And

most repulsive subject "as amusing as a Persian tale." certainly nothing but his inimitable ease and grace of narration could make us forgive-as we do in spite of ourselves—the shallow crudeness of his learning, and the total want of grasp and system in his views.

It was now that appeared the first of his two memorable poems, 'The Traveller,' a meditative and descriptive work, embodying the impressions of human life and society which he had felt in his travels and in his early struggles. Neither the ideas nor the imagery are very new or striking, but it is exquisitely versified (in the rhymed couplet); and its ease, elegance, and tenderness have made many passages pass into the memory and language of society. It is peculiarly admirable for the natural succession and connection of the thoughts and images, one seeming to rise unforcedly, and to be evolved, from the other. It is also coloured with a tender haze, so to say, of soft sentiment and pathos, as grateful to the mind as is to the eye the blue dimness that softens the tints of a distant mountainrange. It is a relief to the reader after Pope, in whom the objects stand out with too much sharpness, and in whom we see too much intense activity of the mere intellect at work. Pope is daylight; Goldsmith is moonlight.

In 1766 appeared the immortal tale which all the world has read, translated, and admired-'The Vicar of Wakefield.' The subject is nothing. A worthy, simple country parson is reduced to the deepest and most unmerited distress, and again restored to happiness. But the charming character of the hero-a kind of more refined Parson Adams-the exquisitely drawn portraits of his family, the natural incidents, the true and tender pathos, and the gentle humour -who knows not these? The style is perfection itself; and the adventures, though not always quite probable, are sufficiently so to maintain the reader's interest.

In the following year Goldsmith, as if not contented with the glory of being the most delightful narrator and the finest painter of character of his day, now aspired to the more poignant rapture of theatrical applause. His first comedy was 'The Good-natured Man ;' and the hero was undoubtedly a dramatised portrait of the author himself, with his unthinking easiness of temper, and his culpable imprudence and generosity. The piece has the defect chargeable against many similar works, particularly on the French stage, namely, the taking of some mental quality as the subject, around which are grouped the inferior characters and interests, and which the dramatist has an irresistible and incessant temptation to exaggerate and caricature. This is not so injurious to nature and probability (the prime requisites of comedy) when the species of folly chosen is of a graver and more reprehensible kind, when it is a vice, in short, instead of a mere absurdity; but when it is a mere obliquity of taste,

the more forcible and vivid the delineation, the less interest do we feel in it. Harpagon is always amusing, because we detest as well as laugh at him; but the weakness of Arnolphe in the Malade Imaginaire,' though we may laugh heartily at the oddity of the incidents and dialogue, is not of sufficient solidity and consistency to carry the weight of a comic plot. But The Goodnatured Man' is lively and gay, and some of the inferior characters, particularly Croaker, are touched with a humour that makes us pardon the rather tiresome uniformity of Honeywood's exaggerated generosity and self-abnegation.

6

The year 1770 gave to the world the companion poem to 'The Traveller,' The Deserted Village,' a work similar in tone, but immeasurably superior in distinctness of aim and felicity of idea. It depicts the sentiments of a wanderer, who, on return to his native place, which he left a smiling pastoral hamlet, finds nothing but ruin and desolation, or relics of former happiness more sad and painful still. "Sweet Auburn" is supposed to have been painted from Goldsmith's own recollections of the village of Lishoy, where his brother had the living; and as The Deserted Village' is more distinct and concentrated in its subject, and more homely in its details, than 'The Traveller,' it is incomparably more touching and more beautiful. Goldsmith was one of the first English poets of this age who had taste and feeling enough to rely for effect upon simple and unornamented descriptions of natural, ordinary objects and persons. He threw aside all that false and vulgar affectation which thought it necessary to clothe such objects in a parade of declamatory language; and his poem is exquisitely pathetic. and the numerous great men who followed him in this true conception of poetical art-did nothing else but restore the manner of our greater and more ancient writers, who find, in the commonest and most familiar images, an inexhaustible source of the most powerful emotions the tenderest beauty and the sublimest terror.

He

Not very long after this poem appeared 'She Stoops to Conquer,' one of the most amusing comedies which the English stage possesses. The action of this piece is exceedingly animated and laughable, and the absence of any moral aim, the renunciation of any attempt to draw, in a principal or leading character, a portrait of some particular folly, is singularly advantageous to its effect, however it may degrade the work as a physiological embodiment. The personages are very numerous, and sketched with felicity; the booby Squire and his pot-house companions, the prosy and hospitable Mr. Hardcastle, his foolish wife, and the equivoques produced by Marlow's extravagant bashfulness-all these, if not of the higher order of comedy, are abundantly laughable and well managed.

In concluding our remarks on this author it will only be necessary to mention a number of histories written merely as booksellers' task

work-mere compilations as regards the matter, but exhibiting Goldsmith's never-failing charm of style: this circumstance, together with the absence of any very oppressive degree of erudition, has rendered them peculiarly well adapted for class-books in schools; a place they will retain till the more accurate and profound method ́ of modern historical investigation shall have been communicated even to the elementary instruction of the young. Besides the "History of England,' Goldsmith successively published that of 'Rome,' of 'Greece,' and of 'Animated Nature,' the last being for the most part a condensation of Buffon.

Our industrious writer (whose life was embittered, notwithstanding his great reputation, activity, and success, by perpetual debts and difficulties) died in 1774, having hastened, if not produced, his own decease, by injudiciously and obstinately taking a powerful medicine; and left behind him a reputation as well deserved as it is universal. There are very few branches of literature which he had not cultivated, if not with unparalleled, at least with more than ordinary success. In all he was above mediocrity, in some he reached excellence, and in one work (the delightful Vicar') he has left us a masterpiece of originality and grace.

CHAPTER XV.

THE GREAT HISTORIANS.

David Hume As Historian-As Moralist and Metaphysician-Attacks on Revealed Religion-William Robertson-Defects of the "Classicist" Historians-Edward Gibbon - The Decline and Fall - Prejudices against Christianity Guizot's judgment on Gibbon.

THE character of the English people is marked by singular inconsistencies: there is no nation which exhibits so much reluctance to pursue to their utmost consequences the deductions of any new system or chain of arguments. The English temperament is at once bold and timid; at the same time penetratingly far-seeing, yet almost slavishly devoted to prescription and authority. Nowhere is a new theory in legislation or in science more freely and candidly discussed; nowhere the true sifted from the false with a more industrious activity; nowhere does a new truth find a more enlightened and ready acceptance; but, at the same time, nowhere is there a greater dread of innovation, or a more determined adherence to the forms of particular systems or institutions.

Of these remarks the story of David Hume is a striking example.

He was sprung from an ancient and noble Scottish family, and was born in 1711. The greater part of his life was passed abroad, chiefly in France. Hume was happy and tranquil in the possession of an income so small that hardly all his national prudence sufficed to make it a competence. What is still more to his honour, he supported, during the early part of his literary career, a degree of neglect and failure which the consciousness of his talents must have rendered exceedingly bitter-this severe trial he bore, if not without a deep and very pardonable discouragement, yet with great manliness and dignity. His first work, 'A Treatise on Human Nature,' published in 1737, was received with absolute neglect; and though recommended by an exquisite refinement of style, and by great novelty of views, and a bold acuteness of argument, it "fell stillborn from the press." Five years after this appeared his Essays, Moral and Philosophical,' which contain a great variety of refined and original speculations, often on subjects previously considered as "hedged in" and defended by an insurmountable barrier of sanctity and prescription. During this part of his life he appears to have had most difficulty and discouragement to struggle with; for he was for some time obliged to accept the most painful of human occupations, the charge of a madman. This was the young Marquis of Annandale, in attendance upon whom the future historian remained a year. Hume was soon afterwards appointed to the post of secretary to General St. Clair, whom he accompanied, first to Canada, and afterwards in his embassy to Vienna and Turin. In 1751 was republished, under the title of An Inquiry concerning the Principles of Morals,' much of the substance though now considerably altered and almost recast, of the not very popular or successful treatise which had appeared fourteen years before and about this time he gave to the world his Political Discourses.' Having caused himself to be appointed librarian to the Faculty of Advocates in Edinburgh, an office which he fulfilled gratuitously for the opportunity of making use of the books under his care, he now entered upon a new path, a path in which he was to more than redeem the ill success of his former publications-that of History. In 1754 appeared the first volume of his History of Great Britain,' containing the reigns of James I. and Charles I. This new attempt was for a while not more popular than his previous ones, but, in proportion as the succeeding volumes appeared, the public admiration grew ever stronger and stronger, and Hume was soon placed, by the unanimous applause of his countrymen, at the head of all the English historians who had then written. This reputation he deserved for many rare qualities, for his philosophic views, and for his exquisite style: and though History has received in more recent times a very different form, a much wider spirit of inquiry and investigation, a far more comprehensive, minute, and accurate spirit, as well as a more picturesque and

striking language, there can be no doubt that Hume's work is of great beauty and value. Its chief defects are want of accuracy in detail, and strong partialities affecting various important principles. A polished and fastidious scholar, a Scotsman of aristocratic birth and sympathies, Hume was tinged not only with those Jacobite tendencies which were so prevalent in the higher classes of his country, but with an exaggerated dread of popular movements, and an indisposition to acknowledge the undeniable advantage which our constitution has so often and so uniformly derived from revolutions. A monarchist in principle, he entertained a somewhat extreme opinion as to the paramount importance of stability in any system of polity, forgetting that in the case of the British constitution a gradual and steady progressive movement was inherent in its very essence-was its sap and life-blood; and that, so far from its stability being compromised by popular movements, or even by revolutions, these were its very conditions and vitality. The English character has more in common (at least in its political manifestations) with that of the Roman people than with that of any other great and civilised nation with which history has made us acquainted. The resemblance is overwhelmingly striking when we take into account the immense difference between the political constitutions of the two countries. Both, however, were eminently aristocratic, and in both the principle of stability is surprisingly prominent-a stability so far from being diminished by incessant internal agitations, and even considerable organic changes, that these changes and agitations are its very exponents. Montesquieu has well remarked that movements which in other countries would infallibly involve a complete overthrow and possible reconstruction of the whole political machine, in England are considered, and justly so, as a proof of the vitality of the government. And the same thing is true of Rome, at least during its earlier and more glorious period. Both nations are eminently practical, logical, and calculating, and in both the attachment to old institutions goes only so far as to make the citizens distrust the prospective advantage of any proposed innovation: in other words, never to admit an innovation until forced on them by circumstances. Thus, the perpetual changes which were going on in the body politic were no more destructive to its individuality, nor injurious to its strength, than are the changes of the seasons to the growth of some majestic tree. Its leaves may be strewn by the gales of autumn, the vernal sap may rise within its vessels, incessant deposits of new matter and never-ceasing loss of old may continue, till not a particle of substance in the whole living structure may remain the same after the lapse of a few years, yet the tree is still the same, it is one, and no other and man and beast find shelter under its ever-waving boughs.

We have already given Hume credit for a philosophical spirit.