this. There is something good in all he has written.' Poor, faint praise, indeed! 5. Next in order of time should be mentioned Swift, born in Dublin, November 30, 1667, and died October 19, 1745, a living wreck of humanity. After all his outrageous frenzy at times, he died, says Scott, 'upon that day without a single pang; so gently, indeed, that his attendants were scarce aware of the moment of his dissolution.' This is not the place to speak of the man, with whom his biographer has dealt as gently as he might. He is introduced here as a master of style. 6. Steele was born the year before Addison, in Dublin, 1791, and died at Llangunnor, near Carmarthen, South Wales, September 1, 1729. He it was who commenced the 'Tatler,' the Spectator,' and the 'Guardian' the sprightly father of the English Essay,' as John Forster called him in his genial 'Life,' to which the reader is referred for the fairest sketch of his mixed character. 7. Next comes Addison, whose name, like Sir Roger de Coverley's, is a sort of household word on every Englishman's tongue, born at Milston in Wiltshire, near Ambresbury, of which his father, Lancelot Addison, was rector, on May 1, 1672, and died at Holland House, June 17, 1719, having first sent for the young Lord Warwick, whose mother he had married, a young man of irregular habits, and to whom Addison's bearing was the tenderest. It was upon this occasion that the good man said, 'I have sent for you that you may see how a Christian can die!' and the young man died himself soon after. Tickell told Dr. Young that it was to this interview he alluded in his Elegy: He taught us how to live; and-oh! too high I have nothing to do with Addison's literary squabbles— I can only here look upon him as a good man in the mainand one of the purest, if not the purest, of our English prose writers. 8. To omit the name of Pope in this little summary would be wrong, for although the tinsel of his verse is tinsel, and VOL. III. A A not the revised English of Dryden, it must nevertheless be admitted that his power over English was great. What Southey thought of his debasement of poetry may be seen in Chapter XII. of the 'Life of Cowper,' where he gives a sketch of the progress of English poetry from the time of Chaucer to Cowper's day. But the general reader will refer, of course, to his 'Life' by Johnson. Pope was born in Lombard Street (where,' says Mrs. Blount, his father was a merchant who dealt in Hollands'), May 22, 1688, and died at Twickenham, the spot he loved so well, March 20, 1727. One name, I think, should yet be mentioned here, in a literary point of view, though on other accounts it would be omitted, and that is the name of Matthew Prior-' one Prior,' Burnet called him, who had been James's secretary, and, upon his death, was employed to prosecute that '-i.e. a peace with France-' which the other did not live to finish. Prior had been taken when a boy out of a tavern by the Earl of Dorset, who accidentally found him reading Horace; and he, being very generous, gave him an education in literature.' He was born July 21, 1664, in Abbot Street, one mile from Wimborne Minster, Dorset, and died September 18, 1721, at Wimpole, a seat of the Earl of Oxford. He certainly knew how to turn the English language over his fingers, and might have excelled as a writer of prose. One of Southey's long-cherished wishes was to have continued Warton's History of English Poetry.' No one could have done it better-nor could anyone have written an account of our English prose more felicitously. Looking to how much I have lived to forget, I venture to insert at the end of these remarks a very striking passage from Locke's 'Essay concerning Human Understanding.' It will be found in the Tenth Chapter of the Second Book, and is headed Retention.' As to some of the philosophy, I dare say it may be wrong, but there is a clear and evident moral in the words which must be right. 'In all these cases, ideas in the mind quickly fade and often vanish quite out of the understanding, leaving no more footsteps or remaining characters of themselves than shadows do flying over fields of corn; and the mind is as void of them as if they had never been there. 'Thus many of those ideas which were produced on the minds of children in the beginning of their sensation (some of which, perhaps, some pleasures and pains, were before they were born, and others in their infancy), if in the future course of their lives they are not repeated again, are quite lost, without the least glimpse remaining of them. This may be observed in those who, by some mischance, have lost their sight when they were very young, in whom the idea of colours having been but slightly taken notice of, and ceasing to be repeated, doth quite wear out; so that some years after there is no more notion or memory of colours left in their minds than in those of people born blind. The memory of some, it is true, is very tenacious, even to a miracle; but yet there seems to be a constant decay of all our ideas, even of those which are struck deepest, and in minds the most retentive; so that if they be not sometimes renewed by repeated exercise of the senses, or reflection on those kinds of objects which at first occasioned them, the print wears out, and at last there remains nothing to be seen. Thus the ideas, as well as children of our youth, often die before us, and our minds represent to us those tombs to which we are approaching; where, though the brass and the marble remain, yet the inscriptions are effaced by time, and the imagery moulders away. The pictures drawn in our minds are laid in fading colours, and if not sometimes refreshed, vanish and disappear. How much the constitution of our bodies and the make of our animal spirits are concerned in this, and whether the temper of the brain makes this difference, that in some it retains the characters drawn in it like marble, in others like freestone, and in others little better than sand, I shall not here inquire, though it may seem probable that the constitution of the body does sometimes influence the memory; like we oftentimes find a disease quite strip the mind of all its ideas, and the flames of a fever in a few days calcine all the images to dust and confusion, which seemed to be so lasting as if graved in marble.' 1 1 Vol. i. 129. Ed. 1793, 8vo. Locke was a good scholar, and no doubt had in his mind the two following passages of that splendid 'Satire' of Juvenal: Patriam tamen obruit olim Gloria paucorum, et laudis titulique cupido Sed omni Membrorum damno major dementia, quæ nec Ibid. 232. 357 CHAPTER XLIII. THE HANOVERIAN SUCCESSION. A hard fate that the enthronement of a stranger should have been the only means to secure our liberties and laws! Almost a century of foreign masters! Such has been the indirect but undoubted effect of the Great Rebellion. Charles and James, driven abroad by the tumults at home, received a French education, and pursued a French policy. Their government was overthrown by a Dutchman; George I. and George II. were entirely German; thus from 1660 to 1760, when a truly English monarch once more ascended the throne, the reign of Queen Anne appears the only exception to a foreign dominion.-LORD MAHON, vol. i. 146. The gardens and pavilions of Herrenhausen are scarce changed since the day when the stout old Electress fell down in her last walk there, preceding but by a few weeks to the tomb James II.'s daughter, whose death made way for the Brunswick Stuarts in England.-THACKERAY'S First George. He hath a mighty burden to sustain Whose fortune doth succeed a gracious prince; Or when men's expectations entertain Hopes of more good and more beneficence. DANIEL'S Panegyric to the King's GEORGE I. arrived at Greenwich on September 16, 1714, and was in the fifty-sixth year of his age, at which time men rarely learn a new language. The consequence was that he never spoke anything but very broken and almost unintelligible English. The accession could hardly be called acceptable in the old town, which, perhaps, rather befriended the Pretendermost certainly disliked the Whigs as unfriendly to the Church, upon many of whom they looked also, as did Thomas Hearne, as 'snivelling, and poor-spirited.' The prejudices of others may be understood from the Antiquarian, who says of his old schoolfellow at Bray in Berks, I should have been glad to |