' And, accordingly, as the popular
anecdote tells us, a Tory leader, Lord Bolingbroke, sent for Booth
who performed Cato, and presented him (_populo spectante_) with fifty
guineas 'for defending so well the cause of the people against a perpetual
dictator.' In which words, observe, Lord Bolingbroke at once asserted the
cause of his own party, and launched a sarcasm against a great individual
opponent, viz., Marlborough. Now, Mr. Schlosser, I have mended your
harness: all right ahead; so drive on once more.
But, oh Castor and Pollux, whither--in what direction is it, that the man
is driving us? Positively, Schlosser, you must stop and let _me_ get
out. I'll go no further with such a drunken coachman. Many another absurd
thing I was going to have noticed, such as his utter perversion of what
Mandeville said about Addison (viz., by suppressing one word, and
misapprehending all the rest). Such, again, as his point-blank
misstatement of Addison's infirmity in his official character, which was
_not_ that 'he could not prepare despatches in a good style,' but
diametrically the opposite case--that he insisted too much on style, to
the serious retardation of public business. But all these things are as
nothing to what Schlosser says elsewhere. He actually describes Addison,
on the whole, as a 'dull prosaist,' and the patron of pedantry! Addison,
the man of all that ever lived most hostile even to what was good in
pedantry, to its tendencies towards the profound in erudition and the non-
popular; Addison, the champion of all that is easy, natural, superficial,
a pedant and a master of pedantry! Get down, Schlosser, this moment; or
let _me_ get out.
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