The author who is now before us is DE LOLME!
I shall consider as an English author that foreigner, who flew to our
country as the asylum of Europe, who composed a noble work on our
Constitution, and, having imbibed its spirit, acquired even the
language of a free country.
I do not know an example in our literary history that so loudly
accuses our tardy and phlegmatic feeling respecting authors, as the
treatment De Lolme experienced in this country. His book on our
Constitution still enters into the studies of an English patriot, and
is not the worse for flattering and elevating the imagination,
painting everything beautiful, to encourage our love as well as our
reverence for the most perfect system of governments. It was a noble
as well as ingenious effort in a foreigner--it claimed national
attention--but could not obtain even individual patronage. The fact is
mortifying to record, that the author who wanted every aid, received
less encouragement than if he had solicited subscriptions for a raving
novel, or an idle poem. De Lolme was compelled to traffic with
booksellers for this work; and, as he was a theoretical rather than a
practical politician, he was a bad trader, and acquired the smallest
remuneration. He lived, in the country to which he had rendered a
national service, in extreme obscurity and decay; and the walls of the
Fleet too often enclosed the English Montesquieu. He never appears to
have received a solitary attention,[132] and became so disgusted with
authorship, that he preferred silently to endure its poverty rather
than its other vexations. He ceased almost to write. Of De Lolme I
have heard little recorded but his high-mindedness; a strong sense
that he stood degraded beneath that rank in society which his book
entitled him to enjoy. The cloud of poverty that covered him only
veiled without concealing its object; with the manners and dress of a
decayed gentleman, he still showed the few who met him that he
cherished a spirit perpetually at variance with the adversity of his
circumstances.
Our author, in a narrative prefixed to his work, is the proud
historian of his own injured feelings; he smiled in bitterness on his
contemporaries, confident it was a tale reserved for posterity.
After having written the work whose systematic principles refuted
those political notions which prevailed at the era of the American
revolution,--and whose truth has been so fatally demonstrated in our
own times, in two great revolutions, which have shown all the defects
and all the mischief of nations rushing into a state of freedom before
they are worthy of it,--the author candidly acknowledges he counted on
some sort of encouragement, and little expected to find the mere
publication had drawn him into great inconvenience.
"When my enlarged English edition was ready for the press, had I
acquainted ministers that I was preparing to boil my tea-kettle with
it, for want of being able to afford the expenses of printing it;"
ministers, it seems, would not have considered that he was lighting
his fire with "myrrh, and cassia, and precious ointment."
In the want of encouragement from great men, and even from booksellers,
De Lolme had recourse to a subscription; and his account of the manner
he was received, and the indignities he endured, all which are
narrated with great simplicity, show that whatever his knowledge of
our Constitution might be, "his knowledge of the country was, at that
time, very incomplete." At length, when he shared the profits of his
work with the booksellers, they were "but scanty and slow." After
all, our author sarcastically congratulates himself, that he--
"Was allowed to carry on the above business of selling my book,
without any objection being formed against me, from my not having
served a regular apprenticeship, and without being molested by the
Inquisition."