August 20.-Looked at a little book with a very pleasing title, and intended to shew the obligations of literature to the mothers of England.

Of Shenstone, the writer says that his "precocious fondness for reading was so great, that to satisfy his craving for a fresh supply of books, his mother often wrapped up a piece of wood in the shape of a book and put it under his pillow, to induce sleep for the night, and gain time to supply the little student's demands for the morrow." I do not remember this anecdote of Shenstone. Mrs. Halsted mentions among famous English women, Lucy, Duchess of Bedford; the Countess of Abingdon; Dryden's Eleonora; Katherine Phillips, the "matchless Orinda ;' Lady Winchelsea; the Duchess of Newcastle, whom she pronounces "the most astonishing person" that flourished during the Stuart dynasty; Elizabeth Burnett, wife of the Bishop of Salisbury; Lady Masham, the friend of Locke, and daughter of Cudworth; Lady Chudleigh; Lady Norton; and the beautiful Lady Grace Gethin, mentioned by Congreve. Cowley, in his ode on Orinda's poems, has exhausted the fertility of his invention :

"Thy numbers gentle, and thy fancies high;

Those as thy forehead smooth, these sparkling as thine eye."

When was a compliment turned with a more courtly air?

POPE: Imitat. of Hor. Ep. 1.

I thought of Whitfield in the evening, while reading Crabbe's description of the Sectarian in The Borough :

"See yonder preacher to his people pass, Borne up and swelled by Tabernacle gass."

Has the following story, told by Walpole,* ever been disproved? —

She

"The apostle Whitfield is come to some shame. He went to Lady Huntingdon lately and asked for forty pounds for some distressed saint or other. said she had not so much money in the house, but would give it him the first time she had. He was very pressing, but in vain. At last he said, 'There's your watch and trinkets, you don't want such vanities,-I will have that.' She would have put him off; but he persisting, she said, Well, if you must have it, you must.' About a fortnight afterwards, going to his house, and being carried to his wife's chamber, among the paraphernalia of the latter, the countess found her own offering. This has made a terrible schism. She tells the story herself."

I have read the latest and fullest life of Lady Huntingdon, but do not remember any allusion to this anecdote, of which Cowper would have said:

"And Perjury stood up to swear all true."

Archbishop Herring, writing to Duncomb in 1756, calls Whitfield "Daniel Burgess Redivivus." August 22.

Amplification is the

source of excellence in modern poetry. A small particle of gold is gathered

out of some stream of thought-issuing from the gloom of elder dayand is then worked up with tasteful skill into a fancy-ornament. Moore is an accomplished master in the art; and, like all ladies' jewellers, he has obtained very high prices for his articles. For a small casket, well filled with imitation-emeralds and rubies, the wholesale dealers have given him sums varying from three to one thousand pounds. He is one of those

Artists who richly chase their thoughts,"

Sometimes

whom Green mentions. it is pleasing to compare the expanded gold with the pure particle.

Thomson, in his "Spring," describes with extraordinary beauty and force the courtship of birds :

"And shiver every feather with desire."

Nothing can be more exquisite ; Moore had not forgotten the line in his courtship of angels. The first angel, in his well-known Adelphipanorama, commonly called the Loves of the Angels, beholds a maiden bathing in a lake-crystal of course-and immediately a glowing sensation thrills through his nervous system :—

"The tremble of my wings all o'er

(For through each plume I felt the thrill)

Startled her, as she reached the shore

Of that small lake, her mirror still."

How much more beautiful the natural and appropriate image of

Thomson!

August 23.-Read the fourteenth sermon of Bishop Patrick, in the volume (fifteen sermons) published after his death. I was aware that Richardson's Pamela had been recommended from the pulpit, but I did not know, until to-day, that the Essays of Cowley had received an equal honour from so distinguished a scholar and so cloquent a preacher as the Bishop of Ely. The bishop is speaking of the emperors of the world who have found their power unable to furnish them with employment or with happiness. "One of them, (as a rare person of our nation hath expressed better than I can do) who styled himself lord and god of all the earth, could not tell

how to pass his day pleasantly without spending two or three hours in catching flies and killing them with his bodkin." The "rare person" is Cowley, to whose essays the bishop refers in the margin. The passage occurs in Cowley's Essay on Greatness. The following allusion, in the same essay, to contemporary manners is very pleasant:-"Is any thing more common than to see our ladies of quality wear such high shoes as they cannot walk in without one to lead them? and a gown as long again as their body, so that they cannot stir to the next room without a page or two to hold it up?" Cowley places the summit of worldly happiness in the possession of an annual income of five hundred pounds (in the seventeenth century no inconsiderable sum); with this, he said, "a man could procure a convenient brick-house, with decent wainscot and pretty forest - work hangings, with flower and fruitgardens." Alas! that he should have been cut off just when he was attempting to fill up the outline which he had drawn!

How characteristic is the following remark:-"There is, in truth, no rising or meridian of the sun, but only in respect to several places; there is no right or left, no upperhand in nature; every thing is little. and every thing is great, according as it is diversely compared. There may be some village in Scotland or Ireland where I might be a great man; and in that case I should be like Cæsar (you would wonder how I and Cæsar should be like one another in any thing), and choose rather to be the first man of the village than second at Rome." Most ingenious of poets and most delightful of prose-writers! you will always be first at Chertsey! nor, by those who reach the Temple of Fame, will you be found outside the door.

August 24.-Read Gilpin's Essay on Picturesque Beauty. The following remark, contained in a note at page 18, is neatly expressed, and might be printed as an ingenious commentary upon the well-known couplet of Pope, in which he tells us that true expression, like the sun, gilds every object without altering it:

“Language," says Gilpin, “like light, is a medium. In painting subjects of

amusement, indeed, language may gild somewhat more and colour with the dyes of fancy; but where information is of more importance than entertainment, though you cannot throw too strong a light, you should carefully avoid a coloured one. The style of some writers resembles a bright light placed between the eye and the thing to be looked at. The light shews itself and hides the object."

Green has four lines very prettily expressed upon the same taste, as displayed in criticism :---

"A tawdry critic, who perceives
No grace which plain proportion gives;
And, more than lineaments divine,
Admires the gilding of the shrine."

A similar criticism will apply to art; the pencil is still more susceptible of these net-allurements of colour

than the pen. It was Mason who

said that

"Titian's colour looks like Virgil's art."

August 25.-Murphy, in his Essay on the Life and Genius of Johnson (page 95), relates a dispute between Johnson and Dr. Rose of Chiswick respecting the merits of Scottish writers. The argument arose out of the approaching publication of Ferguson's Essay on Civil Society. Dr. Rose, at length, offered to name a writer whom Johnson would himself admit to be the best in the kingdom. "Who is that?" inquired the rival doctor. "The Earl of Bute," answered Rose," when he wrote an order for your pension." There, sir," was the reply of Johnson, “you have me in the toil." I do not know whether Croker has noticed this anecdote, or whether it is related in Boswell, but it seems to me only a paraphrase of a well-known story which is told of Dryden, and which may be found in any life of that poet; the difference consisting merely in this

66

- that the order given to Dryden was not for a pension, but for a sum of money.

August 26. The son of a Dissenter, and educated in his opinions, agrecable in manners, moral in life, witty in conversation, holding a situation in the Customhouse, and dying in Nag's Head Court, Gracechurch Street, at the age of forty-one :--such is the brief history of the gifted author of the Spleen, who was commended by Pope and praised by

Gray. He deserved their admiration. With all Prior's case, he had a vein of fancy peculiarly his own. Beautiful gleams of poetry shoot across his coarse and fantastic webs of thought:

"And fancy's telescope applies

With tinctured glass to cheat his eyes." Although living in the bustle of London, Green appears to have indulged the common poetical longing for rural repose. He has painted a pretty cottage view:

"And may my humble dwelling stand
Upon some chosen spot of land;
A pond before, full to the brim,
Where cows may cool and geese may
swim;

Behind a green, like velvet neat,
Soft to the eye and to the feet;
Where od'rous plants, in evening fair,
Breathe all around ambrosial air."

Poets usually introduce Beauty at the door of their cottage-homes; but Green appears to have built his fancy-villa only for a bachelor, for he had expressed an opinion that in Venturing on a wife,

Men ran the greatest risk in life."

In running through the very small volume that encloses the poetical remains of Green, a few passages irresistibly arrest the reader's attention. Take this reminiscence of Westminster Hall:

Law, grown a forest, where perplex
The mazes, and the brambles vex;
Where its twelve verd'rers every day
Are changing still the public way;
Yet if we miss our path and err,
We grievous penalties incur;

And wand'rers tire and tear the skin,
And then get out where they got in."
Or look at the scenery of dreams :-
"Nor in imprest remembrance keep,
Grim tap'stry figures wrought in sleep."
Or glance at a politician out of
place:-

"Grazing on æther in the park." In describing the disposition of hist mind and the tenor of his life, Green says, with great liveliness and poetic fancy

"At helm I make my reason sit,
My crew of passions all submit ;
If dark and blustering prove some nights,
Philosophy puts forth her lights."

Reading the works of Robert Bloomfield the other morning, I met

It may be mentioned, as a curious incident in literary history, that the only persons of rank or consideration who praised Hume's History of England on its appearance were Archbishop Herring, and Stone, primate of Ireland. The historian records the circumstance with natural astonishment. Marivaux has, however, obtained golden suffrages. friend of mine, not more distinguished by learning than by taste, entered the library of Windham at Felbrigg, not long after the death of that accomplished scholar and debater, he found upon the table the Marianne of Marivaux.

When a

Marivaux wrote comedies, of which Barante happily remarks:- “ A scene of Molière is a representation; a scene of Marivaux is a commentary upon nature."*

Marivaux was not deficient in selfappreciation, and did not shrink from measuring himself with Molière. He considered his own M. de Climal to be a better character than the Tartuffe; he ventured to walk by the side of the great Corneille upon the tragic stage; and his first attempt at prose fiction was an unsuccessful imitation of Don Quixote. D'Alembert, who bestows a very copious éloge upon Marivaux, attributes his popularity among English readers a popularity which expired, I imagine, with the 18th century to the difficulty of his style. The diction of Marivaux imparted to the reader, he thought, the peculiar pleasure which the scholar derives from unravelling the intricacies of a dead language. Marivaux possessed great facility and grace of pencil; but, skilful as his drawings usually are, and vivacious as his illustrations of character must often be admitted to be, the reader grows weary over

"The unscented fictions of the loom," where every flower is depicted by art, and no breath of nature ever

comes.

Of the advantages and pleasures of fiction much may be written. The declining days of Cowper were cheered so far as that dark evening

could be cheered-by the fancy of Richardson. Even the severer judgment of Johnson was unwilling to abandon the pleasant aid of romance in female education. Speaking of Sophy Thrale, to her mother, Nov. 29, 1783, he remarked, “She will go back to her arithmetic again,-a science which will always delight her more, as by advancing further she discerns more of its use, and a science suited to Sophy's case of mind; for you told me in the last winter that she loved metaphysics more than romances. Her choice is certainly as laudable as it is uncommon; but I would have her like what is good in both." It has been stated, that Hannah More derived her earliest impressions of virtuous feeling from reading Richardson. Johnson's admiration of the same writer is familiar to every reader of Boswell; but it may not be so well known that he has made eighty references to Richardson in his Dictionary.

Adam Clarke has printed, in his Autobiography, a curious list of the little books which he and his brother obtained by strict economy and extra labour. Books of enchantment, he said, led him to believe in a spiritual world; and the existence of an evil spirit to injure, suggested the existence of a Divine Being to protect and reward. He expressed a belief that he should have been "an arrant coward" if he had never read romances; and was accustomed to say, that he had learned more from Robinson Crusoe about his duty to God, to his neighbour, and to himself, than from all the persons whom he had known, or all the books he had read, in his early days. Augustin relates that he received the first impulse to study sacred things from perusing Cicero's Exhortation to Philosophy. Wisdom became the object of his search; and although the cloud of sin closed over his mind again, the ray of dawning virtue did not entirely die out. Adam Clarke put the story of Defoe into the hands of his children as soon as they could read; and he might have strengthened his own convictions by the practice of Warburton,

VOL. XXIV. NO. CXLII.

Confess. lib. iii. c. 4.

H H