as produced a total change both of his manners and opinions. The account of those salutary conferences is given by Burnet in a book entitled Some Passages of the Life and Death of John Earl of Rochester; which the critic ought to read for its elegance, the philosopher for its arguments, and the saint for its piety. It were an injury to the reader to offer him an abridgment.

He died July 26, 1680, before he had completed his thirty-fourth year; and was so worn away by a long illness, that life went out without a struggle.

Lord Rochester was eminent for the vigour of his colloquial wit, and remarkable for many wild pranks and sallies of extravagance. The glare of his general character diffused itself upon his writings. The compositions of a man whose name was heard so often were certain of attention, and from many readers certain of applause. This blaze of reputation is not yet quite extinguished; and his poetry still retains some splendour beyond that which genius has bestowed.

Wood and Burnet give us reason to believe that much was imputed to him which he did not write. I know not by whom the original collection was made, or by what authority its genuineness was ascertained. The first edition was published in the year of his death, with an air of concealment, professing in the title-page to be printed at Antwerp.

Of some of the pieces, however, there is no doubt. The imitation of Horace's satire, the verses to Lord Mulgrave, the Satire against Man, the verses upon Nothing, and perhaps some others, are, I believe, genuine, and perhaps most of those which the collection exhibits.

As he cannot be supposed to have found leisure for any course of continued study, his pieces are commonly short, such as one fit of resolution would produce.

His songs have no particular character; they tell, like other songs, in smooth and easy language, of scorn and kindness, dismission and desertion, absence and inconstancy, with the commonplaces of artificial courtship. They are commonly smooth and easy, but have little nature and little sentiment.

His imitation of Horace on Lucilius is not inelegant or unhappy. In the reign of Charles II. began that adaptation, which has since been very frequent, of ancient poetry to present times; and perhaps few will be found where the parallelism is better preserved than in this. The versification is, indeed, sometimes careless, but it is sometimes vigorous and weighty.

The strongest effort of his muse is his poem upon Nothing. He is not the first who has chosen this barren topic for the boast of his fertility. There is a poem called Nihil in Latin by Passerat, a poet and critic of the sixteenth century in France; who, in his own epitaph, expresses his zeal for good poetry thus:

"Molliter ossa quiescent,

Sint modo carminibus non onerata malis."

In examining this performance, nothing must be considered as having not only a negative, but a kind of positive signification: as, I need not fear thieves; I have nothing, and nothing is a very powerful protector. In the first part of the sentence it is taken negatively,

in the second it is taken positively as an agent. In one of Boileau's lines it was a question whether he should use à rien faire or à ne rien faire; and the first was preferred, because it gave rien a sense in some sort positive. Nothing can be a subject only in its positive sense, and such a sense is given it in the first line :

"" Nothing, thou elder brother ev'n to shade."

In this line, I know not whether he does not allude to a curious book De Umbra, by Wowerus, which, having told the qualities of shade, concludes with a poem in which are these lines:

"Jam primum terram validis circumspice claustris
Suspensam totam, decus admirabile mundi

Terrasque tractusque maris, camposque liquentes
Aeris et vasti laqueata palatia cœli

Omnibus umbra prior.'

The positive sense is generally preserved with great skill through the whole poem; though sometimes, in a subordinate sense, the negative nothing is injudiciously mingled. Passerat confounds the two senses.

Another of his most vigorous pieces is his lampoon on Sir Car Scrope, who, in a poem called The Praise of Satire, had some lines like these:

"He who can push into a midnight fray

His brave companion, and then run away,
Leaving him to be murder'd in the street,
Then put it off with some buffoon conceit,-
Him, thus dishonour'd, for a wit you own,
And court him as top fiddler of the town."

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This was meant of Rochester, whose buffoon conceit was, I pose, a saying often mentioned, that every man would be a coward if he durst; and drew from him those furious verses, to which Scrope made in reply an epigram ending with these lines:

"Thou canst hurt no man's fame with thy ill word:
Thy pen is full as harmless as thy sword."

Of the Satire against Mankind, Rochester can only claim what remains when all Boileau's part is taken away.

In all his works there is sprightliness and vigour, and every where may be found tokens of a mind which study might have carried to excellence. What more can be expected from a life spent in ostentatious contempt of regularity, and ended before the abilities of many other men began to be displayed?

JOHN SHEFFIELD, DUKE OF BUCKINGHAMSHIRE.* (1649-1721.)

John Sheffield, descended from a long series of illustrious ancestors, was born in 1649, the son of Edmund Earl of Mulgrave, who * Johnson.

died in 1658. The young lord was put into the hands of a tutor with whom he was so little satisfied, that he got rid of him in a short time, and at an age not exceeding twelve years resolved to educate himself. Such a purpose, formed at such an age, and successfully prosecuted, delights as it is strange, and instructs as it is real.

His literary acquisitions are more wonderful, as those years in which they are commonly made were spent by him in the tumult of a military life or the gaiety of a court. When war was declared against the Dutch, he went at seventeen on board the ship in which Prince Rupert and the Duke of Albemarle sailed, with the command of the fleet; but by contrariety of winds they were restrained from action. His zeal for the king's service was recompensed by the command of one of the independent troops of horse then raised to protect the coast.

Next year he received a summons to parliament, which, as he was then but eighteen years old, the Earl of Northumberland censured as at least indecent; and his objection was allowed. He had a quarrel with the Earl of Rochester, which he has, perhaps, too ostentatiously narrated; as Rochester's surviving sister, the Lady Sandwich, is said to have told him with very sharp reproaches.

When another Dutch war (1672) broke out, he went again a volunteer in the ship which the celebrated Lord Ossory commanded; and there made, as he relates, two curious remarks:

"I have observed two things, which I dare affirm, though not

generally believed. One was, that the wind of a cannon-ball, though flying never so near, is incapable of doing the least harm; and indeed, were it otherwise, no man above deck would escape. The other was, that a great shot may be sometimes avoided, even as it flies, by changing one's ground a little; for when the wind sometimes blew away the smoke, it was so clear a sunshiny day, that we could easily perceive the bullets (that were half-spent) fall into the water, and from thence bound up again among us, which gives sufficient time for making a step or two on any side: though, in so swift a motion, 'tis hard to judge well in what line the bullet comes; which if mistaken, may by removing cost a man his life, instead of saving it."

His behaviour was so favourably represented by Lord Ossory, that he was advanced to the command of the Catharine, the best secondrate ship in the navy.

He afterwards raised a regiment of foot, and commanded it as colonel. The land forces were sent ashore by Prince Rupert; and he lived in the camp very familiarly with Schomberg. He was then appointed colonel of the old Holland regiment, together with his own; and had the promise of a garter, which he obtained in his twenty-fifth year. He was likewise made gentleman of the bedchamber. He afterwards went into the French service, to learn the art of war under Turenne, but stayed only a short time. Being by the Duke of Monmouth opposed in his pretensions to the first troop of horse-guards, he, in return, made Monmouth suspected by the Duke of York. He was not long after, when the unlucky Monmouth fell into disgrace, recompensed with the lieutenancy of Yorkshire and the government of Hull.

Thus rapidly did he make his way both to military and civil honours and employments. Yet, busy as he was, he did not neglect his studies, but at least cultivated poetry; in which he must have been early considered as uncommonly skilful, if it be true which is reported, that, when he was not yet twenty years old, his recommendation advanced Dryden to the laurel.

The Moors having besieged Tangier, he was sent (1680) with two thousand men to its relief. A strange story is told of the danger to which he was intentionally exposed in a leaky ship, to gratify some resentful jealousy of the king, whose health he therefore would never permit at his table, till he saw himself in a safer place.* His voyage was prosperously performed in three weeks; and the Moors, without a contest, retired before him.

In this voyage he composed The Vision; a licentious poem, such as was fashionable in those times, with little power of invention or propriety of sentiment.

At his return he found the king kind, who perhaps had never been angry; and he continued a wit and a courtier as before.

At the succession of King James, to whom he was intimately known, and by whom he thought himself beloved, he naturally expected still brighter sunshine; but all know how soon that reign began

Because, as it was said, he had made overtures of marriage to the Princess Anne. Charles II, as Southey observes, was certainly unprincipled enough to connive at any wickedness; but in this case there would have been some difficulty in getting a captain to assist in the plot.