This narrative is subscribed A. Welstede. Warburton maliciously quotes it as a life of Henley, written by Welsted—doubtless designed to lower the writer of that name, and one of the heroes of the Dunciad. The public have long been deceived by this artifice; the effect, I believe, of Warburton’s dishonesty.
Every lecture is dedicated to some branch of the royal family. Among them one is on “University Learning,” an attack.—“On the English History and Historians,” extremely curious.—“On the Languages, Ancient and Modern,” full of erudition.—“On the English Tongue,” a valuable criticism at that moment when our style was receiving a new polish from Addison and Prior. Henley, acknowledging that these writers had raised correctness of expression to its utmost height, adds, though, “if I mistake not, something to the detriment of that force and freedom that ought, with the most concealed art, to be a perfect copy of nature in all compositions.” This is among the first notices of that artificial style which has vitiated our native idiom, substituting for its purity an affected delicacy, and for its vigour profuse ornament. Henley observes that, “to be perspicuous, pure, elegant, copious, and harmonious, are the chief good qualities of writing the English tongue; they are attained by study and practice, and lost by the contrary: but imitation is to be avoided; they cannot be made our own but by keeping the force of our understandings superior to our models; by rendering our thoughts the original, and our words the copy.”—“On Wit and Imagination,” abounding with excellent criticism.—“On grave conundrums and serious buffoons, in defence of burlesque discourses, from the most weighty authorities.”—“A Dissertation upon Nonsense.” At the close he has a fling at his friend Pope; it was after the publication of the Dunciad. “Of Nonsense there are celebrated professors; Mr. Pope grows witty like Bays in the ‘Rehearsal,’ by selling bargains (his subscriptions for Homer), praising himself, laughing at his joke, and making his own works the test of any man’s criticism; but he seems to be in some jeopardy; for the ghost of Homer has lately spoke to him in Greek, and Shakspeare resolves to bring him, as he has brought Shakspeare, to a tragical conclusion. Mr. Pope suggests the last choice of a subject for writing a book, by making the Nonsense of others his argument; while his own puts it out of any writer’s power to confute him.” In another fling at Pope, he gives the reason why Mr. Pope adds the dirty dialect to that of the water, and is in love with the Nymphs of Fleet ditch; and in a lecture on the spleen he announced “an anatomical discovery, that Mr. Pope’s spleen is bigger than his head!”
Thus he anticipated the term, since become so notorious among German theologians.
It is preserved in the “Historical Register,” vol. xi. for 1726. It is curious and well written.
“Gentleman’s Magazine,” vol. lvii. p. 876.