writer a slim apology for addressing an appeal to George I for patronage. This is the practical and melancholy purpose also of Mr. John Dunton's Dying Groans from the Fleet Prison: Or The National Complaint (1723?).

When the "great change" so frequently anticipated occurred in 1733, Dunton had lived long enough to see some very important developments in English literature, and he might reasonably have claimed at least a humble share of credit. Out of the rude embryo of the Mercury the periodical essay had come to full perfection between 1709 and 1714. As a specialist on death he had seen his judgment of public taste thoroughly vindicated in the success of more prosperous books than his but no less gloomy or dull. In this respect, as in others, he paved the way for the more fortunate. About the time he was producing The Mourning-Ring, his friend John Shower the clergyman brought out The Mourner's Companion (1692), and the next year appeared Thomas Doolittle's The Mourner's Directory (1693), both of which he must have regarded as rivals in his own special domain. A much more dangerous enemy had appeared three years earlier, William Sherlock's Practical Discourse concerning Death (1689). Eventually this rose above all opposition and became the great classic on death for readers of the eighteenth century. By 1751 it had attained its twenty-seventh edition. The only serious contestant was Charles Drelincourt's book, translated from French into English by D'Assigny as The Christian's Defence against the Fear of Death. Though translated as far back as 1675, it seems not to have been widely known until much later. A fourth edition was issued in 1701, a seventeenth in 1751. The publishers of this work managed to secure second place for it partly by exploiting Dunton's idea of printing books to be used as funeral gifts, as will be seen by examining any edition after the ninth (1719). Drelincourt had the advantage also, it may be added, of Daniel Defoe's skill as an advertiser; most of the eighteenth-century editions were provided with Defoe's Apparition of Mrs. Veal, which had been written to "recommend the perusal " of this book.57 There can be no ques

57 John Norris's An Effectual Remedy against the Fear of Death (1733) is in itself a work of some consequence, but the author makes a point of recommending the greater work of Drelincourt (p. 48).

tion that as a dispenser of religious gloom Dunton had gauged his public well. He also lived long enough to see the morbid interest in death fully reassert itself in polite literature. With the publication of Parnell's Night Piece on Death (1721) the graveyard school of poetry had definitely begun. That most of Dunton's contribution was stolen is true; but as a compiler and publisher he had played a prominent part. It should be charitably remembered also that writers of pious books before his time and later had a very flexible code of morality. Thomas Jordan had stolen every line of poetry in his Death Dissected (1650). One of the ghastliest books of piety in Dunton's time was a forgery, by his friend George Larkin, entitled The Visions of John Bunyan, Being his Last Remains, Giving an Account of the Glories of Heaven, and the Terrors of Hell, and of the World to Come. Recommended by him as necessary to be had in all Families (1725).58 Richard Steele did not escape the charge of having taken altogether too much of his Ladies' Library (1714) from Jeremy Taylor's Holy Living and Holy Dying,59 and Young deliberately appropriated from Farquhar the very pathetic incident of Narcissa's burial in Night Thoughts.60 Dunton merely outdid the dishonest zeal of others in the cause of religion. University of Minnesota.

* The example of capitalizing Bunyan's name had been set in a forgery called Meditations on the Several Ages of Man's Life: Representing the Vanity of it, from his Cradle to his Grave. Adorn'd with proper Emblems (1701).

5 See Mr. Steele Detected: Or, the poor and oppressed Orphan's Letters Complaining of the great injustice done... by the Ladies' Library .. 1714. (By R. Meredith).

60

Night III, Aldine ed., 1, 41; Farquhar's Sir Harry Wildair, Act I, Sc. I. See Horace W. O'Connor, Pub. Mod. L. Assn. of America, March, 1919, Vol. xxvп, pp. 130-149.

SOME INFAMOUS TORY REVIEWS

BY WALTER GRAHAM

The perversion of literary criticism at the beginning of the nineteenth century, under the influence of political or personal bias, was not confined to Tory periodicals. Many of the most notable contemporary misjudgments of now famous authors appear in liberal organs like the Edinburgh Review, from the pens of writers like Hazlitt, Jeffrey, and Macaulay. Largely because of the prominence of these men, perhaps, much has been written regarding the reviews and reviewers of the Edinburgh. Jeffrey's limitations are well known today, and the reasons for his narrowness are sufficiently clear to students of the Romantic Period. Likewise Hazlitt and Macaulay have been discussed by a score of eminent scholars, until the rationale of their criticism has become widely understood. But the ineptitudes of Tory critics, written by a far less distinguished group of writers, have never been satisfactorily explained. To attempt a clearer exposition of infamous critiques which appeared in the Quarterly Review, the chief organ of the Tories, between 1809 and 1850, is the purpose of this paper.1

To begin with, a few general misapprehensions must be corrected. Tory vituperation and the name of William Gifford have long been associated. As first editor of the Quarterly, he has been widely credited with a number of the more savage and unjust criticisms. But although he was undoubtedly responsible between 1809 and 1824 for the tone of Quarterly criticism, Gifford wrote few articles for the review himself. Southey also, probably because he was for many years the most noted reviewer on the staff, was generally regarded as a foremost maligner of his contemporaries. He did not deserve this reputation, for his articles he almost never reviewed authors of importance-really erred greatly on the side of charity. His expressions of absurdly high opinion for such poets as Mary Colling, Lucretia Davidson, the poetess of Platts

1 Authorship of critical reviews in the Quarterly Review, during the first half-century, was taken from Murray's Register, the only certain authority. Unless otherwise specified, Roman numerals all refer to volumes in the Quarterly.

burgh, James Grahame and James Montgomery, indicate that Southey was much more interested in encouraging than in nipping genius in the bud. Neither Gifford nor Southey, then, can be held to any great extent responsible for the reviews, which, because of their truculent attacks on more or less inoffensive authors, have become a byword for critical blindness and vituperation.

Before discussing in detail some of the more notorious Tory reviews, one other important consideration must be noted. The Quarterly Review was above all else the defender of the Established Church, the palladium of privileged Aristocracy. Religion and the Law, the King and a narrow, orthodox morality, could not be forgotten. The Edinburgh's critical articles often contained political aspersions, and Jeffrey frequently formed his judgments on other than literary grounds. But it is true and natural that Quarterly reviewers showed a much greater inclination to partiality on matters affecting Church and Crown. Whatever tended to decrease general respect for the established order, the Church, the monarchical form of government, the laws, the King, and the landed aristocracy, was evil. Modified and varied by its applications, this was always the major consideration.

I

No review in the Quarterly has gathered to itself more notice than that by John Wilson Croker of Keats's Endymion. Keats, this new author, was a disciple of Leigh Hunt; and the name Hunt was anathema to every good Tory. Croker referred to the review of Rimini, which he is now known to have written, and said that Keats's style in Endymion was more unintelligible, almost as rugged, twice as diffuse, and ten times more tiresome and absurd than Hunt's. Keats had no meaning. Hunt generally had one. Keats merely wrote a line at random, and then indited another suggested by the rime. Yet Croker admitted that the youthful poet showed signs of genius, and also confessed that he (the reviewer) had not read the entire poem. Obviously, this was not literary criticism, as we now understand that term. A writer in the Morning Chronicle, October 8, 1818, called the review senseless, and several besides Shelley remonstrated on the folly of such an attack. For one of the motives which prompted it, we must look to the relations of Keats and Hunt. Moreover, to be fair to the re

viewer who was so savagely unfair to Keats, it must be admitted that he exposed a few of the worst effects of Hunt's baneful influence on the young poet's style. Coinage of questionable forms, the language of swoons and kisses, and such phrases as "honeyfeel of bliss," which the youthful romanticist used to a ridiculous extreme, were derided, and with justification.

The review of Endymion is short and was much less damaging than has been generally believed. It was not nearly so scurrilous and personal as many that appeared in the Edinburgh or Quarterly -those in the latter on Hazlitt and Shelley, for example. It was merely stupid. Egregious failure to see any of the golden promise of Keats, was the most unforgivable thing about it. This was the more inexcusable, because the Quarterly, unlike Blackwood's, never in after years admitted its mistake. Probably, much of the notoriety this piece of so-called criticism received was due to Byron's jeu d'esprit, "Who killed John Keats?" and his "John Keats, who was killed off by one critique," which followed Shelley's drastic arraignment of the reviewer, in the preface and text of Adonais. Certainly, the widely-credited fiction that the review killed Keats was started by Shelley. We now know that the 66 critique" had nothing to do with Keats's death or the progress of the disease which caused it. Indeed, he wrote to his brother George that the Quarterly's attack had done him real service-it had got his book "among several sets." He left no record of any such supersensitiveness as Shelley attributed to him; and the world has been too ready to forget that Keats himself and Shelley both admitted afterward the justice of a part, at least, of the

censure.

II

The real target of Keats's adversaries was Leigh Hunt, who fairly gloried in his warfare with the Tories. Although Gifford pressed Hunt to write for the Quarterly, during its earlier days, in spite of his politics, the latter in his Feast of the Poets, 1814, made a ferocious attack on the Tory editor on account of his "inhumanity and servility." It is not to be wondered, then, that in 1816 Hunt's Story of Rimini was subjected to an assault from the Quarterly. Hunt, who had stigmatized Gifford's verse in the Baviad as lines

'Moore's Life of Byron, letter 419 and Shelley's letter to Gifford, Prose Works, IV, 188. Cf. Leigh Hunt, Autobiography, N. Y., i, 46.