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'The French are very just to eminent men in this point; not 20 a learned man nor a poet can die, but all Europe must be acquainted with his accomplishments'. They give praise and expect it in their turns: they commend their Patrus3 and Molières as well as their Condes and Turennes; their Pellisons* and Racines have their elogies as well as the prince whom they celebrate; and their poems, their mercuries, and orations, nay their very gazettes, are filled with the praises of the learned.

'I am satisfied, had they a Philips among them and known how 21 to value him; had they one of his learning, his temper, but above all of that particular turn of humour, that altogether new genius, he had been an example to their poets and a subject of their panegyricks, and perhaps set in competition with the ancients, to whom only he ought to submit.

'I shall therefore endeavour to do justice to his memory, since 22 nobody else undertakes it. And indeed I can assign no cause why so many of his acquaintance (that are as willing and more able than myself to give an account of him) should forbear to celebrate the memory of one so dear to them, but only that they look upon it as a work entirely belonging to me.

'I shall content myself with giving only a character of the 23

He refers to the Éloges of the Academy. Voltaire, in his Lettres sur les Anglais, says :-'Un jour un bel esprit de ce pays-là me demanda les Mémoires de l'Académie Française; elle n'écrit point de mémoires, lui répondis-je; mais elle a fait imprimer soixante ou quatrevingts volumes de complimens. Il en parcourut un ou deux; il ne put jamais entendre ce style, quoiqu'il entendît fort bien tous nos bons auteurs. Tout ce que j'entrevois, me dit-il, dans ces beaux discours, c'est que le récipiendaire ayant assuré que son prédécesseur était un grand homme, que le Cardinal de Richelieu était un très grand homme, le chancelier Séguier un assez grand homme, le directeur lui répond la même chose, et ajoute que le récipiendaire pourrait bien aussi être une espèce de grand homme, et que pour lui directeur, il n'en quitte pas sa part.... On s'est imposé une espèce de loi d'ennuyer le public.' VOLTAIRE, Euvres, xxiv. 145.

Call Tibbald Shakespeare, and
he'll swear the Nine,
Dear Cibber! never matched one
ode of thine.'

POPE, Imit. Hor. Epis. ii. 2. 137.

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3 Patru (Olivier), né à Paris, en 1604, le premier qui ait introduit la pureté de la langue dans le barreau. Mort en 1681.' VOLTAIRE, Euvres, xvii. 139.

'Mais pour moi, que l'éclat ne saurait décevoir,

Qui mets au rang des biens l'esprit et le savoir,

J'estime autant Patru, même dans l'indigence,

Qu'un commis engraissé des malheurs de la France.'

BOILEAU, Epitres, v. 95.

4 'Pellisson-Fontanier (Paul), né en 1624; poète médiocre, à la vérité, mais homme très savant et très éloquent. . . . Mort en 1693. VOLTAIRE, Euvres, xvii. 139.

Boileau in the couplet (Satires, viii. 209) which runs :'L'or même à la laideur donne un teint de beauté :

Mais tout devient affreux avec la pauvreté,'

had at first written :

'L'or même à Pélisson,' &c. In a note it is stated that ' Pélisson était d'une laideur si étonnante, qu'une dame lui dit un jour, qu'il abusait de la permission que les hommes ont d'être laids.' Euvres, i. 130.

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person and his writings, without meddling with the transactions of his life, which was altogether private: I shall only make this known observation of his family, that there were scarce so many extraordinary men in any one. I have been acquainted with five of his brothers (of which three are still living), all men of fine parts, yet all of a very unlike temper and genius. So that their fruitful mother, like the mother of the gods, seems to have produced a numerous offspring, all of different though uncommon faculties. Of the living, neither their modesty nor the humour of the present age permits me to speak: of the dead, I may say something.

'One of them had made the greatest progress in the study of the law of nature and nations of any one I know. He had perfectly mastered, and even improved, the notions of Grotius, and the more refined ones of Puffendorf. He could refute Hobbes with as much solidity as some of greater name, and expose him with as much wit as Echard'. That noble study, which requires the greatest reach of reason and nicety of distinction, was not at all difficult to him. 'Twas a national loss to be deprived of one who understood a science so necessary, and yet so unknown in England. I shall add only, he had the same honesty and sincerity as the person I write of, but more heat. The former was more inclined to argue, the latter to divert: one employed his reason more; the other his imagination: the former had been well qualified for those posts, which the modesty of the latter made him refuse. His other dead brother would have been an ornament to the college of which he was a member. He had a genius either for poetry or oratory; and, though very young, composed several very agreeable pieces. In all probability he would have wrote as finely, as his brother did nobly. He might have been the Waller, as the other was the Milton of his time. The one might celebrate Marlborough, the other his beautiful offspring. This had not been so fit to describe the actions of heroes as the virtues of private men. In a word, he had been fitter for my place; and while his brother was writing upon the greatest men that any age ever produced, in a style equal to them, he might have served as a panegyrist on him.

'This is all I think necessary to say of his family. I shall proceed to himself and his writings; which I shall first treat of, because I know they are censured by some out of envy, and more out of ignorance.

'The Splendid Shilling, which is far the least considerable, has the more general reputation, and perhaps hinders the character of the rest. The style agreed so well with the burlesque that

'John Eachard, D.D., published two Dialogues on Hobbes. 'I have known men, happy enough at ridicule, who upon grave subjects

were perfectly stupid; of which Dr. Eachard of Cambridge, who writ The Contempt of the Clergy, was a great instance.' SWIFT, Works, ix. 234

the ignorant thought it could become nothing else. Every body is pleased with that work. But to judge rightly of the other requires a perfect mastery of poetry and criticism, a just contempt of the little turns and witticisms now in vogue, and, above all, a perfect understanding of poetical diction and description.

'All that have any taste of poetry will agree, that the great 27 burlesque is much to be preferred to the low. It is much easier to make a great thing appear little, than a little one great : Cotton and others of a very low genius have done the former'; but Philips, Garth 2, and Boileau 3 only the latter.

'A picture in miniature is every painter's talent; but a piece 28 for a cupola, where all the figures are enlarged, yet proportioned to the eye, requires a master's hand.

'It must still be more acceptable than the low burlesque, 29 because the images of the latter are mean and filthy, and the language itself entirely unknown to all men of good breeding. The style of Billingsgate would not make a very agreeable figure at St. James's. A gentleman would take but little pleasure in language, which he would think it hard to be accosted in, or in reading words which he could not pronounce without blushing. The lofty burlesque is the more to be admired, because, to write it, the author must be master of two of the most different talents in nature. A talent to find out and expose what is ridiculous, is very different from that which is to raise and elevate. We must read Virgil and Milton for the one, and Horace and Hudibras for the other. We know that the authors of excellent comedies have often failed in the grave style, and the tragedian as often in comedy. Admiration and laughter are of such opposite natures that they are seldom created by the same person. The man of mirth is always observing the follies and weaknesses, the serious writer the virtues or crimes of mankind; one is pleased with contemplating a beau, the other a hero. Even from the same object they would draw different ideas: Achilles would appear in very different lights to Thersites and Alexander. The one would admire the courage and greatness of his soul; the other would ridicule the vanity and rashness of his temper. As the satyrist says to Hannibal:

"I curre per Alpes, Ut pueris placeas, et declamatio fias *."

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30 'The contrariety of style to the subject pleases the more strongly, because it is more surprising; the expectation of the reader is pleasantly deceived, who expects an humble style from the subject, or a great subject from the style. It pleases the more universally, because it is agreeable to the taste both of the grave and the merry: but more particularly so to those who have a relish of the best writers, and the noblest sort of poetry. I shall produce only one passage out of this poet, which is the misfortune of his Galligaskins:

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'My Galligaskins, which [that] have long withstood
The winter's fury and encroaching frosts,

By time subdued (what will not time subdue!).”

This is admirably pathetical, and shews very well the vicissitudes of sublunary things. The rest goes on to a prodigious height; and a man in Greenland could hardly have made a more pathetick and terrible complaint. Is it not surprising that the subject should be so mean, and the verse so pompous? that the least things in his poetry, as in a microscope, should grow great and formidable to the eye? especially considering that, not understanding French, he had no model for his style? that he should have no writer to imitate, and himself be inimitable? that he should do all this before he was twenty? at an age, which is usually pleased with a glare of false thoughts, little turns, and unnatural fustian? at an age, at which Cowley, Dryden, and I had almost said Virgil, were inconsiderable? So soon was his imagination at its full strength, his judgement ripe, and his humour complete.

'This poem was written for his own diversion, without any design of publication. It was communicated but to me; but soon spread, and fell into the hands of pirates. It was put out, vilely mangled, by Ben Bragge2; and impudently said to be corrected by the author. This grievance is now grown more epidemical; and no man now has a right to his own thoughts, or a title to his own writings3. Xenophon answered the Persian,

Eng. Poets, xvii. 243. Galligaskins were 'a kind of wide hose or breeches worn in the 16th and 17th centuries; later, a more or less ludicrous term for loose breeches in general.' New Eng. Dict.

"Whereas a false copy is published by B. Bragg of an imitation of Milton, under the title of The Splendid Shilling, &c. This is to give notice that it will be printed next week from a true copy.' The Daily Courant, Thursday, Feb. 1, 1705.' Cunningham's Lives of the Poets, ii. 31.

3 It was the statute of the 8th of Queen Anne that 'for the first time Conferred directly upon authors a qualified and time-limited property in their compilations and productions.' Till that time 'the author's copy was the manuscript, and the only way open to him for dealing with that was to sell it out and out as John Milton did Paradise Lost, or to persuade the Crown to give him a grant of letters patent for a term of years.' A. BIRRELL, Copyright in Books, 1899, pp. 74, 92. For 'letters patent' see post, POPE, 130 n.

who demanded his arms, "We have nothing now left but our arms and our valour; if we surrender the one, how shall we make use of the other?" Poets have nothing but their wits and their writings; and if they are plundered of the latter, I don't see what good the former can do them. To pirate, and publickly own it, to prefix their names to the works they steal, to own and avow the theft, I believe, was never yet heard of but in England. It will sound oddly to posterity, that, in a polite nation, in an enlightened age, under the direction of the most wise, most learned, and most generous encouragers of knowledge in the world, the property of a mechanick should be better secured than that of a scholar; that the poorest manual operations should be more valued than the noblest products of the brain; that it should be felony to rob a cobler of a pair of shoes, and no crime to deprive the best author of his whole subsistence; that nothing should make a man a sure title to his own writings but the stupidity of them; that the works of Dryden should meet with less encouragement than those of his own Flecknoe2, or Blackmore; that Tillotson and St. George, Tom Thumb 3 and Temple, should be set on an equal foot. This is the reason why this very paper has been so long delayed; and while the most impudent and scandalous libels are publickly vended by the pirates, this innocent work is forced to steal abroad as if it were a libel.

'Our present writers are by these wretches reduced to the same 32 condition Virgil was, when the centurion seized on his estate *. But I don't doubt that I can fix upon the Mæcenas of the present age, that will retrieve them from it. But, whatever effect this piracy may have upon us, it contributed very much to the advantage of Mr. Philips; it helped him to a reputation, which he neither desired nor expected, and to the honour of being put upon a work of which he did not think himself capable; but the event shewed his modesty. And it was reasonable to hope, that he, who could raise mean subjects so high, should still be more elevated on greater themes; that he, that could draw such noble ideas from a shilling, could not fail upon such a subject as the duke of Marlborough, "which is capable of heightening even the most low and trifling genius." And, indeed, most of the great works which have been produced in the world have been owing less to the poet than the patron. Men of the greatest genius are sometimes lazy, and want a spur; often modest, and dare not

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