Page:The English Review vol 7 Mar-Jun 1847 FGgaAQAAIAAJ.pdf/298

Rh Charles V. fastens round the neck of common thieves…. The greedy instinct with which these inventive copyists cause to be printed for the benefit of mankind under their names what was originally printed under the author's name only, and procure their subsistence, not from other men's coffers, but simply from other men's books, has to crawl through various paths towards their aim, and to enwrap their merit in various shapes. One solders together the 'disjecta membra poetarum' with his own rhymes into a Horatian 'humano capiti cervicem pictor equinam,' &c., or cuts for himself in the oak forests of Klopstock a little wooden or corken pegasus or bobby-horse, or does as those who melted down the fragments of horses of gilt brass found in Herculaneum in to an entirely new nag…. Another, like thieves in England, puts on a mask, writing anonymously, and steals other men's honey, being defended against the stings or its rightful owners by a wire-mask and gloves. Another disguises his selfishness under the semblance of disinterestedness, steals the fruit of the sweat of other men's brows for the sake of imparting it to the public, and enriches himself by impoverishing them through sheer philanthropy; as Pococke relates that the Egyptian thieves smear over their naked bodies with oil, to avoid their being laid hold of in their nocturnal expeditions. Some steal from the author nothing except the book itself, which they fit up with a preface and an index of their own; in other words, with an improved head and an improved tail; as Scheuchzer paints the unicorn,—the body of a horse, with a horn on the forehead and the tail of an ass. Others, again, are fishing in the familiar circles of friendship for the stray thoughts of great men; make them drop their cheese by fair speeches, like the cunning fox in the fable; and store up in their memory the fruit of other men's lips for their next publication. … Nay, often the pupil robs the master, and cheats the world with his borrowed greatness, until the true sun rises and causes the moon to turn pale; or be locks up his stolen ware till the death of the owner, intending by patchwork of his own to prevent its being recognized even so a she-wolf once suckled Romulus, the son of a god. This accounts for the fact that an author is often so much worse than his book, and the child so unlike the father; that those who write for the amusement of a whole public of readers are often mute in society; even as crocodiles are not themselves eatable, but only their eggs."—Grönländische Processe, s. W., t. i. p. 24-27.

In this wild strain,—which we have been obliged to chasten here and there, the salt of our author being, in spite of his own expurgations, occasionally still too gray to be set upon on English table,—the literally starving son of the Muses ran on through four volumes of satires upon all classes and conditions of men, under the grotesque titles "Greenland Lawsuits," and "Extracts from the Devil's Papers."

From this mood, which he himself characterized afterwards as the "vinegar state" of his mind, he passed, after the lapse of nine