The satirised poets did their best to retaliate on Gifford by abusive sonnets in the newspapers; and Mr. Jerningham wrote a feebly vituperative poem on Gifford and Mathias. The Della Cruscans had, undeniably, the worst of the battle. The efficacy of Gifford's satire in putting an end to the school is, however, more than doubtful. It is true that it afterwards came to be considered, naturally enough, that he had given the Della Cruscans their death-blow. Scott, for instance, writing in 1827, observes that the Baviad “squabashed at one blow a set of coxcombs who might have humbugged the world long enough”; but that is not the evidence of contemporary witnesses. Seven years after the publication of the Baviad, Mathias, in the preface to The Pursuits of Literature, remarks that “even the Baviad drops from Mr. Gifford's pen have fallen off like oils from the plumage of the Florence and Cruscan geese. I am told that Mr. Greathead and Mr. Merry yet write and speak, and Mr. Jerningham (poor man!) still continues 'sillier than his sheep.”
This statement is in far better accordance both with the facts and the probabilities of the case. Satire, even first-rate satire, does not kill follies. They gradually die of inanition, or are crowded out by newer fashions. Laura Matilda's dirge in the Rejected Addresses is a standing monument of the vitality of Della Cruscanism more than twenty years after its supposed death-blow.
The career as stage-writers of Merry, Greathead, and Jerningham, their bad tragedies and bad farces, do not belong to my present subject. Of the subsequent history of one or two of them a word may, however, be said. Jerningham lived to publish, as late as 1812, two editions of a flaccid poem, called The Old Bard's Farewell, after which he disappears from life and literature. Mrs. Cowley, perhaps the most interesting of the group, died in rural and religious retirement at Tiverton, in 1809. Mrs. Piozzi, as is well known, outlived all her contemporaries, and witnessed the popularity of a modern literature of which she had no very high opinion.
As for Della Crusca, he married, in 1791, Miss Brunton, an actress, whose sister became Countess of Craven, and who had played the heroine in his tragedy of Lorenzo. His reply to the remonstrances of his aunt on the mésalliance shall be quoted, to show that he had his lucid intervals. “She ought,” he said, “to be proud that he had brought a woman of such virtue and talents into the family. Her virtue his marrying her proved; and her talents would all be thrown away by taking her off the stage.” Nevertheless, he afterwards weakly yielded to his relations, and withdrew her from the stage against her own inclination, thereby depriving himself of a source of income with which, as a gambler and bon vivant, he could ill afford to dispense. He accordingly quitted England, and must have betaken himself to France, an adventure which befell him in Paris, in September, 1792, being thus amusingly given by Horace Walpole:—
In the midst of the massacre of Monday last, Mr. Merry, immortalized, not by his verses, but by those of the Baviad, was mistaken for the Abbé Maury, and was going to be hoisted to the lanterne. He cried out that he was Merry, the poet: the ruffians, who probably had never read the scene in Shakespeare, yet replied, “Then we will hang you for your bad verses”; but he escaped better than Cinna, I don't know how, and his fright cost him but a few “gossamery tears,” and I suppose he will be happy to re-cross the “silky ocean,” and shed dolorous nonsense in rhyme over the woes of this happy country.
But England was not to see much more of Merry. English society was probably not so kind to the Radical husband of an actress as it had been to the bachelor of fashion. He withdrew, with his wife, to America, in 1796, and died, three years afterwards, of apoplexy, in his garden at Baltimore.
Merry did not fail to find in his own day apologists of some pretensions to taste. I find in the notes to George Dyer's poem, The Poet's Fate, published in 1797—which contains early and interesting laudations not only of his school-fellows Lamb and Coleridge, but also of Wordsworth and Southey—the following reference to Merry:—“But, after all, though the hero of the Baviad betrayed glitter and negligence—though he misled the taste of some, too much inclined to admire and imitate defects, yet Merry's writings possess poetical merits; and the spirit of liberty and benevolence which breathes through them is ardent and sincere.” The criticism may be incorrect, but it is worth noting, because it is the criticism of a contemporary. Had it not been for Coleridge's fervently expressed admiration for Bowles's sonnets, which so perplexes critics who do not judge literature from a historical point of view, the world would have continued to sneer at him, with Byron, as “simple Bowles,” and to know him only by Byron's line. The fact is, literary history will never be intelligently written, till it is studied in the spirit of the naturalist, to whom the tares are as interesting as the wheat. We may, perhaps, give the Della Cruscans, with their desperate strainings after poetic fire and poetic diction, the credit of having done something to shake the supremacy of versified prose; of having forwarded, however feebly, the poetic emancipation which Wordsworth and Coleridge were to consummate. The false extravagance of Della Crusca may have cleared the way for the truthful extravagance of Keats. It is, I am aware, customary to attribute the regeneration of English poetry to the French Revolution, which “shook up the sources of thought all over Europe,” but the critics who use these glib catch-words are in no hurry to point out a concrete chain of logical connection between Paris mobs and sequestered poets. Plain judges will ever consider it a far cry from The Rights of Man to Christabel. At all events, Dyer was right in deprecating the savagery of Gifford's satire. The question
Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?
will apply to other schools and fashions besides that of the “elegant Cesario's,” whom Leigh Hunt designated par excellence as “the plague of the Butterflies.” And here, I think, we touch upon the moral which I promised at the outset.
It is not very long since the country, to which Della Crusca ultimately betook himself, received to her shores the reputed prophet of Æstheticism, whose career, in other respects, presented remarkable parallels with that of Robert Merry. Each made his poetical appearance in the columns of a newspaper called the World; each professed Republican opinions; each wrote poems not remarkable for truth to nature or sobriety of diction; each represented a school; and the name of each became as a red rag to the Giffords who played the part of the bull in the china shop. But it is not with this clumsy rage that posterity will regard our follies; nor is it useful, or desirable, that we should now so regard them. It is with a smile of amused anticipation, it is with a bland and philosophic interest, that the antiquarian of the future will turn to the pages of Punch or the libretto of Patience, to read of the Anna Matildas who lately delighted to apparel themselves in what Bramston called “shape-disguising sacks”—the Della Cruscas who took Postlethwaite for a great poet.—National Review.