be
acknowledged, is peculiar, where a dead person was attacked with a
spirit of rancour to which the living only appear subject; but the
author was an antiquary, who lived as much with the dead as the
living: his personal motive was the same as those already recorded,
and here he was acting with a double force on the dead and the
living!

But here I stop my hand, my list would else be too complete.
Great names are omitted--Whitaker and Gibbon;[432] Pope and Lord
Hervey;[433] Wood and South;[434] Rowe, Mores, and Ames;[435] and
George Steevens and Gough.[436]

This chapter is not honourable to authors; but historians are only
Lord Chief Justices, who must execute the laws, even on their intimate
friends, when standing at the bar. The chapter is not honourable--but
it may be useful; and that is a quality not less valuable to the
public. It lets in their readers to a kind of knowledge, which opens a
necessary comment on certain works, and enlarges our comprehension of
their spirit.

If in the heat of controversy authors imprudently attack each other
with personalities, they are only scattering mud and hurling stones,
and will incur the ridicule or the contempt of those who, unfriendly
to the literary character, feel a secret pleasure in its degradation;
but let them learn, that to open a literary controversy from mere
personal motives; thus to conceal the dagger of private hatred under
the mantle of literature, is an expedient of short duration, for the
secret history is handed down with the book; and when once the dignity
of the author's character sinks in the meanness of his motives,
powerful as the work may be, even Genius finds its lustre diminished,
and Truth itself becomes suspicious.

FOOTNOTES:

[431] Lansdowne MSS. 1042-1316.

[432] GIBBON'S _Miscellaneous Works_, vol. i. 243.

[433] WALPOLE'S _Memoirs_, vol. iii. 40.

[434] The Life of Wood, by GUTCH, vol. i.

[435] NICHOLS'S _Literary Anecdotes_.

[436] "Curiosities of Literature," vol. iii. p. 303-4.

INDEX.

ADDISON, quarrels with Pope, 313
disapproves of his satire on Dennis, 315
aids a rival version of Homer, 316
satirized by Pope as _Atticus_, _n._ 317
his nervous fear of criticism, 317
his last interview with Pope, 318-320
quarrels with Steele on political grounds, 433
his disbelief in Rowe, 535

AKENSIDE exhibited as a ludicrous personage by Smollett; his real
character ca