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A LETTER

ON THE ARTICLE ENTITLED

'' ROBERT PHILLIMORE'S LYTTELTON,"

IN THE

QUARTERLY REVIEW, JUNE, 1846,

TO THE

RIGHT HON. J. W. CROKER.

BY

JOHN GEORGE PHILLIMORE,

Ka/cov KopaKoq KaKov owv. Bad is the egg of a bad Croaker.

LONDON:

JAMES RIDGWAY, PICCADILLY.

1846.

LETTER,

Sir, — To make any apology for addressing you i as the author of the article on Phillimore's Lyttelton, which appeared in the last number of the Quarterly Review, would be as ridiculous in )^our eyes as it would be superfluous in my own. Though in the letter which I thought it my duty to address to you, I gave you the opportunity of sparing me, by an explicit denial that you were the author of that article, the disgusting drudgery of commenting on the proofs of ignorance, spite, and false statement which it contains, I never expected that you would accept the condition I proposed,

" Loquela tua te manifestum facit ;"

For whatever your regard for truth may be, of which I mean to furnish the reader of this letter with some means of judging, prudence would cer- tainly dissuade you from the disavowal of a produc- tion, which bears as infallible marks of having been written by you, as if your name had been annexed to it. Without entertaining a worse opinion of the inhabitants of this island than I am willing to do, I would not suppose that any one would endeavour

B 2

to imitate your style, and even if such a distemjiered intellect did exist, so close a resemblance would be impossible ; as " Ursula"* says, " You never could do him so ill- well, unless you were the very man. Here's his dry hand up and down ; you are he, you are he ;" and what " he" is, I shall now endeavour to demonstrate. Before I enter upon this task, I will state the reasons which have led me to under- take it. You have thought proper, under the garb and guise of a Reviewer, to attack, with the most obvious malignity, my very near relation. As usual, not satisfied with assailing his reputation as an author, you have endeavoured to traduce his character as a man. With the exception of playing the monster in literature, and aiming his blows at women under the shelter of an anonymous publication, there is scarcely a crime not falling under the lash of justice which you do not impute to him. You charge him repeatedly with all that a man of honour would shrink from as most odious and contemptible. Strict adherence to truth is, among gentlemen, the first of virtues, without it, all liberal intercourse Tnust be at an end. In seven separate passages you charge him with intentional falsehood. In others you state servility as his motive for this falsehood. In others you make a specific charge of dishonesty against him, and actually have recourse to the vocabulary of the criminal code, to designate the ofience which you call " larceny." To be sure, as the Editor of * Much Ado about Nothing.

u,uc

Lyttelton's Memoirs was not a woman, you could not gall him by those remarks v.hich are peculiarly offensive to the delicacy and sensibilities of that sex, or take a journey to ascertain his age, with any hope of inflicting pain upon him or those connected with him. But there was an opportunity, as you sup- posed, of mortifying a young author, perhaps of damaging his reputation ; nay, it might even be, if good luck was yours, of damping his spirit, and paralyzing his efforts for the remainder of his life. Now it certainly is not by you. Sir, that any hesita- tion in resenting these flagrant outrages would be attributed to any other but the basest motive, from which by any possibility it could arise. '' Poignez vilain il vous oindra," "oignez vilain il vous poindra." To enable any man to appreciate the forbearance of an antagonist, there must be something in his own breast which renders him alive, if not to the refine- ments of polished life, at least to those feelings which the lowest classes of society are seldom totally without. To the thorough-paced and hacknied Zoilus of the Quarterly Review, any courteous or refined demeanour would appeal in vain.

Mr. Murray is of course so conscientious a per- son, that he would be quite incapable of practising any of the tricks of his trade. The bare idea of puffing any work in the Quarterly Review, because he was the publisher of that work, would fill him with scorn and indignation. Every page of the Quarterly Review affords ample proof of the delicacy

6

of Mr. Murray in this respect, and the edifying care with which it avoids all overdone panegyric, all excessive praise of works which issue from his shop. This is the reason why the impartiality of the Quarterly Review, and the magnanimous delicacy of Mr. Murray are almost equally proverbial. In the dark, however, as I am, as to any possible motive which could induce any man, who had a character to lose, to publish such an article as that to which I refer, I must, for the benefit of persons more acute than I am, just state certain circumstances which happened to accompany the publication of Lyttel- ton's Memoirs, and to precede your very scurrilous attack. Mr. Phillimore, the editor, took the family letters, in the first instance, to Mr. Murray. Mr. Murray placed them in the hands of some person to whose judgment he is wont to refer in such matters. That person expressed his opinion, that the letters, all of which have been published — mark this, Mr. Croker — were most valuable and important. A negociation began between Mr. Murray and the Editor. That negociation was broken off, — -partly on account of some ignorance, excusable enough in Mr. Murray, — partly on account of the Editor's dislike to Mr. Murray's mode of dealing. The Editor then took the papers to Mr. Ridgway, with whom he had every reason to be satisfied. Arrange- ments were at once made, and Mr. Ridgway became the publisher of the Lyttelton Papers. The ques- tion of cause and effect, gave metaphysicians, in the

last century, a good deal of trouble, and it is one on which I do not now intend to enter. Can any thing be more improbable ? a foreigner might exclaim, than, that even supposing Mr. Murray had any wish to run down a book published by his rival, a gentleman so conspicuous for modesty, candour, and the dread of giving unnecessary pain as Mr. Croker, from his station, must be supposed to be, would consent to gratify the short-sighted and narrow views of a bookseller, and make a literary journal subservient to that purpose. Impossible. Had this, which we cannot suppose, been Mr. Murray's purpose, he would have sought out some such man as Voltaire has described, some '* pauvre diable," some " Freron," and assigned to him a task, which no man of a different character would under- take. Indeed, the style of the article clearly proves that some such person, though no doubt without any privity or consciousness on Mr. Murray's part, was its author. Without discussing the value of such an argument, I will propose to you. Sir, what appears to me a fair test as to the motive of the writer of that article. If it be written, I will not say in the candid and liberal spirit which Horace recommends, but with ordinary fairness, with anything like regard to truth — if the quotations are fairly made — if the charges are substantially correct, then such an im- putation would be unjust ; but if, on the contrary, the quotations are garbled, the charges broadly asserted left totallv, in most instances, and almost

8

totally in others, without an attempt to support them ; — if a sort of cowardly insolence, a wish to wound where there is no opportunity to strike, be visible in every line, — if the malignity of the writer, not finding sufficient vent in the text, overflows into notes remarkable for cavils the most pettifogging, and for personality of the grossest kind — if no credit is given to the Editor, for facts which he has established, — if the Re- viewer, in the very act of transcribing the infor- mation with which the Editor — and the Editor alone has furnished him — forbears to acknowledge his obligation, and leaves the reader to imagine that the facts and statements so plagiarized from the work which he is traducing, are his own discoveries, and the fruit of his own industry — then, Sir, it will be for the world to say what share Mr. Murray's dis- appointment has had in Mr. Croker's review.

The note to the very first page of your review is, as Chillingworth says, " a fit cover for such a dish." In it you twice quote Crokers Boswell, and deny, in direct contradiction to ^Malone's authority, that the dislike of Johnson for Lyttelton began from a rivalry, of which Miss Booth by was the object. O tlxe ad- vantage of anonymous writing ! Instead of praising " paper credit," Pope should have celebrated this most convenient invention ! Thus Mr. John Wil-

* Malone, an honest, industrious editor, adopts the story which the Editor repeats, and which Mr. Croker rejects. Mr. Malone gives a very sufficient reason for his beUef. Mr. Croker gives none that a child could not answer, for his disbelief .

9

son Croker, the reviewer, corroborates the authority of Mr. John Wilson Croker, the editor of Boswell. " This very absurd story," you say, " was fully dis- proved by Mr. Croker's edition of Bosvv ell." " We can trace no cause of enmity." ** See Croker's Bos- well." Literally at the distance of four lines from the first passage 1 Do you recollect Swift's story. Sir, of the mountebank and his boy ? The boy pro- claimed in the market place of every town they entered : *' The doctor cures all sorts of diseases by an infallible specific." After which, the doctor, with a solemn face and a pompous voice declared, " What the boy says is true." The only difference is, that you are obliged to perform both parts, the mounte- bank and his zany's in your ow7i person ! In this, the first note to the first page, I find also the first of the string of plagiarisms, which is carried on in un- broken continuity through every page of the review. You say, *' We know that Johnson applied to Lord Westcote for that purpose (the purpose of obtaining a life of Lord Lyttelton) in two very civil letters." How do you know it ? From the information fur- nished by the Editor, who publishes the letters in the Memoir, and whose name you pass over in total silence. — Memoirs, p. 28, vol. L

As a specimen of the spirit, with which your review proceeds, I will first mention the cavil on the expression which is used, that the author hopes his work may be ** satisfactory to the Lyttelton family ;" can any expression be more natural ? The

10

Papers which form the substance of the work, have been furnished to the author from confidence in his abilities and character by the representative of that family. Can it be tortured by any power of misre- presentation into servility, into any thing of which a just and honourable mind need be ashamed, and which can offend the haughtiest spirit of indepen- dence, for the person so trusted to express a hope, that those by whom he was trusted should have no reason to repent their confidence ? You do not indeed venture directly to affirm this, but this simple and most innocent expression is repeated by you several times in italics, for the purpose of in- sinuating, what it would have been too flagrant an affront to the understanding of your readers directly to assert. Really, Sir, your lofty spirit of indepen- dence has in this instance carried you a little too far ; you should chasten these grand and swelling sentiments of jealous honour, these stoical dictates of a factitious virtue, by some indulgence for a cor- rupt age, and for human infirmity. In spite of Mr: Croker's morality, I see no reason why ?i man may not be glad that his friend is satisfied with the way in which he has discharged his trust. Reserve, Sir, your indignation for more appropriate objects. Un- doubtedly it does sometimes happen tliat men are led by their deference to rank and fortune into the basest and most disgraceful compliances, — com- pliances which in a court of justice they have been most reluctant to admit. Perhaps in the course of

11

your experience some such instance may have fixed itself upon your notice ; you may have heard of some stern guardian of English morality, some declaimer against French romances, one of the incorruptible sentinels appointed by the Quarterly Review to watch over the decencies of English life, condescend- ing to herd with the parasites and strumpets of a profligate nobleman. Against such revolting mean- ness and hypocrisy lift up j^our voice and spare not — you will be applauded by every honest man — mean- while believe me, Sir, there are submissions to rank far more disgraceful than wishing that a biography may be satisfactory to the family of its hero.

Before I proceed, I cannot help expressing my

surprise, that if it was determined at any rate to run

down Lyttelton's Memoirs, you should have been

selected to write an article on Biography. I should

have thought a very moderate share of discretion

would have induced you to pause a little before you

ventured on a subject in which your experience was

so unfortunate. Your edition of BoswelFs Johnson

being, for bad taste, for blind presumption, for gross

ignorance, almost without a parallel in literature,

and having been consigned to lasting ridicule

and contempt, I should have advised you to try in

preference any other topic ; to see what you could

say about the enormities of Marshal Soult, about

the imbecility of General Napier, about the age of

Miss Martineau, or of Madame D'Arblay ; nay, about

the blessings of a candid and ingenuous nature, of

12

generosity, and a scrupulous regard to truth, almost even to have written an essay on modesty, before you meddled with the ignorance and blunders of a Biographer. It is true, indeed, that a writer who is at all hazards, to abuse and misrepresent a parti- cular work, derives great advantage from the want of knowledge, and want of sensibility. The want of these qualities compensates for the absence of almost every other. The first defect prevents him some- times from being aware of the enormous violations of truth which his task requires him to perpetrate ; the second, even when they obtrude themselves upon his senses, renders him callous to the discovery. Still these advantages, however abundantly possessed, are not quite sufficient even for a packed review ; something more, the art to conceal the design is necessary, and of this ingredient it unfortunately happens your performance is altogether destitute.

You continue, *' He very rarely distinguishes his borrowings by marks of quotation." No one instance ^ of this omission is produced ; not, Sir, from any dis- position in you to spare the Editor, had he been indeed guilty of such dishonesty, but because, as you well know, no such instance is to be found. This sentence is written, however, for the same amiable and excellent purpose, as the daring false- hood that there are " above a hundred other anachro- nisms, which we do not mention, &c. &:c." following the good old rule of calumniating sti-ongly that something may remain. However, the charge is

13

made, and as usual, without an attempt or the sha- dow of an attempt to support it. The answer to it is, that there is not one single passage cited in the words of the writer from which it is taken, that is not distinguished by marks of quotation. The Editor, in my opinion, is obliged to you, for having so early shewn how far your desire to injure another is restrained by the fear of injuring yourself. When the reader sees a misstatement, so gross and palpable, a word may suggest itself to him, which the lan- guage of the Houyhnhnms, was without, but which, if you had been the subject of conversation among them, must speedily have been added to their vocabulary.

But let us go on with the same sentence. " But '* he places at the head of each chapter a list of books, *' which we find on close examination — for he tells us " nothing about it — to be the names of the authorities '* employed in the course of the said chapter. This is " a very convenient device. It enables him to borrow " wholesale, without being obliged to avow each indi- '" vidual — may we not call it larceny ? — by a specific " reference. That this is calculation, and not accident " and mere clumsiness, appears from this. He might " have stated in half a page at the head of the volume " all his authorities." This, to be sure, is perfect. First of all, you make it a charge against the Editor that he places all his authorities at the beginning of each chapter, on the ground that it increases the difficulty of finding the reference, though the parti-

14

cular volume referred to, and the specific period to which it relates are always stated ; and in the next clause of the same sentence you reproach him with not having accumulated all his authorities in the first page of his work, without any distinction of the chapters to which they are intended to apply, or the separate portions to which each chapter refers ! Can blundering go farther ? And are you so very igno- rant of hterature as not to know that this '* convenient device," which enables people " to borrow without acknowledging," has been very generally adopted by the greatest and most learned writers on the Continent? Who but you, Sir, would think that putting the reference at the top of the chapter instead of at the bottom of the page, increased the facility of plagiarism ? Who but you would recom- mend as a remedy, that all the authorities should be heaped together, indiscriminately, in the beginning of a work ? And who but you would display, with such happy unconsciousness, such perfect ignorance of all that a man of letters ought to know ?

" Si tarn audax esset ad agendum," said a writer of antiquity, of whom I am inclined to think you never read ten lines, " tam esset obscurus ad Oonan- dum, in aliqua re fortasse nos aliquando fefellerat verum hoc percommode cadit, ut cum incredibili ejus audacia singularis stultitia conjuncta est."

You proceed to comment upon the date of a letter written by the mother of Lyttelton to his father. The only reason for introducing the letter at all was,

15

as the Editor says, to shew that the marriage was a happy one. There is no possible confusion which can arise from inserting it under the date of 1733, rather than under that of 1738. You are, however, quite welcome to the discovery that the three* of an old fashioned hand was mistaken for an eight— a triumph which, as it is, with the exception of an additioQ of a final e to Montagu, the gravest error, that after a twelvemonths' incubation, your re- searches have enabled you to detect in a work of some 800 pages; it would be uncharitable to dis- turb by any commentary.

" You sa}^, in an ordinary case, we should not think it worth while to notice any errors of the press.'' By an ordinary case, I presume is meant, the case of a work published in Albemarle Street. But such remarks may be safely left to produce their own effect. I will only observe that you fill up a page and a half, 219-220, with insisting upon what you yourself call slips of the pen and errors of the press, which in no way affect the merit of the author, and can in no way mislead any human being. As a proof that no slip of the pen, or mis- take of the printer's devil, is below your notice, you write four lines about the printing of Flora Mac Ivon instead of Flora Mac Ivor, which you

* Is it to be ascribed to accident, or the fatality which seems to have attended you in every page of this Review, that you yourself annihilate this your gravest charge — "3 for 8 wi7/ occa- sionally escape even a practised eye." — Review^ note, p. 221.

16

are so blinded by spite as to suppose may assist your lau'dable purpose. You affect to suppose this a mistake of the Editor, whereas you perfectly well know, it is the mistake of n for r, by the printer. This false and ungenerous accusation proves how often malice is deficient in judgment ; for to lay stress upon such objections, is in truth a high compliment to the writer, whom you wish to vilify. It is like the accusation of magic against those who were obnoxious to the great in ruder ages, which shewed that no more real crime could be proved against them. " If all else fails," said a satellite of Richelieu to his employer, " we can still accuse him of magic." So when all your other cavils are exposed, you can still object to an n put for an 7% the omission of an e, and a 3 for an 8, and fill notes with puff's upon yourself — that is, as long as such proceedings are not thought below a respect- able publication. Ah ! Sir, it is a pity that your vocation is not that of a correcter of the press—then, instead of being a transient blemish to our literature, you might have been useful to its ornaments.

In the next page there is another note equally creditable in its way with the former. You-^the classical editor of Boswell, who aflirmed that "^OurjToi (f)LXoL meant '' dead friends," and puella, a virgin — you, who in this very article, talk about *' quieta ne

The 0 <p whkli caused Mr. Croker's grotesque mistake, are evidently put to signify — Thrale — Friends.

17

movere," " Proli stiipendum !" &c. &c. You, not deterred by the disgrace you seem destined to incur whenever you allude to a Greek or Roman writer, attack the editor for saying that Lord Chesterfield reversed Cato's maxim, for that he, — Lord Chester- field,— " videre quam esse bonus malebat." This, 3^ou first afiect to misunderstand, as if your ignorance of the meaning of a Latin sentence could be cited as an argument against it ! And then, with amazing eflfrontery, you affirm that it is any how erroneous as a character of Lord Chesterfield ; — so that Lord Chesterfield, according to your statement, was com- paratively indifferent to appearances. Lord Chester- field, who is alwa^^s insisting on " les graces, les graces, les graces," as an excuse for everything ! — who quotes his own speech, in comparison with Lord Macclesfield's, about the Gregorian Calendar, as a proof how much form is above matter! — who holds up the Marechal Due de Richelieu, the most worthless scoundrel of Lewis 15th's Court, as an instance of the same truth! Lord Chesterfield, who concludes one of the letters, printed for the first time in this work — " Pray lay me at his Royal Higli- ness's feet, but without shewing this letter, which is in too free a style." " That nothing (says the Editor) might be wanting to render this letter thoroughly characteristic of its writer, the envelope in wdiich it was enclosed, contained on a separate sheet of paper, the following second postscript : — " I add this to my other letter, to tell you, that

c

18

notwithstanding the postscript, you may shew it tlie Prince or not, as j'^ou think proper ; if you woukl have him see it, make a seeming difficulty at firsts and make him force you at lastJ'^ Lord Chesterfield, who in every thing he said or did, or wrote or published, insisted upon the exterior as everything ! Again, 1 ask, for what do you take your readers ? The obser- vation is worthy of you, and I shall leave the reader to judge of it — " miserum si intelligis — miseriorem si non intelh'gis" — what that judgment cannot fail to be. These remarks, however, you think, may pass muster w^ith your other objections ; and a care- less reader may suppose that they are the mistakes of the Editor, who, you are good enough, in the excess of your candour to admit, " has read with sufficient diligence, and made copious extracts from all the ordinary books that relate to the period he treats of." After all. Sir, if ever, in a fit of humihty, you allow yourself to reflect on the causes which ex- pose a man to the disdain of the wise and good^ vou will be inclined, on mature consideration, to think that typographical errors are not those which a man, eager for the good opinion of his contempo- raries, has most reason to apprehend. Ten 'thou- sand such mistakes of the press as those which (although you left a hundred anachronisms un- noticed in your common-place book,) you have enumerated with such anxiety, would, in a moral point of view, be insignificant when compared with the turpitude of wilful misrepresentation, of inces- * Lord Lyttelton's MemoirS; vol. i. page 92.

19

sant plagiarism, and of mutilated quotations, and in a literary point of view, they would be as the fine dust in the balance when compared to your Latin quotations, and such English sentences as abound in every page of your review.

Before I quit this page, Sir, I must refer to the note in which, with a confusion of thought that appears almost judicial, you attack the Editor for carrying (as is the practice of foreign writers) his pages uninterruptedly through two volumes, — say- ing, that the Editor never does things like any body else — though in the very next line you contradict yourself, and admit that it is " by no means a bad plan when two volumes are to be bound together ;" and, after this comment, which perhaps shews your pitiful motive in as clear a light as any other line you have written, — and which, being afraid to insert in the text, you have crowded into a note, you add, in that brutal style, which at the Admiralty, on the Treasury Bench, and in the Quarterly Re- view, has been as much and as surely your emblem as the dog is of Bassano's pictures, " Who will ever bind Mr. Phillimore ?" Those, I should hope, who do not bind Mr. Croker. You say he never does things like anybody else : there are some things, I trust, he never will do like anybody else, — I trust, that he never will slander women, or state deli- berate falsehoods in a review, or associate with the vilest and most degraded instruments of opulent sensuality. If he did these things, Mr. Croker,

c 2

20

he would be quite secure from your imputation of never doing things Uke anybody else ; but he would forfeit the good opinion of all the respectable portion of society.

After availing yourself of the privilege, in the exercise of which your only rivals are those indus- trious persons who supply the metropolis with fish, by saying, that " the Editor respects the living- cur more than the dead lion" — (be it observed, by the way, if there are some living curs he respects, there is one pretty manifest exception to the rule) — you assert, page 222, that he is misled by Walpole's representations ; now in p. 203, Memoirs, the Editor says, how consistently w^ith your statements let the reader determine, " who would believe Horace Walpole's charge against any contemporary ?" In page 441, he mentions " Wal- pole's caricature of Lyttelton," an expression you have plagiarized. In page 445, he calls Horace Walpole the " Detractor-general :" — you may per- ^ haps think such a description a proof of esteem. In page 483, " Newcastle gave Lyttelton carte hlanche for the negotiation, which was overset by his awk- ward {Walpolice for honest) policy." In page 449, the Editor says, " Parliament met again in January, and still for all accounts of what passed within its walls, we must rely chiefly upon Walpole's Me- moirs of George the Second ; always bearing in mind the necessity of carefully distinguishing between the facts related, and the comments of their narrator, discoloured by petty antipathies^

21

and the constant sacrifice of truth to epigram.'^ To crown all there is this note to p. 440 of the Memoirs : " I must guard you (writes Professor Smythe) against the historical publications of the celebrated Horace Walpole. Look for entertainment in them, and you will not be disappointed ; but give Jiim not your confidence, indeed you will soon see from his lively and epigrammatic style of narrative that he cannot deserve it,'' To the same effect Mr. Hallam in his Constitutional History." Really, Sir, you must have been hard put to it for a pretext of attack, when you charge the writer of these passages with too much reliance on the authority of Walpole. Pope Alexander the Sixth, took a vow of chastity, have you taken one of adherence to the truth ?

You say that Mr. Phillimore has taken an imperfect view of the history of King George HI. ; and I suppose, as a proof of it, you blame him with finding fault with the English, in which that King's letter about his interview with Lord Temple is written to Mr. Pitt. You say, " the letter itself is not only as good English as any hurried note (it being an official communication) usually is, but it has the higher merit of being unquestionable evi- dence of the good faith of the King." Supposing the absurdity swallowed, that a man's own note can be unquestionable evidence of his own inten- tions in his own favour, how does " the higher merit" affect the Editor's remark, as to the style in which the note was written ? A person who wrote English would have said, " the letter itself is good

22

English, and it has the higher merit," &c. Your sentence is like the parody on Boswell : " My revered friend spoke angrily of a man who always had his eggs boiled hard, but as they gave employ- ment to industrious mechanics he did not object to the large shoe buckles noAV in use." With your usual candour you forbear to quote the letter which I put in a note to this page.* And first I have to remark, that you must have known, that it was not a

* *' Richmond Lodge, 15 m. past 9, July 15, 1766. "Mr. Pitt,

" Lord Temple has been with me, and has desired me not to see you to-morrow, that he may have time fully to talk ^Yith you. I have, therefore, entrusted him to acquaint you I shall not expect you then ; but, on recollection, I think it may be both of utility, and not void of amusement, for you to know the substance of what has passed.

** I opened to him a desire of seeing him in the Treasury, and, in conjunction with you, chalking out such an administration as can be formed, considering the unhappy divisions that subsist between men, yet taking the present administration for the basis to build on, with such alterations as might appear necessary.

*' I am sorry to see, though we only kept in generals, that he seems to incline to quarters very heterogeneous to my and your ideas, and almost a total exclusion to the present men, which is not your plan ; but as we did not come to particulars, I hope I am not quite founded in my apprehensions.

*' I concluded with saying I should only agree to such a plan as you could with a pleasure be a part of ; but not to one wherein you had not a principal share. I should wish to see you on Thursday at eleven, at the Queen's house, as that will give you time to consider the whole of this weighty matter. This letter remains a perfect secret betwixt me and you, if you think it best that it should. " George R."

Chatham Correspondence ^ vol, ii. 443.

23

hurried note, witness the charming passage, " but on recollection,^' &c. and next I admit that it certainly is written, if not in quite as good English as a " hurried note" usually is by people who understand their own language, in quite as good English as articles in Reviews, the fruit of a year's labour, sometimes are. A few hurried notes written by you, in a style corresponding to this article, would supply our litera- ture with a collection that might rival the " Epistolae Obscui^orum Virorum." Your defence, however, of the style in which George the 3rd's note is written, proves that in a single instance, at least, you follow the Christian precept, and love your neighbour as yourself.

To shew you how much disposed I am to make the most of every indication of an amiable nature which you discover, I will here allude to your defence of Johnson, whom you will not, you say, allow " every puny whipster" to attack ; this is real benevolence, and shows how superior you are to the frailty which, Tacitus says, is peculiar to the human disposition, of hating those whom we have injured.

You glance at the Editor's style not directly, for as it is unexceptionable you were afraid of doing so ; it is a style which proves the writer to be a man of sound taste, and conversant not with " Essays by Karkeet" (Review, 245), or " Short and poor Ballads, signed Sylvius Review," page 220, ib, or ''our articles,"^ to which, in the course of this Review,

* ^'Our article, 22 1 ."—" 0?zr article on Walpole, 222."— *' Our article on Chatliara, 222."—** Our Review of Lord Chat-

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there are no less than seven separate references — but with the best models in his own and other lanouao-es. It is polished, clear, and eloquent, in every respect, in short, diametrically the opposite to your own ; of this it is a sufficient proof, that in spite of the viru- lence of which every line of your review affords such abundant evidence, vou have avoided as much as possible all occasion for enabling the reader to form a judgment of it, and have never once dared to select any passage in the text, as a topic for vitupe- ration.

" Mr. Phillimore," you say, '* struts where he ** thinks himself safe, and cringes where he fears ; " thus the young Prince is accused of intriguing " against his grandfather." The passage referred to is this : " Pitt declared open war with France, joined with Legge, and (through the all-powerful favourite of Leicester House, Lord Bute) with the Princess Dowager, and the future George the Third, who was easily induced, from respect and affection to his mother, to intrigue against his grandfather.'* The words in italics completely destroy your insi- nuation about strutting and cringing — and therefore you carefully refrain from alluding to them, and after this miserable prevarication, you have the

ham, 246."—" Owr article on Lord Chatham, 253."—" We had the good fortune in our article on Chatham Correspondence, 255." — " We rescued in our article 255, note.*'

If to this be added the eloquence of italics and capital letters, the reader may judge what an escape Mr. George Robins, Rowland's Kalydor, and what are called iliQjmjffing vans have had.

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effrontery to talk about " little attempts" and *' want of candour !" — But the historical knowledge which this passage displays, is on a par with its good faith. Do you mean to deny that George the Third encou- raged the opposition to his grandfather? If you do, to borrow a well-known phrase, frivolous as your employment is you do not understand it ; — and your qualifications as a retailer of the political gossip and intrigues of the last century, (lower human ignorance cannot carry them), are about equal to the value of your judgment, in matters of taste, and your know- ledge of the Classics. If you do, why select a state- ment that is incontrovertibly true, on which to ground a charge of injustice and misrepresentation ? Do you place such implicit confidence in the preju- dices and ignorance of your readers, as to deny the narrow-minded obstinacy of George the Third, his king-craft and most unconstitutional interference with his ministers, from the beginning of his reign till he finally lost his faculties ? Do you really sup- pose that the self-complacency with which you cover this ludicrous ignorance of what most schoolboys know, when you assert that in our other " Essays" loe have " sufficiently justified the good King's con- duct during that period," can produce in any man, at all acquainted with the most notorious facts in English history, any other emotion but that of scorn at so clumsy an attempt to mislead, and (unless he should happen to know your reputation) of aston- ishment at your effrontery ?

Read the following extracts from so common a

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book as Waldegrave's Memoirs, which are cited by the Editor, and are relied upon by him, while he emphatically discards \yalpole's authority, and then say whether all the sophistries and equivocations of an Albemarle Street full of Crokers can get rid of the plain, simple, and most notorious fact, that George the Third, at the instigation of his mother, did intrigue against his grandfather. If the passages had been written expressly to corroborate the Editor's statement, they could not do so more effec- tually.

" From this time, all duty and obedience to the grandfather entirely ceased : for though it would have been difficult to have persuaded him* to have done that which he thought wrong, he was ready to think right whatever was prompted either by the mother or hy her favourite'^ — Waldegrave Memoirs, page 41.

" About three months after his return to England, his Majesty sent for the Prince of Wales into his closet, &c. to sift him in relation to Hanover, and to caution him against evil counsellors.

" The prince was flustered and sulky ; bowed, but scarce made any answer : so the conference ended very little to the satisfaction of either party. Here his Majesty was guilty of a very capital mistake ; instead of sending for the Prince, he should have spoke firmly to the mother : told her that as she governed her son, she should be answerable for his conduct : that he would overlook what was past, * The Prince of Wales.

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and treat her still like a friend, if she behaved in a proper manner ; but, on the other hand, if either herself, her son, or any person influenced hy theniy should give any future disturbance, she must expect no quarter ; he might then have ended his admo- nition, by whispering a word in her ear, which would have made her tremble, in spite of her spotless inno- cence."— Waldegrave Memoirs, page 50.

" In the mean time, these factious proceedings were not in the least discouraged at Leicester House : on the contrary, those who by the severest insinuations, or by ironical panegyrick, had thrown the most indecent reflections on majesty itself, were caressed in the most public manner, and honoured with all the nonsense of gracious smiles, mysterious nods, and endless whispers in every corner of the drawing-room." — Waldegrave Me- moirs, p, 62, A.D. 1756.

^'The Princess of Wales' unlimited confidence in the Earl of Bute has been already mentioned ; and by the good offices of the mother, he also became the avowed favourite of the young prince, who was just entering into his nineteenth year, the time of his majority, in case the king had been dead ; and as very considerable changes were soon to be made in his Royal Highness's family, the great point they aimed at was to place the Earl of Bute at the head of the new establishment."

" The next time I had the honour of speaking to his Majesty, he very graciously told me, that as I had incurred the displeasure of Leicester House,

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on account of my attachment to him, and because I had acted an honest part, he Avas determined to shew his approbation of my behaviour, &c." — Walde- . grave Memoirs, p. 71.

'* It was now the general opinion, that Leicester House would enjoy the fruits of their victory, and cause no future disturbance : the Prince of Wales having given the strongest assurance that Lord Bute's promotion was the only part of the establish- ment which he had really at heart ; and that if he could be gratified in this particular, he should make no further demands " — p. 78.

Now will you say that Lord Waldegrave meant to flatter " the antimonarchical part of the Press in this country ?" Cant which well entitles you to that cap gilt without and leaden within, assigned by Dante as the badge of by no means the most amiable class of sinners.^ But you had the alternative either of adopting the Editor's statement, or of denying a notorious truth — and you of course and without hesitation preferred the latter.

To expect from you any but the most disingenuous conduct would I know be most chimerical. But they who allow you to make the Quarterly Reyiew the vehicle in which your crude notions, your reck- less assertions, your inexhaustible treasures of presumption, bad taste, and still less amiable qualities, are obtruded with such incessant prodi- gaUty on the pubhc, might, I think, ask themselves, whether in the long run such a speculation can be * Dante Inferno, Canto 23.

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profitable ? Whether those merely mercantile calcu- lations, by which our literature is now so unhappily governed, would not induce them to abandon a system which, if persisted in, must make this country, as far as letters are concerned, the laughing stock of Europe ? Let them reflect what any foreigner — I speak not of the Schlossers and the Thierss, but of men with no more than the usual share of knowledge and ability — who finds in a widely circulated journal, a Q^rave denial of a fact as well known as the existence of George the Third himself, is likely to think of the general state of intelligence in a country where such impudent folly does not bring down upon the work in which — together with a hundred other equally daring insults to truth and reason — it is admitted, universal derision and contempt. You, however, are yourself still —

" Still, still remain Cibberian forehead, and Cibberian brain."

Scarcely have you proclaimed George the Third's innocence of all intrigue, when you pronounce on Mr. Burke a panegyric written in the most involved and barbarous English, and quote his Thoughts, and to which, as usual, the Editor of these Memoirs had directed your attention, on Political Discontents. If ever you read, as well as quote, that well known tract, you will find — perhaps a little even to your confusion — that it contains as bitter an attack on George the Third's administration, his scanda- lous system of intrigue and jobbing, his efforts to

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substitute tlie personal favour of the Sovereign for every other qualification, and to distinguish between king's friends and pubhc ministers, as is to be found in Junius. " To get rid," says Mr. Burke, " of all this intermediate and independent importance, (i.e. the importance of men of popular weight and character) and to secure to the court the unlimited and uncontrolled use of its own vast influence^ under the sole direction of its own private favour, has for some years past been the great object of policy. If this were compassed, the influence of the crown must of course produce all the effects which the most san- guine partisans of the court could possibly desire. Government might then be carried on without any concurrence on the part of the people ; without any attention to the dignity of the greater, or to the affections of the lower sorts."

" Points of honour and precedence were no more to be regarded in parliamentary decorum, than in a Turkish army. It was to be avowed, as a consti- tutional maxim, that the king might appoint one of his footmen, or one of your footmen for minister ; and that he ought to be, and that he would be, as well followed as the first name for rank or wisdom in the nation. Thus parliament w as to look on, as if perfectly unconcerned, while a cabal of the closet and back-stairs w as substituted in the place of a national administration." — Burke s Thoughts, ^x. page 234.

Such is the way Mr. Burke speaks of the intrigues of George the Third, " of the good king," " whom

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' ice have vindicated" so effectually, that it is merely requisite to allude to our " essay" in which the task is accomplished. Such, Sir, is your consistency, clearness of head, accuracy, and judicious method of attack. But what do all these qualities signify to an anonymous author, safe, as he supposes, from all examination or reply, and burning with the desire to avenge the preference of Mr. Ridgway to Mr. Murray. How wise is that provision of nature, by which the most absolute disregard of fact, and the most eager desire to injure, are often neutralized by a corresponding want of judgment and confusion of understanding — by which Mr. Croker has been incapacitated from seeing that in order to gratify the disposition of a giant a giant's strength is requisite. After a miserable discussion, in your own style, as to whether Lord Lyttelton was a seven months' child or not ; in which you assert what it is impos- sible you should know, as to a subject as incon- ceivably insignificant as any which ever engrossed even your attention, you proceed to give an account of the family, which is entirely taken from page 28 of the book you criticise, without one word of ac- knowledgment. Thus, in the sentence concerning Charles the Bishop, "Goody Carlisle," as I think Horace Walpole calls him ; you say, " Mr. Philli- more calls him the historian of his family, without condescending to inform us where that history was written. He alludes, we presume, to some MSS. in the archives of Hagley." Admirable sagacity ! But you have omitted, for the sake of inserting this

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paltry cavil, the line which refutes it. " To his,* i. e, the Bishop's MSS. Nasli was largely indebted in his History of Worcestershire." — How ingenious! Then comes a passage about the Grenvilles, the substance of which you borrow again, without any notice, from page 68 of Lyttel ton's Memoirs. It is true that you have endeavoured to conceal your theft, by changing the polished language of the Editor into that peculiar jargon which long practice has led you to mistake for style. Next comes indeed a charming passage ; it begins with an attack upon the Editor for not supplying the dates of Lyttelton's career at school. *' Dates," we are told, with a so- lemnity worthy of Polonius, " are the land-marks of biography, even more, if it be possible, than of history." Certainly ; but Avhat dates ? Dates of birth, death, marriage, literary composition, of ac- cession to different offices. But is it equally impor- tant to know, when a boy from doing nothing in the fourth form at Eton, was removed to do nothing in the fifth ? " But we have endeavoured to repair Mr. Phillimore's omission." And what have we done? Quid tanto dignum ? — why nothing, lite- rally nothing. " On inquiry, we were surprised to find that no register was kept in that great school." And how do you know, Mr. Croker, that the Editor of Lyttelton's Memoirs did not inquire as well as " we," and was not surprised to find that no register was kept in that great school? So that the Editor is blamed for not having found out what,, if discovered, * ^lemoirs, page 28.

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would have been of no importance, and what, aftex all you yourself affirm, it was impossible to discover. You were more successful, Sir, in your attempts to discover Miss Burney's age. Next comes a commen- tary on the statement the Editor makes, that " the dates of Lyttelton's poems are strangely inaccurate," in which we have an admirable specimen of reason- ing. The verses on Leonidas are dated in 1734, more than two years before the poem was written. "This seems conclusive," says Mr. Croker; "but we have a suspicion, that in so clear a case Mr. Phillimore is again wrong. Green saw Glover's Leonidas before it was published. And if Green why not Lyttelton ?" Who can withstand such reasoning? Why indeed !

Then follow insinuations gradually hardening into assertions. " The verses were, perhaps, in- tended," and " as they seem," " the date may be right," " we know not on what authority Mr. Phillimore pronounces," &c. To this the only reply is, that the dates are inaccurate. Mr. Croker's suspicions are as valuable as his assertions, but he has succeeded in filling up more than half a page in stating his suspicions, and yet you, who have a hundred instances of error in your notes which you forbear to publish, devote half a page to this utterly unfounded conjecture, which you yourself dare not call by any other name than that of a suspicion, and which, I shall presently shew, that you yourself,

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with the confusion of which this article affords such numerous instances, afterwards in express terms abandon.

Next we have some verses also quoted by the Editor, which you insert without an allusion to him ; and now we come to one of those objections, which put your liberal and amiable disposition in the clearest light. The Editor says, " Lyttelton appears to have early imbibed the spirit of the Boy patriots of the day." You exclaim, '* Non- sense ! The denomination of * Boy patriots' was earned and given ten or a dozen years later." And who denies it ? The Editor says, speaking in his own person of those who were afterwards called the ' Boy patriots,' the spirit which afterwards ani- mated them was early exhibited. Why a boy in the lower form of any great school would be scourged for making so gross a mistake — " Quid " nunc te litteras doceam ? Non opus est verbis sed *' fustibus. Quaere ex familiari tuo illo Poeta probabit " genus ipsum, et agnoscet, neque te nihil scive mira- " bitur."

But as this is one of the anachronisms, I will postpone my commentary on that part of the subject. You make another of those liberal remarks which shew how fully you seize the spirit of history, as to the time of Lyttel ton's residence at Christchurch. Johnson says he stayed a short time : the Editor says he stayed a very short time. You say he

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stayed two years, and are quite delighted with the discovery. Well, but in those days two years was a very short time for any man to be at college : it was the fashion to reside a longer time than at present ; and so this cavil, except that it occupies four or five lines, is perfectly insignificant. It is a pity you did not insert instead of it one of the hundred errors and absurdities which you tell us of in your notes. After some confused sentences you announce, to the dismay of all who admire Theocritus, Virgil, Tasso, Milton, Cervantes, and"^ Garcilaso de la Vega, and the author of " As you like it," that you subscribe to Johnson's general and special condemnation of all mock pastorals. Here we find your usual accuracy and good taste. I doubt whether, with the exception of what you yourself have written, any criticism in the language is more thoroughly contemptible than Johnson's commentary on Lycidas, the most remarkable of those special and general condemnations to which you refer. It is indeed one of the indelible blots on that powerful writer's fame. From the narrow prejudice, the personal rancour, the illiberality of its tone, the utter inability to appreciate merit which it displays, one would think it the model on which your attempts at criticism have been formed. Not being able to imitate the vigour of Johnson's language, you have endeavoured by more virulent acrimony and systematic misrepresentation to atone

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for that deficiency. If it had been your object to say in earnest, as a critic, what Pope said in jest —

*' Let me see

All that disgraced my letters met in me,"

you could hardly be more successful. You flip- pantly remark, '' We are in no danger of the revival of Bucolics," and I agree with you. The age in which '* our articles" are current is in mighty little danger of being shocked by any versification like that of Theocritus, the model of Virgil, or of hearino; strains like those which, if the " Gierusa- lemme" had never existed, would have made Tasso's name immortal : but I return. The Editor, cor- recting Johnson, and the printed date of the Persian Letters, which assign February 1728 as the time when they were written, states that the Persian Letters were probably written in 1734. This, after some three or four lines of cavil, you admit, and then you add, with a modesty all your own, that " this was a point which the Editor, with the archives of Hagley open to him, ought to have ascertained, and not to have left to a merely conjectural asseition such as ours." Why the Editor did not leave it to '*a merely conjectural assertion such as ours." He state'd it most clearly. What could be the object of these assertions, but the hope that somebody might read the words at the close of the sentence, and take for granted, that it was your conjecture and not the Editor's which led to the knowledge of the fact. AVhile we are upon this fact, allow me to ask you,

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Sir, whether you are now of the same opinion as you were three pages ago, when you expressed your dis- beh'ef that the dates of Lyttelton's writings were strangely inaccurate ? Can you guess now, on what authority Mr. Phillimore pronounces " that the printed dates were strangely inaccurate ?" AYas it the wish to misrepresent, or mere blundering, which caused you thus to contradict yourself? or did you think that, because your contradictions generally follow each other at the distance of two or three sentences, that one at the interval of three or four pages, would escape detection altogether ? You say, that the Editor attempts to controvert the charge against Lyttelton, that he could not accomplish an ordinary sum in arithmetic, for no other grounds than that it may be satisfactory to the Lyttelton family. The charge against Lyttelton is a gross and obvious exaggeration. The grounds for thinking it so, which you cannot see, because to have seen them would have prevented an ebullition of vulgar in- solence, but which any man who can read may see are Lyttelton's own speeches, which entirely refute the supposition. From Lyttelton, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, you suddenly go back to the time he was at Oxford, a confusion which serves your purpose of bewildering the reader in a labyrinth of dates and minute facts, till he takes all for granted that you wish him to believe : and here follows a fair sample of your impudent plagiarisms ; all you say about Blenheim, the application of Eve's speech to

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Adam to Sarah Duchess of Marlborough, are taken, as usual, without a syllable or hint of acknow- ledgment, from page 34 of the work you traduce. Here is the passage in the Review, and there is the passage in the Memoirs.

Review, page 230. For the description of the Park, he relies on " Thalia, Sylvan Maid !" and likens the Duke himself to Alexander the Great. Amidst such common places, one passage, though not original, is at least amusing. The old Whig sybil, Sarah Duchess of Marlborough, re- minds him of the gentle fasci- nations of Eve in Milton's Eden.

Memoirs, page 34. When he was about to leave the University, and begin his travels on the Continent, he published the poem of Blen- heim. It is written in blank verse, and in this, as well, I think, as in every other re- spect, bears no comparison to Addisons effusions on the same subject. It betrays an intimate acquaintance with Milton, and it is hardly possible not to smile at the plagiarism by which the beautiful address of the soft, gentle, modest Eve, — *' With thee conversing I for- get all time," — is transferred to the *' Atossa" of Pope, the haughty, turbulent, intriguing Sarah Duchess of Marlborough.

Larceny indeed ! ** I thank thee, {thief?) for teaching me that word."

In the next passage, you are kind enough to point out one of the first duties of a biographer. In one

of the Persian letters, a Mr. P is mentioned.

Nothing of the slightest importance turns upon the name ; it does not in the least bear on Lyttelton's

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personal history. The fact that it is in the Persian Letters, shews, as the truth is, that there are no materials at Hagley from which the blank can be supplied ; but you think, that not to speculate upon the name is a great omission, so at the passage,

" what you tell me of amazes me," you are

quite angry because the Editor has not informed you to whom the blank refers ; — a fact he does not know, — which there are no means of ascertaining, and which, if ascertained, would be without a particle of interest to any human creature. Perhaps the Spec- tator may come within the range of your studies, and you may have read the citizen's speculations on

my Lady Q — P — T — S , which are not in the

least more ludicrous than the gravity which your " stultus labor ineptiarum" is insisted upon. After displaying your historical genius, by affirming " that Sir Robert Walpole had grown in office to be some- thing like a Tory ! !" You complain that some lacuncB are not supplied which there was no possi- bihty of supplying ; and in the next line, enforce your complaint by saying, that had they been sup- plied, " you do not imagine they would have added much of interest or amusement to the original collection." The passages which follow, and which illustrate the history of the time of Lyttelton's inti- macy with Poyntz, his exchanging the residence at Luneville for that of Soissons, where the Congress was carried on, are taken from the Editor without a syllable to denote the obligation. This system of

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shameless fraud is carried on for three or four pages. " Wefindr " We seer " We suspect^ Having in every such instance taken the information from the Memoirs.

In page 227, you say, — " But the truth is, that Mr. Phillimore confounds dates, parties, and per- sons ; he has read of a ' Patriot Wyndham,' and a ' patriot Pitt,' and finding the names, fancied he had found the men ; but the * Patriot Wyndham' of that day was Sir William Wyndham, the celebrated Jacobite, whose politics Lyttelton detested^

I now proceed to point out the enormous blunders and absurdities in this passage, a passage remarkable even among those you have written, which in the French phrase " fait tache dans la boue," and which, if instead of being surrounded by numberless absur- dities, it stood alone, would have been suf&cient to fix upon him who was guilty of them, an indelible stamp of incapacity ; you impute to the Editor a confusion between the two Wyndhams ; Sir William ^ Wyndham, the Jacobite friend of Bolingbroke, and Lord Egremont — the Editor affirms, that- the verses refer to the first ; you declare this to be a very gross blunder, and the reason you give is — That the Patriot Wyndham was a jacobite, whose politics Lyttelton detested ! — therefore, Lyttelton could not have praised him — why, Sir, your favourite study, Beatson's In- dex, might almost have taught you to form a more correct idea of the history of the day — if because Wyndham was a jacobite, Lyttelton could not be his

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friend — how came Lyttelton to be the friend of Bol- ingbroke, the teacher, oracle, and guide of Wynd- ham ? how came Pope, the friend of Bolingbroke and Wyndham, to praise Lyttelton ? There is not a page of the history of that time, which does not refute your position, which does not shew, what few magistrates' clerks are ignorant of, the union of the section of Whigs, to which Lyttelton and Chesterfield, Pulteney and Marchmont belonged, with the Jacobites, for the sake of overturning Walpole. Lyttelton detest the politics of Wyndham ! of Wyndham the mouth- piece of Bolingbroke ! Lord Chesterfield, writing to Lyttelton, Nov. 1740, (Memoirs, page 151,) says, " A meeting of both Peers and Commons should, I think, by all means be pressed, in case Pulteney should have a mind to avoid it, which I think not improbable ; and yet if he will not, I own I do not see, since poor Wyndhain s death, who can call it, of the Commoners I mean." This is to be sure an admirable comment on your text. Why this very interesting letter contains the plan for the campaign, after the opposition, to which Lyttelton belonged, had lost by Wyndham's death their most formidable champion ; and to crown all. Lord Bolingbroke, whose politics Lyttelton detested, just as much as he did Wyndham's, in a letter given in page 197, of the Memoirs, addressed to Lyttelton, says — '' Two principal and fatal errors have prevailed from the accession of the Royal Family, &:c. — The first, that the foreign interests of Britain, must be

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conducted in a certain subordination to those of Hanover. The second, that the domestic interest must be submitted to those of a party. His Royal Highness is, you say, sensible of the first error, and I have heard from you, from Lord Chesterfield, and our departed friend, that he was sensible of the second." Our departed friend was Wyndham, to whom it is impossible, because forsooth he was a Jacobite, and because Lyttelton detested his politics, that Lyttelton could intend his complimentary verses to refer. Now, Sir, if there be any " pene- trable stuff'" remaining in you —

*' If damned custom has not brazed you so. That you are proof and bulwark against sense" —

If a long career of exposure and refutation has not hardened you against detections, which would make most men fly to hide themselves in the utter- most corners of the earth ; you must curse the hour when you first thought proper to display in so mar- vellous a manner, that ignorance and presump- tion, which, during the very short time your name is remembered at all, will be inseparably associated with it. Such are your notions of history ; what }^ur notions of truth are, let the reader judge from this passage, among a hundred others. You say that the Editor has heard only of one Wyndham ; the Editor, as if he had anticipated the attack, page 613, on a note to the words " Lord Egremont wrote to Ly ttleton," says, " His sister married Mr. Grenville ;

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they were children of Sir W. Wyndham, who died 1740, see p. 148." (Memoirs, p. 613.)

After some remarks on the Grenvilles, distin- guished by profound ignorance and petty rancour, but with which I at present have no concern, you continue as follows : — " The letters Mr. Phillimore selects for publication, are mostly political, and of singularly little interest." With regard to the " sin- gularly little interest," you must settle that with Mr. Murray and Mr. Murray's adviser as you can, that is not my present object. This passage we find in page 232 of your review. In page 208 you also say, " selections from the documents are worse than nothing ;" and in page 252 you use these words : — " We have neither space nor time to throw away in following the correspondence which Mr. Phillimore has not selected, but swept from the archives of Hagiey." 1 leave you to reconcile these two accu- sations, and the other contradictions I have quoted and shall quote, as you can — to shew how Mr. Phil- limore is culpable for having selected, and still more culpable for not having selected the letters he has published. You will find it quite as easy, as to reconcile most other sentences of your review with truth, probity, good nature, and good sense.

The Editor says that Hosier's Ghost was, before Campbell's Mariners of England, perhaps the most beautiful poem of the kind in our language. This you think affords room for a sneer ; you say, first, the poems are no more like than chalk and cheese,

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an elegant phrase to be sure, in the mouth of a writer who censures another for a far more pointed and much less homely proverb, (cited by you as if from the text, when in fact it is in a note) — but the meaning is worthy of the language, they are both ballads, written to celebrate a great naval victory — they are both extremely popular, and will last as long as the language in which they are written. It would hardly be possible to discover a closer resemblance as to the occasion which produced them, the enthusiasm with which they were re- ceived, or the subject to which they relate — the words of the Editor imply no more, nor could anything but the most inveterate love of quibble have induced you to deny this. You say that Rule Britannia was a truly national song — do you doubt that Hosier's Ghost was also ? If you had ever read Mr. Burke, Sir, whose name you profanely quote so much, but of whose writings you know so little — nay, if you had read the passage cited in these Memoirs, you would have known that he emphatically so describes it* — and this miserable cavil helps to eke out one of the three pages in which you pretend to enumerate errors and anachronisms! — But toproceed: the next passage puts your misrepresentations in so clear a light, that if any reader take the trouble to anal3^ze it, he will have a key to all you have written, and see the

* ** For that war, Johnsou, &c.*' Burke, cited iu L} tteltoii's Memoirs, p. 134.

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pitiful motive which animated you stripped bare, and exposed in all its naked deformity. I would most earnestly entreat attention to it, it is as follows : " When he mentions that the Prince of Wales, after his quarrel with the King, spent the winter of 1737 at Bath, he thinks it necessary to give a description of that place, as made classical ground by the visits of Pope, Garrick, Chesterfield, Carteret, Pulteney, &:c. Garrick being at that time an unknown youth at Mr. Colson's academy in Rochester ; there, he adds, the unbending Chatham submitted to the severe regimen of the eccentric Dr. Cheyne. Cheyne having died twenty years before the title of Chatham was created ; not content with these (and other !) anachronisms and absurdities," &c. What anachro- nisms and what absurdities ? Did not Garrick visit Bath ? Yes, but not in 1737 : and does the writer say he did visit Bath in 1737 ? he says nothing of the sort, he merely says that Bath is remarkable as the haunt of distinguished persons, and he mentions Garrick among the rest — you assume that he asserts Garrick to have vi«sited Bath in 1737, and on this pure invention you found a charge of absurdity. If Plutarch, in writing the life of Marius, were to say, after mentioning his birth at Arpinum, " this place was famous in Roman history as the birth-place of Marius and Cicero," what would be said to the Bavius, (for such creatures have existed in all ages, and are the growth of every soil), who should sa}^ Plutarch meant to say that Cicero and Marius were

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born at the same time ? yet this is precisely the as- sertion you make, for the purpose of inventing a charge against the writer whom you review. What was said is, that Garrick made Bath his residence — what you affirm to have been said is, that he made it his residence in 1737 ; I hope this is not " satisfac- tory" to Mr. Murray. Your next attack betrays an equal want of sense and candour ; it is said that " at Bath, the unbending Chatham submitted to the regimen of Dr. Cheyne," this is perfectly true : Mr. Pitt, afterwards Lord Chatham, did there submit to Dr. Cheyne — but you add, " the title of Lord Chatham was not created till 30 years afterwards, and, therefore, the writer is guilty of an anachro- nism ;" why, really Sir, this is below contempt : I appeal to any man who has opened a book of his- tory, whether a lower, dirtier, or more pettifogging and more contemptible quibble can be imagined. What if I say Lord Hertford was the favourite of the Regent, am I guilty of an anachronism because he was then Lord Yarmouth ? If I say Francis the' First was in love with Henry the Eighth's sister, then Lewis the Twelfth's wife, and afterwards Duchess of Suffolk — am I to be accused of anachronism^ be- cause at that time the King, afterwards Francis the First, was Duke of Angouleme ? If I quote Lord vSto well's judgments, am I guilty of an anachronism, because when the most celebrated of those judgments were pronounced he was called Sir William Scott ? Remember the Old Bailey, Sir, where I think you

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once distinguished yourself as a witness, you will there see the scorn with which such objections are treated, when any one is insensible enough of what is due to himself and others to insist upon them, and you may, perhaps, adopt a higher standard of morals or at least of civility. At the end of these remarks you con- tinue : " not content with these and a hundred other anachronisms, Mr. Phillimore observes," &c. : and this is the way in which you criticise. What a spirit of truth, candour, and good nature displays itself in this passage ! The writer says that Garrick visited Bath, and that Lord Chatham was a patient of Dr. Cheyne ; the Reviewer forges the assertion that Gar- rick visited Bath in 1737, and triumphs because Dr. Cheyne died before his patient was made Lord Chatham. The hundred other anachronisms have just as real an existence, as George the Third's enlarged mind and aversion to political intrigue, and Mr. Croker's candour and magnanimity — the same Astolpho will bring them all to light.

In page 220, you comment upon the assertion of the Editor, in the note to page 86, " That Anstey's verses were the origin of Smollett's picture of Bath," — and this is quite true. Mr. Campbell, in his Lives of the Poets, had fallen into the error of supposing that Anstey had borrowed from Smollett. The fact being, as is shewn by Lord Byron, in an appendix to the 5th Canto of Don Juan, the reverse ; the main point, that Smollett borrowed from Anstey, and not Anstey from Smollett is correctly stated ; and this.

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of course, you pass over altogether, for the purpose of laying stress upon a fact totally uninteresting and immaterial. As to your quibble that Humphrey Clinker was written long after the Prince visited Bath, it is of a piece with the rest of your remarks : Smollett described no doubt a state of things which had long existed. A very different writer from you, thus describes the work of Anstey : " In comparison with Smollett it was but a slight sketch, compared with the finished manner in which Smollett has in the first place conceived his characters, then fitted them with language, sentiments, and powers of observation, in equal correspondence with their abilities, temper, inclination, and disposition." Sir W. Scott, Mis. Works, vol 3, p. 1 66,

The Editor, starting with the time when the Prince of Wales raised the standard of opposition against his father, proceeds to give a sketch of his political and literary friends ; far from saying — as to give any colour to your attack it was requisite he should have said — that they all belonged to him in 1733 — he says directly the reverse. The Editor says, in the very passage you quote, (though you have endeavoured, by putting other words in italics, to divert the reader's attention from it) — at a " later period,'' Your whole attack assumes, that instead of " at a later period," the Editor had used the words " at the same time." Why did you not boldly print the passage as might have suited your pur. pose ? He must be a nice casuist who can say

49

which of these proceedings in point of morality is most exceptionable.

I am sometimes tempted to hope, Sir, that you are really ignorant of the meaning of the word anachronism : an anachronism is, to speak of a person as livino' at a time when he did not exist. For instance, if any person in the next century, follow- ing the exauiple you have given for so many years of turning history into an old almanack, were to rake up stories of things and people, utterly worth- less and long forgotten, and were to say, that in the reign of George the Second, there lived a man whom a merry freak of fortune had put for many years on the Treasury bench, and in the House of Commons, who never spoke without giving offence, or wrote without shocking reason, as famous for his adulation to the powerful, as for his insolence to the weak, — who published an execrable edition of a very entertaining book, in which he betrayed the grossest ignorance of the Greek and Latin languages that he thought proper ostentatiously to quote — who delighted in making anonymous attacks on women, through the medium of a journal very widely circulated —that the disgrace and scandal thus caused to English literature, had provoked the well known and brilliant author, Macaulay, to inflict upon him more than once, as signal and severe a chastisement as it ever was the lot of a detractor to receive : — this, however true or false the statement might be in other respects, would be an anachronism.

E

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We come next to a passage, in which, while you affect ostentatious accuracy, you fall into a most egregious error, and shew that whatever the Editor of Lyttelton's Memoirs may have done, you at any rate have not read with sufficient diligence the common books relating to the period of which you speak : the Editor's words are, " Swift and Pope probably owed their introduction to Bolingbroke and Chesterfield ;" and on this you exclaim, " We can hardly believe our eyes — Dean Swift at Prince Frederick's court !" Who said Dean Swift was at Prince Frederick's court ? or that he ever returned to England after 1727 ? Not the Editor of Lyttel- ton. He said. Dean Swift probably owed to Boling- broke his introduction to Prince Frederick : and he was right. Dean Swift, as a letter extant from him shews, had received an introduction to Prince Frederick ; in it he thus expresses himself : " In a letter I wrote to Mr. Pope, I desired him to recom- mend Mr. Macaulay to your favour and protection, as a most worthy, honest, deserving gentleman, and I perceive you have effectually interceded with the Prince, &c. I can hardly venture the boldness to deserve that His Royal Highness may know, from you the profound respect, honour, esteem, and veneration I bear towards his princely virtues ; all my friends on your side the water represent him to me in the most amiable light, and the people infalli- bly reckon upon a golden age in both kingdoms, when it shall please God to make him the restorer

51

gf the liberties of his people !" (W. Scott,* Swift, vol. 19.) — And now, Sir, is this ignorance or fraud ? did you know of this letter, or did you not ? If you did not, you have made a greater blunder than any you have attributed to the Editor of Lyttelton ; as Dean Swift is a person of far more importance than those to whom you are in the habit of alluding — if you did, another wilful misrepresentation must be added to the long catalogue of faults which, v/ithout any such addition, renders this article, I was going to say, the foulest, — but it is directed against a 7nan, — so I will only say, as malignant and contemptible, as any with which you have dis- graced the English Press. As if determined to condense into one passage, proofs of an almost uni- versal ignorance, you exclaim in Latin, which seems as if it were borrowed from the only Latin work with which your style leads me to suppose you acquainted, I mean the Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum, — " Proh stupendum !'' Sir, there is another, and a really classical exclamation, which not you, for it implies a sentiment to which your breast and front have long been strangers, but which those who dis- cover your shameless plagiarisms and repeated mis- statements may employ for you, " Proh Pudor !" Next comes a vindication of Johnson : half a page

* The manuscript of this letter is at Hagley. It is referred to by the Editor of Lyttelton' s Memoirs, and only not printed because it is already printed in ScotCs Swift. — Memoirs, page 125.

E 2

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is filled with one of your trivial confused unintelli- gible dissertations, which has no bearing at all upon the main point. Johnson says, ** Moore courted Lyttelton's favour by an apologetical poem, called The Trial of Selim, for w^hich he was paid with kind words, which, as is common, raised great hopes, that at last were disappointed." The Editor says, " This states that Lyttelton never assisted him, whereas, at the proper place in these Memoirs, the contrary will be easily and clearly shewn." Your answer to this would be sufficiently disgraceful to any other writer ; but it is surrounded by so many other more serious instances of dishonesty that perhaps I am wrong in noticing it at all — however, your comment is this : " Mr. Phillimore says, that Johnson states that Lyttelton never assisted Moore. Johnson says no such thing, but simply that Moore had hopes which were disappointed." Here again you leave out the words which detect your impos- ture ; " paid with kind words." Does not a man who says another was paid with kind words affirm that he was paid with nothing else ? -You knew this, and garbled the passage in order to fasten a mistake upon your adversary — and you go 'on to say, '*the term 'disappointed,' Mr. Phillimore conveniently changes into ' unassisted,' and then affiicts to think that he has disproved Johnson's statements, by shewing that Lyttelton had assisted Moore by contributing to his periodical paper of

53

The World." The Editor asserts no such thing — he gives Johnson's meaning, and proves first that Johnson says Moore was paid with kind words only ; secondly, that this was a mistake, because Moore probably received pecuniary aid, and certainly what was quite equivalent to it. Lord Chesterfield's assist- ance in the papers of the World, through Lyttelton's interference. If you attend a little more to the maxims of candour than you have done as yet, that is if you attend to them at all, you will live to be ashamed even of this misrepresentation. It oc- cupies two pages and extends into a third, where you discuss Lyttelton's alteration of Thomson, and where you actually end by asserting unequivocally what at first you peremptorily denied. The Editor states, that Dr. Johnson was very angry with Lyttelton for having, as he alleges, shortened the poem. This is the first part of the statement, and this you contradict. Your phrase is, *' we think it impossible to have treated in less angry, or more judicious terms so unjustifiable a proceeding." The Editor expressed no opinion on the point whether the anger was justifiable or not; he merely stated, " Johnson was very angry." Johnson says that " Sir George Lyttelton's conduct in shortening the poem was a liberty, which had a manifest tendency to lessen the confidence of society, and confound the characters of authors, and therefore cannot be justified." These are words. Sir, which whatever language an anonymous libeller may employ in cold blood ,

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from a sordid or a malignant motive, Dr. Johnson never would have used without considerable irri- tation. His prejudices were violent, and where he thought important principles at stake he often said more than a moderate man would justify ; but he was an honest bigot, not a vile slanderer, and therefore did not wantonly assail the moral character of his antagonist. Dr. Johnson, then, in this case was " very angry," The Editor is very right, and you, as usual, are very wrong. So much for the first part of the statement. Next comes the second, which you, in the hope of producing con- fusion, have mixed up with the first ; but it shall not serve you. The Editor says if, as Johnson alleges, Lyttelton did alter the poem of Liberty, no doubt it was in obedience to Thomson's wishes. You say, " if, as he alleges, Lyttelton did so, why does Mr. Phillimore thus throw a doubt over a notorious fact, which, if it were uncertain, might be so easily tested by confronting the original text of 1735-6 with Lyttelton's edition, published in 1750 ?" I may just remark, by the way, an anecdote told in BoswelFs Johnson, that Johnson took up Thom- son's work, and after reading about a page aloud, asked some one present what he thought of the verses; the person appealed to, having expressed his admiration, Johnson added, " Well, Sir, I have omitted every other line." This is an anecdote you might have remembered : it seems to shew that Thomson's poems might bear a little compression ;

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and if Thomson relied on Lyttelton's taste, which seems to have been unexceptionable enough, the proceeding, though I do not vindicate it, is not altogether indefensible : at any rate, it is one for which you ought to have some sympathy ; for your edition of Boswell — to which, in a manner unworthy of any author above a quack surgeon, you refer at least six times in the course of this article— is, as has been already observed, the most deplorable instance of the length to which bad taste, ignorance on some subjects, the half knowledge which is worse than ignorance on others, carelessness and presumption can carry an editor, that our age has witnessed. You say, however, *'that Lyttelton's alteration is about the most puerile arrogance you have ever read of, and which, to be sure, it was most indecent in any one professing a respect for Lord Lyttelton's memory to drag out of the obscurity to which the culprit had consigned it." Here, again, your malice blinds you. What becomes of the charge of distorting and sup- pressing facts that they may be satisfactory to the Lyttelton family ? Do you not see that it is utterly inconsistent with that which you have just advanced? 0 most unskilful of calumniators ! But let us come to the main question. You say, " Mr. Phillimore, having got hold of the manuscript corrections dated in 1752 and 1758, does not give himself the trouble of inquiring after an edition of 1750, and persists in wondering from what unexplained cause that edition was never completed j the fact being, that the

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edition was completed, printed, and published, with a preface, &c. by Lyttelton, in the said month of May, 1750, in 4 vols. 12mo. and republished in 1752, with the remarkable statement on the title page that it includes all the author's last corrections, additions and improvements, and in it is specially made and avowed the very compression of ' Liberty' censured." This is false : the edition which you say is so easy to compare, which you describe as having a preface, &c. never was printed — so I say : but I can support my assertion by the evidence of a wit- ness who, however little entitled to belief generally, is, in this instance, a credible one; for what will the reader think when I shew him that you say so too — that at the bottom of this very page, in which you assert that the book was printed, you agree with me and the editor, and truth, and assert that it was not. Here is the passage in your own words — " Lyttelton lived tw^enty years after the date of this childish project, and evidently abandoned it, and then comes his admirer, Mr. Phillimore, raking up this weakness, and wondering with a foolish face of praise why the plotted murder was not perpe- trated. We will tell him, because Lyttelton,> on reconsideration, had more sense than his biographer." You having said, not thirty lines higher, that the plotted murder was perpetrated, that the edition was printed, and having in the preceding page accused the biographer of strange blindness to the most obvious facts of the case, because he asserted

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\yliat you now assert ; having actually reproached him for not having collated an edition which you now assert never existed at all, because Lyttelton had more sense than his biographer ! Why, Sir, for what, in Heaven's name, do you take your readers ? Do you suppose they are infatuated with the same rage for abuse and misrepresentation as yourself? Did it never occur to you that some one among them might take the trouble, if not to put what you say in one page by the side of what you say in another, at least to compare the lines at the top and bottom of the same page with the other? Can any but the most voluntary of dupes be im- posed upon by such flagrant, such palpable, such everlasting absurdities ? If you do flatter yourself with a hope of imposing upon any but the weakest blockheads by this jumble, in a style trivial, yet almost unintelligible, of self-destructive denials and assertions, with criticisms upon the supposed omis- sion of an e in a name mentioned a century ago, with misstatements, shuffling, and prevarication, I can only apply the words of an old critic, quoted somewhere, I think, by Bentley — " Usque adeo Lectores suos pro stupidis ac bardis habet, quibus quidvis imponere sibi licere secure confidit."

You may, indeed, prevent inaccuracy, but it will be as the drunken Helot prevented intoxication.

You say, that Akenside could not have derived any support from Lyttelton's interest with the Prince, because " he belonged to an altogether dif-

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ferent time and class." Here, again, is a wild asser- tion, which the audacity of ignorance, or the most appalling indifference to truth, can alone account for. Akenside was the most ardent of the young patriots of the day. In his indignant epistle to Curio, he traces and describes with uncommon spirit the proceedings of Pulteney, then Lyttel ton's leader against Walpole. Although you are pleased to prove your uncommon qualifications for writing the history of that period by asserting that Lyttel ton abhorred Wyndham's politics, and that Akenside belonged to " an altogether different time and place,'' '* Illi robur et ses triplex," not, indeed, " circa pectus."

In page 236, you assert what is absolutely false, in order to accuse the Editor of inaccuracy ; you say, " Lyttelton returns some money offered him by the Prince; the salary, we must suppose, of some office." You may suppose any thing that happens to suit your purpose, but nobody else who can read the endorsement on that letter, and the letter itself, will or can suppose any thing of the sort, as it is quite clear that Lyttelton held no office at that time under the Prince ; and the money was offered on account, as Lyttelton expressly says, of the expense which Lyttelton had incurred by staying in town to look after the Prince's affairs. " Were," says Lyttelton, " my father to object to my staying in town, which I do believe is necessary for your service in this con- juncture, on account of the expense, I would not scruple to remove that objection by accepting such

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assistance as your goodness would be ready to afford me; but, as long as my father is not uneasy, I beseech your Royal Highness to let me serve you, without being paid for it."

The Editor, page 201, quotes an anecdote most un- favourable to his hero. It is, that Lyttelton offered terms through young Selwyn to Walpole. He says, that it is related by the author of an anonymous me- moir. He says, that he disbelieves the story, because no traces are to be discovered of it in the archives at Hag- ley . Next, because Glover, who thirsted for Walpole's blood, " was animated by the most rancorous hatred against Lyttelton,'' and those with whom he acted ; and lastly, that the story is derived from the autho- rity of the Prince of Wales. You begin by saying, that the Editor makes " a little attempt to discredit the story, by calling it anonymous." Any one would suppose you were about to prove that it was not anonymous. " When you say, it is no othei wise anonymous than that the name is not on the title page ;" in other words, than that it is anonymous, and (mark the reasoning) ** Mr. Phillimore admits that the author was Lyttelton's own friend — Glover." Mr. Phillimore having, in the passage, quoted by yourself a few lines above in the same page, ex- pressly stated, that " Glover was animated by the most rancorous hatred against Lyttelton and his party." This, you represent, as admitting that a statement is made by a man's own friend. Such monstrous disregard of truth, — such direct self-con-

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tradictioii is really almost incredible. Again, is the Memoir the less anonymous, because the author's name is not known ? or even because the author's name was known at the time ? Is the abominable mass of malice, dulness, and bad grammar, which I am now commenting upon, the less anonymous, because every one who reads it knows there is but one person in England capable of writing it ? Let us go on. These are your words : " But, he says, the story rests on the sole authority of Glover. As it was a statement of the Prince of Wales, in con- fidence to Glover, we have it undoubtedly on Glover's sole authority." Then, why carp and cavil at the statement to which you cannot object? " But there is not, we presume, any reason to doubt his vera- city." The Editor has just told you some reasons, viz. that he w as the bitter enemy— (you have changed the words, to be sure, into friend) — of Lyttelton and his adherents. And, as to the Prince, Glover relates that the story was separately con- firmed; but he does not tell us by whom, and the only confirmation of a story so grossly improbable, which we now possess, rests on a note in the last edition of Coxe's Life of Walpole ! avowedly resting on Glover's Memoirs as its sole authority ; this, the Editor has stated at full length, page 202, of w^hich, as usual, you know nothing. Of course, you say, " We have no doubt of the fact." How should you, as it is most improbable, and at variance with all we know of the character of the party concerned ? You next give your reader, who has had so many speci-

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mens of your literary, an opportunity of estimating your political, morality, — by saying, " we can ima- gine such a treaty without any disgrace to Lyttel- ton." Were the story true, nothing but the most absolute want of principle on Lyttelton's part would account for it; and, nevertheless, you assert that you can imagine such a treaty without any disgrace to Lyttelton. This may be true. Let us proceed. " Mr. Phillimore tells us, with grave absurdity, that in 1741, Lyttelton became acquainted with War- burton, then in the zenith of his power." On this you remark, " What Mr. Phillimore can mean by saying, that a country clergyman, with a very small living, and only then opening his splenilid literary and clerical career, was in the zenith of his power we do not at all understand." What you mean by saying, that Warburton, who had then written the chef d'oeuvre, on which his reputation is built almost exclusively, was then " opening his career," I do very well understand. It is to mis- represent the truth, for the sake of injuring the w^ork you review. To call Warburton at that time in the zenith of his power is a perfectly legitimate expres- sion. He was in the zenith of his reputation, and his faculties were at their meridian height. When poor Swift, as his faculties began to decay, took up the Tale of a Tub, he is said, after readino; the work for a short time, to have flung it down, exclaiming, " Good God, what a mind I had when I wrote that book." Would it not be right to say that Swift,

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when he wrote the Tale of a Tub, was in the zenith of his power. Yet Swift was then a poor clergyman, with a very small living. Passing from this inef- fectual cavil, which fills three quarters of a page, we come to the next sentence. *' There are half-a- dozen letters from Bolingbroke, but being written late in life, and not affording any insight into the mysteries of his busier days, they are now of little interest.'' As a proof of this, with your usual saga- city, you quote one, which is the most beautiful of its kind in our language, till now unpublished ; and another, which shews that Bolingbroke's idea of a Patriot King was originally composed in a letter to Lyttelton — a literary anecdote, which, as it reveals the history of the most magnificent piece of decla- mation in the language, is not without value in the eyes of any scholar, and which is worth bushels of the useless gossip that it has been the business of your life, in the intervals of anonymous assault on all that is good and eminent, to accumulate. After quoting the beautiful letter to Lyttelton on the death of his wife, another letter of Lord Bolingbroke, written in the same admirable style, immediately follows, now also for the first time published. Here we have another proof of your honesty. The letter ends, " in this temper of mind I wait for my own dissolution, and wish I did not foresee another." You subjoin, with an ostentation of accuracy, " the other was his wife's, who died a year before him." This fact you copied from Mr. Phillimore's book, which

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you do not so much as mention. Another opportu- nity for a cavil is, literally, that the Editor has printed Voltaire's Letters as they were written, with a J instead of I. This is worthy of your Mon- tagu<? objection — had the Editor done the reverse, no doubt you would have made that a subject of complaint. You assert also, probably for the sake of surprising your readers with the knowledge of a common French word, that resentir means to feel, and that Mr. Phillimore imagines it means "resent." Mr. Phillimore having of course said no such thing, but simply that without some ex- planation the letter is unintelligible. To shew how correctly true this statement is, I annex the letter.*" The next page is one with which the Editor has

* " Au Chateau de Ferney, par Geneve, *M9 Juillet, 1761. " My Lord,

" My esteem for you is so great, that j presume the Dame of Corneille shall be honour' d with your name. J dare sai such an attonement for the little displeasure you had caus'd to me, is a favour which j'll ressent great deal more than my

little pain.

*' Je suis avec bien du respect,

** My Lord,

** Votres tres humble et trea

" obeissant serviteur,

"Voltaire."

" The object of this unintelligible letter was to procure Lyt- telton's name and subscription to an edition of Corneille, which Voltaire was preparing, and the profits of which were to be de- voted to the benefit of that distinguished person's great niece." — Memoirsj page 558.

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little concern, but it puts in the broadest light the rank and genuine vulgarity of your nature. You seem to think it strange, that one gentleman, writing to console another, menaced with the same terrible calamity as had actually befallen himself — the loss of a beloved wife — should allude to his own past affliction, because the person whom he endeavoured to console was a Dissenting minister, and his wife's name (as you pedantically say) was Mercy. You add, in your coarse and insolent style, ^'tliat you daresay Mrs. Doddridge was an excellent person." Sir, you are as ignorant of the nobler feelings of our nature, as you are of the decencies of language and of the use of literature. I was about to be so absurd as to ask, Sir, if you recollected the beau- tiful lines in Ariosto's satire — but there may be others who do : they may chance to cast their eye on this defence, and may think that the reasons given by Ariosto for the coarseness of monks, will account for the brutality of others, who have not the excuse of being shut up in a monastery to allege in their defence.

" Non sa che cosa e amor, non sa che vaglia La caritade^ e quindi avvien che i frati ,

Sono si ingorda e si crudel canaglia."

In page 230* you complain of the quotations from

* Having assailed the Editor before for not publishing every letter, but for having selected what suited his purpose. Every letter, however, given to the Editor has been published, (pos- sibly with on^ exception).

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Doddridge : they are now produced for the fii^st time, and they fling light upon a curious fact — an attempt to include the Dissenters in the Church — a transaction which, to those who read history in a different spirit from yourself, will appear of rather more importance tlian filling up the blank after Mr. P — , or replacing the name of some forgotten squire, or inquiries after essays written by S. Karkeet.* This page contains an exquisite proof of your know- ledge of the language in which you write, and of that which you are audacious enough to pretend to quote. After mentioning the Prince, you say, '* His sudden death in 1751, * novas insidias machinans,* closed the scene of faction only to open another more mischievous.^' Now were there ever in two lines, two such glaring solecisms ? Where do you find ** novas insidias machinans' to be Latin ? and where do you find, even if " machinans' were Latin, that ^* his death" can be joined with it without the most flagrant violation of all syntax and all sense ? Why couple another language with your own to convince us of your ignorance of both ? Believe me. Sir, on this subject you have given proofs enough to satisfy Pyrrho himself, were he to be revived for the sole purpose. As a proof of the little value of this work, you proceed to quote from it a paper drawn up by Lyttelton in his own defence, illustrating in the most curious manner the political history of the day, which is now for the first time published, Thea

* Page 162, Review, F

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follows a long quotation from Mr. Phillimore's work ; and, according to 3'our honourable practice, without the slig-htest reference to it.

You then say, '*it seems Mr. Phillimore never reads the Quarterly Review." Probably because there is a quotation of almost an entire page from it in his work.* After this clumsy falsehood comes the following sentence, which, whether it be more remarkable for disgusting hypocrisy or transparent malice, I leave the reader to judge : " We should be sorry to give Mr. Phillimore pain, and shall be better pleased if, without doing so, we shall have demolished his book, and annihilated his authoritv."

You quarrel with the expression moralist as ap- plied to Montesquieu. Disposed as you were to cavil, if 3"ou had objected to the word " great magistrate," the remark would have been more plausible. Narrow as your range in literature evidently is, can you really doubt whether Montesquieu was a great moralist? Are you so ignorant of every thing but Beatson's Political Index, Walpole's Anecdotes of Painting, the Index to the Gentleman's Magazine^ and the flippancies of forgotten pamphlets, as not to know that Montesquieu's works contain most profound and luminous disquisitions on morality ? The study of Montesquieu, Sir, is admirably calculated to fortify and expand the mind, to inspire large and

* "There are some very just remarks on this once celebrated work in one of the numbers of the Quarterly Review. The closing observations of which are as follows, &c." — Memoirs, p. 162.

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generous views, and disdain for what is little and grovelling', to shew how solid a title may be ac. quired to the gratitude of mankind by deep thought, indefatigable labour, and generous views, directed to great and really noble objects. You would do well, Sir, to study his writings.

You accuse the Editor of " passing over in silence Pitt's sneers at Lyttelton." They are always stated at full length,

*' Pitt prepared his deadliest wrath for the new Secretary of State, and the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, who was his old friend Lyttelton." — Metnoirs, p. 486.

" In the course of the debate, half turning with an air of the greatest contempt to Sir George Lyttelton, he said, a gentleman near me," &:c. — p. 486.

" Pitt asked for what the vote was intended. If Sir George could not say for what it was designed, would he at least peremptorily say for what it was not designed." — p. 514.

" Pitt took little notice of Fox, only rising again to lash Sir George Lyttelton, who had called it an appeal of epithets, very little proper to come from him, said he, whose character is a composition of epithets, but Lyttelton had mistaken the day," &c. — p. 514.

" Pitt, redouhling contempt^ said, with a sneer,'' (did you ever blush, Mr. Croker?) — p. 514.

" He at once described Lyttelton as an innocent ;'' and again said, Lyttelton was a " pretty poetical

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genius," that " with a pen in his hand, nobody respected him more."

But this is not all ; the Editor has not only men- tained every sneer of Pitt, he has drawn attention to every libel of Walpole, e. g. p. 469 : " They turned an absent poet to the management of a revenue, and employed a man as visionary as Don Quixote, to combat Demosthenes."

" Except to mention some paltry homage which Sir George Lyttelton's awe made him pay to his offended friend Mr. Pitt."— p. 495.

And in another place the Editor has referred to what he calls Walpole's elaborate caricature of Lyttelton. This could not have escaped you, as you have plagiarized the expression and passage. He has quoted the lines on " the great orator Lyttel- ton," and he has stated, what, I believe, has never been mentioned before, and which may amuse those who are curious in such matters, namely, that the cha- racter of Longbil in a violent party pamphlet of the day, called an Address of Thanks to the Broadbot- toms, is intended for Lyttelton. Here -are some extracts from it : — " Longbil in the beginning had no principle, and took up none since ;" " naturally vain and conceited, Longbil's head and heart warp not a little towards spleen, satire, and ill-nature;" often saying that Longbil, " though no stranger, is yet no slave to virtue." It concludes : *' for further particulars of the character of this chief of the Broad- bottoms, we refer the courteous reader to the leader's

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own lucubrations, and to the conduct of their party since they have taken hsting money from Hal Stiff (Mr. Pelham)." All this abuse of his hero is set out at full length by the Editor, and pointed by him for the first time at Lyttelton as its object, and this you call " passing over in silence the sneers at Lyttelton." Here, again, you have been imprudent enough to stake your credit on an assertion, the utter falsehood of which every reader who will turn to the page cited above of Lyttelton's Memoirs cannot fail at once to discover. Let any person consider your former assertion, that the Editor relied upon H. Walpole's authority, and this assertion that he has passed over in silence Pitt's sneers at Lyt- telton, and say whether " II a dit cela — done c'est le contraire," is not a mode of reasoning which the reader of your review will find it absolutely necessary to adopt.

We now come to two pages, with which the Editor of the Lyttelton papers has no concern. But if any one wishes to see a specimen of wild pre- sumption, of ignorance really almost incredible, confusion of thought, and barbarity of style, he will even, if he should happen to have read the pages to which you refer with so much complacency, ^'the pages which we have written in our previous articles," be unreasonable indeed if he is not com- pletely satisfied. In this exquisite dissertation we are told that it was the happiness of England, at the end of George 2nd's reign, to have no question on

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Avhich a party could be raised, and that, therefore, there were factions struggling solely for private ends, therefore that it was the happiness of a country that all its statesmen should be struggling for private ends; this is proved by saying that Sir Robert Walpole pursued all his life the great Tory doctrine, " quieta ne movere." The grammar of the Latin quotation is, as usual, on a par with the knowledge displayed in the English sentence. Do you call the Excise acts, the Quakers' Tithe Bill, and the Jews' Naturalization Bill exemplifications of this rule ? What you call the great Tory doctrine is the doctrine of all flagitious, corrupt, and despotic governments. It is the doctrine of Russia and of Austria; it was the doctrine of Louis 16th's courtiers : in so far forth as Sir Robert \Yalpole's government was a corrupt government, it acted upon this maxim ; in so far forth as it pursued a system of generous and enlightened policy with regrard to free trade, to toleration, to the measures which kept the crown in the House of Brunswick, it did not. You say that the Tories, Wyndham, Shippen, and Bolingbroke, were as factious as any AVhigs could be. Who doubts it? Do you qudte this as something unprecedented in our annals ? Why, Sir, have you never read the history of WiUiam 3rd ? Have you never heard of his Tory parliaments ? Have you never heard how his mea- sures for breaking down and humbling the power of France were opposed and mutilated, and rendered

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in many respects nugatory by a Tory House of Commons ? Have you never heard of the petition of the men of Kent ? If you have never read the history of England during the close of the seven- teenth century, it is idle to ask if you ever read one of the most magnificent passages in Mr. Burke, describing the effects of Tory faction, and the invin- cible resolution with which it was encountered, stemmed, and overcome by that illustrious king ? But have you never opened Tindal, or Ralph, or even Smollett ? Parties never ran higher in this land of parties than in William 3rd's reign. The questions by which parties were divided were neyer clearer or more distinct; the conduct of the opposition was never more virulent or factious : the character of that opposition was Tory, yet you allege, as a proof that there were no parties in the latter end of George 2nd, and be- ginning of George 3rd's reign, the circumstances that the Tory opposition was factious. " 0 Lepidum caput!" and this is a man who writes dogmatically on points of history. Why, Sir, the children for whom you write stories selected from the history of England, praised by a continuous system of what you call " puffery," in the Quarterly Review,* might teach you better; and the man who

* " Stories for Children, selected from the History of Eng- land from the Conquest to the Revolution. Thirteenth edition. 18mo. 35. — ' This skilful performance of Mr. Croker's suggested the plan of Sir Walter Scott's "Tales of a Grandfather.'"— Quarterly RevieWy^ last number.

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has a controversy with you on points where Beatson's Index can afford you no assistance, must begin by performing the office of a schoohnaster. In the mean time, as your Tiistorical and classical quahfications seem to be on a par, I am surprised that you have not undertaken to teach children Greek and Latin as well as English History.

This precious dissertation terminates with telling US that Burke made the great moral and political discovery that party was a high political duty, and vou tell us two lines afterwards that it is only on Mr. Burke's principle, which you have just men- tioned as a great moral and political discovery, that " monarchical government can exist under a representative system." So that before Mr. Burke wrote, monarchical government under a representa- tive system could not have existed in England i And then what unspeakable folly it is to call Burke's argument, " a discovery," when Mr. Burke enforces his principle both in the "Thoughts on present. Discontents," and in his " Letters," and everywhere as one established, recognized, and insisted upon by all former statesmen, and makes the attempt to ob- literate that principle, and to govern England 6n a diflferent system, the chief ground of his attack upon the court. He imputes in terms to the court party whom he was attacking, that they pretended to a discovery of carrying on the Government in a man- ner different from that adopted by all former English statesmen. He points out the fallacy of the

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pretence, and still insisting upon the old principle of party feeling and attachment, ends by saying, ** The nation is alarmed, and the event may not be pleasant to the contrivers of the scheme;" — that is the new scheme, Sir, of governing without party. And this you call a discovery by Mr. Burke. Why, Sir, 1 do not suspect you of having read anything so well worth reading, but did you never hear of Bolingbroke's " Dissertation on Parties," and his " Patriot King," in which that most eloquent of English writers combats the supporters in his day of the principle, which you tell us Mr. Burke discovered half a century later. Monsieur Jourdan's discovery that he was talking prose, would have been about as original and important, and I really do not believe that in the works of any writer on English politics, yourself included, there are to be found as many proofs of impudent assertion, of astonishing igno- rance of English writers, both of those whom you do quote and those whom you do not, but especially the former, of history and the condition of society, as you have contrived to accumulate in the barbarously written sentences with which you have filled the 257th and 258th pages of your Review. Here I must observe that those works of Bolingbroke and Burke are quoted in these Memoirs, and are com- mented upon at some length. It is really a pity, Sir, that you did not suspend your amiable and en- lightened labour of detecting superfluous e's, and ?''s clianged into Ti's, to glance at the historical infor-

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Illation aflbrded you by the Editor. You would have learnt something, Sir ; and you well know that you need not have acknowledged your obliga- tions to the Editor. You have never done so in any one instance throughout the whole of this libellous trash, which you and Mr. Murray call a Review.

The Editor having quoted Johnson's sneer at Lyttelton, " that he sat down to tell the world what the world all his life had been telling him," and observed, " that the intended sneer was in fact a compliment," — you begin by saying that the passage is not to be found where the Editor would lead you to suppose — the life of Lyttelton. The Editor having carefully referred to Boswel's Johnson. Then con- founding everything together after your approved fashion, you say there is reason to suppose that Johnson never used the expression. Here is the sentence, written as most others are in your Review, (p. 2^0) " which passage is, in fact, nothing more than the recollection of a Dr. Maxwell of a remark made by Johnson in conversation thirty years before, * and which, like several others of Dr. Maxwell's anecdotes, there is good reason to suspect (i e. the sentence!) o^ having been inaccurately remember qd,'' The truth is Johnson did not at the time perceive that his words were a panegyric. Like some other people — his wish to sneer carried him a little too far— but that the sentence was his no one can doubt ; even yourself, surprising as your ignorance of style and its characteristics is — do not venture positively to

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deny it. Why then is this sentence doubtful or unfair to Johnson or Lyttelton ? You contradict, in the mere wantonness of anonymous security, without scruple, the most notorious facts. You deny the Editor's character of Warbur ton: true, his nature was violent and brutal, yet his admiration of Pope and his love of Allen were sincere ; he defended Pope after his death, against Bolingbroke, when he could hope for no reward, and perhaps there seldom existed any man to whom the rank and literary reputation of his adversaries were more indifferent. Nobody can read the preface of his " Divine Legation,'' or his letters to Hurd, or his attack on Bolingbroke, or his criticism on Shaftesbury, without seeing that a surly spirit of independence was part of his nature ; he was not averse to flattery himself, but he was slow to bestow it on others ; still you say, that '* brutal to his opponents, he was profuse of adula- tion where he expected any favour :" to dispute with you. Sir, on such a point, might expose me to the charge of being like the pedant who read Hannibal a lecture on the art of war ; but the determination with or without reason to find fault, misleads people sometimes on the very subjects where they are most at home — you end by saying that few epithets more unlucky could be applied, unless the Editor had used the word " modest ;" Mr. Croker's opinion as to the proper use of the word '' modest,'' is to be sure of singular importance.

In page 244, the passage from Johnson is quoted

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verbatim in the Memoirs, and inserted here without allusion to them.

Page 247, Horace Walpole says, in a letter to Mann, 7th January, 1742 — '^ Lord Hervey lives shut up with my Lord Chesterfield and Mr. Pul- teney — a triumvirate who hate one another more than any one they would proscribe." All this is also taken from the Memoirs, to which no allusion is made.

In page 244, in a note, you quote Mr. Pitt's letter to his nephew, in which Pitt warns him against Lord Bolingbroke. This you insert as your own, but it is taken from an extremely well written passage in the Memoirs. " There seems to have been one master spirit, which had hitherto orga- nized the opposition out of the discordant materials of Jacobites, and Hanover Tories, offended Whigs, and * Boy Patriots,' as Pitt, Lyttelton, and the Grenvilles were called by Sir Robert Walpole, or the ' Cobham Cousins,' according to the phrase of his son Horace. This master spirit was Boling- broke, ' the all accomplished St. John' of Pope ; the ' Lord Bolingbroke of impious memory,' as described by Lord Chatham, in 1759, in a letter to his nephew. He it was, who though prevented from openly thundering against the minister in Parlia- ment, poured upon him and his measures a volley, scarcely more secret or less destructive, through the pages of the * Craftsman,' and, like Goethe's devil, enabled his pupils to triumph in the conflict, by

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striking up, unseen, the swords of their antago- nists."

In page 259, you make the expression about " this time," i, e, 1756, the pretext for an attack. Turn- ing to Johnson's Life of Lyttelton, I find, " and accordingly he was made in time (1754) Cofferer and Privy Councillor, the place he exchanged next year, (1755) for the great office of Chancellor of the Exchequer, &c. The year after, (1756) his curiosity led him to Wales, &c. About this time, (z. e. 1756,) Lyttelton published his ' Dialogues of the Dead,' which were very eagerly read." This is in Johnson's Life of Lyttelton, and is repeated in Chalmers' Biographical Dictionary, Either John- son's account is true, and you are mistaken, or if it is not true, you have deliberately suppressed the fact, that Johnson and not the Editor, was the author of the inaccuracy.

Review, page 259, you attack the Editor for say- ing, that " Garrick's house was the resort of the society which delighted in literary gossip." No fact is more certain, not even any which you have already ventured to contradict. You then intrepidly assert, that the 26th, 27th and 28th of the Dialogues of the Dead, were, as " everybody knows," written by Mrs. Montague. The fact in all probability is otherwise. Here, by the artifice so often used of applying " everybody knows," to a doubtful or an altogether false assertion, as the case may be —you expect to win the herd of readers to your side.

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The Editor says, that the Persian Letters were formed, according to the fashion of the day, on an entirely French model — this you are rash enough to deny. You say, " the age was not addicted to the French models." The age of Bolingbroke, Pope, Walpole, Chesterfield, and Hume, not ad- dicted to French models ! Your assertions are always broad in proportion to their utter want of foundation. Even you might have recollected Dr> Johnson's complaint, that we " should soon babble a dialect of France." It is not to shake your opinion — which is not of the slightest value — but to give the reader an idea of your honesty, that I place the two following passages, in contrast with each other.

Review, page 229. Memoirs, page 259.

Mr. Phillimore is, as usual. In the ** Persian Letters," as

unlucky in his criticism. We in all his other works, Lyttel- know not why he should say ton is but an imitator : the that the Persian Letters and idea, the name, and some of the Dialogues were written after details are borrowed from the the French model. — Nor can ** Lettres Persannes" of the we discover what he means by President Montesquieu, saying, that the Dialogues of the Dead are written on an entirely French model, they are no more on the French model than on the Greek.

You have a wretched quibble on the expression * the fashion of the day.' '^^ The days," you say,

* See how bhnd your malignity is. You, yourself, talk of the Spectator as a work of "Lyttelton's day," page 229 of this

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" being nearly thirty years asunder." What days do you mean ? The Editor, who writes sense and gram- mar, means the day and year on which the letters were written. Did Montesquieu write nothing besides the " Lettres Persannes?" Every line betrays your ignorance. Do you not know that Adam Smith, and Burke, and Gibbon, at different times took him for their model? Gibbon's expression, somewhere, is, '* how fatal was the imitation of Montesquieu !" The Editor is not more responsible for your blunders, in- accuracy, and bad taste in this article, than he is for the colossal statue of the Duke of Wellington, which was intended to be p'aced over the Hyde Park gates.

Page 246, is a series of plagiarisms, varied by a dash of hypocrisy. The letters, which you elsewhere affirm to be worthless, you here allow to be im- portant. In fact, you could not deny it — Chester- field's Letters are most valuable. You say, Mr. Phillimore need not have exa2:s:erated Chesterfield's hope — that the Queen— the great supporter of Wal- pole — might be dead, into an " anxious desire." What purpose can this miserable stuff be intended to answer? Is it not clear that Chesterfield did most anxiously desire that the great stay and support of

Review ; and yet you censure the Editor for talking of Montes- quieu's writings as being of the same day with Lyttelton, his contemporary — Lyttelton was not Addison's contemporary ! Can the wish to injure, with or without cause, display itself more strongly ? To compare you with any of the writers lashed in the Dunciad, would be gross flattery.

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his political enemy might be taken away ; and, if he really thought Walpole was destroying all the best interests of the country, abroad and at home, is there anything very offensive in his wish, or his " anxious desire'' that the impediment to the destruction of so great an evil might be removed ?

In page 247, is a still more conclusive proof of your utter indiiference to the plainest notions of literary honesty ; you say, " Cliesterfield, well as he knew the court, w^as mistaken in his prognostica- tion of Walpole's downfall from the death of the Queen." " Horace Walpole states, in a letter to Mann, &c." All this is copied from the Memoirs, and stated as if it were your own. You are, to be sure, admirably qualified to complain of the exaggeration of a " wish" into " an anxious desire." — Who would not dread the rebuke of such a moralist ? Really, Sir, these sallies of yours, when you play the "pede nudo Catonem," and place yourself in the moral chair, atoning, by the exaltation of your theory, for the laxity of your practice, are infinitely comical. They remind me of Harlequin, who, as^ the story goes, distinguished himself as an Archbishop, but was detected by the manner in which he gave the benediction! In page 264, you say, " we have a reverence to the private man." I really cannot con- ceive why — he was not a shameless plagiarist, nor did he from mean or malignant motives make out thirty pages of unjust abuse and depreciation. He seems to have been an honourable, candid, and

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ingenious person. " For what bad quality," as Benedict says, " do you admire him ?"

You admit, forgetting your assertion in page 237, that the Editor '* had produced nothing new," with manifest reluctance, the value of the Letters written by Lord Lyttelton to his brother, which give an account of the interior of the Cabinet, from 1756 to 1765, and which state an important fact, that, till the appear- ance of Lyttelton*s, and the almost contemporary publication of Walpole's Memoirs, was unknown; namely, that Lyttelton, " the fly upon the wheel," as you call him, refused the office of Prime Minister. These Letters, you say, are the most valuable part of the compilation. Now let us see how often you use similar phrases to escape admitting the utility of the work. Page 254, we find an entirely new docu- ment quoted, which, you are pleased to observe, is of some importance to Lyttelton's character. Page 233, you quote from the Memoirs a secret anecdote of . Philip 5th of Spain, w^hich, you say, " we had not," (that, it is true, proves nothing, but which in fact well-informed people had not) "read elsewhere." We have several of Lord Bolingbroke's letters, every line of which is precious to those who, unlike you, can write and understand English, now pub- lished for the first time. In page 246, " the Letters between October, 1737, and June, 1741," you say, " will be thought the most valuable part of Mr. P.'s extracts from the archives at Hagley." Here are two sets of Letters, both of which you call

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the most valuable part of the compilation, at an interval, it is true, of about 8 pages. You have not mentioned or referred to a single fact, except that relating to " Rule Britannia," which is not stated by the Editor of Lyttelton's Memoirs. You have transcribed facts, mentioned for the first time in these pages, without any reference to the work from which they are taken. You have plagiarized the remarks of the Editor ; you have borrowed his state- ments; all the illustrations, which his varied and ex- tensive knowledge of history and literature (by which I do not mean Essays by Karkeet, or Beatson's Index), enabled the Editor to bring together, you have taken as your own ; except, to be sure, the me- morable dissertation on parties, which, to do you justice, is exclusively your own. Every single re- mark on history, that does not shock common sense, and is not at direct variance with the most notorious facts, is taken, without any mark of citation, from the pages of the writer whom you, — by systematic and deliberate misrepresentations, by falsifying some passages, by garbling others, by substituting expres- sions, sometimes directly opposite to those which the Editor really used, for those which he did em^ploy, by transposing the dates from one period to another, and by a hundred other as liberal artifices, — have endeavoured to injure and defame. The last three pages are one continued plagiarism : speaking of Lyttelton's expression to his brother, that " he was out of the scramble at his own desire ;" you say,

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" this we now know was not the fact." How do you know ? because the Editor has told you. All the intrigues and facts mentioned in 260 and the fol- lowing- pages, the proposal of the Duke of Newcastle to include Lyttelton in his administration, the refusal of Lyttelton to accept office apart from Pitt and Temple, the refusal to join Lord Rockingham's ad- ministration, nay, the account of Lord Lyttelton's retreat, and his acquaintance with Mr. Burke, are taken from the Editor. In the spirit so congenial to a nature like yours, you accuse the Editor of having reproduced, without acknowledgment, from the Gentleman's Magazine, Dr. Johnstone the Phy- sician's Letter to Mrs. Montague, the fact being the Editor took it from the Hagley MSS. ; and you wind up this tissue of malignity and prevarication, by as pettifogging an objection, and a misrepresen- tation as gross as any of those, abundant as they are, which disfigure the production that secures you your position among the Zoilus's and Bavius's of former ages. You say that the Editor ends as he began, ** with the misstatement of an important fact. Lord Lyttelton has not bequeathed his title and his cha- racter to his posterity." This implies that the Editor had said, that the posterity, to whom Lord Lyttelton bequeathed his title, still exist. He said no such thing. He said, in the passage which you yourself quote, " he bequeathed to his posterity both the title," &c. " and the more valuable distinction which public opinion had prefixed to it," &c. The union

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of the words " title'* and " character" is your own, and was introduced, no doubt, in the hope that the confusion so created, might enable this last miserable attempt at fraud to escape detection. You proceed : "The title of Lyttelton was revived in 1794, in the person of his youngest brother, William Lord West- cote, the grandfather of the present peer." This is taken from page 28 of the Memoirs, and you " end as you began" with a dishonest and shameless plagiarism. The Editor says, " VI. William Henry, second heir, who succeeded to the estates on the death of his nephew in 1779, and was created Baron Westcote of Balamore in Ireland, in 1776, and (third) Baron Lyttelton of Frankley, in 1794. He was Governor of South Carolina, and afterwards of Jamaica, the grandfather of the present lord."*

Thus I have shewn that the Editor is right, and that the use of the word " posterity" is legitimate. Lord Lyttelton did bequeath the title which now distinguishes his family to his son. The fact which you represent the Editor as having misstated from ignorance, is circumstantially and accurately related by him, and in all probability has, like many others, been borrowed by you, without any acknowledgm^ent, from his work, at the very moment when you were imputing ignorance of it to him as a crime.

In order to shew that " the thread of your verbo- sity is *' not" finer than the staple of your argu- ment," that in your instance it cannot be said " Ma-

* Lyttelton*s Memoirs, p. 28-9.

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teriam superabat opus," I select a few flowers of your eloquence and erudition.

First, out oi jive Latin quotations I find theybwr following.

Page 216. "That would too openly have re- vealed" the "/a^e^ dolus in generalibus ;'* "latens" probably is meant : but for a writer himself to re- veal a " latens dolus in generalibus" of his own, is a felicity of expression peculiar to yourself.

2. Quieta ne movere.

3. Proh stupendum !

4. *' His death, novas insidias machinans."

P. 217. " Where there is no continuous series, but only scattered letters, or small batches from a few poems, each (of the small batches) covering a limited portion of time, and having little relation," &c. ; a small batch covering a limited portion of time, and having little relation ! !

lb. " This opens another of his confusions."

P. 222. "Though he had no obligation to them, but indeed the contrary ;" having the contrary of an obligation to another, is a happy turn of phrase also peculiar to yourself.

P. 224. " No register kept in that school oi what they call oppidans !"

The boys what they call oppidans ! and the men what wear red coats ! are equally refined modes of expression.

P. 227. " Lytteltons having addressed a much longer poem, would lead us to a contrary opinion."

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P. 227. " His earlier poems are positively better than his last." Probably, if they are better at all,

P. 227 is also remarkable for the most absurd application of a line in Milton's Allegro. "The cy- nosure of * labouring' c^e5," applied to the model of poetical imitators. It is the labour of the head not of the eyes, that enables people to imitate great models. It is only when people form their taste and acquire their knowledge from Indexes, that the labour of the eyes is the principal exertion.

P. 228. " Economical prodigality." " This is hot ice." (M. Night's Dream.)

P. 228. Letters " may be read with information," — and without it, judging from this article.

P. 231. "The Duchess felt no doubt her appro- bation:''— no doubt, people who approve usually do.

P. 231. "Remembering in her will factious ac- tivity by a legacy."

P. 231. " Names left unmentioned out of defe- rence to personal feelings :" — here the phrase ends ; no particular person is mentioned. To account for an impersonal feeling would, I suspect, puzzle most metaphysicians. You had heard an individual's per- sonal feelings spoken of, and in your slip-slop Re- viewer's style, you apply the phrase to the species, and make it nonsense.

P. 233. " Lyttelton shifted his quarters to Sois- sons, where was then holding the celebrated Congress at which Stanhope," &c.

1 wonder what the Congress was holding ? — its

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tongue, or its pen ; no wonder you defend the style of George the Third's note !

P. 236. " He soon subsided into a secondary part.'*

P. 239. ** An instance worth developing."

" Ignorant intricacy ;" it would be quite as good English to talk of an " ignorant apoplexy.'*

P. 247. " Lyttelton and Chesterfield had a reci- procal dislike." Barbarous !

P. 246. We are told of " cold compliments" " widening a breach."

lb. *' He seems to have given him more sober advice in private, and in October he endeavoured to dissuade him from pressing for an increased allow- ance." What did he to him in November ?

lb. "A trait substantiated."

P. 250. " Of the same colour is the following extract of a letter."

P. 251 . " As the first letter is completed so should the other — to complete the series."

P. 251. A person, we are told, "is remembered by a poem, which is itself forgotten !! T To say that a person's throat was cut by a man who was himself buried, would be equally good sense.

P. 251. "Solaced himself," this awkward phrase was probably meant as a sneer, which Johnson after- wards softened into " solaced his grief." In English this ought to have been, "this awkward phrase was softened," &;c. &c. ; as the sentence stands, the only

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meaning is, that a " probable sneer" was softened into " solaced his grief."

P. 255. " But Lyttelton being thus interested," &c. " knowing that," &c. *' feeling as he must have done," " ought Ae," &c. " to have defeated," &c. An exquisite specimen of pure English.

lb. Conduct " trehly unjustifiable." 1st, " be- cause the office of Cofferer," &c. — 2nd, " that if he"— 3rd, caret!! !

P. 256. " Saying a few words on a political fea- ture."— " Antagonist principles, on which our con- stitution was balanced:" — antagonist stools on which people who try to sit, &c.

P. 257. Contains a sentence, as completely an- swering to the idea expressed by the French word Galimatias, as any in our language.

" With the French Revolution commenced a new or we may say a revived state of things." Com- menced a new state of things is, 1st. tautology — 2ndly, a most clumsily constructed sentence. The first thing you should learn in composition, is to put the verb in its right place, which, if there be a wrong one to put it in, you never do. " Commenced a revived state of things" is very downright vulgar nonsense.

P. 260. *' There is good reason to suspect a re- mark— (of what ?) of having been inaccurately remembered." Except in the Quarterly Review, people talk of suspecting that a person has inaccu- rately remembered a remark.

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P. 260. ** Lyttelton's vanity was gratified by the approbation, which an early communication of his volumes procured from some of his friends ;" instead of the volumes it would seem it was the '^ early communication' ' which procured the approbation. This might flatter the vanity of a newspaper agent but not of an historian.

P. 260. " Here ended Lyttelton's literary life, as his political life seemed to have closed on his removal to the House of Lords — but the latter revived." That is, one did end — and the other did not ; and the particle " as" like " by" and " but," and most of its brethren in these pages, is misplaced.

P. 262. *' Coalescing by an inconsistency."

* Lyttelton felt severely that he was excluded from the treaty." How can a man feel severely that he is excluded from a treaty ? he may see plainly, and feel strongly — but he acts severely. Let us, however, go on with the sentence — to soothe the severely feel- ing Lyttelton, " Lord Hardwicke writes one of those smooth epistles, on which he was so often em- ployed :" I suppose as a labourer is on a railroad, or a tailor on a coat.

By a little insincerity, which (we have it on your authority. Sir,) the "most honourable and candid politicians always indulge in, — Lyttelton tells his brother :" — to tell a brother by an insincerity !

P. 263. Lyttelton found " consolation in the affection in which he was held by a select circle of friends :" I thought this phrase was confined, by

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universal consent, to those ingenious writers who inform the public that the Duke of D enter- tained " a select circle" of the most distinguished fashionables, &c.*

P. 267. You have heard, that a young nobleman has by " consanguinity" " an incitement," and '*a happy distinction to emulate his (Lord Lyttel- ton's) talents :" I hope not, for though you may emulate a person's deeds or virtues — to emulate his talents is impossible — besides, why should any one, supposing it were possible, strive to emulate the talents of a " fly upon a wheel," (page 221) of one *' who could not accomplish an ordinary sum in arithmetic," (page 230) " whom nobody acquainted with the history of the day can imagine to have had any serious share in public business," (221) " who was in all his works an imitator," (page 259) and " whose conduct was (page 254) doubly, trebly unjustifiable," who (page 256) " selfishly, not to say treacherously, raised himself on their (his friends) fall," and who (ibid.) " fared, as. we fear is

* In one number of the Quarterly Review, written in the last five years, a panegyric is literally introduced on Mr. Rogers's dinners — the plate and pictures of that amiable and eminent man, and the manner in which he entertains his guests are described in the style of an upper butler. We hope the writer was asked to dinner as a reward. — Surely people maybe forgiven if they turn aside from such trash, and if, like Mr. Phillimore, they do not read our numbers, which Mr. Croker thinks so heinous an oflfence.

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usual in politics, better than his tergiversation de- served ;" whose (page 256) " official life was in- glorious in its progress, and in point of personal character not above reproach at its conclusion/'

With this judicious sentence the review ends. To give any notion, even the faintest, of the abominable style in which, even when the rules of grammar are not grossly violated, it is written,— of the manner in which " hes" and " hims," " whichs" and " whats," are jumbled together, would require extracts which could not be made without injustice to the passages not cited. This I say, in imitation of the great man of whose " little lives" you are the self-ap- pointed champion — that if any one wishes to attain a barbarous jargon, coarse, but not familiar, and trivial, but not intelligible, he should devote his days and nights to the pages of Mr. Croker.

Every man does not possess the same talent, — an eloquent writer often is a partial and incorrect his- torian. The study of words is sometimes unfavour- able to the knowledge of things. Again, it often happens, that minute details escape the person who, in the words of the great man, whose name you have profaned so often, " stand upon that elevation of reason which places centuries under our eye, — which obscures little names, and effaces the colour of parties, and to which nothing can ascend but the spirit and moral quality of human actions."

But, that the same individual should write a barbarous style, and be ignorant of the most notorious

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facts, — should be at once grovelling and inaccurate — should, while crawling in the dust, take as hasty and superficial a view, as if he were soaring above the clouds, — should, while making the most inconceiv- able blunders in the detail, prove himself incapable of seizing the spirit of history, — should unite, in an extraordinary degree, the defects of every class of writers, without possessing the merit of any — is an exemplification of human infirmity as humiliating as any which the annals of our literature exhibit. It is, indeed, extraordinary, that the same author who, in the compass of thirty pages, contrives to talk about " quieta ne movere," " his death, novus insidias machinans," " proh stupendum," ** batches covering a limited portion of time," (page 221) **his own thread woven out of other people's materials," " economical prodigality," (228) " the two main in- fluences of Lyttelton's mature life," " substantiating a trait," (246) about a person being remembered by a poem which is itself forgotten, — who calls faction " a combination of private personal interests," — a' definition which makes every mercantile firm a fac- tion,— talks about " a question subsiding into an unanimity," " a distinctively busy character," of " opening main defects," who makes " is" the verb to "scattered letters," (page 217) — should in the same pages, call Sir Robert Walpole a Tory, — deny that George the 3rd was fond of intrigue, — declare that Lyttelton could not be the friend of Wyndham, because Wyndham was a Jacobite, — bless Burke (as

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Sancho blesses the man who invented sleep !) — as the inventor of parties in England ! — and pronounce Lord Chesterfield a man who preferred reality to appearance, — all this is marvellous enough; but, that such a person, so largely needing the indulgence of others, should be so infatuated, so blind, so mad with vanity, as to assume a tone of arrogance and superiority, which would be intolerable in a writer of the most transcendant merit, or which is the same thing, possessing all the qualities in which you, Mr. Croker, are deficient, really may be considered a curious fact in the history of the species.

And now. Sir, I have finished my task, with more delight than I find it easy to express ; for the drudgery of wading through page after page of your composition, of exposing your ignorance, of pointing out your false statements, your endless pla- giarisms, your gross contradictions ; of detecting the wretched quibbles, the constant proofs of malevolence, exhibiting the base attempts to misrepresent, by which almost every line of your review is polluted ; of laying bare the miserable motives by which its writer must have been actuated, surpasses in the loathing it inspires, and the weariness it creates, any thing that my duty, by no means alw^ays an agree- able one, has hitherto compelled me to undertake. — I never supposed that such a task would be instruc- tive— I knew well, that it would be inglorious. Had my object been that of the Roman, who sought " magnis inimicitiis clarescere," you are the very

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last person it would have entered into my purpose to attack. That your name, and the name I have vindicated, should ever be connected together, is, on the contrary, to me, a cause of mortification and regret ; yet, the motive to which I yielded, was not one of which I have any reason to be ashamed. I wished to rescue the literary merit and moral character of a near relation from unjust censure, and from imputations as gross and sordid as ever were imputed by you, to those whom, for any reason, it suited your purpose to assail ; nor will it, I trust, be thought presumptuous, if I confess the hope sometimes to have crossed my mind, that at the same time I was labouring in some degree for the benefit of society.

Low as the standard of literature is among us at present, what hope or prospect is there of its im- provement, if the mercantile spirit, not content with its encroachments in every other region, is to spread its taint, to infect and contaminate the springs whence its health and purity are supposed to flow ;' if satire is to be jobbed, and praise contracted for, and the terms in which a book is spoken of by those who pretend to regulate the taste and judg- ment of their countrymen, are to be decided not by the merits of the work, but by the residence of its publisher. That a system of pufling, I know no other word that equally describes it, fit only for quacks and mountebanks, and of indiscriminate cen- sure, almost equally disgraceful, prevails now among

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us, no candid person will deny. Few people have contributed to this evilmore largely than yourself. But whatever mischief your panegyric may inflict upon its object, your malevolence is now I trust no longer formidable ; and I may take leave of you in the words with which one of Congreve's wits ad- dresses a petulant and scurrilous traducer of what he had neither heart to feel nor head to compre- hend : " How mortifying it must be to you, to reflect, that no man thinks the worse of another for your abuse."

John George Phillimore.

Temple, Aug. 7th, 1846.

iKORMAN AND SKEEN, PRINTERS, MAIDXN LANE, COVENT OARDBN.

c?H

0CoJi/

TO THE READEK.

TJpHE design of the Canterbury Papers was indicated in tlie brief -"- advertisement which preceded and announced tliem. They are intended to supply the public w^ith information as to the principles, objects, plans, and proceedings of the Canterbury Association for Founding a Settle- ment in New Zealand. For this purpose it has been thought fitting to collect together the various documents published by the Association, and, with their permission, to edit also such other documents of general in- terest as they have not themselves thought it necessary to make public. To these it is intended to append such extracts from printed books, pamphlets, and papers, bearing directly on the same subjects, as have not appeared in a collective form ; and, lastly, to publisli such original essays, statements, discussions, and extracts from private letters, papers, and memoranda, as may throw light in any way on the nature of the Settle- ment, or the means available for its formation and success.

In consequence of this arrangement, the Public will obtain, in a cheap, clear, and compendious form, all the information at present procurable in- cluded within the two first numbers of these Papers, which for this pur- pose are published together. Inasmuch, however, as the Association's proceedings have by this time arrived at that advanced stage which renders frequent information desirable, from time to time, as often as it is forth- coming, additional numbers of these Papers wdll appear, following each other in serial succession.

The whole can be easily bound in a volume, which will form a chapter of the res gestcB of the great " heroic work" of Colonization. It will also constitute an authentic record of the Canterbury Settlement at its first origin, and be the earliest materials for its future history.

Felruary, 1850.

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