are not only one of the most amusing books in the language, but contain, in spite of the narrowness of the author's literary creed, innumerable passages of the happiest and most original criticism, particularly in the appreciation of those writers who, belonging to what is called the classical or artificial school, exhibit characteristics which Johnson was capable of appreciating. His remarks upon the poetry of Cowley, Waller, and Pope are admirable; and his immense knowledge of life, and sharp and weighty sense, have filled his pages with striking and valuable observations. He incorporated with this work his previously written Life of Savage; and on comparing the style of this book with his preceding productions, we are struck by its comparative freedom from that pompous and rhetorical tone which disfigures his earlier prose-writings, in which the abuse of antithesis, of carefully balanced sentences, and of the employment of long Latinized words, had been carried so far as almost to justify his writing being denied the title of idiomatic English. In 1784 this good man and vigorous writer died, after suffering severely from dropsy and a complication of disorders; and it is consoling to reflect that the morbid and almost hypochondriac horror of death which had tormented him during his whole existence gave way, under the influence of his strong religious sentiments, and at the approach of the moment he had so dreaded, to a calm and resignation worthy of so wise and so benevolent a character. Few literary men have enjoyed so much deference as Johnson: both his virtues and his defects, his talents and his weaknesses, contributed to make him the king of his circle; and it is less a matter of surprise that the hardships of his early life should have left a stamp of coarseness and ferocity upon his manners and demeanor, than that the causes which made him rough and bearish in argument, and careless of the minor decencies of social intercourse, should never have sullied the undeviating purity of his moral principles, nor diminished the tenderness of his heart. He was a singular mixture of prejudice and liberality, of scepticism and credulity, of bigotry and candor: and with that paradoxical strangeness which pervades all his personality, we know him better, and admire him more, in the unadorned records which Boswell has given of his conversational triumphs, than in those rhetorical and elaborate writings which his contemporaries thought so magnificent, but which more recent generations seem likely to condemn to comparative oblivion.

§ 9. The name of EDMUND BURKE (1731–1797) has already occurred more than once as connected with Johnson and the accomplished literary society of that day. Burke was a man of powerful and versatile genuis, carrying the fervor and imagery of a great orator into philosophical discussion, and uniting in himself the highest qualities of the statesman, the writer, and the philosopher. His predominant quality was a burning and dazzling enthusiasm for whatever object attracted his sympathies, and in the service of this enthusiasm he impressed all the disciplined forces of his learning, his logic, and his historical and political knowledge. His mind resembled the Puritan regiments of

Cromwell, which moved to battle with the precision of machines, while burning with the fiercest ardor of fanaticism. His sympathies were indeed generally excited by generous pity for misfortune, and horror at cruelty and injustice; but, as in the case of his rupture with Fox, his splendid oratorical display in the impeachment of Warren Hastings, and his furious denunciation of the French Revolution, the very excess of his tenderness made him cruel, and the vehemence of his detestation of injustice made him unjust. He was the son of a Dublin attorney, came early to England to study law, but commenced his career as a miscellaneous writer in magazines. He was the founder and first author of the Annual Register, a useful epitome of political and general facts, and gained his first reputation by his Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful, a short treatise in which ingenuity is more perceptible than solidity of reasoning, and he became one of the most constant and brilliant ornaments of the club where Johnson, Reynolds, and Goldsmith used to assemble. Burke's powers of conversation were most extraordinary; his immense and varied stores of knowledge were poured forth in language unequalled for its splendor of illustration; and Johnson, jealous as he was of his own social supremacy, confessed that in Burke he encountered a fully equal antagonist. Burke's political career commenced as Secretary to Hamilton in Ireland, and he was afterwards attached in the same capacity to Lord Rockingham. He sat in the House of Commons successively for Wendover, Bristol, and Malton, and was one of the most prominent debaters during the agitated period of the American War and the French Revolution. He formed part of more than one ministry, and was successively either in power or in opposition in the successive administrations of Rockingham, North, Grenville, and others. For a short time he held the lucrative post of Paymaster of the Forces in the Rockingham cabinet. The culminating points of his political life were his share in the famous India Bill, which was to entirely change the administration of our Eastern dependencies, and in the trial of Warren Hastings, which lasted from 1786 to 1795, and terminated with the acquittal of the accused. In this majestic and solemn scene, where a great nation sat in public judgment upon a great criminal, Burke played perhaps the most prominent part: he was one of the managers of the impeachment in the name of the Commons, and his speech is one of the sublimest philippics that ancient or modern oratory can show. He had heated his imagination in contemplating the vast, gorgeous, and picturesque nations and history of the East, and his almost morbid, philanthropy was intensified by the consciousness of his proud position as a defender of ancient and oppressed populations before the venerable bar of history and the English people. It is curious to observe how gradually his speeches and writings increase in vividness of coloring and in intensity of passion as he advanced in life: his powerful mind almost lost its balance under the shock of that bitter disappointment caused by the horrors of the French Revolution, in which his unrivalled political sagacity could foresee nothing but unmingled evil. The Reign of

Terror transformed Burke from a constitutional Whig into a Tory, but at the same time animated his genius to some of its most unrivalled bursts of eloquence. The close of this great and good man's life was melancholy; the loss of his son, a youth of great promise, crushed all his hopes, and elicited one of the noblest monuments of pathetic oratory. His finest written compositions are his Letter to a Noble Lord, in which he defends himself against the aspersions of the Duke of Bedford, who had attacked him for accepting a pension, his Reflections on the French Revolution, and his Letter on a Regicide Peace. In Parliament, though his speeches were perhaps unequalled for splendor of illustration, for an almost supernatural acuteness of political foresight, and for the profoundest analysis of constitutional principles, he was often less popular than many inferior debaters: he spoke over the heads of his audience, but he will ever be regarded as one of the greatest orators and statesmen of any age or country.

§ 10. The last half of the eighteenth century was a very gloomy and agitated crisis. The dispute between Great Britain and her American colonies, the lowering and ominous looming of the great revolutionary tempest of France, and many internal subjects of dissension involving important constitutional questions, rendered the political atmosphere gloomy and thunder-charged. From about the beginning of 1769, and with occasional interruptions down to 1772, there appeared in the "Public Advertiser," one of the leading London journals, then published by Woodfall, a series of Letters for the most part signed Junius. They exhibited so much weight and dignity of style, and so minute an acquaintance with the details of party tactics, and breathed such a lofty tone of constitutional principle, combined with such a bitterness, and even ferocity, of personal invective, that their influence was unbounded. Government made the most violent, but fruitless efforts to discover the writer, and Woodfall submitted to severe punishment, though there is every reason to believe that he too was kept in perfect ignorance of the real name of his correspondent. The chief objects of the attack of Junius were the Dukes of Grafton and Bedford, and he strongly pronounced himself against the infringement of constitutional liberty in the expulsion of Wilkes from the House of Commons and the seizure of his papers: but the concealed writer does not confine himself to great public questions, but exhibits minute knowledge of disputes and intrigues in the subordinate department of the War-office, and shows all the rancor of a man who felt himself personally aggrieved. The whole annals of political controversy show nothing so bitter and terrible as the personalities and invectives of Junius, which are rendered more formidable by the lofty dignity of the language, and by the moderate and constitutional principles which he professes to maintain. These letters will always be regarded as masterpieces in their particular style. Many efforts, some very learned, ingenious, and elaborate, have been employed to clear up the riddle of the real authorship of these letters: but the enigma still remains one of the most mysterious in the history of letters. Burke, Hamilton, Francis,

Lyttelton, and Lord George Sackville, have been successively fixed upon as the writer; and the mingled glory and shame — glory for the high merits of the composition, and shame for the atrocious spirit of calumny - have been transported by successive demonstrations to one or to the other. Among the numerous claimants to the doubtful honor Sir Philip Francis appears to have the strongest suffrages: the opinion of Macaulay, whose knowledge of the history of the time was unrivalled, is unconditionally in favor of Francis: but a recent investigator has brought forward some ingenious arguments in favor of Lyttelton. It is hardly probable that this curious and much-vexed question will now ever be settled by anything more conclusive than more or less strong presumptive evidence; and the authorship of the Letters of Funius will remain a singular example of an unsolved political mystery, like the Man in the Iron Mask or the Executioner of Charles I. However this may be, the letters themselves will ever be a monument of the finest but fiercest political invective.

§ 11. ADAM SMITH (1723-1790) was the founder, in England, of the science of Political Economy. He was a Scotchman, and exhibited in a high degree that aptitude for moral, metaphysical, and economic investigation which seems to be so general in his country. He was successively Professor of Logic and of Moral Philosophy in the University of Glasgow. At one period of his life he lectured with success at Edinburgh on rhetoric and belles lettres, and was persuaded to travel with the young Duke of Buccleuch, whose education he superintended. His most important work is the Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, the fruit of ten years of study and investigation, and which laid the foundation for modern economic science. It was the first systematic treatise produced in England upon a most important subject, and though not free from erroneous deductions, was the most valuable contribution ever made to a science then almost in its infancy, and which was destined, thanks in a great measure to his clear and logical reasoning and abundant and popular illustration, to exert an immense and beneficial influence on legislation and commerce. The fundamental principles taught by Adam Smith are chiefly, that gold and silver are by no means wealth either to individuals or communities, being only symbols and conventional representatives of value; that labor is the true source of riches, and that any state interference with the distribution or production of commodities can only aggravate the evils it is intended to cure. He was the first to show, by apt and picturesque illustration, the wonderful results of the division of labor, both as regards the quantity and quality of the product. His moral and metaphysical theories are now nearly forgotten, but his Inquiry will ever remain the alphabet or text-book of the important science of which he was the pioneer.

§ 12. Something similar to what Adam Smith performed for political economy, SIR WILLIAM BLACKSTONE (1723-1780) did for the vast and complicated study of the Constitution and the Laws of England. He was by profession a lawyer, though he mingled a strong taste for ele

gant literature with the graver studies of his profession: and he ultimately became a Justice of the Common Pleas. His Commentaries on the Laws of England gave the first example of a systematic work combining and popularizing all the elementary and historical knowledge requisite for the study; and this book, which is written in a singularly easy and pleasant style, is the groundwork of every legal education, nay, the accidence, so to say, of the grammar of English law. Numerous editions have been published, bringing up the work to the existing state of legal knowledge, and showing such modifications as from time to time have been made in our legislation; and Blackstone's Commentaries still continue the best and completest outline of the history and principles of English law. The great questions of right and property which lie at the bottom of all social organization are lucidly treated, and the mingled web of Teutonic, Feudal, Parliamentary, and Ecclesiastical legislation is carefully unravelled and disposed with luminous distinctness.

§ 13. The most prominent names in the English theological philosophy of the eighteenth century are those of BISHOP BUTLER (1692-1752) and WILLIAM PALEY (1743-1805). The former is more remarkable for the severe and coherent logic with which he demonstrates his conclusions, the latter for the consummate skill with which he popularized the abstruser arguments of his predecessors. Butler's principal work is his Analogy between Natural and Revealed Religion, in which, neglecting the question of the historical credibility of the miracles, he examines into the resemblance between the existence and attributes of God, as proved by arguments drawn from the works of Nature, and shows that that existence and those attributes are in no way incompatible with the notions conveyed to us by Revelation. The writings of Butler have filled the greatest thinkers with admiration, and their study has contributed to form some of the most accomplished dialecticians: but the closeness of his reasoning, which necessitates an unusual degree of attention and a rare faculty of following his analysis, places his writings out of the reach of ordinary readers. His moral theory is mainly based upon the existence, in every mind, of a guiding and testing principle of conscience, furnishing an infallible and supreme criterion of the goodness or wickedness of our actions.

Many of Butler's arguments are rendered more accessible in the easy and animated pages of Paley, who was, like Butler, an ornament of the Church. His books are numerous, and all excellent: the principal of them are Elements of Moral and Political Philosophy, the Hora Pauline, the Evidences of Christianity, and the wonderful production of his old age, the Treatise on Natural Theology. It will be seen from the titles of these books over what an immense extent of moral and theological philosophy Paley's mind had travelled; for in the first of the above books he investigates the principles of human action whether exhibited in the individual or the community; in the second he examines questions of specific theology by the light of Scripture; and in the third he demonstrates the inherent credibility of the Christian miracles,