TOBIAS SMOLLETT.

"Tobias Smollett, well known in his time for the variety and multiplicity of his publications, was born in 1720, at Dalquhurn, in the county of Dumbarton. He was educated under a surgeon in Glasgow, where he also attended the medical lectures of the University; and at this early period he gave some specimens of a talent for writing verses. As it is on this ground that he has obtained a place in the present collection, we shall pass over his various characters of surgeon's mate, physician, historiographer, politician, miscellaneous writer, and especially novelist, and consider his claims as a minor poet of no mean rank. He will be found, in this collection, as the author of The Tears of Scotland,' the 'Ode to Leven-Water,' and some other short pieces, which are polished, tender, and picturesque; and, especially, of an Ode to Independence,' which aims at a loftier flight, and perhaps has few superiors in the lyric style.

"Smollett married a lady of Jamaica: he was, unfortunately, of an irritable disposition, which involved him in frequent quarrels, and finally shortened his life. He died in the neighbourhood of Leghorn, in October, 1771, in the fifty-first year of his age."-Aikin's "Select Brit. Poets." See Gilfillan's Edit. of "Smollett's Poems."

JOHN ARMSTRONG.

‘John Armstrong, a Scotch poet and physician, who, in 1732, took his degree of M.D. at Edinburgh. In 1744 he published the Art of Preserving Health,' one of the best didactic poems in our language, and shortly afterwards received the appointment of physician to the military hospital. In 1760 he was appointed physician to the army in Germany, and the next year wrote a poem called Day, an Epistle to John Wilkes, of Aylesbury, Esq.' In this letter he threw out a reflection upon Churchill, which drew on him the resentment of that satirist. He published several other works of a miscellaneous character. Born at Castleton, Roxburghshire, 1709; died at London, 1779."-Beeton's "Dict. Univ. Biog." See Allibone's "Crit. Dict. Eng. Lit."; Gilfillan's Edit. of "Armstrong's Poems."

WILLIAM JULIUS MICKLE.

"William Julius Mickle was born at Langholm, in Dumfriesshire, in 1734. His father, who was a clergyman of the Scottish church, had lived for some time in London, and had preached in the dissenting meetinghouse of the celebrated Dr. Watts. He returned to Scotland, on being presented to the living of Langholm, the duties of which he fulfilled for many years; and, in consideration of his long services, was permitted to retain the stipend after he had removed to Edinburgh, for the better education of his children. His brother-in-law was a brewer in Edinburgh, on whose death the old clergyman unfortunately embarked his property, in order to continue his business, under the name of his eldest son. William, who was a younger son, was taken from the High-School of Edinburgh, and placed as a clerk in the concern; and, on coming of age, took the whole responsibility of it upon himself. When it is mentioned, that Mickle had, from his boyish years, been an enthusiastic reader of Spenser, and that, before he was twenty, he had composed two tragedies and half an epic poem, which were in due time consigned to the flames, it may be easily conceived that his habits of mind were not peculiarly fitted for close and minute attention to a trade which required incessant superintendence. He was, besides, unfortunate, in becoming security for an insolvent acquaintance. In the year 1763 he became a bankrupt; and, being apprehensive of the severity of one of his creditors, he repaired to London, feeling the misery of his own circumstances aggravated by those of the relations whom he had left behind him.

"Before leaving Scotland, he had corresponded with Lord Lyttelton, to whom he had submitted some of his poems in MS., and one, entitled 'Providence,' which he had printed in 1762. Lord Lyttelton patronized his Muse rather than his fortune. He undertook (to use his lordship's own phrase) to be his 'schoolmaster in poetry;' but his fastidious blottings could be of no service to any man who had a particle of genius: and the only personal benefit which he attempted to render him was to write to his brother, the governor of Jamaica, in Mickle's behalf, when our poet had thoughts of going out to that island. Mickle, however, always spoke with becoming liberality of this connexion. He was pleased with the suavity of Lord Lyttelton's manners, and knew that his means of patronage were very slender. In the mean time, he lived nearly two years in London, upon remittances from his friends in Scotland, and by writing for the daily papers.

"After having fluctuated between several schemes for subsistence, he at length accepted of the situation of corrector to the Clarendon press, at Oxford. Whilst he retained that office, he published a poem, which he at first

named

The Concubine;' but on finding that the title alarmed delicate ears, and suggested a false idea of its spirit and contents, he changed it to Syr Martyn.' At Oxford he also engaged in polemical divinity, and published some severe animadversions on Dr. Harwood's recent translation of the New Testament. He also showed his fidelity to the cause of religion in a tract, entitled' Voltaire in the Shades; or, Dialogues on the Deistical Controversy.'

"His greatest poetical undertaking was the translation of The Lusiad,' which he began in 1770, and finished in five years. For the sake of leisure and retirement, he gave up his situation at the Clarendon press, and resided at the house of a Mr. Tomkins, a farmer, at Forest Hill, near Oxford. The English Lusiad was dedicated, by permission, to the Duke of Buccleuch; but his Grace returned not the slightest notice or kindness to his ingenious countryman. Whatever might be the duke's reasons, good or bad, for this neglect, he was a man fully capable of acting on his own judgment; and there was no necessity for making any other person responsible for his conduct. But Mickle, or his friends, suspected that Adam Smith and David Hume had maliciously stood between him and the Buccleuch patronage. This was a mere suspicion, which our author and his friends ought either to have proved or suppressed. Mickle was indeed the declared antagonist of Hume; he had written against him, and could not hear his name mentioned with temper: but there is not the slightest evidence that the hatred was mutual. That Adam Smith should have done him a mean injury, no one will believe probable, who is acquainted with the traditional private character of that philosopher. But Mickle was also the antagonist of Smith's doctrines on political economy, as may be seen in his 'Dissertation. on the Charter of the East India Company.' The author of the Wealth of Nations,' forsooth, was jealous of his opinions on monopolies ! Even this paltry supposition is contradicted by dates, for Mickle's tract upon the subject of Monopolies was published several years after the preface to the Lusiad. Upon the whole, the suspicion of his philosophical enemies having poisoned the ear of the Duke of Buccleuch seems to have proceeded from the same irritable vanity which made him threaten to celebrate Garrick as the hero of a second Dunciad when he refused to accept of his tragedy, The Siege of Marseilles.'

"Though the Lusiad had a tolerable sale, his circumstances still made his friends solicitous that he should obtain some settled provision. Dr. Lowth offered to provide for him in the Church. He refused the offer with honourable delicacy, lest his former writings in favour of religion should be attributed to the prospect of reward. At length the friendship of his

kinsman, Commodore Johnstone, relieved him from unsettled prospects. Being appointed to the command of a squadron destined for the coast of Portugal, he took out the translator of Camoens as his private secretary. Mickle was received with distinguished honours at Lisbon. The Duke of Braganza, in admitting him a member of the Royal Academy of Lisbon, presented him with his own picture.

"He returned to England in 1780, with a considerable acquisition of prize-money, and was appointed an agent for the distribution of the prize profits of the cruise. His fortune now enabled him to discharge the debts of his early and mercantile life. He married the daughter of Mr. Tomkins, with whom he had resided while translating the Lusiad; and, with every prospect of spending the remainder of his life in affluence and tranquillity, purchased a house, and settled at Wheatley, near Oxford. So far his circumstances have almost the agreeable air of a concluding novel; but the failure of a banker with whom he was connected as prize agent, and a chancery suit in which he was involved, greatly diminished his finances, and disturbed the peace of his latter years. He died at Forest Hill, after a short illness.

"His reputation principally rests upon the translation of the Lusiad, which no Englishman had attempted before him, except Sir Richard Fanshawe. Sir Richard's version is quaint, flat, and harsh; and he has interwoven many ridiculously conceited expressions which are foreign both to the spirit and style of his original; but in general it is closer than the modern translation to the literal meaning of Camoens. Altogether, Fanshawe's representation of the Portuguese poem may be compared to the wrong side of the tapestry. Mickle, on the other hand, is free, flowery, and periphrastical; he is incomparably more spirited than Fanshawe; but still he departs from the majestic simplicity of Camoens' diction as widely as Pope has done from that of Homer. The sonorous and simple language of the Lusitanian epic is like the sound of a trumpet; and Mickle's imitation like the shakes and flourishes of the flute.

Although he was not responsible for the faults of the original, he has taken abundance of pains to defend them in his notes and preface. In this he has not been successful. The long lecture on geography and Portuguese history, which Gama delivers to the King of Melinda, is a wearisome interruption to the narrative; and the use of Pagan mythology is a radical and unanswerable defect. Mickle informs us as an apology for the latter circumstance, that all this Pagan machinery was allegorical, and that the gods and goddesses of Homer were allegorical also; an assertion which would require to be proved, before it can be admitted. Camoens himself has said something about his concealment of a moral

meaning under his Pagan deities; but if he has any such morality, it is so well hidden that it is impossible to discover it. The Venus of the Lusiad, we are told, is Divine Love; and how is this Divine Love employed? For no other end than to give the poet an opportunity of displaying a scene of sensual gratification, an island is purposely raised up in the ocean; Venus conducts De Gama and his followers to this blessed spot, where a bevy of the nymphs of Venus are very goodnaturedly prepared to treat them to their favours; not as a trial, but as a reward for their virtues! Voltaire was certainly justified in pronouncing this episode a piece of gratuitous indecency. In the same allegorical spirit no doubt, Bacchus, who opposes the Portuguese discoverers in the councils of Heaven, disguises himself as a Popish priest, and celebrates the rites of the Catholic religion. The imagination is somewhat puzzled to discover why Bacchus should be an enemy to the natives of a country the soil of which is so productive of his beverage; and a friend to the Mahometans who forbid the use of it: although there is something amusing in the idea of the jolly god officiating as a Romish clergyman.

*

'Mickle's story of Syr Martyn is the most pleasing of his original pieces. The object of the narrative is to exhibit the degrading effects of concubinage in the history of an amiable man, who is reduced to despondency and sottishness, under the dominion of a beldam and a slattern. The defect of the moral is, that the same evils might have happened to Syr Martyn in a state of matrimony. The simplicity of the tale is also, unhappily, overlaid by a weight of allegory, and of obsolete phraseology, which it has not importance to sustain. Such a style applied to the history of a man and his housekeeper, is like building a diminutive dwelling in all the pomp of Gothic architecture."-Campbell's Specimens," pp. 609-611.

44

JOHN LANGHORNE.

"This poetical divine was born in 1735, at Kirkby Steven, in Westmoreland. Left fatherless at four years old, his mother fulfilled her double charge of duty with great tenderness and assiduity. He was educated at Appleby, and subsequently became assistant at the Free-school of Wakefield, took deacon's orders, and gave promise, although very young, of becoming a popular preacher. After various vicissitudes of life and fortune, and publishing a number of works in prose and verse, Langhorne repaired to London, and obtained, in 1764, the curacy and lectureship of St. John's, Clerkenwell. He soon afterwards became assistant-preacher in Lincoln's

Inn Chapel, where he had a very intellectual audience to address, and bore a somewhat trying ordeal with complete success. He continued for a number of years in London, maintaining his reputation both as a preacher and writer. His most popular works were the Letters of Theodosius and Constantia,' and a translation of Plutarch's Lives, which Wrangham afterwards corrected and improved, and which is still standard. He was twice married, and survived both his wives. He obtained the living of Blagden in Somersetshire, and in addition to it, in 1777, a prebend in the Cathedral of Wells. He died in 1779, aged only forty-four; his death, it is supposed, being accelerated by intemperance, although it does not seem to have been of a gross or aggravated description.

"Langhorne, an amiable man, and highly popular as well as warmly beloved in his day, survives now in memory chiefly through his Plutarch's Lives, and through a few lines in his Country Justice,' which are immortalised by the well-known story of Scott's interview with Burns. Campbell puts in a plea besides for his 'Owen of Carron,' but the plea, being founded on early reading, is partial, and has not been responded to by the public." Gilfillan's "Less-Known Brit. Poets," pp. 220, 221.

SIR WILLIAM BLACKSTONE. "Sir William Blackstone, a learned English judge, who, in 1738, was entered at Pembroke College, Oxford, and at the age of twenty composed a treatise on the elements of architecture. He also cultivated poetry, and obtained Mr. Benson's prize medal for the best verses on Milton. These pursuits, however, were abandoned for the study of the law, when he composed his well-known effusion called 'The Lawyer's Farewell to his Muse.' In 1740 he was entered at the Middle Temple, and in 1744 chosen fellow of All Souls College. In 1749 he was appointed recorder of Wallingford, in Berkshire, and in the following year became LL.D., and published an Essay on Collateral Consanguinity,' occasioned by the exclusive claim to fellowships made by the founder's kindred at All Souls. In 1758 he printed Considerations on Copyholders;' and the same year was appointed Vinerian professor of the common law, his lectures in which capacity gave rise to his celebrated 'Commentaries.' In 1759 he published Reflections on the Opinions of Messrs. Pratt, Moreton, and Wilbraham,' relating to Lord Lichfield's disqualification; his lordship being then candidate for the chancellorship. The same year appeared his edition of The Great Charter, and Charter of the Forest.' Of this work it has been said that there is not a

sentence in the composition that is not necessary to the whole, and that should not be perused. In 1761 he was made king's counsel, and chosen member of parliament for Hindon, in Wilts. The same year he vacated his fellowship by marriage, and was appointed principal of New-inn Hall. In 1763 he was appointed solicitor-general to the Queen, and bencher of the Middle Temple. In the next year appeared the first volume of his 'Commentaries,' which was followed by three others. It is upon these that his fame now principally rests; and, although opinion is divided as to the correctness and depth of the matter they contain, the beauty, precision, and elegance of their style have called forth universal admiration. In 1766 he resigned his places at Oxford; and in 1768 was chosen member for Westbury, in Wiltshire. In 1770 he became one of the judges in the court of King's Bench, whence he removed to the Common Pleas. He now fixed his residence in London, and attended to the duties of his office with great application, until overtaken by death. Born in London, 1723; died 1780. -The fundamental error in the Commentaries' is thus pointed out by Jeremy Bentham. There are two characters,' says he, 'one or other of which every man who finds anything to say on the subject of law may be said to take upon him,-that of the expositor, and that of the censor. To the province of the expositor it belongs to explain to us what he supposes the law is; to that of the censor, to observe to us what he thinks it ought to be. Of these two perfectly distinguishable funetions, the former alone is that which it fell necessarily within our author's province to discharge.' Blackstone, however, makes use of both these functions throughout his work, and hence the confusion. His productions have found several translators on the Continent."-Beeton's "Dict. Univ. Biog." See Maunder's Dict. Biog."; Allibone's Crit. Dict. Eng. Lit."

BISHOP PERCY.

"Bishop Percy, born 1728, died 1811. The great revolution in taste, substituting romantic for classical sentiment and subjects, which culminated in the poems and novels of Walter Scott, is traceable to the labours of Bishop Percy. The friend of Johnson, and one of the most accomplished members of that circle in which Johnson was supreme, Percy was strongly impressed with the vast stores of the beautiful, though rude poetry which lay buried in obscure collections of ballads and legendary compositions, and he devoted himself to the task of explaining and popularising the then neglected beauties of these old rhapsodists with the ardour of an antiquary, and with the

taste of a true poet. His publication in 1765, under the title of Reliques of Ancient English Poetry,' of a collection of such ballads, many of which had been preserved only in manuscript, while others, having originally been printed in the rudest manner on flying sheets for circulation among the lower orders of the people, had owed their preservation only to the care of collectors, must be considered as a critical epoch in the history of our literature. Many authors before him, as, for example, Addison and Sir Philip Sydney, had expressed the admiration which a culti vated taste must ever feel for the rough but inimitable graces of our old ballad-poets; but Percy was the first who undertook an examination, at once systematic and popular, of those neglected treasures. His Essay on the Ancient Minstrels,' prefixed to the pieces he selected, exhibits considerable research, and is written in a pleasing and attractive manner; and the extracts are made with great taste, and with a particular view of exciting the public sympathy in favour of a class of compositions, the merits of which were then new and unfamiliar to the general reader. It is true that he did not always adhere with scrupulous fidelity to the ancient texts, and where the poems were in a fragmentary and imper. fect condition, he did not hesitate, any more than Scott after him in the Border Minstrelsy,' to fill up the rents of time with matter of his own invention. This, however, at a period when his chief object was to excite among general readers an interest in these fine old monuments of mediæval genius, was no unpardonable offence, and gave him the opportunity of exhibiting his own poetical powers, which were far from contemptible, and his skill in imitating, with more or less success, the language and manner of the ancient Border poets. Percy found, in collecting these old compositions, that the majority of those most curious from their antiquity and most interesting from their merit were distinctly traceable, both as regards their subjects and the dialect in which they were written, to the North Countrée; that is, to the frontier region between England and Scotland, which, during the long wars that had raged almost without intermission between the Borderers on both sides of the Debateable Land, had necessarily been the scene of the most frequent and striking incidents of predatory warfare, such as those recorded in the noble ballads of Chevy Chase,' and the 'Battle of Otterburn.' The language in the Northern marches of England, and in the Scottish frontier-region bordering upon them, was one and the same dialect; something between the Lowland Scotch and the speech of Cumberland or Westmoreland and it is curious to find the ballad-singer modifying the incidents of his legend so as to suit the prejudices and flatter the national pride of his listeners according as they were inhabitants

:

In

of the Northern or Southern district. various independent copies or versions of the same legend, we find the victory given to the one side or to the other, and the English or Scottish hero alternately playing the nobler and more romantic part. Besides a very large number of these purely heroic ballads, Percy gave specimens of an immense series of songs and lyrics extending down to a comparatively late period of English history, embracing even the Civil War and the Restoration: but the chief interest of his collection, and the chief service he rendered to literature by his publication, is concentrated on the earlier portion. It is impossible to exaggerate the influence exerted by Percy's 'Reliques ; ' this book has been devoured with the most intense interest by generation after generation of English poets, and has undoubtedly contributed to give a first direction to the youthful genius of many of our most illustrious writers.

The boyish enthusiasm of Walter Scott was stirred, as with the sound of a trumpet,' by the vivid recitals of the old Border rhapsodists; and but for Percy it is possible that we should have had neither the 'Lady of the Lake' nor Waverley.' Nor was it upon the genius of Scott alone that is impressed the stamp of this ballad imitation: Wordsworth, Coleridge, even Tennyson himself have been deeply modified, in the form and colouring of their productions, by the same cause: and perhaps the influence of the 'Reliques,' whether direct or indirect, near or remote, will be perceptible to distant ages in English poetry and fiction."-Shaw's Eng. Lit.," pp. 412-414.

JAMES MACPHERSON.

Hist.

"James Macpherson, born 1738, died 1796, a Scotch poet, whose first work, and that which brought him mostly into notice, was a translation of poems attributed by him to Ossian. These poems possess great beauty; but their authenticity was disputed by Dr. Johnson and other writers, and as zealously maintained by the editor and Dr. Blair; it is now, however, generally admitted that Ossian's poems are a forgery. In 1773 Macpherson published a translation of the 'Iliad' into heroic prose, a work of little value. He was also the author of an Introduction to the History of Great Britain and Ireland,' a 'History of Great Britain, from 1660 to the Accession of the House of Hanover,' and of some political pamphlets in defence of Lord North's administration, for which he obtained a place and a seat in the House of Commons."-Beeton's "Dict. Univ. Biog."

THOMAS CHATTERTON.

"No name in our literature affords an example of earlier precocity or of a sadder career than that of the marvellous boy who perished in his pride,' Thomas Chatterton. He was born at Bristol in 1752, was son of a sexton and parish schoolmaster, and died by suicide before he had completed his eighteenth year. Yet in that brief interval he gave proof of power unsurpassed in one so young, and executed a number of forgeries almost without parallel for ingenuity and variety. The writings which he passed off as originals he professes to have discovered in Cannynge's Coffre,' a chest preserved in the muniment-room of the old church of St. Mary Redcliffe, Bristol. These he produced gradually, generally taking advantage of some public occurrence likely to give them an interest. In October, 1768, a new bridge across the Avon was opened, and forthwith he sent an account of the ceremonies that took place on the opening of the old bridge-processions, tournaments, and religious solemnities. Mr. Burguin, who was fond of heraldic honours, he supplies with a pedigree reaching back to William the Conqueror. To another citizen he presents the 'Romaunt of the Cnyghté,' written by one of his ancestors between four and five hundred years before. To a religious citizen he gives an ancient fragment of a sermon on the Holy Spirit, wroten by Thomas Rowley in the fifteenth century. To another with antiquarian tastes he gives an account of the churches of the city three hundred years before. And to Horace Walpole, who was busy writing the History of British Painters,' he gives a record of Carvellers and Peyncters who once flourished in Bristol. Besides all these forgeries he sent to the Town and Country Magazine' a number of poems which occasioned a sharp controversy. Gray and Mason at once pronounced them spurious imitations, but many maintained their genuineness. Meanwhile, Chatterton had obtained a release from the attorney's office where he had served for the last three years, and had come to London. Here he wrote for magazines and newspapers, gaining thereby a very precarious subsistence. At last he grew despondent, took to drinking, which aggravated his constitutional tendencies, and after being reduced to actual want, tore up his papers, and destroyed himself by taking arsenic. was interred in the burying-ground of the Shoe Lane Workhouse, and the citizens of Bristol afterwards erected, in their city, a monument to his memory. His poems, published under the name of Rowley, consist of the tragedy of 'Ella,' the 'Ode to Ella,' a ballad entitled the Bristow Tragedy, or the Death of Sir Charles Bowdin,' some pastoral poems, and other minor pieces. The Ode to Ella' has all the air of a modern poem, except spelling and phraseology. Most of the others

He