GILBERT WEST is one of the writers of whom I regret my inability to give
a sufficient account; the intelligence which my inquiries have obtained
is general and scanty. He was the son of the Rev. Dr. West; perhaps him
who published “Pindar” at Oxford about the beginning of this century.
His mother was sister to Sir Richard Temple, afterwards Lord Cobham. His
father, purposing to educate him for the Church, sent him first to Eton,
and afterwards to Oxford; but he was seduced to a more airy mode of life,
by a commission in a troop of horse, procured him by his uncle. He
continued some time in the army, though it is reasonable to suppose that
he never sunk into a mere soldier, nor ever lost the love, or much
neglected the pursuit, of learning; and afterwards, finding himself more
inclined to civil employment, he laid down his commission, and engaged in
business under the Lord Townshend, then Secretary of State, with whom he
attended the King to Hanover.
His adherence to Lord Townshend ended in nothing but a nomination (May,
1729) to be Clerk-Extraordinary of the Privy Council, which produced no
immediate profit; for it only placed him in a state of expectation and
right of succession, and it was very long before a vacancy admitted him
to profit.
Soon afterwards he married, and settled himself in a very pleasant house
at Wickham, in Kent, where he devoted himself to learning and to piety.
Of his learning the late Collection exhibits evidence, which would have
been yet fuller if the dissertations which accompany his version of
“Pindar” had not been improperly omitted. Of his piety the influence
has, I hope, been extended far by his “Observations on the Resurrection,”
published in 1747, for which the University of Oxford created him a
Doctor of Laws, by diploma (March 30, 1748), and would doubtless have
reached yet further had he lived to complete what he had for some time
meditated—the “Evidences of the Truth of the New Testament.” Perhaps it
may not be without effect to tell that he read the prayers of the public
Liturgy every morning to his family, and that on Sunday evening he called
his servants into the parlour and read to them first a sermon and then
prayers. Crashaw is now not the only maker of verses to whom may be
given the two venerable names of Poet and Saint. He was very often
visited by Lyttelton and Pitt, who, when they were weary of faction and
debates, used at Wickham to find books and quiet, a decent table, and
literary conversation. There is at Wickham a walk made by Pitt; and,
what is of far more importance, at Wickham, Lyttelton received that
conviction which produced his “Dissertation on St. Paul.” These two
illustrious friends had for a while listened to the blandishments of
infidelity; and when West’s book was published, it was bought by some who
did not know his change of opinion, in expectation of new objections
against Christianity; and as infidels do not want malignity, they
revenged the disappointment by calling him a Methodist.
Mr. West’s income was not large; and his friends endeavoured, but without
success, to obtain an augmentation. It is reported that the education of
the young Prince was offered to him, but that he required a more
extensive power of superintendence than it was thought proper to allow
him. In time, however, his revenue was improved; he lived to have one of
the lucrative clerkships of the Privy Council (1752); and Mr. Pitt at
last had it in his power to make him Treasurer of Chelsea Hospital. He
was now sufficiently rich; but wealth came too late to be long enjoyed;
nor could it secure him from the calamities of life; he lost (1755) his
only son; and the year after (March 26) a stroke of the palsy brought to
the grave one of the few poets to whom the grave might be without its
terrors.
Of his translations I have only compared the first Olympic Ode with the
original, and found my expectation surpassed, both by its elegance and
its exactness. He does not confine himself to his author’s train of
stanzas; for he saw that the difference of languages required a different
mode of versification. The first strophe is eminently happy; in the
second he has a little strayed from Pindar’s meaning, who says, “If thou,
my soul, wishest to speak of games, look not in the desert sky for a
planet hotter than the sun; nor shall we tell of nobler games than those
of Olympia.” He is sometimes too paraphrastical. Pindar bestows upon
Hiero an epithet which, in one word, signifies _delighting in horses_; a
word which, in the translation, generates these lines:—
“Hiero’s royal brows, whose care
Tends the courser’s noble breed,
Pleased to nurse the pregnant mare,
Pleased to train the youthful steed.”
Pindar says of Pelops, that “he came alone in the dark to the White Sea;”
and West—
“Near the billow-beaten side
Of the foam-besilvered main,
Darkling, and alone, he stood:”
which, however, is less exuberant than the former passage.
A work of this kind must, in a minute examination, discover many
imperfections; but West’s version, so far as I have considered it,
appears to be the product of great labour and great abilities.
His “Institution of the Garter” (1742) is written with sufficient
knowledge of the manners that prevailed in the age to which it is
referred, and with great elegance of diction; but, for want of a process
of events, neither knowledge nor elegance preserves the reader from
weariness.
His “Imitations of Spenser” are very successfully performed, both with
respect to the metre, the language, and the fiction; and being engaged at
once by the excellence of the sentiments, and the artifice of the copy,
the mind has two amusements together. But such compositions are not to
be reckoned among the great achievements of intellect, because their
effect is local and temporary; they appeal not to reason or passion, but
to memory, and presuppose an accidental or artificial state of mind. An
imitation of Spenser is nothing to a reader, however acute, by whom
Spenser has never been perused. Works of this kind may deserve praise,
as proofs of great industry and great nicety of observation; but the
highest praise, the praise of genius, they cannot claim. The noblest
beauties of art are those of which the effect is co-extended with
rational nature, or at least with the whole circle of polished life; what
is less than this can be only pretty, the plaything of fashion, and the
amusement of a day.
There is in the _Adventurer_ a paper of verses given to one of the
authors as Mr. West’s, and supposed to have been written by him. It
should not be concealed, however, that it is printed with Mr. Jago’s name
in Dodsley’s Collection, and is mentioned as his in a letter of
Shenstone’s. Perhaps West gave it without naming the author, and
Hawkesworth, receiving it from him, thought it his; for his he thought
it, as he told me, and as he tells the public.