s
resolution was inflexible.

Crisp had committed a great error; but he had escaped with a very slight
penance. His play had not been hooted from the boards. It had, on the
contrary, been better received than many very estimable performances
have been,--than Johnson's Irene, for example, or Goldsmith's
Good-Natured Man. Had Crisp been wise, he would have thought himself
happy in having purchased self-knowledge so cheap. He would have
relinquished, without vain repinings, the hope of poetical distinction,
and would have turned to the many sources of happiness which he still
possessed. Had he been, on the other hand, an unfeeling and unblushing
dunce, he would have gone on writing scores of bad tragedies in defiance
of censure and derision. But he had too much sense to risk a second
defeat, yet too little sense to bear his first defeat like a man. The
fatal delusion that he was a great dramatist had taken firm possession
of his mind. His failure he attributed to every cause except the true
one. He complained of the ill will of Garrick, who appears to have done
for the play everything that ability and zeal could do, and who, from
selfish motives, would, of course, have been well pleased if Virginia
had been as successful as the Beggar's Opera. Nay, Crisp complained of
the languor of the friends whose partiality had given him three benefit
nights to which he had no claim. He complained of the injustice of the
spectators, when, in truth, he ought to have been grateful for their
unexampled patience. He lost his temper and spirits, and became a cynic
and a hater of mankind. From London he retired to Hampton, and from
Hampton to a solitary and long-deserted mansion, built on a common in
one of the wildest tracts of Surrey. No road, not even a sheep walk,
connected his lonely dwelling with the abodes of men. The place of his
retreat was strictly concealed from his old associates. In the spring he
sometimes emerged, and was seen at exhibitions and concerts in London.
But he soon disappeared, and hid himself, with no society but his books,
in his dreary hermitage. He survived his failure about thirty years. A
new generation sprang up around him. No memory of his bad verses
remained among men. His very name was forgotten. How completely the
world had lost sight of him will appear from a single circumstance. We
looked for him in a copious Dictionary of Dramatic Authors published
while he was still alive, and we found only that Mr. H