Four Early Pamphlets Part 6

[PRICE TWO s.h.i.+LLINGS.]

THE

HERALD OF LITERATURE;

OR,

A REVIEW

OF THE

MOST CONSIDERABLE PUBLICATIONS

THAT WILL BE MADE IN THE

COURSE OF THE ENSUING WINTER:

WITH

EXTRACTS.

LONDON: PRINTED FOR J. MURRAY, NO. 32, FLEET-STREET.

M DCC Lx.x.xIV.

TO THE AUTHORS OF THE MONTHLY AND CRITICAL REVIEWS.

GENTLEMEN,

In presenting the following sheets to the public, I hope I shall not be considered as encroaching upon that province, which long possession has probably taught you to consider as your exclusive right. The labour it has cost me, and the many perils I have encountered to bring it to perfection, will, I trust, effectually plead my pardon with persons of your notorious candour and humanity. Represent to yourselves, Gentlemen, I entreat you, the many false keys, bribes to the lacqueys of authors that can keep them, and collusions with the booksellers of authors that cannot, which were required in the prosecution of this arduous undertaking. Imagine to yourselves how often I have shuddered upon the verge of petty larceny, and how repeatedly my slumbers have been disturbed with visions of the King's-Bench Prison and Clerkenwell Bridewell. You, gentlemen, sit in your easy chair, and with the majesty of a Minos or an Aeacus, summon the trembling culprits to your bar. But though you never knew what fear was, recollect, other men have snuffed a candle with their fingers.

But I would not be misunderstood. Heroical as I trust my undertaking proves me, I fear no man's censure, and court no man's applause. But I look up to you as a respectable body of men, who have long united your efforts to reduce the disproportioned members of an ancient republic to an happy equality, to give wings to the little emmet of Grub-street, and to hew away the excrescences of lawless genius with a hatchet. In this character I honour you. That you have a.s.sumed it uncompelled and self-elected, that you have exercised it undazzled by the _ignis fatuus_ of genius, is your unfading glory.

Having thus cleared myself from the suspicion of any sinister view, I cannot here refrain from presenting you with a peace-offering. Had it been in my power to procure gums more costly, or incense more fragrant, I would have rendered it more worthy your acceptance.

It has been a subject upon which I have often reflected with mortification, that the world is too apt to lay aside your lucubrations with the occasions that gave birth to them, and that if they are ever opened after, it is only with old magazines by staid matrons over their winter fire. Such persons are totally incapable of comparing your sentences with the maturer verdict of the public; a comparison that would redound so much to your honour. What I design at present, is in some measure to remedy an evil, that can never perhaps be entirely removed. As the field which is thus opened to me is almost unbounded, I will confine myself to two of the most striking examples, in Tristram Shandy, and the Rosciad of Churchill.

In the Monthly Review, vol. 24, p, 103, I find these words:

"But your indiscretion, good Mr. Tristram, is not all we complain of in the volumes before us. We must tax you with what you will dread above the most terrible of all insinuations--nothing less than DULLNESS. Yes, indeed, Mr. Tristram, you are dull, _very dull_. Your jaded fancy seems to have been exhausted by two pigmy octavos, which scarce contained the substance of a twelve-penny pamphlet, and we now find nothing new to entertain us."

The following epithets are selected at random. "We are sick--we are quite tired--we can no longer bear corporal Trim's insipidity--thread-bare--stupid and unaffecting--absolutely dull--misapplication of talents--he will unavoidably sink into contempt."

The Critical Review, vol II, p. 212, has the following account of the Rosciad:

"It is _natural_ for young authors to conceive themselves the cleverest fellows in the world, and withal, that there is not the least degree of merit subsisting but in their own works: It is _natural_ likewise for them to imagine, that they may conceal themselves by appearing in different shapes, and that they are not to be found out by their stile; but little do these _Connoisseurs_ in writing conceive, how easily they are discovered by a veteran in the service. In the t.i.tle-page to this performance we are told (by way of quaint conceit), that it was written by _the author_; what if it should prove that the Author and the Actor[A] are the same! Certain it is that we meet with the _same_ vein of peculiar humour, the same turn of thought, the same _autophilism_ (there's a new word for you to bring into the next poem) which we meet with in the other; insomuch that we are ready to make the conclusion in the author's own words:

[Footnote A: _The Actor, a Poem, by Robert Lloyd, Esq._]

Who is it?------LLOYD.

"We will not pretend however absolutely to a.s.sert that Mr. L---- wrote this poem; but we may venture to affirm, that it is the production, jointly or separately, of the new triumvirate of wits, who never let an opportunity slip of singing their own praises. _Caw me, caw thee_, as Sawney says, and so to it they go, and _scratch_ one another like so many Scotch pedlars."

In page 339, I find a pa.s.sage referred to in the Index, under the head of "a notable instance of their candour," retracting their insinuations against Lloyd and Colman, and ascribing the poem in a particular vein of pleasantry to Mr. Flexney, the bookseller, and Mr. Griffin, the printer.

Candour certainly did not require that they should acknowledge Mr.

Churchill, whose name was now inserted in the t.i.tle-page, as the author, or if author of any, at least not of a considerable part of the poem.

That this was their sense of the matter, appears from their account of the apology for the Rosciad, p. 409.

"This is another _Brutum Fulinen_ launched at the Critical Review by one Churchill, who it seems is a clergyman, and it must be owned has a knack at versification; a bard, who upon the strength of having written a few good lines in a thing called _The Rosciad_, swaggers about as if he were game-keeper of Parna.s.sus."

P. 410. "This apologist has very little reason to throw out behind against the Critical Reviewers, who in mentioning _The Rosciad_, of which he calls himself author, commended it in the lump, without specifying the bald lines, the false thoughts, and tinsel frippery from which it is not entirely free." They conclude with contrasting him with Smollet, in comparison of whom he is "a puny antagonist, who must write many more poems as good as the Rosciad, before he will be considered as a respectable enemy."

Upon these extracts I will beg leave to make two observations.

1. Abstracted from all consideration of the profundity of criticism that is displayed, no man can avoid being struck with the humour and pleasantry in which they are conceived, or the elegant and gentlemanlike language in which they are couched. What can be more natural or more ingenuous than to suppose that the persons princ.i.p.ally commended in a work, were themselves the writers of it? And for that allusion of the Scotch pedlars, for my part, I hold it to be inimitable.

2. But what is most admirable is the independent spirit, with which they stemmed the torrent of fas.h.i.+on, and forestalled the second thoughts of their countrymen. There was a time when Tristram Shandy was applauded, and Churchill thought another Dryden. But who reads Tristram now? There prevails indeed a certain quaintness, and something "like an affectation of being immoderately witty, throughout the whole work." But for real humour not a grain. So said the Monthly Reviewers, (v. 21. p. 568.) and so says the immortal Knox. Both indeed grant him a slight knack at the pathetic; but, if I may venture a prediction, his pretensions to the latter will one day appear no better founded, than his pretentions to the former.

And then poor Churchill! His satire now appears to be dull and pointless. Through his tedious page no modern student can labour. We look back, and wonder how the rage of party ever swelled this _thing_ into a poet. Even the great constellation, from whose tribunal no prudent man ever appealed, has excluded him from a kingdom, where Watts and Blackmore reign. But Johnson and Knox can by no means compare with the Reviewers. These attacked the mountebanks in the very midst of their short-lived empire. Those have only brought up the rear of public opinion, and d.a.m.ned authors already forgotten. They fought the battles a second time, and "again they slew the slain."

Gentlemen,

It would have been easy to add twenty articles to this list. I might have selected instances from the later volumes of your entertaining works, in which your deviations from the dictates of imaginary taste are still more numerous. But I could not have confronted them with the decisive verdict of time. The rage of fas.h.i.+on has not yet ceased, and the ebullition of blind wonder is not over. I shall therefore leave a plentiful crop for such as come after me, who admire you as much as I do, and will be contented to labour in the same field.

I have the honour to be,