CALAMITIES OF AUTHORS: (continued 4)

Such was the cold affected witticism of the critic, whom I intimately knew—and I believe he meant little harm! His friends imagined even that this was the solitary attempt at wit he had ever made in his life; for after a lapse of years, he would still recur to it as an evidence of the felicity of his fancy, and the keenness of his satire. The truth is, he was a physician, whose name is prefixed as the editor to a great medical compilation, and who never pretended that he had any taste for poetry. His great art of poetical criticism was always, as Pope expresses a character, “to dwell in decencies;” his acumen, to detect that terrible poetic crime false rhymes, and to employ indefinite terms, which, as they had no precise meaning, were applicable to all things; to commend, occasionally, a passage not always the most exquisite; sometimes to hesitate, while, with delightful candour, he seemed to give up his opinion; to hazard sometimes a positive condemnation on parts which often unluckily proved the most favourite with the poet and the reader. Such was this poetical reviewer, whom no one disturbed in his periodical course, till the circumstance of a plain Quaker becoming a poet, and fluttering in the finical ornaments of his book, provoked him from that calm state of innocent mediocrity, into miserable humour, and illiberal criticism.

The effect, however, this pert criticism had on poor Scott was indeed a calamity. It produced an inconsiderate “Letter to the Critical Reviewers.” Scott was justly offended at the stigma of Quakerism, applied to the author of a literary composition; but too gravely accuses the critic of his scurrilous allusion to Macheath, as comparing him to a highwayman; he seems, however, more provoked at the odd account of his poems; he says, “You rank all my poems together as bad, then discriminate some as good, and, to complete all, recommend the volume as an agreeable and amusing collection.” Had the poet been personally acquainted with this tantalizing critic, he would have comprehended the nature of the criticism—and certainly would never have replied to it.

The critic, employing one of his indefinite terms, had said of “Amwell,” and some of the early “Elegies,” that “they had their share of poetical merit;” he does not venture to assign the proportion of that share, but “the Amœbean and oriental eclogues, odes, epistles, &c., now added, are of a much weaker feature, and many of them incorrect.”

Here Scott loses all his dignity as a Quaker and a poet—he asks what the critic means by the affected phrase much weaker feature; the style, he says, was designed to be somewhat less elevated, and thus addresses the critic:—

“You may, however, be safely defied to pronounce them, with truth, deficient either in strength or melody of versification! They were designed to be, like Virgil’s, descriptive of Nature, simple and correct. Had you been disposed to do me justice, you might have observed that in these eclogues I had drawn from the great prototype Nature, much imagery that had escaped the notice of all my predecessors. You might also have remarked that when I introduced images that had been already introduced by others, still the arrangement or combination of those images was my own. The praise of originality you might at least have allowed me.”

As for their incorrectness!—Scott points that accusation with a note of admiration, adding, “with whatever defects my works may be chargeable, the last is that of incorrectness.”

We are here involuntarily reminded of Sir Fretful, in The Critic:—

“I think the interest rather declines in the fourth act.”

“Rises! you mean, my dear friend!”

Perhaps the most extraordinary examples of the irritation of a poet’s mind, and a man of amiable temper, are those parts of this letter in which the author quotes large portions of his poetry, to refute the degrading strictures of the reviewer.

This was a fertile principle, admitting of very copious extracts; but the ludicrous attitude is that of an Adonis inspecting himself at his mirror.

That provoking see-saw of criticism, which our learned physician usually adopted in his critiques, was particularly tantalizing to the poet of Amwell. The critic condemns, in the gross, a whole set of eclogues; but immediately asserts of one of them, that “the whole of it has great poetical merit, and paints its subject in the warmest colours.” When he came to review the odes, he discovers that “he does not meet with those polished numbers, nor that freedom and spirit, which that species of poetry requires;” and quotes half a stanza, which he declares is “abrupt and insipid.” “From twenty-seven odes!” exclaims the writhing poet—“are the whole of my lyric productions to be stigmatised for four lines which are flatter than those that preceded them?” But what the critic could not be aware of, the poet tells us—he designed them to be just what they are. “I knew they were so when they were first written, but they were thought sufficiently elevated for the place.” And then he enters into an inquiry what the critic can mean by “polished numbers, freedom, and spirit.” The passage is curious:—

“By your first criticism, polished numbers, if you mean melodious versification, this perhaps the general ear will not deny me. If you mean classical, chaste diction, free from tautologous repetitions of the same thoughts in different expressions; free from bad rhymes, unnecessary epithets, and incongruous metaphors, I believe you may be safely challenged to produce many instances wherein I have failed.

“By freedom, your second criterion, if you mean daring transition, or arbitrary and desultory disposition of ideas, however this may be required in the greater ode, it is now, I believe, for the first time, expected in the lesser ode. If you mean that careless, diffuse composition, that conversation-verse, or verse loitering into prose, now so fashionable, this is an excellence which I am not very ambitious of attaining. But if you mean strong, concise, yet natural easy expression, I apprehend the general judgment will decide in my favour. To the general ear, and the general judgment, then, do I appeal as to an impartial tribunal.” Here several odes are transcribed. “By spirit, your third criticism, I know nothing you can mean but enthusiasm; that which transports us to every scene, and interests us in every sentiment. Poetry without this cannot subsist; every species demands its proportion, from the greater ode, of which it is the principal characteristic, to the lesser, in which a small portion of it only has hitherto been thought requisite. My productions, I apprehend, have never before been deemed destitute of this essential constituent. Whatever I have wrote, I have felt, and I believe others have felt it also.”

On “the Epistles,” which had been condemned in the gross, suddenly the critic turns round courteously to the bard, declaring “they are written in an easy and familiar style, and seem to flow from a good and a benevolent heart.” But then sneeringly adds, that one of them being entitled “An Essay on Painting, addressed to a young Artist, had better have been omitted, because it had been so fully treated in so masterly a manner by Mr. Hayley.” This was letting fall a spark in a barrel of gunpowder. Scott immediately analyses his brother poet’s poem, to show they have nothing in common; and then compares those similar passages the subject naturally produced, to show that “his poem does not suffer greatly in the comparison.” “You may,” he adds, after giving copious extracts from both poems, “persist in saying that Mr. Hayley’s are the best. Your business then is to prove it.” This, indeed, had been a very hazardous affair for our medical critic, whose poetical feelings were so equable, that he acknowledges “Mr. Scott’s poem is just and elegant,” but “Mr. Hayley’s is likewise just and elegant;” therefore, if one man has written a piece “just and elegant,” there is no need of another on the same subject “just and elegant.”

To such an extreme point of egotism was a modest and respectable author most cruelly driven by the callous playfulness of a poetical critic, who himself had no sympathy for poetry of any quality or any species, and whose sole art consisted in turning about the canting dictionary of criticism. Had Homer been a modern candidate for poetical honours, from him Homer had not been distinguished, even from the mediocrity of Scott of Amwell, whose poetical merits are not, however, slight. In his Amœbean eclogues he may be distinguished as the poet of botanists.

A VOLUMINOUS AUTHOR WITHOUT JUDGMENT.

Vast erudition, without the tact of good sense, in a voluminous author, what a calamity! for to such a mind no subject can present itself on which he is unprepared to write, and none at the same time on which he can ever write reasonably. The name and the works of William Prynne have often come under the eye of the reader; but it is even now difficult to discover his real character; for Prynne stood so completely insulated amid all parties, that he was ridiculed by his friends, and execrated by his enemies. The exuberance of his fertile pen, the strangeness and the manner of his subjects, and his pertinacity in voluminous publication, are known, and are nearly unparalleled in literary history.

Could the man himself be separated from the author, Prynne would not appear ridiculous; but the unlucky author of nearly two hundred works,[102] and who, as Wood quaintly computes, “must have written a sheet every day of his life, reckoning from the time that he came to the use of reason and the state of man,” has involved his life in his authorship; the greatness of his character loses itself in his voluminous works; and whatever Prynne may have been in his own age, and remains to posterity, he was fated to endure all the calamities of an author who has strained learning into absurdity, and abused zealous industry by chimerical speculation.

Yet his activity, and the firmness and intrepidity of his character in public life, were as ardent as they were in his study—his soul was Roman; and Eachard says, that Charles II., who could not but admire his earnest honesty, his copious learning, and the public persecutions he suffered, and the ten imprisonments he endured, inflicted by all parties, dignified him with the title of “the Cato of the Age;” and one of his own party facetiously described him as “William the Conqueror,” a title he had most hardly earned by his inflexible and invincible nature. Twice he had been cropped of his ears; for at the first time the executioner having spared the two fragments, the inhuman judge on his second trial discovering them with astonishment, ordered them to be most unmercifully cropped—then he was burned on his cheek, and ruinously fined and imprisoned in a remote solitude,[103]—but had they torn him limb by limb, Prynne had been in his mind a very polypus, which, cut into pieces, still loses none of its individuality.

His conduct on the last of these occasions, when sentenced to be stigmatised, and to have his ears cut close, must be noticed. Turning to the executioner, he calmly invited him to do his duty—“Come, friend, come, burn me! cut me! I fear not! I have learned to fear the fire of hell, and not what man can do unto me; come, scar me! scar me!” In Prynne this was not ferocity, but heroism; Bastwick was intrepid out of spite, and Burton from fanaticism. The executioner had been urged not to spare his victims, and he performed his office with extraordinary severity, cruelly heating his iron twice, and cutting one of Prynne’s ears so close, as to take away a piece of the cheek. Prynne stirred not in the torture; and when it was done, smiled, observing, “The more I am beaten down, the more I am lift up.” After this punishment, in going to the Tower by water, he composed the following verses on the two letters branded on his cheek, S. L., for schismatical libeller, but which Prynne chose to translate “Stigmata Laudis,” the stigmas of his enemy, the Archbishop Laud.

Stigmata maxillis referens insignia Laudis, Exultans remeo, victima grata Deo.

The heroic man, who could endure agony and insult, and even thus commemorate his sufferings, with no unpoetical conception, almost degrades his own sublimity when the poetaster sets our teeth on edge by his verse.

Bearing Laud’s stamps on my cheeks I retire Triumphing, God’s sweet sacrifice by fire.

The triumph of this unconquered being was, indeed, signal. History scarcely exhibits so wonderful a reverse of fortune, and so strict a retribution, as occurred at this eventful period. He who had borne from the archbishop and the lords in the Star Chamber the most virulent invectives, wishing them at that instant seriously to consider that some who sat there on the bench might yet stand prisoners at the bar, and need the favour they now denied, at length saw the prediction completely verified. What were the feelings of Laud, when Prynne, returning from his prison of Mount Orgueil in triumph, the road strewed with boughs, amid the acclamations of the people, entered the apartment in the Tower which the venerable Laud now in his turn occupied. The unsparing Puritan sternly performed the office of rifling his papers,[104] and persecuted the helpless prelate till he led him to the block. Prynne, to use his own words, for he could be eloquent when moved by passion, “had struck proud Canterbury to the heart; and had undermined all his prelatical designs to advance the bishops’ pomp and power;”[105] Prynne triumphed—but, even this austere Puritan soon grieved over the calamities he had contributed to inflict on the nation; and, with a humane feeling, he once wished, that “when they had cut off his ears, they had cut off his head.” He closed his political existence by becoming an advocate for the Restoration; but, with his accustomed want of judgment and intemperate zeal, had nearly injured the cause by his premature activity. At the Restoration some difficulty occurred to dispose of “busie Mr. Pryn,” as Whitelocke calls him. It is said he wished to be one of the Barons of the Exchequer, but he was made the Keeper of the Records in the Tower, “purposely to employ his head from scribbling against the state and bishops;” where they put him to clear the Augean stable of our national antiquities, and see whether they could weary out his restless vigour. Prynne had, indeed, written till he found no antagonist would reply; and now he rioted in leafy folios, and proved himself to be one of the greatest paper-worms which ever crept into old books and mouldy records.[106]

The literary character of Prynne is described by the happy epithet which Anthony Wood applies to him, “Voluminous Prynne.” His great characteristic is opposed to that axiom of Hesiod so often quoted, that “half is better than the whole;” a secret which the matter-of-fact men rarely discover. Wanting judgment, and the tact of good sense, these detailers have no power of selection from their stores, to make one prominent fact represent the hundred minuter ones that may follow it. Voluminously feeble, they imagine expansion is stronger than compression; and know not to generalise, while they only can deal in particulars. Prynne’s speeches were just as voluminous as his writings; always deficient in judgment, and abounding in knowledge—he was always wearying others, but never could himself. He once made a speech to the House, to persuade them the king’s concessions were sufficient ground for a treaty; it contains a complete narrative of all the transactions between the king, the Houses, and the army, from the beginning of the parliament; it takes up 140 octavo pages, and kept the house so long together, that the debates lasted from Monday morning till Tuesday morning!

Prynne’s literary character may be illustrated by his singular book, “Histriomastix,”—where we observe how an author’s exuberant learning, like corn heaped in a granary, grows rank and musty, by a want of power to ventilate and stir about the heavy mass.

This paper-worm may first be viewed in his study, as painted by the picturesque Anthony Wood; an artist in the Flemish school:—

“His custom, when he studied, was to put on a long quilted cap, which came an inch over his eyes, serving as an umbrella to defend them from too much light, and seldom eating any dinner, would be every three hours maunching a roll of bread, and now and then refresh his exhausted spirits with ale brought to him by his servant;” a custom to which Butler alludes,

Thou that with ale, or viler liquors, Didst inspire Withers, Prynne, and Vicars, And force them, though it were in spite Of nature, and their stars, to write.

The “Histriomastix, the Player’s Scourge, or Actor’s Tragedie,” is a ponderous quarto, ascending to about 1100 pages; a Puritan’s invective against plays and players, accusing them of every kind of crime, including libels against Church and State;[107] but it is more remarkable for the incalculable quotations and references foaming over the margins. Prynne scarcely ventures on the most trivial opinion, without calling to his aid whatever had been said in all nations and in all ages; and Cicero, and Master Stubbs, Petrarch and Minutius Felix, Isaiah and Froissart’s Chronicle, oddly associate in the ravings of erudition. Who, indeed, but the author “who seldom dined,” could have quoted perhaps a thousand writers in one volume?[108] A wit of the times remarked of this Helluo librorum, that “Nature makes ever the dullest beasts most laborious, and the greatest feeders;” and Prynne has been reproached with a weak digestion, for “returning things unaltered, which is a symptom of a feeble stomach.”

When we examine this volume, often alluded to, the birth of the monster seems prodigious and mysterious; it combines two opposite qualities; it is so elaborate in its researches among the thousand authors quoted, that these required years to accumulate, and yet the matter is often temporary, and levelled at fugitive events and particular persons; thus the very formation of this mighty volume seems paradoxical. The secret history of this book is as extraordinary as the book itself, and is a remarkable evidence how, in a work of immense erudition, the arts of a wily sage involved himself, and whoever was concerned in his book, in total ruin. The author was pilloried, fined, and imprisoned; his publisher condemned in the penalty of five hundred pounds, and barred for ever from printing and selling books, and the licenser removed and punished. Such was the fatality attending the book of a man whose literary voracity produced one of the most tremendous indigestions, in a malady of writing.

It was on examining Prynne’s trial I discovered the secret history of the “Histriomastix.” Prynne was seven years in writing this work, and, what is almost incredible, it was near four years passing through the press. During that interval the eternal scribbler was daily gorging himself with voluminous food, and daily fattening his cooped-up capon. The temporary sedition and libels were the gradual Mosaic inlayings through this shapeless mass.

It appears that the volume of 1100 quarto pages originally consisted of little more than a quire of paper; but Prynne found insuperable difficulties in procuring a licenser, even for this infant Hercules. Dr. Goode deposed that—

“About eight years ago Mr. Prynne brought to him a quire of paper to license, which he refused; and he recollected the circumstance by having held an argument with Prynne on his severe reprehension on the unlawfulness of a man to put on women’s apparel, which, the good-humoured doctor asserted was not always unlawful; for suppose Mr. Prynne yourself, as a Christian, was persecuted by pagans, think you not if you disguised yourself in your maid’s apparel, you did well? Prynne sternly answered that he thought himself bound rather to yield to death than to do so.”

Another licenser, Dr. Harris, deposed, that about seven years ago—

“Mr. Prynne came to him to license a treatise concerning stage-plays; but he would not allow of the same;”—and adds, “So this man did deliver this book when it was young and tender, and would have had it then printed; but it is since grown seven times bigger, and seven times worse.”

Prynne not being able to procure these licensers, had recourse to another, Buckner, chaplain to the Archbishop of Canterbury. It was usual for the licenser to examine the MS. before it went to the press; but Prynne either tampered with Buckner, or so confused his intellects by keeping his multifarious volume in the press for four years; and sometimes, I suspect, by numbering folios for pages, as appears in the work, that the examination of the licenser gradually relaxed; and he declares in his defence that he had only licensed part of it. The bookseller, Sparks, was indeed a noted publisher of what was then called “Unlawful and unlicensed books;” and he had declared that it was “an excellent book, which would be called in, and then sell well.” He confesses the book had been more than three years in the press, and had cost him three hundred pounds.

The speech of Noy, the Attorney-General, conveys some notion of the work itself; sufficiently curious as giving the feelings of those times against the Puritans.

“Who he means by his modern innovators in the church, and by cringing and ducking to altars, a fit term to bestow on the church; he learned it of the canters, being used among them. The musick in the church, the charitable term he giveth it, is not to be a noise of men, but rather a bleating of brute beasts; choristers bellow the tenor, as it were oxen; bark a counterpoint as a kennel of dogs; roar out a treble like a sort of bulls; grunt out a bass, as it were a number of hogs. Bishops he calls the silk and satin divines; says Christ was a Puritan, in his Index. He falleth on those things that have not relation to stage-plays, musick in the church, dancing, new-years’ gifts, &c.,—then upon altars, images, hair of men and women, bishops and bonfires. Cards and tables do offend him, and perukes do fall within the compass of his theme. His end is to persuade the people that we are returning back again to paganism, and to persuade them to go and serve God in another country, as many are gone already, and set up new laws and fancies among themselves. Consider what may come of it!”

The decision of the Lords of the Star Chamber was dictated by passion as much as justice. Its severity exceeded the crime of having produced an unreadable volume of indigested erudition; and the learned scribbler was too hardly used, scarcely escaping with life. Lord Cottington, amazed at the mighty volume, too bluntly affirmed that Prynne did not write this book alone; “he either assisted the devil, or was assisted by the devil.” But secretary Cooke delivered a sensible and temperate speech; remarking on all its false erudition that,

“By this vast book of Mr. Prynne’s, it appeareth that he hath read more than he hath studied, and studied more than he hath considered. He calleth his book ‘Histriomastix;’ but therein he showeth himself like unto Ajax Anthropomastix, as the Grecians called him, the scourge of all mankind, that is, the whipper and the whip.”

Such is the history of a man whose greatness of character was clouded over and lost in a fatal passion for scribbling; such is the history of a voluminous author whose genius was such that he could write a folio much easier than a page; and “seldom dined” that he might quote “squadrons of authorities.”[109]

GENIUS AND ERUDITION THE VICTIMS OF IMMODERATE VANITY.

The name of Toland is more familiar than his character, yet his literary portrait has great singularity; he must be classed among the “Authors by Profession,” an honour secured by near fifty publications; and we shall discover that he aimed to combine with the literary character one peculiarly his own.[110] With higher talents and more learning than have been conceded to him, there ran in his mind an original vein of thinking. Yet his whole life exhibits in how small a degree great intellectual powers, when scattered through all the forms which Vanity suggests, will contribute to an author’s social comforts, or raise him in public esteem. Toland was fruitful in his productions, and still more so in his projects; yet it is mortifying to estimate the result of all the intense activity of the life of an author of genius, which terminates in being placed among these Calamities.

Toland’s birth was probably illegitimate; a circumstance which influenced the formation of his character. Baptised in ridicule, he had nearly fallen a victim to Mr. Shandy’s system of Christian names, for he bore the strange ones of Janus Junius, which, when the school-roll was called over every morning, afforded perpetual merriment, till the master blessed him with plain John, which the boy adopted, and lived in quiet. I must say something on the names themselves, perhaps as ridiculous! May they not have influenced the character of Toland, since they certainly describe it? He had all the shiftings of the double-faced Janus, and the revolutionary politics of the ancient Junius. His godfathers sent him into the world in cruel mockery, thus to remind their Irish boy of the fortunes that await the desperately bold: nor did Toland forget the strong-marked designations; for to his most objectionable work, the Latin tract entitled Pantheisticon, descriptive of what some have considered as an atheistical society, he subscribes these appropriate names, which at the time were imagined to be fictitious.

Toland ran away from school and Popery. When in after-life he was reproached with native obscurity, he ostentatiously produced a testimonial of his birth and family, hatched up at a convent of Irish Franciscans in Germany, where the good Fathers subscribed, with their ink tinged with their Rhenish, to his most ancient descent, referring to the Irish history! which they considered as a parish register, fit for the suspected son of an Irish Priest!

Toland, from early life, was therefore dependent on patrons; but illegitimate birth creates strong and determined characters, and Toland had all the force and originality of self-independence. He was a seed thrown by chance, to grow of itself wherever it falls.

This child of fortune studied at four Universities; at Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Leyden; from the latter he passed to Oxford, and, in the Bodleian Library, collected the materials for his after-studies.

He loved study, and even at a later period declares that “no employment or condition of life shall make me disrelish the lasting entertainment of books.” In his “Description of Epsom,” he observes that the taste for retirement, reading, and contemplation, promotes the true relish for select company, and says,

“Thus I remove at pleasure, as I grow weary of the country or the town, as I avoid a crowd or seek company.—Here, then, let me have books and bread enough without dependence; a bottle of hermitage and a plate of olives for a select friend; with an early rose to present a young lady as an emblem of discretion no less than of beauty.”

At Oxford appeared that predilection for paradoxes and over-curious speculations, which formed afterwards the marking feature of his literary character. He has been unjustly contemned as a sciolist; he was the correspondent of Leibnitz, Le Clerc, and Bayle, and was a learned author when scarcely a man. He first published a Dissertation on the strange tragical death of Regulus, and proved it a Roman legend. A greater paradox might have been his projected speculation on Job, to demonstrate that only the dialogue was genuine; the rest being the work of some idle Rabbin, who had invented a monstrous story to account for the extraordinary afflictions of that model of a divine mind. Speculations of so much learning and ingenuity are uncommon in a young man; but Toland was so unfortunate as to value his own merits before those who did not care to hear of them.

Hardy vanity was to recompense him, perhaps he thought, for that want of fortune and connexions, which raised duller spirits above him. Vain, loquacious, inconsiderate, and daring, he assumed the dictatorship of a coffee-house, and obtained easy conquests, which he mistook for glorious ones, over the graver fellows, who had for many a year awfully petrified their own colleges. He gave more violent offence by his new opinions on religion. An anonymous person addressed two letters to this new Heresiarch, solemn and monitory.[111] Toland’s answer is as honourable as that of his monitor’s. This passage is forcibly conceived:—

“To what purpose should I study here or elsewhere, were I an atheist or deist, for one of the two you take me to be? What a condition to mention virtue, if I believed there was no God, or one so impotent that could not, or so malicious that would not, reveal himself! Nay, though I granted a Deity, yet, if nothing of me subsisted after death, what laws could bind, what incentives could move me to common honesty? Annihilation would be a sanctuary for all my sins, and put an end to my crimes with myself. Believe me I am not so indifferent to the evils of the present life, but, without the expectation of a better, I should soon suspend the mechanism of my body, and resolve into inconscious atoms.”

This early moment of his life proved to be its crisis, and the first step he took decided his after-progress. His first great work of “Christianity not Mysterious,” produced immense consequences. Toland persevered in denying that it was designed as any attack on Christianity, but only on those subtractions, additions, and other alterations, which have corrupted that pure institution. The work, at least, like its title, is “Mysterious.”[112] Toland passed over to Ireland, but his book having got there before him, the author beheld himself anathematized; the pulpits thundered, and it was dangerous to be seen conversing with him. A jury who confessed they could not comprehend a page of his book, condemned it to be burned. Toland now felt a tenderness for his person; and the humane Molyneux, the friend of Locke, while he censures the imprudent vanity of our author, gladly witnessed the flight of “the poor gentleman.” But South, indignant at our English moderation in his own controversy with Sherlock on some doctrinal points of the Trinity, congratulates the Archbishop of Dublin on the Irish persecution; and equally witty and intolerant, he writes on Toland, “Your Parliament presently sent him packing, and without the help of a fagot, soon made the kingdom too hot for him.”

Toland was accused of an intention to found a sect, as South calls them, of “Mahometan-Christians.” Many were stigmatised as Tolandists; but the disciples of a man who never procured for their prophet a bit of dinner or a new wig, for he was frequently wanting both, were not to be feared as enthusiasts. The persecution from the church only rankled in the breast of Toland, and excited unextinguishable revenge.

He now breathed awhile from the bonfire of theology; and our Janus turned his political face. He edited Milton’s voluminous politics, and Harrington’s fantastical “Oceana,” and, as his “Christianity not Mysterious” had stamped his religion with something worse than heresy, so in politics he was branded as a Commonwealth’s-man. Toland had evidently strong nerves; for him opposition produced controversy, which he loved, and controversy produced books, by which he lived.

But let it not be imagined that Toland affected to be considered as no Christian, or avowed himself as a Republican. “Civil and religious toleration” (he says) “have been the two main objects of all my writings.” He declares himself to be only a primitive Christian, and a pure Whig. But an author must not be permitted to understand himself so much more clearly than he has enabled his readers to do. His mysterious conduct may be detected in his want of moral integrity.

He had the art of explaining away his own words, as in his first controversy about the word mystery in religion, and he exults in his artifice; for, in a letter, where he is soliciting the minister for employment, he says:—“The church is much exasperated against me; yet as that is the heaviest article, so it is undoubtedly the easiest conquered, and I know the infallible method of doing it.” And, in a letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury, he promises to reform his religion to that prelate’s liking! He took the sacrament as an opening for the negotiation.

What can be more explicit than his recantation at the close of his Vindicius Liberius? After telling us that he had withdrawn from sale, after the second edition, his “‘Christianity not Mysterious,’ when I perceived what real or pretended offence it had given,” he concludes thus:—“Being now arrived to years that will not wholly excuse inconsiderateness in resolving, or precipitance in acting, I firmly hope that my persuasion and practice will show me to be a true Christian; that my due conformity to the public worship may prove me to be a good Churchman; and that my untainted loyalty to King William will argue me to be a staunch Commonwealth’s-man. That I shall continue all my life a friend to religion, an enemy to superstition, a supporter of good kings, and a deposer of tyrants.”

Observe, this Vindicius Liberius was published on his return from one of his political tours in Germany. His views were then of a very different nature from those of controversial divinity; but it was absolutely necessary to allay the storm the church had raised against him. We begin now to understand a little better the character of Toland. These literary adventurers, with heroic pretensions, can practise the meanest artifices, and shrink themselves into nothing to creep out of a hole. How does this recantation agree with the “Nazarenus,” and the other theological works which Toland was publishing all his life? Posterity only can judge of men’s characters; it takes in at a glance the whole of a life; but contemporaries only view a part, often apparently unconnected and at variance, when in fact it is neither. This recantation is full of the spirit of Janus Junius Toland.

But we are concerned chiefly with Toland’s literary character. He was so confirmed an author, that he never published one book without promising another. He refers to others in MS.; and some of his most curious works are posthumous. He was a great artificer of title-pages, covering them with a promising luxuriance; and in this way recommended his works to the booksellers. He had an odd taste for running inscriptions of whimsical crabbed terms; the gold-dust of erudition to gild over a title; such as “Tetradymus, Hodegus, Clidopharus;” “Adeisidaemon, or the Unsuperstitious.” He pretends these affected titles indicated their several subjects; but the genius of Toland could descend to literary quackery.

He had the art of propagating books; his small Life of Milton produced several; besides the complacency he felt in extracting long passages from Milton against the bishops. In this Life, his attack on the authenticity of the Eikon Basilike of Charles I. branched into another on supposititious writings; and this included the spurious gospels. Association of ideas is a nursing mother to the fertility of authorship. The spurious gospels opened a fresh theological campaign, and produced his “Amyntor.” There was no end in provoking an author, who, in writing the life of a poet, could contrive to put the authenticity of the Testament to the proof.

Amid his philosophical labours, his vanity induced him to seize on all temporary topics to which his facility and ingenuity gave currency. The choice of his subjects forms an amusing catalogue; for he had “Remarks” and “Projects” as fast as events were passing. He wrote on the “Art of Governing by Parties,” on “Anglia Liberia,” “Reasons for Naturalising the Jews,” on “The Art of Canvassing at Elections,” “On raising a National Bank without Capital,” “The State Anatomy,” “Dunkirk or Dover,” &c. &c. These, and many like these, set off with catching titles, proved to the author that a man of genius may be capable of writing on all topics at all times, and make the country his debtor without benefiting his own creditors.[113]

There was a moment in Toland’s life when he felt, or thought he felt, fortune in his grasp. He was then floating on the ideal waves of the South Sea bubble. The poor author, elated with a notion that he was rich enough to print at his own cost, dispersed copies of his absurd “Pantheisticon.” He describes a society of Pantheists, who worship the universe as God; a mystery much greater than those he attacked in Christianity. Their prayers are passages from Cicero and Seneca, and they chant long poems instead of psalms; so that in their zeal they endured a little tediousness. The next objectionable circumstance in this wild ebullition of philosophical wantonness is the apparent burlesque of some liturgies; and a wag having inserted in some copies an impious prayer to Bacchus, Toland suffered for the folly of others as well as his own.[114] With the South Sea bubble vanished Toland’s desire of printing books at his own risk; and thus relieved the world from the weight of more Pantheisticons!

With all this bustle of authorship, amidst temporary publications which required such prompt ingenuity, and elaborate works which matured the fruits of early studies, Toland was still not a sedentary writer. I find that he often travelled on the continent; but how could a guinealess author so easily transport himself from Flanders to Germany, and appear at home in the courts of Berlin, Dresden, and Hanover? Perhaps we may discover a concealed feature in the character of our ambiguous philosopher.

In the only Life we have of Toland, by Des Maiseaux, prefixed to his posthumous works, he tells us, that Toland was at the court of Berlin, but “an incident, too ludicrous to be mentioned, obliged him to leave that place sooner than he expected.” Here is an incident in a narrative clearly marked out, but never to be supplied! Whatever this incident was, it had this important result, that it sent Toland away in haste; but why was he there? Our chronological biographer,[115] “good easy man,” suspects nothing more extraordinary when he tells us Toland was at Berlin or Hanover, than when he finds him at Epsom; imagines Toland only went to the Electoral Princess Sophia, and the Queen of Prussia, who were “ladies of sublime genius,” to entertain them by vexing some grave German divines, with philosophical conferences, and paradoxical conundrums; all the ravings of Toland’s idleness.[116]

This secret history of Toland can only be picked out by fine threads. He professed to be a literary character—he had opened a periodical “literary correspondence,” as he terms it, with Prince Eugene; such as we have witnessed in our days by Grimm and La Harpe, addressed to some northern princes. He was a favourite with the Electoral Princess Sophia and the Queen of Prussia, to whom he addressed his “Letters to Serena.” Was he a political agent? Yet how was it that Toland was often driven home by distressed circumstances? He seems not to have been a practical politician, for he managed his own affairs very ill. Was the political intriguer rather a suspected than a confidential servant of all his masters and mistresses? for it is evident no one cared for him! The absence of moral integrity was probably never disguised by the loquacious vanity of this literary adventurer.

In his posthumous works are several “Memorials” for the Earl of Oxford, which throw a new light over a union of political espionage with the literary character, which finally concluded in producing that extraordinary one which the political imagination of Toland created in all the obscurity and heat of his reveries.

In one of these “Memorials,” forcibly written and full of curiosity, Toland remonstrates with the minister for his marked neglect of him; opens the scheme of a political tour, where, like Guthrie, he would be content with his quarterage. He defines his character; for the independent Whig affects to spurn at the office, though he might not shrink at the duties of a spy.

“Whether such a person, sir, who is neither minister nor spy, and as a lover of learning will be welcome everywhere, may not prove of extraordinary use to my Lord Treasurer, as well as to his predecessor Burleigh, who employed such, I leave his lordship and you to consider.”

Still this character, whatever title may designate it, is inferior in dignity and importance to that which Toland afterwards projected, and which portrays him where his life-writer has not given a touch from his brush; it is a political curiosity.

“I laid an honester scheme of serving my country, your lordship, and myself; for, seeing it was neither convenient for you, nor a thing at all desired by me, that I should appear in any public post, I sincerely proposed, as occasions should offer, to communicate to your lordship my observations on the temper of the ministry, the dispositions of the people, the condition of our enemies or allies abroad, and what I might think most expedient in every conjuncture; which advice you were to follow in whole, or in part, or not at all, as your own superior wisdom should direct. My general acquaintance, the several languages I speak, the experience I have acquired in foreign affairs, and being engaged in no interest at home, besides that of the public, should qualify me in some measure for this province. All wise ministers have ever had such private monitors. As much as I thought myself fit, or was thought so by others, for such general observations, so much have I ever abhorred, my lord, those particular observers we call Spies; but I despise the calumny no less than I detest the thing. Of such general observations, you should have perused a far greater number than I thought fit to present hitherto, had I discovered, by due effects, that they were acceptable from me; for they must unavoidably be received from somebody, unless a minister were omniscient—yet I soon had good reason to believe I was not designed for the man, whatever the original sin could be that made me incapable of such a trust, and which I now begin to suspect. Without direct answers to my proposals, how could I know whether I helped my friends elsewhere, or betrayed them contrary to my intentions! and accordingly I have for some time been very cautious and reserved. But if your lordship will enter into any measures with me to procure the good of my country, I shall be more ready to serve your lordship in this, or in some becoming capacity, than any other minister. They who confided to my management affairs of a higher nature have found me exact as well as secret. My impenetrable negociation at Vienna (hid under the pretence of curiosity) was not only applauded by the prince that employed me, but also proportionably rewarded. And here, my lord, give me leave to say that I have found England miserably served abroad since this change; and our ministers at home are sometimes as great strangers to the genius as to the persons of those with whom they have to do. At —— you have placed the most unacceptable man in the world—one that lived in a scandalous misunderstanding with the minister of the States at another court—one that has been the laughing-stock of all courts, for his senseless haughtiness and most ridiculous airs—and one that can never judge aright, unless by accident, in anything.”

The discarded, or the suspected private monitor of the Minister warms into the tenderest language of political amour, and mourns their rupture but as the quarrels of lovers.

“I cannot, from all these considerations, but in the nature of a lover, complain of your present neglect, and be solicitous for your future care.” And again, “I have made use of the simile of a lover, and as such, indeed, I thought fit, once for all, to come to a thorough explanation, resolved, if my affection be not killed by your unkindness, to become indissolubly yours.”

Such is the nice artifice which colours, with a pretended love of his country, the sordidness of the political intriguer, giving clean names to filthy things. But this view of the political face of our Janus is not complete till we discover the levity he could carry into politics when not disguised by more pompous pretensions. I shall give two extracts from letters composed in a different spirit.

“I am bound for Germany, though first for Flanders, and next for Holland. I believe I shall be pretty well accommodated for this voyage, which I expect will be very short. Lord! how near was my old woman being a queen! and your humble servant being at his ease.”

His old woman was the Electoral Princess Sophia; and his ease is what patriots distinguish as the love of their country! Again—

“The October Club,[117] if rightly managed, will be rare stuff to work the ends of any party. I sent such an account of these wights to an old gentlewoman of my acquaintance, as in the midst of fears (the change of ministry) will make her laugh.”

After all his voluminous literature, and his refined politics, Toland lived and died the life of an Author by Profession, in an obscure lodging at a country carpenter’s, in great distress. He had still one patron left, who was himself poor, Lord Molesworth, who promised him, if he lived,

“Bare necessaries. These are but cold comfort to a man of your spirit and desert; but ’tis all I dare promise! ’Tis an ungrateful age, and we must bear with it the best we may till we can mend it.”

And his lordship tells of his unsuccessful application to some Whig lord for Toland; and concludes,

“’Tis a sad monster of a man, and not worthy of further notice.”

I have observed that Toland had strong nerves; he neither feared controversies, nor that which closes all. Having examined his manuscripts, I can sketch a minute picture of the last days of our “author by profession.” At the carpenter’s lodgings he drew up a list of all his books—they were piled on four chairs, to the amount of 155—most of them works which evince the most erudite studies; and as Toland’s learning has been very lightly esteemed, it may be worth notice that some of his MSS. were transcribed in Greek.[118] To this list he adds—“I need not recite those in the closet with the unbound books and pamphlets; nor my trunk, wherein are all my papers and MSS.” I perceive he circulated his MSS. among his friends, for there is a list by him as he lent them, among which are ladies as well as gentlemen, esprits forts!

Never has author died more in character than Toland; he may be said to have died with a busy pen in his hand. Having suffered from an unskilful physician, he avenged himself in his own way; for there was found on his table an “Essay on Physic without Physicians.” The dying patriot-trader was also writing a preface for a political pamphlet on the danger of mercenary Parliaments; and the philosopher was composing his own epitaph—one more proof of the ruling passion predominating in death; but why should a Pantheist be solicitous to perpetuate his genius and his fame! I shall transcribe a few lines; surely they are no evidence of Atheism!

Omnium Literarum excultor, ac linguarum plus decem sciens; Veritatis propugnator, Libertatis assertor; nullus autem sectator aut cliens, nec minis, nec malis est inflexus, quin quam elegit, viam perageret; utili honestum anteferens. Spiritus cum æthereo patre, à quo prodiit olim, conjungitur; corpus item, Naturæ cedens, in materno gremio reponitur. Ipse vero æternum est resurrecturus, at idem futurus Tolandus nunquam.[119]

One would have imagined that the writer of his own panegyrical epitaph would have been careful to have transmitted to posterity a copy of his features; but I know of no portrait of Toland. His patrons seem never to have been generous, nor his disciples grateful; they mortified rather than indulged the egotism of his genius. There appeared, indeed, an elegy, shortly after the death of Toland, so ingeniously contrived, that it is not clear whether he is eulogised or ridiculed. Amid its solemnity these lines betray the sneer. “Has,” exclaimed the eulogist of the ambiguous philosopher,

Each jarring element gone angry home? And Master Toland a Non-ens become?

Locke, with all the prescient sagacity of that clear understanding which penetrated under the secret folds of the human heart, anticipated the life of Toland at its commencement. He admired the genius of the man; but, while he valued his parts and learning, he dreaded their result. In a letter I find these passages, which were then so prophetic, and are now so instructive:—

“If his exceeding great value of himself do not deprive the world of that usefulness that his parts, if rightly conducted, might be of, I shall be very glad.—The hopes young men give of what use they will make of their parts is, to me, the encouragement of being concerned for them; but, if vanity increases with age, I always fear whither it will lead a man.”

GENIUS THE DUPE OF ITS PASSIONS.

Pope said that Steele, though he led a careless and vicious life, had nevertheless a love and reverence for virtue. The life of Steele was not that of a retired scholar; hence his moral character becomes more instructive. He was one of those whose hearts are the dupes of their imaginations, and who are hurried through life by the most despotic volition. He always preferred his caprices to his interests; or, according to his own notion, very ingenious, but not a little absurd, “he was always of the humour of preferring the state of his mind to that of his fortune.” The result of this principle of moral conduct was, that a man of the most admirable abilities was perpetually acting like a fool, and, with a warm attachment to virtue, was the frailest of human beings.

In the first act of his life we find the seed that developed itself in the succeeding ones. His uncle could not endure a hero for his heir: but Steele had seen a marching regiment; a sufficient reason with him to enlist as a private in the horse-guards: cocking his hat, and putting on a broad-sword, jack-boots, and shoulder-belt, with the most generous feelings he forfeited a very good estate.—At length Ensign Steele’s frank temper and wit conciliated esteem, and extorted admiration, and the ensign became a favourite leader in all the dissipations of the town. All these were the ebullitions of genius, which had not yet received a legitimate direction. Amid these orgies, however, it was often pensive, and forming itself; for it was in the height of these irregularities that Steele composed his “Christian Hero,” a moral and religious treatise, which the contritions of every morning dictated, and to which the disorders of every evening added another penitential page. Perhaps the genius of Steele was never so ardent and so pure as at this period; and in his elegant letter to his commander, the celebrated Lord Cutts, he gives an interesting account of the origin of this production, which none but one deeply imbued with its feelings could have so forcibly described.

“Tower Guard, March 23, 1701.

“My Lord,—The address of the following papers is so very much due to your lordship, that they are but a mere report of what has passed upon my guard to my commander; for they were writ upon duty, when the mind was perfectly disengaged, and at leisure, in the silent watch of the night, to run over the busy dream of the day; and the vigilance which obliges us to suppose an enemy always near us, has awakened a sense that there is a restless and subtle one which constantly attends our steps, and meditates our ruin.”[120]

To this solemn and monitory work he prefixed his name, from this honourable motive, that it might serve as “a standing testimony against himself, and make him ashamed of understanding, and seeming to feel what was virtuous, and living so quite contrary a life.” Do we not think that no one less than a saint is speaking to us? And yet he is still nothing more than Ensign Steele! He tells us that this grave work made him considered, who had been no undelightful companion, as a disagreeable fellow—and “The Christian Hero,” by his own words, appears to have fought off several fool-hardy geniuses who were for “trying their valour on him,” supposing a saint was necessarily a poltroon. Thus “The Christian Hero,” finding himself slighted by his loose companions, sat down and composed a most laughable comedy, “The Funeral;” and with all the frankness of a man who cares not to hide his motives, he tells us, that after his religious work he wrote the comedy because “nothing can make the town so fond of a man as a successful play.”[121] The historian who had to record such strange events, following close on each other, as an author publishing a book of piety, and then a farce, could never have discovered the secret motive of the versatile writer, had not that writer possessed the most honest frankness.

Steele was now at once a man of the town and its censor, and wrote lively essays on the follies of the day in an enormous black peruke which cost him fifty guineas! He built an elegant villa, but, as he was always inculcating economy, he dates from “The Hovel.” He detected the fallacy of the South Sea scheme, while he himself invented projects, neither inferior in magnificence nor in misery. He even turned alchemist, and wanted to coin gold, merely to distribute it. The most striking incident in the life of this man of volition, was his sudden marriage with a young lady who attended his first wife’s funeral—struck by her angelical beauty, if we trust to his raptures. Yet this sage, who would have written so well on the choice of a wife, united himself to a character the most uncongenial to his own; cold, reserved, and most anxiously prudent in her attention to money, she was of a temper which every day grew worse by the perpetual imprudence and thoughtlessness of his own. He calls her “Prue” in fondness and reproach; she was Prudery itself! His adoration was permanent, and so were his complaints; and they never parted but with bickerings—yet he could not suffer her absence, for he was writing to her three or four passionate notes in a day, which are dated from his office, or his bookseller’s, or from some friend’s house—he has risen in the midst of dinner to despatch a line to “Prue,” to assure her of his affection since noon.[122]—Her presence or her absence was equally painful to him.

Yet Steele, gifted at all times with the susceptibility of genius, was exercising the finest feelings of the heart; the same generosity of temper which deluded his judgment, and invigorated his passions, rendered him a tender and pathetic dramatist; a most fertile essayist; a patriot without private views; an enemy whose resentment died away in raillery; and a friend, who could warmly press the hand that chastised him. Whether in administration, or expelled the House; whether affluent, or flying from his creditors; in the fulness of his heart he, perhaps, secured his own happiness, and lived on, like some wits, extempore. But such men, with all their virtues and all their genius, live only for themselves.

Steele, in the waste of his splendid talents, had raised sudden enmities and transient friendships. The world uses such men as Eastern travellers do fountains; they drink their waters, and when their thirst is appeased, turn their hacks on them. Steele lived to be forgotten. He opened his career with folly; he hurried through it in a tumult of existence; and he closed it by an involuntary exile, amid the wrecks of his fortune and his mind.

Steele, in one of his numerous periodical works, the twelfth number of the “Theatre,” has drawn an exquisite contrast between himself and his friend Addison: it is a cabinet picture. Steele’s careful pieces, when warm with his subject, had a higher spirit, a richer flavour, than the equable softness of Addison, who is only beautiful.

“There never was a more strict friendship than between these gentlemen; nor had they ever any difference but what proceeded from their different way of pursuing the same thing: the one, with patience, foresight, and temperate address, always waited and stemmed the torrent; while the other often plunged himself into it, and was as often taken out by the temper of him who stood weeping on the bank for his safety, whom he could not dissuade from leaping into it. Thus these two men lived for some years last past, shunning each other, but still preserving the most passionate concern for their mutual welfare. But when they met, they were as unreserved as boys; and talked of the greatest affairs, upon which they saw where they differed, without pressing (what they knew impossible) to convert each other.”

If Steele had the honour of the invention of those periodical papers which first enlightened the national genius by their popular instruction, he is himself a remarkable example of the moral and the literary character perpetually contending in the man of volition.

LITERARY DISAPPOINTMENTS DISORDERING THE INTELLECT.

LELAND AND COLLINS.

This awful calamity may be traced in the fate of Leland and Collins: the one exhausted the finer faculties of his mind in the grandest views, and sunk under gigantic tasks; the other enthusiast sacrificed his reason and his happiness to his imagination.

Leland, the father of our antiquaries, was an accomplished scholar, and his ample mind had embraced the languages of antiquity, those of his own age, and the ancient ones of his own country: thus he held all human learning by its three vast chains. He travelled abroad; and he cultivated poetry with the ardour he could even feel for the acquisition of words. On his return home, among other royal favours, he was appointed by Henry VIII. the king’s antiquary, a title honourably created for Leland; for with him it became extinct. By this office he was empowered to search after English antiquities; to review the libraries of all the religious institutions, and to bring the records of antiquity “out of deadly darkness into lively light.” This extensive power fed a passion already formed by the study of our old rude historians; his elegant taste perceived that they wanted those graces which he could lend them.

Six years were occupied, by uninterrupted travel and study, to survey our national antiquities; to note down everything observable for the history of the country and the honour of the nation. What a magnificent view has he sketched of this learned journey! In search of knowledge, Leland wandered on the sea-coasts and in the midland; surveyed towns and cities, and rivers, castles, cathedrals, and monasteries; tumuli, coins, and inscriptions; collected authors; transcribed MSS. If antiquarianism pored, genius too meditated in this sublime industry.

Another six years were devoted to shape and to polish the immense collections he had amassed. All this untired labour and continued study were rewarded by Henry VIII. It is delightful, from its rarity, to record the gratitude of a patron: Henry was worthy of Leland; and the genius of the author was magnificent as that of the monarch who had created it.

Nor was the gratitude of Leland silent: he seems to have been in the habit of perpetuating his spontaneous emotions in elegant Latin verse. Our author has fancifully expressed his gratitude to the king:—

“Sooner,” he says, “shall the seas float without their silent inhabitants; the thorny hedges cease to hide the birds; the oak to spread its boughs; and Flora to paint the meadows with flowers;”

Quàm Rex dive, tuum labatur pectore nostro Nomen, quod studiis portus et aura meis. Than thou, great King, my bosom cease to hail, Who o’er my studies breath’st a favouring gale.

Leland was, indeed, alive to the kindness of his royal patron; and among his numerous literary projects, was one of writing a history of all the palaces of Henry, in imitation of Procopius, who described those of the Emperor Justinian. He had already delighted the royal ear in a beautiful effusion of fancy and antiquarianism, in his Cygnea Cantio, the Song of the Swans. The swan of Leland, melodiously floating down the Thames, from Oxford to Greenwich, chants, as she passes along, the ancient names and honours of the towns, the castles, and the villages.

Leland presented his “Strena, or a New Year’s Gift,” to the king.—It consists of an account of his studies; and sketches, with a fervid and vast imagination, his magnificent labour, which he had already inscribed with the title De Antiquitate Britannica, and which was to be divided into as many books as there were shires. All parts of this address of the King’s Antiquary to the king bear the stamp of his imagination and his taste. He opens his intention of improving, by the classical graces of composition, the rude labours of our ancestors; for,

“Except Truth be delicately clothed in purpure, her written verytees can scant find a reader.”

Our old writers, he tells his sovereign, had, indeed,

“From time to time preserved the acts of your predecessors, and the fortunes of your realm, with great diligence, and no less faith; would to God with like eloquence!”

An exclamation of fine taste, when taste was yet a stranger in the country. And when he alludes to the knowledge of British affairs scattered among the Roman, as well as our own writers, his fervid fancy breaks forth with an image at once simple and sublime:—

“I trust,” says Leland, “so to open the window, that the light shall be seen so long, that is to say, by the space of a whole thousand years stopped up, and the old glory of your Britain to re-flourish through the world.”[123]

And he pathetically concludes—

“Should I live to perform those things that are already begun, I trust that your realm shall so well be known, once painted with its native colours, that it shall give place to the glory of no other region.”

The grandeur of this design was a constituent part of the genius of Leland, but not less, too, was that presaging melancholy which even here betrays itself, and even more frequently in his verses. Everything about Leland was marked by his own greatness; his country and his countrymen were ever present; and, by the excitement of his feelings, even his humbler pursuits were elevated into patriotism. Henry died the year after he received the “New Year’s Gift.” From that moment, in losing the greatest patron for the greatest work, Leland appears to have felt the staff which he had used to turn at pleasure for his stay, break in his hands.

He had new patrons to court, while engaged in labours for which a single life had been too short. The melancholy that cherishes genius may also destroy it. Leland, brooding over his voluminous labours, seemed to love and to dread them; sometimes to pursue them with rapture, and sometimes to shrink from them with despair. His generous temper had once shot forwards to posterity; but he now calms his struggling hopes and doubts, and confines his literary ambition to his own country and his own age.

POSTERITATIS AMOR DUBIUS. Posteritatis amor mihi perblanditur, et ultro Premittit libris secula multa meis. At non tam facile est oculato imponere, nosco Quàm non sim tali dignus honore frui. Græcia magniloquos vates desiderat ipsa, Roma suos etiam disperiisse dolet. Exemplis quum sim claris edoctus ab istis, Quî sperem Musas vivere posse meas? Certè mî sat erit præsenti scribere sæclo, Auribus et patriæ complacuisse meæ. IMITATED. Posterity, thy soothing love I feel, That o’er my volumes many an age may steal: But hard it is the well-clear’d eye to cheat With honours undeserved, too fond deceit! Greece, greatly eloquent, and full of fame, Sighs for the want of many a perish’d name; And Rome o’er her illustrious children mourns, Their fame departing with their mouldering urns. How can I hope, by such examples shown, More than a transient day, a passing sun? Enough for me to win the present age, And please a brother with a brother’s page.

By other verses, addressed to Cranmer, it would appear that Leland was experiencing anxieties to which he had not been accustomed,—and one may suspect, by the opening image of his “Supellex,” that his pension was irregular, and that he began, as authors do in these hard cases, to value “the furniture” of his mind above that of his house.

AD THOMAM CRANMERUM, CANT. ARCHIEPISCOP. Est congesta mihi domi Supellex Ingens, aurea, nobilis, venusta, Quâ totus studeo Britanniarum Vero reddere gloriam nitori. Sed Fortuna meis noverca cœptis Jam felicibus invidet maligna. Quare, ne pereant brevi vel horâ Multarum mihi noctium labores Omnes, et patriæ simul decora Ornamenta cadant, &c. &c. IMITATED. The furnitures that fill my house, The vast and beautiful disclose, All noble, and the store is gold; Our ancient glory here unroll’d. But fortune checks my daring claim, A step-mother severe to fame. A smile malignantly she throws Just at the story’s prosperous close. And thus must the unfinish’d tale, And all my many vigils fail, And must my country’s honour fall; In one brief hour must perish all?

But, conscious of the greatness of his labours, he would obtain the favour of the Archbishop, by promising a share of his own fame—

——pretium sequetur amplum— Sic nomen tibi litteræ elegantes Rectè perpetuum dabunt, suosque Partim vel titulos tibi receptos Concedet memori Britannus ore: Sic te posteritas amabit omnis, Et famâ super æthera innotesces. IMITATED. But take the ample glorious meed, To letter’d elegance decreed, When Britain’s mindful voice shall bend, And with her own thy honours blend, As she from thy kind hands receives Her titles drawn on Glory’s leaves, And back reflects them on thy name, Till time shall love thy mounting fame.

Thus was Leland, like the melancholic, withdrawn entirely into the world of his own ideas; his imagination delighting in reveries, while his industry was exhausting itself in labour. His manners were not free from haughtiness,—his meagre and expressive physiognomy indicates the melancholy and the majesty of his mind; it was not old age, but the premature wrinkles of those nightly labours he has himself recorded. All these characteristics are so strongly marked in the bust of Leland, that Lavater had triumphed had he studied it.[124]

Labour had been long felt as voluptuousness by Leland; and this is among the Calamities of Literature, and it is so with all those studies which deeply busy the intellect and the fancy. There is a poignant delight in study, often subversive of human happiness. Men of genius, from their ideal state, drop into the cold formalities of society, to encounter its evils, its disappointments, its neglect, and perhaps its persecutions. When such minds discover the world will only become a friend on its own terms, then the cup of their wrath overflows; the learned grow morose, and the witty sarcastic; but more indelible emotions in a highly-excited imagination often produce those delusions, which Darwin calls hallucinations, and which sometimes terminate in mania. The haughtiness, the melancholy, and the aspiring genius of Leland, were tending to a disordered intellect. Incipient insanity is a mote floating in the understanding, escaping all observation, when the mind is capable of observing itself, but seems a constituent part of the mind itself when that is completely covered with its cloud.

Leland did not reach even the maturity of life, the period at which his stupendous works were to be executed. He was seized by frenzy. The causes of his insanity were never known. The Papists declared he went mad because he had embraced the new religion; his malicious rival Polydore Vergil, because he had promised what he could not perform; duller prosaists because his poetical turn had made him conceited. The grief and melancholy of a fine genius, and perhaps an irregular pension, his enemies have not noticed.

The ruins of Leland’s mind were viewed in his library; volumes on volumes stupendously heaped together, and masses of notes scattered here and there; all the vestiges of his genius, and its distraction. His collections were seized on by honest and dishonest hands; many were treasured, but some were stolen. Hearne zealously arranged a series of volumes from the fragments; but the “Britannia” of Camden, the “London” of Stowe, and the “Chronicles” of Holinshed, are only a few of those public works whose waters silently welled from the spring of Leland’s genius; and that nothing might be wanting to preserve some relic of that fine imagination which was always working in his poetic soul, his own description of his learned journey over the kingdom was a spark, which, falling into the inflammable mind of a poet, produced the singular and patriotic poem of the “Polyolbion” of Drayton. Thus the genius of Leland has come to us diffused through a variety of other men’s; and what he intended to produce it has required many to perform.

A singular inscription, in which Leland speaks of himself, in the style he was accustomed to use, and which Weever tells us was affixed to his monument, as he had heard by tradition, was probably a relic snatched from his general wreck—for it could not with propriety have been composed after his death.[125]

Quantùm Rhenano debet Germania docto Tantùm debebit terra Britanna mihi. Ille suæ gentis ritus et nomina prisca Æstivo fecit lucidiora die. Ipse antiquarum rerum quoque magnus amator Ornabo patriæ lumina clara meæ. Quæ cum prodierint niveis inscripta tabellis, Tum testes nostræ sedulitatis erunt. IMITATED. What Germany to learn’d Rhenanus owes, That for my Britain shall my toil unclose; His volumes mark their customs, names, and climes, And brighten, with a summer’s light, old times. I also, touch’d by the same love, will write, To ornament my country’s splendid light, Which shall, inscribed on snowy tablets, be Full many a witness of my industry.

Another example of literary disappointment disordering the intellect may be contemplated in the fate of the poet Collins.

Several interesting incidents may be supplied to Johnson’s narrative of the short and obscure life of this poet, who, more than any other of our martyrs to the lyre, has thrown over all his images and his thoughts a tenderness of mind, and breathed a freshness over the pictures of poetry, which the mighty Milton has not exceeded, and the laborious Gray has not attained. But he immolated happiness, and at length reason, to his imagination! The incidents most interesting in the life of Collins would be those events which elude the ordinary biographer; that invisible train of emotions which were gradually passing in his mind; those passions which first moulded his genius, and which afterwards broke it! But who could record the vacillations of a poetic temper, its early hope and its late despair, its wild gaiety and its settled frenzy, but the poet himself? Yet Collins has left behind no memorial of the wanderings of his alienated mind but the errors of his life!

At college he published his “Persian Eclogues,” as they were first called, to which, when he thought they were not distinctly Persian, he gave the more general title of “Oriental.” The publication was attended with no success; but the first misfortune a poet meets will rarely deter him from incurring more. He suddenly quitted the university, and has been censured for not having consulted his friends when he rashly resolved to live by the pen. But he had no friends! His father had died in embarrassed circumstances; and Collins was residing at the university on the stipend allowed him by his uncle, Colonel Martin, who was abroad. He was indignant at a repulse he met with at college; and alive to the name of author and poet, the ardent and simple youth imagined that a nobler field of action opened on him in the metropolis than was presented by the flat uniformity of a collegiate life. To whatever spot the youthful poet flies, that spot seems Parnassus, as applause seems patronage. He hurried to town, and presented himself before the cousin who paid his small allowance from his uncle in a fashionable dress with a feather in his hat. The graver gentleman did not succeed in his attempt at sending him back, with all the terror of his information, that Collins had not a single guinea of his own, and was dressed in a coat he could never pay for. The young bard turned from his obdurate cousin as “a dull fellow;” a usual phrase with him to describe those who did not think as he would have them.

That moment was now come, so much desired, and scarcely yet dreaded, which was to produce those effusions of fancy and learning, for which Collins had prepared himself by previous studies. About this time Johnson[126] has given a finer picture of the intellectual powers and the literary attainments of Collins than in the life he afterwards composed. “Collins was acquainted not only with the learned tongues, but with the Italian, French, and Spanish languages; full of hopes and full of projects, versed in many languages, high in fancy, and strong in retention.” Such was the language of Johnson, when, warmed by his own imagination, he could write like Longinus; at that after-period, when assuming the austerity of critical discussion for the lives of poets, even in the coldness of his recollections, he describes Collins as “a man of extensive literature, and of vigorous faculties.”

A chasm of several years remains to be filled. He was projecting works of labour, and creating productions of taste; and he has been reproached for irresolution, and even for indolence. Let us catch his feelings from the facts as they rise together, and learn whether Collins must endure censure or excite sympathy.

When he was living loosely about town, he occasionally wrote many short poems in the house of a friend, who witnesses that he burned as rapidly as he composed. His odes were purchased by Millar, yet though but a slight pamphlet, all the interest of that great bookseller could never introduce them into notice. Not an idle compliment is recorded to have been sent to the poet. When we now consider that among these odes was one the most popular in the language, with some of the most exquisitely poetical, it reminds us of the difficulty a young writer without connexions experiences in obtaining the public ear; and of the languor of poetical connoisseurs who sometimes suffer poems, that have not yet grown up to authority, to be buried on the shelf. What the outraged feelings of the poet were, appeared when some time afterwards he became rich enough to express them. Having obtained some fortune by the death of his uncle, he made good to the publisher the deficiency of the unsold odes, and, in his haughty resentment at the public taste, consigned the impression to the flames!

Who shall now paint the feverish and delicate feelings of a young poet such as Collins, who had twice addressed the public, and twice had been repulsed? He whose poetic temper Johnson has finely painted, at the happy moment when he felt its influence, as “delighting to rove through the meadows of enchantment, to gaze on the magnificence of golden palaces, and repose by the waterfalls of Elysian gardens!”

It cannot be doubted, and the recorded facts will demonstrate it, that the poetical disappointments of Collins were secretly preying on his spirit, and repressing his firmest exertions. With a mind richly stored with literature, and a soul alive to the impulses of nature and study, he projected a “History of the Revival of Learning,” and a translation of “Aristotle’s Poetics,” to be illustrated by a large commentary.

But “his great fault,” says Johnson, “was his irresolution; or the frequent calls of immediate necessity broke his schemes, and suffered him to pursue no settled purpose.” Collins was, however, not idle, though without application; for, when reproached with idleness by a friend, he showed instantly several sheets of his version of Aristotle, and many embryos of some lives he had engaged to compose for the “Biographia Britannica;” he never brought either to perfection! What then was this irresolution but the vacillations of a mind broken and confounded? He had exercised too constantly the highest faculties of fiction, and he had precipitated himself into the dreariness of real life. None but a poet can conceive, for none but a poet can experience, the secret wounds inflicted on a mind of romantic fancy and tenderness of emotion, which has staked its happiness on its imagination; for such neglect is felt as ordinary men would feel the sensation of being let down into a sepulchre, and buried alive. The mind of Tasso, a brother in fancy to Collins, became disordered by the opposition of the critics, but perpetual neglect injures it not less. The Hope of the ancients was represented holding some flowers, the promise of the spring, or some spikes of corn, indicative of approaching harvest—but the Hope of Collins had scattered its seed, and they remained buried in the earth.

The oblivion which covered our poet’s works appeared to him eternal, as those works now seem to us immortal. He had created Hope with deep and enthusiastic feeling!—

With eyes so fair— Whispering promised pleasure, And bade the lovely scenes at distance hail; And Hope, enchanted, smiled, and waved her golden hair!

The few years Collins passed in the metropolis he was subsisting with or upon his friends; and, being a pleasing companion, he obtained many literary acquaintances. It was at this period that Johnson knew him, and thus describes him:—“His appearance was decent, and his knowledge considerable; his views extensive, and his conversation elegant.” He was a constant frequenter at the literary resorts of the Bedford and Slaughter’s; and Armstrong, Hill, Garrick, and Foote, frequently consulted him on their pieces before they appeared in public. From his intimacy with Garrick he obtained a free admission into the green-room; and probably it was at this period, among his other projects, that he planned several tragedies, which, however, as Johnson observes, “he only planned.” There is a feature in Collins’s character which requires attention. He is represented as a man of cheerful dispositions; and it has been my study to detect only a melancholy, which was preying on the very source of life itself. Collins was, indeed, born to charm his friends; for fancy and elegance were never absent from his susceptible mind, rich in its stores, and versatile in its emotions. He himself indicates his own character, in his address to “Home:”—

Go! nor, regardless while these numbers boast My short-lived bliss, forget my social name.

Johnson has told us of his cheerful dispositions; and one who knew him well observes, that “in the green-room he made diverting observations on the vanity and false consequence of that class of people, and his manner of relating them to his particular friends was extremely entertaining:” but the same friend acknowledges that “some letters which he received from Collins, though chiefly on business, have in them some flights which strongly mark his character, and for which reason I have preserved them.” We cannot decide of the temper of a man viewed only in a circle of friends, who listen to the ebullitions of wit or fancy; the social warmth for a moment throws into forgetfulness his secret sorrow. The most melancholy man is frequently the most delightful companion, and peculiarly endowed with the talent of satirical playfulness and vivacity of humour.[127] But what was the true life of Collins, separated from its adventitious circumstances? It was a life of want, never chequered by hope, that was striving to elude its own observation by hurrying into some temporary dissipation. But the hours of melancholy and solitude were sure to return; these were marked on the dial of his life, and, when they struck, the gay and lively Collins, like one of his own enchanted beings, as surely relapsed into his natural shape. To the perpetual recollection of his poetical disappointments are we to attribute this unsettled state of his mind, and the perplexity of his studies. To these he was perpetually reverting, which he showed when after a lapse of several years, he could not rest till he had burned his ill-fated odes. And what was the result of his literary life? He returned to his native city of Chichester in a state almost of nakedness, destitute, diseased, and wild in despair, to hide himself in the arms of a sister.

The cloud had long been gathering over his convulsed intellect; and the fortune he acquired on the death of his uncle served only for personal indulgences, which rather accelerated his disorder. There were, at times, some awful pauses in the alienation of his mind—but he had withdrawn it from study. It was in one of these intervals that Thomas Warton told Johnson that when he met Collins travelling, he took up a book the poet carried with him, from curiosity, to see what companion a man of letters had chosen—it was an English Testament. “I have but one book,” said Collins, “but that is the best.” This circumstance is recorded on his tomb.

He join’d pure faith to strong poetic powers, And in reviving reason’s lucid hours, Sought on one book his troubled mind to rest, And rightly deem’d the book of God the best.

At Chichester, tradition has preserved some striking and affecting occurrences of his last days; he would haunt the aisles and cloisters of the cathedral, roving days and nights together, loving their

Dim religious light.

And, when the choristers chanted their anthem, the listening and bewildered poet, carried out of himself by the solemn strains, and his own too susceptible imagination, moaned and shrieked, and awoke a sadness and a terror most affecting amid religious emotions; their friend, their kinsman, and their poet, was before them, an awful image of human misery and ruined genius!

This interesting circumstance is thus alluded to on his monument:—

Ye walls that echoed to his frantic moan, Guard the due record of this grateful stone: Strangers to him, enamour’d of his lays, This fond memorial of his talents raise.

A voluntary subscription raised the monument to Collins. The genius of Flaxman has thrown out on the eloquent marble all that fancy would consecrate; the tomb is itself a poem.

There Collins is represented as sitting in a reclining posture, during a lucid interval of his afflicting malady, with a calm and benign aspect, as if seeking refuge from his misfortunes in the consolations of the Gospel, which lie open before him, whilst his lyre, and “The Ode on the Passions,” as a scroll, are thrown together neglected on the ground. Upon the pediment on the tablet are placed in relief two female figures of Love and Pity, entwined each in the arms of the other; the proper emblems of the genius of his poetry.

Langhorne, who gave an edition of Collins’s poems with all the fervour of a votary, made an observation not perfectly correct:—“It is observable,” he says, “that none of his poems bear the marks of an amorous disposition; and that he is one of those few poets who have sailed to Delphi without touching at Cythera. In the ‘Ode to the Passions,’ Love has been omitted.” There, indeed, Love does not form an important personage; yet, at the close, Love makes his transient appearance with Joy and Mirth—“a gay fantastic round.”

And, amidst his frolic play, As if he would the charming air repay, Shook thousand odours from his dewy wings.

It is certain, however, that Collins considered the amatory passion as unfriendly to poetic originality; for he alludes to the whole race of the Provençal poets, by accusing them of only employing

Love, only love, her forceless numbers mean.

Collins affected to slight the urchin; for he himself had been once in love, and his wit has preserved the history of his passion; he was attached to a young lady who was born the day before him, and who seems not to have been very poetically tempered, for she did not return his ardour. On that occasion he said “that he came into the world a day after the fair.”

Langhorne composed two sonnets, which seem only preserved in the “Monthly Review,” in which he was a writer, and where he probably inserted them; they bear a particular reference to the misfortunes of our poet. In one he represents Wisdom, in the form of Addison, reclining in “the old and honoured shade of Magdalen,” and thus addressing

The poor shade of Collins, wandering by; The tear stood trembling in his gentle eye, With modest grief reluctant, while he said— “Sweet bard, belov’d by every muse in vain! With pow’rs, whose fineness wrought their own decay; Ah! wherefore, thoughtless, didst thou yield the rein To fancy’s will, and chase the meteor ray? Ah! why forget thy own Hyblæan strain, Peace rules the breast, where Reason rules the day.”

The last line is most happily applied; it is a verse by the unfortunate bard himself, which heightens the contrast with his forlorn state! Langhorne has feelingly painted the fatal indulgences of such a character as Collins.

Of fancy’s too prevailing power beware! Oft has she bright on life’s fair morning shone; Oft seated Hope on Reason’s sovereign throne, Then closed the scene, in darkness and despair. Of all her gifts, of all her powers possest, Let not her flattery win thy youthful ear, Nor vow long faith to such a various guest, False at the last, tho’ now perchance full dear; The casual lover with her charms is blest, But woe to them her magic bands that wear!

The criticism of Johnson on the poetry of Collins, that “as men are often esteemed who cannot be loved, so the poetry of Collins may sometimes extort praise when it gives little pleasure,” might almost have been furnished by the lumbering pen of old Dennis. But Collins from the poetical never extorts praise, for it is given spontaneously; he is much more loved than esteemed, for he does not give little pleasure. Johnson, too, describes his “lines as of slow motion, clogged and impeded with clusters of consonants.” Even this verbal criticism, though it appeals to the eye, and not to the ear, is false criticism, since Collins is certainly the most musical of poets. How could that lyrist be harsh in his diction, who almost draws tears from our eyes, while his melodious lines and picturing epithets are remembered by his readers? He is devoured with as much enthusiasm by one party as he is imperfectly relished by the other.

Johnson has given two characters of this poet; the one composed at a period when that great critic was still susceptible of the seduction of the imagination; but even in this portrait, though some features of the poet are impressively drawn, the likeness is incomplete, for there is not even a slight indication of the chief feature in Collins’s genius, his tenderness and delicacy of emotion, and his fresh and picturesque creative strokes. Nature had denied to Johnson’s robust intellect the perception of these poetic qualities. He was but a stately ox in the fields of Parnassus, not the animal of nature. Many years afterwards, during his poetical biography, that long Lent of criticism, in which he mortified our poetical feeling by accommodating his to the populace of critics—so faint were former recollections, and so imperfect were even those feelings which once he seemed to have possessed—that he could then do nothing but write on Collins with much less warmth than he has written on Blackmore. Johnson is, indeed, the first of critics, when his powerful logic investigates objects submitted to reason; but great sense is not always combined with delicacy of taste; and there is in poetry a province which Aristotle himself may never have entered.

THE REWARDS OF ORIENTAL STUDENTS.

At a time when oriental studies were in their infancy in this country, Simon Ockley, animated by the illustrious example of Pococke and the laborious diligence of Prideaux, devoted his life and his fortune to these novel researches, which necessarily involved both. With that enthusiasm which the ancient votary experienced, and with that patient suffering the modern martyr has endured, he pursued, till he accomplished, the useful object of his labours. He, perhaps, was the first who exhibited to us other heroes than those of Rome and Greece; sages as contemplative, and a people more magnificent even than the iron masters of the world. Among other oriental productions, his most considerable is “The History of the Saracens.” The first volume appeared in 1708, and the second ten years afterwards. In the preface to the last volume, the oriental student pathetically counts over his sorrows, and triumphs over his disappointments; the most remarkable part is the date of the place from whence this preface was written—he triumphantly closes his labours in the confinement of Cambridge Castle for debt!

Ockley, lamenting his small proficiency in the Persian studies, resolves to attain to them—

“How often have I endeavoured to perfect myself in that language, but my malignant and envious stars still frustrated my attempts; but they shall sooner alter their courses than extinguish my resolution of quenching that thirst which the little I have had of it hath already excited.”

And he states the deficiencies of his history with the most natural modesty—

“Had I not been forced to snatch everything that I have, as it were, out of the fire, our Saracen history should have been ushered into the world after a different manner.” He is fearful that something would be ascribed to his indolence or negligence, that “ought more justly to be attributed to the influence of inexorable necessity, could I have been master of my own time and circumstances.”

Shame on those pretended patrons who, appointing “a professor of the oriental languages,” counteract the purpose of the professorship by their utter neglect of the professor, whose stipend cannot keep him on the spot where only he ought to dwell. And Ockley complains also of that hypocritical curiosity which pretends to take an interest in things it cares little about; perpetually inquiring, as soon as a work is announced, when it is to come out. But these Pharisees of literature, who can only build sepulchres to ancient prophets, never believe in a living one. Some of these Ockley met with on the publication of his first volume: they run it down as the strangest story they had ever heard; they had never met with such folks as the Arabians! “A reverend dignitary asked me if, when I wrote that book, I had not lately been reading the history of Oliver Cromwell?” Such was the plaudit the oriental student received, and returned to grow pale over his MSS. But when Petis de la Croix, observes Ockley, was pursuing the same track of study, in the patronage of Louis XIV., he found books, leisure, and encouragement; and when the great Colbert desired him to compose the life of Genkis Chan, he considered a period of ten years not too much to be allowed the author. And then Ockley proceeds—

“But my unhappy condition hath always been widely different from anything that could admit of such an exactness. Fortune seems only to have given me a taste of it out of spite, on purpose that I might regret the loss of it.”

He describes his two journeys to Oxford, for his first volume; but in his second, matters fared worse with him—

“Either my domestic affairs were grown much worse, or I less able to bear them; or what is more probable, both.”

Ingenuous confession! fruits of a life devoted in its struggles to important literature! and we murmur when genius is irritable, and erudition is morose! But let us proceed with Ockley:—

“I was forced to take the advantage of the slumber of my cares, that never slept when I was awake; and if they did not incessantly interrupt my studies, were sure to succeed them with no less constancy than night doth the day.”

This is the cry of agony. He who reads this without sympathy, ought to reject these volumes as the idlest he ever read, and honour me with his contempt. The close of Ockley’s preface shows a love-like tenderness for his studies; although he must quit life without bringing them to perfection, he opens his soul to posterity and tells them, in the language of prophecy, that if they will bestow encouragement on our youth, the misfortunes he has described will be remedied. He, indeed, was aware that these students—

“Will hardly come in upon the prospect of finding leisure, in a prison, to transcribe those papers for the press which they have collected with indefatigable labour, and oftentimes at the expense of their rest, and all the other conveniences of life, for the service of the public.”

Yet the exulting martyr of literature, at the moment he is fast bound to the stake, does not consider a prison so dreadful a reward for literary labours—

“I can assure them, from my own experience, that I have enjoyed more true liberty, more happy leisure, and more solid repose in six months here, than in thrice the same number of years before. Evil is the condition of that historian who undertakes to write the lives of others before he knows how to live himself. Yet I have no just reason to be angry with the world; I never stood in need of its assistance in my life, but I found it always very liberal of its advice; for which I am so much the more beholden to it, by how much the more I did always in my judgment give the possession of wisdom the preference to that of riches.”[128]

Poor Ockley, always a student, and rarely what is called a man of the world, once encountered a literary calamity which frequently occurs when an author finds himself among the vapid triflers and the polished cynics of the fashionable circle. Something like a patron he found in Harley, the Earl of Oxford, and once had the unlucky honour of dining at the table of my Lord Treasurer. It is probable that Ockley, from retired habits and severe studies, was not at all accomplished in the suaviter in modo, of which greater geniuses than Ockley have so surlily despaired. How he behaved I cannot narrate: probably he delivered himself with as great simplicity at the table of the Lord Treasurer as on the wrong side of Cambridge Castle gate. The embarrassment this simplicity drew him into is very fully stated in the following copious apology he addressed to the Earl of Oxford, which I have transcribed from the original; perhaps it may be a useful memorial to some men of letters as little polished as the learned Ockley:—