a certain rude and earth-born vigor; but his verse is dust and ashes now, solemnly inurned, of course, in the Chalmers columbarium, and without danger of violation. His brawn and muscle are fading traditions, while the fragile, shivering genius of Cowper is still a good life on the books of the Critical Insurance Office. "It is not, then, loftiness of mind that puts one by the side of Virgil?" cries poor old Cavalcanti at his wit's end. Certainly not altogether that. There must be also the great Mantuan's art, his power, not only of being strong in parts, but of making these parts coherent in an harmonious whole, and tributary to it.LOWELL, JAMES RUSSELL, 1866-90, Carlyle; Prose Works, Riverside ed., vol. II, p. 80.

Churchill was a man of much generous impulse; and the reader can still enjoy the vigour of many passages in his poems, although their absolute subjectmatter, combined with their length, is a bar to general perusal now-a-days. ROSSETTI, WILLIAM MICHAEL, 1872, ed., Humourous Poems, p. 226.

Churchill was inspired by both the motives which, according to the two great Latin satirists, are the parents of satire; but his indignation did not burn with the pure flame of Juvenal, and his impecuniosity, unlike the honorable poverty of Horace, was the child of his vices. Writing to live, he did not write so that his works should live after him. Dashing off a poem a month, in order to catch a perennial stream of half-crowns from his eager and insatiable readers, he vehemently declared that to blot, prune, or correct was like the cutting-away of his own flesh. "Little of books, and little known of men, When the mad fit comes on, I seize the pen; Rough as they run, the ready thoughts set down;

Rough as they run, discharge them on the town."

With his quiver of darts so unpolished that they could not escape the rust, tipped with venom that long ago had lost its sting, Churchill, "the scourge of bad men, and hardly better than the very worst," easily and rapidly stormed in his lifetime the citadel of Fame, but he was not of those whose names are engraved upon its bulwarks.-TREVELYAN, GEORGE OTTO, 1880, The Early History of Charles James Fox, p. 149.

The celebrity of the smart verse making of Churchill marks a low point in English taste. It nearly secured him a poet's monument in Westminster Abbey; and it actually secured a poet's rank for a petulant rhymer without a spark of the poet's imagination, of cold heart, natural bad taste, and very little knowledge of that narrow world which he so impudently lampooned. Nothing in Churchill reveals a gleam of genial feeling, or justifies the suspicion that he could take any pleasure in what refines or elevates. If we may believe his own account of himself, nature had given him little enough, beyond an ugly face, a sour temperament and a bitter tongue. Yet he was not dissatisfied. He was very willing to be taken for what he was and if he could not win liking and respect, he was content to be feared. In all this there must have been something of affectation. Yet it is only too clear that the coarse texture of his mind was impermeable to the kindlier and worthier influences of his time. Cowper,

we know, had a real admiration for him. His earliest work the "Rosciad," is his best, because in it he most adhered to

good models.

good models. His later works will serve the student as a rich mine of all sorts of errors in taste and judgment. In proportion as he abandoned himself to his own guidance, his work degenerated, and the poverty of his thought appeared; and in three years he had literally written himself out. But in all that he wrote there is a certain fierce manliness which wins attention, and even sympathy for his untutored brain and unsoftened heart, and this effect is heightened by the story of his life and death. -PAYNE, E. J., 1880, The English Poets, ed. Ward, vol. III, pp. 389, 391.

The satirist who towered for a moment so high above his contemporaries, and who leaves upon us the same impression of greatness as a knock-kneed giant at a country fair may leave. The Rev. Charles Churchill (1731-1764) has faded to the merest shadow of himself, and the writer who of all others aimed at being virile, robust, and weighty, has come to be regarded as the ideal of a pasteboard hero. .. Feared and admired for his force, with his tempest of uncouth and vituperative verse, his rattling facility, and his reckless swaggering courage to support him,

He left this life for a better,

Sept. 25, 1764,

In the 61st year of his age." -KNIGHT, CHARLES, 1865, Shadows of the Old Booksellers, p. 213.

Personally Dodsley is an attractive figure. Johnson had ever a kindly feeling for his "patron," and thought he deserved a biography. His early condition lent a factitious importance to some immature verse, and his unwearied endeavours for literary fame gained him a certain contemporary fame. Some of his songs have merit-"One kind kiss before we part" being still sung-and the epigram on the words "one Prior" in Burnet's "History" is well known. As a bookseller he showed remarkable enterprise and business aptitude, and his dealings were conducted with liberality and integrity. He deserves the praise of Nichols as "that admirable patron and encourager of learning."TEDDER, H. R., 1888, Dictionary of National Biography, vol. xv, p. 173.

GENERAL

The first edition of the present volumes was one of the many excellent plans produced by the late Mr. Robert Dodsley; a man to whom literature is under so many obligations that it would be unpardonable to neglect this opportunity of informing those who may have received any pleasure from the work, that they owe it to a person whose merit and abilities raised him from an obscure situation in life to affluence and independence.-REED, ISAAC, 1780, ed., Select Collection of Old Plays.

His plan of republishing "Old English Plays" is said to have been suggested to him by the literary amateur Coxeter, but the execution of it leaves us still indebted to Dodsley's enterprise. CAMPBELL, THOMAS, 1819, Specimens of the British Poets.

"Dodsley's Collection" turned out to be a chance "medley:" unskilled in the language and the literature and the choice of his dramatists, he, as he tells us, "by the assistance of a little common sense, set a great number of these passages right;" that is, the dramatist of the dull "Cleone" brought down the ancient genius to his own; and, if he became intelligible, at least he was spurious. If, after all, some parts were left unintelligible, the reader must consider how many such

remain in Shakespeare.-DISRAELI, ISAAC, 1841, Shakespeare, Amenities of Literature. Good DODSLEY honest, bustling, hearty soul, A foot-man, verse-man, prose-man, bibliopole;

A menial first beneath a lady's roof,
His humble education soon complete,
Then Mercury to guttling Dartineuf,

He learnt good things to write, good things

to eat.

Then boldly ventured on the buskin'd stage, And show'd how toys may help to make us sage:

Nay, dared to bite the great with satire's tooth,

And made a Miller tell his King the truth.
In tragic strain he told Cleone's woes,
The touching sorrows and the madd'ning
throes

Of a fond mother and a faithful wife.
He wrote "The Economy of Human Life."
For flights didactic then his lyre he strung,
Made rhymes on Preaching, and blank verse
on Dung;

Anon with soaring weary, much at his ease,
Wrote Epigrams, and Compliments, and
Kisses.

All styles he tried, the tragic, the comic, lyric,

The grave didactic and the keen satiric; Now preach'd and taught as sober as a dominie,

Now went pindaric-mad about Melpomene;
Now tried the pastoral pipe and oaten stop,
Yet all the while neglected not his shop.
Fair be his fame, among a knavish clan
His noblest title was an honest man.
A bookseller, he robb'd no bard of pelf,
No bard he libell'd, though a bard himself.
-COLERIDGE, HARTLEY, 1849, Sketches
of English Poets, Poems, vol. II, p. 307.

Dodsley attempted literary fame in many branches, but among all his productions nothing is so well known as his "Select Collection of Old Plays," 1744, dedicated to Sir Clement Cotterel Dormer, who probably contributed some of its contents. The great ladies who first patronised Dodsley had not forgotten him, and the subscription list displays a host of aristocratic names. The art of collation was then unknown, and when he first undertook the work the duties of an editor of other than classical literature were not so well understood as in more recent times. . . . His most important commercial achievement was the foundation of the "Annual Register" in 1758, which is still published.-TEDDER, H. R., 1888, Dictionary of National Biography, vol. XV. pp. 171, 172.

Hare. No! to Mr. Pope; who, in a youthful frolic, recommended Thomas Aquinas to him. With this treasure he retired, in order to be free from interruption, to an obscure place in the suburbs. His director hearing no more of him in six months, and apprehending he might have carried the jest too far, sought after him, and found him out just in time to prevent an irretrievable derangement.-RUFFHEAD, OWEN, 1769, Life of Pope, p. 291, note.

There are who relate, that, when first Young found himself independent, and his own master at All Souls, he was not the ornament to religion and morality which he afterwards became.

After

They who think ill of Young's morality, in the early part of his life, may perhaps be wrong; but Tindal could not err in his opinion of Young's warmth and ability in the cause of religion. Tindal used to spend much of his time at All Souls. "The other boys," said the atheist, "I can always answer, because I always know whence they have their arguments, which I have read a hundred times; but that fellow Young is continually pestering me with something of his own." all, Tindal and the censurers of Young may be reconcilable. Young might, for two or three years, have tried that kind of life in which his natural principles would not suffer him to wallow long. If this were so, he has left behind him not only his evidence in favour of virtue, but the potent testimony of experience against vice.-CROFT, JR., HERBERT, 1780, Young, Lives of the English Poets by Samuel Johnson.

That there was an air of benevolence in his manner, but that he could obtain from him less information than he had hoped to receive from one who had lived too much in intercourse with the brightest men of what had been called the Augustan age of England; and that he shewed a degree of eager curiosity concerning the common occurrences that were then passing, which appeared somewhat remarkable in a man of such intellectual stores, of such an advanced age, and who had retired from life with declared disappointment in his expectations. LANGTON, BENNET, 1781, Boswell's Life of Johnson, ed. Hill, vol. IV, p. 69.

We stopped at Welwin, where I wished much to see, in company with Johnson,

the residence of the authour of "Night Thoughts," which was then possessed by his son, Mr. Young. We went into the garden, where we found a gravel walk, on each side of which was a row of trees, planted by Dr. Young, which formed a handsome gothic arch. Dr. Johnson called it a fine grove. I beheld it with reverence. We sat some time in the summer-house, on the outside wall of which was inscribed "Ambulantes in horto audiebant vocem Dei ;" and in reference to a brook by which it is situated, “Vivendi rectè qui prorogat horam," &c. I said to Mr. Young that I had been told his father was cheerful. "Sir," said he, "he was too well bred a man not to be cheerful in company; but he was gloomy when alone. He never was cheerful after my mother's death, and he had met with many disappointments."' Dr. Johnson observed to me afterwards "That this was no favourable account of Dr. Young; for it is not becoming in a man to have so little acquiescence in the ways of Providence as to be gloomy because he has not obtained as much preferment as he expected, nor to contine gloomy for the loss of his wife. Grief has its time."-BOSWELL, JAMES, 1781, Life of Johnson, ed. Croker, ch. lxxiii.

She

Young, whose satires give the very anatomy of human foibles, was wholly governed by his housekeeper. thought and acted for him, which probably greatly assisted the "Night Thoughts," but his curate exposed the domestic economy of a man of genius by a satirical novel. If I am truly informed, in that gallery of satirical poets in his "Love of Fame," Young has omitted one of the most striking-his own! While the poet's eye was glancing from "earth. to heaven," he totally overlooked the lady whom he married, and who soon became the object of his contempt; and not only his wife, but his only son, who when he returned home for the vacation from Winchester school, was only admitted into the presence of his poetical father on the first and the last day; and whose unhappy life is attributed to this unnatural neglect: -a lamentable domestic catastrophe, which, I fear, has too frequently occurred amidst the ardour and occupations of literary glory.-DISRAELI, ISAAC, 17961818, Domestic Life, The Literary Character.