University of Virginia Library

A Collaboration in Learning: The Gentleman's Magazine and Its Ingenious Contributors
by
James M. Kuist

During the last fifty years of the eighteenth century and the first three decades of the nineteenth, The Gentleman's Magazine published thousands of articles, poems, and reviews submitted by writers in the public at large.[1] Before 1750 and after about 1830, the magazine was largely the product of a paid staff, but during the intervening eight decades—nearly a century of publication—this periodical took its character from qualities inherent in the ideas and opinions of the hundreds of writers who contributed to its pages each year on a volunteer basis. Although in its general format and informational features The Gentleman's Magazine perpetuated qualities which gave it popularity and wide circulation in its earliest years, the grounds on which it maintained its strength after 1750 were the intimacy and plenitude with which it represented the mind of its audience since it published work emanating from that audience itself. The leading feature of the magazine each month, the section of "Miscellaneous Essays," which ran to half or more of each number, was nearly exclusively the domain of contributing writers. The next featured section, the poetry, also was largely supplied by contributors.

The editors, of course, published selectively and maintained a discernible presence. They tended, however, to appear submerged in the identity of the fictitious proprietor Sylvanus Urban, and even Mr. Urban changed the manner in which he presided over the publication so widely recognized as his. In the beginning, he had served the public, city and country at once, by selecting from other periodicals the most readable essays and other literary works and by providing the most current information. With the years, however, his

presence grew avuncular: he served as an arbiter and genial host. Correspondents almost invariably addressed him among their opening remarks. This matter of form attended to, however, the contributing writers developed discourse almost entirely intended for one another. The pages of The Gentleman's Magazine became a forum in which many individual voices were to be heard, and each was to be given an equal hearing (or at least the opportunity for one). The value and significance of such an opportunity were not lost on several generations of literate men and women in England, continental Europe, and America.

To the cultural historian, The Gentleman's Magazine serves today as an authentic compendium of thought, opinion, and learning from the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. If it is not encyclopedic in its nature, the magazine represents the times voluminously. It is also a fascinating record of the intellectual lives of individual persons. Insofar as it is possible to detect and isolate the work of individual writers, most of whom published anonymously or over pseudonyms in the magazine, we may learn much about the concerns, the habits of mind, and the evolving thought of the people of this age. Within the past decade, the recovery of files kept by the editors has made it possible to reconstruct the corpus of texts produced by each of several hundred writers in The Gentleman's Magazine during this period.

Such documentation may help to confirm, though it does not greatly extend, our knowledge about the lives and work of Samuel Johnson, William Cowper, Bishop Percy, and others who have attracted prior biographical and bibliographical attention. More compelling, however, is the opportunity now first readily available to us of reading as one corpus the various writings of George Bennett, a solicitor of Rolstone, Somerset; of the Rev. Samuel Denne, a vicar in Kent; of Mr. John Hodgson of Red Lion Square in London; of the Rev. Joseph Mills of Cowbit, Mrs. Jane West of Little Bowden, and Mr. John Roby in Ireland. The list of names might cover several pages. A common denominator exists among all those on such a list: largely, in some cases exclusively, The Gentleman's Magazine served as the medium by which their private learning became public discourse, and had the magazine not given them this opportunity much of their learning would never have achieved its articulation. For few people of any other age has such an opportunity existed.

More than any other factor inducing the magazine's conversion from reprocessing periodical literature to publishing original contributions was the sheer abundance of such materials. The printing of original work which correspondents might submit was within the scope of editorial policy as Edward Cave outlined it in the earliest numbers. But though the magazine carried occasional articles and poems supplied by writers beyond the staff, Cave seems to have intended to include only the most interesting or controversial within the regular monthly format, diverting such other pieces as came to hand into a series of supplementary pamphlets, a procedure he followed during the 1740s. By 1750, as the annual prefaces for that and the next year announced, the flow of work from the editor's correspondents had convinced Cave that the public at large was a more promising source of edification

and entertainment for the magazine's readers than was the assortment of periodical literature already in the hands of this readership. That after Cave died in 1754 he was succeeded by proprietors with less aggressive instincts, ideally suited as editors to compile and to arrange, doubless helped to confirm Cave's redefinition of editorial policies which was their immediate inheritance.

By 1778, when John Nichols—a young printer who had already contributed several pieces to the magazine—bought part of the proprietorship, the partnership between The Gentleman's Magazine and a reading public which wrote for it had been firmly cemented through two decades of collaboration. The manner in which Nichols cultivated and extended an arrangement he inherited was characteristic of a man of his energies. Although the procedures of submission and selection functioned so well as to need little stimulation, he seems to have given considerable impetus to the practice of writing for the magazine. Through a column he instituted, he established public communication with correspondents, and he doubled the number of pages in each issue from 1783 onwards. Nichols remained in charge of the magazine's affairs until his death some fifty years later.

His son and grandson, both of whom worked with him in managing The Gentleman's Magazine, shared in the decision to limit the participation of contributing writers beyond a paid staff when the elder Nichols died in 1826. That decision apparently had more to do with contemporary publishing fashions and with the presence of strong editorial associates such as John Mitford than with disinclination to admit unsolicited work into the magazine. Nonetheless, between 1834, when they began to publish a New Series, and 1856, when the family sold the proprietorship, the policies of John Bowyer Nichols and John Gough Nichols effected only a limitation upon rather than the exclusion of contributions from writers in the public at large.

We may understand with greater immediacy the habits of mind and qualities of thought and the motives shared by the magazine's many contributors by looking closely at individual writers whose work appeared during this period. The two considered here are representative in many specific ways of the magazine's broad clientele. The Rev. William Tooke was a prolific author noted particularly for his works on Russia. Before he achieved wide public recognition, however, his frequent contribution to The Gentleman's Magazine served as a crucial means of development in his authorial practice. Tooke's articles nearly spanned the period of John Nichols' editorship. The second writer, Edward Phillips of Melksham, was ten years younger than Nichols and Tooke. His essays in the magazine, which he seems to have produced in his later years and which thus incorporate the reflections of a lifetime, reveal many of the preoccupations of educated people in this era as they attempted to come to terms with cultural change. Phillips' correspondence with the editors of The Gentleman's Magazine has recently come to light in the massive manuscript archives of the Nichols family.[2] His letters

there constitute perhaps the only remaining traces of the personal circumstances out of which his essays in the magazine emerged. Lasting well over a century, for insight into the literary lives of persons such as Edward Phillips, we have relied on the selected correspondence which Nichols and his son published in the Literary Anecdotes and the Illustrations of the Literary History of the Eighteenth Century. But Phillips' letters were not selected for either series, and even Tooke's correspondence, we can now see, was edited considerably. The treatment of Tooke and Phillips in the present study has been informed greatly by a reading of the letters which they and the many persons like them exchanged with members of the Nichols family and which today are available again to introduce us to the realities within which they lived.

I. William Tooke (1744-1820)

The Tooke family maintained friendships with the Nichols family through several generations. William Tooke and John Nichols were schoolboys together at the academy of John Shield in Islington. But while Nichols remained a quintessential Londoner, seldom straying far from the metropolis, the Tookes were for years a family of English exotics living far from their native shores. In 1771, five years after Nichols entered into the partnership with William Bowyer which launched his busy career in publishing, Tooke left England to become Chaplain in the English church at Cronstadt, in the Gulf of Finland, a position from which he moved to the Chaplaincy at the British Factory in St. Petersburg three years later. His two sons were born there, Thomas in 1774, William in 1777. Each of the three Tooke men made his mark in life and is the subject of an article in the Dictionary of National Biography. The elder William Tooke is identified as the "historian of Russia" whose many books on the history and culture of that country, as well as on a variety of theological and literary topics, made him a well-known author in his own day. Thomas Tooke is remembered as an economist whose theories had considerable impact on the formulation of monetary policy, the subject of his several books published during the earlier nineteenth century. The younger William Tooke, a solicitor by profession with a seat in Parliament for several terms, was one of the founding officers of London University and was active in the Royal Society and the Society of Arts. True to his name, he too was a contributor to the magazine.

In 1792, William Tooke and his family settled in London after he received a long-awaited inheritance from his uncle. Quite clearly, the two decades which the family spent abroad were powerfully formative years. They provided the Rev. Tooke, who had already published books on antiquarian

and theological subjects, immersion in the traditions of a fascinating foreign country and close access to contemporary Continental scholarship. Within this unusual general setting, his sons grew up in a richly cultured home where interesting, brilliant people visited and where books and bookishness were central in the daily routine. The very remoteness from England which members of the Tooke family shared during these years was undoubtedly a condition in which the seeds of their later achievements were given intense nourishment.

In his early twenties, William Tooke had demonstrated a proclivity for study and writing that was to be one of his characteristic traits. He published three works before leaving England. During the next twenty years, he found time to complete only two. Tooke had achieved sufficient notice to be elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1783. His duties as Chaplain to the British Factory, however, and his activities in the social and learned circles in which he moved, did not allow him time to produce the volume of writing which he would achieve later. In this period of his life, he seems to have been sorting out his interests, meeting and reading the work of Continental scholars, assimilating historical documents, studying the new French and German publications—it was the period in which he began the scholarship from which the great outpouring of printed volumes would emanate at the end of the century. During these years, The Gentleman's Magazine served Tooke as a clearing house, a place in which he could sketch out his observations and knowledge about Russia, a repository for information which he did not wish to delay conveying into print or for which he sensed there was an interested readership immediately at hand. In all, Tooke contributed twenty articles to The Gentleman's Magazine while he was living and working in St. Petersburg.[3]

In his situation a considerable distance from home (a distance made to seem much more considerable by the hazards of shipping) William Tooke read avidly the books which Nichols and other friends sent him. Among the products of the London press which Tooke received was The Gentleman's Magazine. Nichols had become a proprietor and the printer of the magazine several years after Tooke's departure from England, and Tooke noted with

pleasure the increasing traces he detected of his friend's presence in the text.[4] The magazine helped him keep abreast of the cultural issues currently engaging his English contemporaries, such as the 1782 controversy over authorship of the poetry claimed by Thomas Chatterton to have been written by a fifteenth-century priest named Rowley. Nichols was Tooke's publisher, and much of their correspondence through the early 1780s had to do with the progress of the two works which Tooke was publishing at a distance from the press that made him uncomfortable.

The personal letters he sent his boyhood friend are bathed in the consciousness of his situation. Unexcerpted, they are much more highly animated, more newsy, often more tenderly written than the texts which Nichols published in the Literary Anecdotes. Quite clearly, Tooke treasured his unusual locus, his place in a significant foreign capital which gave him entree into a most interesting society and brought him into contact with celebrated people. He knew how to value the opportunity to learn about aspects of his world with which few contemporary Englishmen were familiar, to explore realms which men and women like himself living throughout England would never directly experience. At the same time, he felt keenly what it is to live far from home and friends:

The twenty articles which Tooke wrote in Russia for The Gentleman's Magazine introduce a variety of matter. He enclosed the first in a letter to Nichols dated 9 August 1782 O.S.; the last appeared late in 1789. Though the sequence is a miscellaneous assortment as to subject—Nichols usually adopted the terms "Occasional Remarks" or "Original Correspondence" as running heads in the magazine—Tooke tended to write about specific places or curiosities of natural life in the earlier essays and to dwell at greater length on Russian history in the later ones. His accounts of the ancient city of Bolgari (LV, i, 15-18), of the "Burial place of the antient Khans, at Kazimof" (LV, i, 172-173), of the Russian muskrat Mus Jaculus (LV, i, 264-266) and Slepetz (LV, ii, 761) in 1785 were succeeded by topographical and naturalistic description of Pavlofsk (LVI, i, 455-457) and of the Crimea (LVI, ii, 643-648) and by an "Account of the Progress of Arts and Sciences in Russia" (LVII, i, 390-395) in 1786-87. In communicating these articles to Nichols, Tooke at times professed to be rather uninterested in what he wrote: ". . . I do not care one polushka about them, and . . . you may put them in any place you think

fit."[6] He took Nichols to task, however, for what he considered carelessness in the reproduction of at least one of the earlier engraved plates which accompanied his work,[7] and as one article succeeded another in the magazine his allusions to them in personal letters reveal well enough the purposefulness with which the articles were produced.

From the first, Tooke's Russian articles were published over a pseudonymous signature, "M. M. M.," which possessed some significance for him: the initials are those of the Tooke family motto, Militia Mea Multiplex.[8] Out of this motto, apparently, the author created a distinct persona, a man vaguely military by profession whose duties require him to travel extensively throughout the Russian territories. He told Mr. Urban at the beginning of his first article that the notes on the antiquities he described were derived from his travels and that he thought of sending them through "the accident of my meeting with some numbers of your Magazine at the house of a German officer at Simbirsk. . . . If the engravings are executed with accuracy from the drawings I herewith transmit, and the narrative faithfully given, I may be occasionally induced to send you more, as often as my warfare in this world, which is very various, will allow me avocation" (LV [1785], i, 15).

Perhaps to aid Tooke in the objectification of this persona, Nichols subjoined a footnote to the writer's remark that he sends the article as "a favour": "That we do 'esteem it a favour,' our friendly correspondent will see by its being so early inserted; which is done, we will assure him, without the most distant view to 'the bear-skin boots,' or 'the pastilla,' or 'the sweet kloukva quass,' or 'the caviar,' he so liberally promises.—The invariable rule of this Magazine is, never to receive a bribe for what is either inserted or omitted" (LV, i, 15). The ideas and information which Tooke transmitted in the succeeding articles may well have been drawn from excursions he actually made, but his care in dating each article from a specific place and his scattered references to duties which called him from one encampment to another served to perpetuate and confirm his fictional authorial identity.

Mr. Urban's correspondent "M. M. M.," whose avocation was to share a knowledge of Russian antiquities and natural history with his fellow readers of The Gentleman's Magazine, was also a contemplative observer of the more general human scene. Tooke came to use the opportunity of writing about Russia for discourse on human nature and on books in the vein of the eighteenth-century periodical essayists. His account of the Don Cossaks and their region, in two articles dated 31 Oct. 1785 O. S. (from Tscherkask) and 5 Nov. 1785 O. S. (from Azof), is prefaced, for instance, by several paragraphs on literature as a source of our insight into human character. The pretext for these remarks, he says, is "the vexatious want of character throughout the

regions I am doomed to traverse" (LVI [1786], ii, 548). His real agenda, however, would seem to be a call for more attentive biographical analysis in English literature. Attached to Tooke's long account of the Crimea is a similar prefatory essay even less integral to his primary subject. He expatiates on human tendency to rail against fate, when establishing self-control would allow us to deal purposefully with the "common occurrences of life." This leads him to compare the Spectator papers with Johnson's Rambler as guides to self-knowledge.

We find in the articles which William Tooke wrote for The Gentleman's Magazine during his sojourn in Russia the core of interests and play of mind which were to be displayed so richly in the numerous works he published after returning to England. Evidently he was all the while gathering documentary materials and storing observations that he wished to commit to publications of greater scope, and in his letters he indicates increasingly a desire to exchange his present situation in the world for a place closer to his publisher and to the reading public. In 1791 he told Nichols:

But until he returned, he could in a sense practice. Writing about the land and society within which he found himself, focusing from time to time on authors and literary works, modern and ancient, in the course of his reading, he prepared for an established periodical audience a series of articles in which he exercised various authorial manners. He wrote description, developed scientific and historical evidence, shaped speculative opinions about human nature, cultivated narratives faithful to a persona he created or, in a more complex exercise, pretended to weave together the disorganized notes of a fellow traveller.[10] A comparison of the books which Tooke published after residence in Russia with those published before and during that period would doubtless reveal a number of things, including simply a greater maturity. To the experience of writing articles for The Gentleman's Magazine, however, we may understand that Tooke owed a certain measure of the development he attained towards his establishment as an author of recognized importance among his contemporaries.

In the three decades of his life after he left Russia, Tooke continued to be a contributing writer for the magazine, and in fact provided a more significant level of work—eighty articles, as compared with the twenty he sent to Nichols from Russia. The preponderance of these were a group of sixty-seven articles (perhaps best conceived as successive segments of one long work)

on Horace which appeared from the latter part of 1806 through 1811. He wrote one or two obituary articles.[11] Of the remainder, two articles (for both of which he used his Russian signature, "M. M. M.") appear to be leftovers from Russia, published soon after the resettlement in England: a biographical note on von Haller and a note on annotation in a copy of Salmisii Exercitationes Plinianae.[12] The rest concerned a variety of things Russian and appeared in 1812 and 1815-16. All of Tooke's work published after 1800 appeared either anonymously or over his actual initials.

Tooke's long commentary on Horace is a work unto itself in his canon. In its conception, it is essentially the experience of a learned eighteenth-century reader, exploring the text of Horace's epistles and satires sequentially and offering remarks of various kinds—exegetical, philological, amplificatory—in apparently random fashion, though his progress through the text advances nearly line by line. It is the schoolroom exercise carried forward in maturity, the summary explication of a text grown, through countless readings, as familiar as the lines on the hand. There is constant interplay between painstaking analysis of the particular and highly generalized notions about the poet. The earliest installments in the series are called "Observations" and "Remarks," but thereafter they bear the title "Illustrations of Horace," a use of the term "illustration" which appropriately connects Tooke's work with the content and manner of literary scholarship as it was conducted in his generation and in many generations preceding his. His long series of remarks was, therefore, perfectly tailored for an audience such as the subscribers to The Gentleman's Magazine, a body of readers who had been provided such readings of the standard authors in previous volumes and who perhaps kept journals full of such remarks of their own in the privacy of their studies.

As representative of the genre, Tooke's remarks on Horace are delivered with a stylistic elegance which many of his knowing readers might not have been able to achieve. He is rarely content with the perfunctory observation: "Venafri. The oil from the territory of Venafrum was reckoned the best. Plin. lib xv. cap. 2." (LXXXI [1811], ii, 428). More characteristically, Tooke is given to broader periods:

In his obituary in The Gentleman's Magazine, we are told that Tooke was revising this series on Horace at the time of his death "for separate publication" (XC [1820], ii, 467). The revision must have consisted chiefly of new, more general introductory matter than Tooke wrote for the series as it originally appeared, for his remarks are highly polished in their original state and seem to represent decided opinions, a culminating rather than tentative reading of the Roman poet. His remarks on Horace are at the other end of the spectrum of composition from the early articles on Russian history, geography, and natural life. In them, Tooke introduced and rehearsed the subject matter of the major publications he projected. In the "Illustrations of Horace," Tooke delivered in the magazine a work of major scope very nearly in the finished state it would have possessed had he lived to publish it separately.

During the last three decades of his life, the Rev. William Tooke was not the only member of his family writing articles signed "W. T." in The Gentleman's Magazine. His son William—"that monkey Bill,"[13] as his father described him during boyhood in a letter to Nichols—began his own correspondence with Mr. Urban in a set of remarks on the current English passion for German literature in 1799 (LXIX, ii, 923-924). This was followed by an article entitled "Causes of Present Scarcity; and Remedies Proposed" in 1800 (LXX, ii, 918-920), by three articles on the distresses of chimney-sweeps in 1803-5,[14] and by a note on his own edition of Churchill's poetry (LXXIV [1804], ii, 1188-89). By now, the former little rascal was beginning a professional career, having served his apprenticeship to a solicitor in Gray's Inn with whom he entered into partnership in 1798. The claims of public life allowed little time for authorship during these years. Later, he was to republish his edition of Churchill in three volumes (1844), the two-volume Monarchy of France, its Rise, Progress, and Fall (1855), and a volume of verse (1860). His further work in the magazine included an article on Nicholas Rowe's will in 1822 (XCII, i, 207-208), one on the history of the Tooke family in 1839 (N. S. XII, 602-606), and several notes on literary and biographical matters in the early 1840s. His final contribution to The Gentleman's Magazine appears to have been an article signed "Vassili Vassilovich" entitled "The Chapters of 'Political Philosophy' on Russia" in 1843 (N. S. XIX, 40-42).

The younger William Tooke contributed more sporadically and less voluminously than his father did to the pages of Mr. Urban's miscellany. Like his father, who occasionally published in The Monthly Review, he also contributed to the New Monthly Review and the Annual Register. The work published by the two William Tookes in The Gentleman's Magazine, one hundred thirteen articles, constitutes, however, a special and distinctive body

of writing, a utilization of opportunities which the Gentleman's held forth to them, as it did to many others like them, in a way which made this periodical important to its era. It provided the opportunity to organize and shape ideas, as in the Rev. Tooke's miscellaneous observations on Russia and his son's commentary on reading tastes in late eighteenth-century London. As in the younger Tooke's remarks on the plight of young chimney-sweeps, it provided an immediate audience for addressing issues which challenged the conscience. Also, as in the elder Tooke's extended discussion of Horace, the magazine was ready to carry the more fully rendered productions of learning pursued in the private study. The magazine stood ready at any time to broadcast the request for information, to gather in the piece of fugitive evidence, to transmit the reply to a critic, to disseminate a decided opinion. In surveying the writings of the William Tookes, father and son, published in The Gentleman's Magazine, one comes to understand the diverse ways in which this periodical participated in the lives of its literate and thoughtful audience.

II. Edward Phillips, Jr. (1754-1831)

Perhaps the only information about this man which is readily available in standard biographical resources is the following reference in the obituary columns of The Gentleman's Magazine for April 1831 (printed in the May number [CI, i, 476]): "GLOUCESTER.—In his 77th year, Mr. Edward Phillips, formerly of Melksham." No date of death is recorded, and no further details are provided, even editorially, about the life and work of one who contributed sixty-six articles, many of them substantial essays, to this periodical. He is not included in the Dictionary of National Biography, and the printed catalogues of the British Library contain no mention of his name. John and John Bowyer Nichols do not refer to him, even in passing, in the Literary Anecdotes and Illustrations, chronicles of the literary history of the eighteenth century but also a repository of countless details about those whose lives, like Phillips', extended into the nineteenth century. Perhaps he would have been included in the sequel which Bowyer Nichols appears to have planned on the literary history of the early nineteenth century.[15] As far as one can tell in the absence of personal and professional information about him, his contribution to the cultural life of his times seems to have consisted entirely of the essays he published in The Gentleman's Magazine.[16]

Since even in the magazine his work appeared not over his own name

but over the pseudonymous signatures "E. P." or "Alciphron," his obscurity is perfectly understandable. Yet the corpus of his articles in this periodical alone is a substantial body of work which circulated among a significant readership for over a decade. His "Speculations on Literary Pleasures," which appeared in seventeen installments during 1827-29, ran to some 71 pages in length. His essay "On the Mutability of National Grandeur" in 1823 covered 14 pages of the magazine. He published essays long enough to need division into two or three installments on the "Progress of Literature in Different Ages," on nineteenth-century poetry, on Thomson and Young, on Johnson and Helvetius as moralists, on "Italy and the Italians," on Gibbon and Lardner, on the "Value and Importance of History," on the "Influence of Time and Place in Developing Genius," and on the Continental historian Niebuhr. His single essays cover a diverse and interesting array of topics: "On the Pleasures of Philosophic Contemplation," "On the Subjects of Epic Poems," and many others. The writings of Edward Phillips, Jr., of Melksham are well worth the attention of anyone seeking to understand the intellectual life of the early nineteenth century.

Phillips' first contact with those who were to print and circulate his work came in a letter (now first published) "To the Editor of the Gentlemans Magazine" dated 19 February 1817. His approach to Nichols was much the same as that of others who paused at the gateway between their private worlds and the realm of public discourse:

The essays which Phillips apparently had immediately in mind were of a reflective nature in the manner of the eighteenth-century periodical essayists. The first two were published early in July[18]—one ("Essay on Greatness of Mind") in the June number of the magazine, the other ("On the Pleasures of Philosophic Contemplation") in the Supplement to Part I of the volume for 1817.[19] Another essay of this kind, "On the Appropriation of Hours of Leisure," came out in the October number. Whether he had these essays on hand when he wrote for editorial encouragement in February is not clear. In their published form, the essay in the June number is dated 2 June and

that in the October number 10 September. At any rate, beginning with his "Remarks on the Character and Genius of Johnson," which appeared in the January number for 1818, the sequence of Phillips' essays intermixed the treatment of more specifically focused subjects and the more speculative discourse with which his contributions to The Gentleman's Magazine had begun.

Phillips' essay on Johnson (LXXXVIII, i, 31-37) is a good example of his work. He obviously found the subject congenial, and he let his thoughts play out slowly and deliberately. Phillips realized that he was approaching Johnson's life and works at an interesting time, a little over three decades after Johnson's death, a quarter of a century after the decade in which so many recollections of the famous man, including Boswell's, had first been published. Phillips was thirty years old when Johnson died and presumably had read the essay on Shakespeare, the account of the journey to Scotland, and the Lives of the Poets when these works first came out. The reading public in 1818, however, included many persons of a generation after Phillips' who knew little of the Johnson canon but had read much about his personal eccentricity and frank opinions. "Casual readers," Phillips comments, "naturally recur to what, with most pleasure, is attended with least trouble; and hence, oftentimes form their estimate, and even their literary estimate, rather from these objectionable traits, which occupy a prominent feature in Johnson, than from the sterling weight and real excellence of his works." Although Phillips reviews Johnson's life to establish the consistency between his principles and actions and comments more broadly on Johnson's "fine discriminating powers and manliness of thought," much of the essay is commentary on specific works, including his lesser-known early biographies:

By and large, in his critical views about literature—his most frequent subject as an essayist—Edward Phillips showed himself to be very much a man of his generation. His tastes and principles of judgment were grounded in the literary values of the later eighteenth century. He was a Classicist attending the birth of Romanticism. This is not to say that his criticism of poetry in the early nineteenth century was a reactionary dismissal of the contemporary as viewed against a golden heritage. But he expected poets to assume a place within a tradition to which, it seemed, they necessarily belonged. He believed in the strength of this tradition. Along with his praise for Shakespeare and Milton and (less inevitably by then) for Dryden and Pope, Phillips could assert that "Collins, Gray, Armstrong, and Mason . . . Glover, Akenside,

Thomson, and Young, contributed by their labours to raise the dignity and character of metrical composition to a height not eclipsed by any other age or nation. . ." (LXXXIX [1819], ii, 400).

Phillips' long essay in 1819 "On the Poetry of the Nineteenth Century"[20] contains no mention of Shelley or Keats, and he had absolutely no use for Wordsworth and Coleridge ("littleness for which Literature has scarcely a name," "quaint conceit, splendid inanity . . . unintelligible sentiment"). Phillips was quite ready, however, to meet other writers on their own ground. He admired the poetry of Crabbe but ultimately found it limited. He shared with his contemporaries the feeling that Moore was a gifted poet, though he found the recent oriental style of this poet too mannered. Scott, he felt, had soaring creative powers, but in his view posterity would find Scott's interests too parochial. "Our poetical pretensions of equality, therefore, with several previous epochs during the long line of our literary history, may be justly a matter of question with the cool unprejudiced critick." The single great exception, Phillips felt, was Lord Byron. But he despaired for Byron even while admiring him.

It was difficult for Phillips to balance his attraction to Byron's poetry with his alienation from the poet's ideas.

On the other hand, he found Byron too often "gloomy and despondent in his views of life," a poet who "exhibits, in his intellectual speculations, a glaring licentiousness of principle, associated with the querulousness of a dark and brooding misanthrope. . . ." Such depression of mind and character led Byron often enough to "a negligence of speech, a quaintness and prettiness unworthy alike of his general style, and of an author who writes for a literary immortality." The fundamental problem for Phillips was that Byron "offers outrage to the correct principles of sober reason, while the imagination of the reader hangs with the liveliest interest and emotion on fine scenes of sentiment and of pathos. . . ."

Phillips' evident distress over this point of tension in his reading of Byron apparently led him in 1822 to write an essay, over nine thousand words in length, which he called "The Rhetoric of the Infidel School." Here, citing not only the kinds of criticism of Byron which he himself had previously made but also the noble poet's evident disdain for such arguments, Phillips ranges through the history of British letters to show how many writers, even of the

first eminence in their own times, had passed into disregard because of their intellectual and moral flaws. He compares Byron chiefly with Lord Bolingbroke, of the previous century, but refers also to the lives and works of Rochester, Herbert of Cherbury, Hobbes, Voltaire, Hume, and Gibbon. He reviews aspects of "Childe Harold" and "Don Juan" and other poems which he finds objectionable, particularly "Cain," the blasphemous character of which he distinguishes pointedly from the treatment of Satan in "Paradise Lost." He concludes:

Although Phillips' principal subject as an essayist was the literary tradition and history of his country, his work demonstrates considerable range. He wrote on Swedish and Italian literature and on the pleasures of historical research. When his subject was specifically literary, much of his attention was engrossed by moral or theological questions, by the larger cultural issues to which, he evidently believed, all learning should address itself. Given to generalization and abstract argument, he did not neglect the practical: his essays on the learned achievements of Locke (LXXXIX [1819], ii, 589-592) and the importance of Cook's exploits (XCVIII [1828], ii, 24-25) were written explicitly to lobby for the erection of public monuments. Within themselves, the essays often cover a broad spectrum of ideas and effects. His three-part discourse on Johnson and Helvetius is set as a narrative, his thoughts about these writers and the principles implicit in their work arising from his agitation of mind during a storm which he describes in rhapsodic detail. Similarly, an essay entitled "Reveries in Autumn" (XCV [1825], ii, 108-111), which begins with an account of his feelings as he observes the descent of evening on a wild rural landscape, becomes a long discussion of atmospheric phenomena based on the theories and observations of leading natural scientists.

Edward Phillips was perhaps most truly in his element in the long series he called "Speculations on Literary Pleasures." These essays form a chronicle of early nineteenth-century thought, ranging from commentary on Locke, Johnson, and Franklin to consideration of the ideas of various contemporary thinkers. Perhaps it was the summary chronicle of his own reflective life. He was free in this loosely structured discourse to allow his mind to rove along contours of thought which delighted and stimulated him. He let his mind play with the notions of writers who had captured his attention and had made him think. It is not too extravagant to claim that, in extending to Phillips the opportunity to publish, The Gentleman's Magazine allowed a man retiring from his public duties to compose and deliver his own intellectual legacy.

Within the pages of The Gentleman's Magazine, the writings of William Tooke and his son and of Edward Phillips, Jr., possess so many of the characteristics of the articles collected there that they blend seamlessly with their textual environment. In the personae which they each more or less developed, in the character and style of their discourse, in the kinds of subjects which they explored, these three writers are entirely representative of the magazine's family of contributors. We read an article by "M. M. M." or "Alciphron" and think of it as an extension of the views of "A Well-Wisher to Truth" or a correction of facts cited by "T. T." There is a linear quality to the learning spread out for us by those who contributed to The Gentleman's Magazine over the years in which Tooke and Phillips were contributors, and certainly these two participated busily in the creation of a collective text which we now look back upon as a document of cultural history.

All too easily, we may overlook the fact that Tooke and Phillips—that all of the contributors, indeed—were not members of a school, probably did not even know one another except as they read one another's work in the magazine, properly speaking were not even writers in a professional sense. They were coeval individuals, each living out a course of years with personal and professional commitments which identified them in terms distinct from those of a "literary" or "cultural" establishment. What they had in common was a private commitment to learning, an intellectual life informing and energizing the core of daily existence. They each pursued studies in which their interest never abated over the years, and they each took stock reflectively of the world in which they lived. In these qualities, too, the writers we have been considering were entirely representative. Every contributed item we find on the horizontal surface of the magazine's text is an element in a vertical process by which the learning of an individual mind has achieved its expression.

As divergent and separately constituted as were the lives of William Tooke and Edward Phillips—as different as they appear to have been personally—they each carried things worth saying into Mr. Urban's forum, an agenda of thought and opinion which derived from their own intellectual activity. As different as were the preoccupations and styles of the fascinated historian and the speculative essayist, they each had allotted places in this forum. Especially after the advent of more rigidly oriented journals in the early nineteenth century, it was a distinguishing feature of The Gentleman's Magazine that all persons who wished to write and whose writings could be conceived of as adding constructively to the discourse were provided a place on the printed page. It is not an overstatement to say that The Gentleman's Magazine in fact created many writers, for the major opportunity many men and women had to follow out their studies into publication, to complete their thoughts by carrying them into statement, was afforded by the policies and practice of this British periodical. Paralleled hundreds of times in the experiences of their fellow contributors, the personal attainments of Tooke and Phillips in their collaboration with the editors of The Gentleman's Magazine constitute a phenomenon of real significance in our cultural tradition.

Notes