New Orleans daily crescent. [volume] ([New Orleans, La.]) 1851-1866, 1854-02-17
THE DAILY CRESCENT.
EDJToRJ.aL BooK..No1Es.

authorship, whose talents, whose iaaies, anu
whose wretched career recall but toe closely
+boso If that hapless minion Of the Muses.,
p;,hord savape whom rather the sympathies
.,d tbe torching narrative of DR. johnson than
his real literary merits, have immortalzed. we
say iu,mortalized, though we'll persuaded that,
Il, The first place, he can be no great things In
letters, who is immortalized by another, not
himself; and, secondly, that he whose immor-
tally is enwrapped within that OF DR.. Samuel
Johnson may come to have by no means an eter.
nal one
We have only the space to suggest, and moi
10 delineate at large, the parallel between Lip
nard and Savage. Both were almost equally
foundlings For though Lippard had none Of
the infamy of Savage's birth, his even exceeded
ii in penury. If not disowned, he was an orphan
almost from his cradle To Savage some of the
advantages of education were dealt out, even oy
the unnatural parents to whose protiigacy ne
owed nothing further, save the sad boon OF ms
existence: while casual charity was the Only
early friend and his own fervld mind Vhe only
instructor of poor George Lppard what the
disgraces Of SaYages origin entalied upon MN
If rersonal irregularities, the distresses OF Lip
p,rd,s youth, perhaps, as pardonably drew him
into Roth struggled up from obscurity into
something of reputation, and then sank away
into neglect and want, dying, the one IN Jail,
tle other in d garrett They had alike snatched
at fame and caught little but starvation. Oddly
euaueh. it may be said of the one that the only
rad fortune that ever befel him was that of
having often had to sleep in the streets along
with Samuel johnson !; and it is equally true Of
the other that his early death was the greatest
happiness that ever attended him, through a life
ofnisery and of exhausting over aspiration, that
seem at last to have waned into little short OF
the saddest imbecility. Savage, we believe, ex-
pired in prison for debt Of eight pounds ster-
ling; the ingenious humanity Of our laws denied
to Lippard even the final resource of such q
habitation and it was many day since any
one would have credited him for such a sum-
Alike in their literary and all other fortunes,
with the further resemblance of the same rough
yigor of style, they were yet much unlike in
this: that Lippard was no worse than vision
ary; Savage no better than an impostor. The
one abounded in generous, though it might be
crude ideas; the other was probably but o
cheat, even In his appeals to those sacred senti-
ments, by the Invocation of which, in his attacks
upon his pretended mother, he excited the pub
Lie pity towards himself and drew down the
public exeeration upon her. We cannot believe
that real son, however cruelty maltreated,
could ever have played such part. If the
infamy which he threw upon the Countess of
Macclesfeld was just, he was yet more unnatu-
raj than she. Her tale--thate he was only the
child of the nurse of her own, which had died in
its infancy--is far more probable than his In
truth, he was worthless, selfish fellow, in
whose whole history there is not trace of any
thing genial not a trait Of anything manly.
Physically, he stirs our pity by his known suf-
ferings and lamentations; but, after ALL we
compassionate without esteeming him for he
! utters the whine of the beggar rather than the
moan of genuine woe; he is AFFECT much more
than he is touching
As to genius, we are not SO much given to
the prevailing misuse Of that term as to apply
it to either. Talent is the utmost that can be
attributed to the one or the other In spite of
much the better education of the two, Savage
had little of it; and Lippard, though excessively
iH-educated, was gradually arriving ct much
The first, if born in more fortunate condition,
would have written worse or not at all; for he
wrote for bread the second, under like circum-
stances, wonld have produced better things for,
from his very childhood, sad and neglected as it
was, he seems to have had before his eyes the
bright vision of fame; was gradually purging
off the feculum Of ignorance and ill-taste; and
had he lived to savage's age (43l would proba.
bly, have become an author of solid merit. The
kindly Lippard was fervid without bitterness
the sensual Savage, fierce without warmth, The
mind of Lippard was a soil but too prolific, of a
weedy exuberance; his rivals only as much
correcter as it was thinner.
So much for Lippard, as comparable with
him Of more received renown, whom in fate he
most resembled. We have yet to measure him,
however, with an Immediate and more success
full ernulator, who, stealing his style and adopt
ing his faults, has, by the mere imitation Of
Lippard, without an atom of either his vigor,
his warmth or his Imagination, arrived at for
tune, while he whom he copied was sinking into
baggary. We refer, of course, to that mighty
master Of unrneaning magnifcence, that shall
lowest of prose-rhapsodists, parson Headley;
who has strid through Biography on the tallest
stills that ever circus performer mounted, told
battles in the strain Of Ensign Pistol and Cap
tain Bobadil, and lifted up History to the top
most heights Of rhodomontade!
As semi karharous nations have, if possessed
Of any imagination, an inveterate tendency to
bombast. SO, even amidst a cultivated people,
the half educated delight in fustian. 1t is the
boyish vice of the mind. Few, perhaps, have
ever written well, who did not begin by writing
bombast. The great difficulty is, that some
never get up even to that false height; while
others stay there for ever He that has never
been hombastie is no genius: he that continues
to be so is o bloekhead; and this, we take it,
is the true difference between Lippard and
Headley. In short, Lippard was the original,
Headley the imitator. As the former, an un-
formed, uneducated boy, wrote at 10, the other,
an educated man, wrote at 80 and continues
to write at perhaps As.
Had Lippard not gone on, improving all the
while, he would have been execrable: but
Headley Is ever as inveterately bad as he was
in the beginning, and therefore detestable.
While Lippard lived, there was a man who had
once written in the English language almost
as intolerably as Headly; now he stands with
out peer, past or present. Much what Nat
Lee wrote for tragedy when,he was mad, Head