“Had I not been forced to snatch everything that I have, as it were, out of the fire, our Saracen history should have been ushered into the world after a different manner.” He is fearful that something would be ascribed to his indolence or negligence, that “ought more justly to be attributed to the influence of inexorable necessity, could I have been master of my own time and circumstances.”
Shame on those pretended patrons who, appointing “a professor of the oriental languages,” counteract the purpose of the professorship by their utter neglect of the professor, whose stipend cannot keep him on the spot where only he ought to dwell. And Ockley complains also of that hypocritical curiosity which pretends to take an interest in things it cares little about; perpetually inquiring, as soon as a work is announced, when it is to come out. But these Pharisees of literature, who can only build sepulchres to ancient prophets, never believe in a living one. Some of these Ockley met with on the publication of his first volume: they run it down as the strangest story they had ever heard; they had never met with such folks as the Arabians! “A reverend dignitary asked me if, when I wrote that book, I had not lately been reading the history of Oliver Cromwell?” Such was the plaudit the oriental student received, and returned to grow pale over his MSS. But when Petis de la Croix, observes 188 Ockley, was pursuing the same track of study, in the patronage of Louis XIV., he found books, leisure, and encouragement; and when the great Colbert desired him to compose the life of Genkis Chan, he considered a period of ten years not too much to be allowed the author. And then Ockley proceeds—
“But my unhappy condition hath always been widely different from anything that could admit of such an exactness. Fortune seems only to have given me a taste of it out of spite, on purpose that I might regret the loss of it.”
He describes his two journeys to Oxford, for his first volume; but in his second, matters fared worse with him—
“Either my domestic affairs were grown much worse, or I less able to bear them; or what is more probable, both.”
Ingenuous confession! fruits of a life devoted in its struggles to important literature! and we murmur when genius is irritable, and erudition is morose! But let us proceed with Ockley:—
“I was forced to take the advantage of the slumber of my cares, that never slept when I was awake; and if they did not incessantly interrupt my studies, were sure to succeed them with no less constancy than night doth the day.”
This is the cry of agony. He who reads this without sympathy, ought to reject these volumes as the idlest he ever read, and honour me with his contempt. The close of Ockley’s preface shows a love-like tenderness for his studies; although he must quit life without bringing them to perfection, he opens his soul to posterity and tells them, in the language of prophecy, that if they will bestow encouragement on our youth, the misfortunes he has described will be remedied. He, indeed, was aware that these students—
“Will hardly come in upon the prospect of finding leisure, in a prison, to transcribe those papers for the press which they have collected with indefatigable labour, and oftentimes at the expense of their rest, and all the other conveniences of life, for the service of the public.”
Yet the exulting martyr of literature, at the moment he is fast bound to the stake, does not consider a prison so dreadful a reward for literary labours—