DISAPPOINTED GENIUS
TAKES A FATAL DIRECTION BY ITS ABUSE.
How the moral and literary character are reciprocally influenced, may be traced in the character of a personage peculiarly apposite to these inquiries. This worthy of literature is Orator Henley, who is rather known traditionally than historically.[43] He is so overwhelmed with the echoed satire of Pope, and his own extravagant conduct for many years, that I should not care to extricate him, had I not discovered a feature in the character of Henley not yet drawn, and constituting no inferior calamity among authors.
Henley stands in his “gilt tub” in the Dunciad; and a portrait of him hangs in the picture-gallery of the Commentary. Pope’s verse and Warburton’s notes are the pickle and the bandages for any Egyptian mummy of dulness, who will last as long as the pyramid that encloses him. I shall transcribe, for the reader’s convenience, the lines of Pope:—
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Embrown’d with native bronze, lo! Henley stands, Tuning his voice, and balancing his hands; How fluent nonsense trickles from his tongue! How sweet the periods, neither said nor sung! Still break the benches, Henley, with thy strain, While Sherlock, Hare, and Gibson, preach in vain. Oh! great restorer of the good old stage, Preacher at once, and Zany of thy age![44] |
It will surprise when I declare that this buffoon was an indefatigable student, a proficient in all the learned languages, an elegant poet, and, withal, a wit of no inferior class. It remains to discover why “the Preacher” became “the Zany.”
Henley was of St. John’s College, Cambridge, and was distinguished for the ardour and pertinacity of his studies; he gave evident marks of genius. There is a letter of his to the 60 “Spectator,” signed Peter de Quir, which abounds with local wit and quaint humour.[45] He had not attained his twenty-second year when he published a poem, entitled “Esther, Queen of Persia,”[46] written amid graver studies; for three years after, Henley, being M.A., published his “Complete Linguist,” consisting of grammars of ten languages.
The poem itself must not be passed by in silent notice. It is preceded by a learned preface, in which the poet discovers his intimate knowledge of oriental studies, with some etymologies from the Persic, the Hebrew, and the Greek, concerning the name and person of Ahasuerus, whom he makes to be Xerxes. The close of this preface gives another unexpected feature in the character of him who, the poet tells us, was “embrowned with native bronze”—an unaffected modesty! Henley, alluding to a Greek paraphrase of Barnes, censures his faults with acrimony, and even apologises for them, by thus gracefully closing the preface: “These can only be alleviated by one plea, the youth of the author, which is a circumstance I hope the candid will consider in favour of the present writer!”
The poem is not destitute of imagination and harmony.
The pomp of the feast of Ahasuerus has all the luxuriance of Asiatic splendour; and the circumstances are selected with some fancy.