THE VICTORIAN CHANCELLORS.
[TO TIM EDITOZ OF TEE " SPEITATOZ."]
SIR,—In the review of Mr. Atlay's "Victorian Chancellors" in your last issue you ask : "Who was the .author of the famous mot that Lord Campbell by his biographies had added a fresh terror to death ?" You suggest that probably §ir Charles Wetherell was the real author. As a matter of fact, the jest was purloined from an older source. Dr. Arbuthnot, the friend of Pope, said of Curl, the publisher, that he had added a new terror to death. Curl, by his pirated publica- tions, filled his contemporaries with dread. Nothing is so curious in our literature as the antiquity of many of the witticisms, epigrams, and metaphors that are astribed to modern writers, who thereby acquire a reputation that is quite fictitious. Take, for example, Disraeli's description of Boling- broke as "England's glory and her shame." For a long time I assumed that this was an adaptation of Pope's description of Erasmus in his "Essay on Criticism " :—
" At length Erasmus, that great injured name, The glory of the priesthood and the shame."
But I was interested to find recently the same thought in a still older writer, Sir George Mackenzie, "the Bluidy Mackenzie" of Scottish Presbyterian hagiology. In his quaint poem, " Crelia's Country House and Closet," he describes the great Montrose as
"His country's glory and its shame, Caesar in all things equall'd, but his fame."
Another well-known saying of Disraeli's was his dictum that all sensible men were of the same religion, but sensible men never told what that religion was. This is ascribed to many previous writers. Sir William Fraser in his "Disraeli and his Day" says it came from Isaac Disraeli. Mr. Secoombe in the Bookman for March of last year said that Disraeli got it from the Marquis of Halifax. Dr. Saintsbury in a note to his translation of Scherer's "Essays on English Literature" says that the saying is usually fathered on Lord Chesterfield. The oldest source to which I have traced it is the first Lord Shaftesbury. Toland in his "Elidophorus " says :—" This puts me in mind of what I was told by a near relation to the old Lord Shaftesbury. The latter, conferring one day with Major Wildman about the many sects of religion in the world, they came to this conclusion at last; that notwithstanding those infinite divisions caus'd by the interest of the priests and the ignorance of the people, all wise men are of the same religion; whereupon a lady in the room, who seem'd to mind her needle more than their discourse, demanded with some concern what that religion was. To whom the Lord Shaftes- bury strait reply'd, Madam, wise men never tell." A very interesting book could be written on the pedigrees of witti, cisms and bans M014.—I am, Sir, dt.c., J. A. LO-VAT FEMME.-
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