of that year. Now that Churchill's Sermons were twelve in number (i. xxvi), and now, quoting Dr. Kippis, that they were ten (iii. 318). These instances, sparingly selected from a lavish abundance, will probably suffice.

We shall be equally sparing of more general examples that remain. Mr. Tooke, as the character of this literary performance would imply, has no deficiency on the score of boldness. Thus, while he thinks that "the Rev. "Doctor Croly, in his classical and beautiful play of "Catiline, has at once shown what a good tragedy should be, and that he is fully equal to the task of producing "one" (ii. 297), he has an utter contempt for the Wordsworths and Coleridges. "What language," he indignantly exclaims, before giving a specimen of the latter poet in a lucid interval, "could the satirist have found sufficiently "expressive of his disgust at the simplicity of a later "school of poetry, the spawn of the lakes, consisting of 66 a mawkish combination of the nonsense verses of the nursery, with the Rhodomontade of German mysticism "and transcendentalism!" (i. 189.) This is a little strong, for a writer like Mr. Tooke. Nor, making but one exception in the case of Lord Byron, does he shrink from pouring the vials of his critical wrath upon every Lord who has presumed to aspire to poetry. Not the gentle genius of Lord Surrey, or the daring passion of Lord Buckhurst; not the sharp wit of my Lords Rochester and Buckingham, or the earnestness and elegance of Lord Thurlow-can shake the fierce poetical democracy of Mr. William Tooke. "The claim of the whole lot of "other noble poets," he observes with great contempt, "from Lord Surrey downwards-the Buckinghams, the

Roscommons, the Halifaxes, the Grenvilles, the Lyttle"tons of the last age, and the still minor class of "Thurlows, Herberts, and others of the present gene"ration, have been tolerated as poets, only because they "were peers." (iii. 262.)

A contempt of grammar, as of nobility, may be observed to relieve the sense and the elegance of this passage.

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But this is a department of Mr. Tooke's merits too extensive to enter upon. When he talks of "a masterly "but caustic satire" (i. xl), and of "plunging deeper and more irrecoverably into," &c. (i. xli), we do not stop to ask what he can possibly mean. But his use of the prepositions and conjunctions is really curious. His "and to which we would refer our readers accordingly, "and to whose thanks we shall entitle ourselves for so doing" (iii. 157); his "and from which but little infor"mation could be collected, he was at the same time. "confident that none others existed, and which the lapse "of time has confirmed" (iii. 296); are of perpetual recurrence in the shape of and who, or but which, and may be said to form the peculiarity of his style. On even Mr. Pickering's Aldine press, a genius of blundering has laid its evil touch. The errors in the printing of the book are execrable. Not a page is correctly pointed from first to last; numbers of lines in the text (as at iii. 21617) are placed out of their order; and it is rare when a name is rightly given. But enough of a distasteful subject. We leave Mr. Tooke and pass to Churchill.

Exactly a hundred years after the birth of Dryden, Charles Churchill was born. More than a hundred years were between the two races of men. In 1631, Hampden was consoling Eliot in his prison, and discussing with Pym the outraged Petition of Right; in 1731, Walpole was flying at Townshend's throat, and suggesting to Gay the quarrels of Lockit and Peachum. Within the reach of Dryden's praise and blame, there came a Cromwell and a Shaftesbury; a Wilkes and a Sandwich exhausted Churchill's. There is more to affect a writer's genius in personal and local influences of this kind, than he would himself be willing to allow. If, even in the failures of the first and greatest of these satirists, there

is a dash of largeness and power; there is never wholly absent from the most consummate achievements of his successor, a something we must call conventional. But the right justice has not been done to Churchill. Taken with the good and evil of his age, he was a very remarkable person.

An English clergyman, who, in conjunction with his rectory of Rainham in Essex, held the curacy and lectureship of St. John the Evangelist in Westminster, from 1733 to his death in 1758, was the father of Charles Churchill. He had two younger sons: William, who afterwards chose the church for his profession, and passed a long, quiet, unobtrusive life within it; and John, brought up to the business of medicine. The elder, named Charles after himself, he from the first especially designed for his own calling; and he sent him in 1739, when eight years old, as a day-boy to Westminster school. Nichols was then the head master, and the second master was (not Lloyd, as Mr. Tooke would inform us, but) Johnson, afterwards a bishop. Vincent Bourne was usher of the fifth form, and Dr. Pierson Lloyd (after some years second master), a man of fine humour as well as of rare worth and learning, was usher at the fourth. Churchill, judging from the earliest notice taken of him, must have been already a robust, manly, broad-faced little fellow when he entered the school; all who in later life remembered him, spoke of the premature growth and fulness both of his body and mind;' and

he was not long in assuming the place in his boy's circle, which quick-sighted lads are not slow to concede to a deserving and daring claimant. He was fond of play; but, when he turned to work, was a hard and a successful worker. There is a story of one of his punishments by flogging, which only increased and embittered the temper that provoked it; but there is another, of a literary task by way of punishment, for which the offender received public thanks from the masters of the school. "He could do well if he would," was the admission of his enemies; and the good Dr. Lloyd loved him.

There were a number of remarkable boys at Westminster then. Bonnell Thornton was already in the upper forms; but George Colman, Robert Lloyd, Richard Cumberland, and Warren Hastings, were all, with very few years' interval, Churchill's contemporaries; and there was one mild, shrinking, delicate lad of his own age, though two years younger in the school, afraid to lift his eyes above the shoestrings of the upper boys, but encouraged to raise them as high as Churchill's heart. He stood by Cowper in those days; and the author of the Task and the Table-Talk repaid him in a sorer need. Indeed, there was altogether a manly tone of feeling among these Westminster scholars. In whatever respect they fell short of any promises of their youth when they grew to manhood, they yet continued true to all that in those earlier days had pledged them to each other. Never, save when two examples occurred too flagrant for avoidance, in a profligate duke and a hypocritical parson, did Churchill lift his pen against a schoolfellow. Mr. Tooke says that the commencement of a satire against Thornton and Colman was found among his papers; but there is no proof of this, and we doubt, in common with Southey, the alleged desertion of poor Lloyd which is said to have suggested the satire. Even Warren Hastings profited by his old connexion with Westminster, when Wilkes deserted his supporters in the House of Commons to defend the

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playfellow of his dead friend; and the irritable Cumberland so warmed to the memory of his school companion, as to call him always, fondly, the Dryden of his age.

Literature itself had become a bond of union with these youths before they left the Westminster cloisters. The Table-Talk tells of the "little poets at Westminster," and how they strive "to set a distich upon six and five." Even the boredom of school exercises, more rife in English composition then than since, did not check the scribbling propensity. All the lads we have named had a decisive turn that way; and little Colman, emulating his betters, addressed his cousin Pulteney from the fifth form with the air of a literary veteran. For, in the prevailing dearth of great poetry, verse-writing was cultivated much, and much encouraged. Again it had become, as Lady Mary Montagu said of it a few years before, as common as taking snuff. Others compared it to an epidemical distemper-a sort of murrain. Beyond all doubt, it was the rage. "Poets increase and multiply to that stupendous "degree, you see them at every turn, in embroidered "coats, and pink-coloured top-knots." Nor was it probable, as to Churchill himself, that he thought the dress less attractive than the verse-tagging. But his father, as we have said, had other views with respect to him. He must shade his fancies with a more sober colour, and follow the family profession.

It was an unwise resolve. It was one of those resolves that more frequently mar than make a life. The forced control of inclinations to a falsehood is a common parent's crime; not the less grievous when mistaken for a virtue. The stars do not more surely keep their courses, than an ill-regulated manhood will follow a mis-directed youth. This boy had noble qualities for a better chosen career. Thus early he had made it manifest that he could see for himself and feel for others; that he had strong sensibility and energy of intellect; that where he had faith, he had steadiness of purpose and enthusiasm: but that, closely neighbouring his power, were vehe