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It is the warmest wish of my heart that the Earl of Bute may speedily complete the story of Roger Mortimer." Almon's Wilkes, i. 70, 86. Yet Wilkes within less than a year violently attacked Johnson in parliament. He said, 'The two famous doctors, Shebbeare and Johnson, are in this reign the state hirelings called pensioners. Their names, he continued, 'disgraced the Civil List.
See post, May 13, 1778. Mr. Croker's conjecture that Dr. Gent. Mag. xxviii. 555. Ib. xxix. 91. Before the seven years had run out, Shebbeare was pensioned. Smollett, in the preface to Humphry Clinker, represents the publisher of that novel as writing to the imaginary author: 'If you should be sentenced to the pillory your fortune is made. As times go, that's a sure step to honour and preferment.
John Shebbeare, has had his demerits in other ways excused to some extent on the score of Lydia whose surname, by the way, was "Fairchild," not unknown in later days of fiction. Even one who, if critical conscience would in any way permit it, would fain let the Tory dogs have a little the best of it, must, I fear, pronounce Lydia a very poor thing.
Shebbeare, who was a journalist, had the journalist faculty of "letting everything go in" of taking as much as he could from Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, etc., up to date ; and of throwing back to Afra for an interesting Indian, Canassatego. A virtuous one who reads it through will have to look to his virtue for reward.
Letters on the English Nation: By Batista Angeloni, a Jesuit, who resided many years in London. Translated from the original Italian by the Author of the Marriage Act. A Novel. 2 vols. Shebbeare published besides six Letters to the People of England in the years 1755-7, for the last of which he was sentenced to the pillory.
Shebbeare, a punster remarked that the king had pensioned a she-bear and a he-bear; to which Goldsmith replied, "Johnson, to be sure, has a roughness in his manner, but no man alive has a more tender heart. He has nothing of the bear but the skin."
Indeed, none of the objects of his munificence, with the single exception of Johnson, can be said to have been well selected; and the public, not unnaturally, ascribed the selection of Johnson rather to the Doctor's political prejudices than to his literary merits; for a wretched scribbler named Shebbeare, who had nothing in common with Johnson except violent Jacobitism, and who had stood in the pillory for a libel on the Revolution, was honored with a mark of royal approbation, similar to that which was bestowed on the author of the English Dictionary, and of the Vanity of Human Wishes.
The irony is factitious and forced; the sentiment unappealing; the coarseness quite destitute of Rabelaisian geniality; and the nomenclature may be sampled from "the Countess of Liberal" and "Lord Beef." I believe Shebbeare was once pilloried for his politics. If it had been for Lydia, I should not have protested. The next book to be mentioned is an agreeable change.
Shebbeare and Dr. Johnson have been pensioned, but this wretched South Briton is to be prosecuted. It was Fox, and not Burke, who on this occasion defended Johnson. Parl. Hist. xvii.1054. As Goldsmith was writing Retaliation at the very time that this second attack was made, it is very likely that it was the occasion, of the change in the line. In the original yet.
I mentioned the very liberal payment which had been received for reviewing; and, as evidence of this, that it had been proved in a trial, that Dr. Shebbeare had received six guineas a sheet for that kind of literary labour.
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