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Fleet Street, in the Parish of St. Dunstan in the West, in the City of London, Publisher, at No. 196. Fleet Street aforesaid.- Saturday, June 12, 1852. A MEDIUM OF INTER-COMMUNICATION FOR LITERARY MEN,. ARTISTS, ANTIQUARIES, GENEALOGISTS, ETC. NOTES: Page 577 579 Defoe's Pamphlet on the Septennial Bill, by James Inedited Poetry, by W. Sparrow Simpson Folk Lore:- Lancashire May-day Custom - Hair_cut Minor Notes: A Bit o' fine Writing'-Custom of Cranes in Storms- Aldress- How the ancient Irish used to crown their King - One of Junius's Correspondents identified -- 580 581 581 581 582 - 583 DEFOE'S PAMPHLET ON THE SEPTENNIAL BILL. It is impossible to read Chalmers' and Wilson's Lives of Defoe without being constantly struck not merely by the want of all critical acumen and ordinary knowledge of the characteristics of Defoe's style which they display, but also by the absence of research on almost every point of importance connected with his career. Out of innumerable instances, I may mention his pamphlet on the subject of the Septennial Bill. Chalmers, and after him Wilson, are satisfied with repeating -583 Boyer's statement that Defoe was the author of The Triennial Bill Impartially Stated, London, 1716; but neither of them appears to have referred to the pamphlet itself, and Wilson does not seem to have even consulted Boyer. He observes, "Mr. Chalmers thinks the pamphlet was not his." Whatever Chalmers might think, he does not certainly say so in express terms. The point itself is a curious one; and as it has not hitherto been gone into, perhaps I shall not trespass too much upon your space if I give your readers the results of my examination of it. In Boyer's Political State for April, 1716 (p. 484.), he enumerates in the following terms the pamphlets on the Septennial Bill: Minor Queries: St. Augustine's Six Treatises on "A Letter to a Country Gentleman, showing the Inconveniences which attend the Last Act for Triennial Purliaments, which, I am informed, was written by the learned Dr. Tyndal. This was followed with others intitled, An Epistle to a Whig Member of Parliament; Some Considerations on a Law for Triennial Parliaments; The Suspension of the Triennial Bill, the Properest Means to unite the Nation; A First and Second Letter to a Friend in Suffolk; The Alterations in the Triennial Act Considered; The Innkeeper's Opinion of the Triennial Act; and a few others. The only pamphlet that was published on the other side was called The Triennial Act Impartially Stated, &c. This pamphlet was judged, from its loose style and way of arguing, to be written by that prostituted fool of the last ministry, D- D-F-; but whatever was offered either in print, or vivâ voce, against the Septennial Bill, was fully answered and confuted by the following writing, generally fathered on the ingenious and judicious Joseph Addison, Esq." VOL. V.-No. 138. Then follows (pp. 485-501.) a printer of a pamphlet, certainly an able one, entitled : "Arguments about the Alteration of Triennial Elections of Parliament. In a Letter to a Friend in the Country." In the following year, when Defoe had occasion to notice The Minutes of the Negociations of Mons. Mesnager, 1717, 8vo., the well-known work which has been so frequently attributed to him, in a letter in the public prints, which letter seems entirely to have escaped all his biographers, and yet is of the most interesting description, he adverts to the above charge of being the author of The Triennial Act Impartially Stated, in the following words : "About a year since, viz., when the debates were on foot for enlarging the time for the sitting of the present Parliament, commonly called repealing the Triennial Bill, a stranger, whom I never knew, wrote a warm pamphlet against it; and I, on the other hand, wrote another about a week before it. Mr. Boyer, with his usual assurance, takes notice of both these books in his monthly work, and bestows some praises, more than I think it deserved, upon one; but falls upon the other with great fury, naming, after much ill language, D. D. F. to be the author of it, which, he said, might be known by the inconsistency of the style, or to that effect. Now that the world may see what a judge this Frenchman is of the English style, and upon what slender ground he can slander an innocent man, I desire it may be noted, that it has been told him by his own friends, and I offer now to prove it to him by three unquestionable witnesses, that the book which he praised so impertinently I was the author of, and that book which he let fly his dirt upon I had no concern in." This declaration of Defoe, which claims to him the pamphlet fastened on the "ingenious and judicious Joseph Addison, Esq.," and repudiates that "judged to be written by that prostituted fool of the last ministry, D- D-F-," will amuse your readers, as it seems to form an admirable commentary on the text "And every blockhead knows me by my style." We can fully accept his disclaimer of The Triennial Act Impartially Stated. It is, however, singular enough that the style of the Arguments about the Alteration of Triennial Elections of Parliament, without attaching too much importance to that criterion, is not the style of Defoe; and the Bill of Commerce with France is denounced in it in such terms as "that destructive bill," "that fatal bill," as one can scarcely suppose, without entertaining a meaner opinion of him than I feel assured he deserves, he could or would, under any circumstances, have made use of. To carry this Bill of Commerce he exerted all his great powers as a writer, and supported it in the Review and the Mercator, in the Essay on the Treaty of Commerce with France (1713, 8vo.), and in two other tracts, both of which were unknown to Chalmers and Wilson, and have never been noticed or included in the list of his works, namely, Some Thoughts upon the Subject of Commerce with France: by the Author of the Review (Baker, 1713, 8vo.), and A general History of Trade, in which an Attempt is made to state and moderate the present Disputes about settling a Commerce between Great Britain and France for the Month of September (Baker, 1713); being the fourth Number of the History of Trade, which Wilson says "extended only to two Numbers" (vol. iii. p. 339.). In the Appeal to Honour and Justice, published only the year before (1715), he supports the same cause with all his strength. He vindicates the part he had taken, and says "This was my opinion, and is so still; and I would venture to maintain it against any man upon a public stage, before a jury of fifty merchants, and venture my life upon the cause, if I were assured of fair play in the dispute."— Works, edit. 1841, vol. xx. p. 43. His opinion on the policy of the bill, as appears by all his subsequent commercial works, never changed: and that he could so speak of it in this pamphlet (Arguments about the Alteration, &c.), supposing it to be his, seems almost incredible. I feel convinced that no other similar instance can which he can be shown to express himself with be found, during the whole of his career, in such a total disregard of his avowed opinions and his honest convictions. Were it certain that he had done so, then the character which the Tolands, Oldmixons, and Boyers have given of him, as ready to take up any cause for hire, and as the prostituted agent of a party, and which I believe to be a base slander, would indeed be well deserved. But it will be asked how, after so apparently distinct and explicit an avowal, can it be doubted that he was the author of the pamphlet in question? I can only account for it on the supposition that Defoe, in writing from recollection of what Boyer had stated, in the following year, confounded the pamphlet praised with one of the pamphlets noticed. It appears to me that one of them, the full title of which is Some Considerations on a Law for Triennial Parliaments, with an enquiry, 1. Whether there may not be a time when it is necessary to suspend the execution even of such Laus as are most essential to the Liberties of the People? 2. Whether this is such a time or no? (London, printed for J. Baker and T. Warner, at the Black Boy, in Paternoster Row, 1716, pp. 40.), and which is noticed in Boyer's list, has infinitely more both of Defoe's style and manner of treating a subject than the other pamphlet. I entertain no doubt that it was written by him, though it has never hitherto been attributed to him; and it is far from being unlikely that his recollection may have deceived him, and that he may have thought that Boyer's praise applied to this pamphlet, written on the same side, and not to the other. It most interesting; for he was a man of truth, and incapable of misrepresentation, though, of course, liable to misconception, in his recital of events; nor can it be denied, that a history, in any degree worthy of the theme - that is, of the Irish Rebellion, is still unpublished.* Whatever objection may have prevented the publication during his life, none, I should suppose and hope, can now be urged after his death, which, singularly enough, in an article devoted to him in the Biographie Universelle, I find as having occurred so long since as 1830. His son, too, is there represented as the husband of his own mother! the writer, with other confusions of facts, having mistaken Arthur for his elder brother, Roger O'Connor, father of the present eccentric Feargus, M.P. It is thus, too, that the great vocalist Braham is in the same voluminous repository stated to have died of the cholera in August, 1830, though, several years subsequently, I saw him in hale flesh and blood; but the compilation, valuable, it must be admitted, in French biography, teems with ludicrous blunders on English lives, which, in the new edition now in state of preparation, will, I hope, be corrected. Even the articles of Newton, though by Biot, and of Shakspeare and Byron by Villemain, are not much to their credit, particularly the latter, in which the national prejudices prominently emerge. From the French recent papers we learn that Arthur O'Connor, one of the prominent actors in the Irish Rebellion of 1798, has just closed his prolonged life at his residence, the Château de Bignon, near Nemours (Seine et Marne) in France. When, in 1834, by permission of the government of Lord Grey, he and his accomplished wife were in this city (Cork), with the view of disposing of his inherited and not confiscated property, in order to invest the produce in France, I was almost in daily intercourse with them; and, from my recollection of the lady's father, the Marquis de Condorcet, a distinguished mathematician, but better known as the biographer and ardent propagator of Voltaire's infidel principles, as well as the zealous partisan of the O'Connor, after having for sixteen years occuRevolution, though finally its victim, I was al- pied apartments in the house of an eminent bookways a welcome visitor. O'Connor, whom Bona- seller and printer, Monsieur Renouard, in the parte had raised to the rank of General of Di-Rue de Tournan, leading to the Luxembourg, vision, equivalent to that of General in full in our and the only street that I remember, now sixty service, being next to the degree of Marshal, told years since, had a flagged footpath in that, at me that the disunion and personal altercations of the present, embellished metropolis, purchased his Irish Legion engaged in the service of the then late residence, the Château de Bignon, with the republican France had deservedly and utterly proceeds of his paternal estates sold here, as preestranged and disgusted the French successive viously stated, in 1834. The purchase was made rulers, particularly Napoleon, in whose triumphs from the heirs of Mirabeau, who was born in that they consequently were not allowed to partici- mansion, and not in Provence, as generally supposed, pate as a national body. The rancorous duel because that southern province was the family's between two officers, McSweeny and Corbet, original seat. The great orator's father, distinboth from Cork, had made a deep impression on guished, per antiphrasim, as "l'Ami des hommes," the great soldier, and the Legion was disbanded. for he was the most unamiable of men, had acHaving inquired from O'Connor whether he did not quired and removed to the castle so called, in intend to publish the events of his variegated life, order to approach the royal court of Versailles. he told me that he was preparing the narrative; The renowned son's bursts of eloquence still, I but, on mentioning to his wife that he had made may say, resound in my ears, dazzling and enthis acknowledgment, she immediately called on trancing my judgment, as Lord Chatham is reme with an earnest request that I would dissuade ported similarly to have affected his hearers. him from doing so. She did not explain her Yet my old friend Vergniaux's genuine oratory motive, and I only promised to avoid the future and reasoning power struck me as far superior; renewal of the subject in our conversations. As and I can well believe that Chatham's son's were yet, whatever preparations he may have made, to those of his father, which his contemporary, the press has not been resorted to; thougb, if in Hume, no incompetent judge, and doubtless his existence, as may be presumed, the work, or its materials, will not, most probably, be suffered to remain in closed and mysterious secrecy. The Memoirs, for so he entitled it, cannot fail to be * Indeed, the general history of the kingdom is still a sad desideratum, and, in the impassioned dissensions of the people, not likely to be adequately supplied. hearer, by no means exalts, though the effects on his parliamentary audience appear to have been so extraordinary. "At present," writes Hume (Essay xiii.), "there are above half-a-dozen speakers in the two houses, who, in the judgment of the public, have reached very nearly the same pitch of eloquence, and no man pretends to give any one a preference over the next. This seems to me a certain proof that none of them have attained much beyond mediocrity in this art." Hume's Essays first appeared in 1742, when the elder Pitt was, indeed, young in parliament; but he survived till 1776, during which interval Chatham's fame reached its culminating point. Yet, in all the ensuing editions, the author never thought it necessary to modify his depreciation of British eloquence. O'Connor, it is said, published his father-in-law Condorcet's collective works; but whether the edition of 1804 in 21 volumes is meant, I cannot determine, though I know no other; nor does this contain his mathematical writings. While outlawed in 1793 with the Girondist faction, he evaded, from October to March, 1794, the revolutionary search, when he poisoned himself, unwilling, he said, in some verses addressed to his wife, the sister of Marshal Grouchy, further to participate in the horrors of the period, though he had been most instrumental in preparing the way for them. He chose, however, the better side, in his conception, of the proposed alternative or dilemma: "Ils m'ont dit: Choisis d'être oppresseur ou victime; J'embrassai le malheur, et leur laissai le crime." Madame O'Connor, a child of five years old at her father's death, had a very faint recollection of him; but I perfectly remember him, with his ardent look, and, while still young, a gray head,— "a volcano covered with snow," as was observed O'Connor's only child, a mild gentleof him. manly young man, but certainly not the inheritor of his parent's talents, predeceased him, so that no descendant, either of Condorcet or O'Connor, J. R. (of Cork). now survives. Oh thou who only knowest what is best, Then let me find that thou can'st give me aid. Or fever's rage o'er reason longest gain; The devotional feeling displayed in these lines, and the circumstances under which they were composed, will probably render them interesting to some of your readers. The other poems in the little volume relate chiefly to the death of her beloved husband. I should have sent one of these had I thought them suitable to your columns. Suffice it to say, that her grief for her bereavement seems only to have been equalled by her affectionate reminiscences of the piety and excellence of the departed bishop, and only to have been assuaged by the sure and certain hope" The Queries which I which filled her mind. would found upon the MS. are two in number: 1. What is the precise date of the author's death? 66 the piece printed at page 435.? 2. The meaning (if any) of the subscription to Permit me to notice a trifling error of the press, p. 387. col. 2. 1. 21., for then read them; and to thank you for the space given to these three communications. W. SPARROW SIMPSON, B.A. P.S.-Since writing the above I have seen the observation of your correspondent C. B., p. 523.: I cannot think the meaning of the signature so evident as he implies. His reason for the use of the name Juba is evidently correct: I am indebted to him for the suggestion, and must confess that the coincidence had escaped me. With regard to the word Issham, had it been intended to signify that the former name was assumed, or false," it would certainly have been written I-sham, as C. B. evidently feels. It is possible that this part of the signature may have no meaning: this I must leave for some other correspondent to determine. |