This claims a tear! Never were the agonies of literary disappointment more pathetically told.
But as it is impossible to have known poor deluded Stockdale, and not to have laughed at him more than to have wept for him--so the catastrophe of this author's literary life is as finely in character as all the acts. That catastrophe, of course, is his last poem.
After many years his poetical demon having been chained from the world, suddenly broke forth on the reports of a French invasion. The narrative shall proceed in his own inimitable manner.
"My poetical spirit excited me to write my poem of 'The Invincible Island.' I never found myself in a happier disposition to compose, nor ever wrote with more pleasure. I presumed warmly to hope that unless _inveterate prejudice and malice_ were as invincible as our island itself, it would have _the diffusive circulation_ which I earnestly desired.
"Flushed with this idea--borne impetuously along _by ambition and by hope, though they had often deluded me_, I set off in the mail-coach from Durham for London, on the 9th of December, 1797, at midnight, and in a severe storm. On my arrival in town my poem was advertised, printed, and published with great expedition. It was printed for Clarke in New Bond-street. For several days the sale was very promising; and my bookseller as well as myself entertained sanguine hopes; _but the demand for the poem relaxed gradually_! From this last of many literary misfortunes, I inferred that _prejudice_ and _malignity_, in my fate as an _author_, seemed, indeed, to be invincible."
The catastrophe of the poet is much better told than anything in the poem, which had not merit enough to support that interest which the temporary subject had excited.
Let the fate of Stockdale instruct some, and he will not have written in vain the "Memoirs of his Life and Writings." I have only turned the literary feature to our eye; it was combined with others, equally striking, from the same mould in which that was cast. Stockdale imagined he possessed an intuitive knowledge of human nature. He says, "everything that constituted my nature, my acquirements, my habits, and my fortune, conspired to let in upon me a complete knowledge of human nature." A most striking proof of this knowledge is his parallel, after the manner of Plutarch, between Charles XII. and himself! He frankly confesses there were some points in which he and the Swedish monarch did not exactly resemble each other. He thinks, for instance, that the King of Sweden had a somewhat more fervid and original genius than himself, and was likewise a little more robust in his person--but, subjoins Stockdale,