Part 51 (2/2)
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]
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