Fytte the Second," and in vol. viii., the "Semihoræ Biographicæ;" and here is also, in a paper entitled "Extracts from a Lost (and found) Memorandum Book," a project for getting rid of peripatetic beggars which may be useful in these days, and which for the inimitable gravity and apparent sincerity with which the absurd device is propounded, is almost worthy of comparison with Swift's notorious Project for Eating Children. In the number for April, 1854, appeared his "Story without a Tail," since republished in the Tales from Blackwood.
I must not omit to point out that in Fraser's Magazine, Jan., 1838, appeared the first of the celebrated "Homeric Ballads," of which there are sixteen in all, the concluding one, actually dictated from his death-bed to a friend, being the last poetical essay that proceeded from the Doctor's facile pen, as his last prose paper was a "leader" for the Age. It is needless to speak at length of these "Ballads," which are well known through the various reprints by Professor Conington, "the Modern Pythagorean," and others. Gladstone himself speaks of their "admirably turned Homeric tone;"[1] and Matthew Arnold says that they are vigorous and genuine poems in their own way, and not one continued falsetto, like the pinchbeck Roman Ballads of Lord Macaulay;"[2] while an able anonymous critic affirms that he does not know a book "better calculated to inspire a clever youth with a love of the Homeric poems."[3]
In the name of the Prophet, figs! Goldsmith, with the same pen that traced the undying lineaments of the Vicar of Wakefield, wrote for John Newbury, the publisher, a catchpenny pamphlet on the Cock Lane Ghost,—not included in his collected works till the appearance of Peter Cunningham's edition of 1854; Lockhart's range of subjects extended, as we have seen, "from poetry to dry rot;" and Maginn, who had sung the deeds of the Trojan heroes, did not disdain, in a novel entitled the Red Barn, to embody the strange story of Maria Martin, and the Polestead murder, of 1828. The book sold by thousands, but the authorship was never revealed.[4]
In 1838, Maginn translated some of the dramatic pieces of Lucian for Fraser; but notwithstanding their high merit, they did not seem to be popular, and were not continued.
In newspaper literature, he was one of the chief contributors to the John Bull; he was on the staff of the Age; he wrote for the True Sun; he was chosen by Murray foreign editor of the unfortunate and short-lived Representative, and in this capacity, resided for a while at Paris; and on the establishment of the Standard was appointed joint-editor with Dr. Gifford. It must be held, moreover, a singular proof of the estimation in which his abilities were held, that Murray,—that ἄναξ of booksellers, as Lord Byron termed him,—should have made overtures to him, at that time unknown to the public, so recently a junior schoolmaster in an Irish provincial town, and who had written no book, to undertake a life of the illustrious poet who had then just died. The letters and papers of Byron were actually placed in his hands; and it is probably true that
- ↑ Gladstone on Homer, 1858, vol. i. p. 3, note.
- ↑ On Translating Homer: Three Lectures given at Oxford by Matthew Arnold, M.A., Professor of Poetry in the University of Oxford. 1861, 8vo, p. 50.
- ↑ Gentleman's Magazine, January, 1866, p. 105.
- ↑ I must confess never to have seen this book, but give the statement on the authority of the late John Timbs, F.S.A., in the Leisure Hour, Feb. 17, 1870, p. 605.
