Winged Words

John Murray to Lord Byron.

November 4th, 1812.

…I shall be careful to give you full notice of the new edition of ‘Childe Harold,’ which has been very much assisted in sale by the admiration forced from the ragamuffins who are abusing the Address. I would be delighted if you had a new poem ready for publication about the same time that Walter Scott is expected; but I will sacrifice my right arm (your Lordship’s friendship) rather than publish any poem not equal to ‘Childe Harold’ without a conscriptive command, like that which I lately executed in committing your portrait to the flames; but I had some consolation in seeing it ascend in sparkling brilliancy to Parnassus. Neither Mr. Gifford nor I, I can venture to assure you, upon honour, have any notion who the author of the admirable article on ‘Horne Tooke’ is.

I ever remain,

Your Lordship’s faithful Servant,

John Murray.

P.S.—I do not mention ‘Waltzing,’ from the hope that it improves geometrically as to the time that it is retained.’

Walter Scott and John Horne Tooke are mentioned in the same paragraph of a letter from publisher John Murray to Lord Byron.  Tooke, the English politician, whose conversational skills are said to rival Samuel Johnson’s, died on March 18, 1812.  Tooke also wrote a philological treatise on “winged words”; those which have passed into common usage from an original source.   The term winged words is a translated phrase from Homer, and this term was employed by Thomas Carlyle in his essay “On Walter Scott".

‘His {Scott’s} power of representing these things, too, his poetic power, like his moral power, was a genius in extenso, as we may say, not in intenso. In action, in speculation, broad as he was, he rose nowhere high; productive without measure as to quantity, in quality he for the most part transcended but a little way the region of commonplace. It has been said, 'no man has written as many volumes with so few sentences that can be quoted.' Winged words were not his vocation; nothing urged him that way: the great Mystery of Existence was not great to him; did not drive him into rocky solitudes to wrestle with it for an answer, to be answered or to perish…’

Robert Walpole

The unofficial first Prime Minister of Great Britain, Sir Robert Walpole, died on March 18, 1745. His “ministership” began in 1721, and he gained notoriety and influence by stopping a Jacobite plot to capture King George I, and restore King James Stewart to the throne. The plot was named for a leading conspirator, Francis Atterbury. Walpole became important to the Hanovers, and Sir Walter Scott wrote about this period in history in his "Tales of a Grandfather":

'George, the first of his family who had ascended the British throne, had transmitted the important acquisition to his son, George II. Both sovereigns were men of honour, courage, and good sense; but, being born and educated foreigners, they were strangers to the peculiar character, no less than to the very complieated form of government, of the country over which they were called by Providence to reign. They were successively under the necessity of placing the administration in the hands of a man of distinguished talent, the celebrated Sir Robert Walpole. Unfortunately, this great statesman was a man of a coarse mind, who, altogether disbelieving in the very existence of patriotism, held the opinion that every man had his price, and might be bought, if his services were worth the value at which he rated them. His creed was as unfavourable to the probity of public men, as that of a leader who should disbelieve in the existence of military honour would be degrading to the character of a soldier. The venality of Sir Robert Walpole's administration became a shame and reproach to the British nation, which was also burdened with the means of supplying the wages of the national corruption.

The Kings also, George I and II, under whom Sir Robert Walpole conducted public affairs, were themselves unpopular from a very natural reason. They loved with fond partiality their paternal dominions of Hanover, and the manners and customs of the country in which they had been born and bred. Their intimacy and confidence were chiefly imparted to those of their own nation; and so far, though the preference might be disagreeable to their British subjects, the error flowed from a laudable motive. But both the royal father and sot suffered themselves to be hurried farther than this. Regard for their German territories was the principle which regulated their political movements, and both alliances and hostilities were engaged in for interests and disputes which were of a nature exclusively German, and with which the British nation had nothing to do. Out of this undue partiality for their native dominions arose a great clamour against the two first kings of the House of Guelph, that, called to the government of so fair and ample a kingdom as Britain, they neglected or sacrificed its interests for those of the petty and subaltern concerns of their electorate of Hanover.

Besides other causes of unpopularity, the length of Sir Robert Walpole's administration was alone sufficient to render it odious to a people so fickle as the English, who soon become weary of one class of measures, and still sooner of the administration of any one minister. For these various reasons, the government of Sir Robert Walpole, especially towards its close, was highly unpopular in England, and the Opposition attacked it with a degree of fury which made those who watched the strife from a distance imagine, that language so outrageous was that of men in the act of revolt. The foreign nations, whose ideas of our constitution were as imperfect formerly as they are at this moment, listened like men who hear what they conceive to be the bursting of a steam-engine, when the noise only announces the action of the safetyvalves....'

Laurence Sterne

" Any man who has a name, or who has the power of pleasing," said Johnson, "will be very generally invited in London. The man Sterme, I am told, has had engagements for three months." Johnson's feelings of morality, and respect for the priesthood, led him to speak of Sterne with contempt; but when Goldsmith added, " And a very dull fellow," he replied with his emphatic, " Why, no, sir."

Walter Scott included this snippet of conversation between Samuel Johnson and Oliver Goldsmith to portray the Anglican clergyman and novelist Laurence Sterne as his contemporaries saw him.  The text is part of Scott's article on Laurence Sterne in his "The Lives of the Novelists".  The dialogue above captures something of the moral discomfort people felt at the time, about the novel "The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy, Gentleman"; especially as this work came from the pen of a clergyman.  Scott comments in his lives that:

"...Tristram Shandy is no narrative, but a collection of scenes, dialogues, and portraits, humorous or affecting, intermixed with much wit, and with much learning, original or borrowed. It resembles the irregularities of a Gothic room, built by some fanciful collector, to contain the miscellaneous remnants of antiquity which his pains have accumulated, and bearing as little proportion in its parts, as there is connexion between the pieces of rusty armor with which it is decorated..."

Tristam Shandy was much better appreciated after Sterne's death, up to the current time.  As was the author, Laurence Sterne, who died on March 18, 1768.