The Tatler (Vol 4)

From Thursday, Oct. 5, to Saturday, Oct. 7, 1710

From my own Apartment, Oct. 6

I have reason to believe that certain of my contemporaries have made use of an art I some time ago professed, of being often designedly dull;[128 - See Nos. 38 and 230.] and for that reason shall not exert myself when I see them lazy. He that has so much to struggle with as the man who pretends to censure others, must keep up his fire for an onset, and may be allowed to carry his arms a little carelessly upon an ordinary march. This paper therefore shall be taken up by my correspondents, two of which have sent me the two following plain, but sensible and honest letters, upon subjects no less important than those of education and devotion:

"Sir,[129 - This letter refers to the one by Swift in No. 230, on the corruptions of the English language in ordinary writings. The present letter, which is supposed to be by James Greenwood, closes with the statement that an English grammar, with notes, would be published next term. Soon afterwards there appeared, with the date 1711, "A Grammar of the English Tongue, with Notes… Printed for John Brightland," &c. This book was noticed in the Works of the Learned for November 1710. Facing the title is a page bearing the head of Cato the Censor, and the following lines: "The Approbation of Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq.: 'The following treatise being submitted to my censure, that I may pass it with integrity, I must declare, that as grammar in general is on all hands allowed to be the foundation of all arts and sciences, so it appears to me that this Grammar of the English Tongue has done that justice to our language which, till now, it never obtained. The text will improve the most ignorant, and the notes will employ the most learned. I therefore enjoin all my female correspondents to buy, read, and study this grammar, that their letters may be something less enigmatic; and on all my male correspondents likewise, who make no conscience of false spelling and false English, I lay the same injunction, on pain of having their epistles exposed in their own proper dress in my Lucubrations. – Isaac Bickerstaff, Censor.'" There is a Dedication to the Queen, and a Preface in which "the Authors" explain how they have come to undertake a much-needed work at the request of Mr. Brightland.This book was followed by a pamphlet of six pages, "Reasons for an English Education, by teaching the Youth of both Sexes the Arts of Grammar, Rhetoric, Poetry, and Logic, in their own Mother-Tongue, 1711." On p. 5 the writer asks, "Has our Censor complained without cause, and given a false alarm of danger to the language of our country? (Lucubrat., Sept. 28, 1710);" and on the next page we are told that I. B., encouraged by the success of his book, was industriously correcting it for a second edition. This appeared in 1712, with an increase in the number of pages from 180 to 264. Other editions appeared in 1714 and 1720. The fifth is dated 1729, and is advertised in the Craftsman for July 5, 1729, as "recommended by Sir Richard Steele, for the use of the schools of Great Britain;" but according to the Monthly Chronicle, it really appeared on August 8, 1728, being called in the Index, "Bickerstaffe's Grammar." The seventh and eighth editions were published in 1746 and 1759.In Nos. 254 and 255 of the Tatler there was advertised, as shortly to be published, "An Essay towards a Practical English Grammar, by James Greenwood… Particular care has been taken to render this book useful and agreeable to the Fair Sex." This book is dated 1711, and is noticed in the Works of the Learned for July. The Preface gives "part of a letter which I wrote about a twelvemonth ago to the ingenious author of the Tatler upon this head" (i. e. knowledge of grammar among the fair sex). Greenwood's remarks on female education were not printed in the Tatler; but they may have formed part of the letter in this number (234), if this letter is by Greenwood. The third edition, enlarged, of Greenwood's "Essay" appeared on May 24, 1729. Greenwood was sub-master at St. Paul's School, and afterwards kept a boarding-school at Woodford, in Essex. He published "The London Vocabulary, English and Latin," of which there was a third edition in 1713, with curious illustrations. By 1817 this book had passed through twenty six-editions in England, besides several in America. Greenwood also published in 1713 "The Virgin Muse," a collection of poetry for "young gentlemen and ladies at school." Second and third editions appeared in 1722 and 1731.Michael Maittaire also issued, in 1712, "An English Grammar; or, an Essay on the Art of Grammar, applied to and exemplified in the English Tongue." In the same year a pamphlet appeared with the title, "Bellum Grammatical, or the Grammatical Battle-Royal. In Reflections on the three English Grammars published in about a year last past." It consists chiefly of an attack on Greenwood's "Essay," and praise of Brightland's "Grammar," which "merits what the Censor said of it." In a postscript Maittaire's "Grammar" is described as the worst of all. Brightland and Greenwood deserve to be remembered for their efforts to spread abroad a knowledge of "the genius and nature of the English tongue." (The facts in this note are taken from a paper by the present writer in Watford's Antiquarian for October 1885.)]

"I am an old man, retired from all acquaintance with the town, but what I have from your papers (not the worst entertainment of my solitude); yet being still a well-wisher to my country and the commonwealth of learning (a qua, confiteor, nullam ætatis meæ partem abhorruisse), and hoping the plain phrase in writing that was current in my younger days would have lasted for my time, I was startled at the picture of modern politeness transmitted by your ingenious correspondent, and grieved to see our sterling English language fallen into the hands of clippers and coiners. That mutilated epistle, consisting of hipps, reps, and such-like enormous curtailings, was a mortifying spectacle, but with the reserve of comfort to find this, and other abuses of our mother-tongue, so pathetically complained of, and to the proper person for redressing them, the Censor of Great Britain.

"He had before represented the deplorable ignorance that for several years past has reigned amongst our English writers, the great depravity of our taste, and continual corruption of our style: but, sir, before you give yourself the trouble of prescribing remedies for these distempers (which you own will require the greatest care and application), give me leave (having long had my eye upon these mischiefs, and thoughts exercised about them) to mention what I humbly conceive to be the cause of them, and in your friend Horace's words, "Quo fonte derivata clades In patriam populumque fluxit."[130 - Horace, 3 Od. iv. 19.]

"I take our corrupt ways of writing to proceed from the mistakes and wrong measures in our common methods of education, which I always looked upon as one of our national grievances, and a singularity that renders us no less than our situation,

– Penitus toto divisos orbe Britannos.[131 - Virgil, "Eclog." i. 67.]

This puts me upon consulting the most celebrated critics on that subject, to compare our practice with their precepts, and find where it was that we came short or went wide.

"But after all, I found our case required something more than these doctors had directed, and the principal defect of our English discipline to lie in the initiatory part, which, although it needs the greatest care and skill, is usually left to the conduct of those blind guides, viz., Chance and Ignorance.

"I shall trouble you with but a single instance, pursuant to what your sagacious friend has said, that he could furnish you with a catalogue of English books, that would cost you a hundred pounds at first hand, wherein you could not find ten lines together of common grammar; which is a necessary consequence of our mismanagement in that province.

"For can anything be more absurd than our way of proceeding in this part of literature? To push tender wits into the intricate mazes of grammar, and a Latin grammar? To learn an unknown art by an unknown tongue? To carry them a dark roundabout way to let them in at a back-door? Whereas by teaching them first the grammar of their mother-tongue (so easy to be learned), their advance to the grammars of Latin and Greek would be gradual and easy; but our precipitate way of hurrying them over such a gulf, before we have built them a bridge to it, is a shock to their weak understandings, which they seldom, or very late, recover. In the meantime we wrong nature, and slander infants, who want neither capacity nor will to learn, till we put them upon service beyond their strength, and then indeed we baulk them.

"The liberal arts and sciences are all beautiful as the Graces, nor has Grammar (the severe mother of all) so frightful a face of her own; it is the vizard put upon it that scares children. She is made to speak hard words that to them sound like conjuring. Let her talk intelligibly, and they will listen to her.

"In this, I think, as on other accounts, we show ourselves true Britons, always overlooking our natural advantages. It has been the practice of wisest nations to learn their own language by stated rules, to avoid the confusion that would follow from leaving it to vulgar use. Our English tongue, says a learned man, is the most determinate in its construction, and reducible to the fewest rules: whatever language has less grammar in it, is not intelligible; and whatever has more, all that it has more is superfluous; for which reasons he would have it made the foundation of learning Latin, and all other languages.

"To speak and write without absurdity the language of one's country, is commendable in persons of all stations, and to some indispensably necessary; and to this purpose, I would recommend above all things the having a grammar of our mother-tongue first taught in our schools, which would facilitate our youths learning their Latin and Greek grammars, with spare time for arithmetic, astronomy, cosmography, history, &c., that would make them pass the spring of their life with profit and pleasure, that is now miserably spent in grammatical perplexities.

"But here, methinks, I see the reader smile, and ready to ask me (as the lawyer did sexton Diego on his bequeathing rich legacies to the poor of the parish,[132 - Bartolus (a covetous lawyer). Where shall I find these sums? Diego (sexton to Lopez). Even where you please, sir."– Beaumont and Fletcher's "Spanish Curate," Act. iv. sc. i.] Where are these mighty sums to be raised?), Where is there such a grammar to be had? I will not answer, as he did, Even where your Worship pleases. No, it is our good fortune to have such a grammar, with notes, now in the press, and to be published next term.

"I hear it is a chargeable work, and wish the publisher to have customers of all that have need of such a book; yet fancy that he cannot be much a sufferer, if it is only bought by all that have more need for it than they think they have.

"A certain author brought a poem to Mr. Cowley, for his perusal and judgment of the performance, which he demanded at the next visit with a poetaster's assurance; and Mr. Cowley, with his usual modesty, desired that he would be pleased to look a little to the grammar of it. 'To the grammar of it! What do you mean, sir? Would you send me to school again?' 'Why, Mr. H – , would it do you any harm?'

"This put me on considering how this voyage of literature may be made with more safety and profit, expedition and delight; and at last, for completing so good a service, to request your directions in so deplorable a case; hoping that, as you have had compassion on our overgrown coxcombs in concerns of less consequence, you will exert your charity towards innocents, and vouchsafe to be guardian to the children and youth of Great Britain in this important affair of education, wherein mistakes and wrong measures have so often occasioned their aversion to books, that had otherwise proved the chief ornament and pleasure of their life. I am with sincerest respect,

    "Sir,
    "Your, &c."
    St. Cl[eme]nts, Oct. 5.

"Mr. Bickerstaff,

"I observe, as the season begins to grow cold, so does people's devotion; insomuch that, instead of filling the churches, that united zeal might keep one warm there, one is left to freeze in almost bare walls, by those who in hot weather are troublesome the contrary way. This, sir, needs a regulation that none but you can give to it, by causing those who absent themselves on account of weather only this winter time, to pay the apothecary's bills occasioned by coughs, catarrhs, and other distempers contracted by sitting in empty seats. Therefore to you I apply myself for redress, having gotten such a cold on Sunday was sevennight, that has brought me almost to your worship's age from sixty within less than a fortnight. I am,

    "Your Worship's in all obedience,
    "W. E."

No. 235. [Steele.[133 - Nichols thinks that Addison was probably the author of this paper, because of the allusion to Addison's family at the close. But Steele had visited Dr. Lancelot Addison's home when he was a boy at the Charterhouse. The paper is not printed in Addison's works.]

From Saturday, Oct. 7, to Tuesday, Oct. 10, 1710

Scit Genius, natale comes qui temperat astrum.

    Hor., 2 Ep. ii. 187.

From my own Apartment, Oct. 9

Among those inclinations which are common to all men, there is none more unaccountable than that unequal love by which parents distinguish their children from each other. Sometimes vanity and self-love appear to have a share towards this effect; and in other instances I have been apt to attribute it to mere instinct: but however that is, we frequently see the child that has been beholden to neither of these impulses in their parents, in spite of being neglected, snubbed, and thwarted at home, acquire a behaviour which makes it as agreeable to all the rest of the world, as that of every one else of their family is to each other. I fell into this way of thinking from an intimacy which I have with a very good house in our neighbourhood, where there are three daughters of a very different character and genius. The eldest has a great deal of wit and cunning; the second has good sense, but no artifice; the third has much vivacity, but little understanding. The first is a fine, but scornful woman; the second is not charming, but very winning; the third no way commendable, but very desirable. The father of these young creatures was ever a great pretender to wit, the mother a woman of as much coquetry. This turn in the parents has biassed their affections towards their children. The old man supposes the eldest of his own genius, and the mother looks upon the youngest as herself renewed. By this means, all the lovers that approach the house are discarded by the father for not observing Mrs. Mary's wit and beauty, and by the mother for being blind to the mien and air of Mrs. Biddy. Come never so many pretenders, they are not suspected to have the least thoughts of Mrs. Betty, the middle daughter. Betty therefore is mortified into a woman of a great deal of merit, and knows she must depend on that only for her advancement. The middlemost is thus the favourite of all her acquaintance as well as mine, while the other two carry a certain insolence about them in all conversations, and expect the partiality which they meet with at home to attend them wherever they appear. So little do parents understand that they are of all people the least judges of their children's merit, that what they reckon such, is seldom anything else but a repetition of their own faults and infirmities.

There is, methinks, some excuse for being particular when one of the offspring has any defect in nature. In this case, the child, if we may so speak, is so much the longer the child of its parents, and calls for the continuance of their care and indulgence from the slowness of its capacity, or the weakness of its body. But there is no enduring to see men enamoured only at the sight of their own impertinences repeated, and to observe, as we may sometimes, that they have a secret dislike of their children for a degeneracy from their very crimes. Commend me to Lady Goodly; she is equal to all her own children, but prefers them to those of all the world beside. My lady is a perfect hen in the care of her brood; she fights and squabbles with all that appear where they come, but is wholly unbiassed in dispensing her favours among them. It is no small pains she is at to defame all the young women in her neighbourhood by visits, whispers, intimations, and hearsays; all which she ends with thanking Heaven, that no one living is so blessed with such obedient and well-inclined children as herself. Perhaps, says she, Betty cannot dance like Mrs. Frontinett, and it is no great matter whether she does or not; but she comes into a room with a good grace; though she says it that should not, she looks like a gentlewoman. Then if Mrs. Rebecca is not so talkative as the mighty wit Mrs. Clapper, yet she is discreet, she knows better what she says when she does speak. If her wit be slow, her tongue never runs before it. This kind parent lifts up her eyes and hands in congratulation of her own good fortune, and is maliciously thankful that none of her girls are like any of her neighbours: but this preference of her own to all others, is grounded upon an impulse of nature; while those who like one before another of their own, are so unpardonably unjust, that it could hardly be equalled in the children, though they preferred all the rest of the world to such parents. It is no unpleasant entertainment to see a ball at a dancing-school, and observe the joy of relations when the young ones, for whom they are concerned, are in motion. You need not be told whom the dancers belong to: at their first appearance the passion of their parents are in their faces, and there is always a nod of approbation stolen at a good step, or a graceful turn.

I remember among all my acquaintance but one man whom I have thought to live with his children with equanimity and a good grace. He had three sons and one daughter, whom he bred with all the care imaginable in a liberal and ingenuous way.[134 - Addison's father, Dr. Lancelot Addison, Dean of Lichfield, had three sons: (1) Joseph; (2) Gulston, who died Governor of Fort-George in the East Indies; (3) Lancelot, who was entered in Queen's College, and afterwards became Master of Arts, and Fellow of Magdalen College in Oxford; and a daughter, Dorothy, first married to Dr. Sartre, formerly minister of Montpellier, and afterwards Prebendary of Westminster; and, secondly, to Daniel Combes, Esq. Swift wrote on October 25, 1710: "I dined to-day with Addison and Steele, and a sister of Mr. Addison, who is married to one Mons. Sartre, a Frenchman, prebendary of Westminster, who has a delicious house and garden; yet I thought it was a sort of monastic life in those cloisters, and I liked Laracor better. Addison's sister is a sort of a wit, very like him. I am not fond of her."Addison had two other sisters, who died young. Of his brother Gulston we read thus in the "Wentworth Papers" (pp. 75-76): "Since I wrote this, I am told a great piece of news, that Mr. Addison is really a very great man with the juncto, and that he has got his elder brother, who has been a factor abroad in those parts, to be Governor of Fort St. George… It seems Mr. Addison's friends can do what they please with the chief of the East India Company, who, I think, have the liberty of naming their Governor, and by management with them this place is got, which they say some years is worth £20,000" (Peter Wentworth to Lord Raby, January 28, 1709).] I have often heard him say, he had the weakness to love one much better than the other, but that he took as much pains to correct that as any other criminal passion that could arise in his mind. His method was, to make it the only pretension in his children to his favour to be kind to each other; and he would tell them, that he who was the best brother, he would reckon the best son. This turned their thoughts into an emulation for the superiority in kind and tender affection towards each other. The boys behaved themselves very early with a manly friendship; and their sister, instead of the gross familiarities and impertinent freedoms in behaviour, usual in other houses, was always treated by them with as much complaisance as any other young lady of their acquaintance. It was an unspeakable pleasure to visit or sit at meal in that family. I have often seen the old man's heart flow at his eyes with joy upon occasions which would appear indifferent to such as were strangers to the turn of his mind; but a very slight accident, wherein he saw his children's good-will to one another, created in him the God-like pleasure of loving them, because they loved each other.[135 - In the Dedication to Congreve of Addison's "Drummer" (1722), Steele said, "Mr. Dean Addison, father of this memorable man, left behind him four children, each of whom, for excellent talents and singular perfections, was as much above the ordinary world as their brother Joseph was above them. Were things of this nature to be exposed to public view, I could show, under the Dean's own hand, in the warmest terms, his blessing on the friendship between his son and me; nor had he a child who did not prefer me in the first place of kindness and esteem, as their father loved me like one of them."] This great command of himself, in hiding his first impulse to partiality, at last improved to a steady justice towards them; and that which at first was but an expedient to correct his weakness, was afterwards the measure of his virtue.

The truth of it is, those parents who are interested in the care of one child more than that of another, no longer deserve the name of parents, but are in effect as childish as their children, in having such unreasonable and ungovernable inclinations. A father of this sort has degraded himself into one of his own offspring; for none but a child would take part in the passions of children.

No. 236. [Steele.[136 - The authorship of the letter which forms the principal part of this number is unknown. Goldsmith was told that a Dean of Killaloe was the author of a paper in the Tatler or Spectator, but there is nothing to connect the Dean (Jerome Ryves) with this particular number.]

From Tuesday, Oct. 10, to Thursday, Oct. 12, 1710

Nescio qua natale solum dulcedine mentem
Tangit, et immemorem non sinit esse sui.

    Ovid, Ep. ex Pont. 1. iii.

From my own Apartment, Oct. 11

I find in the registers of my family, that the branch of the Bickerstaffs from which I am descended, came originally out of Ireland.[137 - This may apply either to Swift, from whom Steele borrowed the name of Bickerstaff, or to Steele himself.] This has given me a kind of natural affection for that country. It is therefore with pleasure that I see not only some of the greatest warriors, but also of the greatest wits, to be natives of that kingdom. The gentleman who writes the following letter is one of these last. The matter of fact contained in it is literally true, though the diverting manner in which it is told may give it the colour of a fable.

To Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq., at his House in Great Britain

    Dublin.

"Sir,

"Finding by several passages of your Tatlers, that you are a person curious in natural knowledge, I thought it would not be unacceptable to you to give you the following history of the migration of frogs into this country. There is an ancient tradition among the wild philosophers of the kingdom, that this whole island was once as much infested by frogs, as that wherein Whittington made his fortune was by mice; insomuch that it is said, Macdonald the First could no more sleep by reason of these Dutch nightingales (as they are called at Paris), than Pharaoh could when they croaked in his bed-chamber. It was in the reign of this great monarch that St. Patrick arrived in Ireland, being as famous for destroying vermin as any rat-catcher of our times. If we may believe the tradition, he killed more in one day than a flock of storks could have done in a twelvemonth. From that time for about five hundred years, there was not a frog to be heard in Ireland, notwithstanding the bogs still remained, which in former ages had been so plentifully stocked with those inhabitants.

"When the arts began to flourish in the reign of King Charles the Second, and that great monarch had placed himself at the head of the Royal Society, to lead them forward into the discoveries of nature, it is said, that several proposals were laid before his Majesty for the importing of frogs into Ireland. In order to it, a virtuoso of known abilities was unanimously elected by the Society, and entrusted with the whole management of that affair. For this end he took along with him a sound, able-bodied frog, of a strong, hale constitution, that had given proof of his vigour by several leaps which he made before that learned body. They took ship, and sailed together till they came within sight of the Hill of Howth, before the frog discovered any symptoms of being indisposed by his voyage: but as the wind chopped about, and began to blow from the Irish coast, he grew sea-sick, or rather land-sick; for his learned companion ascribed it to the particles of the soil with which the wind was impregnated. He was confirmed in his conjecture, when, upon the wind's turning about, his fellow-traveller sensibly recovered, and continued in good health till his arrival upon the shore, where he suddenly relapsed, and expired upon a Ring's End car[138 - "Our one horse vehicles have always been peculiar to ourselves, and were in use long before anything of a similar kind was introduced into England. The earliest and rudest of these were the Ring's End cars, so called from their plying principally to that place and Irishtown, then the resort of the beau monde for the benefit of sea-bathing. This car consisted of a seat suspended in a strap of leather between shafts, and without springs. The noise made by the creaking of the strap, which supported the whole weight of the company, particularly distinguished this mode of conveyance" ("Sketches of Ireland Sixty Years Ago," p. 77, quoted in Notes and Queries, 7th Series, iv. 178-179). Ring's End is a fishing village near Dublin.] on his way to Dublin. The same experiment was repeated several times in that reign, but to no purpose. A frog was never known to take three leaps upon Irish turf, before he stretched himself out and died.

"Whether it were that the philosophers on this side the water despaired of stocking the island with this useful animal, or whether in the following reign it was not thought proper to undo the miracle of a Popish saint, I do not hear of any further progress made in this affair till about two years after the battle of the Boyne.

"It was then that an ingenious physician,[139 - Sir Hans Sloane. The hazardous voyage to Liverpool is, perhaps, an allusion to the doctor's voyage to Jamaica, ridiculed by Dr. William King, in "A Voyage to the Island of Cajamai."] to the honour as well as improvement of his native country, performed what the English had been so long attempting in vain. This learned man, with the hazard of his life, made a voyage to Liverpool, where he filled several barrels with the choicest spawn of frogs that could be found in those parts. This cargo he brought over very carefully, and afterwards disposed of it in several warm beds that he thought most capable of bringing it to life. The doctor was a very ingenious physician, and a very good Protestant; for which reason, to show his zeal against Popery, he placed some of the most promising spawn in the very fountain that is dedicated to the Saint, and known by the name of St. Patrick's Well, where these animals had the impudence to make their first appearance. They have since that time very much increased and multiplied in all the neighbourhood of this city. We have here some curious inquirers into natural history who observe their motions, with a design to compute in how many years they will be able to hop from Dublin to Wexford; though, as I am informed, not one of them has yet passed the mountains of Wicklow.

"I am further informed, that several graziers of the county of Cork have entered into a project of planting a colony in those parts, at the instance of the French Protestants: and I know not but the same design may be on foot in other parts of the kingdom, if the wisdom of the British nation do not think fit to prohibit the further importation of English frogs. I am,

    "Sir,
    "Your most humble Servant,
    "T. B."