FullReads

Francis Jeffrey wrote this, and Moore challenged him to fight. The police interfered, and as Jeffrey put it, “the affair ended amicably. We have since breakfasted together very lovingly. He has expressed penitence for what he has written and declared that he will never again apply any little talents he may possess to such purpose: and I have said that I shall be happy to praise him whenever I find that he has abjured these objectionable topics.” It was Sydney Smith who said of Jeffrey he would “damn the solar system–bad light–planets too distant–pestered with comets. Feeble contrivance–could make a better with great ease.”

Jeffrey reviewed Wordsworth and found in the “Lyrical Ballads” “vulgarity, affectation and silliness.” He is alarmed, moreover, lest his “childishness, conceit and affectation” spread to other authors. He proposes a poem to be called “Elegiac Stanzas to a Sucking Pig,” and of “Alice Fell” he writes that “if the publishing of such trash as this be not felt as an insult on the public taste, we are afraid it cannot be insulted.” When the “White Doe of Rylstone” was published–no prime favorite, I confess, of my own–Jeffrey wrote that it had the merit of being the very worst poem he ever saw imprinted in a quarto volume. “It seems to us,” he wrote, “to consist of a happy union of all the faults, without any of the beauties, which belong to his school of poetry. It is just such a work, in short, as some wicked enemy of that, school might be supposed to have devised, on purpose to make it ridiculous.”

Lord Byron, on the publication of an early volume, is counselled “that he do forthwith abandon poetry … the mere rhyming of the final syllable, even when accompanied by the presence of a certain number of feet … is not the whole art of poetry. We would entreat him to believe,” continued the reviewer, “that a certain portion of liveliness, somewhat of fancy, is necessary to constitute a poem; and that a poem in the present day, to be read, must contain at least one thought….” It was this attack that brought forth Byron’s “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers.”

As long as Jeffrey hoped to enlist Southey to write for the Edinburgh Review, he treated him with some favor. But Southey took up with the Quarterly. “The Laureate,” says the Edinburgh presently, “has now been out of song for a long time: But we had comforted ourselves with the supposition that he was only growing fat and lazy…. The strain, however, of this publication, and indeed of some that went before it, makes us apprehensive that a worse thing has befallen him … that the worthy inditer of epics is falling gently into dotage.”

Now for the Quarterly Review, if by chance it can show an equal spleen!

There lived in the early days of the nineteenth century a woman by the name of Lady Morgan, who was the author of several novels and books of travel. Although her record in intelligence and morals is good, John Croker, who regularly reviewed her books, accuses her works of licentiousness, profligacy, irreverence, blasphemy, libertinism, disloyalty and atheism. There are twenty-six pages of this in one review only, and any paragraph would be worth the quoting for its ferocity. After this attack it was Macaulay who said he hated Croker like “cold boiled veal.”

The Quarterly reviewed Keats’ “Endymion,” although the writer naively states at the outset that he has not read the poem. “Not that we have been wanting in our duty,” he writes, “far from it–indeed, we have made efforts almost as superhuman as the story itself appears to be, to get through it; but with the fullest stretch of our perseverance we are forced to confess that we have not been able to struggle beyond the first of the four books….” Finally he questions whether Keats is the author’s name, for he doubts “that any man in his senses would put his real name to such a rhapsody.”