Stockdale once wrote a declamatory life of Waller. When Johnson’s appeared, though in his biography, says Stockdale, “he paid a large tribute to the abilities of Goldsmith and Hawkesworth, yet he made no mention of my name.” It is evident that Johnson, who knew him well, did not care to remember it. When Johnson was busied on the Life of Pope, Stockdale wrote a pathetic letter to him earnestly imploring “a generous tribute from his authority.” Johnson was still obdurately silent; and Stockdale, who had received many acts of humane kindness from him, adds with fretful naïveté,
“In his sentiments towards me he was divided between a benevolence to my interests, and a coldness to my fame.”
Thus, in a moment, in the perverted heart of the scribbler, will ever be cancelled all human obligation for acts of benevolence, if we are cold to his fame!
And yet let us not too hastily condemn these unhappy men, even for the violation of the lesser moral feelings—it is often but a fatal effect from a melancholy cause; that hallucination of the intellect, in which, if their genius, as they call it, sometimes appears to sparkle like a painted bubble in the buoyancy of their vanity, they are also condemned to see it sinking in the dark horrors of a disappointed author, who has risked his life and his happiness on the miserable productions of his pen. The agonies of a disappointed author cannot, indeed, be contemplated without pain. If they can instruct, the following quotation will have its use.
Among the innumerable productions of Stockdale, was a “History of Gibraltar,” which might have been interesting, from his having resided there: in a moment of despair, like Medea, he immolated his unfortunate offspring.
“When I had arrived at within a day’s work of its conclusion, in consequence of some immediate and mortifying accidents, my literary adversity, and all my other misfortunes, took fast hold of my mind; oppressed it extremely; and reduced it to a stage of the deepest dejection and despondency. In this unhappy view of life, I made a sudden resolution—never more to prosecute the profession of an author; to retire altogether from the world, and read only for consolation and amusement. I committed to the flames my History of Gibraltar 223 and my translation of Marsollier’s Life of Cardinal Ximenes; for which the bookseller had refused to pay me the fifty guineas, according to agreement.”
This claims a tear! Never were the agonies of literary disappointment more pathetically told.
But as it is impossible to have known poor deluded Stockdale, and not to have laughed at him more than to have wept for him—so the catastrophe of this author’s literary life is as finely in character as all the acts. That catastrophe, of course, is his last poem.
After many years his poetical demon having been chained from the world, suddenly broke forth on the reports of a French invasion. The narrative shall proceed in his own inimitable manner.
“My poetical spirit excited me to write my poem of ‘The Invincible Island.’ I never found myself in a happier disposition to compose, nor ever wrote with more pleasure. I presumed warmly to hope that unless inveterate prejudice and malice were as invincible as our island itself, it would have the diffusive circulation which I earnestly desired.