Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/205

 Satire's View of Sentiment alism 199 Of Mrs. Piozzi, the most famous satire is Peter Pindar's Bozzy and Piozzi. Peter, however, was interested rather in ridiculing the triviality of the anecdotes which she recorded about Dr. Johnson than in deriding the sentimentality which led her to ally herself with the Delia Cruscans. In his "town eclogue, " he sets her to competing in alternate anecdotes with her rival biographer, James Boswell. For the material of his witty verses, Peter turned to BoswelFs Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides and Mrs. Piozzi's Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson, LL.D., and he was sufficiently systematic in his researches to be able to give, in foot notes, definite references to the pages from which he borrowed. One of Madam Piozzi's stories is as follows: For me, in Latin Doctor Johnson wrote Two lines upon Sir Joseph Banks's Goat; A goat that round the World so curious wept; A goat that now eats grass that grows in Kent. 118 Miss Hannah More was Peter Pindar's favorite enemy; apparently he would rather mock at her literary pretensions than at the idiosyncracies of George the Third. Other satirists might praise her, as indeed some of them did. Mathias, who had a weakness for moral sentimentalism, declared in The Pur- suits of Literature and The Shade of Alexander Pope his admira- tion for such authoresses as Hannah More, Mrs. Carter, Mrs. Charlotte Smith, and even Mrs. Radcliffe. His imitator, the Rev. Mr. Polwhele, expressed a similar liking in his satire, The Unsex'd Females. In fact his poem is, as one might not expect from its title, in large part an appreciative survey of the literary achievement of the principal contemporary woman writers, Mrs. Carter, Mrs. Montagu, Mrs. Charlotte Smith, Miss Seward, Mrs. Radcliffe, and Miss Hannah More. 119 Such praises no doubt contributed to the popularity of these sensible authoresses. But Peter Pindar was not to be deceived and not to be denied. He saw Hannah More and Bluestockings in general, as sentimentalists, and vulgarly wrote them down so. m Works of Peter Pindar, I, 370. 119 Unsex'd Females, 17, 32-36.