reverence for literature; and will be remembered as the friend of men of letters, and for his generosity to them, when in need of assistance.
As a minister and politician men do, and will, form opinions widely diverse as to his conduct and abilities. But I doubt not that the ultimate verdict of posterity will be that he was, through his long career, when all his solecisms and shortcomings as a diplomatist are taken into account, a consistent Liberal according to his lights,—an honest man,—and a faithful servant, alike of his queen and his countrymen. His life was a life of labour, and I could enumerate, if space allowed, a score of diplomatic offices which he filled with more or less distinction. He was raised to the peerage, under the title of Earl Russell, in 1861, and he died May 28th, 1878, in the eighty-sixth year of his age. He was succeeded in the peerage by a grandson, thirteen years of age, the son of the late Lord Amberley.
XVI.—RIGHT HON. JOHN WILSON CROKER.
It is Southey who somewhere says that bad poets make malevolent critics, just as weak wine turns to vinegar; and he elsewhere expresses a doubt whether any man ever criticised a good poem maliciously who had not written a bad one himself. So poor Haydon wrote, in consolatory vein, to Mary Russell Mitford smarting under adverse judgment,—"all the critics in the papers are ci-devant poets, painters, and tragedy-writers who have failed. A successful tragedy, and by a lady, rouses their mortified pride, and damnation is their only balm. Be assured of this." So, long before Southey and Haydon, in the prologue to his Conquest of Granada, wrote Dryden:—
"They who write ill, and they who ne'er durst write,
Turn critics out of mere revenge and spite,"
There is a seductiveness in antithesis which leads us to inquire closely into the truth of any axiom where this figure of speech has place; but I believe, notwithstanding, that the principle here laid down is perfectly true; and that William Gifford and John Wilson Croker are not in any respect exceptions to its applicability. Both of these men were critics of the most acrimonious and venomous malignity, in whose hands the ferula of Aristarchus became a poisoned dagger; and yet both produced substantive works of no mean ability. One, the Magnus Apollo of Lord Byron, was author of The Baviad and Mæviad, those terse and vigorous satires which annihilated the school of "Della Crusca;" and the other, in his Familiar Epistles to Frederick E. Jones, Esq., on the Present State of the Irish Stage,[1] which drove poor Edwin, the comedian, to the bottle which killed him,[2] gave evidence of that power of invective and sarcasm which was, in the future, to become the tool of private malice and party ferocity. Still these pieces themselves were purely critical in character,
- ↑ The copy before me, the presentation one from Croker to Gifford, is the fourth edition, Dublin, 1805, 8vo.
- ↑ Our Actresses, by Mrs. C. B. Wilson.
