ART. XI. The Correspondence of the late John Wilkes, &c. &c. Edited by John Almon. 5 Vols. 12mo. 17. 15s. Boards. Phillips. 1805. Letters from the Year 1774 to the Year 1796, of John Wilkes, Esq. 4 Vols. 12mo. 11. 1s. Boards. Longman and Co. 1805. NINE volumes of the life and correspondence of the late John Wilkes! There was once indeed a time when the name of Wilkes carried with it a charm powerful enough to give sale and sauction to the most trifling extracts, or the most bulky compilation: when it could inflame curiosity, and enchain attention; add poignancy to dulness; give weight to nonsense; and render palatable to the public taste, sedition, bawdry, and blasphemy itself. But the time is past: the spell is broken. Long before his own race was run, John Wilkes was in at the death of his popularity. In fact there was nothing in his situation of life; nothing in his character (save only the hardihood of his profligacy); and if we may judge from these his letters, and other literary efforts, there was nothing in his abilities; of consequence enough to attract any extraordinary attention, had he not, prompted by necessity and impudence, contrived to make himself the principal performer in the tragi-comedy acted by his majesty's servants, at the desire of several persons of quality, for the benefit of Mr. Wilkes, and at the expence of the constitution.'* It was only whilst he was the object of ministerial persecution, that he excited interest amongst his countrymen. Then, indeed, the friends of the constitution saw in him the undaunted asserter of their most important rights, and watched his fate with indignation and pity, while it was yet doubtful whether he would become the victim of illegal oppression, or the triumphant champion of liberty and the laws; the turbulent and factious looked up to him as their very torch and firebrand; even the partisans of the then ministry were malignantly attentive to all that could illustrate the character and actions of a man who had been able to defy their utmost power, and to rise superior from their reiterated attempts to crush him. In short, while the rays of royal indignation collected upon him, served only to illumine, and could not consume,'t so long he was the notified John Wilkes,' but when the battle was over, and the articles of peace were signed,-when the names of patriot and outlaw were exchanged for those of lord-mayor and chamberlain of the city,-then was accomplished the prediction of Junius, he will soon fall back into his natural situation, a silent senator, and hardly supporting the weekly eloquence of a newspaper. The gentle breath of peace would leave him on the surface, neglected and unremoved. It is only the tempest that lifts him from his place.' When government had once cried, Come! I'll be friends with thee, Jack;' the voice of that prostitute, the public, added, • Whether I shall ever see thee again or no, there is nobody cares.* But though Mr. Wilkes, no longer persecuted, was no longer an object of attention to his cotemporaries, yet from the commotions he excited during his popularity, his name has become so intimately connected with a very interesting period of our history, and is branded with infamy or stamped with honour in the writings of so many distinguished writers, that it undoubtedly deserves a place in the records. of British biography, proportioned to the noise that formerly accompanied it, and to the curiosity that it will excite here after. The public therefore had a right to expect, and, no doubt, would receive with favour, an authentic account of the life of John Wilkes, accompanied by such documents as would throw light on the public transactions of its most active period; by anecdotes of the most distinguished persons his cotemporaries; and by just so much of his private correspondence as would illustrate his character, and explain the motives of his conduct. Such a life Mr. Almon was sufficiently qualified to supply not indeed from his superior abilities as a biographer; but from his long and intimate connection with the deceased, from his former situation as a political bookseller, and lastly from his having had submitted to his perusal and use the original papers and letters of Mr. Wilkes. The five volumes which this gentleman has published, contain, we believe, an accurate account of Wilkes's life, correct copies of many of his productions the most in request, and à vast number of private letters; enough, in short, to satisfy the most eager curiosity. Not, therefore, to accuse Mr. Almon of any sins of omission in discharging his duty to his friend and to the public, we could wish him to have recollected that too much may be done as well as too little, that works of supererogation have long ceased to be esteemed meritorious, and that it was not absolutely necessary to bestow all his tediousness upon our worships. But perhaps Mr. Almon may have observed that the public taste for lives and letters, which arose from the success of Mason's Life of Gray, and some other happy specimens, has of late increased to such a degree as to encourage sundry merce *Henry IV. act ii. sc. 4. Dol Tearsheet to Falstaff. pary book-makers and book-sellers to make a shameful job of this sort of productions, and to load the press with all the trash that has passed through the post-office for the last century. He may have observed this; and wishing, good man! to cure the public of that vitiated taste which exposes it to so much literary quackery, he has here, like a skilful leech, forced upon it so large a dose as must infallibly produce satiety and surfeit, and make it loath in future the very name of 'Lives and Correspondence.' If this was his intention, he has succeeded to a miracle; if not meant, 'tis a hit indeed. In reality these volumes might have been reduced to at least half their bulk, without any violent loss to the public or to the character of Mr. Wilkes. What is written by Mr. Almon himself, displays neither great powers of mind, nor elegance of expression. Of the letters many are perfectly uninteresting, add nothing to our instruction, and are very far indeed from contributing to our amusement. Such are those from Dr. Brewster in the first, and many others in the subsequent volumes. Even the correspondence between Wilkes and his daughter, though it undoubtedly exhibits him in so amiable a point of view that we can hardly blame the friendly zeal which dictated the publication, is so often on subjects of no imaginable interest to the rest of mankind, and is so monotonous withal, that we cannot but feel that there is something too much of this.'. We feel this the more, as the style in which Mr. Wilkes expresses his affection for his daughter is extremely fulsome, foreign from the simple manliness of the English character, and evidently imitative of the factitious and putid style of fondness exhibited in madame de Sevigné's and other French letters. Indeed the eternal expressions of his paternity remind us of the old monkish greeting: Quot pilos habent asinorum cutes, which may be thus translated; Count all the hairs upon an ass's hide, } It is here but fair to observe, that except in this respect, we have no objection to advance against the style of Wilkes's letters; which is in general very clear, terse, sprightly, and expressive. After making every deduction, it must be allowed that these volumes contain, in the midst of much irrelevant matter, no small portion of amusement and information. This will be evident from a brief account of their more remarkable contents, accompanied by a few extracts. The first volume begins with an account of Mr. Wilkes's family, education, marriage, and separation from his wife. From this we learn that his mother was a very amiable and respectable lady, but a rigid dissenter; and that in consequence of a plan concerted between her and Mrs. Mead (the mother of his future wife), also a dissenter, who resided with her daugh ter at Aylesbury, our hero, after having received the rudi ments of his education at Hertford, was placed under the tuition of a private preceptor, a dissenting clergyman, who kept a small seminary at Aylesbury. When young Mr. Wilkes had been some time under Mr. Leeson's care, his father resolved to send him, with his preceptor, to the university of Leyden, to finish his studies. Here he cultivated his taste for the Latin classics, with great assiduity. He also entered into the Greek classics, but not with the same partiality. Of all the Latin writers, he was most attached to Cicero and Virgil. Tacitus he preferred to Livy, but with no enthusiasm for either. Of Mr. Wilkes's academical acquirements, no eulogy need be attempted. He owed more to his own application, and to study, than to the assistance of the university. These were his best preceptors. The university did something, but his own ardour and perseverance did more. They made him a most excellent Latin classic, and a tolerable Greek one. He never failed to cultivate and improve his acquaintance with the best writers in those languages; so that when he entered into the wide field of politics, which was a few months after the accession of his present majesty, he was as complete a scholar as he could have been had he remained at Oxford or Cambridge from the time of his leaving Hertford.'— P. 9. We here pause to observe, that, notwithstanding Mr. Almon's eulogy on his attainments, the foregoing account of Mr. Wilkes's education, connected with the subsequent detail of his depraved conduct and licentious opinions, furnishes an argument in favour of the usual and regular mode of education for English gentlemen at a public school and English university, too strong to be overthrown by the invective of Gibbon's wounded vanity, or the overflowings of Cowper's mistaken zeal. Whatever might be the original propensities of Wilkes's constitution, the temptations by which he was seduced, or the accidents by which he was thrown into a participation of every loose and every profane excess in the company of the most abandoned profligates, we have no doubt that the illiberal austerity and puritanical seclusion of his education left on his mind an impression of aversion and disgust, and tended very strongly to give him an ardent longing for the unknown and forbidden pleasures of the world; so that the moment he was emancipated from restraints, he plunged headlong with all the eagerness of curiosity, into the extremes of vice and folly. Nor did it increase his affection for a life of moral and religious regularity, that he found himself in his nonage married, in compliance with the will of his parents, to a woman half as old again as himself, brought up a recluse, of habits abhorrent from gaiety, and bigoted to her own per suasions. We return from this digression.-The remainder of the first volume is, perhaps, the most interesting part of the whole work. It contains the History of the North Briton, of the General Warrant, Evasion of the Habeas Corpus Act, Seizure of Papers, and Discharge by the Court of Common Pleas : in short, the whole of Mr. Wilkes's public life, from his first political Essay On the Rupture with Spain, in 1762,' till his return after his first flight to Paris, in 1763. Of Wilkes's own composition, we have here his Dedication to Lord Bute of Ben Jonson's play The Fall of Mortimer,' which Wilkes himself esteemed his best production; his correspondence with the secretaries of state; the last paper of the North Briton; his Letter on his Public Conduct, &c. &c. In the second volume, we have an account of the meeting of parliament, in November, 1763; the king's message, in consequence of which No. 45 was ordered to be burned by the common hangman; and Mr. Wilkes's ineffectual complaint of breach of privilege. After a tedious account of the duel with Mr. Martin, and five letters to his daughter, follow those to Mr. Cotes, forming by far the most important part of his correspondence. As a specimen we give LETTER VIII. Paris, Hotel de Saxe, January 20, 1764. MY DEAREST COTES, "PHILIPPS writes to me in a warm strain, to return immediately; and, from the partial view he takes of my affairs, which is so far as law and the two houses are concerned, I really think him right. You and I, my beloved friend, have more extended views; and therefore, as I have now an opportunity, I will sift it to the bottom, for I am secure of my conveyance. Your letter of the 10th leaves me no doubt of the certainty of my expulsion. Now give me leave to take a peep into futurity. I argue upon the supposition that I was expelled this morning, at one or two o'clock, after a warm debate. I am, then, no longer a member of parliament. Of consequence, a political man not in the house is of no impor Philipps was now his solicitor.' |
