1757. Æt. 29. * 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 66 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 "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 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 ortho"graphy," &c. &c. + British Poets, xi. Prefatory notice to Wilkie. "our circulating libraries."* 66 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 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. 66 66 66 "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 * Monthly Review, xvii. 228, September 1757. + Ibid, 56. + Burton's Life, ii. 58. Burton's Life, ii. 55. § See Prior, i. 231. Ibid. 1757. Æt. 29. 1757. Æt. 29. 66 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 perpetual professor. "He rather converses," said Goldsmith, "with the ease of a cheerful companion, than dictates, as other writers in this class have done, with "the affected superiority of an Author. He is the first "writer since Bickerstaffe who has been perfectly satyrical 66 yet perfectly goodnatured; and who never, for the sake "of declamation, represents simple folly as absolutely "criminal. He has solidity to please the grave, and "humour and wit to allure the gay."* Our author by compulsion seemed here to anticipate his authorship by choice, and with indistinct yet hopeful glance beyond his dunciad and its deities, perhaps turned with better faith to Burke's essay on the beautiful. His criticism† was elaborate and excellent; he objected to many parts of the theory, and especially to the materialism on which it founded the connection of objects of pleasure with a necessary relaxation of the nerves; but these objections, discreet and well considered, gave strength and relish to its praise, and Burke spoke to many of his friends of the pleasure it had given him. And now appeared, in three large quarto volumes, followed within six months by a fourth, the Complete History of England, deduced from the Descent of Julius Cæsar to the Treaty of Aix la Chapelle in 1748. Containing the Transactions of One Thousand Eight Hundred and Three Years. By T. Smollett, M.D. The wonder of this performance had been its incredibly rapid production: the author of Random and Pickle having in the space of fourteen + Ibid, 473. I may add, that besides these and other detailed and important articles in this May number, he contributed also twenty-three notices of minor works to the department of the review styled the Monthly Catalogue (for which, indeed, he wrote largely every month), and a compilation of literary news from Italy, dated from Padua! I 1757. Et. 29. months scoured through those eighteen centuries. It was a scheme of the London booksellers to thwart the success of Hume, which promised just then to be too considerable for an undertaking in which the craft had no concern. His Commonwealth volume, profiting by religious outcry against its author, was selling vigorously; people were inquiring for the preceding Stuart volume; and Paternoster Row, alarmed for its rights and properties in standard history books, resolved to take the field before the promised Tudor volumes could be brought to market. They backed their best man, and succeeded. The Complete History, we are told, "had a very disagreeable effect on Mr. Hume's "performance." It had also, it would appear, a very disagreeable effect on Mr. Hume's temper. "A Frenchman "came to me," he writes to Robertson," and spoke of translating my new volume of history: but as he also "mentioned his intention of translating Smollett, I gave "him no encouragement to proceed."* It had besides, it may be added, a very disagreeable effect on the tempers of other people. Warburton heard of its swift sale while his own Divine Legation lay heavy and quiet at his publisher's; and "the vagabond Scot who writes nonsense," was the character vouchsafed to Smollett by the vehement proud priest. But it is again incumbent on me to say that Goldsmith keeps his temper: that, in this as in former instances, there is no disposition to carp at a great success or quarrel with a celebrated name. His notice has evident marks of the interpolation of Griffiths, though that worthy's more deadly hostility to Smollett had not yet begun; but even as it stands, in the Review which had so many points 66 * "I am afraid," he writes in a letter to Millar (6th April, 1758), "the extra "ordinary run upon Dr. Smollett has a little hurt your sales; but these things are only temporary." Burton's Life, ii. 135. 66 |