Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 13.djvu/115

 shot as she was leaving Covent Garden Theatre, 7 April 1779. Into Croft's strange compound of passion and pedantry on this miserable pair there was inserted a huge interpolation on Chatterton, and the fifth edition contained a postscript on Chatterton. Many years later this circumstance inflicted an indelible stain on Croft's reputation. In a letter inserted in the ‘Monthly Magazine’ for November 1799 he was accused by Southey of having obtained in 1778 Chatterton's letters from the boy's mother and sister under false pretences, of having published the letters without consent, and without awarding to the owners an adequate remuneration from the large profits he had himself made by their publication, and of having detained the originals for twenty-one years. To these charges Croft made a very unsatisfactory answer in the pages of the ‘Gentleman's Magazine’ (1800, pt. i. 99–104, 222–6, 322–5), which was subsequently published separately as ‘Chatterton and Love and Madness. A letter from Denmark to Mr. Nichols, editor of the “Gentleman's Magazine,” 1800.’ The manner in which Croft had obtained his information was justly censurable, but the matter which he printed on Chatterton has been said to have afforded ‘more graphic glimpses of the boy than all subsequent writers have supplied.’ He had undertaken to contribute a life of Chatterton to the ‘Biographia Britannica’ (Kippis's ed.), but was prevented by his other labours. The memoir was, however, based on his materials, and a long letter from him at Lincoln's Inn (5 Feb. 1782) to George Steevens on the subject is printed in a footnote, iv. 606–8. Further details concerning Southey's charges are in Cottle's ‘Reminiscences,’ i. 253–71; ‘Southey's Life and Correspondence,’ ii. 186. 5. ‘Fanaticism and Treason, or a Dispassionate History of the Rebellious Insurrection in June 1780,’ 1780, 8vo. 6. ‘The Abbey of Kilkhampton, or Monumental Records for the year 1780’ (anon.), 1780. The popularity of this satirical collection of epitaphs on a number of persons famous or notorious in that age is shown by the fact that eight editions of the first part and three of the second part were published in 1780. At least fourteen editions appeared, and in 1822 there was issued a volume called ‘The Abbey of Kilkhampton Revived.’ Kilkhampton is a fine parish church on the north coast of Cornwall, and the name was no doubt selected by Croft owing to the circumstance that James Hervey's ‘Meditations among the Tombs,’ a very popular volume of that period, was suggested by his visit to that church. A line in the ‘Pursuits of Literature’ condemns those who pen ‘inscriptive nonsense in a fancied abbey,’ and a note ties the condemnation to ‘a vile pamphlet called “Kilkhampton Abbey.”’ 7. ‘Some Account of an intended Publication of the Statutes on a Plan entirely new. By Herbert Croft, barrister-at-law,’ 1782, republished 1784. The gist of the proposition was that the statutes should be codified chronologically. 8. ‘Sunday Evenings,’ 1784, 8vo; fifty copies were printed for the private perusal of his friends. It was of this composition that Johnson expressed himself as not highly pleased, as the discourses were couched in too familiar a style. 9. ‘A Prize in the Lottery for Servants, Apprentices, &c.,’ circa 1786, 2d. each. 10. ‘The Will of King Alfred,’ Oxford, at the Clarendon Press, 1788. This was passed through the press under Croft's superintendence. 11. An unfinished ‘Letter to the Right Hon. William Pitt concerning the New Dictionary of the English. By the Rev. Herbert Croft.’ This letter, which pointed out the defects of Johnson's ‘Dictionary,’ was printed in March 1788, but neither finished nor published. It stopped abruptly with forty-four pages of text and seven pages of postscript, but with a reference to further information on the subject in the ‘Gentleman's Magazine’ for August 1787 and February 1788, in which periodical numerous letters on the progress of the work appeared in volumes lvii–lxiii. In 1787 his manuscripts on this dictionary amounted to two hundred quarto volumes, and in 1790 he claimed to have amassed eleven thousand words used by the highest authorities, but not in Johnson, a number which three years later had more than doubled. Proposals for a new edition of Johnson's ‘Dictionary’ were issued by Croft in 1792, and the work was to have been published in four large volumes, priced at twelve guineas, but the subscribers' names were so few that in the ‘Gentleman's Magazine’ for 1793, p. 491, he announced his intention of not printing until further pecuniary assistance had been received. This result is much to be regretted, more especially as Priestley, who had meditated ‘a large treatise on the structure and present state’ of our language, had dropped the scheme and given the unused materials to Croft. 12. At the close of 1789 Croft communicated to his friend Priestley the speedy appearance of ‘a book against the Socinians of the last age,’ with a letter to him. When it appeared, Priestley, who had previously suspected Croft of longing for preferment, and had ‘always considered him as a mere belles-lettres man,’ was surprised to find the letter ‘not controversial but complimentary, and on that account not politic.’ The anti-Socinian treatise was ‘An Account of Reason and Faith by