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news of his son's death. "Lord, grant me patience!" he exclaims, and there was now large need of it. The wine of life was on the lees; his work was done; and, after spending some time in Hereford, Steele retired to his wife's estate at Carmarthen. He continued to suffer as he had suffered all his life long-from pecuniary difficulties; and he had also a dispute with the managers of Drury Lane, which estranged him from his former friends. We hear, too, of a paralytic seizure; but the date of it is uncertain, nor do we know how these last sad years of retirement were passed.

The end came in 1729; and we bid farewell to a man who, although far indeed from faultless, possessed a fine intellect, a tender heart, and a generous disposition, that keep his memory fragrant still. How much Steele accomplished for English literature will be best understood by those who are familiar with the age in which he lived; and the more we become acquainted with it, the higher will be our estimation of the man who, with the help of his friend Addison, reformed the morals and manners of society, and showed how possible it was to employ the wit and humour that had been so often prostituted to vice in the service of virtue and religion.

THE WARTONS.

THE brothers Joseph and Thomas Warton were conspicuous figures among the men of letters who flourished under that most unliterary of monarchs, King George III. The elder was the Master of Winchester and Prebend of St. Paul's; the younger, who was also a clergyman, occupied the post held earlier in the century by his father, of Professor of Poetry. He was, moreover, Camden Professor of History, and succeeded Whitehead as Laureate. Both the brothers were Oxford men, and Thomas, who never married, resided at the University more than forty-seven years; both were small poets, Thomas being by far the better singer of the twain, both were poetical critics, both were men of high culture, but neither of them, it may be said, has left an ineffaceable mark in literature. The work they did is for the most part done well, but none of it supremely well, and the popularity they en joyed among their contemporaries passed away with

their lives. It is curious to note how little of biographical interest has come down to us about the Wartons. Their memoirs were written by learned but dull men, who did not know that the object of a biographer ought to be to produce a vivid and genuine representation of his hero; and thus, instead of giving us a finished portrait of the brothers, we find it scarcely possible to catch the outline of their features.

The Rev. John Wooll undertook, six years after Joseph Warton's death, to write the biography of his late friend and master, and to publish a selection from his works. Accordingly in 1806 appeared, after the fashion of those days, a bulky quarto volume, printed in admirable type, and with wide margins. To it we owe a few facts for which we are bound to be thankful, and it must be acknowledged that the writer's views of a biographer's duties are carried out in the most exemplary manner. "To descend," he says, "to the minutiæ of daily habits is surely beneath the province of biography," and he intimates that all letters of a domestic character are suppressed, and that the reader will be disappointed "should he expect a detail of those peculiarities and trifling incidents which are by some indiscriminately termed strokes

of character." Wooll observes, and no doubt justly, that a good deal of injury may be inflicted on a man by his biographer; but he does not see that it is possible to deal gently and wisely with a person's weaknesses and foibles, and at the same time to produce a characteristic portrait.

Biographers have sinned frequently, no doubt, in trenching on sacred ground, but this is no reason why the memoir-writer should confine himself to the statement of a few barren facts. To know where a man lived, what offices he filled, what books he wrote, whom and how often he married, is not to know the man. Yet this is the principal information, useful no doubt in its way, supplied by the Rev. John Wooll. What of it is needful for us to state may be put into a few paragraphs.

Joseph, who came into the world six years before Thomas, and died ten years after him, was born in 1722, and educated at Winchester and at Oriel College, Oxford, where his skill as a poetaster appears to have been first exhibited. At the age of twenty-two he was ordained, and three years afterwards was presented by the Duke of Bolton to the rectory of Wynslade, when he married the lady to whom he had been for some time attached. The Duke expected a service in return for the favour he

had conferred, and one which any clergyman worthy of the name would have declined with scorn. "In the year 1751," writes the biographer,

"Warton was called from the indulgence of connubial happiness and the luxury of literary retirement to attend his patron to the south of France, for which invitation the Duke had two motives the society of a man of learning and taste, and the accommodation of a Protestant clergyman, who immediately on the death of his Duchess, then in a confirmed dropsy, could marry him to the lady with whom he lived, and who was universally known and distinguished by the name of Polly Peachum."

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Wooll allows that the object of this expedition was "not the most eligible in a professional view,” but praises Warton, notwithstanding, for his laudable wish to improve his income. The connection appears to have terminated abruptly, since, before reaching Italy, Warton left the Duke and his mistress and returned to England. Warton now produced his edition of Virgil,' gaining thereby a considerable reputation for scholarship. In this edition he published Pitt's translation of the Eneid' and attempted himself a translation of the 'Eclogues and 'Georgics,' which proved that, though an elegant scholar, he was not a poet. Pitt's chief fault as a translator, says Mr. Connington, who of all modern critics was the best qualified to judge, "is

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