An English Garner | Page 7

become a consummate master.
The Advice to a Young Reviewer brings us into a very different sphere of criticism, and has indeed a direct application to our own time. It was written by Edward Copleston, afterwards Dean of St. Paul's and Bishop of Llandaff. Born in February 1776 at Offwell, in Devonshire, Copleston gained in his sixteenth year a scholarship at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. After carrying off the prize for Latin verse, he was elected in 1795 Fellow of Oriel. In 1800, having been ordained priest, he became Vicar of St. Mary's. In 1802 he was elected Professor of Poetry, in which capacity he delivered the lectures subsequently published under the title of _Praelectiones Academicae_--a favourite book of Cardinal Newman's. In 1814 he succeeded Dr. Eveleigh as Provost of Oriel. In 1826 he was made Dean of Chester, in 1828 Bishop of Llandaff and Dean of St. Paul's. He died at Llandaff, on October 14th, 1849. Copleston is one of the fathers of modern Oxford, and from his provostship date many of the reforms which transformed the University of Gibbon and Southey into the University of Whateley, of Newman, of Keble, and of Pusey. The brochure which is printed here was written when Copleston was Fellow and Tutor of Oriel. It was immediately inspired, not, as is commonly supposed, by the critiques in the Edinburgh Review, but by the critiques in the British Critic, a periodical founded in 1793, and exceedingly influential between that time and about 1812. Archbishop Whateley, correcting a statement in the Life of Copleston by W.J. Copleston, says that it was occasioned by a review of Mant's poems in the _British Critic_[2]. But on referring to the review of these poems, which appeared in the November number of 1806, plainly the review referred to, we find nothing in it to support Whateley's assertion. That the reviews in the British Critic are, however, what Copleston is parodying in the critique of _L'Allegro_ is abundantly clear, but what he says about voyages and travels and about science and recondite learning appear to have reference to articles particularly characteristic of the Edinburgh Review. It was not, however, till after the date of Copleston's parody that the Edinburgh Review began conspicuously to illustrate what Copleston here satirises; it was not till a time more recent still that periodical literature generally exemplified in literal seriousness what Copleston intended as extravagant irony. It is interesting to compare with Copleston's remarks what Thackeray says on the same subjects in the twenty-fourth chapter of Pendennis, entitled 'The Pall Mall Gazette.' This brochure is evidently modelled on Swift's 'Digression Concerning Critics' in the third section of the Tale of a Tub, and owes something also to the Treatise on the Bathos in Pope's and Swift's Miscellanies, as the title may have been suggested by Shaftesbury's Advice to an Author. The Advice itself and the supplementary critique of Milton are clever and have good points, but they will not bear comparison with the satire of Swift and Pope.
The excerpt which comes next in this Miscellany links with the name of the author of the Essay of Dramatic Poesy the name of the most illustrious of his contemporaries. The difference, indeed, between Milton and Dryden is a difference not in degree merely, but in kind, so immeasurably distant and alien is the sphere in which they moved and worked both as men and as writers. It has sometimes been questioned whether Dryden is a poet. Few would dispute that Milton divides with Shakespeare the supremacy in English poetry. In Dryden as a man there is little to attract or interest us. In character and in private life he appears to have been perfectly commonplace. We close his biography, and our curiosity is satisfied. With Milton it is far otherwise. We feel instinctively that he belongs to the demi-gods of our race. We have the same curiosity about him as we have about Homer, Aeschylus, and Shakespeare, so that the merest trifles which throw any light on his personality assume an interest altogether out of proportion to their intrinsic importance. Our debt to Ellwood is, it must be admitted, much less than it might have been, if he had thought a little more of Milton and a little less of his somewhat stupid self and the sect to which he belonged. But, as the proverb says, we must not look a gift-horse in the mouth, and we are the richer for the Quaker's reminiscences. With Ellwood's work, the _History of Thomas Ellwood, written by Himself_, we are only concerned so far as it bears on his relation with Milton. Born in 1639, the son of a small squire and justice of the peace at Crowell in Oxfordshire, Ellwood had, in 1659, been persuaded by Edward Burrough, one of