LETTER FROM THOMAS HOPE, ESQ. SIR, As an article in the last Number of your Magazine, entitled, "On Anastasius by Lord Byron," contains some assertions which, though probably only meant by the writer as facetiousness, might be mistaken by some simple reader for fact, I beg to state, that in the course of long and various travels, I resided nearly a twelvemonth at Constantinople; visited the arsenal and bagnio frequently; witnessed the festival of St George; saw Rhodes; was in Egypt, in Syria, and in every other place which I have attempted to describe minutely; collected my eastern vocabulary (notwithstanding the gentleman at Gordon's Hotel may be ignorant of the circumstance,) on the spot, and whilst writing my work; had at one time an Albanian in my service, as well as the celebrated poet for whom, by a high literary compli ment, I have been mistaken; adopted a fictitious hero, in order to embody my observations on the East in a form less trite than that of a journal; avoided all antiquarian descriptions studiously, as inconsistent with the character assumed; for the same reason, omitted my own name in the titlepage; had finished my novel, (or whatever else you may be pleased to call it,) as to the matter, long before Lord Byron's admirable productions appeared; and need scarcely add, though I do so explicitly, that I am the sole author of Anastasius,And your very humble servant, THOMAS HOPE. Duchess Street,} Oct. 9, 1821. To the Editor of Blackwood's Magazine. FAMILIAR EPISTLES TO CHRISTOPHER NORTH, From an Old Friend with a New Face. LETTER IV. On the Personalities of the Augustan Age of English Literature. MY DEAR KIT, I SYMPATHISE with the indignation you feel against "those pluckless Tories," who having smarted so long themselves under the Whig cat-o'nine tails, viz. PERSONALITIES, had at last mustered courage to attack their adversaries, but, failing in the science, and wanting bottom, have cried peccavi. Courage, my old friend-stick to your own principles, and still wield your crutch undismayed. The new outcry against personalities, ought only to make you the more explicit in manifesting your determination to adhere to the rule you have adopted, namely, to use against your adversaries the weapons which they have themselves used; and I therefore again take leave to reiterate what I urged in my last, namely, that you should shew the Whigs, from their own oracles and organs, that they have far exceeded, both in spite and venom, the utmost malice of your bitterest resentment, and, in many instances, without one allaying drop of your generous good humour; and also to remind the credulous pub lic, whom the Whigs are so sedulously again trying to gull, that what is now called personality is a very ancient, perhaps an inveterate quality of all criticism. I do not mean, however, that you should write a regular history of personalities, but only in a cursory way convince some of your fainthearted readers, that the heinous sin of personality, which the Whigs, worthy souls! are so piously trying to rail out of fashion, was quite as gross in former days as in our own. Old Dennis, the Jeffrey of Queen Anne's time, says of Pope, in his "Reflections, Critical and Satirical, on a Rhapsody called an Essay on Criticism, printed by Bernard Lintot," "One would swear that this youngster (the Poet,) had espoused some antiquated muse, who had sued out a divorce from some superannuated sinner upon account of impotence, and who being p-d by the former spouse, has got the gout in her decrepid age, which makes her hobble so damnably." This is pretty plain and free criticism. Match it if you can Or still more of these verses, "Know Eusden thirsts no more, for sack He sleeps among the dull of ancient days; lest, Where wretched Withers, Ward, and Golden rest, And high-born Howard, more majestic sire, even from the writings of the Whigs of our own time. Cobbett himself has nothing so rich and perfect. But this, it will be said, is only metaphorical, and applicable to "The Essay on Criticism." The author is spared, indeed! Then read on, "He is a little affected hypocrite, who has nothing in his mouth but candour, truth, friendship, good nature, humanity and magnanimity. He is so great lover of falsehood, that whenever he has a mind to calumniate his cotemporaries, he brands them with some defect which is contrary to some good quality, for which all their friends and acquaintances commend them." But did Pope prosecute Dennis for this? No-he had dy; but was Pope prosecuted by EusHere is both personality and paromore sense he did as you would have den for calling him a drunkard, or redone in his age and situation; he wrote viled like your excellent Chaldean for the Dunciad. Pope was also elsewhere the allusion to the 24th psalm? And described as a creature that is "at pray when did you send forth any once a beast and a man ; a Whig and a Tory, a writer of Guardians and Exa-thing like the account of Curl's mishap? miners; a jesuitical professor of truth; a base and foul pretender to candour.' Theobald, in Mist's Journal for 22d June, 1728, declared that "he ought to have a price set on his head, and to be hunted down as a wild beast," In Gulliveriana, he is desired to cut his throat or hang himself. So much for the critics of the Augustan age of English literature. But let us now look at Pope's retaliation-for his satire, like your own, was retaliation, with this difference however, that as the provocation was personal, the revenge was personal. Yours was party, and your retaliation is also party, and of course the more innocent of the two, for you have attacked only public principles, offensively put forth, and public conduct, nefarious in its practices, or ludicrous by its folly. I will begin with the Dunciad. There has been some doubt among the commentators as to who was the hero of the poem, and therefore let us pass him over. But what is to be said of the personality in the description of Bedlam? “Close to those walls, where folly holds her throne, And laughs to think Munroe would take Lift up your gates, ye princes, see him come! Sound, sound, ye viols! be the cat-call dumb. Obscene with filth, the miscreant lies bewray'd, Fallen in the plash his wickedness had laid. I shall neither advert to the coarse ness of this passage, nor offend the delicate organs of some of your friends, by quoting what follows about Curl's being "Renew'd by ordure's sympathetic force, As oil'd by magic juices for the course. Vigorous he rises, from the effluvia strong, Imbibes new life, and scours and stinks along." I have not looked into the Dunciad since we were chums together at Dame Norton's, and I had no remembrance of its obscenity and grossness. Surely Byron must have been quizzing "the Smalls" when he eulogized the moral has he himself ever been considered as taste of Pope;-and I would here ask, a libeller, for his "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers?"-But, for the present, our business is with Twickenham. of Raving and Melancholy Madness, were by Cibber's There Ridpath, Roper, cudgell'd might ye view, The very worsted still look'd black and blue." I do not mean to defend the allusions in these verses to the punishments which some of the parties mentioned suffered, for all such things are in bad taste, but merely to remind your thin-skinned friends, that when you have happened, once or twice, in some momentary fit of spleen, to sneer at the legal misfortunes of some of the Cockney libellers, you have had the classical authority of Pope for your example. But what is the foregoing to the following? "A second see, by meeker manners known, And modest as the maid that sips alone; From the strong fate of drams, if thou get free, Another Durfey, Ward! shall sing in thee. Thee shall each alehouse, thee each gill house mourn, And answering gin-shops sourer sighs re turn." But I am disgusted with the ribaldry of the Dunciad, a work, both on account of its absurdity and malicious spirit, long since justly consigned to contempt and neglect. I will therefore throw it aside, and dip a little into Dryden. In which of all your piquant pages, can you shew me any thing half so keenly personal, as fifty extracts which may be made from his Absalom and Achitophel? Take, for example, the character of Lord Shaftesbury. "A name to all succeeding ages cutsed; For close designs and crooked councils fit, Sagacious, bold, and turbulent of wit; Restless, unfix'd in principles and place; In power unpleased, impatient of disgrace; A fiery soul, which, working out its way, Fretted the pigmy body to decay. Great wits are sure to madness near allied, And thin partitions do their bonds divide; Else why should he, with wealth and ho nour bless'd, Refuse his age the needful hours of rest, son; Got while his soul did huddled notions try, And born a shapeless lump, like anarchy; In friendship false, implacable in hate, Resolved to ruin, or to rule the state." Thus wicked but in will, of means bereft, He left not faction, but of that was left." And what's this to many others? And when did you ever say any thing to Dryden's Shimei? But is Dryden, comparable against Mayor or Alderman considered to have exceeded the anfor that character of Slingsby Bethel, cient charter of the satirists ? But to leave the Absalom and Achitophel, (every verse of which is a drop of the genuine aquafortis of personality,) what have even the Whigs of our written to match Dryden's character own time, gross as they have been, ever of the Duke of Marlborough in Tarquin and Tullia. "Of these, a captain of the guard was worst, Whose memory, to this day, stands aye accurst; This rogue, advanced to military trust, By his own whoredom and his sister's lust, Forsook his master, after dreadful vows, And plotted to betray him to his foes.” This, I think, is a tolerable specimen of the licensed licentiousness of the press of former days; but what shall we say to the account of King William and his Consort Mary. "The states thought fit That Tarquin on the vacant throne should sit; Voted him regent in their senate house; And with an empty name endowed his sups, The sobbing dame was maudlin in her cups. But brutal Tarquin never did relent,Too hard to melt, too wicked to repent ; Cruel in deeds, more merciless in will, And blest with natural delight in ill." Enough. I do not call your attention to these extracts as examples to practise personality, but to support my opinion, that personal as controversy has become, it has still participated in the general refinement of manners; and that few things now actually prosecuted, are, in reality, so bad as many things that were formerly tolerated.But, in the days of King William and Queen Anne, the circulation of satire and libel was comparatively very circumscribed, and the taste of the age in such things was much grosser than that of the present. Besides, the reciprocities of social intercourse were more strictly confined to particular classes and families; so that the abuse of satire was then, in fact, less mischievous. But now, when commerce has broken down the fences of the privileged classes, and mingled all orders and professions into one general multitude, the peace of society is much more endangered by the additional chance of conflicting interests and individuals coming into contact with each other. And it is upon this consideration that I would justify, were I in your place, the necessity of restraining the licentiousnes of the press, and not upon the paltry pretext of its having become more libellous and blasphemous than of old, which it has not, as the extracts I have quoted abundantly testify. But I am wandering from the object of this letter, which was certainly not to point out the defects of the law, or to justify the prevalence of alities, but simply to apprise those person worthy silly personages who complain of your quizzical allusions to the public follies of public characters, that the personalities of the present day are as oil and honey, compared with the vinegar and salt of Pope and Dryden's time; and that nothing can be more demonstrative of their own puerile and pitiful judgments than to speak of the elegant satire of the one and the spirited sarcasms of the other, when almost the very least of their touches would set the whole Parliament House aghast. present; at some other time, when I So much, my old friend, for the have more leisure, I will perhaps resume the subject, and give it a more direct application; that is, make it have in my eye. I shall not, however, tell upon certain individuals whom I mention them by name-they have made themselves sufficiently notorious but only quote a few things, of which tice, and rejoice in the application. every one will at once admit the jus In my last, I exhorted you to entertain your readers with two or three tit the Morning Chronicle-the two great bits from the Edinburgh Review and vehicles of Whig pretension and intolerance. But in this you have been partly anticipated by a clever article in "THE JOHN BULL;" and I now earnestly beg you to subjoin it to this letter, in order that your readers may see how false in fact, and fraudulent in motive, are those cries about your personalities, which the discomfitted creatures are making at every corner, as if they had not long ago incurred the contempt of all honourable minds, by the libertine license which they have taken with private characters. Meantime, I remain, my dear Kit, Your We adopt the suggestion of our correspondent, and the more readily, as we may thereby be the means of preserving what might be lost in the columns even of such a newspaper as JoHN BULL. The following is the very able and striking article alluded to: "When the Chronicle says, WE HAVE HEARD OF NO WHIG who has made the press a vehicle for inroads into the bosom of families, and that the Whigs are strangers to this rancour and meanness-that they loathe the idea of detraction, and more especially when female reputation is the subject of it,'-it is from a supposition that we shall be unwilling to quote their filth VOL. X. that they presume to make such bare-faced assertions-but quote we must. We have to apologise to the noble and illustrious personages libelled by them, for doing so; the necessity will plead our excuse it is our duty, and it must be done. "At the 59th page of the Fudge Family in Paris, we find this stanza : 2 R < Htd, who, though no sot himself, Delights in all such lib'ral arts, Drinks largely to the house of GUELPH, And superintends the Corni parts.' At page 103 of the same book we find Why then, my Lord, in Heaven's name, PITCH IN, without reserve or stint, The whole of R-gl-y's beauteous dame; If that won't raise him, devil's in't.' "But, may say the Chronicle, this is an anonymous work, and we disclaim it. "Whether anonymous or not, every body knows who wrote these libels, and we shall, therefore, look at them with a careful eye. We have, in the Two-penny Post-bag, page 22, the most indecent allusions to the conduct of a married lady of high rank, and at page 58 we see these lines "Last night a concert vastly gay, "The postscript to the second letter of the same book is, from the beginning to the end, a filthy libel upon female reputation; and the third letter, giving a supposed account of a private dinner in a private family, beginning with these words, We miss'd you last night at the hoary old sinner's, Who gave us, as usual, the cream of good dinners,' seems to us to be carrying war into domestic circles as resolutely as Thistlewood him self would have done it. 6 page "An Anacreontic, republished at 55, is pretty much in the same taste. The conclusion of the free translation of Horace's Ode, at page 68, excels it in gross. ness and brutal scurrility, while the rancour' and meanness' which the Whigs disclaim so vehemently, burst upon one in every page of a work devoted to scandal of the most shameful nature, and an unremitting attack upon the Regent of the country, from whose hands the writer had received every mark of kindness and consideration. "And all this is avowedly done by a Whig; but, says the Chronicle, we never saw them. Softly and fairly, my gentle Chronicle-do you remember this couplet -this vile, infamous couplet ?— The Pe just in bed, or about to depart for't, His legs full of gout, and his arms full of -! "There is no detraction here-no de traction in ridiculing the first subject in the land, whose shoes the Whigs have licked, and would lick again if they were suffered to do so; but, above all, there is a tender regard for female reputation, and a holy reverence for the sanctity of private families, in these lines, which is quite exemplary. "Why, says the Chronicle, to be sure, it is rather bad-and rather licentiousand rather scandalous-but we-we Whigs loath such personalities. "Gentle reader, turn to page 149 of the preceding the couplet in question :same book, and you will find these lines, The following pieces have already appeared in MY FRIEND Mr PERRY'S PAPER, and are here, by desire of several persons of distinction,' reprinted.-T. B. "Every body knows (as we said before) that they are by Tom Moore; but whether they are, or are not, we here see printed and published that they are by some man who calls Mr Perry HIS FRIEND. And, after having put forth such friendly communications to the world, to hear the Chronicle talk of the delicacy of the Whigs, and their careful abstinence from personality, PARTICULARLY when female character is concerned, is about the best joke that once pert paper has hit upon in latter days. But lest the Chronicle should suppose that we wish to particularize the extracts from the two works we have above quoted, as being peculiarly striking proofs of its delicacy, mildness, and moderation, we will bring before our readers some more specimens of its style and manner, which are equally gratifying, as examples of the pure literature of the Whigs, who shudder at rancour and meanness, and are so careful of female character, and so tender towards disarmed enemies ! ! ! "In the first place, we would observe, that when the Whig-radicals speak of the late Queen, they talk of a systematic attack, a continued attack, and an incessant attack, having been made upon her. The attacks upon ONE noble lady, which were made by the Chronicle, in the year 1812, were, as we may shew, more systematic, certainly incessant, and assuredly of longer continuance, than any made by the constitutional press upon the Queen ; and when it is recollected that that noble lady is a lady of superior mind, qualities, and accomplishments-living honourably and happily with her husband-we think the few bijoux we shall collect as testimonials of the Chro nicle's consistency and consideration, will bear away the palm for rancour, meanness, falsehood, and scurrility, from any Paper ever published. "The Chronicle of the 12th of March, 1812, contains a poem too long and too disgusting to be copied. It is full of the most indecent and filthy invective. We |