James Prior

“ An intimacy ensued, which like most of the critic’s friendships continued undisturbed through life, though faults and follies scarcely attempted to be concealed impaired respect for his new companion. To many the now renowned biographer appeared then a jumble of contradictions—sense and nonsense, shrewdness and good humour, cunning and simplicity, vanity, yet with kindness and generosity; a tone of flattery to the great in order to make way in the world, combined with feelings of rectitude and firm regard to truth in biographical statements. ”

“ The seeing you and your brother both so diligent in the pursuit of the necessary means for your own happiness and success in the world, is the greatest joy and pleasure of my life, and makes amends for a thousand troubles I have from other causes; and if it shall ever be in my power to reward you for it as I wish to do, I’ll show you all the affection and kindness the most deserving child can expect. But as human events are so precarious, there is no trusting to that chance. ”

“ Time has so little diminished this passion, or rather mania, that it has grown nearly to a literary nuisance. Editors and commentators upon Shakspeare appear at every turn in all societies. In the club-house we meet three or four of a morning; in the park, see them meditating by the Serpentine, or under a tree in Kensington Gardens; no dinner table is without one or two; in the theatre you view them by dozens. ”

“ If I am not very much mistaken, our next session will be as turbulent as ever Charlemont himself could wish. Lord Buckingham is, of all men upon earth, the most unfit for the present crisis. He and all his coadjutors are timid to a ridiculous degree; and his public economy, necessary as it is, has made so many men his enemies that I have a strong suspicion that something in the way of a very strong address will be procured at the meeting of Parliament. I wish sincerely we may have hopes of seeing you at the opening of it. Surely London will have as great charms in October. ”

“ It forms a debt of honour, if not of gratitude, which literary men are bound to bestow upon each other. The neglect of it is injustice to their class. And in this instance, it would be to sin against an eminent literary antiquary and critic, an amiable man, and the intimate personal friend of several of the very first characters of their time.
No name is more suggestive than that of Malone whenever we take up a volume of Shakspeare, of Dryden, of the history of the stage, of Boswell, or of biographical sketches of a few eminent contemporary friends who had just passed away. ”

“ Have you seen Mr. Hitchcock’s History of the Irish Stage? It is the first volume of a work commencing at the earliest and proceeding to the latest date of theatres in this kingdom. It is full of wretched blunders in facts, and stuffed with whole pages of follies in opinions.
I fancy Jephson is the only one of my acquaintance you have in London now. Pray give him my best compliments, and believe me, dear sir, most sincerely your servant and friend, J. P. Kemble. ”

“ Were not you diverted, dearest, to see me making a figure in the fashionable intelligence of a London newspaper? Who informed the public of so important an event as my visit to Mr. Malone, I cannot guess; but there I was, to my own great surprise and amusement. I feel extremely obliged to Miss C. Malone for her good-nature to me, and still more for her kindness to you. She rates much too highly my attempt to be of use to the best and most affectionate of friends ”

“ To revise the plan, scan the characters, revolve the sentiments, correct the language—in fact, to put that mental machinery into motion which can alone produce a finished piece, and then to carry the whole through the press, were the duties expected from the critic. Alas! how rarely is this done faithfully. The delicacy of the operation precludes even a friend from doing what even the poet himself in all sincerity may wish, in order to secure his path to immortality. But he has not the heart to pull his offspring to pieces. ”

“ But I cannot help hoping that when you have given yourself the relaxation which you will find necessary to your health, if you are not called to exert your great talents, and employ your great acquisitions in the transitory service to your country which is done in active life, you will continue to do that permanent service which it receives from the labours of those who know how to make the silence of their closets more beneficial to the world than all the noise and bustle of courts, senates, and camps. ”

“ To me, who have come from an uncultivated world, where rude nature reigns without a rival, each minutest beauty is so far from being lost, that I often fancy I view everything around me through a magnifying glass, [5] and that every tree spreads at least a quadruple proportion of foliage before my eyes beyond its real produce. At present, I can truly say I pass nothing unadmired. I am in the situation of one caught in love; my heart—my poor heart—my Edmond, is caught, and the Sylvan Deities have engaged all my attention. ”

“ I believe the persons to whom they are directed are all your friends. I am sorry to hear Lord Charlemont has been unwell, which gives real concern to all that know him. I am afraid to express my particular esteem and affection, as it would have an air of impertinent familiarity and equality; and, for another reason, shall say nothing regarding yourself for fear of the suspicion of being a toad-eater—a character for which we gentlemen about town have great abhorrence, and are apt to run too much on the other side in order to avoid it. ”

“ Toward the end of 1794, a tour in Lancashire and Cheshire, to which Jephson refers in one of his letters, had unexpected results. Again he became a victim to the tender passion. Criticism and time had not steeled the heart to love. And shall we be cold enough to blame him? Although once unsuccessful in a suit that lasted nearly a life, why not be permitted to try again? Are the young and the gay alone privileged to seek again and again the tenderest ties of human life? ”

“ I despair of ever bringing our friend Southwell to a proper sense of his duty as a correspondent. I wrote him a long letter, and have not yet received a line in answer, but suppose his Donegal expedition, and his intention of assuming the garb of sobriety which you say he is resolved upon, has obliterated all epistolary thought. Where is he gone to, in so remote a part of Ireland as Donegal?
I still remain very comfortable and snug, and pleased with my situation. I begin to like the people of the country rather more than I did. ”

“ Each has a new view, a new inference, a new conjecture, a new explanation, which, whether with or without a basis, he expects shall fill the post of honour and be alone accepted as truth.
Apparitions of such volumes haunt the reader’s path in every shop or stall of books. The eye scarcely rests upon one when another aims to thrust it into oblivion. To displace it is scarcely enough. ”

“ Anything of the age of Elizabeth, her predecessors or indeed successors even to his own time bearing upon poetry and the drama, formed the business of his life to obtain. No research was spared, no sale unattended, no novelty unexamined, no money grudged to glean information from every source. Whenever one collector died off who was rich in curious rarities, another was in the field to acquire them. ”

“ Burke is, indeed, a young man of his years. But the reason I take to be, that if age should deprive him of one half of his ideas he would still have more left him than any man of five-and-twenty. If he has really given up politics—a cession which I wish heartily he had made twelve months ago—literature will be his only resource, and he will yet be able to delight and to inform mankind. ”

“ Truth is always worth some trouble in the pursuit. So thought Dr. Johnson. He praises the judge I have just quoted (Lord Hailes) “as a man of worth, a scholar, and wit, whose exactness excites my wonder . . . whose book (Annals of Scotland) has such a stability of dates, such a certainty of facts, and such a punctuality of citation,” &c. These are precisely the merits of Malone. They will be the merits of every one who has courage to quit the hard-trodden path of commonplace book makers and will plunge for knowledge into an exploratory track of his own. ”

“ How is it that Irishmen are thus prone to form such undue estimates of each other? Why do not the gifted class more frequently travel to England for reputation—that England so often abused and vilified by the idle, the uninformed, and the bigoted of their country? There, when they deserve it, they will obtain it. No party or religious feelings which poison the sources of liberality elsewhere, can in her keep down the intellect of man to the narrow dimensions which interested bigotry and superstition prescribe at home. ”