The Dean and the 'Squire A Political Eclogue. Humbly Dedicated to Soame Jenyns, Esq. By the Author of the Heroic Epistle to Sir William Chambers [i.e. William Mason]. The Second Edition |
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 | The Dean and the 'Squire |  |
THE DEAN and the 'SQUIRE.
Not far from Bond-street, call'd The Mount,
Soame Jenyns met the Dean of Gloucester;
And, as they sate in lounging posture,
Each on his bench, and face to face,
The Dean began in tone of bass:
While Jenyns, in his treble key,
Replied with much alacrity.
Repeat, my Muse, th' alternate strains,
That flow'd from these Arcadian swains,
Who both were equally alert
Or to deny, or to assert.
'Squire Jenyns, since with like intent
We both have writ on Government,
And both stand stubborn as a rock
Against the principles of Locke,
Compare our notes with one another.
'Tis true, I've not had time to look,
Tho' much I wish'd it, in your book.
'SQUIRE.
Doctor, my book is quickly read.
DEAN.
I'd other crotchets in my head.
But you, I guess, have studied mine.
'SQUIRE.
No, to my shame, not ev'n a line.
DEAN.
That's something strange—yet fortunate;
For now on par we shall debate.
'SQUIRE.
True. Who to play at whist regards,
When he, that deals, has seen the cards?
DEAN.
Well put. First then, 'tis fit, I deem,
You tell me how you treat your theme.
'SQUIRE.
I controvert those five positions,
Which Whigs pretend are the conditions
That men are equal born—and free—
That kings derive their lawful sway
All from the people's yea and nay—
That compact is the only ground,
On which a Prince his rights can found—
Lastly, I scout that idle notion,
That government is put in motion,
And stopt again, like clock or chime,
Just as we want them to keep time.
DEAN.
'Sblood! do you controvert them all?
'SQUIRE.
Indeed I do, Sir, great and small.
DEAN.
You're a bold man, my master Jenyns,
And have good right to count your winnings,
If you succeed.—But I, who dare
As much as most, to go so far
Had not the courage, I assure ye,
Tho' I suborned a tory jury.
That men were equal born at first,
I hold of all whig lies the worst.
But yet, if only this they mean,
That you and I, good Mr. Dean,
Were equally produced, 'tis true;
For I was born as much as you.
But now, comparing size and strength,
Our body's bulk, our nose's length,
The periwigs, that grace our pate,
My little wit, your learning great,
We find, we are unequal quite.
DEAN.
My honest friend, you're too polite.
Your wit, Lord Hardwicke deigns to own,
Surpasses every wit's in town:
And none e'er doubted Hardwicke's taste,
Who e'er were bid to Hardwicke's feast.
But yet, I fear, at this arch quibble
The Lockians will do more than nibble.
They say, and with them I agree,
That, as to men's equality,
It rests on native rights they have,
Not to become another's slave,
Or tamely bear a tyrant's yoke:
This truth you parry with a joke.
Jokes, Mr. Dean, I'd have you know,
Have parried many a stouter blow.
A joke like this, as I conceive,
Is reason's representative,
Who, vested with his rights, is sent
To disputation's parliament.
DEAN.
Yet scorns, like some they patriots call,
To vote, as he instructs, at all.
'SQUIRE.
Sometimes he may—but to proceed—
All men at birth, it is agreed,
Have equal learning, wit and power,
Tho', at Lucina's squalling hour,
The new-born babes, in nurse's lap,
Have only power to suck her pap.
In infants void of all discerning,
Is just as if these whigs disputed,
As most fools do, to be confuted,
Whether their teeth, in breadth and length,
Had equal size and equal strength;
When, bless each little slobbering mouth,
It had not cut a single tooth.
DEAN.
Your instance, I confess, is pretty:
I wish it were as apt as witty.
'SQUIRE.
But let us give them all they ask,
Their equal birth, a harder task
I think remains behind, to prove
That men thro' life must equal move;
None e'er assume a jot of power
More than he had at natal hour.
Strange doctrine this! ye whigs, shall none
Be long and lank as Jenkinson,
None grow to full six feet or more,
Because some only measure four?
Or, because Hunter cannot treat us
With different size of same-aged fætus?
Thus, Mr. Dean, the point I've prov'd:
And, if your Reverence is so mov'd,
I prove they all are not born free.
DEAN.
My sprightly 'Squire, if this be proving,
Then billing is the whole of loving.
Dame Logic knows, whene'er I meet her,
With more substantial sport I treat her.
These whigs will answer your demand
With saying, all they understand
By power is, “That alone is just,
“Which to a few the rest entrust;
“And to assume without assent,
“Is force, not legal government.”
As to your simile of size,
They'll say your brains are in your eyes.
But now go on.
'SQUIRE.
Their next assertion
You'll find affords me more diversion.
For how should men be e'er born free,
When to be born is slavery,
Do parents ask the little elf,
Ere they beget him, his good leave
Or to beget or to conceive?
Or does he approbation give
By self, or representative?
DEAN.
Yet, when begot, in my opinion,
He's then the heir to self-dominion;
Has right both to be born and bred,
To suck the breast—
'SQUIRE.
And p*** his bed.
DEAN.
He has. Nay more, I'd have you know,
Protection, while in embrio,
Is his, e'er you can justly date
His quasi-compact with the state.
Once, Sir, I knew a pious lady,
Who, just as she was getting ready
For church, one Easter-Sunday morn,
With labour-pains was sorely torn.
That with her spouse she chose to parley;
Nor would she let the midwife lay her,
Till she had been at morning prayer;
When, lo! in midst of all this fray,
Before mama had time to pray,
Her heir, a free-born British boy,
Bolted to light and liberty.
'SQUIRE.
Your story, Mr. Dean, is pleasant,
And wrapt withal, in terms right decent.
Yet vainly sure such proof you bring;
One swallow does not make a spring.
I say, in spite of your strange tale,
For full nine months he lies in jail.
And what a jail! so little roomy,
So dank, so sultry and so gloomy,
Howard, who ev'ry prison knows,
Ne'er ventur'd there to thrust his nose.
Yet there he lies, unlucky wight!
Depriv'd of sunshine and of sight,
Floating in brine, like a young porpus,
Till, by obstetric Habeas Corpus,
The brat is pluck'd to liberty.
But, tell me, is such freedom free?
Like Styx, that gird him nine times round;
They squeeze his navel, press his head,
Feed him with water and with bread.
Thus nine months more he lies in chains,
And, when his freedom he regains,
He puts it to so bad a use,
'Tis found he must not yet go loose.
Tyrannic nurse then claims her right
To plague him both by day and night.
Then grave as Pope, and gruff as Turk,
Prelatic schoolmaster, like York,
Thrashes the wretch with grammar's flail,
To mend his head corrects his tail,
And this with most despotic fury,
Heedless of mercy, law, and jury.
DEAN.
Sir, you've a happy vein for satire,
And touch it with a main du maitre.
Yet why, Sir, treat mild M*****m thus?
His Grace, you know, is one of us.
'SQUIRE.
I ask his pardon. At the time
He chanc'd to hitch into my rhyme—
The boy is born and educated;
And now he walks the world at large;
Yet has he got a free discharge?
No; volens nolens, as at school,
He still must yield to civil rule;
A subject born, he's subject still,
Not govern'd by his mere self-will;
But, if he breaks the laws in force,
Or kills his man, or steals a horse,
Howe'er he may dispute their right,
And Coke with Burgersdicius fight,
Must make at Tyburn his confession.
DEAN.
I fear, Sir, here you beg the question.
A subject born in any state
May, if he please, depatriate,
To Zealand-New, or Otaheite.
'SQUIRE.
Yet there what freedom will he have,
When made Queen Oberea's slave?
Her majesty may lay a tax,
I fear would weaken stronger backs,
Than ev'n was your's, my doughty Dean,
When nerv'd with youth, and stout eighteen.
DEAN.
Perhaps she might. Then let's suppose
To some unpeopled isle he goes,
And takes a mistress in his sleeve,
To live as Adam did with Eve;
Or say, that he had luck to find
A hundred more of the same mind,
To migrate with their mates by dozens,
And there to live like cater-cousins,
We will not call them sirs, and madams,
But a cool hundred Eves and Adams;
I think they would, or soon, or late,
By quasi-compact found a state.
Who wenching held so very dear,
(I don't aver his taste was right
In liking black girls more than white,
Not that I rashly would decide;
They know the best, who both have tried)
That, to indulge and take his fill,
He fenc'd an Apalachian hill,
And, holding there supreme command,
“Scatter'd his image o'er the land,”
Till soon he got so large a race
Of little tawny babes of grace,
And these so soon begot a second,
And those a third, that quick he reckon'd
To reign their sovereign great and good.
If such a man was not born free,
I know not what is liberty.
'SQUIRE.
Dear Dean, you interrupt my theme.
I want to preach, but you to dream
Of negro girls and patriarch kings—
Pray clip your fancy's wayward wings.
My two points prov'd, I draw from hence
This truly Christian inference,
That all, whom we the factious call,
Who 'gainst court influence hourly bawl,
Who from their seats would dash contractors,
And be themselves the nation's factors,
Are all of the old round-head leaven,
And therefore ne'er will get to heaven.
DEAN.
Right. This would give my mind much ease,
If drawn from sounder premises.
Locke and his crew, I know right well,
Have sent full many a fool to hell,
But not from what you've prov'd, but I—
You've run two heats; to start a third
Would now, I think, be quite absurd;
Come breath a while, and gather strength.
You shall not tax, should it be willing,
The town beyond a single shilling:
Stop then in time your tinkling rill;
The reader's ears have drank their fill.
The Dean had been employed in writing his Cui Bono? to Mons. Neckar, which is said, by persons who have read it, to contain many curious crotchets Cui Bono?
Before the Dean published his elaborate treatise, he printed it first only for the perusal of certain friends, who were either Tories from principle or discretion. It may therefore reasonably be supposed, that (in Milton's phrase) it numbered many choice intellects among our great churchmen. The mitred author of the Letter to the Cocoa-Tree, (written at the commencement of Lord Bute's administration) from which I have taken my motto, was amongst these personages; and it is not to be doubted, but it would receive many improvements from his adroit and masterly hand.
The passage in Mr. Locke's treatise, which the Dean here alludes to, seems to be this: “Though I said that all men are by nature equal, I cannot be supposed to understand all sorts of equality: age or virtue may give men a just precedency: excellency of parts and merit may place others above the common level: birth may subject some, and alliance or benefits others, to pay an observance to those, to whom nature, gratitude, or other respects may have made it due: and yet all this consists with the equality, which all men are in, in respect of jurisdiction or dominion one over another: which was the equality I there (ch. 2d.) spoke of, as proper to the business in hand, being that equal right, that every man hath, to his natural freedom, without being subjected to the will or authority of any other man”. Ch. 6. sec. 54. To this the Dean accedes in his first chapter. “First then, I agree with Mr. Locke and his disciples, that there is a sense, in which it may be said, that no man is born the political subject of another”.
So Locke. “Government, into whatsoever hands it is put, being intrusted with this condition, and for this end, that men might have and secure their properties, the prince or senate, however it may have power to make laws for the regulating of property between the subjects one amongst another, yet can never have a power to take to themselves the whole or any part of the subjects property without their own consent, for this would be in effect to leave them no property at all”. Ch. xi. sec. 139.
“Children are entitled to protection, whilst in embrio, though they neither did nor could enter into any compact with the state for that purpose”. Tucker on Civil Government, p. 2. I have taken the liberty to add the term quasi in my version of this passage, to make it more analogous to the learned writer's general sentiments, who allows of no compact, but what he is pleased to term quasi.
Had not this unlucky bolt been shot by the 'Squire, it is probable the Dean would not have been thrown off his scent, but would have answered all, that had been asserted, in some such manner as Mr. Locke does: “Children, I confess, are not born in this full state of equality, though they are born to it. Their parents have a sort of rule and jurisdiction over them, when they come into the world, and for some time after; but it is but a temporary one. The bonds of this subjection are like the swaddling cloths they are wrapt up in, and supported by, in the weakness of their infancy: age and reason, as they grow up, loosen them, till at length they drop quite off, and leave a man at his own free disposal”. Ch. 6. sec. 51. This passage, and the other two already quoted, seem to be a sufficient answer to Mr. Jenyns on his two first heads. All his objections turn on the term born: whereas Locke's propositions are, “Men are by nature equal, and by nature free”; that is, have equal natural rights in their persons and liberty.
Here the Dean turns aside to his own ingenious hypothesis, which he makes the true basis of civil government, and which, the more to disseminate it, I shall here briefly explain. He supposes, that a hundred Adams and Eves should all be produced full grown, and in conjugal pairs; and then concludes, that they would naturally herd together, and form a civil society, from their instinctive love of living together as gregarious animals. But, as some might object that another instinctive appetite would speedily disturb the peace of this society, and that Horace's teterrima belli causa might make it a state of war, he sagely provides against this by noting, “that the appetite between the sexes can have no place in the question, because it is not of that sort, which renders mankind gregarious.” Yet, as he also owns, “that the most solitary animals at certain seasons converse in pairs”, it is necessary, for the support of his hypothesis, that all his Adams and Eves should be as chaste as turtles; and, therefore, I have called them a cool hundred, an epithet which, the reader sees, is here far from being an expletive, but highly emphatical; for, if the Dean's hundred Adams and Eves were not more cool than an hundred pairs of people of fashion, whom I could mention, it is to be feared, that many of the males in his civil society, would not only be gregarious animals, but absolutely horned cattle. See Tucker on Government, p. 136.
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