[17] In Mrs. Hannah More's drawing-room at Barley Wood, amongst the few
pictures which adorned it, hung a kit-kat portrait of John Henderson.
This, and our private knowledge that Mrs. H. M. had personally known and
admired Henderson, led us to converse with that lady about him. What we
gleaned from her in addition to the notices of Aguttar and of some
amongst Johnson's biographers may yet see the light.
_XIV. GREAT FORGERS: CHATTERTON AND WALPOLE, AND 'JUNIUS.'_
I have ever been disposed to regard as the most venial of deceptions
such impositions as Chatterton had practised on the public credulity.
Whom did he deceive? Nobody but those who well deserved to be deceived,
viz., shallow antiquaries, who pretended to a sort of knowledge which
they had not so much as tasted. And it always struck me as a judicial
infatuation in Horace Walpole, that he, who had so brutally pronounced
the death of this marvellous boy to be a matter of little consequence,
since otherwise he would have come to be hanged for forgery, should
himself, not as a boy under eighteen (and I think under seventeen at the
first issuing of the Rowley fraud), slaving for a few guineas that he
might procure the simplest food for himself, and then buy presents for
the dear mother and sister whom he had left in Bristol, but as an
elderly man, with a clear six thousand per annum,[18] commit a far more
deliberate and audacious forgery than that imputed (if even accurately
imputed) to Chatterton. I know of no published document, or none
published under Chatterton's sanction, in which he formally _declared_
the Rowley poems to have been the compositions of a priest living in
the days of Henry IV., viz., in or about the year 1400. Undoubtedly he
suffered people to understand that he had found MSS. of that period in
the tower of St. Mary Redcliff at Bristol, which he really _had_ done;
and whether he simply tolerated them in running off with the idea that
these particular poems, written on _discoloured_ parchments by way of
colouring the hoax, were amongst the St. Mary treasures, or positively
_said so_, in either view, considering the circumstances of the case, no
man of kind feelings will much condemn him.
But Horace Walpole roundly and audaciously affirmed in the first
sentence of his preface to the poor romance of 'Otranto,' that it had
been translated from the Italian of Onuphrio Muralto, and that the MS.
was still preserved in the library of an English Catholic family;
circumstantiating his needless falsehood by other most superfluous
details. _Needless_, I say, because a book with the Walpole name on the
title-page was as sure of selling as one with Chatterton's obscure name
was at that time sure of _not_ selling. Possibly Horace Walpole did not
care about selling, but wished to measure his own intrinsic power as a
novelist, for which purpose it was a better course to preserve his
_incognito_. But this he might have preserved without telling a
circumstantial falsehood. Whereas Chatterton knew that his only chance
of emerging from the obscure station of a grave-digger's son, and
carrying into comfort the dear female relatives that had half-starved
themselves for _him_ (I speak of things which have since come to my
knowledge thirty-five years after Chatterton and his woes had been
buried in a pauper's coffin), lay in bribing public attention by some
_extrinsic_ attraction. Macpherson had recently engaged the public gaze
by his 'Ossian'--an abortion fathered upon the fourth century after
Christ. What so natural as to attempt other abortions--ideas and
refinements of the eighteenth century--referring themselves to the
fifteenth? Had this harmless hoax succeeded, he would have delivered
those from poverty who delivered _him_ from ignorance; he would have
raised those from the dust who raised _him_ to an aerial height--yes, to
a height from which (but it was after his death), like _Ate_ or _Eris_,
come to cause another Trojan war, he threw down an apple of discord
amongst the leading scholars of England, and seemed to say: 'There, Dean
of Exeter! there, Laureate! there, Tyrwhitt, my man! Me you have
murdered amongst you. Now fight to death for the boy that living you
would not have hired as a shoeblack. My blood be upon you!' Rise up,
martyred blood! rise to heaven for a testimony against these men and
this generation, or else burrow in the earth, and from that spring up
like the stones thrown by Deucalion and Pyrrha into harvests of feud,
into armies of self-exterminating foes. Poor child! immortal child!
Slight were thy trespasses on this earth, heavy was thy punishment, and
it is to be hoped, nay, it is certain, that this disproportion did not
escape the eye which, in the algebra of human actions, estimates _both_
sides of the equation.
Lord Byron was of opinion that people abused Horace Walpole for several
sinister reasons, of which the first is represented to be that he was a
gentleman. Now, I, on the contrary, am of opinion that he was _not_
always a gentleman, as particularly seen in his correspondence with
Chatterton. On the other hand, it is but just to recollect that in
retaining Chatterton's MSS. (otherwise an unfeeling act, yet chiefly
imputable to indolence), the worst aggravation of the case under the
poor boy's construction, viz., that if Walpole had not known his low
rank 'he would not have dared to treat him in that way,' though a very
natural feeling, was really an unfounded one. Horace Walpole (I call him
so, because he was not _then_ Lord Orford) certainly had not been aware
that Chatterton was other than a gentleman by birth and station. The
natural dignity of the boy, which had not condescended to any degrading
applications, misled this practised man of the world. But recurring to
Lord Byron's insinuations as to a systematic design of running Lord
Orford down, I beg to say that I am no party to any such design. It is
not likely that a furious Conservative like myself, who have the
misfortune also to be the most bigoted of Tories, would be so. I
disclaim all participation in any clamour against Lord Orford which may
have arisen on democratic feeling. Feeling the profoundest pity for the
'marvellous boy' of Bristol, and even love, if it be possible to feel
love for one who was in his unhonoured grave before I was born, I resent
the conduct of Lord Orford, in this one instance, as universally the
English public has resented it. But generally, as a writer, I admire
Lord Orford in a very high degree. As a letter-writer, and as a
brilliant sketcher of social aspects and situations, he is far superior
to any French author who could possibly be named as a competitor. And as
a writer of personal or anecdotic history, let the reader turn to
Voltaire's 'Siècle de Louis Quatorze,' in order to appreciate his
extraordinary merit.
* * * * *
Next will occur to the reader the forgery of 'Junius.' Who did _that_?
Oh, villains that have ever doubted since '"Junius" Identified'! Oh,
scamps--oh, pitiful scamps! You, reader, perhaps belong to this wretched
corps. But, if so, understand that you belong to it under false
information. I have heard myriads talk upon this subject. One man said
to me, 'My dear friend, I sympathize with your fury. You are right.
Righter a man cannot be. Rightest of all men you are.' I was
right--righter--rightest! That had happened to few men. But again this
flattering man went on, 'Yes, my excellent friend, right you are, and
evidently Sir Philip Francis was the man. His backer proved it. The day
after his book appeared, if any man had offered me exactly two thousand
to one in guineas, that Sir Philip was _not_ the man, by Jupiter! I
would have declined the bet. So divine, so exquisite, so Grecian in its
perfection, was the demonstration, the _apodeixis_ (or what do you call
it in Greek?), that this brilliant Sir Philip--who, by the way, wore
_his_ order of the Bath as universally as ever he taxed Sir William
Draper with doing--had been the author of "Junius." But here lay the
perplexity of the matter. At the least five-and-twenty excellent men
proved by posthumous friends that they, every mother's son of them, had
also perpetrated "Junius."' 'Then they were liars,' I answered. 'Oh no,
my right friend,' he interrupted, 'not liars at all; amiable men, some
of whom confessed on their death-beds (three to my certain knowledge)
that, alas! they had erred against the law of charity. "_But how?_" said
the clergyman. "Why, by that infernal magazine of sneers and all
uncharitableness, the 'Letters of Junius.'" "Let me understand you,"
said the clergyman: "you wrote 'Junius'?" "Alas! I did," replied A. Two
years after another clergyman said to another penitent, "And so you
wrote 'Junius'?" "Too true, my dear sir. Alas! I did," replied B. One
year later a third penitent was going off, and upon the clergyman
saying, "Bless me, is it possible? Did _you_ write 'Junius'?" he
replied, "Ah, worshipful sir, you touch a painful chord in my
remembrances--I now wish I had not. Alas! reverend sir, I did." Now, you
see,' went on my friend, 'so many men at the New Drop, as you may say,
having with tears and groans taxed themselves with "Junius" as the
climax of their offences, one begins to think that perhaps _all_ men
wrote "Junius."' Well, so far there was reason. But when my friend
contended also that the proofs arrayed in pamphlets proved the whole
alphabet to have written 'Junius,' I could not stand his absurdities.
Death-bed confessions, I admitted, were strong. But as to these wretched
pamphlets, some time or other I will muster them all for a field-day; I
will brigade them, as if the general of the district were coming to
review them; and then, if I do not mow them down to the last man by
opening a treacherous battery of grape-shot, may all my household die
under a fiercer Junius! The true reasons why any man fancies that
'Junius' is an open question must be these three:
First, that they have never read the proofs arrayed against Sir Philip
Francis; this is the general case.
Secondly, that, according to Sancho's proverb, they want better bread
than is made of wheat. They are not content with proofs or absolute
demonstrations. They require you, like the witch of Endor, to raise Sir
Philip from the grave, that they may cross-examine him.
Thirdly (and this is the fault of the able writer who unmasked Sir
Philip), there happened to be the strongest argument that ever picked a
Bramah-lock against the unknown writer of 'Junius'; apply this, and if
it fits the wards, oh, Gemini! my dear friend, but you are
right--righter--rightest; you have caught 'Junius' in a rabbit-snare.