panded into a quarto, to which a second was added in 1805. The germ of his system, however, had been stated by Tooke in his Letter to Mr. Dunning, published in 1778. In Latin scholarship, the most remarkable production of this date was perhaps the edition of the rare work (originally published at Paris in 1615) of the Scottish writer William Bellenden, or Bellendenus, entitled De Statu, which appeared anonymously in 1787, with a long and eloquent Latin Preface, loud in its advocacy of the Whig politics and laudation of the Whig leaders of the day, now known to be the composition of the Rev. Dr. Samuel Parr, who had already some years before announced himself in a sermon published under the name of Phileleutherus Norfolciencis, and was for nearly forty years after this date to continue to make considerable noise in the literary world as theologian, critic, Philopatris Varvicencis (Warwickshire Patriot), &c. Parr was assisted in the preparation of his edition of Bellendenus by his friend Henry Homer, who published some good editions of Horace, Cæsar, and other Latin authors, but died at an early age in 1791. Another reverend politician and classical scholar of this day was Gilbert Wakefield, who, being a dissenter, carried his liberalism both in politics and in divinity considerably farther than Dr. Parr, and was, from his twentieth year till his death in 1801, at the age of forty-five, one of the most restless of writers upon all sorts of subjects. Wakefield published an edition of Virgil's Georgics in 1788; his Silva Critica (a miscellany of Latin notes upon the Sacred Scriptures and other ancient writings) in 1789; and a complete translation of the New Testament in 1792; but his reputation as a scholar, whatever it may be, rests principally upon his work of greatest pretension, his collated and annotated edition of Lucretius, published in 1796 and 1797. He also gave to the world editions of several Greek tragedies, of Bion and Moschus, of Horace, and of Virgil; and among his numerous original works are an unfinished Inquiry into the Opinions of the Fathers concerning the Person of Christ, an Answer to Paine's Age of Reason, a Reply to (Watson) the Bishop of Llandaff's Address to the People of Great Britain (for the publication of which, in 1798, he was brought to trial by the government, and, being convicted of a seditious libel, was imprisoned for two years in Dorchester gaol), and his Memoirs of his Own Life, first published in 1795. His Correspondence with Charles Fox was printed after his death.

The excellent edition of Aristotle's Treatise on Poetry, which had been prepared by Thomas Tyrwhitt, the admirable editor of Chaucer, before his death in 1786, was brought out at Oxford, from the Clarendon press, in 1794. The reputation of Richard Porson, who had already given proof of his unrivalled acuteness in his Letters to Archdeacon Travis on the subject of the controverted passage about the three witnesses in the First Epistle of John, published in 1790, and who, in a mastery of the Greek language at once extensive and exact, is admitted to have had few superiors among modern scholars, was crowned by his edition in 1795 of the Hecuba of Euripides, followed by those of the Orestes, Phoenissæ, and Medea. Porson, upon whom the mantle of the great Bentley seemed to have descended, and who might perhaps have left a name as illustrious as his if unfortunate habits of life had not wasted as well as probably shortened his days, died at the age of forty-nine in 1808. Other active labourers during this period in the department of classical scholarship were Dr. Thomas Randolph, who died Bishop of London in 1813; Dr. Thomas Burgess, Bishop of Salisbury; and Dr. Herbert Marsh, Bishop of Peterborough, whose varied acquirements and literary performances embraced politics, theology, and German and Oriental learning, as well as Greek and Latin. The last thirty or forty years of the eighteenth century formed, moreover, the great age of commentatorship upon Shakespeare, and also upon some other portions of our old poetry. Dr. Johnson's first edition of Shakespeare, in eight volumes, appeared in 1765; George Steevens's edition of the Twenty Old Quartos, in four volumes, in 1766; Edward Capel's edition of all the Plays, in ten volumes, in 1768, but his Notes, in three volumes quarto, not till 1783, two years after the author's death; Sir Thomas Hanmer's, in six quartos, in 1771; that by Johnson and Steevens, in ten octavos, in 1773; their second edition in 1778; the Supplement to that edition by Edmund Malone, in two volumes, in 1780; Isaac Reed's first edition (sometimes called the third edition of Johnson and Steevens) in 1786; Malone's first edition, in ten volumes, in 1790:--which were followed by Isaac Reed's second edition, in twenty-one volumes, in 1803; Malone's second, in sixteen volumes, in 1816; and Malone's and Boswell's, in twenty-one volumes, now regarded as the standard Variorum edition, in 1821. We have already mentioned the two volumes on Ireland's forgeries (to the second of which, it may be

here stated, an Appendix was added in 1800), published by George Chalmers, the laborious author of many other works, generally written in the most fantastic style, on finance, economical science, and the politics of the day, as well as of various historical and antiquarian compilations, the most important of which, however, his Life of Mary Queen of Scots, and his Caledonia (unfinished), were not published till after the commencement of the present century, as well as the editor of Allan Ramsay, Sir David Lyndsay, and others of our old poets. Following, also, in the path struck out by Warton and Percy, John Pinkerton, Joseph Ritson, David Macpherson, George Ellis, and others investigated, with more or less learning and acuteness, the history of our early poetry, or edited different portions of it.

In Moral Speculation, political, philosophical, and theological, among the principal names belonging to this age of our literature are (besides Burke), Paine, Godwin, Mary Wolstonecraft, Paley, Bishops Watson, Horsley, and Porteus, Priestley, Price, Dr. Geddes, Dr. Campbell of Aberdeen, Dr. MacKnight of Edinburgh, Dr. Blair, &c. Of Thomas Paine's three dexterous and smartly-written works, the first, his Common Sense, was published in 1776; the next, his Rights of Man, in 1791-2; the last, his Age of Reason, in 1794-5. Mary Wolstonecraft's more declamatory Vindication of the Rights of Women came forth immediately after the First Part of Paine's Rights of Man-not unlike the hollow but imposing thunder of the artillery following the flash. Godwin's more systematic exposition of the new philosophy (not destined ever to grow old), his Enquiry concerning Political Justice, and its Influence on general Virtue and Happiness, appeared in 1793. Bishop Watson, who, besides five volumes of Chemical Essays and a variety of charges, sermons, addresses, and other occasional publications, had defended the cause of religion against the subtle learning of Gibbon in his Apology for Christianity in 1776, twenty years later wrote his Apology for the Bible in answer to the bold ignorance of Paine. All these performances, however, attacks and defences alike, having served each its temporary purpose, are already passed, or are fast passing, away into forgetfulness. Not so with Archdeacon Paley's works: his elements of Moral and Political Philosophy, published in 1785; his Hore Paulinæ, in 1790; his View of the Evidence of Christianity, in 1794; and his Natural Theology, in 1802—all of which are characterised by a mature

ness in the conception, and a care and sterling ability in the execution, that will make it long before they are superseded. Finally, we ought not to omit to notice that the first edition of Mr. Malthus's celebrated Essay on the Principle of Population was published in 1798 in an octavo volume, although this original exposition of the new doctrine is charged with having differed not more in size than it did in substance from that given in the next edition of the work, which, expanded into a quarto, appeared in 1803.

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THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

Ir might almost seem as if there were something in the impressiveness of the great chronological event formed by the termination of one century and the commencement of another that had been wont to act with an awakening and fructifying power upon literary genius in these islands. Of the three last great sunbursts of our literature, the first, making what has been called the Elizabethan age of our dramatic and other poetry, threw its splendour over the last quarter of the sixteenth and the first of the seventeenth century; the second, famous as the Augustan age of Anne, brightened the earlier years of the eighteenth; the nineteenth century was ushered in by the third. At the termination of the reign of George III., in the year 1820, there were still among us, not to mention minor names, at least nine or ten poetical writers, each (whatever discordance of opinion there might be about either their relative or their absolute merits) commanding universal attention from the reading world to whatever he produced:-Crabbe (to take them in the order of their seniority), Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Scott, Campbell, Moore, Byron, Shelley, and perhaps we ought to add Keats, though more for the shining promise of his great but immature genius than for what he had actually done. Many other voices there were from which divine words were often heard, but these were oracles to whom all listened, whose inspiration all men acknowledged. It is such crowding and clustering of remarkable writers that has chiefly distinguished the great literary ages in every country: there are eminent writers at other times, but they come singly or in small numbers, as Lucretius, the noblest of the Latin poets, did before the Augustan age of Roman literature; as our own Milton and Dryden did in the interval between our Elizabethan age and that of Anne; as Goldsmith, and Burke, and Johnson, and then Cowper,

VOL. II.

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