1757.

stands in the dedication to the Four Dissertations he was Et. 29. bringing out at the time, that "Johnny Home" had all the theatric genius of those two poets so refined and purged. But little was even a philosopher's exaltation, to the persecu tion of a presbytery. No man better than Hume knew that. The first volume of his History had lain hopelessly on Millar's shelves, after sale of forty-five copies in a twelvemonth, when, on inquisitorial proceedings of the General Assembly against Lord Kames and himself, the public in turn became inquisitive and began to buy. And, surely as the History of Hume, must even puffery of Home have languished, but for that resolve of the presbytery to eject from his pulpit a parson who had written a play. It carried Douglas to London; secured a nine nights' reasonable wonder; and the noise of the carriages on their way to Covent Garden to see the Norval of silver-tongued Barry, were now giving sudden headaches to David Garrick, and strange comparisons of silver tongues to the hooting of owls.

But out of reach of every influence to raise or to depress, unless it be a passing thought now and then to his own tragic fragments, sits the critic with the thin duodecimo before him. The popular stir affects even quiet Gray in his cloistered nook of Pembroke Hall; but the sharp, clear, graceful judgment now lodged and boarded at The Dunciad, shows itself quite un-affected." "When the town," it began, "by a tedious succession of indifferent performances, has "been long confined to censure, it will naturally wish for "an opportunity of praise.' That is, as I translate it, the town, sick of Doctor Brown's Athelstan and Barbarossa, of Mr. Whitehead's Creusa, of Mr. Crisp's Virginia, of Mr. Glover's Boadicea, of Doctor Francis's Eugenia, of Mr. Aaron Hill's Merope, of the Regulus of Mr. Havard,

* Monthly Review, xvi. 426, May 1757.

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and the Mahomet of Mr. Miller, on which lean fare it has
had perforce to diet itself for several seasons, turns to any-
thing of the reasonable promise of a Douglas, with disposition
to enjoy it if it can. But the more striking, Goldsmith felt,
was the indiscreetness that could obtrude a work like Douglas
as 'perfection:" in proof of which critical folly he made
brief but keen mention of its leading defects; while to those
who would plead in arrest particular beauties of diction, he
directed a remark which, half a century later, was worked
out in detail by the Coleridge and Schlegel school of
reviewers. "In works of this nature, general observation
"often characterises more strongly than a particular criticism
"could do; for it were an easy task to point out those
passages in any indifferent author where he has excelled
'himself, and yet these comparative beauties, if we may be
"allowed the expression, may have no real merit at all.
"Poems, like buildings, have their point of view; and too
near a situation gives but a partial conception of the
"whole."* Good-naturedly, at the same time, he closes
with quotation of two of the best passages in the poem,
emphatically marking with excellent taste five lines of
allusion to the wars of Scotland and England.

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Gallant in strife, and noble in their ire,
The Battle is their pastime. They go forth
Gay in the morning, as to Summer sport:
When evening comes, the glory of the morn,
The youthful warrior, is a clod of clay.

If Boswell, on Johnson's challenge to show any good lines
out of Douglas, had mustered sense and discrimination to
offer these, the Doctor could hardly have exploded his
emphatic pooh! Goldsmith differed little from Johnson in
the matter, it is true: but his pooh was more polite.

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A Scottish Homer in due time followed the Shakspeare: Mr. Griffiths submitting to his boarder, in a very thick duodecimo, The Epigoniad, A Poem in Nine Books. Doctor Wilkie's laboured versification of his adventures of the descendants of the Theban warriors, got into Anderson's collection, the editor being a Scotchman: though candid enough to say of it, that" too antique to please the unlettered reader, and too modern for the scholar, it was neglected by both, read by few, and soon forgotten by all." Yet this not very profound editor might have been more candid, and told us that his sentence was stolen and adapted from the Monthly Review. After discussion of the claims justly due and always conceded to a writer of genuine learning, Goldsmith remarked "on the contrary, if he be detected of ignorance "when he pretends to learning, his case will deserve our pity too antique to please one party, and too modern for "the other, he is deserted by both, read by few, and soon

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forgotten by all, except his enemies." Perhaps if his friends had forgotten him, the Doctor might have profited. "The Epigoniad," continued Goldsmith, "seems to be one "of those new old performances; a work that would no more have pleased a peripatetic of the academic grove, "than it will captivate the unlettered subscriber to one of

66

*For a very curious account of Wilkie, who was the son of a farmer near Edinburgh, and is said to have conceived the subject of his poem while he stood as a scarecrow against the pigeons in one of his father's fields of wheat, see a letter of Hume in his Life by Burton, ii. 25-9. "Wilkie," adds Hume at the close of his letter (dated 3rd July, 1757), "is now a settled minister at Ratho, "within four miles of the town. He possesses about £80 or £90 a-year, which "he esteems exorbitant riches. Formerly, when he had only £20 as helper, he "said that he could not conceive what article, either of human convenience or "pleasure, he was deficient in, nor what any man could mean by desiring more 66 money. He possesses several branches of erudition, besides the Greek poetry; "and particularly is a very profound geometrician... Yet this man, who has com'posed the second epic poem in our language, understands so little of orthography," &c. &c. + British Poets, xi. Prefatory notice to Wilkie.

"our circulating libraries."*

Nevertheless the Scottish clique made a stand for their rough Homeric doctor. Smith, Robertson, and Home were vehement in laudation; Charles Townshend (" who," writes Hume to Adam Smith,t "passes for the cleverest fellow in England") said aye to all their praises; and when, some months afterwards, Hume came up to London to bring out the Tudor volumes of his History, he published puffs of Wilkie under assumed signatures, both in the Critical Review and in various magazines, and reported progress to the Edinburgh circle. It was somewhat "uphill work," he told Adam Smith; ‡ and with much mortification hinted to Robertson that the verdict of the Monthly Review (vulgarly interpolated, I should mention, by Griffiths himself §) would have upon the whole to stand. "However," he adds, in his letter to Robertson," if you want a little flattery to the author '(which I own is very refreshing to an author), you may tell "him that Lord Chesterfield said to me he was a great poet. "I imagine that Wilkie will be very much elevated by praise "from an English earl, and a knight of the garter, and an

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ambassador, and a secretary of state, and a man of so "great reputation. For I observe that the greatest rustics "are commonly most affected with such circumstances." || It is to be hoped he was, and proportionately forgetful of low abuse from obscure hirelings in booksellers' garrets.

"An Irish gentleman," Hume in another letter told Adam Smith, "wrote lately a very pretty treatise on the "Sublime." This Irish gentleman had indeed written so pretty a treatise on the Sublime, that the task-work of our critic became work of praise. "When I was beginning the

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:

world," said Johnson in his old age to Fanny Burney, " and was nothing and nobody, the joy of my life was to "fire at all the established wits." Perhaps it is a natural infirmity when one is nothing and nobody, and when Goldsmith became something and somebody his friends still charged it upon him. They may have had some reason, for he was never very subtle or reliable in literary judgments; but as yet, at any rate, the particular weakness does not appear. A critic of the profounder sort he never was; criticism of that order was little known, and seldom practised in his day but as it is less the want of depth, than the presence of envy, which it has been the fashion to urge against him, it will become us in fairness to observe that here, in the garret of Griffiths, he is tolerably free from it. Whether it is to seize him in the drawing-room of Reynolds, will be matter of later inquiry. He has no pretension yet to enter himself brother or craftsman of the guild of literature, and we find him in his censures just and temperate, and liberal as well as candid in his praise: glad to give added fame to established wits, as even the youths Bonnell Thornton and George Colman were beginning already to be esteemed; and eager, in such a case as Burke's, to help that the wit should be established. In the same number of the Review he noticed the collection into four small volumes of the Connoisseur, and the appearance in its three-shilling pamphlet of A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. The Connoisseur he honoured with the title of friend of society, wherein reference was possibly intended to the defective side of that lectureship of society, to which the serious and resolute author of the Rambler had been lately self-appointed