I spare you the rest of my task, and I earnestly hope, my dear reader, that these citations may have a better effect upon you than they had upon me. With shame I confess, that even with the addition of Shakspeare’s eloquent
“To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,” &c.
which I learnt by heart gratis, not a bit the better was I for all this poetical morality. What I wanted was, not conviction of my folly, but resolution to amend.
When I say that I was not a bit the better for these documentings, I must not omit to observe to you that I was very near four hundred pounds a year the better for them.
Being obliged to learn so much of Young’s Night Thoughts by rote, I was rather disgusted, and my attention was roused to criticise the lines which had been forced upon my admiration. Afterward, when I went to college, I delighted to maintain, in opposition to some of my companions, who were enthusiastic admirers of Young, that he was no poet. The more I was ridiculed, the more I persisted. I talked my self into notice; I became acquainted with several of the literary men at Cambridge; I wrote in defence of my opinion, or, as some called it, my heresy. I maintained that what all the world had mistaken for sublimity was bombast; that the Night Thoughts were fuller of witty conceits than of poetical images: I drew a parallel between Young and Cowley; and I finished by pronouncing Young to be the Cowley of the eighteenth century. To do myself justice, there was much ingenuity and some truth in my essay, but it was the declamation of a partisan, who can think only on one side of a question, and who, in the heat of controversy, says more than he thinks, and more than he originally intended.
It is often the fortune of literary partisans to obtain a share of temporary celebrity far beyond their deserts, especially if they attack any writer of established reputation. The success of my essay exceeded my most sanguine expectations, and I began to think that my father was right; that I was born to be a great genius, and a great man. The notice taken of me by a learned prelate, who piqued himself upon being considered as the patron of young men of talents, confirmed me at once in my self-conceit and my hopes of preferment.
I mentioned to you that my father, in honour of my namesake Basil, bishop of Caesarea, and to verify his own presentiments, had educated me for the Church. My present patron, who seemed to like me the better the oftener I dined with him, gave me reason to hope that he would provide for me handsomely. I was not yet ordained, when a living of four hundred per annum fell into his gift: he held it over for some months, as it was thought, on purpose for me.
In the mean time he employed me to write a charity sermon for him, which he was to preach, as it was expected, to a crowded congregation. None but those who are themselves slaves to the habit of procrastination will believe that I could be so foolish as to put off writing this sermon till the Saturday evening before it was wanted. Some of my young companions came unexpectedly to sup with me; we sat late: in the vanity of a young author, who glories in the rapidity of composition, I said to myself that I could finish my sermon in an hour’s notice. But, alas! when my companions at length departed, they left me in no condition to complete a sermon. I fell fast asleep, and was wakened in the morning by the bishop’s servant. The dismay I felt is indescribable; I started up—it was nine o’clock: I began to write; but my hand and my mind trembled, and my ideas were in such confusion, that I could not, great genius as I was, produce a beginning sentence in a quarter of an hour.
I kept the bishop’s servant forty minutes by his watch; wrote and re-wrote two pages, and walked up and down the room; tore my two pages; and at last, when the footman said he could wait no longer, was obliged to let him go with an awkward note, pleading sudden sickness for my apology. It was true that I was sufficiently sick at the time when I penned this note: my head ached terribly; and I kept my room, reflecting upon my own folly, the whole of the day. I foresaw the consequences: the living was given away by my patron the next morning, and all hopes of future favour were absolutely at an end.
My father overwhelmed me with reproaches; and I might perhaps have been reformed by this disappointment, but an unexpected piece of good fortune, or what I then thought good fortune, was my ruin.