Milton divine and great Shakespeare
With reverence I mention;
My name with theirs shall ne'er appear,
_'Tis far from my intention!_
If poetry, as one _pretends,
Be all imagination!_
Why then, at once, _my bardship ends--
'Mong prose I take my station._
_Moxon's Poems, p. 81, Ed. 1826._
But as _"common sense"_ must see, says Mr. Moxon, that _imagination_ can
have nothing to do with _poetry_, he engages to pursue his tuneful
vocation, subject to _one_ condition--
You'll hear no more from me,
If _critics prove unkind;_
My next _in simple prose_ must be,
_Unless I favour find!_
We regret that some _kind_--or, as Mr. Moxon would have thought it,
_unkind_--critic, did not, on the appearance of this first volume,
confirm his own misgivings that he had been all this time, like the man
in the farce, talking not only _prose_, but _nonsense_ into the bargain:
this disagreeable information the pretension of his recent publication
obliges us to convey to him. The fact is, that the volume at first
struck us with serious alarm. Its typographical splendour led us to fear
that this style of writing was getting into fashion; and the hints about
_"classic Cam"_ seemed to impute the production to one of our
Universities: on turning, with some curiosity, to the title-page, for
the name of the too indulgent bookseller who had bestowed such unmerited
embellishment on a work which we think of so little value--_we found
none_; and on further inquiry learned that _Dover Street, Piccadilly_,
and not the banks of _"classic Cam"_ is the seat of this sonneteering
muse--in short, that Mr. Moxon, the bookseller, is his own poet, and
that Mr. Moxon, the poet, is his own bookseller. This discovery at once
calmed both our anxieties--it relieved the university of Cambridge from
an awful responsibility, which might have called down upon it the
vengeance of Lord Radnor; and it accounted--without any imputation on
the public taste--for the extraordinary care and cost with which the
paternal solicitude of the poet-publisher had adorned his own volume.
Mr. Moxon seems to be--like most sonneteers--a man of amiable
disposition, and to have an ear--as he certainly has a _memory_--for
poetry; and--if he had not been an old hand--we should not have presumed
to say that he is incapable of anything better than this tumid
commonplace. But, however that may be, we do earnestly exhort him to
abandon the self-deluding practice of being his own publisher. Whatever
may have been said in disparagement of the literary taste of the
booksellers, it will at least be admitted that their experience of
public opinion and a due attention to their own pecuniary interest,
enable them to operate as a salutary check upon the blind and
presumptive vanity of small authors. The necessity of obtaining the
_"imprimatur"_ of a publisher is a very wholesome restraint, from which
Mr. Moxon--unluckily for himself and for us--found himself relieved. If
he could have looked at his own work with the impartiality, and perhaps
the good taste, that he would have exercised on that of a stranger, _he_
would have saved himself a good deal of expense and vexation--and _we_
should have been spared the painful necessity of contrasting the
ambitious pretensions of his volume with its very moderate literary
merit.