is told that “admonition is good meat.” Various persons bring forward their accusations; and Horace replies that they envy him,
| Because I hold more worthy company. |
The greatness of Ben’s genius is by no means denied by
| Good Horace, no! my cheeks do blush for thine, |
To which one adds, that “jewels, master Horace, must be hanged, you know.” This “Whip of Men,” with Asinius his admirer, are brought to court, transformed into satyrs, and bound together: “not lawrefied, but nettle-fied;” crowned with a wreath of nettles.
| With stinging-nettles crown his stinging wit. |
Horace is called on to swear, after Asinius had sworn to give up his “Ningle.”
“Now, master Horace, you must be a more horrible swearer; for your oath must be, like your wits, of many colours; and like a broker’s book, of many parcels.”
Horace offers to swear till his hairs stand up on end, to be rid of this sting. “Oh, this sting!” alluding to the nettles. “’Tis not your sting of conscience, is it?” asks one. In the inventory of his oaths, there is poignant satire, with strong humour; and it probably exhibits some foibles in the literary habits of our bard.
He swears “Not to hang himself, even if he thought any man could write plays as well as himself; not to bombast out a new play with the old linings of jests stolen from the Temple’s Revels; not to sit in a gallery, when your comedies have entered their actions, and there make vile and bad faces at every line, to make men have an eye to you, and to make players afraid; not to venture on the stage, when your play is ended, and exchange courtesies and compliments with gallants to make all the house rise and cry—‘That’s Horace
The king observes, that
| ——————————He whose pen |
Such were the bitter apples which Jonson, still in his youth, plucked from the tree of his broad satire, that branched over all ranks in society. That even his intrepidity and hardiness felt the incessant attacks he had raised about him, appears from the close of the Apologetical Epilogueto “The Poetaster;” where, though he replies with all the consciousness of genius, and all its haughtiness, he closes with a determination to give over the composition of comedies! This, however, like all the vows of a poet, was soon broken; and his masterpieces were subsequently produced.
| Friend. Will you not answer then the libels? |
His Friend tells him that he is accused that “all his writing is mere railing;” which Jonson nobly compares to “the salt in the old comedy;” that they say, that he is slow, and “scarce brings forth a play a year.”
| Author. ——————’Tis true, |
He is angry that their
| ——————Base and beggarly conceits |
And then exclaims with admirable enthusiasm—
| O this would make a learn’d and liberal soul |
And again, alluding to these mimics—
| This ’tis that strikes me silent, seals my lips, |
Such was the noble strain in which Jonson replied to his detractors in the town and to his rivals about him. Yet this poem, composed with all the dignity and force of the bard, was not suffered to be repeated. It was stopped by authority. But Jonson, in preserving it in his works, sends it “TO POSTERITY, that it may make a difference between their manners that provoked me then, and mine that neglected them ever.”
CAMDEN AND BROOKE.
Literary, like political history, is interested in the cause of an obscure individual, when deprived of his just rights—character of Camden—Brooke’s “Discovery of Errors” in the “Britannia”—his work disturbed in the printing—afterwards enlarged, but never suffered to be published—whether Brooke’s motive was personal rancour!—the persecuted author becomes vindictive—his keen reply to Camden—Camden’s beautiful picture of calumny—Brooke furnishes a humorous companion-piece—Camden’s want of magnanimity and justice—when great authors are allowed to suppress the works of their adversary, the public receives the injury and the insult.
In the literary as well as the political commonwealth, the cause of an obscure individual violently deprived of his just rights is a common one. We protest against the power of genius itself, when it strangles rather than wrestles with its adversary, or combats in mail against a naked man. The general interests of literature are involved by the illegitimate suppression of a work, of which the purpose is to correct another, whatever may be the invective which accompanies the correction: nor are we always to assign to malignant motives even this spirit of invective, which, though it betrays a contracted genius, may also show the earnestness of an honest one.
The quarrel between Camden, the great author of the “Britannia,” and Brooke, the “York Herald,” may illustrate these principles. It has hitherto been told to the shame of the inferior genius; but the history of Brooke was imperfectly known to his contemporaries. Crushed by oppression, his tale was marred in the telling. A century sometimes passes away before the world can discover the truth even of a private history.
Brooke is aspersed as a man of the meanest talents, insensible to the genius of Camden, rankling with envy at his fame, and correcting the “Britannia” out of mere spite.
When the history of Brooke is known, and his labours fairly estimated, we shall blame him much less than he has been blamed; and censure Camden, who has escaped all censure,
The character of the author of “Britannia” is great, and this error of his feelings, now first laid to his charge, may be attributed as much to the weakness of the age as to his own extreme timidity, and perhaps to a little pride. Conscious as was Camden of enlarged views, we can easily pardon him for the contempt he felt, when he compared them with the subordinate ones of his cynical adversary.
Camden possessed one of those strongly directed minds which early in life plan some vast labour, while their imagination and their industry feed on it for many successive years; and they shed the flower and sweetness of their lives in the preparation of a work which at its maturity excites the gratitude of their nation. His passion for our national antiquities discovered itself even in his school-days, grew up with him at the University; and, when afterwards engaged in his public duties as master at Westminster school, he there composed his “Britannia,” “at spare hours, and on festival days.” To the perpetual care of his work, he voluntarily sacrificed all other views in life, and even drew himself away from domestic pleasures; for he refused marriage and preferments, which might interrupt his beloved studies! The work at length produced, received all the admiration due to so great an enterprise; and even foreigners, as the work was composed in the universal language of learning, could sympathise with Britons, when they contemplated the stupendous labour. Camden was honoured by the titles (for the very names of illustrious genius become such), of the Varro, the Strabo, and the Pausanias of Britain.
While all Europe admired the “Britannia,” a cynical genius, whose mind seemed bounded by his confined studies, detected one error amidst the noble views the mighty volume embraced; the single one perhaps he could perceive, and for which he stood indebted to his office as “York Herald.” Camden, in an appendage to the end of each county, had committed numerous genealogical errors, which he afterwards affected, in his defence, to consider as trivial matters in so great a history, and treats his adversary with all the contempt and bitterness he could inflict on him; but Ralph Brooke entertained very high notions of the importance of heraldical studies, and conceived that the “Schoolmaster” Camden, as he considered him, had encroached on the rights
Brooke prepared “A Discovery of Certain Errors in the Much-commended Britannia.” When we consider Brooke’s character, as headstrong with heraldry as Don Quixote’s with romances of chivalry, we need not attribute his motives (as Camden himself, with the partial feelings of an author, does, and subsequent writers echo) to his envy at Camden’s promotion to be Clarencieux King of Arms; for it appears that Brooke began his work before this promotion. The indecent excesses of his pen, with the malicious charges of plagiarism he brings against Camden for the use he made of Leland’s collections, only show the insensibility of the mere heraldist to the nobler genius of the historian. Yet Brooke had no ordinary talents: his work is still valuable for his own peculiar researches; but his naÏve shrewdness, his pointed precision, the bitter invective, and the caustic humour of his cynical pen, give an air of originality, if not of genius, which no one has dared to notice. Brooke’s first work against Camden was violently disturbed in its progress, and hurried, in a mutilated state, into the world, without licence or a publisher’s name. Thus impeded, and finally crushed, the howl of persecution followed his name; and subsequent writers servilely traced his character from their partial predecessors.
But Brooke, though denied the fair freedom of the press, and a victim to the powerful connexions of Camden, calmly pursued his silent labour with great magnanimity. He wrote his “Second Discovery of Errors,” an enlargement of the first. This he carefully finished for the press, but could never get published. The secret history of the controversy may be found there.
Brooke had been loudly accused of indulging a personal rancour against Camden, and the motive of his work was attributed to envy of his great reputation; a charge constantly repeated.
Yet this does not appear, for when Brooke first began his “Discovery of Errors,” he did not design its publication; for he liberally offered Camden his Observations and Collections. They were fastidiously, perhaps haughtily, rejected; on this pernicious and false principle, that to correct his errors in genealogy might discredit the whole work. On which absurdity Brooke shrewdly remarks—“As if healing the sores would have maimed the body.” He speaks with more humility on this occasion than an insulted, yet a skilful writer, was likely to do, who had his labours considered, as he says, “worthy neither of thanks nor acceptance.”
“The rat is not so contemptible but he may help the lion, at a pinch, out of those nets wherein his strength is hampered; and the words of an inferior may often carry matter in them to admonish his superior of some important consideration; and surely, of what account soever I might have seemed to this learned man, yet, in respect to my profession and courteous offer, (I being an officer-of-arms, and he then but a schoolmaster), might well have vouchsafed the perusal of my notes.”
When he published, our herald stated the reasons of writing against Camden with good-humour, and rallies him on his “incongruity in his principles of heraldry—for which I challenge him!—for depriving some nobles of issue to succeed them, who had issue, of whom are descended many worthy families: denying barons and earls that were, and making barons and earls of others that were not; mistaking the son for the father, and the father for the son; affirming legitimate children to be illegitimate, and illegitimate to be legitimate; and framing incestuous and unnatural marriages, making the father to marry the son’s wife, and the son his own mother.”
He treats Camden with the respect due to his genius, while he judiciously distinguishes where the greatest ought to know when to yield.
“The most abstruse arts I profess not, but yield the palm and victory to mine adversary, that great learned Mr. Camden,
Brooke had seen, as he observes, in four editions of the “Britannia,” a continued race of errors, in false descents, &c., and he continues, with a witty allusion:—
“Perceiving that even the brains of many learned men beyond the seas had misconceived and miscarried in the travail and birth of their relations, being gotten, as it were, with child (as Diomedes’s mares) by the blasts of his erroneous puffs; I could not but a little question the original father of their absurdities, being so far blown, with the trumpet of his learning and fame, into foreign lands.”
He proceeds with instances of several great authors on the Continent having been misled by the statements of Camden.
Thus largely have I quoted from Brooke, to show, that at first he never appears to have been influenced by the mean envy, or the personal rancour, of which he is constantly accused. As he proceeded in his work, which occupied him several years, his reproaches are whetted with a keener edge, and his accusations are less generous. But to what are we to attribute this? To the contempt and persecution Brooke so long endured from Camden: these acted on his vexed and degraded spirit, till it burst into the excesses of a man heated with injured feelings.
When Camden took his station in the Herald’s College with Brooke, whose offers of his notes he had refused to accept, they soon found what it was for two authors to live under the same roof, who were impatient to write against each other. The cynical York, at first, would twit the new king-of-arms, perpetually affirming that “his predecessor was a more able herald than any who lived in this age:” a truth, indeed, acknowledged by Dugdale. On this occasion, once the king-of-arms gave malicious York “the lie!” reminding the crabbed herald of “his own learning; who, as a scholar, was famous through all the provinces of Christendom.” “So that (adds Brooke) now I learnt, that before him, when we speak in commendation of any other, to say, I must always except Plato.” Camden would allow of no private communication between them; and in Sermonibus Convivalibus, in his table-talk, “the heat and height of his spirit” often scorched
The treatment the exasperated Brooke now incurred was more provoking than Camden’s refusal of his notes, and the haughtiness of his “Sermonibus Convivalibus.” The imperfect work was, however, laid before the public, so that Camden could not refuse to notice its grievous charges. He composed an angry reply in Latin, addressed ad Lectorem! and never mentioning Brooke by name, contemptuously alludes to him only by a Quidam and Iste (a certain person, and He!)—“He considers me (cries the mortified Brooke, in his second suppressed work) as an Individuum vagum, and makes me but a Quidam in his pamphlet, standing before him as a schoolboy, while he whips me. Why does he reply in Latin to an English accusation? He would disguise himself in his school-rhetoric; wherein, like the cuttle-fish, being stricken, he thinks to hide and shift himself away in the ink of his rhetoric. I will clear the waters again.”
He fastens on Camden’s former occupation, virulently accusing him of the manners of a pedagogue:—“A man may perceive an immoderate and eager desire of vainglory growing in hand, ever since he used to teach and correct children for these things, according to the opinion of some, in mores et naturam abeunt.” He complains of “the school-hyperboles” which Camden exhausts on him, among which Brooke is compared to “the strumpet Leontion,” who wrote against “the divine Theophrastus.” To this Brooke keenly replies:
“Surely, had Theophrastus dealt with women’s matters, a woman, though mean, might in reason have contended with him. A king must be content to be laughed at if he come into Apelles’s shop, and dispute about colours and portraiture. I am not ambitious nor envious to carp at matters of higher learning than matters of heraldry, which I profess: that is the slipper, wherein I know a slip when I find it. But see your cunning; you can, with the blur of your pen, dipped in
At the close of Camden’s answer, he introduced the allegorical picture of Calumny, that elegant invention of the Grecian fancy of Apelles, painted by him when suffering under the false accusations of a rival. The picture is described by Lucian; but it has received many happy touches from the classical hand of the master of Westminster School. As a literary satire, he applies it with great dignity. I give here a translation, but I preserve the original Latin in the note as Camden’s reply to Brooke is not easily to be procured.
“But though I am not disposed to waste more words on these, and this sort of men, yet I cannot resist the temptation of adding a slight sketch, for I cannot give that vivacity of colouring of the picture of the great artist Apelles that our Antiphilus and the like, whose ears are ever open to calumny, may, in contemplating it, find a reflection of themselves.
“On the right hand sits a man, who, to show his credulity, is remarkable for his prodigious ears, similar to those of Midas. He extends his hand to greet Calumny, who is approaching him. The two diminutive females around him are Ignorance and Suspicion. Opposite to them, Calumny advances, betraying in her countenance and gesture the savage rage and anger working in her tempestuous breast: her left hand holds a flaming torch; while with her right she drags by the hair a youth, who, stretching his uplifted hands to Heaven, is calling on the immortal powers to bear testimony to his innocence. She is preceded by a man of a pallid and impure appearance, seemingly wasting away under some severe disease, except that his eye sparkles, and has not the dulness usual to such. That Envy is here meant, you readily conjecture. Some diminutive females, frauds and deceits, attend her as companions, whose office is to encourage and instruct, and studiously to adorn their mistress. In the background, Repentance, sadly arrayed in a mournful, worn-out, and ragged garment, who, with averted head, with tears and shame, acknowledges and prepares to receive Truth, approaching from a distance.”
This elegant picture, so happily introduced into a piece of literary controversy, appears to have only slightly affected the mind of Brooke, which was probably of too stout a grain to take the folds of Grecian drapery. Instead of sympathising with its elegance, he breaks out into a horse-laugh; and, what is quite unexpected among such grave inquiries into a ludicrous tale in verse, which, though it has not Grecian fancy, has broad English humour, where he maliciously insinuates that Camden had appropriated to his own use, or “new-coated his ‘Britannia’” with Leland’s MSS., and disguised what he had stolen.
| A TALE (NOT OF A ROASTED) BUT OF A PAINTED HORSE.
|
To close with honour to Brooke; in his graver moments he warmly repels the accusation Camden raised against him, as an enemy to learning, and appeals to many learned scholars, who had tasted of his liberality at the Universities, towards their maintenance; but, in an elevated tone, he asserts his right to deliver his animadversions as York Herald.
“I know (says Brooke) the great advantage my adversary has over me, in the received opinion of the world. If some will blame me for that my writings carry some characters of spleen against him, men of pure affections, and not partial, will think reason that he should, by ill hearing, lose the pleasure he conceived by ill speaking. But since I presume not to understand above that which is meet for me to know, I must not be discouraged, nor fret myself, because of the malicious; for I find myself seated upon a rock, that is sure from tempest and waves, from whence I have a prospect into his errors and waverings. I do confess his great worth and merit, and that we Britons are in some sort beholding to him; and might have been much more, if God had lent him
Such was the dignified and the intrepid reply of Ralph Brooke, a man whose name is never mentioned without an epithet of reproach; and who, in his own day, was hunted down, and not suffered, vindictive as he was no doubt, to relieve his bitter and angry spirit, by pouring it forth to the public eye.
But the story is not yet closed. Camden, who wanted the magnanimity to endure with patient dignity the corrections of an inferior genius, had the wisdom, with the meanness, silently to adopt his useful corrections, but would never confess the hand which had brought them.
Thus hath Ralph Brooke told his own tale undisturbed, and, after the lapse of more than a century, the press has been opened to him. Whenever a great author is suffered to gag the mouth of his adversary, Truth receives the insult. But there is another point more essential to inculcate in literary controversy. Ought we to look too scrupulously into the motives which may induce an inferior author to detect the errors of a greater? A man from no amiable motive may perform a proper action: Ritson was useful after Warton; nor have we a right to ascribe it to any concealed motives, which, after all, may be doubtful. In the present instance, our much-abused Ralph Brooke first appears to have composed his elaborate
MARTIN MAR-PRELATE.
Of the two prevalent factions in the reign of Elizabeth, the Catholics and the Puritans—Elizabeth’s philosophical indifference offends both—Maunsell’s Catalogue omits the books of both parties—of the Puritans, “the mild and moderate, with the fierce and fiery,” a great religious body covering a political one—Thomas Cartwright, the chief of the Puritans, and his rival Whitgift—attempts to make the Ecclesiastical paramount to the Civil Power—his plan in dividing the country into comitial, provincial, and national assemblies, to be concentrated under the secret head at Warwick, where Cartwright was elected “perpetual Moderator!”—after the most bitter controversies, Cartwright became very compliant to his old rival Whitgift, when Archbishop of Canterbury—of Martin Mar-Prelate—his sons—specimens of their popular ridicule and invective—Cartwright approves of this mode of controversy—better counteracted by the wits than by the grave admonishers—specimens of the Anti-Martin Mar-Prelates—of the authors of these surreptitious publications.
The Reformation, or the new Religion, as it was then called, under Elizabeth, was the most philosophical she could form, and therefore the most hateful to the zealots of all parties. It was worthy of her genius, and of a better age! Her sole object was, a deliverance from the Papal usurpation. Her own supremacy maintained, she designed to be the great sovereign of a great people; and the Catholic, for some time, was called to her council-board, and entered with the Reformer into the same church. But wisdom itself is too weak to regulate human affairs, when the passions of men rise up in obstinate insurrection. Elizabeth neither won over the Reformers nor the Catholics. An excommunicating bull, precipitated by Papal Machiavelism, driving on the brutalised obedience of its slaves, separated the friends. This was a political error arising from a misconception of the weakness of our government; and when discovered as such, a tolerating dispensation was granted “till better times;” an unhealing expedient, to join again a dismembered nation! It would surprise many, were they aware how numerous were our ancient families and our eminent characters who still remained
On the other side, the national evil took a new form. It is probable that the Queen, regarding the mere ceremonies of religion, now venerable with age, as matters of indifference, and her fine taste perhaps still lingering amid the solemn gorgeousness of the Roman service, and her senses and her emotions excited by the religious scenery, did not share in that abhorrence of the paintings and the images, the chant and the music, the censer and the altar, and the pomp of the prelatical habits, which was prompting many well-intentioned Reformers to reduce the ecclesiastical state into apostolical nakedness and primitive rudeness. She was slow to meet this austerity of feeling, which in this country at length extirpated those arts which exalt our nature, and for this these pious Vandals nicknamed the Queen “the untamed heifer;” and the fierce Knox expressly wrote his “First Blast Against the Monstrous Government of Women.” Of these Reformers, many had imbibed the republican notions of Calvin. In their hatred of Popery, they imagined that they had not gone far enough in their wild notions of reform, for they viewed it, still shadowed out in the new hierarchy of the bishops. The fierce Calvin, in his little church at Geneva, presumed to rule a great nation on the scale of a parish institution; copying the apostolical equality at a time when the Church (say the Episcopalians) had all the weakness of infancy, and could live together in a community of all things, from a sense of their common poverty. Be this as it may, the dignified ecclesiastical order was a vulnerable institution, which could do no greater injury, and might effect as much public good as any other order in the state.
Elizabeth was harassed by the two factions of the intriguing Catholic and the disguised Republican. The age abounded with libels.
Men echo the tone of their age, yet still the same unvarying human nature is at work; and the Puritans,
Of this faction, the chief was Thomas Cartwright, a person of great learning, and doubtless of great ambition.
Such is my conception of the character of Cartwright. The reader is enabled to judge for himself by the note.
But Cartwright, chilled by an imprisonment, and witnessing some of his party condemned, and some executed, after having long sustained the most elevated and rigid tone, suddenly let his alp of ice dissolve away in the gentlest thaw that ever occurred in political life. Ambitious he was, but not of martyrdom! His party appeared once formidable,
Then occurred one of those political spectacles at which the simple-minded stare, and the politic smile; when, after the most cruel civil war of words,
One of the memorable effects of this attempted innovation was that continued stream of libels which ran throughout the nation, under the portentous name of Martin Mar-Prelate.
“Where his father is; he who had studied the art of pistle-making? Why has he been tongue-tied these four or five months? Good Nuncles (the bishops), have you closely murthered the gentleman in some of your prisons? Have you choaked him with a fat prebend or two? I trow my father will swallow down no such pills, for he would thus soon purge away all the conscience he hath. Do you mean to have the keeping of him? What need that? he hath five hundred sons in the land. My father would be sorry to put you to any such cost as you intend to be at with him. A meaner house, and less strength than the Tower, the Fleet, or Newgate, would serve him well enough. He is not of that ambitious vein that many of his brethren the bishops are, in seeking for more costly houses than even his father built for him.”
This same “Martin Junior,” who, though he is but young, as he says, “has a pretty smattering gift in this pistle-making; and I fear, in a while, I shall take a pride in it.” He had picked up beside a bush, where it had dropped from somebody, an imperfect paper of his father’s:—
“Theses MartinianÆ—set forth as an after-birth of the noble gentleman himselfe, by a pretty stripling of his, Martin Junior, and dedicated by him to his good nuncka, Maister John Cankerbury (i.e. Canterbury). Printed without a sly privilege of the Cater Caps”—(i.e. the square caps the bishops wore).
But another of these five hundred sons, who declares himself to be his “reverend and elder brother, heir to the renowned Martin Mar-Prelate the Great,” publishes
“The just Censure and Reproof of Martin Junior; where, lest the Springall should be utterly discouraged in his good meaning, you shall finde that he is not bereaved of his due commendation.”
Martin Senior, after finding fault with Martin Junior for “his rash and indiscreet headiness,” notwithstanding agrees with everything he had said. He confirms all, and cheers him; but charges him,
“Should he meet their father in the street, never to ask his blessing, but walke smoothly and circumspectly; and if anie offer to talk with thee of Martin, talke thou straite of the voyage into Portugal, or of the happie death of the Duke of Guise, or some such accident; but meddle not with thy father. Only, if thou have gathered anie thing in visitation for thy father, intreate him to signify, in some secret printed
Such were the mysterious personages who, for a long time, haunted the palaces of the bishops and the vicarages of the clergy, disappearing at the moment they were suddenly perceived to be near. Their slanders were not only coarse buffooneries, but the hottest effusions of hatred, with an unparalleled invective of nicknames.
The Court-party did not succeed more happily when they persecuted Martin, broke up his presses, and imprisoned his
These pamphlets were “speedily dispersed and greedily read,” not only by the people; they had readers and even patrons among persons of condition. They were found in the corners of chambers at Court; and when a prohibition issued that no person should carry about them any of the Mar-Prelate pamphlets on pain of punishment, the Earl of Essex observed to the Queen, “What then is to become of me?” drawing one of these pamphlets out of his bosom, and presenting it to her.
The Martinists were better counteracted by the Wits, in
Father Martin and his two sons received “A sound boxe of the eare,” in “a pistle” to “the father and the two sonnes, Huffe, Ruffe, and Snuffe, the three tame ruffians of the Church, who take pepper in the nose because they cannot marre prelates grating,” when they once met with an adversary who openly declared—
“I profess rayling, and think it is as good a cudgel for a Martin as a stone for a dogge, or a whip for an ape, or poison for a rat. Who would curry an ass with an ivory comb? Give this beast thistles for provender. I doe but yet angle with a silken flie, to see whether Martins will nibble; and if I see that, why then I have wormes for the nonce, and will give them line enough, like a trowte, till they swallow both hooke and line, and then, Martin, beware your gills, for I’ll make you daunce at the pole’s end.”
“Fill thy answer as full of lies as of lines, swell like a toade, hiss like an adder, bite like a dog, and chatter like a monkey, my pen is prepared, and my mind; and if you chaunce to find anie worse words than you broughte, let them be put in your dad’s dictionarie. Farewell, and be hanged; and I pray God you fare no worse.—Yours at an hour’s warning.”
This was the proper way to reply to such writers, by driving them out of the field with their own implements of warfare. “Pasquill of England”
Of the heads of this party, I shall notice Penry and Udall, two self-devoted victims to Nonconformity. The most active was John Penry, or Ap Henry. He exulted that “he was born and bred in the mountains of Wales:” he had, however, studied at both our Universities. He had all the heat of his soil and of his party. He “wished that his head might not go down to the grave in peace,” and was just the man to obtain his purpose. When he and his papers were at length seized, Penry pleaded that he could not be tried for sedition, professing unbounded loyalty to the Queen: such is the usual plea of even violent Reformers. Yet how could Elizabeth be the sovereign, unless she adopted the mode of government planned by these Reformers? In defence of his papers, he declared that they were only the private memorandums of a scholar, in which, during his wanderings about the kingdom, he had collected all the objections he had heard against the government. Yet these, though written down, might not be his own. He observed that they were not even English, nor intelligible to his accusers; but a few Welshisms could not save Ap Henry; and the judge, assuming the hardy position, that scribere est agere, the author found more honour conferred on his MSS. than his genius cared to receive. It was this very principle which proved so fatal, at a later period, to a more elevated politician than Penry; yet Algernon Sidney, perhaps, possessed not a spirit more Roman.
Contrasted with this fiery Mar-Prelate was another, the learned subtile John Udall. His was the spirit which dared to do all that Penry had dared, yet conducting himself in the heat of action with the tempered wariness of age: “If they silence me as a minister,” said he, “it will allow me leisure to write; and then I will give the bishops such a blow as shall make their hearts ache.” It was agreed among the party neither to deny, or to confess, writing any of their books, lest among the suspected the real author might thus be discovered, or forced solemnly to deny his own work; and when the Bishop of Rochester, to catch Udall by surprise,
The last stroke for Udall’s character is the history of his condemnation. He suffered the cruel mockery of a pardon granted conditionally, by the intercession of the Scottish
SUPPLEMENT TO MARTIN MAR-PRELATE.
As a literary curiosity, I shall preserve a very rare poetical tract, which describes with considerable force the Revolutionists of the reign of Elizabeth. They are indeed those of wild democracy; and the subject of this satire will, I fear, be never out of time. It is an admirable political satire against a mob-government. In our poetical history, this specimen too is curious, for it will show that the stanza in alternate rhymes, usually denominated elegiac, is adapted to very opposite themes. The solemnity of the versification is impressive, and the satire equally dignified and keen.
The taste of the mere modern reader had been more gratified by omitting some unequal passages; but, after deliberation, I found that so short a composition would be injured by dismembering extracts. I have distinguished by italics the lines to which I desire the reader’s attention, and have added a few notes to clear up some passages which might appear obscure.
| RYTHMES AGAINST MARTIN MARRE-PRELATE.
|
Anecdote of a Bishop and a Doctor—Dr. Middleton and Dr. Bentley—Warburton and Dr. Taylor—Warburton and Edwards—Swift and Dryden—Pope and Bentley—why fiction is necessary for satire, according to Lord Rochester’s confession—Rowe and Addison—Pope and Atterbury—Sir John Hawkins and George Steevens—a fierce controversial author a dangerous neighbour—a ludicrous instance of a literary quarrel from personal motives between Bohun and the Wykehamists.
Literary Quarrels have abundantly sprung from mere personal motives; and controversies purely literary, sometimes of magnitude, have broken out, and been voluminously carried on, till the public are themselves involved in the contest, while the true origin lies concealed in some sudden squabble; some neglect of petty civility; some unlucky epithet; or some casual observation dropped without much consideration, which mortified or enraged the author. How greatly has passion prevailed in literary history! How often the most glorious pages in the chronicles of literature are tainted with the secret history which must be placed by their side, so that the origin of many considerable works, which do so much honour to the heads of their authors, sadly accuse their hearts. But the heaven of Virgil was disturbed with quarrels—
| TantÆne animis coelestibus irÆ? Æneid. |
| Can heavenly minds such high resentment show? Dryden. |
And has not a profound observer of human affairs declared, Ex privatis odiis respublica crescit? individual hatreds aggrandize the republic. This miserable philosophy will satisfy those who are content, from private vices, to derive public benefits. One wishes for a purer morality, and a more noble inspiration.
To a literary quarrel from personal motives we owe the origin of a very remarkable volume. When Dr. Parr delivered his memorable sermon, which, besides the “sesquipedalia verba,” was perhaps the longest that ever was heard—if not listened to—Bishop Hurd, who had always played the part of one of the most wary of politicians in private life, and who had occasion once adroitly to explain the French word Retenue, which no man better understood, in a singularly unguarded moment, sarcastically observed that he did not like “the doctor’s long vernacular sermon.” The happy epithet was soon conveyed to the classical ear of the modern Grecian: it was a wasp in it! The bishop had, in the days of literary adventure, published some pieces of irony, which were thought more creditable to his wit than his feelings—and his great patron, Warburton, certain juvenile prose and verse—all of which they had rejected from their works. But this it is to be an author!—his errors remain when he has outlived and corrected them. The mighty and vindictive Grecian in rage collected them all; exhausted his own genius in perpetuating follies; completed the works of the two bishops in utter spite; and in “Tracts by Warburton and a Warburtonian,” has furnished posterity with a specimen of the force of his own “vernacular” style, giving a lesson to the wary bishop, who had scarcely wanted one all his life—of the dangers of an unlucky epithet!
Dr. Conyers Middleton, the author of the “Life of Cicero,” seldom wrote but out of pique; and he probably owed his origin as an author to a circumstance of this nature. Middleton when young was a Dilettante in music; and Dr. Bentley, in contempt, applied the epithet “fiddling Conyers.” Had the irascible Middleton broken his violin about the head of the learned Grecian, and thus terminated the quarrel, the epithet had then cost Bentley’s honour much less than it afterwards did. It seems to have excited Middleton to deeper studies, which the great Bentley not long after felt when he published proposals for an edition of the New Testament in Greek. Middleton published his “Remarks, paragraph by paragraph, upon the proposals,” to show that Bentley had neither talents nor materials proper for the work. This opened a great paper-war, and again our rabid wolf fastened on the majestic lion, “paragraph by paragraph.” And though the lion did affect to bear in contempt the fangs of his little active enemy, the flesh was torn. “The proposals” sunk
The irascibility of Middleton, disguising itself in a literary form, was still more manifested by a fact recorded of him by Bishop Newton. He had applied to Sir Robert Walpole for the mastership of the Charter-house, who honestly informed him that Bishop Sherlock, with the other Bishops, were against his being chosen. Middleton attributed the origin of this opposition to Bishop Sherlock, and wreaked his vengeance by publishing his “Animadversions upon Sherlock’s Discourses on Prophecy.” The book had been long published, and had passed through successive editions; but Middleton pretended he had never seen them before, and from this time Lambeth-house was a strong provocative for his vindictive temper.
Nor was the other great adversary of Middleton, he who so long affected to be the lord paramount, the Suzerain in the feudal empire, rather than the republic of letters—Warburton himself—less easily led on to these murderous acts of personal rancour. A pamphlet of the day has preserved an anecdote of this kind. Dr. Taylor, the Chancellor of Lincoln, once threw out in company an opinion derogatory to the scholarship of Warburton, who seems to have had always some choice spirits of his legion as spies in the camp of an enemy, and who sought their tyrant’s grace by their violation of the social compact. The tyrant himself had an openness, quite in contrast with the dark underworks of his satellites. He boldly interrogated our critic, and Taylor replied, undauntedly and more poignantly than Warburton might have suspected, that “he did not recollect ever saying that Dr. Warburton was no scholar, but that indeed he had always thought so.” To this intrepid spirit the world owes one of the remarkable prefaces to the “Divine Legation”—in which the Chancellor of Lincoln, intrepid as he was, stands like a man of straw, to be buffeted and tossed about with all those arts of distortion which the wit and virulence of Warburton almost every day was practising at his “established places of execution,” as his prefaces and notes have been wittily termed.
Even Warburton himself, who committed so many personal injuries, has, in his turn, most eminently suffered from the same motive. The personal animosity of a most ingenious man was the real cause of the utter destruction of Warburton’s critical reputation. Edwards, the author of the “Canons of Criticism,” when young and in the army, was a visitor at Allen’s of Prior-park, the patron of Warburton; and in those literary conversations which usually occupied their evenings, Warburton affected to show his superiority in his acquaintance with the Greek writers, never suspecting that a red coat covered more Greek than his own—which happened unluckily to be the case. Once, Edwards in the library, taking down a Greek author, explained a passage in a manner which did not suit probably with some new theory of the great inventor of so many; a contest arose, in which Edwards discovered how Warburton came by his illegitimate knowledge of Greek authors: Edwards attempted to convince him that he really did not understand Greek, and that his knowledge, such as it was, was derived from French translations—a provoking act of literary kindness, which took place in the presence of Ralph
Such is the implacable nature of literary irascibility! Men so tenderly alive to intellectual sensibility, find even the lightest touch profoundly enter into the morbid constitution of the literary temper; and even minds of a more robust nature have given proof of a sickly delicacy hanging about them quite unsuspected. Swift is a remarkable instance of this kind: the foundation of the character of this great wit was his excellent sense. Yet having, when young, composed one of the wild Pindarics of the time, addressed to the Athenian Society, and Dryden judiciously observing that “cousin Jonathan would never be a poet,” the enraged wit, after he had reached the maturity of his own admirable judgment, and must have been well aware of the truth of the friendly prediction, could never forgive it. He has indulged the utmost licentiousness of personal rancour; he even puns miserably on his name to degrade him as the emptiest of writers. His spirited translation of Virgil, which was admired even by Pope, he levels by the most grotesque sarcastic images to mark the poet’s diminutive genius—he says this version-maker is so lost in Virgil, that he is like “the lady in a lobster; a mouse under a canopy of state; a shrivelled beau within the penthouse of a full-bottomed perriwig.” He never was generous enough to contradict his opinion, and persisted in it to the last. Some critic, about Swift’s own time, astonished at his treatment of Dryden, declares he must have been biassed by some prejudice—the anecdote here recorded, not then probably known, discovers it.
What happened to Pope on the publication of his Homer shows all the anxious temper of the author. Being in company with Bentley, the poet was very desirous of obtaining the doctor’s opinion of it, which Bentley contrived to parry as well as he could; but in these matters an author who calculates on a compliment, will risk everything to obtain it. The question was more plainly put, and the answer was as plainly given. Bentley declared that “the verses were good verses, but the work is not Homer—it is Spondanus!” From this interview posterity derives from the mortified poet the full-length
| The mighty Scholiast, whose unwearied pains |
When Bentley was told by some officious friend that Pope had abused him, he only replied, “Ay, like enough! I spoke against his Homer, and the portentous cub never forgives!” Part of Pope’s severe criticism only is true; but to give full effect to their severity, poets always infuse a certain quantity of fiction. This is an artifice absolutely necessary to practise; so I collect from a great master in the arts of satire, and who once honestly avowed that no satire could be composed unless it was personal; and no personalities would sufficiently adorn a poem without lies. This great satirist was Rochester. Burnet details a curious conversation between himself and his lordship on this subject. The bishop tells us that “he would often go into the country, and be for some months wholly employed in study, or the sallies of his wit chiefly directed to satire. And this he often defended to me by saying, there were some people that could not be kept in order, or admonished, but in this way.” Burnet remonstrated, and Rochester replied—“A man could not write with life unless he were heated by revenge; for to make a satire without resentments, upon the cold notions of philosophy, was as if a man would, in cold blood, cut men’s throats who had never offended him. And he said, the lies in these libels came often in as ornaments, that could not be spared without spoiling the beauty of the poem.” It is as useful to know how the materials of satire are put together; as thus the secret of pulling it to pieces more readily may sometimes be obtained.
These facts will sufficiently establish this disgraceful principle of the personal motives which have influenced the quarrels of authors, and which they have only disguised by giving them a literary form. Those who are conversant in literary history can tell how many works, and some considerable ones, have entirely sprung out of the vengeance of authors. Johnson, to whom the feelings of the race were so well known, has made a curious observation, which none but an author could have made:—“The best advice to authors would be, that they should keep out of the way of one another.” He says this in the “Life of Rowe,” on the
The personal motives of an author, influencing his literary conduct, have induced him to practise meannesses and subterfuges. One remarkable instance of this nature is that of Sir John Hawkins, who indeed had been hardly used by the caustic pleasantries of George Steevens. Sir John, in his edition of Johnson, with ingenious malice contrived to suppress the acknowledgment made by Johnson to Steevens of his diligence and sagacity, at the close of his preface to Shakspeare. To preserve the panegyric of Steevens mortified Hawkins beyond endurance; yet, to suppress it openly, his character
A fierce controversial author may become a dangerous neighbour to another author: a petulant fellow, who does not write, may be a pestilent one; but he who prints a book against us may disturb our life in endless anxieties. There was once a dean who actually teased to death his bishop, wore him out in journeys to London, and at length drained all his faculties—by a literary quarrel from personal motives.
Dr. Thomas Pierce, Dean of Sarum—a perpetual controversialist, and to whom it was dangerous to refuse a request, lest it might raise a controversy—wanted a prebend of Dr. Ward, Bishop of Salisbury, for his son Robert. He was refused; and now, studying revenge, he opened a controversy with the bishop, maintaining that the king had the right of bestowing all dignities in all cathedrals in the kingdom, and not the bishops. This required a reply from the bishop, who had been formerly an active controversialist himself. Dean Pierce renewed his attack with a folio volume, entitled “A Vindication of the King’s Sovereign Right, &c.,” 1683.—Thus it proceeded, and the web thickened around the bishop in replies and rejoinders. It cost him many tedious journeys to London, through bad roads, fretting at “the King’s Sovereign Right” all the way; and, in the words of a witness, “in unseasonable times and weather, that by degrees his spirits were exhausted, his memory quite gone, and he was totally unfitted for business.”
I shall close this article with a very ludicrous instance of a literary quarrel from personal motives. This piece of secret
Bohun, an antiquarian lawyer, in a work entitled “The English Lawyer,” in 1732, in illustrating the origin of the Act of Scandalum Magnatum, which arose in the time of William of Wykeham, the chancellor and bishop of Edward III. and the founder of New College, in Oxford; took that opportunity of committing the very crime on the venerable manes of Wykeham himself. He has painted this great man in the darkest colours. Wykeham is charged with having introduced “Alice Piers, his niece or,” &c., for the truth is he was uncertain who she was, to use his peculiar language, “into the king’s bosom;” to have joined her in excluding the Black Prince from all power in the state; and he hints at this hero having been poisoned by them; of Wykeham’s embezzling a million of the public money, and, when chancellor, of forging an Act of Parliament to indemnify himself, and thus passing his own pardon. It is a singularity in this libellous romance, that the contrary of all this only is true. But Bohun has so artfully interwoven his historical patches of misrepresentations, surmises, and fictions, that he succeeded in framing an historical libel.
Not satisfied with this vile tissue, in his own obscure volume, seven years afterwards, being the editor of a work of high reputation, Nathaniel Bacon’s “Historical and Political Discourse of the Laws and Government of England,” he further satiated his frenzy by contriving to preserve his libel in a work which he was aware would outlive his own.
Whence all this persevering malignity? Why this quarrel of Mr. Bohun, of the Middle Temple, with the long-departed William of Wykeham?
| What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba? |
He took all these obscure pains, and was moved with this perpetual rancour against William of Wykeham, merely to mortify the Wykehamists; and slandered their founder, with the idea that the odium might be reflected on New College. Bohun, it seems, had a quarrel with them concerning a lease on which he had advanced money; but the holder had contrived to assign it to the well-known Eustace Budgell: the college confirmed the assignment. At an interview before
But here I stop my hand, my list would else be too complete. Great names are omitted—Whitaker and Gibbon;
This chapter is not honourable to authors; but historians are only Lord Chief Justices, who must execute the laws, even on their intimate friends, when standing at the bar. The chapter is not honourable—but it may be useful; and
If in the heat of controversy authors imprudently attack each other with personalities, they are only scattering mud and hurling stones, and will incur the ridicule or the contempt of those who, unfriendly to the literary character, feel a secret pleasure in its degradation; but let them learn, that to open a literary controversy from mere personal motives; thus to conceal the dagger of private hatred under the mantle of literature, is an expedient of short duration, for the secret history is handed down with the book; and when once the dignity of the author’s character sinks in the meanness of his motives, powerful as the work may be, even Genius finds its lustre diminished, and Truth itself becomes suspicious.
