entirely the company of the earl of Bute and his other distinguished friends at London, and planted himself down in a villa, which he built near his former residence in East Lothian, and where he continued to reside for the next twelve years. To increase the felicity of a settled home, he married a lady of his own name in 1770, by whom he never had any children.
Three tragedies, the Fatal Discovery, Alonzo, and Alfred, successively appeared in 1769, 1773, and 1778; but, though received at first with considerable applause, they took no permanent hold of the stage; and thus seemed to confirm the opinion which many English critics had avowed in regard to the success of Douglas that it was owing to no peculiar powers of dramatic composition in the author, but simply to the national character of the piece, with a slight aid from its exhibition of two very popular passions, maternal and filial tenderness.[2] The reception of the last mentioned play was so cool, that he ceased from that time to write for the stage.
- ↑ The elder Sheridan, then manager of the theatre at Dublin, sent Mr Home a gold medal in testimony of his admiration of Douglas; and his wife, a woman not less respectable for her virtues than for genius and accomplishments, drew the idea of her admired novel of Sydney Biddulph, as her introduction bears, from the genuine moral effect of that excellent tragedy." Mackenzie's Life of Home, p. 47.
- ↑ "As we sat over our tea," says Boswell on this subject, "Mr Home's tragedy of Douglas was mentioned. I put Dr Johnson in mind that once, in a Coffee-house at Oxford, he called to old Mr Sheridan, 'How came you, sir, to give Home a gold medal[1] 'for writing that foolish play?' and defied Mr Sheridan to show ten good lines in it. He did not insist that they should be together; but that there were not ten good lines in the whole play. He now persisted in this. I endeavoured to defend that pathetic and beautiful tragedy, and repeated the following passage: Sincerity,
Thou first of virtues, let no mortal leave
Thy onward path, altho' the earth should gape,
And from the gulph of hell destruction cry,
To take dissimulation's winding way.Johnson. 'That will not do, sir. Nothing is good but what is consistent with truth or probability, which this is not. Juvenal indeed gives us a noble picture of inflexible virtue:
He repeated the lines with great force and dignity; then added, 'And after this comes Johnny Home, with his earth gaping and his destruction crying!—Pooh!'—Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides.It must be acknowledged Boswell was not fortunate in the specimen he produced, and that the passage quoted by Johnson from Juvenal is infinitely superior. The circumstances attending the representation of Douglas were not such as to dispose an English critic to allow its merit. In the first place, the national taste was in some degree committed in the judgment passed upon the play by the favourite actor and manager; and it was not only galling to himself, but to all who relied upon his taste, that he should have been mistaken. In the next place, the Scots did not use their triumph with discretion; they talked of the merits of Douglas in a strain quite preposterous, and of which no unfair specimen is to be found in the anecdote of a Caledonian who, being present in the pit of Drury Lane one night of its performance, is said to have exclaimed, in the insolence of his exultation, "Whar's your Wully Shakspeare nou?" Such ridiculous pretensions are now forgotten; but they were advanced at the time, and, from their extreme arrogance and absurdity, could not fail to exasperate a mind so ready to repel insult as Johnson's, and so keenly alive as his was to the honour of the national literature of England. The natural consequence followed: he decried Douglas perhaps as much as it was overvalued by its admirers; and his acquaintance with far superior compositions, must have enabled him, as in the instance above quoted, to pour derision upon it with an effect which the more judicious part of its admirers could not contend with, the more especially as the noise of undiscriminating applause with which it was hailed, had induced them to assume higher ground than their sober judgment would have led them to fix upon. And indeed, it may be a question whether the same cause that contributed to the first popularity of Douglas does not still continue to operate, preserving to our only tragedy a higher rank than it really is entitled to occupy: it is rare that the parents of an only child do not love and admire him for virtues which all the world else fails to discover that he is possessed of.Esto bonus miles, tutor bonus, arbiter idem
Integer: ambiguæ si quando citabere testis
Incertæque rei, Phalaris licet imperet, ut sis
Falsus, et admoto dictet perjuria tauro,
Summum crede nefas, animam præferre pudori,
Et, propter vitam, vitæ perdere causas.'
