plainest country gentleman, can pro- | Churchill was a blockhead. The con ceed from the same sharp and vigorous intellect which had excited their admiration under the same roof, and on the same day. tempt which he felt for the trash of He was undoubtedly an excellent Johnson decided literary questions like a lawyer, not like a legislator. He never examined foundations where a point was already ruled. His whole code of criticism rested on pure assumption, for which he sometimes quoted a precedent or an authority, but rarely troubled himself to give a reason drawn from the nature of things. He took it for granted that the kind of poetry which flourished in his own time, which he had been accustomed to hear praised from his childhood, and which he had himself written with success, was the best kind of poetry. In his biographical work he has repeatedly laid it down as an undeniable proposition that during the latter part of the seventeenth century, and the earlier part of the eighteenth, English poetry had been in a constant Some of Johnson's whims on literary progress of improvement. Waller, subjects can be compared only to that Denham, Dryden, and Pope, had been, strange nervous feeling which made according to him, the great reformers. him uneasy if he had not touched every He judged of all works of the imagina-post between the Mitre tavern and his tion by the standard established among own lodgings. His preference of Latin his own contemporaries. Though he epitaphs to English epitaphs is an inallowed Homer to have been a greater stance. An English epitaph, he said, man than Virgil, he seems to have would disgrace Smollett. He declared thought the Eneid a greater poem that he would not pollute the walls of than the Iliad. Indeed he well might Westminster Abbey with an English have thought so; for he preferred Pope's epitaph on Goldsmith. What reason Iliad to Homer's. He pronounced that, there can be for celebrating a British after Hoole's translation of Tasso, Fair-writer in Latin, which there was not fax's would hardly be reprinted. He for covering the Roman arches of tricould see no merit in our fine old Eng-umph with Greek inscriptions, or for lish ballads, and always spoke with commemorating the deeds of the heroes the most provoking contempt of Percy's of Thermopyla in Egyptian hieroglyfondness for them. Of the great ori-phics, we are utterly unable to imagine. ginal works of imagination which ap- On men and manners, at least on peared during his time, Richardson's the men and manners of a particular novels alone excited his admiration. place and a particular age, JohnHe could see little or no merit in Tom son had certainly looked with a Jones, in Gulliver's Travels, or in Tris- most observant and discriminating tram Shandy. To Thomson's Castle eye. His remarks on the education of of Indolence he vouchsafed only a children, on marriage, on the economy line of cold commendation, of commen- of families, on the rules of society, are dation much colder than what he has always striking, and generally sound. bestowed on the Creation of that por- In his writings, indeed, the knowledge tentous bore, Sir Richard Blackmore. of life which he possessed in an eminent Gray was, in his dialect, a barren rascal. | degree is very imperfectly exhibited head. T for the m eed just; by chay or the very ta en of gen sed it, not en in:non-1 uperficial dly an envi t when a red, when judgment a: at minds to eternal inious. Her excellent hakspeare eem to us i d as if the er himself the worst whims on ared only ing which not touched Like those unfortunate chiefs of the ac were rarely found in a Londoner who re tavern eference of pitaphs is epitaph, ett. He de llute the with an E man arches scriptions, Heeds of the gyptian hier nable to im ners, at leas ers of a pa ular ag looked d discri generally ed, the ssed in knowing than another fact. The fact that there is a snake in a pyramid, or the fact that Hannibal crossed the Alps, are in themselves as unprofitable to us as the fact that there is a green blind in a particular house in Threadneedle Street, or the fact that a Mr. Smith comes into the city every mom ing on the top of one of the Blackwall also, to be an indelicate people, be- travelling? What did Lord Charlemont cause a French footman touched the learn in his travels, except that there sugar with his fingers. That ingenious was a snake in one of the pyramids of and amusing traveller, M. Simond, has Egypt ?" History was, in his opinion, defended his countrymen very success- to use the fine expression of Lord fully against Johnson's accusation, and Plunkett, an old almanack: historians has pointed out some English practices could, as he conceived, claim no higher which, to an impartial spectator, would dignity than that of almanack-makers; seem at least as inconsistent with phy- and his favourite historians were those sical cleanliness and social decorum as who, like Lord Hailes, aspired to no those which Johnson so bitterly repre- higher dignity. He always spoke with hended. To the sage, as Boswell loves contempt of Robertson. Hume' he to call him, it never occurred to doubt would not even read. He affronted that there must be something eternally one of his friends for talking to him and immutably good in the usages to about Catiline's conspiracy, and dewhich he had been accustomed. In clared that he never desired to hear of fact, Johnson's remarks on society be- the Punic war again as long as he lived. yond the bills of mortality, are generally Assuredly one fact which does not of much the same kind with those of directly affect our own interests, conhonest Tom Dawson, the English foot-sidered in itself, is no better worth man in Dr. Moore's Zeluco. "Suppose the king of France has no sons, but only a daughter, then, when the king dies, this here daughter, according to that there law, cannot be made queen, but the next near relative, provided he is a man, is made king, and not the last king's daughter, which, to be sure, is very unjust. The French footguards are dressed in blue, and all the march-stages. But it is certain that those ing regiments in white, which has a who will not crack the shell of history very foolish appearance for soldiers; will never get at the kernel. Johnson, and as for blue regimentals, it is only with hasty arrogance, pronounced the fit for the blue horse or the artillery." kernel worthless, because he saw no Johnson's visit to the Hebrides in-value in the shell. The real use of troduced him to a state of society completely new to him; and a salutary suspicion of his own deficiencies seems on that occasion to have crossed his mind for the first time. He confessed, in the last paragraph of his Journey, that his thoughts on national manners were the thoughts of one who had seen but little, of one who had passed his time almost wholly in cities. This feeling, however, soon passed away. It is remarkable that to the last he entertained a fixed contempt for all those modes of life and those studies which tend to emancipate the mind from the prejudices of a particular age or a particular nation. Of foreign travel and of history he spoke with the fierce and boisterous contempt of ignorance. "What does a man learn by travelling? Is Beauclerk the better for travelling to distant countries and of studying the annals of past times is to preserve men from the contraction of mind which those can hardly escape whose whole communion is with one generation and one neighbourhood, who arrive at conclusions by means of an induction not sufficiently copious, and who therefore constantly confound exceptions with rules, and accidents with essential properties. In short, the real use of travelling and of studying history is to keep men from being what Tom Dawson was in fiction, and Samuel Johnson in reality. Johnson, as Mr. Burke most justly observed, appears far greater in Boswell's books than in his own. His conversation appears to have been quite equal to his writings in matter, and far superior to them in manner. When he talked, he clothed his wit| Saxon or Norman-French, of which and his sense in forcible and natural the roots lie in the inmost depths of expressions. As soon as he took his our language; and that he felt a vipen in his hand to write for the public, cious partiality for terms which, long his style became systematically vicious. after our own speech had been fixed, All his books are written in a learned were borrowed from the Greek and language, in a language which nobody Latin, and which, therefore, even when hears from his mother or his nurse, in lawfully naturalised, must be consia language in which nobody ever dered as born aliens, not entitled to quarrels, or drives bargains, or makes rank with the king's English. His love, in a language in which nobody constant practice of padding out a ever thinks. It is clear that Johnson sentence with useless epithets, till it himself did not think in the dialect in became as stiff as the bust of an exwhich he wrote. The expressions which quisite, his antithetical forms of exprescame first to his tongue were simple, sion, constantly employed even where energetic, and picturesque. When he there is no opposition in the ideas exwrote for publication, he did his sen- pressed, his big words wasted on little tences out of English into Johnsonese. things, his harsh inversions, so widely His letters from the Hebrides to Mrs. different from those graceful and easy Thrale are the original of that work inversions which give variety, spirit, of which the Journey to the Hebrides and sweetness to the expression of our is the translation; and it is amusing great old writers, all these peculiarities to compare the two versions. "When have been imitated by his admirers we were taken up stairs," says he in and parodied by his assailants, till the one of his letters, a dirty fellow public has become sick of the subject. bounced out of the bed on which one of us was to lie." This incident is recorded in the Journey as follows: "Out of one of the beds on which we were to repose started up, at our entrance, a man black as a Cyclops from the forge." Sometimes Johnson translated aloud. "The Rehearsal," he said, very unjustly, "has not wit enough to 1 keep it sweet;" then, after a pause, "it has not vitality enough to preserve it from putrefaction." 66 Mannerism is pardonable, and is sometimes even agreeable, when the manner, though vicious, is natural. Few readers, for example, would be willing to part with the mannerism of Milton or of Burke. But a mannerism which does not sit easy on the mannerist, which has been adopted on principle, and which can be sustained only by constant effort, is always offensive. And such is the mannerism of Johnson. The characteristic faults of his style are so familiar to all our readers, and have been so often burlesqued, that it is almost superfluous to point them out. It is well known that he made less use than any other eminent writer of those strong plain words, Anglo Goldsmith said to him, very wittily and very justly, "If you were to write a fable about little fishes, doctor, you would make the little fishes talk like whales." No man surely ever had so little talent for personation as Johnson. Whether he wrote in the character of a disappointed legacy-hunter or an empty town fop, of a crazy virtuoso or a flippant coquette, he wrote in the same pompous and unbending style. His speech, like Sir Piercy Shafton's Euphuistic eloquence, bewrayed him under every disguise. Euphelia and Rhodoclea talk as finely as Imlac the poet, or Seged, Emperor of Ethiopia. The gay Cornelia describes her reception at the country-house of her relations, in such terms as these: "I was surprised, after the civilities of my first reception, to find, instead of the leisure and tranquillity which a rural life always promises, and, if well conducted, might always afford, a confused wildness of care, and a tumultuous hurry of diligence, by which every face was clouded, and every motion agitated." The gentle Tranquilla informs us, that she "had not passed the earlier part of life without the flattery of courtship, and the joys of triumph; but had danced the round of gaiety amidst the | that of this remarkable man! To be JOHN HAMPDEN. Some Memorials of John Hampden, his We had something more to say. But our article is already too long; and we must close it. We would fain part in good humour from the hero, from the biographer, and even from the editor, who, ill as he has performed his task, has at least this claim to our gratitude, that he has induced us to read Boswell's book again. As we close it, the club-room is before us, and the table on which stands the omelet for Nugent, and the lemons for Johnson. There are assembled those heads which live for ever on the canvass of Reynolds. There are the spectacles of We have read this book with great Burke and the tall thin form of Lang-pleasure, though not exactly with that ton, the courtly sneer of Beauclerk and kind of pleasure which we had expected. the beaming smile of Garrick, Gibbon We had hoped that Lord Nugent would tapping his snuff-box and Sir Joshua have been able to collect, from family with his trumpet in his ear. In the papers and local traditions, much new foreground is that strange figure which and interesting information respecting is as familiar to us as the figures of the life and character of the renowned those among whom we have been leader of the Long Parliament, the first brought up, the gigantic body, the of those great English commoners huge massy face, scamed with the scars whose plain addition of Mister has, to of disease, the brown coat, the black our ears, a more majestic sound than worsted stockings, the grey wig with the proudest of the feudal titles. In the scorched foretop, the dirty hands, this hope we have been disappointed; the nails bitten and pared to the quick. but assuredly not from any want of We see the eyes and mouth moving zeal or diligence on the part of the with convulsive twitches; we see the noble biographer. Even at Hampden, heavy form rolling; we hear it puffing; there are, it seems, no important papers and then comes the "Why, sir!" and relating to the most illustrious prothe "What then, sir?" and the "No, prietor of that ancient domain. The sir!" and the "You don't see your most valuable memorials of him which way through the question, sir!" still exist, belong to the family of his friend Sir John Eliot. Lord Eliot has furnished the portrait which is engraved for this work, together with some very interesting letters. The portrait is undoubtedly an original, and probably the only original now in existence. What a singular destiny has been It is proper to observe that this passage bears a very close resemblance to a passage in the Rambler (No. 20.). The resemblance may possibly be the effect of unconscious plagiarism. etal forehead, the mild restra nd the eye, and the inflexible reso an expressed by the lines of the suficiently guarantee the kea. We shall probably make some nts from the letters. They com nest all the new information And Nagent has been able to pro pecting the private pursuits of ee of Hampden is gr They contain some Fre that even the want of The most minute chronicler, Thrale, or Boswell himorded concerning their he elebrated Puritan leader is an ry instance of a great man sought nor shunned greatand glory only because glory plain path of duty. During forty years he was known ry neighbours as a gentleivated mind, of high prinMished address, happy in his ad active in the discharge of and to political men as industrious, and sensiblejn Parliament, not eager to Talents, stanch to his party, fire to the interests of his A great and terrible crisis H direct attack was made br y government on a sacred J Egishmen, on a right which i if security for all their other r The nation looked round for a r Calmly and unostentatiously Buckinghamshire Esquire in elf at the head of his cound right before the face and The |