the harshness with which he had been treated, and urged some matters in mitigation. But, on the whole, he frankly acknowledged that he had been justly reproved. "If," said he, "Mr. Collier be my enemy, let him triumph. If he be my friend, as I have given him no personal occasion to be otherwise, he will be glad of my repentance."

It would have been wise in Congreve to follow his master's example. He was precisely in that situation in which it is madness to attempt a vindication; for his guilt was so clear that no address or eloquence could obtain an acquittal. On the other hand, there were in his case many extenuating circumstances which, if he had acknowledged his error and promised amendment, would have procured his pardon. The most rigid censor could not but make great allowances for the faults into which so young a man had been seduced by evil example, by the luxuriance of a vigorous fancy, and by the inebriating effect of popular applause. The esteem, as well as the admiration, of the public was still within his reach. He might easily have effaced all memory of his transgressions, and have shared with Addison the glory of showing that the most brilliant wit may be the ally of virtue. But, in any case, prudence should have restrained him from encountering Collier. The Non-juror was a man thoroughly fitted by nature, education, and habit for polemical dispute. Congreve's mind, though a mind of no common fertility and vigor, was of a different class. No man understood so well the art of polishing epigrams and repartees into the clearest effulgence, and setting them neatly in easy and familiar dialogue. In this sort of jewelry he attained to a mastery unprecedented and inimitable. But he was altogether rude in the art of controversy; and he had a cause to defend which scarcely any art could have rendered victorious.

Con

The event was such as might have been foreseen. greve's answer was a complete failure. He was angry, obscure, and dull. Even the Greenroom and Will's Coffeehouse were compelled to acknowledge that in wit, as well as in argument, the parson had a decided advantage over the poet. Not only was Congreve unable to make any show of a

case where he was in the wrong; but he succeeded in putting himself completely in the wrong where he was in the right. Collier had taxed him with profaneness for calling a clergyman Mr. Prig, and for introducing a coachman named Jehu, in allusion to the King of Israel, who was known at a distance by his furious driving. Had there been nothing worse in the "Old Bachelor" and "Double Dealer," Congreve might pass for as pure a writer as Cowper himself, who, in poems revised by so austere a censor as John Newton, calls a fox-hunting squire Nimrod, and gives to a chaplain the disrespectful name of Smug. Congreve might, with good effect, have appealed to the public whether it might not be fairly presumed that, when such frivolous charges were made, there were no very serious charges to make. Instead of doing this, he pretended that he meant no allusion to the Bible by the name of Jehu, and no reflection by the name of Prig. Strange, that a man of such parts should, in order to defend himself against imputations which nobody could regard as important, tell untruths which it was certain that nobody would believe!

One of the pleas which Congreve set up for himself and his brethren was that, though they might be guilty of a little levity here and there, they were careful to inculcate a moral, packed close into two or three lines, at the end of every play. Had the fact been as he stated it, the defense would be worth very little. little. For no man acquainted with human nature could think that a sententious couplet would undo all the mischief that five profligate acts had done. But it would have been wise in Congreve to have looked again at his own comedies before he used this argument. Collier did so; and found that the moral of the "Old Bachelor," the grave apothegm which is to be a set-off against all the libertinism of the piece, is contained in the following triplet:

"What rugged ways attend the noon of life!
Our sun declines, and with what anxious strife,
What pain, we tug that galling load—a wife !”

"Love for Love," says Collier, "may have a somewhat better farewell, but it would do a man little service should he remember it to his dying day:"

"The miracle to-day is, that we find

A lover true, not that a woman's kind."

Collier's reply was severe, and triumphant. One of his repartees we will quote, not as a favorable specimen of his manner, but because it was called forth by Congreve's characteristic affectation. The poet spoke of the "Old Bachelor" as a trifle to which he attached no value, and which had become public by a sort of accident. "I wrote it," he said, " to amuse myself in a slow recovery from a fit of sickness." "What his disease was," replied Collier, "I am not to inquire but it must be a very ill one to be worse than the remedy."

All that Congreve gained by coming forward on this occasion was that he completely deprived himself of the excuse which he might with justice have pleaded for his early offenses. "Why," asked Collier, "should the man laugh at the mischief of the boy, and make the disorders of his nonage his own by an after-approbation ?"

Congreve was not Collier's only opponent. Vanbrugh, Dennis, and Settle took the field.(') And, from a passage in a contemporary satire, we are inclined to think that among the answers to the "Short View" was one written, or supposed to be written, by Wycherley. The victory remained with Collier. A great and rapid reform in almost all the departments

() Settle, who lived between 1648 and 1723, was immortalized as Doeg in "Absalom and Achitophel." The closing lines of the passage about him and Shadwell, who is satirized under the name of Og, are equal to any thing in the poem. Og is thus apostrophized:

"I will not rake the dunghill of thy crimes;

For who would read thy life that reads thy rhymes?
But of King David's foes be this the doom:

May all be like the young man Absalom!
And, for my own, may this my blessing be:

To talk like Doeg, and to write like thee!"

Dennis lives in the hatred of Pope, who has proclaimed his indifference to the attacks of the critic in invectives as virulent as were ever penned. It would not be easy to name two lines containing two more unfounded statements than the celebrated couplet wherein Pope announces that he can sleep without a poem in his head

"Nor know if Dennis be alive or dead."

A new

of our lighter literature was the effect of his labors. race of wits and poets arose, who generally treated with reverence the great ties which bind society together, and whose very indecencies were decent when compared with those of the school which flourished during the last forty years of the seventeenth century.

THE COURT LIFE OF MISS BURNEY.

[Essay on Madame D'Arblay.]

LIFE still smiled upon Frances.(") Domestic happiness, friendship, independence, leisure, letters, all these things were hers; and she flung them all away.

In December, 1785, Miss Burney was on a visit to Mrs. Delany at Windsor. The dinner was over. The old lady was taking a nap. Her grand-niece, a little girl of seven, was playing at some Christmas game with the visitors, when the door opened, and a stout gentleman entered unannounced, with a star on his breast, and "What? what? what?" in his mouth. A cry of "The king!" was set up. A general scampering followed. Miss Burney owns that she could not have been more terrified if she had seen a ghost. But Mrs. Delany came forward to pay her duty to her royal friend, and the disturbance was quieted. Frances was then presented, and underwent a long examination and cross-examination about all that she had written and all that she meant to write. The queen soon made her appearance, and His Majesty repeated, for the benefit of his consort, the information which he had extracted from Miss Burney. The good-nature of the royal pair could not but be delightful to a young lady who had been brought up a Tory. In a few days the visit was repeated. Miss Burney was more at ease than before. His

(') Miss Burney, afterward Madame D'Arblay, had already established her fame by writing "Evelina" and "Cecilia."

Majesty, instead of seeking for information, condescended to impart it, and passed sentence on many great writers, English and foreign. Voltaire he pronounced a monster. Rousseau he liked rather better. "But was there ever," he cried, "such stuff as great part of Shakspeare? Only one must not say so. But what think you? What? Is there not sad stuff? What? what?"

The next day Frances enjoyed the privilege of listening to some equally valuable criticism uttered by the queen touching Goethe and Klopstock, and might have learned an important lesson of economy from the mode in which Her Majesty's library had been formed. "I picked the book up on a stall," said the queen. "Oh, it is amazing what good books there are on stalls!" Mrs. Delany, who seems to have understood from these words that Her Majesty was in the habit of exploring the booths of Moorfields and Holywell Street in person, could not suppress an exclamation of surprise. "Why," said the queen, "I don't pick them up myself. But I have a servant very clever; and, if they are not to be had at the bookseller's, they are not for me more than for another." Miss Burney describes this conversation as delightful; and, indeed, we can not wonder that, with her literary tastes, she should be delighted at hearing in how magnificent a manner the greatest lady in the land encouraged literature.

The truth is, that Frances was fascinated by the condescending kindness of the two great personages to whom she had been presented. Her father was even more infatuated than herself.() The result was a step of which we can not think with patience, but which, recorded as it is, with all its consequences, in these volumes, deserves at least this praise, that it has furnished a most impressive warning.

A German lady of the name of Haggerdorn, one of the keepers of the queen's robes, retired about this time; and Her Majesty offered the vacant post to Miss Burney. When we consider that Miss Burney was decidedly the most popular

(') Dr. Burney, author of the “General History of Music," was Frances Burney's father.