Born at Cork, 10th July 1793, and educated at Trinity College, Dublin, at twenty six took his LL.D., taught in Cork for ten years, and in 1823 removed to London. His first of many contributions to Blackwood’s Magazine—a Latin translation of “Chevy Chase”—appeared in 1819. In 1828 he joined the staff of the Standard, and he was one of the originators of Fraser’s Magazine in 1830. He wrote his “Shakespeare Papers” for Blackwood in 1837, and in 1840 began his “Magazine Miscellanies.” His life was irregular, and he was often in jail for debt. He died 21st August 1842. His “Whitehall, or the Days of George IV” (1827), is a parody on the historical novel; “John Manesty” (1844) was completed after his death by Charles Oilier. His “Homeric Ballads” were published in 1849. A collection of his papers was edited by R. S. Mackenzie (New York, 1855–57), and his “Miscellanies” by Montagu (1885).

Personal

  I wish I had it in my power to show you in any way how deeply I and my friends feel indebted to you. I have no wish you should give up your incognito unless you find it perfectly agreeable to do so; but I hope you some day will, or at all events that you will point out to me how I can make you any return for all your kindnesses. It is not merely that it would give me satisfaction were you to allow me to offer you the remuneration we make to our ordinary contributors; but the hearty good will with which you enter into the very spirit of “Maga” lays me under a weight of obligation which I cannot repay you.

  His manners, devoid of all affectation, simple and unstudied, were singularly engaging. No robe of reserve did he draw round him, like too many men of celebrity, whose silence is perhaps the best safeguard of their fame. None of these absurd misanthropic monkey airs, which almost established the reputation of Byron, and certainly veiled the poverty of his mind, did he ever display. He maintained a certain boyishness of heart and character to the very last, and though his knowledge of mankind was extensive and accurate, he could be as easily deceived, as if he were only a raw youth. There was a snowy candor in his manner, which lent a perfect charm to all he said and did, and the most unlettered person felt as much at ease in his company as the most learned.

  In person, Dr. Maginn was rather under the middle stature, slight in figure, active in motion, and very natural in manners. He was gray at the age of 26, and, during his last ten years, was almost white—exhibiting the peculiarity of bright, keen eyes, and youthful features with the hoary locks of age.

  To him the gossip of the modern world was as familiar as the learning of the ancient. From, some organic defect of utterance his speech was occasionally hesitating; yet when his words came forth they were full of meaning—always pleasant, often wise. It cannot, however, be denied he was best of a morning,—the double excitement of the table and the talk was sometimes too much for him.

  What can be therefore more sad than to survey, however imperfectly, this profitless and broken career; and know that, after all, one so variously and rarely gifted,—of learning so profound and extensive,—who, in philosophy was pronounced by Dr. Moir, “abler than Coleridge,” in satire, declared by Macnish “equal to Swift,”—as a political writer, termed by another great authority, “the greatest in the world,”—as a companion, remembered by Charles Knight as “one of the pleasantest and most improving of his visitors,”—whose intellect, as the “Modern Pythagorean” wrote “adorned every theme that it touched,”—who was characterized by his biographer, Kenealy, “as a scholar, perhaps the most universal of his time,—far more various in his learning than Voltaire, far more profound and elegant than Johnson,”—of whose “abilities as a writer and a conversationalist, and excellent nature as a man,” Maclise could not find “words powerful enough to convey his opinion,”—whom Richard Oastler, who was his companion in the Fleet, styled “the brightest star of intellectual light,”—to whom the able editor of the “Homeric Ballads” said the “celebrated eulogy of Parr on Fox so perfectly applied that it seemed to have been written for him,”—and who was described to Sir Robert Peel by the friend who wrote to that illustrious statesman on behalf of the dying man, as “an individual of exalted genius, the most universal scholar, perhaps, of the age, and as good, and kind, and gentle-hearted a being as ever breathed;”—should perish in the very prime and flower of life; and this, as we must infer, from his own imprudences in great measure;—and be indebted to the munificence of a stranger for the support of his last days, and the means of decent burial.

  A literary Swiss who readily sold himself to any buyer, or to two buyers at the same time—one being Tory, the other Whig…. Maginn came to London in 1823–24 with as large a “stock-in-trade” of knowledge as was ever brought by one man from Ireland to England; yet it was profitless and almost fruitless. His profound learning, extensive reading, his familiarity with ancient and modern languages, his ready and brilliant wit, were utterly ineffectual in achieving for him independence or fame…. He had an awkward impediment of speech, not quite a stutter; and soon after he achieved repute, his countenance, never very expressive, and certainly not handsome, assumed the terrible character that self-indulgence never fails to give. He is an example of the men who could fight for the shadow, while utterly ignoring the substance of honour, and is one of the shames as well as one of the glories of Literature. No doubt the fertile source of his misery was drink. He was always drunk when he could obtain the means of intoxication; consequently he seldom put pen to paper in a condition of entire sobriety, and sometimes did not know what he wrote.

  “The Adjutant;” “Ensign;” “The Modern Rabelais;” “Odoherty;” “Peter MacGrawler;” “The Prince of Pedagogues;” “The Standard Bearer.”

  Maginn’s biographers, S. C. Hall excepted, have dealt kindly with him, but his character is scarcely a more agreeable spectacle than his life. His dissipation might be forgiven, but it is not so easy to overlook the discredit he brought upon the profession of letters by his systematic want of principle, his insensibility to the courtesies and amenities of life, in a word, by the extreme debasement of his standard in everything but scholarship. Thackeray’s portrait of him as “Captain Shandon” in “Pendennis” is probably the best which we possess; the vague encomiums of his other friends, Lockhart’s epitaph excepted, seem mainly prompted by good nature.

  We are by no means proud of the part Maginn took in the Magazine, nor of himself or the connection so speedily formed, and to place him immediately after the Great Twin Brethren who formed it is too honourable a place. But there was no one of the contributors who had for a number of years so much to do with “Maga,” or who wore her colours with more apparent devotion: and his history, never written at any length or deserving to be so, is full of the tragic contrast—so often, alas! to be found in the lives of self-ruined men—of brilliant and careless youth and a maturity miserable and shameful. He was turned, indeed, into Captain Shandon, a picture in some respects too good for him, by Thackeray; and Lockhart for one had a lingering affection for him all through, and wrote him a tragico-jesting epitaph. But he has never had any justice, as who of his kind ever has? He was not a bad man: he was full of generous and friendly impulses, wit, and sometimes wisdom: but so spoilt and hampered by other qualities that every promise ended in the mean and squalid misery of a nature fallen, fallen, fallen from its high estate. Such a man cannot have justice from the world, scarcely even pity. It is almost immoral to be sorry for him, or to remember that once he was young and an emblem of all that was joyous, delightful, and gay.

General

  Originality, the distinctive attribute of genius, he possessed in no ordinary degree; and whether we examine his criticisms or his maxims, grave or gay, his translations or his songs, his tales or his humorous compositions, we shall find that to no one preceding writer is he much indebted for his mode of thought and style. He resembles Aristophanes, or Lucian, or Rabelais, more perhaps than any modern author; he has the same keen and delicate raillery, the withering sarcasm, the strange and humorous incident, the quaint learning, the bitter scorn of quackery and imposture, the grave and laughable irony, the profound and condensed philosophy of this illustrious triad; but the grossness and obscenity, the loose and depraved sentiments, the utter defiance of modesty and decorum, which their ordinary imitators substitute for wit and wisdom, he does not possess in the slightest degree. Nothing can be more sly than his satire—nothing, when he wishes it, more terrific or more scathing; but it is always clothed in the robe of decency, and does not ever disgust. Even Swift has not equalled him in sarcasm, though in the power of irony he may be entitled to more praise, as having preceded Maginn.

  Why are not his essays collected? Who holds them back from an expectant public? He wrote when our periodical literature was in its zenith; yet he bore away the palm; and his clear, firm hand might be discerned amid a host of inferior writers. There was no mistaking that emphatic, pure, and stately English of his. No modern writer in periodicals has ever given to satire a less repulsive form of personality. No private venom seemed to direct the powerful pen which spared not Affectation and lashed Presumption till she bled to death.

  It is, to be sure, enviable praise to be associated with so brilliant a name as Swift; but, much as we admire the writings of the Dean, we must in justice say that they are far short of those of Maginn, for Swift was morose and cynical and austere, Maginn was kind and gentle and child-like. Swift’s whole conversation was irony or sarcasm; Maginn’s was entirely genial and anecdotical, and free from bitterness.

  One of the most brilliant of the band of magazine writers to whom Blackwood first afforded a medium—younger than the great critics of the reviews, more dashing but less serious, who in one way never reached the level of Jeffrey, but in another surpassed and excelled him…. Maginn was, if anything, less scrupulous than the original coterie of Edinburgh, the compilers of the Chaldee Manuscript: and he had not only an excellent style, but an easy and powerful command of classical subjects, than which nothing is more effective and telling in periodical literature. A bit of brilliant translation, an adaptation from Homer, a scrap of Horace, lightly turned into contemporary use, is everything to the light gallop of a slashing article, and confers on the writer a position which the world immediately appreciates, and the less learned envy. Everybody will remember Captain Shandon, in “Pendennis,” peppering his sentences with learned extracts from old Burton. Maginn, unfortunately, had many features like those of Shandon, and like him lived a distracted life from luxury to misery, through prisons and disreputable hidings, and every vicissitude that poverty, and levity and bad habits and an unstable mind produce.

  The man who seldom wrote except in company and generally in the midst of tumult, who in the middle of a sentence would relieve the strain of thought by throwing himself back in his chair and telling a humorous story, and who then would suddenly break off in his talk and resume his pen, could not possibly concentrate his powers for the production of steady continuous work.

  Nevertheless it is doubtful whether Maginn can be regarded as a “wasted genius;” for if he had really anything serious to say which would have been of much interest to humanity at large, surely here or there some note of it would have been apparent in his current work. But we look in vain for any such sign. Jokes innumerable and excellent, parodies many and first-rate, paraphrases from Horace of much wit and ingenuity, we find indeed; but all these were humorous reflections in the current with which he and his fame were swept away. His translations show more stability; and if we take his Homeric ballads and put them beside his translation from Vidocq we must admit an unusually wide range of literary sympathy. But the light of these is reflected; and though it is impossible to deny him originality or imagination, both of these required a stimulus from some other mind to set them in action. It was not when alone with his own thoughts, but when he was parodying Coleridge or Shelley, that he was in most danger of “dropping into poetry.”

  His faculties were undoubtedly extraordinary; they were those of an accomplished scholar grafted on a brilliant improvisatore, the compound constituting a perfectly ideal magazinist. Exuberant to the verge of extravagance, he could provide inexhaustible entertainment on any number of topics; his humour made the most ephemeral trifles interesting for the moment, and his learning and critical discrimination gave weight to his more serious disquisitions. His extreme facility inevitably prejudiced him as an artist. He has left only two works of imagination perfect in their respective styles: “The City of the Demons,” and “Bob Burke’s Duel with Ensign Brady,” perhaps the raciest Irish story ever written. Half a dozen more like it would have won him a high reputation.

  All the persons hitherto mentioned in this chapter appear by undoubted right in any history of English Literature: it may cause a little surprise to see that of Maginn figuring with them. Yet his abilities were scarcely inferior to those of any; and he was kept back from sharing their fame only by infirmities of character and by his succumbing to that fatal Bohemianism which, constantly recurring among men of letters, exercised its attractions with special force in the early days of journalism in this century…. The collections of Maginn’s work are anything but exhaustive, and the work itself suffers from all the drawbacks, probable if not inevitable, of work written in the intervals of carouse, at the last moment, for ephemeral purposes. Yet it is instinct with a perhaps brighter genius than the more accomplished productions of some much more famous men. The Homeric Ballads, though they have been praised by some, are nearly worthless; and the longer attempts in fiction are not happy. But Maginn’s shorter stories in Blackwood’s, especially the inimitable “Story without a Tail,” are charming; his more serious critical work, especially that on Shakespeare, displays a remarkable combination of wide reading, critical acumen, and sound sense; and his miscellanies in prose and verse, especially the latter, are characterised by a mixture of fantastic humour, adaptive wit, and rare but real pathos and melody, which is the best note of the specially Irish mode. It must be said, however, that Maginn is chiefly important to the literary historian as the captain of a band of distinguished persons, and as in a way the link between the journalism of the first and the journalism of the second third of the century.

  Thackeray has immortalised him in Captain Shandon; but if he had the weaknesses of that well-known character he had certainly all his cleverness and more than all his accomplishments. For Maginn’s more serious articles show no inconsiderable learning; while his best humorous articles are simply excellent.