Page images
PDF
EPUB

six women of some fashion. The doctor left behind him a widow, and two fatherless children, if they may be called so, besides the little boy before mentioned. In relation to whom we may say of the doctor, as the good old ballad about 'The Children in the Wood' says of the unnatural uncle, that he was father and mother both in one. These are all the circumstances that I could learn of Dr. Young's life, which might have given occasion to many obscene fictions: but as I know those would never have gained a place in your paper, I have not troubled you with any impertinence of that nature; having stuck to the truth very scrupulously, as I always do when I subscribe myself,

"Sir, Your," &c.

I shall add, as a postscript to this letter, that I am informed, the famous Saltero,' who sells coffee in his museum at Chelsea, has by him a curiosity which helped the doctor to carry on his imposture, and will give great satisfaction to the curious inquirer.

No. 229. TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 1710.

Quæsitam meritis sume superbiam.-HOR.

From my own Apartment, September 25.

THE whole creation preys upon itself: every living creature is inhabited. A flea has a thousand invisible insects that teaze him as he jumps from place to place, and revenge our quarrels upon him. A very ordinary microscope shows us, that a louse is itself a very lousy creature. A whale, besides those seas and oceans in the several vessels of his body, which are filled with

IV. notes to No. 34, Nichols's ed.-G.

innumerable shoals of little animals, carries about it a whole world of inhabitants; insomuch that, if we believe the calculations some have made, there are more living creatures, which are too small for the naked eye to behold, about the leviathan, than there are of visible creatures upon the face of the whole earth. Thus every nobler creature is as it were the basis and support

of multitudes that are his inferiors.

This consideration very much comforts me, when I think on those numberless vermin that feed upon this paper, and find their sustenance out of it; I mean, the small wits and scribblers that every day turn a penny by nibbling at my lucubrations. This has been so advantageous to this little species of writers, that, if they do me justice, I may expect to have my statue erected in Grub-street, as being a common benefactor to that quarter.

They say, when a fox is very much troubled with fleas, he goes into the next pool with a little lock of wool in his mouth, and keeps his body under water, till the vermin get into it, after which he quits the wool, and diving, leaves his tormentors to shift for themselves, and get their livelihood where they can. I would have these gentlemen take care that I do not serve them after the same manner; for though I have hitherto kept my temper pretty well, it is not impossible but I may some time or other disappear; and what will then become of them? Should I lay down my paper, what a famine would there be among the hawkers, printers, booksellers, and authors? It would be like Dr. Burgess's dropping his cloak, with the whole congregation hanging upon the skirts of it. To enumerate some of these my doughty antagonists, I was threatened to be answered weekly Tit for Tat: I was undermined by the Whisperer, haunted by Tom Brown's Ghost, scolded at by a Female Tatler, and slandered

a Daniel Burgess was secretary and reader to the princess Sophia at the court of Hanover in 1714.-N.

by another of the same character, under the title of Atalantis. I have been annotated, retattled, examined, and condoled: but it being my standing maxim, never to speak ill of the dead; I shall let these authors rest in peace, and take great pleasure in thinking that I have sometimes been the means of their getting a belly-full. When I see myself thus surrounded by such formidable enemies, I often think of the Knight of the Red Cross in Spencer's Den of Error, who, after he has cut off the dragon's head, and left it wallowing in a flood of ink, sees a thousand monstrous reptiles making their attempts upon him, one with many heads, another with none, and all of them without eyes.

The same so sore annoyed has the knight,
That well nigh choaked with the deadly stink,
His forces fail, he can no longer fight;

Whose courage when the fiend perceived to shrink,
She poured forth out of her hellish sink
Her fruitful cursed spawn of serpents small,
Deformed monsters, foul, and black as ink;
Which swarming all about his legs did crawl,
And him encombred sore, but could not hurt at all.

As gentle shepherd in sweet even-tide,
When ruddy Phoebus gins to welk in west,
High on an hill, his flock to viewen wide,
Marks which do bite their hasty supper best:
A cloud of combrous gnats do him molest,
All striving to infix their feeble stings,
That from their noyance he no where can rest;
But with his clownish hands their tender wings

He brusheth oft, and oft doth mar their murmurings.a

If ever I should want such a fry of little authors to attend me, I shall think my paper in a very decaying condition. They are like ivy about an oak, which adorns the tree at the same time that it eats into it; or like a great man's equipage, that do honour to the person on whom they feed. For my part, when I Fairy Queen, L. i., l. 1.-V. 22-25.-N.

a

see myself thus attacked, I do not consider my antagonists as malicious, but hungry, and therefore am resolved never to take any notice of them.

As for those who detract from my labours without being prompted to it by an empty stomach, in return to their censures I shall take pains to excel, and never fail to persuade myself, that their enmity is nothing but their envy or ignorance.

Give me leave to conclude, like an old man and a moralist, with a fable.

The owls, bats, and several other birds of night, were one day got together in a thick shade, where they abused their neighbours in a very sociable manner. This satire at last fell upon the sun, whom they all agreed to be very troublesome, impertinent, and inquisitive. Upon which the sun, who overheard them, spoke to them after this manner: 'Gentlemen, I wonder how dare abuse one that you know could in an instant scorch you up, and burn every mother's son of you: but the only answer I shall give you, or the revenge I shall take of you, is, to shine on.'

you

No. 239. THURSDAY, OCTOBEB 19, 1710.

-Mecum certasse feretur.-OVID.

From my own Apartment, October 18.

It is ridiculous for any man to criticise on the works of another, who has not distinguished himself by his own performances. A judge would make but an indifferent figure who had never been known at the bar. Cicero was reputed the greatest orator of his age and country before he wrote a book De Oratore; and Horace the greatest poet before he published his Art of Poetry.

The observation arises naturally in any one who casts his eye upon this last mentioned author, where he will find the criticisms placed in the latter end of his book, that is, after the finest odes and satires in the Latin tongue.

[ocr errors]

A modern, whose name I shall not mention, because I would not make a silly paper sell, was born a critic and an examiner, and, like one of the race of the serpent's teeth, came into the world with a sword in his hand. His works put me in mind of the story that is told of a German monk, who was taking a catalogue of a friend's library, and meeting with a Hebrew book in it, entered it under the title of, A book that has the beginning where the end should be.' This author, in the last of his crudities, has amassed together a heap of quotations, to prove that Horace and Virgil were both of them modester men than myself, and if his works were to live as long as mine, they might possibly give posterity a notion, that Isaac Bickerstaffe was a very conceited old fellow, and as vain a man as either Tully or Sir Francis Bacon. Had this serious writer fallen upon me only, I could have overlooked it; but to see Cicero abused, is, I must confess, what I cannot bear. The censure he passes upon this great man runs thus: 'The itch of being very abusive, is almost inseparable from vain-glory. Tully has these two faults in so high a degree, that nothing but his being the best writer in the world can make amends for them.' The scurrilous wretch goes on to say I am as bad as Tully. His words are these: And yet the Tatler, in his paper of September 26, has outdone him in both. He speaks of himself with more arrogance, and with more insolence of others.' I am afraid, by his discourse, this gentleman has no more read Plutarch than he has Tully. If he had, he would have observed a passage in that historian, wherein he has with great delicacy distinguished between two passions which are usually complicated in human nature, and which an

[ocr errors]
« PreviousContinue »