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price; for though Dennis's luckier one reached only to 217., Dr. Young's Busiris acquired 847. Smith's Phædra and Hippolytus, 50l.; Rowe's Jane Shore, 50l. 158; and Jane Gray, 751. 58. Cibber's Nonjuror obtained 1057. for the copyright.

Is it not a little mortifying to observe, that among all these customers of genius whose names enrich the ledger of the bookseller, Jacob, that "blunderbuss of law," while his lawbooks occupy in space as much as Mr Pope's works, the amount of his account stands next in value, far beyond many a name which has immortalised itself!

POPE'S EARLIEST SATIRE.

WE find by the first edition of Lintot's "Miscellaneous Poems," that the anonymous lines "To the Author of a Poem called Successio," was a literary satire by Pope, written when he had scarcely attained his fourteenth year. This satire, the first probably he wrote for the press, and in which he has succeeded so well, that it might have induced him to pursue the bent of his genius, merits preservation. The juvenile composition bears the marks of his future excellences: it has the tune of his verse, and the images of his wit. Thirty years afterwards, when occupied by the Dunciad, he transplanted and pruned again some of the original images.

The hero of this satire is Elkanah Settle. The subject is one of those Whig poems, designed to celebrate the happiness of an uninterrupted "Succession" in the Crown, at the time the Act of Settlement passed, which transferred it to the Hanoverian line. The rhymer and his theme were equally contemptible to the juvenile Jacobite poet.

The hoarse and voluminous Codrus of Juvenal aptly designates this eternal verse-maker;-one who has written with such constant copiousness, that no bibliographer has presumed to form a complete list of his works.*

When Settle had outlived his temporary rivalship with Dryden, and was reduced to mere Settle, he published partypoems, in folio, composed in Latin, accompanied by his own. translations. These folio poems, uniformly bound, except that the arms of his patrons, or rather his purchasers, richly

*The fullest account we have of Settle, a busy scribe in his day, is in Mr. Nichols's "Literary Anecdotes," vol. i. p. 41.

gilt, emblazon the black morocco, may still be found. These presentation-copies were sent round to the chiefs of the party, with a mendicant's petition, of which some still exist. To have a clear conception of the present views of some politicians, In 1702, it is necessary to read their history backwards. when Settle published Successio," he must have been a Whig. In 1685 he was a Tory, commemorating, by a heroic poem, the coronation of James II., and writing periodically against the Whigs. In 1680 he had left the Tories for the Whigs, and conducted the whole management of burning the A Whig, a Pope, then a very solemn national ceremony.* pope-burner, and a Codrus, afforded a full draught of inspiration to the nascent genius of our youthful satirist.

Settle, in his latter state of wretchedness, had one standard elegy and epithalamium printed off with blanks. By the ingenious contrivance of inserting the name of any considerable person who died or was married, no one who had gone out of the world or was entering into it but was equally welcome to this dinnerless livery-man of the draggled-tailed Muses. I have elsewhere noticed his last exit from this state of poetry and of pauperism, when, leaping into a green dragon which his own creative genius had invented, in a theatrical booth, Codrus, in hissing flames and terrifying-morocco folds, discovered "the fate of talents misapplied!"

TO THE AUTHOR OF A POEM ENTITLED

66 SUCCESSIO."

Begone, ye critics, and restrain your spite;
Codrus writes on, and will for ever write.
The heaviest Muse the swiftest course has gone,
As clocks run fastest when most lead is on.+

It was the custom when party feeling ran high on the subject of papacy, towards the close of the reign of Charles the Second, to get up these solemn mock-processions of the Pope and Cardinals, accompanied with figures to represent Sir Edmundbury Godfrey, and other subjects well adapted to heat popular feelings, and parade them through the streets of London. The day chosen for this was the anniversary of the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth (Nov. 17), and when the procession reached Temple-bar, the figure of the Pope was tossed from his chair by one dressed as the Devil into a great bonfire made opposite the statue of Queen Elizabeth, on the city side of Temple-bar. Two rare tracts describe these "solemn mockprocessions," as they are termed, in 1679 and 1680. Prints were also published depicting the whole proceedings, and descriptive pamphlets from the pen of Settle, who arranged these shows.-ED.

Thus altered in the Dunciad, book i., ver. 183

"As clocks to weight their nimble motions owe,
The wheels above urged by the load below."

What though no bees around your cradle flew,
Nor on your lips distill'd their golden dew;
Yet have we oft discover'd in their stead,

A swarm of drones that buzz'd about your head.
When you, like Orpheus, strike the warbling lyre,
Attentive blocks stand round you, and admire.
Wit past through thee no longer is the same,
As meat digested takes a different name;*
But sense must sure thy safest plunder be,
Since no reprisals can be made on thee.

Thus thou mayst rise, and in thy daring flight
(Though ne'er so weighty) reach a wondrous height:
So, forced from engines, lead itself can fly,

And pond'rous slugs move nimbly through the sky.†
Sure Bavius copied Mævius to the full,

And CHERILUS+ taught CODRUS to be dull;
Therefore, dear friend, at my advice give o'er
This needless labour, and contend no more
To prove a dull Succession to be true,
Since 'tis enough we find it so in you.

This original image a late caustic wit (Horne Tooke), who probably had never read this poem, employed on a certain occasion. Godwin, who had then distinguished himself by his genius and by some hardy paradoxes, was pleading for them as hardily, by showing that they did not originate in him that they were to be found in Helvetius, in Rousseau, and in other modern philosophers. "Ay," retorted the cynical wit; so you eat at my table venison and turtle, but from you the same things come quite changed!" The original, after all, is in Donne, long afterwards versified by our poet. See Warton's edition, vol. iv. p. 257. Pope must have been an early reader of Donne.

Thus altered in the Dunciad, book i. ver. 181

"As, forced from wind-guns, lead itself can fly,

And pond'rous slugs cut swiftly through the sky."

66

Perhaps, by Charilus, the juvenile satirist designated Flecknoe, or Shadwell, who had received their immortality of dulness from his master, catholic in poetry and opinions, Dryden.

THE ROYAL SOCIETY.

THE ROYAL SOCIETY at first opposed from various quarters-their Experimental Philosophy supplants the Aristotelian methods-suspected of being the concealed Advocates of Popery, Arbitrary Power, and Atheism -disappointments incurred by their promises-the simplicity of the early Inquirers-ridiculed by the Wits and others-Narrative of a quarrel between a Member of the Royal Society and an AristotelianGlanvill writes his "Plus Ultra," to show the Improvements of Modern Knowledge-Character of Stubbe of Warwick-his Apology, from himself-opposes the "Plus Ultra" by the "Plus Ultra reduced to a Nonplus"-his "Campanella revived"-the Political Projects of Campanella-Stubbe persecuted, and menaced to be publicly whipped; his Roman spirit-his "Legends no Histories"-his "Censure on some Passages of the History of the Royal Society"-Harvey's ambition to be considered the Discoverer of the Circulation of the Blood, which he demonstrates-Stubbe describes the Philosophy of Scienceattacks Sprat's Dedication to the King-The Philosophical Transactions published by Sir Hans Sloane ridiculed by Dr. King-his new Species of Literary Burlesque-King's character-these attacks not ineffectually renewed by Sir John Hill.

THE ROYAL SOCIETY, on its first establishment, at the era of the Restoration, encountered fierce hostilities; nor, even at later periods, has it escaped many wanton attacks. A great revolution in the human mind was opening with that establishment; for the spirit which had appeared in the recent political concussion, and which had given freedom to opinion, and a bolder scope to enterprise, had now reached the literary and philosophical world; but causes of the most opposite natures operated against this institution of infant science.

In the first place, the new experimental philosophy, full of inventions and operations, proposed to supplant the old scholastic philosophy, which still retained an obscure jargon of terms, the most frivolous subtilties, and all those empty and artificial methods by which it pretended to decide on all topics. Too long it had filled the ear with airy speculation, while it starved the mind that languished for sense and knowledge. But this emancipation menaced the power of the followers of Aristotle, who were still slumbering in their undisputed autho

rity, enthroned in our Universities. For centuries the world had been taught that the philosopher of Stagira had thought on every subject: Aristotle was quoted as equal authority with St. Paul, and his very image has been profanely looked BACON had fixed a on with the reverence paid to Christ.

new light in Europe, and others were kindling their torches at his flame. When the great usurper of the human understanding was once fairly opposed to Nature, he betrayed too many symptoms of mere humanity. Yet this great triumph was not obtained without severe contention; and upon the Continent even blood has been shed in the cause of words. In our country, the University of Cambridge was divided by a party who called themselves Trojans, from their antipathy to the Greeks, or the Aristotelians; and once the learned Richard Harvey, the brother of Gabriel, the friend of Spenser, stung to madness by the predominant powers, to their utter dismay set up their idol on the school-gates, with his heels upwards, and ass's ears on his head. But at this later period, when the Royal Society was established, the war was more Now the world open, and both parties more inveterate. seemed to think, so violent is the reaction of public opinion, that they could reason better without Aristotle than with him: that he had often taught them nothing more than selfevident propositions, or had promoted that dangerous idleness of maintaining paradoxes, by quibbles and other captious subtilties. The days had closed of the "illuminated," the "profound," and the "irrefragable," titles, which the scholastic heroes had obtained; and the Aristotelian four modes, by which all things in nature must exist, of materialiter, formaliter, fundamentaliter, and eminenter, were now considered as nothing more than the noisy rattles, or chains of cherrystones, which had too long detained us in the nursery of the human mind.* The world had been cheated with words

Causes

Some may be curious to have these monkish terms defined. are distinguished by Aristotle into four kinds :-The material cause, ex qua, out of which things are made; the formal cause, per quam, by which a thing is that which it is, and nothing else; the efficient cause, a qua, by the agency of which anything is produced; and the final cause, propter quam, the end for which it is produced. Such are his noticns in his Phys. 1. ii. c. iii., referred to by Brucker and Formey in their Histories of torian of the Philosophy. Of the Scholastic Metaphysics, Sprat, the hisw Royal Society, observes, "that the lovers of that cloudy knowledge boast that it is an excellent instrument to refine and make subtley the minds of But there may be a greater excess in the subtlety of men's wits

men.

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