Love in the Suds
A Town Eclogue, Being the Lamentation of Roscius for the Loss of His NYKY
9781465536112
724 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
Meo deo irato. Ter. Phor. To DAVID GARRICK, Esq. SIR, The author of the following Eclogue, having requested my assistance to introduce it to the world; it was with more indignation than surprize I was informed of your having used your extensive influence over the press to prevent its being advertised in the News-papers. How are you, Sir, concerned in the Lamentation of Roscius for his Nyky? Does your modesty think no man entitled to the appellation of Roscius but yourself? Does Nyky resemble any nick-named favourite of yours? Or does it follow, that if you have cherished an un-*worthy favourite, you must bear too near a resemblance to him? Qui capit ille facit; beware of self-accusation, where others bring no charge! Or, granting you right in these particulars, by what right or privilege do you, Sir, set up for a licenser of the press? That you have long successfully usurped that privilege, to swell both your fame and fortune, is well known. Not the puffs of the quacks of Bayswater and Chelsea are so numerous and notorious: but by what authority do you take upon you to shut up the general channel, in which writers usher their performances to the public? If they attack either your talents or your character, in utrumque paratus, you are armed to defend yourself. You have, besides your ingenuous countenance and conscious innocence; Nil conscire sibi, nulla pallescere culpa; Besides this brazen bulwark, I say, you have a ready pen and a long purse. The press is open to the one, and the bar is ever ready to open with the other. For a poor author, not a printer will publish a paragraph, not a pleader will utter a quibble. You have then every advantage in the contest: It is needless, therefore, to endeavour to intimidate your antagonists by countenancing your retainers to threaten their lives! These intimidations, let me tell you Sir, have an ugly, suspicious look. They are besides needless; the genus irritabile vatum want no such personal provocations; Heaven knows, the life of a play-wright, like that of a spider, is in a state of the most slender dependency. It is well for my rhiming friend that his hangs not on so slight a thread. He thinks, nevertheless, that he has reason to complain, as well as the publick, of your having long preferred the flimzy, translated, patch'd-up and mis-altered pieces of your favourite compilers, to the arduous attempts at originality of writers, who have no personal interest with the manager. In particular, he thinks the two pieces, you are projecting to get up next winter, for the emolument of your favorite in disgrace, or to reimburse yourself the money, you may have advanced him, might, for the present at least, be laid aside. But you will ask me, perhaps, in turn, Sir, what right I have to interfere with the business of other people, or with yours? I will answer you. It is because I think your business, as patentee of a theatre-royal, is not so entirely yours, but that the publick also have some concern in it. You, Sir, indeed have long behaved as if you thought the town itself a purchased appurtenance to the theatre; but, tho' the scenes and machines are yours; nay, tho' you have even found means to make comedians and poets your property; it should be with more caution than you practise, that you extend your various arts to make so scandalous a property of the publick. Again I answer, it is because I have some regard for my friend, and as much for myself, whom you have treated as ill perhaps as you have done any other writer; while under your auspices, some of the persons stigmatised by the satirist, have frequently combined to do me the most essential injury. But nemo me impune lacessit. Not that I mean now to enter into particulars which may be thought to relate too much to myself and too little to the publick. When I shall have leisure to draw a faithful portraiture of Mr. Garrick, not only from his behaviour to me in particular, but from his conduct towards poets, players and the town in general, I doubt not to convince the most partial of his admirers that he hath accumulated a fortune, as manager, by the meanest and most meretricious devices, and that the theatrical props, which have long supported his exalted reputation, as an actor, have been raised on the ruins of the English stage
