Scottish Shakspeare, whom the most illustrious of the Pokers at once pronounced better than the English, because free from 'unhappy barbarism.' Yes, refined from the unhappy barbarism of our southern Shakspeare, and purged of the licentiousness of our poor London-starved Otway. It was veritably David Hume's opinion, and still stands in the dedication to the Four Dissertations he was bringing out at the time, that 'Johnny Home' had all the theatric genius of these two poets so refined and purged. But little was even a Philosopher's exaltation, to the persecution of a Presbytery. No man better than Hume knew that. The first volume of his History had lain hopelessly on Millar's shelves, after sale of forty-five copies in a twelvemonth, when on inquisitorial proceedings of the General Assembly against Lord Kames and himself, the public in turn became inquisitive, and began to buy. And, surely as the History of Hume, must even puffery of Home have languished, but for that resolve of the Presbytery to eject from his pulpit a parson who had written a play. It carried Douglas to London; secured a nine nights' reasonable wonder; and the noise of the carriages on their way to Covent Garden to see the Norval of silver-tongued Barry, were now giving sudden headaches to David Garrick, and strange comparisons of silver tongues to the hooting of owls. But out of reach of every influence to raise or to depress, unless it be a passing thought now and then to his own tragic fragments, sits the critic with the thin duodecimo before him. The popular stir affects even quiet Gray in his cloistered nook of Pembroke Hall; but the sharp, clear, graceful judgment now lodged and boarded at The Dunciad, shews itself quite un-affected. 'When the town,' it began, 'by a tedious succession of 'indifferent performances, has been long confined to cen'sure, it will naturally wish for an opportunity of praise.' That is, as I translate it, the town, sick of Doctor Brown's Athelstan and Barbarossa, of Mr. Whitehead's Creusa, of Mr. Crisp's Virginia, of Mr. Glover's Boadicea, of Doctor Francis's Eugenia, of Mr. Aaron Hill's Merope, of the Regulus of Mr. Havard, and the Mahomet of Mr. Miller, turns to anything of the reasonable promise of a Douglas, with disposition to enjoy it if they can. But the more striking, Goldsmith felt, was the indiscreetness which could obtrude a work like Douglas 'as perfection:' in proof of which critical folly he made brief but keen mention of its leading defects: while to those who would plead in arrest particular beauties of diction, he directed a remark which, half a century later, was worked out in detail by the Coleridge and Schlegel reviewers. In works of 'this nature, general observation often characterises more 'strongly than a particular criticism could do; for it 'were an easy task to point out those passages in any 'indifferent author where he has excelled himself, and yet 'these comparative beauties, if we may be allowed the 'expression, may have no real merit at all. 'buildings, have their point of view; and Poems, like too near a 'situation gives but a partial conception of the whole.' Good-naturedly, at the same time, he closes with quotation of two of the best passages in the poem, emphatically marking with excellent taste five lines of allusion to the wars of Scotland and England. Gallant in strife, and noble in their ire, The battle is their pastime. They go forth If Boswell, on Johnson's challenge to shew any good lines out of Douglas, had mustered sense and discrimination to offer these, the Doctor could hardly have exploded his emphatic pooh! Goldsmith differed little from Johnson in the matter, it is true: but his pooh was more polite. A Scottish Homer followed the Shakspeare: Mr. Griffiths submitting to his boarder, in a very thick duodecimo, The Epigoniad, A Poem in Nine Books. Doctor Wilkie's laboured versification of his Homeric Episode got into Anderson's collection, the editor being a Scotsman: though candid enough to say of it, that 'too antique to 'please the unlettered reader, and too modern for the scholar, 'it was neglected by both, read by few, and soon forgotten 'by all.' Yet this very common-place editor might have been more candid, and told us that his sentence was stolen from the Monthly Review. After discussion of the claims justly due and always conceded to a writer of genuine learning, Goldsmith remarked: 'on the contrary, if he be 'detected of ignorance when he pretends to learning, his case will deserve our pity: too antique to please one party, 'and too modern for the other, he is deserted by both, read 'by few, and soon forgotten by all, except his enemies.' Perhaps if his friends had forgotten him, the Doctor might have profited. The Epigoniad,' continued Goldsmith, 'seems to be one of those new old performances; 'a work that would no more have pleased a peripatetic of 'the Academic grove, than it will captivate the unlettered 'subscriber to one of our circulating libraries.' Nevertheless the Scottish clique made a stand for their rough Homeric Doctor. Smith, Robertson, and Home were vehement in laudation; Charles Townshend (who,' writes Hume to Adam Smith, 'passes for the cleverest fellow in England') said aye to all their praises; and when, some months afterward, Hume came up to London to bring out the Tudor volumes of his History, he published puffs of Wilkie under assumed signatures, in various magazines, and reported progress to the Edinburgh circle. It was remarkably 'uphill work,' he said; and broadly hinted that the verdict of the Monthly Review (vulgarly interpolated, I should mention, by Griffiths himself) would have upon the whole to stand. 'However,' he adds, in one of his letters to Robertson, 'if you want a little flattery for the author, which I own is very refreshing to an author, you 'may tell him that Lord Chesterfield said to me he was a 'great poet. I imagine that Wilkie will be very much 'elevated by praise from an English Earl, and a Knight 'of the Garter, and an Ambassador, and a Secretary of 'State.' It is to be hoped he was, and proportionately forgetful of low abuse from obscure hirelings in booksellers' garrets. 'An Irish gentleman,' Hume proceeded to tell his friends, 'wrote lately a very pretty treatise on the Sub'lime.' This Irish gentleman had indeed written so pretty a treatise on the Sublime, that the task-work of our critic became work of praise. When I was begin'ning the world,' said Johnson in his old age to Fanny Burney, and was nothing and nobody, the joy of my life 'was to fire at all the established wits.' Perhaps it is a natural infirmity when one is nothing and nobody, and when Goldsmith became something and somebody, his friends still charged it upon him. A critic of the profounder sort he never was: criticism of that order was not known in his day: but it is less the want of depth, than the presence of envy, which it has been the fashion to urge against him. It will become us therefore in fairness to observe, that here, in the garret of Griffiths, he is tolerably free from it. Whether it is to seize him in the drawing-room of Reynolds, will be matter of later inquiry. He has no pretension yet to enter himself brother or craftsman of the Guild of Literature, and we find him in his censures just and temperate, and liberal as well as candid in his praise; glad to give added fame to established wits, as even the youths Bonnell Thornton and George Colman were already beginning to be esteemed; and ready, in such a case as Burke's, to help |