Calamities And Quarrels Of Authors Part 51

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 his candour. We read May now, as well as Clarendon; nor is the work of May that of a man who "had lost his wits," nor is it "meanly performed."

Warburton, a keen critic of the writers of that unhappy and that glorious age for both parties, has p.r.o.nounced this "History" to be "a just composition, according to the rules of history; written with much judgment, penetration, manliness, and spirit, and with a candour that will greatly increase your esteem, when you understand that he wrote by order of his masters the Parliament."

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.[347] The better spirit of the present times will maintain a safer and a more honourable principle,--the true objects of LITERATURE, the cultivation of the intellectual faculties, stand entirely unconnected with POLITICS and RELIGION, let this be the imprescriptible right of an author. In our free country unhappily they have not been separated--they run together, and in the ocean of human opinions, the salt and bitterness of these mightier waves have infected the clear waters from the springs of the Muses. I once read of a certain river that ran through the sea without mixing with it, preserving its crystalline purity and all its sweetness during its course; so that it tasted the same at the Line as at the Poles. This stream indeed is only to be found in the geography of an old romance; literature should be this magical stream!

FOOTNOTES:

[338] A forcible description of Locke may be found in the curious "Life of Wood," written by himself. I shall give the pa.s.sage where Wood acknowledges his after celebrity, at the very moment the bigotry of his feelings is attempting to degrade him.

Wood belonged to a club with Locke and others, for the purpose of hearing chemical lectures. "John Locke of Christchurch was afterwards a noted writer. This John Locke was a man of a turbulent spirit, clamorous, and never contented. The club wrote and took notes from the mouth of their master, who sat at the upper end of a table, but the said John Locke scorned to do it; so that while every man besides of the club were writing, he would be prating and troublesome."

[339] This anecdote deserves preservation. I have drawn it from the MSS. of Bishop KENNET.

"In the Epitaph on JOHN PHILIPS occurs this line on his metre, that

'Uni in hoc laudis genere Miltono secundus, Primoque pene par.'

These lines were ordered to be razed out of the monument by Dr. Sprat, Bishop of Rochester. The word Miltono being, as he said, not fit to be in a Christian church; but they have since been restored by Dr. ATTERBURY, who succeeded him as Bishop of Rochester, and who wrote the epitaph jointly with Dr.

FREIND."--Lansdowne MSS., No. 908, p. 162.

The anecdote has appeared, but without any authority. Dr.

SYMMONS, in his "Life of Milton," observing on what he calls Dr. Johnson's "biographical libel on Milton," that Dr. Johnson has mentioned this fact, seems to suspect its authenticity; for, if true, "it would cover the respectable name of Sprat with eternal dishonour." Of its truth the above gives sufficient authority; but at all events the prejudices of Sprat must be pardoned, while I am showing that minds far greater than his have shared in the same unhappy feeling. Dr.

Symmons himself bears no light stain for his slanderous criticism on the genius of THOMAS WARTON, from the motive we are discussing; though Warton, as my text shows, was too a sinner! I recollect in my youth a more extraordinary instance than any other which relates to Milton. A woman of no education, who had retired from the business of life, became a very extraordinary reader; accident had thrown into her way a large library composed of authors who wrote in the reigns of the two Charleses. She turned out one of the _malignant_ party, and an abhorrer of the Commonwealth's men. Her opinion of CROMWELL and MILTON may be given. She told me it was no wonder that the rebel who had been secretary to the usurper should have been able to have drawn so finished a character of SATAN, and that the Pandaemonium, with all the oratorical devils, was only such as he had himself viewed at Oliver's council-board.

[340] I throw into this note several curious notices respecting BURNET, and chiefly from contemporaries.

Burnet has been accused, after a warm discussion, of returning home in a pa.s.sion, and then writing the character of a person.

But as his feelings were warm, it is probable he might have often practised the reverse. An anecdote of the times is preserved in "The Memoirs of Grub-street," vol. ii. p. 291. "A n.o.ble peer now living declares he stood with a very ill grace in the history, till he had an opportunity put into his hands of obliging the bishop, by granting a favour at court, upon which the bishop told a friend, within an hour, that he was mistaken in such a lord, and must go and alter his whole character; and so he happens to have a pretty good one." In this place I also find this curious extract from the MS.

"Memoirs of the M---- of H----." "Such a day Dr. B----t told me King William was an obstinate, conceited man, that would take no advice; and on this day King William told me that Dr.

B----t was a troublesome, impertinent man, whose company he could not endure." These anecdotes are very probable, and lead one to reflect. Some political tergiversation has been laid to his charge; Swift accused him of having once been an advocate for pa.s.sive obedience and absolute power. He has been reproached with the deepest ingrat.i.tude, for the purpose of gratifying his darling pa.s.sion of popularity, in his conduct respecting the Duke of Lauderdale, his former patron. If the following piece of secret history be true, he showed too much of a compliant humour, at the cost of his honour. I find it in Bishop Kennet's MSS. "Dr. Burnet having _over night_ given in some important depositions against the Earl of Lauderdale to the House of Commons, was, _before morning_, by the intercession of the D----, made king's chaplain and preacher at the Rolls; so he was bribed to hold the peace."--Lansdowne MSS., 990. This was quite a politician's short way to preferment! An honest man cannot leap up the ascent, however he may try to climb. There was something morally wrong in this transaction, because Burnet notices it, and acknowledges--"I was much blamed for what I had done." The story is by no means refuted by the _nave_ apology.

Burnet's character has been vigorously attacked, with all the nerve of satire, in "Faction Displayed," attributed to Shippen, whom Pope celebrates--

----"And pour myself as plain As honest Shippen or as old Montaigne."

Shippen was a Tory. In "Faction Displayed," Burnet is represented with his Cabal (so some party nicknames the other), on the accession of Queen Anne, plotting the disturbance of her government. "Black Aris's fierceness," that is Burnet, is thus described:--

"A Scotch, seditious, unbelieving priest, The brawny chaplain of the calves'-head feast, Who first his patron, then his prince betray'd, And does that church he's sworn to guard, invade, Warm with rebellious rage, he thus began," &c.

One hardly suspects the hermit Parnell capable of writing rather harsh verses, yet stinging satire; they are not in his works; but he wrote the following lines on a report of a fire breaking out in Burnet's library, which had like to have answered the purpose some wished--of condemning the author and his works to the flames--

"He talks, and writes, that Popery will return, And we, and he, and all his works will burn; And as of late he meant to bless the age With _flagrant prefaces of party rage_, O'ercome with pa.s.sion and the subject's weight, Lolling he nodded in his elbow-seat; Down fell the candle! Grease and zeal conspire, Heat meets with heat, and pamphlets burn their sire; Here crawls a _preface_ on its half-burn'd maggots, And there an _introduction_ brings its f.a.gots; Then roars the prophet of the northern nation, Scorch'd by a flaming speech on moderation."

Thomas Warton smiles at Burnet for the horrors of Popery which perpetually haunted him, in his "Life of Sir T. Pope," p. 53.

But if we subst.i.tute the term arbitrary power for popery, no Briton will join in the abuse Burnet has received on this account. A man of Burnet's fervid temper, whose foible was strong vanity and a pa.s.sion for popularity, would often rush headlong into improprieties of conduct and language; his enemies have taken ample advantage of his errors; but many virtues his friends have recorded; and the elaborate and spirited character which the Marquis of Halifax has drawn of Burnet may soothe his manes, and secure its repose amid all these disturbances around his tomb. This fine character is preserved in the "Biographia Britannica." Burnet is not the only instance of the motives of a man being honourable, while his actions are frequently the reverse, from his impetuous nature. He has been reproached for a want of that truth which he solemnly protests he scrupulously adhered to; yet, of many circ.u.mstances which were at the time condemned as "lies," when Time drew aside the mighty veil, Truth was discovered beneath.

Tovey, with his visual good humour, in his "Anglia Judaica,"

p. 277, notices "that pleasant copious imagination which will for ever rank our _English Burnet_ with the _Grecian Heliodorus_." Roger North, in his "Examen," p. 413, calls him "a busy Scotch parson." Lord Orford sneers at his hasty epithets, and the colloquial carelessness of his style, in his "Historic Doubts," where, in a note, he mentions "_one_ Burnet" tells a ridiculous story, mimicking Burnet's chit-chat, and concludes surprisingly with, "So the Prince of Orange mounted the throne."

After reading this note, how would that learned foreigner proceed, who I have supposed might be projecting the "Judgments of the Learned" on our English authors? Were he to condemn Burnet as an historian void of all honour and authority, he would not want for doc.u.ments. It would require a few minutes to explain to the foreigner the nature of political criticism.

[341] Dryden was very coa.r.s.ely satirised in the political poems of his own day; and among the rest, in "The Session of the Poets,"--a general onslaught directed against the writers of the time, which furnishes us with many examples of unjust criticism on these literary men, entirely originating in political feeling.

One example may suffice;

"Then in came Denham, that limping old bard, Whose fame on _the Sophy_ and _Cooper's-hill_ stands, And brought many stationers, who swore very hard That nothing sold better except 'twere his lands.

But Apollo advised him to write something more, To clear a suspicion which possessed the Court, That _Cooper's-hill_, so much bragg'd on before, Was writ by a vicar, who had forty pounds for't."

[342] Dr. Wagstaffe, in his "Character of Steele," alludes to the rumour which Pope has sent down to posterity in a single verse: "I should have thought Mr. Steele might have the example of his _friend_ before his eyes, who _had the reputation of being the author of The Dispensary_, till, by two or three unlucky after-claps, he proved himself incapable of writing it."--WAGSTAFFE'S _Misc. Works_, p. 136.

[343] I know not how to ascertain the degree of political skill which Steele reached in his new career--he was at least a spirited Whig, but the ministry was then under the malignant influence of the concealed adherents to the Stuarts, particularly of Bolingbroke, and such as Atterbury, whose secret history is now much better known than in their own day. The terrors of the Whigs were not unfounded. Steele in the House disappointed his friends; from his popular Essays, it was expected he would have been a fluent orator; this was no more the case with him than Addison. On this De Foe said he had better have continued the _Spectator_ than the _Tatler_.--LANSDOWNE'S _MSS._ 1097.

[344] Wagstaffe's "Miscellaneous Works," 1726, have been collected into a volume. They contain satirical pieces of humour, accompanied by some Hogarthian prints. His "Comment upon the History of Tom Thumb," ridicules Addison's on the old ballad of "Chevy Chase," who had declared "it was full of the majestic simplicity which we admire in the greatest of the ancient poets," and quoted pa.s.sages which he paralleled with several in the aeneid. Wagstaffe tells us he has found "in the library of a schoolboy, among other undiscovered valuable authors, one more proper to adorn the shelves of Bodley or the Vatican than to be confined to the obscurity of a private study." This little Homer is the chanter of Tom Thumb. He performs his office of "a true commentator," proving the congenial spirit of the poet of Thumb with that of the poet of aeneas. Addison got himself ridiculed for that fine natural taste, which felt all the witchery of our ballad-Enniuses, whose beauties, had Virgil lived with Addison, he would have inlaid into his mosaic. The bigotry of cla.s.sical taste, which is not always accompanied by a natural one, and rests securely on prescribed opinions and traditional excellence, long contemned our vernacular genius, spurning at the minstrelsy of the nation; Johnson's ridicule of "Percy's Reliques" had its hour, but the more poetical mind of Scott has brought us back to home feelings, to domestic manners, and eternal nature.

[345] I shall content myself with referring to "The Character of Richard St--le, Esq.," in Dr. Wagstaffe's Miscellaneous Works, 1726. Considering that he had no personal knowledge of his victim, one may be well surprised at his entering so deeply into his private history; but of such a character as Steele, the private history is usually too public--a ma.s.s of scandal for the select curious. Poor Steele, we are told, was "arrested for the maintenance of his b.a.s.t.a.r.ds, and afterwards printed a _proposal_ that the public should take care of them;" got into the House "not to be arrested;"--"his _set_ speeches there, which he designs to get _extempore_ to speak in the House." For his literary character we are told that "Steele was a jay who borrowed a feather from the peac.o.c.k, another from the bullfinch, and another from the magpye; so that _d.i.c.k_ is made up of borrowed colours; he borrowed his humour from Estcourt, criticism of Addison, his poetry of Pope, and his politics of Ridpath; so that his qualifications as a man of genius, like Mr. T----s, as a member of Parliament, _lie in thirteen parishes_." Such are the pillows made up for genius to rest its head on!

Wagstaffe has sometimes delicate humour; Steele, who often wrote in haste, necessarily wrote incorrectly. Steele had this sentence: "And ALL, as one man, will join in a common indignation against ALL who would perplex our obedience:" on which our pleasant critic remarks--"Whatever contradiction there is, as some suppose, in _all joining against all_, our author has good authority for what he says; and it may be proved, in spite of Euclid or Sir Isaac, that everything consists of _two alls_, that these _alls_ are capable of being divided and subdivided into as many _alls_ as you please, and so _ad infinitum_. The following lines may serve for an ill.u.s.tration:--

'Three children sliding on the ice Upon a summer's day; As it fell out, they all fell in; The rest they ran away.'

"Though this polite author does not directly say there are _two alls_, yet he implies as much; for I would ask any _reasonable_ man what can be understood by _the rest they ran away_, but the _other all_ we have been speaking of? The world may see that I can exhibit the beauties, as well as quarrel with the faults, of his composition, but I hope he will not value himself on his _hasty productions_."

Poor Steele, with the best humour, bore these perpetual attacks, not, however, without an occasional groan, just enough to record his feelings. In one of his wild, yet well-meant projects, of the invention of "a Fish-pool, or Vessel for Importing Fish Alive," 1718, he complains of calumnies and impertinent observations on him, and seems to lay some to the account of his knighthood:--"While he was pursuing what he believed might conduce to the common good, he gave the syllables _Richard Steele_ to the publick, to be used and treated as they should think fit; he must go on in _the same indifference_, and allow the TOWN _their usual liberty with his name_, which I find they think they have much more room to sport with than formerly, as it is lengthened with the monosyllable SIR."

[346] "Rehearsal Transprosed," p. 45.

[347] The late Gilbert Wakefield is an instance where the political and theological opinions of a recluse student tainted his pure literary works. Condemned as an enraged Jacobin by those who were Unitarians in politics, and rejected because he was a Unitarian in religion by the orthodox, poor Wakefield's literary labours were usually reduced to the value of waste-paper. We smile, but half in sorrow, in reading a letter, where he says, "I meditate a beginning, during the winter, of my criticisms on all the ancient Greek and Latin authors,_ by small piecemeals, on the cheapest possible paper, and at the least possible expense of printing_. As I can never do more than barely indemnify myself, I shall print only 250 copies." He half-ruined himself by his splendid edition of Lucretius, which could never obtain even common patronage from the opulent friends of cla.s.sical literature. Since his death it has been reprinted, and is no doubt now a marketable article for the bookseller; so that if some authors are not successful for themselves, it is a comfort to think how useful, in a variety of shapes, they are made so to others.

Even Gilbert's "contracted scheme of publication" he was compelled to abandon! Yet the cla.s.sic erudition of Wakefield was confessed, and is still remembered. No one will doubt that we have lost a valuable addition to our critical stores by this literary persecution, were it only in the present instance; but examples are too numerous!

HOBBES, AND HIS QUARRELS;

INCLUDING AN ILl.u.s.tRATION 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 circ.u.mstances--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 ill.u.s.trated 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 monstrous egotism--his devotion to his literary pursuits--the despotic principle of the LEVIATHAN of an innocent tendency--the fate of systems of opinions.

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.[348]

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.[349]

More generous tempers, men endowed with warmer imaginations, awake to sympathies of a higher nature, will indignantly reject the system, which has reduced the unlucky system-maker himself to such a pitiable condition.

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.[350]

The eloquent and thinking Madame de Stael has a.s.serted 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 const.i.tution, which presumes to be neither.[351]