But an author, though born to suffer martyrdom, does not always expire; he may be flayed like St. Bartholomew, and yet he can breathe without a skin; stoned, like St. Stephen, and yet write on with a broken head; and he has been even known to survive the flames, notwithstanding the most precious part of an author, which is obviously his book, has been burnt in an auto da fe. Hume once more tried the press in “The Natural History of Religion.” It proved but another martyrdom! Still was the fall (as he terms it) of the first volume of his History haunting his nervous imagination, when he found himself yet strong enough to hold a pen in his hand, and ventured to produce a second, which “helped to buoy up its unfortunate brother.” But the third part, containing the reign of Elizabeth, was particularly obnoxious, and he was doubtful whether he was again to be led to the stake. But Hume, a little hardened by a little success, grew, to use his own words, “callous against the impressions of public folly,” and completed his History, which was now received “with tolerable, and but tolerable, success.”
At length, in the sixty-fifth year of his age, our author began, a year or two before he died, as he writes, to see “many symptoms of my literary reputation breaking out at last with additional lustre, though I know that I can have but few years to enjoy it.” What a provoking consolation for a philosopher, who, according to the result of his own system, was close upon a state of annihilation!
To Hume, let us add the illustrious name of Dryden.
It was after preparing a second edition of Virgil, that the great Dryden, who had lived, and was to die in harness, found himself still obliged to seek for daily bread. Scarcely relieved from one heavy task, he was compelled to hasten to another; and his efforts were now stimulated by a domestic feeling, the expected return of his son in ill-health from Rome. In a letter to his bookseller he pathetically writes—“If it please God that I must die of over-study, I cannot 205 spend my life better than in preserving his.” It was on this occasion, on the verge of his seventieth year, as he describes himself in the dedication of his Virgil, that, “worn out with study, and oppressed with fortune,” he contracted to supply the bookseller with 10,000 verses at sixpence a line!
What was his entire dramatic life but a series of vexation and hostility, from his first play to his last? On those very boards whence Dryden was to have derived the means of his existence and his fame, he saw his foibles aggravated, and his morals aspersed. Overwhelmed by the keen ridicule of Buckingham, and maliciously mortified by the triumph which Settle, his meanest rival, was allowed to obtain over him, and doomed still to encounter the cool malignant eye of Langbaine, who read poetry only to detect plagiarism. Contemporary genius is inspected with too much familiarity to be felt with reverence; and the angry prefaces of Dryden only excited the little revenge of the wits. How could such sympathise with injured, but with lofty feelings? They spread two reports of him, which may not be true, but which hurt him with the public. It was said that, being jealous of the success of Creech, for his version of Lucretius, he advised him to attempt Horace, in which Dryden knew he would fail—and a contemporary haunter of the theatre, in a curious letter[133] on The Winter Diversions, says of Congreve’s angry preface to the Double Dealer, that—
“The critics were severe upon this play, which gave the author occasion to lash them in his epistle dedicatory—so that ’tis generally thought he has done his business and lost himself; a thing he owes to Mr. Dryden’s treacherous friendship, who being jealous of the applause he had got by his Old Bachelor deluded him into a foolish imitation of his own way of writing angry prefaces.”
This lively critic is still more vivacious on the great Dryden, who had then produced his Love Triumphant, which, the critic says,
“Was damned by the universal cry of the town, nemine contradicente but the conceited poet. He says in his prologue that ‘this is the last the town must expect from him;’ he had done himself a kindness had he taken his leave before.” He then describes the success of Southerne’s Fatal Marriage, or the Innocent Adultery, and concludes, 206 “This kind usage will encourage desponding minor poets, and vex huffing Dryden and Congreve to madness.”
I have quoted thus much of this letter, that we may have before us a true image of those feelings which contemporaries entertain of the greater geniuses of their age; how they seek to level them; and in what manner men of genius are doomed to be treated—slighted, starved, and abused. Dryden and Congreve! the one the finest genius, the other the most exquisite wit of our nation, are to be vexed to madness!—their failures are not to excite sympathy, but contempt or ridicule! How the feelings and the language of contemporaries differ from that of posterity! And yet let us not exult in our purer and more dignified feelings—we are, indeed, the posterity of Dryden and Congreve; but we are the contemporaries of others who must patiently hope for better treatment from our sons than they have received from the fathers.
Dryden was no master of the pathetic, yet never were compositions more pathetic than the Prefaces this great man has transmitted to posterity! Opening all the feelings of his heart, we live among his domestic sorrows. Johnson censures Dryden for saying he has few thanks to pay his stars that he was born among Englishmen.[134] We have just seen that Hume went farther, and sighed to fly to a retreat beyond that country which knew not to reward genius.—What, if Dryden felt the dignity of that character he supported, dare we blame his frankness? If the age be ungenerous, shall contemporaries escape the scourge of the great author, who feels he is addressing another age more favourable to him?