Born, in Galway, 20 Dec. 1780. Educated at schools in Cork and Portarlington. To Trinity Coll., Dublin, Nov. 1796; B.A., 1800. Entered at Lincoln’s Inn, 1800. Studied law for two years. Contrib. letters on French Revolution to “The Times;” and assisted in starting “The Cabinet” and “The Picnic.” Returned to Dublin, 1802. Called to Irish Bar, 1802. Married Rosamond Pennell, 1806. M.P. for Downpatrick, May 1807 to 1812. Acting Chief Secretary for Ireland, 1808. Assisted in starting “Quarterly Review,” Feb. 1809; contrib. frequently to it, 1809–57. LL.B. and LL.D., Dublin 1809. Secretary of the Admiralty, 9 Oct. 1809 to Nov. 1830. F.R.S., 5 July 1810. M.P. for Athlone, 1812–18; for Yarmouth, I. of W., 1819–20; for Bodmin, 1820–26; for Aldeburgh, 1826–27; for Dublin Univ., 1827–30; for Aldeburgh, 1830–32. Appointed Privy Councillor, 16 June 1828. First to make use of term “Conservatives,” in “Quarterly Review” for Jan. 1830. Retired from public life, Aug. 1832. Chiefly occupied in literary pursuits till his death. Died, at Hampton, 10 Aug. 1857. Buried at West Moulsey. Works: “Theatrical Tears” (anon.), 1804; “Familiar Epistles to Frederick Jones, Esq.” (anon.), 1804; “An Intercepted Letter” (anon.), 1804; “Songs of Trafalgar,” 1804; “The History of Cutchacutchoo” (anon.), 1805; “The Anazoniad” (anon.), 1806; “A Sketch of the State of Ireland” (anon.), 1808; “The Battle of Talavera” (anon.), 1809; “Key to the Orders in Council,” 1812; “A Letter on the fittest style … for the Wellington Testimonial,” 1815; “Monarchy according to the Charter” (anon.), 1816; “Stories for Children from the History of England,” 1817; “A Second Letter from the King to his People,” 1821; “Two Letters on Scottish Affairs” (under pseud. of Edward Bradwardine Waverley), 1826; “Progressive Geography for Children,” 1828; “Military Events of the French Revolution of 1830,” 1831; “History of the Guillotine” (from “Quarterly Review”), 1853; “Correspondence with Lord John Russell on … Moore’s Diary,” 1854; “Essays on the Early Period of the French Revolution” (from “Quarterly Review”), 1857. Posthumous: “The Croker Papers;” correspondence and diaries, ed. with life, by L. J. Jennings (3 vols.), 1884. He translated: Chateaubriand’s “Monarchy according to the Charter,” 1816; “Royal Memoirs of the French Revolution,” 1823; and edited: “Memoirs of the Embassy of the Marshal de Bassompierre,” 1819; Lady Harvey’s “Letters,” 1821–22; “The Suffolk Papers,” 1823; Horace Walpole’s “Letters to Lord Hertford,” 1824; Countess of Suffolk’s “Letters,” 1824; Boswell’s “Life of Johnson,” 1831; “John, Lord Hervey’s Memories of the Court of George II,” 1848.

Personal

  Your paper is a very good one—lively and wise too, as is your wont. It has received an unique compliment. Mr. Croker pronounces it “charming both for the sense and pleasantry.” I scarcely think he ever said a word in favour of any other article not his own.

  His best place was his desk at the Admiralty; his best action was in his office; and the most painful part of his life was the latter part, amidst an ignoble social reputation, and the political odium attached to him by Mr. Disraeli’s delineation of him in “Coningsby.”

  While Macaulay is thus ascending to the House of Peers, his old enemy and rival Croker has descended to the grave, very noiselessly and almost without observation, for he had been for some time so withdrawn from the world that he was nearly forgotten. He had lived to see all his predictions of ruin and disaster to the country completely falsified. He continued till the last year or two to exhale his bitterness and spite in the columns of the Quarterly Review, but at last the editor (who had long been sick of his contributions) contrived to get rid of him. I never lived in any intimacy with him, and seldom met him in society, but he certainly occupied a high place among the second-rate men of his time; he had very considerable talents, great industry, with much information and a retentive memory. He spoke in Parliament with considerable force and in society his long acquaintance with the world and with the public affairs, and his stores of general knowledge made him entertaining, though he was too over-bearing to be agreeable. He was particularly disliked by Macaulay, who never lost an opportunity of venting his antipathy by attacks upon him.

  The immense correspondence of all kinds which he left strips away disguises. If he had been the unjust, selfish, and bad man described by his foes, this correspondence would have told the tale. That his character was not without defects, assuredly he would have been the last to pretend. He sometimes held extreme opinions, and was extreme in his way of advocating them. He was of a combative disposition, ever ready for a fray, and seldom happier than when the cry of battle rung in his ears. He was a redoubtable opponent, as his enemies found out to their cost; and a man who struck so hard, and so often, was sure to make many enemies. But any fair-minded reader who dispassionately considers his life and work, with the aid of the materials which are now produced for the formation of a right conclusion, will speedily be convinced that, so far from being wholly “bad,” the vehement controversialist had, after all, a kindly heart and a generous nature; and that in everything he undertook he was animated by a lofty sense of duty, which alone could entitle him to respectful recollection.

  Notwithstanding his eminent services and his real merit, it is not by these that he is known to the present generation, who are indebted for their ideas of him rather to his enemies than his friends. To most men under fifty he is the Croker only of Boswell’s Johnson or the Rigby of Mr. Disraeli’s “Coningsby.”… That Mr. Croker was not the man he has been painted by either of those two redoubtable antagonists, may reasonably be inferred from his relations with the eminent men who were his regular and familiar associates. But that two writers so utterly unlike each other as Macaulay and Disraeli should have agreed only in depreciating Croker, unless there was something in the man corresponding to the picture they have drawn of him, is hardly to be credited.

  One would fain believe that the correspondent of Scott, the adviser of Peel, and the friend of Wellington was not the base and unscrupulous sycophant whom Mr. Disraeli has painted under the name of Rigby. But to any one who carefully studies Mr. Jennings’s own account of the relations between his hero and Lord Hertford, one thing is clear—no impartial critic can ever, as regards the gravest charge against Croker, give a more favorable verdict than “not proven;” and even his modified form of acquital can be gained only by an apologist who frankly admits the moral coarseness or want of delicacy which, perhaps, explains conduct that, in any person endowed with ordinary sense of what is becoming and of good report, would argue the most disgraceful turpitude.

  Councillor Crawley, a character in Lady Morgan’s “Florence Macarthy,” is a representation of John Wilson Croker. The portrait was so life-like in all its dominant particulars that it afforded as much amusement to his friends as to his foes. It was a revenge for his strictures, in his “Familiar Epistles” (1804), on the Dublin stage.

  He was manifestly a man of strict honour, of high principle, of upright life, of great courage, of untiring industry, devoted with singleness of heart to the interests of his country, a loyal friend, and in his domestic relations unexceptionable. Living in the days when party rancour raged, prominent as a speaker in Parliament, and wielding a trenchant and too often personally aggressive pen in the leading organ of the tory party, he came in for the very large share of misrepresentation which always pursues political partisans. His literary tastes were far from catholic in their range, and he made himself obnoxious to the newer school by the dogmatic and narrow spirit and the sarcastic bitterness which are apt to be the sins that more easily beset the self-constituted and anonymous critics of a leading review. Thus to political adversaries he added many an enemy in the field of literature. As he never replied to any attack, however libelous, it became the practice among a certain class of writers to accuse him of heartlessness and malignity.

  From both sides this very important Personage in his generation has been done to death, or rather has been exhibited in all his cleverness and bitterness and officialism as a man for whom there was no milk of human kindness to spare. It was natural, perhaps, in those days when Whigs and Tories were ever at each other’s throats, and even so mild and genial a man as William Blackwood spoke of his opponents as “the cursed Whigs,” that Macaulay should cut to pieces in his most incisive way his political antagonist. But that the same individual should also be assailed in the house of his friends, and set up as an image of scorn in that house for the warning and edification of future generations, was a hard fate.

  The life of a writer has been said to be a warfare upon earth, and Croker’s experience was largely in support of the proposition. From his first appearance in literature to his last he was the object of unjust and unsparing attack. Political differences largely accounted for this, as did also the fact that he was frequently on the winning side…. His judgments on literary and political matters, even after his retirement from parliament and public life, had great influence. As a politician he was always at least consistent, and Irishmen especially should remember that he advocated the Catholic claims nearly a quarter of a century before the passing of the Emancipation Act by a government of which he was a member. He sometimes held extreme views, and supported them with vigour, and occasionally with bitterness. Had he imparted less of a certain arrogance of tone into his speeches, he might have made fewer enemies, and his manners towards strangers or those who did not know him certainly savoured of harshness; but, as was said of Dr. Johnson, there was “nothing of the bear about him except the skin.”

Edition of Boswell’s Johnson, 1831

  That part of the volumes before us, for which the editor is responsible, is ill-compiled, ill-arranged, ill-expressed, and ill-printed. Nothing in the work had astonished us so much as the ignorance or carelessness of Mr. Croker with respect to facts and dates. Many of his blunders are such as we should be surprised to hear any well-educated gentleman commit, even in conversation. The notes absolutely swarm with misstatements, into which the editor never would have fallen, if he had taken the slightest pains to investigate the truth of his assertions, or if he had even been well acquainted with the very book on which he undertook to comment…. Indeed, the decisions of this editor on points of classical learning, though pronounced in a very authoritative tone, are generally such, that if a schoolboy under our care were to utter them, our soul assuredly should not spare for his crying. It is no disgrace to a gentleman, who has been engaged during nearly thirty years in political life, that he has forgotten his Greek and Latin. But he becomes justly ridiculous, if, when no longer able to construe a plain sentence, he affects to sit in judgment on the most delicate questions of style and metre.

  There may have been something of the feeling of a party writer on one side towards a party writer on the other side in Macaulay’s condemnation of Croker’s Boswell for bad scholarship, gross carelessness, bad English, and weak judgment; but the weak book certainly came to pieces in the strong man’s hand. Of Croker’s imperfect understanding of Johnson himself, Macaulay said little, for his own insight into Johnson’s character was much less deep than Carlyle’s. An edition of Croker’s Boswell was afterwards issued in which all discovered errors were corrected.

  I should be wanting in justice were I not to acknowledge that I owe much to the labors of Mr. Croker. No one can know better than I do his great failings as an editor. His remarks and criticisms far too often deserve the contempt that Macaulay so liberally poured on them. Without being deeply versed in books, he was shallow in himself. Johnson’s strong character was never known to him. Its breadth and length, and depth and height were far beyond his measure. With his writings even he shows few signs of being familiar. Boswell’s genius, a genius which even to Lord Macaulay was foolishness, was altogether hidden from this dull eye. No one surely but a “blockhead,” a “barren rascal,” could with scissors and paste-pot have mangled the biography which of all others is the delight and the boast of the English-speaking world. He is careless in small matters, and his blunders are numerous. These I have only noticed in the more important cases, remembering what Johnson somewhere points out, that the triumphs of one critic over another only fatigue and disgust the reader. Yet he has added considerably to our knowledge of Johnson. He knew men who had intimately known both the hero and his biographer, and he gathered much that but for his care would have been lost for ever. He was diligent and successful in his search after Johnson’s letters, of so many of which Boswell with all his persevering and pushing diligence had not been able to get a sight…. That monstrous medley reached no second edition. In its new form all the worst excrescences had been cleared away, and though what was left was not Boswell, still less was it unchastened Croker. His repentance, however, was not thorough. He never restored the text to its old state; wanton transpositions of passages still remain, and numerous insertions break the narrative.

  The book was in truth a monument of editorial industry and editorial skill, and enriched by a large amount of curious information, of which subsequent editors have not failed to avail themselves.

  Croker’s achievement, consider it how you will, remains the most preposterous in literary history. He could see nothing in the “Life” but a highly entertaining compilation greatly in need of annotation and correction. Accordingly he took up Boswell’s text and interlarded it with scraps of his own and other people’s; he pegged into it a sophisticated version of the “Tour;” and he overwhelmed his amazing compound with notes and commentaries in which he took occasion to snub, scold, “improve,” and insult his author at every turn. What came of it one knows. Macaulay, in the combined interests of Whiggism and good literature, made Boswell’s quarrel his own, and the expiation was as bitter as the offense was wanton and scandalous.

  There is no doubt that he was probably the only man then living who was capable of doing it, for his knowledge of the political and social history of Johnson’s time was perhaps second to none, and, besides, he knew the most celebrated survivors of the generation which could remember Johnson and Boswell; and his social position enabled him to prosecute his researches in every direction. The work cost him two years of laborious and painstaking research, and that, undeniable faults apart, he did it well is attested by the fact that his successors have been able to add but little to what he has done.

General

  North.—“They, [“Thoughts on Ireland”] to be sure, were written when he was very young, and the style has the faults of youth, inexperience, and over imitation of Tacitus; but still one may see the pace of the man’s mind there; and a very fiery pace it is.”

  John Wilson Croker more than approached the editor in sarcastic sallies and biting wit: he gave early proof of such powers in his poem on the Irish stage; intimated talents active and argumentative in his speeches; and a poetic feeling and spirit approaching Scott, in his Peninsular battles. To his pen many articles full of wormwood are attributed; and also some of the papers on America, which were not received in a tone of thankfulness by the men of the West.

  Mr. Croker has often been hardly judged and bitterly criticised. In his long account of his “quarrels with authors” I rather think that, upon the whole, he is the loser, and that he has often been made to suffer more punishment than he ever inflicted. He committed one of the most grievous faults in any author—he wrote too much. In his self-assumed office of censor of the politics of England and her empire he appeared too often in his invidious capacity: the recurrence of his reviews was not only too frequent, but his special performances were too diffuse. Readers were tired with the iteration of his acrimony, and the mechanical structure of his style became at last monotonous. He established a rope’s-end school of criticism, and was not satisfied without his showing us the ropewalk in which his scourges were woven. He so often flourished his lash, that at last people began to look on him as compelled, like a bed-ridden fox-hunter, to be obliged to crack his whip for the sake of old habits. Chastising and criticising seemed to him synonymous. He appeared to keep a file of damaging paragraphs; he was the historian of indiscreet expressions; and he carefully illustrated obscure particulars of mean scandals…. Much of his literary character might be traced to his own idiosyncrasy, affected by the prolonged practice of controversy…. Mr. Croker was a Red Indian in critical literature, and his memory is buried under a pyramid of scalps.

  He was not averse to raking for materials in the sinks and sewers of literature, though the thin disguise of rebuke that he pretends gives an unpleasant impression of character. He had much sagacity in discerning what it was probable people would do or say. But Mr. Croker had also many disqualifications. He was not a scholar. His acquaintance with Latin was probably slender, but be that as it may, he had not even the average reading of a scholar. He was an Irishman, and had the inaccurate mind of his countrymen. It was not only that he was liable to mistakes, such, e.g., as confounding the two brothers Warton—who is not liable?—but he had not an accurate habit of literary language. He had no sense of poetry, and no cultivated taste. He knew little or nothing of the history of our language or literature, and did not even know that there was anything to be known. As Secretary to the Admiralty, he had shared the odium of mal-administration or jobbery, which attached to that department. He had augmented it by his violent Tory politics, especially by a tone of virulence which pervaded his conversation, and his articles in the Tory journal. It is to be regretted that Macaulay should have forgotten the dignity and decencies of criticism in his attack upon him (in his review of Madame D’Arblay’s “Diary”), yet it is not perhaps going too far to say that Mr. Croker’s mind had the stamp which is generally called “low.” If any one now could do so, Mr. Croker perhaps could have cleared up the doubtful allusions to persons in Pope’s “Satires.” Beyond this we could not have expected anything from his editing.

  It is in his connection with the “Quarterly Review,” from its foundation in 1809, for over forty years, that his career is interesting. His devotion to the journal was extraordinary; and it is evident from the perusal of his always recognizable articles that his heart was in the business. The extraordinary number of these papers, the ardent, eager style in which they were written, show that he was prompted by each subject to a deliverance; just as a popular speaker in the House of Commons is prompted to a sudden reply. But the angry, hostile, and too often malicious tone of these papers shows that his passion, rather than a calm, judicial temper, was what imparted to them their spirit. It is impossible at the same time not to admire the amount of general knowledge acquired in the particular case, and the vigorously malignant fashion in which he exposed follies and contradictions; but, at the same time, there was often vast unfairness shown in straining the sense to make a point.

  And what delirious aberration of tasteless caprice can possibly have suggested the admission of a doggerel epithalamium by Croker—of all scribblers on record!—into the very last niche of this radiant and harmonious gallery of song? “You have a very great name of your own”—“But I may be allowed to confess”—here is proper lyric stuff to wind up with! There is a due conformity of cadence and of style in these twenty villainous lines which should have sufficed to exclude them from any collection above the literary level of an old annual—Gem, Keepsake, or Souvenir. O Sminthian Apollo! what a malodorous mouse to nail up on the hinder door of such a gracious little chapel, under the very nose as it were of the departing choir! Were but this utterably miserable rubbish once duly struck out and swept away, the close of a beautiful volume would be beautiful and appropriate beyond all praise or thanks.

  His criticisms were too often marked by a peculiar acrimony, which was attributed to personal spite or revenge for satire directed against himself; but we believe this to be a mistake, as Croker appears to have been singularly insensible to adverse criticism. His review of Macaulay’s History was undoubtedly an act of vengeance to which he had looked forward, but it must be remembered that Macaulay had treated Croker’s edition of Boswell with such an unmerciful flaying as even an eel would cry out against. Macaulay and Croker had many duels in Parliament, in which the brilliant orator, whose arguments often had many weak points for a watchful enemy to seize upon, did not always come off a victor…. He was the conscientious and painstaking editor of many valuable papers.

  Two ponderous volumes of letters and diary which have been published in these latter years—have good bits in them; but they are rare bits, to be dredged for out from quagmires of rubbish. The papers are interesting, furthermore, as showing how a cleverish man, with considerable gifts of presence and of brain, with his reactionary Toryism dominant, and made a fetich of, can still keep a good digestion and go in a respectable fashion through a long life—backwards, instead of “face to the front.”