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—
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Tantæne animis cœlestibus iræ? Æneid. |
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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 531 before the “paragraph by paragraph,” and no edition of the Greek Testament by Bentley ever appeared. Bentley’s proposals at first had met with the greatest success; the subscription-money amounted to two thousand pounds, and it was known that his nephew had been employed by him to travel abroad to collect these MSS. He declared he would make use of no MS. that was not a thousand years old, or above; of which sort he had collected twenty, so that they made up a total of twenty thousand years. He was four years studying them before he issued his proposals. The Doctor rested most on eight Greek MSS., the most recent of which was one thousand years old. All this wore a very imposing appearance. At a touch the whole magnificent edifice fell to pieces! Middleton says, “His twenty old MSS. shrink at once to eight, and he is forced again to own that even of these eight there are only four which had not been used by Dr. Mill;” and these Middleton, by his sarcastic reasoning, at last reduces to “some pieces only of the New Testament in MS.” So that twenty MSS. and their twenty thousand years were battered by the “fiddling Conyers” into a solitary fragment of little value! Bentley returned the subscription-money, and would not publish; the work still lies in its prepared state, and some good judges of its value have expressed a hope to see it yet published. But Bentley himself was not untainted in this dishonourable quarrel: he well knew that Middleton was the author of this severe attack; but to show his contempt of the real author, and desirous, in his turn, of venting his disappointment on a Dr. Colbatch, he chose to attribute it to him, and fell on Colbatch with a virulence that made the reply perfectly libellous, if it was Bentley’s, as was believed.
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 533 Allen and his niece, who, though they could not stand as umpires, did as witnesses. An incurable breach took place between the parties, and from this trifling altercation, Edwards produced the bitter “Canons of Criticism,” and Warburton those foaming notes in the Dunciad.
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 534 figure of “the slashing Bentley,” in the fourth book of the Dunciad:
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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 535 occasion of Addison’s Observations on Rowe’s Character. Rowe had expressed his happiness to Pope at Addison’s promotion; and Pope, who wished to conciliate Addison towards Rowe, mentioned it, adding, that he believed Rowe was sincere. Addison replied, “That he did not suspect Rowe feigned; but the levity of his heart is such, that he is struck with any new adventure: and it would affect him just in the same manner as if he heard I was going to be hanged.” Warburton adds that Pope said he could not deny but Addison understood Rowe well. Such is the fact on which Johnson throws out an admirable observation:—“This censure time has not left us the power of confirming or refuting; but observation daily shows that much stress is not to be laid on hyperbolical accusations and pointed sentences, which even he that utters them desires to be applauded, rather than credited. Addison can hardly be supposed to have meant all that he said. Few characters can bear the microscopic scrutiny of WIT quickened by ANGER.” I could heap up facts to demonstrate this severe truth. Even of Pope’s best friends, some of their severities, if they ever reached him, must have given the pain he often inflicted. His friend Atterbury, to whom he was so partial, dropped an expression, in the heat of conversation, which Pope could never have forgiven; that our poet had “a crooked mind in a crooked body.” There was a rumour, after Pope’s death, that he had left behind him a satirical “Life of Dean Swift.” Let genius, whose faculty detects the foibles of a brother, remember he is a rival, and be a generous one. In that extraordinary morsel of literary history, the “Conversations of Ben Jonson with his friend Drummond of Hawthornden,” preserving his opinions of his contemporaries, if I err not in my recollection, I believe that he has not spoken favourably of a single individual!
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 536 as an editor did not permit. In this dilemma he pretended he reprinted the preface from the edition of 1765; which, as it appeared before Johnson’s acquaintance with Steevens, could not contain the tender passage. However, this was unluckily discovered to be only a subterfuge, to get rid of the offensive panegyric. On examination, it proved not true; Hawkins did not reprint from this early edition, but from the latest, for all the corrections are inserted in his own. “If Sir John were to be tried at Hicks’s Hall (long the seat of that justice’s glory), he would be found guilty of clipping,” archly remarks the periodical critic.
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.”[431] Such was the fatal disturbance occasioned by Dean Pierce’s folio of “The King’s Sovereign Right,” and his son Bob being left without a prebend!
I shall close this article with a very ludicrous instance of a literary quarrel from personal motives. This piece of secret 537 history had been certainly lost, had not Bishop Lowth condescended to preserve it, considering it as necessary to assign a sufficient reason for the extraordinary libel it produced.
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?
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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 538 the warden, high words had arisen between the parties: the warden withdrew, and the wit gradually shoved the antiquary off the end of the bench on which they were sitting: a blow was struck, and a cane broken. Bohun brought an action, and the Wykehamites travelled down to give bail at Westminster Hall, where the legal quarrel was dropped, and the literary one then began. Who could have imagined that the venerable bishop and chancellor of Edward III. was to be involved in a wretched squabble about a lease with an antiquary and a wit? “Fancying,” says Bishop Lowth, “he could inflict on the Society of New College a blow which would affect them more sensibly by wounding the reputation of their founder, he set himself to collect everything he could meet with that was capable of being represented to his discredit, and to improve it with new and horrible calumnies of his own invention.” Thus originated this defamatory attack on the character of William of Wykeham! And by arts which active writers may practise, and innocent readers cannot easily suspect, a work of the highest reputation, like that of Nathaniel Bacon’s, may be converted into a vehicle of personal malignity, while the author himself disguises his real purpose under the specious appearance of literature! The present case, it must be acknowledged, is peculiar, where a dead person was attacked with a spirit of rancour to which the living only appear subject; but the author was an antiquary, who lived as much with the dead as the living: his personal motive was the same as those already recorded, and here he was acting with a double force on the dead and the living!
But here I stop my hand, my list would else be too complete. Great names are omitted—Whitaker and Gibbon;[432] Pope and Lord Hervey;[433] Wood and South;[434] Rowe, Mores, and Ames;[435] and George Steevens and Gough.[436]
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 539 that is a quality not less valuable to the public. It lets in their readers to a kind of knowledge, which opens a necessary comment on certain works, and enlarges our comprehension of their spirit.
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.
A modern writer observes, that “Valeriano is chiefly known to the present times by his brief but curious and interesting work, De Literatorum Infelicitate, which has preserved many anecdotes of the principal scholars of the age, not elsewhere to be found.”—Roscoe’s Leo X. vol. iv. p. 175.
There is also a bulky collection of this kind, entitled, Analecta de Calamitate Literatorum, edited by Mencken, the author of Charlataneria Eruditorum.
From the Grecian Psyche, or the soul, the Germans have borrowed this expressive term. They have a Psychological Magazine. Some of our own recent authors have adopted the term peculiarly adapted to the historian of the human mind.
It has been lately disclosed that Home, the author of “Douglas,” was pensioned by Lord Bute to answer all the papers and pamphlets of the Government, and to be a vigilant defender of the measures of Government.
I have elsewhere portrayed the personal characters of the hireling chiefs of these paper wars: the versatile and unprincipled Marchmont Needham, the Cobbett of his day; the factious Sir Roger L’Estrange; and the bantering and profligate Sir John Birkenhead.
An ample view of these lucubrations is exhibited in the early volumes of the Gentleman’s Magazine.
It was said of this man that “he had submitted to labour at the press, like a horse in a mill, till he became as blind and as wretched.” To show the extent of the conscience of this class of writers, and to what lengths mere party-writers can proceed, when duly encouraged, Oldmixon, who was a Whig historian, if a violent party-writer ought ever to be dignified by so venerable a title, unmercifully rigid to all other historians, was himself guilty of the crimes with which he so loudly accused others. He charged three eminent persons with interpolating Lord Clarendon’s History; this charge was afterwards disproved by the passages being produced in his Lordship’s own handwriting, which had been fortunately preserved; and yet this accuser of interpolation, when employed by Bishop Kennett to publish his collection of our historians, made no scruple of falsifying numerous passages in Daniel’s Chronicle, which makes the first edition of that collection of no value.
Smollett died in a small abode in the neighbourhood of Leghorn, where he had resided some time in the hope of recovering his shattered health; and where he wrote his “Humphrey Clinker.” His friends had tried in vain to procure for him the appointment of consul to any one of the ports of the Mediterranean. He is buried in the English cemetery at Leghorn.—Ed.
It stands opposite Dalquhurn House, where he was born, near the village of Renton, Dumbartonshire. Had Smollett lived a few more years, he would have been entitled to an estate of about 1000l. a year. There is also a cenotaph to his memory on the banks of Leven-water, which he has consecrated in one of his best poems.—Ed.
The following facts will show the value of literary property; immense profits and cheap purchases! The manuscript of “Robinson Crusoe” ran through the whole trade, and no one would print it; the bookseller who did purchase it, who, it is said, was not remarkable for his discernment, but for a speculative turn, got a thousand guineas by it. How many have the booksellers since accumulated? Burn’s “Justice” was disposed of by its author for a trifle, as well as Buchan’s “Domestic Medicine;” these works yield annual incomes. Goldsmith’s “Vicar of Wakefield” was sold in the hour of distress, with little distinction from any other work in that class of composition; and “Evelina” produced five guineas from the niggardly trader. Dr. Johnson fixed the price of his “Biography of the Poets” at two hundred guineas; and Mr. Malone observes, the booksellers in the course of twenty-five years have probably got five thousand. I could add a great number of facts of this nature which relate to living writers; the profits of their own works for two or three years would rescue them from the horrors and humiliation of pauperism. It is, perhaps, useful to record, that, while the compositions of genius are but slightly remunerated, though sometimes as productive as “the household stuff” of literature, the latter is rewarded with princely magnificence. At the sale of the Robinsons, the copyright of “Vyse’s Spelling-book” was sold at the enormous price of 2200l., with an annuity of fifty guineas to the author!
The circumstance, with the poet’s dignified petition, and the King’s honourable decree, are preserved in “Curiosities of Literature,” vol. i. p. 406.
The elder Tonson’s portrait represents him in his gown and cap, holding in his right hand a volume lettered “Paradise Lost”—such a favourite object was Milton and copyright! Jacob Tonson was the founder of a race who long honoured literature. His rise in life is curious. He was at first unable to pay twenty pounds for a play by Dryden, and joined with another bookseller to advance that sum; the play sold, and Tonson was afterwards enabled to purchase the succeeding ones. He and his nephew died worth two hundred thousand pounds.—Much old Tonson owed to his own industry; but he was a mere trader. He and Dryden had frequent bickerings; he insisted on receiving 10,000 verses for two hundred and sixty-eight pounds, and poor Dryden threw in the finest Ode in the language towards the number. He would pay in the base coin which was then current; which was a loss to the poet. Tonson once complained to Dryden, that he had only received 1446 lines of his translation of Ovid for his Miscellany for fifty guineas, when he had calculated at the rate of 1518 lines for forty guineas; he gives the poet a piece of critical reasoning, that he considered he had a better bargain with “Juvenal,” which is reckoned “not so easy to translate as Ovid.” In these times such a mere trader in literature has disappeared.
A coster-monger, or Costard-monger, is a dealer in apples, which are so called because they are shaped like a costard, i.e. a man’s head. Steevens.—Johnson explains the phrase eloquently: “In these times when the prevalence of trade has produced that meanness, that rates the merit of everything by money.”
An abundance of these amusing tracts eagerly bought up in their day, but which came in the following generation to the ballad-stalls, are in the present enshrined in the cabinets of the curious. Such are the revolutions of literature! [It is by no means uncommon to find them realise sums at the rate of a guinea a page; but it is to be solely attributed to their extreme rarity; for in many instances the reprints of such tracts are worthless.]
Poverty and the gaol alternated with tavern carouses or the place of honour among the wild young gallants at the playhouses. They were gentlemen or beggars as daily circumstances ordained. When this was the case with such authors as Greene, Peele, and Massinger, we need not wonder at finding “a whole knot” of writers in infinitely worse plight, who lived (or starved) by writing ballads and pamphlets on temporary subjects. In a brief tract, called “The Downfall of Temporising Poets,” published 1641, they are said to be “an indifferent strong corporation, twenty-three of you sufficient writers, besides Martin Parker,” who was the great ballad and pamphlet writer of the day. The shifts they were put to, and the difficulties of their living, is denoted in the reply of one of the characters in this tract, who on being asked if he has money, replies “Money? I wonder where you ever see poets have money two days together; I sold a copy last night, and have spent the money; and now have another copy to sell, but nobody will buy it.”—Ed.
Chatterton had written a political essay for “The North Briton,” which opened with the preluding flourish of “A spirited people freeing themselves from insupportable slavery:” it was, however, though accepted, not printed, on account of the Lord Mayor’s death. The patriot thus calculated the death of his great patron!
| £ | s. | d. | |||
| Lost by his death in this Essay | 1 | 11 | 6 | ||
| Gained in Elegies | £2 | 2 | |||
| —— in Essays | 3 | 3 | |||
| 5 | 5 | 0 | |||
| Am glad he is dead by | £3 | 13 | 6 | ||
This author, now little known but to the student of our rarer early poets, was a native of Shrewsbury, and had served in the army. He wrote a large number of poetical pieces, all now of the greatest rarity; their names have been preserved by that industrious antiquary Joseph Ritson, in his Bibliographia Poetica. The principal one was termed “The Worthiness of Wales,” and is written in laudation of the Principality. He was frequently employed to supply verses for Court Masques and Pageantry. He composed “all the devises, pastimes, and plays at Norwich” when Queen Elizabeth was entertained there; as well as gratulatory verses to her at Woodstock. He speaks of his mind as “never free from studie,” and his body “seldom void of toyle”—“and yet both of them neither brought greate benefits to the life, nor blessing to the soule” he adds, in the words of a man whose hope deferred has made his heart sick!—Ed.
Villanellas, or rather “Villanescas, are properly country rustic songs, but commonly taken for ingenious ones made in imitation of them.”—Pineda.
This practice of dedications had indeed flourished before; for authors had even prefixed numerous dedications to the same work, or dedicated to different patrons the separate divisions. Fuller’s “Church History” is disgraced by the introduction of twelve title-pages, besides the general one; with as many particular dedications, and no less than fifty or sixty inscriptions, addressed to benefactors; for which he is severely censured by Heylin. It was an expedient to procure dedication fees; for publishing books by subscription was an art not then discovered.
The price of the dedication of a play was even fixed, from five to ten guineas, from the Revolution to the time of George I., when it rose to twenty—but sometimes a bargain was to be struck—when the author and the play were alike indifferent. Even on these terms could vanity be gratified with the coarse luxury of panegyric, of which every one knew the price.
This circumstance was so notorious at the time, that it occasioned a poetical satire in a dialogue between Motteux and his patron Henningham—preserved in that vast flower-bed or dunghill, for it is both, of “Poems on Affairs of State,” vol. ii. 251. The patron, in his zeal to omit no possible distinction that could attach to him, had given one circumstance which no one but himself could have known, and which he thus regrets:
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“PATRON.
POET.
PATRON.
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“Athenæ Britannicæ, or a Critical History of the Oxford and Cambridge Writers and Writings, with those of the Dissenters and Romanists, as well as other Authors and Worthies, both Domestic and Foreign, both Ancient and Modern. Together with an occasional freedom of thought, in criticising and comparing the parallel qualifications of the most eminent authors and their performances, both in MS. and print, both at home and abroad. By M. D. London, 1716.” On the first volume of this series, Dr. Farmer, a bloodhound of unfailing scent in curious and obscure English books, has written on the leaf “This is the only copy I have met with.” Even the great bibliographer, Baker, of Cambridge, never met but with three volumes (the edition at the British Museum is in seven), sent him as a great curiosity by the Earl of Oxford, and now deposited in his collection at St. John’s College. Baker has written this memorandum in the first volume: “Few copies were printed, so the work has become scarce, and for that reason will be valued. The book in the greatest part is borrowed from modern historians, but yet contains some things more uncommon, and not easily to be met with.” How superlatively rare must be the English volumes which the eyes of Farmer and Baker never lighted on!
These clubs are described in Macky’s “Journey through England,” 1724. He says they were formed to uphold the Royalist party on the accession of King George I. “This induced a set of gentlemen to establish Mughouses in all the corners of this great city, for well-affected tradesmen to meet and keep up the spirit of loyalty to the Protestant succession,” and to be ready to join their forces for the suppression of the other party. “Many an encounter they had, till at last the Parliament was obliged by a law to put an end to this city strife, which had this good effect, that upon the pulling down of the Mughouse in Salisbury Court, for which some boys were hanged on this act, the city has not been troubled with them since.” It was the custom in these houses to allow no other drink but ale to be consumed, which was brought in mugs of earthenware; a chairman was elected, and he called on the members of the company for songs, which were generally party ballads of a strongly-worded kind, as may be seen in the small collection printed in 1716, entitled “A Collection of State Songs, Poems, &c., published since the Rebellion, and sung in the several Mughouses in the cities of London and Westminster.”—Ed.
My researches could never obtain more than one letter of Cowley’s—it is but an elegant trifle—returning thanks to his friend Evelyn for some seeds and plants. “The Garden” of Evelyn is immortalised in a delightful Ode of Cowley’s, as well as by Evelyn himself. Even in this small note we may discover the touch of Cowley. The original is in Astle’s collection.
MR. ABRAHAM COWLEY TO JOHN EVELYN, ESQ.
“Barn Elms, March 23, 1663.
“Sir,—There is nothing more pleasant than to see kindness in a person for whom we have great esteem and respect: no, not the sight of your garden in May, or even the having such an one; which makes me more obliged to return you my most humble thanks for the testimonies I have lately received of you, both by your letter and your presents. I have already sowed such of your seeds as I thought most proper upon a hot-bed; but cannot find in all my books a catalogue of these plants which require that culture, nor of such as must be set in pots; which defects, and all others, I hope shortly to see supplied, as I hope shortly to see your work of Horticulture finished and published; and long to be in all things your disciple, as I am in all things now,
“Sir, your most humble and most obedient Servant,
“A. Cowley.”
[Barn Elms, from whence this letter is dated, was the first country residence of Cowley. It lies low on the banks of the Thames, and here the poet was first seized with a fever, which obliged him to remove; but he chose an equally improper locality for a man of his temperament, in Chertsey, where he died from the effects of a severe cold.]
Such were the ordinary letters which passed between two men whom it would be difficult to parallel for their elegant tastes and gentle dispositions. Evelyn’s beautiful retreat at Sayes Court, at Deptford, is described by a contemporary as “a garden exquisite and most boscaresque, and, as it were, an exemplar of his book of Forest-trees.” It was the entertainment and wonder of the greatest men of those times, and inspired the following lines of Cowley, to Evelyn and his lady, who excelled in the arts her husband loved; for she designed the frontispiece to his version of Lucretius—
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“In books and gardens thou hast placed aright |