So I, bereft of fortune, house, and home—
Of all that could be torn away,
My talents still retain and can employ:
O’er these no foe has aught of power.
What seems especially to have aroused Panizzi’s anger (and herein may be remarked his sincere affection for the land of his refuge and rest), was that he should be called a “foreigner.” If to be domiciled in England and naturalized by an act of her legislature makes a man an Englishman, then was he an Englishman to all the then necessary intents and purposes. “It is true,” says he, “that I am not ungrateful; I love my adoptive country as much as the one wherein I was born, and being able to gain a very honourable and independent subsistence, by making use of those talents which Providence has been pleased to bestow on me, no wonder that I do not allow murmurs and sighs to escape me.” His alleged disposition towards Rossetti, the foundation for which he declares to have been derived from advantage taken of certain private conversation, grossly misrepresented by his reviewer, he thus vindicates from a charge which he declares to be “utterly false.”
“I dissent from Mr. Rossetti’s views concerning Dante; but I have a high opinion of his talents and acquirements; I respect them too much to be virulent when speaking of his works, which I do not incessantly attack. The contrary assertion made by the reviewer is a wilful and deliberate falsehood, charitably invented and propagated to cause mischief and strife between Mr. Rossetti and myself. I once stated freely my reasons for differing from Mr. Rossetti’s system concerning Dante; but I then said, that I knew him to be a very clever man, and I added that his writings on the subject do much honour to his ingenuity, and his very mistakes indicate a lively imagination.[imagination.] Is this the language of ‘a virulent assailant’?”
In treating another passage in the article our author displays, as well he may, more of contempt than anger. His reviewer, one Mr. Keightley, drew a comparison between Panizzi’s literary merits and his own—by no means in favour of the former, a practice, though decidedly blameable, not so rare as to call for lengthy notice here. A couple of sonnets translated from Bojardo by this same Mr. Keightley are actually inserted in the review. Examples are to be found, both in early and late history, of an author praising his own works anonymously, and if by means of self-laudation he can smite his enemies secretly his acuteness has been thought all the more deserving of admiration.
To what motive can the savage tone and evident personal rancour of this article be imputed? The office of the critic has for a long time past been discharged fairly enough; if not with an undue excess of leniency and generosity, at least (from the critic’s own point of view) with justice and honour. Politics, and such other matters as may be taken to be the common property of the public, have, it is true, been known to infuse something of what might at first sight be called acerbity into his style; but as he who in fair and open fight, complaining of blows, would meet with scant pity, so the “benighted Tory” or the “reckless and destructive Radical,” or possibly the propounder of some latest theory in literature, science, or art, must put up smilingly with the rubs which it may please his adverse judge to give him, remembering always that the office of that judge is to suppress the ignorant, to repress the arrogant, and occasionally, though of course but very rarely, to oppress those who are neither the one nor the other. Still, that the gall of personal animosity should mix itself with the ink and infect the pen of the reviewer is plainly a thing so utterly monstrous as to astonish us on hearing of its occurrence more than once in an ordinary lifetime. There is, unfortunately, too clear evidence that, not uninfluenced by some such dark motive, the critic now under notice perpetrated the article in question.
It seems that about two years before the review appeared either Panizzi made Mr. Keightley’s acquaintance or Mr. Keightley Panizzi’s.
The relations between the two—so long as they lasted—seem to have been of an amicable kind. Panizzi assisted his new acquaintance in the Italian works on which he was engaged, and, although he never appears to have been inclined to admit him to any very intimate friendship, yet a good deal of intercourse seems to have taken place between them, especially in matters relating to the peculiar study with which each was occupied. Panizzi, indeed, acknowledges that the last time he met Mr. Keightley the latter insisted upon his accepting a copy of his works, and that he (Panizzi) “peremptorily objected” to doing so. It maybe admitted that this was somewhat discourteous, and perhaps hinc illæ lachrymæ. Be that as it may, what must have been his astonishment to receive, three months afterwards, the following letter from his quondam friend, of whom during that period he had quite lost sight:—