s which faction has
thrown out? Do we not fear to trust ourselves amid the multiplicity of
his facts? And when we are familiarised with the variety of his
historical portraits, are we not startled when it is suggested that
"they are tinged with his own passions and his own weaknesses?" Burnet
has indeed made "his humble appeal to the great God of Truth" that he
has given it as fully as he could find it; and he has expressed his
abhorrence of "a lie in history," so much greater a sin than a lie in
common discourse, from its lasting and universal nature. Yet these
hallowing protestations have not saved him! A cloud of witnesses, from
different motives, have risen up to attaint his veracity and his
candour; while all the Tory wits have ridiculed his style, impatiently
inaccurate, and uncouthly negligent, and would sink his vigour and
ardour, while they expose the meanness and poverty of his genius. Thus
the literary and the moral character of no ordinary author have fallen
a victim to party-feeling.[340]

But this victim to political criticism on literature was himself
criminal, and has wreaked his own party feelings on the _Papist_
Dryden, and the _Tory_ Prior; Dryden he calls, in the most unguarded
language, "a monster of immodesty and impurity of all sorts." There
had been a literary quarrel between Dryden and Burnet respecting a
translation of Varillas' "History of Heresies;" Burnet had ruined the
credit of the papistical author while Dryden was busied on the
translation; and as Burnet says, "he has wreaked his malice on me for
spoiling his three months' labour." In return, he kindly informs
Dryden, alluding to his poem of "The Hind and the Panther," "that he
is the author of the _worst_ poem the age has produced;" and that as
for "his morals, it is scarce possible to grow a worse man than he
was"--a personal style not to be permitted in any controversy, but to
bring this passion on the hallowed ground of history, was not "casting
away his shoe" in the presence of the divinity of truth.[341] It could
only have been the spirit of party which induced Burnet, in his
History, to mention with contempt and pretended ignorance so fine a
genius as "_one Prior_, who had been Jersey's secretary." It was the
same party-feeling in the Tory Prior, in his elegant "Alma," where he
has interwoven so graceful a wreath for Pope, that could sneer at the
fine soliloquy of the Roman Cato of the Whig Addison:

I hope you would not have