2 HURLOTHRUMBO.
Lord Shaftesbury has said that “of all the artificial relations formed between mankind, the most capricious and variable is that of Author and Reader.” He may be right in this; but when he says 'tis evident that an Author's art and labour are for his Reader's sake alone, I cannot assent to the position. For though I have a great and proper regard for my readers, and entertain all due respect for them, it is not for their sake alone that my art and labour have been thus employed,—not for their benefit alone, still less for their amusement that this Opus has been edified. Of the parties concerned in it, the Readers, sooth to say, are not those who have been either first or second in my consideration. The first and paramount object was to preserve the Doctor's memory; the second to gratify myself by so doing; for what higher gratification can there be than in the performance of a debt of gratitude, one of those debts truly to be called immense, which
A grateful mind
By owing owes not, but still pays, at once
Indebted and discharged.3
That there are some readers who would think themselves beholden, though in far less degree, to me, as I am to the revered subject of these memorials, was an after consideration.
3 MILTON.
Sir Egerton Brydges says he never took up a book which he could read without wishing to know the character and history of the author. “But what is it,” he says, “to tell the facts that he was born, married or lived single and died? What is common to all can convey no information. We desire to know an author's feelings, his temper, his disposition, his modes of thinking, his habits; nay even his person, his voice, and his mode of expressing himself, the society in which he has lived, and the images and lessons which attended upon his cradle.” Most of this, Sir Egerton, you can never know otherwise than by guess work. Yet methinks my feelings, my temper, my disposition and my modes of thinking are indicated here, as far as a book can indicate them. You have yourself said; “if it could be proved that what one writes, is no index to what he thinks and feels, then it would be of little value and no interest;” but you are confident that such delusive writers always betray themselves; “Sincerity,” you say, “has always a breath and spirit of its own.” Yes, Sir Egerton, and if there is not that spirit in these volumes, there is no vitality in them; if they have not that breath of life, they must be still-born.
Yet I cannot agree with you in the opinion that those who make a false display of fine feelings whether in prose or verse, always betray themselves. The cant of sentimentalism passes as current with the Reading Public, as cant of a different description with those who call themselves the Religious Public. Among the latter, the proudest and the most uncharitable people in this nation are to be found; and in proof that the most intensely selfish of the human race may be sentimentalists, and super-sentimentalists, it is sufficient to name Rousseau.
Perhaps some benevolent and sagacious Reader may say to me as Randolph said to his friend Owen Feltham,—
Thy book I read, and read it with delight,
Resolving so to live as thou dost write;
And yet I guess thy life thy book produces
And but expresses thy peculiar uses.
But the Reader who should apply to me and my Opus the French lines,