bered after plunging into the water was a sense of freedom from pain, and a sudden recollection of all his past life, especially of guilty actions that he had long forgotten. Professor Wilson said that if this were so, it was indeed very startling: and I think that Mr. De Quincy said that he also had heard of one, if not two of three such cases.

I was so absorbed with watching and listening to the conversation of Professor Wilson and Mr. De Quincy, that I left almost supperless, in spite of the kindly pressure of Mrs. Wilson. I often saw her look, as I fancied, with fond interest at her famous husband, whose demeanor had a noble simplicity. His eyes sometimes seemed to glitter and flash with the irrepressible fire of genius. I watched him with lynx-like vigilance; but all was spontaneous and genuine; not a vestige of artifice, affectation, or display: no silly "inflicting his eye on you:" but all, whether grave or frolicsome, the exuberance of a gloriously-gifted man of genius. And see how hospitable and kind he was to a young English stranger, whom he had never seen till the preceding day. Before I left, he asked me much about my intentions and prospects, wished me heartily well, and when, about eleven o'clock, I had shaken hands with him and got into the street, the sun of GENIUS no longer shone on me, and I felt dull, and indeed in the dark. As I walked home, I thought myself a poor pigmy that had just been entertained by a good-humored giant!

I never saw any man who looked the man of genius he was, but Professor Wilson. Next to him was Sir Walter Scott. Him I first saw in his fifty-seventh year, when I was at college in Edinburgh, and had wandered one day, in, I think, the mouth of June, into one of the law courts to hear Mr. Jeffrey plead. The latter's face, let me say in passing, appeared to me that of an acute, refined, sensitive, and somewhat irritable man, but not indicative of power. I had been standing for some time in the Court of Sessions, in which Sir Walter Scott was one of the principal clerks, who sat at the table below the judges, when my eye fell upon an elderly man, one of those sitting at the table, wearing a rusty-looking old stuff gown. His chin rested on his left hand, and his right hung by his side with a pen in it. Without having an idea who he was, my attention was soon arrested by his lofty forehead, and a pair of eyes that seemed gazing dreamily into a distant world unseen by any but himself. The more I looked at those eyes, the more

remarkable appeared their character and expression; not bright, or penetrating, but invested with a grand, rapt, profound air. He sat motionless as a statue, apparently lost to all that was passing around him. A sudden suspicion arose within me that I was looking on the mighty northern novelist, who had publicly avowed himself the author of Waverley in the preceding February. To make assurance doubly sure, I asked a person standing beside me, who that was, indicating him. "Whaur d'ye come frae ?" said he, looking at me rather contemptuously: d'ye no ken that's Sir Walter ?""" Almost while this was being said, Sir Walter Scott seemed to rouse himself from a reverie, and soon afterwards wrote rapidly on several sheets of paper, and then quitted the court, leaning on his stick, and walking very lame.

66

Professor Wilson's noble countenance indicated, to even an ordinary observer, the impulsive energy of his character, daring and generous,-also acuteness, refinement, and power; one, in short, to fear, to admire, and to love. Every thing petty and mean he spurned with a scorn that was magnificent; to obscure and timid genius, he extended, with tender kindliness, the hand of, as it were, the King of Letters. To pretenders, however, of all sorts, he was utterly merciless : to them, the crutch of Christopher was annihilation. It was fine to hear him talk on such a subject: his eye, his lip, his voice, his ges ture, all in fierce and vivid accord.

As an instance of his watchfulness of literary merit, when newly manifested, I recollect his once saying to me, "By the way, do you know any one in the Temple-a special pleader, or something of that kind-called Moile-Nicholas Thirning Moile?"* I told him that I had never heard of the name; on which he pressed me much, and said, "Try to find out, then, for he is a very clever fellow. He has just published a sort of poetical version of two or three of the State Trials, which I have read, and formed a high opinion. of them. Some parts are beautiful--he's a man of genius. I shall review the book in the Magazine;" and his opinion of the performance may be seen in No. 288.

Professor Wilson read with prodigious

*It turned out that the name of "Nicholas Thirn

ing Moile" was assumed by a friend of my own, now an eminent Queen's counsel, who had sent to me the very volume in question in his assumed name; and, after glancing at it for a moment, I acknowledged the receipt of the book to the publisher, but

soon afterwards lost sight of it. It was only a few months ago that I discovered the author.

would carry us far beyond the limits of our present purpose; and we must content ourselves with noticing only one or two of the most eminent of those whose letters mark each of the different stages through which the art passed in England. Pope must necessarily begin the series; in his hands letter-writing was an instrument by which the writer strove to adopt and preserve the tone of an exclusive artificial so. ciety, a means of establishing a sort of freemasonry between those whom birth or the privilege of genius entitled to speak a peculiar kind of language, denied to the vulgar. The literary man assumed in the days of Pope a new position, and Pope himself assumed it more completely than any of his contemporaries. The man of genius asserted himself the equal of the man of rank; but he did so on the condition of adopting the manners and morals of his superior in worldly position. It thus became necessary, or at least natural, that acquaintances holding such a relation to each other should seek a mode of interchanging their thoughts that should bear a perpetual testimony and tribute to the excellences appreciated in good society. And such a mode Pope introduced in the epistolary style he made current. With Pope we may couple Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, as a specimen of a writer whose letters exhibited the high-bred ease and wit that suggested a corresponding display in men of literary reputation. The art of letter-writing passed into a second stage when from this beginning epistolary graces came to be cultivated as a requisite for high standing among the upper classes of society. It grew to be a study with the most refined members of these classes, how to say everything to their correspondents in the most pointed and elegant way. Of such writers we may take Horace Walpole and Lord Chesterfield as sufficient examples. Lastly, that which had been confined to the higher circles spread downwards, and all educated men imbibed something of the love, and in some measure used the style, current in the world of fashion. Letter-writing then attained its highest perfection. It lost its forced and hot-house character, and retained all its beauty and grace. The style adopted was more elevated and sustained than would be employed in the present day; but still it was perfectly easy, natural, and simple. Of the writers whose letters exhibited this perfection, Gray and Cowper are, perhaps, the most conspicuous.

In the days of Queen Anne, the position

a very

of the leading wits, as men of literary pretensions were then termed, was remarkable one. The great fish were quite separated from the lesser ones, and the heroes of the Dunciad were forbidden even to swim in the same waters as their more successful rivals. Pope and Addison, Garth, Arbuthnot, Swift, Gay, Prior, and a few others, stood at an elevation which raised them into the envied circles of the rich and powerful, and kept them at a safe distance from the ignobile vulgus. The courtiers of Charles and James, while indulging in the licence that showed at once the danger and the worth of the Puritanism to which it succeeded, needed some vent for the impulses of intellectual power. They found what they wanted in the drama, in light verses, in epigrams, and in the sallies of a lively repartee. The gayety and the graces of France were sedulously cultivated. But wit and dramatic talent cannot be always commanded, even by the favorites of a court. The faculties of obscure auxiliaries must be called in aid, if the desired aim is to be attained; and thus a class of wits grew up, whose claims were felt and acknowledged by the rulers of fashion. In France or in England, before the Civil Wars, these allies might have been condemned to be the very humble servants of the men they stimulated, amused, or enlightened. But the clown and the noble had been brought together too closely in that great collision to permit Englishmen, at the head of any class so important as the literary, to be thereafter the abject dependants of the great. Something of the spirit of liberty imperceptibly pervaded all the relations of society. Gradually a kind of coalition was formed, and the result in its perfect form was seen in the days of Pope, to whose exertions it was indeed greatly owing. The literary class sent a few representatives into the assembly of the beau monde, but the representatives, when elected, or rather promoted, were cut off from the body to which they belonged. They had, too, to conform to the standard, to adopt the language, and breathe the sentiments of the circle to which they were raised. Being men of genius, they of course themselves affected in turn those who thus colored their own minds and expressions; but certainly the influence of society on literature in the early part of the eighteenth century is more observable than the influence of literature on society; and it is more observable in Pope than in any other writer.

We have already said that Pope used the

art of letter-writing as a powerful engine in | binding together this intercourse between the gifted and the great; and in proportion as he thinks the full force of this engine ought to be brought into play does he aim at the greater artistic excellence in his letters. It is true that what is meant to be most excellent is often less so than that which is more simple and unpremeditated. But the presence of the effort is very appa rent, according as the demand for it is greater, and we may trace in Pope's letters three distinct styles, or rather three distinct points to which the style is wound up. The lowest is that in which he writes to ordinary acquaintances, on business, and for a direct purpose. There is, of course, nothing remarkable in such of his letters couched in this style as have been preserved. The wording has the neatness of a practised pen, but that is all. We need take no further notice of it. But two styles remain in the one, the inferior, he does justice to himself and his pretensions when writing to those of his own class, to the great wits of his acquaintance, and to those in the world of fashion with whom he was on too familiar a footing to talk long in his supreme and Olympian mode. This mode was reserved for very great people, for ladies of rank, and for what may be termed "show-letters "letters, that is, which were written on a theme or particular subject, and with great care and study, and which were evidently intended to be passed from hand to hand through a large circle of admirers. We will bestow a little attention on each of these styles separately, beginning with the last.

It places us at an immeasurable distance from the letter-writers of the last century, to know that they wrote rough copies of their letters. When we open a well-edited volume of Pope's Correspondence, we find appended, as a running commentary, the first draft of the composition. Words were inserted or erased, sentences compressed or expanded; the lima labor was as severe as when a poem or an ode was to be polished. If this toil had been a sacrifice on the altar of friendship, the offering would have been one unrivalled since the days of Pylades and Orestes. But it was nothing of the sort. It was a sacrifice of the kind made by court beauties in the days when they would sit for hours with their hair built into pyramids, waiting till night brought the season of display. It was a means to a great end-a means of astonishing and delighting others, and of gratifying the author's vanity; a

means, too, we ought in justice to add, of satisfying his own artistic fastidiousness. Pope bestowed this kind of compliment more freely on Lady Mary Wortley Montagu than on any other of his correspondents. She had every claim upon his epistolary powers. She was the daughter of a duke; was a beauty, a wit, an excellent letterwriter herself, and the object of that vague kind of devotion on the part of Pope, which is frequently excited towards a person of different sex and rank by a community of tastes and studies. To her, therefore, he always writes his best. He never starts the subjects which he intends to make the ground-work of his letter without the most carefully turned flourishes and preludes.

Pope's show-letters were modelled on the writings of Addison in the Spectator. He did not contribute to a periodical collection printed and laid before the public, but he had private correspondents who were very happy to receive descriptions and essays such as those which have made Addison immortal, and were sure to let others enjoy the pleasure they themselves received. Elaborate and careful sketches of great houses and country residences were the specimens which Pope most delighted to give of his power to walk in the path of Addison. Sometimes the whole interest is intended to be centred in the fidelity, minuteness, and liveliness of the delineations; sometimes little touches of Addisonian humor, irony, and satire are added. The Duke of Buckingham, to take a conspicuous instance, had sent Pope a long-winded account of Buckingham House; and Pope, in return, gave a picture of a house where he tells the Duke he was then living, but which the critics rightly conjecture to have existed only in his own mind. He diverts himself with the ingenuity of construction which had built up such beautiful edifices in the Spectator. Every thing is touched so as to be seemingly consistent, and yet the result of a scarcely concealed whim.

You must excuse me (he begins) if I say nothing of the front; indeed I do not know which it is. A stranger would be grievously disappointed who endeavored to get into this house the right way. One would reasonably expect after the entry through the porch to be let into in an office. From the parlor you think to step the hall; alas! nothing less! you find yourself into the drawing-room, but upon opening the iron-nailed door you are convinced by a flight of birds about your ears, and a cloud of dust in your eyes, that it is the pigeon-house. If you come