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 reverend Dr. West; perhaps[176] 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
publick 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 awhile 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 terrours.
Of his translations, I have only compared the first Olympick 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 the 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,
Pleas'd to nurse the pregnant mare,
Pleas'd 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-besilver'd 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 preserve 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 pre-suppose 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
coextended 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 publick.
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[Footnote 176: Certainly him. It was published in 1697.]