two of the most bitter, powerful, and resistless literary satires which modern days have produced. Gifford was a self-taught man, who had raised himself, by dint of almost superhuman exertions and admirable integrity, to a high place among the literary men of his age. Distinguished as a satirist, as a translator of satires, and as the editor of several of the illustrious but somewhat neglected dramatists of the Elizabethan age, his writings, admirable for sincerity, good sense, and learning, were also strongly tinged with bitterness and personality.

Gifford was succeeded in the editorship of the Quarterly, after a short interregnum, by JOHN GIBSON LOCKHART (1794-1854), a man of undoubted genius, the author of several novels which have been already mentioned, and one of the earliest and ablest contributors to Blackwood's Magazine. He was born in 1794, in Lanarkshire, and was educated at Oxford, where he took a first class in classics. He possessed a clear, penetrating intellect, and under his editorship, which continued from 1826 to 1853, the reputation of the Quarterly was not only maintained, but augmented. Many of the ablest articles were written by himself; and those which combine the biography and criticism of distinguished authors are unsurpassed by anything of the kind in the English language. In 1820 he married the eldest daughter of Sir Walter Scott, and in 1837-39 he published the charming life of his fatherin-law. In biography he was unrivalled; and his Life of Napoleon, which appeared without his name, is far superior to many more ambitious performances.

§ 11. The same reasons which led to the establishment of the Quarterly Review in London, induced another enterprising publisher to start, in the city in which the Edinburgh Review exercised undivided sway, a periodical which might serve as an organ of Toryism in Scotland. Blackwood's Magazine first appeared in 1817, and was distinguished by the ability of its purely literary articles, as well as by the violence of its political sentiments. Among the many able men who wrote for it, two stood pre-eminent, John Wilson and John Gibson Lockhart. Of the latter we have already spoken in connection with the Quarterly Review; the former, upon whom fell the chief burden of the magazine after Lockhart's removal to London, must not be dismissed without a short notice. JOHN WILSON (1785-1854) was born in Paisley, May 18, 1785, the son of a wealthy merchant. After studying at Oxford, he took up his abode on the banks of the Windermere, attracted thither by the society of Worsdworth, Southey, Coleridge, and other eminent men. Wilson was an ardent admirer of Wordsworth, whose style he adopted, to some extent, in his own poems, the Isle of Palms (1812), and The City after the Plague (1816). The year before the publication of the latter poem, Wilson had been compelled, by the loss of his fortune, to remove to Edinburgh, and to adopt literature as a profession. Though Mr. Blackwood was the editor of his own magazine, Wilson was the presiding spirit, and under the name of Christopher North and other pseudonymes, he poured forth article after article with exuberant fertility. His Noctes Ambrosianæ, in which politics,

He

literary criticism, and fun, were intermingled, enjoyed extraordinary popularity. His novels likewise were eagerly read (see p. 450). In 1820 he was elected Professor of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh. died April 2, 1854. "With respect to Wilson's merits as a writer, a variety of judgments will be formed. His poetry can never, in our opinion, take a foremost place among English classics. His prose tales, Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life, The Trials of Margaret Lindsay, The Foresters, &c., had their day. Probably no man, living or dead, could have written them except himself, yet we doubt whether they will find many readers a dozen years hence. Of his criticism, likewise, we are constrained to observe that it is at all times the decision of an impulsive rather than of a judicial mind. But far above all his contemporaries, and, indeed, above writers of the same class in any age, he soars as a rhapsodist. As Christopher North, by the loch, or on the moors, or at Ambrose's, he is the most gifted and extraordinary being that ever wielded pen. We can compare him, when such fits are on, to nothing more aptly than to a huge Newfoundland dog, the most perfect of its kind; or, better still, to the 'Beautiful leopard from the valley of the palm-trees,' which, in sheer wantonness and without any settled purpose, throws itself into a thousand attitudes, always astonishing and often singularly graceful.” *

§ 12. It would be impossible in our limits to give an account of the many other writers who distinguished themselves by their contributions to the Reviews and Magazines; but in addition to those already mentioned two essayists stand forth pre-eminent — Charles Lamb and Thomas de Quincey.

CHARLES LAMB (1775-1834) is one of the most admirable of those humorists who form the peculiar feature of the literature, as the ideas they express are the peculiar distinction of the character, of the English people. He was born February 18, 1775, in the Temple, where his father was clerk to one of the Benchers, and was educated at Christ's Hospital. He was essentially a Londoner: London life supplied him with his richest materials; and yet his mind was so imbued, so saturated with our older writers, that he is original by the mere force of self-transformation into the spirit of the older literature: he was, in short, an old writer, who lived by accident a century or two after his real time. Wordsworth is peculiarly the poet of solitary rural nature; Lamb drew an inspiration as true, as delicate, as profound, from the city life in which he lived; and from which he never was for a moment removed but with pain and a yearning to come back. In him the organ of locality must have been enormously developed: "his household gods planted a terribly fixed foot, and were not to be rooted up without blood." During the early and greater part of his life, Lamb, poor and unfriended, was drudging as a clerk in the India House; and it was not till late in life that he was unchained from the desk. Yet in this, the most monotonous and unideal of all employments, he found

* Quarterly Review, No. 225, p. 240.

means to fill his mind with the finest aroma of our older authors; particularly of the prose writers and dramatists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: and in his earliest compositions, such as the drama of John Woodvil, and subsequently in the Essays of Elia, although the world at first perceived a mere imitation of their quaintness of expression, there was, in reality, a revival of their very spirit. The Essays of Elia, contributed by him at different times to the London Magazine, are the finest things, for humor, taste, penetration, and vivacity, which have appeared since the days of Montaigne. Where shall we find such intense delicacy of feeling, such unimaginable happiness of expression, such a searching into the very body of truth, as in these unpretending compositions? A chance word, dropped half by accident, a parenthesis, an exclamation, often let us into the very mechanism of the sentiment admit us, as it were, behind the scenes. The style has a peculiar and most subtle charm; not the result of labor, for it is found in as great perfection in his familiar letters - - a certain quaintness and antiquity, not affected in Lamb, but the natural garb of his thoughts. This arises partly from the saturation of his mind with the rich and solid reading in which he delighted; and partly, but in a much higher degree, from the sensibility of his mind. The manure was abundant, but the soil was also of a "Sicilian fruitfulness." As in all the true humorists, his pleasantry was inseparably allied with the finest pathos: the merry quip on the tongue was but the commentary on the tear which tembled in the eye. He possessed the power, which is seen in Shakspeare's Fools, of conveying a deep philosophical verity in a jest — of uniting the wildest merriment with the truest pathos and the deepest wisdom. It is not only the easy laugh of Touchstone in the forest of Arden, but the heart-rending pleasantry of Lear's Fool in the storm. The inspiration that other poets find in the mountains, in the forest, in the sea, Lamb could draw from the crowd of Fleet Street, from the remembrances of an old actor, from the benchers of the Temple. In his poems, also, so few in number and so admirable in originality, we have the quintessence of familiar sentiment, expressed in the diction of Herbert, Wither, and the great dramatists.

Lamb was the schoolfellow, the devoted admirer and friend, of Coleridge; and perhaps there never was an individual so loved by all his contemporaries, by men of every opinion, of every shade of literary, political, and religious sentiment, as this great wit and amiable man, The passionate enemy of everything like cant, commonplace, or conventionality, his writings derive a singular charm, a kind of fresh and wild flavor, from his delight in paradox. The man himself was full of paradox: and his punning repartees, delivered with all the pangs of stuttering, often contained a decisive and unanswerable settlement of the question. In his drama of John Woodvil he endeavored to revive the forms of the Elizabethan drama; and the work might be mistaken for some woodland play of Heywood or Shirley. But it was

his Specimens of the Old English Dramatists which showed what treasures of the richest poetry lay concealed in the unpublished, and in modern times unknown, writers of that wonderful age, whose fame had been eclipsed by the glory of some two or three names of the same period. In the few lines, often only the few words, of criticism in which Lamb sketched the characters of the dramatists (with whose writings, from the greatest to the least, from Shakspeare down to Broome or Tourneur, no man was ever more familiar), we see perpetual examples of the delicacy and penetration of his critical faculty.

Lamb's mind, in its sensitiveness, in its mixture of wit and pathos, was eminently Shakspearian; and his intense and reverent study of the works of Shakspeare doubtless gave a tendency to this: the glow of his humor was too pure and steady not to have been reflected from the sun. In his poems, as for instance the Farewell to Tobacco, the Old Familiar Faces, and his few but beautiful sonnets, we find the very essence and spirit of this quaint tenderness of fancy, the simplicity of the child mingled with the learning of the scholar.

Among the Essays of Elia are several little narratives, generally visions and parables, inexpressibly simple and beautiful. The one named Dream-Children, and another entitled The Child-Angel, are worthy of Jean Paul himself: while the little tale Rosamond Gray is perhaps one of the most inimitable gems ever produced in that difficult style.

§ 13. Perhaps the greatest master of English prose in the present century, not excepting even Macaulay, is THOMAS DE QUINCEY (17851859). He was born of wealthy parents near Manchester, August 15, 1785, and in his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater he has left us an extraordinary account of his early life, in which, however, there is clearly a mixture of Dichtung and Wahrheit. As an undergraduate at Oxford, he was remarkable for his extraordinary stock of knowledge upon every subject that was started in conversation; but even at that period he had commenced taking large doses of opium. After leaving Oxford he settled at Grasmere, but resided during the latter part of his life at Glasgow and Edinburgh. He died December 8, 1859. Upon De Quincey's position in the literature of the present day an able critic observes, "De Quincey's mind never wholly recovered from the effects of his eighteen years' indulgence in opium. He himself says, half jocularly, but apparently quite truly, that it is characteristic of the opium-eater never to finish anything. He himself never finished anything, except his sentences, which are models of elaborate workmanship. But many of his essays are literally fragments, while those which are not generally convey the impression of being mere prolegomena to some far greater work of which he had formed the conception only. Throughout his volumes, moreover, we find allusions to writings which have never seen the daylight. And finally, there is The Great Unfinished, the De Emendatione Humani Intellectus, to which he had at one time devoted the labor of his whole life. It is, in fact, the one half

melancholy reflection which his career suggests, that a man so capable as he was of exercising a powerful influence for good upon the political and religious thought of the present age, should have comparatively wasted his opportunities, and left us his most precious ideas in the condition of the Sibyl's leaves after they had been scattered by the wind. Hence those who approach him with any serious purpose are only too likely to come away disappointed. It is, therefore, rather on his style, at once complex and harmonious, at once powerful and polished, than on the substance of his works, that his posthumous fame will be dependent. The extraordinary compass and unique beauty of his diction, accommodating itself without an effort to the highest flights of imagination, to the minutest subtleties of reasoning, and to the gayest vagaries of humor, are by themselves indeed a sure pledge of a long if not undying reputation."*

De Quincey's writings have been collected in fourteen volumes. The best known is the Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, published in 1821, in which the language frequently soars to astonishing heights of eloquence. Of his historical essays and narratives, the finest is his Flight of the Kalmuck Tartars, which is equal, in many passages, to the English Opium-Eater. His literary criticisms, both upon English and German writers, are very numerous, but cannot be further noticed here. Some of his essays are almost exclusively humorous, among which Murder considered as one of the Fine Arts is the best known. The critic whom we have already quoted, thus sums up De Quincey's literary merits: "A great master of English composition; a critic of uncommon delicacy; an honest and unflinching investigator of received opinions; a philosophic inquirer, second only to his first and sole hero (Coleridge), — De Quincey has left no successor to his rank. The exquisite finish of his style, with the scholastic rigor of his logic, forms a combination which centuries may never reproduce, but which every generation should study as one of the marvels of English literature."

§ 14. One of the studies peculiar to the present century has been that of political economy. Adam Smith has been well called the creator of the science, and his followers in the present age have exercised no small influence in moulding the character of public opinion and in controlling the course of public events. RICARDO, SENIOR, MACULLOCH, and MILL are writers whose place in a history of literature would perhaps be small, but whose influence on politics and commerce have been so great, that it would be a serious omission not to call the attention of the student to their works. The most important writer upon ethics, jurisprudence, and political economy is undoubtedly JEREMY BENTHAM (1748-1832). He was the son of a solicitor in London, was educated at Oxford, and called to the bar, but did not pursue it as a profession. For half a century Bentham was the centre of a small but influential circle of philosophical writers, and was the founder of what

* Quarterly Review, No. 219, pp. 15, 16.