Our author now proceeds to speak of a transaction which he seems to touch upon with reluctance. It respects a young nobleman of these times, of the name of Rawdon. It is very remarkable, that the last couplet of this passage is printed with a scratch through the lines, as if it had been the author’s intention to have erazed them. Whether he thought the event alluded to in this distich was too disgraceful for justification—or that the justification suggested was incomplete—that the image contained in them was too familiar and puerile for the general sublimity of his great poem, or whatever he thought, we know not, but such is the fact. The passage is as follows:—after relating the circumstance, he says
Association forms the mind’s great chain,
By plastic union many a thought we gain,
[Struck-through:
(Thus Raw suggested Raw head, and the Don,
Haply reminded him of Bloody bone).]
To the justice of the disgrace thrown upon the above couplet, we by no means concede.—What it wants in poetical construction, it amply makes up in the deep knowledge which it contains of the more latent feelings of the human heart, and its philosophic detection of some of the true sources of human action. We all know how long, and how tenaciously, original prejudices stick by us. No man lives long enough to get rid of his nursery. That the noble duke therefore might not be free from the common influence of a very common sensation, no one can reasonably wonder at, and the best proof that he was not so is, that we defy any person to show us, upon what possible principle, if not upon this, the conduct of the noble Duke, in the transaction alluded to, is to be explained or defended. The Duke of Richmond—a gentleman by a thousand pretensions—a soldier—a legislator—a peer—in two countries a duke—in a third a prince—a man whose honour is not a mere point of speculative courtesy, but is his oath—impeaches the reputation of another individual of pure and unblemished character; and with the same publicity that he had applied the original imputation, this peer, prince, legislator, and soldier, eats every syllable he had said, and retracts every item of his charge. Is this to be credited without a resort to some principle of a very paramount nature in the heart of man indeed? Is the original depravity, in the first instance, of publicly attempting to sully the fair honour of that interesting and sacred character, a youthful soldier, or the meanness in the second, of an equally public and unprecedentedly pusillanimous retraction of the whole of the calumny, to be believed in so high a personage as the Duke of Richmond, without a reference to a cause of a very peculiar kind, to an impulse of more than ordinary potency? Evidently not.—And what is there, as we have before observed, that adheres so closely, or controuls so absolutely, as the legends of our boyish days, of the superstitions of a nursery? For these reasons, therefore, we give our most decided suffrage for the full re-establishment of the couplet to the fair legitimate honours that are due to it.
The poet concludes his portrait of this illustrious person, with the following lines—
The triple honours that adorn his head,
A three-fold influence o’er his virtue shed;
As Gallia’s prince, behold him proud and vain;
Thrifty and close as Caledonia’s thane;
In Richmond’s duke, we trace our own JOHN BULL,
Of schemes enamour’d—and of schemes—the GULL.
* * * * *
NUMBER V.
The author of the Rolliad has, in his last edition, introduced so considerable an alteration, that we should hold ourselves inexcusable, after the very favourable reception our commentaries have been honoured with, in omitting to seize the earliest opportunity of pointing it out to the public.
Finding the variety and importance of the characters he is called upon to describe, likely to demand a greater portion both of time and words than an expiring man can be reasonably supposed to afford, instead of leaving the whole description of that illustrious assembly, of which the dying drummer has already delineated some of the principal ornaments, to the same character, he has made an addition to the vision in which the House of Commons is represented, at the conclusion of the Sixth Book, by contriving that the lantern of Merlin should be shifted in such a manner, as to display at once to the eager eye of Rollo, the whole interior of the Upper House; to gain a seat in which the hero immediately expresses a laudable impatience, as well as a just indignation, on beholding persons, far less worthy than himself, among those whom the late very numerous creations prevent our calling—
——pauci—quos æquus amavit Jupiter—