literature, the best sentences of the best writers, and sometimes the ludricous beyond the gay; pages of Barrow, whole letters of Richardson, whole scenes of Foote, favourite pieces from the periodical press.' And this marvellous miscellany of remembered literature was set in a framework of his own admirable sense (sometimes, however, highly paradoxical) and trenchant wit and humour. Many of his pointed sayings were remembered. Being on one occasion informed that Southey considered his poem Madoc as likely to be a valuable possession to his family, Porson answered, 'Madoc will be read-when Homer and Virgil are forgotten.' The ornate style of Gibbon was his aversion. 'There could not,' he said, ‘be a better exercise for a schoolboy than to turn a page of The Decline and Fall into English. Unhappily he is even better remembered for such Facetiæ Cantabrigienses as:

I went to Frankfort and got drunk

With that most learn'd professor, Brunck;
I went to Worms and got more drunken
With that more learn'd professor, Ruhnken.
When Dido found Æneas would not come,
She mourned in silence and was di do dum.

From the Letters on Hawkins's 'Johnson.' Mr URBAN,-Two canons of criticism are undisputed: that an author cannot fail to use the best possible word on every occasion, and that a critic cannot chuse but know what that word is. And if these rules hold good in words, why not in sentences? These points being granted, it follows that whenever Sir John Hawkins, in quoting any part of Johnson's works, adopts a reading different from the editions, it is to be replaced in the text, and the other discarded. Now to apply. We read in the vulgar editions of London, vol. xi. p. 319, ' And fix'd on Cambria's solitary shore.' But how much better is Sir John's reading (56)! And fix'd in Cambria's solitary shore.' I would not believe that Johnson wrote otherwise, though Johnson himself should affirm it. Again, in the last number of The Rambler, vol. vii. p. 395, Johnson says, or is made to say, 'I have endeavoured to refine our language to grammatical purity.' How tame, dull, flat, lifeless, insipid, prosaic, &c. is this, compared to what the Knight has substituted (291) -grammar and purity! A fine instance of the figure Hen dia duoin! like Virgil's pateris et auro; or like— but I will not overpower you with my learning; or, more properly speaking, with my lettered ignorance; for that is the statutable phrase, and so it ought to have been printed in the verses on Levett, vol. xi. p. 366, upon the authority of the Knight (555), instead of lettered arrogance Lettered ignorance is a beautiful oxymoron, and hints that people who affect to be men of learning may be very ignorant notwithstanding. Examples, I suppose, will occur to every reader. Here I cannot help hazarding, though somewhat out of its place, a conjecture of my own upon a passage in Sir John's work (311), Among men of real learning there is but one opinion-' Ought it not to be, ‘Among us men of real learning—'? . . . Critics in a dead language, when they dislike the common text, quarrel with the careless or faithless transcribers. My spleen is not less moved by those negligent,

or worse than negligent, rogues, the printers, who have given us, in the preface to Johnson's Dictionary, vol. ix. p. 221, the following paragraph: 'In gathering the authorities, I forbore to copy those which I thought likely to occur whenever they were wanted. It is remarkable that in reviewing my collection, I found the word sea unexemplified.' Now would you believe, Mr Urban, that not a word of this is genuine? No. The true reading, or nearly the true reading (for the Knight (344) has not favoured us with the exact words) runs thus: So near perfection have I brought this Dictionary, that, upon a review of it, previous to my drawing up the preface, I am unable to detect the casual omission of more than one article, the appellative ocean.' You, I dare say, Mr Urban, and many others, had no more wit than to imagine that Johnson was rather confessing his weakness than exulting in his strength; that he meant to show how the most common things may escape our notice, and therefore says, 'In reviewing my collection, I found the word sea unexemplified.' See, Sir, how griev ously you were mistaken. Johnson, in the sentence we have retrieved, boasts of the perfection to which he has brought his work, in the modest style of Exegi monumentum-: and it was not the word sea unexemplified that made the single fault, but the appellative ocean omitted.

The next part of my task I would gladly decline, of proposing some corrections in Sir John's work. I shudder at my own rashness; but, since I have begun, it is too late to retreat. P. 384, I once travelled with Richardson in the Fulham stage-coach.' Tell me the truth, Mr Urban, is there not something in this sentence that grates upon your round and religious ears? If the date of the fact were settled, I should pronounce at once that Sir John wrote, 'My own coach being out of order, I once travelled.'—A like omission has happened (419), 'I retired and staid in the outer room to take him home." Read boldly, 'To take him home in my own coach.' Whoever is well acquainted with the Knight's writings knows that he never misses an opportunity of using the pronoun of the first person. It was on this ground I offered my first conjecture. Thus we find, from the beginning of the volume to the end, not only my own coach, but also my servants. My servant. My lands. My countryhouse. My gate in the country. My gardener. While I was chairman. Intelligence in my judicial capacity. Kelly practised under me. A bill found before me. I have discharged debtors [i.e. as judge, not as creditor]. My discourse with Lord Rochford. My conversation with a nobleman. Bishop Hoadley himself told me [what he had told all the world before]. Sir John (386) has given a list of the books in ana, but has forgotten one of the most famous, called Jomilleriana. This is the more extraordinary, because he is indebted to it for two of his best stories in pages 192 and 348; and the Knight is a man of such nice honour that he never borrows from an author without acknowledging the obligation. Witness Mr Boswell, Mrs Piozzi, the Gentle man's and European Magazines, &c.

Did I tell you, Mr Urban, that Sir John has a delicate hand at a compliment? If I told you so, I told you nothing but the truth. Out of fifty proofs I shall produce two. P. 211, Dr Hill obtained from one of those universities (St Andrews), which would scarce refuse a degree to an apothecary's horse, a diploma. The civil things that Johnson said of Scotland were highly

grateful and honourable to the natives, or Mr Boswell would not have recorded them. But, in my mind, the Knight is far superior to his model both in sentiment and language.

Porson's Tracts and Criticisms were collected by Kidd (1815). See Selby Watson's Life of him (1861), and his Correspondence edited by Lugard (1867).

Sharon Turner (1768–1847), a London solicitor, London-born but of Yorkshire extraction, commenced in 1799 the publication of a series of works on English history. The first was a History of the Anglo-Saxons (1799-1805); the second, a History of England (1814-29), ultimately brought down to the end of the reign of Elizabeth; the whole series being comprised in twelve volumes, and containing much new and interesting information on the government, laws, literature, and manners, as well as on the civil and ecclesiastical history, of the country. From an ambitious attempt to rival Gibbon in loftiness of diction, Sharon Turner disfigured his History, especially in the later volumes, by pomp of expression and involved intricacy of style. The early part of his History, the labour of sixteen years, may be said to have revealed their ancestors to modern Englishmen, and gave a vast impulse to historical study and research; and though his work is now somewhat antiquated, it may safely be said that he made a much greater advance on his predecessors than his more fully equipped successors have done on him. He also wrote a very orthodox Sacred History of the World, in two volumes, and so late as 1845 published an historical poem, Richard III.

William Roscoe (1753-1831) was the only son of a Liverpool innkeeper and market-gardener. He was articled to an attorney in 1769, and began to practise in 1774. In 1777 he published a poem, Mount Pleasant, and another in 1787, The Wrongs of Africa, a protest against the slave-trade. Having in youth acquired a competent knowledge of Latin, French, and Italian, he applied himself about 1789 to the great task he had long meditated, a Life of Lorenzo de Medici, called the Magnificent (2 vols. 1796). The work ranked its author among the most popular of the day; a second edition was soon called for, and Cadell & Davies purchased the copyright for £1200. About the same time Roscoe relinquished practice as an attorney, and studied for the Bar, but in 1799 became partner and manager in a Liverpool bank. His next literary appearance was as the translator of The Nurse (1798), a poem from the Italian of Luigi Tansillo. His second great work, The Life and Pontificate of Leo X. (4 vols. 1805), though carefully prepared, and also enriched with new information, had not the success of his Life of Lorenzo. 'The history of the reformation of religion,' it was truly said, 'involved many questions of subtle disputation, as well as many topics of character and conduct; and, for a writer of great candour and discernment, it was scarcely possible to satisfy

either the Papists or the Protestants.' Roscoe's liberal views and his accomplishments recommended him to his townsmen as a fit person to represent them in Parliament, and he was accordingly elected in 1806. He spoke in favour of the abolition of the slave-trade, and of the civil disabilities of the Catholics, thereby exciting against him a powerful and violent opposition; and on the dissolution in the following spring he was not again returned. But he still took a warm interest in passing events, and published several pamphlets on the topics of the day. A projected History of Art and Literature was not carried out. Pecuniary embarrassments came to cloud his latter days. The banking establishment of which he was a partner was forced in 1816 to suspend payment, and Roscoe had to sell his library, pictures, and other works of art; but his love of literature continued undiminished. The Butterfly's Ball (1807), the bestknown of his poems, was written for the entertainment of his youngest child; the earliest (1777) was a descriptive poem, Mount Pleasant. He gave valuable assistance in the establishment of the

Royal Institution of Liverpool. He edited an edition of Pope, which showed but little research or discrimination; and in his best work De Quincey detected 'the feebleness of the mere belles-lettrist.' See the Life by his son Henry (1833), the Memoir by J. S. Traill (1853), and Espinasse's Lancashire Worthies (2nd series, 1877).

Archibald Alison (1757-1839), the son of a Provost of Edinburgh, studied at Glasgow University and Balliol College, Oxford, received Anglican orders in 1784, and had held several preferments, including a prebend of Salisbury and the perpetual curacy of Kenley, Shropshire, when in 1800 he returned to his native city, and till 1831 served there as an Episcopal minister. In 1790 he published his Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste, designed to prove that material objects appear beautiful or sublime in consequence of their association with our moral feelings and affections; the objects presented to the eye generate trains of thought and pleasing emotion, and these constitute our sense of beauty. This theory, referring all our ideas of beauty to the law of association, was long maintained and disputed. Alison's too simple æsthetic theory was subsequently maintained by Jeffrey, but has been superseded by the modified associationist doctrines of Bain and Herbert Spencer, and is now mainly of historic interest. His two volumes of sermons (1814-15) were, like Blair's, ‘elegant' in language, non-doctrinal and non-controversial. The following extracts are from his Essays:

Historic Association.

Even the peasant, whose knowledge of former times extends but to a few generations, has yet in his village some monuments of the deeds or virtues of his forefathers, and cherishes with a fond veneration the memorial of those good old times to which his imagination

returns with delight, and of which he loves to recount the simple tales that tradition has brought him. And what is it that constitutes the emotion of sublime delight which every man of common sensibility feels upon his first prospect of Rome? It is not the scene of destruction which is before him. It is not the Tiber, diminished in his imagination to a paltry stream, flowing amidst the ruins of that magnificence which it once adorned. It is not the triumph of superstition over the wreck of human greatness, and its monuments erected upon the very spot where the first honours of humanity have been gained. It is ancient Rome which fills his imagination. It is the country of Cæsar, of Cicero, and Virgil which is before him. It is the mistress of the world which he sees, and who seems to him to rise again from her tomb to give laws to the universe. All that the labours of his youth, or the studies of his maturer age, have acquired with regard to the history of this great people, open at once on his imagination, and present him with a field of high and solemn imagery which can never be exhausted. Take from him these associations-conceal from him that it is Rome that he sees, and how different would be his emotion !

Sound coloured by Association.

The howl of the wolf is little distinguished from the howl of the dog, either in its tone or in its strength; but there is no comparison between their sublimity. There are few, if any, of these sounds so loud as the most common of all sounds, the lowing of a cow. Yet this is the very reverse of sublimity. Imagine this sound, on the contrary, expressive of fierceness or strength, and there can be no doubt that it would become sublime. The hooting of the owl at midnight, or amid ruins, is strikingly sublime; the same sound at noon, or during the day, is very far from being so. The scream of the eagle is simply disagreeable when the bird is either tame or confined; it is sublime only when it is heard amid rocks and deserts, and when it is expressive to us of liberty and independence, and savage majesty. The neighing of a war-horse in the field of battle, or of a young untrained horse when at large among mountains, is powerfully sublime. The same sound in a cart-horse or a horse in the stable is simply indifferent, if not disagreeable. No sound is more absolutely mean than the grunting of swine. The same sound in the wild boaran animal remarkable both for fierceness and strength -is sublime. The low and feeble sounds of animals which are generally considered the reverse of sublime are rendered so by association. The hissing of a goose and the rattle of a child's plaything are both contemptible sounds; but when the hissing comes from the mouth of a dangerous serpent, and the noise of the rattle is that of the rattlesnake, although they do not differ from the others in intensity, they are both of them highly sublime. . . . There is certainly no resemblance, as sounds, between the noise of thunder and the hissing of a serpent-between the growling of a tiger and the explosion of gunpowder-between the scream of the eagle and the shouting of a multitude: yet all of these are sublime. In the same manner, there is as little resemblance between the tinkling of the sheep-fold bell and the murmuring of the breeze-between the hum of the beetle and the song of the lark-between the twitter of the swallow and the sound of the curfew; yet all these are beautiful.

John Howie (1735-93), a farmer at Lochgoin near Eaglesham in Renfrewshire, was sprung of a family which claimed descent from an Albigensian refugee of the name of Huet in the thirteenth century, and which had certainly suffered persecution and forfeiture for its adherence to the Covenant in the reign of Charles II. He was as keen and devout a Presbyterian as his ancestors, and his leisure was employed in the collection of a number of Covenanting relics still shown in the house at Lochgoin, and also in the editing of Presbyterian tracts and sermons, and the composition of the Scots Worthies (1774), a series of biographies of Presbyterian saints and martyrs from Patrick Hamilton down to James Renwick. The information which these biographies contain is taken chiefly from Knox, Calderwood, Wodrow, Patrick Walker, and other similar sources; but their pages are sometimes enriched (notably in the interesting life of Captain Paton) from the stories of local and family tradition. Howie was a workmanlike compiler, and wrote a simple and not ineffective style, and his book well deserved the national popularity it long enjoyed as a Presbyterian hagiography. Of the recent reprints, the great majority, like that by Rev. W. H. Carslaw (1870), omit the curious and characteristic 'Appendix containing a short Historical Hint of the Wicked Lives and Miserable Deaths of some of the most Remarkable Apostates and Bloody Persecutors in Scotland, from the Reformation to the Revolution.' The extract which follows is from the life of Captain Paton:

The Captain, with a few more, being one night quartered in the fore-mentioned house of Lochgoin, with James Howie, who was one of his fellow-sufferers; at which time one Captain Ingles, with a party, lay at the Dean of Kilmarnock's, who sent out parties on all hands to see what they could apprehend: and that night a party, being out in quest of some of the sufferers, came to Meadowhead, and from thence went to another remote place in the muirs of Fenwick, called Croilburn; but finding nothing there, they went next to Lochgoin, as apprehending they would not miss their design there; and that they might come upon this place more securely, they sent about five men with one Serjeant Rae by another way, whereby the main body could not come so well up undiscovered.

The sufferers had watched all night, which was very stormy, by turns; and about day-break the Captain, on account of his asthmatical disorder, went to the far-end of the house for some rest. In the meanwhile, one George Woodburn went out to see if he could observe any (but it seems he looked not very surely); and going to secret duty instead of this, from which he was but a little time returned, until, on a sudden, ere they were aware, Serjeant Rae came to the inner door of the house, and cried out, Dogs! I have found you now. The four men took to the spence-James and John Howie happened to be then in the byre, among the cattle. The wife of the house, one Isabel Howie, seeing none but the serjeant, cried to them to take the hills, and not be killed in the house. She took hold of Rae as he was coming boldly forward to the door of the place in which

they were, and ran him backward out of the outer door of the house, giving him such a hasty turn as made him lie on the ground. In the meanwhile the Captain, being alarmed, got up, put on his shoes, though not very hastily, and they got all out, by which time the rest of the party was up. The serjeant fired his gun at them; which one John Kirkland answered by the like with his. The bullet passed so near the serjeant that it took off the knot of hair on the side of his head. The whole crew being alarmed, the Captain and the rest took the way for Eaglesham muirs, and they followed. Two of the men ran with the Captain, and other two stayed by turns, and fired back on the enemy, the enemy firing on them likewise; but by reason of some wetness their guns had got in coming through the water, they were not so ready to fire, which helped the others to escape.

After they had pursued them some time, John Kirkland turned about, and stooped down on his knee, and aimed so well that he shot a highland serjeant through the thigh, which made the front still stoop as they came forward, till they were again commanded to run. By this time the sufferers had gained some ground; and being come to the muirs of Eaglesham, the four men went to the heights, in view of the enemy, and caused the Captain, who was old and not able to run, take another way by himself. At last he got a mare upon the field, and took the liberty to mount her a little, that he might be more suddenly out of their reach. But ere he was aware, a party of dragoons going for Newmills was at hand; and what was more observable, he wanted his shoes, having cast them off before, and was riding on the beast's bare back; but he passed by them very slowly, and got off undiscovered; and at length gave the mare her liberty, which returned home, and went unto another of his lurking-places. All this happened on a Monday morning; and on the morrow these persecutors returned, and plundered the house, drove off their cattle, and left almost nothing remaining.

Sir James Mackintosh (1765-1832) was born at Aldourie, on the banks of Loch Ness, October 24, 1765. His father was a brave Highland officer, possessed of a small estate, Kyllachy, in his native county. From his earliest days James Mackintosh had a passion for books; and though all his relatives were Jacobites, he was a staunch Whig. After studying at Aberdeen-where he had as a college companion and friend the pious and eloquent Robert Hall-Mackintosh went to Edinburgh and studied medicine. In 1788 he repaired to London, wrote for the press, and afterwards applied himself to the study of law. In 1791 he published his Vindicia Gallica, a defence of the French Revolution, in reply to Burke, which, for cogency of argument, historical knowledge, and logical precision, is a remarkable effort for a young man of twenty-six. Four years afterwards he acknowledged to Burke that he had been the dupe of his own enthusiasm, and that a 'melancholy experience' had undeceived him-a change of opinion bitterly resented by many of those who had most warmly welcomed the Vindicia. A series of lectures on the Law of Nature and Nations greatly extended his reputation. In 1795 he was

called to the Bar, and as barrister in 1803 made a brilliant defence of M. Peltier, an emigrant royalist indicted for a libel on Napoleon, then First Consul. The forensic display of Mackintosh was too much like an elaborate essay or dissertation, but it marked him out for legal promotion, and he received the appointment-to which his poverty, not his will, consented-of Recorder of Bombay. He was knighted; sailed from England in the beginning of 1804; and after discharging faithfully his high official duties, returned at the end of seven years, the earliest period that entitled him to his retiring pension of £1200 per annum. Mackintosh in 1813 obtained a seat in Parliament for Nairn, and stuck faithfully by his old friends the Whigs, till, in

1827, his friend Canning, on the formation of his administration, made him a Privy-Councillor. On the accession of the Whig Ministry in 1830, he was appointed a commissioner for the affairs of India. On questions of criminal law and national policy Mackintosh spoke forcibly, but he was not accounted a successful parliamentary orator. Amid the bustle of public business he did not neglect literature, though he lacked resolution for continuous and severe study. The charms of society, the interruptions of public business, and the debilitating effects of his Indian sojourn cooperated with his constitutional indolence to prevent the realisation of the ambitious dreams of his youth. Nevertheless he wrote various articles for the Edinburgh Review, a long famous Dissertation on the Progress of Ethical Philosophy for the Encyclopædia Britannica, and three volumes of a History of England for Lardner's Cabinet

Cyclopædia, which, though without grace or charm of style, contains admirable statements of constitutional history. He also furnished for the same comprehensive series a short but valuable Life of Sir Thomas More; and at his death he was engaged on a History of the Revolution of 1688, which was continued by another hand in a rather different spirit (1834). Mackintosh's Dissertation was long used as a text-book of the history of ethics, and as such was probably more widely known than anything else by him. It is even accounted his most important work, though James Mill was largely justified in criticising (as he did, however, with needless asperity) its lack of precision in thought and expression. It is curiously eclectic in standpoint: accepting Butler's supremacy of the conscience, it yet takes utility as the ethical criterion, and contrives to adopt Hartley's association theory as a help to explain the development of conscience. On the whole it represents a modified utilitarianism; as a treatise it is incomplete and inadequate, and has long since been superseded by more systematic and more profound works. But in its own time it filled a gap, and promoted ethical studies. Mackintosh's works were all little more than fragments of what he might have done; and there was no Boswell to record his brilliant conversation.

From the 'Vindicia Gallicæ.'

The collision of armed multitudes [in Paris] terminated in unforeseen excesses and execrable crimes. In the eye of Mr Burke, however, these crimes and excesses assume an aspect far more important than can be communicated to them by their own insulated guilt. They form, in his opinion, the crisis of a revolution far more important than any change of government—a revolution in which the sentiments and opinions that have formed the manners of the European nations are to perish. "The age of chivalry is gone, and the glory of Europe extinguished for ever!' He follows this exclamation by an eloquent eulogium on chivalry, and by gloomy predictions of the future state of Europe, when the nation that has been so long accustomed to give her the tone in arts and manners is thus debased and corrupted. A caviller might remark that ages much more near the meridian fervour of chivalry than ours have witnessed a treatment of queens as little gallant and generous as that of the Parisian mob. He might remind Mr Bruke that, in the age and country of Sir Philip Sidney, a queen of France, whom no blindness to accomplishment, no malignity of detraction, could reduce to the level of Marie Antoinette, was, by ‘a nation of men of honour and cavaliers,' permitted to languish in captivity and expire on a scaffold; and he might add that the manners of a country are more surely indicated by the systematic cruelty of a sovereign than by the licentious frenzy of a mob. He might remark that the mild system of modern manners which survived the massacres with which fanaticism had for a century desolated and almost barbarised Europe, might perhaps resist the shock of one day's excesses committed by a delirious populace.

But the subject itself is, to an enlarged thinker,

fertile in reflections of a different nature. That system of manners which arose among the Gothic nations of Europe, of which chivalry was more properly the effusion than the source, is, without doubt, one of the most peculiar and interesting appearances in human affairs. The moral causes which formed its character have not perhaps been hitherto investigated with the happiest success. But to confine ourselves to the subject before us, chivalry was certainly one of the most prominent features and remarkable effects of this system of manners. Candour must confess that this singular institution is not alone admirable as a corrector of the ferocious ages in which it flourished. It contributed to polish and soften Europe. It paved the way for that diffusion of knowledge and extension of commerce which afterwards in some measure supplanted it, and gave a new character to manners. Society is inevitably progressive. In government, commerce has overthrown that feudal and chivalrous' system under whose shade it first grew. In religion, learning has subverted that superstition whose opulent endowments had first fostered it. Peculiar circumstances softened the barbarism of the middle ages to a degree which favoured the admission of commerce and the growth of knowledge. These circumstances were connected with the manners of chivalry; but the sentiments peculiar to that institution could only be preserved by the situation which gave them birth. They were themselves enfeebled in the progress from ferocity and turbulence, and almost obliterated by tranquillity and refinement. But the auxiliaries which the manners of chivalry had in rude ages reared, gathered strength from its weakness and flourished in its decay. Commerce and diffused knowledge have, in fact, so completely assumed the ascendant in polished nations that it will be difficult to discover any relics of Gothic manners but in a fantastic exterior, which has survived the generous illusions that made these manners splendid and seductive. Their direct influence has long ceased in Europe; but their indirect influence, through the medium of those causes which would not perhaps have existed but for the mildness which chivalry created in the midst of a barbarous age, still operates with increasing vigour. The manners of the middle age were, in the most singular sense, compulsory. Enterprising benevolence was produced by general fierceness, gallant courtesy by ferocious rudeness, and artificial gentleness resisted the torrent of natural barbarism. But a less incongruous system has succeeded, in which commerce, which unites men's interests, and knowledge, which excludes those prejudices that tend to embroil them, present a broader basis for the stability of civilised and beneficent manners.

Mr Burke, indeed, forebodes the most fatal consequences to literature, from events which he supposes to have given a mortal blow to the spirit of chivalry. I have ever been protected from such apprehensions by my belief in a very simple truth—that diffused knowledge immortalises itself. A literature which is confined to a few may be destroyed by the massacre of scholars and the conflagration of libraries, but the diffused knowledge of the present day could only be annihilated by the extirpation of the civilised part of mankind.

There is a Life of Mackintosh by his son, Robert James Mackintosh (2 vols. 1835); and see the essays on him by Macaulay and De Quincey. His miscellaneous works were collected in three volumes in 1846.