So in his histories there was plenty of room for lofty declamation; but he shows no inclination to avail himself of such opportunities. Let us take, for instance, his reflections on the death of Cæsar, and on the extinction of the Western Empire of Rome-both good openings for the eloquent worshipper of greatness. The following is his peroration on Cæsar, more remarkable for sound judgment than for eloquence :

"Cæsar was killed in the fifty-sixth year of his age, and about fourteen years after he began the conquest of the world. If we examine his history, we shall be equally at a loss whether most to admire his great abilities or his wonderful fortune. To pretend to say that from the beginning he planned the subjection of his native country, is doing no great credit to his well-known penetration, as a thousand obstacles lay in his way, which fortune, rather than conduct, was to surmount. No man, therefore, of his sagacity, would have begun a scheme in which the chances of succeeding were so many against him: it is most probable that, like all very successful men, he only made the best of every occurrence; and his ambition rising with his good fortune, from at first being contented with humbler aims, he at last began to think of governing the world, when he found scarce any obstacle to oppose his designs. Such is the disposition of man, whose cravings after power are always most insatiable when he enjoys the greatest share.’

He dismisses the Roman Empire at the conclusion of his "History of Rome' with two sentences:

"Such was the end of this great empire, that had conquered mankind with its arms, and instructed the world with its wisdom; that had risen by temperance, and that fell by luxury; that had been established by a spirit of patriotism, and that sunk into ruin when the empire was become so extensive, that a Roman citizen was but an empty name. Its final dissolution happened about five hundred and twenty-two years after the battle of Pharsalia; an hundred and forty-six after the removal of the imperial seat to Constantinople; and four hundred and seventy-six after the nativity of our Saviour."

Bolingbroke, Burke, or De Quincey would have concluded in a much loftier strain.

Pathos. Considering Goldsmith's natural tenderness and wide acquaintance with distress, one would expect his writings to be deeply tinged with pathos. In reality, however, he is not so pathetic a writer as Sterne. His benevolence was probably more active than sentimental, just as Sterne's was more sentimental than active. His poems and his novel contain some of our very finest touches of pathos, but in his ordinary prose we meet with comparatively few. The only deeply touching letter in his 'Citizen of the World' is one entitled "A City Night Piece," and it in some parts is too distressing to be lingered over with melancholy pleasure, rather serving the moralist's end of making the reader uncomfortable :

"The clock just struck two, the expiring taper rises and sinks in the socket, the watchman forgets the hour in slumber, the laborious and the

happy are at rest, and nothing wakes but meditation, guilt, revelry, and despair. The drunkard once more fills the destroying bowl, the robber walks his midnight round, and the suicide lifts his guilty arm against his own sacred person.

"Let me no longer waste the night over the pages of antiquity or the sallies of contemporary genius, but pursue the solitary walk, where Vanity ever changing, but a few hours past walked before me, where she kept up the pageant, and now like a froward child, seems hushed with her own importunities.

"How few appear in those streets which but some few hours ago were crowded and those who appear now no longer wear their daily mask, nor attempt to hide their lewdness or their misery.

"But who are those who make the streets their couch, and find a short repose from wretchedness at the doors of the opulent? These are strangers, wanderers, and orphans, whose circumstances are too humble to expect redress, and whose distresses are too great even for pity. Their wretchedness excites rather horror than pity. Some are without the covering even of rags, and others emaciated with disease: the world has disclaimed them; society turns its back upon their distress, and has given them up to nakedness and hunger.

"Why was I born a man, and yet see the sufferings of wretches I cannot relieve! Poor houseless creatures! the world will give you reproaches, but will not give you relief. The slightest misfortunes of the great, the most imaginary uneasiness of the rich, are aggravated with all the power of eloquence, and held up to engage our attention and sympathetic sorrow. poor weep unheeded, persecuted by every subordinate species of tyranny; and every law which gives others security, becomes an enemy to them.

The

"Why was this heart of mine framed with so much sensibility? or why was not my fortune adapted to its impulse? Tenderness, without a capacity of relieving, only makes the man who feels it more wretched than the object which sues for assistance."

The Ludicrous.-Goldsmith surpasses all our humorists in the combination of delicate wit with extravagant fun. His fancy was of the lightest and airiest order, and his volatile spirit was easily warmed to the boiling-point of comical extravagance. "His comic writing," says Leigh Hunt, "is of the class which is perhaps as much preferred to that of a staider sort by people in general, as it is by the writer of these pages-comedy running into farce. It is that of the prince of comic writers, Molière. The English have no dramatists to compare in this respect with the Irish. Farquhar, Goldsmith, and Sheridan surpass them all; and O'Keefe, as a farce-writer, stands alone.'

The following passage from a letter written about the time when he commenced author, may be quoted as characteristic. He was far from being a happy self-complacent man, but the mere excitement of writing to a friend was enough to elevate him "o'er a' the ills o' life victorious." The sturdier, less inflammable spirit of Burns, required stronger stimulants to raise it to the same pitch :—

"God's curse, sir! who am I? Eh! what am I? Do you know whom you have offended? A man whose character may one of these days be men

tioned with profound respect in a German comment or Dutch Dictionary; whose name you will probably hear ushered in by a Doctissimus Doctissimorum, or heel-pieced with a long Latin termination. Think how Goldsmithius, or Gubblegurchius, or some such sound, as rough as a nutmeg. grater, will become me. I must own my ill-natured contemporaries have not hitherto paid me those honours I have had such just reason to expect. I have not yet seen my face reflected in all the lively display of red and white paints on any sign-posts in the suburbs. Your handkerchief weavers seem as yet unacquainted with my merits or my physiognomy, and the very snuff-box makers appear to have forgot their respect. Tell them all from me, they are a set of Gothic, barbarous, ignorant scoundrels. There will come a day, no doubt it will," &c.

His works contain many traces of this airy conquest of the ills of life. Beau Tibbs is made to describe his garret as "the first floor down the chimney;" the Man in Black, when imprisoned, reflects that "he is now on one side the door, and those who are unconfined are on the other; that is all the difference between them" and both are strokes of wit that may have consoled the author himself in similar circumstances. His incomparable "description of an author's bed-chamber," ending with the couplet

"A night-cap decked his brows instead of bay,

A cap by night-a stocking all the day "

may also be taken as a humorous transfiguration of his own experience. Take also the following anecdote related in the "Club of

"I'll tell you a story, gentlemen, which is as true as that this pipe is made of clay. When I was delivered of my first book, I owed my tailor for a suit of clothes; but that is nothing new, you know, and may be any man's case as well as mine. Well, owing him for a suit of clothes, and hearing that my book took very well, he sent for his money, and insisted on being paid immediately. Though I was at the time rich in fame, for my book ran like wild-fire, yet I was very short in money, and being unable to satisfy his demand, prudently resolved to keep my chamber, preferring a prison of my own choosing at home, to one of my tailor's choosing abroad. In vain the bailiffs used all their arts to decoy me from my citadel; in vain they sent to let me know that a gentleman wanted to speak with me at the next tavern; in vain they came with an urgent message from my aunt in the country; in vain I was told that a particular friend was at the point of death, and desired to take his last farewell. I was deaf, insensible, rock, adamant; the bailiffs could make no impression on my hard heart, for I effectually kept my liberty by never stirring out of my room.'

"This was all very well for a fortnight;" but at the end of that time the unfortunate author was entrapped by "a splendid message from the Earl of Doomsday." He took coach and rode in high expectation to the residence, as he thought, of his noble patron; but on alighting, found himself, to his horror, at the door of a spunging-house. All the proceedings of this club of authors are in Goldsmith's happiest vein, and form a good illustration of his

power of throwing a ludicrous colour over incidents uncomfortably near the reality of his own life.

Goldsmith is also the most amiable of our satirists. He was full of "the milk of human kindness," and the range of his sympathies was wide. His ridicule is always on the side of good sense and good feeling. And he handles even his embodiments of folly and weakness "tenderly, as if he loved them;" as if, at least, he had a lurking toleration for them, and secretly recognised their claim to exist in their own way as varieties of multiform humanity.

The most exquisite of his humorous creations is Beau Tibbs, who figures in the letters of the 'Citizen of the World.'

OTHER WRITERS.

THEOLOGY.

Few of the theologians that we reckon in this period were men of high literary celebrity. The reason probably is that there was no exciting topic to vex the theological world, and put its foremost intellects upon their mettle. The Deists had been a hundred times answered before 1760, and no other heresy equally dangerous and exciting appeared until the ferment of the French Revolution. The great religious revival begun by Wesley and Whitefield gained no distinguished champions during the first half of the reign of George III.

One of the most eminent divines of the generation was Samuel Horsley (1733-1806), who has been called "the last of the race of polemical giants in the English Church-a learned, mighty, fearless, and haughty champion of the theology and constitution of the Anglican establishment." His first efforts in authorship were some mathematical tracts. In 1776 he published proposals for a new edition of the works of Sir Isaac Newton. About the same time he wrote on Man's Free Agency. His charge to the clergy of his archdeaconry in 1783 involved him in a controversy with Priestley concerning the divinity of Christ: in which controversy he is said to have displayed great learning, masterly reasoning, and impetuous dogmatism. He was made Bishop of St David's in 1788. When the French Revolution broke out, he stood forth in the front rank of alarmists, and declaimed with great vehemence against the "twin furies" Jacobinism and Infidelity. His declamations against conventicles, and his disposition to favour penal laws against Dissent, brought him into collision with Robert Hall, who assails him as "the apologist of tyranny, and the patron of passive obedience," and describes a sermon of his as a "disgusting picture of sanctimonious hypocrisy and priestly insolence." Horsley had an arrogance and dogmatism even fiercer than Warburton's, without any

thing like Warburton's genius for style. His sermons procured him respect from many that disapproved of his violence as a polemic; they are distinguished by breadth of view and clear racy expression.

Beilby Porteous (1731-1808), Bishop of London, was a divine of a much milder type, author of a poem "On Death," which gained the Seatonian prize in 1759, and the intimate associate of Hannah More, whom he is said to have assisted in the composition of her religious novel, 'Colebs in search of a Wife.' He wrote a life of his patron, Archbishop Secker, and published a variety of sermons, charges, and other devotional tracts. His 'Evidences' is still used as a class-book in schools.

The most distinguished Scottish theologian of the time was George Campbell, author of an able Dissertation on Miracles,' written in reply to Hume's Essay on Miracles, and a 'New Translation of the Gospels, with Preliminary Dissertations,' a work displaying the highest critical sagacity. We shall notice him again among the writers on Rhetoric.

PHILOSOPHY.

By far the most eminent psychologist of this generation is Thomas Reid (1710-1796), the founder of what is known as the Philosophy of Common Sense. He was a native of Kincardineshire, and was educated at Marischal College, Aberdeen. He studied for the Church, and in 1737 was presented to the living of New Machar, a parish near Aberdeen. In 1752 he was appointed Professor of Philosophy in King's College, Aberdeen. While in this office he took part in the meetings of a literary coterie, of great local celebrity, which comprised several men that attained eminence in the world of letters-himself, Campbell, Beattie, and Gerard. In 1763 he was invited to succeed Adam Smith as Professor of Moral Philosophy in Glasgow. His 'Inquiry into the Human Mind,' which had been discussed by his friends in Aberdeen, and had been in part submitted to Hume, was published in 1764. The impulse to this work was given, as he said in the dedication, by Hume's Treatise of Human Nature.' He had not previously "thought of calling in question the principles commonly received with regard to the human understanding;" but finding that, "by reasoning which appeared to him to be just," there was built upon those principles "a system of scepticism which leaves no ground to believe any one thing rather than its contrary," he proceeded to subject the principles themselves to a close examination. "For my own satisfaction, I entered into a serious examination of the principles upon which the sceptical system is built; and was not a little surprised to find, that it leans with its whole weight upon a