232 Letters of Timothy Tickler, Esq. No. VIII. haver and stare over the wonderful achievements of those miraculous Gentlemen of the Press, who bring out the dramatic criticisms in the morning papers, the very day after the piece criticized was performed-after testifying this profound respect for the Reporters! -after calling the contributions to Colburn's Magazine, and its rival, "the very cream of periodical literature"in short, after this complete blending, amalgamating, and interfusing of itself, with all that sort of concern-upon what, in the name of everything that is salutiferous, is this Quondam Down-looker to take his stand?—No! he has fallen from his humbug height -he has slidden from his vapouring vantage-ground-he has leapt from his laughter-moving pinnacle-he now stands upon the debateable ground like other people, and woe be to him if he stands there only to be a mark for your unerring and unsparing articlery. You may depend on it, many will be the weary days through which Mr Jeffrey will bemoan himself, for having been betrayed into this betise. It will not be either sneering or snuffling that will suffice to lug him out of the quagmire, into which he has suffered a quackish and Cockney will-o'-thewisp to seduce his unfortunate stilts. Let Mr Jeffrey reflect upon all this coolly by himself and, if he does make up his mind to do the thing like a man -if he does make up his mind to attack you boldly and directly for your articles on the Edinburgh Review, its political basenesses-its irreligious tone throughout-its occasional slips of infidelity, open and not to be mistakenits blasphemous sneers-and its vile prostitution of literary criticism to the purposes of unpatriotic and unchristian rancour and spleen-if he does make up his mind to come forth in harness, and give battle upon these great points-no fear, say I, but he shall meet a champion well armed for the conflict. But let him not lay the flattering unction to his soul, that, by loose, vague, and indefinite paragraphs of abuse, such as this made-up thing consists of, he can blind the eyes of the public to the damning fact, that he avoids the questions which really have been, and are, at issue, between his journal and that which first bearded him in his own northern den, which first shewed that to be little which had before passed current for great, which [Aug. stripped the mask from the features of foulness, and made the despot-impostor stoop from his throne to drain the cup of exposure, and kneel in the dust of irretrievable degradation. ingly reiterated throughout the five or As for the old assertion, so unpitysix concluding pages of this article, viz. that the Tory press of the present day has had the guilt of introducing a new and unheard-of measure, and, inpersonal vituperation into English lideed, a new and unheard-of system, of terature-I say, once for all, that the assertion is grossly in opposition to the false, I do not say-because I am sure truth of history. That it is wilfully Mr Jeffrey is incapable of writing or editing what he knows to be false; but, at the same time, I must be permitted to observe, that this article shews that some Edinburgh Reviewers have read Blackwood's Magazine; and all the world knows, that this assertion has been proved to be false in that journal, not once nor twice, but fifty times. I refer, once for all, to that in which the history of English libel Number of the Noctes Ambrosianæ, was gone into at so much length, and brought to so triumphant a conclusion in favour of the Tories generally—but Tory writers of the present time. As above all, and more especially, of the for the grossness of the mis-statement, I need not surely lecture upon that to Brougham, and Moore, were vindicyour readers. They know that Jeffrey, ciples, long ere Christopher North ever tive libellers of men, as well as of prinperiodical literature. They know that shed one drop of ink on the field of Peter Pindar preceded the Anti-jacobin they know that the Examiner, the Morning Chronicle, and the Times, preceded John Bull. They know that the Tory warfare has been strictly, defensive one: They know that Mr and in every stage of its progress, a Jeffrey and his clan had twenty years Blackwood began to abuse them; and of free and unchecked abusing, cre they know, and all the world feels, that if, on one or two occasions, (for I deny that more than this can be asserted, enemies,) you have overstepped the even by the bitterest of your honest limits of perfect propriety in the style only a transcript of what he and all of your warring, the transgression was his friends had been accustomed to do from their youth upwards-and they -the world-the impartial candid world, will not fail to observe how broad is the line that must be drawn between the unprovoked, tyrannical, vindictive vituperation, habitual to the old Edinburgh Review, and the few occasional instances of ultra-severity into which the representative and the avenger of a party whose very food had been insult, may have been betrayed in the momentary heat of temper-or rather, I should say, in the roused and flaming indignation of long-trampled virtue, long-derided religion, long-spurned and outraged patriotism. Does Mr Jeffrey flatter himself that all his thousand misdeeds of the former, the free, the unfettered day of his domination, are forgotten or forgiven, merely because in these latter times he and his partizans have been whipped, lashed, scourged into comparative quietness, decorum, and inoffensiveness? Does a blue and yellow viper cease to be one, merely because his fangs have been extracted? Is such a CREATURE the less a viper, because pity is a more natural and appropriate feeling for him in his present disabled condition than wrath? No-no!-the memory of an insulted community is not quite so short-lived as some of these old and branded of fenders may well wish it were. The time was, and at no distant date, when, to make use of language that you will have no difficulty in recognizing, "The Whigs assumed a natural superiority over us, as if, being of a different party, we were necessarily of an inferior species, and justly liable to be tortured, worried, and hunted to death like any other vermin." The time was, when they had a right to say what they pleased of us, to invent and propagate any falsehood or misrepresentation that suited their turn. It was then that the greater the falsehood, the more was the merit-the more barefaced the imposture, the more laudable the fraud. You were a Tory-a loyal man-a Christian writer-did not that of itself imply all other crimes and misdemeanours? That being once granted, they had a right to heap every outrage, every indignity upon you, as a matter of course. You were an enthusiast in the cause of the throne and the altar. Did it not follow that you must be a bad poet, a contemptible orator, a bigot, a slave! You were for the MiniVOL. XIV. sters: Was it to be supposed that you were not against sense, grammar, rhyme, and reason? You were entitled, in short, neither to justice nor to mercy; and the Edinburgh Reviewer, who volunteered to deprive you of a livelihood, whether by striking at your moral fame, or your intellectual reputation; in short, by any means, however atrocious or dastardly, this Edinburgh Reviewer, this Brougham, this Jeffrey, was entitled to the thanks of the liberal, the gratitude of the decorous, the applauses of THE WHIGS. Witness, ye much injured names of Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey-witness, ye eternally blended epithets of Renegado and Driveller-witness, ye magnanimous sneerers about the Morning Post and the Stamp-Office-witness, Oxford !— witness, Copplestone !-witness, ye more recent audacities, that have just been rebuked into the mingled blush and shiver of impotence, by the stern retributing indignation of insulted Philpotts! But I beg pardon-I have really been verging towards seriousness which is surely the last mood of your mind in contemplating this affair. You, of course, regard the whole as an indirect compliment paid to yourself; and indeed, dear North, a compliment of compliments, and a triumphant tribute to you it is. I speak not of the compliments to your talents, extorted by a lurking remnant of truth, in the midst of abuse-as, for instance, where, in an absurd tirade against the Noctes Ambrosianæ, to put down which he appears anxious for an act of Parliament, he is compelled to admit their wit, and the shrewdness of their remarks; because compliments from such a creature are rather affronts than otherwise. But your triumph, your true and glorious triumph, consists in the grovelling, crawling, cowardly, pitiful confession. of the utter prostration of the whole gang of whom he now acts as mouthpiece, before you, and in the beggarly and starveling lamentation over the severity of the well-deserved infliction. That you have crushed the vermin, we all know; that they do squeal and gibber at the very mention of your name, is clear as light; but that any of the unfortunate should be so spoony as to make the confession in terms so abject, with contortions of countenance 2 G so ludicrously lamentable, surpassed my warmest expectations, until I saw it in this article. Then the awful soreness of the whole party at finding the press to which they set up a sort of unalienable claim, turned against them-and discomfiting them totally -is here given utterance to in all the blackness of sorrow. We have put the Whigs down in a great measure by its agency, and nothing can comfort them. All they have left is to accuse us of scurrility and personal sarcasm. Poor wretches! whom does that gull? Nobody with a head differing in organization from a turnip. They commenced a crusade against all that was estimable in society. Peter Pindar was set upon the most virtuous king that ever ornamented a throne, and his ruffian buffoonery was cheered by the thundering applause of the Whigs. Tom Moore was clapped as the first of jeux-d'esprit writers for the incredible infamies of his Twopenny Postbag, and the Fudge Family-Sydney Smyth flung dirt through Peter Plymley's Letters, to their infinite joyHone caricatured the King, and libelled the most illustrious men and women in the country-this very Edinburgh Review was established for the purpose of insulting and annoying us in every manner possible, and in the course of its hopeful career has been guilty of the basest slanders on the living and the dead, has run tilt against every honest feeling, male and female, with the most felonious ferocity. What nced I swell the catalogue? Take up the files of the Morning Chronicle for the last thirty years, and mark its articles; and I venture to say, the venom, the black-hearted assassin virulence displayed in them, will make even the strongest stomach turn. Was this to be tolerated? Indeed it was not. And accordingly we retorted. shewed the mere baseness of the Whig newspaper world-the gross ignorance and drivelling impertinence of the Cockneys-the shallow pretensions, and the cowardly deism of the Edinburgh-the utter insufficiency of the Whig statesmen-and destroyed by merely holding up to light the infamy of the Whig libellers. And they are down! down among the dead men! There let them rot! We In this operation it appears we have been throwing filth. We are sure the accusation is quite true. We have had occasion to give anecdotes of the lives of some of the profligates whom we have overthrown, and their enormity was so great as to surpass the filth of any feigned charge. We have had occasion to point out the tendency of some of their works, and this tendency is so foul, that our very language in exposing it was necessarily open to the danger of being suspected of sharing in the contamination. But it is now little matter; we have seen the work. Extract, North, extract, in the very joy of your soul, Hazlitt's graphic description of your overthrow of him and his rabble rout. It is decidedly the very best thing he ever wrote. 6 "Who, indeed, was likely to stand, for any length of time, the pelting of this pitiless storm'-the precipitation of nicknames from such a height, the thundering down of huge volumes of dirt and rubbish, the ugly blows at character, the flickering jests on personal defects with the complacent smiles of the great, and THE AN GRY SHOUTS OF THE MOв, to say nothing of the Attorney-General's information, filed ex officio, and the well-paid depositions of spies and informers! It was a hard battle to fight. The enemy were well entrenched on the heights of place and power, and skulked behind their ramparts those whom they assailed were exposed, and on the pavé. It was the forlorn hope of genius and independence struggling for fame and bread; and it is no wonder that many of the candidates turned tail, and fled from such fearful odds." Is not this balm to your heart? Do you not feel a glowing and cheery warmth over you while reading this passage? To be sure you do. Not that we rejoice in the woe of any poor fellow-creatures, but because we are happy at soul to find that the noxious influence, which their sinful propensities led them to exercise whenever they could, is clean gone. Do not disturb yourself about the abusive words occasionally vented against you. In their vocabulary, a sycophant to a man in power, is one who fears God, and honours the king; an atrocious dastard is a man who takes one of the "VERMIN," (I thank thee, slave, for teaching me the word,) by the throat, and squeezes it to death in squeaking convulsions. Such is the dialect of the crew. But, blowing away this froth, skipping also the nonsense about Attorney-Generals and informers, who, Hazlitt well knows, never meddled with his gang, look at the real matter of this delightful paragraph. Here we have the miserable man owning, that in consequence of OUR exertions, the whole of his wickedly industrious pack are LAUGHED AT BY THE GREAT, AND, BEST OF ALL, INSULTED BY THE MOB, tortured, hunted, and worried to death, convicted of stupidity and ignorance in prose and verse, ruined in pretensions, scorned for the discovered particulars of their whole life, education, and conversation, dissected as condemned malefactors, looked on as guilty of petty vices and absurdities, suspected of being bad subjects, and universally admitted to be bad writers and bad men, by all the respectable and well-disposed part of the community! How awful a delineation of the wretched state of mind enjoyed (if I may use the word) by those who have lifted up their voices against their monarch and their God! How consolatory to those who have stuck to that cause through good and evil report! Not a word that I can say could heighten the picture; but never forget it, North; let it serve as an everlasting text for you, whenever you think fit to mention THE VERMIN. Mille habet ornatus ; mille decenter habet. I am afraid I have spun out your patience altogether-but take heart, I am almost done with it now. The article "On Early Moral Education" is Brougham's, and it is in his best style. It is full of plain strong sense; and yet a certain graceful tinge of feeling is diffused over every sentence. Such articles cannot be too widely read, or too highly applauded. The appearance of such things I ever hail with delight, wherever I find them. I am a Tory, and Brougham is a Whig; but, after all, into what insignificance these party names and party objects sink, when contrasted with the universal feelings of humanity-and the great-God grant it were always the common cause-of social good. I would it were in my power to terminate in this vein; but I cannot end without saying, very shortly, that nothing, even in the Edinburgh Review, ever excited in my mind emotions of a more painful nature, than certain passages in the article on Las Cases's book about Napoleon. To see the character of Marie Antoinette thus sneered at in the face of all the affecting evidences of its saint-like, princely, and heroic elevation which Mme. Campan's work and the "Royal Memoirs" have just laid before the world! Is this chivalry? Is this manhood? And to see such things quoted in the Review that is to be lying on the tables of at least some English ladies for three months to come!such vile obscenity-such heartless, witless filth! I blush indeed for Mr Jeffrey. Is it possible that the article is another contribution from the same wretched Ribald, who treats the same subject in the same spirit of dishonesty and degradation in the new number of the Liberal? Is such community to be pushed so far-and Mr Jeffrey still hope to maintain any degree of reputation for his work? The argument in favour of the late unhappy Queen of England, viz. that, "after all, she only formed one connexion in the course of six years," is, in this shape at least, a new one. One connexion! only one Bergami! Peace be to her ashes! Must her friends always be the persons to stir them with the boldest finger of insult? And this is from the Review that says the Examiner would be a respectable paper, but for its "flippancy about morals and religion !" Yours truly, TIMOTHY TICKLER. Southside, 15th August, 1823. [Aug. Noctes Ambrosianae. No. XI. ΧΡΗ ΔΕΝ ΣΥΜΠΟΣΙΩ ΚΥΛΙΚΩΝ ΠΕΡΙΝΙΣΣΟΜΕΝΑΩΝ [This is a distich by wise old Phocylides, PHOC. ap. Ath. An ancient who wrote crabbed Greek in no silly days; Meaning, ""TIS RIGHT FOR GOOD WINEBIBBING PEOPLE, NOT TO LET THE JUG PACE ROUND THE BOARD LIKE A CRIPPLE; "BUT GAILY TO CHAT WHILE DISCUSSING THEIR TIPPLE." An excellent rule of the hearty old cock 'tis And a very fit motto to put to our Noctes.] NORTH. C. N. ap. Ambr. Nay, do not blush, Ensign. I thought you had dipped in the Shannon. I believe you sing extempore? Ay, and ex-trumpery. MULLION. NORTH. Curse your punning. Quaver away this (throwing M. a paper.) MULLION, (hums a preludio.) Then, therefore, give due audience and attend. Milton, hem! Really a very pretty song. It was spoony in you to drop it out of your pocket, ODoherty! ODOHERTY. And amazingly genteel in you to sing it under the circumstances. It was about as bad as Brougham's reading in Parliament Mr Saurin's letter, picked out of Lord Norbury's pocket. Is the author a secret? NORTH. ODOHERTY. Not the least. Rest her soul! she died of love. Her name was Quashie Maboo-quite a sentimental negress, who kept a canteen in the Bowery Way, New York. Poetry and peach-brandy were the death of her. I got her a great wake in 1816, for she was tenderly attached to me. |