Richard Herne Shepherd

“ Again: as Wouvermans is sunk in complete selfishness, and, with entire satisfaction, paints men occupied in no higher employments than those of drinking, smoking, and card-playing; so Smollett never rises, and seeks not to rise, from the slough of filth in which he wallows.
Poor Fielding! He seems to me, of all the great writers with whom I am acquainted, to have stood so peculiarly alone. Other literary men have had friends numerous and kind among their own brethren. Even Savage had a companion—and what a companion!—in his dreary night-walks. But Fielding had few friends and no companions. ”

“ I hope the limitation will be observed, and then, I think, these tales will find few readers on this side of the Channel.
It will be seen that I am by no means one of those who consider that no harm may be derived from the perusal of an impure book, unless the impurity be already inherent in the reader's mind. Moreover, the question of contagion aside, we have nothing to do with these diseased forms of literature. Literature, fulfilling its noble and real office, seeks, like the Spirit of Truth, to lead us into all truth. ”

“ Johnson, being asked on one occasion whether a good life of Rochester had been written, replied, not perhaps without a latent meaning beyond that which appears on the surface,—"Why, sir, we have a good death, but there is no life." ”

“ He was born in London, in the Annus Mirabilis, 1666; he himself, perhaps, not one of its least wonders, and, at any rate, destined to excel their poet in his dramatic walk. For Dryden's comedies have no other resemblance to those of Vanbrugh but their lax morality. I have not deemed it worth while to devote here any especial notice to them, and I have so high an opinion of him as a poet (Milton himself confessed Dryden to be a good verse-writer) , that I do not wish to drag his delinquencies before the public gaze. ”

“ I recognise in him an unflinching champion of right exposing and battling with much sickening wrong: the true ore everywhere pierces and glistens through the incrustation of baser matter. The apostolical hint concerning some classes of evildoers, "It is a shame even to speak of those things which are done of them in secret," although it has happily in our own day received a more general recognition, was too little regarded in that of Swift, Even the high intentions of satire are no longer held to be an excuse for the introduction of impure thoughts. ”

“ I refer to the pollutions in literature that have arisen from a class of writers existing even in ancient times, but at a more recent date revived by Rabelais and Boccaccio, who may be considered as the founders of a distinct school, which in Italy and France, during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, counted a very goodly array of disciples, and exercised an influence over the whole of European literature that it did not entirely lose until the Revolution of 1793. ”

“ We admit the charm of the captivating page, the ceaseless interest with which, once and again, through long sunny hours of summer, under the shade of venerable trees or overlooking clear waters, we read it, and are lost to all else but its perusal: if, however, we look for anything more than mere amusement, we find it wanting. ”

“ Sterne was, in the strictest sense of the word, a Pantagruelist; he imitated the style, and borrowed many of the thoughts of Rabelais, Verville, and the other early writers of that school. But his obscenity often consists as much in what is implied as in what is said. "There is not a page in Sterne's writing but has something that were better away, a latent corruption, a hint as of an impure presence." [15] Wherever we turn we are met by the anguis in herba. With this covert filth his works begin and end. ”

“ The Pantagruelists, who as yet had received few marks of English esteem, and who had, indeed, no great English representative—unless the Canterbury Tales oblige us to include reluctantly in their list the name of our sweet Chaucer—at length, emerging from the cloud, saw their literature suddenly coming into request. There were not found wanting men who set about diligently to produce an abundant supply. Among the earliest results were a translation of Rabelais by Sir Thomas Urquehart, and a translation of Scarron's Comic Romance by an unknown "hand." ”

“ To transform the rich creations of a poet's fancy into ribaldry and jest—to metamorphose the harmonious expression of his grandest thoughts into clownish barbarism,—^this surely is offence enough against good taste. But it is not alone good taste which here receives a shock. Every opening which the original might give, or seem to give, for licentious description is seized upon; every page is more or less mud-bespattered. ”

“ It was in the drawing of female character that Vanbrugh excelled. Berinthia, in The Relapse whom the heroine of the play admits to be "much handsomer" than herself, is one of the most deliciously-drawn women in modern drama or fiction. Then there is Lady Brute, the provoked wife, and her maiden friend: their conversation is loose, it is true, and the wife does not teach the unmarried woman very good lessons; yet there is a freedom in their sprightliness from all such obtrusive filth as Wycherley's. ”

“ For the enlivenment of their solitude—ladies and gentlemen of our author's description considering rural solitude to be synonymous with Tartarean gloom—they form a scheme of each telling daily in succession some tale they may remember. ”

“ These tales were not published in her life-time; but after her death, a friend of hers into whose hands they had fallen, thought fit to embalm her memory by giving them to the world. Alas!
"The evil that we do lives after us,
The good is often buried with our lives."
The prose imitator of Boccaccio was to be succeeded by an imitator who should call in the additional embellishment of verse. Jean de la Fontaine, author of Fables well known, and used largely in schools, published also, about the year 1670, a collection of short tales in verse, entitled Contes et Nouvelles en vers. ”

“ I consider this part of our subject especially important because the writers whom it includes have obtained a more extended acceptation—their works being more generally received as standard literature—than most of the others I have mentioned. Consequently, the evil influence they have exercised has been considerably greater, both in degree and amount. Rochester, Sedley, and D'Urfey have long been read only by the few; but Swift, Fielding, Smollett and Sterne still find readers among the many. ”

“ In England, after the death of Sterne, the school of Pantagruel gradually died out, nor has it since re-arisen in any very threatening shape. Our literature and, I hope, our lives are purer than those of our ancestors. Yet these works, read and admired by them in a less cultivated age, still, unfortunately, retain their place in our libraries ”

“ Nor (and herein lies a graver and more positive charge, sin of commission as well as omission, for which alone Fielding is cited to our bar) —is even the amusement which we obtain wholly harmless. Tom Jones, even if scarcely deserving Colonel Newcomers severe invective, passes through scenes which, to say the least, are very unsuited to modern taste, and expressions are used which could not now be read aloud. ”

“ Good Churchman, far-sighted politician, keen satirist. Pure in life, uncorrupted in opinions, rebuking spiritual wickedness in high and low places. A whole, if not a perfect man.
Fielding and Smollett, in literature, remind me of Salvator and Wouvermans, in painting, as characterised by Mr. ”

“ Besides his four comedies he produced a tragedy to which Johnson has accorded high praise, [7] and two masques. He could write elegant stanzas as well as witty dramas, and his prefaces and dedications—as also his reply to Collier— display an excellence and facility of prose composition that Wycherley—judging from his letters to Pope—failed to attain.
Lord Macaulay, in his essay on the Comic Dramatists of the Restoration, has, from want of space, reluctantly omitted Vanbrugh and Farquhar. He says they are "not men to be hastily dismissed." ”

“ Fielding's History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, was first published in 1749. It has survived its probation of a century, and will, I think, continue to live. That it is a great, a very great work who can deny? First of all novels in artistic execution ”

“ Johnson has himself supplied, in his Lives of the Poets, the want of a concise biography of this nobleman. ↑ Witty, that is, as wit goes: "what," as Carlyle says (Frederick, i.204) , "is called 'wit' in modern times." ↑ Johnson—Prologue at the opening of the Theatre Royal (Poems, 1785, pp. 49—50) . ↑ Johnson said there was nothing finer in Shakespeare than the lines in The Mourning Bride, beginning
"How reverend is the face of this tall pile!" ”