I leave it to others therefore to celebrate the happiness of your invention, the urbanity of your wit, the regularity of your plan, the address with which you conceal the point you aim at in this Dissertation, and yet the pains you take in seeming obliquely to make your way to it. These and many other beauties which your long study of the ancients hath enabled you to bring into modern composition, have been generally taken notice of in your other writings, and will find encomiasts enough among the common herd of your readers. The honour I propose to do you by this address is of another kind; and as it lies a little remote from vulgar apprehension, I shall have some merit with you for displaying it as it deserves.
To come to a point then, next to the total want of FRIENDSHIP which one has too much reason to observe and lament in the great scholars of every age, nothing hath at any time disgusted me so much as the gross indelicacy with which they are usually seen to conduct themselves in their expression of this virtue.
I have by me a large collection of the civil things which these lettered friends have been pleased to say of one another, and it would amaze you to see with what an energy and force of language they are delivered. One thing I thought very remarkable, that the greater the parts and the more unquestioned the learning and abilities of the encomiast, just so much the stronger, that is to say, according to the usual acceptation, just so much the more friendly are his encomiums.
I have a great example in my eye. A man, for instance, hath a bosom FRIEND, whom he takes for a person of the purest and most benevolent virtue, presently he sets him down for such, and publisheth him to all the world.—Or he hath an intimacy with an eminent Poet: and no regard to decency restrains him from calling him a great genius, as Horace, you know, did his friend Virgil, almost to his face.—Or, he is loved and honoured by a great Lawyer or two; and then be sure all the fine things that have been said of your Ciceros, your Scævolas on your Hydes, are squandered away upon them.—Or, he hath perchance the honour of being well with a great Churchman, much famed for his political and religious services; down he goes at once for a lover of his country, and the scourge of infidels and freethinkers, with as little reserve as if he had a Jerom or a father Paul to celebrate.—Or, once or twice in his life it hath been his fortune to be distinguished by great Ministers. Such occasions are rare. And therefore a little gratitude, we will say, is allowable. But can any thing be said for abominable formal dedications?—Or, lastly, he thinks he sees some sparks of virtue even in his ordinary acquaintance, and these, as fast as he observes them he gathers up, and sticks, on the first occasion, in some or other of his immortal volumes.
O Doctor Jortin! if you did but see half the extravagancies I have collected of this sort in the single instance of one man, you would stand aghast at this degree of corruption in the learned world, and would begin to apprehend something of your great merit in this seasonable endeavour to put a stop to its progress.
And what above all grieves me is that this is no novel invention; for then it might well have ranked with the other arguments of degeneracy so justly chargeable on the present times; but the all-accomplished ancients themselves have, to own the truth, set the example.
I took notice just now of the Ingenium ingens of Horace. The other poets of that time abound in these fulsome encomiums. But I am even shocked to think that such men as Cicero and Pliny, men so perfect, as they were, in the commerce of the world, and from their rank and station, so practised in all the decencies of conversation, were far gone in the folly. And yet there are, in truth, more instances of this weakness in their writings than in those of any modern I can readily call to mind.
Something I know hath been said in excuse of this illiberal manner, from the VIEWS and CHARACTERS and NECESSITIES of those that use it. And my unfeigned regard for the professors of learning makes me willing that any thing they have to offer for themselves should be fairly heard.
They say then, and with some appearance of truth, that as all the benefit they propose to themselves by their labours is for the most part nothing more than a little fame (which whether good or bad, as the poet observes,
——begins and ends
In the small circle of our foes or friends.)