In a letter to Joseph Warton.
Burton, the author of “The Anatomy of Melancholy,” offers a striking instance. Bishop Kennett, in his curious “Register and Chronicle,” has preserved the following particulars of this author. “In an interval of vapours he would be extremely pleasant, and raise laughter in any company. Yet I have heard that nothing at last could make him laugh but going down to the Bridge-foot at Oxford, and hearing the bargemen scold and storm and swear at one another; at which he would set his hands to his sides, and laugh most profusely; yet in his chamber so mute and mopish, that he was suspected to be felo de se.” With what a fine strain of poetic feeling has a modern bard touched this subject!—
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“As a beam o’er the face of the waters may glow, While the tide runs in darkness and coldness below, So the cheek may be tinged with a warm sunny smile, Though the cold heart to ruin runs darkly the while.” Moore’s “Irish Melodies.” |
Dr. Edmund Castell offers a remarkable instance to illustrate our present investigation. He more than devoted his life to his “Lexicon Heptaglotton.” It is not possible, if there are tears that are to be bestowed on the afflictions of learned men, to read his pathetic address to Charles II., and forbear. He laments the seventeen years of incredible pains, during which he thought himself idle when he had not devoted sixteen or eighteen hours a day to this labour; that he had expended all his inheritance (it is said more than twelve thousand pounds); that it had broken his constitution, and left him blind as well as poor. When this invaluable Polyglott was published, the copies remained unsold in his hands; for the learned Castell had anticipated the curiosity and knowledge of the public by a full century. He had so completely devoted himself to oriental studies, that they had a very remarkable consequence, for he had totally forgotten his own language, and could scarcely spell a single word. This appears in some of his English Letters, preserved by Mr. Nichols in his valuable “Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century,” vol. iv. Five hundred of these Lexicons, unsold at the time of his death, were placed by Dr. Castell’s niece in a room so little regarded, that scarcely one complete copy escaped the rats, and “the whole load of learned rags sold only for seven pounds.” The work at this moment would find purchasers, I believe, at forty or fifty pounds.—The learned Sale, who first gave the world a genuine version of the Koran, and who had so zealously laboured in forming that “Universal History” which was the pride of our country, pursued his studies through a life of want—and this great orientalist (I grieve to degrade the memoirs of a man of learning by such mortifications), when he quitted his studies too often wanted a change of linen, and often wandered in the streets in search of some compassionate friend who would supply him with the meal of the day!
The following are extracts from Ockley’s letters to the Earl of Oxford, which I copy from the originals:—
“Cambridge Castle, May 2, 1717.
“I am here in the prison for debt, which must needs be an unavoidable consequence of the distractions in my family. I enjoy more repose, indeed, here, than I have tasted these many years, but the circumstance of a family obliges me to go out as soon as I can.”
“Cambridge, Sept. 7, 1717.
“I have at last found leisure in my confinement to finish my Saracen history, which I might have hoped for in vain in my perplexed circumstances.”