provement of the Human Intellect), which might have been a companion to the Novum Organum of Bacon, if he had had the method and the persistence of will to carry the work to completion. "He never finished anything except his sentences, which are models of elaborate workmanship."— London Quarterly.

Of the excellence of his style, as a writer of prose, it is difficult to speak too highly. Not a few critics of great authority place him, in that respect, at the head of all English prose writers, while others divide the honor between him and Ruskin. His pre-eminent abilities seem to have met their full recognition first in the United States; and to Ticknor & Fields, of Boston, belongs the honor of bringing out the first complete edition of his works. That edition is in 20 vols., 12mo.

He wrote on a great variety of subjects, historical, literary, speculative, imaginative; and on every subject that he undertook he left the evidences of great and original genius. "The authors about whom he has written most are Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, and Coleridge. Of the first, third, and fourth, he was a devoted admirer and champion. But the second [Pope] seemed to him the very incarnation of the worst epoch of our literature."- London Quarterly.

De Quincey, like Coleridge, had a wonderful power in conversation. A visitor thus describes his talk: "For a half hour at least he talked as we have never heard another talk. We have listened to Sir William Hamilton at his own fireside, to Carlyle, walking in the parks of London, to Lamartine in the midst of a favored few at his own house, to Cousin at the Sorbonne, and to many others, but never have we heard such sweet music of eloquent speech as then flowed from De Quincey's tongue. To attempt reporting what he said would be like attempting to entrap the rays of the sun. Strange light beamed from that grief-worn face, and for a little while that weak body, so long fed upon by pain, seemed to be clothed upon with supernatural youth."

Lockhart.

John Gibson Lockhart, 1794-1854, occupies a large and honorable place in the literary history of his times.

Career. Lockhart was a native of Scotland. He was educated at Glasgow and Oxford, and married the eldest daughter of Sir Walter Scott. He was one of the early contributors to Blackwood's Magazine, and from 1826 to 1853 was editor of the London Quarterly Review, succeeding Gifford, the well-known "slasher" of young poets.

In his position as editor, Lockhart placed the Quarterly in the very first rank of periodicals, and restored to it the wide range of sympathy and culture which it had lost under Gifford's administration. Besides his editorial labors and his numerous and still uncollected contributions to the Quarterly, to Blackwood, and to other magazines, Lockhart is the author of a number of independent works.

Prominent among his works are the following: Reginald Dalton, a Novel, being a Story of English University Life; Matthew Wald, also a Novel; the Life of Burns, written with great understanding of the poet's character and talents; a Life of Napoleon; and a volume of Translations of Ancient Spanish Ballads. This work is well known to every lover of ballad literature and warmly praised by critics of every country. Lockhart is at once a faithful and a spirited translator; in some instances, indeed, he has even improved slightly upon the imperfect original.

Lockhart's great work is his Memoirs of Sir Walter Scott, which, as a biography,

ranks next to Boswell's Life of Johnson. The chief merit of this biography, aside from the light which it throws upon the life of the celebrated novelist, is the warm spirit of devotion by which it is pervaded. Lockhart, like Boswell, is completely given up to his theme, and his own enthusiasm kindles the heart of the reader. As Prescott has happily expressed it: "Fortunate as Sir Walter Scott was in his life, it was not the least of his good fortune that he left the task of recording it to one so competent."

Landor.

WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR, 1775-1864, is one of the connecting links between the age of Walter Scott, Byron, and Southey, and that of Tennyson and Dickens. He began writing while still a boy, and he did not cease entirely until extreme old age, though he lived to be almost ninety.

Landor was educated at Rugby and Oxford, and was remarkable for the accuracy of his scholarship in Latin and Greek, and for his knowledge of history, and especially of the history of Greece and Rome. The men and the affairs of former ages seemed to be as familiar to his mind, in all the minutiae of their every-day and private life, as are those of our own personal acquaintance. This thoroughness of historical knowledge, joined to a vigorous imagination, enabled him to execute in so wonderful a manner those Imaginary Conversations, which form the enduring basis of his fame. In these Conversations, after the manner of Plato and Cicero, he introduces wellknown historical characters, as discussing various questions of public and private interest. The range of subjects discussed in these dialogues is almost encyclopædic in character, in accordance with the character of the author's mind, and the proprieties of time and person are so nicely observed that the reader almost unconsciously becomes acquainted with the men as well as with the subjects.

In this class of his works are to be included Imaginary Conversations of Greeks and Romans, 2 vols.; Imaginary Conversations of Literary Men and Statesmen, 2 vols.; Pericles and Aspasia, 2 vols.; and perhaps Citation and Examination of Shakespeare for Deer-stealing.

Landor published several poems, some of which enjoyed much popularity, though all gave evidence of power. Gebir, one of his earliest, he translated into Latin, and Jeffrey declared it to be equally unintelligible in both languages, while Southey claimed to be the only person who had read it, until he discovered that the same feat had been accomplished by De Quincey. Some of Landor's other poems are Count Julian, a Tragedy; Andria of Hungary, and Giovanni of Naples, Dramas; Hellenics, etc. Mr. Landor was a man of wealth, extremely fastidious in his tastes, prond even to arrogance, careless, almost contemptuous, of public opinion, and not condescending to conceal the good opinion he had of himself. He was of course unpopular, and was subjected to savage criticism. Yet, as years rolled on, his eminent merits gradually obtained recognition; and, unlike many of his contemporaries, his star now stands confessedly higher in the firmament than it did fifty years ago. His writings are very unequal, and some of them doubtless deserve the condemnation which they received. But others are truly classical, and may claim to stand beside the famous works of antiquity which they most resemble in form and structure.

Mr. Landor in 1806 sold his large estates and left England in disgust. He served in the Spanish army, against Napoleon, from 1808 to 1814. In 1816 he became a resident of Florence, and died there in 1864, having visited England however at intervals meanwhile.

band of writers who in the early part of this century made the Edinburgh Review a power in the world.

Sydney Smith studied at Winchester and at Oxford, took orders in the Church of England, and became finally Canon of St. Paul's. His name has become the synonym for wit and humor. It is not so generally known, however, that his more solid qualities of judgment and taste were equally prominent.

Smith's wit was of the highest order, the wit which results from a keen, intuitive perception of right and wrong, not degenerating into bitterness and rancor, but poised by strong good sense and healthy self-activity. He differs from Lamb in having less humor, and a less delicate play of fancy. Lamb's whimsicalities are those of a recluse who lives to himself and his books, and loiters through the world with halfclosed eyes; Smith walks briskly through the great Vanity Fair with eyes wide open and a jest at his tongue's end for every folly. Many of Smith's sayings and repartees have become proverbial, such as the one in which he characterizes Macaulay's conversation as enlivened by brilliant flashes of silence.

Sydney Smith was one of the founders of the Edinburgh Review, and he wrote for that periodical many of its most brilliant articles on politics, literature, and philosophy.

His most celebrated series of writings was his Letters on the Subject of the Catholics, to my Brother Abraham who lives in the Country. These Letters, appearing during the times of agitation which preceded the passage of the Catholic Emancipation Bill, exhibited the author's full powers of wit, sarcasm, and solid reasoning, and summed up the case for Emancipation so ably as to leave nothing to be said on the other side.

Several volumes of his Sermons have been published; they show that Smith was no less able as a preacher than as a writer. Many of these sermons bear directly upon the Emancipation controversy.

His Letters on American Debts, written for the Morning Chronicle, were occasioned by his loss of money invested in Pennsylvania State loans. Their tone is somewhat unfair, and is deplorably bitter, the more so since Smith's loss was not heavy. As a matter of principle, however, the legislative repudiation of those days deserved all the scorn and denunciation that it received,

Sydney Smith's Memoirs, published by his daughter, Lady Holland, is a most interesting biography, revealing to us both the public and domestic life of one of the shrewdest and most admirable of writers, husbands, and fathers.

It may be said of Smith's wit that it is always good, and never vulgar. A collection of his sayings has been made, under the title of Wit and Wisdom of Sydney Smith. Among the hundreds of brilliant remarks here brought together, there is not one soiled by impurity, vulgarity, or profanity.

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LADY HOLLAND. (Miss) Saba Smith, afterwards Lady Holland, 1867, eldest daughter of the Rev. Sydney Smith, was married, in 1834, to Henry Holland, who was physician-in-ordinary to Prince Albert and knighted in 1853 by Queen Victoria. Lady Holland has won for herself a lasting name by her one work, the Memoir of her father Sydney Smith, one of the most delightful and best-told personal narratives in the language.

Jeffrey.

Francis, Lord Jeffrey, 1773-1850, made for himself a world-wide celebrity as a leading writer for the Edinburgh Review, of which also, for more than the fourth of a century, he was the fearless and unequalled editor.

Jeffrey was a native of Edinburgh. He studied at the University of Glasgow and at Oxford, and practised law in Edinburgh, but with little success. While a young man in Edinburgh, he became intimate with Horner, Brougham, and Sydney Smith, and the result of this intimacy was the establishment of the celebrated Review. After the publication of the first three numbers, the editorship was transferred from Smith to Jeffrey, who retained it from 1803 to 1829.

In 1830, Jeffrey was appointed Lord Advocate. From 1831 to 1834 he sat in Parlia ment. In 1834 he succeeded Lord Craigie in the Court of Sessions, thereby acquiring the honorary title of Lord Jeffrey. After retiring from the post of editor, he contributed only four or five more articles to the Review.

Jeffrey's contributions number in all two hundred A selection, seventy-nine in number, has been published, in 4 vols., 8vo; the remaining articles still lie scattered throughout the numbers of the Review.

Jeffrey occupies undoubtedly the most prominent position among modern English reviewers. This prominence is due, however, fully as much to his success in editorship as to his own merits as a critic. Under his management the Edinburgh Review became a great literary and political power in the realm. Men of every rank and profession read and admired, dreaded or hated, its slashing tone and, its recklessness of fear or favor. Much, very much, of the political progress of England during the present century is due to the stimulus applied unsparingly to the body politic by the writers for this Review.

As to Lord Jeffrey's own writings, opinions are somewhat divided. There can be no question concerning the vigor and elegance of his style, the purity of his motives, and the general soundness of his principles of criticism. In matters of poetry, however, he made such grave blunders-failing, for instance, to appreciate the rising genius of poets like Scott, Byron, Coleridge, Moore, and others that it may be doubted whether he was not defective in true imagination and sympathy. On this point, the opinion of one who is himself a poet should be heard. "Our very ideas of what is poetry," says Scott, "differ so widely that we rarely talk upon the subject. There is something in his mode of reasoning that leads me greatly to doubt whether, notwithstanding the vivacity of his imagination, he really has any feeling of poetical genius, or whether he has worn it all off by perpetually sharpening his wit on the grindstone of criticism."

Brougham.

Henry, Lord Brougham, 1778-1868, was one of the great lights of the nineteenth century. He was an advocate, a jurist, a statesman, a political reformer, and a man of let

Leigh Hunt.

JAMES HENRY LEIGH HUNT, 1784-1859, was one of the leading literary men of this period.

Hunt was born at Southgate, near London, and educated at Christ Hospital, where Lamb and Coleridge also received their schooling. He began at a very early age the life of a man of letters. In 1808, in company with his brother John, he edited The Examiner. In 1812, both brothers were fined and imprisoned because of a satire upon the Prince Regent. From 1818 to 1822 he edited The Indicator, and in 1822, in conjunction with Byron and Shelley, The Liberal. He also edited The Companion and The London Journal, besides contributing profusely to many other periodicals, and publishing a number of independent works and translations.

Hut is not without some merit as a poet. His Rimini and his translations of Redi's Bacchus in Tuscany and Tasso's Amyntas have been highly praised. It is as a writer of easy, entertaining prose, however, that Leigh Hunt is and will be best known. Not the least interesting of his prose works is his Autobiography.

"His style, in spite of its mannerism, nay, partly by reason of its mannerism, is well suited for light garrulous, desultory ana, half-critical, half-biographical. We do not always agree with his literary judgments; but we find in him what is very rare in our time, the power of justly appreciating and heartily enjoying good things of very different kinds."— - Macaulay.

John Foster.

JOHN FOSTER, 1770-1843, was the son of a weaver, and was himself apprenticed to a trade; but discovering aptitudes for higher occupations, he was allowed to study for the ministry, and entered the Bap. tist College at Bristol.

Foster was ordained, and exercised his ministry among the Baptists in different places, but was obliged by a glandulous affection of the neck to stop preaching. He gave himself up, after this, to literary work, writing chiefly for the Eclectic Review. His contributions to this Review rank with those of Macaulay, Jeffrey, and Mackintosh in the Edinburgh, for vigor, originality, depth, and finish. He wrote also a series of Essays, which are known wherever the English language is spoken.

His publications are: Lectures at Broadmead Chapel; Contributions, Biographical, Literary, and Philosophical, to the Eclectic Review; Essays. The Essays are on the following subjects: 1. On a Man's Writing Memoirs of Himself; 2. On Decision of Character; 3. On the Application of the Epithet Romantic; 4. On Some of the Causes by which Evangelical Religion has been rendered Less Acceptable to Persons of Cultivated Taste; 5. On the Evils of Popular Ignorance; and 6. On the Communication of the Gospel to the People of India; Introductory Essay to Doddridge's Rise and Progress.

"In simplicity of language, in majesty of conception, in the eloquence of that conciseness which conveys, in a short sentence, more meaning than the mind dares at once admit, his writings are unmatched."- North British Review.

"The author places the idea which he wishes to present in such a flood of light, that it is not only visible itself, but it seems to illumine all around it. He paints metaphysics, and has the happy art of arraying what in other hands would appear