to no one. Of his young daughter, his dear Ada, he spoke with great tenderness, and seemed to be pleased at the great sacrifice he had made in leaving her to comfort her mother. The intense hatred he bore his mother-in-law, and a sort of Euryclea of Lady Byron, two women to whose influence he, in a great measure, attributed her estrangement from him,-demonstrated clearly how painful the separation was to him, notwithstanding some bitter pleasantries which occasionally occur in his writings against her also, dictated rather by rancour than by indifference." THE following letter appeared in the Morning Chronicle for December 19, 1816, and is an answer to the article in the Quarterly Review for January, 1816, which reviewed Waterloo and other Poems, by J. Wedderburn Webster. Paris, 1816 "To MR. W. Gifford, "Editor of the Quarterly Review. "Tristius haud illis monstrum, nec sævior ulla VIRGIL. "SIR,-This address will the less surprize you, having so lately received one of a similar nature from Dr. Clarke, in which with so much reason he complains of your obliquity of fair criticism,' in the Review of his Travels, and I am fortunate in the warranty of that precedent to repel your invidious attack upon myself in the last number of the Quarterly Review. "That those high talents which deservedly placed the Baviad in the first School of Criticism, should be lent to the construction of such matter as that which now too frequently deforms the pages of your Review, must excite the indignation of your friends, and cannot fail to ensure the contempt of your enemies. "In support of this position, with a moderation to which you are a stranger, I shall add for the present but one instance to that of Dr. Clarke's and my own, wherein you display a wanton desertion of those principles upon which you pretend, and upon which you can alone have a right to criticise the works of others. "For this purpose it is unnecessary to traverse the record, as the article on the Story of Rimini' in the 28th Number of your Review, immediately presents itself. You there commence with an absurdity and end with an insult-affecting a douce humanité, which, if you ever possessed, you have forgot the practice ofand a lofty profession of candour and impartiality, set forth it would seem for the mere purpose of making your defection of such principles, and your subsequent personal attack upon the author the more unwarrantable and conspicuous. "Though it is impossible to follow you through all the petty distortions and false colouring, by which, with a 6th form ingenuity, you have attempted to present that Poem to the public, I shall cite the concluding passage, which is meant I presume as a kind of Elegy on the mangled remains of the Author; and with such a specimen of the candour and impersonality of your criticism, I shall leave our readers to form their own conclusions. The article in question ends thus "Mr. Hunt prefixes to his work a dedication to Lord Byron, in which he assumes a high tone, and talks big of his fellow dignity,' and independence; what fellow dignity may mean, we know not, perhaps the dignity of a fellow; but this we will say, that Mr. Hunt is more unlucky in his pompous pretension to versification and good language, than he is in that which he makes, in this dedication to proper spirit, as he calls it, and fellow dignity; for we never in so few lines saw so many clear marks of the vulgar impatience of a low man, conscious and ashamed of his wretched vanity, and labouring with coarse flippancy, to scramble over the bounds of birth and education, and fidget himself into the stoutheartedness of being familiar with a Lord.' "Of this Gentleman's birth I know as little as I do of Mr. W. Gifford's-therefore it is impossible to guess which in a civic procession or in the order of parochial duties, would be found most worthy of this fellow dignity.'-But I know the merits of ' Rimini' are stamped with the admiration of an author whose muse has long soared far above the sooty talons of such criticism-and consequently can lose nothing, but what the contagion of such an association may for a moment leave behind it. "In regard to myself, you have attempted to wound me where (I confess) indifference has made me invulnerable. In the desolating activity with which you wished to strike a mortal blow, you have over-shot your victim-leaving him untouched by the impotence of the assault. "However, a fly may sting, tho' it cannot bite,'—and were it possible for me to think more humbly than I do of my 'Waterloo and other Poems,' you might have triumphed in proportion. "For the motives which induced me to commit an unrevised and hasty composition to all the consequent blunders, in which, particularly during my absence from Paris, I had every right to expect the French press might send it forth,-I beg to refer you to my advertisement, though even under the mechanical distortion of M. Didot's Devils, had the work been published the property III.] WEDDERBURN WEBSTER'S LETTER. 447 of certain retailers in this country, I might have been complimented at the expense of my understanding. This is no enigma, at least to a Reviewer.-As it is, however, I am satisfied to bear the penalty of this incident, though I religiously believe M. Didot's knowledge of the English language, so fully displayed at my expence in the composition alluded to, not a whit inferior to that of Mr. Gifford's in the French. "When I first heard that my publication was announced in the 30th Number of your Review (and which only reached me last week), I expected to find a Review of the work, not a personal attack upon myself. That you have given everything but the former, and identified the latter by the most repulsive features, will be readily admitted by any unbiassed reader of both. "The whole article, whether taken as the one or the other, is such a complete 'Jokeby' composition that one cannot seriously attribute it to the Author of the Baviad, though it becomes yours by adoption. It appears rather the slimy offspring of some Grubstreet worm, who, centipede-like, crawls and stings-and who, in the stifled madness of low pique and impotent revenge has burstinto a rhapsody of satire without wit-ribaldry without truthand abuse without even the garnish of common sense to make it intelligible. To the order of fellow dignity' with which you seem so conversant, it may, however, possess all those qualities, but beyond that respectable fraternity, as I am persuaded it can create no feeling but disgust—and leave none but oblivion, I can only say with Swift-that "On me when dunces are satirick, Passing therefore over the exordium, and all its component ropery and low parodies upon my name, too contemptible even to excite indignation, I shall give your remark upon the 14th stanza of 'Waterloo,' as a curious specimen of your playful imagination and acute criticism-that Stanza runs thus, page 10 "Bear witness Soigniers's darkling bowers, Thou yet can boast one battlement ! That long shall speak to other times, And mock the power of Deepest crimes; For well thy rude unhallowed fane, Hath marked the downfal of the rebel train !' Upon which you make the following ingenious commentary :"The whole stanza is a curious piece of verbal mosaic, but the most wonderful of all is that line in which a wood and a house are jointly apostrophised with a singular pronoun and a plural verb-on the subject of a talkative battlement common to both !!!' 666 "What verbal mosaic may mean, any more than oral, auricular, or ocular mosaic, it is difficult to determine-perhaps the law of Moses, and that we are indebted to some pious vision under 'the pains of sleep' for all your valuable apothegms; indeed, when you tell us of talkative battlements' growing in forests, it is pretty clear the whole must have been the effect of an anodyne, which ending in the night-mare, produced that sanguinary image of the foot soldier you bring in so happily, for you proceed'Having apparently collected from the conduct of our countrymen who literally swarm (more mosaic) round every penny shew-box in Paris, that John Bull is somewhat muddy headed, he (query, M. Didot or Mr. Gifford) has taken an insidious advantage of the circumstance to propound a riddle to him, which would have puzzled Sphinx herself "The Vulture shrieked aloud, And the red Traveller sought his shroud.'-P. 9. Now riddle my ree, what is this? "After a hundred conjectures we ended with determining (ingenious enough in Mr. Gifford), that it was one of the Foot Guards going on the forlorn hope-No such thing-it is the rising sun! The peculiar malice of the question lies in this, that whereas the red Traveller of Ossian, from whom the word is taken, is broad and bright and glowing, the red Traveller (for Traveller read Reviewer) of the Poem is first black, and then of no colour at all, for he never makes his appearance.' This is below all comment; but I shall subjoin the stanza and note upon which it is formed, in testimony of your impartial judgment and apt critique. "Stanza 12.-P. 9. ""'Twas then the vulture shrieked aloud, To those which fired the earth that day. The eye of heaven, refused to look On that which man's alone could brook For then did havoc wildly reign; And Mercy shuddering fled her lost domain !' "In looking over the volume, you seem to have been impelled by a commendable aversion to the evidence of any invulnerable parts of the Poem, making the words of Milton no fiction """-Aside the Devil turned For envy, yet with jealous leer malign Accordingly you next select the following verse, p. 21. I. "It was an hour when none could save Or tear one victim from the grave; "And the red Traveller sought his shroud." "My fame is bright before me, like the streak of light on a cloud, when the broad sun comes forth red Traveller of the sky."-OSSIAN. |