Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 13.djvu/114

 lished in the ‘Gentleman's Magazine,’ 1801, pt. i. p. 497. At the close of 1800 he seems to have returned to his own country, and during the next year he resided at the Royal Terrace, Southend, discharging in person the duties attached to his living and superintending the passing through the press of two sermons which he preached at Prittlewell. A few years previously he had announced to his friends that the lord chancellor had promised to present him to another benefice of the value of 150l. per annum, but the hoped-for preferment was never conferred upon him. When promotion came neither from lay nor clerical hands, Croft again withdrew to the continent in 1802, and there he spent the remainder of his days. He was engaged at this date on an edition of ‘Télémaque,’ to be printed in a new system of punctuation, but this remains among his many unfinished ventures. His first settlement on his second trip abroad was at Lille, and on the renewal of the war between England and France he was one of those detained by Bonaparte, and would probably have been ordered to dwell at Verdun with his companions in restraint, but, to the credit of Napoleon's government, it should be stated that when it was notified that Croft was a literary man, he was allowed to live where he pleased. According to an elaborate article by P. L. Jacob, bibliophile, the pseudonym of Paul Lacroix, in the ‘Bibliophile Français’ for 1869, he lived for some years in a pleasant country retreat near the château in the vicinity of Amiens which belonged to a Lady Mary Hamilton, who is said to have been a daughter of the Earl of Leven and Melville and the wife of a Mr. Hamilton. At a later period he removed to Paris, where he haunted libraries and sought the society of book-lovers, and at Paris he died on 26 April 1816. A white marble monument to his memory was placed on the north wall of Prittlewell church. His principal support during this period was, according to Charles Nodier, the assistant of Croft and Lady Mary Hamilton in their literary undertakings, the annual salary of five thousand francs which he received from an English paper as its correspondent in France. It is, however, asserted in another memoir of him that for a very considerable period he enjoyed a pension of 200l. per annum from the English government; and, if this assertion be correct, the pension was no doubt his reward for having answered, as he himself confessed in 1794, two of Burke's publications during the American war (Egerton MS. 2186, ff. 88–9). A print of him (‘Drummond pinxt Farn sculpt’) is prefixed to page 251 of the ‘European Magazine’ for 1794. A second engraving of him (Abbot, painter; Skelton, engraver) was published by John B. Nichols & Son in 1828. Busts of his two most illustrious friends, Johnson and Lowth, are represented in the background. Croft's acknowledged works are very numerous, but his name is solely remembered now from the life of Young which he contributed to Johnson's ‘Lives of the Poets.’ His writings were: 1. ‘A Brother's Advice to his Sisters’ [signed ‘H.’], 1775, 2nd edition 1776, when it was dedicated to the Duchess of Queensberry, who patronised Gay. To the advice which he gave little exception can be taken, but it was written in a stilted style. 2. A paper called by the whimsical name of ‘The Literary Fly.’ The first number, ten thousand copies of which were distributed gratuitously, was issued on 18 Jan. 1779, but it soon died of inanition. Some information about it is printed in Cyrus Redding's ‘Yesterday and To-day,’ iii. 274–80. 3. ‘A Memoir of Dr. Young, the Poet,’ which he was requested to write on account of his intimacy with the poet's son, and for which he took considerable pains in collecting information. It was written while Croft was in London preparing for the law, and was included with Dr. Johnson's ‘Lives of the Poets,’ being published by him without any alteration save the omission of a single passage, for which see the ‘Gentleman's Magazine,’ li. p. 318. Burke said of this production: ‘It is not a good imitation of Johnson; it has all his pomp without his force; it has all the nodosities of the oak without its strength,’ and, after a pause, ‘It has all the contortions of the Sibyl without the inspiration.’ The author was gratified at the distinction by which alone his name is now kept alive, but Peter Cunningham, in his edition of the ‘Lives of the Poets’ (vol. i. pp. xx–xxi), says that he had seen Croft's copy of the lives bound with the lettering of ‘Johnson's Beauties and Deformities.’ 4. ‘Love and Madness, a Story too true, in a series of Letters between Parties whose names could perhaps be mentioned were they less known or less lamented’ [anon.], 1780. Of this volume, which went through seven editions, with many variations in the text, and of the tragedy on which it was based, Carlyle in his ‘Reminiscences,’ p. 224, says: ‘The story is musty rather, and there is a loose, foolish old book upon it called “Love and Madness” which is not worth reading.’ The letters are supposed to have been written by Miss Martha Ray, the mistress of Lord Sandwich, and James Hackman, at one time in the army, but afterwards a clergyman with a living in Norfolk, who was madly in love with her (a love which is sometimes said to have been returned), and by whom she was