I have now to bring forward one of those unhappy men of rhyme, who, after many painful struggles, and a long querulous life, have died amid the ravings of their immortality—one of those miserable bards of mediocrity whom no beadle-critic could ever whip out of the poetical parish.
There is a case in Mr. Haslam’s “Observations on Insanity,” who assures us that the patient he describes was insane, which will appear strange to those who have watched more poets than lunatics!
“This patient, when admitted, was very noisy, and importunately talkative—reciting passages from the Greek and Roman poets, or talking of his own literary importance. He became so troublesome to the other madmen, who were sufficiently occupied with their own speculations, that they avoided and excluded him from the common room; so that he was at last reduced to the mortifying situation of being the sole auditor of his own compositions. He conceived himself very nearly related to Anacreon, and possessed of the peculiar vein of that poet.”
Such is the very accurate case drawn up by a medical writer. I can conceive nothing in it to warrant the charge of insanity; Mr. Haslam, not being a poet, seems to have mistaken the common orgasm of poetry for insanity itself.
Of such poets, one was the late Percival Stockdale, who, with the most entertaining simplicity, has, in “The 219 Memoirs of his Life and Writings,” presented us with a full-length figure of this class of poets; those whom the perpetual pursuits of poetry, however indifferent, involve in a perpetual illusion; they are only discovered in their profound obscurity by the piteous cries they sometimes utter; they live on querulously, which is an evil for themselves, and to no purpose of life, which is an evil to others.
I remember in my youth Percival Stockdale as a condemned poet of the times, of whom the bookseller Flexney complained that, whenever this poet came to town, it cost him twenty pounds. Flexney had been the publisher of Churchill’s works; and, never forgetting the time when he published “The Rosciad,” which at first did not sell, and afterwards became the most popular poem, he was speculating all his life for another Churchill, and another quarto poem. Stockdale usually brought him what he wanted—and Flexney found the workman, but never the work.
Many a year had passed in silence, and Stockdale could hardly be considered alive, when, to the amazement of some curious observers of our literature, a venerable man, about his eightieth year, a vivacious spectre, with a cheerful voice, seemed as if throwing aside his shroud in gaiety—to come to assure us of the immortality of one of the worst poets of the time.
To have taken this portrait from the life would have been difficult; but the artist has painted himself, and manufactured his own colours; else had our ordinary ones but faintly copied this Chinese grotesque picture—the glare and the glow must be borrowed from his own palette.
Our self-biographer announces his “Life” with prospective rapture, at the moment he is turning a sad retrospect on his “Writings;” for this was the chequered countenance of his character, a smile while he was writing, a tear when he had published! “I know,” he exclaims, “that this book will live and escape the havoc that has been made of my literary fame.” Again—“Before I die, I think my literary fame may be fixed on an adamantine foundation.” Our old acquaintance, Blas of Santillane, at setting out on his travels, conceived himself to be la huitième merveille du monde; but here is one, who, after the experience of a long life, is writing a large work to prove himself that very curious thing.
What were these mighty and unknown works? Stockdale confesses that all his verses have been received with 220 negligence or contempt; yet their mediocrity, the absolute poverty of his genius, never once occurred to the poetical patriarch.