Part 69

A curious instance how the insertion of a single prosaic expression turns a fine verse into something worse than the vilest prose.

To conclude with one more instance of critical emendation: Milton says, with an agreeable turn of expression--

So parted they; the angel up to heaven, From the thick shade; and Adam to his bower.

Bentley "conjectures" these two verses to be inaccurate, and in lieu of the last writes--

ADAM, TO RUMINATE ON PAST DISCOURSE.

And then our erudite critic reasons! as thus:--

After the conversation between the Angel and Adam in the bower, it may be well presumed that our first parent waited on his heavenly guest at his departure to some little distance from it, till he began to take his flight towards heaven; and therefore "sagaciously" thinks that the poet could not with propriety say that the angel parted from the thick shade, that is, the bower, to go to heaven. But if Adam attended the Angel no farther than the door or entrance of the bower, then he shrewdly asks, "How Adam could return to his bower if he was never out of it?"

Our editor has made a thousand similar corrections in his edition of Milton! Some have suspected that the same kind intention which prompted Dryden to persuade Creech to undertake a translation of Horace influenced those who encouraged our Doctor, in thus exercising his "sagacity" and "happy conjecture" on the epic of Milton. He is one of those learned critics who have happily "elucidated their author into obscurity," and comes nearest to that "true conjectural critic" whose practice a Portuguese satirist so greatly admired: by which means, if he be only followed up by future editors, we might have that immaculate edition, in which little or nothing should be found of the original!

I have collected these few instances as not uninteresting to men of taste; they may convince us that a scholar may be familiarized to Greek and Latin, though a stranger to his vernacular literature; and that a verbal critic may sometimes be successful in his attempts on a single word, though he may be incapable of tasting an entire sentence. Let it also remain as a gibbet on the high roads of literature; that "conjectural critics" as they pass may not forget the unhappy fate of Bentley.

The following epigram appeared on this occasion:--

ON MILTON'S EXECUTIONER.

Did MILTON'S PROSE, O CHARLES! thy death defend? A furious foe, unconscious, proves a friend; On MILTON'S VERSE does BENTLEY comment? know, A weak officious friend becomes a foe. While he would seem his author's fame to farther, The MURTHEROUS critic has avenged thy MURTHER.

The classical learning of Bentley was singular and acute; but the erudition of words is frequently found not to be allied to the sensibility of taste.

FOOTNOTES:

"----woebegone Drew Priam's curtain in the dead of night, And would have told him half his Troy was burn'd."

Bentley alters the first word of the sentence to a proper name, which is given in the third book of the Iliad, and the second of the Æneid; and reads the passage thus:--

"----Ucaligon Drew Priam's curtain," &c.!]

A JANSENIST DICTIONARY.

When L'Advocat published his concise Biographical Dictionary, the Jansenists, the methodists of France, considered it as having been written with a view to depreciate the merit of their friends. The spirit of party is too soon alarmed. The Abbé Barral undertook a dictionary devoted to their cause. In this labour, assisted by his good friends the Jansenists, he indulged all the impetuosity and acerbity of a splenetic adversary. The Abbé was, however, an able writer; his anecdotes are numerous and well chosen; and his style is rapid and glowing. The work bears for title, "Dictionnaire Historique, Littéraire, et Critique, des Hommes Célèbres," 6 vols. 8vo. 1719. It is no unuseful speculation to observe in what manner a faction represents those who have not been its favourites: for this purpose I select the characters of Fenelon, Cranmer, and Luther.

Of Fenelon they write, "He composed for the instruction of the Dukes of Burgundy, Anjou, and Berri, several works; amongst others, the Telemachus--a singular book, which partakes at once of the character of a romance and of a poem, and which substitutes a prosaic cadence for versification."

But several luscious pictures would not lead us to suspect that this book issued from the pen of a sacred minister for the education of a prince; and what we are told by a famous poet is not improbable, that Fenelon did not compose it at court, but that it is the fruits of his retreat in his diocese. And indeed the amours of Calypso and Eucharis should not be the first lessons that a minister ought to give his scholars; and, besides, the fine moral maxims which the author attributes to the Pagan divinities are not well placed in their mouth. Is not this rendering homage to the demons of the great truths which we receive from the Gospel, and to despoil J. C. to render respectable the annihilated gods of paganism? This prelate was a wretched divine, more familiar with the light of profane authors than with that of the fathers of the church. Phelipeaux has given us, in his narrative of Quietism, the portrait of the friend of Madame Guyon. This archbishop has a lively genius, artful and supple, which can flatter and dissimulate, if ever any could. Seduced by a woman, he was solicitous to spread his seduction. He joined to the politeness and elegance of conversation a modest air, which rendered him amiable. He spoke of spirituality with the expression and the enthusiasm of a prophet; with such talents he flattered himself that everything would yield to him.

In this work the Protestants, particularly the first Reformers, find no quarter; and thus virulently their rabid catholicism exults over the hapless end of Cranmer, the first Protestant archbishop:--

"Thomas Cranmer married the sister of Osiander. As Henry VIII. detested married priests, Cranmer kept this second marriage in profound secrecy. This action serves to show the character of this great reformer, who is the hero of Burnet, whose history is so much esteemed in England. What blindness to suppose him an Athanasius, who was at once a Lutheran secretly married, a consecrated archbishop under the Roman pontiff whose power he detested, saying the mass in which he did not believe, and granting a power to say it! The divine vengeance burst on this sycophantic courtier, who had always prostituted his conscience to his fortune."

Their character of Luther is quite Lutheran in one sense, for Luther was himself a stranger to moderate strictures:--

"The furious Luther, perceiving himself assisted by the credit of several princes, broke loose against the church with the most inveterate rage, and rung the most terrible alarum against the pope. According to him we should have set fire to everything, and reduced to one heap of ashes the pope and the princes who supported him. Nothing equals the rage of this phrenetic man, who was not satisfied with exhaling his fury in horrid declamations, but who was for putting all in practice. He raised his excesses to the height by inveighing against the vow of chastity, and in marrying publicly Catherine de Bore, a nun, whom he enticed, with eight others, from their convents. He had prepared the minds of the people for this infamous proceeding by a treatise which he entitled 'Examples of the Papistical Doctrine and Theology,' in which he condemns the praises which all the saints had given to continence. He died at length quietly enough, in 1546, at Eisleben, his country place--God reserving the terrible effects of his vengeance to another life."

Cranmer, who perished at the stake, these fanatic religionists proclaim as an example of "divine vengeance;" but Luther, the true parent of the Reformation, "died quietly at Eisleben:" this must have puzzled their mode of reasoning; but they extricate themselves out of the dilemma by the usual way. Their curses are never what the lawyers call "lapsed legacies."

MANUSCRIPTS AND BOOKS.

It would be no uninteresting literary speculation to describe the difficulties which some of our most favourite works encountered in their manuscript state, and even after they had passed through the press. Sterne, when he had finished his first and second volumes of Tristram Shandy, offered them to a bookseller at York for fifty pounds; but was refused: he came to town with his MSS.; and he and Robert Dodsley agreed in a manner of which neither repented.