It occurred to the Black Boy, on this proposed arithmetical criticism, that the work required addition, subtraction, and division; that the fittest critic, on whose name, indeed, he had originally engaged in the work, was our Dr. Barnard; and he sent the package to the doctor, who resided near Lincoln.
The doctor, it appears, had no appetite for a dish dressed by another, while he himself was in the very act of the cookery; and it was suffered to lie cold for three weeks at the carrier’s.
But entreated and overcome, the good doctor at length sent to the carrier’s for the life of his father-in-law. “I found it, according to the bookseller’s description, most lame and imperfect; ill begun, worse carried on, and abruptly concluded.” The learned doctor exercised that plenitude of power with which the Black Boy had invested him—he very obligingly showed the author in what a confused state his materials lay together, and how to put them in order—
Nec facundia deseret hunc, nec lucidus ordo.
If his rejections were copious, to show his good-will as well as his severity, his additions were generous, though he used the precaution of carefully distinguishing by “distinct paragraphs” his own insertions amidst Vernon’s mass, with a gentle hint that “He knew more of Heylin than any man now living, and ought therefore to have been the biographer.” He returned the MS. to the gentleman with great civility, but none he received back! When Vernon pretended to ask for improvements, he did not imagine that the work was to be improved by being nearly destroyed; and when he asked for correction, he probably expected all might end in a compliment.
The narrative may now proceed in Dr. Barnard’s details of his doleful mortifications, in being “altered and mangled” by Mr. Vernon.
“Instead of thanks from him (Vernon), and the return of common civility, he disfigured my papers, that no sooner came into his hands, but he fell upon them as a lion rampant, or the cat upon the poor cock in the fable, saying, Tu hodie mihi discerperis—so my papers came home miserably clawed, blotted, and blurred; whole sentences dismembered, and pages scratched out; several leaves omitted which ought to be printed,—shamefully he used my copy; so that before it was carried to the press, he swooped away the second part of the Life wholly from it—in the room of which he shuffled in a preposterous conclusion at the last page, which he printed in a different character, yet could not keep himself honest, as the poet saith,
| Dicitque tua pagina, fur es. Martial. |
For he took out of my copy Dr. Heylin’s dream, his sickness, his last words before his death, and left out the burning of his surplice. He so mangled and metamorphosed the whole Life I composed, that I may say as Sosia did, Egomet mihi non credo, ille alter Sosia me malis mulcavit modis—Plaut.”