Cole had passed a long life in the pertinacious labour of forming an “Athenæ Cantabrigienses,” and other literary collections—designed as a companion to the work of Anthony Wood. These mighty labours exist in more than fifty folio volumes in his own writing. He began these collections about the year 1745; in a fly-leaf of 1777 I found the following melancholy state of his feelings and a literary confession, as forcibly expressed as it is painful to read, when we consider that they are the wailings of a most zealous votary:
“In good truth, whoever undertakes this drudgery of an ‘Athenæ Cantabrigienses’ must be contented with no prospect of credit and reputation to himself, and with the mortifying reflection that after all his pains and study, through life, he must be looked upon in a humble light, and only as a journeyman to Anthony Wood, whose excellent book of the same sort will ever preclude any other, who shall follow him in the same track, from all hopes of fame; and will only represent him as an imitator of so original a pattern. For, at this time of day, all great characters, both Cantabrigians and Oxonians, are already published to the world, either in his book, or various others; so that the collection, unless the same characters are reprinted here, must be made up of second-rate persons, and the refuse of authorship.—However, as I have begun, and made so large a progress in this undertaking, it is death to think of leaving it off, though, from the 93 former considerations, so little credit is to be expected from it.”
Such were the fruits, and such the agonies, of nearly half a century of assiduous and zealous literary labour! Cole urges a strong claim to be noticed among our literary calamities. Another of his miseries was his uncertainty in what manner he should dispose of his collections: and he has put down this naïve memorandum—“I have long wavered how to dispose of all my MS. volumes; to give them to King’s College, would be to throw them into a horsepond; and I had as lieve do one as the other; they are generally so conceited of their Latin and Greek, that all other studies are barbarism.”[69]
The dread of incompleteness has attended the life-labours (if the expression may be allowed) of several other authors who have never published their works. Such was the learned Bishop Lloyd, and the Rev. Thomas Baker, who was first engaged in the same pursuit as Cole, and carried it on to the extent of about forty volumes in folio. Lloyd is described by Burnet as having “many volumes of materials upon all subjects, so that he could, with very little labour, write on any of them, with more life in his imagination, and a truer judgment, than may seem consistent with such a laborious course of study; but he did not lay out his learning with the same diligence as he laid it in.” It is mortifying to learn, in the words of Johnson, that “he was always hesitating and inquiring, raising objections, and removing them, and waiting for clearer light and fuller discovery.” Many of the labours of this learned bishop were at length consumed in the kitchen of his descendant. “Baker (says Johnson), after many years passed in biography, left his manuscripts to be buried in a library, because that was imperfect which could never be perfected.” And to complete the absurdity, or to heighten the calamity which the want of these useful labours makes every literary man feel, half of the collections of Baker sleep in their dust in a turret of the University; while the other, deposited in our national library at the British Museum, and frequently used, are rendered imperfect by this unnatural divorce.
I will illustrate the character of a laborious author by that of Anthony Wood.
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Wood’s “Athenæ Oxonienses” is a history of near a thousand of our native authors; he paints their characters, and enters into the spirit of their writings. But authors of this complexion, and works of this nature, are liable to be slighted; for the fastidious are petulant, the volatile inexperienced, and those who cultivate a single province in literature are disposed, too often, to lay all others under a state of interdiction.
Warburton, in a work thrown out in the heat of unchastised youth, and afterwards withdrawn from public inquiry, has said of the “Athenæ Oxonienses”—
“Of all those writings given us by the learned Oxford antiquary, there is not one that is not a disgrace to letters; most of them are so to common sense, and some even to human nature. Yet how set out! how tricked! how adorned! how extolled!”[70]
The whole tenor of Wood’s life testifies, as he himself tells us, that “books and MSS. formed his Elysium, and he wished to be dead to the world.” This sovereign passion marked him early in life, and the image of death could not disturb it. When young, “he walked mostly alone, was given much to thinking and melancholy.” The deliciæ of his life were the more liberal studies of painting and music, intermixed with those of antiquity; nor could his family; who checked such unproductive studies, ever check his love of them. With what a firm and noble spirit he says—
“When he came to full years, he perceived it was his natural genie, and he could not avoid them—they crowded on him—he could never give a reason why he should delight in those studies, more than in others, so prevalent was nature, mixed with a generosity of mind, and a hatred to all that was servile, sneaking, or advantageous for lucre-sake.”
These are not the roundings of a period, but the pure expressions of a man who had all the simplicity of childhood in his feelings. Could such vehement emotions have been excited in the unanimated breast of a clod of literature? Thus early Anthony Wood betrayed the characteristics of genius; nor did the literary passion desert him in his last moments. With his dying hands he still grasped his beloved papers, and his last mortal thoughts dwelt on his Athenæ Oxonienses.[71]
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It is no common occurrence to view an author speechless in the hour of death, yet fervently occupied by his posthumous fame. Two friends went into his study to sort that vast multitude of papers, notes, letters—his more private ones he had ordered not to be opened for seven years; about two bushels full were ordered for the fire, which they had lighted for the occasion. “As he was expiring, he expressed both his knowledge and approbation of what was done by throwing out his hands.”
Turn over his Herculean labour; do not admire less his fearlessness of danger, than his indefatigable pursuit of truth. He wrote of his contemporaries as if he felt a right to judge of them, and as if he were living in the succeeding age; courtier, fanatic, or papist, were much alike to honest Anthony; for he professes himself “such an universal lover of all mankind, that he wished there might be no cheat put upon readers and writers in the business of commendations. And (says he) since every one will have a double balance, one for his own party, and another for his adversary, all he could do is to amass together what every side thinks will make best weight for themselves. Let posterity hold the scales.”
Anthony might have added, “I have held them.” This uninterrupted activity of his spirits was the action of a sage, not the bustle of one intent merely on heaping up a book.
“He never wrote in post, with his body and thoughts in a hurry, but in a fixed abode, and with a deliberate pen. And he never concealed an ungrateful truth, nor flourished over a weak place, but in sincerity of meaning and expression.”
Anthony Wood cloistered an athletic mind, a hermit critic abstracted from the world, existing more with posterity than amid his contemporaries. His prejudices were the keener from the very energies of the mind that produced them; but, as he practises no deception on his reader, we know the causes of his anger or his love. And, as an original thinker creates a style for himself, from the circumstance of not attending to style at all, but to feeling, so Anthony Wood’s has all the peculiarity of the writer. Critics of short views have attempted to screen it from ridicule, attributing his uncouth style to the age he lived in. But not one in his own time nor since, has composed in the same style. The austerity 96 and the quickness of his feelings vigorously stamped all their roughness and vivacity on every sentence. He describes his own style as “an honest, plain English dress, without flourishes or affectation of style, as best becomes a history of truth and matters of fact. It is the first (work) of its nature that has ever