LORD BYRON AND “MY GRANDMOTHER’S REVIEW.”
At the close of the first canto of Don Juan, its noble author, by way of propitiating the reader for the morality of his poem, says:—
“The public approbation I expect,
And beg they’ll take my word about the moral,
Which I with their amusement will connect,
As children cutting teeth receive a coral;
Meantime, they’ll doubtless please to recollect
My epical pretensions to the laurel;
For fear some prudish reader should grow skittish,
I’ve bribed my Grandmother’s Review—the British.
I sent it in a letter to the editor,
Who thank’d me duly by return of post—
I’m for a handsome article his creditor;
Yet if my gentle muse he please to roast,
And break a promise after having made it her,
Denying the receipt of what it cost,
And smear his page with gall instead of honey,
All I can say is—that he had the money.”
Canto I. st. ccix. ccx.
Now, “the British” was a certain staid and grave high-church review, the editor of which received the poet’s imputation of bribery as a serious accusation; and, accordingly, in his next number after the publication of Don Juan, there appeared a postscript, in which the receipt of any bribe was stoutly denied, and the idea of such connivance altogether repudiated; the editor adding that he should continue to exercise his own judgment as to the merits of Lord Byron, as he had hitherto done in every instance! However, the affair was too ludicrous to be at once altogether dropped; and, so long as the prudish publication was in existence, it enjoyed the sobriquet of “My Grandmother’s Review.”
By the way, there is another hoax connected with this poem. One day an old gentleman gravely inquired of a printseller for a portrait of “Admiral Noah”—to illustrate Don Juan!
WALPOLE’S WAY TO WIN THEM.
Sir Robert Walpole, in one of his letters, thus describes the relations of a skilful Minister with an accommodating Parliament—the description, it may be said, having, by lapse of time, acquired the merit of general inapplicability to the present state of things:—“My dear friend, there is scarcely a member whose purse I do not know to a sixpence, and whose very soul almost I could not purchase at the offer. The reason former Ministers have been deceived in this matter is evident—they never considered the temper of the people they had to deal with. I have known a minister so weak as to offer an avaricious old rascal a star and garter, and attempt to bribe a young rogue, who set no value upon money, with a lucrative employment. I pursue methods as opposite as the poles, and therefore my administration has been attended with a different effect.” “Patriots,” elsewhere says Walpole, “spring up like mushrooms. I could raise fifty of them within four-and-twenty hours. I have raised many of them in one night. It is but refusing to gratify an unreasonable or insolent demand, and up starts a patriot.”
DR. JOHNSON’S CRITICISMS.
Johnson decided literary questions like a lawyer, not like a legislator. He never examined foundations where a point was already ruled. His whole code of criticism rested on pure assumption, for which he sometimes gave a precedent or authority, but rarely troubled himself to give a reason drawn from the nature of things. He judged of all works of the imagination by the standard established among his own contemporaries. Though he allowed Homer to have been a greater man than Virgil, he seems to have thought the Æneid to have been a greater poem than the Iliad. Indeed, he well might have thought so; for he preferred Pope’s Iliad to Homer’s. He pronounced that after Hoole’s translation of Tasso, Fairfax’s would hardly be reprinted. He could see no merit in our fine old English ballads, and always spoke with the most provoking contempt of Dr. Percy’s fondness for them.