world. But this is not the case,-for moral truth is still the light of poetry, and fiction is only the refracting atmosphere which diffuses it; and the laws of moral truth are as essential to poetry as those of physical truth (anatomy and optics for instance) are to painting. Allegory, narration, and the drama make the last appeal to the ethics of the human heart. It is therefore unsafe to draw a marked distinction between morality and poetry, or to speak of "solid observations on life" as of things in their nature unpoetical; for we do meet in poetry` with observations on life, which, for the charm of their solid truth, we should exchange with reluctance for the most ingenious touches of fancy. -Campbell's Specimens of British Poets.

THE GENIUS OF GOLDSMITH.

ONE should have his own pen to describe him as he ought to be described. Amiable, various, and bland, with careless, inimitable grace, touching on every kind of excellence, with manners unstudied, but a gentle heart, performing miracles of skill from pure happiness of nature, and whose greatest fault was ignorance of his own worth. As a poet, he is the most flowing and elegant of our versifiers since Pope, with traits of artless nature which Pope had not; and with a peculiar felicity in his turns upon words, which he constantly repeated with delightful effect, such as,— -"His lot though small,

He sees that little lot, the lot of all."

"And turned and looked, and turned to look again."

As a novelist, his "Vicar of Wakefield" has charmed all Europe. What reader is there in the civilized world who is not the better for the story of the washes which the worthy Dr. Primrose demolished so deliberately with the poker-for the knowledge of the guinea which the Miss Primroses kept unchanged in their pockets-the adventure of the picture of the Vicar's family which could not be got into the houseand that of the Flamborough family, all painted with oranges in their hands-or for the story of the case of shagreen spectacles and the cosmogony?

As a comic writer, his Tony Lumpkin draws forth new powers from Mr. Liston's face. That alone is praise enough for it. Poor Goldsmith! How happy he has made others! how unhappy he was in himself! He never had the pleasure of reading his own works. He only had the satisfaction of good-naturedly relieving the necessities of others, and the consolation of being harassed to death with his own! He is the most amusing and interesting person in one of the most amusing and interesting books in the world, "Boswell's Life of Johnson." His peach-coloured coat shall always bloom in Boswell's writings, and his fame survive in his own! His genius was a mixture of originality and imitation. He could do nothing without some model before him; and he could copy nothing that he did not adorn with the graces of his own

mind. Almost all the latter part of the "Vicar of Wakefield," and a good deal of the former, is taken from "Joseph Andrews," but the circumstances I have mentioned above are not.

The finest things he has left behind him in verse are his character of a country schoolmaster, and that prophetic description of Burke in the "Retaliation." His moral essays in "The Citizen of the World" are as agreeable chit-chat as can be conveyed in the form of didactic discourses.-Hazlitt.

FADING BEAUTY AND HER MIRROR.

THE general idea of a beautiful woman relinquishing her lookingglass on discovering that her charms begin to wane, presents a picture that has in it both a shade of sadness and a touch of satire. Apart from its mechanical uses, her looking-glass, it must be confessed, is no unimportant element in a woman's life; and it may be said to be a necessary help to her attaining that complete self-knowledge at which all should aim. It is right that a beautiful woman should know whether she is beautiful or not. Socrates is said to have enjoined all young persons to look often into their glass, to ascertain if they were goodlooking, that, if they were so, they might strive to make their mental attainments correspond; and if they were not so, then that they might endeavour by the superior accomplishments of their minds to compensate for their personal shortcomings. The fondness for this species of self-contemplation seems to be strong in the sex in general. Novelists describe the village coquette as delighting to admire her face in a small fragment of looking-glass; and in one of Southey's books we are told of the poor Portuguese nuns who had never seen the reflection of themselves from the time of entering their place of seclusion, until the nunneries were thrown open by the effects of the French invasion. The first impulse of them all was to fly to a looking-glass, that they might see their own faces,—a sight which to most of them would seem strange indeed, and would inflict the same kind of pain that Lais was determined to avoid. Ovid somewhere tells of a lady,—

"The time will come when this your old delight,

Your mirror, will present no pleasant sight."

This era, at which a woman's looking-glass becomes distasteful to her, must bring with it a severe trial and a crisis in her character. In a light French comedy, a handsome and gay widow is one day found by her friends and admirers to be in a very wayward mood, the explanation of which, on careful inquiry, is found to be that she had that morning observed in her glass the first wrinkle that had visited her face. must require in the case of an established beauty no small degree of good humour, good sense, and strength of mind, to submit cheerfully to the change thus commencing; and it will be well for her if she has already followed the advice that Ovid gives to a young woman:

"Build up the mind to prop frail beauty's power;
The mind alone lasts to life's latest hour."

It

The beauty who thus passes into the list of has-beens may, however, console herself with the sentiment expressed by a clever wit to a plainlooking woman who was taunting by that epithet a veteran belle, that "the Has-beens were at least better than the Never-was-es."-Lord Neaves, The Greek Anthology.

DR. JOHNSON'S LITERARY CONTEMPORARIES.

WHEN Johnson arrived in London in the year 1737, with his tragedy of "Irene "and very little coin in his pocket, accompanied by his quondam pupil David Garrick, the second monarch of the House of Hanover had been seated on the English throne for ten years—in other words, George the Second was king, Sir Robert Walpole was premier, actively opposed by Lord Chesterfield and his clique, and the country was in a state of great prosperity. It may prove somewhat interesting to our readers if we attempt to furnish a little information on the state of literature in England about the period when the penniless schoolmaster from Edial, with his slipshod dress, with his gaunt, twitching body, in which the bones were hideously prominent (for Johnson had not then become the "tun of man" he was in after-years), entered the Great City to win his spurs in the arena of letters.

Most of the "old set"-the brilliant writers who flourished in the latter part of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries were dead. Dryden-" glorious John "-had been dead eight years, and the philosopher Locke five years, before Johnson was born. Burnet, Newton, Wycherly, Congreve, Rowe, Matt. Prior, Addison, Steele, Parnell, Gay, had all gone to their rest before the year 1737.

The poet laureate was Colley Cibber, upon whom Johnson wrote the biting epigram,

"Augustus still survives in Maro's strain,

And Spenser's verse prolongs Eliza's reign;
Great George's acts let tuneful Cibber sing,
For Nature formed the poet for the king."

Pope was in the zenith of his fame, and his villa at Twickenham was
the rendezvous of the most illustrious men of letters and statesmen of
the period. Bolingbroke was residing in France. Swift's political
pamphlets, his "Drapier's Letters," "Gulliver's Travels," "Tale of a
Tub," and the "Miscellanies," the joint production of himself, Pope,
and Dr. Arbuthnot, had all been published, and the satirical and witty
Dean was a sour, half-insane recluse at his house in Dublin. Thom-
son's "Seasons,"
""Castle of Indolence," plays, etc., had years before
gained him deserved renown; and the poet, who had grown
more fat
than bard beseems," was living in comfortable and dignified retirement
at Richmond. Young was a middle-aged man, but had not yet penned
his "Night Thoughts," although he was known as a poet of consider-
able genius from his "Love of Fame," a satire produced in early youth,
and other poems. Hogarth was steadily working his way by pencil and
burin towards celebrity. He had long before abandoned the not very

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remunerative occupation of engraving arms, crests, etc., upon silver plate; had designed his magnificent illustrations to "Hudibras," and his "Harlot's Progress" and "Rake's Progress" had been published, and were being remorselessly pirated by unprincipled book and print sellers. Dyer's poem, "Grongar Hill," had appeared, and rendered the author justly celebrated. Glover had written his epic poem "Leonidas," which was very popular. Fielding was but a young man, known to the world chiefly as the author of some plays which had indifferent success. His first production, however, "Love in several Masques" (written at the early age of 20), although it followed “The Provoked Husband,”– a play that had a "run" like some of our modern sensation pieces,— was very well received. A good story is told by Murphy, which is highly characteristic of young Fielding's reckless disposition. A play of his was being performed for the first time, and Garrick, who anticipated an unfavourable result, ventured to propose to the author some alterations in the character he had to play. "No, d-n them,” replied careless Harry, "if the scene is not good let them find it out!" In the course of the performance, Fielding was enjoying a bottle of champagne and a pipe, when the hisses and cat-calls of the audience greeted him as he sat in the green-room. "What is the matter, Garrick ?" inquired he of the actor, who appeared in a state of great agitation. "What are they hissing now?" Why, the scene I begged you to retrench I knew would not do, and they have so frightened me that I shall not recollect myself again the whole night." "Oh," coolly replied the author, "they have found it out, have they?" The History of Jonathan Wild the Great," an entertaining romance, the subject of which, as Fielding himself once observed, is not so much a rogue as roguery, was the only work of any importance he had yet published. "Tom Jones," "Joseph Andrews," and "Amelia," still slumbered in the chambers of his fertile brain. Smollett, the rival of Fielding in fiction, was a lad of sixteen studying medicine; and his seafaring experiences were yet to be acquired, in the capacity of surgeon's mate, before he flashed "Roderick Random" on the world. Sterne was a student at Jesus College, Cambridge; and the very remarkable 66 Shandy" family were not heard of till many a long year afterwards. David Hume was a young man of about Johnson's own age. He had tried commercial pursuits at Bristol, but his passion for literature rendered the dull routine of business distasteful. He was not yet known as an author, although he had written an "Essay on Human Nature," which, notwithstanding his remarkable views, failed to attract any notice from the most bigoted and orthodox—in his own words, “it fell stillborn from the press." Edmund Burke, the orator and essayist, was a small boy creeping “like snail unwillingly to school." Oliver Goldsmith had "had the small-pox," and was a schoolboy of ten at Elphin in Roscommon. Sir Joshua Reynolds, the fast friend of Johnson and Goldsmith in later years, was a youth of fifteen. Collins was a scholar at Winchester College; and Gray a student at Cambridge University. Shenstone's poetry was yet unwritten. The fiercely pugnacious, satirical Churchill had hardly shed his milk teeth-the young cub!

The "English Aristophanes," Samuel Foote, was a boy of fifteen studying law, which, however, he soon relinquished for the stage. Armstrong's" Art of Preserving Health"-a didactic poem but little read now-a-days-had not appeared, but he was known to the literary world as the author of a humorous essay on the empirical practice in London, and a poem entitled “The Enemy of Love." Akenside was a youth at Edinburgh College; the Wartons were schoolboys; Horace Walpole was still at Cambridge; Edward Gibbon, the illustrious author of" The Decline and Fall," was only born this year; and the prince of biographers, even James Boswell, was yet to be born, when Samuel Johnson first set foot in the metropolis.-W. A. Clouston.

THE POETRY OF WALTER SCOTT.

SCOTT, cradled in ballad-land, became the most zealous as well as the ablest of ballad editors in collecting materials for the "Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border," thinking, as it was said, "of little but the queerness and the fun he was making for himself" for the work of his life. He was also in no small degree making at the same time the public taste to which that work was to be submitted. In fulness of time the "Lay of the Last Minstrel" was born to fascinate a world, athwart which the genius of Burns had lately flashed, but in which Hayley was probably the most popular poet, and the laurels of Dryden certainly wreathed the brow of Pye! Few critics will question the supremacy of Scott, at least in our language, in the field of metrical. romance. Opinion may vary as to the rank to be assigned to that class of composition. Other poets have soared higher into the empyrean of thought, or have dived deeper into the mystery of life. But none has ever told his tale with greater breadth of light and shade, or hurried his reader along with a more genial vivacity; none has ever lit up the banquet-hall or the battle-field with more of Homeric fire, or adorned his action with a more exquisite transcript of the scenery of nature. It is in virtue of these qualities that a great poet holds as his own for ever the ground, historical or topographical, which his wand has once touched; and conquests of this kind are, in one sense, a measure of his power. In this sphere Scott is certainly the greatest of peaceful and beneficent conquerors in the world of letters.-Sir W. Stirling Maxwell, at the Scott Centenary Banquet, Edinburgh, 1871.

THE PRINCE OF NOVELISTS.

HENRY FIELDING, upon whom we place the distinction of being England's first great novelist, has for a century past been the constant subject of criticism. His surpassing merits have compelled even his most pronounced foes to assign him a lofty place in the art which he adorned. Attempts to depreciate his genius, because the moral backbone was lacking in some of his characters, have been repeatedly made, but with no permanent effect upon his renown. For ourselves, we affirm, at the outset, that we consider him the Shakspeare of novelists.