Books and Authors Part 11

I could raise fifty of them within four-and-twenty hours. I have raised many of them in one night. It is but refusing to gratify an unreasonable or insolent demand, and _up starts a patriot_."

DR. JOHNSON'S CRITICISMS.

Johnson decided literary questions like a lawyer, not like a legislator.

He never examined foundations where a point was already ruled. His whole code of criticism rested on pure a.s.sumption, for which he sometimes gave a precedent or authority, but rarely troubled himself to give a reason drawn from the nature of things. He judged of all works of the imagination by the standard established among his own contemporaries. Though he allowed Homer to have been a greater man than Virgil, he seems to have thought the aeneid to have been a greater poem than the Iliad. Indeed, he well might have thought so; for he preferred Pope's _Iliad_ to Homer's.

He p.r.o.nounced that after Hoole's translation of _Ta.s.so_, Fairfax's would hardly be reprinted. He could see no merit in our fine old English ballads, and always spoke with the most provoking contempt of Dr.

Percy's fondness for them.

Of all the great original works which appeared during his time, Richardson's novels alone excited his admiration. He could see little or no merit in _Tom Jones_, in _Gulliver's Travels_, or in _Tristram Shandy_. To Thomson's _Castle of Indolence_ he vouchsafed only a line of cold commendation--of commendation much colder than what he has bestowed on _The Creation_ of that portentous bore, Sir Richard Blackmore. Gray was, in his dialect, a barren rascal. Churchill was a blockhead. The contempt which he felt for Macpherson was, indeed, just; but it was, we suspect, just by by chance. He criticized Pope's epitaphs excellently.

But his observations on Shakspeare's plays, and Milton's poems, seem to us as wretched as if they had been written by Rymer himself, whom we take to have been the worst critic that ever lived.

GIBBON'S HOUSE, AT LAUSANNE

The house of Gibbon, in which he completed his "Decline and Fall," is in the lower part of the town of Lausanne, behind the church of St.

Francis, and on the right of the road leading down to Ouchy. Both the house and the garden have been much changed. The wall of the Hotel Gibbon occupies the site of his summer-house, and the _berceau_ walk has been destroyed to make room for the garden of the hotel; but the terrace looking over the lake, and a few acacias, remain.

Gibbon's record of the completion of his great labour is very impressive.

"It was on the day, or rather the night, of the 27th of June, 1787, between the hours of eleven and twelve, that I wrote the last line of the last page, in a summer-house in my garden. After laying down my pen, I took several turns in a _berceau_, or covered walk of acacias, which commands a prospect of the country, the lake, and the mountains. The air was temperate, the sky was serene, the silver orb of the moon was reflected from the waves, and all nature was silent."

At a little inn at Morges, about two miles distant from Lausanne, Lord Byron wrote the _Prisoner of Chillon_, in the short s.p.a.ce of _two days_, during which he was detained here by bad weather, June 1816: "thus adding one more deathless a.s.sociation to the already immortalized localities of the Lake."

ORIGIN OF "BOZ." (d.i.c.kENS.)

A fellow pa.s.senger with Mr. d.i.c.kens in the _Britannia_ steam-ship, across the Atlantic, inquired of the author the origin of his signature, "Boz." Mr. d.i.c.kens replied that he had a little brother who resembled so much the Moses in the _Vicar of Wakefield_, that he used to call him Moses also; but a younger girl, who could not then articulate plainly, was in the habit of calling him Bozie or Boz. This simple circ.u.mstance made him a.s.sume that name in the first article he risked to the public, and therefore he continued the name, as the first effort was approved of.

BOSWELL'S "LIFE OF JOHNSON."

Sir John Malcolm once asked Warren Hastings, who was a contemporary and companion of Dr. Johnson and Boswell, what was his real estimation of Boswell's _Life of Johnson_? "Sir," replied Hastings, "it is the _dirtiest_ book in my library;" then proceeding, he added: "I knew Boswell intimately; and I well remember, when his book first made its appearance, Boswell was so full of it, that he could neither think nor talk of anything else; so much so, that meeting Lord Thurlow hurrying through Parliament-street to get to the House of Lords, where an important debate was expected, for which he was already too late, Boswell had the temerity to stop and accost him with "Have you read my book?" "Yes," replied Lord Thurlow, with one of his strongest curses, "every word of it; I could not help it."

PATRONAGE OF AUTHORS.

In the reigns of William III., of Anne, and of George I., even such men as Congreve and Addison could scarcely have been able to live like gentlemen by the mere sale of their writings. But the deficiency of the natural demand for literature was, at the close of the seventeenth, and at the beginning of the eighteenth century, more than made up by the artificial encouragement--by a vast system of bounties and premiums.

There was, perhaps, never a time at which the rewards of literary merit were so splendid--at which men who could write well found such easy admittance into the most distinguished society, and to the highest honours of the state. The chiefs of both the great parties into which the kingdom was divided, patronized literature with emulous munificence.

Congreve, when he had scarcely attained his majority, was rewarded for his first comedy with places which made him independent for life. Rowe was not only poet laureate, but land-surveyor of the Customs in the port of London, clerk of the council to the Prince of Wales, and secretary of the Presentations to the Lord Chancellor. Hughes was secretary to the Commissioners of the Peace. Ambrose Phillips was judge of the Prerogative Court in Ireland. Locke was Commissioner of Appeals and of the Board of Trade. Newton was Master of the Mint. Stepney and Prior were employed in emba.s.sies of high dignity and importance. Gay, who commenced life as apprentice to a silk-mercer, became a secretary of Legation at five-and-twenty. It was to a poem on the death of Charles II., and to "the City and Country Mouse," that Montague owed his introduction into public life, his earldom, his garter, and his auditorship of the Exchequer. Swift, but for the unconquerable prejudice of the queen, would have been a bishop. Oxford, with his white staff in his hand, pa.s.sed through the crowd of his suitors to welcome Parnell, when that ingenious writer deserted the Whigs. Steele was a Commissioner of Stamps, and a member of Parliament. Arthur Mainwaring was a Commissioner of the Customs, and Auditor of the Imprest. Tickell was secretary to the Lords Justices of Ireland. Addison was Secretary of State.

But soon after the succession of the throne of Hanover, a change took place. The supreme power pa.s.sed to a man who cared little for poetry or eloquence. Walpole paid little attention to books, and felt little respect for authors. One of the coa.r.s.e jokes of his friend, Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, was far more pleasing to him than Thomson's _Seasons_ or Richardson's _Pamela_.

LEARNING FRENCH.

When Brummell was obliged by want of money, and debt, and all that, to retire to France, he knew no French; and having obtained a grammar for the purpose of study, his friend Scrope Davies was asked what progress Brummell had made in French. He responded, that Brummell had been stopped, like Buonaparte in Russia, by the _Elements_.

"I have put this pun into _Beppo_, (says Lord Byron), which is a fair exchange and no robbery, for Scrope made his fortune at several dinners, (as he owned himself,) by repeating occasionally, as his own, some of the buffooneries with which I had encountered him in the morning."

JOHNSON'S CLUB-ROOM.

In a paper in the _Edinburgh Review_, we find this cabinet picture:--The club-room is before us, and the table, on which stands the omelet for Nugent, and the lemons for Johnson. There are a.s.sembled those heads which live for ever on the canvas of Reynolds. There are the spectacles of Burke, and the tall thin form of Langton; the courtly sneer of Beauclerc, and the beaming smile of Garrick; Gibbon tapping his snuff-box, and Sir Joshua with his trumpet in his ear. In the foreground is that strange figure which is as familiar to us as the figures of those among whom we have been brought up--the gigantic body, the huge ma.s.sy face, seamed with the scars of disease; the brown coat, the black worsted stockings, the grey wig, with the scorched foretop; the dirty hands, the nails bitten and pared to the quick. We see the eyes and nose moving with convulsive twitches; we see the heavy form rolling; we hear it puffing; and then comes the "Why, sir!" and the "What then, sir?" and the "No, sir!" and the "You don't see your way through the question, sir!"

DR. CHALMERS'S INDUSTRY.

In October, 1841, Dr. Chalmers commenced two series of biblical compositions, which he continued with unbroken regularity till the day of his decease, May 31, 1847. Go where he might, however he might be engaged, each week-day had its few verses read, thought over, written upon--forming what he denominated "Horae Biblicae Quotidianae:" each Sabbath-day had its two chapters, one in the Old and the other in the New Testament, with the two trains of meditative devotion recorded to which the reading of them respectively gave birth--forming what he denominated "Horae Biblicae Sabbaticae." When absent from home, or when the ma.n.u.script books in which they were ordinarily inserted were not beside him, he wrote in short-hand, carefully entering what was thus written in the larger volumes afterwards. Not a trace of haste nor of the extreme pressure from without, to which he was so often subjected, is exhibited in the handwriting of these volumes. There are but few words omitted--scarcely any erased. This singular correctness was a general characteristic of his compositions. His lectures on the Epistle to the Romans were written _currente calamo_, in Glasgow, during the most hurried and overburthened period of his life. And when, many years afterwards, they were given out to be copied for the press, scarcely a blot, or an erasure, or a correction, was to be found in them, and they were printed off exactly as they had originally been written.

In preparing the "Horae Biblicae Quotidianae," Chalmers had by his side, for use and reference, the "Concordance," the "Pictorial Bible,"

"Poole's Synopsis," "Henry's Commentary," and "Robinson's Researches in Palestine." These const.i.tuted what he called his "Biblical Library."

"There," said he to a friend, pointing, as he spoke, to the above-named volumes, as they lay together on his library-table, with a volume of the "Quotidianae," in which he had just been writing, lying open beside them,--"There are the books I use--all that is Biblical is there. I have to do with nothing besides in my Biblical study." To the consultation of these few volumes he throughout restricted himself.

The whole of the MSS. were purchased, after Dr. Chalmers's death, for a large sum of money, by Mr. Thomas Constable, of Edinburgh, her Majesty's printer; and were in due time given to, and most favourably received by, the public.

LATEST OF DR. JOHNSON'S CONTEMPORARIES.[6]

In the autumn of 1831, died the Rev. Dr. Shaw, at Chesley, Somersetshire, at the age of eighty-three: he is said to have been the last surviving friend of Dr. Johnson.

On the 16th of January, in the above year, died Mr. Richard Clark, chamberlain of the City of London, in the ninety-second year of his age.

At the age of fifteen, he was introduced by Sir John Hawkins to Johnson, whose friendship he enjoyed to the last year of the Doctor's life. He attended Johnson's evening parties at the Mitre Tavern, in Fleet-street;[7]

where, among other literary characters he met Dr. Percy, Dr. Goldsmith, and Dr. Hawksworth. A substantial supper was served at eight o'clock; the party seldom separated till a late hour; and Mr. Clark recollected that early one morning he, with another of the party, accompanied the Doctor to his house, where Mrs. Williams, then blind, made tea for them.

When Mr. Clark was sheriff, he took Johnson to a "Judges' Dinner," at the Old Bailey; the judges being Blackstone and Eyre. Mr. Clark often visited the Doctor, and met him at dinner-parties; and the last time he enjoyed his company was at the Ess.e.x Head Club, of which, by the Doctor's invitation, Clark became a member.

[6] See, also, an ensuing page, 120.

[7] Johnson, by the way, had a strange nervous feeling, which made him uneasy if he had not touched every post between the Mitre Tavern and his own lodgings.