When Bentley was told by some officious friend that Pope had abused him, he only replied, “Ay, like enough! I spoke against his Homer, and the portentous cub never forgives!” Part of Pope’s severe criticism only is true; but to give full effect to their severity, poets always infuse a certain quantity of fiction. This is an artifice absolutely necessary to practise; so I collect from a great master in the arts of satire, and who once honestly avowed that no satire could be composed unless it was personal; and no personalities would sufficiently adorn a poem without lies. This great satirist was Rochester. Burnet details a curious conversation between himself and his lordship on this subject. The bishop tells us that “he would often go into the country, and be for some months wholly employed in study, or the sallies of his wit chiefly directed to satire. And this he often defended to me by saying, there were some people that could not be kept in order, or admonished, but in this way.” Burnet remonstrated, and Rochester replied—“A man could not write with life unless he were heated by revenge; for to make a satire without resentments, upon the cold notions of philosophy, was as if a man would, in cold blood, cut men’s throats who had never offended him. And he said, the lies in these libels came often in as ornaments, that could not be spared without spoiling the beauty of the poem.” It is as useful to know how the materials of satire are put together; as thus the secret of pulling it to pieces more readily may sometimes be obtained.
These facts will sufficiently establish this disgraceful principle of the personal motives which have influenced the quarrels of authors, and which they have only disguised by giving them a literary form. Those who are conversant in literary history can tell how many works, and some considerable ones, have entirely sprung out of the vengeance of authors. Johnson, to whom the feelings of the race were so well known, has made a curious observation, which none but an author could have made:—“The best advice to authors would be, that they should keep out of the way of one another.” He says this in the “Life of Rowe,” on the 535 occasion of Addison’s Observations on Rowe’s Character. Rowe had expressed his happiness to Pope at Addison’s promotion; and Pope, who wished to conciliate Addison towards Rowe, mentioned it, adding, that he believed Rowe was sincere. Addison replied, “That he did not suspect Rowe feigned; but the levity of his heart is such, that he is struck with any new adventure: and it would affect him just in the same manner as if he heard I was going to be hanged.” Warburton adds that Pope said he could not deny but Addison understood Rowe well. Such is the fact on which Johnson throws out an admirable observation:—“This censure time has not left us the power of confirming or refuting; but observation daily shows that much stress is not to be laid on hyperbolical accusations and pointed sentences, which even he that utters them desires to be applauded, rather than credited. Addison can hardly be supposed to have meant all that he said. Few characters can bear the microscopic scrutiny of WIT quickened by ANGER.” I could heap up facts to demonstrate this severe truth. Even of Pope’s best friends, some of their severities, if they ever reached him, must have given the pain he often inflicted. His friend Atterbury, to whom he was so partial, dropped an expression, in the heat of conversation, which Pope could never have forgiven; that our poet had “a crooked mind in a crooked body.” There was a rumour, after Pope’s death, that he had left behind him a satirical “Life of Dean Swift.” Let genius, whose faculty detects the foibles of a brother, remember he is a rival, and be a generous one. In that extraordinary morsel of literary history, the “Conversations of Ben Jonson with his friend Drummond of Hawthornden,” preserving his opinions of his contemporaries, if I err not in my recollection, I believe that he has not spoken favourably of a single individual!
The personal motives of an author, influencing his literary conduct, have induced him to practise meannesses and subterfuges. One remarkable instance of this nature is that of Sir John Hawkins, who indeed had been hardly used by the caustic pleasantries of George Steevens. Sir John, in his edition of Johnson, with ingenious malice contrived to suppress the acknowledgment made by Johnson to Steevens of his diligence and sagacity, at the close of his preface to Shakspeare. To preserve the panegyric of Steevens mortified Hawkins beyond endurance; yet, to suppress it openly, his character 536 as an editor did not permit. In this dilemma he pretended he reprinted the preface from the edition of 1765; which, as it appeared before Johnson’s acquaintance with Steevens, could not contain the tender passage. However, this was unluckily discovered to be only a subterfuge, to get rid of the offensive panegyric. On examination, it proved not true; Hawkins did not reprint from this early edition, but from the latest, for all the corrections are inserted in his own. “If Sir John were to be tried at Hicks’s Hall (long the seat of that justice’s glory), he would be found guilty of clipping,” archly remarks the periodical critic.
A fierce controversial author may become a dangerous neighbour to another author: a petulant fellow, who does not write, may be a pestilent one; but he who prints a book against us may disturb our life in endless anxieties. There was once a dean who actually teased to death his bishop, wore him out in journeys to London, and at length drained all his faculties—by a literary quarrel from personal motives.
Dr. Thomas Pierce, Dean of Sarum—a perpetual controversialist, and to whom it was dangerous to refuse a request, lest it might raise a controversy—wanted a prebend of Dr. Ward, Bishop of Salisbury, for his son Robert. He was refused; and now, studying revenge, he opened a controversy with the bishop, maintaining that the king had the right of bestowing all dignities in all cathedrals in the kingdom, and not the bishops. This required a reply from the bishop, who had been formerly an active controversialist himself. Dean Pierce renewed his attack with a folio volume, entitled “A Vindication of the King’s Sovereign Right, &c.,” 1683.—Thus it proceeded, and the web thickened around the bishop in replies and rejoinders. It cost him many tedious journeys to London, through bad roads, fretting at “the King’s Sovereign Right” all the way; and, in the words of a witness, “in unseasonable times and weather, that by degrees his spirits were exhausted, his memory quite gone, and he was totally unfitted for business.”[431] Such was the fatal disturbance occasioned by Dean Pierce’s folio of “The King’s Sovereign Right,” and his son Bob being left without a prebend!
I shall close this article with a very ludicrous instance of a literary quarrel from personal motives. This piece of secret 537 history had been certainly lost, had not Bishop Lowth condescended to preserve it, considering it as necessary to assign a sufficient reason for the extraordinary libel it produced.
Bohun, an antiquarian lawyer, in a work entitled “The English Lawyer,” in 1732, in illustrating the origin of the Act of Scandalum Magnatum, which arose in the time of William of Wykeham, the chancellor and bishop of Edward III. and the founder of New College, in Oxford; took that opportunity of committing the very crime on the venerable manes of Wykeham himself. He has painted this great man in the darkest colours. Wykeham is charged with having introduced “Alice Piers, his niece or,” &c., for the truth is he was uncertain who she was, to use his peculiar language, “into the king’s bosom;” to have joined her in excluding the Black Prince from all power in the state; and he hints at this hero having been poisoned by them; of Wykeham’s embezzling a million of the public money, and, when chancellor, of forging an Act of Parliament to indemnify himself, and thus passing his own pardon. It is a singularity in this libellous romance, that the contrary of all this only is true. But Bohun has so artfully interwoven his historical patches of misrepresentations, surmises, and fictions, that he succeeded in framing an historical libel.
Not satisfied with this vile tissue, in his own obscure volume, seven years afterwards, being the editor of a work of high reputation, Nathaniel Bacon’s “Historical and Political Discourse of the Laws and Government of England,” he further satiated his frenzy by contriving to preserve his libel in a work which he was aware would outlive his own.
Whence all this persevering malignity? Why this quarrel of Mr. Bohun, of the Middle Temple, with the long-departed William of Wykeham?
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