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THOMAS DILWORTH, — 1780, was an English schoolmaster, whose school-books were in great vogue in the last century, both in England and in the colonies; indeed, their use in the United States continued until times within the memory of many still living Works: Book-keeper's Assistant; Schoolmaster's Assistant; Arithmetic; Guide to the English Tongue, etc.

JOHN ENTINCK, 1713-1773, was employed by the booksellers in compiling various works: Latin and English Dictionary; The Present State of the British Empire, ↓ vols., 8vo; A General History of the Late War [in America] 5 vols.; A New Naval History, fol.; A Survey and History of London, 4 vols. Entinck's Latin Dictionary had a long run. It is even still in use.

THOMAS NUGENT, 1772, is chiefly known as the compiler of Nugent's Pocket French Dictionary, a work which still retains its value, and has run through several revised editions. Mr. Nugent also translated Benvenuto Cellini's Autobiography, Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws, Henault's Chronological Abridgment (of the history of France), and other works.

WILLIAM KENRICK, LL. D., 1720-1779, is now known, so far as known at all, mainly by his English Dictionary.

Kenrick was a belligerent critic, who, in the pithy language of Disraeli, "could criticize all the genius of his age faster than it was produced." Kenrick succeeded in embroiling himself with almost every notable literary personage of the times, including Goldsmith, Johnson, Akenside, and Garrick. The last named, indeed, sued him for libel, in consequence of his poem called “Love in the Suds." Kenrick's principal works are his Epistles, Philosophical and Moral, his Review of Dr. Johnson's New Edition of Shakespeare, and A Dictionary of the English Language.

JOHN ASH, LL. D., 1724–1779, is likewise chiefly known by his English Dictionary, published in 1775. It is one of the standard works in the history of English lexicography. It contains a large number of words now obsolete, and many provincial and cant words.

Four Shakespearian Editors.

EDWARD CAPELL, 1713-1781, is distinguished for his labors as an editor of Shakespeare. He spent a great part of his life in the attempt to ascertain the true text and to throw light upon the meaning. His Notes and Various Readings form a part of the Variorum Editions, though there is much difference of opinion as to their value. His judgment does not appear to have been equal to his industry.

GEORGE STEEVENS, 1736-1800, has a place in literature as a commentator on Shakespeare. He was educated at Cambridge, was rich and ill-tempered, and managed for the most part to keep himself and others in a ferment. He contributed to Johnson's Lives of the Poets, Dodsley's Annual Register, and other works of that kind, and was much addicted to making anonymous attacks in the newspapers upon other authors. Johnson's and Steevens's edition of Shakespeare first appeared in 1773, in 10 vols., Svo. This was increased and supplemented by various authors, from time to time. The sixth edition, in 1813, combining the critical labors of Johnson, Steevens, Reed, and Malone, was in 21 vols., 8vo.

EDMUND MALONE, 1741-1812, a native of Ireland, and a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, was a gentleman of leisure, who devoted himself to literary pursuits, and

chiefly to Shakespearian researches. He published an edition of Shakespeare, in 10 vols.; An Historical Account of the Rise and Progress of the English Stage, etc. Malone spent much labor on his various critical editions, but he had little judgment or taste, and his notes and criticisms are now esteemed of almost no value.

ISAAC REED, 1742-1807, is also known by his connection with Shakespearian and dramatic literature. He was a lawyer by profession, but occupied himself mostly with books. He published an edition of Shakespeare, 10 vols.; Dodsley's Old Plays, 12 vols.; contributed largely to Johnson's Lives of the Poets; and did a good deal more literary work of this kind.

II. THE NOVELISTS.

Richardson.

Samuel Richardson, 1689-1767, came before the public a little earlier than his great rival, Fielding, and is sometimes called the Father of the English Novel. But this epithet belongs more properly to the latter writer. Richardson's three novels, however, Pamela, Clarissa Harlowe, and Sir Charles Grandison, are among the memorable works of the age, and ensure to their author a permanent and honorable place in English literature.

Career. Richardson was a printer by trade, and he succeeded in gaining for himself a competency long before he ever thought of turning his attention to writing. As a boy he evinced a fondness for reading, and skill in the use of the pen, so that the young women of the village frequently employed him to write their love-letters. In this way Richardson laid the foundations for that knowledge of woman's heart and woman's ways, which afterwards stood him in such good stead. Indeed, he seems to have been, throughout life, a chatty, not to say gossipy, soul, and never so much at home as when the centre of a small circle of kind-hearted if not particularly strong-headed female admirers. The greater part of Clarissa and of Sir Charles Grandison was thus read aloud, from day to day, in manuscript, by the author dressed in his morning-cap and gown.

Works. The composition of Pamela might almost be called an accident. Two booksellers applied to Richardson to write a small volume of letters on subjects that might be of use to country readers unable to write for themselves, or in need of advice. This volume was published under the title of Familiar Letters. While writing those of the letters which were intended to instruct handsome girls in service how to protect their virtue, the story of Pamela occurred to Richardson's mind, and was developed by him into the well-known novel. The success of Pamela aroused the emulation of Fielding, then unknown to fame, and resulted in the publication of his Joseph

Andrews, which was intended primarily as a satire upon the sentimentalism of Pamela. Clarissa Harlowe, which soon followed Pamela, only heightened Richardson's fame, and even spread it over to the continent. Diderot, among many others, was carried away by the work. The theme is a painful one-the long averted but inevitable seduction of the heroine. Sir Charles Grandison, which divides admiration with Clarissa, is not much different in style, and may be summed up perhaps as the adventures of a very proper, moral, male flirt, and the tragic madness of an interesting woman whose intense affection is thrown away upon the hero. Pamela is simply the story of a beautiful servant who escapes all snares and marries well and happily.

Character of his Novels. — In judging Richardson's merits we must take into account the age in which he lived and the circumstances under which he wrote. Before him there had been no novel; nothing but romances in imitation of the French, where the loves of princes and princesses were narrated in very vaporous and stilted language. Richardson brought the scene from the moonshine down to the earth, and was the first to give a real episode from English life, with real English men and women for actors.

Sentimentalism. The characters in Richardson are all sentimental, and the general tone is what we might call lackadaisical. But we should bear in mind that the eighteenth century was pre-eminently the age of sentimentality. This morbid state did not reach its climax, it is true, until several years later, when Rousseau gave it final expression and immortality in his Nouvelle Heloise and his Confessions. Still, the seeds had long been sown, and the crop was fast ripening to the harvest. The state of the public mind was that of reaction from the utter frivolity of the Restoration and Queen Anne.

Morality.-Richardson, marked according to our standard, might be set down as licentious. As compared with Fielding, however, and others of his age, his works appear to great advantage, and show a distinct moral tendency. Richardson himself probably never dreamed but that he was furthering the cause of good morals; and the favor with which Pamela and Clarissa were read and recommended by the best and wisest of the day, shows us how careful we must be in our estimates of writers of works of imagination.

His Style. As a writer, Richardson is open to grave criticism. His style is not finished, in our sense of the term. There is nothing either fresh or profound about it, nor is it easy or racy. Upon the whole it may be pronounced plain. The plot is insufferably tedious, and the conversation stilted. Unlike the great master of sentimentality, Rousseau, Richardson has no truly ideal characters, and none of those concise, passionate utterances that burn with the intensity of genius. With all his defects, however, he has put English literature under heavy obligations. His works will always be read by the curious and sympathetic, and must be studied by all who wish to understand the course of English literature.

Fielding.

Henry Fielding, 1707-1754, may be considered as the true father of the English Novel. There were other writers of fiction before him, as there were other poets before Chaucer. But Fielding first showed by example the great resources and power of this species of literature,

not only as a delineator of manners, but as a moral influence in society.

Career. Fielding was of worthy stock, his father being a distinguished soldier under the Duke of Marlborough. After studying at Eton, he was sent to the University of London to study the Civil Law; but having pursued his studies there for two years, he was obliged to return home on account of the financial difficulties of his father. At the age of twenty-one he began writing for the stage as a means of living, and he produced a large number of indifferent plays, which yielded him no fame and little money. After a few years, not very creditably spent, he succeeded in winning the hand of a celebrated beauty, Miss Craddock, who brought him, besides other charms, the sum of £1500. He fell heir about the same time to an annuity of £200. The young couple retired to an estate in the country, but free living and gayety soon exhausted their means, and Fielding returned to London in the hope of doing something at the law. He entered upon the duties of the profession with great zeal, but violent attacks of the gout, brought on by his previous excesses, obliged him to relinquish the practice.

Origin of his Novels. In this emergency, Fielding turned once more to literature, and after sundry attempts, in different lines of composition, he struck at length the true vein, and laid bare to the world a mine of heretofore undiscovered wealth in the production of his first great novel, Joseph Andrews. This was intended primarily as a satire on Richardson's Pamela, and met with a prodigious success. It was followed by Tom Jones, a work of still greater power, and the most consummate in plot of all his works. His third great novel, Amelia, came soon after, and though generally rated not quite so high as either of the others, had an immediate success superior to either.

Character as a Magistrate.-Besides his literary success, Fielding received from the Government an appointment as Justice of the Peace for the County of Middlesex, and by the vigor of his administration, aided by his knowledge of law and his native insight into criminal character, he did important service in repressing the robberies and crimes of various kinds which were then rampant.

Literary Character. - Fielding did a good many other things, and wrote many other works, among them no less than twenty-five Comedies; but the three great Novels which have been mentioned so far overtop all else that he did or wrote, that it scarcely deserves to be mentioned in the comparison. As an artist, in the delineation of human nature, it is conceded on all hands that Fielding has never been surpassed by any writer of English fiction. Yet there is a coarseness in his scenes, and often in his language, that makes a sad drawback to the pleasure of reading him.

"Fielding is the first of the British Novelists. His name is immortal as a painter of national manners. Of all the works of imagination to which English genius has given origin, his writings are most decidedly her own; all the actors in his narrative live in England, travel in England, quarrel and fight in England; and scarce an inci. dent occurs without its being marked by something which could not well have happened in any other country. In his power of strong and natural humor, and forcible

yet natural expression of character, the Father of the English Novel has not been approached even by his most successful followers. He is, indeed, as Byron terms him, The prose Homer of human nature.'"-Sir Walter Scott.

"Fielding, no doubt, began to write this novel [Joseph Andrews] in ridicule of Pamela, for which work one can understand the hearty contempt and antipathy which such an athletic and boisterous genius as Fielding's must have entertained. He could not do otherwise than laugh at the puny cockney bookseller, pouring out endless volumes of sentimental twaddle, and hold him up to scorn as a moll-coddle and a milksop. His genius had been nursed on sack-posset, and not on dishes of tea. His muse had sung the loudest in tavern choruses; had seen the daylight streaming in over thousands of emptied bowls, and reeled home to chambers on the shoulders of the watchmen. Richardson's goddess was attended by old maids and dowagers, and fed on muffins and bohea. Milksop!' roars Harry Fielding, clattering at the timid shop-hutters. Wretch! Monster! Mohock!' shricks the sentimental author of Pamela, and all the ladies of his court cackle out an affrighted chorus."— Thackeray. "In Tom Jones, Fielding has comprehended a larger variety of incidents and characters under a stricter unity of story than in Joseph Andrews; but he has given to the whole a tone of worldliness which does not mar the delightful simplicity of the latter. As an expression of the breadth and power of his mind, however, it is altogether his greatest work; and in the union of distinct pictorial representation with profound knowledge of practical life, it is unequalled by any novel in the language." -Whipple.

SARAH FIELDING, 1714-1768, a sister of the novelist, was a woman of learning, and a contributor to the literature of her day. She wrote The Adventures of David Simple; Familiar Letters between the Characters in David Simple; The Governess, or Little Female Academy; The Lives of Cleopatra and Octavia; The History of Ophelia; The History of the Countess of Delwin; The Cry, a Domestic Fable, sometimes attributed to Patty Fielding; Xenophon's Memoirs of Socrates, translated from the Greek.

Smollett.

Tobias George Smollett, 1721-1771, is permanently associated in fame with Richardson and Fielding. His three novels, Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, and Humphrey Clinker, if not equal to the three great novels of Fielding, are superior to the three of Richardson, and occupy a prominent place in the literature of the age.

Early Life. Smollett was a native of Scotland. He studied at Dumbarton and Glasgow, and entered the navy as surgeon's mate, and took part in the Carthagena expedition. After residing some time in the West Indies, where he married, he settled in London, in 1746.

Literary Career.—In 1748 appeared Roderick Random, in which the author embodied many of his experiences in the navy. In 1751 appeared Peregrine Pickle. After the publication of these two works, Smollett attempted to resume the practice of medicine, and published

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