and Oxford. When the Edinburgh Review was founded in 1802, Jeffrey was settled in practice in his native city. He was invited to conduct the Review, and he continued to be the editor until 1829, when he was appointed Dean of the Faculty of Advocates, and resigned the Review into the hands of Macvey Napier (1777-1847). Jeffrey was made Lord Advocate of Scotland in 1830, but the labour of politics-for the post involved attendance in Parliament-was irksome to him. He was still M.P. for Edinburgh, however, when in 1834

he was made a judge of the Court of Session, with the title of Lord Jeffrey. His health began to fail in 1841, but he continued to perform his duties on the bench until a few days before his death, which occurred at Edinburgh on the 26th of January 1850. Jeffrey exercised a sort of dictatorship in English criticism during a period of great importance for our literature, but posterity has reversed the majority of his obiter dicta. He had fine social gifts, and filled a very important position in Edinburgh, when that city was still a centre of hospitality and cultivation. He collected his scattered writings in four volumes in 1844, but already those who had been astonished at his essays when they appeared anonymously discovered that much of the splendour had departed. Those who turn to his volumes to-day will probably say of them, as Jeffrey himself had the temerity to exclaim of The Excursion, "This will never do!" But he was a man of light and even of leading in his day, and did his honest best to put an extinguisher on the later lights of letters.

William Cobbett

The Rev. Sydney Smith (1771-1845) was the second of the four sons of a gentleman at Woodford, Essex, where he was born on the 3rd of June 1771. His father had been a spendthrift, but he contrived to give his children a sound education, and Sydney went to Winchester and to New College, Oxford. From 1794 to 1797 he was a curate in Wiltshire, and afterwards a tutor in Edinburgh, but he suffered much from poverty, until the production of the Edinburgh Review supplied him with regular literary employment. He moved to London in 1803, and in 1806 he got at last a

living, the rectory of Foston-le-Clay, in Yorkshire. At this time he was discharging his clerical duties (at Foston-le-Clay) by

deputy, and writing his brilliant Peter Plymley letters (1807-8). Later on he exchanged Foston for the beautiful rectory of Combe Florey, in Somerset, where he loved to entertain his friends. In 1831 he was made a canon residentiary of St. Paul's. In his grand climacteric, 1839, as he said, he became by the death of a relative "unexpectedly a rich man." He died in London on the 22nd of February 1845. Sydney Smith was pre-eminently witty both in writing and in speech, a droll and delightful companion, a perfectly honest man, and a genuine lover of liberty and truth.

A book which is little regarded to-day exercised so wide and so beneficial an influence on critical thought at the beginning of the century that it seems imperative to mention it here. The Curiosities

Minor Prose of Literature, by Isaac D'Israeli, was not a masterpiece, but its storehouses of anecdote and cultivated reflection must have familiarised with the out

Writers

lines of literary history thousands who
would have been repelled by a more
formal work. We dare not speak here at
any length of Cobbett and Combe, of
Bentham and Dugald Stewart, of Horner
and Mackintosh and Mary Wollstonecraft.
Of all these writers, in their various ways,
it may safely be said that their ideas were
of more importance than their style, and
that, interesting as they may severally be,
they do not illustrate the evolution of
English literature.

William Cobbett (1762-1835) was born
at Farnham. He was originally a farm labourer,
then (1783) an attorney's clerk in London. From
1784 to 1791 he served as a private soldier in
Nova Scotia. Under the pseudonym of Peter
Porcupine, he became a mordant satiric pam-
phleteer. He is best remembered now by his Rural Rides (1830). He was an exces-
sively prolific occasional writer. William Combe (1741-1823) is famous as the

author of The Tour of Dr. Syntax in Search of the Picturesque (1812-21), and of a
daring forgery, Lord Lyttelton's Letters (1782). The great champion of pure utilitarianism,
Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), was the son of a solicitor in Houndsditch. He was
excessively precocious, and known as "the philosopher" at the age of thirteen. He
invented, or first made general, the formula of "the greatest happiness of the greatest
number." The uncouthness of Bentham's

style did injustice to his learning and to the
freshness of his mind. He bequeathed his
body to be dissected and preserved in Uni-
versity College, where it may still be seen,
dressed in the last suit of clothes which
Bentham had made for him. Another octo-
genarian was Isaac Disraeli (1766-1848),
best known as the father of Lord Beacons-
field. He came of a family of Venetian
Jews who settled in England about twenty
years before the birth of Isaac; and he
was educated in Amsterdam. He made
the by-paths of literary history the subject of
his life's study, and he wrote two anecdotal
miscellanies which are still among our minor
classics, Curiosities of Literature, 1791-1834,
and The Calamities and Quarrels of Authors,
1812-14. His life was serene and his tem-
per placid, "and amid joy or sorrow, the
philosophic vein was ever evident." Sir
James Mackintosh (1765-1832) was an
ambitious but upright public man, whose
legal and political responsibilities-he lived
to be Commissioner of the Board of Control
-left him leisure for considerable literary activity, the results of which were mainly
not given to the public until several years after his death. Dugald Stewart
(1753-1828) was the principal metaphysician of his time, a disciple of Reid and com-
mentator on his philosophy. He was a brilliant lecturer and a graceful writer: he
was considered the finest didactic orator of his age.

Ruins of Kenilworth Castle

During the later years of this period romantic fiction fell into great Scott's Novels decay. Out of its ashes sprang the historical novel, the invention of which was boldly claimed by Miss Jane Porter (1776-1850), whose Thaddeus of Warsaw, 1803, long cherished by our great-grandfathers, and not entirely unknown to our fathers, had some faint merit. Other ladies, with the courage of their sex, but with remarkably little knowledge of the subject, attacked the muse of history. But nothing was really done of importance until Sir WALTER SCOTT turned his attention from poetry to prose romance. Waverley was not published till 1814, and the long series of novels really belong to the subsequent chapter. They had, however, long been prepared for, and it will be convenient to consider them here. Scott had written a fragment

of an historical novel (afterwards Waverley) in 1805, and in 1808 he had taken up the useful task of preparing for the press an antiquarian story by Strutt, called Quenhoo Hall. His long poems of the same decade had necessitated the approach to historical study in a romantic and yet human

Sir Walter Scott

spirit. From his earliest years Scott had been laying up, from Scottish and from German sources, impressions which were to be definitely useful to him in the creation of his great novels. At last, in the maturity of forty-three years, he began the gigantic work which he was not to abandon until his death in 1832.

It is difficult to speak of the novels of Sir Walter Scott in a perfectly critical spirit. They are a cherished part of the heritage of the English-speaking race, and in discussing them we cannot bring ourselves to use regarding them anything but what to foreign critics seems the language of hyperbole. The noble geniality of attitude which they discover in the author, their perennial freshness, their variety, their "magnifi

cent train of events," make us impatient of the briefest reference to their shortcomings in execution. But it is, perhaps, not the highest loyalty to Scott to attempt to deny that his great books have patent faults: that the conduct of the story in Rob Roy is primitive, that the heroines of Ivanhoe are drawn with no psychological subtlety, that there is a great deal that is terribly heavy and unexhilarating in the pages of Peveril of the Peak. It is best, surely, to admit all this, to allow that Scott sometimes wrote too rapidly and too loosely, that his antiquarianism sometimes ran away with him, that his