only is their due, as it surely is their aim. There is a story told of an officer in an Irish inn, who called the waiter to him, and complained of the dirty plate on which was the chop provided for his meal. "Sure," said the waiter, "your honour knows that every one must eat dirt in the course of his life." "I know that, you rascal," cried the officer; "but another time bring me the chop on one plate and the dirt on the other; I prefer to mix them for myself." This will illustrate the feelings of our age, which has been defended by some critics for its impatience at being taught or talked to. No man who writes a novel or a story, says one, has a right to make it the vehicle for anything else but the plot of the little drama that he unfolds. In short, they prefer to have the moral on one dish, and the tale on the other, and to mix them for themselves. But Johnson's "Rasselas" deserves to be read on account of its real merit, and from its being a representative book. It was appropriately written by one of the noblest, best, and poorest of men who ever lived, in the nights of one week, to pay the expenses of his mother's funeral. It is a tale about a Prince of Abyssinia, the author knowing (though he knew almost all that was to be known in his day) about as much about Abyssinia as he knew of the inhabitants and geography of the moon. "It is, in fact,” says a writer, "a series of essays on various subjects of morality and religion-on the efficacy of pilgrimages, the state of departed souls, the probability of the re-appearance of the dead, the dangers of solitude, &c." It is well remarked, too, that in Abyssinia the Prince and his companions talk just as wisely and as well as did Johnson and Reynolds in Bolt Court or at the club. It is tinged, this little fan

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ciful romance, with the author's habitual melancholy, but it is full of sound sense, and is a perfect mine of deep reflection. It may not live except in the ponderous works of its author; for the world grows so full of books that it will frequently be overlooked; but whoever reads it, will find that he has not wasted his time in company with the very fictitious Prince of Abyssinia. A curious work in its way, without any morality, not even the little assumption of it that its author could put on, is "The Castle of Otranto," published in 1764 by Horace Walpole, and written by him as a kind of proof of strength at one sitting. It is usually printed with a much prettier and purer story, "The Old English Baron," by Miss Clara Reeve, and may be taken as the first of a long series of tales of a "Rococo" taste, made up of ghosts, old castles, secret passages, armour, old oak chests, seneschals, my lady and my lord and such dolls and upholstery as are found in the predecessors of Sir Walter Scott. Walpole published it anonymously, as from a manuscript found in the north of England, and printed at Naples, in black letter, in the year 1529. "I wished it to be believed ancient," wrote Walpole, who loved to talk of this literary success, "and almost everybody was imposed upon." And yet he blamed poor Chatterton for the Rowley forgeries! Yes, everybody was imposed upon who knew nothing of old times. The monks and knights are modern fine gentlemen, dressed in theatrical costumes or "Brummagem" armour; the whole story is improbable and wild; and yet every young person reads it with pleasure on account of its "lovely" style. So much of the man himself does the story breathe, that "Otranto" might be a magnified copy of the sham-Gothic doll

house at Strawberry Hill; and Walpole, who "loved to gaze on Gothic toys through Gothic glass," seems to have thrown his renaissance and semi-antique life as much into the one as into the other. There can, however, be no doubt that this story had a very powerful effect on the writers that followed; nay, that it led, amongst other things, to the study of architecture, mediævalism, the love of the Gothic, the writing of Sir Walter Scott's great romances, and even to the revival of the love of colour, glitter, show, and pictorial decoration observable in the religious services of a large portion of the people of this land.

CHAPTER XXIV.

ENGLISH PERIODICAL ESSAYISTS.

has been already explained how certain literary fashions, or even single performances, begot other fashions and performances; how the drama arose from the

monks feeling that there was a necessity to teach the "mysteries" of their religion to those who could not read nor write; how it passed through the romantic and historical phases, until, growing corrupt, it gave rise to certain self-constituted censors of the press, the periodical essayists; so that the government of good, if not the finger of God, may be seen in the world; and without the Church even, there is always to be found, as in the days of the wicked Israelitish kings, a band of men, "whose hearts God has touched," to watch over the teaching of the people, and to keep it pure, wholesome, and manly. This is of course the view of only one phase of the question ; but it is a broad, wholesome, and earnest view, and will bear thought and inspection.

The English, a people always either political or religious, and often both, were ever fond of lecturing their

neighbours. In the good old times, sermons three hours long, indulged in some sixteen times a week, gave a full vent to the preaching passion of the advisers; but afterwards, when learning became emancipated from the church, we see the tendency to guide and sermonize break out in the poet. Chaucer introduces a very long, and somewhat dull sermon, in his "Canterbury Tales ;" and others followed his example. Sir Walter Raleigh wrote, not only his "History of the World,” but a series of Essays, "Advice to his Son." John Lyly, whom Sir Walter Scott has somewhat ignorantly represented as a foolish pedant, published in 1579-81 a very valuable collection of Essays, in two parts-the one called "Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit," the other "Euphues and his England"—to which I have made slight reference in a preceding chapter-a quasi romance, but interspersed with didactic matter of a very beautiful character. Lyly's book exhibits great care in the choice of language; its style is neat and antithetical, and it is notable for the cadence and harmony of its prose. Lyly became unwittingly the inventor of Euphuism, a refined or over-refined way of speaking, which both Shakespeare and Sir Walter Scott have ridiculed. ward Blount, the bookseller, writing in 1632, truly says—“Our nation are in his debt, for a new English which hee taught them. Euphues and his England began first that language. All our ladies were then his schollers; and that beautie in court which could not parley Euphueisme was as little regarded as she which now there speaks not French." Lyly, who was also an admirable dramatist, though sometimes guilty of drowsy monotony of diction, alliteration, punning,

Ed