"

was pleasant in man was sleeping in Westminster Abbey, Johnson said of him, "he was the cheerfullest man of his age"; and we know from other sources that his gaiety never went beyond "the limits of becoming mirth" that it was not purchased, like Foote's, and that of so many wits, by the loss of his own self-respect, or at the cost of pain to other people.

So, too, when we hear of Garrick's being meanly parsimonious, and some loose words of Johnson are quoted to support the charge, let us set against them such passages as these "Sir, I know that Garrick has given away more money than any man that I am acquainted with, and that not from ostentatious views." "Garrick was a very good man—a man who gave away freely money acquired by himself." More conclusive than all upon this and many other points, where Garrick's character was chiefly assailed by his detractors, are the words which Reynolds puts into Johnson's mouth in that admirable Imaginary Conversation between him and Gibbon, which Croker says Sir George Beaumont told him was not invention, but the substance of what Reynolds had heard Johnson say in many conversations. "That he loved money, nobody will dispute. Who does not? But if you mean, by loving money, that he was parsimonious to a fault, sir, you have been misinformed! To Foote, and such scoundrels, who circulated these reports, to such profligate spendthrifts, prudence is meanness, and economy is avarice." Precisely so. It was just by Foote and others of his class, who had made frequent appeals to him for money in large sums, and not made them in vain, that Garrick was slandered for meanness and avarice. None knew this better than Johnson and Reynolds; and with two such vouchers for his liberality, let Macklin, Foote, Murphy, and the like say their worst of him, the ultimate verdict is certain to be in his favour.

Johnson in many ways had reason to speak well of Garrick. In his prosperity, the successful actor and manager had a warm heart and hand for the poor scholar with whom he had come up to London to seek their fortunes; Johnson, to use his own mocking phrase, with twopence halfpenny in his pocket, and Garrick with three halfpence in his. Among his first acts as manager was to bring out his friend's Irene, that most perfect specimen of what Johnson meant when he spoke of plays in which

Declamation roared, while passion slept ;

and not only did he bring it out, but he lent his own great name and genius to the second part in the piece. Nor did Garrick ever lose his early admiration for his old preceptor. Very pleasant is the picture Boswell gives of his bustling about him with a kind of filial fondness at the Literary Club, and flattering the old man's pride with a subtle deference of homage. In this there was no servility, for, well as he knew how free Johnson at times made with his name, he could bear such passing slights for the sake of the old times and the core of true regard for him which he well knew to be in the heart of a man whose genius and worth threw all his foibles into the shade. Nor could this deference be otherwise than most grateful to Johnson; for here was a man of unquestionable genius, with fame, fortune, influence, and troops of friends at his command, throwing off all airs of superiority, if he had any, and placing himself humbly among the foremost of his admirers. People accused Garrick of being prone to play off too much the airs of a prosperous man. Such accusations successful men, however humble, are sure to provoke from the unsuccessful. One who knew human nature so well as Johnson could not fail to take a juster view of Garrick's demeanour. "If all this good fortune," he said, "had happened to me, I should have had a couple of fellows with long poles walking before me, to knock down everybody that stood in my way. Consider, if all this had happened to Cibber or Quin, they'd have jumped over the moon. Yet Garrick speaks to us." Yes, dearly in his heart did that strange medley of nobleness and weakness love his Davie. When Davie died, a great piece of sunshine disappeared from Johnson's life. Better than the fine panegyric which he wrote of him a few months after that event, that it had "eclipsed the gaiety of nations, and impoverished the public stock of harmless pleas ure more convincing to our hearts of the high qualities as a man which he knew to have distinguished him who had never been less to him than the admiring friend of the old Edial days-is the picture shown to us in these words of Cumberland: "I saw old Samuel Johnson standing beside his grave at the foot of Shakespeare's monument, and bathed in tears." Burke was there too, and showed no less emotion.

The reputation of Garrick is in a measure unique. He sprang at once to the very summit of his profession, without previous training or experience. From his childhood he had been fond of the theatre, and, like most boys who are so, he had appeared in

rope as other men who had little to do but to read. He gathered round him a fine library, the catalogue of which is still sought after by bibliopoles, and showed his genuine appreciation of our great drama by making the magnificent collection of old plays, now in the British Museum, to which Charles Lamb was mainly indebted for his Specimens. Fine libraries are formed by men who never read, but that Garrick's was formed, not for fashion's sake, but from a genuine love of literature, there is ample proof in his correspondence. Quick as were his powers, the amount of work gone through by him indicates a method and economy of time rarely combined with sensibility of temperament and vivacity of disposition like his. The wear and tear of such a life must have been immense. It began to tell upon him comparatively early. In January, 1757, when he had been only sixteen years on the stage, we find his friend Warburton- not then, but soon to be, a bishop writing to him, "Hark you, my friend! Do not your frequent indispositions say (whatever your doctors may think fit to do), Lusisti satis? Is it tanti to kill yourself in order to leave a vast deal of money to your heirs?” As years went on the indispositions did not grow less frequent, nor the work lighter. But Garrick fought on manfully, doing his best for the public and his own profession, and very often sorely tried by both, but still, as Johnson said, "the cheerfullest man of his age." He quitted the stage before any decay of his powers was perceptible; but the disease which a greater parsimony of his energies might have averted had taken fatal hold of his fine constitution, and within three years of his last performance that busy brain was still, and the fire of those marvellous eyes was quenched.

How much the toils of Garrick's life were soothed, and his career prolonged, by the love of his charming wife it is easy to imagine. Her beauty lives for us in Hogarth's fine picture now at Windsor Castle, which represents her stealing behind her husband, and catching his pen, as he pauses to fix the thoughts as they flash before his fancy. The picture was painted for Garrick, and the catalogue of his sale states that it represents him writing his prologue to Foote's farce of Taste. We can fancy him at that point where, in illustration of the virtuoso's passion for the antique, he says,

Their Venus must be old, and want a nose!

when his reverie is broken by the saucy smile of as pretty a mouth and sweet a pair of

eyes as ever made a husband's heart happy. How worthy of his love the fair Eva Maria Violette was, we can gather from a thousand sources. They were never separated. Her presence made his doubly welcome wherever they went, for she had as much esprit and sweetness as beauty. Garrick's friends were hers, and to the last he was lover as well as husband- l'heureux mari, as Madame Riccoboni writes -"dont les regards lui disent sans cesse, I love you!" Even Foote, who respected nothing, and constancy in a husband least of all, softens in writing of her and her husband. has been my misfortune not to know Mrs. Garrick; but from what I have seen, and all I have heard, you will have more to regret when either she or you die than any man in the kingdom." She survived her lover-husband forty-three years, dying in October, 1822, at the age of eighty-nine, in the full possession of her faculties, and room was found for her in Westminster Abbey, beside her dear Davie."

"It

It is the life of this man that Mr. Percy Fitzgerald- having, it appears, performed a similar office for Sterne has undertaken to write. That there was room for a good life of Garrick there can be no doubt. The memoirs by Murphy and Davies, valuable so far as they go, are both imperfect; and the sketch by Boaden prefixed to the two bulky quartos of Garrick's Correspondence published in 1831, though excellent in many respects, is somewhat meagre, and fails in turning to due account the valuable materials which lay ready to the writer's hands, in the letters to which it forms the introduction. From these and other scattered, though by no means recondite, sources of information the fullest light as to the man and the actor were to be drawn. But judgment, taste, a power of appreciating character, and of depicting it, with a special familiarity with the men and manners of the time, and the history and usages of the stage, were required for the task. The subject was, moreover, worthy of all the pains that a careful and conscientious writer could give it, and of that nice finish in execution of which Garrick's own performances were an example. In all these qualities Mr. Fitzgerald's work is painfully deficient. He has appropriated all that is good in the works of Murphy, Davies, and Boaden in the most wholesale way, without skill in condensation, and very constantly without acknowledgment, and he has thrown together, very confusedly, an immense quantity of miscellaneous materials from other sources, taking no pains to winnow what is

worthless or even fictitious from what is characteristic and authentic. Mr. Fitzgerald shoots all kinds of rubbish upon his reader without mercy, and has manifestly never taken home to himself the wholesome axiom that the excellence of all books, and of biographies especially, lies quite as much in what the author does not write as in what he does. He suppresses nothing, not even himself. Nor does Mr. Fitzgerald fail only in the exercise of that discrimination which we have a right to demand in a biographer dealing with copious materials which it is his duty to sift for his reader. His workmanship is slovenly in the last degree. For grace of style it would be idle to look in a writer of Mr. Fitzgerald's class; but some little regard to method and grammar might not have been too much to expect. What is to be said of a man who could print such a passage as this? "Here, too, was seen that wild and witty and drunken Dr. Barrowby, who after a jovial life had died the death that so often attends a jovial life." Or this: "He tried to get into the Royal Society, and when he was rejected, held up two old patrons, who had opposed, his admission, in the most outrageous manner." We might fill columns with similar specimens of slipslop.

Mr. Fitzgerald, like all weak writers, is very hard upon former biographers. He takes infinite pains to point out Murphy's mistakes, which Boaden and others had pointed out before, as if the discovery of them were his own. He even accuses Boaden of having made a most arbitrary selection in printing the Garrick correspondence, "printing almost the least interesting, cutting up the letters, often suppressing the best portions and mistaking the sense.” This is a most serious charge, but Mr. Fitzgerald has not even attempted to support it by evidence. Where in his book are these "best portions?" where anything more interesting than the letters actually printed by Boaden in 1831? Certainly not in Mr. Fitzgerald's volumes. Even in the sorry fragments of new matter which he prints, he, too, resorts to suppression of the most absurd kind. From a manuscript journal of Garrick's grandfather he quotes the notice by the writer of the death of a brother, "having suffered like a martyr with a retention.' A retention of what? "Of urine," says the original, of which a copy is before us; but the fact was too gross for the squeamish taste of Mr. Fitzgerald! Why, then, quote the passage at all?

Without enthusiasm for his subject no man can write a good biography; but unless

enthusiasm is controlled by judgment, biography degenerates into panegyric. So it has been with Mr. Fitzgerald. His portrait has no shadows. His avowed aim has been to show that his hero was "as great in Garrick as in Lear". a very laudable one if discreetly pursued, and one with which we heartily sympathise. But here it has not been discreetly pursued. "Estne quisquam, qui tibi purior, prudentior, humanior, officiosior, liberalior videatur?" might have been taken from Cicero's speech for Roscius as the motto of the book, for it is the question put to the reader all through these two bulky volumes with a very clumsy persistency. But Mr. Fitzgerald would have come much nearer his mark had he kept his enthusiasm in check by remembering Churchill's warning,

He hurts the most who lavishly commends.

A PAPER in the Contemporary Review which calls for especial notice is that of Mr. Plumptre, the King's College Professor of Theology. It is a curious attempt to dissect the party organization of the Church of England, from the stand-point of one who professes to belong to neither. The oddest thing about it is that one who ought to be well-informed, makes no mention whatever of the great Anglican party which is represented by the main body of our bishops, clergy and laity, and which is notoriThey cannot certainly be included in the Broad ously that of many of our leading Divines. or Low Church parties, and the only other party he gives us is the High Church, but then that party is represented in Mr. Plumptre's analysis by Dr. Pusey and the Tracts, by the Guardian, Christian Remembrancer, and Ecclesiastic in its better phase, by its "more recent developments " in its later and worse. and cheaper organs The Anglican party has never accepted that position, never "treated the great work of the Reformation as an unlucky episode, 'a limb badly set, which must be broken before it can be set right again""; never" spoken and written as if the Anglican reformers were martyrs either for an opinion which was itself heretical, or through sheer stupid incapacity to perceive that their teaching and that of the Church of Rome were substantially identical." As this party, beyond a doubt, represents the Reformers, and nearly all the Divines of any importance of whom the Church of England has boasted since, and as it has never accepted some of the principal points of the Tractarian theology and loudly repudiated their "organs," it is, we say, strange that the learned Professor should have quietly omitted all notice of it. Perhaps it

might be, one would think, that he was himself part of it, and that his reticence arose from. a sort of misplaced modesty, but his vehement partiality for the Latitudinarians which comes out in every page forbids the assumption. This partiality has led him into some odd statements. It is surely an unworthy trick to claim Bishop Butler as in any sense a parent of the Broad Church school. If ever there was a divine who would have been horrified at the modern principles of that school, it would have been the great author of the "Analogy," whose destruction of Rationalism on its own premises is thus twisted to his discredit. Does the Professor really mean to let his friends "assume the fallibility of the Bible and of the Church"? Has he weighed the fact that the doctrine of the Atonement is held pretty much alike by High and Low Churchmen? Has he any logical theory of the Divine relation to man, except what is Rationalistic, which will

entitle him to throw such bitter scorn on the Bampton Lectures of 1858? As a minor blunder, does he really consider Leighton and Baxter as the representatives of the "Puritan tradition"? They were of a much higher stamp; representatives of Presbyterianism, no doubt, but that was a very different thing. In short, we are sorry for Mr. Plumptre's reputation that he should have undertaken a task so much beyond his strength as an analysis of Church parties; and still more sorry to see how much he is identified with the worst of them. His complacency at the prospect of the whole education of the country getting into the hands of the Broad Churchmen is perhaps one of the most painful parts of his article. With him it is" matter for rejoicing"; but it is fair to say that his joy is founded on the mistake we have already exposed, that no other teachers are possible but those of the school of the Record or the Church Times. All who are not of these schools are with him comprehended in the "Broad Church" school, with those who from "Dr. Arnold downwards have been prominent in the work of educational progress." What can we say of such an analysis of the Church of England of to-day! - London Churchman.

TO MY NOSE.

KNOWS he, who never took a pinch,
Nosey, the pleasure thence which flows?
Knows he the titillating joy
That my nose knows?

O Nose! I am as proud of thee
As any mountain of its snows;
I gaze on thee and feel that pride
A Roman knows.