Chapter XX: Preface: It is observed by Mr. Pope, that (10)

‘Let those who are in favour with their stars,
Of public honour and proud titles boast,
Whilst I, whom fortune of such triumph bars,
Unlook’d for joy in that I honour most.
Great princes’ favourites their fair leaves spread,
But as the marigold in the sun’s eye;
And in themselves their pride lies buried,
For at a frown they in their glory die.
The painful warrior famous’d for fight,
After a thousand victories once foil’d,
Is from the book of honour razed quite,
And all the rest forgot for which he toil’d:
Then happy I, that love and am belov’d,
Where I may not remove, nor be remov’d.’

LOVE’S CONSOLATION

‘When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my out-cast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featur’d like him, like him with friends possess’d,
Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least:
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee,—and then my state
(Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remember’d, such wealth brings,
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.’

NOVELTY

‘My love is strengthen’d, though more weak in seeming
I love not less, though less the show appear:
That love is merchandis’d, whose rich esteeming
The owner’s tongue doth publish everywhere.
Our love was new, and then but in the spring,
When I was wont to greet it with my lays:
As Philomel in summer’s front doth sing,
And stops his pipe in growth of riper days:
Not that the summer is less pleasant now
Than when her mournful hymns did hush the night,
But that wild music burdens every bough,
And sweets grown common lose their dear delight.
Therefore, like her, I sometime hold my tongue,
Because I would not dull you with my song.’

LIFE’S DECAY

‘That time of year thou may’st in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day,
As after sun-set fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou seest the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consum’d with that which it was nourish’d by.
This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.’

In all these, as well as in many others, there is a mild tone of sentiment, deep, mellow, and sustained, very different from the crudeness of his earlier poems.

End of THE CHARACTERS OF SHAKESPEAR’S PLAYS.

-----

Footnote 64:

A few alterations and corrections have been inserted in the present
edition.

[Note by W. H. to Second Edition.]

Footnote 65:

See the passage, beginning—‘It is impossible you should see this, were
they as prime as goats,’ etc.

Footnote 66:

‘_Iago._ Ay, too gentle.

_Othello._ Nay, that’s certain.’

Footnote 67:

In the account of her death, a friend has pointed out an instance of
the poet’s exact observation of nature:—

‘There is a willow growing o’er a brook,
That shews its hoary leaves i’ th’ glassy stream.’

The inside of the leaves of the willow, next the water, is of a
whitish colour, and the reflection would therefore be ‘hoary.’

Footnote 68:

See an article, called _Theatralia_, in the second volume of the
_Reflector_, by Charles Lamb.

Footnote 69:

There is another instance of the same distinction in Hamlet and
Ophelia. Hamlet’s pretended madness would make a very good real
madness in any other author.

Footnote 70:

The river wanders at its own sweet will.—WORDSWORTH.

Footnote 71:

The lady, we here see, gives up the argument, but keeps her mind.

A LETTER TO WILLIAM GIFFORD, ESQ.

[The title-page of the original edition is as follows: _A Letter to
William Gifford, Esq. From William Hazlitt, Esq. ‘Fit pugil, et
medicum urget.’ London: Printed for John Miller, Burlington Arcade,
Piccadilly. 1819. Price Three Shillings._ A so-called ‘second
edition’ of 1820 consisted of the unsold copies with a fresh
title-page: _London: Printed for Robert Stodart, 81 Strand. 1820._]

A LETTER TO WILLIAM GIFFORD, ESQ.

Sir,—You have an ugly trick of saying what is not true of any one you do not like; and it will be the object of this letter to cure you of it. You say what you please of others: it is time you were told what you are. In doing this, give me leave to borrow the familiarity of your style:—for the fidelity of the picture I shall be answerable.

You are a little person, but a considerable cat’s-paw; and so far worthy of notice. Your clandestine connexion with persons high in office constantly influences your opinions, and alone gives importance to them. You are the _Government Critic_, a character nicely differing from that of a government spy—the invisible link, that connects literature with the police. It is your business to keep a strict eye over all writers who differ in opinion with his Majesty’s Ministers, and to measure their talents and attainments by the standard of their servility and meanness. For this office you are well qualified. Besides being the Editor of the Quarterly Review, you are also paymaster of the band of Gentlemen Pensioners; and when an author comes before you in the one capacity, with whom you are not acquainted in the other, you know how to deal with him. You have your cue beforehand. The distinction between truth and falsehood you make no account of: you mind only the distinction between Whig and Tory. Accustomed to the indulgence of your mercenary virulence and party-spite, you have lost all relish as well as capacity for the unperverted exercises of the understanding, and make up for the obvious want of ability by a bare-faced want of principle. The same set of thread-bare common-places, the same second-hand assortment of abusive nicknames, the same assumption of little magisterial airs of superiority, are regularly repeated; and the ready convenient lie comes in aid of the dearth of other resources, and passes off, with impunity, in the garb of religion and loyalty. If no one finds it out, why then there is no harm done, _snug’s the word_; or if it should be detected, it is a good joke, shews spirit and invention in proportion to its grossness and impudence, and it is only a pity that what was so well meant in so good a cause, should miscarry! The end sanctifies the means; and you keep no faith with heretics in religion or government. You are under the protection of the _Court_; and your zeal for your king and country entitles you to say what you chuse of every public writer who does not do all in his power to pamper the one into a tyrant, and to trample the other into a herd of slaves. You derive your weight with the great and powerful from the very circumstance that takes away all real weight from your authority, _viz._ that it is avowedly, and upon every occasion, exerted for no one purpose but to hold up to hatred and contempt whatever opposes in the slightest degree and in the most flagrant instances of abuse their pride and passions. You dictate your opinions to a party, because not one of your opinions is formed upon an honest conviction of the truth or justice of the case, but by collusion with the prejudices, caprice, interest or vanity of your employers. The mob of well-dressed readers who consult the Quarterly Review, know that _there is no offence in it_. They put faith in it because they are aware that it is ‘false and hollow, but will please the ear’; that it will tell them nothing but what they would wish to believe. Your reasoning comes under the head of Court-news; your taste is a standard of the prevailing _ton_ in certain circles, like Ackerman’s dresses for May. When you damn an author, one knows that he is not a favourite at Carlton House. When you say that an author cannot write common sense or English, you mean that he does not believe in the doctrine of _divine right_. Of course, the clergy and gentry will not read such an author. Your praise or blame has nothing to do with the merits of a work, but with the party to which the writer belongs, or is in the inverse _ratio_ of its merits. The dingy cover that wraps the pages of the Quarterly Review does not contain a concentrated essence of taste and knowledge, but is a receptacle for the scum and sediment of all the prejudice, bigotry, ill-will, ignorance, and rancour, afloat in the kingdom. This the fools and knaves who pin their faith on you know, and it is on this account they pin their faith on you. They come to you for a scale not of literary talent but of political subserviency. They want you to set your mark of approbation on a writer as a thorough-paced tool, or of reprobation as an honest man. Your fashionable readers, Sir, are hypocrites as well as knaves and fools; and the watch-word, the practical intelligence they want, must be conveyed to them without implied offence to their candour and liberality, in the _patois_ and gibberish of fraud of which you are a master. When you begin to jabber about common sense and English, they know what to be at, shut up the book, and wonder that any respectable publisher can be found to let it lie on his counter, as much as if it were a Petition for Reform. Do you suppose, Sir, that such persons as the Rev. Gerard Valerian Wellesley and the Rev. Weeden Butler would not be glad to ruin what they call a Jacobin author as well as a Jacobin stationer?[72] Or that they will not thank you for persuading them that their doing so in the former case is a proof of their taste and good sense, as well as loyalty and religion? You know very well that if a particle of truth or fairness were to find its way into a single number of your publication, another Quarterly Review would be set up to-morrow for the express purpose of depriving every author, in prose or verse, of his reputation and livelihood, who is not a regular hack of the vilest cabal that ever disgraced this or any other country.

There is something in your nature and habits that fits you for the situation into which your good fortune has thrown you. In the first place, you are in no danger of exciting the jealousy of your patrons by a mortifying display of extraordinary talents, while your sordid devotion to their will and to your own interest at once ensures their gratitude and contempt. To crawl and lick the dust is all they expect of you, and all you can do. Otherwise they might fear your power, for they could have no dependence on your fidelity: but they take you with safety and fondness to their bosoms; for they know that if you cease to be a tool, you cease to be anything. If you had an exuberance of wit, the unguarded use of it might sometimes glance at your employers; if you were sincere yourself, you might respect the motives of others; if you had sufficient understanding, you might attempt an argument, and fail in it. But luckily for yourself and your admirers, you are but the dull echo, ‘the tenth transmitter’ of some hackneyed jest: the want of all manly and candid feeling in yourself only excites your suspicion and antipathy to it in others, as something at which your nature recoils: your slowness to understand makes you quick to misrepresent; and you infallibly make nonsense of what you cannot possibly conceive. What seem your wilful blunders are often the felicity of natural parts, and your want of penetration has all the appearance of an affected petulance!

Again, of an humble origin yourself, you recommend your performances to persons of fashion by always abusing _low people_, with the smartness of a lady’s waiting woman, and the independent spirit of a travelling tutor. Raised from the lowest rank to your present despicable eminence in the world of letters, you are indignant that any one should attempt to rise into notice, except by the same regular trammels and servile gradations, or should go about to separate the stamp of merit from the badge of sycophancy. The silent listener in select circles, and menial tool of noble families, you have become the oracle of Church and State. The purveyor to the prejudices or passions of a private patron succeeds, by no other title, to regulate the public taste. You have felt the inconveniences of poverty, and look up with base and groveling admiration to the advantages of wealth and power: you have had to contend with the mechanical difficulties of a want of education, and you see nothing in learning but its mechanical uses. A self-taught man naturally becomes a pedant, and mistakes the means of knowledge for the end, unless he is a man of genius; and you, Sir, are not a man of genius. From having known nothing originally, you think it a great acquisition to know anything now, no matter what or how small it is—nay, the smaller and more insignificant it is, the more curious you seem to think it, as it is farther removed from common sense and human nature. The collating of points and commas is the highest game your literary ambition can reach to, and the squabbles of editors are to you infinitely more important than the meaning of an author. You think more of the letter than the spirit of a passage; and in your eagerness to show your minute superiority over those who have gone before you, generally miss both. In comparing yourself with others, you make a considerable mistake. You suppose the common advantages of a liberal education to be something peculiar to yourself, and calculate your progress beyond the rest of the world from the obscure point at which you first set out. Yet your overweening self-complacency is never easy but in the expression of your contempt for others; like a conceited mechanic in a village ale-house, you would set down every one who differs from you as an ignorant blockhead; and very fairly infer that any one who is beneath yourself must be nothing. You have been well called an Ultra-Crepidarian critic. From the difficulty you yourself have in constructing a sentence of common grammar, and your frequent failures, you instinctively presume that no author who comes under the lash of your pen can understand his mother-tongue: and again, you suspect every one who is not your ‘very good friend’ of knowing nothing of the Greek or Latin, because you are surprised to think how you came by your own knowledge of them. There is an innate littleness and vulgarity in all you do. In combating an opinion, you never take a broad and liberal ground, state it fairly, allow what there is of truth or an appearance of truth, and then assert your own judgment by exposing what is deficient in it, and giving a more masterly view of the subject. No: this would be committing your powers and pretensions where you dare not trust them. You know yourself better. You deny the meaning altogether, misquote or misapply, and then plume yourself on your own superiority to the absurdity you have created. Your triumph over your antagonists is the triumph of your cunning and mean-spiritedness over some nonentity of your own making; and your wary self-knowledge shrinks from a comparison with any but the most puny pretensions, as the spider retreats from the caterpillar into its web.

There cannot be a greater nuisance than a dull, envious, pragmatical, low-bred man, who is placed as you are in the situation of the Editor of such a work as the Quarterly Review. Conscious that his reputation stands on very slender and narrow grounds, he is naturally jealous of that of others. He insults over unsuccessful authors; he hates successful ones. He is angry at the faults of a work; more angry at its excellences. If an opinion is old, he treats it with supercilious indifference; if it is new, it provokes his rage. Everything beyond his limited range of inquiry, appears to him a paradox and an absurdity: and he resents every suggestion of the kind as an imposition on the public, and an imputation on his own sagacity. He cavils at what he does not comprehend, and misrepresents what he knows to be true. Bound to go through the nauseous task of abusing all those who are not like himself the abject tools of power, his irritation increases with the number of obstacles he encounters, and the number of sacrifices he is obliged to make of common sense and decency to his interest and self-conceit. Every instance of prevarication he wilfully commits makes him more in love with hypocrisy, and every indulgence of his hired malignity makes him more disposed to repeat the insult and the injury. His understanding becomes daily more distorted, and his feelings more and more callous. Grown old in the service of corruption, he drivels on to the last with prostituted impotence and shameless effrontery; salves a meagre reputation for wit, by venting the driblets of his spleen and impertinence on others; answers their arguments by confuting himself; mistakes habitual obtuseness of intellect for a particular acuteness, not to be imposed upon by shallow appearances; unprincipled rancour for zealous loyalty; and the irritable, discontented, vindictive, peevish effusions of bodily pain and mental imbecility for proofs of refinement of taste and strength of understanding.

Such, Sir, is the picture of which you have sat for the outline:—all that remains is to fill up the little, mean, crooked, dirty details. The task is to me no very pleasant one; for I can feel very little ambition to follow you through your ordinary routine of pettifogging objections and barefaced assertions, the only difficulty of making which is to throw aside all regard to truth and decency, and the only difficulty in answering them is to overcome one’s contempt for the writer. But you are a nuisance, and should be abated.

I shall proceed to shew, first, your want of common honesty, in speaking of particular persons; and, secondly, your want of common capacity, in treating of any general question. It is this double negation of understanding and principle that makes you all that you are.—As an instance of the summary manner in which you dispose of any author who is not to your taste, you began your account of the first work of mine you thought proper to notice (the Round Table), with a paltry and deliberate falsehood. I need not be at much pains to shew that your opinion on the merits of a work is not of much value, after I have shewn that your word is not to be taken with respect to the author. The charges which you brought against me as the writer of that work, were chiefly these four:—1st, That I pretended to have written a work in the manner of the Spectator; I answer, this is a falsehood. The Advertisement to that work is written expressly to disclaim any such idea, and to apologise for the work’s having fallen short of the original intention of the projector (Mr. Leigh Hunt), from its execution having devolved almost entirely upon me, who had undertaken merely to furnish a set of essays and criticisms, which essays and criticisms were here collected together.—2. That I was not only a professed imitator of Addison, but a great coiner of new words and phrases: I answer, this is also a deliberate and contemptible falsehood. You have filled a paragraph with a catalogue of these new words and phrases, which you attribute to me, and single out as the particular characteristics of my style, not any one of which I have used. This you knew.—3. You say I write eternally about washerwomen. I answer, no such thing. There is indeed one paper in the Round Table on this subject, and I think a very agreeable one. I may say so, for it is not my writing.—4. You say that ‘I praise my own chivalrous eloquence’: and I answer, that’s a falsehood; and that you knew that I had not applied these words to myself, because you knew that it was not I who had used them. The last paragraph of the article in question is true: for as if to obviate the detection of this tissue of little, lying, loyal, catchpenny frauds, it contains a cunning, tacit acknowledgment of them; but says, with equal candour and modesty, that it is not the business of the writer to distinguish (in such trifling cases) between truth and falsehood. That may be; but I cannot think that for the editor of the Quarterly Review to want common veracity, is any disgrace to me. It is necessary, Sir, to go into the details of this fraudulent transaction, this Albemarle-street hoax, that the public may know, once for all, what to think of you and me. The first paragraph of the Review is couched in the following terms.

‘Whatever may have been the preponderating feelings with which we closed these volumes, we will not refuse our acknowledgments to Mr. Hazlitt for a few mirthful sensations,’ (that they were very few, I can easily believe,) ‘which he has enabled us to mingle with the rest, by the hint that his Essays were meant to be “in the manner of the Spectator and Tatler.” The passage in which this is conveyed, happened to be nearly the last to which we turned; and we were about to rise from the Round Table, heavily oppressed with a recollection of vulgar descriptions, silly paradoxes, flat truisms, misty sophistry, broken English, ill humour, and rancorous abuse, when we were first informed of the modest pretensions of our host. Our thoughts then reverted with an eager impulse to the urbanity of Addison, his unassuming tone, and clear simplicity; to the ease and softness of his style, to the chearful benevolence of his heart. The playful gaiety too, and the tender feelings of his coadjutor, poor Steele, came forcibly to our memory. The effect of the ludicrous contrast thus presented to us, it would be somewhat difficult to describe. We think that it was akin to what we have felt from the admirable _nonchalance_ with which Liston, in the complex character of a weaver and an ass, seems to throw away all doubt of his being the most accomplished lover in the universe, and receives, as if they were merely his due, the caresses of the fairy queen.’—Quarterly Review, No. xxxiii. p. 154.

The advertisement prefixed to the Round Table, in which the hint is conveyed which afforded you ‘a few mirthful sensations,’ stood thus.—

‘The following work falls somewhat short of its title and original intention. It was proposed by my friend Mr. Hunt, to publish a series of papers in the Examiner, in the manner of the early periodical essayists, the Spectator and Tatler. These papers were to be contributed by various persons on a variety of subjects; and Mr. Hunt, as the editor, was to take the characteristic or dramatic part of the work upon himself. I undertook to furnish occasional essays and criticisms; one or two other friends promised their assistance; but the essence of the work was to be miscellaneous. The next thing was to fix upon a title for it. After much doubtful consultation, that of THE ROUND TABLE was agreed upon, as most descriptive of its nature and design. But our plan had been no sooner arranged and entered upon, than Buonaparte landed at Frejus, _et voila la Table Ronde dissoute_. Our little Congress was broken up as well as the great one. Politics called off the attention of the Editor from the belles lettres; and the task of continuing the work fell chiefly upon the person who was least able to give life and spirit to the original design. A want of variety in the subjects, and mode of treating them, is, perhaps, the least disadvantage resulting from this circumstance. All the papers in the two volumes here offered to the public, were written by myself and Mr. Hunt, except a letter communicated by a friend in the sixteenth number. Out of the fifty-two numbers, twelve are Mr. Hunt’s, with the signatures L. H. or H. T. For all the rest I am answerable. W. HAZLITT.’

Such, Sir, is the passage to which you allude, with so much hysterical satisfaction, as having let you into the secret that I fancied myself to have produced a work ‘in the manner of the Spectator and Tatler’; and as having relieved you from the extreme uneasiness you had felt in reading through the ‘vulgar descriptions, silly paradoxes, flat truisms, misty sophistry, broken English, ill humour, and rancorous abuse,’ contained in the Round Table. If I had indeed given myself out for a second Steele or Addison, I should have made a very ludicrous mistake. As it is, it is you have made a wilful misstatement. Your oppression, Sir, in rising from the Round Table, must have been great to put you upon so desperate an expedient to divert your chagrin, as that of affecting to suppose that I had said just the contrary of what I did say, in order that you might affect ‘a few mirthful sensations’ at my expence. I cannot say that I envy you the little voluntary revulsion which your feelings underwent, at the ludicrous comparison which you fancy me to make between myself and Addison, on purpose to indulge the suggestions of your spleen and prejudice. These are among the last refinements, the _menus plaisirs_ of hypocrisy, of which I must remain in ignorance. I will not require you to retract the assertion you have made, but I will take care before I have done, that any assertion you may make with respect to me shall not be taken as current. As to your praise of the Tatler and Spectator, I must at all times agree to it: but as far as it was meant as a tacit reproof to my vanity in comparing myself with these authors, it appears to have been unnecessary. You say elsewhere, speaking of some passage of mine—‘Addison never wrote anything so fine!’—and again that I fancy myself a finer writer than Addison. By your uneasy jealousy of the self-conceit of other people, it should seem that you are in the habit of drawing comparisons, ‘secret, sweet, and precious,’ between yourself and your ‘illustrious predecessors’ not much to their advantage. As you have here thought proper to tell me what I do not think, I will tell you what I do think, which is, that you could not have written the passage in question, _On the Progress of Arts_, because you never felt half the enthusiasm for what is fine.

2. After stating the pretensions of the work, you proceed to the style in which it is written.—‘There is one merit which this author possesses besides that of successful imitation—he is a very eminent creator of words and phrases. Amongst a vast variety which have newly started up we notice “firesider”—“kitcheny”—“to smooth up”—“to do off”—and “to tiptoe down.” To _this_ we add a few of the author’s new-born phrases, which bear sufficient marks of a kindred origin to entitle them to a place by _their_ side. Such is the assertion that Spenser “was dipt in poetic luxury”; the description of “a minute coil which clicks in the baking coal”—of “a numerousness scattering an individual gusto”—and of “curls that are ripe with sun shine.” _Our readers are perhaps by this time as much acquainted with the style of this author as they have any desire to be_,’ etc.

I have nothing to do at present with the merits of the words or phrases, which you here attribute to me, and make the test of my general style, as if your readers truly if they persisted would find only a constant repetition of them in my writings. I say that they are not mine at all; that they are not characteristic of my style, that you knew this perfectly, and also that there were reasons which prevented me from pointing out this petty piece of chicanery; and farther, I say that I am so far from being ‘a very eminent creator of words and phrases,’ that I do not believe you can refer to an instance in anything I have written in which there is a single new word or phrase. In fact, I am as tenacious on this score of never employing any new words to express my ideas, as you, Sir, are of never expressing any ideas that are not perfectly thread-bare and commonplace. My style is as old as your matter. This is the fault you at other times find with it, mistaking the common idiom of the language for ‘broken English.’

3. You say that ‘I write eternally about washerwomen’; and pray, if I did, what is that to you, Sir? There is a littleness in your objections which makes even the answers to them ridiculous, and which would make it impossible to notice them, were you not the Government-Critic. You say yourself indeed afterwards that ‘It is he’ (Mr. Hunt) ‘who devotes _ten or twelve pages_ to a dissertation on washerwomen.’ Good: what you say on this subject is a fair specimen of your mind and manners. The playing at fast-and-loose with the matter-of-fact may be passed over as a matter of course in your hypercritical lucubrations. There is but one half paper on this interdicted subject in the Round Table:—you have filled one page out of five of the article in the Review with a ridicule of this paper on account of the vulgarity of the subject, which offends you exceedingly; you recur to it twice afterwards _en passant_, and end your performance (somewhat in the style of a quack-doctor aping his own merry-andrew) with ‘two or three conclusive digs in the side at it.’ There is something in the subject that makes a strong impression on your mind. You seem ‘to hate it with a perfect hatred.’[73] Now I would ask where is the harm of this dissertation on washerwomen inserted in the Round Table, any more than those of Dutch and Flemish kitchen-pieces, the glossy brilliancy and high finishing of which must have become familiar to your eye in the collections of Earl Grosvenor, Lord Mulgrave, and the Marquis of Stafford? What has Mr. Hunt done in this never-to-be forgiven paper to betray the lowness of his breeding or sentiments, or to shew that he who wrote it is ‘the droll or merry fellow of the piece,’ and that I who _did not write it_ am ‘a sour Jacobin, who hate everything but washerwomen’? Would Addison or Steele, ‘poor Steele’ as you call him, have brought this as a capital charge against their ‘imitators’? Did they instinctively direct their speculations or limit their views of human life to ‘remarks on gentlemen and gentlewomen’? They often enough treated of low people and familiar life without any consciousness of degradation. ‘Their gorge did not rise’ at the humble worth or homely enjoyments of their fellow-creatures, like your’s. A coronet or a mitre were not the only things that caught their jaundiced eye, or soothed their rising gall. They who are always talking of high and low people are generally of a vulgar origin themselves, and of an inherent meanness of disposition which nothing can overcome. Besides, there is a want of good faith, as well as of good taste, in your affected fastidiousness on this point. ‘You assume a vice, though you have it not,’ or not to the degree, which your petulance and servility would have us suppose. A short time before you wrote this uncalled-for tirade against Mr. Hunt as an exclusive patroniser of that class of females, ycleped ‘washerwomen,’ he had quoted with praise in the Examiner, and as a mark of tender and humane feelings in the author, in spite of appearances to the contrary, the following epitaph from the Gentleman’s Magazine.

‘EPITAPH BY WILLIAM GIFFORD, ESQ.

‘We are no friends, publicly speaking, to the author of the following epitaph. We differ much with his politics, and with the cast of his satire; and do not think him, properly speaking, a poet, as many do. But we always admired the spirit that looked forth from his account of his own life, and the touching copy of verses on a departed friend, that are to be found in the notes to one of his satires; and there are feelings and circumstances in this world, before which politics and satire, and poetry, are of little importance’—(_How little knew’st thou of Calista!_)—‘feelings, that triumph over infirmity and distaste of every sort, and only render us anxious, in our respect for them, to be thought capable of appreciating them ourselves. The world, with all its hubbub, slides away from before one on such occasions; and we only see humanity in all its better weakness, and let us add, in all its beauty.

‘The author will think what he pleases of this effusion of ours. It is an interval in the battle, during which we only wish to show ourselves fellow-men with him. Afterwards, he may resume his hostilities, if he has any, and we will draw our swords as before.

_For the ‘Gentleman’s Magazine.’ Dec. 18, 1815._

‘Mr. Urban,—I am one of those who love to contemplate the “frail
memorials” of the dead, and do not, therefore, count the solitary
hours, occasionally spent in a church-yard, among the most
melancholy ones of my life. But in London, this is a gratification
rarely to be found; for, either through caution, or some less worthy
motive, the cemeteries are closed against the stranger. I have been
in the practice of passing by the chapel in South Audley Street,
Grosvenor Square, almost every day, for several weeks, yet never saw
the door of the burying-ground open till yesterday. I did not
neglect the opportunity thus offered, but walked in. I found it far
more spacious and airy than I expected; but I met with nothing very
novel or interesting till I came to a low tomb, plain but neat,
where I was both pleased and surprised by the following inscription,
which, I believe, has never yet appeared in print, and which seems
not unworthy of your miscellany.

M. D.

Here lies the Body
of ANN DAVIES,
(for more than twenty years)
Servant to William Gifford.[74]
She died February 6, 1815,
in the forty-third year of her age,
of a tedious and painful malady,
which she bore
with exemplary patience and resignation.

Her deeply-afflicted master
erected this stone to her memory,
as a faithful testimony
of her uncommon worth,
and of his perpetual gratitude,
respect and affection,
for her long and meritorious services.

Though here unknown, dear Ann, thy ashes rest,
Still lives thy memory in one grateful breast,
That traced thy course through many a painful year,
And marked thy humble hope, thy pious fear.—
O! when this frame, which yet, while life remained,
Thy duteous love, with trembling hand, sustained,
Dissolves (as soon it must) may that Bless’d Pow’r
Who beamed on thine, illume my parting hour!
So shall I greet thee, where no ills annoy,
And what was sown in grief, is reap’d in joy;
Where worth, obscured below, bursts into day,
And those are paid, whom Earth could never pay.’[75]

It seems then, you can extract the pathetic though not the humorous, out of persons who are not ‘gentlemen or gentlewomen.’ It was the amiable weakness thus noticed, that made you take such pains to do away the suspicion of a particular partiality for low people. You could not afford ‘the frail memorial’ of your private virtues to get beyond the inscription on a tomb-stone, or the poet’s corner of the Gentleman’s Magazine. The natural sympathies of the undoubted translator of Juvenal might be a prejudice to the official character of the anonymous editor of the Quarterly Review. You were determined to hear no more of this epitaph, and ‘other such dulcet diseases’[76] of yours.—You perhaps recollect, Sir, that the columns of the Examiner newspaper, which gave you such a premature or posthumous credit for some ‘compunctious visitings of nature,’ also contained the first specimen of the Story of Rimini. You seem to have said on that occasion with Iago, ‘You are well tuned now,—but I’ll set down the pegs that make this music, _as honest as I am_.’—That Mr. Hunt should have supposed it possible for a moment, that a government automaton was accessible to anything like a liberal concession, is one of those deplorable mistakes which constantly put men who are ‘made of penetrable stuff,’ at the mercy of those who are not. The amiable and elegant author of Rimini thought he was appealing to something human in your breast, in the recollection of your ‘Dear Ann Davies’; he touched the springs, and found them ‘stuffed with paltry blurred sheets’ of the Quarterly Review, with notes from Mr. Murray, and directions how to proceed with the author, from the Admiralty Scribe. You retorted his sympathy with ‘one whom earth could never pay,’ by laughing to scorn his honest laborious ‘tub-tumbling viragos,’ whose red elbows and coarse fists prevented so inelegant a contrast to the pining and sickly form whose loss you deplore. Is there anything in your nature and disposition that draws to it only the infirm in body and oppressed in mind; or that, while it clings to power for support, seeks consolation in the daily soothing spectacle of physical malady or morbid sensibility? The air you breathe seems to infect; and your friendship to be a canker-worm that blights its objects with unwholesome and premature decay. You are enamoured of suffering, and are at peace only with the dead.—Even if you had been accessible to remorse as a political critic, Mr. Hunt had committed himself with you (past forgiveness) in your character of a pretender to poetry about town. The following lines in his Feast of the Poets, must have occasioned you ‘a few mirthful sensations,’ which you have not yet acknowledged, except by deeds.—

‘A hem was then heard, consequential and snapping,
And a sour little gentleman walked with a rap in.
He bow’d, look’d about him, seem’d cold, and sat down,
And said,[77] “I’m surpris’d that you’ll visit this town:—
To be sure, there are one or two of us who know you,
But as for the rest, they are all much below you.
So stupid, in general, the natives are grown,
They really prefer Scotch reviews to their own;
So that what with their taste, their reformers, and stuff,
They have sicken’d myself and my friends long enough.”
“Yourself and your friends!” cried the God in high glee;
“And pray my frank visitor, who may you be?”
“Who be?” cried the other; “why really—this tone—
William Gifford’s a name, I think pretty well known.”
“Oh—now I remember,” said Phœbus;—“ah true—
My thanks to that name are undoubtedly due:
The rod, that got rid of the Cruscas and Lauras,
—That plague of the butterflies—sav’d me the horrors;
The Juvenal too stops a gap in one’s shelf,
At least in what Dryden has not done himself;
And there’s something, which even distaste must respect,
In the self-taught example, that conquer’d neglect.
But not to insist on the recommendations
Of modesty, wit, and a small stock of patience,
My visit just now is to poets alone,
And not to small critics, however well known.”
So saying, he rang, to leave nothing in doubt,
And the sour little gentleman bless’d himself out.’

_Thus painters write their names at Co._ For this passage and the temperate and judicious note which accompanies it, it is no wonder that you put the author—of Rimini, in Newgate, without the Sheriff’s warrant. In order to give as favourable an impression of that poem as you could, you began your account of it by saying that it had been composed in Newgate, though you knew that it had not; but you also knew that the name of Newgate would sound more grateful to certain ears, to pour flattering poison into which is the height of your abject ambition. In this courtly inuendo which ushered in your wretched verbal criticism (it is the more disgusting to see such gross and impudent prevarication combined with such petty captiousness) you were guided not by a regard to truth, but to your own ends; and yet you say somewhere, very oracularly, out of contradiction to me, that ‘not to prefer the true to the agreeable, where they are inconsistent, is folly.’ You have mistaken the word: it is not folly, but knavery.[78]

4. You say you have no objection to my ‘praising my own chivalrous eloquence’; and I say that the insinuation is impertinent and untrue. The paper in which that phrase occurs is written by Mr. Hunt, as you know, and is an answer to some observations of mine on the poetical temperament in a preceding number _On the Causes of Methodism_. Mr. Hunt’s having taken upon him ‘to praise my chivalrous eloquence,’ without consulting you, appeared no doubt a great piece of presumption; and you punished me by magnifying this indiscretion into the enormity of my having praised myself. I might as well say that Mr. Canning had made a fulsome eulogy on his own private virtues and public principles in your dedication of the edition of Ben Jonson to him.—You say indeed in the last paragraph of your criticism that ‘you understand some of the papers to be by Mr. Hunt; that it is he who is the droll or merry fellow of the piece; who has shocked you by writing eternally about washerwomen, etc. but that you cannot stay to distinguish between us, and that we must divide our respective share of merit between ourselves.’ The share of merit in that work may indeed be so small that it is of little consequence who has the reversion of any part of it, but I will take care that a cat’s-paw shall not be put on the pannel of my _quantum meruit_, nor take measure of my capacity with a mechanic rule, marked by ignorance and servility, nor turn the scale of public opinion by throwing in false weights as he pleases, nor make both of us ridiculous, by attributing to each the peculiarities of the other, with whatever exaggerated interpretation he chuses to put upon them. By this transposition of persons, which is not a matter of indifference as you pretend, you gain this advantage which you have no right to gain. You can at any time apply to me or Mr. Hunt the obnoxious points in your account of either, and improve upon them, as it suits your purpose. By combining the extremes of individual character, you make a very strange and wilful compound of your own. It is the same person, and yet it is not one person but two persons, according to the critical creed you would establish, who is a merry fellow, and a sour Jacobin; who is all gaiety and all gloom; a person who rails at poets, and yet is himself a poet; a hater of cats, and of cat’s-paws;[79] a reviler of Mr. Pitt, and a panegyrist upon washerwomen. If, Sir, your friend, Mr. Hoppner, of whom, as you tell us[80] you discreetly said nothing, while he was struggling with obscurity, lest it should be imputed to the partiality of friendship, but whom you praised and dedicated to, as soon as he became popular, to shew your disinterestedness and deference to public opinion, if even this artist, whom you celebrate as a painter of flattering likenesses, had undertaken to unite in one piece the most striking features and characteristic expression of his and your common friends, had improved your lurking archness of look into Mr. Murray’s gentle, downcast obliquity of vision; had joined Mr. Canning’s drooping nose to Mr. Croker’s aspiring chin, the clear complexion (the _splendida bilis_) of the one, to the candid self-complacent aspect of the other; had forced into the same preposterous medley, the invincible _hauteur_ and satanic pride of Mr. Pitt’s physiognomy, with the dormant meaning and admirable nonchalance of Lord Castlereagh’s features, the manly sleekness of Charles Long, and the monumental outline of John Kemble—what mortal would have owned the likeness!—I too, Sir, must claim the privilege of the _principium individuationis_, for myself as well as my neighbours; I will sit for no man’s picture but my own, and not to you for that; I am not desirous to play so many parts as Bottom, and as to his ass’s head which you would put upon my shoulders, it will do for you to wear the next time you shew yourself in Mr. Murray’s shop, or for your friend Mr. Southey to take with him, whenever he appears at Court.

As to the difference of political sentiment between the writer of the Round Table and the writer of the article in the Review, which forms the heavy burthen of your flippant censure, I cannot consider that as an accusation. You have many other objections to make: such as that, because Mr. Addison wrote some very pleasing papers on the Pleasures of the Imagination, I am not willing to fall short of ‘my illustrious predecessor’; and ‘accordingly,’ you say, ‘we hear much of poetry and of painting, and of music and of _gusto_.’ Is this the only reason you can conceive why any one should take an interest in such things; or did you write your Baviad and Mæviad that you might not fall short of Pope, your translation of Juvenal that you might surpass Dryden, or did you turn commentator on the poets, that you might be on a par with ‘your illustrious predecessors’—‘from slashing Bentley down to piddling Theobalds’? Of Hogarth you make me say, quoting from your favourite treatise on washerwomen, that ‘he is too apt to perk morals and sentiments in your face.’ You cannot comprehend my definition of _gusto_, which you do not ascribe to any defect in yourself. My account of Titian and Vandyke’s colouring, appears to you very odd, because it is like the things described, and you have no idea of the things described. If I had described the style of these two painters in terms applicable to them both, and to all other painters, you would have thought the precision of the style equal to the justness of the sentiment. A distinction without a difference satisfies you, for you can understand or repeat a common-place. It is the pointing out the real differences of things that offends you, for you have no idea of what is meant; and a writer who gets at all below the surface of a question, necessarily gets beyond your depth, and you can hardly contain your wonder at his presumption and shallowness. You quote half a dozen detached sentences of mine, as ‘convincing instances of affectation and paradox,’ (such as, _The definition of a true patriot is a good hater—He who speaks two languages has no country_, etc.) and which taken from the context to which they belong, and of which they are brought as extreme illustrations, may be so, but which you cannot answer in the connection in which they stand, and which you detach from the general speculation with which you dare not cope, to bring them more into the focus of your microscopic vision, and that you may deal with them more at ease and in safety on your old ground of literal and verbal quibbling.

You do not like the subjects of my Essays in general. You complain in particular of ‘my eager vituperation of good nature and good-natured people’; and yet with this you have, as I should take it, nought to do: you object to my sweeping abuse of poets, as (with the exception of Milton) dishonest men,[81] with which you have as little to do; you are no poet, and of course, honest! You do not like my abuse of the Scotch at which the Irish were delighted, nor my abuse of the Irish at which the Scotch were not displeased, nor my abuse of the English, which I can understand; but I wonder you should not like my abuse of the French. You say indeed that ‘no abuse which is directed against whole classes of men is of much importance,’ and yet you and your Anti-Jacobin friends have been living upon this sort of abuse for the last twenty years. You add with characteristic ‘no meaning’—‘_If undeserved_, it is utterly impotent and may be well utterly despised.’ The last part of the proposition may be true, but abuse is not without effect, because undeserved, nor is a thing utterly impotent because it is thoroughly despicable. You, Sir, have power which is considerable, in proportion as it is despicable!