QUARRELS OF AUTHORS; (continued 5)

A TALE (NOT OF A ROASTED) BUT OF A PAINTED HORSE. John Fletcher, famous, and a man well known, But using not his sirname’s trade alone,[398] Did hackney out poor jades for common hire, Not fit for any pastime but to tire. His conscience, once, surveying his jade’s stable, Prick’d him, for keeping horses so unable. “Oh why should I,” saith John, “by scholars thrive, For jades that will not carry, lead, nor drive?” To mend the matter, out he starts, one night, And having spied a palfrey somewhat white, He takes him up, and up he mounts his back, Rides to his house, and there he turns him black; Marks him in forehead, feet, in rump, and crest, As coursers mark those horses which are best. So neatly John had coloured every spot, That the right owner sees him, knows him not. Had he but feather’d his new-painted breast, He would have seemèd Pegasus at least. Who but John Fletcher’s horse, in all the town, Amongst all hackneys, purchased this renown? But see the luck; John Fletcher’s horse, one night, By rain was wash’d again almost to white. His first right owner, seeing such a change, Thought he should know him, but his hue was strange! But eyeing him, and spying out his steed, By flea-bit spots of his now washèd weed, Seizes the horse; so Fletcher was attainted, And did confess the horse—he stole and painted.

To close with honour to Brooke; in his graver moments he warmly repels the accusation Camden raised against him, as an enemy to learning, and appeals to many learned scholars, who had tasted of his liberality at the Universities, towards their maintenance; but, in an elevated tone, he asserts his right to deliver his animadversions as York Herald.

“I know (says Brooke) the great advantage my adversary has over me, in the received opinion of the world. If some will blame me for that my writings carry some characters of spleen against him, men of pure affections, and not partial, will think reason that he should, by ill hearing, lose the pleasure he conceived by ill speaking. But since I presume not to understand above that which is meet for me to know, I must not be discouraged, nor fret myself, because of the malicious; for I find myself seated upon a rock, that is sure from tempest and waves, from whence I have a prospect into his errors and waverings. I do confess his great worth and merit, and that we Britons are in some sort beholding to him; and might have been much more, if God had lent him the grace to have played the faithful steward, in the talent committed to his trust and charge.”

Such was the dignified and the intrepid reply of Ralph Brooke, a man whose name is never mentioned without an epithet of reproach; and who, in his own day, was hunted down, and not suffered, vindictive as he was no doubt, to relieve his bitter and angry spirit, by pouring it forth to the public eye.[399]

But the story is not yet closed. Camden, who wanted the magnanimity to endure with patient dignity the corrections of an inferior genius, had the wisdom, with the meanness, silently to adopt his useful corrections, but would never confess the hand which had brought them.[400]

Thus hath Ralph Brooke told his own tale undisturbed, and, after the lapse of more than a century, the press has been opened to him. Whenever a great author is suffered to gag the mouth of his adversary, Truth receives the insult. But there is another point more essential to inculcate in literary controversy. Ought we to look too scrupulously into the motives which may induce an inferior author to detect the errors of a greater? A man from no amiable motive may perform a proper action: Ritson was useful after Warton; nor have we a right to ascribe it to any concealed motives, which, after all, may be doubtful. In the present instance, our much-abused Ralph Brooke first appears to have composed his elaborate work from the most honourable motives: the offer he made of his Notes to Camden seems a sufficient evidence. The pride of a great man first led Camden into an error, and that error plunged him into all the barbarity of persecution; thus, by force, covering his folly. Brooke over-valued his studies: it is the nature of those peculiar minds adapted to excel in such contracted pursuits. He undertook an ungracious office, and he has suffered by being placed by the side of the illustrious genius with whom he has so skilfully combated in his own province; and thus he has endured contempt, without being contemptible. The public are not less the debtors to such unfortunate, yet intrepid authors.[401]

MARTIN MAR-PRELATE.

Of the two prevalent factions in the reign of Elizabeth, the Catholics and the Puritans—Elizabeth’s philosophical indifference offends both—Maunsell’s Catalogue omits the books of both parties—of the Puritans, “the mild and moderate, with the fierce and fiery,” a great religious body covering a political one—Thomas Cartwright, the chief of the Puritans, and his rival Whitgift—attempts to make the Ecclesiastical paramount to the Civil Power—his plan in dividing the country into comitial, provincial, and national assemblies, to be concentrated under the secret head at Warwick, where Cartwright was elected “perpetual Moderator!”—after the most bitter controversies, Cartwright became very compliant to his old rival Whitgift, when Archbishop of Canterbury—of Martin Mar-Prelate—his sons—specimens of their popular ridicule and invective—Cartwright approves of this mode of controversy—better counteracted by the wits than by the grave admonishers—specimens of the Anti-Martin Mar-Prelates—of the authors of these surreptitious publications.

The Reformation, or the new Religion, as it was then called, under Elizabeth, was the most philosophical she could form, and therefore the most hateful to the zealots of all parties. It was worthy of her genius, and of a better age! Her sole object was, a deliverance from the Papal usurpation. Her own supremacy maintained, she designed to be the great sovereign of a great people; and the Catholic, for some time, was called to her council-board, and entered with the Reformer into the same church. But wisdom itself is too weak to regulate human affairs, when the passions of men rise up in obstinate insurrection. Elizabeth neither won over the Reformers nor the Catholics. An excommunicating bull, precipitated by Papal Machiavelism, driving on the brutalised obedience of its slaves, separated the friends. This was a political error arising from a misconception of the weakness of our government; and when discovered as such, a tolerating dispensation was granted “till better times;” an unhealing expedient, to join again a dismembered nation! It would surprise many, were they aware how numerous were our ancient families and our eminent characters who still remained Catholics.[402] The country was then divided, and Englishmen who were heroic Romanists fell the terrible victims.

On the other side, the national evil took a new form. It is probable that the Queen, regarding the mere ceremonies of religion, now venerable with age, as matters of indifference, and her fine taste perhaps still lingering amid the solemn gorgeousness of the Roman service, and her senses and her emotions excited by the religious scenery, did not share in that abhorrence of the paintings and the images, the chant and the music, the censer and the altar, and the pomp of the prelatical habits, which was prompting many well-intentioned Reformers to reduce the ecclesiastical state into apostolical nakedness and primitive rudeness. She was slow to meet this austerity of feeling, which in this country at length extirpated those arts which exalt our nature, and for this these pious Vandals nicknamed the Queen “the untamed heifer;” and the fierce Knox expressly wrote his “First Blast Against the Monstrous Government of Women.” Of these Reformers, many had imbibed the republican notions of Calvin. In their hatred of Popery, they imagined that they had not gone far enough in their wild notions of reform, for they viewed it, still shadowed out in the new hierarchy of the bishops. The fierce Calvin, in his little church at Geneva, presumed to rule a great nation on the scale of a parish institution; copying the apostolical equality at a time when the Church (say the Episcopalians) had all the weakness of infancy, and could live together in a community of all things, from a sense of their common poverty. Be this as it may, the dignified ecclesiastical order was a vulnerable institution, which could do no greater injury, and might effect as much public good as any other order in the state.[403] My business is not with this discussion. I mean to show how the republican system of these Reformers ended in a political struggle which, crushed in the reign of Elizabeth, and beaten down in that of James, so furiously triumphed under Charles. Their history exhibits the curious spectacle of a great religious body covering a political one—such as was discovered among the Jesuits, and such as may again distract the empire, in some new and unexpected shape.

Elizabeth was harassed by the two factions of the intriguing Catholic and the disguised Republican. The age abounded with libels.[404] Many a Benedicite was handed to her from the Catholics; but a portentous personage, masked, stepped forth from a club of Puritans, and terrified the nation by continued visitations, yet was never visible till the instant of his adieus—“starting like a guilty thing upon a fearful summons!”

Men echo the tone of their age, yet still the same unvarying human nature is at work; and the Puritans,[405] who in the reign of Elizabeth imagined it was impossible to go too far in the business of reform, were the spirits called Roundheads under Charles, and who have got another nickname in our days. These wanted a Reformation of a Reformation—they aimed at reform, but they designed Revolution; and they would not accept of toleration, because they had determined on predominance.[406]

Of this faction, the chief was Thomas Cartwright, a person of great learning, and doubtless of great ambition. Early in life a disappointed man, the progress was easy to a disaffected subject. At a Philosophy Act, in the University of Cambridge, in the royal presence, the queen preferred and rewarded his opponent for the slighter and more attractive elegances in which the learned Cartwright was deficient. He felt the wound rankle in his ambitious spirit. He began, as Sir George Paul, in his “Life of Archbishop Whitgift,” expresses it, “to kick against her Ecclesiastical Government.” He expatriated himself several years, and returned fierce with the republican spirit he had caught among the Calvinists at Geneva, which aimed at the extirpation of the bishops. It was once more his fate to be poised against another rival, Whitgift, the Queen’s Professor of Divinity. Cartwright, in some lectures, advanced his new doctrines; and these innovations soon raised a formidable party, “buzzing their conceits into the green heads of the University.”[408] Whitgift regularly preached at Cartwright, but to little purpose; for when Cartwright preached at St. Mary’s they were forced to take down the windows. Once our sly polemic, taking advantage of the absence of Whitgift, so powerfully operated, in three sermons on one Sunday, that in the evening his victory declared itself, by the students of Trinity College rejecting their surplices, as Papistical badges. Cartwright was now to be confuted by other means. The University refused him his degree of D.D.; condemned the lecturer to silence; and at length performed that last feeble act of power, expulsion. In a heart already alienated from the established authorities, this could only envenom a bitter spirit. Already he had felt a personal dislike to royalty, and now he had received an insult from the University: these were motives which, though concealed, could not fail to work in a courageous mind, whose new forms of religion accorded with his political feelings. The “Degrees” of the University, which he now declared to be “unlawful,” were to be considered “as limbs of Antichrist.” The whole hierarchy was to be exterminated for a republic of Presbyters; till, through the church, the republican, as we shall see, discovered a secret passage to the Cabinet of his Sovereign, where he had many protectors.

Such is my conception of the character of Cartwright. The reader is enabled to judge for himself by the note.[409]

But Cartwright, chilled by an imprisonment, and witnessing some of his party condemned, and some executed, after having long sustained the most elevated and rigid tone, suddenly let his alp of ice dissolve away in the gentlest thaw that ever occurred in political life. Ambitious he was, but not of martyrdom! His party appeared once formidable,[410] and his protection at Court sure. I have read several letters of the Earl of Leicester, in MS., that show he always shielded Cartwright, whenever in danger. Many of the ministers of Elizabeth were Puritans; but doubtless this was before their state policy had detected the politicians in mask. When some of his followers had dared to do what he had only thought, he appears to have forsaken them. They reproached him for this left-handed policy, some of the boldest of them declaring that they had neither acted nor written anything but what was warranted by his principles. I do not know many political ejaculations more affecting than that of Henry Barrow, said to have been a dissipated youth, when Cartwright refused, before Barrow’s execution, to allow of a conference. The deluded man, after a deep sigh, said: “Shall I be thus forsaken by him? Was it not he that brought me first into these briars? and will he now leave me in the same? Was it not from him alone that I took my grounds? Or did I not, out of such premises as he pleased to give me, infer those propositions, and deduce those conclusions, for which I am now kept in these bonds?” He was soon after executed, with others.

Then occurred one of those political spectacles at which the simple-minded stare, and the politic smile; when, after the most cruel civil war of words,[411] Cartwright wrote very compliant letters to his old rival, Whitgift, now Archbishop of Canterbury; while the Archbishop was pleading with the Queen in favour of the inveterate Republican, declaring that had Cartwright not so far engaged himself in the beginning, he thought he would have been, latterly, drawn into conformity. To clear up this mysterious conduct, we must observe that Cartwright seems to have graduated his political ambition to the degree the government touched of weakness or of strength; and besides, he was now growing prudent as he was growing rich. For it seems that he who was for scrambling for the Church revenues, while telling the people of the Apostles, silver and gold they had none, was himself “feeding too fair and fat” for the meagre groaning state of a pretended reformation. He had early in life studied that part of the law by which he had learned the marketable price of landed property; and as the cask still retains its old flavour, this despiser of bishops was still making the best interest for his money by land-jobbing.[412]

One of the memorable effects of this attempted innovation was that continued stream of libels which ran throughout the nation, under the portentous name of Martin Mar-Prelate.[413] This extraordinary personage, in his collective form, for he is to be splitted into more than one, long terrified Church and State. He walked about the kingdom invisibly, dropping here a libel, and there a proclamation for sedition; but wherever Martinism was found, Martin was not. He prided himself in what he calls “Pistling the Bishops.” Sometimes he hints to his pursuers how they may catch him, for he prints, “within two furlongs of a bouncing priest,” or “in Europe;” while he acquaints his friends, who were so often uneasy for his safety, that “he has neither wife nor child,” and prays “they may not be anxious for him, for he wishes that his head might not go to the grave in peace.”—“I come, with the rope about my neck, to save you, howsoever it goeth with me.” His press is interrupted, he is silent, and Lambeth seems to breathe in peace. But he has “a son; nay, five hundred sons!” and Martin Junior starts up! He inquires

“Where his father is; he who had studied the art of pistle-making? Why has he been tongue-tied these four or five months? Good Nuncles (the bishops), have you closely murthered the gentleman in some of your prisons? Have you choaked him with a fat prebend or two? I trow my father will swallow down no such pills, for he would thus soon purge away all the conscience he hath. Do you mean to have the keeping of him? What need that? he hath five hundred sons in the land. My father would be sorry to put you to any such cost as you intend to be at with him. A meaner house, and less strength than the Tower, the Fleet, or Newgate, would serve him well enough. He is not of that ambitious vein that many of his brethren the bishops are, in seeking for more costly houses than even his father built for him.”

This same “Martin Junior,” who, though he is but young, as he says, “has a pretty smattering gift in this pistle-making; and I fear, in a while, I shall take a pride in it.” He had picked up beside a bush, where it had dropped from somebody, an imperfect paper of his father’s:—

“Theses Martinianæ—set forth as an after-birth of the noble gentleman himselfe, by a pretty stripling of his, Martin Junior, and dedicated by him to his good nuncka, Maister John Cankerbury (i.e. Canterbury). Printed without a sly privilege of the Cater Caps”—(i.e. the square caps the bishops wore).

But another of these five hundred sons, who declares himself to be his “reverend and elder brother, heir to the renowned Martin Mar-Prelate the Great,” publishes

“The just Censure and Reproof of Martin Junior; where, lest the Springall should be utterly discouraged in his good meaning, you shall finde that he is not bereaved of his due commendation.”

Martin Senior, after finding fault with Martin Junior for “his rash and indiscreet headiness,” notwithstanding agrees with everything he had said. He confirms all, and cheers him; but charges him,

“Should he meet their father in the street, never to ask his blessing, but walke smoothly and circumspectly; and if anie offer to talk with thee of Martin, talke thou straite of the voyage into Portugal, or of the happie death of the Duke of Guise, or some such accident; but meddle not with thy father. Only, if thou have gathered anie thing in visitation for thy father, intreate him to signify, in some secret printed pistle, where a will have it lefte. I feare least some of us should fall into John Canterburie’s hand.”

Such were the mysterious personages who, for a long time, haunted the palaces of the bishops and the vicarages of the clergy, disappearing at the moment they were suddenly perceived to be near. Their slanders were not only coarse buffooneries, but the hottest effusions of hatred, with an unparalleled invective of nicknames.[414] Levelled at the bishops, even the natural defects, the personal infirmities, the domestic privacies, much more the tyranny, of these now “petty popes,” now “bouncing priests,” now “terrible priests,” were the inexhaustible subjects of these popular invectives.[415] Those “pillars of the State” were now called “its caterpillars;” and the inferior clergy, who perhaps were not always friendly to their superiors, yet dreaded this new race of innovators, were distinguished as “halting neutrals.” These invectives were well farced for the gross taste of the multitude; and even the jargon of the lowest of the populace affected, and perhaps the coarse malignity of two cobblers who were connected with the party, often enlivened the satirical page. The Martin Mar-Prelate productions are not, however, effusions of genius; they were addressed to the coarser passions of mankind, their hatred and contempt. The authors were grave men, but who affected to gain over the populace with a popular familiarity.[416] In vain the startled bishops remonstrated: they were supposed to be criminals, and were little attended to as their own advocates. Besides, they were solemn admonishers, and the mob are composed of laughers and scorners.

The Court-party did not succeed more happily when they persecuted Martin, broke up his presses, and imprisoned his assistants. Never did sedition travel so fast, nor conceal itself so closely; for they employed a moveable press; and, as soon as it was surmised that Martin was in Surrey, it was found he was removed to Northamptonshire, while the next account came that he was showing his head in Warwickshire. And long they invisibly conveyed themselves, till in Lancashire the snake was scotched by the Earl of Derby, with all its little brood.[417]

These pamphlets were “speedily dispersed and greedily read,” not only by the people; they had readers and even patrons among persons of condition. They were found in the corners of chambers at Court; and when a prohibition issued that no person should carry about them any of the Mar-Prelate pamphlets on pain of punishment, the Earl of Essex observed to the Queen, “What then is to become of me?” drawing one of these pamphlets out of his bosom, and presenting it to her.

The Martinists were better counteracted by the Wits, in some extraordinary effusions, prodigal of humour and invective Wit and raillery were happily exercised against these masked divines: for the gaiety of the Wits was not foreign to their feelings. The Mar-Prelates showed merry faces, but it was with a sardonic grin they had swallowed the convulsing herb; they horridly laughed against their will—at bottom all was gloom and despair. The extraordinary style of their pamphlets, concocted in the basest language of the populace, might have originated less from design than from the impotence of the writers. Grave and learned persons have often found to their cost that wit and humour must spring from the soil; no art of man can plant them there. With such, this play and grace of the intellect can never be the movements of their nature, but its convulsions.

Father Martin and his two sons received “A sound boxe of the eare,” in “a pistle” to “the father and the two sonnes, Huffe, Ruffe, and Snuffe, the three tame ruffians of the Church, who take pepper in the nose because they cannot marre prelates grating,” when they once met with an adversary who openly declared—

“I profess rayling, and think it is as good a cudgel for a Martin as a stone for a dogge, or a whip for an ape, or poison for a rat. Who would curry an ass with an ivory comb? Give this beast thistles for provender. I doe but yet angle with a silken flie, to see whether Martins will nibble; and if I see that, why then I have wormes for the nonce, and will give them line enough, like a trowte, till they swallow both hooke and line, and then, Martin, beware your gills, for I’ll make you daunce at the pole’s end.”

“Fill thy answer as full of lies as of lines, swell like a toade, hiss like an adder, bite like a dog, and chatter like a monkey, my pen is prepared, and my mind; and if you chaunce to find anie worse words than you broughte, let them be put in your dad’s dictionarie. Farewell, and be hanged; and I pray God you fare no worse.—Yours at an hour’s warning.”

This was the proper way to reply to such writers, by driving them out of the field with their own implements of warfare. “Pasquill of England”[418] admirably observed of the papers of this faction—“Doubt not but that the same reckoning in the ende will be made of you which your favourers commonly make of their old shooes—when they are past wearing, they barter them awaie for newe broomes, or carrie them forth to the dunghill and leave them there.” The writers of these Martin Mar-Prelate books have been tolerably ascertained,[419] considering the secrecy with which they were printed—sometimes at night, sometimes hid in cellars, and never long in one place: besides the artifices used in their dispersion, by motley personages, held together by an invisible chain of confederacy. Conspiracy, like other misery, “acquaints a man with strange bedfellows;” and the present confederacy combined persons of the most various descriptions, and perhaps of very opposite views. I find men of learning, and of rigid lives, intimately associated with dissipated, or with too ardently-tempered youths; connected, too, with maniacs, whose lunacy had taken a revolutionary turn; and men of rank combining with old women and cobblers.[420] Such are the party-coloured apostles of insurrection! and thus their honourable and dishonourable motives lie so blended together, that the historian cannot separate them. At the moment the haughty spirit of a conspirator is striking at the head of established authority, he is himself crouching to the basest intimates; and to escape often from an ideal degradation, he can bear with a real one.

Of the heads of this party, I shall notice Penry and Udall, two self-devoted victims to Nonconformity. The most active was John Penry, or Ap Henry. He exulted that “he was born and bred in the mountains of Wales:” he had, however, studied at both our Universities. He had all the heat of his soil and of his party. He “wished that his head might not go down to the grave in peace,” and was just the man to obtain his purpose. When he and his papers were at length seized, Penry pleaded that he could not be tried for sedition, professing unbounded loyalty to the Queen: such is the usual plea of even violent Reformers. Yet how could Elizabeth be the sovereign, unless she adopted the mode of government planned by these Reformers? In defence of his papers, he declared that they were only the private memorandums of a scholar, in which, during his wanderings about the kingdom, he had collected all the objections he had heard against the government. Yet these, though written down, might not be his own. He observed that they were not even English, nor intelligible to his accusers; but a few Welshisms could not save Ap Henry; and the judge, assuming the hardy position, that scribere est agere, the author found more honour conferred on his MSS. than his genius cared to receive. It was this very principle which proved so fatal, at a later period, to a more elevated politician than Penry; yet Algernon Sidney, perhaps, possessed not a spirit more Roman.[421] State necessity claimed another victim; and this ardent young man, whose execution had been at first unexpectedly postponed, was suddenly hurried from his dinner to a temporary gallows; a circumstance marked by its cruelty, but designed to prevent an expected tumult.[422]

Contrasted with this fiery Mar-Prelate was another, the learned subtile John Udall. His was the spirit which dared to do all that Penry had dared, yet conducting himself in the heat of action with the tempered wariness of age: “If they silence me as a minister,” said he, “it will allow me leisure to write; and then I will give the bishops such a blow as shall make their hearts ache.” It was agreed among the party neither to deny, or to confess, writing any of their books, lest among the suspected the real author might thus be discovered, or forced solemnly to deny his own work; and when the Bishop of Rochester, to catch Udall by surprise, suddenly said, “Let me ask you a question concerning your book,” the wary Udall replied, “It is not yet proved to be mine!” He adroitly explained away the offending passages the lawyers picked out of his book, and in a contest between him and the judge, not only repelled him with his own arms, but when his lordship would have wrestled on points of divinity, Udall expertly perplexed the lawyer by showing he had committed an anachronism of four hundred years! He was equally acute with the witnesses; for when one deposed that he had seen a catalogue of Udall’s library, in which was inserted “The Demonstration of Discipline,” the anonymous book for which Udall was prosecuted; with great ingenuity he observed that this was rather an argument that he was not the author, for “scholars use not to put their own books in the catalogue of those they have in their study.” We observe with astonishment the tyrannical decrees of our courts of justice, which lasted till the happy Revolution. The bench was as depraved in their notions of the rights of the subject in the reign of Elizabeth as in those of Charles II. and James II. The Court refused to hear Udall’s witnesses, on this strange principle, that “witnesses in favour of the prisoner were against the queen!” To which Udall replied, “It is for the queen to hear all things when the life of any of her subjects is in question.” The criminal felt what was just more than his judges; and yet the judge, though to be reprobated for his mode, calling so learned a man “Sirrah!” was right in the thing, when he declared that “you would bring the queen and the crown under your girdles.” It is remarkable that Udall repeatedly employed that expression which Algernon Sidney left as his last legacy to the people, when he told them he was about to die for “that Old Cause in which I was from my youth engaged.” Udall perpetually insisted on “The Cause.” This was a term which served at least for a watchword: it rallied the scattered members of the republican party. The precision of the expression might have been difficult to ascertain; and, perhaps, like every popular expedient, varied with “existing circumstances.” I did not, however, know it had so remote an origin as in the reign of Elizabeth; and suspect it may still be freshened up, and varnished over, for any present occasion.

The last stroke for Udall’s character is the history of his condemnation. He suffered the cruel mockery of a pardon granted conditionally, by the intercession of the Scottish monarch but never signed by the Queen—and Udall mouldered away the remnant of his days in a rigid imprisonment.[423] Cartwright and Travers, the chief movers of this faction, retreated with haste and caution from the victims they had conducted to the place of execution, while they themselves sunk into a quiet forgetfulness and selfish repose.

SUPPLEMENT TO MARTIN MAR-PRELATE.

As a literary curiosity, I shall preserve a very rare poetical tract, which describes with considerable force the Revolutionists of the reign of Elizabeth. They are indeed those of wild democracy; and the subject of this satire will, I fear, be never out of time. It is an admirable political satire against a mob-government. In our poetical history, this specimen too is curious, for it will show that the stanza in alternate rhymes, usually denominated elegiac, is adapted to very opposite themes. The solemnity of the versification is impressive, and the satire equally dignified and keen.

The taste of the mere modern reader had been more gratified by omitting some unequal passages; but, after deliberation, I found that so short a composition would be injured by dismembering extracts. I have distinguished by italics the lines to which I desire the reader’s attention, and have added a few notes to clear up some passages which might appear obscure.

RYTHMES AGAINST MARTIN MARRE-PRELATE.[424] Ordo Sacerdotum fatuo turbatur ab omni, Labitur et passim Religionis honos. Since Reason, Martin, cannot stay thy pen, We ’il see what rime will do; have at thee then! A Dizard late skipt out upon our stage, But in a sacke, that no man might him see; And though we know not yet the paltrie page, Himselfe hath Martin made his name to bee. A proper name, and for his feates most fit; The only thing wherein he hath shew’d wit. Who knoweth not, that Apes, men Martins call,[425] Which beast, this baggage seemes as ’t were himselfe: So as both nature, nurture, name, and all, Of that’s expressed in this apish elfe. Which Ile make good to Martin Marre-als face, In three plaine poynts, and will not bate an ace. For, first, the Ape delights with moppes and mowes, And mocketh Prince and Peasants all alike; This jesting Jacke, that no good manners knowes, With his Asse-heeles presumes all states to strike. Whose scoffes so stinking in each nose doth smell, As all mouthes saie of Dolts he beares the bell. Sometimes his chappes do walke in poynts too high, Wherein the Ape himself a Woodcock tries. Sometimes with floutes he drawes his mouth awrie, And sweares by his ten bones, and falselie lies. Wherefore be he what he will I do not passe; He is the paltriest Ape that euer was. Such fleering, leering, jeering fooles bopeepe, Such hahas! teehees! weehees! wild colts play; Such Sohoes! whoopes and hallowes; hold and keepe; Such rangings, ragings, reuelings, roysters ray; With so foule mouth, and knaue at euery catch, ’Tis some knaue’s nest did surely Martin hatch. Now out he runnes with Cuckowe king of May, Then in he leapes with a wild Morrice daunce; Then strikes he up Dame Lawson’s[426] lustie lay; Then comes Sir Jeffrie’s ale-tub, tapp’d by chaunce, Which makes me gesse, and I can shrewdly smell, He loues both t’ one and t’other passing well. Then straight, as though he were distracted quite, He chafeth like a cut-purse layde in warde; And rudely railes with all his maine and might, Against both knights and lords without regard: So as Bridewell must tame his dronken fits, And Bedlem help to bring him to his wits. But, Martin, why, in matters of such weight, Dost thou thus play the dawe, and dauncing foole? O sir (quoth he) this is a pleasant baite For men of sorts, to traine them to my schoole. Ye noble states, how can you like hereof, A shamelesse Ape at your sage head should scoffe? Good Noddie, now leaue scribbling in such matters; They are no tooles for fooles to tend unto; Wise men regard not what mad monkies patters! ’Twere trim a beast should teach men what to do. Now Tarleton’s dead, the consort lackes a Vice. For knaue and foole thou maist bear prick and price. The sacred sect, and perfect pure precise, Whose cause must be by Scoggin’s jests mainteinde, Ye shewe, although that Purple, Apes disguise, Yet Apes are still, and so must be, disdainde. For though your Lyons lookes weake eyes escapes, Your babling bookes bewraies you all for Apes. The next point is, Apes use to tosse and teare What once their fidling fingers fasten on; And clime aloft, and cast downe euery where, And neuer staie till all that stands be gon! Now whether this in Martin be not true, You wiser heads marke here what doth ensue. What is it not that Martin doth not rent? Cappes, tippets, gownes, black chiuers, rotchets white; Communion bookes, and homelies: yea, so bent To teare, as women’s wimples feele his spite. Thus tearing all, as all apes use to doo, He teares withall the Church of Christ in two. Marke now what thinges he meanes to tumble downe, For to this poynt to look is worth the while, In one that makes no choice ’twixt cap and crowne, Cathedral churches he would fain untile, And snatch up bishops’ lands, and catch away All gaine of learning for his prouling pray. And thinke you not he will pull downe at length As well the top from tower as cocke from steeple; And when his head hath gotten some more strength, To play with Prince as now he doth with People: Yes, he that now saith, Why should Bishops bee? Will next crie out, Why Kings? The Saincts are free! The Germaine boores with Clergiemen began, But neuer left till Prince and Peeres were dead. Jacke Leyden was a holy zealous man, But ceast not till the Crowne was on his head. And Martin’s mate, Jacke Strawe, would alwaies ring, The Clergie’s faults, but sought to kill the King. “Oh that,” quoth Martin, “chwere a Nobleman!”[427] Avaunt, vile villain! ’tis not for such swads. And of the Counsell, too: marke Princes then: These roomes are raught at by these lustie lads. For Apes must climbe, and neuer stay their wit, Untill on top of highest hilles they sit. What meane they els, in euery towne to craue Their Priest and King like Christ himself to be: And for one Pope ten thousand Popes to have, And to controll the highest he or she? Aske Scotland that, whose King so long they crost, As he was like his kingdome to haue lost. Beware ye States and Nobles of this lande, The Clergie is but one of these men’s buttes. The Ape at last on master’s necke will stande: Then gegge betimes these gaping greedie gutts. Least that too soone, and then too late ye feele, He strikes at head that first began with heele. The third tricke is, what Apes by flattering waies Cannot come by with biting, they will snatch; Our Martin makes no bones, but plainely saies, Their fists shall walke, they will both bite and scratch. He’ll make their hearts to ake, and will not faile, Where pen cannot, their penknife shall prevail.[428] But this is false, he saith he did but mock: A foole he was, that so his words did scanne. He only meant with pen their pates to knocke; A knaue he is, that so turns cat in pan. But, Martin, sweare and stare as deepe as hell, Thy sprite, thy spite and mischeuous minde doth tell. The thing that neither Pope with booke nor bull, Nor Spanish King with ships could doe without, Our Martins heere at home will worke at full: If Prince curbe not betimes that rabble rout. That is, destroy both Church and State and all; For if t’ one faile, the other needes must fall. Thou England, then, whom God doth make so glad Through Gospel’s grace and Prince’s prudent reigne, Take heede lest thou at last be made as sad, Through Martin’s makebates marring, to thy paine. For he marrs all and maketh nought, nor will, Saue lies and strife, and works for England’s ill. And ye graue men that answere Martin’s mowes, He mocks the more, and you in vain loose times. Leaue Apes to Doggs to baite, their skins to Crowes, And let old Lanam[429] lashe him with his rimes. The beast is proud when men read his enditings; Let his workes goe the waie of all wast writings. Now, Martin, you that say you will spawne out Your brawling brattes, in euery towne to dwell, We will provide in each place for your route, A bell and whippe that Apes do loue so well. And if yo skippe, and will not wey the checke, We ’il haue a springe, and catche you by the necke. And so adieu, mad Martin-mar-the-land Leaue off thy worke, and “more work”[430] hearest thou me Thy work’s nought worth, take better worke in hand. Thou marr’st thy worke, and thy work will marre thee. Worke not anewe, least it doth work thy wracke, And then make worke for him that worke doth lacke. And this I warn thee, Martin Monckies-face, Take heed of me; my rime doth charm thee bad. I am a rimer of the Irish race, And haue alreadie rimde thee staring mad. But if thou cease not thy bald jests to spread, I’le never leave till I have rimde thee dead.

LITERARY QUARRELS

FROM PERSONAL MOTIVES

Anecdote of a Bishop and a Doctor—Dr. Middleton and Dr. Bentley—Warburton and Dr. Taylor—Warburton and Edwards—Swift and Dryden—Pope and Bentley—why fiction is necessary for satire, according to Lord Rochester’s confession—Rowe and Addison—Pope and Atterbury—Sir John Hawkins and George Steevens—a fierce controversial author a dangerous neighbour—a ludicrous instance of a literary quarrel from personal motives between Bohun and the Wykehamists.

Literary Quarrels have abundantly sprung from mere personal motives; and controversies purely literary, sometimes of magnitude, have broken out, and been voluminously carried on, till the public are themselves involved in the contest, while the true origin lies concealed in some sudden squabble; some neglect of petty civility; some unlucky epithet; or some casual observation dropped without much consideration, which mortified or enraged the author. How greatly has passion prevailed in literary history! How often the most glorious pages in the chronicles of literature are tainted with the secret history which must be placed by their side, so that the origin of many considerable works, which do so much honour to the heads of their authors, sadly accuse their hearts. But the heaven of Virgil was disturbed with quarrels—

Tantæne animis cœlestibus iræ? Æneid.

Can heavenly minds such high resentment show? Dryden.

And has not a profound observer of human affairs declared, Ex privatis odiis respublica crescit? individual hatreds aggrandize the republic. This miserable philosophy will satisfy those who are content, from private vices, to derive public benefits. One wishes for a purer morality, and a more noble inspiration.

To a literary quarrel from personal motives we owe the origin of a very remarkable volume. When Dr. Parr delivered his memorable sermon, which, besides the “sesquipedalia verba,” was perhaps the longest that ever was heard—if not listened to—Bishop Hurd, who had always played the part of one of the most wary of politicians in private life, and who had occasion once adroitly to explain the French word Retenue, which no man better understood, in a singularly unguarded moment, sarcastically observed that he did not like “the doctor’s long vernacular sermon.” The happy epithet was soon conveyed to the classical ear of the modern Grecian: it was a wasp in it! The bishop had, in the days of literary adventure, published some pieces of irony, which were thought more creditable to his wit than his feelings—and his great patron, Warburton, certain juvenile prose and verse—all of which they had rejected from their works. But this it is to be an author!—his errors remain when he has outlived and corrected them. The mighty and vindictive Grecian in rage collected them all; exhausted his own genius in perpetuating follies; completed the works of the two bishops in utter spite; and in “Tracts by Warburton and a Warburtonian,” has furnished posterity with a specimen of the force of his own “vernacular” style, giving a lesson to the wary bishop, who had scarcely wanted one all his life—of the dangers of an unlucky epithet!

Dr. Conyers Middleton, the author of the “Life of Cicero,” seldom wrote but out of pique; and he probably owed his origin as an author to a circumstance of this nature. Middleton when young was a Dilettante in music; and Dr. Bentley, in contempt, applied the epithet “fiddling Conyers.” Had the irascible Middleton broken his violin about the head of the learned Grecian, and thus terminated the quarrel, the epithet had then cost Bentley’s honour much less than it afterwards did. It seems to have excited Middleton to deeper studies, which the great Bentley not long after felt when he published proposals for an edition of the New Testament in Greek. Middleton published his “Remarks, paragraph by paragraph, upon the proposals,” to show that Bentley had neither talents nor materials proper for the work. This opened a great paper-war, and again our rabid wolf fastened on the majestic lion, “paragraph by paragraph.” And though the lion did affect to bear in contempt the fangs of his little active enemy, the flesh was torn. “The proposals” sunk before the “paragraph by paragraph,” and no edition of the Greek Testament by Bentley ever appeared. Bentley’s proposals at first had met with the greatest success; the subscription-money amounted to two thousand pounds, and it was known that his nephew had been employed by him to travel abroad to collect these MSS. He declared he would make use of no MS. that was not a thousand years old, or above; of which sort he had collected twenty, so that they made up a total of twenty thousand years. He was four years studying them before he issued his proposals. The Doctor rested most on eight Greek MSS., the most recent of which was one thousand years old. All this wore a very imposing appearance. At a touch the whole magnificent edifice fell to pieces! Middleton says, “His twenty old MSS. shrink at once to eight, and he is forced again to own that even of these eight there are only four which had not been used by Dr. Mill;” and these Middleton, by his sarcastic reasoning, at last reduces to “some pieces only of the New Testament in MS.” So that twenty MSS. and their twenty thousand years were battered by the “fiddling Conyers” into a solitary fragment of little value! Bentley returned the subscription-money, and would not publish; the work still lies in its prepared state, and some good judges of its value have expressed a hope to see it yet published. But Bentley himself was not untainted in this dishonourable quarrel: he well knew that Middleton was the author of this severe attack; but to show his contempt of the real author, and desirous, in his turn, of venting his disappointment on a Dr. Colbatch, he chose to attribute it to him, and fell on Colbatch with a virulence that made the reply perfectly libellous, if it was Bentley’s, as was believed.

The irascibility of Middleton, disguising itself in a literary form, was still more manifested by a fact recorded of him by Bishop Newton. He had applied to Sir Robert Walpole for the mastership of the Charter-house, who honestly informed him that Bishop Sherlock, with the other Bishops, were against his being chosen. Middleton attributed the origin of this opposition to Bishop Sherlock, and wreaked his vengeance by publishing his “Animadversions upon Sherlock’s Discourses on Prophecy.” The book had been long published, and had passed through successive editions; but Middleton pretended he had never seen them before, and from this time Lambeth-house was a strong provocative for his vindictive temper.

Nor was the other great adversary of Middleton, he who so long affected to be the lord paramount, the Suzerain in the feudal empire, rather than the republic of letters—Warburton himself—less easily led on to these murderous acts of personal rancour. A pamphlet of the day has preserved an anecdote of this kind. Dr. Taylor, the Chancellor of Lincoln, once threw out in company an opinion derogatory to the scholarship of Warburton, who seems to have had always some choice spirits of his legion as spies in the camp of an enemy, and who sought their tyrant’s grace by their violation of the social compact. The tyrant himself had an openness, quite in contrast with the dark underworks of his satellites. He boldly interrogated our critic, and Taylor replied, undauntedly and more poignantly than Warburton might have suspected, that “he did not recollect ever saying that Dr. Warburton was no scholar, but that indeed he had always thought so.” To this intrepid spirit the world owes one of the remarkable prefaces to the “Divine Legation”—in which the Chancellor of Lincoln, intrepid as he was, stands like a man of straw, to be buffeted and tossed about with all those arts of distortion which the wit and virulence of Warburton almost every day was practising at his “established places of execution,” as his prefaces and notes have been wittily termed.

Even Warburton himself, who committed so many personal injuries, has, in his turn, most eminently suffered from the same motive. The personal animosity of a most ingenious man was the real cause of the utter destruction of Warburton’s critical reputation. Edwards, the author of the “Canons of Criticism,” when young and in the army, was a visitor at Allen’s of Prior-park, the patron of Warburton; and in those literary conversations which usually occupied their evenings, Warburton affected to show his superiority in his acquaintance with the Greek writers, never suspecting that a red coat covered more Greek than his own—which happened unluckily to be the case. Once, Edwards in the library, taking down a Greek author, explained a passage in a manner which did not suit probably with some new theory of the great inventor of so many; a contest arose, in which Edwards discovered how Warburton came by his illegitimate knowledge of Greek authors: Edwards attempted to convince him that he really did not understand Greek, and that his knowledge, such as it was, was derived from French translations—a provoking act of literary kindness, which took place in the presence of Ralph Allen and his niece, who, though they could not stand as umpires, did as witnesses. An incurable breach took place between the parties, and from this trifling altercation, Edwards produced the bitter “Canons of Criticism,” and Warburton those foaming notes in the Dunciad.

Such is the implacable nature of literary irascibility! Men so tenderly alive to intellectual sensibility, find even the lightest touch profoundly enter into the morbid constitution of the literary temper; and even minds of a more robust nature have given proof of a sickly delicacy hanging about them quite unsuspected. Swift is a remarkable instance of this kind: the foundation of the character of this great wit was his excellent sense. Yet having, when young, composed one of the wild Pindarics of the time, addressed to the Athenian Society, and Dryden judiciously observing that “cousin Jonathan would never be a poet,” the enraged wit, after he had reached the maturity of his own admirable judgment, and must have been well aware of the truth of the friendly prediction, could never forgive it. He has indulged the utmost licentiousness of personal rancour; he even puns miserably on his name to degrade him as the emptiest of writers. His spirited translation of Virgil, which was admired even by Pope, he levels by the most grotesque sarcastic images to mark the poet’s diminutive genius—he says this version-maker is so lost in Virgil, that he is like “the lady in a lobster; a mouse under a canopy of state; a shrivelled beau within the penthouse of a full-bottomed perriwig.” He never was generous enough to contradict his opinion, and persisted in it to the last. Some critic, about Swift’s own time, astonished at his treatment of Dryden, declares he must have been biassed by some prejudice—the anecdote here recorded, not then probably known, discovers it.

What happened to Pope on the publication of his Homer shows all the anxious temper of the author. Being in company with Bentley, the poet was very desirous of obtaining the doctor’s opinion of it, which Bentley contrived to parry as well as he could; but in these matters an author who calculates on a compliment, will risk everything to obtain it. The question was more plainly put, and the answer was as plainly given. Bentley declared that “the verses were good verses, but the work is not Homer—it is Spondanus!” From this interview posterity derives from the mortified poet the full-length figure of “the slashing Bentley,” in the fourth book of the Dunciad:

The mighty Scholiast, whose unwearied pains Made Horace dull, and humbled Milton’s strains.

When Bentley was told by some officious friend that Pope had abused him, he only replied, “Ay, like enough! I spoke against his Homer, and the portentous cub never forgives!” Part of Pope’s severe criticism only is true; but to give full effect to their severity, poets always infuse a certain quantity of fiction. This is an artifice absolutely necessary to practise; so I collect from a great master in the arts of satire, and who once honestly avowed that no satire could be composed unless it was personal; and no personalities would sufficiently adorn a poem without lies. This great satirist was Rochester. Burnet details a curious conversation between himself and his lordship on this subject. The bishop tells us that “he would often go into the country, and be for some months wholly employed in study, or the sallies of his wit chiefly directed to satire. And this he often defended to me by saying, there were some people that could not be kept in order, or admonished, but in this way.” Burnet remonstrated, and Rochester replied—“A man could not write with life unless he were heated by revenge; for to make a satire without resentments, upon the cold notions of philosophy, was as if a man would, in cold blood, cut men’s throats who had never offended him. And he said, the lies in these libels came often in as ornaments, that could not be spared without spoiling the beauty of the poem.” It is as useful to know how the materials of satire are put together; as thus the secret of pulling it to pieces more readily may sometimes be obtained.

These facts will sufficiently establish this disgraceful principle of the personal motives which have influenced the quarrels of authors, and which they have only disguised by giving them a literary form. Those who are conversant in literary history can tell how many works, and some considerable ones, have entirely sprung out of the vengeance of authors. Johnson, to whom the feelings of the race were so well known, has made a curious observation, which none but an author could have made:—“The best advice to authors would be, that they should keep out of the way of one another.” He says this in the “Life of Rowe,” on the occasion of Addison’s Observations on Rowe’s Character. Rowe had expressed his happiness to Pope at Addison’s promotion; and Pope, who wished to conciliate Addison towards Rowe, mentioned it, adding, that he believed Rowe was sincere. Addison replied, “That he did not suspect Rowe feigned; but the levity of his heart is such, that he is struck with any new adventure: and it would affect him just in the same manner as if he heard I was going to be hanged.” Warburton adds that Pope said he could not deny but Addison understood Rowe well. Such is the fact on which Johnson throws out an admirable observation:—“This censure time has not left us the power of confirming or refuting; but observation daily shows that much stress is not to be laid on hyperbolical accusations and pointed sentences, which even he that utters them desires to be applauded, rather than credited. Addison can hardly be supposed to have meant all that he said. Few characters can bear the microscopic scrutiny of WIT quickened by ANGER.” I could heap up facts to demonstrate this severe truth. Even of Pope’s best friends, some of their severities, if they ever reached him, must have given the pain he often inflicted. His friend Atterbury, to whom he was so partial, dropped an expression, in the heat of conversation, which Pope could never have forgiven; that our poet had “a crooked mind in a crooked body.” There was a rumour, after Pope’s death, that he had left behind him a satirical “Life of Dean Swift.” Let genius, whose faculty detects the foibles of a brother, remember he is a rival, and be a generous one. In that extraordinary morsel of literary history, the “Conversations of Ben Jonson with his friend Drummond of Hawthornden,” preserving his opinions of his contemporaries, if I err not in my recollection, I believe that he has not spoken favourably of a single individual!

The personal motives of an author, influencing his literary conduct, have induced him to practise meannesses and subterfuges. One remarkable instance of this nature is that of Sir John Hawkins, who indeed had been hardly used by the caustic pleasantries of George Steevens. Sir John, in his edition of Johnson, with ingenious malice contrived to suppress the acknowledgment made by Johnson to Steevens of his diligence and sagacity, at the close of his preface to Shakspeare. To preserve the panegyric of Steevens mortified Hawkins beyond endurance; yet, to suppress it openly, his character as an editor did not permit. In this dilemma he pretended he reprinted the preface from the edition of 1765; which, as it appeared before Johnson’s acquaintance with Steevens, could not contain the tender passage. However, this was unluckily discovered to be only a subterfuge, to get rid of the offensive panegyric. On examination, it proved not true; Hawkins did not reprint from this early edition, but from the latest, for all the corrections are inserted in his own. “If Sir John were to be tried at Hicks’s Hall (long the seat of that justice’s glory), he would be found guilty of clipping,” archly remarks the periodical critic.

A fierce controversial author may become a dangerous neighbour to another author: a petulant fellow, who does not write, may be a pestilent one; but he who prints a book against us may disturb our life in endless anxieties. There was once a dean who actually teased to death his bishop, wore him out in journeys to London, and at length drained all his faculties—by a literary quarrel from personal motives.

Dr. Thomas Pierce, Dean of Sarum—a perpetual controversialist, and to whom it was dangerous to refuse a request, lest it might raise a controversy—wanted a prebend of Dr. Ward, Bishop of Salisbury, for his son Robert. He was refused; and now, studying revenge, he opened a controversy with the bishop, maintaining that the king had the right of bestowing all dignities in all cathedrals in the kingdom, and not the bishops. This required a reply from the bishop, who had been formerly an active controversialist himself. Dean Pierce renewed his attack with a folio volume, entitled “A Vindication of the King’s Sovereign Right, &c.,” 1683.—Thus it proceeded, and the web thickened around the bishop in replies and rejoinders. It cost him many tedious journeys to London, through bad roads, fretting at “the King’s Sovereign Right” all the way; and, in the words of a witness, “in unseasonable times and weather, that by degrees his spirits were exhausted, his memory quite gone, and he was totally unfitted for business.”[431] Such was the fatal disturbance occasioned by Dean Pierce’s folio of “The King’s Sovereign Right,” and his son Bob being left without a prebend!

I shall close this article with a very ludicrous instance of a literary quarrel from personal motives. This piece of secret history had been certainly lost, had not Bishop Lowth condescended to preserve it, considering it as necessary to assign a sufficient reason for the extraordinary libel it produced.

Bohun, an antiquarian lawyer, in a work entitled “The English Lawyer,” in 1732, in illustrating the origin of the Act of Scandalum Magnatum, which arose in the time of William of Wykeham, the chancellor and bishop of Edward III. and the founder of New College, in Oxford; took that opportunity of committing the very crime on the venerable manes of Wykeham himself. He has painted this great man in the darkest colours. Wykeham is charged with having introduced “Alice Piers, his niece or,” &c., for the truth is he was uncertain who she was, to use his peculiar language, “into the king’s bosom;” to have joined her in excluding the Black Prince from all power in the state; and he hints at this hero having been poisoned by them; of Wykeham’s embezzling a million of the public money, and, when chancellor, of forging an Act of Parliament to indemnify himself, and thus passing his own pardon. It is a singularity in this libellous romance, that the contrary of all this only is true. But Bohun has so artfully interwoven his historical patches of misrepresentations, surmises, and fictions, that he succeeded in framing an historical libel.

Not satisfied with this vile tissue, in his own obscure volume, seven years afterwards, being the editor of a work of high reputation, Nathaniel Bacon’s “Historical and Political Discourse of the Laws and Government of England,” he further satiated his frenzy by contriving to preserve his libel in a work which he was aware would outlive his own.

Whence all this persevering malignity? Why this quarrel of Mr. Bohun, of the Middle Temple, with the long-departed William of Wykeham?

What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba?

He took all these obscure pains, and was moved with this perpetual rancour against William of Wykeham, merely to mortify the Wykehamists; and slandered their founder, with the idea that the odium might be reflected on New College. Bohun, it seems, had a quarrel with them concerning a lease on which he had advanced money; but the holder had contrived to assign it to the well-known Eustace Budgell: the college confirmed the assignment. At an interview before the warden, high words had arisen between the parties: the warden withdrew, and the wit gradually shoved the antiquary off the end of the bench on which they were sitting: a blow was struck, and a cane broken. Bohun brought an action, and the Wykehamites travelled down to give bail at Westminster Hall, where the legal quarrel was dropped, and the literary one then began. Who could have imagined that the venerable bishop and chancellor of Edward III. was to be involved in a wretched squabble about a lease with an antiquary and a wit? “Fancying,” says Bishop Lowth, “he could inflict on the Society of New College a blow which would affect them more sensibly by wounding the reputation of their founder, he set himself to collect everything he could meet with that was capable of being represented to his discredit, and to improve it with new and horrible calumnies of his own invention.” Thus originated this defamatory attack on the character of William of Wykeham! And by arts which active writers may practise, and innocent readers cannot easily suspect, a work of the highest reputation, like that of Nathaniel Bacon’s, may be converted into a vehicle of personal malignity, while the author himself disguises his real purpose under the specious appearance of literature! The present case, it must be acknowledged, is peculiar, where a dead person was attacked with a spirit of rancour to which the living only appear subject; but the author was an antiquary, who lived as much with the dead as the living: his personal motive was the same as those already recorded, and here he was acting with a double force on the dead and the living!

But here I stop my hand, my list would else be too complete. Great names are omitted—Whitaker and Gibbon;[432] Pope and Lord Hervey;[433] Wood and South;[434] Rowe, Mores, and Ames;[435] and George Steevens and Gough.[436]

This chapter is not honourable to authors; but historians are only Lord Chief Justices, who must execute the laws, even on their intimate friends, when standing at the bar. The chapter is not honourable—but it may be useful; and that is a quality not less valuable to the public. It lets in their readers to a kind of knowledge, which opens a necessary comment on certain works, and enlarges our comprehension of their spirit.

If in the heat of controversy authors imprudently attack each other with personalities, they are only scattering mud and hurling stones, and will incur the ridicule or the contempt of those who, unfriendly to the literary character, feel a secret pleasure in its degradation; but let them learn, that to open a literary controversy from mere personal motives; thus to conceal the dagger of private hatred under the mantle of literature, is an expedient of short duration, for the secret history is handed down with the book; and when once the dignity of the author’s character sinks in the meanness of his motives, powerful as the work may be, even Genius finds its lustre diminished, and Truth itself becomes suspicious.