titled to no confidence whatever. Mr. | never have read the second and ninth Croker has committed an error of five satires of Juvenal. years with respect to the publication of Goldsmith's novel, an error of twelve years with respect to the publication of part of Gibbon's History, an error of twenty-one years with respect to an event in Johnson's life so important as the taking of the doctoral degree. Two of these three errors he has committed, while ostentatiously displaying his own accuracy, and correcting what he represents as the loose assertions of others. How can his readers take on trust his statements concerning the births, marriages, divorces, and deaths of a crowd of people, whose names are scarcely known to this generation? It is not likely that a person who is ignorant of what almost every body knows can know that of which almost every body is ignorant. We did not open this book with any wish to find blemishes in it. We have made no curious researches. The work itself, and a very common knowledge of literary and political history, have enabled us to detect the mistakes which we have pointed out, and many other mistakes of the same kind. We must say, and we say it with regret, that we do not consider the authority of Mr. Croker, unsupported by other evidence, as sufficient to justify any writer who may follow him in relating a single anecdote or in assigning a date to a single event. Mr. Croker shows almost as much ignorance and heedlessness in his criticisms as in his statements concerning facts. Dr. Johnson said, very reasonably as it appears to us, that some of the satires of Juvenal are too gross for imitation. Mr. Croker, who, by the way, is angry with Johnson for defending Prior's tales against the charge of indecency, resents this aspersion on Juvenal, and indeed refuses to believe that the doctor can have said any thing so absurd. " He probably said-some passages of them-for there are none of Juvenal's satires to which the same objection may be made as to one of Horace's, that it is altogether gross and licentious." Surely Mr. Croker can * L. 167. Indeed the decisions of this editor on points of classical learning, though pronounced in a very authoritative tone, are generally such that, if a schoolboy under our care were to utter them, our soul assuredly should not spare for his crying. It is no disgrace to a gentleman who has been engaged during near thirty years in political life that he has forgotten his Greek and Latin. But he becomes justly ridiculous if, when no longer able to construe a plain sentence, he affects to sit in judgment on the most delicate questions of style and metre. From one blunder, a blunder which no good scholar would have made, Mr. Croker was saved, as he informs us, by Sir Robert Peel, who quoted a passage exactly in point from Horace. We heartily wish that Sir Robert, whose classical attainments are well known, had been more frequently consulted. Unhappily he was not always at his friend's elbow; and we have therefore a rich abundance of the strangest errors. Boswell has preserved a poor epigram by Johnson, inscribed "Ad Lauram parituram." Mr. Croker censures the poet for applying the word puella to a lady in Laura's situation, and for talking of the beauty of Lucina. "Lucina," he says, "was never famed for her beauty." If Sir Robert Peel had seen this note, he probably would have again refuted Mr. Croker's criticisms by an appeal to Horace. In the secular ode, Lucina is used as one of the names of Diana, and the beauty of Diana is extolled by all the most orthodox doctors of the ancient mythology, from Homer in his Odyssey, to Claudian in his Rape of Proserpine. In another ode, Horace describes Diana as the goddess who assists the “laborantes utero puellas." But we are ashamed to detain our readers with this fourth-form learning. Boswell found, in his tour to the Hebrides, an inscription written by a Scotch minister. It runs thus: "Joannes Macleod, &c., gentis suæ Philarchus &c., Flora Macdonald matri ⚫ 1. 193. Mr. Croker has also given us a specimen of his skill in translating Latin. Johnson wrote a note in which he consulted his friend, Dr. Lawrence, on the propriety of losing some blood. The note contains these words: -"Si per te licet, imperatur nuncio Holderum ad me deducere." Johnson should rather have written "imperatum est." But the meaning of the words is perfectly clear. "If you say yes, the messenger has orders to bring Holder to me." Mr. Croker translates the words as follows: "If you consent, pray tell the messenger to bring Holder to me."* If Mr. Croker is resolved to write on points of classical learning, we would advise him to begin by giving an hour every morning to our old friend Corderius. moniali vinculo conjugatus turrem hanc | Croker ascribes to it without imminent Beganodunensem proævorum habita- danger of a flogging. culum longe vetustissimum, diu penitus labefactatam, anno æræ vulgaris MDCLXXXVI. instauravit."- -"The minister," says Mr. Croker," seems to have been no contemptible Latinist. Is not Philarchus a very happy term to express the paternal and kindly authority of the head of a clan ?" The composition of this eminent Latinist, short as it is, contains several words that are just as much Coptic as Latin, to say nothing of the incorrect structure of the sentence. The word Philarchus, even if it were a happy term expressing a paternal and kindly authority, would prove nothing for the minister's Latin, whatever it might prove for his Greek. But it is clear that the word Philarchus means, not a man who rules by love, but a man who loves rule. The Attic writers of the best age used the word pixapxos in the sense which we assign to it. Would Mr. Croker translate Adoopos, a man who acquires wisdom by means of love, or piλokepoǹs, a man who makes money by means of love? In fact, it requires no Bentley or Casaubon to perceive, that Philarchus is mercly a false spelling for Phylarchus, the chief of a tribe. | Indeed we cannot open any volume of this work in any place, and turn it over for two minutes in any direction, without lighting on a blunder. Johnson, in his Life of Tickell, stated that a poem entitled The Royal Progress, which appears in the last volume of the Spectator, was written on the accession of George I. The word “arrival” was afterwards substituted for "accession." "The reader will observe," says Mr. Croker," that the Whig term accession, which might imply legality, was altered into a statement of the simple fact of King George's arrival."† Now Johnson, though a bigoted Tory, was not quite such a fool as Mr. Croker here represents him to be. In the Life of Granville, Lord Lansdowne, which stands a very few pages from the Life of Tickell, mention is made of the ac cession of Anne, and of the accession of George I. The word arrival was used in the Life of Tickell for the simIt was used beplest of all reasons. cause the subject of the poem called The Royal Progress was the arrival of the king, and not his accession, which took place near two months before his arrival. The editor's want of perspicacity is indeed very amusing. He is perpetually telling us that he cannot understand scmething in the text which is • V. 27. + IV. 425. as plain as language can make it. | pletely. Sir William distributes twenty"Mattaire," said Dr. Johnson, "wrote three hours among various employLatin verses from time to time, and ments. One hour is thus left for published a set in his old age, which devotion. The reader expects that he called Senilia, in which he shows the verse will end with "and one to so little learning or taste in writing, heaven." The whole point of the lines as to make Carteret a dactyl." Here- consists in the unexpected substitution upon we have this note : "The editor of "all" for "one." The conceit is does not understand this objection, wretched enough; but it is perfectly nor the following observation." The intelligible, and never, we will venture following observation, which Mr. Cro- to say, perplexed man, woman, or child ker cannot understand, is simply this: before. “In matters of genealogy," says John- Poor Tom Davies, after failing in son, "it is necessary to give the bare business, tried to live by his pen. John names as they are. But in poetry and son called him "an author generated in prose of any elegance in the writing, by the corruption of a bookseller." they require to have inflection given This is a very obvious, and even a to them." If Mr. Croker had told commonplace allusion to the famous Johnson that this was unintelligible, dogma of the old physiologists. Drythe doctor would probably have re- den made a similar allusion to that plied, as he replied on another occa- dogma before Johnson was born. Mr. sion, "I have found you a reason, sir; Croker, however, is unable to underI am not bound to find you an under-stand what the doctor meant. "The standing." Everybody who knows anything of Latinity knows that, in genealogical tables, Joannes Baro de Carteret, or Vice-comes de Carteret, may be tolerated, but that in compositions which pretend to elegance, Carteretus, or some other form which admits of inflection, ought to be used. 66 expression," he says, seems not quite clear." And he proceeds to talk about the generation of insects, about bursting into gaudier life, and Heaven knows what.* There is a still stranger instance of the editor's talent for finding out difficulty in what is perfectly plain. "No man," said Johnson, "can now be made a bishop for his learning and piety." "From this too just observation," says Boswell, "there are some eminent exceptions." Mr. Croker is puzzled by Boswell's very natural and simple language. "That a general observation should be pronounced too just, by the very person who admits that it is not universally just, is not a little odd."† A very large proportion of the two thousand five hundred notes which the editor boasts of having added to those of Boswell and Malone consists of the flattest and poorest reflections, reflections such as the least intelligent reader is quite competent to make for himself, and such as no intelligent reader would think it worth while to utter aloud. They remind us of nothing so much as of those profound and interesting annotations which are penciled by sempstresses and apothecaries' boys on the dog-eared margins of novels + III. 228. ⚫ IV. 323. borrowed from circulating libraries; | rative is, without the shadow of a reason, "How beautiful!" "Cursed Prosy!" degraded to the appendix. The editor "I don't like Sir Reginald Malcolm at has also taken upon himself to alter or all." "I think Pelham is a sad dandy." omit passages which he considers as Mr. Croker is perpetually stopping us indecorous. This prudery is quite unin our progress through the most de-intelligible to us. There is nothing lightful narrative in the language, to immoral in Boswell's book, nothing observe that really Dr. Johnson was which tends to inflame the passions. very rude, that he talked more for He sometimes uses plain words. But victory than for truth, that his taste if this be a taint which requires exfor port wine with capillaire in it was purgation, it would be desirable to very odd, that Boswell was impertinent, begin by expurgating the morning and that it was foolish in Mrs. Thrale to evening lessons. The delicate office marry the music-master; and so forth. which Mr. Croker has undertaken he We cannot speak more favourably has performed in the most capricious of the manner in which the notes are manner. One strong, old-fashioned, written than of the matter of which English word, familiar to all who read they consist. We find in every page their Bibles, is changed for a softer words used in wrong senses, and con- synonyme in some passages, and sufstructions which violate the plainest fered to stand unaltered in others. In rules of grammar. We have the vul- one place a faint allusion made by garism of "mutual friend," for "com- Johnson to an indelicate subject, an mon friend." We have "fallacy" used allusion so faint that, till Mr. Croker's as synonymous with "falsehood." We note pointed it out to us, we had never have many such inextricable labyrinths noticed it, and of which we are quite of pronouns as that which follows: sure that the meaning would never be "Lord Erskine was fond of this ancc-discovered by any of those for whose dote; he told it to the editor the first sake books are expurgated, is altotime that he had the honour of being gether omitted. In another place, a in his company." Lastly, we have a coarse and stupid jest of Dr. Taylor plentiful supply of sentences resembling on the same subject, expressed in the those which we subjoin. "Markland, broadest language, almost the only who, with Jortin and Thirlby, Johnson passage, as far as we remember, in all calls three contemporaries of great Boswell's book, which we should have eminence." "Warburton himself did been inclined to leave out, is suffered not feel, as Mr. Boswell was disposed to remain. to think he did, kindly or gratefully of Johnson." "It was him that Horace Walpole called a man who never made a bad figure but as an author." One or two of these solecisms should perhaps be attributed to the printer, who has certainly done his best to fill both the text and the notes with all sorts of blunders. In truth, he and the editor have between them made the book so bad, that we do not well see how it could have been worse. We complain, however, much more of the additions than of the omissions. We have half of Mrs. Thrale's book, scraps of Mr. Tyers, scraps of Mr. Murphy, scraps of Mr. Cradock, long prosings of Sir John Hawkins, and connecting observations by Mr. Croker himself, inserted into the midst of Boswell's text. To this practice we most decidedly object. An editor might as well publish Thucydides with extracts from Diodorus interspersed, or incorporate the Lives of Suetonius with the History and Annals of Tacitus. Mr. Croker tells us, indeed, that he has done only what Boswell wished to do, and was prevented from doing by the law of copyright. We doubt this greatly. Boswell has studiously abstained from availing himself of the information given by his rivals, on many occasions on which | cisely as Boswell wrote it; and in the "Ut per læve severos Effundat junctura ungues.” This is not the case with Mr. Croker's insertions. They are not chosen as Boswell would have chosen them. They are not introduced as Boswell would have introduced them. They differ from the quotations scattered through the original Life of Johnson, as a withered bough stuck in the ground differs from a tree skilfully transplanted with all its life about it. the Life. We love, we own, to read the great productions of the human mind as they were written. We have this feeling even about scientific treatises; though we know that the sciences are always in a state of progression, and that the alterations made by a modern editor in an old book on any branch of natural or political philosophy are likely to be improvements. Some errors have been detected by writers of this generation in the speculations of Adam Smith. A short cut has been made to much knowledge at which Sir Isaac Newton Not only do these anecdotes disfigure arrived through arduous and circuitous Boswell's book; they are themselves paths. Yet we still look with peculiar disfigured by being inserted in his veneration on the Wealth of Nations book. The charm of Mrs. Thrale's and on the Principia, and should regret little volume is utterly destroyed. The to see either of those great works feminine quickness of observation, the garbled even by the ablest hands. But feminine softness of heart, the col-in works which owe much of their inloquial incorrectness and vivacity of terest to the character and situation style, the little amusing airs of a half-of the writers the case is infinitely learned lady, the delightful garrulity, stronger. What man of taste and feelthedear Doctor Johnson," the "iting can endure rifacimenti, harmonies, was so comical," all disappear in Mr. abridgments, expurgated editions? Croker's quotations. The lady ceases to speak in the first person; and her anecdotes, in the process of transfusion, become as flat as Champagne in decanters, or Herodotus in Beloc's version. Sir John Hawkins, it is true, loses nothing; and for the best of reasons. Sir John had nothing to lose. The course which Mr. Croker ought to have taken is quite clear. He should have reprinted Boswell's narrative pre Who ever reads a stage-copy of a play |