Samuel Pegge (the younger) on Edward Capell

I have OCRed and mounted the "Brief Memoirs of Edward Capell, Esq." by Samuel Pegge the younger at the Mr. Shakespeare web site.  It is a rare work, published in  Illustrations of the Literary History of the Eighteenth Century Consisting of Authentic Memoirs and Original Letters of Eminent Persons; and Intended As a Sequel to The Literary Anecdotes by John Nichols, F. S. A., vol. I pp. 465-476, 1817.  With friends like Pegge, however, Capell had no need of an enemy, and indeed, with George Steevens in the world, both men had an ample enemy.  This is a roundabout story, so let me begin with an extract from the 1909 Sidney Lee DNB, the entry on the great Shakespeare editor (and outlaw) George Steevens:

"Steevens, in 1789, having procured a block of marble, and having engraved upon it by means of aquafortis some Anglo-Saxon letters, placed it in the window of a shop in Southwark, and caused it to be represented to the Society of Antiquaries that it had been dug up in Kennington Lane, and was the tombstone of Hardecanute. Jacob Schnebbelie [q. v.] produced in good faith a drawing, which was engraved by Baeire and published in the ' Gentleman's Magazine' (1790, i. 217). Samuel Pegge, falling into the trap, read a paper on the inscription before the Society of Antiquaries on 10 Dec. 1789; but the deception was discovered before the disquisition was printed in the 'Archseologia.' An acrimonious correspondence between Steevens and those he hoped to dupe followed in the daily and monthly journals (Gent. Mag. 1790, i. 217, 290-92 ; General Evening Post, 26 Oct. 1790 ; NICHOLS, Lit. Illustrations, v. 430-32). Steevens finally committed the stone to the custody of Sir Joseph Banks, and it was regularly exhibited at his assemblies in Soho Square."

The sad Pegge of this anecdote was, I am fairly certain, the father of the Samuel Pegge who later wrote, more out of revenge than admiration, the Brief Memoir of Capell.  (There were two Samuel Pegges, father and son, and both were antiquaries and fellows of the society of antequaries.  I cannot be certain which wrote the article on Hardecanute, nor, for the purposes of this post, does it matter.  Suffice it to say they both had an ax to grind with Steevens). 

Pegge's "Brief Memoir," while purporting to redress a wrong done to Capell in the Biographia Dramatica of 1782, in fact does him more harm than good.  Nicholl, in the one illuminating footnote to the Pegge article he provides, assigns Steevens as the source of the derogatory observations on Capell published in the Biographia.  It would be much like Steevens.  It was rumored that Steevens bribed a printer to show him proofs of Capell's edition as it proceeded through the presses, and a latter day editor, G. Blakemore Evans has it "Steevens engaged in 'heavy filching from Capell'" (quoted in Murphy, Shakespeare in Print, p. 91).  While the unnamed grist for Pegge's animus must be Steevens, his mill grinds at poor Capell in an entirely deflating manner.  In fact, after reading the "Brief Memoir" one is not entirely sure if Pegge knew Capell or simply knew of him, and was using his memory to strike back at Steevens.  Listen to the sorts of things Capell's memoirist has to say of him:

• "...nothing but his industry could exceed his vanity."
• "...so that, in fact, 33 years of his life were absorbed in these Works : for he did little else..."
• "It cannot be allowed that Mr. Capell had any genius, by which I mean wit or invention ; for nothing original is known to have been written by him."
• "Neither had he any tincture of what is called taste."
• "He is so far rather a Commentator on the old Editors than on the Poet himself ; a task hardly worth the pains of a German Grammarian..." [Oh, how Pegge strikes home here!]
• "His vanity, it must be allowed, was a little aided in this weakness by the irritable state of his nerves, occasioned by a sedentary and secluded life."
• "Mr. Capell's style, it cannot but be confessed, is turgid to a great degree..."
• "The Bust prefixed to his Notes and the "School of Shakespeare," was taken, I presume, when he was in the meridian of health; for it conveys nothing of his features in profile to those who only knew him in the latter part of his life, when he was much afflicted with a scorbutic humour, which shewed itself so much in his face, that his features became coarse, swoln, and disguised."
• "...his constitution, from the nature of those infirmities which carried him off, suffered ultimately by these inamoratas."
• "If you had sufficient address to hear him prose about various readings, transpositions of passages, &c. you might preserve yourself tolerably well in his graces : —but it was labour and sorrow, for he was all over Shakespeare."
• "...it is said that the share he took in them was not the most agreeable, from his being too opiniatre and dictatorial."
• "There was once much intercourse between him and Mr. Garrick ; for I may not call it intimacy, as two men of such predominant vanities could never coalesce for any long time."
• "There was once a moment, but from what degree of duplicity on the part of Mr. Garrick I know not, when Mr. Capell cautioned a friend, in the manner of Pontius Pilate's Wife, "never to have any thing to do with David Garrick ; for, depend upon it, he will deceive you." This was at the close of Mr. Capell's life, when he was, as it were, determined to have the last blow, and when his peevishness, and dissatisfactions, perchance, at feeling himself of no consequence, entirely had soured a disposition that was naturally upon the fret, and easily fermented."
• "It is matter of no surprise that one who had affected so much refinement should fancy himself a man of taste. Painting, and Musick, I think, he-was equally a stranger to..."
• "As he must shew a taste in something, he chose Architecture, and built a house on the faith of his own skill in that Science, for which he paid exceedingly dear, to the great disappointment of those who succeeded to his fortune."
• "Here, for the last twenty years of his life, he passed his hours from May till October, equally unknowing and unknown, for he was of too haughty a spirit to associate with the inhabitants, and too much an humourist to be sought for by the neighbouring gentry."
• "Thus, while he mistook literary industry for genius, he thought preciseness was a proof of a refined understanding ; —long habit had changed the latter into a humoursome particularity and peevishness, which drove his friends from even making him elemosinary visits when he really wished and begged for a little company."

With a memoirist like this, who needs slanderers?  Take that, Steevens!