him was, as he assures us, a free-will offering, it abounds with curious information, and is in no way inferior to any of the former. The lives of Hooker and Herbert, it is said, were written under the roof of Walton's attached friend, Morley, who had returned to England and was then bishop of Winchester; which seems to accord with Wood's account, that "after his quitting London, he lived mostly in the families of the eminent clergy of that time," to whom his unaffected piety, amiable manners, staunch friendship, and delight in recording the history of good men, must have endeared him.

In 1676, the eighty-third year of his life, Walton was preparing a fifth and enlarged edition of the Angler,' when Mr C. Cotton of Beresford, in Staffordshire, whom he had adopted as a son, wrote a second part, on Fly-fishing, of which Walton, though an expert angler, knew little, being indebted for what he has said on this subject chiefly to his friend Mr Thomas Barker, author of a book entitled, Barker's delight, or the art of Angling.'

In the same year, notwithstanding his age, he undertook to write a life of Bishop Sanderson, which was published, together with some of the Bishop's writings, and a sermon of Hooker's, in 1677. The period when the faculties of men usually begin to decline, had long passed, when he undertook this life; yet far from lacking the excellencies which distinguish the former lives, it abounds with evidences of a vigorous imagination, sound judgment, and memory unimpaired. Sufficient commendation of these productions would be found in the fact that 'Walton's Lives' was a very favourite book of Dr Johnson,—one which, as Boswell states, he not only read but studied. One short passage the Doctor has pointed out as affording him peculiar delight, and much food for reflection; it forms the concluding paragraph of Sanderson's Life" Thus this pattern of meekness and primitive innocence changed this for a better life :-It is now too late to wish that mine may be like his; for I am in the eighty-fifth year of my age; and God knows it hath not; but I most humbly beseech Almighty God that my death may; and I do as earnestly beg that if any reader shall receive any satisfaction from this very plain, and as true relation, he will be so charitable as to say Amen."

It appears that Walton had contemplated writing the life of Sir Henry Savile, several letters relating to it having been found. He also undertook to collect materials for a life of Hales. In 1683, when he was ninety years old, he published Thealma and Clearchus,' a pastoral history, in smooth and easy verse, written long since by John Chalkhill, Esq., an acquaintance and friend of Edmund Spenser ; to this poem he wrote a preface, containing a very amiable character of the author. He lived but a very little time after this publication, for, as Wood says, he ended his days on the 15th of December, 1683, during the great frost, at Winchester, in the house of Dr William Hawkins, a prebendary of that cathedral, where he lies buried. On a large, flat, black marble stone, is an inscription to his memory, the poetry of which has very little to recommend it.

Edmund Castell, D. D.

BORN A. D. 1606.-DIED A. D. 1685.

THIS learned and industrious divine was born in 1606 at Hatley in Cambridgeshire. He entered Emmanuel college, Cambridge, in 1621, and resided in that college for several years, but ultimately removed to St John's college in order to enjoy the use of its library, which was of special service to him in compiling his 'Lexicon Heptaglotton.' On this magnificent work he expended the labours of eighteen years, and a sum of twelve thousand pounds. This fact is stated by Hearne, on the authority of a letter from Dr Castell himself. It is likewise confirmed by an advertisement in the London Gazette, in which Castell informs the subscribers to his lexicon, that they may send for their copies of "that long-expected, often, and many ways most dismally obstructed and interrupted work, which is now fully finished: (the author) having laboured therein eighteen years,-expended not so little as £12,000, besides that which has been brought in by benefactors and subscribers."

In 1666, Castell was appointed king's chaplain, and also professor of Arabic at Cambridge; and in 1668, he obtained a prebend in Canterbury. These appointments assisted to relieve him a little under the pressure of the pecuniary embarrassments in which his lexicon had involved him; but the publication of the work itself next year failed to afford him any compensation either for his labour or expenses. The age could not appreciate its value, and the copies lay unsold upon his hands.

Dr Walker received eminent assistance from Dr Castell in preparing his celebrated polyglott bible. The latter not only collated the Samaritan, Syriac, Arabic, and Ethiopic versions, but even aided the publication from his own funds, besides contributing his own labours gratuitously. His only other work was a thin quarto, entitled, Sol Angliæ Oriens auspiciis Caroli II. Regum gloriosissimi.' He died at Higham Gobion in 1685. The great object of Castell's life was the pursuit of oriental literature. In this he spared no labour and no expense that a fortune at one time liberal could supply. He bequeathed his valuable collection of manuscripts to the university of Cambridge. It is supposed that about 500 of his lexicons were unsold at his death. These were placed by his niece and executrix in a room of a house at Martin in Surrey, where for many years they lay exposed to the unmolested depredations of rats and other vermin. The consequence was, that when they came into the possession of this lady's executors, scarcely one complete volume could be formed out of the remainder, and the whole load of learned rags brought only seven pounds!

Thomas Otway.

BORN A. D. 1651.—died A. D. 1685.

THOMAS OTWAY was the son of a clergyman, and was born at Trottin in Sussex on the 3d of March, 1651. After receiving the primary part of his education at Winchester school, he entered Christ-church, Oxford, but from some unassignable cause left the university without taking a degree, and went to London, where he began his career as an actor. Meeting with but little success in that line,' he turned his thoughts to a nobler occupation, and in 1675 produced two tragedies with the titles of Alcibiades,' and 'Don Carlos.' The latter of these appears to have been received with extraordinary applause, if we may judge from a passage in Rochester's 'Session of the Poets,' in which Otway is represented as swearing that Don Carlos had "amply filled his pockets.' As Otway was a man of lively conversation, and no ways given to decency, he became a great favourite with the gay and dissolute noblemen of those days, but he appears to have obtained nothing from their friendship, or rather their familiarity, save an acceleration on the road to ruin. It was not likely that the

"Gay coxcombs, cowards, knaves, and prating fools,
Bullies of o'ergrown bulk, and little souls,
Gamesters, half-wits, and spendthrifts,"—

with whom, as he himself tells us, he fed "on every soil of variety," should do him any lasting service, since intemperance and debauchery, more perhaps than any other crimes, breed in their victims a hardened selfishness which utterly incapacitates them for any real friendship. A cornet's commission was indeed obtained for him in some troops sent into Flanders, but Otway's genius was so little martial that he speedily resigned, and returned to England in extreme indigence. Soon after his return he brought out two translations from French dramas, and in 1678 an original comedy, entitled, Friendship in Fashion,' which, greatly to the credit of the spectators, was hissed off the stage in 1745 on account of its gross obscenities. In 1680 his 'Orphan' was exhibited, and in the same year he wrote a tragedy called The History and Fall of Caius Marius.' In this execrable travestie he has had the audacity to borrow the entire plot, and more than one-half of his scenes, without the alteration of a single letter, from Romeo and Juliet, and to invest the coarse, stupid, plebeian son, of the brutal Caius Marius, with the character and expressions of the gentle, gifted, romantic Romeo. His last, and unquestionably his best dramatic work, was published in 1685. He died on the 14th of April in the same year, some say of absolute starvation-others, with more probability, of a feBe this as it may, all agree that his death was hastened by the sorrows and deprivations which poverty brought in its train; of which poverty, it is to be feared, that his own vices were the cause.

ver.

His contemporaries, and the critics of Queen Anne's time, have

In Downer's Roscius Anglicanus it is mentioned that, in 1672, he failed in the character of the King in Mrs Belin's Forced Marriage.'

awarded to Otway a much higher rank as a dramatist than his merits can fairly challenge. It is true enough that nothing has been produced since his time at all equal to Venice Preserved, but if he be compared with his illustrious predecessors of the Elizabethan age, he is lost in the magnitude of his rivals. His comedies cannot be allowed the merit of superiority even over those of the present day. They are compounds of the most brutal obscenity and intolerable stupidity, without a spark of genius to gild their shame, a single trait of virtue to contrast with their vice, or even a thin mantle of refinement to conceal their deformity. They are productions which would have disgraced any age, save that in which the formal gravity of the court of Charles the First, and the austere religion of the puritans, were alike washed away by the poisonous inundation of foreign manners, foreign impiety, and foreign debauchery, which overspread the land on Charles the Second's unhappy restoration. For such an age they were well-suited, or indeed for any age in which obscenity can make a wit, or clever villany, a gentleman. His tragedies, however, are productions of a different stamp. Not that the inculcation of virtue by either precept or example is any where much attended to, but his dramatis-personæ are in general respectable, and their language decent, while the talent displayed is of a vastly superior description to any thing he has left us in the comic line. His characters are not often drawn with any singular felicity, the laws of the drama are nowhere strictly regarded,—his language is seldom polished or select,-no lofty thought, or playful fancy, or high imagination, beams forth from his page to dazzle or delight, we see none of the learning of a scholar, or the refinement of a man of taste,-yet his tragedies, especially on the first perusal, excite a deep and oftentimes a long-remembered interest. Dryden and Addison have agreed in ascribing this interest to the power which Otway possesses of exciting the passions, but neither of them have explained the method by which this is effected. Perhaps the secret of it may be, that when Otway has succeeded in bringing his heroes into situations of the most overwhelming interest, instead of endowing them with lofty thoughts and lofty language, as Kit Marlowe, Shakspeare, or Beaumont and Fletcher would have done, he has put into their mouths just such ideas and expressions as persons of ordinary mind would naturally and appropriately employ, and has thereby come home to the bosoms of the great majority of his readers, who would find themselves lost in the vast intellect of a Hamlet. The concluding scene of Don Carlos,' and nearly the whole of the Orphan,' are strong instances in proof. Mrs Barry used to say that she could never pronounce the words, "Ah! poor Castalio;" in his character of Monimia in the latter play, without shedding tears. It is on Venice Preserved,' however, that his fame rests; and it is an edifice well-calculated to sustain it. Its grand defect is, that the characters from beginning to end, with the exception of the wearisome scenes between Antonio and Aquilina, speak in the most elevated tone of passion. There is no repose in the picture. From the first scene to the last all is thunder and lightning There are excellencies, however, quite sufficient to counterbalance the defects, and the reader will find, in the exquisite portraits of the deep unutterable affection of Belvidera, and the irresolution and remorse of Jaffier, some remnant of the glories of the Elizabethan age. The

opinion which Moreri has pronounced on him will not, we think, be disputed:-"Ce n'est pas un poete du premier genie, mais peut-être auroit-il ête plus loin, si ses débauches ne l'eussent pas tué à l'âge de 35 ans."-Otway's works have been printed in 3 vols. duodecimo, ir 1722, 1768, and 1812.

Edmund Waller.

BORN A. D. 1605.-died a. D. 1687.

EDMUND WALLER was born on the 3d of March, 1605, at Coleshill in Hertfordshire. His father belonged to an ancient and respectable family, and his mother was an aunt of Oliver Cromwell, and sister of John Hampden, the immortal martyr to the cause of English liberty. By the death of his father, young Waller, at an early age, became possessed of an ample fortune, which enabled him, after passing through the usual routine of education at Eton and Cambridge, to enter parliament in his eighteenth, if not in his sixteenth year. His poetical career commenced about the same time, since the poem on the Prince's escape at St Andero-which is generally printed first in his works-must have been written in his eighteenth year. The most remarkable feature in this juvenile performance is, that it shows its author to have obtained almost without effort, or as Dr Johnson has said, to have" inherited" a purity of language, and an exquisite harmony of versification, such as few men acquire even by laborious culture. During the long interval which elapsed in King Charles's reign, without the meeting of any parliament, Waller appears to have spent his time in the company of those "with whom it was most honourable to converse," and in the liberal enjoyment of a handsome fortune. He had married early in life a woman of large property; but her death, soon after their nuptials, leaving his affections once more free, he paid his addresses to the Lady Dorothea Sidney, daughter of the earl of Leicester, to whom, under the unmeaning name of Saccharissa, many of his poems were addressed, though without exciting any sympathetic flame. Finding her inexorable, he took refuge in the arins of some other beauty, perhaps the Amoret or Phillis to whom several of his strains are inscribed, and there is every reason to believe that his marriage was a happy one. He sat in both the parliaments summoned in 1640 (the latter of which was the famous long parliament) and at first joined heart and hand with his illustrious relative Hampden, in resisting the arbitrary measures of the court. So decided a part did he take, that he was chosen by the parliament to manage the prosecution of Judge Crawley, for his opinion in favour of ship-money; and the way in which he performed the task amply justified the confidence they had reposed in his zeal and ability. When, however, the war of words was exchanged for one of blows, Waller suddenly veered round to the royalists, and both publicly and privately aided their cause, though he still sat among the representatives of the people. Not only did he

• Moreri does not seem to agree with the writers of the late French dictionary of universal biography, who gravely say, "that the English in general esteem Otway second only to Shakspeare!"