by letter, or in conversation, have I ever had dispute or controversy beyond the common social interchange of opinions. Nay, where I had reason to suppose my convictions fundamentally different, it has been my habit, and I may add, the impulse of my nature, to assign the grounds of my belief, rather than the belief itself; and not to express dissent, till I could establish some points of complete sympathy, some grounds common to both sides, from which to commence its explanation. Still less can I place these attacks to the charge of envy. The few pages which I have published, are of too distant a date; and the extent of their sale a proof too conclusive against their having been popular at any time, to render probable, I had almost said possible, the excitement of envy on their account; and the man who should envy me on any other, verily he must be envy-mad ! Lastly; with as little semblance of reason could I suspect any animosity towards me from vindictive feelings as the cause. I have before said, that my acquaintance with literary men has been limited and distant; and that I have had neither dispute nor controversy. From my first entrance into life, I have, with few and short intervals, lived either abroad or in retirement. My different essays on subjects of national interest, published at different times, first in the Morning Post and then in the Courier, with my courses of lectures on the principles of criticism as applied to Shakspeare and Milton, constitute my whole publicity; the only occasions on which from the reformation to the first half of Charles II.; and that of those who had flourished during the present reign, and the preceding one. About twelve months afterwards, a review appeared on the same subject, in the concluding paragraph of which the reviewer asserts, that his chief motive for entering into the discussion, was to separate a rational and qualified admiration of our elder writers, from the indiscriminate enthusiasm of a recent school, who praised what they did not understand, and caricatured what they were unable to imitate. And, that no doubt might be left concerning the persons alluded to, the writer annexes the names of Miss BAILIE, R. SOUTHEY, WORDSWORTH, and COLERIDGE. For that which follows, I have only hear-say evidence, but yet such as demands my belief; viz. that on being questioned concerning this apparently wanton attack, more especially with reference to Miss Bailie, the writer had stated as his motives, that this lady, when at Edinburgh, had declined a proposal of introducing him to her; that Mr. Southey had written against him; and Mr. Wordsworth had talked contemptuously of him; but that as to Coleridge, he had noticed him merely because the names of Southey and Wordsworth and Coleridge always went together. But if it were worth while to mix together, as ingredients, half the anecdotes which I either myself know to be true, or which I have received from men incapable of intentional falsehood, concerning the characters, qualifications, and motives of our annoymous critics, whose decisions are oracles for our reading public, I might safely borrow the words of the apocryphal Daniel; "Give me leave, O SOVEREIGN PUBLIC, and I shall slay this dragon without sword or staff." For the compound would be the "Pitch, and fat, and hair, which Daniel took, and did seethe them together, and made lumps thereof, and put into the dragon's mouth, and so the dragon burst in sunder; and Daniel said, LO, THESE ARE THE GODS YE WORSHIP." I could offend any member of the republic of letters. With one solitary exception, in which my words were first mis-stated, and then wantonly applied to an individual, I could never learn that I had excited the displeasure of any among my literary contemporaries. Having announced my intention to give a course of lectures on the characteristic merits and defects of the English poetry in its different eras; first, from Chaucer to Milton; second, from Dryden inclusive to Thompson; and third, from Cowper to the present day, I changed my plan, and confined my disquisition to the two former eras, that I might furnish no possible pretext for the unthinking to misconstrue, or the malignant to misapply, my words, and having stamped their own meaning on them, to pass them as current coin in the marts of garrulity or detraction. Praises of the unworthy are felt by ardent minds as robberies of the deserving; and it is too true, and too frequent, that Bacon, Harrington, Machiavel and Spinosa, are not read, because Hume, Condillac, and Voltaire are. But in promiscuous company, no prudent man will oppugn the merits of a contemporary in his own supposed department; contenting himself with praising in his turn those whom he deems excellent. If I should ever deem it my duty at all to oppose the pretensions of individuals, I would oppose them in books which could be weighed and answered, in which I could evolve the whole of my reason and feelings, with their requisite limits and modifications; not in irrecoverable conversation, where, however strong the reasons might be, the feelings that prompted them would assuredly be attributed by some one or other to envy and discontent. Besides, I well know, and I trust, have acted on that knowledge, that it must be the ignorant and injudicious who extol the unworthy; and the eulogies of critics without taste or judgment, are the natural reward of authors without feeling or genius. "Sint unicuique sua premia." How, then, dismissing, as I do, these three causes, am I to account for attacks, the long continuance and inveteracy of which it would require all three to explain? The solution may seem to have been given, or at least suggested, in a note to a preceding page. I was in habits of intimacy with Mr. Wordsworth and Mr. Southey! This, however, transfers, rather than removes, the difficulty. Be it, that by an unconscionable extension of the old adage, “noscitur a socio," my literary friends are never under the water-fall of criticism, but I must be wet through with the spray: yet, how came the torrent to descend upon them? First, then, with regard to Mr. Southey. I well remember the general reception of his earlier publications, viz. the poems published with Mr. Lovell, under the names of Moschus and Bion; the two volumes of poems under his own name, and the Joan of Arc. The censures of the critics by profession are extant, and may be easily referred to :-careless lines, inequality in the merit of the different poems, and, (in the lighter works,) a predilection for the strange and whimsical; in short, such faults as might have been anticipated in a young and rapid writer, were indeed sufficiently enforced. Nor was there at that time wanting, a party spirit to aggravate the defects of a poet, who, with all the courage of uncorrupted youth, had avowed his zeal for a cause which he deemed that of liberty, and his abhorrence of oppression, by whatever name consecrated. But it was as little objected by others, as dreamt of by the poet himself, that he preferred careless and prosaic lines on rule and of forethought, or, indeed, that he pretended to any other art or theory of poetic diction beside that which we may all learn from Horace, Quintilian, the admirable dialogue de Causis Corruptæ Eloquentiæ, or Strada's Prolusions; if, indeed, natural good sense, and the early study of the best models in his own language, had not infused the same maxims more securely, and, if I may venture the expression, more vitally. All that could have been fairly deduced, was, that in his taste and estimation of writers, Mr. Southey agreed far more with Warton than with Johnson. Nor do I mean to deny that, at all times, Mr. Southey was of the same mind with Sir Philip Sydney, in preferring an excellent ballad in the humblest style of poetry, to twenty indifferent poems that strutted in the highest. And by what have his works, published since then, been characterized, each more strikingly than the preceding, but by greater splendor, a deeper pathos, profounder reflections, and a more sustained dignity of language and of metre? Distant may the period be-but whenever the time shall come when all his works shall be collected by some editor worthy to be his biographer, I trust, that an excerpta of all the passages in which his writings, name, and character, have been attacked, from the pamphlets and periodical works of the last twenty years, may be an accompani ment. Yet that it would prove medicinal in after times I dare not hope; for as long as there are readers to be delighted with calumny, there will be found reviewers to calumniate, and such readers will become, in all probability, more numerous in proportion as a still greater diffusion of literature shall produce an increase of sciolists, and sciolism brings with it petulance and presumption. In times of old, books were as religious oracles; as literature advanced, they next became venerable preceptors; they then descended to the rank of instructive friends; and, as their numbers increased, they sunk still lower, to that of entertaining companions; and, at present, they seem degraded into culprits to hold up their hands at the bar of every self-elected, yet not the less peremptory, judge, who chooses to write from humour or interest, from enmity or arrogance, and to abide the decision, (in the words of Jeremy Taylor,) "of him that reads in malice, or him that reads after dinner." The same gradual retrograde movement may be traced in the relation which the authors themselves have assumed toward their readers. From the lofty address of Bacon: "these are the meditations of Francis of Verulam, which, that posterity should be possessed of, he deemed their interest ;" or from dedication to monarch or pontiff, in which the honour given was asserted in equipoise to the patronage acknowledged from PINDAR'S επ' άλλοι -ςι δ' ἄλλοι μεγάλοι. τό δ' ἔσχατον κορυ Πάπταινε πόρειον. Εἵη δὲ τε τᾶτον Υψε χρόνον πατεῖν εμέ Τε τοςςαδε νικαρόροις Ομιλέιν, πρόφαντον ςορίαν καθ' Ελ -λανας εοντα παντᾶ. OLYMP. OD. I. Poets and Philosophers, rendered diffident by their very number, addressed themselves to "learned readers ;" then aimed to conciliate the graces of "the candid reader ;" till the critic, still rising as the author sunk, the amateurs of literature, collectively, were erected into a municipality of judges, and addressed as THE TOWN! And now, finally, all men being supposed able to read, and all read ers able to judge, the multitudinous PUBLIC, shaped into personal unity by the magic of abstraction, sits nominal despot on the throne of criticism. But, alas! as in other despotisms, it but echoes the decisions of its invisible ministers, whose intellectual claims to the guardianship of the muses seem, for the greater part, analogous to the physical qualifications which adapt their oriental brethren for the superintendence of the harem. Thus, it is said that St. Nepomuc was installed the guardian of bridges, because he had fallen over one, and sunk out of sight; thus, too, St. Cecilia is said to have been first propitiated by musicians, because, having failed in her own attempts, she had taken a dislike to the art, and all its successful professors. But I shall probably have occasion, hereafter, to deliver my convictions more at large concerning this state of things, and its influences on taste, genius, and morality. In the "Thalaba," the " Madoc," and still more evidently in the unique "Cid," the "Kehama," and as last, so best, the "Don Roderick," Southey has given abundant proof, "se cogitasse quam sit magnum dare aliquid in manus hominum: nec persuadere sibi posse, non sæpe tractandum quod placere et semper et omnibus cupiat." Plin. Ep. Lib. 7. Ep. 17. But, on the other hand, I guess, that Mr. Southey was quite unable to comprehend wherein could consist the crime or mischief of printing half a dozen or more playful poems; or, to speak more generally, compositions which would be enjoyed or passed over, according as the taste and humour of the reader might chance to be; provided they contained nothing immoral. In the present age, "perituræ parcere chartæ," is emphatically an unreasonable demand. The merest trifle he ever sent abroad had tenfold better claims to its ink and paper, than all the silly criticisms, which prove no more than that the critic was not one of those for whom the trifle was written, and than all the grave exhortations to a greater reverence for the public. As if the passive page of a book, by having an epigram or doggerel tale impressed on it, instantly assumed at once locomotive power * I have ventured to call it "unique," not only because I know no work of the kind in our language (if we except a few chapters of the old translation of Froissart,) none which, uniting the charms of romance and history, keeps the imagination so constantly on the wing, and yet leaves so much for after reflection; but likewise, and chiefly, because it is a compilation which, in the various excellences of translation, selection, and arangement, required, and proves greater genius in the compiler, as living in the present state of society, than in the original composers. |