Michelet that this very point of Kempis _having_ manufactured
Kempis is furiously and hopelessly litigated, three or four nations
claiming to have forged his work for him, the shocking old doubt will
raise its snaky head once more--whether this forger, who rests in so
much darkness, might not, after all, be of English blood. Tom, it may
be feared, is known to modern English literature chiefly by an
irreverent mention of his name in a line of Peter Pindar's (Dr Wolcot)
fifty years back, where he is described as
"Kempis Tom,
Who clearly shows the way to Kingdom Come"
Few in these days can have read him, unless in the Methodist version of
John Wesley Among those few, however, happens to be myself, which arose
from the accident of having, when a boy of eleven, received a copy of
the "De Imitatione Christi" as a bequest from a relation who died very
young, from which cause, and from the external prettiness of the book--
being a Glasgow reprint by the celebrated Foulis, and gaily bound--I
was induced to look into it, and finally read it many times over,
partly out of some sympathy which, even in those days, I had with its
simplicity and devotional fervour, but much more from the savage
delight I found in laughing at Tom's Latinity that, I freely grant to M
Michelet, is inimitable. Yet, after all, it is not certain whether the
original _was_ Latin.
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