And bring in pomp laborious nothings home.”
Again he pounces upon the biographer of Dr. Johnson thus-wise:
“Boswell, aping with preposterous pride,
Johnson’s worst frailties, rolls from side to side,
His heavy head from hour to hour erects,
Affects the fool, and is what he affects.”
These lines afford a very good measure of his poetic grace and aptitude; but they give only a remote idea of his wonderful capacity for abusing people who did not think as he thought. He had a genius in this direction, which could not have discredited an editorial room in New York—or elsewhere. Walter Scott—a warm political friend—speaks of him as “a little man, dumpled up together, and so ill-made as to seem almost deformed;” and I think that kindly gentleman was disposed to attribute much of the critic’s rancor to his invalidism; but if we measure his printed bile in this way, there must be credited him not only his usual rheumatic twinges, but a pretty constant dyspepsia, if not a chronic neuralgia. Of a certainty he was a most malignant type of British party critics; and it is curious how the savors of its first bitterness do still linger about the pages of the Quarterly Review.
John Wilson Croker[41] will be best known to our readers as the editor of that edition of Boswell’s “Johnson,” to which I have alluded. Within the last ten years, however, his memoirs and correspondence, in two bulky volumes, have excited a certain languid interest, and given entertainment to those who are curious in respect to the political wire-pullings of the early part of this century in London. He was an ardent co-worker with Gifford in the early history of the Quarterly Review. He loved a lord every whit as well as Gifford, and by dint of a gentlemanly manner and gentlemanly associations was not limited to the “back-stairs way” of Mr. Gifford in courting those in authority. His correspondence with dukes and earls—to all of whom he is a “dear Croker”—abound; and his account of interviews with the Prince Regent, and of dinners at the Pavilion in Brighton, are quite Boswellian in their particularity and in their atmosphere of worship. There is also long account in the book to which I have called attention, of a private discourse by George IV., of which Mr. Croker was sole auditor; and it is hard to determine whether Croker is more elated by having the discourse to record, or Mr. Jennings by having such a record to edit.