Well, well, omnivorous are the Shades;
But seldom hath that Stygian sculler
Oared o'er a gayer ghost than "Blayds,"[11]
Whose transit leaves the dull world duller.
Literary Controversies
Charles Reade, who died in the same year, is not ineptly described as the "Rupert of Letters," and his indiscretions and exuberances are overlooked in virtue of his services both as a dramatist and novelist, and the "noble rage" with which he vindicated "the master-virtue, Justice."
Echoes of a controversy over the censorship exerted by the libraries, revived periodically in later years, come to us from the years 1884 and 1885, when the banning of Mr. George Moore's novels led to a correspondence in the Pall Mall Gazette. Here the late Mr. George Gissing, while professing little sympathy with Mr. Moore, had fallen foul of Thackeray for truckling to the demands of Mrs. Grundy and betraying his artistic conscience—à propos of the Preface to Pendennis. This was altogether too much for Punch, who belaboured Mr. Gissing to his heart's content in his most truculent vein, and did not abstain from his old and ugly habit of making offensive capital out of an antagonist's name: "humbly we own that we never heard of his name before, though it seems suggestive of a kind of guttural German embrace performed by the nationalizer of the Land [Henry George]."
Another famous literary quarrel broke out in 1886, the year of the trenchant attack, recalling the style and temper of Macaulay, on Mr. Gosse in the Quarterly Review for October. As Punch had already indulged in a good deal of acid pleasantry at the expense of the mutual admiration of "Poet Dobson" and "Poet Gosse," it was easy to guess on which side his sympathies would be enlisted. The sting of the Quarterly's indictment lay in the statement that "the men who write bad books are the men who criticize them," and Punch did not refrain from rubbing in the charge:—
Quarterly pay was dear to man
Since or ever the world began,