carefully arranged to appear on the occasion of the third Napoleon's visit to England, and so mortify the new dynasty. In the same spirit Croker assailed Soult when he visited this country-recounting all his military errors and defeats, and reminding him that the Duke of Wellington (who was seriously annoyed by the mistimed reminiscence) had deprived him of his dinner at Oporto in 1809, and at Waterloo in 1815. Two of the later contributions to the Review by Croker made considerable noise — those on Macaulay's History and Moore's Memoirs. In Macaulay's case, Rogers said Croker 'attempted murder, but only committed suicide.' With Moore the reviewer had been on friendly terms. They were countrymen and college acquaintances; and when Lord John Russell published the poet's journals for the benefit of his widow, a generous friend of the dead man would have abstained from harsh comments. Croker plied the scalpel unsparingly; the editor remarked on the critic's 'safe malignity;' and Croker retaliated by showing that Moore had been recording unfavourable notices of Lord John in his journal at the very time that he was cultivating his acquaintance by letters and soliciting favours at his hands. Lord John's faults as an editor were also unsparingly exposed; and on the whole, in all but good feeling, Croker was triumphant in this passage-at-arms. Disraeli satirised him in Coningsby as 'Rigby,' the jackal of 'Lord Monmouth' (Hertford); and Macaulay, as is well known, 'detested him more than cold boiled veal.' Yet Croker did service to literature by his annotated edition of Boswell's Life of Johnson, and his publication of the Suffolk Papers, the Letters of Lady Hervey, and Lord Hervey's Memoirs of the Court of George II. He wrote Stories from the History of England for Children, which served as a model for Sir Walter Scott's Tales of a Grandfather; and he collected some of his contributions to the Review as Essays on the Early Period of the French Revolution. At his death he was preparing an edition of Pope's works, which passed into the hands of the Rev. Whitworth Elwin. Croker's publications numbered nearly a score, and his Correspondence and Diaries were edited by Louis J. Jennings 3 vols. 1884). George Croly (1780-1860) was a voluminous writer in poetry, history, fiction, exegetical and polemical theology, politics, &c. Born in Dublin, and educated at Trinity College, he took orders in 1804, and coming in 1810 to London, was appointed rector of St Stephen's, Walbrook, in 1835. He wrote industriously for Blackwood's Magazine and the reviews, and showed from the commencement versatility and a decided literary gift. His-somewhat Byronic-poems include Paris in 1815, a description of the works of art in the Louvre (1817); The Angel of the World (1820); Catiline, a tragedy (1822); Poetical Works (2 vols. 1830); and The Modern Orlando, a satirical poem (1846). He edited the works of Jeremy Taylor and the poems of Pope. The most important of his theological works is The Apocalypse of St John, a new Interpretation (1827), but he published also on providence, baptism, the papal aggression, and the deceased wife's sister; while his historical writings include a series of Sketches, a Character of Curran, The Political Life of Burke, and The Personal History of King George the Fourth. There were also books on the Holy Land, a history of the defence of Hamburg against Davoût, and three volumes of Tales of the Great St Bernard-a series of stories supposed to be told to relieve the monotony of imprisonment by bad weather at the hospice, the Englishman, the Italian, and the rest of the storm-stayed travellers each telling his tale. The romances Salathiel (1829) and Marston, Soldier and Statesman (1846), are sharply contrasted in subject as in other things -the latter a tale of modern public life, the former the part of the story of the Wandering Jew and his tragic adventures till after the siege of Jerusalem. Salathiel was greeted on its appearance by the Athenæum (then but two years old) as 'one of the most splendid productions among works of fiction that the age has brought forth,' and was by other reviews compared with the most powerful of Shakespeare's dramas. It is strongly conceived and has many powerful passages, the style in many places being obviously modelled on De Quincey. Byron, whom he was believed to have attacked in a 'Letter of Cato,' sneered at him as the Reverend Rowley Powley,' and spoke, not inaptly, of the 'psalmodic amble' of his Pegasus. A brief memoir by his son was prefixed to Croly's Book of Job (1863). Pericles and Aspasia. When Athens was the land of fame; When each was like a living flame; His sovereignty was held or won : Resistless words were on his tongue, Then Eloquence first flashed below; Minerva from the Thunderer's brow! But, if their solemn love were crime, Pity the beauty and the sage, Yet still she conquered in his name. The French Army in Russia. [name. A Of the wild rage of storm, or deadly clime, The human harvest, now stark, stiff, and chill, Still did the hoof and wheel their passage tear, [drear. Each knew the mound, the black ravine whose strait They reach the wilderness! The majesty The struggling daylight shows the unmeasured desert wan. Still on they sweep, as if their hurrying march At once is covered with a livid veil; In mixed and fighting heaps the deep clouds reel; In sanguine light, an orb of burning steel; The trumpet of the northern winds has blown, Of armies on that boundless field o'erthrown: Is tempested, a sea without a shore, Satan; from a Picture by Sir Thomas Lawrence. 'Satan dilated stood.'-MILTON. Prince of the fallen! around thee sweep On thy curled lip is throned disdain, Yet wan, wild beauty lingers there, Thou prisoned, ruined, unforgiven! Charles Caleb Colton.-A once popular collection of apophthegms and moral reflections was published in 1820-22 under the title of Lacon, or Many Things in Few Words; addressed to those who Think; six editions of it appeared within a twelvemonth. The history of its author conveys a moral probably more striking than even the best of his maxims. The Rev. Charles Caleb Colton (c. 1780-1832) passed in 1796 from Eton to King's College, Cambridge, and in 1801 obtained a fellowship and the college living of Prior's Portion near Tiverton, in 1818 that of Kew and Petersham. A great fisherman and sportsman generally, he was eccentric to a degree; for a time he carried a wine-merchant's business; and he would abroad in military dress. About 1823 on go gambling and extravagance forced him to leave England, and for a time he lived in America and in Paris. In the French capital he is said to have been so successful as a gamester that in two years he realised £25,000. For fear of a surgical operation he shot himself at Fontainebleau 28th April 1832. Besides Lacon, he published a satire on hypocrisy, a poem on Napoleon's retreat from Moscow, and one or two trifles. His somewhat pretentious moralising is exemplified in such shorter extracts from Lacon as Bigotry murders religion to frighten fools with her ghost;' 'Ignorance is a blank sheet on which we may write; but error is a scribbled one on which we must first erase;' and these longer ones: Mystery and Intrigue. There are minds so habituated to intrigue and mystery in themselves, and so prone to expect it from others, that they will never accept of a plain reason for a plain fact, if it be possible to devise causes for it that are obscure, far-fetched, and usually not worth the carriage. Like the miser of Berkshire, who would ruin a good horse to escape a turnpike, so these gentlemen ride their high-bred theories to death, in order to come at truth, through by-paths, lanes, and alleys; while she herself is jogging quietly along upon the high and beaten road of common-sense. The consequence is, that those who take this mode of arriving at truth are sometimes before her, and sometimes behind her, but very seldom with her. Thus the great statesman who relates the conspiracy against Doria pauses to deliberate upon, and minutely to scrutinise into, divers and sundry errors committed and opportunities neglected whereby he would wish to account for the total failure of that spirited enterprise. But the plain fact was, that the scheme had been so well planned and digested that it was victorious in every point of its operation, both on the sea and on the shore, in the harbour of Genoa no less than in the city, until that most unlucky accident befell the Count de Fiesque, who was the very life and soul of the conspiracy. In stepping from one galley to another, the plank on which he stood upset, and he fell into the sea. His armour happened to be very heavy, the night to be very dark, the water to be very deep, and the bottom to be very muddy. And it is another plain fact that water, in all such cases, happens to make no distinction whatever between a conqueror and a cat. Magnanimity in a Cottage. In the obscurity of retirement, amid the squalid poverty and revolting privations of a cottage, it has often been my lot to witness scenes of magnanimity and self-denial as much beyond the belief as the practice of the great; a heroism borrowing no support either from the gaze of the many or the admiration of the few, yet flourishing amidst ruins and on the confines of the grave; a spectacle as stupendous in the moral world as the falls of the Missouri in the natural, and, like that mighty cataract, doomed to display its grandeur only where there are no eyes to appreciate its magnificence. Charles Waterton (1782-1865), born at Walton Hall, Wakefield, and educated at the Roman Catholic college of Stonyhurst, went out about 1804 to Demerara to manage some family estates, and determined in 1812 to wander 'through the wilds of Demerara and Essequibo, with the view to reach the inland frontier fort of Portuguese Guiana, to collect a quantity of the strongest Wourali (Curari) poison, and to catch and stuff the beautiful birds which abound in that part of South America.' He made two more journeys, amidst difficulties unspeakable, through Brazil and Guiana-in 1816 and 1820-and in 1825 published his most entertaining Wanderings in South America, the North-west of the United States, and the Antilles. In order to pick up matter for natural history, I have wandered through the wildest parts of South America's equinoctial regions. I have attacked and slain a modern python, and rode on the back of a cayman close to the water's edge; a very different situation from that of a Hyde-Park dandy on his Sunday prancer before the ladies. Alone and barefoot I have pulled poisonous snakes out of their lurkingplaces, climbed up trees to peep into holes for bats and vampires, and for days together hastened through sun and rain to the thickest parts of the forest to procure specimens I had never seen before.' The python and cayman made much noise and amusement at the time, and the conquest of the cayman was made the subject of a caricature. Waterton had long wished to obtain one of the huge (non-venomous) Coulacanara snakes, and at length he saw one coiled up in his den. He advanced towards him stealthily, and with his lance struck him behind the neck and fixed him to the ground. A Snake Story. That moment the negro next to me seized the lance and held it firm in its place, while I dashed head foremost into the den to grapple with the snake, and to get hold of his tail before he could do any mischief. On pinning him to the ground with the lance, he gave a tremendous loud hiss, and the little dog ran away, howling as he went. We had a sharp fray in the den, the rotten sticks flying on all sides, and each party struggling for the superiority. I called out to the second negro to throw himself upon me, as I found I was not heavy enough. He did so, and his additional weight was of great service. I had now got firm hold of his tail, and after a violent struggle or two he gave in, finding himself overpowered. This was the moment to secure him. So while the first negro continued to hold the lance firm to the ground, and the other was helping me, I contrived to unloose my braces, and with them tied up the snake's mouth. The snake, now finding himself in an unpleasant situation, tried to better himself, and set resolutely to work, but we overpowered him. We contrived to make him twist himself round the shaft of the lance, and then prepared to convey him out of the forest. I stood at his head and held it firm under my arm; one negro supported the belly, and the other the tail. In this order we began to move slowly towards home, and reached it after resting ten times. Next day Waterton killed the snake, which was fourteen feet long and enormously thick. The cayman or alligator was found on the Essequibo after three days' waiting and seeking, and caught with a shark-hook baited with a large fish. The difficulty was to pull him up. The Indians proposed shooting him with arrows; but this the 'Wanderer' resisted. 'I had come above three hundred miles on purpose to catch a cayman uninjured, and not to carry back a mutilated specimen.' The men pulled with a will, and out he came at last, the modern St George standing armed with the mast of the canoe, which he proposed to force down the dragon's throat. How to catch a Cayman. By the time the cayman was within two yards of me, I saw he was in a state of fear and perturbation; I instantly dropped the mast, sprang up, and jumped on his back, turning half round as I vaulted, so that I gained my seat with my face in a right position. I immediately seized his fore-legs, and by main force twisted them on his back; thus they served me for a bridle. He now seemed to have recovered from his surprise, and, probably fancying himself in hostile company, he began to plunge furiously, and lashed the sand 'with his long and powerful tail. I was out of reach of the strokes of it, by being near his head. He continued to plunge and strike, and made my seat very uncomfortable. It must have been a fine sight for an unoccupied spectator. The people roared out in triumph, and were so vociferous that it was some time before they heard me tell them to pull me and my beast of burden further inland. I was apprehensive the rope might break, and then there would have been every chance of going down to the regions under water with the cayman. That would have been more perilous than Arion's marine morning ride-'Delphini insidens, vada cærula sulcat Arion.' The people now dragged us above forty yards on the sand: it was the first and last time I was ever on a cayman's back. Should it be asked how I managed to keep my seat, I would answer, I hunted some years with Lord Darlington's fox-hounds. His ac The cayman, killed and stuffed, was, like the python's skin, added to the curiosities of Walton Hall. Waterton's next work was Essays on Natural History, chiefly Ornithology, with an Autobiography of the Author (three series, 1838-57; ed. by J. G. Wood, 1878). count of his family-an old Roman Catholic line that had suffered persecution from the days of Henry VIII. downwards-is a quaint, amusing chronicle; and the notes on the habits of birds show minute observation and vivid characterisation (sometimes after the manner of White of Selborne), as well as the kindly, genial spirit of the eccentric squire. The ancient wanderer died from a fall when carrying a log in his own grounds (as Abyssinian Bruce from a fall down his own staircase), and was buried with all the ceremony prescribed by himself between two favourite oaks beside a lake in his own park. There is a Life of him by Richard Hobson (1865). Ann and Jane Taylor were members of an English Nonconformist family so distinguished through five generations in literature and art as to have been made the subject of researches in heredity by Mr Gulton. Their father, Isaac Taylor (1759-1829), the second of four Isaacs, was, like his father before him, an engraver of some eminence. He had an uncle, Charles Taylor (1756-1821), who edited Calmet's Dictionary of the Bible, and another, Josiah, who became eminent as a publisher of architectural works. The father of Ann and Jane, besides his engraving business, took a warm interest in the affairs of the 'meeting-house,' and in 1796 became pastor of an Independent congregation at Colchester, in 1811 at Ongar-whence the famous kin became known as 'the Taylors of Ongar' (as distinguished from the Taylors of Norwich;' see Vol. II. p. 712). His wife (born Ann Martin) had literary impulses, and published Maternal Solicitude (1814), The Family Mansion (1819), and other tales, and a series of educational works. The daughters, Ann (17821866) and Jane (1783–1824), were born in London, but brought up from 1786 at Lavenham in Suffolk, where their father had, for the sake of economy, taken up his residence. His daughters assisted in the engraving, working steadily at their allotted tasks from their thirteenth or fourteenth year, and paying their share of the family expenses. They began their literary career in 1798 by contributing to a cheap annual, The Minor's Pocket-Book, the publishers of which induced them to undertake a volume of verses for children. Accordingly in 1804-5 there appeared Original Poems for Infant Minds, which were followed by Rhymes for the Nursery (1806), Hymns for Infant Minds (1810), Rural Scenes, City Scenes, &c. The hymns, somewhat analogous to Dr Watts's, were highly popular, were praised by men as eminent and as unlike one another as Dr Arnold and Archbishop Whately, and are still familiar- My Mother' and 'Twinkle, Twinkle, little Star,' can surely never become obsolete in the nursery. Jane Taylor was authoress of a tale, Display (1815), and of Essays in Rhyme (1816) and Contributions of Q. Q. Ann married in 1813 a Congregational minister, the Rev. Joseph Gilbert (1779-1852), who settled at Nottingham in 1825, and published The Christian Atonement, &c.; a memoir of him was written by his widow. When she also was removed, her son, Josiah Gilbert, an accomplished artist, and author of The Dolomite Mountains; Cadore, or Titian's Country, &c., published in 1874 Autobiography and other Memorials of Mrs Gilbert (Ann Taylor). Each of the accomplished sisters has bequeathed to the Christian Church at least one hymn of universal acceptation, Mrs Gilbert having written 'Great God, and wilt thou condescend;' Jane Taylor's best known is 'Lord, I would own thy tender care.' Their brother, Isaac Taylor (1787-1865), became still more distinguished as an author; a notice of him will be found at page 244. For a recent notice of Jane Taylor, see Mrs L. B. Walford's Twelve English Authoresses (1892). From 'The Song of the Tea-Kettle.' By ANN TAYLOR. Since first began my ominous song, Slow was the world my worth to glean, My visible secret long unseen! On whom first fell the amazing dream? The viewless bonds of a mental sway, Hark! 'tis the din of a thousand wheels 'Tis the many-fingered, intricate, bright machine, With its flowery film of lace, I ween! And see where it rushes, with silvery wreath, Stupendous, vital, fiery, bright, Trailing its length in a country's sight; And man, fitly crowned with brow sublime, Lone was the shore where the hero mused, And moon after moon, since its anchor weighed, She starts-wild winds at her bosom rage, A few bright suns, and at rest she lies, The Squire's Pew. By JANE TAYLOR. A slanting ray of evening light And since those trappings first were new, To rob the velvet of its hue, Has come and passed away! How many a setting sun hath made That curious lattice-work of shade? Crumbled beneath the hillock green The cunning hand must be That carved this fretted door, I weenAcorn and fleur-de-lis; And now the worm hath done her part In days of yore-that now we call- All seated round in order due, On damask-cushions, set in fringe, Now streaming down the vaulted aisle, Of their inscription stone; Outstretched together are expressed Set forth in order as they died, The numerous offspring bend; Have filled the stately pew; |