CHARLES CHURCHILL,'

1731-1764.

The Poetical Works of Charles Churchill. With Copious Notes, and a Life of the Author. By W. TOOKE, F.R.S. 3 vols. 12mo. London: 1844.

MR. WILLIAM TOOKE sets us a bad example in his "copious notes," which we do not propose to follow. Our business is with Churchill; and not with the London University, or with the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, or with the Reform Bill, or with the Penny Postage Bill, or with the Dissenters' Marriage Act, or with the Whigs in general, or with Lord Campbell in particular, or with the Popish Ascendency, or with the voters of Metropolitan Boroughs, or with the members

1 From the Edinburgh Review, January 1845. With additions. The common tendency of remarks upon individuals is to the too free indulgence either of blame or praise; and what is here said of Mr. Tooke does not altogether, I fear, escape this reproach. No one who examines the book under review, however, will say that the remarks in the Essay were unprovoked or without ample justification. Still I would gladly now have omitted them, if I could have done so without leaving uncorrected much grave error, or without exposing to possible misrepresentation hereafter both the matter and the motive of them. So long, however, as Mr. Tooke's "Copious Notes"

of unprovoked and unscrupulous personal attack continue to disfigure what might easily have been made the best edition of a true English poet, their writer can have no good cause of complaint. I should add that the quotations in these pages from Churchill's Poetry and Satire, have not been taken from Mr. Tooke's volumes, but from the edition of the Poems (the third) issued in 1766 by the poet's brother and executor, John Churchill. The Fragment of a Dedication to Warburton is of later date, being the only composition of Churchill's not published until after his death.

who represent them in Parliament. There are many reasons why Mr. Tooke should not have named these things, far less have gone out of his way so lavishly to indulge his contempt and abuse of them; but we shall content ourselves with mentioning one. If the editorial pains bestowed upon them had been given to his author, we should probably not have had the task, which, before we speak of Churchill, we shall discharge as briefly as we may, of pointing out his editorial

deficiencies.

It would be difficult to imagine a worse biographer than Mr. Tooke. As Dr. Johnson said of his friend Tom Birch, he is " a dead hand at a Life." Nor is he a more lively hand at a Note. In both cases he compiles with singular clumsiness, and his compilations are not always harmless. But though Mr. Tooke is a bad biographer and a bad annotator, he is a far worse critic.

If it were true, as he says, that "the character of "Churchill as a poet, may be considered as fixed in the "first rank of English classics" (i. xiii), we should have to place him with Shakespeare and Milton, in the rank above Dryden and Pope. If the Rosciad were really, as Mr. Tooke thinks, remarkable for its "strength of imagi"nation" (i. xxxiv), we should have to depose it from its place beside the Dunciads, and think of it with the Paradise Losts. And indeed we shall be well disposed to do this, when Mr. Tooke establishes the critical opinion he adopts from poor Dr. Anderson, that the Cure of Saul, a sacred ode by Dr. Brown, "ranks with the most distinguished lyric compositions" (iii. 302).

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This Dr. Brown, the author of the flat tragedy of Barbarossa, and a vain, silly, impracticable person, is described by Mr. Tooke to have been "a far wiser and better "man than Jeremy Bentham" (iii. 109); whose "always "mischievous, but happily not always intelligible, gib"berish," is in a previous passage ranked with "the "coarse blasphemy of Richard Carlyle" (iii. 107). It is in the same discriminating taste we are told after this,

that Dr. Francklin's Translation of Sophocles is "a bold " and happy transfusion into the English language of the "terrible simplicity of the Greek tragedian" (iii. 298); -poor Dr. Francklin being as much like the terrible simplicity of the Greeks, as Mr. Tooke resembles Aristides, or an English schoolmaster is like the Phidian Jove.

The reader will not suppose that Mr. Tooke, a wealthy and respectable solicitor of long standing, and a gentleman who appears to have been really anxious to do good after his peculiar fashion, has not had ample time to set himself right on these points, when we mention the fact of his first appearance as Churchill's editor no fewer than forty years ago. Forty years ago, when he was in the flush of youth, and George the Third was King, he aspired to connect himself with the great satirist. What turned his thoughts that way, from the "quiddets and "quillets, and cases and tenures and tricks" that surrounded him in his daily studies, he has not informed us. But, among his actions of scandal and battery, the echo of Churchill's rough and manly voice was in that day lingering still; and an aspiring young follower of the law could hardly more agreeably indulge a taste for letters, than among the mangled and still bleeding reputations of the Duellist, the Candidate, and the Ghost. We have yet reason to complain, that he did not improve this taste with some little literary knowledge. In his notes to his favourite satirist he has drawn together, no doubt, a great mass of information; which cannot, however, be in any manner useful except to those who know better than himself not only how to select what is of any worth in it, but how to reject what is utterly worthless; and unhappily where it is not matter of fact but of opinion, even this chance is not left to them.

Whether he praises or blames, Mr. Tooke has the rare felicity of never making a criticism that is not a mistake. Nothing of this kind, committed forty years back, has he cared to correct; and every new note added, has added

something to the stock of blunders. He cannot even praise in the right place, when he has such a man as Dr. Garth to praise. Garth was an exquisite creature; a real wit, a gentleman, a friend, a physician, a philosopher; and yet his Satire was not "admirable," nor his Claremont "above mediocrity," nor his Translations from Ovid "spirited and faithful" (iii. 16-17). In an earlier page, Mr. Tooke has occasion to refer to the writer of a particular panegyric, whom he calls Conyngham (ii. 317). This exemplifies another and abundant class of mistakes in his volumes. The writer was Codrington, and the lines were addressed to Garth on his Dispensary. Mr. Tooke has to speak of the two Doctors William King; and he attributes the well-known three octavos of the King of St. Mary's-hall to the King of Christ-church (iii. 173). He has to speak of Bishop Parker, Marvell's antagonist, and he calls him Archbishop Parker (ii. 171); a singularly different person. He condemns Churchill for his public appearance in a theatre with a celebrated courtesan, whom his next sentence, if correct, would prove to have been a venerable lady of between eighty and ninety years old. (i. 47);—the verses quoted having been written sixty-three years before, to the Venus of a past generation. If an anecdote has a point, he misses it; and if a question has two sides, he takes the wrong one. He gravely charges the old traveller Mandeville with wilful want of veracity, and with having "observed in a high northern latitude "the singular phenomenon of the congelation of words "as they issued from the mouth, and the strange medley "of sounds that ensued upon a thaw" (ii. 76);-vulgar errors, we need hardly say. Sir John Mandeville wrote conscientiously, according to the lights of his times; and qualifies his marvellous relations as reports. The congelation of words was a pure invention of Addison's, palmed off upon the old traveller.

In matters more closely connected with his subject, Mr. Tooke is not more sparing of errors and self-contradictions. He confounds Davies, the actor and bookseller-Johnson's