Pens Dipped in Gall
Theodore Hook declared that Shelley’s “Prometheus Unbound” was the most appropriate of titles, rattling off his criticism in the lines:
“For surely an age would be spent in the finding
A reader so weak as to pay for the binding.”
Erskine is the author of an ill-natured couplet concerning Sir Walter Scott’s “On Waterloo’s Ensanguined Field:”
“None by sabre or by shot
Fell half so flat as Walter Scott.”
Samuel Rogers, the London poet and banker, was the victim of a woman’s unsparing wit, when Lady Blessington wrote of his exquisitely illustrated “Italy” that “the work would surely have been dished had it not been for the plates.” Tom Moore once experienced a savage dislike for a cross-eyed woman, who was said to be a poetess, and sneeringly observed that “instead of her gazing at one muse at a time, she had an eye for the whole nine at once.” Garrick was a relentless critic of Sir John Hill, who was a doctor and dramatist:
“Thou essence of dock and valerian and sage
At once the disgrace and the pest of the age,
The worst that we wish thee for all thy sad crimes
Is to take thine own physic and read thine own rhymes.”
The great lake poets, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey, were satirized by a cynical author, who wrote:
“They came from the lakes, an appropriate quarter
For poems diluted with plenty of water.”
It was one of Pope’s observations: “We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.” Swift, who was the keenest of English satirists, remarked in the same vein: “A man of business should always have his eyes open, but must often seem to have them shut.” Satire has its place, and the foibles of individuals and races may be dealt with most effectively at times with the pen dipped in gall, but in general its use is to be deplored, not alone in criticism, but in all the relationships of life.