the
meed that is their due, and not to be treated as low pretenders who
have encroached on the province of their betters. Suppose Richardson
to have been acquainted with the great man's steward, or valet,
instead of the great man himself, I will venture to say that there was
more difference between him who lived in an _ideal world_, and had the
genius and felicity to open that world to others, and his friend the
steward, than between the lacquey and the mere lord, or between those
who lived in different rooms of the same house, who dined on the same
luxuries at different tables, who rode outside or inside of the same
coach, and were proud of wearing or of bestowing the same tawdry
livery. If the lord is distinguished from his valet by any thing else,
it is by education and talent, which he has in common with our author.
But if the latter shows these in the highest degree, it is asked what
are his pretensions? Not birth or fortune, for neither of these would
enable him to write a Clarissa. One man is born with a title and
estate, another with genius. That is sufficient; and we have no right
to question the genius for want of _gentility_, unless the former ran
in families, or could be bequeathed with a fortune, which is not the
case. Were it so, the flowers of literature, like jewels and
embroidery, would be confined to the fashionable circles; and there
would be no pretenders to taste or elegance but those whose names were
found in the court list. No one objects to Claude's Landscapes as the
work of a pastrycook, or withholds from Raphael the epithet of
_divine_, because his parents were not rich. This impertinence is
confined to men of letters; the evidence of the senses baffles the
envy and foppery of mankind. No quarter ought to be given to this
_aristocratic_ tone of criticism whenever it appears. People of
quality are not contented with carrying all the external advantages
for their own share, but would persuade you that all the intellectual
ones are packed up in the same bundle. Lord Byron was a later instance
of this double and unwarrantable style of pretension--_monstrum
ingens, biforme_. He could not endure a lord who was not a wit, nor a
poet who was not a lord. Nobody but himself answered to his own
standard of perfection. Mr. Moore carries a proxy in his pocket from
some noble persons to estimate literary merit by the same rule. Lady
Mary calls Fielding names, but she afterwards makes atonement by doing
justi