than
the other, there being many rich effendis to one Sir Isaac Newton. The
wish was not a very intellectual one. The same petulance of rank and
sex breaks out everywhere in these "_Letters_". She is constantly
reducing the poets or philosophers who have the misfortune of her
acquaintance, to the figure they might make at her Ladyship's levee or
toilette, not considering that the public mind does not sympathize
with this process of a fastidious imagination. In the same spirit, she
declares of Pope and Swift, that "had it not been for the
_good-nature_ of mankind, these two superior beings were entitled, by
their birth and hereditary fortune, to be only a couple of link-boys."
Gulliver's Travels, and the Rape of the Lock, go for nothing in this
critical estimate, and the world raised the authors to the rank of
superior beings, in spite of their disadvantages of birth and fortune,
_out of pure good-nature_! So, again, she says of Richardson, that he
had never got beyond the servants' hall, and was utterly unfit to
describe the manners of people of quality; till, in the capricious
workings of her vanity, she persuades herself that Clarissa is very
like what she was at her age, and that Sir Thomas and Lady Grandison
strongly resembled what she had heard of her mother and remembered of
her father. It is one of the beauties and advantages of literature,
that it is the means of abstracting the mind from the narrowness of
local and personal prejudices, and of enabling us to judge of truth
and excellence by their inherent merits alone. Woe be to the pen that
would undo this fine illusion (the only reality), and teach us to
regulate our notions of genius and virtue by the circumstances in
which they happen to be placed! You would not expect a person whom you
saw in a servants' hall, or behind a counter, to write Clarissa; but
after he had written the work, to _pre-judge_ it from the situation of
the writer, is an unpardonable piece of injustice and folly. His merit
could only be the greater from the contrast. If literature is an
elegant accomplishment, which none but persons of birth and fashion
should be allowed to excel in, or to exercise with advantage to the
public, let them by all means take upon them the task of enlightening
and refining mankind: if they decline this responsibility as too heavy
for their shoulders, let those who do the drudgery in their stead,
however inadequately, for want of their polite example, receive