Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/248

232 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES "A Tale of a Tub" (1633) should be especially interesting to all North Londoners, the scene being Finsbury Hundred, and the dramatis personce belong- ing to Pancras, Totten-Court, Maribone, Kentish-town, Kilborn, Islington, Hamstead, Chalcot; the which places, together with Canonbury, Tyburn (already a scene of dire suspense), Highgate, Paddington, are spoken of as "all the towns about here." One of the characters says, "to Kentish Town we are got at length" — riding from Totten(ham) Court ! St. John's Wood was so truly a wood that daylight brigandage could be plausibly located in its corner, a mile west through the fields from the town of Pancras ; and so with the This theory of equivocal generation had passed out of fashion be- fore Gifford's time (see one of his notes on "Alchemist," ii. i, vol. ii. p. 27), but he could not contain himself. Thus he burst out : " There is nothing new under the sun ! This is precisely the prin- ciple on which that great philosopher Dr. Darwin [really scientific versifier of the " Loves of the Plants/'grandfather of our great author of the ' ' Origin of Species"], and those humane admirers of the French Revolution t(p to a certain point, Price, Priestley, &c., justified their exultation at the wholesale murder of princes and peers by a re- generative cry of hell-hounds. The corruption of one dead king would produce a thousand worms, whose happiness, taken in the aggregate, would surpass that of the individual, and consequently prove a clear gain on the score of humanity ; while the summary ex- termination of a perverse generation of priests and nobles, though not quite agreeable to the victims themselves, would be more than compensated to the universe in a few centuries by prodigious advances towards perfectibility, in a more tractable and philosophic race of atheists and murderers." How long are the pages of Jonson to be defiled by such rabid and venomous slaver? Gifford, the editor and scholiast, commands our admiration and gratitude ; but the sooner Gifford the High Church and State man (" high as venison is high") is ejected from the society of our brave old poet the better : there is surely quite enough of him and his fellows in this kind in his own Quarterly for even the most determined followers of Mithridates, who " fed on poisons till they were become a sort of nutriment."