Identifier: macliseportraitg00macl (find matches)
Title: The Maclise portrait-gallery of "illustrious literary characters", with memoirs biographical, critical, bibliographical & anecdotal, illustrative of the literature of the former half of the present century
Year: 1883 (1880s)
Authors: Maclise, Daniel, 1806-1870 Bates, William, d. 1884
Subjects: Authors Authors, English Journalists
Publisher: London : Chatto and Windus
Contributing Library: The Centre for 19th Century French Studies - University of Toronto
Digitizing Sponsor: University of Toronto

View Book Page: Book Viewer
About This Book: Catalog Entry
View All Images: All Images From Book
Click here to view book online to see this illustration in context in a browseable online version of this book.

Text Appearing Before Image:
tlytme; and that William Gifford and John Wilson Croker are not in anyrespect exceptions to its applicability. Both of these men were critics ofthe most acrimonious and venomous malignity, in whose hands the ferulaof Aristarchus became a poisoned dagger; and yet both produced sub-stantive w^orks of no mean ability. One, the Magnus Apollo of LordByron, was author of The Baviad and Mcpviad, those terse and vigoroussatires which annihilated the school of Delia Crusca ; and the other,in his Familiar Epistles to Frederick E. Jones, Esq., on the Preseftt Stateof the Irish Stage, which drove poor Edwin, the comedian, to the bottlewhich killed him,t gave evidence of that power of invective and sarcasmwhich was, in the future, to become the tool of private malice and partyferocity. Still these pieces themselves were purely critical in character, * The copy before me, the presentation one from Croker to Gifford, is the fourthedition, Dublin, 1805, 8vo. •\ Otir Actresses, by Mrs. C. B. Wilson.
Text Appearing After Image:
RIGHT HON. JOHN WILSON CROKER. 73 and differing in no essential respect from their authors subsequent prosediatribes in the Quarterly Review^ or the Courier^ cannot be held to in-validate the rule so neatly formulated by Dryden and Southey. Croker, though of English descent, was an Irishman by the accidentof birth, and first saw the light in County Gal way, in December, 1780.He was educated at the University of Dublin, where he graduated B.A.in 1800. He sat for many years for Downpatrick in the House ofCommons, and, for the first five years of his parliamentary career,represented his University ; but he had been among the most strenuousopponents of the Reform Bill, and resolutely withdrew from public affairsupon the dissolution which followed that momentous measure. He wasSecretary to the Admiralty, from 1809 to 1830; and, in 1828, became aPrivy Councillor. He was a bigoted Tory, says Edmund Yates, aviolent partisan, and a most malevolent and unscrupulous critic. * In thespring of 180

Note About Images