C’est la qui fait peur aux esprits de ce tems,
Qui tout blancs au dehors, sont tout noirs au dedans.
Ils tremblent qu’un censeur, que sa verve encourage,
Ne vienne en ses ecrits demasquer leur visage,
Et fouillant dans leurs mœurs en tout liberté,
N’aille du fonds du puits tirer la verité.
CHAPTER XXII.
A third member of this “Symposium” was perhaps superior to those who have been already mentioned, in intellectual endowment. He has written the circumstances of his early life with such a dignified simplicity, that it is only necessary here to observe, that by the momentum of talent alone, directed by discretion and sound judgment, he rose from the very humblest station in life to an honourable and merited independence. He was an excellent scholar, and had superintended the education of a young nobleman with the highest credit to himself, and advantage to his pupil. He afterwards accompanied him to the Continent, where he successfully availed himself of the opportunities of his situation, to enlarge his own stores of knowledge, as well as those of the individual under his care and direction.
Of his first productions of a literary kind, nothing perhaps is known, except by himself, and a very few; but at the period before us, he had already, by the common acknowledgements of scholars, greatly adorned the literature of his country. His primary distinction was a sort of intuitive acuteness, which enabled him instantly to penetrate into the real characters of those with whom he communicated, and to discern the merits and defects of whatever was submitted to his perusal. This acuteness, aided by a very strong judgment, gave him perhaps a particular bias to criticism and to satire.
By one of his performances of this kind, he effectually put an extinguisher upon a gaudy and meretricious taste, which, for too long a period, had been permitted to intrude upon the regions of poetry, and fraudulently under the guise of polish and softness, to substitute sound for sense, tinsel for gold, and a profusion of false and garish metaphors, for the best and truest embellishments of the art. Day after day, even to fastidiousness, was the public nauseated with epistles, odes, and sonnets, and canzonettas, under the signatures of Rosa, Matilda, Laura, Yenda, and a hundred others. The honest indignation and energy of this writer’s Satiric Muse, swept all these cobwebs away, and they were visible no more.