QUARRELS OF AUTHORS; (continued 4)

Steele was doomed even to lose the friendship of Addison amid political discords; but on that occasion Steele showed that his taste for literature could not be injured by political animosity. It was at the close of Addison’s life, and on occasion of the Peerage Bill, Steele published “The Plebeian,” a cry against enlarging the aristocracy. Addison replied with “The Old Whig,” Steele rejoined without alluding to the person of his opponent. But “The Old Whig” could not restrain his political feelings, and contemptuously described “little Dicky, whose trade it was to write pamphlets.” Steele replied with his usual warmth; but indignant at the charge of “vassalage,” he says, “I will end this paper, by firing every free breast with that noble exhortation of the tragedian—

Remember, O my friends! the laws, the rights, The generous plan of power deliver’d down From age to age, &c.”

Thus delicately he detects the anonymous author, and thus energetically commends, while he reproves him!

Hooke (a Catholic), after he had written his “Roman History,” published “Observations on Vertot, Middleton, &c., on the Roman Senate,” in which he particularly treated Dr. Middleton with a disrespect for which the subject gave no occasion: this was attributed to the Doctor’s offensive letter from Rome. Spelman, in replying to this concealed motive of the Catholic, reprehends him with equal humour and bitterness for his desire of roasting a Protestant parson.

Our taste, rather than our passions, is here concerned; but the moral sense still more so. The malice of faction has long produced this literary calamity; yet great minds have not always degraded themselves; not always resisted the impulse of their finer feelings, by hardening them into insensibility, or goading them in the fury of a misplaced revenge. How delightful it is to observe Marvell, the Presbyterian and Republican wit, with that generous temper that instantly discovers the alliance of genius, warmly applauding the great work of Butler, which covered his own party with odium and ridicule. “He is one of an excellent wit,” says Marvell, “and whoever dislikes the choice of his subject, cannot but commend the performance.”[346]

Clarendon’s profound genius could not expand into the same liberal feelings. He highly commends May for his learning, his wit and language, and for his Supplement to Lucan, which he considered as “one of the best epic poems in the English language;” but this great spirit sadly winces in the soreness of his feelings when he alludes to May’s “History of the Parliament;” then we discover that this late “ingenious person” performed his part “so meanly, that he seems to have lost his wit when he left his honesty.” Behold the political criticism in literature! However we may incline to respect the feelings of Clarendon, this will not save his judgment nor his candour. We read May now, as well as Clarendon; nor is the work of May that of a man who “had lost his wits,” nor is it “meanly performed.” Warburton, a keen critic of the writers of that unhappy and that glorious age for both parties, has pronounced this “History” to be “a just composition, according to the rules of history; written with much judgment, penetration, manliness, and spirit, and with a candour that will greatly increase your esteem, when you understand that he wrote by order of his masters the Parliament.”

Thus have authors and their works endured the violations of party feelings; a calamity in our national literature which has produced much false and unjust criticism.[347] The better spirit of the present times will maintain a safer and a more honourable principle,—the true objects of Literature, the cultivation of the intellectual faculties, stand entirely unconnected with Politics and Religion, let this be the imprescriptible right of an author. In our free country unhappily they have not been separated—they run together, and in the ocean of human opinions, the salt and bitterness of these mightier waves have infected the clear waters from the springs of the Muses. I once read of a certain river that ran through the sea without mixing with it, preserving its crystalline purity and all its sweetness during its course; so that it tasted the same at the Line as at the Poles. This stream indeed is only to be found in the geography of an old romance; literature should be this magical stream!

HOBBES, AND HIS QUARRELS;

INCLUDING AN ILLUSTRATION OF HIS CHARACTER.

Why Hobbes disguised his sentiments—why his philosophy degraded him—of the sect of the Hobbists—his Leviathan; its principles adapted to existing circumstances—the author’s difficulties on its first appearance—the system originated in his fears, and was a contrivance to secure the peace of the nation—its duplicity and studied ambiguity illustrated by many facts—the advocate of the national religion—accused of atheism—Hobbe’s religion—his temper too often tried—attacked by opposite parties—Bishop Fell’s ungenerous conduct—makes Hobbes regret that juries do not consider the quarrels of authors of any moment—the mysterious panic which accompanied him through life—its probable cause—he pretends to recant his opinions—he is speculatively bold, and practically timorous—an extravagant specimen of the anti-social philosophy—the SELFISM of Hobbes—his high sense of his works, in regard to foreigners and posterity—his monstrous egotism—his devotion to his literary pursuits—the despotic principle of the Leviathan of an innocent tendency—the fate of systems of opinions.

The history of the philosopher of Malmesbury exhibits a large picture of literary controversy, where we may observe how a persecuting spirit in the times drives the greatest men to take refuge in the meanest arts of subterfuge. Compelled to disguise their sentiments, they will not, however, suppress them; and hence all their ambiguous proceedings, all that ridicule and irony, and even recantation, with which ingenious minds, when forced to their employ, have never failed to try the patience, or the sagacity, of intolerance.[348]

The character of Hobbes will, however, serve a higher moral design. The force of his intellect, the originality of his views, and the keenest sagacity of observation, place him in the first order of minds; but he has mortified, and then degraded man into a mere selfish animal. From a cause we shall discover, he never looked on human nature but in terror or in contempt. The inevitable consequence of that mode of thinking, or that system of philosophy, is to make the philosopher the abject creature he has himself imagined; and it is then he libels the species from his own individual experience.[349] More generous tempers, men endowed with warmer imaginations, awake to sympathies of a higher nature, will indignantly reject the system, which has reduced the unlucky system-maker himself to such a pitiable condition.

Hobbes was one of those original thinkers who create a new era in the philosophical history of their nation, and perpetuate their name by leaving it to a sect.[350]

The eloquent and thinking Madame de Staël has asserted that “Hobbes was an Atheist and a Slave.” Yet I still think that Hobbes believed, and proved, the necessary existence of a Deity, and that he loved freedom, as every sage desires it. It is now time to offer an apology for one of those great men who are the contemporaries of all ages, and, by fervent inquiry, to dissipate that traditional cloud which hangs over one of “those monuments of the mind” which Genius has built with imperishable materials.

The author of the far-famed “Leviathan” is considered as a vehement advocate for absolute monarchy. This singular production may, however, be equally adapted for a republic; and the monstrous principle may be so innocent in its nature, as even to enter into our own constitution, which presumes to be neither.[351]

As “The Leviathan” produced the numerous controversies of Hobbes, a history of this great moral curiosity enters into our subject.

Hobbes, living in times of anarchy, perceived the necessity of re-establishing authority with more than its usual force. But how were the divided opinions of men to melt together, and where in the State was to be placed absolute power? for a remedy of less force he could not discover for that disordered state of society which he witnessed. Was the sovereign or the people to be invested with that mighty power which was to keep every other quiescent?—a topic which had been discussed for ages, and still must be, as the humours of men incline—was, I believe, a matter perfectly indifferent to our philosopher, provided that whatever might be the government, absolute power could somewhere be lodged in it, to force men to act in strict conformity. He discovers his perplexity in the dedication of his work. “In a way beset with those that contend on one side for too great liberty, on the other side for too much authority, ’tis hard to pass between the points of both unwounded.” It happened that our cynical Hobbes had no respect for his species; terrified at anarchy, he seems to have lost all fear when he flew to absolute power—a sovereign remedy unworthy of a great spirit, though convenient for a timid one like his own. Hobbes considered men merely as animals of prey, living in a state of perpetual hostility, and his solitary principle of action was self-preservation at any price.

He conjured up a political phantom, a favourite and fanciful notion, that haunted him through life. He imagined that the many might be more easily managed by making them up into an artificial One, and calling this wonderful political unity the Commonwealth, or the Civil Power, or the Sovereign, or by whatever name was found most pleasing; he personified it by the image of “Leviathan.”[352]

At first sight the ideal monster might pass for an innocent conceit; and there appears even consummate wisdom in erecting a colossal power for our common security; but Hobbes assumed that Authority was to be supported to its extreme pitch. Force with him appeared to constitute right, and unconditional submission then became a duty: these were consequences quite natural to one who at his first step degraded man by comparing him to a watch, and who would not have him go but with the same nicety of motion, wound up by a great key.

To be secure, by the system of Hobbes, we must at least lose the glory of our existence as intellectual beings. He would persuade us into the dead quietness of a commonwealth of puppets, while he was consigning into the grasp of his “Leviathan,” or sovereign power, the wire that was to communicate a mockery of vital motion—a principle of action without freedom. The system was equally desirable to the Protector Cromwell as to the regal Charles. A conspiracy against mankind could not alarm their governors: it is not therefore surprising that the usurper offered Hobbes the office of Secretary of State; and that he was afterwards pensioned by the monarch.

A philosophical system, moral or political, is often nothing more than a temporary expedient to turn aside the madness of the times by substituting what offers an appearance of relief; nor is it a little influenced by the immediate convenience of the philosopher himself; his personal character enters a good deal into the system. The object of Hobbes in his “Leviathan” was always ambiguous, because it was, in truth, one of these systems of expediency, conveniently adapted to what has been termed of late “existing circumstances.” His sole aim was to keep all things in peace, by creating one mightiest power in the State, to suppress instantly all other powers that might rise in insurrection. In his times, the establishment of despotism was the only political restraint he could discover of sufficient force to chain man down, amid the turbulence of society; but this concealed end he is perpetually shifting and disguising; for the truth is, no man loved slavery less.[353]

The system of Hobbes could not be limited to politics: he knew that the safety of the people’s morals required an Established Religion. The alliance between Church and State had been so violently shaken, that it was necessary to cement them once more. As our philosopher had been terrified in his politics by the view of its contending factions, so, in religion, he experienced the same terror at the hereditary rancours of its multiplied sects. He could devise no other means than to attack the mysteries and dogmas of theologians, those after-inventions and corruptions of Christianity, by which the artifices of their chiefs had so long split them into perpetual factions:[354] he therefore asserted that the religion of the people ought to exist, in strict conformity to the will of the State.[355]

When Hobbes wrote against mysteries, the mere polemics sent forth a cry of his impiety; the philosopher was branded with Atheism;—one of those artful calumnies, of which, after a man has washed himself clean, the stain will be found to have dyed the skin.[356]

To me it appears that Hobbes, to put an end to these religious wars, which his age and country had witnessed, perpetually kindled by crazy fanatics and intolerant dogmatists, insisted that the crosier should be carried in the left hand of his Leviathan, and the sword in his right.[357] He testified, as strongly as man could, by his public actions, that he was a Christian of the Church of England, “as by law established,” and no enemy to the episcopal order; but he dreaded the encroachments of the Churchmen in his political system; jealous of that supremacy at which some of them aimed. Many enlightened bishops sided with the philosopher.[358] At a time when Milton sullenly withdrew from every public testimonial of divine worship, Hobbes, with more enlightened views, attended Church service, and strenuously supported an established religion; yet one is deemed a religious man, and the other an Atheist! Were the actions of men to be decisive of their characters, the reverse might be inferred.

The temper of our philosopher, so ill-adapted to contradiction, was too often tried; and if, as his adversary, Harrington, in the “Oceana,” says, “Truth be a spark whereunto objections are like bellows,” the mind of Hobbes, for half a century, was a very forge, where the hammer was always beating, and the flame was never allowed to be extinguished. Charles II. strikingly described his worrying assailants. “Hobbes,” said the king, “was a bear against whom the Church played their young dogs, in order to exercise them.”[359] A strange repartee has preserved the causticity of his wit. Dr. Eachard, perhaps one of the prototypes of Swift, wrote two admirable ludicrous dialogues, in ridicule of Hobbes’s “State of Nature.”[360] These were much extolled, and kept up the laugh against the philosophic misanthropist: once when he was told that the clergy said that “Eachard had crucified Hobbes,” he bitterly retorted, “Why, then, don’t they fall down and worship me?”[361]

“The Leviathan” was ridiculed by the wits, declaimed against by the republicans, denounced by the monarchists, and menaced by the clergy. The commonwealth man, the dreamer of equality, Harrington, raged at the subtile advocate for despotic power; but the glittering bubble of his fanciful “Oceana” only broke on the mighty sides of the Leviathan, wasting its rainbow tints: the mitred Bramhall, at “The Catching of Leviathan, or the Great Whale,” flung his harpoon, demonstrating consequences from the principles of Hobbes, which he as eagerly denied. But our ambiguous philosopher had the hard fate to be attacked even by those who were labouring to the same end.[362] The literary wars of Hobbes were fierce and long; heroes he encountered, but heroes too were fighting by his side. Our chief himself wore a kind of magical armour; for, either he denied the consequences his adversaries deduced from his principles, or he surprised by new conclusions, which many could not discover in them; but by such means he had not only the art of infusing confidence among the Hobbists, but the greater one of dividing his adversaries, who often retreated, rather fatigued than victorious. Hobbes owed this partly to the happiness of a genius which excelled in controversy, but more, perhaps, to the advantage of the ground he occupied as a metaphysician: the usual darkness of that spot is favourable to those shiftings and turnings which the equivocal possessor may practise with an unwary assailant. Far different was the fate of Hobbes in the open daylight of mathematics: there his hardy genius lost him, and his sophistry could spin no web; as we shall see in the memorable war of twenty years waged between Hobbes and Dr. Wallis. But the gall of controversy was sometimes tasted, and the flames of persecution flashed at times in the closet of our philosopher. The ungenerous attack of Bishop Fell, who, in the Latin translation of Wood’s “History of the University of Oxford,” had converted eulogium into the most virulent abuse,[363] without the participation of Wood, who resented it with his honest warmth, was only an arrow snatched from a quiver which was every day emptying itself on the devoted head of our ambiguous philosopher. Fell only vindicated himself by a fresh invective on “the most vain and waspish animal of Malmesbury,” and Hobbes was too frightened to reply. This was the Fell whom it was so difficult to assign a reason for not liking:

I don’t like thee, Dr. Fell, The reason why I cannot tell, But I don’t like thee, Dr. Fell!

A curious incident in the history of the mind of this philosopher, was the mysterious panic which accompanied him to his latest day. It has not been denied that Hobbes was subject to occasional terrors: he dreaded to be left without company; and a particular instance is told, that on the Earl of Devonshire’s removal from Chatsworth, the philosopher, then in a dying state, insisted on being carried away, though on a feather-bed. Various motives have been suggested to account for this extraordinary terror. Some declared he was afraid of spirits; but he was too stout a materialist![364]—another, that he dreaded assassination; an ideal poniard indeed might scare even a materialist. But Bishop Atterbury, in a sermon on the Terrors of Conscience, illustrates their nature by the character of our philosopher. Hobbes is there accused of attempting to destroy the principles of religion against his own inward conviction: this would only prove the insanity of Hobbes! The Bishop shows that “the disorders of conscience are not a continued, but an intermitting disease;” so that the patient may appear at intervals in seeming health and real ease, till the fits return: all this he applies to the case of our philosopher. In reasoning on human affairs, the shortest way will be to discover human motives. The spirit, or the assassin of Hobbes, arose from the bill brought into Parliament, when the nation was panic-struck on the fire of London, against Atheism and Profaneness; he had a notion that a writ de heretico comburendo was intended for him by Bishop Seth Ward, his quondam admirer.[365] His spirits would sink at those moments; for in the philosophy of Hobbes, the whole universe was concentrated in the small space of Self. There was no length he refused to go for what he calls “the natural right of preservation, which we all receive from the uncontrollable dictates of Necessity.” He exhausts his imagination in the forcible descriptions of his extinction: “the terrible enemy of nature, Death,” is always before him. The “inward horror” he felt of his extinction, Lord Clarendon thus alludes to: “If Mr. Hobbes and some other man were both condemned to death (which is the most formidable thing Mr. Hobbes can conceive)”—and Dr. Eachard rallies him on the infinite anxiety he bestowed on his body, and thinks that “he had better compound to be kicked and beaten twice a day, than to be so dismally tortured about an old rotten carcase.” Death was perhaps the only subject about which Hobbes would not dispute.

Such a materialist was then liable to terrors; and though, when his works were burnt, the author had not a hair singed, the convulsion of the panic often produced, as Bishop Atterbury expresses it, “an intermitting disease.”

Persecution terrified Hobbes, and magnanimity and courage were no virtues in his philosophy. He went about hinting that he was not obstinate (that is, before the Bench of Bishops); that his opinions were mere conjectures, proposed as exercises for the powers of reasoning. He attempted (without meaning to be ludicrous) to make his opinions a distinct object from his person; and, for the good order of the latter, he appealed to the family chaplain for his attendance at divine service, from whence, however, he always departed at the sermon, insisting that the chaplain could not teach him anything. It was in one of these panics that he produced his “Historical Narrative of Heresy, and the Punishment thereof,” where, losing the dignity of the philosophic character, he creeps into a subterfuge with the subtilty of the lawyer; insisting that “The Leviathan,” being published at a time when there was no distinction of creeds in England (the Court of High Commission having been abolished in the troubles), that therefore none could be heretical.[366]

No man was more speculatively bold, and more practically timorous;[367] and two very contrary principles enabled him, through an extraordinary length of life, to deliver his opinions and still to save himself: these were his excessive vanity and his excessive timidity. The one inspired his hardy originality, and the other prompted him to protect himself by any means. His love of glory roused his vigorous intellect, while his fears shrunk him into his little self. Hobbes, engaged in the cause of truth, betrayed her dignity by his ambiguous and abject conduct: this was a consequence of his selfish philosophy; and this conduct has yielded no dubious triumph to the noble school which opposed his cynical principles.

A genius more luminous, sagacity more profound, and morals less tainted, were never more eminently combined than in this very man, who was so often reduced to the most abject state. But the anti-social philosophy of Hobbes terminated in preserving a pitiful state of existence. He who considered nothing more valuable than life, degraded himself by the meanest artifices of self-love,[368] and exulted in the most cynical truths.[369] The philosophy of Hobbes, founded on fear and suspicion, and which, in human nature, could see nothing beyond himself, might make him a wary politician, but always an imperfect social being. We find, therefore, that the philosopher of Malmesbury adroitly retained a friend at court, to protect him at an extremity; but considering all men alike, as bargaining for themselves, his friends occasioned him as much uneasiness as his enemies. He lived in dread that the Earl of Devonshire, whose roof had ever been his protection, should at length give him up to the Parliament! There are no friendships among cynics!

To such a state of degradation had the selfish philosophy reduced one of the greatest geniuses; a philosophy true only for the wretched and the criminal.[370] But those who feel moving within themselves the benevolent principle, and who delight in acts of social sympathy, are conscious of passions and motives, which the others have omitted in their system. And the truth is, these “unnatural philosophers,” as Lord Shaftesbury expressively terms them, are by no means the monsters they tell us they are: their practice is therefore usually in opposition to their principles. While Hobbes was for chaining down mankind as so many beasts of prey, he surely betrayed his social passion, in the benevolent warnings he was perpetually giving them; and while he affected to hold his brothers in contempt, he was sacrificing laborious days, and his peace of mind, to acquire celebrity. Who loved glory more than this sublime cynic?—“Glory,” says our philosopher, “by those whom it displeaseth, is called Pride; by those whom it pleaseth, it is termed a just valuation of himself.”[371] Had Hobbes defined, as critically, the passion of self-love, without resolving all our sympathies into a single monstrous one, we might have been disciplined without being degraded.

Hobbes, indeed, had a full feeling of the magnitude of his labours, both for foreigners and posterity, as he has expressed it in his life. He disperses, in all his works, some Montaigne-like notices of himself, and they are eulogistic. He has not omitted any one of his virtues, nor even an apology for his deficiency in others. He notices with complacency how Charles II. had his portrait placed in the royal cabinet; how it was frequently asked for by his friends, in England and in France.[372] He has written his life several times, in verse and in prose; and never fails to throw into the eyes of his adversaries the reputation he gained abroad and at home.[373] He delighted to show he was living, by annual publications; and exultingly exclaims, “That when he had silenced his adversaries, he published, in the eighty-seventh year of his life, the Odyssey of Homer, and the next year the Iliad, in English verse.”

His greatest imperfection was a monstrous egotism—the fate of those who concentrate all their observations in their own individual feelings. There are minds which may think too much, by conversing too little with books and men. Hobbes exulted he had read little; he had not more than half-a-dozen books about him; hence he always saw things in his own way, and doubtless this was the cause of his mania for disputation.

He wrote against dogmas with a spirit perfectly dogmatic. He liked conversation on the terms of his own political system, provided absolute authority was established, peevishly referring to his own works whenever contradicted; and his friends stipulated with strangers, that “they should not dispute with the old man.” But what are we to think of that pertinacity of opinion which he held even with one as great as himself? Selden has often quitted the room, or Hobbes been driven from it, in the fierceness of their battle.[374] Even to his latest day, the “war of words” delighted the man of confined reading. The literary duels between Hobbes and another hero celebrated in logomachy, the Catholic priest, Thomas White, have been recorded by Wood. They had both passed their eightieth year, and were fond of paying visits to one another: but the two literary Nestors never met to part in cool blood, “wrangling, squabbling, and scolding on philosophical matters,” as our blunt and lively historian has described.[375]

His little qualities were the errors of his own selfish philosophy; his great ones were those of nature. He was a votary to his studies:[376] he avoided marriage, to which he was inclined; and refused place and wealth, which he might have enjoyed, for literary leisure. He treated with philosophic pleasantry his real contempt of money.[377] His health and his studies were the sole objects of his thoughts; and notwithstanding that panic which so often disturbed them, he wrote and published beyond his ninetieth year. He closes the metrical history of his life with more dignity than he did his life itself; for his mind seems always to have been greater than his actions. He appeals to his friends for the congruity of his life with his writings; for his devotion to justice; and for a generous work, which no miser could have planned; and closes thus:—

And now complete my four-and-eighty years, Life’s lengthen’d plot is o’er, and the last scene appears.[378]

Of the works of Hobbes we must not conclude, as Hume tells us, that “they have fallen into neglect;” nor, in the style with which they were condemned at Oxford, that “they are pernicious and damnable.” The sanguine opinion of the author himself was, that the mighty “Leviathan” will stand for all ages, defended by its own strength; for the rule of justice, the reproof of the ambitious, the citadel of the Sovereign, and the peace of the people.[379] But the smaller treatises of Hobbes are not less precious. Locke is the pupil of Hobbes, and it may often be doubtful whether the scholar has rivalled the nervous simplicity and the energetic originality of his master.

The genius of Hobbes was of the first order; his works abound with the most impressive truths, in all the simplicity of thought and language, yet he never elevates nor delights. Too faithful an observer of the miserable human nature before him, he submits to expedients; he acts on the defensive; and because he is in terror, he would consider security to be the happiness of man. In Religion he would stand by an established one; yet thus he deprives man of that moral freedom which God himself has surely allowed us. Locke has the glory of having first given distinct notions of the nature of toleration. In Politics his great principle is the establishment of Authority, or, as he terms it, an “entireness of sovereign power:” here he seems to have built his arguments with such eternal truths and with such a contriving wisdom as to adapt his system to all the changes of government. Hobbes found it necessary in his day to place this despotism in the hands of his colossal monarch; and were Hobbes now living, he would not relinquish the principle, though perhaps he might vary the application; for if Authority, strong as man can create it, is not suffered to exist in our free constitution, what will become of our freedom? Hobbes would now maintain his system by depositing his “entireness of sovereign power” in the Laws of his Country. So easily shifted is the vast political machine of the much abused “Leviathan!” The Citizen of Hobbes, like the Prince of Machiavel, is alike innocent, when the end of their authors is once detected, amid those ambiguous means by which the hard necessity of their times constrained their mighty genius to disguise itself.

It is, however, remarkable of Systems of Opinions, that the founder’s celebrity has usually outlived his sect’s. Why are systems, when once brought into practice, so often discovered to be fallacies? It seems to me the natural progress of system-making. A genius of this order of invention long busied with profound observations and perpetual truths, would appropriate to himself this assemblage of his ideas, by stamping his individual mark on them; for this purpose he strikes out some mighty paradox, which gives an apparent connexion to them all: and to this paradox he forces all parts into subserviency. It is a minion of the fancy, which his secret pride supports, not always by the most scrupulous means. Hence the system itself, with all its novelty and singularity, turns out to be nothing more than an ingenious deception carried on for the glory of the inventor; and when his followers perceive they were the dupes of his ingenuity, they are apt, in quitting the system, to give up all; not aware that the parts are as true as the whole together is false; the sagacity of Genius collected the one, but its vanity formed the other!

HOBBES’S QUARRELS

WITH DR. WALLIS THE MATHEMATICIAN.

Hobbes’s passion for the study of Mathematics began late in life—attempts to be an original discoverer—attacked by Wallis—various replies and rejoinders—nearly maddened by the opposition he encountered—after four years of truce, the war again renewed—character of Hobbes by Dr. Wallis, a specimen of invective and irony; serving as a remarkable instance how the greatest genius may come down to us disguised by the arts of an adversary—Hobbes’s noble defence of himself; of his own great reputation; of his politics; and of his religion—a literary stratagem of his—reluctantly gives up the contest, which lasted twenty years.

The Mathematical War between Hobbes and the celebrated Dr. Wallis is now to be opened. A series of battles, the renewed campaigns of more than twenty years, can be described by no term less eventful. Hobbes himself considered it as a war, and it was a war of idle ambition, in which he took too much delight. His “Amata Mathemata” became his pride, his pleasure, and at length his shame. He attempted to maintain his irruption into a province he ought never to have entered in defiance, by “a new method;” but having invaded the powerful natives, he seems to have almost repented the folly, and retires, leaving “the unmanageable brutes” to themselves:

Ergo meam statuo non ultra perdere opellam Indocile expectans discere posse pecus.

His language breathes war, while he sounds his retreat, and confesses his repulse. The Algebraists had all declared against the Invader.

Wallisius contra pugnat; victusque videbar Algebristarum Theiologumque scholis, Et simul eductus Castris exercitus omnis Pugnæ securus Wallisianus ovat.

And,

Pugna placet vertor— Bella mea audisti—&c.

So that we have sufficient authority to consider this Literary Quarrel as a war, and a “Bellum Peloponnesiacum” too, for it lasted as long. Political, literary, and even personal feelings were called in to heat the temperate blood of two Mathematicians.

What means this tumult in a Vestal’s veins?

Hobbes was one of the many victims who lost themselves in squaring the circle, and doubling the cube. He applied, late in life, to mathematical studies, not so much, he says, to learn the subtile demonstrations of its figures, as to acquire those habits of close reasoning, so useful in the discovery of new truths, to prove or to refute. So justly he reasoned on mathematics; but so ill he practised the science, that it made him the most unreasonable being imaginable, for he resisted mathematical demonstration, itself![380]

His great and original character could not but prevail in everything he undertook; and his egotism tempted him to raise a name in the world of Science, as he had in that of Politics and Morals. With the ardour of a young mathematician, he exclaimed, “Eureka!” “I have found it.” The quadrature of the circle was indeed the common Dulcinea of the Quixotes of the time; but they had all been disenchanted. Hobbes alone clung to his ridiculous mistress. Repeatedly confuted, he was perpetually resisting old reasonings and producing new ones. Were only genius requisite for an able mathematician, Hobbes had been among the first; but patience and docility, not fire and fancy, are necessary. His reasonings were all paralogisms, and he had always much to say, from not understanding the subject of his inquiries.

When Hobbes published his “De Corpore Philosophico,” 1655, he there exulted that he had solved the great mystery. Dr. Wallis, the Savilian professor of mathematics at Oxford,[381] with a deep aversion to Hobbes’s political and religious sentiments, as he understood them, rejoiced to see this famous combatant descending into his own arena. He certainly was eager to meet him single-handed; for he instantly confuted Hobbes, by his “Elenchus Geometriæ Hobbianæ.” Hobbes, who saw the newly-acquired province of his mathematics in danger, and which, like every new possession, seemed to involve his honour more than was necessary, called on all the world to be witnesses of this mighty conflict. He now published his work in English, with a sarcastic addition, in a magisterial tone, of “Six Lessons to the Professors of Mathematics in Oxford.” These were Seth Ward[382] and Wallis, both no friends to Hobbes, and who hungered after him as a relishing morsel. Wallis now replied in English, by “Due Correction for Mr. Hobbes, or School-discipline for not saying his Lessons Right,” 1656. That part of controversy which is usually the last had already taken place in their choice of phrases.[383]

In the following year the campaign was opened by Hobbes with “ΣΤΙΓΜΑΙ; or, marks of the absurd Geometry, rural Language, Scottish Church-politics, and Barbarisms, of John Wallis.” Quick was the routing of these fresh forces; not one was to escape alive! for Wallis now took the field with “Hobbiani Puncti dispunctio! or, the undoing of Mr. Hobbes’s Points; in answer to Mr. Hobbes’s ΣΤΙΓΜΑΙ, id est, Stigmata Hobbii.” Hobbes seems now to have been reduced to great straits; perhaps he wondered at the obstinacy of his adversary. It seems that Hobbes, who had been used to other studies, and who confesses all the algebraists were against him, could not conceive a point to exist without quantity; or a line could be drawn without latitude; or a superficies be without depth or thickness; but mathematicians conceive them without these qualities, when they exist abstractedly in the mind; though, when for the purposes of science they are produced to the senses, they necessarily have all the qualities. It was understanding these figures, in the vulgar way, which led Hobbes into a labyrinth of confusions and absurdities.[384] They appear to have nearly maddened the clear and vigorous intellect of our philosopher; for he exclaims, in one of these writings:—

“I alone am mad, or they are all out of their senses: so that no third opinion can be taken, unless any will say that we are all mad.”

Four years of truce were allowed to intervene between the next battle; when the irrefutable Hobbes, once more collecting his weak and his incoherent forces, arranged them, as well as he was able, into “Six Dialogues,” 1661. The utter annihilation he intended for his antagonist fell on himself. Wallis borrowing the character of “The Self-tormentor” from Terence, produced “Hobbius Heauton-timorumenos (Hobbes the Self-tormentor); or, a Consideration of Mr. Hobbes’s Dialogues; addressed to Robert Boyle,” 1662.

This attack of Wallis is of a very opposite character to the arid discussion of abstract blunders in geometry. He who began with points, and doubling the cube, and squaring the circle, now assumes a loftier tone, and carrying his personal and moral feelings into a mere controversy between two idle mathematicians, he has formed a solemn invective, and edged it with irony. I hope the reader has experienced sufficient interest in the character of Hobbes to read the long, but curious extract I shall now transcribe, with that awe and reverence which the old man claims. It will show how even the greatest genius may be disguised, when viewed through the coloured medium of an adversary. One is, however, surprised to find such a passage in a mathematical work.

“He doth much improve; I mean he doth, proficere in pejus; more, indeed, than I could reasonably have expected he would have done;—insomuch, that I cannot but profess some relenting thoughts (though I had formerly occasion to use him somewhat coarsely), to see an old man thus fret and torment himself to no purpose. You, too, should pity your antagonist; not as if he did deserve it, but because he needs it; and as Chremes, in Terence, of his Senex, his self-tormenting Menedemus—

Cum videam miserum hunc tam excruciarier Miseret me ejus. Quod potero adjutabo senem.

“Consider the temper of the man, to move your pity; a person extremely passionate and peevish, and wholly impatient of contradiction. A temper which, whether it be a greater fault or torment (to one who must so often meet with what he is so ill able to bear), is hard to say.

“And to this fretful humour you must add another as bad, which feeds it. You are therefore next to consider him as one highly opinionative and magisterial. Fanciful in his conceptions, and deeply enamoured with those phantasmes, without a rival. He doth not spare to profess, upon all occasions, how incomparably he thinks himself to have surpassed all, ancient, modern, schools, academies, persons, societies, philosophers, divines, heathens, Christians; how despicable he thinks all their writings in comparison of his; and what hopes he hath, that, by the sovereign command of some absolute prince, all other doctrines being exploded, his new dictates should be peremptorily imposed, to be alone taught in all schools and pulpits, and universally submitted to. To recount all which he speaks of himself magnificently, and contemptuously of others, would fill a volume. Should some idle person read over all his books, and collecting together his arrogant and supercilious speeches, applauding himself, and despising all other men, set them forth in one synopsis, with this title, Hobbius de se—what a pretty piece of pageantry this would make!

“The admirable sweetness of your own nature has not given you the experience of such a temper: yet your contemplation must have needs discerned it, in those symptoms which you have seen it work in others, like the strange effervescence, ebullition, fumes, and fetors, which you have sometimes given yourself the content to observe, in some active acrimonious chymical spirits upon the injection of some contrariant salts strangely vexing, fretting, and tormenting itself, while it doth but administer sport to the unconcerned spectator. Which temper, being so eminent in the person we have to deal with, your generous nature, which cannot but pity affliction, how much soever deserved, must needs have some compassion for him: who, besides those exquisite torments wherewith he doth afflict himself, like that

——quo Siculi non invenere Tyranni Tormentum majus—

is unavoidably exposed to those two great mischiefs; an incapacity to be taught what he doth not know, or to be advised when he thinks amiss; and moreover, to this inconvenience, that he must never hear his faults but from his adversaries; for those who are willing to be reputed friends must either not advertise what they see amiss, or incommode themselves.

“But, you will ask, what need he thus torment himself? What need of pity? If he have hopes to be admitted the sole dictator in philosophy, civil and natural, in schools and pulpits, and to be owned as the only magister sententiarum, what would he have more?

“True, if he have; but what if he have not? That he had some hopes of such an honour, he hath not been sparing to let us know, and was providing against the envy that might attend it (nec deprecabor invidiam, sed augendo, ulciscar, was his resolution); but I doubt these hopes are at an end. He did not find (as he expected) that the fairies and hobgoblins (for such he reputes all that went before him) did vanish presently, upon the first appearance of his sunshine: and, which is worse, while he was on the one side guarding himself against envy, he is, on the other side, unhappily surprised by a worse enemy, called contempt, and with which he is less able to grapple.

“I forbear to mention (lest I might seem to reproach that age which I reverence) the disadvantages which he may sustain by his old age. ’Tis possible that time and age, in a person somewhat morose, may have riveted faster that preconceived opinion of his own worth and excellency beyond others. ’Tis possible, also, that he may have forgotten much of what once he knew. He may, perhaps, be sometimes more secure than safe; while trusting to what he thinks a firm foundation, his footing fails him; nor always so vigilant or quicksighted as to discern the incoherence or inconsequence of his own discourses; unwilling, notwithstanding, to make use of the eyes of other men, lest he should seem thereby to disparage his own; but certainly (though his will may be as good as ever) his parts are less vegete and nimble, as to invention at least, than in his younger days.

“While he had endeavoured only to raise an expectation, or put the world in hopes of what great things he had in hand (to render all philosophy as clear and certain as Euclid’s Elements), if he had then died, it might, perhaps, have been thought by some that the world had been deprived of a great philosopher, and learning sustained an invaluable loss, by the abortion of so desired a piece. But since that Partus Montis is come to light, and found to be no more than what little animals have brought forth, and that deformed enough and unamiable, he might have sooner gone off the stage with more advantage than now he is like to do; such is the misfortune for a man to outlive his reputation!

“By this time, perhaps, you may see cause to pity him while you see him falling. But if you consider him tumbling headlong from so great a height, ’twill make some addition to that compassion which doth already begin to work. You are therefore next to consider that when, upon the account of geometry, he was unsafely mounted to that height of vanity, he did unhappily fall into the hands of two mathematicians, who have used him so unmercifully as would have put a person of greater patience into passion, and meeting with such a temper, have so discomposed him that he hath ever since talked idly: and to augment the grief, these mathematicians were both divines—he had rather have fallen by any other hand. These mathematical divines (a term which he had thought incomponible) began to unravel the wrong end; and while he thought they should have first untiled the roof, and by degrees gone downward, they strike at the foundation, and make the building tumble all at once; and that in such confusion, that by dashing one part against another, they make each help to destroy the whole. They first fall upon his last reserve, and rout his mathematics beyond a possibility of rallying; and by firing his magazine upon the first assault, make his own weapons fight against him. Not contented herewith, they enter the breach, and pursue the rout through his Logics, Physics, Metaphysics, Theology, where they find all in confusion.”

This invective and irony from this celebrated mathematician, so much out of the path of his habitual studies, might have proved a tremendous blow; but the genius of Hobbes was invulnerable to mere human opposition, unless accompanied by the supernatural terrors of penal fires or perpetual dungeons. Our hero received the whole discharge of this battering train, and stood invulnerable, while he returned the fire in “Considerations upon the Reputation, Loyalty, Manners, and Religion of Thomas Hobbes, of Malmesbury, written by way of Letter to a learned person, Dr. Wallis,” 1662.

It is an extraordinary production. His lofty indignation retorts on the feeble irony of his antagonist with keen and caustic accusations; and the green strength of youth was still seen in the old man whose head was covered with snows.

From this spirited apology for himself I shall give some passages. Hobbes thus replied to Dr. Wallis, who affected to consider the old man as a fit object for commiseration.

“You would make him contemptible, and move Mr. Boyle to pity him. This is a way of railing too much beaten to be thought witty: besides, ’tis no argument of your contempt to spend upon him so many angry lines, as would have furnished you with a dozen of sermons. If you had in good earnest despised him, you would have let him alone, as he does Dr. Ward, Mr. Baxter, Pike, and others, that have reviled him as you do. As for his reputation beyond the seas, it fades not yet; and because, perhaps, you have no means to know it, I will cite you a passage of an epistle written by a learned Frenchman to an eminent person in France, in a volume of epistles.” Hobbes quotes the passage at length, in which his name appears joined with Galileo, Descartes, Bacon, and Gassendi.

In reply to Wallis’ sarcastic suggestion that an idle person should collect together Hobbes’s arrogant and supercilious speeches applauding himself, under one title, Hobbius de se, he says—

“Let your idle person do it; Mr. Hobbes shall acknowledge them under his hand, and be commended for it, and you scorned. A certain Roman senator having propounded something in the assembly of the people, which they, misliking, made a noise at, boldly bade them hold their peace, and told them he knew better what was good for the commonwealth than all they; and his words are transmitted to us as an argument of his virtue; so much do truth and vanity alter the complexion of self-praise. You can have very little skill in morality, that cannot see the justice of commending a man’s self, as well as of anything else, in his own defence; and it was want of prudence in you to constrain him to a thing that would so much displease you.

“When you make his age a reproach to him, and show no cause that might impair the faculties of his mind, but only age, I admire how you saw not that you reproached all old men in the world as much as him, and warranted all young men, at a certain time which they themselves shall define, to call you fool! Your dislike of old age you have also otherwise sufficiently signified, in venturing so fairly as you have done to escape it. But that is no great matter to one that hath so many marks upon him of much greater reproaches. By Mr. Hobbes’s calculation, that derives prudence from experience, and experience from age, you are a very young man; but, by your own reckoning, you are older already than Methuselah.

“During the late trouble, who made both Oliver and the people mad but the preachers of your principles? But besides the wickedness, see the folly of it. You thought to make them mad, but just to such a degree as should serve your own turn; that is to say, mad, and yet just as wise as yourselves. Were you not very imprudent to think to govern madness?”—p. 15.

“The king was hunted as a partridge in the mountains, and though the hounds have been hanged, yet the hunters were as guilty as they, and deserved no less punishment. And the decypherers (Wallis had decyphered the royal letters),[385] and all that blew the horn, are to be reckoned among the hunters. Perhaps you would not have had the prey killed, but rather have kept it tame. And yet who can tell? I have read of few kings deprived of their power by their own subjects that have lived any long time after it, for reasons that every man is able to conjecture.”

He closes with a very odd image of the most cynical contempt:—

“Mr. Hobbes has been always far from provoking any man, though, when he is provoked, you find his pen as sharp as yours. All you have said is error and railing; that is, stinking wind, such as a jade lets fly when he is too hard girt upon a full belly. I have done. I have considered you now, but will not again, whatsoever preferment any of your friends shall procure you.”

These were the pitched battles; but many skirmishes occasionally took place. Hobbes was even driven to a ruse de guerre. When he found his mathematical character in the utmost peril, there appeared a pamphlet, entitled “Lux Mathematica, &c., or, Mathematical Light struck out from the clashings between Dr. John Wallis, Professor of Geometry in the celebrated University of Oxford (celeberrima Academia), and Thomas Hobbes, of Malmesbury; augmented with many and shining rays of the Author, R. R.” 1672.

Here the victories of Hobbes are trumpeted forth, but the fact is, that R. R. should have been T. H. It was Hobbes’s own composition! R. R. stood for Roseti Repertor, that is, the Finder of the Rosary, one of the titles of Hobbes’s mathematical discoveries. Wallis asserts that this R. R. may still serve, for it may answer his own book, “Roseti Refutator, or, the Refuter of the Rosary.”

Poor Hobbes gave up the contest reluctantly; if, indeed, the controversy may not be said to have lasted all his life. He acknowledges he was writing to no purpose; and that the medicine was obliged to yield to the disease.

Sed nil profeci, magnis authoribus Error Fultus erat, cessit sic Medicina malo.

He seems to have gone down to the grave, in spite of all the reasonings of the geometricians on this side of it, with a firm conviction that its superficies had both depth and thickness.[386] Such were the fruits of a great genius, entering into a province out of his own territories; and, though a most energetic reasoner, so little skilful in these new studies, that he could never know when he was confuted and refuted.[387]

JONSON AND DECKER.

Ben Jonson appears to have carried his military spirit into the literary republic—his gross convivialities, with anecdotes of the prevalent taste in that age for drinking-bouts—his “Poetaster” a sort of Dunciad, besides a personal attack on the frequenters of the theatres, with anecdotes—his Apologetical Dialogue, which was not allowed to be repeated—characters of Decker and of Marston—Decker’s Satiromastix, a parody on Jonson’s “Poetaster”—Ben exhibited under the character of “Horace Junior”—specimens of that literary satire; its dignified remonstrance, and the honourable applause bestowed on the great bard—some foibles in the literary habits of Ben, alluded to by Decker—Jonson’s noble reply to his detractors and rivals.

This quarrel is a splendid instance how genius of the first order, lavishing its satirical powers on a number of contemporaries, may discover, among the crowd, some individual who may return with a right aim the weapon he has himself used, and who will not want for encouragement to attack the common assailant: the greater genius is thus mortified by a victory conceded to the inferior, which he himself had taught the meaner one to obtain over him.

Jonson, in his earliest productions, “Every Man in his Humour,” and “Every Man out of his Humour,” usurped that dictatorship, in the Literary Republic, which he so sturdily and invariably maintained, though long and hardily disputed. No bard has more courageously foretold that posterity would be interested in his labours; and often with very dignified feelings he casts this declaration into the teeth of his adversaries: but a bitter contempt for his brothers and his contemporaries was not less vehement than his affections for those who crowded under his wing. To his “sons” and his admirers he was warmly attached, and no poet has left behind him, in MS., so many testimonies of personal fondness, in the inscriptions and addresses, in the copies of his works which he presented to friends: of these I have seen more than one fervent and impressive.

Drummond of Hawthornden, who perhaps carelessly and imperfectly minuted down the heads of their literary conference on the chief authors of the age, exposes the severity of criticism which Ben exercised on some spirits as noble as his own. The genius of Jonson was rough, hardy, and invincible, of which the frequent excess degenerated into ferocity; and by some traditional tales, this ferocity was still inflamed by large potations: for Drummond informs us, “Drink was the element in which he lived.”[388] Old Ben had given, on two occasions, some remarkable proofs of his personal intrepidity. When a soldier, in the face of both armies, he had fought single-handed with his antagonist, had slain him, and carried off his arms as trophies. Another time he killed his man in a duel. Jonson appears to have carried the same military spirit into the Literary Republic.

Such a genius would become more tyrannical by success, and naturally provoked opposition, from the proneness of mankind to mortify usurped greatness, when they can securely do it. The man who hissed the poet’s play had no idea that he might himself become one of the dramatic personages. Ben then produced his “Poetaster,” which has been called the Dunciad of those times; but it is a Dunciad without notes. The personages themselves are now only known by their general resemblance to nature, with the exception of two characters, those of Crispinus and Demetrius.[389]

In “The Poetaster,” Ben, with flames too long smothered, burst over the heads of all rivals and detractors. His enemies seem to have been among all classes; personages recognised on the scene as soon as viewed; poetical, military, legal, and histrionic. It raised a host in arms. Jonson wrote an apologetical epilogue, breathing a firm spirit, worthy of himself; but its dignity was too haughty to be endured by contemporaries, whom genius must soothe by equality. This apologetical dialogue was never allowed to be repeated; now we may do it with pleasure. Writings, like pictures, require a particular light and distance to be correctly judged and inspected, without any personal inconvenience.

One of the dramatic personages in this epilogue inquires

I never saw the play breed all this tumult. What was there in it could so deeply offend, And stir so many hornets?

The author replies:

——————I never writ that piece More innocent, or empty of offence; Some salt it had, but neither tooth nor gall. ——————Why, they say you tax’d The law and lawyers, captains, and the players, By their particular names. ——————It is not so: I used no names. My books have still been taught To spare the persons, and to speak the vices.

And he proceeds to tell us, that to obviate this accusation he had placed his scenes in the age of Augustus.

To show that Virgil, Horace, and the rest Of those great master-spirits, did not want Detractors then, or practisers against them: And by this line, although no parallel, I hoped at last they would sit down and blush.

But instead of their “sitting down and blushing,” we find—

That they fly buzzing round about my nostrils; And, like so many screaming grasshoppers Held by the wings, fill every ear with noise.

Names were certainly not necessary to portraits, where every day the originals were standing by their side. This is the studied pleading of a poet, who knows he is concealing the truth.

There is a passage in the play itself where Jonson gives the true cause of “the tumult” raised against him. Picturing himself under the character of his favourite Horace, he makes the enemies of Horace thus describe him, still, however, preserving the high tone of poetical superiority.

“Alas, sir, Horace is a mere sponge. Nothing but humours and observations he goes up and down sucking from every society, and when he comes home squeezes himself dry again. He will pen all he knows. He will sooner lose his best friend than his least jest. What he once drops upon paper against a man, lives eternally to upbraid him.”

Such is the true picture of a town-wit’s life! The age of Augustus was much less present to Jonson than his own; and Ovid, Tibullus, and Horace were not the personages he cared so much about, as “that society in which,” it was said, “he went up and down sucking in and squeezing himself dry:” the formal lawyers, who were cold to his genius; the sharking captains, who would not draw to save their own swords, and would cheat “their friend, or their friend’s friend,” while they would bully down Ben’s genius; and the little sycophant histrionic, “the twopenny[390] tear-mouth, copper-laced scoundrel, stiff-toe, who used to travel with pumps full of gravel after a blind jade and a hamper, and stalk upon boards and barrel-heads to an old crackt trumpet;” and who all now made a party with some rival of Jonson.

All these personages will account for “the tumult” which excites the innocent astonishment of our author. These only resisted him by “filling every ear with noise.” But one of the “screaming grasshoppers held by the wings,” boldly turned on the holder with a scorpion’s bite; and Decker, who had been lashed in “The Poetaster,” produced his “Satiromastix, or the untrussing of the humorous Poet.” Decker was a subordinate author, indeed; but, what must have been very galling to Jonson, who was the aggressor, indignation proved such an inspirer, that Decker seemed to have caught some portion of Jonson’s own genius, who had the art of making even Decker popular; while he discovered that his own laurel-wreath had been dexterously changed by the “Satiromastix” into a garland of “stinging nettles.”

In “The Poetaster,” Crispinus is the picture of one of those impertinent fellows who resolve to become poets, having an equal aptitude to become anything that is in fashionable request. When Hermogenes, the finest singer in Rome, refused to sing, Crispinus gladly seizes the occasion, and whispers the lady near him—“Entreat the ladies to entreat me to sing, I beseech you.” This character is marked by a ludicrous peculiarity which, turning on an individual characteristic, must have assisted the audience in the true application. Probably Decker had some remarkable head of hair,[391] and that his locks hung not like “the curls of Hyperion;” for the jeweller’s wife admiring among the company the persons of Ovid, Tibullus, &c., Crispinus acquaints her that they were poets, and, since she admires them, promises to become a poet himself. The simple lady further inquires, “if, when he is a poet, his looks will change? and particularly if his hair will change, and be like those gentlemen’s?” “A man,” observes Crispinus, “may be a poet, and yet not change his hair.” “Well!” exclaims the simple jeweller’s wife, “we shall see your cunning; yet if you can change your hair, I pray do it.”

In two elaborate scenes, poor Decker stands for a full-length. Resolved to be a poet, he haunts the company of Horace: he meets him in the street, and discovers all the variety of his nothingness: he is a student, a stoic, an architect: everything by turns, “and nothing long.” Horace impatiently attempts to escape from him, but Crispinus foils him at all points. This affectionate admirer is even willing to go over the world with him. He proposes an ingenious project, if Horace will introduce him to Mæcenas. Crispinus offers to become “his assistant,” assuring him that “he would be content with the next place, not envying thy reputation with thy patron;” and he thinks that Horace and himself “would soon lift out of favour Virgil, Varius, and the best of them, and enjoy them wholly to ourselves.” The restlessness of Horace to extricate himself from this “Hydra of Discourse,” the passing friends whom he calls on to assist him, and the glue-like pertinacity of Crispinus, are richly coloured.

A ludicrous and exquisitely satirical scene occurs at the trial of Crispinus and his colleagues. Jonson has here introduced an invention, which a more recent satirist so happily applied to our modern Lexiphanes, Dr. Johnson, for his immeasurable polysyllables. Horace is allowed by Augustus to make Crispinus swallow a certain pill; the light vomit discharges a great quantity of hard matter, to clear

His brain and stomach of their tumorous heats.

These consist of certain affectations in style, and adulteration of words, which offended the Horatian taste: “the basin” is called quickly for and Crispinus gets rid easily of some, but others were of more difficult passage:—

‘Magnificate!’ that came up somewhat hard! Crispinus. ‘O barmy froth——’ Augustus. What’s that? Crispinus. ‘Inflate!—Turgidous!—and Ventositous’— Horace. ‘Barmy froth, inflate, turgidous, and ventosity are come up.’ Tibullus. O terrible windy words! Gallus. A sign of a windy brain.

But all was not yet over: “Prorumpt” made a terrible rumbling, as if his spirit was to have gone with it; and there were others which required all the kind assistance of the Horatian “light vomit.” This satirical scene closes with some literary admonitions from the grave Virgil, who details to Crispinus the wholesome diet to be observed after his surfeits, which have filled

His blood and brain thus full of crudities.

Virgil’s counsels to the vicious neologist, who debases the purity of English diction by affecting new words or phrases, may too frequently be applied.

You must not hunt for wild outlandish terms To stuff out a peculiar dialect; But let your matter run before your words. And if at any time you chance to meet Some Gallo-Belgick phrase, you shall not straight Rack your poor verse to give it entertainment, But let it pass; and do not think yourself Much damnified, if you do leave it out When not the sense could well receive it.

Virgil adds something which breathes all the haughty spirit of Ben: he commands Crispinus:

——————Henceforth, learn To bear yourself more humbly, nor to swell Or breathe your insolent and idle spite On him whose laughter can your worst affright:

and dismisses him

To some dark place, removed from company; He will talk idly else after his physic.

“The Satiromastix” may be considered as a parody on “The Poetaster.” Jonson, with classical taste, had raised his scene in the court of Augustus: Decker, with great unhappiness, places it in that of William Rufus. The interest of the piece arises from the dexterity with which Decker has accommodated those very characters which Jonson has satirised in his “Poetaster.” This gratified those who came every day to the theatre, delighted to take this mimetic revenge on the arch bard.

In Decker’s prefatory address “To the World,” he observes, “Horace haled his Poetasters to the bar;[392] the Poetasters untrussed Horace: Horace made himself believe that his Burgonian wit[393] might desperately challenge all comers, and that none durst take up the foils against him.” But Decker is the Earl Rivers! He had been blamed for the personal attacks on Jonson; for “whipping his fortunes and condition of life; where the more noble reprehension had been of his mind’s deformity:” but for this he retorts on Ben. Some censured Decker for barrenness of invention, in bringing on those characters in his own play whom Jonson had stigmatised; but “it was not improper,” he says, “to set the same dog upon Horace, whom Horace had set to worry others.” Decker warmly concludes with defying the Jonsonians.

“Let that mad dog Detraction bite till his teeth be worn to the stumps; Envy, feed thy snakes so fat with poison till they burst; World, let all thy adders shoot out their Hydra-headed forked stings! I thank thee, thou true Venusian Horace, for these good words thou givest me. Populus me sibilat, at mihi plaudo.”

The whole address is spirited. Decker was a very popular writer, whose numerous tracts exhibit to posterity a more detailed narrative of the manners of the town in the Elizabethan age than is elsewhere to be found.

In Decker’s Satiromastix, Horace junior is first exhibited in his study, rehearsing to himself an ode: suddenly the Pindaric rapture is interrupted by the want of a rhyme; this is satirically applied to an unlucky line of Ben’s own. One of his “sons,” Asinius Bubo, who is blindly worshipping his great idol, or “his Ningle,” as he calls him, amid his admiration of Horace, perpetually breaks out into digressive accounts of what sort of a man his friends take him to be. For one, Horace in wrath prepares an epigram: and for Crispinus and Fannius, brother bards, who threaten “they’ll bring your life and death on the stage, as a bricklayer in a play,” he says, “I can bring a prepared troop of gallants, who, for my sake, shall distaste every unsalted line in their fly-blown comedies.” “Ay,” replies Asinius, “and all men of my rank!” Crispinus, Horace calls “a light voluptuous reveller,” and Fannius “the slightest cobweb-lawn piece of a poet.” Both enter, and Horace receives them with all friendship.

The scene is here conducted not without skill. Horace complains that

————————When I dip my pen In distill’d roses, and do strive to drain Out of mine ink all gall— Mine enemies, with sharp and searching eyes, Look through and through me. And when my lines are measured out as straight As even parallels, ’tis strange, that still, Still some imagine that they’re drawn awry. The error is not mine, but in their eye, That cannot take proportions.

To the querulous satirist, Crispinus replies with dignified gravity—

Horace! to stand within the shot of galling tongues Proves not your guilt; for, could we write on paper Made of these turning leaves of heaven, the clouds, Or speak with angels’ tongues, yet wise men know That some would shake the head, though saints should sing; Some snakes must hiss, because they’re born with stings. ——————Be not you grieved If that which you mould fair, upright, and smooth, Be screw’d awry, made crooked, lame, and vile, By racking comments.— So to be bit it rankles not, for Innocence May with a feather brush off the foul wrong. But when your dastard wit will strike at men In corners, and in riddles fold the vices Of your best friends, you must not take to heart If they take off all gilding from their pills, And only offer you the bitter core.—

At this the galled Horace winces. Crispinus continues, that it is in vain Horace swears, that

———————He puts on The office of an executioner, Only to strike off the swoln head of sin, Where’er you find it standing. Say you swear, And make damnation, parcel of your oath, That when your lashing jests make all men bleed, Yet you whip none—court, city, country, friends, Foes, all must smart alike.—

Fannius, too, joins, and shows Ben the absurd oaths he takes, when he swears to all parties, that he does not mean them. How, then, of five hundred and four, five hundred

Should all point with their fingers in one instant, At one and the same man?

Horace is awkwardly placed between these two friendly remonstrants, to whom he promises perpetual love.

Captain Tucca, a dramatic personage in Jonson’s Poetaster, and a copy of his own Bobadil, whose original the poet had found at “Powles,” the fashionable lounge of that day, is here continued with the same spirit; and as that character permitted from the extravagance of its ribaldry, it is now made the vehicle for those more personal retorts, exhibiting the secret history of Ben, which perhaps twitted the great bard more than the keenest wit, or the most solemn admonition which Decker could ever attain. Jonson had cruelly touched on Decker being out at elbows, and made himself too merry with the histrionic tribe: he, who was himself a poet, and had been a Thespian! The blustering captain thus attacks the great wit:—“Do’st stare, my Saracen’s head at Newgate? I’ll march through thy Dunkirk guts, for shooting jests at me.” He insists that as Horace, “that sly knave, whose shoulders were once seen lapp’d in a player’s old cast cloak,” and who had reflected on Crispinus’s satin doublet being ravelled out; that he should wear one of Crispinus’s “old cast sattin suits,” and that Fannius should write a couple of scenes for his own “strong garlic comedies,” and Horace should swear that they were his own—he would easily bear “the guilt of conscience.” “Thy Muse is but a hagler, and wears clothes upon best be trust (a humorous Deckerian phrase)—thou’rt great in somebody’s books for this!” Did it become Jonson to gibe at the histrionic tribe, who is himself accused of “treading the stage, as if he were treading mortar.”[394] He once put up—“a supplication to be a poor journeyman player, and hadst been still so, but that thou couldst not set a good face upon’t. Thou hast forget how thou ambled’st in leather-pilch, by a play-waggon in the highway; and took’st mad Jeronimo’s part, to get service among the mimics,” &c.

Ben’s person was, indeed, not gracious in the playfulness of love or fancy. A female, here, thus delineates Ben:—

“That same Horace has the most ungodly face, by my fan; it looks for all the world like a rotten russet-apple, when ’tis bruised. It’s better than a spoonful of cinnamon-water next my heart, for me to hear him speak; he sounds it so i’ th’ nose, and talks and rants like the poor fellows under Ludgate—to see his face make faces, when he reads his songs and sonnets.”

Again, we have Ben’s face compared with that of his favourite, Horace’s—“You staring Leviathan! look on the sweet visage of Horace; look, parboil’d face, look—he has not his face punchtfull of eyelet-holes, like the cover of a warming-pan.”

Joseph Warton has oddly remarked that most of our poets were handsome men. Jonson, however, was not poetical on that score; though his bust is said to resemble Menander’s.

Such are some of the personalities with which Decker recriminated.

Horace is thrown into many ludicrous situations. He is told that “admonition is good meat.” Various persons bring forward their accusations; and Horace replies that they envy him,

Because I hold more worthy company.

The greatness of Ben’s genius is by no means denied by his rivals; and Decker makes Fannius reply, with noble feelings, and in an elevated strain of poetry:—

Good Horace, no! my cheeks do blush for thine, As often as thou speakst so; where one true And nobly virtuous spirit, for thy best part Loves thee, I wish one, ten; even from my heart! I make account, I put up as deep share In any good man’s love, which thy worth earns, As thou thyself; we envy not to see Thy friends with bays to crown thy poesy. No, here the gall lies;—We, that know what stuff Thy very heart is made of, know the stalk On which thy learning grows, and can give life To thy, once dying, baseness; yet must we Dance anticke on your paper—. But were thy warp’d soul put in a new mould, I’d wear thee as a jewel set in gold.

To which one adds, that “jewels, master Horace, must be hanged, you know.” This “Whip of Men,” with Asinius his admirer, are brought to court, transformed into satyrs, and bound together: “not lawrefied, but nettle-fied;” crowned with a wreath of nettles.

With stinging-nettles crown his stinging wit.

Horace is called on to swear, after Asinius had sworn to give up his “Ningle.”

“Now, master Horace, you must be a more horrible swearer; for your oath must be, like your wits, of many colours; and like a broker’s book, of many parcels.”

Horace offers to swear till his hairs stand up on end, to be rid of this sting. “Oh, this sting!” alluding to the nettles. “’Tis not your sting of conscience, is it?” asks one. In the inventory of his oaths, there is poignant satire, with strong humour; and it probably exhibits some foibles in the literary habits of our bard.

He swears “Not to hang himself, even if he thought any man could write plays as well as himself; not to bombast out a new play with the old linings of jests stolen from the Temple’s Revels; not to sit in a gallery, when your comedies have entered their actions, and there make vile and bad faces at every line, to make men have an eye to you, and to make players afraid; not to venture on the stage, when your play is ended, and exchange courtesies and compliments with gallants to make all the house rise and cry—‘That’s Horace that’s he that pens and purges humours.’ When you bid all your friends to the marriage of a poor couple, that is to say, your Wits and Necessities—alias, a poet’s Whitsun-ale—you shall swear that, within three days after, you shall not abroad, in bookbinders’ shops, brag that your viceroys, or tributary-kings, have done homage to you, or paid quarterage. Moreover, when a knight gives you his passport to travel in and out to his company, and gives you money for God’s sake—you will swear not to make scald and wry-mouthed jests upon his knighthood. When your plays are misliked at court, you shall not cry Mew! like a puss-cat, and say, you are glad you write out of the courtier’s element; and in brief, when you sup in taverns, amongst your betters, you shall swear not to dip your manners in too much sauce; nor, at table, to fling epigrams or play-speeches about you.”

The king observes, that

——————————He whose pen Draws both corrupt and clear blood from all men Careless what vein he pricks; let him not rave When his own sides are struck; blows, blows do crave.

Such were the bitter apples which Jonson, still in his youth, plucked from the tree of his broad satire, that branched over all ranks in society. That even his intrepidity and hardiness felt the incessant attacks he had raised about him, appears from the close of the Apologetical Epilogueto “The Poetaster;” where, though he replies with all the consciousness of genius, and all its haughtiness, he closes with a determination to give over the composition of comedies! This, however, like all the vows of a poet, was soon broken; and his masterpieces were subsequently produced.

Friend. Will you not answer then the libels? Author. No. Friend. Nor the Untrussers. Author. Neither. Friend. You are undone, then. Author. With whom? Friend. The world. Author. The bawd! Friend. It will be taken to be stupidity or tameness in you. Author. But they that have incensed me, can in soul Acquit me of that guilt. They know I dare To spurn or baffle them; or squirt their eyes With ink or urine: or I could do worse, Arm’d with Archilochus’ fury, write iambicks, Would make the desperate lashers hang themselves.—

His Friend tells him that he is accused that “all his writing is mere railing;” which Jonson nobly compares to “the salt in the old comedy;” that they say, that he is slow, and “scarce brings forth a play a year.”

Author. ——————’Tis true, I would they could not say that I did that.

He is angry that their

——————Base and beggarly conceits Should carry it, by the multitude of voices, Against the most abstracted work, opposed To the stufft nostrils of the drunken rout.—

And then exclaims with admirable enthusiasm—

O this would make a learn’d and liberal soul To rive his stained quill up to the back, And damn his long-watch’d labours to the fire; Things, that were born, when none but the still night, And the dumb candle, saw his pinching throes.

And again, alluding to these mimics—

This ’tis that strikes me silent, seals my lips, And apts me rather to sleep out my time, Than I would waste it in contemned strifes With these vile Ibides, these unclean birds, That make their mouths their clysters, and still purge From their hot entrails.[395] But I leave the monsters To their own fate. And since the Comic Muse Hath proved so ominous to me, I will try If Tragedy have a more kind aspect. Leave me! There’s something come into my thought That must and shall be sung, high and aloof, Safe from the wolf’s black jaw, and the dull ass’s hoof. Friend. I reverence these raptures, and obey them.

Such was the noble strain in which Jonson replied to his detractors in the town and to his rivals about him. Yet this poem, composed with all the dignity and force of the bard, was not suffered to be repeated. It was stopped by authority. But Jonson, in preserving it in his works, sends it “TO POSTERITY, that it may make a difference between their manners that provoked me then, and mine that neglected them ever.”

CAMDEN AND BROOKE.

Literary, like political history, is interested in the cause of an obscure individual, when deprived of his just rights—character of Camden—Brooke’s “Discovery of Errors” in the “Britannia”—his work disturbed in the printing—afterwards enlarged, but never suffered to be published—whether Brooke’s motive was personal rancour!—the persecuted author becomes vindictive—his keen reply to Camden—Camden’s beautiful picture of calumny—Brooke furnishes a humorous companion-piece—Camden’s want of magnanimity and justice—when great authors are allowed to suppress the works of their adversary, the public receives the injury and the insult.

In the literary as well as the political commonwealth, the cause of an obscure individual violently deprived of his just rights is a common one. We protest against the power of genius itself, when it strangles rather than wrestles with its adversary, or combats in mail against a naked man. The general interests of literature are involved by the illegitimate suppression of a work, of which the purpose is to correct another, whatever may be the invective which accompanies the correction: nor are we always to assign to malignant motives even this spirit of invective, which, though it betrays a contracted genius, may also show the earnestness of an honest one.

The quarrel between Camden, the great author of the “Britannia,” and Brooke, the “York Herald,” may illustrate these principles. It has hitherto been told to the shame of the inferior genius; but the history of Brooke was imperfectly known to his contemporaries. Crushed by oppression, his tale was marred in the telling. A century sometimes passes away before the world can discover the truth even of a private history.

Brooke is aspersed as a man of the meanest talents, insensible to the genius of Camden, rankling with envy at his fame, and correcting the “Britannia” out of mere spite.

When the history of Brooke is known, and his labours fairly estimated, we shall blame him much less than he has been blamed; and censure Camden, who has escaped all censure, and whose conduct, in the present instance, was destitute of magnanimity and justice.

The character of the author of “Britannia” is great, and this error of his feelings, now first laid to his charge, may be attributed as much to the weakness of the age as to his own extreme timidity, and perhaps to a little pride. Conscious as was Camden of enlarged views, we can easily pardon him for the contempt he felt, when he compared them with the subordinate ones of his cynical adversary.

Camden possessed one of those strongly directed minds which early in life plan some vast labour, while their imagination and their industry feed on it for many successive years; and they shed the flower and sweetness of their lives in the preparation of a work which at its maturity excites the gratitude of their nation. His passion for our national antiquities discovered itself even in his school-days, grew up with him at the University; and, when afterwards engaged in his public duties as master at Westminster school, he there composed his “Britannia,” “at spare hours, and on festival days.” To the perpetual care of his work, he voluntarily sacrificed all other views in life, and even drew himself away from domestic pleasures; for he refused marriage and preferments, which might interrupt his beloved studies! The work at length produced, received all the admiration due to so great an enterprise; and even foreigners, as the work was composed in the universal language of learning, could sympathise with Britons, when they contemplated the stupendous labour. Camden was honoured by the titles (for the very names of illustrious genius become such), of the Varro, the Strabo, and the Pausanias of Britain.

While all Europe admired the “Britannia,” a cynical genius, whose mind seemed bounded by his confined studies, detected one error amidst the noble views the mighty volume embraced; the single one perhaps he could perceive, and for which he stood indebted to his office as “York Herald.” Camden, in an appendage to the end of each county, had committed numerous genealogical errors, which he afterwards affected, in his defence, to consider as trivial matters in so great a history, and treats his adversary with all the contempt and bitterness he could inflict on him; but Ralph Brooke entertained very high notions of the importance of heraldical studies, and conceived that the “Schoolmaster” Camden, as he considered him, had encroached on the rights and honours of his College of Heralds. When particular objects engage our studies, we are apt to raise them in the scale of excellence to a degree disproportioned to their real value; and are thus liable to incur ridicule. But it should be considered that many useful students are not philosophers, and the pursuits of their lives are never ridiculous to them. It is not the interest of the public to degrade this class too low. Every species of study contributes to the perfection of human knowledge, by that universal bond which connects them all in a philosophical mind.

Brooke prepared “A Discovery of Certain Errors in the Much-commended Britannia.” When we consider Brooke’s character, as headstrong with heraldry as Don Quixote’s with romances of chivalry, we need not attribute his motives (as Camden himself, with the partial feelings of an author, does, and subsequent writers echo) to his envy at Camden’s promotion to be Clarencieux King of Arms; for it appears that Brooke began his work before this promotion. The indecent excesses of his pen, with the malicious charges of plagiarism he brings against Camden for the use he made of Leland’s collections, only show the insensibility of the mere heraldist to the nobler genius of the historian. Yet Brooke had no ordinary talents: his work is still valuable for his own peculiar researches; but his naïve shrewdness, his pointed precision, the bitter invective, and the caustic humour of his cynical pen, give an air of originality, if not of genius, which no one has dared to notice. Brooke’s first work against Camden was violently disturbed in its progress, and hurried, in a mutilated state, into the world, without licence or a publisher’s name. Thus impeded, and finally crushed, the howl of persecution followed his name; and subsequent writers servilely traced his character from their partial predecessors.

But Brooke, though denied the fair freedom of the press, and a victim to the powerful connexions of Camden, calmly pursued his silent labour with great magnanimity. He wrote his “Second Discovery of Errors,” an enlargement of the first. This he carefully finished for the press, but could never get published. The secret history of the controversy may be found there.[396]

Brooke had been loudly accused of indulging a personal rancour against Camden, and the motive of his work was attributed to envy of his great reputation; a charge constantly repeated.

Yet this does not appear, for when Brooke first began his “Discovery of Errors,” he did not design its publication; for he liberally offered Camden his Observations and Collections. They were fastidiously, perhaps haughtily, rejected; on this pernicious and false principle, that to correct his errors in genealogy might discredit the whole work. On which absurdity Brooke shrewdly remarks—“As if healing the sores would have maimed the body.” He speaks with more humility on this occasion than an insulted, yet a skilful writer, was likely to do, who had his labours considered, as he says, “worthy neither of thanks nor acceptance.”

“The rat is not so contemptible but he may help the lion, at a pinch, out of those nets wherein his strength is hampered; and the words of an inferior may often carry matter in them to admonish his superior of some important consideration; and surely, of what account soever I might have seemed to this learned man, yet, in respect to my profession and courteous offer, (I being an officer-of-arms, and he then but a schoolmaster), might well have vouchsafed the perusal of my notes.”

When he published, our herald stated the reasons of writing against Camden with good-humour, and rallies him on his “incongruity in his principles of heraldry—for which I challenge him!—for depriving some nobles of issue to succeed them, who had issue, of whom are descended many worthy families: denying barons and earls that were, and making barons and earls of others that were not; mistaking the son for the father, and the father for the son; affirming legitimate children to be illegitimate, and illegitimate to be legitimate; and framing incestuous and unnatural marriages, making the father to marry the son’s wife, and the son his own mother.”

He treats Camden with the respect due to his genius, while he judiciously distinguishes where the greatest ought to know when to yield.

“The most abstruse arts I profess not, but yield the palm and victory to mine adversary, that great learned Mr. Camden, with whom, yet, a long experimented navigator may contend about his chart and compass, about havens, creeks, and sounds; so I, an ancient herald, a little dispute, without imputation of audacity, concerning the honour of arms, and the truth of honourable descents.”

Brooke had seen, as he observes, in four editions of the “Britannia,” a continued race of errors, in false descents, &c., and he continues, with a witty allusion:—

“Perceiving that even the brains of many learned men beyond the seas had misconceived and miscarried in the travail and birth of their relations, being gotten, as it were, with child (as Diomedes’s mares) by the blasts of his erroneous puffs; I could not but a little question the original father of their absurdities, being so far blown, with the trumpet of his learning and fame, into foreign lands.”

He proceeds with instances of several great authors on the Continent having been misled by the statements of Camden.

Thus largely have I quoted from Brooke, to show, that at first he never appears to have been influenced by the mean envy, or the personal rancour, of which he is constantly accused. As he proceeded in his work, which occupied him several years, his reproaches are whetted with a keener edge, and his accusations are less generous. But to what are we to attribute this? To the contempt and persecution Brooke so long endured from Camden: these acted on his vexed and degraded spirit, till it burst into the excesses of a man heated with injured feelings.

When Camden took his station in the Herald’s College with Brooke, whose offers of his notes he had refused to accept, they soon found what it was for two authors to live under the same roof, who were impatient to write against each other. The cynical York, at first, would twit the new king-of-arms, perpetually affirming that “his predecessor was a more able herald than any who lived in this age:” a truth, indeed, acknowledged by Dugdale. On this occasion, once the king-of-arms gave malicious York “the lie!” reminding the crabbed herald of “his own learning; who, as a scholar, was famous through all the provinces of Christendom.” “So that (adds Brooke) now I learnt, that before him, when we speak in commendation of any other, to say, I must always except Plato.” Camden would allow of no private communication between them; and in Sermonibus Convivalibus, in his table-talk, “the heat and height of his spirit” often scorched the contemned Yorkist, whose rejected “Discovery of Errors” had no doubt been too frequently enlarged, after such rough convivialities. Brooke now resolved to print; but, in printing the work, the press was disturbed, and his house was entered by “this learned man, his friends, and the stationers.” The latter were alarmed for the sale of the “Britannia,” which might have been injured by this rude attack. The work was therefore printed in an unfinished state: part was intercepted; and the author stopped, by authority, from proceeding any further. Some imperfect copies got abroad.

The treatment the exasperated Brooke now incurred was more provoking than Camden’s refusal of his notes, and the haughtiness of his “Sermonibus Convivalibus.” The imperfect work was, however, laid before the public, so that Camden could not refuse to notice its grievous charges. He composed an angry reply in Latin, addressed ad Lectorem! and never mentioning Brooke by name, contemptuously alludes to him only by a Quidam and Iste (a certain person, and He!)—“He considers me (cries the mortified Brooke, in his second suppressed work) as an Individuum vagum, and makes me but a Quidam in his pamphlet, standing before him as a schoolboy, while he whips me. Why does he reply in Latin to an English accusation? He would disguise himself in his school-rhetoric; wherein, like the cuttle-fish, being stricken, he thinks to hide and shift himself away in the ink of his rhetoric. I will clear the waters again.”

He fastens on Camden’s former occupation, virulently accusing him of the manners of a pedagogue:—“A man may perceive an immoderate and eager desire of vainglory growing in hand, ever since he used to teach and correct children for these things, according to the opinion of some, in mores et naturam abeunt.” He complains of “the school-hyperboles” which Camden exhausts on him, among which Brooke is compared to “the strumpet Leontion,” who wrote against “the divine Theophrastus.” To this Brooke keenly replies:

“Surely, had Theophrastus dealt with women’s matters, a woman, though mean, might in reason have contended with him. A king must be content to be laughed at if he come into Apelles’s shop, and dispute about colours and portraiture. I am not ambitious nor envious to carp at matters of higher learning than matters of heraldry, which I profess: that is the slipper, wherein I know a slip when I find it. But see your cunning; you can, with the blur of your pen, dipped in copperas and gall, make me learned and unlearned; nay, you can almost change my sex, and make me a whore, like Leontion; and, taking your silver pen again, make yourself the divine Theophrastus.”

At the close of Camden’s answer, he introduced the allegorical picture of Calumny, that elegant invention of the Grecian fancy of Apelles, painted by him when suffering under the false accusations of a rival. The picture is described by Lucian; but it has received many happy touches from the classical hand of the master of Westminster School. As a literary satire, he applies it with great dignity. I give here a translation, but I preserve the original Latin in the note as Camden’s reply to Brooke is not easily to be procured.

“But though I am not disposed to waste more words on these, and this sort of men, yet I cannot resist the temptation of adding a slight sketch, for I cannot give that vivacity of colouring of the picture of the great artist Apelles that our Antiphilus and the like, whose ears are ever open to calumny, may, in contemplating it, find a reflection of themselves.

“On the right hand sits a man, who, to show his credulity, is remarkable for his prodigious ears, similar to those of Midas. He extends his hand to greet Calumny, who is approaching him. The two diminutive females around him are Ignorance and Suspicion. Opposite to them, Calumny advances, betraying in her countenance and gesture the savage rage and anger working in her tempestuous breast: her left hand holds a flaming torch; while with her right she drags by the hair a youth, who, stretching his uplifted hands to Heaven, is calling on the immortal powers to bear testimony to his innocence. She is preceded by a man of a pallid and impure appearance, seemingly wasting away under some severe disease, except that his eye sparkles, and has not the dulness usual to such. That Envy is here meant, you readily conjecture. Some diminutive females, frauds and deceits, attend her as companions, whose office is to encourage and instruct, and studiously to adorn their mistress. In the background, Repentance, sadly arrayed in a mournful, worn-out, and ragged garment, who, with averted head, with tears and shame, acknowledges and prepares to receive Truth, approaching from a distance.”[397]

This elegant picture, so happily introduced into a piece of literary controversy, appears to have only slightly affected the mind of Brooke, which was probably of too stout a grain to take the folds of Grecian drapery. Instead of sympathising with its elegance, he breaks out into a horse-laugh; and, what is quite unexpected among such grave inquiries into a ludicrous tale in verse, which, though it has not Grecian fancy, has broad English humour, where he maliciously insinuates that Camden had appropriated to his own use, or “new-coated his ‘Britannia’” with Leland’s MSS., and disguised what he had stolen.

Now, to show himself as good a painter as he is a herald, he propounded, at the end of his book, a table (i.e. a picture) of his own invention, being nothing comparable to “Apelles,” as he himself confesseth, and we believe him; for, like the rude painter that was fain to write, ‘This is a Horse,’ upon his painted horse, he writes upon his picture the names of all that furious rabble therein expressed—which, for to requite him, I will return a tale of John Fletcher (some time of Oxford) and his horse. Neither can this fable be any disparagement to his table, being more ancient and authenticall, and far more conceipted than his envious picture. And thus it was:—