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109.: ATTACK ON LITERATURE EXAMINER, 12 JUNE, 1831, PP. 369-71 - John Stuart Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XXII - Newspaper Writings December 1822 - July 1831 Part I [1822]

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The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XXII - Newspaper Writings December 1822 - July 1831 Part I, ed. Ann P. Robson and John M. Robson, Introduction by Ann P. Robson and John M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986).

Part of: Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, in 33 vols.

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109.

ATTACK ON LITERATURE

EXAMINER, 12 JUNE, 1831, PP. 369-71

This lengthy defence of state pensions for literary worthies was prompted by a leading article, “Literature and Patronage,” in the Brighton Guardian, 8 June, 1831, p. 2, from which the quotations, unless otherwise noted, are taken. The Brighton Guardian responded, and Mill replied (see No. 111). The article is the first in the “Political Examiner,” and is headed as title. It is described in Mill’s bibliography as “A leading article headed ‘Attack on Literature’ in answer to the Brighton Guardian; in the Examiner of 12th June 1831” (MacMinn, p. 16); it is listed as title and enclosed in square brackets in the Somerville College set.

in the year 1824, a Society was instituted, under the name of the Royal Society of Literature. With what definite views it was established, or what purposes of utility the association, as such, has ever promoted, we know not; and the members themselves, possibly, know as little. There were annexed, however, to the Institution, ten pensions, of a hundred guineas each, from the Privy Purse; to be held by as many persons, distinguished in the world of letters. And the individuals who were first selected to hold these moderate stipends were the following (we quote from the Englishman’s Magazine):1

Samuel Taylor Coleridge; the Rev. Edward Davies; Dr. Jamieson, the indefatigable compiler of the Scottish Dictionary; the Rev. T.R. Malthus; Matthias, the author of the Pursuits of Literature; James Millingen, Esq.; Sir William Ouseley; William Roscoe; the Rev. Henry J. Todd; and Sharon Turner.*

Perhaps no act of the late King, which is known to the public, was altogether so creditable to him as the grant of these pensions. While the debates on the Civil List are fresh in the recollection of our readers,2 we need scarcely remind them, that, of what is called the Privy Purse, a large part is granted by Parliament avowedly for purposes of liberality and munificence. These pensions were among the best examples which England had long seen, of well-directed munificence. They were too inconsiderable to excite the cupidity of tax-eating idlers. Several of the persons on whom they were bestowed, were in circumstances which rendered the accession to their incomes of real importance. The individuals were not selected on any narrow or exclusive principle; but had distinguished themselves in different modes, and in different walks of literature and philosophy. All, however, were men of reputation in their several departments; all, as writers, had proposed to themselves higher objects than merely to amuse; and none of them could possibly have acquired affluence, or even respectable subsistence, by such works as those to which they had dedicated themselves. A. or B. may think some of the number undeserving of what was bestowed upon them, and may imagine that he himself could have pointed out individuals better entitled to be so provided for. This was inevitable. We ourselves, as well as other people, could have suggested emendations in the list; but the giver was not bound to please us, or to please A. or B., but to satisfy the body of educated and cultivated Englishmen: and taking, as is proper, for the standard, the prevalent opinions and feelings, at the time when the grant was made, of the bulk of those whose approbation had the best title to be considered, it would be difficult to point out ten persons, the selection of whom, as the objects of the Royal liberality, would have been in every respect so unobjectionable.

These pensions, however, his present Majesty has, it appears, seen fit to discontinue. It, undoubtedly, rests with the King himself to decide in what manner that portion of his revenues which is set apart for acts of generosity, can be most worthily employed; and it is proper that, in the choice of objects, he should follow his own opinion, and not ours. On this subject it would be disrespectful to express more than regret, and our firm conviction that the one thousand guineas per annum which the Privy Purse will save by the stoppage of this annual bounty, will be expended, we know not how indeed, but most assuredly in a less useful manner, and for the benefit of less meritorious persons. We might be permitted to add, (what has been insisted upon with great force by some of our contemporaries) that when the odious Pension List, the wages of political, if not even of personal prostitution—the purchase-money of despotic power—the fragments of a nation’s spoil which the feasters have flung from their richly-furnished table to allay the hunger of some of the baser and more subordinate of their tools;—when this monument of iniquity has just been screened from revision, on the ground that, although there had been no promise, persons naturally expect to keep what they have once got;3 —the moment is ill chosen for resuming the scanty pittance which men, whose lives had been devoted to usefulness, had every rational ground to calculate upon retaining for their few remaining years. But it is in this spirit that an English government usually economizes. Whatever is enormous and unearned, it leaves undisturbed to the possessors. Its retrenchments bear uniformly and exclusively upon the ill-paid and the deserving.

But, as Rousseau well observes, one bad maxim is worse than a thousand bad actions,—because it leads to ten thousand.4 A report that Lord Grey, at the instigation of Lord Brougham, had tendered to Mr. Coleridge a grant of two hundred pounds from the Treasury (which, however, Mr. Coleridge declined),5 has furnished the Brighton Guardian with the occasion of an article, equal in length to half a page of The Times; the Vandalism of which, inconceivable, if any Vandalism could be inconceivable, provokes us to take up the pen. The matter with which the article is filled, is indeed, or should be, very little formidable, did the writer merely state the opinion of one rather perverse individual. But, unfortunately, this perverse person is but one man who is bold enough to utter what the whole tribe of the dunces are intimately persuaded of in their hearts, but do not dare to avow. They will soon, however, pluck up courage to proclaim and act upon it, if they find themselves countenanced by one or two persons (as this writer has proved himself to be) not untinctured with letters. It is, therefore, of some importance to analyse a performance, more abounding in the ideas and feelings characteristic of uncultivated minds, than is often the case with the productions of an understanding even superficially cultivated.

The object of the writer is to establish, that men of letters ought, in no case, to be provided for at the national expense. And though this is, in our opinion, a mischievous error, it is shared by too many superior men in the present day, to be matter of serious reproach to any one. It is a maxim in perfect harmony with the laissez faire spirit of the prevailing philosophy—with the idea by which, either consciously or unconsciously, nine-tenths of the men who can read and write, are at present possessed—viz. that every person, however uneducated or ill-educated, is the best judge of what is most for his own advantage, better even than the man whom he would delegate to make laws for him. The scope of the received doctrines is, to make mankind retrograde, for a certain space, towards the state of nature; by limiting the ends and functions of the social union, as strictly as possible, to those of a mere police. The idea that political society is a combination among mankind for the purpose of helping one another in every way in which help can be advantageous, is yet a stranger to the immense majority of understandings.

But if the conclusion at which this writer arrives, is common to him with many wiser men than himself, this is not precisely the case with the premises by which he supports it; for he goes the full length of averring that literary men are of no use; that the improvement of mankind is not, in the slightest degree, owing to them or their writings; and that we should be as far, or farther, advanced in wisdom and virtue than we now are, if the whole tribe had long since become extinct.

He begins by accounting for the high estimation in which literary men are held. It arises, he says, from the fact, that “literary men are the penholders of society, and they praise themselves and praise their pursuits.” In part also it is “a sort of traditionary sentiment.” After the breaking up of the Roman empire, all the knowledge of past times existed in a dead language; and was accessible only to literary men, who, consequently, met with “respect, and even veneration.” “There was, at the period of what is called the revival of learning in Europe, a considerable mine of valuable knowledge opened by literary men.” This, however, is no longer the case; because, peradventure, we now know everything; or, at least, one of us knows no more than another. Literature “is praised and honoured for what it once did,—not for what it now does.” He then holds forth as follows:

Do literary men, or does literature now improve and instruct mankind? To a certain extent, we admit that it does both. But amusement is afforded to thousands of people by Punch in the street, by a clown at the theatre, and by the shows at Vauxhall; and we have never heard any person venture to assert, that a fellow playing on Pan-pipes, making faces, performing extraordinary leaps, or rattling his chin till it sounded like a pair of symbols [cymbals],6 was a proper object for the national bounty, and ought to be pensioned in his old age, if he dissipated the halfpence or shillings he collected from the crowds. A man who writes a novel, or a play, or a poem, in respect of amusement, and in respect of being entitled to public rewards, is on the same footing as a mountebank or a puppet-showman. It is very possible that this amusement may be combined with some sentiments that may make the heart better; and it is equally possible, which we believe is in fact more generally the case, that the amusement is only made the vehicle of perverted sentiments, of conveying impurity into the mind, and of promoting the cause of vice, rather than of virtue. The use of literature, then, comes to consist in the truth and accurate knowledge which it contains. Unfortunately, however, those who have taught mankind truth have been prosecuted, not pensioned. De Foe, Horne Tooke, Thomas Paine,7 and a number of other writers, who have been the means of making useful, moral, and scientific truths known to the world, have been punished by the government, not rewarded. Governments always have been, and ever will be,—precisely because they are the offspring of conquest or of fraud, not of reason,—ready to prohibit literary men from searching after truth; so that if we should admit that literature, in the abstract, might be harmless, existing literature must have been mischievous. That system of corruption, which we are all now eager to pull down, has in fact long been supported by the majority of literary men. By all who have been pensioned,—by all who have sought any other patronage than that of the public, this miserable system has been favourably regarded, and they have endeavoured, and do endeavour, to uphold it.

Now, if this man’s insight into human nature, and into the future destination of mankind, does not enable him to form the conception of any other government than one which is “the offspring of conquest or of fraud, not of reason”—if his mind is fully made up that the human race shall for ever, in spite of themselves, have their necks under the feet of men disposed to restrain and persecute those who search after truth—it is natural that he should look with small favour on any literary labours which such governments are likely to esteem deserving of reward. For our part, we do not hold it to be a law of nature that governments shall endeavour to stop the progress of the human mind. We do not believe that, even in the present vicious constitution of political society, the majority of civilized governments have any such purpose, or are actuated by any such spirit. And we look forward to a time, and no very distant one, in which all the more vulgar and subordinate purposes of government will merge in one grand purpose of advancing the progress of civilization. Proceeding upon premises so different from those of our contemporary, no wonder that we should quarrel with his conclusion.

We must, however, [says he,] go a step further in speaking of literature, and say that it has little or no influence over the progress of society. It is the consequence, not the cause, of civilization. Literary men and philosophers may flatter themselves that they possess a great power over the hearts and minds of their fellow-men, and over the progress of society; but experience teaches a different lesson. Man is taught by events, not by books, which too often obscure the most plain facts.

For “it is now upwards of three hundred years since Sir Thomas More made those beautiful observations on punishing theft by death;”8 and theft still continues to be thus punished. “It is now also a hundred and thirty-nine years since Sir Dudley North published his Discourses on Trade;”9 and he wrote in vain, till there arose “a want of markets for our produce:” and “it is upwards of two hundred years since Lord Bacon taught that man was but the minister and interpreter of nature;”10 notwithstanding which, literary men are constantly recommending alterations in the structure of society; which, according to this writer, is a gross absurdity, since “human society, in its complicated relations, is as much a part of creation as minerals or flowers;” a proposition which is about as good an argument against improvements in the social science, as it would be against improvements in mining or horticulture.

So, because a man of genius may have an idea too far in advance of his age to gain many converts in it, men of genius have no more influence upon the destinies of society than dunces have. Because Sir Thomas More did not convince mankind of the barbarism of capital punishment, the labours of Beccaria, of Voltaire, of Bentham, of Romilly, in the same cause, have been useless and of none effect.11 Because Sir Dudley North perceived the advantages of free trade, while the politicians of the world, both practical and theoretical, did not read him, or were too stupid, or too much engrossed by other subjects, to understand him, therefore the truth which he detected would by this time have been incorporated in our laws, if Adam Smith, and Say, and Ricardo,12 and all men resembling them, had never existed. And this, because “man is taught by events, not books;” and events, it seems, never have any need of an interpreter; their language is as intelligible to any blockhead, who is not deaf, as to the greatest genius. If Newton had never lived, his next-door neighbour, no doubt, might have seen an apple fall, and in due time would have evolved the Principia,13 for man is taught by events.

This “ignorance of what mankind owe to books” (if we may borrow an expression from Mr. Coleridge)14 is most pitiable. We contend, in opposition to our contemporary, that mankind, instead of not being indebted to men of highly-cultivated intellects for any of the steps of their progress, are indebted to them for every step. Events might have spoken, or even cried aloud, but they would have spoken a foreign language: mankind could not have profited, and do not profit, even by the lessons of their personal experience, until a man of genius arises to construe those lessons for them. Before the press existed, the leading minds of a nation could bring themselves into contact with the national mind only by means of speech. The forum, the theatre, the pulpit, the school, were then the sources of illumination and mental culture. Since the discovery of printing, books are the medium by which the ideas, the mental habits, and the feelings, of the most exalted and enlarged minds are propagated among the inert, unobserving, unmeditative mass. And we challenge our adversary to a historical trial of the fact. From the Reformation to the present Parliamentary Reform Bill, he will not find one great moral or social improvement, the origin of which cannot be distinctly traced to the labours of men of letters. No one man of genius, it is probable, was ever indispensable; because, what he did, it is likely might have been done by some other: but by another man of genius. Had it not been for a few great minds, mankind would never have emerged from the savage state. Let the series of great minds be once broken off, and it is not clear that we shall not relapse into barbarism.

But mark the pseudo-metaphysical theory, which serves as a pedestal to this fine philosophical system. “Instead of society being modelled on, or formed by, the opinions of literary men or philosophers, all their opinions, as far as they are correct, are modelled on what they behold in the world. Every thought they possess, if correct, is a mere copy of external nature; and yet it is assumed, that by some little legerdemain arrangement of their reflections, they influence the course of the intellectual world:” and, we presume, whatever is “in the world,” and in “external nature,” is as visible to one man’s optics as to another’s. This style of philosophizing will carry us far. Every picture which Raphael ever painted, “if correct, is a mere copy of external nature;” of that nature, too, which we can see with our bodily eyes, not solely with those of our minds: argal, every man who has eyes, could have painted the Transfiguration.15 Lavoisier’s discovery of the composition of water,16 was “modelled on what he beheld in the world;” the hydrogen and the oxygen were always before us, in every rivulet, and in every cistern, “and yet it is assumed, that by some little arrangement” of retorts and gas apparatus, he “influenced the course” of the science of chemistry, and of the arts to which it is applied.

Finally, our contemporary adds:

It is clear, we think, whether looked at theoretically or as a matter of fact, that literature and literary men are of no more use to society, no more instrumental in promoting its improvement, than is any other class or any other art; and therefore, we conclude, no more to be pensioned and provided for out of the people’s purse than is the weaver, for his skill in cloth-making. The best reward for both is the common market of the world; and what will not sell there is worth no man’s labour.

From this we may learn, that the sale of a book is always in exact proportion to its utility; and mankind are as well able to discern, and as eager to seek, that which will enlarge and elevate their minds, as that which will please and beautify their bodies. The person whose mind is capable of conceiving an opinion of this sort, must be a precious observer of his age and of human nature.

If we were now to state our own opinion with respect to a public provision for literary men, we should suggest to this writer a distinction which, it would seem, is not “heard of in his philosophy.”17 We should remind him, that there are literary men, and literary works, whose object is solely to give immediate pleasure, and other literary men and literary works that aim at producing a permanent impression upon the mind. The first we should, with him, regard as being on the same footing in respect to public rewards, with “a mountebank or a puppet-showman:” not because amusement in itself is not a worthy object of pursuit, but because it is one for which mankind are always willing to pay the full value. Accordingly, the amusement of the poor, who cannot afford to pay for it, is a fit object of public provision; and doubtless, as civilization advances, will be so considered.

In addition, however, to these writers, whose aim is only to please mankind, there is another sort, who endeavour to educate them: to batter down obstinate prejudices; to throw light on the dark places; to discover and promulgate ideas, which must be meditated for years before they will be appreciated; to form mankind to closer habits of thought; to shame them out of whatever is mean and selfish in their behaviour; to elevate their tastes; to inspire them with nobler and more beneficent desires; to teach them that there are virtues which they have never conceived, and pleasures beyond what they have ever enjoyed. These, by the leave of our contemporary, are the labours, for which “the best reward” is not always “the common market of the world.” This is a literature which deserves a public provision, and which, unfortunately, is too apt to require one; because such are not the services which mankind are apt at first to requite with either their money or their thanks.

But no enemy to a cause ever did more for its injury, than is done to this cause by its friends, when they talk of giving “encouragement to literature.”18 The phrase grates upon our ears. Literature needs no encouragement. The man who engages in literature from the motive of money, is false to his mission. It is the curse of literature, that it is a trade. He who would inspire others with high desires, must himself be inspired with them. He would teach mankind to love truth and virtue for themselves, and shall he need any other stimulus than the love of truth and virtue, in order to inculcate them? What is due to literary men is not encouragement, but subsistence. They ask not to be rewarded,—they ask to be kept alive, while they continue to enlighten and civilize the world. They ask this, in order that they may not, like so many of the first men of our own country, be compelled to renounce or suspend the labours for which none others are fit, and devote their lives to some merely gainful occupation, in order that they may have bread to eat: or still worse, that they may not be compelled by penury and dire dependance, which eat up so many minds fit for better things, to prostitute their noble calling by base compliances—to pander to selfishness and malignity, instead of wrestling with them; to give utterance to the opinion which they hold not, to counterfeit the emotion which they feel not, to find justification for the evil-doer, instead of bringing him to shame—to become confounded with the meanest of mankind, by sycophancy and base hypocrisy—or if they sink not to this depth of infamy, at least to waste their highest powers, by mixing among the herd of those who write merely to amuse.

It is most true, as our contemporary affirms, that the majority of our literary men have long been of the low description, which we have just attempted to characterize. But why is this? For several reasons, one of the chief of which is, that such men, in this country, have not any public provision. In Germany and France, where, through the universities and various other institutions, a man of letters or science easily obtains, by the sacrifice of a small part of his time, a respectable subsistence—there, even under arbitrary governments, the lettered class are really the highest and most cultivated minds of their several nations. With us, they are dependant, for subsistence, upon the sale of their works, and must consequently adapt themselves to the taste of those who will buy. The buying class, until lately, have been the aristocracy: which explains why, as our adversary says, our corrupt institutions have “long been supported by the majority of literary men.” When, subsequently to this, the mass of the people became buyers, books were written which were addressed chiefly to them. As the people had not the sinister interests of the aristocracy, the writings which were addressed to them did not assume the same particular form of noxiousness and wickedness, as those which were written for the ruling classes: but they assumed other forms. And so it will be, if, by the Reform Bill and its consequences, all the corruptions of our government are done away. The people, as well as the aristocracy, like better to have their opinions confirmed, than corrected. The people as well as the aristocracy prefer those who chime in with their feelings, to those who endeavour to improve them. After the Reform Bill as before, it will be easier and more gainful to take men as they now are, with their vices and weaknesses, and to give them the food which pleases their vitiated palates, than to form their tastes and their constitutions to healthier nourishment. And such will be the character of all literature, which is got up for “the common market of the world;” until mankind shall have attained a degree of civilization, to which Parliamentary Reform may remove some of the obstacles, but which of itself it gives not, nor ever can give.

But to prevent these evils, it is not necessary that any thing should be added to the fiscal burdens by which we are already weighed down. It is not requisite that the people should be taxed to give pensions to men of literature and science. The endowments of our universities, now squandered upon idle monks, are an ample fund already existing; a large portion of which (the Fellowships) already is expended under that pretext, and is of right appropriate to that purpose and to no other. And a time, we trust, is coming, when to that, and no other purpose, it will be applied.

[1 ]“Extraordinary Case of the Royal Associates of the Royal Society of Literature,” Englishman’s Magazine, I (June 1831), 264. The beneficiaries were Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), poet and philosopher; Reverend Edward Davies (1756-1831), master of a grammar school at Chipping Sodbury, better known for his Celtic Researches on the Origin, Traditions, and Language of the Ancient Britons (1804); Dr. John Jamieson (1759-1838), antiquary and philologist, friend of Walter Scott, who had compiled a two-volume Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language (1808); Thomas Robert Malthus (see No. 17); Thomas James Matthias (1754?-1835), probably best known for his Pursuits of Literature (1794-96), a satire on many authors, but whose scholarly Italian translations were his best works; James Millingen (1774-1845), archaeologist, who had compiled works in English, French, and Italian, on coins, medals, Etruscan vases, etc.; William Ouseley (1767-1842), orientalist, author of Persian Miscellanies (1795) and Oriental Collections (1797-1800); William Roscoe (1743-1831), historian, author of several works, including a Life of Lorenzo de’ Medici (1795) and an edition of Pope’s Works (10 vols., 1824); Reverend Henry John Todd (1763-1845), editor of Milton, Spenser, and Johnson’s Dictionary, author of numerous original works including a life of Cranmer (1831); Sharon Turner (1768-1847), historian, whose best known work was his History of the Anglo-Saxons from Their First Appearance to the Norman Conquest (1799-1805).

[* ]The first account of the affair appeared in The Law Magazine. [“Events of the Quarter,” The Law Magazine; or, Quarterly Review of Jurisprudence, V (Jan. and Apr. 1831), 523.]

[2 ]In the House of Commons on 28 Mar., 12 and 14 Apr., 1831 (PD, 3rd ser., Vol. 3, cols. 1102-12, 1253-5, 1371-85).

[3 ]See “Pension List,” The Times, 2 June, 1831, p. 2.

[4 ]Adapted from Jean Jacques Rousseau, Julie, ou La nouvelle Héloïse (1760), in Oeuvres complètes, Vol. VIII, p. 168 (Pt. 1, Letter 30).

[5 ]See The Times, 3 June, 1831, p. 2.

[6 ]Mill’s square-bracketed correction.

[7 ]Daniel Defoe (ca. 1659-1731), journalist and novelist, employed by the government as a writer, was fined and imprisoned in 1702; John Horne Tooke (1736-1812), philologist and politician, a supporter of John Wilkes, was several times tried for his opinions; and the publication of the writings of Thomas Paine (1737-1809), English-born political philosopher and revolutionary propagandist in the United States and France, led to prosecutions for libel (see Nos. 4 and 9).

[8 ]In A Fruteful and Pleasaunt Worke of the Beste State of a Publyque Weale, and of the New Yle Called Utopia (London: Vele, 1551), pp. [41-2] (Bk. I), by Thomas More (1478-1535).

[9 ]Discourses upon Trade (London: Basset, 1691), pp. 10-24, by Dudley North (1641-91), merchant and financier, M.P., one of earliest advocates of free trade.

[10 ]Francis Bacon, Novum Organum (1620), in Works, new ed., trans. Basil Montague, 16 vols. (London: Pickering, 1825-36), Vol. XIV, p. 31. (This edition gives the wording cited.)

[11 ]Cesare Bonesana, marchese di Beccaria (1738-94), Italian jurist and economist who influenced Bentham, best known for Dei delitti e delle pene (Leghorn: n.p., 1764). François Marie Arouet Voltaire (1694-1778), leading French philosopher, whose relevant writings include “Des lois,” Chap. xlii of Précis du siècle de Louis XV (1752), “De la peine de mort,” Sect. x of Commentaire sur le livre Des délits et des peines par un avocat de province (1766), “Des proportions,” Chap. x of L’homme aux quarante écus (1767), and “Du meurtre,” Art. III of “Prix de la justice et de l’humanité” (1777), in Oeuvres complètes, 66 vols. (Paris: Renouard, 1817-25), Vol. XIX, p. 379, Vol. XXVI, pp. 229-31, Vol. XL, pp. 60-7, and Vol. XXVI, p. 271, respectively. Bentham, Rationale of Punishment (1830), in Works, Vol. I, pp. 441-50, 525-32. Samuel Romilly (1757-1818), legal reformer, M.P., Solicitor-General 1806-07, associate of Bentham, Observations on the Criminal Law of England, as It Relates to Capital Punishments (London: Cadell and Davies, 1810).

[12 ]Adam Smith (1723-90), Scots political economist and moral philosopher, who was, like Jean Baptiste Say and David Ricardo, an advocate of free trade.

[13 ]I.e., Newton’s Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica (London: Royal Society, 1687).

[14 ]Coleridge, The Friend, 3 vols. (London: Rest Fenner, 1818), Vol. II, p. 306.

[15 ]The Transfiguration, begun in 1519 and left unfinished, was the last painting of Raphael Sanzio (1483-1520).

[16 ]Antoine Laurent Lavoisier (1743-94), French chemist, whose work on hydrogen led to his discovery in 1783 of the composition of water.

[17 ]Cf. Shakespeare, Hamlet, I, v, 166; in The Riverside Shakespeare, p. 1151.

[18 ]Leading article on literary pensions, Morning Chronicle, 3 June, 1831, p. 2; cf. the article in the Englishman’s Magazine cited in n1 above.