The Author Protests

Readers were asked for a letter of protest by any one of the following, addressed to a journal of his day, guilty Of publishing an unfavourable review of one of his works: Byron, Coleridge, Ben Jonson, Macaulay, Pope, Swift.

Literary recrimination is in the air and I had thought competitors might have been stimulated, if not positively infected, by recent exchanges in the columns of this journal between A Certain Reviewer and A Lady Poet. In the letters received I wanted the authors to dismiss the unfavour- able quality of the review as revealing the paltriness of mind, smallness of imagina- tion, and literary ineptitude, of the reviewers. Many entrants went slapdash at the author's style, more intent on parodying The Dunciad, Don Juan, The Ancient Mariner or Gulliver's Travels, etc., than on cunningly assembling a subtle rebuke to the reviewer or editor concerned.

Pope and Byron were neck-and-neck favourites with Swift close behind; Coleridge and Macaulay came much lower down the table—and none assayed Ben Jonson: too many scruples about the quality and intensity of Elizabethan literary vitupera- tion, perhaps. Coleridge's combination of remoteness from everyday, verbal discrimi- nation, and exactitude of thought, were very neatly caught in Francys Heritage's exegesis upon the aim of Kubla Khan; this, quite the best of the entries, disqualified itself by exceeding the word-limit one hundred per cent. Among the remainder the Byrons hit the best general level, the Popes were mostly puerile and the Swifts almost all lacked the saw-tooth bite. After Francys Heritage's rejection, I find one Byron And one Pope approximating, quite closely, to what I looked for; equal prizes of £2 10s. to

D. L. L. Clarke and R. Kennard Davis.

PRIZES

(D. L. L. CLARKE)

Pope, to the Editor of the 'Gentleman's Magazine,' 1743

Sir,

Your excellent Critick writes of my Dunciad that I needed not to trouble myself about my butts, for they might have railed against me till they were weary, without injury to me or redit to themselves (1) as who should say "bac wine needeth no bush." This is well ehough. But what follows? "Mr. Pope is master of a seeming candour, whose praise but heralds the stab of rancour : he writes to vex, affecting fame." Observe the fine cadence. At one blow it soothes the injured Mr. Cibber—if it does not indicate a siccessor to his illustrious laurels—and flatters where it seeks to wound, for is not this the very mirror of the method he ascribes to me? Can this be that assiduous contributor (2) of yours who honoured me with the tag, ex allow ingenio Poeta, ex sito tannin' Versifi- calor'? If so, he may indeed go far before affecting fame. ALEXANDER POPR

(1) For Johnson's obiter dictum, ascribed to 1775, see Boswell's Life, Oxford edn., i. 575.

(2) Johnson, who prefaced his translation into Latin of Pope's Messiah with this quota- tion from Scaliger.

(R. KENNARD DAVIS)

Byron, in Reply to a Review of Don 'Juan

Sir, l'm informed that in your latest number, ('Informed' I say, because I have not read it; `Tis not my wont my idle brain to encumber With reading what can bring but little credit, Nor let detraction break my peaceful slumber) —Still,l'm informed (and it is you that said it). That in the recent volume of my verse I've Proved 'garrulous, inconsequent, discursive.'

Well, it has always been my way to write

Of things as I have found them; not to twist 'em Into a pattern, neat and watertight,

To suit some pedant's philosophic system, And subjects crowd upon me, day and night, Lively and grave, till I can scarce resist 'em. Life guides my pen; and life, with me, I beg you'll hate, Love, ridicule, enjoy—but never regulate!