15

---

---

LETTER II.

“Because of these things cometh the wrath of God upon the children of disobedience. Be not ye therefore partakers with them.” Ephes. v. 6, 7.

---

TO THE REVEREND MR ANDREW THOMSON.

Sir,

The foregoing letter, which I have presumed to address to your reverend and excellent brother and friend, will supersede the necessity of a formal ceremonious approach to yourself. Like him you have combined the characters of the Scholar and the Divine, and have obtained no inconsiderable share of applause from the learned, and approbation from the good. To you, as to him, the eyes of many are turned as to “a watchman unto the house of Israel,” who will warn them of even the distant approach of danger,—as a man whose function has impressed him with much stronger convictions of duty than they are expected to attain, and extended his

16

views to the consequences of wickedness farther than their observation is supposed to reach,—as a leader whose steps they are bound to follow, but whose purity they will hardly be required to equal. Your exertions have not been confined to the pulpit; your published Discourses, and the pages of “The Edinburgh Christian Instructor” have contributed to the propagation of piety, as powerfully as precept can do; and your example, I believe, has hitherto never been wanting to give to precept its due respect and efficacy. From the survey of such a character, it is truly painful to proceed to the consideration, that you are now represented to the public as pledged to countenance and assist the Magazine to which I have adverted in the preceding letter. Your Discourses, I perceive, are advertised on the cover of this work, and your assistance promised in the prospectus. You now see what it is that you are represented as approving, and expected to support: and it remains with you to do, in this situation, what you may consider due to the public, yourself, and your own reputation.

17

I have learned with a mixture of satisfaction and surprise that you, Sir, or Dr M’Crie, or both of you, did remonstrate in the strongest terms with the editor or publisher of this Magazine, against the insertion of the profane ribaldry which now disgraces its pages. That you should refuse to “count that gain which virtue shuns to win,” and should despise the most money-getting line that would make good men the foes of its author, is no more than might have been easily anticipated: but that you should have hoped for a moment to succeed in your remonstrance, and find your advice respected, seems to me as surprising as if you had quoted St Paul to a Turk, or Tom Paine in a sermon, or endeavoured to deter rats from your bacon by inscribing on the shelves of your pantry “Thou shalt not steal.” It is said that the best way to make a pig go forward, is to pull him back by the tail: but you have cast your pearls before him, and you see how he has valued them and treated you. I am willing, however, to rejoice in this remonstrance, as an earnest of your’s and Dr M’Crie’s future conduct towards a publication that has

18

so unhandsomely pilloried your names. You will not content yourselves with protesting, like Pilate, that you wash your hands from the scandal and impiety of a work which is countenanced by your names, and which your assistance contributes to circulate and sell. You will not join a party in which you may “haply be found with those that fight against the faith;” nor will you place your chair beside that of the scorner, or give place to them that deride things sacred, “no, not for an hour.”

I can readily foresee that the publisher of this Magazine, (who is also employed by you to publish the Christian Instructor and your own Discourses,) may state abundance of defences for his own share in the publication in question. He is doing nothing else than labouring in his vocation of scraping money; in which, I certainly know of no written law that can oblige him to be as much of a gentleman, and practise as much liberality as his competitor. That he should feel some anti-peristaltic sensations at the sale and celebrity of his competitor’s Magazine, and hate the cause of his bile, is not to be wondered at.

19

It is surprising what various and dissimilar views the private interests of different men will deduce from the same object. A tailor, surveying a field of battle, would probably find his heart bleed for the quantity of tailor’s work he saw thus inhumanly destroyed; and the same critical and poetical excellence which has attracted public favour and patronage to the new series of the Scots Magazine, has only disordered the liver of its rival’s publisher, by suggesting the handfuls of half-crowns that might have rung on his counter, if the monopoly of magazine-making had fallen to his lot. He has loudly exclaimed, that by the destruction of his monopoly, he has been most unhandsomely dealt with: but there are limits to the efficacy of the most artful outcry; and though, like Potiphar’s wife, he has got the start of his adversaries in complaint, the facts have supported his story as ill as they did the story of the two elders who imputed their own incontinence to “Susanna.” I would not for the world insinuate that so sober a tradesman would gratuitously prefer a profane parody to a more respectable article: on the contrary, I fully believe him so perfectly single mind-

20

ed, that, like the bookseller in Joseph Andrews, he “would as readily print a sermon of Whitfield, as any farce that was ever refused to be licensed for indelicacy.” At present he has done no more than hire a few literary scavengers to rake the channel and pelt his adversaries, in the hope of chasing them from the course; and if he find himself disappointed, and discover that his Magazine is no more able to outstrip its rival, than a man with a wooden leg is able to catch a hare,—he must content himself with railing at his unprofitable servants, who, dealing their blows in the dark, have missed the proper adversary, and only wounded the interests of piety and morality. He has begged help (as I am convinced you perfectly well know) from every man of letters whom he could tease into granting it for nothing; and bought it from every scribbling drudge willing to sell it cheap. Of this latter awkward squad who have consented to perform their exercise at his bidding, I have heard only of two—a brace of poets—the doleful Highland Hector, and the rhyming Swineherd. I should be sorry to give offence to either of these poetical drum-

21

mers, by classing them irregularly; but really, I am totally unable to settle the precedence between a flea and a louse. If their manager, the publisher, will shew me his books, and the order in which he writes their names, I shall endeavour to catalogue them in the same manner. In addition to these, he has collected a “sine nomine turba,” a nameless gang of “stickit lawyers” and juvenile pretenders to criticism, some of whom (like Martial’s coxcombs) turn up their noses before they are well able to blow them. This precious pack has undertaken, on some principle of free-masonry in nonsense, to find out the dunce-mark in their enemies, and estimate the negative quantity of intellect evinced in the braying of brother blockheads. They must infallibly succeed, if it be true of dulness, as it is of wit, that they who excel therein are best qualified to arbitrate the pretensions of others.

But how will the public be persuaded to help off even one copy of a Magazine composed by such trashy dabblers? Even infidels weary of impiety, and even fools are shocked with it at last. But the annals of bookselling

22

have preserved a recipe for such emergencies; and the famous Mr Curl has not left his successor without a precedent on this occasion. The policy which the publisher and editor of this Magazine have pursued in their distress, is thus anticipated by the Goddess of Dulness in her advice to Curl in the Dunciad:

To him the Goddess Son! thy grief lay down And turn this whole illusion on the town. As the sage dame, experienc’d in her trade, By names of toasts retails each batter’d jade; Be thine, my Stationer! this magic gift Cook shall be Prior, and Concanen Swift: So shall each hostile name become our own, And we, too, boast our Garth and Addison.”

Hence the majority of the respectable names which are promised as permanent contributors to “Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine.”

I scarce know whether to laugh at or to lament the destiny of those who in good earnest may be termed the journeymen of this publisher; ordained as they are to be starved by his love, or libelled by his hate. While they work as much, and accept as little as he pleases, they have all the honour that his creditable countenance can confer. “Nos poma natamus,” he tells them, with an air of

23

benignant familiarity, “You to praise, and I to pudding.” The instant they disagree, he denounces them as dunces and rogues,—as indifferent to the force of their retort, as Jack Ketch is to the participation of, the disgrace he inflicts; and he hires a literary terrier or two to gnaw their heels and supply their place, till a second disagreement produce a repetition of the same dissentions.

As for the author of the vile Parody of Scripture, who attempts to jest with a halter about his neck, I give him joy of a performance for which his conscience will reproach him as a scorner of religion, after he has spent every farthing that his bookseller would bestow to keep him from the gallows; and which he cannot now avow either to the public or his friends, without reproaching himself with the want of the only quality that can redeem a stupid miscreant from universal contempt. I am enabled to state, as a fact now quite notorious, that the ingenious and accomplished editor of a celebrated literary work, conveyed to this libeller, through the medium of his publisher, an intimation which the libeller would perhaps prosecute me for scandal if I

24

reported, but which he has shewn be deserved, by pocketing it in silence. I should have been much dissatisfied with the conduct of that accomplished and respectable gentleman in thus resenting a charge, the falsehood of which nobody knew better than his accuser, if the result of his proceeding has not put the finishing stroke to his libeller’s disgrace, by shewing that he who is such a prodigal of his conscience as to make thus free with his God, is such an economist of his person as to hedge and shrink from encountering the correction of a man. Thus destitute both of piety and of courage, the noblest quality of what is divine, and the most manly of what is human in our nature, what inferior merit shall this buffoon be permitted to claim? That he has conveyed a sting to the minds of one or two worthy men, has arisen from the venom of his shaft, and not from the vigour of his bow. “He has sometimes sported with lucky malice,” said Johnson, in reference to a far abler calumniator, “but to him that knows his company, it is not hard to be sarcastic in a mask. While he walks like Jack the Giant-killer in a coat of darkness, he may

25

do much mischief with little strength. When he has once provided for his safety by impenetrable secresy, he has had nothing to combat but truth and justice, enemies whom he knows to be feeble in the dark.” He has shown his wit in searching Scripture for sentences to be ludicrously and profanely applied to those whom he was hired to traduce; his magnanimity in insulting decrepitude; his cleverness and humour in pushing down the crutch of a lame man; his generous hostility in hiding his own person, and yet making personal defects the butt of his insolence. Shakespear has told us that “In nature there’s no blemish but the mind;” and a more odious blemish than this libeller’s own mind, I believe it would be difficult to depict. I wish the authors, great and small, whom he has bepraised, much joy of the diplomas they hold from him. But I would rather belong to the party that, with a Playfair, share the honour, of possessing no quality that can excite the complacency of so despicable a babbler. By his mean and stupid abuse of that great man, he has conferred on him the only sort of honour which it is within his

26

competence, and which it is certainly most congenial to his nature and his manners to bestow. I would rather be pelted, than cheered and embraced by the mob of Orator Hunt, or the pen of this libeller. Nor shall I honour him so far as to notice one of his untruths. The cart’s tail is the only proper theatre for discussion with him; the beadle his proper disputant; and the “things called whips” the only argument and answer to which he is entitled. As for his publisher, who carries a shield before him to battle, and hopes to eat all that he kills, he will be severely enough punished by the loss of his meal. On another occasion, he will assuredly find calomel pills a much better remedy for the bile, than profanity.

It has given me great pleasure to learn that some of the most respectable inhabitants of this city, who had been importuned by the publisher of this Magazine to purchase copies of it, have since returned them,—declaring that they would neither keep nor encourage such loathsome profanity and scurrility; and prohibiting the publisher from sending them any future number of the work. Some others,

27

I dare say, who can swallow profanity where it is united with a shadow of wit, will follow the same example, in order to get back the half-crowns they paid for what is obviously not worth half a farthing to any body but the tobacconist. When I first saw this Magazine on the publisher’s counter, I turned over a page or two, and then shut it, as I thought, forever; quickly perceiving that the outer covering and vignette were no more than the Lion’s skin, and that the genius of the former editors had deserted it forever. Having subsequently heard of this precious parody, I not only perused it, but taxed myself to wade through another of its articles,—a tirade against Mr Leigh Hunt; intended, I suppose, to provoke that gentleman to give some repute to the Magazine by noticing it in his Newspaper. It seems to be the composition of some obscure and desperate dunce, who tries to make people look at him by walking without his breeches. Such horrible nonsense is below all criticism; and yet some parts of it amused me; for I have been lately reading “Peregrine Pickle,” and now see in this article, that Pallet the painter is still alive. He

28

has exchanged the painter’s brush for the critic’s birch; and is now as like Jeffrey as he was then like Rubens. He did not of yore reach the highest altitudes of absurdity, till after the Socratic immersion he sustained at Alost; and luckily for his admirers he seems now to be in somewhat of the same wrath-stirring pickle; for, from the purity of his Billingsgate, and the slavering fury he expresses at the friendship between Lord Byron and Mr Hunt, I should guess that he had been contumeliously refused admittance by the porter of one of these personages, and had the door of the other slapped in his face. You may now see what the editor of this Magazine has been partly aiming at. Apothecaries frequently sprinkle something pungent over a purge, to hinder the stomach from treating it as an emetic, and rejecting it on the spot. Nothing but a little startling blasphemy, or the hope of meeting with some communication from such pens as your’s and Dr M’Crie’s, could procure a moment’s attention to the trash of this Magazine.

The little article already furnished by Dr M’Crie, I have not read; and I hope I shall

29

never again be referred for any production of your or his pen, to the pages of “Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine.”

I am far from expecting that he or you will declare war on innocent mirth and recreation; that you will exhort a bridegroom to look like an Undertaker, or a lover to court from the Lamentations; or that you will even press to its sternest limits the inexpediency of “foolish talking and jesting.” Religion, like a well-made coat, sits so easy upon you both, as to be neither stiff nor morose. But the act of profanity to which I have now directed your attention, is of so vile and disgraceful a nature, that the virtue which would wink at it for a moment, deserves to lose her eyesight forever. The prevalent laxity of morals will never be admitted by you as a reason for relaxing the curb on licentiousness that is entrusted to your hands, or weakening the efficacy of the example you are expected to shew. You are not one of those censors who demonstrate their charity in making allowance for what is, at the expense of their zeal in contending for what ought to be; nor are you one of those ministers who can satisfy

30

their consciences by comparing the official regularity of their own deportment, with the open profanity of others. What you think yourself entitled to touch, to taste, to handle, others, without scruple, will grasp, devour, and embrace. To suggest to you the value of so lofty a privilege, or the responsibility with which it is accompanied, would be worse than superfluous. What I have submitted to your consideration, are the sentiments of a man who sincerely esteems both your character and your function; who desires to see your claims on public respect continue unimpaired; who would rather see a clergyman whipping a top in the streets, or running a sack-race, than associating himself with the witlings and parodists of this Magazine; and who, for the present, subscribes himself,