Note 348 — QUARRELS OF AUTHORS; (continued 4)

Shaftesbury has thrown out, on this head, some important truths:—“If men are forbid to speak their minds seriously, they will do it ironically. If they find it dangerous to do so, they will then redouble their disguise, invoke themselves into mysteriousness, and talk so as hardly to be understood. The persecuting spirit has raised the bantering one. The higher the slavery, the more exquisite the buffoonery.”—Vol. i. p. 71. The subject of our present inquiry is a very remarkable instance of “involving himself into mysteriousness.” To this cause we owe the strong raillery of Marvell; the cloudy “Oracles of Reason” of Blount; and the formidable, though gross burlesque, of Hickeringill, the rector of All-Saints, in Colchester. “Of him (says the editor of his collected works, 1716), the greatest writers of our times trembled at his pen; and as great a genius as Sir Roger L’Estrange’s was, it submitted to his superior way of reasoning”—that is, to a most extraordinary burlesque spirit in politics and religion. But even he who made others tremble felt the terrors he inflicted; for he complains that “some who have thought his pen too sharp and smart, those who have been galled, sore men where the skin’s off, have long lain to catch for somewhat to accuse me—upon such touchy subjects, a man had need have the dexterity to split a hair, to handle them pertinently, usefully, and yet safely and warily.”—Such men, however, cannot avoid their fate: they will be persecuted, however they succeed in “splitting a hair;” and it is then they have recourse to the most absurd subterfuges, to which our Hobbes was compelled. Thus also it happened to Woolston, who wrote in a ludicrous way “Blasphemies” against the miracles of Christ; calling them “tales and rodomontados.” He rested his defence on this subterfuge, that “it was meant to place the Christian religion on a better footing,” &c. But the Court answered, that “if the author of a treasonable libel should write at the conclusion, God save the king! it would not excuse him.”