No More Learning

Abel
Boyer, like Rapin, was a French Huguenot, who settled in
England in 1689 and, after several years of strenuous endeavour,
gained a long-lived reputation by an Anglo-French and Franco-
English dictionary, professing to have been composed for the
use of the duke of Gloucester, to whom, in 1692, Boyer had
been appointed French tutor. In 1702, when this dictionary
was published at the Hague, Boyer also brought out, in
English, his History of William III (which included that of
James II); and, in the following year, he began the yearly publi-
cation of The History of the Reign of Queen Anne digested into
annals, which was preceded by a similar register of political
events, notable for the reports of parliamentary debates contained
in it, and extending over the years 1713—29. In 1722 appeared
his History of Queen Anne, of which a second edition, with
numerous appendixes, followed in 1735. Boyer was a voluminous
producer of books, pamphlets and contributions to journalism, all
in the whig interest? . Among the pamphlets, one had nearly cost
him dear, as it attacked Swift, who, in an often quoted passage of his
Journal to Stella, vowed vengeance on the ‘French dog' (a term of
abuse to be found already in Froissart). Boyer's History of Queen
1 It was afterwards further continued by Smollett.
2 See bibliography, and of. the article on Boyer by Espinasse, Francis, in vol. vi of
The Dict. of Nat. Biogr. (1886). As to Boyer's English translation of the Mémoires of
Gramont, see ante, vol. VIII, p. 451.


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6
Boyer. Oldmixon
237
Anne has been found extremely useful, not to say indispensable,
by modern historians (by no means only in the 'Annual List of the
Deaths of Eminent Persons' appended to it with short obituary
notices—'whoever pretends to write Characters ought,' he ventures
to think, 'to be well acquainted with those he describes ') and
shows him capable of applying the principles of historical writing,
as to both matter and manner, effectively abstracted by him ‘for
his own Instruction, and laid down in his preface. ' A continua-
tion of the work to the death of George I was published in 1747.
English historical composition was greatly indebted to the infusion
of French lucidity in arrangement and treatment; and, for this
quality, Boyer, too, deserves praise.
Little purpose would be served by entering at length into
the qualities of John Oldmixon as a historical writer. . In
The Dunciad', Pope abuses him without, perhaps, very much
point; but, in a note to the passage, he describes him with
undeniable truth as having been 'all his life a virulent Party-
writer for hire,' who received his reward in a small place'-
the collectorship of the port of Bridgwater. It was not till 1717,
or thereabouts, that Oldmixon obtained this ill and irregularly
paid post-about nine years after he had first exchanged his
efforts as a poet and dramatist for a long series of labours as a
party historian and journalist. These need not here be examined in
detail. His earliest historical work, The British Empire in America
(2 vols. 1708), was at least designed to meet a real need; The
Secret History of Europe (4 parts, 1712—5) was a frank and fierce
attack upon the tory government and its subservience to France.
But the special enmity of the opposition wits he incurred by his
Essay on Criticism, prefixed to the third edition (1727) of The
Critical History of England, Ecclesiastical and Civil (2 vols.
1724-6). The Essay, an avowedly and, perhaps, intentionally
rambling discourse, supposed to be in the manner of Montaigne,
contains some fair hits at Dryden, Addison, Pope and others, and
keeps up a steady fire of minute criticism against Echard as a
historian. Of The Critical History itself, the first volume carries
on this attack in a sort of running commentary upon previous
historians, especially Echard and Clarendon, in a vein frequently
flippant, but by no means without occasional sensible remarks.
Each section ends with a list of authorities to be studied, so that
the book is a curious combination of party pamphlet and school
1 Bk n, 11. 283—90.


## p. 238 (#262) ############################################

238
Historical and Political Writers
manual. The second volume covers much the same ground,
although more particularly devoting itself to ecclesiastical history,
and intended to show that the protestant dissenters ‘have a Claim
to our Indulgence and Good-will, as they are Brethren of the
Reformation,' and that Echard's charges against them of 'sedition
and enthusiasm are 'groundless and scandalous. ' From a dif-
ferent point of view, as showing that no literary fashion endures
for ever, Oldmixon's remark upon the 'affectation of continually
drawing characters,' especially 'when they are arbitrary and are
not of the subject,' is worth noting. Of The History of England
during the Reigns of the Royal House of Stuart, the first volume,
published in 1729, states at length the charge, already noticed and
adverted to in The Critical History of England, against the
Oxford editors of Clarendon, of having altered his text for party
ends. The second volume of the later work (1735) carried on
the narrative to the reign of George I, and the third (1739) took it
back to the last four Tudor reigns, the whole being written in the
spirit of whig constitutionalism. 'In the midst of all the infirmities
of old age, sickness, lameness, and almost blindness,' Oldmixon
wrote Memoirs of the Press, Historical and Political, for Thirty
Years Past, from 1710 to 1740; but he did not live to see the
book, which has much biographical interest, published. He died
in 1742; the hardships of his laborious career seem to belie the
commonplace that, in a free country, there is nothing like sticking
to one's party.
Though also confessedly composed by a partisan-who avows
that ‘he knows not by what influence or means he took very early
to the loyal side,' and who consistently speaks of its opponents
as 'the faction against monarchy' or 'the faction' pure and
simple-Roger North’s biographies hold an enduring position in
English historical literature. The period with which they deal
extends but slightly beyond the reign of Charles II; but the
most important of them, The Life of Francis North, Lord
Guilford, was repeatedly revised, and was not published with
the companion Lives of the Hon. Sir Dudley North and the
Hon. and Rev. Dr John North till 1740, immediately after the
author's Examen; while Roger North’s own Autobiography
was not generally accessible till 1887, when an edition of it was
brought out by Jessopp, who has identified himself with The
Lives of the Norths.
1 Ante, vol. VIII, p. 444.
: Cf. ante, p. 234, note 1.
* See his standard complete edition in 3 vols. , 1890.


## p. 239 (#263) ############################################

North's Lives
of the Norths
239
6
Roger North, who confesses that he was himself of a timid
disposition, gifted neither with readiness of speech nor with the
quickness of thought which underlies it, and whose innate modesty
is not the least pleasing element in the altruism which ennobled his
character, was a true believer in his family. The Norths, he says,
were a numerous flock, and no one scabby sheep in it’; and,
though the eldest of the brothers (Lord North and Gray of
Rolleston) had 'attached himself to the faction, the rest were
‘in all respects helpful and assistant to each other. . . nor the least
favour of difference or feud found amongst them. ' Roger became
the biographer of four of them, including himself. Specially in-
timate were his relations with the third of the brothers, Francis, who
became Lord Guilford and keeper of the great seal. The advance-
ment of Francis in place and prosperity was also that of Roger,
whom he associated with himself in every stage of his career,
who lodged with him, was a daily guest at his table and, for many
years, never failed to see him safe to bed; who, in short, as Roger him-
self expresses it, was his brother's 'shadow. With the frankness
which adds both value and charm to his narrative, Roger confesses
that his nature at one time rebelled against this dependence ; but
he never broke through it, and the sincerity with which he judges
his brother's character and career is never devoid of piety. Their
intimacy enabled the biographer to interpret the laconic notes
kept by the successful counsel and eminent judge with a fulness
which converts them into so many episodes of legal experience, as
well as to expand the speculums' that represented his passing
thoughts on the multifarious problems of his public and private
life. Thus, Francis North's complex but masculine, though, in
more respects than one, not very attractive, character is brought
before the reader with all the force of veracity--for he was
cautious as well as ambitious, not overscrupulous so long as he
kept well within the law (within which he consistently conjured
king Charles II to keep); but, at the same time, straightforward
in his private and in his public acts, and content to leave the latter
without any affected lustre or handles to fame if he could avoid
them. ' 'No wonder,' writes his biographer, with telling irony,
'he is so soon forgot? . ' The account of his matrimonial and
1 Though lord keeper North had the chief share in directing the proceedings
against those accused of complicity in the Rye house plot, there is no reason for
attributing to him any share in A True Account of that Horrid Conspiracy against the
late King, His Present Majesty and the Government, drawn up at his suggestion, but
composed by Thomas Sprat, bishop of Rochester, and published in 1685. It speaks of
Russell's adherence to the doctrine of resistance as . conformable to his Presbyterian
6


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240
Historical and Political Writers
6
electioneering operations illustrates the social and political ethics
of the age rather than his own. The characters of Lord
Guilford's contemporaries in the higher judiciary are drawn with
less reticence and extraordinary force—such portraits as those of
*Silenus' Saunders and Jeffreys, in their way, are immortal, the
latter more especially so because Macaulay's portrait owes to it some
of its most telling features ; while the finer touches which reveal
the biographer's antipathy against Sir Matthew Hale are at least
equally to the credit of his artistic skill. By the side of these
portraits of legal luminaries may be mentioned the admirable
portrait of one whose light was hid behind the backstairs-Will
Chiffinch.
To the literary ability of Roger North, the second of these
Lives, that of Sir Dudley North, the great Turkey merchant,
afterwards, at a critical season, appointed sheriff of London by a
more than doubtful process dictated by the policy of the court",
bears signal witness. This biography depicts, with singular
fidelity and force, the career of a young man of family who, virtually,
began his mercantile life as supercargo on a ship bound for
Archangel, and ended it as treasurer of the Turkey company at
Constantinople. The account, derived from him by his brother,
of the Turkish system of government (the description of avanios
or exactions from Christian states and persons is specially in-
teresting), law and society, is as full of interest as, when first made
known, it must have been of novelty; and the personal character
of the great merchant-whose eastern notions were not, like his
mustachios, suppressed on his return home—is brought out with
much affectionate humour. The honours gained by Sir Dudley
North after his return nearly involved him in serious trouble after
the revolution of 1688: Roger's account of his brother's examina-
tion before the House of Commons is one of the best-told episodes
in the story. The third of the Lives, that of John North, master
of Trinity college, Cambridge, has a very different interest; it
relates the story of the life of a Cambridge don, first at Jesus, where
7
education' and of Sidney (sarcastically) as '& stubborn Asserter of the Good Old
Cause. '
1 An account of these proceedings, from the point of view of those who took the
lead in opposing them, will be found in a book based on materials constituting a most
valuable addition to the memoir-literature of this period, Papillon, F. W. , Memoirs of
Thomas Papillon of London, Merchant (1623—1702). Thomas Papillon, of distinguished
Huguenot descent, was twice an exile-once for joining in an effort to restore Charles I
to power, once for his action with regard to the London charter and North's election.
He was member for Dover both before and after his second absence from England.


## p. 241 (#265) ############################################

North's Lives of the Norths
241
his younger brother was his pupil but where he grew tired of the
'grave, and perhaps empty seniors,' then at Trinity lodge, where
he was on uneasy terms with the fellows, very unpopular with the
undergraduates and ‘so nice that he never completed anything'
in the way of a book. In the end, his intellectual powers decayed
with those of his body ; through life, his greatest happiness seems
to have been the occasional society of his brothers.
Roger, the sixth and youngest of his father's sons, was, as has
been observed, born to be the biographer of those among them
whose worldly success had outstripped his own. He judged himself
humbly, but without hypocrisy—though not of prime of my
rank, yet not contemptible. ' His tastes were intellectual: mathe-
matics and music had a special attraction for him, and, of amuse-
ments, he preferred that of sailing. That he had a genuine literary
gift, he seems hardly to have suspected—for he never himself
published anything but A Discourse of Fish and Fish Ponds (1683);
but, during the long evening of his life (from 1690 to 1734), which
he spent in his own house at Rougham in Norfolk, after, as a non-
juror, he had given up practice at the bar, he wrote the Lives of
which mention has been made and his own Autobiography. The
latter breaks off with an account of his long services as trustee
under Sir Peter Lely's will, which, like those by him performed
under that of his brother Lord Guilford, long occupied most of his
leisure. But, though only a fragment, and a repetition, here and
there, of what he had already told in the Lives of his brothers, it
is not the least engaging of his productions, and, occasionally,
lifts an unsuspected corner of his inner nature--as in the strange
passage concerning a man's right to end his own existence.
In a lighter vein is the comparison—which must amuse readers
of The Rape of the Lock—of the life of men to a game at
ombre.
The merits of Roger North's biographies consist in their trans-
parent candour, combined, as it is, with a shrewdness partly due to
experience and partly to an innate insight, and in a naturalness
of style which, at the same time, is always that of a well-bred
scholar. He never shrinks from the use of an idiomatic phrase or
proverbial turn, still less from that of an apposite anecdote; but
they never have the effect of interrupting the pleasant, if some-
what sedate, progress of his narrative. The minutiae' for which
he goes out of his way to apologise are, of course, welcome in
themselves to readers of later generations ; but the effect of each
biography, as a whole, is not trifling or petty, and the dignity of the
16
E. L. IX,
CH. VIII.


## p. 242 (#266) ############################################

242
Historical and Political Writers
theme-whether it be that of legal eminence, mercantile enter-
prise, or scholarly calm—is invariably maintained without any
apparent effort. Here and there, although he is constantly
referring to the fuller treatment a subject has received in his
Examen, Roger North becomes lengthy; but the total effect
of his Lives, as that of all biographies of real excellence, is
not less entertaining than it is instructive for those who are
open to the appeal of a human life intelligently, truthfully and
sympathetically told.


## p. 243 (#267) ############################################

CHAPTER IX
MEMOIR-WRITERS, 1715—60
UNDER the first two Georges, English society became con-
solidated into what Disraeli, with his accustomed iridescence,
described as a 'Venetian oligarchy. Placemen in, and patriots
out of, office flit across the scene. The big county interests of the
aristocracy rule, subject to occasional correction from the growing
power of finance or the expiring growls of the city mob, and
Walpole and Pelham, or their inferiors, pull the strings. The
nation, hoping eternally to see corruption extinguished and a new
era of virtue and public spirit inaugurated, is, again and again,
disappointed. Placemen and patriots cross over, and the game
begins anew. But, behind the chief actors in the comedy, may be
perceived a slowly gathering knot of observers and note-takers,
the chroniclers and memoir-writers of the period. They offer us
a unique and fascinating picture of the privileged classes who
then presided over the fortunes of the country; and they open a
new chapter in literary history. Through them, the eighteenth
century is self-portrayed with a vivid insight and picturesqueness
probably unrivalled, save in the parallel descriptions of French
society from 1648 to 1789.
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, one must imagine, was a lady
of far more masculine understanding and knowledge than most
of the classical ladies of whose attainments Johnson thought
highly. As a descriptive topographer, she was a keen observer,
not superior to the love of gossip, with a quick eye for the telling
features of a story or a situation and an easy, effective style. Her
manner is one of conscious superiority. She belonged to the
great whig aristocracy which ruled England. Her father, Evelyn
Pierrepont, was connected with the Evelyns of Wootton, and
married Mary Feilding, daughter of the earl of Denbigh, from one
of whose brothers Henry Fielding the novelist descended. Mary
16-2


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244
Memoir-Writers, 1715—60
a
was born in May 1689; a year later, her father became earl of
Kingston and, at the whig triumph of 1715, duke of Kingston;
she was brought up, carelessly enough, in a library. One of her
girl friends was Anne Wortley Montagu, a granddaughter of the
first earl of Sandwich (Pepys's chief), whose father had, on marry-
ing an heiress, taken the name Wortley. Anne's favourite brother
Edward, a most unromantic young man, was strongly attracted
by Lady Mary's lucidity of both mind and visage. A number
of letters between them are extant. The young pair were, un-
mistakably, in love; but Kingston was inexorable on the subject
of settlements and tried to coerce his daughter into another match;
whereupon, she eloped with Edward Wortley (August 1712). With
the whigs' advent to power, the period of narrow means came to an
end, and Edward, a relative of Halifax, became M. P. for Westminster
and, in 1716, was appointed ambassador to the Porte. In 1717, the
couple journeyed to Constantinople, by way of Vienna and Belgrade.
Her most vivid letters were written during this period and remain
an imperishable monument of her husband's otherwise undistin-
guished embassy ; for it was upon his successors that devolved the
important task of concluding the peace of Passarowitz. It must
not be supposed that we have the letters in their original form.
Moy Thomas came upon a list of letters written by the ambassadress,
with notes of their contents. The published letters correspond but
imperfectly to the précis, and only two are indexed as copied at
length. Of those remaining to us, some that had been copied
were reproduced with small alteration; the majority were recon-
structed from the diary in which she was accustomed to note the
events and thoughts of every day, and from which she had pre-
BU bly drawn freely for the original correspondence; others,
less finished in form, for the most part, have been found and
incorporated since. The substance of many letters hitherto un-
known was given as late as 1907 by 'George Paston' in her Lady
Mary Wortley Montagu and her Times. The Turkish Letters
(May 1716—November 1718), which are the most finished and the
most original, were evidently prepared for publication, though
they were not actually published until after Lady Mary's death.
They were, no doubt, handed round among the writer's private
friends. The prefaces are dated 1724—5 and are attributed to
Mary Astell; and the early editions include a frontispiece, 'Lady
M-y W-r-t-l-y M-nt-g-e The Female Traveller, in the Turkish
Dress. ' Lady Mary, in this respect at all events, was a pre-
cursor of Lady Hester Stanhope. Besides assuming Turkish


## p. 245 (#269) ############################################

Lady Mary Montagu's Life and Letters 245
attire, she studied the Turkish language, and did her best to
disabuse English minds of a vast accumulation of ludicrous
prejudice on the score of Ottoman cruelty, luxury and sensuality.
It may be added that she gave expression to the common English
antipathy of her day (fully brought out by Smollett in the next
generation) to Roman catholicism. Her letters still delight by
their high power of communicativeness.
In 1739 (after her daughter's elopement with Lord Bute), Lady
Mary determined to go abroad for a lengthened residence.
The
letters of the next two and twenty years of her life, addressed,
for the most part, to Lady Bute, are the most natural and,
perhaps, the most charming that she ever wrote. She had
seen a little of Italy on her return from Pera, by way of Tunis,
Genoa and the Mont Cenis. After experiences in Venice, Chambéri
and Avignon, she determined, in 1743, to settle at Lovere on
Lago d'Iseo, forty miles from Brescia. There, she spent eighteen
fairly serene, though solitary, years. Rising at six, after breakfast
she worked with her weaving women till nine, inspected poultry,
bees and silkworms and, at eleven, allowed herself the pleasure of
an hour's reading-all that her eyesight would permit. She dined
at twelve, then slept till three, and woke to play whisk with
three old priests at a penny a corner, till it was cool enough to set
out upon those rides in the mountains which were as delightful as
a romance, or to float under her lute-string awning on the river
waiting for a fish to bite. 'I confess I sometimes wish for a little
conversation, but then,' she added gaily, 'gardening is the next
amusement to reading. When the winter came, she found herself
obliged to keep the house and wrote to thank Lady Bute for pre-
suming her taste was still undivorced from the gay part of reading
-by which she meant novels. These were sent out in cases from
England (the beginning of British novel export) and aroused the
utmost excitement upon their arrival, as they well might when one
single box is reported to have contained Peregrine Pickle, Roderick
Random, Clarissa Harlowe and Pompey the Little. She set to
work at once to read them, and whole letters to her daughter are
devoted to discussing the characters and the intrigues of the stories.
With her strong and satirical, by this time almost sardonic,
understanding, Lady Mary professed a solid English woman's good-
natured contempt for the epistolary light wine of Mme de Sévigné;
nevertheless, as she grew older, her letters came more and more to
resemble the epistles of that incomparable model, and the resem-
blance is strengthened by the fact that most of the letters are to
a


## p. 246 (#270) ############################################

246 Memoir-Writers, 1715460
her daughter Lady Bute. On 1 January 1761, her curmudgeon of a
husband died, leaving an immense fortune to Lady Bute; and the
widow had to return home. She was sick of life. 'I am preparing
for my last and longest journey and stand on the threshold of this
world, my several infirmities like post-horses ready to hurry me
away. ' Horace Walpole saw her again, and repeated his libellous
saying about the 'she meteor,' complaining of her dirtiness, avarice
and eccentricity, her cheating ‘horse and foot,' her hideous style of
dress. Mrs (Elizabeth) Montagu refers to her as speaking, acting,
dressing like nobody else. Society had unconsciously caught the
tone of the venomous master detractor of Twickenham, whose
vendetta against Lady Mary is completely explained only by the
unhappy combination in him of bad heart and bad health.
Everyone in London agreed as to her preserved liveliness
and unimpaired faculties ; but it soon became known that the
intrepid 'female traveller' was suffering from cancer; and of this
disease she died, in her seventy-fourth year, at her house in
Great George street, 21 August 1762. She was buried in the
Grosvenor chapel in South Audley street, where Lord Chesterfield
was interred some ten years later. Her letters, collectively
regarded and interpreted, form the autobiography of a warm-
hearted, but disappointed, unloved and solitary woman.
When Lady Mary died, Walpole reports, in a letter to Mann,
that she left twenty-one large MS volumes, in prose and verse,
to her daughter Lady Bute. At least nineteen volumes were
actually left to Lady Bute; two, containing the letters during
her husband's embassy at Constantinople, had been given to
Mr Sowden of Rotterdam. There were duplicates of these and
they form the basis of the Letters given to the world in two
volumes in 1763. The miscellaneous correspondence in Lady
Bute's hands, or portions of it, were first edited by James Dallaway
(1803). The voluminous diary was always kept under lock and
key, and, although Lady Bute often read passages aloud to her
daughters and friends, she never trusted it out of her hands, with
the exception of the first five or six copy-books, which she once
permitted Lady Louisa to peruse alone, on condition that nothing
should be transcribed. When she felt her end drawing near, Lady
Bute burned the diary (1794), and the eighteenth century lost a
document which might have proved of unique interest.
Apart from Lady Mary's Letters, her other writings are in-
significant and unattractive. They include a translation of the
Enchiridion of Epictetus, written in 1710, at the time when her


## p. 247 (#271) ############################################

Lady Mary in Verse and Prose
247
6
>
marriage was in debate, and submitted to the taste and judgment
of her old friend and adviser Gilbert Burnet, bishop of Sarum? Her
Town Eclogues were written during the period of her friendly inti-
macy with Pope and owe something to his inspiration, if not to his
'correction. They fell by some 'mischance' into the hands of
Edmund Curll, who published them in 1716 (through his colleague
James Roberts), under the title Court Poems by a Lady of Quality.
Only three, 'The Basset-table, An Eclogue,''The Drawing-Room' and
'The Toilet,' were included in this thin quarto (misdated 1706),
'publish'd faithfully, as they were found in a Pocket-Book taken
up in Westminster-Hall, the Last Day of the Lord Winton's Tryal,'
and, upon a perusal at St James's coffeehouse, 'attributed by the
General Voice to be the Production of a Lady of Quality. The
eclogues numbered six, one for each week-day (1747). Their delicacy
and refinement is not conspicuous, and their metrical sprightliness
in no way remarkable; their only value, today, consists in the
little intimate touches that describe the social arcana of the period.
Lady Mary was certainly no poet. Her mind was the reverse
of poetical. All that can be said of her heroic verse is that it is
generally fluent, often lively and sometimes forcible. She is at
the best when, like Gay, she paints the manners of the times in
Town Eclogues. Her serious satires are far-away echoes of
Pope. The prose essays published with her other remains are
trite and show that her talent did not easily work in that form.
It is to the Letters, and to these alone, that she owes her niche
in the house of fame. Without being sympathetic or humourous,
and with no great store of wit or fancy, she is rich in descriptive
faculty, keen perception, good spirits and glorified common sense.
Her style, though correct and perspicuous, is unstudied, natural,
flowing, spirited; she never uses an unnecessary word, or a phrase
savouring of affectation. At the same time, she meant to write
well and was conscious of having succeeded. Before the Bible
society letters of George Borrow appeared, it is doubtful if any
traveller's letters have proved so generally entertaining, unless we
make exception of Smollett's Letters from France and Italy,
published in 17662 Lady Mary was almost the first to enter the
rich mine of eastern manners and colouring. The travellers of
the early seventeenth century wrote in an obsolete fashion and
employed an antiquated prose. The historians of Turkey, such as
Knollys and Rycaut,' are full of fabulous detail. She was one of
1 The learned prelate's corrections were printed in italics.
9 Cf. vol. , chap. II, post.


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248
Memoir-Writers, 1715460
the earliest (long before Pierre Loti) to make a plain tale of the
treatment of women in the east (Turkey was far more remote
then than Turkestan or Korea are now), and she did not waste
her opportunities. Entertaining, however, as Lady Mary was,
whether as a discerning traveller or as a writer with a relatively
modern style, her fame for a hundred years depended largely, if
not mainly, upon the supposed mystery of her life. That the
daughter of a duke, the wife of a millionaire and the mother of a
man so much talked of as Edward Wortley should be unhappy and
should seek refuge abroad in eccentric solitude and isolation from
her quality was, to the early eighteenth century, a thing incredible.
The malignity of Walpole and the vindictive line of Pope about the
lady who 'starved a sister' and 'denied a debt'stimulated fresh
curiosity concerning the cleverest woman of the day.
With the gradual decline of her notoriety and the eclipse, at
least in not a few ostensible ways, of her achievement, Lady
Mary's writings have received less and less attention, and are now,
perhaps, in danger of being as much undervalued as they are
generally admitted to have been at one time overrated. Frag-
ments of her criticism have survived the general wreck of her
descriptive writings, such as the wellknown division of the human
race into men, women and Herveys, her comparison of Fielding
and Steele, with her diagnosis of the happy temperament which
forgot everything over a venison pasty and a flask of champagne,
and her hearty contempt for Richardson, over whose novels she
confessed to sobbing in a most scandalous manner. Her Con-
stantinople Letters (of 1763) soon became popular and classical all
over Europe. They were reprinted in the successive editions of
Lady Mary's Letters and Works? , of which her great-grandson
Lord Wharncliffe's (1837) remained the standard edition till its
contents were considerably enriched, but not substantially altered,
in that of Moy Thomas (1861). His canon includes twelve letters to
Mrs Hewett, twelve in correspondence with Anne Wortley, thirty-
nine with Wortley Montagu, sixty dealing with the embassy of
1716—18, twenty from Pope to Lady Mary, dated 1716–21, fifty-
two letters to the countess of Mar 1721–7, twenty-four items
of miscellaneous correspondence, and two hundred and seventy-
five letters written between 1738 and 1762 to the countesses
of Pomfret, Oxford, Bute, Wortley Montagu and others.
There are, also, some sixty-four occasional poems and versions
besides Town Eclogues, the Enchiridion, four essays, two of
1 See bibliography,


## p. 249 (#273) ############################################

Lady Cowper's Diary
249
them in French, the second of which, 'On a maxim of La Roche-
a
foucauld about marriage,' is as humourous as anything Lady Mary
ever wrote, besides a rather interesting fragment upon the court
of George I at the time of his accession.
One of the most intimate pictures we possess of the court at the
beginning of the Brunswick dynasty is the work of another diarist
and letter-writer, Mary Clavering, of the Durham family, who
married, in 1706, William Cowper, lord and afterwards first earl
Cowper. She corresponded with the electoral princess of Han-
over, afterwards queen Caroline, whose household she entered in
October 1714, when she began to keep a diary. This extended,
originally, to 1720; the last four years of it were, however, all but
completely destroyed by the writer in 1722, when her husband
was under suspicion of complicity in the Jacobite plot.
Lady Cowper tells some amusing stories of her mistress, such
as that of the snub administered to Robinson, bishop of London :
This day (Dec. 23, 1714) the Bishop of London waited on my mistress and
desired Mrs Howard to go into the Princess and say he thought it his duty
to wait upon her, as he was Dean of the Chapel, to satisfy her in any Doubts
or Scruples she might have in regard to our Religion and to explain anything
to her which she did not comprehend. She was a little nettled when
Mrs Howard delivered this message to her, and said, 'Send him away
civilly; though he is very impertinent to suppose that I who refused to be
Empress for the sake of the Protestant Religion, don't understand it fully. '
The amount of bargaining and backstair dealing revealed in this
diary is astonishing; but the notes are too summary to aspire to
literary art, and there is little picturing, hardly any descriptive
energy. Lady Cowper naturally saw a good deal of the domestic
quarrels of the Hanoverian court; but she lets us hear little
about them. Very probably, this was the portion destroyed.
The mutilated diary was handed down with the other Cowper
manuscripts and edited by Spencer Compton in 1864. The
Mrs Howard to whom it refers, Henrietta Hobart, afterwards
Mrs Howard and countess of Suffolk, was, as is well known,
adored by the earl of Peterborough and became the mistress of
George II. Her husband anticipated coming events by paying
his court with her at Herrenhausen in 1712; and, after she
had been appointed bedchamber woman to the princess of
Wales, her rooms in St James's palace became the place of
reunion for the little court of the heir apparent. She cultivated
the society of men of letters, such as Gay and Arbuthnot, and was


## p. 250 (#274) ############################################

250
Memoir-Writers, 1715—60
the subject of Peterborough's lines 'I said to my heart, between
sleeping and waking' and of Pope's complimentary verses,
I knew a thing that's most uncommon
(Envy be silent and attend ! )
I knew a reasonable woman,
Handsome and witty, yet a friend.
Lady Hervey, Miss Bellenden, Pulteney, Pelham, Pitt, Horace
Walpole, Lord Chesterfield, Swift and Young were among her
correspondents, and most of them celebrate her wit and reason-
ableness, She wrote an often quoted Gulliverian letter to
Swift, which he professed to be unable to understand. George II
built her a house at Marble hill, Twickenham, where her literary
friends professed to act as chamberlains. Though she lacked suf-
ficient skill for prevailing against queen Caroline, her conciliatory
temper, not less than her position at court, made her the recipient
of many confidences from the intrigants about St James's. A
judicious selection from her correspondence entitled Letters to
and from Henrietta, countess of Suffolk, and her second husband,
the Hon. George Berkeley from 1712 to 1767 was edited anony-
mously by the editor of Lord Hervey's Memoirs (John Wilson
Croker), in 1824.
Precursor in chief of Horace Walpole as court gossip, scandal-
monger and memoir-writer was John Lord Hervey, ‘remorse-
less Hervey of the coffin face and painted cheeks, a miniature
St Simon at the early Hanoverian court, though, it must be
admitted, a St Simon rather lacking in the artistic precision and
measured science of his prototype. Lord Hervey's father and
grandfather (Sir Thomas Hervey, son-in-law of Sir Humphrey
May, who drew a touching portrait of Charles I's last hours) were
both great letter-writers; and their letters from 1651 to 1731
have now been published, in three volumes. The MS diary of John,
first earl of Bristol, ranging from 1688 to 1742, is largely a ledger
of payments and expenses; but the letters furnish an intimate and
attractive portrait of a noble family at the close of the seventeenth,
a
and beginning of the eighteenth, century. John had a half-brother,
Carr Hervey, whose mother was the earl's first wife; but he was
himself the eldest son of the second countess, a merry lady, who
was a correspondent of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and lady of the
bedchamber to queen Caroline. Educated at Westminster under
Freind, and at Clare hall, Cambridge, he inherited from both
parents, but especially from his mother, a gift for repartee and a


## p. 251 (#275) ############################################

Lord Hervey
251
fondness for riming. After his return from Hanover, in a fine flush of
Hanoverian zeal, he declined hard labour and gravitated between
Ickworth, where he browsed on poetry, and the court at Richmond.
Early in 1720, when a handsome youth of twenty-four, he secretly
married the beauty of the younger court, Mary Lepell, ‘Youth's
youngest daughter, sweet Lepell,' who had charmed all the wits,
including Pope. The reciprocal devotion between the Herveys
and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu offended both Pope and Horace
Walpole, who suspected the ladies of scandal about his paternity.
Pope was jealous, with the result that, in the first of his imitations
of Horace, addressed to Fortescue, 'Lord Fanny' and 'Sappho '
were generally identified with Hervey and Lady Mary. Hervey
had already been attacked in The Dunciad and Bathos, and he
now retaliated. There is no doubt that he had a share (possibly
the sole share) in Verses to the Imitator of Horace (1732). In
Letters from a nobleman at Hampton Court to a Doctor of
Divinity (1733), he scoffed at Pope's deformity and humble birth.
Pope's reply was A Letter to a noble Lord, dated November 1733,
and the scathing portrait of Sporus in the Epistle to Dr Arbuth-
not (1735). Hervey also quarrelled fiercely with Pulteney over a
libel and was very nearly a victim to his adversary's rapier. He
also fell out with Frederick, prince of Wales, in the matter of an
amour with one of the queen's maids of honour, Anne Vane, who
became the prince's mistress. He was thus much exposed on every
side to the malice and detraction of declared enemies ; and this
fact helps to account for the cynicism and venom which overflow
in his Memoirs. Meanwhile, in 1723, by the death of his brother,
he became heir to the earldom of Bristol and assumed the title
by which he is rememberedt. In the new reign, his advancement
was assured, inasmuch as, with a strong feeling for self-preserva-
tion, he had made sure of all the approaches, and all the back-
stair exits, of the innermost court.
After a spell of Italian travel, in which he had engaged
partly for the sake of his health (which, according to the parental
view, had been undermined by that 'poisonous plant tea'),
he returned in 1729, and, having given in his adherence to the
victorious wing of the party in power, was promptly pensioned
and appointed vice-chamberlain, with the special purpose of serving
as Walpole's agent about the person of queen Caroline, whose
closest confidences he shared. Walpole employed his incisive
1 In June 1733, he was called to the House of Lords by writ in virtue of his father's
barony.


## p. 252 (#276) ############################################

252
Memoir-Writers, 1715460
>
>
pen to refute the libels contributed to The Craftsman by
Pulteney, whose barbed retorts suggested most of the ugly insinua-
tions which Pope worked up into his scarifying caricature of
'Sporus, that mere white curd of ass's milk. ' After the queen's
death in November 1737, Lord Hervey was admitted to the
cabinet as lord privy seal, but, much against his inclination, was
thrown out of office by the fall of Walpole. His pamphlets, such
as Miscellaneous Thoughts on the Present Posture of Foreign
and Domestic Affairs and his Three Speeches on the Gin Act
(1742–3), show that his mental vigour was unimpaired. His
health, however, was gradually failing ; and he died, in the life-
time of his father, on 5 August 1743, aged only 46, and was buried
in the family tomb at Ickworth. During the last fifteen years of his
life, he had been composing his both lifelike and highly polished,
but thoroughly cynical, Memoirs, which extend from his first coming
to court to the death of the queen. The manuscript of these
Memoirs, entirely in autograph, was left to his sons, by whom it
appears that several sheets referring to the more intimate dis-
sensions in the royal family were destroyed. Allusion was made
to them by Horace Walpole, who seems to have inspected them
in 1759; but Hervey's second son, the third earl, left strict in-
junctions, in his will, that the Memoirs were not to be published
until after the death of George III. They appeared, eventually,
as Memoirs of the reign of George the Second, edited from
the original manuscript at Ickworth by John Wilson Croker
(1848). They give a wonderfully vivid picture of the court
of the second George ; but the comedy presented is of the type
of classical Roman satire, in which the motive of avarice is over-
whelmingly predominant. The dramatis personae are the king,
the prince, Wilmington, Walpole, Pulteney, Wyndham, Bolingbroke,
Chesterfield-and the writer hates them all, sees all their characters
at their worst and depicts them with merciless satire. For the
queen alone and her daughter the princess Caroline, he had a
genuine respect and attachment; indeed, the princess's affection
for him was commonly said to be the reason for the close retire-
ment in which she lived after his death.
Apart from the queen and her daughter, Hervey's portraits are
all, without exception, of the Spagnoletto school; he systematically
blackens. How far his tendency to detraction may have been the
result of his epilepsy, of his vegetarian diet, of his habitual cast
of thought, or of his literary predilections, it would be impossible
to determine. His narrative was never meant to be scrutinised


## p. 253 (#277) ############################################

Character of Lord Hervey's Memoirs 253
by contemporaries; its confirmation, in many respects, by Horace
Walpole’s Memoirs must be regarded as somewhat ambiguous
evidence of accuracy, since it has never yet been tested minutely by
any modern critic. The elaborate structure of the periods reveals
Hervey as a careful student of the Latin historians of the empire.
It must be remembered that he occasionally composed Latin
epitaphs and letters. He was a useful patron to Conyers Middleton,
who showed his gratitude by dedicating to Hervey his famous Life
of Cicero. The panegyric earned for its victim the gibe, containing
an unkind allusion to Hervey's cadaverous complexion:
Narcissus, praised with all a parson's power,
Look'd a white lily sunk beneath a shower.
To whatever cause we may attribute the fact, there can be little
doubt that Hervey was a virtuoso in defamatory epithets and
studied forms of detraction. Akin to Horace Walpole in rancour,
the note-taking Hervey, warmed in the bosom of the court, stung
the king and nearly all around him to the full extent of his powers.
'A court,' says Lord Rosebery), 'is considered fair game by such reptiles.
But it is hard to see why princes who after all are human beings should not
be allowed to some extent the same sanctity of family life which humbler
human beings claim and maintain. Hervey was the intimate associate of the
King, the confidential friend of the Queen, the lover of one of their daughters,
he was the tame cat of the family circle. He thought it seemly to narrate
their secrets in so brutal a fashion that some more decent members of his
family tore out and destroyed the coarsest and bitterest passages. What
remains is coarse and bitter enough. It shows the King and Queen in a most
unfavorable light. But that aspect is fascinating, compared to that in which
he presents himself. '
Lord Rosebery justly concludes that it is most unwise to attribute
literal exactitude or even general veracity to such broken con-
fidences and chronicles, too amusing to be likely to be strictly
true, as those of Lord Hervey and his fellow cynic, the 'inimitable'
Horace.
Among the less important memoirs of the second quarter of
the eighteenth century, before the protagonist of memoir-writing
is reached—the great little Horace, whose name, as Sir Leslie
Stephen points out, is a synonym for the history of England from
1740 to 1790—a passing mention may be made of the Memoirs of
Lord Waldegrave and George Bubb Dodington. James, second
earl of Waldegrave, a great-grandson of James II, became a
favourite with George II, was nominated lord of the bedchamber
in 1743 and governor of the prince of Wales, afterwards George III,
by whom he was not liked. Though extremely 'unlovely' in
'
i Chatham, p. 197.


## p. 254 (#278) ############################################

254
Memoir-Writers, 1715460
both address and appearance, Waldegrave, who hated hard work,
set up for a man of gallantry and pleasure, and, a few years before
his death from small-pox in 1763 (when he was aged only forty-
eight), married Walpole's niece, the handsomest woman in England.
Waldegrave, though he was prime minister for five days only
(8—12 June 1757), had a close insight into the course of affairs
during the period of which he writes (1754–8). The real interest
of his Memoirs consists in the carefully weighed characters which
he draws of the chief actors, and in the strong contrast between
these portraits and the sinister silhouettes of the too clever and
far from scrupulous Hervey. Thus, in his portrait of George II,
Waldegrave insists, as upon the two really salient features in the
likeness, on the king's passion for business and his keen knowledge
(surpassing that of any of his ministers) of foreign affairs.
Among the Tapers and Tadpoles of the 'broad-bottom
administration, we are fortunate in possessing a three-quarter
length portrait of so typical a fortune-hunter as George Bubb
Dodington, who, by a long course of 'disagreeable compliances' and
grotesque contortions, raised himself to £5000 a year and a peerage
as baron Melcombe. He died at Hammersmith, aged seventy, on
28 July 1762. In the days of his splendour, he sought to become
a patron of letters and was accepted as such by Young, Thomson
and Fielding, but spurned by Johnson. A diligent student of
Tacitus, he compiled a large quantity of political papers and
memoranda, which he left to a distant cousin, Henry Penrud-
docke Wyndham, on condition that those alone should be published
which did honour to his memory. Wyndham published the Diary
in 1784, persuading himself, with judicious sophistry, that the
phrase in the will formed no barrier to such a proceeding.
The Diary presents, perhaps, the most curious illustration in
existence of the servile place-hunters of the age, with its unctuous
professions of virtuous sentiment and disgust at venality, which
serve only to heighten the general effect. It must be said, in
Bubb's honour, that he united with Chesterfield and Walpole in
trying to save Byng. His Diary, though carelessly compiled,
contains some curious historical information, especially as to the
prince and princess of Wales, during the period which it covers,
from 1748 to 1760. In his cynical self-complacency, he becomes
almost a humourous artist. But, from a literary point of view,
his is a dry light, which few readers of the present day will be
specially interested to rekindle.
* 1 Lord Walpole edited Lord Waldegrave's Memoirs in 1821.


## p. 255 (#279) ############################################

CHAPTER X
WRITERS OF BURLESQUE AND TRANSLATORS
As the seventeenth century drew to its close, there came into
being a strange underworld of letters, an inferno inhabited by
lettered vagabonds, who matched, in scholarship and scurrility,
the heroes of Petronius. Beggar students, tavern keepers, idlers
from the inns of court, adventurers who had trailed a pike in
Holland, flocked thither with spruce young squires who 'knew
the true manage of the hat,' and loungers fresh from the universities.
Thus, in the coffeehouses, there grew up a new public, for whose
amusement a new literature was invented. The old days of dignity
and leisure were passed. The wits of the town wrote, not to please
themselves, but to flatter the taste of their patrons, and many of
them succeeded so well as to echo in prose or verse the precise
accent of the tavern. A familiarity of speech and thought dis-
tinguished them all. They were ribald, they were agile, they were
fearless. They insolently attacked their great contemporaries.
They had, indeed, as little respect for high personages in life or
letters as for the English tongue, which they maltreated with light-
hearted ribaldry. The slang which they used—and they were all
masters in this kind—was not the curious slang of metaphor, such
as is enshrined in the pages of Cotgrave's Dictionary; rather, it
was composed of the catchwords which seemed worth a smile when
they were heard in the coffeehouse, but which instantly lost their
savour when they were put in print, and which today defy the
researches of the archaeologist. As they aimed, one and all, at
the same mark-popularity—they exhibit in their works no subtle
differences. The vanity of individual expression was not for them.
They admitted that the booksellers, who paid the piper, had
a perfect right to call the tune, and they sang and danced in loyal
obedience to the fashion of the moment. They wrote the slippered
doggerel, the easy prose, the flippant plays, that were asked of
them, and their names might be transposed on many title-pages
without any violation of justice or probability.
a


## p. 256 (#280) ############################################

256 Writers of Burlesque and Translators
In spirit and ambition, they were true cockneys. They readily
shook off the influences and associations of their childhood. Though
Tom Brown went to Christ Church from Shifnal, though Ned Ward
was a loyal son of Oxfordshire, though Peter Motteux first saw the
light at Rouen, London was their paradise. They saw through her
eyes, they spoke with her tongue. Most intimately at home in
Will's or Ned Ward's, they dragged their muse, as they would
still have called her, down to the level of sawdust and spilled wine.
Before all things, and at all times, they were anti-heroic. Their
jests never sparkled more brightly than when they were aimed at
authority. No poets, living or dead, were sacred in their careless
eyes. It seemed to them a legitimate enterprise to ridicule Vergil,
or to trick Homer out in the motley garments of the age. Aeneas
and Ulysses, esteemed heroes by many generations of men, were
for them no better than those who frequented Grub street or took
their pleasure in the Mall. And they found in travesty or burlesque
an admirable field for the exercise of their untidy talent.
In burlesque, Scarron was their openly acknowledged master.
They did not make any attempt to belittle the debt which they owed
to Le Virgile Travesti. They announced their obligation not merely
in their style, but in their titles, and, if this antic form of poetry
took some years in crossing the Channel, it flourished with amazing
energy after its passage. The success of Scarron himself is a
curiosity of literary history. The form was no new thing, when
Scarron made it his own. The reverse process, the exaltation of
paltry subjects by august treatment, such as was afterwards em-
ployed by John Philips in his Splendid Shilling, was not unknown
to the ancients. The trick of putting the gods and heroes of Greece
and Rome into dressing-gowns had been practised in Spain and
Italy before Scarron published, in 1648, the first book of his famous
Virgile. But, for France, and, so, for England, Scarron was a real
inventor. The artifice seemed simple enough when it was dis-
covered. It depended for its triumph upon nothing else than an
obvious contrast. To represent whatever had seemed sacred to
the tradition of the race as trivial and ludicrous was not a difficult
enterprise, while the anachronism which persuaded Vergil to speak
of oil-paintings and to quote Corneille was assured of a laugh.
The example of Scarron was quickly followed. Furetière, Dufresnoy,
d'Assoucy bastened to prove themselves possessed of this new
humour. Ovid, curled and barbered, was sent to pay his addresses
to the ladies of the court with M. de Boufflers. Not even Lucan
As to John Philips, cf. ante, p. 182.


## p. 257 (#281) ############################################

Scarron and his Imitators
257
or Juvenal escaped the outrage of parody. And the style of the
burlesques matched the irreverence of their thought. It was
familiar to baseness ; it flowed with the ease and swiftness of
a turbid stream. In brief, as Boileau said, Parnassus spoke the
language of the market, and Apollo, travestied, became a Tabarin.
The enthusiasm which Scarron's experiment aroused made an
easy conquest of courtier and scholar alike. From the capital,
it spread to the provinces, and, though none of his imitators is
worth remembrance, Scarron deserves his meed of praise. He did
an ill thing supremely well. In facility and suppleness, his Virgile
has never been surpassed. His humour, such as it is, is tireless
and inexhaustible. Moreover, if he be happy in his raillery, his
work, as French admirers have said, is not without some value as
a piece of criticism. He touches with a light hand the weakness of
the lachrymose hero. He turns the light of the prevailing ‘good
sense' upon Vergil's many simplicities, for which few will thank
him; and, even in the very act of burlesque, he pays his victim
the compliment of a scrupulously close adherence to his text.
The fashion was already overpast in France, when Charles
Cotton made his first experiment in English burlesque. In 1664,
was published under the title Scarronides, or Virgil Travestie,
a mock-poem on the first book of the Aeneid. To this, Cotton
added the fourth book six years later, and, presently, put some of
Lucian's dialogues into ‘English fustian,' with the title Burlesque
upon Burlesque: or the Scoffer Scoff"d. Of these experiments in
the new craft, no more can be said than that they were better than
the base imitations which speedily followed. Cotton, at any rate,
was a man of letters, with a sense of style and variety, and if
he stooped to play the tune which the tavern-haunters demanded,
he played it with some skill and energy. He uses the artifices
which they all use. He mixes ancient and modern inextricably.
He measures the distance which Aeneas rowed by a familiar
standard, "twixt Parson's Dock and Billingsgate. ' As to Dido's
temple, 'I cannot liken any to it,' says he, 'unless 't be Pancras, if
you know it. ' The humour is forced and barren; but those French
critics are in the wrong, who declare that Cotton was content
merely to translate Scarron. If his theory of burlesque was
Scarron's, the application of it was all his own.
Cotton's success did not long remain unchallenged. Within a
year, one Monsey of Pembroke hall, Cambridge, gave to the world
his own Scarronides, a mock-poem, being the second and seventh
books of Vergil's Aeneid, which he dedicated, by what, no doubt,
17
E. L. IX.
CH. X.


## p. 258 (#282) ############################################

258 Writers of Burlesque and Translators
he thought a great stroke of humour, to ‘Lady Ann Dido, Countess
of Carthage. It is a work without character, scrupulously fashioned
according to the pattern of the hour; and a reference to James
Hind proves that this author also has learned the lesson of
anachronism. Then John Phillips, a true habitant of Grub street,
paraphrased, in bis Maronides, the fifth and sixth books of the
Aeneid. In a preface, he attempts a timid defence of his temerity.
'I leave the world to determine,' says he, 'whether it be not reason
that he that has caused us so often to cry when we were Boys,
ought not to make us laugh as much now we are men. ' As Phillips
travestied him, Vergil does not make us laugh, and the justification
fails. The experiment, in truth, differed little from the others,
save that its author, for the moment a zealous royalist, put the
puritans in hell. There they all lie, Haselrigge and Pym, Hugh
Peters, the chief of English rogues, Bradshaw,
in a Squarr
Of burning Canvas, lin'd with Tarr,
and Cromwell himself,
that Devil of a Devil,
Whose Noddle was the Mint of Evil.
The licence which John Phillips allowed himself in his treatment
of Vergil was vastly increased by the author of The Irish Hudibras,
or Fingallian Prince, who boldly adapted the sixth book of the
Aeneid to his own time, and turned it to a high encomium of
William III, 'this present Monarch, England's timely Redeemer,
whom Heaven long preserve. '
Nor was Vergil the only one of the poets attacked in England
with wanton insolence. In 1664, James Scudamore's Homer à
la Mode, A Mock Poem upon the first and second Books of Homer's
Iliads, came upon the town. The version is free from the brutality
which disgraced many of its rivals, and gives promise of better
things. The promise remained unfulfilled, for the author, who was
bred at Christ Church, had but just taken his degree when he was
drowned in the Wye, 'to the great reluctancy of all those who were
acquainted with his pregnant parts. The author of Homerides: or
Homer's First Book Moderniz'd, who, some fifty years later, essayed
Scudamore's task over again, need not awaken our curiosity. He
showed a spark of self-knowledge when he called himself Sir Iliad
Doggerell, and a complete ignorance of literary fitness, when he
regretted that Pope did not give Homer 'the English air as well
as tongue. ' Ovid, better suited to the methods of burlesque, did
but tempt the makers of travesties to a wilder extravagance.


## p. 259 (#283) ############################################

Hudibras and Hudibrastic Verse
259
'Naso Scarronomimus,' the writer of Ovidius Exulans, can scarcely
persuade the sorry tit of his humour to move for all his thwackings,
and even Alexander Radcliffe, a captain, an inns-of-court-man and
a poet, who, in The Ramble, An Anti-Heroic Poem, gave proof of
a rough vigour and freshness, fails to arouse a laugh by his Ovid
Travestie. To send Ulysses to Scotland as a volunteer, for the
suppression of rebellion, and to leave him loitering at an inn on the
homeward road, is an artifice which no literary fashion can justify.
In truth, the taste of the dying seventeenth century was not our
taste, and we can only wonder at the indiscretion of our ancestors.
Meanwhile, Samuel Butler had discovered in Hudibras the real
purpose of burlesque? If Scarron had done nothing else than to
inspire, at a distance, this work of genius, we should still owe him
a debt of gratitude. It was not for Butler to ridicule the ancient
mythologies; he saw before his eyes the follies and pretensions
of his own time and country awaiting castigation. And so, he
turned the travesty magnificently to the uses of satire. He
employed the artifices of contrast and anachronism beloved by
the imitators of Scarron to exhibit in the clear light of absurdity
the hypocrisy and meanness of presbyterians.