Chapter V: Part 5

Though it was not the lot of Warton to attain distinction in his clerical profession, yet literary honours, more congenial to his taste and habits, awaited him. In 1756, he was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford, and faithfully performed the duties of his office, by recommending the purest models of antiquity in lectures which are said to have been "remarkable for elegance of diction, and justness of observation," and interspersed with translations from the Greek epigrammatists.

To Johnson he had already rendered a material service by his exertions to procure him the degree of Master of Arts, by diploma; and he increased the obligation, by contributing some notes to his edition of Shakspeare, and three papers to The Idler. The imputation cast on one, from whom such kindness had been received, of his "being the only man of genius without a heart," must have been rather the effect of spleen in Johnson, than the result of just observation; and if either these words, or the verses in ridicule of his poems--

Endless labour all along,
Endless labour to be wrong;
Trick'd in antique ruff and bonnet,
Ode, and elegy, and sonnet;

had been officiously repeated to Warton, we cannot much wonder at what is told, of his passing Johnson in a bookseller's shop without speaking, or at the tears which Johnson is related to have shed at that mark of alienation in his former friend.

A Description of Winchester, and a Burlesque on the Oxford Guides, or books professing to give an account of the University, both anonymous, are among the next publications attributed to his pen.

In 1758, he made a selection of Latin inscriptions in verse; and printed it, together with notes, under the title of Inscriptionum Romanarum Metricarum Delectus; and then first undertook, at the suggestion it is said of Judge Blackstone, the splendid edition of Theocritus, which made its appearance twelve years after. The papers left by Mr. St. Amand,[1] formed the basis of this work: to them were added some valuable criticisms by Toup; and though the arrangement of the whole may be justly charged with a want of clearness and order, and Dr. Gaisford has since employed much greater exactness and diligence in his edition of the same author, yet the praise of a most entertaining and delightful variety cannot be denied to the notes of Warton. In a dissertation on the Bucolic poetry of the Greeks, he shews that species of composition to have been derived from the ancient comedy; and exposes the dream of a golden age.

La bella eta dell' or unqua non venne,
Nacque da nostre menti
Entro il vago pensiero,
E nel nostro desio chiaro divenne.
_Guidi_.

The characters in Theocritus, are shewn to be distinguished into three classes,--herdsmen, shepherds, and goatherds; the first of which was superior to the next, as that in its turn was to the third; and this distinction is proved to have been accurately observed, as to allusions and images. The discrimination seems to have been overlooked by Virgil: in which instance, no less than in all the genuine graces of pastoral poetry, he is inferior to the Sicilian.[2] The contempt with which Warton speaks of those eminent and unfortunate Greek scholars, who diffused the learning of their country over Europe, after the capture of Constantinople, and whom he has here termed "Graeculi famelici," is surely reprehensible. But for their labours, Britain might never have required an editor of Theocritus.

In 1760, he contributed to the Biographia Britannica a Life of Sir Thomas Pope, twice, subsequently published, in a separate form, with considerable enlargements: in the two following years he wrote a Life of Dr. Bathurst, and in his capacity of Poetry Professor, composed Verses on the Death of George II., the Marriage of his Successor, and the Birth of the Heir Apparent, which, together with his Complaint of Cherwell, made a part of the Oxford Collections. Several of his humorous pieces were soon after (in 1764) published in the Oxford Sausage, the preface to which he also wrote; and in 1766, he edited the Greek Anthology of Cephalas. In 1767, he took the degree of Bachelor in Divinity; and in 1771, was chosen a Fellow of the Antiquarian Society; and on the nomination of the Earl of Lichfield, Chancellor of the University, was collated to the Rectory of Kiddington, Oxfordshire, a benefice of small value. Ten years after, he drew up a History of his Parish, and published it as a specimen of a Parochial History of Oxfordshire. Meanwhile, he was engaged in an undertaking, of higher interest to the national antiquities and literature.

In illustrating the origin, and tracing the progress of our vernacular poetry, we had not kept pace with the industry of our continental neighbours. To supply this deficiency, a work had been projected by Pope, and was now contemplated, and indeed entered on, by Gray and Mason, in conjunction. We cannot but regret, that Gray relinquished the undertaking, as he did, on hearing into whose hands it had fallen, since he would (as the late publication of his papers by Mr. Mathias has shewn) have brought to the task a more accurate and extensive acquaintance with those foreign sources from whence our early writers derived much of their learning, and would, probably, have adopted a better method, and more precision in the general disposition of his materials. Yet there is no reason to complain of the way in which Warton has acquitted himself, as far as he has gone. His History of English Poetry is a rich mine, in which, if we have some trouble in separating the ore from the dross, there is much precious metal to reward our pains. The first volume of this laborious work was published in 1774; two others followed, in 1778, and in 1781; and some progress had been made at his decease in printing the fourth. In 1777, he increased the poetical treasure of his country by a volume of his own poems, of which there was a demand for three other editions before his death. In 1782, we find him presented by his college to the donative of Hill Farrance, in Somersetshire, and employed in publishing an Inquiry into the Authenticity of the Poems attributed to Thomas Rowley, and Verses on Sir Joshua Reynolds's painted window at New College: about the same time, probably, he was chosen a member of the Literary Club.

In 1785, he edited Milton's minor poems, with very copious illustrations; and in the year following, was elected to the Camden Professorship of History, and was appointed to succeed Whitehead, as Poet Laureate. In his inaugural speech as Camden Professor, subjoined to the edition of his poetical works by Dr. Mant, he has shewn that the public duties required at the first foundation of the Professorship, owing to the improvement in the course of academical studies, are rendered no longer necessary. From one who had already voluntarily done so much, it would have been ungracious to exact the performance of public labours not indispensably requisite. In the discharge of his function as Laureate, he still continued, as he had long ago professed himself to be,--

Too free in servile courtly phrase to fawn;

and had the wish been gratified,--expressed by himself before his appointment, or by Gibbon after it,--that the annual tribute might be dispensed with, we should have lost some of his best lyric effusions.

Till his sixty-second year, he had experienced no interruption to a vigorous state of health. Then a seizure of the gout compelled him to seek relief from the use of the Bath waters; and he returned from that place to college, with the hope of a recovery from his complaint. But on the 20th of May, 1790, between ten and eleven o'clock at night, as he was sitting in the common room with two of the college fellows, and in higher spirits than usual, a paralytic affection deprived him of his speech. Some indistinct sounds only, in which it was thought the name of his friend, Mr. Price, the librarian of the Bodleian, was heard, escaped him, and he expired on the day but one after. His funeral was honoured by the attendance of the Vice-Chancellor, and a numerous train of followers, to the ante-chapel of his college, where he is interred, with a very plain inscription to his memory.

His person was short and thick, though in the earlier part of his life he had been thought handsome. His face, latterly, became somewhat rubicund, and his utterance so confused, that Johnson compared it to the gobbling of a turkey. The portrait of him by Reynolds, besides the resemblance of the features, is particularly characterized by the manner in which the hand is drawn, so as to give it a great air of truth. He was negligent in his dress; and so little studious of appearances, that having despatched his labours, while others were yet in bed, he might have been found, at the usual hours of study, loitering on the banks of his beloved Cherwell, or in the streets, following the drum and fife, a sound which was known to have irresistible attraction for his ears,--a spectator at a military parade, or even one amongst a crowd at a public execution. He retained to old age the amiable simplicity and unsuspecting frankness of boyhood: his affection for his brother, to whose society at Winchester he latterly retired from college, during the vacations in summer, does not seem ever to have suffered any abatement; and his manners were tranquil and unassuming. The same amenity and candour of disposition, which marked him in private life, pervade his writings, except on some few occasions, when his mind is too much under the influence of party feelings. This bias inclined him, not only to treat the character of Milton with a most undue asperity, but even to extenuate the atrocities committed under the government of Mary, and somewhat to depreciate the worth of those divines, whose attachment to the reformed religion led them to suffer death in her reign.

The writer of this paper has been told by an Italian, who was acquainted with Warton, that his favourite book in the Italian language (of which his knowledge was far from exact) was the Gerusalemme Liberata. Both the stately phrase, and the theme of that poem, were well suited to him.

Among the poets of the second class, he deserves a distinguished place. He is almost equally pleasing in his gayer, and in his more exalted moods. His mirth is without malice or indecency, and his seriousness without gloom.

In his lyrical pieces, if we seek in vain for the variety and music of Dryden, the tender and moral sublime of Gray, or the enthusiasm of Collins, yet we recognize an attention ever awake to the appearances of nature, and a mind stored with the images of classical and Gothic antiquity. Though his diction is rugged, it is like the cup in Pindar, which Telamon stretches out to Alcides, [Greek: chruso pephrkuan], rough with gold, and embost with curious imagery. A lover of the ancients would, perhaps, be offended, if the birth-day ode, beginning

Within what fountain's craggy cell
Delights the goddess Health to dwell?

were compared, as to its subject, with that of the Theban bard, on the illness of Hiero, which opens with a wish that Chiron were yet living, in order that the poet might consult him on the case of the Syracusan monarch; and in its form, with that in which he asks of his native city, in whom of all her heroes she most delighted.

Among the odes, some of which might more properly be termed idylliums, The Hamlet is of uncommon beauty; the landscape is truly English, and has the truth and tenderness of Gainsborough's pencil. Those To a Friend on his leaving a Village in Hampshire, and the First of April, are entitled to similar praise. The Crusade, The Grave of King Arthur, and most of the odes composed for the court, are in a higher strain. In the Ode written at Vale Royal Abbey, is a striking image, borrowed from some lent verses, written by Archbishop Markham, and printed in the second volume of that collection.

High o'er the trackless heath, at midnight seen,
No more the windows ranged in long array
(Where the tall shaft and fretted arch between
Thick ivy twines) the taper'd rites betray.

_Prodidit areanas arcta fenestra faces_.

His sonnets have been highly and deservedly commended by no less competent a judge than Mr. Coleridge. They are alone sufficient to prove (if any proof were wanting) that this form of composition is not unsuited to our language. One of our longest, as it is one of our most beautiful poems, the Faerie Queene, is written in a stanza which demands the continual recurrence of an equal number of rhymes; and the chief objection to our adopting the sonnet is the paucity of our rhymes.

The lines to Sir Joshua Reynolds are marked by the happy turn of the compliment, and by the strength and harmony of the versification, at least as far as the formal couplet measure will admit of those qualities. They need not fear a comparison with the verses addressed by Dryden to Kneller, or by Pope to Jervas.

His Latin compositions are nearly as excellent as his English. The few hendecasyllables he has left, have more of the vigour of Catullus than those by Flaminio; but Flaminio excels him in delicacy. The Mons Catharinae contains nearly the same images as Gray's Ode on a Prospect of Eton College. In the word "cedrinae," which occurs in the verses on Trinity College Chapel, he has, we believe, erroneously made the penultimate long. Dr. Mant has observed another mistake in his use of the word "Tempe" as a feminine noun, in the lines translated from Akenside. When in his sports with his brother's scholars at Winchester he made their exercises for them, he used to ask the boy how many faults he would have:--one such would have been sufficient for a lad near the head of the school.

His style in prose, though marked by a character of magnificence, is at times stiff and encumbered. He is too fond of alliteration in prose as well as in verse; and the cadence of his sentences is too evidently laboured.

FOOTNOTES
[1] There is a little memoir of James St. Amand, in the preface, that
will interest some readers. He was of Lincoln College, Oxford, about
1705, where he had scarcely remained a year, before his ardour for
Greek literature induced him to visit Italy, chiefly with a view of
searching MSS. that might serve for an edition of Theocritus. In
Italy, before he had reached his twentieth year, he was well known
to the learned world, and had engaged the esteem of many eminent
men; among others, of Vincenzo Gravina, Niccolo Valletto, Fontanini,
Quirino, Anton Maria Salvini, and Henry Newton, the English
Ambassador to the Duke of Tuscany. Their letters to him are
preserved in the Bodleian. By his researches into the MSS. of
Italian libraries, he assisted his learned friends, Kuster, Le
Clerc, Potter, Hudson, and Kennet, and other literary characters of
that time, in their several pursuits. He then returned to England by
way of Geneva and Paris, well laden with treasures derived from the
foreign libraries, all which, with a large collection of valuable
books, he bequeathed to the Bodleian. He died about 1750. He
desisted from his intention of publishing Theocritus, either from
ill health, or weariness of his work, or some fear about its
success. His preparations for this edition, together with some notes
on Pindar (an edition of which he also meditated), Aristophanes, the
Argonautics of Apollonius Rhodius, Demosthenes, and others, remain
in the Bodleian.
Dr. Shaw, in his edition of Apollonius Rhodius, has since made use
of his notes on that poet, and pays a tribute to his critical
abilities in the preface.
[2] Warton's distinction between them is well imagined.
"Sinillis est Theocritus amplo cuidam pascuo per se satis foecundo,
herbis pluribus frugiferis floribusque pulchris abundanti, dulcibus
etiam fluviis uvido: similis Virgilius horto distincto nitentibus
areolis; ubi larga floruni copia, sed qui studiose dispositi,
curaque meliore nutriti, atque exculti diligenter, olim hue a pascuo
illo majore transferebantur."

* * * * *

JOSEPH WARTON.

The Memoirs of Joseph Warton, by Dr. Wooll, the present Head-master of Rugby school, is a book which, although it contains a faithful representation of his life and character by one who had been his pupil, and though it is enriched with a collection of letters between some of the men most distinguished in literature during his time, is yet so much less known than it deserves, that in speaking of it to Mr. Hayley, who had been intimate with Warton, and to whom some of the letters are addressed, I found him ignorant of its contents. It will supply me with much of what I have to relate concerning the subject of it.

There is no instance in this country of two brothers having been equally celebrated for their skill in poetry with Joseph and Thomas Warton. What has been already told of the parentage of the one renders it unnecessary to say more in this respect of the other. He was born at Dunsfold, in Surrey, under the roof of his maternal grandfather, in the beginning of 1722. Like his brother, he experienced the care of an affectionate parent, who did the utmost his scanty means would allow to educate them both as scholars; but with this difference, that Joseph being three-and -twenty years old at the time of Mr. Warton's decease, whereas Thomas was but seventeen, was more capable of appreciating, as it deserved, the tenderness of such a father. To what has been before said of this estimable man, I have to add, that his poems, of which I had once a cursory view, appeared to me to merit more notice than they have obtained; and that his version of Fracastorio's pathetic lamentation on the death of his two sons particularly engaged my attention. Suavis adeo poeta ac doctus, is the testimony borne to him by one[1] who will himself have higher claims of the same kind on posterity.

Having been some time at New College school, but principally taught by his father till he was fourteen years old, Joseph was then admitted on the foundation of Winchester, under Dr. Sandby. Here, together with two of his school-fellows, of whom Collins was one, he became a contributor to the Gentleman's Magazine. Johnson, who then assisted in editing that miscellany, had sagacity enough to distinguish, from the rest, a few lines that were sent by Collins, which, though not remarkable for excellence, ought now to take their place among his other poems.

In 1740, Warton being superannuated at Winchester, was entered of Oriel College, Oxford; and taking his bachelor's degree, in 1744, was ordained to his father's curacy at Basingstoke. Having lost his father about a year after, he removed to the curacy of Chelsea, in February, 1746. Near this time, I suppose a letter, that is without date of time or place, to have been written to his brother. As it informs us of some particulars relating to Collins, of whom it is to be wished that more were known, I am tempted to transcribe it.

Dear Tom,--You will wonder to see my name in an advertisement next
week, so I thought I would apprize you of it. The case was this.
Collins met me in Surrey, at Guildford races, when I wrote out for him
my Odes, and he likewise communicated some of his to me: and being
both in very high spirits, we took courage, resolved to join our
forces, and to publish them immediately. I flatter myself, that I
shall lose no honour by this publication, because I believe these
Odes, as they now stand, are infinitely the best things I ever wrote.
You will see a very pretty one of Collins's, on the Death of Colonel
Ross before Tournay. It is addressed to a lady who was Ross's intimate
acquaintance, and who, by the way, is Miss Bett Goddard. Collins is
not to publish the Odes unless he gets ten guineas for them.

I returned from Milford last night, where I left Collins with my
mother and sister, and he sets out to-day for London. I must now tell
you, that I have sent him your imitation of Horace's Blandusian
Fountain, to be printed amongst ours, and which you shall own or not
as you think proper. I would not have done this without your consent,
but because I think it very poetically and correctly done, and will
get you honour.

* * * * *

You will let me know what the Oxford critics say. Adieu, dear Tom.

I am your most affectionate brother,

J. WARTON.

On this Dr. Wooll founds a conjecture, that Warton published a volume of poems conjointly with his brother and Collins; but adds, that after a diligent search he had not been able to discover it. I think it more likely that the design was abandoned. However this may be, it is certain that he himself published a volume of Odes in 1746, of which, as I learn from a note to the present Bishop of Killaloe's verses to his memory, a second edition appeared in the following year. To complete his recovery from the small-pox, which he had taken at Chelsea, he went, in May 1746, to Chobham; and then, after officiating for a few months at Chawton and Droxford, returned to his first curacy of Basingstoke. In the next year he was presented by the Duke of Bolton to the rectory of Wynslade, by which preferment he was enabled immediately to marry a young lady in that neighbourhood, of the name of Daman, to whom he had been long attached. Of the country adjacent to Wynslade, Thomas Warton has given a very pleasing description in one of his sonnets, and in an "Ode sent to a friend, on his leaving a favourite village in Hampshire." Both were written on the occasion of his brother's absence, who had gone in the train of the Duke of Bolton to France. One motive, on which he went, would not now be thought quite creditable to a clergyman. It was that he might be at hand to join the Duke in marriage to his mistress, as soon as the Duchess, who was far gone in a dropsy, should be no more. Warton set out reluctantly, but with the hope that he might benefit his family by compliance. He had not been away five months, when the impatience for home came on him so strongly, that he quitted Montauban, where the Duke was residing, and made his way towards England by such conveyances as he could meet with; at one time in a courier's cart; at another, in the company of carriers who were travelling in Britanny. Thus he scrambled on to Bourdeaux, and till he reached St. Malo's, where he took ship and landed at Southampton. When he had been returned a month the Duchess died. He then asked permission to go back, and perform the marriage ceremony; but the chaplain of the embassy at Turin was already on his way for that purpose.

He was now once more at Wynslade, restored to a domestic life, and the uninterrupted pursuit of his studies. Before going abroad, he had published (in 1749) his Ode on West's translation of Pindar; and after his return, employed himself in writing papers, chiefly on subjects of criticism, for the Adventurer, and in preparing for the press an edition of Virgil, which (in 1753) he published, together with Pitt's translation of the Aeneid, his own of the Eclogues and Georgies, his notes on the whole, and several essays. The book has been found useful for schools; and was thought at the time to do him so much credit, that it obtained for him the degree of Master of Arts by diploma from the University of Oxford, and no doubt was instrumental in recommending him to the place of second master of Winchester School, to which he was appointed in 1755. In the meantime he had been presented by the Jervoise family to the rectory of Tunworth, and resided for a short time at that place.

In 1756, appeared the first volume of his Essay on the genius and writings of Pope, dedicated to Young. The name of the author was to have been concealed, but he does not seem to have kept his own secret very carefully, for it was immediately spoken of as his by Akenside, Johnson, and Dr. Birch. The second volume did not follow till after an interval of twenty-six years. The information contained in this essay, which is better known than his other writings, is such as the recollection of a scholar, conversant in polite literature, might easily have supplied. He does not, like his brother, ransack the stores of antiquity for what has been forgotten, but deserves to be recalled; nor, like Hurd, exercise, on common materials, a refinement that gives the air of novelty to that with which we have been long familiar. He relaxes, as Johnson said of him, the brow of criticism into a smile. Though no longer in his desk and gown, he is still the benevolent and condescending instructor of youth; a writer, more capable of amusing and tempting onwards, by some pleasant anticipations, one who is a novice in letters, than of satisfying the demands of those already initiated. He deserves some praise for having been one of the first who attempted to moderate the extravagant admiration for Pope, whom he considered as the poet of reason rather than of fancy; and to disengage us from the trammels of the French school. Some of those who followed have ventured much further, with success; but it was something to have broken the ice. I do not know that he published anything else while he remained at Winchester, except[2] an edition of Sir Philip Sydney's Defence of Poesy, and Observations on Eloquence and Poetry from the Discoveries of Ben Jonson, in 1787. His literary exertions, and the attention he paid to the duties of his school, did not go unrewarded. In 1766 he was advanced to the Head-mastership of Winchester, and took his two degrees in divinity; in 1782, Bishop Lowth gave him a prebend of St. Paul's, and the rectory of Chorley, which he was allowed to exchange for Wickham, in Hants. In 1788, through the intervention of Lord Shannon with Mr. Pitt, he obtained a prebend of Winchester; and soon after, at the solicitation of Lord Malmesbury, was presented by the Bishop of that diocese to the rectory of Easton, which, in the course of a twelve-month, he exchanged for Upham.

In his domestic relations, he enjoyed as much happiness as prudence and affection could ensure him, but not unembittered by those disastrous accidents to which every father of a family is exposed. Some years after his marriage (1763) his letters to his brother discover him struggling under his anguish for the loss of a favourite daughter, who had died under inoculation, but striving to conceal his feelings for the sake of a wife whom he tenderly loved. In 1772, this wife was also taken from him, leaving him with six children. His second son, Thomas, fellow of New College, a man on whom the poetic spirit of the Wartons had descended, was found by him, one day when he returned from the college prayers, sitting in the chair in which he had left him after dinner, without life. It was the termination of a disease under which he had long laboured. This happened in 1786; and before he had space to recover the blow, in four years after, his brother died. In 1773, he had solaced himself by a second marriage with Miss Nicholas, the daughter of Robert Nicholas, Esq. In both his matrimonial connexions, his sister described him as having been eminently fortunate.

The latter part of his life was spent in retirement and tranquillity. In 1793, he resigned the mastership of Winchester, and settled himself on his living of Wickham. He had intended to finish his brother's History of English Poetry, which wanted another volume to complete it; and might now have found time enough to accomplish the task. But an obstacle presented itself, by which it is likely that he was discouraged from proceeding. The description given by Daniel Prince, a respectable old bookseller at Oxford, of the state in which his brother's rooms were found at his decease, and of the fate that befell his manuscripts and his property, may be edifying to some future fellow of a college, who shall employ himself in similar pursuits.[3] "Poor Thomas Warton's papers were in a sad litter, and his brother Joe has made matters worse by confusedly cramming all together, sending them to Winchester, &c. Mr. Warton could not give so much as his old clothes; his very shoes, stockings, and wigs, laid about in abundance. Where could his money go? It must lay in paper among his papers, or be laid in a book; he could not, nor did not spend it; and his brother, on that score, is greatly disappointed."

A republication of Pope's works, with notes, offered him an easier occupation than the digesting of those scattered materials for the History of Poetry which he had thus assisted in disarranging. He was probably glad to escape from inaction, and set himself to parcel out his Essay into comments for this edition; which, in 1797, was published in nine volumes. His indiscretion, in adding to it some of Pope's productions which had been before excluded, has been most bitterly censured. That it would have been better to let them remain where they were can scarcely be questioned. But I should be more willing to regard the insertion of them as proof of his own simplicity, in suspecting no harm from what he had himself found to be harmless, than of any design to communicate injury to others. A long life, passed without blame, and in the faithful discharge of arduous duties, ought to have secured him from this misconstruction at its close. After all, the pieces objected to are such as are more offensive to good manners than dangerous to morality. There are some other of Pope's writings, more likely to inflame the passions, which yet no one scruples to read; and Dr. Wooll has suggested that it was inconsistent to set up the writer as a teacher of virtue, and in the same breath to condemn his editor as a pander to vice.

He bestowed on his censurers no more consideration than they deserved, and went on to prepare an edition of Dry den for the press. Two volumes, with his notes, were completed, when his labours were finally broken off by a painful disease. His malady was an affection of the kidneys, which continued to harass him for some months, and ended in a fatal paralysis on the twenty-third of February, 1800, in the seventy-eighth year of his age.

He was interred in the cathedral at Winchester, where, by the contributions of his former scholars, a monument, executed by Mr. Flaxman, was raised to his memory, of a design so elegant, as the tomb of a poet has not often been honoured with. It is inscribed with the following epitaph--

H.S.E. Josephus Warton, S.T.P. Hujus Ecclesiae Prebendarius: Scolae Wintoniensis Per annos fere triginta Informator: Poeta fervidus, facilis, expolitus. Criticus eruditus, perspicax, elegans: Obiit XXIII'o. Feb. M.D.CCC. Aetat. LXXVIII. Hoc qualecunque Pietatis monumentum Praeceptori optimo, Desideratissimo, Wiccamici sui P.C.

In the frankness of his disposition he appears to have resembled his brother, but with more liveliness and more love of general society. I have heard, that in the carelessness of colloquial freedom, he was apt to commit himself by hasty and undigested observations. As he did not aim at being very oracular himself, so he was unusually tolerant of ignorance in others. Of this, a diverting instance is recorded by Dr. Wooll: meeting in company with a lady who was a kinswoman of Pope's, he eagerly availed himself of the occasion offered for learning some new particulars concerning one by whom so much of his time and thoughts had been engaged. "Pray, Sir," began the lady, "did not you write a book about my cousin Pope?" "Yes, Madam;" was the reply. "They tell me 'twas vastly clever. He wrote a great many plays, did not he?" was the next question. "I never heard but of one attempt, Madam;" said Warton, beginning perhaps to expect some discovery, when his hopes were suddenly crushed by an "Oh! no," from the lady, "I beg your pardon, Sir. That was Mr. Shakspeare. I always confound them." He had the good breeding to conceal his disappointment, and to take a courteous leave of the kinswoman of Pope.

He was regarded with great affection by those whom he had educated. The opinions of a man so long experienced in the characters of children, and in the best methods of instruction, are on these subjects entitled to much notice. "He knew," says his biographer and pupil, "that the human mind developed itself progressively, but not always in the same consistent degrees, or at periods uniformly similar." He conjectured, therefore, that the most probable method of ensuring some valuable improvement to the generality of boys was not to exact what the generality are incapable of performing. As a remedy for inaccurate construction, arising either from apparent idleness or inability, he highly approved, and sedulously imposed, translation. Modesty, timidity, or many other constitutional impediments, may prevent a boy from displaying before his master, and in the front of his class, those talents of which privacy, and a relief from these embarrassments, will often give proof. These sentiments were confirmed by that most infallible test, experience; as he declared (within a few years of his death) that "the best scholars he had sent into the world were those whom, whilst second master, he had thus habituated to translation, and given a capacity of comparing and associating the idiom of the dead languages with their own."

It is pleasant to observe the impression which men, who have engrossed to themselves the attention of posterity, have made on one another, when chance has brought them together. Of Mason, whom he fell in with at York, he tells his brother, that "he is the most easy, best natured, agreeable man he ever met with." In the next year, he met with Goldsmith, and observed of him, "that of all solemn coxcombs, he was the first, yet sensible; and that he affected to use Johnson's hard words in conversation."

Soon after the first volume of his Essay on Pope had been published, Lyttleton, then newly raised to the peerage, gave him his scarf, and submitted some of his writings, before they were printed, to his inspection.

Harris, the author of Hermes, and Lowth, were others in whose friendship he might justly have prided himself.

He was one of the few that did not shrink from a collision with Johnson; who could so ill endure a shock of this kind, that on one occasion he cried out impatiently, "Sir, I am not used to contradiction."

"It would be better for yourself and your friends, Sir, if you were;" was the natural retort. Their common friends interfered, to prevent a ruder altercation.

Like Johnson, he delighted in London, where he regularly indulged himself by passing the holidays at Christmas. His fondness for everything relating to a military life was a propensity that he shared with his brother; and while the one might have been seen following a drum and fife at Oxford, the other, by the sprightliness of his conversation, had drawn a circle of red coats about him at the St. James's Coffee House, where he frequently breakfasted. Both of them were members of the Literary Club, set on foot by Sir Joshua Reynolds.

This gaiety of temper did not hinder him from discharging his clerical office in a becoming manner. "His style of preaching," we are told by Mr. Wooll, "was unaffectedly earnest and impressive; and the dignified solemnity with which he read the Liturgy, particularly the Communion Service, was remarkably awful."

His reputation as a critic and a scholar has preserved his poetry from neglect. Of his Odes, that to Fancy, written when he was very young, is one that least disappoints us by a want of poetic feeling. Yet if we compare it with that by Collins, on the Poetical Character, we shall see of how much higher beauty the same subject was capable. In the Ode to Evening, he has again tried his strength with Collins. There are some images of rural life in it that have the appearance of being drawn from nature, and which therefore please.

Hail, meek-eyed maiden, clad in sober grey, Whose soft approach the weary woodman loves, As homeward bent to kiss his prattling babes, He jocund whistles through the twilight groves. * * * * * * * * * * To the deep wood the clamorous rooks repair, Light skims the swallow o'er the watery scene, And from the sheep-cotes, and fresh-furrow'd field, Stout ploughmen meet to wrestle on the green.

The swain that artless sings on yonder rock, His nibbling sheep and lengthening shadow spies; Pleased with the cool, the calm, refreshful hour, And the hoarse hummings of unnumber'd flies.

But these pretty stanzas are interrupted by the mention of Phoebus, the Dryads, old Sylvan, and Pan. The Ode to Content is in the same metre as his school-fellow's Ode to Evening; but in the numbers, it is very inferior both to that and to Mrs. Barbauld's Ode to Spring.

In his Dying Indian, he has produced a few lines of extraordinary force and pathos. The rest of his poems, in blank verse, are for the most part of an indifferent structure.

In his Translations from Virgil, he will probably be found to excel Dryden as much in correctness, as he falls short of him in animation and harmony.

When his Odes were first published, Gray perceived the author to be devoid of invention, but praised him for a very poetical choice of expression, and for a good ear, and even thus perhaps a little over-rated his powers. But our lyric poetry was not then what it has since been made by Gray himself, the younger Warton, Mason, Russell, and one or two writers now living.

If he had enjoyed more leisure, it is probable that he might have written better; for he was solicitous not to lose any distinction to be acquired by his poetry; and took care to reclaim a copy of humorous verses, entitled, an Epistle from Thomas Hearne, which had been attributed by mistake to his brother, among whose poems it is still printed.

FOOTNOTES [1] Mr. Crowe, in one of his Crewian Orations. [2] Nichols's Literary Anecdotes, vol. ix. [3] Nichols's Literary Anecdotes, vol. ix.

* * * * *

CHRISTOPHER ANSTEY.

An account of Christopher Anstey, written by his second son, is prefixed to the handsome edition of his works, printed at London, in 1808. He was born on the thirty-first of October, 1724, and was the son of Doctor Anstey, rector of Brinkley, in Cambridgeshire, a living in the gift of St. John's College, Cambridge; of which the Doctor had formerly been fellow and tutor. His mother was Mary, daughter of Anthony Thompson, Esq. of Trumpington, in the same county. They had no offspring but our poet, and a daughter born some years before him.

His father was afflicted with a total deafness for so considerable a portion of his life, as never to have heard the sound of his son's voice; and was thus rendered incapable of communicating to him that instruction which he might otherwise have derived from a parent endowed with remarkable acuteness of understanding. He was, therefore, sent very early to school at Bury St. Edmunds. Here he continued, under the tuition of the Rev. Arthur Kinsman, till he was removed to Eton; on the foundation of which school he was afterwards placed.

His studies having been completed with great credit to himself, under Doctor George, the head-master of Eton, in the year 1742 he succeeded to a scholarship of King's College, Cambridge, where his classical attainments were not neglected. He was admitted in 1745 to a fellowship of his college; and, in the next year, he took his degree of Bachelor of Arts. He now resided chiefly in the University, where his resistance to an innovation, attempted to be introduced into King's College, involved him in a dispute which occasioned the degree of Master to be refused him. That College had immemorially asserted for its members an exemption from the performance of those public exercises demanded of the rest of the University as a qualification for their degrees. This right was now questioned; and it was required of the Bachelor Fellows of King's, that they should compose and pronounce a Latin oration in the public schools. Such an infringement of privilege was not to be tamely endured. After some opposition made by Anstey, in common with the other junior Fellows, the exercise in dispute was at lenth exacted. But Anstey, who was the senior Bachelor of the year, and to whose lot it therefore fell first to deliver this obnoxious declamation, contrived to frame it in such a manner, as to cast a ridicule on the whole proceeding. He was accordingly interrupted in the recitation of it, and ordered to compose another; in which, at the same time that he pretended to exculpate himself from his former offence, he continued in the same vein of raillery. Though his degree was withheld in consequence of this pertinacity, yet it produced the desired effect of maintaining for the College its former freedom.

While an under-graduate, he had distinguished himself by his Latin verses, called the Tripos Verses; and, in 1748, by a poem, in the same language, on the Peace; printed in the Cambridge Collection.

His quarrel with the senior part of the University did not deprive him of his fellowship. He was still occasionally an inmate of the College, and did not cease to be a Fellow, till he came into the possession of the family estate at his mother's death, in 1754.

In two years after he married Anne, third daughter of Felix Calvert, Esq. of Albury-Hall, in Hertfordshire, and the sister of John Calvert, Esq. one of his most intimate friends, who was returned to that and many successive Parliaments, for the borough of Hertford. "By this most excellent lady," says his biographer, with the amiable warmth of filial tenderness, "who was allowed to possess every endowment of person, and qualification of mind and disposition which could render her interesting and attractive in domestic life, and whom he justly regarded as the pattern of every virtue, and the source of all his happiness, he lived in uninterrupted and undiminished esteem and affection for nearly half a century; and by her (who for the happiness of her family is still living) he had thirteen children, of whom eight only survive him."

This long period is little checquered with events. Having no taste for public business, and his circumstances being easy and independent, he passed the first fourteen years at his seat in Cambridgeshire, in an alternation of study and the recreations of rural life, in which he took much pleasure. But, at the end of that time, the loss of his sister gave a shock to his spirits, which they did not speedily recover. That she was a lady of superior talents is probable, from her having been admitted to a friendship and correspondence with Mrs. Montague, then Miss Robinson. The effect which this deprivation produced on him was such as to hasten the approach, and perhaps to aggravate the violence, of a bilious fever, for the cure of which by Doctor Heberden's advice, he visited Bath, and by the use of those waters was gradually restored to health.

In 1766 he published his Bath Guide, from the press of Cambridge; a poem, which aiming at the popular follies of the day, and being written in a very lively and uncommon style, rapidly made its way to the favour of the public. At its first appearance, Gray, who was not easily pleased, in a letter to one of his friends observed, that it was the only thing in fashion, and that it was a new and original kind of humour. Soon after the publication of the second edition, he sold the copy-right for two hundred pounds to Dodsley, and gave the profits previously accruing from the work to the General Hospital at Bath. Dodsley, about ten years after his purchase, candidly owned that the sale had been more productive to him than that of any other book in which he had before been concerned; and with much liberality restored the copy-right to the author.

In 1767 he wrote a short Elegy on the Death of the Marquis of Tavistock; and the Patriot, a Pindaric Epistle, intended to bring into discredit the practice of prize-fighting.

Not long after he was called to serve the office of high-sheriff for the county of Cambridge. In 1770 he quitted his seat there for a house which he purchased in Bath. The greater convenience of obtaining instruction for a numerous family, the education of which had hitherto been superintended by himself, was one of the motives that induced him to this change of habitation.

The Heroic Epistle to Sir William Chambers appearing soon after his arrival at Bath, and being by many imputed to a writer who had lately so much distinguished himself by his talent for satire, he was at considerable pains to disavow that publication; and by some lines containing a deserved compliment to his sovereign, gave a sufficient pledge for the honesty of his disclaimer.

In 1776, a poem entitled An Election Ball, founded on a theme proposed by Lady Miller, who held a sort of little poetical court at her villa at Batheaston, did not disappoint the expectations formed of the author of the Bath Guide. It was at first written in the Somersetshire dialect, but was afterwards judiciously stripped of its provincialism.

About 1786 he entertained a design of collecting his poems, and publishing them together. But the painful recollections which this task awakened, of those friends and companions of his youth who had been separated from him by death during so long a period, made him relinquish his intention. He committed, however, to the press, translations of some of Gay's Fables, which had been made into Latin, chiefly with a view to the improvement of his children; an Alcaic Ode to Doctor Jenner, on the discovery of the Cowpock; and several short poems in his own language. "His increasing years," to use the words of his son, "stole inperceptibly on the even tenor of his life, and gradually lessened the distance of his journey through it, without obscuring the serenity of the prospect. Unimpeded by sickness, and unclouded by sorrow, or any serious misfortune, his life was a life of temperance, of self-denial, and of moderation, in all things; and of great regularity. He rose early in the morning, _ante diem poscens chartas_, and was constant on horseback at his usual hour, and in all seasons. His summers were uniformly passed at Cheltenham, with his family, during the latter part of his life; and upon his return to Bath in the autumn, he fell habitually into the same unruffled scenes of domestic ease and tranquillity, rendered every day more joyous and interesting to him by the increase of his family circle, and the enlargement of his hospitable table; and by many circumstances and occurrences connected with the welfare of his children, which gave him infinite delight and satisfaction."

At the beginning of 1805, he experienced a sudden and general failure of his bodily faculties, and a correspondent depressure of mind. The little confidence he placed in the power of medicine made him reluctantly comply with the wishes of his friends, that he should take the opinion of Doctor Haygarth. Yet he was not without hope of alleviation to his complaints from change of air; and, therefore, removed from Bath to the house of his son-in-law, Mr. Bosanquet, in Wiltshire. Here having at first revived a little, he soon relapsed, and declining gradually, expired in the eighty-first year of his age, without apparent suffering, in the possession of his intellectual powers, and, according to the tender wish of Pindar for one of his patrons--

[Greek: huion, psaumi, paristamenon,]

in the midst of his children.

He was buried in the parish church of Walcot, in the city of Bath, in the same vault with his fourth daughter the wife of Rear-Admiral Sotheby, and her two infant children.

A cenotaph has been erected to his memory among the poets of his country in Westminster Abbey, by his eldest son, the Rev. Christopher Anstey, with the following inscription:--

M.S. Christopheri Anstey, Arm. Alumni Etonensis, Et Collegii Regalis apud Cantabrigienses olim Socii, Poetae, Literis elegantioribus adprime ornati, Et inter principes Poetarum, Qui in eodem genere floruerunt, Sedem eximiam tenentis. Ille annum circiter MDCCLXX. Rus suum in agro Cantabrigiensi Mutavit Bathonia, Quem locum ei praeter omne dudum arrisisse Testis est, celeberrimum illud Poema, Titulo inde ducto insignitum: Ibi deinceps sex et triginta annos commoratus, Obiit A.D. MDCCCV. Et aetatis suae Octogesimo primo.

To this there is an encomium added, which its prolixity hinders me from inserting.

A painter and a poet were, perhaps, never more similar to each other in their talents than the contemporaries Bunbury and Anstey. There is in both an admirable power of seizing the ludicrous and the grotesque in their descriptions of persons and incidents in familiar life; and this accompanied by an elegance which might have seemed scarcely compatible with that power. There is in both an absence of any extraordinary elevation or vigour; which we do not regret, because we can hardly conceive but that they would be less pleasing if they were in any respect different from what they are. Each possesses a perfect facility and command over his own peculiar manner, which has secured him from having any successful imitator. Yet as they were both employed in representing the fortuitous and transient follies, which the face of society had put on in their own day, rather than in portraying the broader and more permanent distinctions of character and manners, it may be questioned whether they can be much relished out of their own country, and whether even there, the effect must not be weakened as fatuity and absurdity shall discover new methods of fastening ridicule upon themselves. They border more nearly on farce than comedy. They have neither of them any thing of fancy, that power which can give a new and higher interest to the laughable itself, by mingling it with the marvellous, and which has placed Aristophanes so far above all his followers.

When Anstey ventures out of his own walk, he does not succeed so well. It is strange that he should have attempted a paraphrase of St. Paul's eulogium on Charity, after the same task had been so ably executed by Prior. If there is anything, however, that will bear repetition, in a variety of forms, it is that passage of scripture; and his verses though not equal to Prior's, may still be read with pleasure.

The Farmer's Daughter is a plain and affecting tale.

His Latin verses might well have been spared. In the translation of Gray's Elegy there is a more than usual crampness; occasioned, perhaps, by his having rendered into hexameters the stanzas of four lines, to which the elegiac measure of the Romans would have been better suited. The Epistola Poetica Familiaris, addressed to his friend Mr. Bamfylde, has more freedom. His scholarship did him better service when it suggested to him passages in the poets of antiquity, which he has parodied with singular happiness. Such is that imitated in one of Simkin's Letters:

Do the gods such a noble ambition inspire?
Or a god do we make of each ardent desire?

from Virgil's

Dine hunc ardorem mentibus addunt,
Euryale? an sua cuique deus fit dira cupido?

a parody that is not the less diverting, from its having been before gravely made by Tasso:

O dio l'inspira,
O l'uom del suo voler suo dio si face.

On the whole, he has the rare merit of having discovered a mode of entertaining his readers, which belongs exclusively to himself.

* * * * *

WILLIAM MASON.

It is to be regretted that no one of Mason's friends has thought fit to pay the same tribute of respect to his memory, which he had himself paid to that of his two poetical friends, Gray and Whitehead. In this dearth of authentic biography, we must be contented with such information concerning him, as either his own writings, or the incidental mention made of him by others, will furnish.

William Mason was born on the 23rd of February, 1725, at Hull, where his father, who was vicar of St. Trinity, resided. Whether he had any other preceptor in boyhood, except his parent, is not known.