ON LITERARY PURSUITS.
In every duty, in every science in which we would wish to arrive at perfection, we should propose for the object of our pursuit some certain station even beyond our abilities; some imaginary excellence, which may amuse and seem to animate our enquiry. In deviating from others in following an unbeaten road, though we perhaps may never arrive at the wished-for object, yet it is possible we may meet several discoveries by the way; and the certainty of small advantages, even while we travel with security, is not so amusing as the hopes of great rewards by which the adventurer is inspired.
This enterprising spirit is, however, by no means the character of the present age; every person who should now have received opinions, who should attempt to be more than a commentator upon philosophers, or an imitator in polite learning, might be regarded as a chimerical projector. Hundreds would be ready not only to point out his errors, but to load him with reproach. Our probable opinions are now regarded as certainties; the difficulties hitherto undiscovered, as utterly inscrutable; and the writers of the last age inimitable, and therefore the properest models for imitation.
One might be almost induced to deplore the philosophic spirit of the age, which, in proportion as it enlightens the mind, increases its timidity, and represses the vigour of every undertaking. Men are more content with being prudently in the right, which, though not the way to make new acquisitions, it must be owned, is the best method of securing what we have. Yet this is certain, that the writer who never deviates, who never hazards a new thought, or a new expression, though his friends may compliment him upon his sagacity, though Criticism lifts her feeble voice in his praise, will seldom arrive at any degree of perfection. The way to acquire lasting esteem, is not by the fewness of a writer’s faults, but the greatness of his beauties, and our noblest works are generally most replete with both.
An author, who would be sublime, often runs his thoughts into burlesque; yet I can readily pardon his mistaking sometimes for once succeeding. True genius walks along a line, and, perhaps, our greatest pleasure is in seeing it often near falling, without being ever actually down.
Every science has its hitherto undiscovered mysteries, after which men should travel undiscouraged by the failure of former adventurers. Every new attempt serves, perhaps, to facilitate its future invention. We may not find the philosopher’s stone, but we shall, probably, hit upon new inventions in pursuing it. We shall, perhaps, never be able to discover the longitude, yet, perhaps, we may arrive at new truths in the investigation.
Were any of these sagacious minds among us, (and surely no nation, no period could ever compare with us in this particular,) were any of these minds, I say, who now sit down contented with exploring the intricacies of another’s system, bravely to shake off admiration, and undazzled with the splendor of another’s fame, to chalk out a path to renown for themselves, and boldly to cultivate untried experiments, what might not be the result of their enquiries, should the same study that has made them wise, make them enterprizing also? What could not such qualities, united, produce?
Projectors in a state are generally rewarded above their merit; projectors in the republic of letters, never. If they are wrong, every dunce thinks himself entitled to laugh at their disappointment; if they are right, men of superior talents think their honour engaged to oppose, as every new discovery is a tacit diminution of their own pre-eminence.
To aim at excellence, our reputation, our friends, and our all must be ventured: by aiming only at mediocrity, we run no risque, and we do little when prudence and greatness are ever persuading us to contrary pursuits. The one instructs us to be content with our station, and to find happiness in setting bounds to every wish. The other impels us to superiority, and calls nothing felicity but rapture. The one directs us to follow mankind, and to act and think with the rest of the world; the other drives us from the croud, and exposes us as a mark to all the shafts of envy or ignorance.
The rewards of mediocrity are immediately paid; those attending excellence generally paid in reversion. In a word, the little mind which loves itself, will write and think with the vulgar, but the great mind will be bravely eccentric, and scorn the beaten road, from universal benevolence.
THE
WANDERINGS
OF THE
IMAGINATION.
BY MRS. GOOCH.
(Continued from [page 363].)
CONCLUSION
OF THE
HISTORY OF CAPTAIN S——.
“Various are the stages of human woe; and long is the catalogue of mental miseries!—A load of grief, so new, so unexpected, burst with the early dawn on my distracted senses, and awakened them to everlasting wretchedness.
“The next morning I went to the Bedford, and enquired for Captain Nesbitt. The waiter told me he was not there, but asked my name, and said he had a letter for me. I opened it, and read as follows.
“SIR,
“As our meeting might be attended with disagreeable consequences to both, you must not be surprized at my declining it. I have but executed the commission with which you intrusted me, and at which you seem highly offended. As I am going to leave town immediately, I must beg leave to postpone till my return any thing you must have to communicate; and remain,
“Sir,
“Your humble servant,
“James Nesbitt.”
“I pocketed the infamous scrawl, as I shuddered at the depravity of human nature. My wife, (why cannot I blot out the dear, the sacred appellation?) was still wound about my heart, nor could I attempt to slacken, without breaking its every string. Worthless, yet still beloved woman, was it for this that I crossed the seas? for this that I submitted to an odious stigma cast upon my conduct, degrading even in idea to the character of an officer, and a gentleman?—for this that I renounced every hope of future advancement?—Cruel, cruel Isabella! Better could I behold thee dead; for what can life be to those who have broken every tie of duty, every claim to the purest affections that can ennoble the intellectual being?
“In a fit of frenzy, I flew to her lodgings. A fond, foolish hope to reclaim her, and a wish to see my still innocent child, led me beyond the bounds of prudence. She had quitted the house, and the people could not, or would not, inform me whither she was gone. I found by them, that they knew her only by the name of her seducer; and that my boy, whom they called by the same name, had accompanied his mother. My next enquiry was at the house of her relation; she had also left town, as they said, for some months.
“I returned to the Bedford-Arms, and hastily scrawled an incoherent letter, which I left in charge of the waiter there: he unwillingly took it, under pretence that Captain Nesbitt seldom came to their house, and it was uncertain when he might see him again. It ran as follows.
“SIR,
“If your heart is not callous to every feeling of social humanity, let me implore you to pity as a man, the distresses to which you have reduced me. You are young, but let me hope you are not a determined villain. A time may perhaps arrive, when you will feel, like me, WHAT IT IS to be a Husband, and a Father!—The opinion of the World is of little import to those, who, blessed with conscious rectitude, can defy its malice.
“Restore my wife—restore my child—I will receive her once more, as the first, best gift of Heaven; and her errors shall be blotted from the tablets of my memory. Let me conjure you, Sir, to be the friend of this unhappy woman; point out to her the path, of duly; and if you have any real affection for her, make the sacrifice of it to her honour, and future peace. As you deal by her, may Heaven, in justice, deal by you!
“I take this method of addressing you, in preference to that which a man of the World might think more consistent with my situation, under the present circumstances; but I feel, while I am writing it, that I am no coward, and that were human miseries to be extinguished only in blood, the last drop of mine should be spilt to save her from perdition.
“Your answer I shall most anxiously wait for at the Gloucester Coffee-house, Piccadilly, from the hour of twelve, every morning, till I receive it.
“I am, Sir,
“Your’s, &c.
“Frederick S———.”
“I waited two days at the Coffee-house without hearing from him. I impatiently counted every minute, and anticipated the transition from deep despondency to transcendant joy. I called for coffee, read, or seemed to read, the papers of the day; and my heart beat at the shadow of every object I saw approaching towards the house.
“It was near one on the third morning before I heard any tidings interesting to myself. A waiter then came forward, with a smile, and told me that a Gentleman enquired for me. Half breathless, I desired him to be admitted; my trembling limbs could scarcely support me as he entered, and I begged him to be seated. I asked him if he came from Captain Nesbitt? He answered in the affirmative, and I attempted to close the door; but he desired to admit his friend; and then informed me that he was the bearer of a writ against me, in the name of Captain James Nesbitt, to whom I stood indebted for the sum of two hundred pounds, for money lent me by him in the West-Indies.
“I knew full well that a gambling debt was not by law recoverable; but my heart recoiled at the idea of contesting it, and I determined immediately to extricate myself, however inconvenient. My stock of money was reduced to four hundred and seventy pounds. I paid out of it the debt and costs, which were no small augmentation. I hired a retired lodging, and resolved to wait as patiently as I could, the result of an event which had robbed me of every terrestrial joy. Here I lived many months, with sober, well-disposed people, but gained no intelligence of those for whose sake alone I still continued to drag on the load of heavy existence.
“I was one morning surprized by the entrance of an attorney, who produced me two bills; the one for a hundred and twenty pounds, which debt, he said, had been contracted by Mrs. S——— for board and lodging; the other, for twenty-five guineas for one quarter’s schooling and masters for my boy.
“I candidly declared to him my situation, and my inability to satisfy these demands; the consequence of which was an immediate arrest; and I was hurried from my peaceful chamber to the loathsome place appropriated in Newgate for debtors. Here I pined in misery and want. The course language of my fellow-prisoners, whose hearts seemed hardened in proportion to their necessities, offended, and disgusted me. I soon after heard that Lord G—— was arrived in England. I wrote to him, and he sent a servant to me with momentary relief. Obligation was new to me. Insensibly, and actuated more by despair than choice, I joined my companions; and the sight of a few guineas rejoicing them, I proposed our sharing them together. The sum was not sufficient to relieve me materially; and as the die of misery was cast, I endeavoured to dissipate its calamity: I drank—I laughed—I joined in their vulgar jokes, and for a while forgot myself. With the morning, rejected reason returned, but vanished as my companions of the time approached me.
“I passed near two years in this state of mental horror, when I was unexpectedly relieved from it by the commiserating heart of the then Sheriff, Mr. P. L—— M——. To that Gentleman it is not necessary to be personally known. His urbanity, his feelings do so much honour to human Nature, that she is compelled to acknowledge him her master-piece. In him the poor find a protector; the oppressed, a friend. That Gentleman saw, heard my story, and pitied me. His heart and purse were equally opened; and he seemed to satisfy the one, while he bountifully took from the other. I endeavoured to evince my gratitude; but the manly tear glistened in his eye, and I buried it in my heart. I returned to the house where I had lodged, forlorn and desolate, and took possession of the garret over my former apartment.
“I had not been there many days, before the Gentleman above-mentioned condescended to visit me. He was attended by his lawyer, who had been, by his directions, with Mrs. S——. He found her, surrounded by affluence; the new, but acknowledged favourite of the French Duke de ——. She was regardless of my situation, insensible to my misery; yet he prevailed on her, partly by intreaty, and partly by threats, in my name, of appropriating her property, to sign an instrument, which he had prepared, and which was a mutual release from all pecuniary matters between us. Nor did the generosity of my noble friend stop here: he hastily slipped into my hand a twenty-five pound note, and hurried down stairs, as if fearful to receive the bare acknowledgment of obligations which can never, never be repaid!
“Fortune seemed at this time anxious to make me amends for the many injuries with which she had lately overwhelmed me. The relation, to whom I had stood indebted for my commission, and who had left unanswered all the letters I had written to him, now sent for me. He received me with coldness, bordering on displeasure; and I briefly related to him my whole story. Ah, what a world of light did this meeting cast over my bewildered mind!—He was a very old man, who had been confined some years to his house by various bodily infirmities; and to such, the plausible appearance of youth and beauty in distress, is peculiarly interesting. I found he had received frequent visits from Mrs. S———, and had materially assisted her. Her attentions secured to her his friendship; and she had art enough to persuade him, that my conduct in the West-Indies had been such as to-forfeit every claim to his protection. She assured him, that my commission had been sold to discharge various gambling debts contracted there. This cruel, this unprecedented injury, soon, however, retorted on herself; and as “foul deeds WILL rise,” I was indebted to her for the vindication of my own character, and the total overthrow of that of my unnatural accuser.
“My uncle (for by that name I shall henceforth distinguish him) had found an uncommon affection for my child, who frequently accompanied his mother in her visits to him. He had been well tutored by her how to answer any questions that might be put to him; yet where there was no suspicion, there could be little danger. Mrs. S—— had constantly assured the old gentleman that she boarded at the house of the relation where I had first seen her. He found himself one day very ill, and was desirous of the company of his little favourite. His housekeeper, whom many years service, and the solitude of her master’s life, had placed on a footing that fell little short of being mistress of his house, was the person whom he dispatched for the child: she was nearly as old and infirm as her master; and as her walks had for several years extended no farther than to and from the adjacent chapel every Sunday morning, she could have wished to evade his proposal of shaking her ancient bones in a hackney-coach, and would gladly have had the commission devolve on the foot-boy, who, with herself, composed the whole of his household establishment. But her master, though a very good man, was a very peremptory one, and she dared not risk his displeasure by a refusal. Mrs. Wilmot accordingly equipped herself in her Sunday gown and cloak, and desiring the coachman to drive very gently over the stones, she sallied forth in quest of the little Frederick; for whom she also, after the example of her master, felt more than an usual affection.”
(To be continued.)
THE FARRAGO.
Nº. IV.
“One who had gain’d a princely store
By cheating all, both rich and poor,
Dared cry aloud “the land must sink
For all its fraud,” and whom d’ye think
The sermonizing rascal chid?
——A GLOVER, THAT SOLD LAMB FOR KID.”
MANDEVILLE.
Among the high privileges, which we digressive writers enjoy, may be reckoned that which Don Quixote gave his horse, to choose a path and pursue it at pleasure. In another point there is an affinity between us and that errant steed, so renowned in the volumes of Cervantic chivalry. When we begin an excursion, the Lord only knows how it will be prosecuted, or where it will end. Whim and caprice being commonly our guides, and those personages never keeping in their almanack a list of stages, we are sometimes most sadly benighted. As this is my day for similitudes, I stop not here; having so modestly compared myself and other ramblers to a quadruped, I will descend still lower into “the valley of humiliation,” and liken them to an insect, which is a spider. Though their stock is confessedly small, they have the art of drawing out a most lengthy texture. Thus an essayist, conscious of the scantiness of his stores, handles a topic as a farmer’s wife manages her annual pound of bohea, in such a manner as to make it last.
When I began my second speculation with some general remarks on the utility of an alliance between application and genius, I little thought that I should quit my sober task, and commence character painter. When Fancy handed me a pencil, and bade me sketch the likeness of Meander, I had no design to ransack his room, or transcribe his diary; and lastly, when the journal was published, I tremblingly thought I had said too much, and dreaded lest my readers should complain that they were surfeited by the Farrago. But they who are even tinged with the metaphysical doctrine of ideas flowing in a train, will not be confounded, though they see another speculation rising from the last, when I narrate the following incident. A friend who had attentively gazed at the portrait of Meander, saw me the day after its exhibition. So, Mr. Delineator, cries he, must you become a dauber in caricature? One so fond of the zigzag walk in life as you, is hardly entitled to ridicule deviation in another. I blushed; and the suffusion, like Corporal Trim’s bow, spoke as plainly as a blush could speak, “my man of remark, you are perfectly sage in your opinion.” This trivial circumstance led me to reflect, first on my own inconsistency, and next on that of others. By exposing the rambles of genius I virtually made proclamation for dissipation to depart, but she taxed me with issuing contradictory orders, and pertinently asked how she could go into exile, when I insisted on her keeping me company? I then looked on my neighbours. Their characters were similar to mine, and they wore not the uniform of regularity more than myself. Celia, who murders reputations, as “butcher felleth ox” pronounced, t’other day at a tea-table, a most bitter invective against scandal, though five minutes before she had invented a tale of calumny against her friend. Vafer censorially cautions a young gallant to beware an indulgence of the licentious passion, but forgets, while reading his lecture, that he once was amorous, that he solicited the virgin and the wife, and that, unsatisfied with the ordinary mysteries of intrigue, he elaborately refined on the system of seduction. Vinoso, whose face is as red-lettered as the court calendar, and who makes his Virginia fence at nine in the morning, applauds a very heavy excise on distilled spirits, and zealously damns every drunkard in the nation. Bobbin the haberdasher, who in vending a row of pins, defrauds the heedless customer of four, and who, when furnishing the village lass, with a set of apron-strings, pilfers from her a portion of the tape, exclaims against a vinter for adulterating his liquors, and wittily wonders, that he can adopt the Christian scheme so far, as to baptize even his wine. Messalina, whole chastity is valiant as a holiday Captain because no enemy is at hand, and who produced a lovely pair of twins six months before marriage, frowns at the forwardness of young flirts; and a decayed maiden, “far gone in her wane, Sir,” who has been but twenty these ten years, and who has more wrinkles in her forehead, than dimples on her chin, even she scoffs the vestal sisterhood, and turns up her note at the staleness of antiquated virginity.
In literature, as well as in life, we may recongnize this propensity. Authors are noted for inconsistence. Instances might be selected from almost every writer in our language. Pope, in conjunction with Arbuthnot and Swift, composed a satirical treatise, the design of which was, to lash his poetical brethren for attempting to soar, when their wings only served them to sink. Yet Pope, after some fine panegyrical verses upon Lord Mansfield, fell from a noble height of poetry to the very bottom of the bathos, by concluding his eulogy with the following feeble lines,
Graced as thou art with all the power of words,
So known, so honoured in the House of Lords.
Surely this was as risible a couplet of anticlimax, as the distich the bard ridicules, by merely quoting it,
Thou Dalhoussy, the great God of war,
Lieutenant Colonel to the Earl of Mar.
In the works of Swift, who omits no opportunity of damning dullness, may be found some compositions where the disappointed reader, instead of being dazzled with the gleam of fancy, sorrowing sees nothing but the vapid insipidity of a poet laureat’s ode, and eagerly inquires if it be upon record, that Swift ever studied the sing song of Cibber. Knox, a modern and, as he in his wisdom thinketh, a classic writer, censures, in one of his essays, the bombastic style; yet, were his own effusions arraigned in the court of criticism, they would, without any peradventure, be found guilty of turgidity. This pragmatical critic, who heated by high-church zeal, gives Gibbon to the Devil, and his writings to Lethe, presumptuously condemns that elegant historian for super-abundance of epithet, though a reader of Knox would suppose that the favourite page of this pedagogue’s grammar was that which contained the declension and variation of adjectives. Dr. Beattie, in the warmth of his wishes to promote social benevolent affections, almost hates the man, who practices not philanthropy. Rocked in the cradle of the kirk, and implicitly believing all that the nurse and priest had taught him, this presbyterian zealot declaims in terms so acrimonious against the sceptics of the age, that one is led to think his “milk of human kindness,” had became sour by the means he employed to preserve it.
Juvenal, the ancient satyrist, in one of his virulent attacks on the reigning Roman follies, avers that the most profligate of the senate were invariably strenuous advocates for a revival and execution of the obsolete rigid laws against debauchery. The indignant poet declares that if such glaring inconsistencies continue, none could be astonished should Clodius commence railer against libertines, and Cataline be first to impeach a conspirator. Were a name-sake of this bard to arise, I should tremble for the sect of modern inconsistents. He might brandish the lance of satire against such characters with more justice, though perhaps with less dexterity, than his classic predecessor. The field of foibles and follies is so fully ripe, that some one should put in the sickle. In this field appears, and will again appear, a labourer, who though aukward, may be useful, and who will be “worthy of his hire,” if he cut up nothing but tares.