was correct, and his blank verse is free and beautifully modulated, deserving to be studied by all who would excel in that truly English metre. His philosophical ideas are taken chiefly from Plato, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson. He adopted Addison's threefold division of the sources of the pleasures of imagination, though in his later edition he substituted another. The poem is seldom read continuously, but it contains many passages of great force and beauty; those, for example, where he speaks of the death of Cæsar, where he compares nature and art, where he describes the final causes of the emotion of taste, and in a fragment of a fourth book, where he sketches the landscape on the banks of his native Tyne, and notes the feelings of his own boyhood. His 'Hymn to the Naiads' has the true classic ring, and has caught the manner and the feeling of Callimachus. His inscriptions -those, for example, on Chaucer and Shakspere-are reckoned among our best, and have been imitated by both Southey and Wordsworth. His odes are his least successful productions; his 'Ode to the Earl of Huntingdon' having received most favour. Yet withal, his popularity was greater in his own day than it is likely to be in ours-popularity attributable to the influence of the writings of Gray, and especially to the revived study of Milton and other classic models through the notes and writings of Warton.

"It may be added that, upon the question sometimes discussed, whether the progress of science is favourable to poetry, Akenside differs from Campbell. The latter speaks of poetic feelings that yield to cold material laws.' the former holds that the rainbow's tinctured hues' shine the more brightly when science has investigated and explained them." -Dr. Angus's "Handbook of Eng. Lit.," pp. 216, 217. Lit."

See Allibone's "Crit. Dict. Eng.

borough of Oakhampton; and being warmed with that patriotic ardour which rarely fails to inspire the bosom of an ingenuous youth, he became a distinguished partisan of opposition politics, whilst his father was a supporter of the ministry, then ranged under the banners of Walpole. When Frederic Prince of Wales, having quarrelled with the court, formed a separate court of his own, in 1737, Lyttelton was appointed secretary to the Prince, with an advanced salary. At this time Pope bestowed his praise upon our patriot in an animated couplet:

Free as young Lyttelton her course pursue, Still true to virtue, and as warm as true.

"In 1741 he married Lucy, the daughter of Hugh Fortescue, Esq., a lady for whom he entertained the purest affection, and with whom he lived in unabated conjugal harmony. Her death in childbed, in 1747, was lamented by him in a Monody,' which stands prominent among his poetical works, and displays much natural feeling, amidst the more elaborate strains of a poet's imagination. So much may suffice respecting his productions of this class, which are distinguished by the correctness of their versification, the elegance of their diction, and the delicacy of their sentiments. His miscellaneous pieces, and his history of Henry II., the last, the work of his age, have each their appropriate merits, but may here be omitted.

"The death of his father, in 1751, produced his succession to the title and a large estate; and his taste for rural ornament rendered Hagley one of the most delightful residences in the kingdom. At the dissolution of the ministry, of which he composed a part, in 1759, he was rewarded with elevation to the peerage, by the style of Baron Lyttelton, of Frankley, in the county of Worcester. He died of a lingering disorder, which he bore with pious resignation, in August, 1773, in the 64th year of his age."-Aikin's "Select Brit. Poets." See Gilfillan's Ed. of "Brit. Poets."

GEORGE, LORD LYTTELTON.

'George, Lord Lyttelton, born at Hagley, in Jan., 1708-9, was the eldest son of Sir Thomas Lyttelton, Bart., of the same place. He received his early education at Eton, whence he was sent to Christchurch College, Oxford. In both of these places he was distinguished for classical literature, and some of his poems which we have borrowed were the fruits of his juvenile studies. In his nineteenth year he set out on a tour to the Continent; and some of the letters which he wrote during this absence to his father are pleasing proofs of his sound principles, and his unreserved confidence in a venerated parent. He also wrote a poetical epistle to Dr. Ayscough, his Oxford tutor, which is one of the best of his works. On his return from abroad he was chosen representative in Parliament for the

THOMAS GRAY.

Thomas Gray, born 1716, died 1771, was a man of vast and varied acquirements, and whose life was devoted to the cultivation of letters. He was the son of a respectable London money-scrivener, but his father was a man of violent and arbitrary character, and the poet was early left to the tender care of an excellent mother, who had been obliged to separate from her tyrannical husband. He received his education at Eton, and afterwards settled in learned retirement at Cambridge, where he passed nearly the whole of his life. He travelled in France and Italy as tutor to Horace Walpole, but quarrelling with his

pupil. he returned home alone. Fixing himself at Cambridge, he soon acquired a high poetical reputation by his beautiful 'Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College,' published in 1747, which was followed, at pretty frequent intervals, by his other imposing and highly-finished works, the Elegy written in a Country Churchyard,' the Pindaric Odes,' and the far from numerous but splendid productions which make up his works. His quiet and studious retirement was only broken by occasional excursions to the North of England, and other holiday journeys, of which he has given in his letters so vivid and animated a description. His correspondence with his friends, and particularly with the poet Mason, is remarkable for interesting details, descriptions, and reflections, and is indeed, like that of Cowley, among the most delightful records of a thoughtful and literary life. Gray refused the offer of the Laureateship, which was proposed to him on the death of Cibber, but accepted the appointment of Professor of Modern History in the University, though he never performed the functions of that chair, his fastidious temper and indolent self. indulgence keeping him perpetually engaged in forming vast literary projects which he never executed. He appears not to have been popular among his colleagues; his haughty, retiring, and somewhat effeminate character prevented him from sympathizing with the tastes and studies that prevailed there; and he was at little pains to conceal his contempt for academical society. His industry was un. tiring, and his acquirements undoubtedly immense; for he had pushed his researches far beyond the usual limits of ancient classical philology, and was not only deeply versed in the romance literature of the Middle Ages, in modern French and Italian, but had studied the then almost unknown departments of Scandinavian and Celtic poetry. Constant traces may be found in all his works of the degree to which he had assimilated the spirit not only of the Greek lyric poetry, but the finest perfume of the great Italian writers: many passages of his works are a kind of mosaic of thought and imagery borrowed from Pindar, from the choral portions of the Attic tragedy, and from the majestic lyrics of the Italian poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: but though the substance of these mosaics may be borrowed from a multitude of sources, the fragments are, so to say, fused into one solid body by the intense flame of a powerful and fervent imagination. His finest lyric compositions are the Odes entitled The Bard,' that on the Progress of Poetry,' the 'Installation Ode' on the Duke of Grafton's election to the Chancellorship of the University, and the short but truly noble Ode to Adversity,' which breathes the severe and lofty spirit of the highest Greek lyric inspiration. The Elegy written in a Country Churchyard' is a masterpiece from beginning

to end. The thoughts indeed are obvious enough, but the dignity with which they are expressed, the immense range of allusion and description with which they are illustrated, and the finished grace of the language and versification in which they are embodied, give to this work something of that inimitable perfection of design and execution which we see in an antique statue or a sculptured gem. In the Bard,' starting from the picturesque idea of a Welsh poet and patriot contemplating the victorious invasion of his country by Edward I., he passes in prophetic review the whole panorama of English History, and gives a series of most animated events and per. sonages from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century. It is true that he is occasionally turgid, but the general march of the poem has a rush and a glow worthy of Pindar himself. The phantoms of the great and the illustrious flit before us like the shadowy kings in the weird procession of Macbeth: and the unity of sentiment is maintained first by the gratified vengeance with which the prophet foresees the crimes and sufferings of the oppressors of his country and their descendants, and by the triumphant prediction of the glorious reign of the Tudor race in Britain. In the odes entitled 'The Fatal Sisters' and 'The Descent of Odin,' Gray borrowed his materials from the Scandinavian legends. The tone of the Norse poetry is not perhaps very faithfully reproduced, but the fiery and gigantic imagery of the ancient Scalds was for the first time imitated in English; and though the chants retain some echoes of the sentiment and versification of more modern and polished literature, these attempts to revive the rude and archaic grandeur of the mythological traditions of the Eddas deserve no niggardly meed of approbation. In general Gray may be said to overcolour his language, and to indulge occasionally excess of ornament and personification; he will nevertheless be always regarded as a lyric poet of a very high order, and as one who brought an immense store of varied and picturesque erudition to feed the fire of a rich and powerful fancy."-Shaw's Hist. Eng. Lit.," pp. 388, 389; Allibone's "Crit. Dict. Eng. Lit."; Beeton's "Dict. Univer. Biog."; Gilfillan's Ed. of "Gray's Poems."

in an

WILLIAM MASON.

66

"William Mason, a poet of some distinction, born in 1725, was the son of a clergyman, who held the living of Hull. He was admitted first of St. John's College, and afterwards of Pembroke College, Cambridge, of the latter of which he was elected Fellow in 1747. He entered into holy orders in 1754, and, by the favour of the Earl of Holderness, was pre

sented to the valuable rectory of Aston, Yorkshire, and became chaplain to His Majesty. Some poems which he printed gave him reputation, which received a great accession from his dramatic poem of Elfrida.' By this piece, and his 'Caractacus,' which followed, it was his aim to attempt the restoration of the ancient Greek chorus in tragedy; but this is so evidently an appendage of the infant and imperfect state of the drama, that a pedantic attachment to the ancients could alone suggest its revival. In 1756 he published a small collection of 'Odes,' which were generally considered as displaying more of the artificial mechanism of poetry, than of its genuine spirit. This was not the case with his Elegies,' published in 1763, which, abating some superfluity of ornament, are in general marked with the simplicity of language proper to this species of composition, and breathe noble sentiments of freedom and virtue. A collection of all his poems which he thought worthy of praserving, was published in 1764, and afterwards went through several editions. He had married an amiable lady, who died of a consumption in 1767, and was buried in the cathedral of Bristol, under a monument, on which are inscribed some very tender and beautiful lines, by her husband.

"In 1772, the first book of Mason's 'English Garden,' a didactic and descriptive poem, in blank verse, made its appearance, of which the fourth and concluding book was printed in 1781. Its purpose was to recommend the modern system of natural or landscape gardening, to which the author adheres with the rigour of exclusive taste. The versification is formed upon the best models, and the description, in many parts, is rich and vivid; but a general air of stiffness prevented it from attaining any considerable share of popularity. Some of his following poetic pieces express his liberal sentiments on political subjects; and when the late Mr. Pitt came into power, being then the friend of a free constitution, Mason addressed him in an 'Ode,' containing many patriotic and manly ideas. But being struck with alarm at the unhappy events of the French Revolution, one of his latest pieces was a 'Palinody to Liberty.' He likewise revived, in an improved form, and published, Du Fresnoy's Latin poem on the Art of Painting, enriching it with additions furnished by Sir Joshua Reynolds, and with a metrical version. Few have been better executed than this, which unites to great beauties of language a correct representation of the original. His tribute to the memory of Gray, being an edition of his poems, with some additions, and Memoirs of his Life and Writings,' was favourably received by the public.

"Mason died in April, 1797, at the age of seventy-two, in consequence of a mortification produced by a hurt in his leg. A tablet has

OLIVER GOLDSMITH.

Oliver Goldsmith, born 1728, died 1774. "The most charming and versatile, and certainly one of the greatest writers of the eighteenth century, whose works, whether in prose or verse, bear peculiar stamp of gentle grace and elegance. He was born at the village of Pallas, in the county of Longford, Ireland. His father was a poor curate of English extraction, struggling, with the aid of farming and a miserable stipend, to bring up a large family. By the assistance of a benevolent uncle, Mr. Contarine, Oliver was enabled to enter the University of Dublin in the humble quality of sizar. He however neglected the opportunities for study which the place offered him, and became notorious for his irregularities, his disobedience to authority, and above all for a degree of improvidence carried to the extreme, though excused by a tenderness and charity almost morbid. The earlier part of his life is an obscure and monotonous narrative of ineffectual struggles to subsist, and of wanderings which enabled him to traverse almost the whole of Europe. Having been for a short time tutor in a family in Ireland, he determined to study medicine; and after nominally attending lectures in Edinburgh, he began those travels-for the most part on foot, and subsisting by the aid of his flute and the charity given to a poor scholarwhich successively led him to Leyden, through Holland, France, Germany, and Switzerland, and even to Pavia, where he boasted, though the assertion is hardly capable of proof, that he received a medical degree. His professional as well as his general knowledge was of the most superficial and inaccurate character. It was while wandering in the guise of a beggar in Switzerland that he sketched out the plan of his poem of the 'Traveller,' which afterwards formed the commencement of his fame. In 1756 he found his way back to his native country; and his career during about eight years was a succession of desultory struggles with famine, sometimes as a chemist's shopman in London; sometimes as an usher in boardingschools, the drudge of his employers and the butt and laughing-stock of the pupils; sometimes as a practitioner of medicine among the poorest and most squalid population- the

bergars in Axe Lane,' as he expressed it himself; and more generally as a miserable and scantily-paid bookseller's hack. More than once, under the pressure of intolerable distress, he exchanged the bondage of the school for the severer slavery of the corrector's table in a printing-office, and was driven back again to the bondage of the school. The grace and readiness of his pen would probably have afforded him a decent subsistence, even from the hardly-earned wages of a drudge-writer, but for his extreme improvidence, his almost childish generosity, his passion for pleasure and fine clothes, and above all his propensity for gambling. At one time, during this wretched period of his career, he failed to pass the examination qualifying him for the humble medical post of a hospital mate; and, under the pressure of want and improvidence, committed the dishonourable action of pawning a suit of clothes lent him by his employer, Griffiths, for the purpose of appearing with decency before the Board. His literary apprenticeship was passed in this severe school -writing to order, and at a moment's notice, schoolbooks, tales for children, prefaces, indexes, and reviews of books; and contributing to the Monthly,' 'Critical,' and 'Lady's Review,' the British Magazine,' and other periodicals. His chief employer in this way appears to have been Griffiths, and he is said to have been at one time engaged as a corrector of the press in Richardson's service. In this period of obscure drudgery he composed some of his most charming works, or at least formed that inimitable style which makes him the rival, and perhaps more than the rival, of Addison. He produced the Chinese Letters,' the plan of which is imitated from Montesquieu's Lettres Persanes,' giving a description of English life and manners in the assumed character of a Chinese traveller, and containing some of those little sketches and humorous characters in which he was unequalled; a Life of Beau Nash;' and a short and gracefully-narrated 'History of England,' in the form of Letters from a Nobleman to his Son,' the authorship of which was ascribed to Lyttelton. It was in 1764 that the publication of his beautiful poem of the Traveller' caused him to emerge from the slough of obscure literary drudgery in which he had hitherto been crawling. The universal judgment of the public pronounced that nothing so harmonious and so original had appeared since the time of Pope; and from this period Goldsmith's career was one of uninterrupted literary success, though his folly and improvidence kept him plunged in debt which even his large earnings could not enable him to avoid, and from which indeed no amount of fortune would have saved him. In 1766 appeared the Vicar of Wakefield,' that masterpiece of gentle humour and deli cate tenderness; in the following year his first comedy, the Goodnatured Man,' which failed

upon the stage in some measure from its very merits, some of its comic scenes shocking the perverted taste of an audience which admired the whining, preaching, sentimental pieces that were then in fashion. In 1768 Goldsmith composed, as taskwork for the booksellers though taskwork for which his now rapidly rising popularity secured good payment-the History of Rome,' distinguished by its extreme superficiality of information and want of research no less than by enchanting grace of style and vivacity of narration. In 1770 he published the Deserted Village,' the companion poem to the Traveller,' written in some measure in the same manner, and not less touching and perfect; and in 1773 was acted his comedy 'She Stoops to Conquer,' one of the gayest, pleasantest, and most amusing pieces that the English stage can boast. Goldsmith had long risen from the obscurity to which he had been condemned: he was one of the most admired and popular authors of his time; his society was courted by the wits, artists, statesmen, and writers who formed a brilliant circle round Johnson and Reynolds-Burke, Garrick, Beauclerk, Percy, Gibbon, Boswell-and he became a member of that famous Club which is so intimately associated with the intellectual history of that time. Goldsmith was one of those men whom it is impossible not to love, and equally impossible not to despise and laugh at; his vanity, his childish though not malignant envy, his more than Irish aptitude for blunders, his eagerness to shine in conversation, for which he was peculiarly unfitted, his weaknesses and genius combined, made him the pet and the laughing. stock of the company. He was now in the receipt of an income which for that time and for the profession of letters might have been accounted splendid; but his improvidence kept him plunged in debt, and he was always anticipating his receipts, so that he continued to be the slave of booksellers, who obliged him to waste his exquisite talent on works hastily thrown off, and for which he neither possessed the requisite knowledge nor could make the necessary researches: thus he successively put forth as taskwork the History of England,' the History of Greece,' and the History of Animated Nature,' the two former works being mere compilations of second-hand facts, and the last an epitomized translation of Buffon. In these books we see how Goldsmith's neverfailing charm of style and easy grace of narration compensates for total ignorance and a complete absence of independent know. ledge of the subject. In 1774 this brilliant and feverish career was terminated. Goldsmith was suffering from a painful and dangerous disease, aggravated by disquietude of mind arising from the disorder in his affairs; and relying upon his knowledge of medicine he imprudently persisted in employing a

violent remedy, against the advice of his physicians. He died at the age of forty-six, deeply mourned by the brilliant circle of friends to which his very weaknesses had endeared him no less than his admirable genius, and surrounded by the tears and blessings of many wretches whom his inexhaustible benevolence had relieved. He was buried in the Temple Churchyard, and a monument was erected to his memory in Westminster Abbey, for which Johnson wrote a Latin inscription, one passage of which gracefully alludes to the versatility of his genius qui nullum fere scribendi genus non tetigit, nullum quod tetigit non ornavit.'

·

"In everything Goldsmith wrote, prose or verse, serious or comic, there is a peculiar delicacy and purity of sentiment, tinging, of course, the language and diction as well as the thought. It seems as if his genius, though in its earlier career surrounded with squalid distress, was incapable of being sullied by any stain of coarseness or vulgarity. Though of English descent he had in an eminent degree the defects as well as the virtues of the Irish character: and no quality in his writings is more striking than the union of grotesque humour with a sort of pensive tenderness which gives to his verse a peculiar character of gliding melody and grace. He had seen much, and reproduced with singular vivacity quaint strokes of nature, as in his sketch of Beau Tibbs and innumerable passages in the Vicar of Wakefield.' The two poems of the Traveller' and the Deserted Village' will ever be regarded as masterpieces of sentiment and description. The light yet rapid touch with which, in the former, he has traced the scenery and the natural peculiarities of various countries will be admired long after the reader has learned to neglect the false social theories embodied in his deductions; and in spite of the inconsistency pointed out by Macaulay, between the pictures of the village in its pristine beauty and happiness, and the same village when ruined and depopulated by the forced emigration of its inhabitants, the reader lingers over the delicious details of human as well as inanimate nature which the poet has combined into the lovely pastoral picture of 'sweet Auburn.' The touches of tender personal feeling which he has interwoven with his description, as the fond hope with which he dwelt on the project of returning to pass his age among the scenes of innocence which had cradled his boyhood, the comparison of himself to a hare returning to die where it was kindled, the deserted garden, the village alehouse, the school, and the evening landscape, are all touched with the pensive grace of a Claude; while, when the occasion demands, Goldsmith rises with easy wing to the height of lofty and even sublime elevation, as in the image of the storm-girded yet sunshine-crowned peak to which he compares the good pastor.

"The Vicar of Wakefield,' in spite of the extreme absurdity and inconsistency of its plot, an inconsistency which grows more perceptible in the latter part of the story, will ever remain one of those rare gems which no lapse of time can tarnish. The gentle and quiet humour embodied in the simple Dr. Primrose, the delicate yet vigorous contrasts of character in the other personages, the atmosphere of purity, cheerfulness, and gaiety which envelops all the scenes and incidents, will contribute, no less than the transparency and grace of the style, to make this story a classic for all time. Goldsmith's two comedies are written in two different manners, the 'Goodnatured Man' being a comedy of character, and 'She Stoops to Conquer' a comedy of intrigue. In the first the excessive easiness and generosity of the hero is not a quality sufficiently reprehensible to make him a favourable subject for that satire which is the essential element of this kind of theatrical painting; and the merit of the piece chiefly consists in the truly laughable personage of Croaker, and in the excellent scene where the disguised bailiffs are passed off on Miss Richland as the friends of Honeywood, whose house and person they have seized. But in 'She Stoops to Conquer' we have a first-rate specimen of the comedy of intrigue, where the interest mainly depends upon a tissue of lively and farcical incidents, and where the characters, though lightly sketched, form a gallery of eccentric pictures. The best proof of Goldsmith's success in this piece is the constancy with which it has always kept possession of the stage; and the peals of laughter which never fail to greet the lively bustle of its scenes and the pleasant absurdities of Young Marlow, Mr. and Mrs. Hardcastle, and above all the admirable Tony Lumpkin, a conception worthy of Vanbrugh himself.

"Some of Goldsmith's lighter fugitive poems are incomparable for their peculiar humour. The Haunch of Venison' is a model of easy narrative and accurate sketching of commonplace society; and in Retaliation we have a series of slight yet delicate portraits of some of the most distinguished literary friends of the poet, thrown off with a hand at once refined and vigorous. In how masterly a manner, and yet in how few strokes, has Goldsmith placed before us Garrick, Burke, and Reynolds; and how deeply do we regret that he should not have given us similar portraits of Johnson, Gibbon, and Boswell. Several of the songs and ballads scattered through his works are remarkable for their tenderness and harmony, though the 'Edwin and Angelina,' which has been so often lauded, has always appeared to me mawkish, affected, and devoid of the true spirit of the mediaval ballad." Shaw's "Hist. of Eng. Lit.," pp. 350-354. See Dr. Angus's "Handbook of Eng. Lit."; Gilfillan's