many other writers confirm this opinion. Yet had this historian been an ordinary compiler, he could not have incurred a more mortifying fate; for he was compelled to retail in shilling numbers that invaluable history which we have only learned of late times to appreciate, and which was the laborious fruits of self-devotion. Carte was the first of our historians who had the sagacity and the fortitude to ascertain where the true sources of our history lie. He discovered a new world, beyond the old one of our research, and not satisfied in gleaning the res historica from its original writers, a merit which has not always been possessed by some of our popular historians, Carte opened those subterraneous veins of secret history from whence even the original writers of our history, had they possessed them, might have drawn fresh knowledge and more ample views. Our domestic or civil history was scarcely attempted till Carte planned it; while all his laborious days and his literary travels on the Continent were absorbed in the creation of a History of England, and of a Public Library in the metropolis, for we possessed neither. A diligent foreigner, Rapin, had compiled our history, and had opportunely found in the vast collection of Rymer's "Foedera” a rich accession of knowledge; but a foreigner could not sympathise with the feelings, or even understand the language, of the domestic story of our nation; our rolls and records, our state-letters, the journals of parliament, and those of the privy-council; an abundant source of private memoirs; and the hidden treasures in the state-paper office, the Cottonian and Harleian libraries; all these, and much besides, the sagacity of Carte contemplated. He had further been taught by his own examination of the true documents of history, which he found preserved among the ancient families of France, who with a warm patriotic spirit, worthy of imitation, "often carefully preserved in their families the acts of their ancestors ;" and the trésor des chartes and the dépôt pour les affaires étrangères (the state-paper office of France),-that the history of our country is interwoven with that of its neighbours, as well as with that of our own countrymen*. Carte, with these enlarged views, and firm with diligence which never paused, was aware that such labours--both for the expense and assistance they demand-exceeded the powers of a private individual; but, "what a single man cannot do," he said, may be easily done by a society, and the value of an opera subscription would be sufficient 66 It is much to the honour of Carte, that the French acknowledge that his publication of the Rolles Gascognes gave to them the first idea of their learned work, the Notice des Diplomes. to patronise a History of England." His valuable “ History of the Duke of Ormond" had sufficiently announced the sort of man who solicited this necessary aid; nor was the moment unpropitious to his fondest hopes, for a Society for the Encouragement of Learning had been formed, and this impulse of public spirit, however weak, had, it would seem, roused into action some unexpected quarters. When Carte's project was made known, a large subscription was raised to defray the expense of transcripts, and afford a sufficient independence to the historian; many of the nobility and the gentry subscribed ten or twenty guineas annually, and several of the corporate bodies in the city honourably appeared as the public patrons of the literature of their nation. He had, perhaps, nearly a thousand a year subscribed, which he employed on the History. Thus everything promised fair both for the history and for the historian of our fatherland, and about this time he zealously published another proposal for the erection of a public library in the Mansionhouse. "There is not," observed Carte, a great city in Europe so ill-provided with public libraries as London." He enters into a very interesting and minute narrative of the public libraries of Paris*. He then also suggested the purchase of ten thousand manuscripts of the Earl of Oxford, which the nation now possess in the Harleian collection. Though Carte failed to persuade our opulent citizens to purchase this costly honour, it is probably to his suggestion that the nation owes the British Museum. The ideas of the literary man are never thrown away, however vain at the moment, or however profitless to himself. Time preserves without injuring the image of his mind, and a following age often performs what the preceding failed to comprehend. It was in 1743 that this work was projected, in 1747 the first volume appeared. One single act of indiscretion, an unlucky accident rather than a premeditated design, overturned in a moment this monument of history;-for it proved that our Carte, however enlarged were his views of what history ought to consist, and however experienced in collecting its most authentic materials, and accurate in their statement, was infected by a superstitious jacobitism, which seemed likely to spread itself through his extensive history. Carte indeed was no philosopher, but a very faithful historian. Having unhappily occasion to discuss whether the King of England had, from the time of Edward the Confessor, the power of healing inherent This paper, which is a great literary curiosity, is preserved by Mr. Nichols in his Literary History, vol. ii. in him before his unction, or whether the gift was conveyed by ecclesiastical hands, to show the efficacy of the royal touch, he added an idle story, which had come under his own observation, of a person who appeared to have been so healed. Carte said of this unlucky personage, so unworthily introduced five hundred years before he was born, that he had been sent to Paris to be touched by "the eldest lineal descendant of a race of kings who had indeed for a long succession of ages cured that distemper by the royal touch." The insinuation was unquestionably in favour of the Pretender, although the name of the prince was not avowed, and was a sort of promulgation of the right divine to the English throne. The first news our author heard of his elaborate history was the discovery of this unforeseen calamity; the public indignation was roused, and subscribers, public and private, hastened to withdraw their names. The historian was left forlorn and abandoned amid his extensive collections, and Truth, which was about to be drawn out of her well by this robust labourer, was no longer imagined to lie concealed at the bottom of the waters. Thunderstruck at this dreadful reverse to all his hopes, and witnessing the unquitted labour of more than thirty years withered in an hour, the unhappy Carte drew up a faint appeal; rendered still more weak by a long and improbable tale, that the objectionable illustration had been merely a private note which by mistake had been printed, and only designed to show that the person who had been healed, improperly attributed his cure to the sanative virtue of the regal unction; since the prince in question had never been anointed. But this was plunging from Scylla into Charybdis, for it inferred that the Stuarts inherited the heavenly-gifted touch by descent. This could not avail; yet heavy was the calamity! for now an historian of the utmost probity and exactness, and whose labours were never equalled for their scope and extent, was ruined for an absurd but not peculiar opinion, and an indiscretion which was more ludicrous than dishonest. This shock of public opinion was met with a fortitude which only strong minds experience; Carte was the true votary of study,—by habit, by devotion, and by pleasure, he persevered in producing an invaluable folio every two years; but from three thousand copies he was reduced to seven hundred and fifty, and the obscure patronage of the few who knew to appreciate them. Death only arrested the historian's pen-in the fourth volume. We have lost the important period of the reign of the second Charles, of which Carte declared that he had read “a series of memoirs from the beginning to the end of that reign which would have laid open all those secret intrigues which Burnet with all his genius for conjecture does not pretend to account for." So precious were the MS. collections Carte left behind him, that the proprietor valued them at 1500l.; Philip Earl of Hardwicke paid 2007. only for the perusal, and Macpherson a larger sum for their use; and Hume, without Carte, would scarcely have any authorities. Such was the calamitous result of Carte's historical labours, who has left others of a more philosophical cast, and of a finer taste in composition, to reap the harvest whose soil had been broken by his hand. LITERARY RIDICULE. ILLUSTRATED BY SOME ACCOUNT OF A LITERARY SATIRE. RIDICULE may be considered as a species of eloquence; it has all its vehemence, all its exaggeration, all its power of diminution; it is irresistible! Its business is not with truth, but with its appearance; and it is this similitude, in perpetual comparison with the original, which, raising contempt, produces the ridiculous. There is nothing real in ridicule; the more exquisite, the more it borrows from the imagination. When directed towards an individual, by preserving a unity of character in all its parts, it produces a fictitious personage, so modelled on the prototype, that we know not to distinguish the true one from the false. Even with an intimate knowledge of the real object, the ambiguous image slides into our mind, for we are at least as much influenced in our opinions by our imagination, as by our judgment. Hence some great characters have come down to us, spotted with the taints of indelible wit; and a satirist of this class, sporting with distant resemblances and fanciful analogies, has made the fictitious accompany for ever the real character. Piqued with Akenside, for some reflections against Scotland, Smollett has exhibited a man of great genius and virtue as a most ludithe ridiculous physician in “Peregrine Pickle,” crous personage; and who can discriminate, in what is real from what is fictitious* ? * Of AKENSIDE few particulars have been recorded, for the friend who best knew him was of so cold a temper with regard to public opinion, that he has not, in his account, revealed a solitary feature in the character of the Poet. Yet Akenside's mind and manners were of a fine romantic cast, drawn from the moulds of classical antiquity. Such the cold and sluggish mind of Sir John Hawkins, who has, with unusual vivacity, described a day spent with him in the country. As I have mentioned the fictitious physician in Peregrine Pickle, let the same page show the was the charm of his converse, that he even heated H The banterers and ridiculers possess this provoking advantage over sturdy honesty or nervous sensibility-their amusing fictions affect the world more than the plain tale that would put them down. They excite our risible emotions, while they are reducing their adversary to contemptotherwise they would not be distinguished from gross slanderers. When the wit has gained over the laughers on his side, he has struck a blow which puts his adversary hors de combat. A grave reply can never wound ridicule, which, assuming all forms, has really none. Witty calumny and licentious raillery are airy nothings that float about us, invulnerable from their very nature, like those chimeras of hell which the sword of Æneas could not pierce-yet these shadows of truth, these false images, these fictitious realities, have made heroism tremble, turned the eloquence of wisdom into folly, and bowed down the spirit of honour itself. Not that the legitimate use of RIDICULE is denied: the wisest men have been some of the most exquisite ridiculers; from Socrates to the Fathers, and from the Fathers to Erasmus, and from Erasmus to Butler and Swift. Ridicule is more efficacious than argument; when that keen instrument cuts what cannot be untied. "The Rehearsal" wrote down the unnatural taste for the rhyming heroic tragedies, and brought the nation back from sound to sense, from rant to passion. More important events may be traced in the history of Ridicule. When a certain set of intemperate Puritans, in the reign of Elizabeth, the ridiculous reformists of abuses in church and state, congregated themselves under the literary nom de guerre of Martin Marprelate, a stream of libels ran throughout the nation. The grave discourses of the archbishop and the prelates could never silence the hardy and real one. I shall transcribe Sir John's forgotten wordsomitting his "neat and elegant dinner :"-" Akenside's conversation was of the most delightful kind, learned, instructive, and, without any affectation of wit, cheerful and entertaining. One of the pleasantest days of my life I passed with him, Mr. Dyson, and another friend, at Putney-where the enlivening sunshine of a summer's day, and the view of an unclouded sky, were the least of our gratifications. In perfect good-humour with himself and all about him, he seemed to feel a joy that he lived, and poured out his gratulations to the great Dispenser of all felicity, in expressions that Plato himself might have uttered on such an occasion. In conversations with select friends, and those whose studies had been nearly the same with his own, it was a usual thing with him, in libations to the memory of eminent men among the ancients, to bring their characters into view, and expatiate on those particulars of their lives that had rendered them famous." Observe the arts of the ridiculer! he seized on the romantic enthusiasm of Akenside, and turned it to the cookery of the ancients! 66 concealed libellers. They employed a moveable printing-press, and the publishers perpetually shifting their place, long escaped detection. They declared their works were printed in Europe, not far from some of the bouncing priests;" or they were " printed over sea, in Europe, within two furlongs of a bouncing priest, at the cost and charges of Martin Mar-prelate, gent." It was then that Tom NASH, whom I am about to introduce to the reader's more familiar acquaintance, the most exquisite banterer of that age of genius, turned on them their own weapons, and annihilated them into silence when they found themselves paid in their own base coin. He rebounded their popular ribaldry on themselves, with such replies as "Pap with a hatchet, or a fig for my god-son; or, crack me this nut. To be sold, at the sign of the Crab-tree Cudgel, in Thwack-coat lane*.” Not less biting was his " Almond for a Parrot, or an Alms for Martin." Nash first silenced Martin Mar-prelate, and the government afterwards hanged him; Nash might be vain of the greater honour. A ridiculer then is the best champion to meet another ridiculer; their scurrilities magically undo each other. But the abuse of ridicule is not one of the least calamities of literature, when it withers genius, and gibbets whom it ought to enshrine. Never let us forget that Socrates before his judges asserted, that "his persecution originated in the licensed raillery of Aristophanes, which had so unduly influenced the popular mind during several years!" And thus a fictitious Socrates, not the great moralist, was condemned. Armed with the most licentious ridicule, the Aretine of our own country and times has proved that its chief magistrate was not protected by the shield of domestic and public virtues; a false and distorted image of an intelligent monarch could cozen the gross many, and aid the purposes of the subtle few. There is a plague-spot in ridicule, and the man who is touched with it, can be sent forth as the jest of his country. The literary reign of Elizabeth, so fertile in every kind of genius, exhibits a remarkable instance, in the controversy between the witty Tom Nash and the learned Gabriel Harvey. It will illustrate the nature of the fictions of ridicule, expose the materials of which its shafts are composed, and the secret arts by which ridicule can level a character which seems to be placed above it. GABRIEL HARVEY was an author of considerable rank, but with two learned brothers, as Wood tells us, "had the ill luck to fall into the *This pamphlet has been ascribed to John Lilly, but it must be confessed that its native vigour strangely contrasts with the famous Euphuism of that refined writer. hands of that noted and restless buffoon, Tom hardihood, with all undue gravity, to charge pellNash." mell among the whole knighthood of drollery; a circumstance probably alluded to by Spenser, in a sonnet addressed to Harvey : Harvey is not unknown to the lover of poetry, from his connexion with Spenser, who loved and revered him. He is the Hobynol whose poem is prefixed to the Faery Queen, who introduced Spenser to Sir Philip Sidney: and, besides his intimacy with the literary characters of his times, he was a Doctor of Laws, an erudite scholar, and distinguished as a poet. Such a man could hardly be contemptible; and yet, when some little peculiarities become aggravated, and his works are touched by the caustic of the most adroit banterer of that age of wit, no character has descended to us with such grotesque deformity, exhibited in so ludicrous an attitude. Harvey was a pedant, but pedantry was part of the erudition of an age when our national literature was passing from its infancy; he introduced hexameter verses into our language, and pompously laid claim to an invention which, designed for the reformation of English verse, was practised till it was found sufficiently ridiculous. His style was infected with his pedantic taste, and the hard outline of his satirical humour betrays the scholastic cynic, not the airy and fluent wit. He had, perhaps, the foibles of a man who was clearing himself from obscurity; he prided himself on his family alliances, while he fastidiously looked askance on the trade of his father, a rope-manufacturer. He was somewhat rich in his apparel, according to the rank in society he held; and, hungering after the notice of his friends, they fed him on soft sonnet and relishing dedication, till Harvey ventured to publish a collection of panegyrics on himself—and thus gravely stepped into a niche erected to Vanity. At length he and his two brothers, one a divine and the other a physician, became students of astronomy; then an astronomer usually ended in an almanac-maker, and above all, in an astrologer ;-an avocation which tempted a man to become a prophet. Their “sharp and learned judgment on earthquakes" drove the people out of their senses (says Wood); but when nothing happened of their predictions, the brothers received a severe castigation from those great enemies of prophets, the wits. The buffoon, Tarleton, celebrated for his extempore humour, jested on them at the theatre; Elderton, a drunken ballad-maker, "consumed his alecrammed nose to nothing in bear-bating them with bundles of ballads." One on the earthquake commenced with "Quake! quake! quake!" They made the people laugh at their false terrors, or, as Nash humorously describes their fanciful panic, "when they sweated and were not a haire the worse." Thus were the three learned brothers beset by all the town-wits; Gabriel had the "Harvey, the happy above happier men, I read; that sitting like a looker-on of faulty men, which daunger to thee threat, The "foolish reprehension of faulty men, threatening Harvey with danger," describes that gregarious herd of town-wits in the age of Elizabeth; Kit Marlow, Robert Greene, Dekker, Nash, &c.; men of no moral principle, of high passions, and the most pregnant Lucianic wits who ever flourished at one period*. Unfortunately for the learned Harvey, his "critique pen," which is strange in so polished a mind and so curious a student, indulged a sharpness of invective which would have been peculiar to himself, had his adversary, Nash, not quite outdone him. Their pamphlets foamed against each other, till Nash, in his vehement invective, involved the whole generation of the Harveys, made one brother more ridiculous than the other, and even attainted the fair name of Gabriel's respectable sister. Gabriel, indeed, after the death of Robert Greene, the crony of Nash, sitting like a vampire on his grave, sucked blood from his corpse, in a memorable narrative of the debaucheries and miseries of this town-wit. I throw into the note the most awful satirical address I ever read +. It became necessary * Harvey, in the title-page of his "Pierce's Supererogation," has placed an emblematic woodcut, expressive of his own confidence, and his contempt of the wits. It is a lofty palm-tree, with its durable and impenetrable trunk ; and filthy toads, in vain attempting to pierce or to pollute it. The Italian motto, wreathed among the branches of the palm, declares, Il vostro malignare non giova nulla; Your malignity avails nothing. at its feet lie a heap of serpents, darting their tongues, + Among those Sonnets, in Harvey's "Foure Letters, and certaine Sonnets, especially touching Robert Greene and other parties by him abused, 1592," there is one, which, with great originality of conception, has an equal vigour of style, and causticity of satire, on Robert Greene's death. John Harvey the physician, who was then dead, is thus made to address the town-wit, and the libeller of himself and his family. If Gabriel was the writer of this singular Sonnet, as he undoubtedly is of the verses to Spenser, subscribed Hobynol, it must be confessed he is a Poet, which he never appears in his English hexameters : to dry up the floodgates of these rival ink-horns, terise these licentious wits. They wrote then as by an order of the Archbishop of Canterbury. the old fabliers told their tales, naming everything The order is a remarkable fragment of our literary by its name; our refinement cannot approve, but history, and is thus expressed : "That all Nashe's it cannot diminish their real nature, and among bookes and Dr. Harvey's bookes be taken where- our elaborate graces, their naïveté must be still soever they may be found, and that none of the wanting. said bookes be ever printed hereafter." In this literary satire NASH has interwoven a This extraordinary circumstance accounts for kind of ludicrous biography of Harvey; and the excessive rarity of Harvey's "Foure Letters, seems to have anticipated the character of Mar1592," and that literary scourge of Nash's, "Have tinus Scriblerus. I leave the grosser parts of this with you to Saffron-Walden (Harvey's residence), invective untouched; for my business is not with or Gabriel Harvey's hunt is vp, 1596;" pamphlets | slander, but with ridicule. now as costly as if they consisted of leaves of gold. Nash, who, in his other works, writes in a style as flowing as Addison's, with hardly an obsolete vestige, has rather injured this literary invective, by the evident burlesque he affects of Harvey's pedantic idiom; and for this Mr. Malone has hastily censured him, without recollecting the aim of this modern Lucian. The delicacy of irony; the sous-entendu, that subtlety of indicating what is not told; all that poignant satire, which is the keener for its polish, were not practised by our first vehement satirists; but a bantering masculine humour, a style stamped in the heat of fancy, with all the life-touches of strong individuality, charac JOHN HARVEY the Physician's Welcome to No fitter house for busie folke to dwell; Thy conny-catching pageants are past +, Some other must those arrant stories tell; It was thy living; be not so aghast! And for my brothers never vex thyself; *Nash was a great favourite with the wits of his day. One calls him "our true English Aretine," another, "Sweet satyric Nash," a third describes his Muse as "armed with a gag-tooth (a tusk), and his pen possessed with Hercules's furies." He is well characterised in "The Return from Parnassus." "His style was witty, tho' he had some gall; Something he might have mended, so may all; Yet this I say, that for a mother's wit, Few men have ever seen the like of it." Nash opens as a skilful lampooner; he knew well that ridicule, without the appearance of truth, was letting fly an arrow upwards, touching no one. Nash accounts for his protracted silence by adroitly declaring, that he had taken these two or three year to get perfect intelligence of Harvey's “Life and conversation; one true point whereof well sat downe will more excruciate him than knocking him about the ears with his own style in a hundred sheets of paper." And with great humour says "As long as it is since he writ against me, so long have I given him a lease of his life, and he hath only held it by my mercy; and now let him thank his friends for this heavy load of disgrace I lay upon him, since I do it but to show my sufficiency; and they urging what a triumph he had over me, hath made me ransack my standish more than I would." In the history of such a literary hero as Gabriel, the birth has ever been attended by portents. Gabriel's mother "dreamt a dream," that she was delivered "of an immense elder gun that can shoot nothing but pellets of chewed paper; and thought, instead of a boy, she was brought to bed of one of those kistrell birds called a wind-sucker." At the moment of his birth came into the world "a calf with a double tongue and eares longer than any asse's, with his feet turned backwards." Facetious analogies of Gabriel's literary genius! He then paints to the life the grotesque portrait of Harvey; so that the man himself stands alive before us." He was of an adust swarth choleric dye, like restie bacon, or a dried scate-fish; his skin riddled and crumpled like a piece of burnt parchment, with channels and creases in his face, and wrinkles and frets of old age." Nash dexterously attributes this premature old age to his own talents; exulting humorously "I have brought him low, and shrewdly broken Nash abounds with "Mother-wit;" but he was also him; look on his head, and you shall find a gray educated at the University, with every advantage of haire for euerie line I have writ against him; and classical studies. you shall haue all his beard white too by the time + Greene had written "The Art of Coney-catching," a he hath read ouer this booke." great adept in the arts of a town-life. To give a finishing to the portrait, and to reach |