The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 by Philip Wharton;Grace Wharton
page 17 of 349 (04%)
page 17 of 349 (04%)
|
That greets your very name: folks see but one
Fool more, as well as knave, in Dodington. Dodington has been occasionally classed with Lord Hervey but the classification is scarcely fair. With all his faults--and he had them in abundance--Lord Hervey was a better creature than Bubb Dodington. If he was effeminate, he had convictions and could stand by them. If Pope sneered at him as Sporus and called him a curd of asses' milk, he has left behind him some of the most brilliant memoirs ever penned. If he had some faults in common with Dodington he was endowed with virtues of which Dodington never dreamed. The name of Lord Chesterfield is in the air just now. Within the last few months the curiosity of the world has been stimulated and satisfied by the publication of some hitherto unknown letters by Lord Chesterfield. The pleasure which the student of history has taken in this new find is just dimmed at this moment by the death of Lord Carnarvon, whose care and scholarship gave them to the worlds. They are indeed a precious possession. A very eminent French critic, M. Brunetière, has inveighed lately with much justice against the passion for raking together and bringing out all manner of unpublished writings. He complains, and complains with justice, that while the existing classics of literature are left imperfectly edited, if not ignored, the activity of students is devoted to burrowing out all manner of unimportant material, anything, everything, so long as it has not been known beforehand to the world. The French critic protests against the class of scholars who go into ecstacies over a newly discovered washing list of Pascal or a bill from Racine's perruquier. The complaint tells against us as well on our side of the Channel. We hear a great deal about newly discovered fragments by this great writer and that great |
|