The new species of literary burlesque which King seems to have invented, consists in selecting the very expressions and absurd passages from the original he ridiculed, and framing out of them a droll dialogue or a grotesque narrative, he adroitly inserted his own remarks, replete with the keenest irony, or the driest sarcasm.[278] Our arch wag says, “The bulls and blunders which Sloane and his friends so naturally 360 pour forth cannot be misrepresented, so careful I am in producing them.” King still moves the risible muscles of his readers. “The Voyage to Cajamai,” a travestie of Sloane’s valuable “History of Jamaica,” is still a peculiar piece of humour; and it has been rightly distinguished as “one of the severest and merriest satires that was ever written in prose.”[279] The author might indeed have blushed at the labour bestowed on these drolleries; he might have dreaded that humour so voluminous might grow tedious; but King, often with a Lucianic spirit, with flashes of Rabelais, and not seldom with the causticity of his friend Swift, dissipated life in literary idleness, with parodies and travesties on most of his contemporaries; and he made these little things often more exquisite at the cost of consuming on them a genius capable of better. A parodist or a burlesquer is a wit who is perpetually on the watch to catch up or to disguise an author’s words, to swell out his defects, and pick up his blunders—to amuse the public! King was a wit, who lived on the highway of literature, appropriating, for his own purpose, the property of the most eminent passengers, by a dextrous mode no other had hit on. What an important lesson the labours of King offer to real genius! Their temporary humour lost with their prototypes becomes like a paralytic limb, which, refusing to do its office, impedes the action of the vital members.
Wotton, in summing up his “Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning,” was doubtful whether knowledge would improve in the next age proportionably as it had done in his own. “The humour of the age is visibly altered,” he says, “from what it had been thirty years ago. Though the 361 Royal Society has weathered the rude attacks of Stubbe,” yet “the sly insinuations of the Men of Wit,” with “the public ridiculing of all who spend their time and fortunes in scientific or curious researches, have so taken off the edge of those who have opulent fortunes and a love to learning, that these studies begin to be contracted amongst physicians and mechanics.”—He treats King with good-humour. “A man is got but a very little way (in philosophy) that is concerned as often as such a merry gentleman as Dr. King shall think fit to make himself sport.”[280]
SIR JOHN HILL,
WITH
THE ROYAL SOCIETY, FIELDING, SMART, &c.
A Parallel between Orator Henley and Sir John Hill—his love of the Science of Botany, with the fate of his “Vegetable System”—ridicules scientific Collectors; his “Dissertation on Royal Societies,” and his “Review of the Works of the Royal Society”—compliments himself that he is NOT a Member—successful in his attacks on the Experimentalists, but loses his spirit in encountering the Wits—“The Inspector”—a paper war with Fielding—a literary stratagem—battles with Smart and Woodward—Hill appeals to the Nation for the Office of Keeper of the Sloane Collection—closes his life by turning Empiric—Some Epigrams on Hill—his Miscellaneous Writings.
In the history of literature we discover some who have opened their career with noble designs, and with no deficient powers, yet unblest with stoic virtues, having missed, in their honourable labours, those rewards they had anticipated, they have exhibited a sudden transition of character, and have left only a name proverbial for its disgrace.
Our own literature exhibits two extraordinary characters, indelibly marked by the same traditional odium. The wit and acuteness of Orator Henley, and the science and vivacity of the versatile Sir John Hill, must separate them from those who plead the same motives for abjuring all moral restraint, without having ever furnished the world with a single instance that they were capable of forming nobler views.
This orator and this knight would admit of a close parallel;[281] both as modest in their youth as afterwards remarkable for their effrontery. Their youth witnessed the same devotedness to study, with the same inventive and enterprising genius. Hill projected and pursued a plan of botanical travels, to form a collection of rare plants: the patronage he received was too 363 limited, and he suffered the misfortune of having anticipated the national taste for the science of botany by half a century. Our young philosopher’s valuable “Treatise on Gems,” from Theophrastus, procured for him the warm friendship of the eminent members of the Royal Society. To this critical period of the lives of Henley and of Hill, their resemblance is striking; nor is it less from the moment the surprising revolution in their characters occurred.