wood's books, it is because he publishes it. If we praise one of Murray's, it is because the author is one of our Contributors. If we praise one of Constable's, it is because we wrote it ourself. If we damn a dunce, or flea a fool, or kime a knave, or pin a puppy, or kick a cur, or muzzle a Morgan, or root out a Radical, or whip a Whig, or crucify a Cockney,—the reason assigned is, we presume, "because he is not a Contributor."-Admitted. The whole periodical press is bought and sold-except Blackwod's Magazine. The moment one single dunce-even a dubious one-drivelling on debateable ground—is praised in this Work-" may skill part from our right hand." The moment we are conscious of basely and abjectly denying his due to a man of genius, may our heart wither. We have our fits-our moodsour measures. Our spirits are very unequal. We look on this world with many thousand eyes. On Monday, a man seems to us to show some talent-on Tuesday, we find him feeble—and on Wednesday, weep to acknowledge him a Macvey. Thus are we sometimes led into inconsistencies. But all who have studied our character with a truly philosophic eye, know how to correct our reckoning. We do not deal out our stinted praise like alms, as if genius were mendicity, we do not fear to let ourselves down by lifting up others to our own level; or if it so happen that they deserve it, to take our place at their feet. We know who are our equals, and seat them by our sides;-we know who are our superiors, and we ask to sit on their right hands; we know who are immeasurably, eternally our inferiors, and we either shove them aside without cruelty; or if they turn against us with tooth or tail, we scorch, scotch, and scarify them, as meet is, and tread them into invisibility among the ashes of oblivion. And now we are brought four-in-hand bang-up to the gate of Truth. THE MIGHTY ARMY OF THE BLOCKHEADS ARE SET IN ARRAY AGAINST US. THEIR WOODEN TRUMPETS CLATTER-AND THEIR TIMBER BAYONETS ARE FIXED TO THEIR PASTEBOARD BLUNDERBUSSES. See how they wheel back in miserable prostration. What recrimination among their heels and their toes! What suicide is going on among that swinish multitude! We are not moving from our position. Yet they fancy we are pursuing them, and giving no quarter. They are crying out for mercy-and instinctively skulking to the rear, begin plundering the baggage, and abusing in drunken infatuation the clemency of their unconscious and unintending conquerors. This, gentle Reader, is a flight. But to be a little more intelligible ;-the simple truth is, that a Periodical Work that shuts its gates against all blockheads, or now and then drags one in, and sends him out tarred and feathered, or like a rat with his mouth stitched together with strong pack-thread, to frighten his brotherhood of vermin, must be assailed every hour of the day with the mud missiles of malice. Blockheads too are breedy, and double themselves every ten years. Fat carries off thousands annually no doubt, but they marry early, and often beget twins. Well do we know the round, fat, oily, procreative abusers of Blackwood. Nor are they all so. The small, spiteful, wizzened, spawnless, dry-haddock of a hater, may be seen shedding the salt rheums of his blear eyes against us-that stains our page as lemon juice does velveteen breeches. To the current stupidity, and the current malignity of the Times,-in other words, to the Fools join the Knaves; and not an enemy to our work will be omitted, or a friend taken in. Cetera desunt. C. N. แ LETTER FROM A GENTLEMAN OF THE PRESS," TO CHRISTOPHER NORTH, ESQ. MY DEAR N.-Will you permit me to expostulate a little with a correspondent of yours in your last,* who does not sign his name, and waxes marvellously wroth with some hardhearted critic unknown, who has not meted unto Mr Halls due meed of praise for his picture? Before I begin, however, let me say that I know nothing of Mr Halls-never heard of his picture until I saw it noticed in your valuable and wide-spreading Miscellany, (which I perceive is the fashionable etiquette in addressing magazines,)—that I am no judge of painting, taste, gusto, virtu, and all that sort of thing, that I am very willing to believe, as it has been praised by a contributor of yours, that the picture is quite excellent, and, moreover, perfectly ready to admit that the critic complained of may be a bad man and an ugly Christian. After all these admissions, I must still say, dear N., that your contributor is rather an absurd sort of person, at least in this particular matter. A man paints a picture. Very well. People go to see it. Still better. But if the people who go there are not to express their opinions on it, I must withhold the assertion, that the whole transaction is the best of all possible things. My opponent, however, would remark, that he expects that nobody should criticise unless he possessed a perfect knowledge of the subject; and that he should get through his task with the most benignant suavity, scattering nothing but rose-water on the head of the happy artist. May I ask your correspondent in what part of the terraqueous globe he has lived since he cut his eye-teeth-since he became a carnivorous animal? Not in London or Edinburgh I swear, or he would not at this time of day go about with a lantern in his hand, looking for faultless monsters which the world never saw. Here is a poor devil getting his three guineas a-week, and working like a cart-horse-obliged to attend boxing-matches, bull-baitings, methodist preachings, Whig meetings, Jacko Macacko, Alderman Waithman, and all other sorts of curiosities, eternally reporting, reporting, reporting, scribble, scribble all day long,-up at night listening to Liston, or Maberly, or Grimaldi, or Lord Erskine, et hoc genus omne, still with the pen everlasting between the forefinger and thumb of his dexter paw, with an omnivorous, roaring, gaping newspaper behind him for ever bellowing to him for food-and this unfortunate homo is, forsooth, to be a walking encyclopædia, to write critically, scientifically, literally, philosophically, etceteraly on all given subjects-to understand politics, pugilism, eloquence, music, painting, and poetry, and all other branches of art and nature-for three guineas a-week-for three pounds three shillings and no pence sterling money of our liege Lord and Sovereign King George the Fourth, whom God preserve. You, North, are undoubtedly a living pantology, as all who have the pleasure of your acquaintance must admit;-but have the goodness to recollect that you are in the receipt of some seven or eight thousand a-year for so being. A man may write de omni scibili, or rather de omni scribili, at that rate, but to expect it for 156 guineas per annum, is quite absurd and unreasonable. Well, well, it may be said, we do not expect perfect connoisseurship in the articles, but fair play, my good sir, fair play-no ill nature-no abuse -no evil speaking, lying, and slandering. Here again I have your correspondent on the hip. What right has he or any man to cry out that calling a man a jackass is foul play? I am looking out of my window this moment, and I see two grand looking fellows passing by in superfine black coats-breeches to match-and black silk stockings, each with a perpendicular cane firmly invested in his fist, and talking with the utmost gravity, composure, and conscious dignity to one another. I bet ten to four that they are both asses-six to one that one or the other is so. Will anybody take me up in pounds, guineas, pistoles, doubloons, or joes? If anybody Mr T. alludes to the concluding article of our sixty-fourth Number, vol. XI., | p. 596, on Mr Halls' picture. This letter was too late for our last. graph writer is in general a poor though merry fellow, who has neither friend nor enemy among artists superior to sign-post daubers, these great and golden rules for reviewing, viz. 1. Puff your friends; 2. Abuse your enemies, cannot have a very extensive influence. Of the majority he knows nothing whatever. Let him then go by chance, does, his cash is in jeopardy. I contemplate some of it transmuting into the most admirable blackstrap possible, and wambling down my throat with the most agreeable rapidity. In the same way Mr Hubbledeshuff, the reporter, or Mr Grub, the editor, goes into a picture gallery-He does not know a good picture from a bad onewarm colouring from cold-back--abuse and praise on any principle, ground from foreground-nor does he care a fig's end about it, but an article he must write. Mayhap too his head is addled by an extra half dozen tumblers of punch, or by a speech of Joe Hume's, or something else that is apt to stupify a man; but addled or not addled, there stands the open-throated, wide-gutted newspaper clamouring for prog. So he goes about the room, putting down whatever strikes his fancy, right or wrong-larding thick with chiaro oscuro-light and shade-breadth -colouring-expression-Raphael Michael Angelo-and Jack the painter; or indeed if he have sense, he does not go there at all, but criticizes quietly over his cheese and porter in the cool of the evening, looking only at the catalogue. His own friends he puffs of coursefor the rest, acting on the principle of the general jackassification of mankind, which I have already glanced at, he abuses them right and left, just as a drunken Irishman at a fair hits all about him, in the hope that he may chance to break the head of an oppo nent. Now, Sir, I would wish to ask, is there any thing unchristian, impolite, indecorous, or asinine, in praising a man's friend? For the life of me, I cannot see that there is, vid. Cic. de Amic. Therefore, if praising a friend is right, ex equali, it follows, that abusing your enemy is just as praiseworthy. Had I an enemy who painted a picture more Titianish than Titian, or more Rembrandtish than Rembrandt, or more Haydonish than Haydon, I think it would be a most unfair thing to ask me to puff it. You may talk to me of the days of chivalry, but they had no critics or connoisseurs in those days and God be thanked they have gone to the dogs moreover. Nay more, it would, I think, be quite correct in me to tear it to pieces-into bits of canvas inch square. Shew me a law of nature to contradict me, to hinder me from doing so. There is none extant in all her statute book. But as the para regular or irregular-and were I criticising, I should lay on abuse as thick as butter. Nor would there be a particle of malignity in my whole composition while doing so. I well know that the people in general, and the reading public in particular, feel a sort of repugnant horror against the sweetmeat confections of flattery, and like exceedingly to have their palates roused by the piquant sauce of the tomohawk. And do you think, my dear fellow, I am to send to my employer a milk-and-water affair, which would be voted a bore, and mayhap get me turned off as an ass? Gammon me, if I should do any such thing. Besides, take it up in a patriotic point of view. Is the interest of the FEW to predominate over the interest of the MANY? Am I to respect the feelings of some half dozen artists (who, by the way, are quite impertinent in pretending to any,) and baulk the appetite of the half million who would be quite delighted at seeing these good people cut up, hacked, hashed, mangled, and embowelled? It is a selfish expectation on the part of the artists, and let us hear no more about it. How But your correspondent will here put in a word. "My good sir, you have all this time been fighting the wind. It was no bread-and-cheese, three-guineas-a-week reporter whom I charge-this calumnious, this atrocious, this cold-hearted, this bloody ruffian of an article, of which I complain, was written by a brother artist, to depreciate Mr Halls' fame. can you defend that?" To which I reply, I can defend it with all the ease and grace imaginable. Should not every man have-or whether he should or not-has not every man of genius, or who supposes he has a genius, an innate desire of seeing himself in print? Of observing how the letters traced in villainous manuscript by his own hand will look when disposed in orderly lines and well-crammed columns by the compositor? This being granted, I do not see why a painter should, by handling the brush, lose all faculty and desire of handling the pen. You see Hazlitt, what a fine writer he is-how universally admired-nearly as much respected as a scribe, as he was valued as a painter. Well, then, on what is the man to write? Obviously on his own profession; and in this he can only employ himself in dissertating either on dead or living painters. As for the dead painters, it is ten to one that he does not know any thing concerning them, though that to be sure, is no reason why he should not write-but still more, they have been written on so often, that no man of originality would bother himself with them nowa-days. Then of living painters, he must either write of himself or his contemporaries. He puffs himself of course-but there is no reason why he should do so for another. Must he not occasionally cut up his brotherbrushes ? The resolution-signing painters of Edinburgh, who made all that riot about the Report of the Cognoscenti, would say-No; but every body of sense would say-Ay, and the ayes have it. Indeed, in the present highly improved and flourishing state of British art, if he did not cut up three hundred and sixty-four out of 365 of the pictures which we see lauded to the stars in the Literary Gazette, and elsewhere, he must be as eyeless as old Polyphemus, after the unpleasant affair he had with the Ithacan. Now in this way an innocent, and perhaps truly benevolent, painter thought he could be smart on Mr Halls, and write a nice little article for some paper which he patronizes with his absurdity. I am not disparaging Mr Halls, nor panegyrizing his critic, who, if he be a writer of Cockaigne, is probably a stupid animal, but merely starting a hypothesis which will solve the phenomena, without having recourse to all the vivid indignation of your correspondent against the pendribble of the Cockney. Verily, it is a storm in a kennel. Now I have overthrown your correspondent totally; and yet I see a sort of unsatisfied puzzle in his countenance. Damn it he will say is then a man to be blackguarded with total impunity by any fellow who takes pen in hand, and afterwards to be told, by way of excuse, that his slanderer is a truly benevolent person, or a beer-bibbing reporter, occupied in the innocent employment of feeding a voracious newspaper? As your correspondent (I wish I knew his name, for it is a bore to be using this cumbrous periphrasis every five lines) is obviously a clever, though in this respect, an unenlightened man, and as he has told the story of the stupid abbot admirably well, I shall answer him with the most condescending benignity. All the abuse of all the scurrilous publications in the country-the old Edinburgh Review, the Scotsman, the Examiner, the Morning Chronicle, &c. &c.-never will do a man of geniusof real undoubted genius-one pinsworth of harm. Jeffrey, in one of his thousand-and-one slanderous articles, told Lord Byron that he ought to give up poetry-for that Nature never intended him to be a poet. Did any body believe the smallest of critics? Nobody with more brains than a tit mouse. He began a critique on the Excursion, by the very elegant and beautiful phrase of "This will never do," and who cared a pinch of snuff about it. Hunt, in his Feast of the Poets, declared that Sir Walter Scott could not write a sentence of readable prose-whereat I burst into a loud guffaw. In his Examiner, he said that HE (Hunt) had put down the Duke of Wellington! which only reminded me of a quaintly devised saying of my old and good friend Jack Curran, dear, witty, jolly, eloquent Jack Curran, to our friend Charley. "What are you writing there, Charley, my boy?" says Jack. "A speech, sir," said the orator, "and I intend to give your friend Grattan a dressing in it." "Never mind it, Charley, my boy," replied Curran, "never mind it-it is only a child trying to throw a pebble at the leg of a Colossus."-And do you think that Lord Byron, or Wordsworth, or Sir Walter, or the Duke, for it is not worth while to multiply examples, are a bit the worse for the drivellings of Jeffrey or Hunt? Not they, indeed,-no more than they would for the barkings of a couple of cross-grained cur dogs. Nay, not to rely on the efforts of such impotent weaklings as the SMALL KNOWN, and the King of the Cockneys, -even men of real talent do not put down men of real talent. Did the whole congregation of wits, who drew their polished pens against Bentley in the Boyle controversy, lessen the fame of that mighty scholar? Did Warburton prostrate Lowth, or Lowth Warburton? Neither they both flourish, full of honour, after having abused one another most tremendously. Or to give an example more immediately in point. Has the powerful satire of powerful Churchill injured Hogarth in the eyes of posterity? No more than Hogarth's caricaturing him as a bear has made us blind to the merits of the satirist. To be sure, feebleness and effeminacy, and pretension, and gingerbread work, and namby pamby, go to the ground before a vigorous critic,-for the weak must bend to the strong. They who failed to make Bentley a butt, have damned to everlasting fame a cartload of Blackmores, Eusdens, Welsteads, Gildons, and other dunces-and why? Because they were dunces. Down tumbled the whole crockery of the Della Crusca before the mawling hand of Gifford, and they were cracked into fragments, never to be pieced again. Did Gifford, think you, or his journeyman in the Quarterly, whoever he was, smash in pieces so easily the author of Waverley, when he pronounced Gay Mannering a dull book? Not he, faith,-every one laughed out at the critic. Or, Mr North, will you let me tread on your own corns? You are flattered so outrageously-there is so unanimous an acclaim of praise in your favour-all ranks and classes of men, except Whigs and tailors (though on consideration, these are scarce to be reckoned among mankind-the former being asses, the latter fractions) unite so cordially in puffing you, that you are growing as vain as a peacock, and will, perhaps, not listen to me, when I tell you that you had some reprehensible articles, in former times, in your Magazine, cutting up those who deserved it not. For instance, you gave Coleridge a barbarous lot of abuseyet the author of Christabel is unhurt by it-swimming about quite peaceably among the swans of Thames. Why? Because he is a man of real genius. But turn the tables. Signor Z, whoever he be, gibbeted everlastingly Hunt, Hazlitt, Keats, Webb, and all the Cockney school. Has any one dared to take them down from that bad eminence? Have they dared VOL. XII. to shew their faces in decent society, branded as they are on the countenance with that admirably adapted title? Have not their books been obliged to skulk from the tables of gentlemen, where they might formerly have been seen, into the fitting company of washerwomen, merchants' clerks, ladies of easy virtue, and mythological young gentlemen, who fill the agreeable office of ushers at boarding-schools? What is the reason that they sunk under it? Because they were, are, and ever will be, ignorant pretenders, without talent or information. It is in vain for Mr Hazlitt* to call Z "a mischievous crew of critics in Edinburgh," to abuse the public for minding him, and mourn over the title of Cockney. It will not do, my dear H, blame not Z, but Nature, who at thy birth gave thee the blessing she gave Og in Absalom and Achitophel-BE THOU DULL. As I am not angry, I shall not say any worse. What I have said about abuse, I might say of Puff; viz. that you can no more puff up permanently what is bad, than you can cry down permanently what is good; but that would be wandering away too much, and besides, the art of puffing is too mighty an art to be discussed in this way as a side-dish. The total of what I have discoursed on is, That all the clamour about cruel criticism is absurd-it will do no harm to the mighty; and as for the pigmies, let them be crushed for daring to tread where none but the mighty should enter. Gods, men, or booksellers, tolerate not even mediocrity in literature or art-let it therefore be kicked out. If a critic mistake his man-why, all that is to be said about it is, that he will not be able to put his kicking propensities into execution, and perhaps get off with a broken head; unless the attacked party should look on him with the same sovereign contempt that a Newfoundland dog does on an impertinent turnspit, and treat him accordingly. Nor is there any cruelty in a critic thus attacking his legitimate game-no more than in a Bow-street officer unkenneling a swindler-only let both critic and officer take care they collar the right man, else they may get into a scrape. As for malignity, &c., it is almost all * Vide Hazlitt's Table Talk. H |