THE

LITERARY EXAMINER.

No. XXIV. SATURDAY, DEC. 13, 1823

REVIEW OF BOOKS.

Ultra-Crepidarius; a Satire on William Gifford. By Leigh Hunt. For reasons which it is obviously unnecessary to enumerate, no literary appreciation of Ultra-Crepidarius will be attempted in the following brief notice, which, with the exception of a few remarks on the circumstances which have produced it, will be confined to a little explanatory observation and illustrative remark.

However beneficial in light, airy, or incidental application, an elaborate expenditure of satire on a particular individual is possibly defensible on two grounds alone,-in absolute self-defence; and in a chastisement of the perpetrator of vices and follies which have become a public nuisance. Without advertence to fair and legitimate criticism, or to the usual hostile darts, which, whether hurled by Hectors or Priams, all who publish should expect to encounter, we are scarcely called upon to say, that in respect to the first of these motives, the plea of justification of the author of Ultra-Crepidarius is notorious. Giving the widest

allowance to excursive remark in the discussion of merits, and an entirely open field to the quiz and the squibbery of the very large existing college of anonymous Littlewits, unless malignant insinuation, envenomed slander, and knowingly false and rancorous imputation, be also provided for, our Satirist is amply vindicated. So much for the self-defence plea; and as to the more general one, will it be found wanting in the estimation of any regular reader of the Quarterly Review, who belongs not to the clan which that miserably insidious and canting vehicle is constructed exclusively to support? The leader of any venal and interested gang of stipendiaries may claim to fight in his vocation, and to conduct an attack upon the opinions which he is hired to oppose,—but what right has he to assail persons when disconnected from their opinions? Or, to speak without a figure, what is more iniquitous than a pretended literary review, which decides not in reference to a work, but to the party or political bias of the author of it?-on a poem, for instance: "Is he one of us?" "No." "Then down with him." Such is the critical principle of the Quarterly Review, which, however, is happily beginning to operate to its own overthrow, and which will scarcely survive the precarious existence of the wretched-tempered man under whose nominal management it has been disgracefully displayed,-the "cankered carle," who may be fairly attacked by every man, not because, in resemblance of the valiant Ishmael, every man has been attacked by him that might

VOL. I.

24

have been honest, but because he has meanly laid in ambush for those only, whose heads and ears would fetch a price at the seraglio door; rejoice the viziers and eunuchs; and repay repay the despicable executioner in hard sequins for his brutal performances.

Mr. Hunt alluded in the third number of THE LIBERAL to the jeu d'esprit which has now made its appearance, as having been composed four years ago... That it has not appeared before he attributes to a deficiency in his duties as a good hater ;" and that it now sees the light, to motives quite as defensible. Having once resolved, he does not spare; as will be seen by the following quotation from the preface:

"The person who crawled for his portrait in the following sketch, has no excuse for the malignity of his very mediocre pretensions and slavish success. He is no inexperienced youth; nor is he poor in his old age. He has grown grey, yet he has not grown wiser. He has endured sickness and melancholy, yet they have not made him humane. The young he has treated as if he had never wanted encouragement himself, nor found it. The delicate of health he has not spared, though his own hand shook that struck them. It is said I attacked him first. It is not true. He attacked a woman. He struck, in her latter days, at the crutches of poor Mary Robinson-a human being, who was twenty times as good as himself, and wliose very lameness (that last melancholy contradiction to qualities of heart and person, which he might well envy) was owing to a spirit of active kindness which he never possessed. The blow was bound to make every manly cheek tingle; and I held up the little servile phænomenon in the "Feast of the Poets. For this, and for attacking powerful Princes instead of their discarded mistresses, he has never forgiven me. My first notice of him was in his praise: to which, if I mistake not, I owe the im portunate requests which Mr. Murray made me to write in the Quarterly Review. I was then a youth, and knew his writings only piecemeal. I did not write in the Quarterly Review; and I soon acquired knowledge enough to sound the shallow depths of the Editor. Hinc ille lachrymæ. Hence the misquoting" criticism on the Story of Rimini Henius was calculated merely to perplex him. Hence, in some mea for no other cause, his unfeeling attack on Mr. Keats; for extraordinary sure, his unchristian hatred and misrepresentation of the christian temper of Mr. Shelley for if ever faith and charity were separate, it was in the persons of these two men. Mr. r. Gifford's faith delights in scorning charity, and extinguishing hope.”

The machinery and versification of Ultra-Crepidarius remind us in a small degree of "The Feast of the Poets." Mercury, rising one morning, misses one of his winged shoes, which Venus, with whom he was at that time domesticated (a bonnes fortunes) had dispatched to Ashburton, to bespeak a similar pair for herself. Not returning, the God and Goddess agree to go in search of it, and scarcely alight before they stumble on a Shoe, which behaves with the greatest disrespect to everything light, airy, beautiful, or winged; until, exasperated, Mercury translates him into the good-natured Aristarchus of the Quarterly. The following passage will convey a fair notion of the spirit and versification:

"As soon as I finish my words, thou shalt be,
Not a man, for thou canst not, but human to see:
Thy appearance at least shall be taken for human,
However perplexing to painter or woman.

A

In ev'ry thing else, thou shalt be as thou art, A thing made for dirty ways, hollow at heart. 910 M »s -1ot :tazonal Serve an Earl, as thou say'st; and, in playing the shoepsberg and lo aansleim nwo Let the stories told of thee, malicious or true, eemid sh isnt youteg * yented bus Only lead thee hereafter to scandalize too. ni on line Ens to node But let not an Earl stop thy progress; go higher,sedo lo resuskiestr 200020 97 zid And at every new step show addition of mire, beste o cab guida 8 aviz 3008 Like one, who, in climbing a loose moulded hill, tad silt maseb Finds his foot growing heavier and dirtier still, 109 1

Strain after all those who ascend to the crown to ussd svad
But all who are falling, assist to kick down:
Then getting at top, gape with sycophant joy,
And poking about for becoming employ,

Make signs thou art ready, with pliable span, 092bted in ma013
To clasp any foot, that would trample on manghelle tuli T
But despair

Stretchinghose scents, which thou'lt see

the Delphian tree,

Holy ground, to to climb up to whose least laurell'd shelf Thou wouldst have to change natures, and put off thyself. soak adbonStop, and strain at the base; yet, to ease thy despair,madzil feet that come there, ones, winged like mine,

ostar post to obstruct a

younger

Till bright, up above thee, they soar and they shine,
Should even the graves, such as lie near the spot,
Of critics and note-makers, help thee a jot,
Be sure to pretend that the heap's of no use,
And repay those who gave thee a lift with abuse.
stay Dig into their errors, their merits conceal,

And then shudder to think that the dead can not feel.
All things, in short, petty and fit, say and do,
Becoming a man with the soul of a shoe.

Boast thy origin once, because good common-place 34 daid Has pronounc'd such behaviour a merit and grace; I brs But after that once, be consistent, and show MD not be great horror of lowness, because it is low. Pick out for thy path, through the region of letters, The very worst tracks that dishonour'd thy betters; soon te v Like boys, who to get a sensation and splutter, itor: Prefer, to the kick through the gutter: pavement, a MAUBOV Bв nan) enw I wolled Thus, edit no authors but such as With their talents a good deal of di of dirt or of spit newsively spite ona et to Jaak AlBen Jonson, because he was beastly and bluff;

And Massinger,mince through his loathsomer stuffin viboen Xa And Persius, let him be writ down' Imitated, And say to poor Juvenal, Thou art trauslated. atendong aid syne These Latins will help too thy fondest of penchants, ravý not a vellane And swell thy large hate with the hates of the ancients. bonsBut as for such writers as Shakespear and others,

Low fellows, who treated all men as their brothers,
Base panders, whose heads ran on love and a wood,vaab llame a

odved Blasphemers, who thought the gat Jupiter good,

* Bolotaggi Who had right to be naked, and yet not asham'd,→→

Be sure to inform us, that they may be damn'd. ed edge And so Murrain shall, in a bookseller's shape; I hear some one say, Murrain take him, the ape!ed, 4:0 uds bo0, topgeareth. de An evil-eyed elf, in a down-looking flurry, 20 aldatavad,, 910k baterWho'd fain be a coxcomb, and calls himself Murray, endivioys of Adorn thou his door, like the sign of the Shoe, in zatajenou PINO

For court-understrappers to congregate to;

1879 ble For Southey to come in his dearth of invention,

And eat his own words for mock-praise and a pension; -; aoia and,
For Croker to lurk with his spider-like limb in,

"Mr. Gifford is particularly furious and triumphant at the mistakes or little wit of his predecessors in annotation. He is angry that a pioneer is not a general; forgetting that he himself, at his best, is but one of the company, His own mistakes in criticism, if not in the commoner tasks of annotation, are numerous, and betray a feebleness of observation and sentiment, always compelled to stop short of any thing deep or elevated. His footing is only fit for beaten paths; and his eye cannot discern the best things that adorn even those. Sie Andrew can as soon give an ' exquisite reason.' ༣༤་སངྐ་ས།། Lila zalvoad parwrong tool su) sbal

And feed on corruption, like bats, who at nights

In the dark take their shuffles, which they call their flights.
Be these the Court-critics, and vamp a Review;
And by a poor figure, and therefore a true,l dus

For it suits with thy nature, both shoe-like and slaughterly,
Be it's hue leathern, and title the Quarterly.

Much misconduct it; and see that the others

Misdeem, and misconstrue, like miscreant brothers;
Misquote, and misplace, and mislead, and misstate,
Misapply, misinterpret, misreckon, misdate,
Misinform, misconjecture, misargue; in short,

Miss all that is good, that ye miss not the Court. 189
Count the worth of a mind, not from what it produces,
But what it will take to fall in with abuses.

Is any, one ardent, sincere, independent ?

What distancing virtue! Pray try make an end on't.
Does any discover what you never could?
Pretend it's a trifle no gentleman would.

Does a true taste appear for the authors you edit?
Take pains, by your scorn, to show you never had it.
In short, be the true Representative Tools
Of a whole Court of Coblers' got up into rule."bant

Subsequently the Poet, invoking Pope, imagines an Avatar of the heroes of the Dunciad. We select a few specimens of the bodies

which they chuse to inform:

ແ Happy Page shall be Best, well aware of his fury, eConcanen be Croker, and Lintot be Murray :

In Southey poor Blackmore, beginning to doat, All
Shall not only turn a new stave, but his coat
The Wards and the Welsteds shall pamper their spleens,
And club in Scotch papers and Scotch Magazines:
And finally, thou, my old soul of the tritical,
Noting, translating, high slavish, hot critical,
Quarterly-scutcheon'd, great heir to each dunce,
Be Tibbald, Cook, Arnall, and Dennis at once.*

*

When the great and their flourishing vices are mention'd,
Say people " impute 'em," and show thou art pension'd;
But meet with a Prince's old mistress discarded,

And then let the world see "how vice is rewarded."

The virtuous indignation against discarded mistresses (the Sultanas regnant are uniformly. sacred personages with moralists of this school) we presume, was acquired in the family of the deceased Earl Grosvenor, which, as our readers are aware, was almost proverbial for purity, in respect to the intercourse of the sexes.

To conclude, the person attacked cannot reasonably complain of this dose of bitter aloes from the hand which presents it. Most likely he will not take any open notice of it. Why should he, when he can spit vipers in return, at least once a quarter; or, more characteristically still, -anguis in herba,-await sweltering amidst the rank literary vegetation of his review, until his natural venom can be ejected with equal safety and malignity.

"Tibbald, an ostentatious annotator; Cook, a poor translator;

a govern

ment hireling; and Dennis, the famous Dennis, the most irritable envious critic

of this nation, till his soul entered the unhappy little body before us!"

The Fall of Constantinople, a Poem, with a Preface animadverting in detail on the unprecedented conduct of the Royal Society of Literature. By Jacob Jones, Jun. of the Inner Temple, &c.

ALL the world is aware of the formation of the Royal Society of Literature, and nobody on earth acquainted with anything which it has done, besides holding out inducements which it has not fulfilled, and thereby seducing harmless people into gratuitous rhyming, and a temporary sojourn in the Paradise of Fools. An equally ingenuous and irascible innocent of this description is Mr. Jacob Jones, Jun. whose detail of injuries he will pardon us-made us laugh " sans intermission," if not "quite an hour by the dial." Not but that Mr. Jones has reason to complain, or that the Royal Society of Literature is not a very silly affair, but there is something so immensely ludicrous in a grave Society baiting with moonshine and catching poetical gudgeons by the score, it is impossible to resist the humour of it. The outline of this lamentable history is as follows:

4

With a profundity as to results which belongs to a body of Literati composed chiefly of grave and learned personages, who become members ex-officio-lawyers, judges, politicians, and what not, it is discovered that a premium of a hundred guineas will produce an excel-, lent dissertation on the Age of Homer; one of fifty guineas, an essay on the history of the Greek Language; and another of fifty guineas, a poem on the Fall of Constantinople. Unfortunate temptations these to Mr. Jacob Jones, Jun.-for, yielding to two out of the three, with an equal portion of perseverance and simplicity, he boxes himself up for five months to the production of an Essay on Homer, and a poem on the Fall of Constantinople-and behold the reward!, The Society first postpone giving the prizes to the productions furnished, and after inviting the unlucky candidates to revise and amend, decline giving them altogether. Peruse, gentle reader, the following intimation, and imagine the indignation of Mr. Jacob Jones, Jun. and such of his fellow sufferers as sought a similar explanation:

"SIR,-I am directed to inform you that the Council of the Royal Society of Literature are of opinion, that much INDUSTRY and ABILITY have been shewn in some of the Essays presented for competition, but that they do no not think any one of them fully deserving the Premium proposed. I have the honour to be, Sir, your most obedient, humble servant,

"4, Lincoln's-Inn-Fields, July 22d, 1823."

"RICHARD CATTERMOLE, Sec,

As poetic expectant, Mr. Jones received an intimation in the very same words, except for " industry," read "ingenuity," and for "Essays," "Poems." It is impossible to be more pleasantly official.

We are by no means certain that Mr. Jacob Jones is a Cambrian Celt, but we strongly suspect it, for he has not only published this book-a common piece of resentment on the part of the genus irritabile-but has gravely applied to a counsel for advice, as to the ground of action for a breach of agreement, and obtains the following satisfactory explanation:

"Such is the state of the English Law, that there are many rights without remedies-now as this agreement was a nudum pactum, the violation of it is not an actionable fraud. In equity and natural justice, however, the action is a swindling transaction."