“In dedicating to you the following Satire, I have two motives—first, to attract attention to your name, and, secondly, to display both your name and character in its true light; dedications are, thanks to the independence of modern authors, out of fashion: the singularity of this will, therefore, I trust, obtain for you that notoriety to which your peculiar qualifications have so eminently entitled you.
“You would be thought the censor of the press, the magnus
| MY MISERABLE CONDITION. | 217 |
“Sir, you are a slaughterman of reputation, and can flay poor authors with as much facility, and something less of feeling, than a carcase butcher does the bleating lamb; nor do you confine your criticisms to authors alone, but, ‘labouring in your vocation,’ spread your pestilential breathings over the whole arena of genius, arts, and science.
“If to all these superlative qualifications (got God knows how) for the office of a public critic I could add that of honesty,* I would teach my tongue submission to your sapient judgment, and bow with becoming meekness to the Mohawk of Paternoster Row.—
“But I know ye, Sirrah, know all your paltry tricks, your devious windings, quirks, and shiftinga, and will uncase ye to the world.”
“You have placed yourself (in defiance to propriety) upon the pedestal of detraction, and are surrounded by satellites as malignant as the demoniac planet in whose orbit they move. Be it my office to expose the one and crush the other; first, then, to measure your altitude, and with my gray goose quill disjoint the pilfered fragments that compose your colossal self; which, like the idol of modern barbarians, disgraces the classic base where once was seen the splendid
* “I have heard, this critic boasts of his intimacy with such distinguished patrons of the arts as Sir John Fleming Leicester and the Marquis of Stafford: if they ever do suffer him into their presence, it can only be to laugh at his presumption, ignorance, and folly.”—The Blow-fly. |
| 218 | AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY. |
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* “Take the opinion of the editor of ‘The Examiner’ on his (Jerdan’s) abuse of Lord Byron:—“This is certainly the most ‘gracious fooling’ Master Jerdan has treated the town with, since he abused the finest passages in ‘Heaven and Earth,’ as the merest ‘tol-de-rol buffoonery’ (I quote his own words). The editor of the Literary Gazette grudging a shilling for three Cantos of Don Juan! What does he imagine the public think of eightpence for sixteen pages of little else than a mass of unconnected extracts from about a dozen books? ‘When a true genius appears in the world,’ says Swift, ’you may know him by this sign—that the dunces are in confederacy against him.’” † “It is a national disgrace that any common pick-fault who would experience a difficulty in stringing together three original sentences, should be permitted to set himself up for a critic, and mutilate what he cannot comprehend.” |
| THE PAST. | 219 |
“Revenge and fear, by turns, display their power over your jaundiced mind, and every line you write is impregnated with the sulphurous spirit of the author. I need not travel far through your absurdities for damning proof. Almost every page teems with some obnoxious sarcasm levelled at those (both male and female) who have not paid tribute to the Mohawk chieftain of the Cockney literati. For myself, you well know ‘I am not to be terrified by abuse, or bullied by reviewers with or without arms.’ The malignity of your attack upon a trifle of mine has defeated itself, while the approving voice of every other paper, and the flattering sale of the book offers the best reply to your slanders, and is a sure criterion of your critical abilities. Here I might safely waive all personal feelings but those of contempt; but I have undertaken to expose the system upon which you and your employers act, for the benefit of others, and I will fearlessly do my duty. Your arm is raised against every independent author.
“It is disgraceful to this age, that any publication so connected and so conducted, should be supported; and I am satisfied that it only requires to be generally known to meet universal condemnation.”
