and somewhat humiliating, to see how great a proportion of those who had once fought their way successfully to distinction, and surmounted the rivalry of contemporary envy, have again sunk into neglect. We have great deference for public opinion, and readily admit that nothing but what is good can be permanently popular. But though its vivat1 be generally oracular, its pereat appears to us to be often sufficiently capricious; and while we would foster all that it bids to live, we would willingly revive much that it leaves to die. The very multiplication of works of amusement necessarily withdraws many from notice that deserve to be kept in remembrance; for we should soon find it labour, and not amusement, if we were obliged to make use of them all, or even to take all upon trial. As the materials of enjoyment and instruction accumulate around us, more and more, we fear, must thus be daily rejected and left to waste. For while our tasks lengthen, our lives remain as short as ever; and the calls on our time multiply, while our time itself is flying swiftly away. This superfluity and abundance of our treasures, therefore, necessarily renders much of them worthless; and the veriest accidents may, in such a case, determine what part shall be preserved and what thrown away and neglected. When an army is decimated, the very bravest may fall; and many poets, worthy of eternal remembrance, have probably been forgotten, merely because there was not room in our memories for all.

By such a work as the present, however, this injustice of fortune may be partly redressed some small fragments of an immortal strain may still be rescued from oblivion-and a wreck of a name preserved which time appeared to have swallowed up for ever. There is something pious, we think, and endearing, in the office of thus gathering up the ashes of renown that has passed away; or rather, of calling back the departed life for a transitory glow, and enabling those great spirits which seemed to be laid for ever still to draw a tear of pity, or a throb of admiration, from the hearts of a forgetful generation. The body of their poetry probably can never be revived; but some sparks of its spirit may yet be preserved in a narrower and feebler frame.

When we look back upon the havoc which two hundred years have thus made in the ranks of our immortals, and, above all, when we refer their rapid disappearance to the quick succession of new competitors, and the accumulation of more good works than there is time to peruse, we cannot help being dismayed at the prospect which lies before the writers of the present day. There never was an age so prolific of popular poetry as that in which we now live; and as wealth, population, and education extend, the produce is likely to go on increasing. The last ten years have produced, we think, an annual supply of about ten thousand lines of good staple poetry,-poetry from the very first hands that we can boast of, —that runs quickly on to three or four large editions, and is as likely 1 i. e., Sentence of approbation; literally, "Let it live." 2 i.e., Sentence of condemnation; literally, "Let it perish."

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to be permanent as present success can make it. Now, if this goes on for a hundred years longer, what a task will await the poetical readers of 1919! Our living poets will then be nearly as old as Pope and Swift are at present; but there will stand between them and that generation nearly ten times as much fresh and fashionable poetry as is now interposed between us and those writers; and if Scott, and Byron, and Campbell, have already cast Pope and Swift a good deal into the shade, in what form and dimensions are they themselves likely to be presented to the eyes of our great-grandchildren? The thought, we own, is a little appalling; and we confess we see nothing better to imagine than that they may find a comfortable place in some new collection of specimens―the centenary of the present publication. There, if the future editor have anything like the indulgence and veneration for antiquity of his predecessor, there shall posterity still hang with rapture on the half of Campbell, and the fourth-part of Byron, and the sixth of Scott, and the scattered tithes of Crabbe, and the three per cent. of Southey; while some good-natured critic shall sit in our mouldering chair, and more than half prefer them to those by whom they have been superseded! It is an hyperbole of good-nature, however, we fear, to ascribe to them even those dimensions at the end of a century; after a lapse of 250 years, we are afraid to think of the space they may have shrunk into. We have no Shakspere, alas! to shed a never-setting light on his contemporaries; and if we continue to write and rhyme at the present rate for 200 years longer, there must be some new cut of short-hand reading invented, or all reading will be given up in despair.

2. RISE AND DECLINE OF THE STYLE OF QUEEN ANNE'S REIGN.

It was the ambition of the authors of Queen Anne's time to improve and perfect the new style introduced at the Restoration, rather than to return to the old one; and it cannot be denied that they did improve it. They corrected its gross indecency—increased its precision and correctness—made its pleasantry and sarcasm more polished and elegant and spread through the whole of its irony, its narration, and its reflection, a tone of clear and condensed good sense, which recommended itself to all who had, and all who had not, any relish for higher beauties. This is the praise of Queen Anne's wits, and to this praise they are justly entitled. This was left for them to do, and they did it well. They were invited to it by the circumstances of their situation, and do not seem to have been possessed of any such bold or vigorous spirit as either to neglect or to outgo the invitation. Coming into life immediately after the consummation of a bloodless revolution, effected much more by the cool sense than the angry passions of the nation, they seem to have felt that they were born in an age of reason, rather than of feeling or fancy; and that men's minds, though considerably divided and unsettled upon many points, were in a much better temper to relish

judicious argument and cutting satire, than the glow of enthusiastic passion, or the richness of a luxuriant imagination. To these, accordingly, they made no pretensions; but writing with infinite good sense, and great grace and vivacity, and, above all, writing for the first time in a tone that was peculiar to the upper ranks of society, and upon subjects that were almost exclusively interesting to them, they naturally figured, at least while the manner was new, as the most accomplished, fashionable, and perfect writers which the world had ever seen, and made the wild, luxuriant, and humble sweetness of our earlier authors appear rude and untutored in the comparison. Men grew ashamed of admiring, and afraid of imitating, writers of so little skill and smartness; and the opinion became general, not only that their faults were intolerable, but that even their beauties were puerile and barbarous, and unworthy the serious regard of a polite and distinguishing age.

These, and similar considerations, will go far to account for the celebrity which those authors acquired in their day; but it is not quite so easy to explain how they should have so long retained their ascendant. One cause, undoubtedly, was the real excellence of their productions, in the style which they had adopted. It was hopeless to think of surpassing them in that style; and, recommended as it was by the felicity of their execution, it required some courage to depart from it, and to recur to another, which seemed to have been so lately abandoned for its sake. The age which succeeded, too, was not the age of courage or adventure. There never was, on the whole, a quieter time than the reigns of the two first Georges, and the greater part of that which ensued. There were two little provincial rebellions, indeed, and a fair proportion of foreign war; but there was nothing to stir the minds of the people at large, to rouse their passions, or excite their imaginations-nothing like the agitations of the Reformation in the sixteenth century, or of the civil wars in the seventeenth. They went on, accordingly, minding their old business, and reading their old books, with great patience and stupidity; and certainly there never was so remarkable a dearth of original talent-so long an interregnum of native genius-as during about sixty years in the middle of the last century. The dramatic · art was dead fifty years before, and poetry seemed verging to a similar extinction. The few sparks that appeared, too, showed that the old fire was burnt out, and that the altar must hereafter be heaped with fuel of another quality. Gray, with the talents rather of a critic than a poet,-with learning, fastidiousness, and scrupulous delicacy of taste, instead of fire, tenderness, or invention,-began and ended a small school, which we could scarcely have wished to become permanent, admirable in many respects as some of its productions are, being far too elaborate and artificial either for grace or for fluency, and fitter to excite the admiration of scholars than the delight of ordinary men. However, he had the merit of not being in any degree French, and of restoring to our poetry the dignity of seriousness, and the tone at least of force and energy.

The Whartons, both as critics and as poets, were of considerable service in discrediting the high pretensions of the former race, and in bringing back to public notice the great stores and treasures of poetry which lay hid in the records of our older literature. Akenside attempted a sort of classical and philosophical rapture, which no elegance of language could easily have rendered popular, but which had merits of no vulgar order for those who could study it. Goldsmith wrote with perfect elegance and beauty, in a style of mellow tenderness and elaborate simplicity. He had the harmony of Pope without his quaintness, and his selectness of diction without his coldness and eternal vivacity. And last of all came Cowper, with a style of complete originality, and, for the first time, made it apparent to readers of all descriptions that Pope and Addison were no longer to be the models of English poetry.

In philosophy and prose writing in general, the case was nearly parallel. The name of Hume is by far the most considerable which occurs in the period to which we have alluded. But, though his thinking was English, his style is entirely French; and, being naturally of a cold fancy, there is nothing of that eloquence or richness about him which characterizes the writings of Taylor, and Hooker, and Bacon, and continues, with less weight of matter, to please in those of Cowley and Clarendon. Warburton had great powers, and wrote with more force and freedom than the wits to whom he succeeded; but his faculties were perverted by a paltry love of paradox, and rendered useless to mankind by an unlucky choice of subjects, and the arrogance and dogmatism of his temper. Adam Smith was nearly the first who made deeper reasonings and more exact knowledge popular among us, and Junius and Johnson the first who again familiarized us with more glowing and sonorous diction, and made us feel the tameness and poorness of the serious style of Addison and Swift.

XIV. SYDNEY SMITH

SYDNEY SMITH was born in 1768, at Woodford, in Essex, and received his classical education at the famous school founded by William of Wykeham, in Winchester. From Winchester he removed to New College, Oxford, where in due course he graduated; and on taking orders he became curate in a small country parish near Amesbury. He soon after accepted the office of tutor to a son of the Member of Parliament for Cirencester, and, in company with his pupil, he resided for nearly five years in Edinburgh. Here he became acquainted with Jeffrey and Brougham, and in conjunction with them founded the Edinburgh Review," the first few numbers of which were edited by Smith. In 1803 he married, and settling in London, became at once a highly popular preacher; while his brilliant wit and ready conversational powers made him equally popular in society. He delivered

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a course of lectures on moral philosophy at the Royal Institution, which were published posthumously; and he laid the Whigs under a deep debt of obligation by his famous "Letters of Peter Plymley," which so effectually aided the cause of Catholic Emancipation. Church preferment was slowly bestowed upon him; but in 1827 he was made a Canon of Bristol Cathedral, and four years afterwards Canon Residentiary of St Paul's. He died in 1845. He has left behind him no work of any magnitude; the longest production of his pen being the famous "Letters of Peter Plymley," the wittiest in the language. He is a powerful arguer,-almost as plain in his language and allusions as Swift. He shows no respect to persons, but overwhelms every opponent with a copious and irresistible stream of ridicule. Though his works were written only to serve an occasion, their wit is ever fresh and pleasing; and their popularity is still maintained, although the circumstances that produced them are well-nigh forgotten. It ought also to be remembered that Sydney Smith was one of the loudest in denouncing the wrongs and hardships to which particular classes of the community were exposed, and that to him we are indebted in a great measure for their removal. Besides the "Letters," his works consist of the "Lectures on Moral Philosophy,” "Contributions to the Edinburgh Review," "Sermons," and other miscellaneous productions.

1. ADVANTAGES OF STUDYING LATIN AND GREEK.

Latin and Greek are useful, as they inure children to intellectual difficulties, and make the life of a young student what it ought to be, a life of considerable labour. We do not, of course, mean to confine this praise exclusively to the study of Latin and Greek, or to suppose that other difficulties might not be found which it would be useful to overcome; but though Latin and Greek have this merit in common with many arts and sciences, still they have it; and, if they do nothing else, they at least secure a solid and vigorous application at a period of life which materially influences all other periods. To go through the grammar of one language thoroughly is of great use for the mastery of every other grammar; because there obtains, through all languages, a certain analogy to each other in their grammatical construction. Latin and Greek have now mixed themselves etymologically with all the languages of Modern Europe, and with none more than our own; so that it is necessary to read these two tongues for other objects than themselves.

The two ancient languages are, as mere inventions-as pieces of mechanism-incomparably more beautiful than any of the modern languages of Europe; their mode of signifying time and case by terminations, instead of auxiliary verbs and particles, would of itself stamp their superiority. Add to this, the copiousness of the Greek language, with the fancy, harmony, and majesty of its compounds; and there are quite sufficient reasons why the classics should be studied for the beauties of language. Compared to them merely