Joseph Spence, anecdotist, born at Kingsclere, Hants, 25th April 1699, from Winchester passed to New College, Oxford, and became a fellow in 1722, professor of poetry (1727), rector of Birchanger and Great Harwood, professor of Modern History (1737), and a prebendary of Durham (1754). He secured Pope’s friendship by his “Essay on Pope’s Odyssey” (1727), and began to record Pope’s conversation and anecdotes of other friends and notabilities. In 1736 he edited Sackville’s “Gorboduc,” and in 1747 published his “Polymetis.” He was drowned at Byfleet, Surrey, August 20, 1768. The best edition of the “Anecdotes” is by Singer (1820; 2d ed. 1858), with memoir.

Personal

  Mr. Spence is the completest scholar either in solid or polite learning, for his years, that I ever knew. Besides, he is the sweetest tempered gentleman breathing.

  At Captain M’Lean’s, I mentioned Pope’s friend, Spence. JOHNSON. “He was a weak conceited man. BOSWELL. “A good scholar, Sir?” JOHNSON. “Why, no, Sir.” BOSWELL. “He was a pretty scholar.” JOHNSON. “You have about reached him.”

  As I knew Mr. Joseph Spence, I do not think I should have been so much delighted as Dr. Kippis with reading his letters. He was a good-natured, harmless little soul, but more like a silver penny than a genius. It was a neat, fiddle-faddle bit of sterling, that had read good books, and kept good company, but was too trifling for use, and only fit to please a child.

  There was a moral loveliness in the character and the life of Spence, which could not fail to engage the affections of such an elegant scholar as Lowth, and those of many other men of genius. Cultivating literature and the arts with the ardour and the playfulness of a lover, it was fortunate that the vicissitudes of life rendered him a traveller.

  Spence’s benevolence was most liberal and unconfined; distress of every sort, and in every rank of life, never preferred its claim to his attention in vain: and he is described by one who knew him well, to have had a heart and a hand ever open to the poor and the needy…. Spence was in person below the middle size, his figure spare, his countenance benignant, and rather handsome, but bearing marks of a delicate constitution. As in his childhood he had been kept alive by constant care and the assistance of skilful medical aid, he did not expect that his life would have been protracted beyond fifty years. But he possessed those greatest of all blessings, a cheerful temperament, a constant flow of animal spirits, and a most placable disposition. These, with the happy circumstances in which he was placed, and the active nature of his gardening amusements, prolonged its date to his 70th year: when he was unfortunately drowned in a canal in his garden at Byfleet. Being, when the accident occurred, quite alone, it could only be conjectured in what manner it happened; but it was generally supposed to have been occasioned by a fit, while he was standing near the brink of the water. He was found flat upon his face at the edge, where the water was too shallow to cover his head, or any part of his body.

  Phesoj Enceps, in the Rev. James Ridley’s novel “Tales of the Genii,” is Joseph Spence. The sobriquet is an imperfect anagram.

  His generosity towards all kinds of persons is warmly eulogised, and he continued to be a friend to struggling authors, especially to Dodsley before his prosperous bookselling days. One of his earliest friends, Christopher Pitt, and one of the latest, Shenstone, unite in their testimony to his gentleness and urbanity. Gardening continued to be his favourite recreation; he also made several tours in England. His health failed during the later years of his life, and when, on 20 Aug. 1768, he was found dead in a canal in his garden, there were rumours of suicide, but the cause of death was more probably a fit. He was buried in Byfleet church, where there is a monument with an inscription by Bishop Lowth.

General

  I am indebted to this learned and amiable man, on whose friendship I set the greatest value, for most of the anecdotes relating to Pope, mentioned in this work, which he gave me when I was making him a visit at Byfleet, in 1754.

  A man whose learning was not very great, and whose mind was not very powerful.

  The Anecdotes of Pope, compared with Boswell’s Memoirs of Johnson, want life and spirit, and connexion. They furnish curious particulars, but minute and disjointed:—They want picturesque grouping and dramatic effect. We have the opinions and sayings of eminent men: but they do not grow out of the occasion: we do not know at whose house such a thing happened, nor the effect it had on those who were present. The conversations seldom extend beyond an observation and a reply. We have good things served up in sandwiches; but we do not sit down, as in Boswell, to “an ordinary of fine discourse.”—There is no eating and drinking going on…. There is a gap between each conclusion, and at the end of every paragraph we have a new labour to begin. They are not scenes, but soliloquies, with which we are presented: And in reading through the book, we do not seem travelling along a road, but crossing a series of stepping stones: consequently, we do not get on fast with it. It is made up of shreds and patches, and not cut out of the entire piece; something like the little caps into which the tailor in Don Quixote cut his cloth, and held them up at his fingers’ ends. In a word, the living scene does not pass before us;—we have notes and slips of paper handed out by one of the company, but we are not ourselves admitted to their presence, nor made witnesses of the fray.

  Spence had much of Boswell’s curiosity and hero-worship, but there is neither insight into character in his pages, nor any trace of the dramatic skill which makes Boswell’s narrative so delightful. At the same time there is every indication that he strove to give the sayings of the poet, as far as possible, in his own words.

  Although inadequate from the first, [“Polymetis”] and long ago superseded, it remains an agreeable book, owing to the urbanity of its old-fashioned scholarship, the justice of some incidental observations, and its affluent stores of quotations; and, as an intellectual if heterogeneous banquet, may be compared with the “Deipnosophists” of Athenæus.