and differing in no essential respect from their author's subsequent prose diatribes in the Quarterly Review or the Courier cannot be held to invalidate the rule so neatly formulated by Dryden and Southey.
Croker, though of English descent, was an Irishman by the accident of birth, and first saw the light in County Gal way, in December, 1780. He was educated at the University of Dublin, where he graduated B.A. in 1800. He sat for many years for Downpatrick in the House of Commons, and, for the first five years of his parliamentary career, represented his University; but he had been among the most strenuous opponents of the Reform Bill, and resolutely withdrew from public affairs upon the dissolution which followed that momentous measure. He was Secretary to the Admiralty, from 1809 to 1830; and, in 1828, became a Privy Councillor. " He was a bigoted Tory," says Edmund Yates, " a violent partisan, and a most malevolent and unscrupulous critic."[1] In the spring of 1809, Croker, in association with Sir Walter Scott, George Canning, Merritt, and George Ellis, set on foot the Quarterly Review, as an equipoise to the Edinburgh, which had become obnoxious to the Tory party, and hated for the reckless ferocity of its criticism. It is difficult, if not impossible, at this length of time, to discriminate between the articles of Gifford and those of Croker,—par nobile fratrum,—and no doubt many are attributed to the latter which were actually written by the former. But still it was undoubtedly Croker who wrote that virulent review of Lord John Russell's Life of Moore, which gave such distress to the poet's widow, who could not be made to believe that it was Croker's, as she had believed him her husband's friend;[2] it was Croker, who left the munificent hospitality of Drayton Manor, only to cut up his host in a political article; and it was Croker who, in the London Courier, penned that bitter notice of his friend Scott's Letters of Malachi Malagrowther, which evoked such a delicate and touching rebuke from their author, then succumbing to adversity and disease. It was Croker, again,—at least the dramatist always thought so,—who wrote that trenchant review of Galt's tragedy, Majolo, which was a cruel blow to the declining and ruined author. It was he who was the arch-enemy of Lady Morgan, charging her in the Quarterly with blasphemy, profligacy, and disloyalty,—not to mention that unkindliest cut of all, his epithet of "female Methuselah,"—for all of which Miladi well avenged herself, when she pilloried him before her readers and admirers, who were only increased in number by the unreasoning abuse, in the character of "Crawley junior," in her Florence Macarthy. Finally, it was Croker, of whom a competent judge of his character said that he was " a man who would go a hundred m^iles through sleet and snow, in a December night, to search a parish register, for the sake of showing that a man was* illegitimate, or a woman older than she said she was."
The miserable man whose portrait is before us,—"tasteless and shameless," as Mr. Rossetti has it,—so willing to wound, so fearless to strike, so anxious to inflict pain,— and that without the excuse of the critic in Bulwer's tale,[3] that "he was in distress, and the only thing the magazines would buy of him was abuse,"—met with a retribution
- ↑ Life and Correspondence of Charles Mathews, p. 251.
- ↑ The correspondence on this subject,—in which I must say Croker seemed to have the best of it,—first appeared in the Times, but has been reprinted in pamphlet form.
- ↑ The Student ("The World as it is").
