Born, at Ashburton, April 1756. Educated at Ashburton Free School. Afterwards at work on a farm. At sea, 1767–70. To school again at Ashburton, 1770. Apprenticed to shoemaker, 1 Jan. 1772. To school again, 1776. Matric. at Exeter Coll., Oxford, as Bible Clerk, 16 Feb. 1779; B.A., 10 Oct. 1782. Travelling tutor to son of Lord Grosvenor, 1781. Unsuccessfully prosecuted for libel in “The Baviad,” 1797. Edited “Anti-Jacobin,” Nov. 1797 to July 1798. Editor of “Quarterly Review,” Feb. 1809 to Sept. 1824. Held posts of Commissioner of Lottery and Paymaster of Gentlemen-Pensioners. Died, in London, 31 Dec. 1826; buried in Westminster Abbey. Works: “Easton Chronicle” (anon.), 1789; “The Baviad” (anon.), 1791; “The Mæviad” (anon.), 1795 (two preceding pubd. together, 1797); “Epistle to Peter Pindar” (anon.), 1800; “An Examination of the strictures … on the translation of Juvenal,” 1803. He translated: “Juvenal” (with autobiography), 1802; “Persius,” 1821; and edited: Massinger’s “Works,” 1805; Ben Jonson’s “Works,” 1816; Ford’s “Dramatic Works,” 1827; Shirley’s “Dramatic Works,” 1833.

Personal

  The mildest man in the world till he takes a pen in his hand, but then all gall and spitefulness.

	I hear some one say, “Murrain take him, the ape!”
	And so Murrain shall, in a bookseller’s shape;
	An evil-eyed elf, in a down-looking flurry,
	Who’d fain be a coxcomb, and calls himself Murray.
	Adorn thou his door, like the sign of the Shoe,
	For court-understrappers to congregate to;
	For Southey to come in his dearth of invention,
	And eat his own words for mock-praise and a pension;
	For Croker to lurk with his spider-like limb in,
	And stock his lean bag with way-laying the women;
	And Jove only knows for what creatures beside
	To shelter their envy and dust-licking pride,
	And feed on corruption, like bats, who at nights
	In the dark take their shuffles, which they call their flights.
	Be these the Court-critics, and vamp a Review;
	And by a poor figure, and therefore a true,
	For it suits with thy nature, both shoe-like and slaughterly,
	Be its hue leathern, and title the Quarterly.
	Much misconduct it; and see that the others
	Misdeem, and misconstrue, like miscreant brothers;
	Misquote, and misplace, and mislead, and misstate,
	Misapply, misinterpret, misreckon, misdate,
	Misinform, misconjecture, misargue; in short,
	Miss all that is good, that ye miss not the Court.
	*        *        *        *        *
	And finally, thou, my old soul of the tritical,
	Noting, translating, high slavish, hot critical,
	Quarterly-scutcheon’d, great heir to each dunce,
	Be Tibbald, Cook, Arnall, and Dennis at once.

  With respect to Gifford, I have never seen him; but I know that his conversation, particularly since his health began to decline, is excessively splenetic. He is a fanatical Ministerialist, and retains even now his old hatred of the Jacobins, Della Cruscans, &c. His information on all points is prodigious, and he pours it forth very freely. I am told he dislikes all his associates—Croker, J. Murray, &c.—but I do not know how true that is. He would be a hard card to manage in a dialogue.

  He was very valetudinary, and realized two verses, wherein he says Fortune assigned him—

	—“One eye not over good,
	Two sides that to their cost have stood
	A ten years’ hectic cough,
	Aches, stitches, all the various ills
	That swell the devilish doctor’s bills,
	And sweep poor mortals off.

But he might also justly claim as his gift, the moral qualities expressed in the next fine stanza—

	——“A soul
	That spurns the crowd’s malign control,
	A firm contempt of wrong;
	Spirits above affliction’s power,
	And skill to soothe the lingering hour
	With no inglorious song.”

He was a little man, dumpled up together, and so ill made as to seem almost deformed, but with a singular expression of talent in his countenance.

  I see in the papers, to-day [?], the death of Mr. Gifford—the direst, darkest enemy I ever had. We never saw each other; he hated me for my success and my principles.

Mort la bête, mort le venin,

at least esperons!

  He was a singularly ugly little man, of a wasping temper, and, in my opinion, much overrated both as a poet and a critic. His “Autobiography” is amusing, and there are some good lines in his “Baviad and Mæviad.” But he had a self-conceit which led him to despise others in a very unjustifiable manner; and he had an idea of retaining his dominion by menaces and superciliousness. He affected almost a puritan strictness of morals in his writings; but this did not become the companion of the late Lord Grosvenor. I found him, however, courteous, communicative, and frank, when I paid him a visit.

  Hitherto we have seen Gifford only in his blander moods—bent on being amiable in return for the assistance cordially rendered to his studies by a stranger. But these were weaker moments—the tiger assuming the bleat of the lamb. The gall in his system lay too near the surface not to ooze through the thin layer of suavity upon the smallest provocation.

  Giffard looked very aged [in 1819], his face much wrinkled, and he seemed to be in declining health; his dress was careless, and his cravat and waistcoat covered with snuff. There was an antique, philosophic cast about his head and countenance, better adapted to excite a feeling of curiosity in a stranger than the head of Sir Walter Scott; the latter seemed more a man of this world’s mould.

  He must have had many literary and political acquaintances and friends; but in this year, 1824, when I knew him, sick and moribund, he appeared to be a solitary old man.

  It was not merely because he was a critic that he was hated, but because he was malicious and malignant, and because he did not criticise from a literary, but from a political, point of view. That he was not alone, in this last peculiarity, this deliberate and obstinate incompetency, as we may say, was admitted by his victims, who belabored by the bludgeons of Lockhart, Maginn, and Wilson, were able before long to forgive, if they could not quite forget, those jocose blackguards, who could take as well as give hard blows; but Gifford they never forgave. They despised him for his venal pen, his sycophancy to the great, and for his low origin. That he should have been despised on account of his origin was hard; for he neither concealed it, as most men would have done, nor boasted of it, as many might have done, but acknowledged it in the frankest and manliest way. The story of his early years, as related by himself, was a melancholy, a pathetic one, and to have lived through them and risen above them, as he did, was to deserve well of the world.

General

  The name suggests the honourable mention of a poem lately published, under the title of “The Baviad, or an Imitation of the first Satire of Persius.”… If this be a first production, the poet must proceed with the consciousness of genius: he has the ground work of all excellence, good sense, and a knowledge of just and harmonious expression.

	In these cold shades, beneath these shifting skies,
	Where Fancy sickens, and where Genius dies;
	Where few and feeble are the Muse’s strains,
	And no fine frenzy riots in the veins,
	There still are found a few to whom belong
	The fire of virtue and the soul of song;
	Whose kindling ardour still can wake the strings
	When learning triumphs, and when Gifford sings.
	To thee the lowliest Bard his tribute pays,
	His little wild-flower to thy wreath conveys;
	Pleas’d, if permitted round thy name to bloom,
	To boast one effort rescued from the tomb.
	While this delirious Age enchanted seems
	With hectic Fancy’s desultory dreams;
	While wearing fast away is every trace
	Of Grecian Vigour, and of Roman Grace,
	With fond delight, we yet one Bard behold,
	As Horace polish’d, and as Persius bold,
	Reclaim the Art, assert the Muse divine,
	And drive obtrusive Dulness from the shrine.

  Have got through half of Gifford’s “Memoirs of Ben Jonson.” What a “canker’d carle” it is! Strange that a man should be able to lash himself up into such a spiteful fury, not only against the living but the dead, with whom he engages in a sort of sciomachy in every page. Poor dull and dead Malone is the shadow at which he thrusts in his “Jonson,” as he did at poor Monck Mason, still duller and deader in his “Massinger.”

  All his notions are low, upstart, servile. He thinks it the highest honour to a poet to be patronised by a peer or by some dowager of quality. He is prouder of a court-livery than of a laurel-wreath; and is only sure of having established his claims to respectability by having sacrificed those of independence. He is a retainer to the Muses; a door-keeper to learning; a lacquey in the state. He believes that modern literature should wear the fetters of classical antiquity; that truth is to be weighed in the scales of opinion and prejudice; that power is equivalent to right; that genius is dependent on rules; that taste and refinement of language consist in word-catching. Many persons suppose that Mr. Gifford knows better than he pretends; and that he is shrewd, artful, and designing. But perhaps it may be nearer the mark to suppose that his dulness is guarantee for his sincerity; or that before he is the tool of the profligacy of others, he is the dupe of his own jaundiced feelings, and narrow, hoodwinked perceptions…. Mr. Gifford, as a satirist, is violent and abrupt. He takes obvious or physical defects, and dwells upon them with much labour and harshness of invective, but with very little wit or spirit. He expresses a great deal of anger and contempt, but you cannot tell very well why—except that he seems to be sore and out of humour. His satire is mere peevishness and spleen, or something worse—personal antipathy and rancour. We are in quite as much pain for the writer, as for the object of his resentment.

  He was a man of rare attainments and many excellent qualities. His Juvenal is one of the best versions ever made of a classical author, and his satire of the Baviad and Mæviad squabashed at one blow a set of coxcombs, who might have humbugged the world long enough. As a commentator he was capital, could he but have suppressed his rancours against those who had preceded him in the task; but a misconstruction or misinterpretation, nay, the misplacing of a comma, was in Gifford’s eyes a crime worthy of the most severe animadversion. The same fault of extreme severity went through his critical labours, and in general he flagellated with so little pity, that people lost their sense of the criminal’s guilt in dislike of the savage pleasure which the executioner seemed to take in inflicting the punishment.

  Considered as a poet, was merely Pope, without Pope’s wit and fancy; and whose satires are decidedly inferior in vigour and poignancy to the very imperfect juvenile performance of Lord Byron himself.

  Gifford has done a great deal for the text of Massinger, but not as much as might easily be done. His comparison of Shakspere with his contemporary dramatist is obtuse indeed.

  He was a man of extensive knowledge; was well acquainted with classic and old English lore; so learned, that he considered all other people ignorant; so wise that he was seldom pleased with anything; and, as he had not risen to much eminence in the world, he thought no one else was worthy to rise. He almost rivalled Jeffrey in wit, and he surpassed him in scorching sarcasm and crucifying irony. Jeffrey wrote with a sort of levity which induced men to doubt if he were sincere in his strictures: Gifford wrote with an earnest fierceness, which showed the delight which he took in his calling.

  Read the “Baviad” and “Mæviad,” preferred the former: the subject was too much exhausted for a new satire, at least to equal in pungent effect the former one. They are, however, both extremely good, and must have fallen like a giant’s arm upon the insect-like flutterings of the half-formed witlings whom they aimed to crush. But to imagine that Burns lived in comparative neglect while these apes were attracting notice by their absurdities!

  He was fierce, dogmatic, bigoted, libellous, and unsympathizing. Whatever may have been his talents, they were exquisitely unfitted for his position—his literary judgments being contemptible, where any sense of beauty was required, and principally distinguished for malice and word-picking. The bitter and snarling spirit with which he commented on the excellence he could not appreciate; the extreme narrowness and shallowness of his taste; the labored blackguardism in which he was wont to indulge under the impression that it was satire; his detestable habit of carrying his political hatreds into literary criticism; his gross personal attacks on Hunt, Hazlitt, and others who might happen to profess less illiberal principles than his own; made him a dangerous and disagreeable adversary, and one of the worst critics of modern times.

  Distinguished as a satirist, as a translator of satires, and as the editor of several of the illustrious but somewhat neglected dramatists of the Elizabethan age, his writings, admirable for sincerity, good sense, and learning, were also strongly tinged with bitterness and personality.

  He is the only man I ever attacked, respecting whom I have felt no regret. It would be easy for me at this distance of time to own that Gifford possessed genius, had such been the case. It would have been easy for me at any time. But he had not a particle. The scourger of poetasters was himself a poetaster. When he had done with his whip, everybody had a right to take it up, and lay it over the scourger’s shoulders; for though he had sense enough to discern glaring faults, he abounded in commonplaces. His satire itself, which, at its best never went beyond smartness, was full of them.

  The power wielded thirty years ago by that little arid mass of commonplace and dried venom is, to us, absolutely marvellous. The manner in which he exercised the critical profession showed, indeed, that he was perfectly skilled in his former one, especially in the adroit use of the awl. He was admirable at boring small holes; but beyond this he was nothing. If Shakespeare’s works had appeared in his time, he would have treated them precisely as he treated Shelley’s and Keats’, unless, indeed, they had been submitted to his revision before, or dedicated to him at publication.

  When Lord Byron began to write, the classical satirist of the day was William Gifford, our friend who did the butchering business in the Anti-Jacobin. He had published, in 1794 and ’95, the “Baviad” and “Mæviad;” and he was now extolled by the party who had taken him up, as the censor of the age. It is pleasant to know that the satirist has generally ranked in this country as an official of some dignity; though there is a constant tendency in officiality to degenerate into beadledom. One learns something of that age, and of the difference between our times and it, by observing the Giffordian phenomenon; by reflecting that Gifford was a great authority; was listened to when he mauled Shelley and Keats; and was deferred to respectfully by the author of “Childe Harold” and “Don Juan.”… Gifford was hearty in his abuse, as in his general energy, and flung his whole soul into Billingsgate with the same zeal which he had displayed when he studied algebra in the shoemaker’s shop, working out “my problems with a blunted awl on pieces of leather.” Hunt attacked him; Hazlitt attacked him; but I think the worst treatment he met with was from old Peter Pindar, whom he incautiously assailed in 1800, and from whom he instantly got a douche of savage buffoonery, which splashed him from head to foot. Those were energetic fighting-days—days when, if people hated each other, they said so in public. They gave no quarter, and expected none.

  William Gifford’s best title to fame was, no doubt, his edition of the “Early English Dramatists”—Ford, Massinger, Shirley, and Ben Jonson. His generous and able vindication of Jonson reflects credit both upon the critic and the poet.

  Although as a literary critic Gifford was crabbed and strangely wanting in taste, the fault was redeemed by strong common sense.

  How could a rhinoceros like Gifford have been expected to behave when what was hung in front of him for investigation and report was such an unprecedented invention of sheer phantasy and lusciousness as Keats’s “Endymion”?

  Gifford was so intent on denouncing the inaccuracies of others that he frequently failed to secure accuracy himself. The hectoring tone that he chose to adopt has been generally, though not universally, discarded by later scholars. In reading the old dramatists we do not want to be distracted by editorial invectives and diatribes.

  His critical taste was none of the most delicate, but he knew nonsense when he saw it, and possessing a considerable fund of rough but genuine humour, together with the mastery of a satiric verse which stands to that of Pope in the relation of the oaken cudgel to the rapier, he turned the faculty and the weapon to such effective account in the “Baviad” and the “Mæviad,” his two famous lampoons on the Della Cruscan school, as to reduce that incorporated society of idiots to its constituent atoms of individual imbecility.

  Gifford is perhaps our capital example in English of a cast of mind which is popularly identified with that of the critic, though in truth nothing is more fatal to the attainment of the highest critical competence. It was apparently impossible for him (as it has been, and, it would seem, is for others), to regard the author whom he was criticising, the editor who had preceded him in his labours, or the adversary with whom he was carrying on a polemic, as anything but a being partly idiotic and partly villainous, who must be soundly scolded, first for having done what he did, and secondly to prevent him from doing it again. So ingrained was this habit in Gifford that he could refrain from indulging it, neither in editing the essays of his most distinguished contributors, nor in commenting on their work…. Yet he was a really useful influence in more ways than one. Tho service that he did in forcibly suppressing the Della Cruscans nuisance is even yet admitted, and there has been plentiful occasion, not always taken, for similar literary dragonnades since. And his work as an editor of English classics, was, blemishes of manner and temper excepted, in the main very good work.

  Gifford did not apply his personal canons of taste with more serene assurance than Jeffrey to the most original poets of his time: but he was a duller man, and with all his classic zeal lacked Roman urbanity as conspicuously as Romantic imagination. Before the end of his editorship he had committed sins of blind rancour against the new poetry and the new prose which modern criticism justly finds unpardonable, and which raised up more than one avenger with a voice more resonant than his own…. In the presence of almost all that was great and prophetic in the literature of his time, Gifford was purely futile or mischievous; but his bludgeon fell at times upon weeds or reptiles.