temper of the constituencies in 1839 and 1840, that if it had taken place, the victory would have rested with the Lords. On a dissolution, the people would have sided with them. The danger lay in the precedent ;-in the fear that, in a different state of public feeling, the Lords, pleased with their apparent recovery of political power, might, on some other occasion, exercise their legal right to oppose the popular will; and thus force the Crown to exercise its legal right of putting down that opposition by a creation, which, in the state of parties which now exists, or in any which can be expected to exist in that House, must be a very numerous one; and then, as we said before, Peerage Reform is inevitable. If that event should actually occur if the most distinguished, and, on the whole, the most enlightened hereditary body that the world has ever seen, should be changed into an elected senate, on whom will the responsibility rest ?On those who endeavour to alarm the prudence of the House of Lords, or on those who may inflame its ambition? On those who, by pointing out its political subordination, endeavour to secure its legislative authority; or on those who may tempt it to temporary triumph, and ultimate defeat, by ascribing to it a political independence and a political equality, which it possesses neither in theory nor in practice? On those who may have to sacrifice its existing constitution to the welfare of the state; or on those who, without any necessity-in the mere insolence of power, by the wanton creations of forty years-converted it from a moderately-sized council, fairly representing both the great parties, into a large assembly; in which one set of opinions is always persisted in, one class of measures approved, and one body of leaders supported, by the same overwhelming and hereditary majority?

We now close these volumes, with gratitude to the author, for much amusement, information, and instruction-with respect for his learning, and with admiration of his genius. We feel that the account which we have given of his work is very imperfect. We have been forced to omit the whole of the historical portion, and many philosophical discussions of great merit; among others, those on Party, on Checks, on Federal Union, and on Judicial arrangements. This, however, is not of much importance. Lord Brougham will be read in his own, not in our pages. On looking back at what we have written, we are struck by its controversial tone. This is perhaps unavoidable in criticism, where the subject-matter admits of only probable reasoning. On such subjects, when there is perfect coincidence of opinion in the author and the critic, there is little opportunity and no necessity for remark but when this perfect coincidence does not exist, if the matter be important, the critic feels bound to express his dissent; and, if

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the author be one whose opinions carry great weight, to support it by argument and illustration. We have agreed in opinion with Lord Brougham much oftener than we have disagreed; but in the one case we have generally been silent-in the other, we have thought it necessary to state at some length the grounds of our dissent. No one, we are sure, will judge us with more candour than the great author himself. He will feel that, whenever we have ventured to express dissent, it has been from no love of paradox or of opposition, but from a sincere difference of opinion on some of the most important, and, at the same time, most doubtful questions on which the human mind can be employed.

ART. II. The Poetical Works of Charles Churchill. With copious Notes, and a Life of the Author. By W. TOOKE, F.R.S. 3 vols. 12mo. London; 1844.

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MR WILLIAM TOOKE sets us a bad example in his copious notes,' which we do not propose to follow. Our business is with Churchill; and not with the London University, or the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, or the Reform Bill, or the Whigs, or the Popish Ascendency, or the bribed voters of Metropolitan Boroughs, or the profligate members who represent them in Parliament. There are many reasons why Mr Tooke should not have named these things; but we shall content ourselves with mentioning one. If the editorial pains bestowed upon them had been given to his author, we should probably not have had the task, which, before we speak of Churchill, we shall discharge as briefly as we may, of pointing out his editorial deficiencies.

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It would be difficult to imagine a worse biographer than Mr Tooke. As Dr Johnson said of his friend Tom Birch, he is a dead hand at a Life. Nor is he a more lively hand at a Note. In both cases he compiles with singular clumsiness, and his compilations are not always harmless. But though Mr Tooke is a bad biographer and a bad annotator, he is a worse critic.

If it were true, as he says, that the character of Churchill as a poet, may be considered as fixed in the first rank of English classics,' (Vol. i. p. xiii,) we should have to place him with Shakspeare and Milton, in the rank above Dryden and Pope. If the Rosciad were really, as Mr Tooke thinks, remarkable for its strength of imagination,' (Vol. i. p. xxxiv,) we should have to depose it from its place beside the Dunciads, and think of it with

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the Paradise Losts. And indeed we shall be well disposed to do this, when Mr Tooke establishes the critical opinion he adopts from poor Dr Anderson, that the Cure of Saul, a sacred ode by Dr Brown, ranks with the most distinguished lyric compositions, (Vol. iii. p. 302.).

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This Dr Brown, the author of the flat tragedy of Barbarossa, and a vain, silly, impracticable person, is described by Mr Tooke to have been a far wiser and better man than Jeremy Bentham,' (Vol, iii. p. 109;) whose always mischievous, but happily not always intelligible gibberish,' is in a previous pass sage ranked with the coarse blasphemy of Richard Carlyle,' (Vol. iii. p. 107.) It is in the same discriminating taste we are told after this, that Dr Franeklin's Translation of Sophocles is a bold and happy transfusion into the English language of the ' terrible simplicity of the Greek tragedian,' (Vol. iii. p. 298)→ poor Dr Francklin being as much like the terrible simplicity of the Greeks, as Mr Tooke resembles Aristides, or an English schoolmaster is like the Phidian Jove.

The reader will not suppose that Mr Tooke, a respectable solicitor of long standing, has not had ample time to set himself right on these points, when we mention the fact of his first appearance as Churchill's editor no fewer than forty years ago. Forty years ago, when he was in the flush of youth, and George the Third was King, he aspired to connect himself with the great satirist. What turned his thoughts that way, from the quiddets and quillets, and cases and tenures and tricks,' that surrounded him in his daily studies, he has not informed us. But, among his actions of scandal and battery, the echo of Churchill's rough and manly voice was in that day lingering still; and an aspiring young attorney could hardly more agreeably indulge a taste for letters, than among the mangled and still bleeding reputations of the Duellist, the Candidate, and the Ghost. But we have reason to complain that he did not improve this taste with some little literary knowledge.

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Whether he praises or blames, he has the rare felicity of never making a criticism that is not a mistake. Nothing of this kind, committed forty years back, has he eared to correct; and every new note added, has added something to the stock. He cannot even praise in the right place, when he has such a man as Dr Garth to praise. Garth was an exquisite creature a real wit, a gentleman, a friend, a physician, a philosopher; and yet his Satire was not admirable,' nor his Claremont above mediocrity,' nor his Translations from Ovid spirited and faithful,' (Vol. iii. p. 16-17.) In a later page, Mr Tooke has occasion to refer to the writer of a particular panegyric, whom he calls Conyng

ham, (Vol. ii. p. 317.) This exemplifies another and abundant class of mistakes in his volumes. The writer was Codrington, and the lines were addressed to Garth on his Dispensary. Mr Tooke has to speak of the two Doctors William King; and he attributes the well-known three octavos of the King of St Mary's Hall to the King of Christ Church, (Vol. iii. p. 173.) He has to speak of Bishop Parker, Marvell's antagonist, and he calls him Archbishop Parker, (Vol. ii. p. 171;) a singularly different person. He condemns Churchill for his public appearance in a theatre with a celebrated courtesan, whom his next sentence, if correct, would prove to have been a venerable lady of between eighty and ninety years old, (Vol. i. p. 47;)—the verses quoted having been written sixty-three years before, to the Venus of a past generation. If an anecdote has a point, he misses it; and if a question has two sides, he takes the wrong one. He gravely charges the old traveller Mandeville, with wilful want of veracity, and with having observed in a high northern latitude the singular phenomenon of the congelation of words as they issued from the mouth, and the strange medley of sounds that ensued upon a thaw,' (Vol. ii. p. 76 ;)-vulgar errors, we need not say. Sir John Mandeville wrote conscientiously, according to the lights of his times; and qualifies his marvellous relations as reports. The congelation of words was a pure invention of Addison's, palmed upon the old traveller.

In matters more closely connected with his subject, Mr Tooke is not more sparing of errors and self-contradictions. He confounds Davies, the actor and bookseller-Johnson's friend, Garrick's biographer, and a reasonably correct as well as agreeable writer-with Davis, an actor not only much lower in the scale than Davies, but remembered only by the letter Mr Tooke has printed, (Vol. i. p. 36-7.) He tells us, with amazing particularity, that Churchill's brother John survived him little more than one 'year, dying, after a week's illness only, on 18th November 1765,' (Vol. i. p. Ivi;) the truth being that John, who was a surgeonapothecary in Westminster, survived his brother many years; published, in the character of executor, the fifth collected edition of his works as late as 1774; and was recommending the use of bark to Wilkes, whose medical attendant he became, as late as 1778. In one place he says that he has endeavoured, without success, to ascertain the truth of a statement that Churchill had a curacy in Wales, and became bankrupt in cider speculations there; suppositions which, unable to substantiate, he rejects, (Vol. i. p. xxv.) In another place, he speaks, without a doubt, of Churchill's flight from his curacy in Wales,' (Vol. iii. p. 28;) and in a third, tells us decisively that Churchill's own failure in trade as

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• a cider-dealer,' had tinctured him with a strong and unfounded prejudice' against the merchants of London, (Vol. ii. p. 318.) At one time he relates a story of Churchill's having incurred a repulse at Oxford, on account of alleged deficiency in the clas 'sics,' to acquaint us that it is obviously incorrect,' (Vol. i. p. xxi.) At another, he informs us that the poet's antipathy to colleges may be dated from his rejection by the University of 'Oxford, on account of his want of a competent skill in the 'learned languages,' (Vol. ii. p. 227.) No opportunity of selfcontradiction is too minute to be lost. Now he says that the price of the Rosciad was half-a-crown, (Vol. i. p. 114,) and now that it was but the moderate price of one shilling,' (Vol. ii. p. 167;) now that Lord Temple resigned in 1761, (Vol. i. p. 171,) and now that the resignation was in 1762, (Vol. ii. p. 29 ;) now that the Apology was published in April 1761, (Vol. i. p. 115,) and six pages later, (Vol. i. p. 121,) that it was published in May of that year; now that Churchill's Sermons were ten in number, (Vol. i. p. xxvi,) and now that they were twelve, (Vol. iii. p. 318.) These instances, sparingly selected from a lavish abundance, will probably suffice.

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We shall be equally sparing of more general examples that remain. Mr Tooke, as the character of this literary performance would imply, has no deficiency on the score of boldness. Thus, while he thinks that the Rev. Doctor Croly, in his classical ' and beautiful play of Catiline, has at once shown what a good tragedy should be, and that he is fully equal to the task of producing one,' (Vol. ii. p. 297,) he has an utter contempt for the Wordsworths and Coleridges. What language,' he indignantly exclaims, before giving a specimen of the latter poet in a lucid interval, could the satirist have found sufficiently expres'sive of his disgust at the simplicity of a later school of poetry, 'the spawn of the lakes, consisting of a mawkish combination of "the nonsense verses of the nursery, with the rodomontade of • German mysticism and transcendentalism!' (Vol. i. p. 189.) This is a little strong for a writer like Mr Tooke. Nor, making one exception in the case of Lord Byron, does he shrink from pouring the vials of his critical wrath upon every Lord who has presumed to aspire to poetry. Not the gentle genius of Lord Surrey, nor the daring passion of Lord Buckhurst; not the sharp wit of my Lords Rochester and Buckingham, nor the earnestness and elegance of Lord Thurlow-can shake the fierce poetical democracy of Mr William Tooke. "The claim of the whole lot of other noble poets,' he observes with great contempt, from Lord Surrey downwards-the Buckinghams, the

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