Note 197 — Chapter X
Reading edition
Mr. Hollis published handsome editions of Toland’s Life of Milton, and Algernon Sidney’s Discourses on Government,—works of which the principles, political and religious, coincided with his own. He was a very honest well-meaning man, the idol of a small circle of friends, who profited largely by his bounty, and showed their gratitude by extravagant praises of his moral and intellectual merit. He died suddenly from apoplexy at his seat at Corscombe, in Dorsetshire, in 1764. An injudicious tribute was paid to his memory by the publication of his Life in two massive volumes, 4to, by Archdeacon Blackburne, in 1780—one of the dullest books of the day—and which as completely failed in its object as some of the biographies of the same cast, the introduction of which into the Biographia Britannica, drew forth the well-known lines of Cowper—
“O fond attempt to give a deathless lot To names ignoble, born to be forgot! In vain recorded in historic page, They court the notice of a future age. Those twinkling tiny lustres of the land, Drop one by one from Fame’s neglecting hand; Lethæan gulp receives them as they fall, And dark oblivion soon absorbs them all.”—E.