SOPHIE.
From Lord Russell to Mr. T. Norton Longman
December 9th.—I was much interested in C. Greville's Memoirs. He is not a bit too severe on George IV. A worse man has not lived in our time.
On the other hand, many of the papers criticised the work in a hostile and violent manner. It was, they said, a breach of official confidence for a man in Greville's position to keep a journal at all. Greville—whose name it was fatally easy to rhyme to Devil—was described as a man delighting in listening at keyholes, and habitually misrepresenting the only half-heard secrets. Here is a specimen; one epigram out of many, all to the same effect, and all ending with the same rhyme:—
For fifty years he listened at the door,
And heard some secrets, and invented more;
These he wrote down, and statesmen, queens and kings,
Are all degraded into common things.
Though most have passed away, some still remain
To whom such scandal gives a needless pain;
And though they smile, and say 'Tis only Greville,'
They wish him, Reeve, and Longman at the devil.
The 'Quarterly Review,' too, in a peculiarly venomous article, compared the relative positions of Greville and Reeve with those of Bolingbroke and Mallet, as painted by Dr. Johnson. Bolingbroke, he had said, was a cowardly blackguard, who loaded a gun which he was afraid to fire off himself, and left a shilling to a beggarly Scotchman to pull the trigger after his death. The inference was inevitable; and though Reeve was neither a Scotchman nor a beggar, he unquestionably felt the sting, coming, as it did, from a friend of more than forty years' standing, Abraham Hayward [Footnote: See ante, vol. i. pp. 12, 34.]. The friendship was not unnaturally broken, nor does the old intimacy appear to have been ever renewed.
Of course the gravamen of this charge, made not only by the 'Quarterly Review,' but by other less distinguished journals, was that Reeve had been mainly, if not solely, influenced by the idea of making a good thing out of it. The sale of the work—they said—was very great. Commercially, it had been a brilliant success. Reeve's trained insight into literary affairs had shown him that it must be so, and, tempted by the auri sacra fames, he had yielded, maugre the counsels of his better part. Never was charge more unjust, more untrue. Reeve, though not a wealthy man, was now in easy circumstances, with a sufficient and assured income. Prudent in the management of his property and in his expenditure he seems to have always been; but as far removed, both by temperament and education, from parsimony as from extravagance. Money he valued only for what it could give him; and both in fact and in sentiment he was in a position to say with the poet—
mihi parva rura et
Spiritum Graias tenuem Camoenae
Parca non mendax dedit, et malignum
Spernere vulgus.
Still, the charge was made at the time, was currently repeated, and has been believed by many. It happens, however, that the most complete contradiction of it remains in the shape of Reeve's letters to Mr. T. Longman, some of which we can now read.
C. O., November 7th.—Nothing could end better for me than the amicable discussion with H. Farquhar, and I am exceedingly glad to have had an opportunity of writing the letter which appears in the 'Times' and 'Post' to-day.