‘The following work falls somewhat short of its title and original intention. It was proposed by my friend Mr. Hunt, to publish a series of papers in the Examiner, in the manner of the early periodical essayists, the Spectator and Tatler. These papers were to be contributed by various persons on a variety of subjects; and Mr. Hunt, as the editor, was to take the characteristic or dramatic part of the work upon himself. I undertook to furnish occasional essays and criticisms; one or two other friends promised their assistance; but the essence of the work was to be miscellaneous. The next thing was to fix upon a title for it. After much doubtful consultation, that of The Round Table was agreed upon, as most descriptive of its nature and design. But our plan had been no sooner arranged and entered upon, than Buonaparte landed at Frejus, et voila la Table Ronde dissoute. Our little Congress was broken up as well as the great one. Politics called off the attention of the Editor from the belles lettres; and the task of continuing the work fell chiefly upon the person who was least able to give life and spirit to the original design. A want of variety in the subjects, and mode of treating them, is, perhaps, the least disadvantage resulting from this circumstance. All the papers in the two volumes here offered to the public, were written by myself and Mr. Hunt, except a letter communicated by a friend in the sixteenth number. Out of the fifty-two numbers, twelve are Mr. Hunt’s, with the signatures L. H. or H. T. For all the rest I am answerable. W. Hazlitt.’
Such, Sir, is the passage to which you allude, with so much hysterical satisfaction, as having let you into the secret that I fancied myself to have produced a work ‘in the manner of the Spectator and Tatler’; and as having relieved you from the extreme uneasiness you had felt in reading through the ‘vulgar descriptions, silly paradoxes, flat truisms, misty sophistry, broken English, ill humour, and rancorous abuse,’ contained in the Round Table. If I had indeed given myself out for a second Steele or Addison, I should have made a very ludicrous mistake. As it is, it is you have made a wilful misstatement. Your oppression, Sir, in rising from the Round Table, must have been great to put you upon so desperate an expedient to divert your chagrin, as that of affecting to suppose that I had said just the contrary of what I did say, in order that you might affect ‘a few mirthful sensations’ at my expence. I cannot say that I envy you the little voluntary revulsion which your feelings underwent, at the ludicrous comparison which you fancy me to make between myself and Addison, on purpose to indulge the suggestions of your spleen and prejudice. These are among the last refinements, the menus plaisirs of hypocrisy, of which I must remain in ignorance. I will not require you to retract the assertion you have made, but I will take care before I have done, that any assertion you may make with respect to me shall not be taken as current. As to your praise of the Tatler and Spectator, I must at all times agree to it: but as far as it was meant as a tacit reproof to my vanity in comparing myself with these authors, it appears to have been unnecessary. You say elsewhere, speaking of some passage of mine—‘Addison never wrote anything so fine!’—and again that I fancy myself a finer writer than Addison. By your uneasy jealousy of the self-conceit of other people, it should seem that you are in the habit of drawing comparisons, ‘secret, sweet, and precious,’ between yourself and your ‘illustrious predecessors’ not much to their advantage. As you have here thought proper to tell me what I do not think, I will tell you what I do think, which is, that you could not have written the passage in question, On the Progress of Arts, because you never felt half the enthusiasm for what is fine.
2. After stating the pretensions of the work, you proceed to the style in which it is written.—‘There is one merit which this author possesses besides that of successful imitation—he is a very eminent creator of words and phrases. Amongst a vast variety which have newly started up we notice “firesider”—“kitcheny”—“to smooth up”—“to do off”—and “to tiptoe down.” To this we add a few of the author’s new-born phrases, which bear sufficient marks of a kindred origin to entitle them to a place by their side. Such is the assertion that Spenser “was dipt in poetic luxury”; the description of “a minute coil which clicks in the baking coal”—of “a numerousness scattering an individual gusto”—and of “curls that are ripe with sun shine.” Our readers are perhaps by this time as much acquainted with the style of this author as they have any desire to be,’ etc.
I have nothing to do at present with the merits of the words or phrases, which you here attribute to me, and make the test of my general style, as if your readers truly if they persisted would find only a constant repetition of them in my writings. I say that they are not mine at all; that they are not characteristic of my style, that you knew this perfectly, and also that there were reasons which prevented me from pointing out this petty piece of chicanery; and farther, I say that I am so far from being ‘a very eminent creator of words and phrases,’ that I do not believe you can refer to an instance in anything I have written in which there is a single new word or phrase. In fact, I am as tenacious on this score of never employing any new words to express my ideas, as you, Sir, are of never expressing any ideas that are not perfectly thread-bare and commonplace. My style is as old as your matter. This is the fault you at other times find with it, mistaking the common idiom of the language for ‘broken English.’
3. You say that ‘I write eternally about washerwomen’; and pray, if I did, what is that to you, Sir? There is a littleness in your objections which makes even the answers to them ridiculous, and which would make it impossible to notice them, were you not the Government-Critic. You say yourself indeed afterwards that ‘It is he’ (Mr. Hunt) ‘who devotes ten or twelve pages to a dissertation on washerwomen.’ Good: what you say on this subject is a fair specimen of your mind and manners. The playing at fast-and-loose with the matter-of-fact may be passed over as a matter of course in your hypercritical lucubrations. There is but one half paper on this interdicted subject in the Round Table:—you have filled one page out of five of the article in the Review with a ridicule of this paper on account of the vulgarity of the subject, which offends you exceedingly; you recur to it twice afterwards en passant, and end your performance (somewhat in the style of a quack-doctor aping his own merry-andrew) with ‘two or three conclusive digs in the side at it.’ There is something in the subject that makes a strong impression on your mind. You seem ‘to hate it with a perfect hatred.’[[73]] Now I would ask where is the harm of this dissertation on washerwomen inserted in the Round Table, any more than those of Dutch and Flemish kitchen-pieces, the glossy brilliancy and high finishing of which must have become familiar to your eye in the collections of Earl Grosvenor, Lord Mulgrave, and the Marquis of Stafford? What has Mr. Hunt done in this never-to-be forgiven paper to betray the lowness of his breeding or sentiments, or to shew that he who wrote it is ‘the droll or merry fellow of the piece,’ and that I who did not write it am ‘a sour Jacobin, who hate everything but washerwomen’? Would Addison or Steele, ‘poor Steele’ as you call him, have brought this as a capital charge against their ‘imitators’? Did they instinctively direct their speculations or limit their views of human life to ‘remarks on gentlemen and gentlewomen’? They often enough treated of low people and familiar life without any consciousness of degradation. ‘Their gorge did not rise’ at the humble worth or homely enjoyments of their fellow-creatures, like your’s. A coronet or a mitre were not the only things that caught their jaundiced eye, or soothed their rising gall. They who are always talking of high and low people are generally of a vulgar origin themselves, and of an inherent meanness of disposition which nothing can overcome. Besides, there is a want of good faith, as well as of good taste, in your affected fastidiousness on this point. ‘You assume a vice, though you have it not,’ or not to the degree, which your petulance and servility would have us suppose. A short time before you wrote this uncalled-for tirade against Mr. Hunt as an exclusive patroniser of that class of females, ycleped ‘washerwomen,’ he had quoted with praise in the Examiner, and as a mark of tender and humane feelings in the author, in spite of appearances to the contrary, the following epitaph from the Gentleman’s Magazine.
‘Epitaph by William Gifford, Esq.
‘We are no friends, publicly speaking, to the author of the following epitaph. We differ much with his politics, and with the cast of his satire; and do not think him, properly speaking, a poet, as many do. But we always admired the spirit that looked forth from his account of his own life, and the touching copy of verses on a departed friend, that are to be found in the notes to one of his satires; and there are feelings and circumstances in this world, before which politics and satire, and poetry, are of little importance’—(How little knew’st thou of Calista!)—‘feelings, that triumph over infirmity and distaste of every sort, and only render us anxious, in our respect for them, to be thought capable of appreciating them ourselves. The world, with all its hubbub, slides away from before one on such occasions; and we only see humanity in all its better weakness, and let us add, in all its beauty.
‘The author will think what he pleases of this effusion of ours. It is an interval in the battle, during which we only wish to show ourselves fellow-men with him. Afterwards, he may resume his hostilities, if he has any, and we will draw our swords as before.
For the ‘Gentleman’s Magazine.’ Dec. 18, 1815.
‘Mr. Urban,—I am one of those who love to contemplate the “frail memorials” of the dead, and do not, therefore, count the solitary hours, occasionally spent in a church-yard, among the most melancholy ones of my life. But in London, this is a gratification rarely to be found; for, either through caution, or some less worthy motive, the cemeteries are closed against the stranger. I have been in the practice of passing by the chapel in South Audley Street, Grosvenor Square, almost every day, for several weeks, yet never saw the door of the burying-ground open till yesterday. I did not neglect the opportunity thus offered, but walked in. I found it far more spacious and airy than I expected; but I met with nothing very novel or interesting till I came to a low tomb, plain but neat, where I was both pleased and surprised by the following inscription, which, I believe, has never yet appeared in print, and which seems not unworthy of your miscellany.