: eminent Persons of his time; By the Rev. Joseph Spence. Now first published from the Original Papers, with Notes, and a Life of the Author; By SAMUEL WELLER SINGER. penter, London. Constable & Co., Edinburgh. 1820.

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TH HERE is no species of composition, perhaps, so delightful as that which presents us with personal anecdotes of eminent men: And if its chief charm be in the gratification of our curiosity, it is a curiosity at least that has its origin in enthusiasm. We are anxious to know all that is possible to be learnt of those who have at any rate so honoured a place in our remembrance. It is not, merely, that every circumstance derivès value from the person to whom it relates: but an apparently insignificant anecdote often throws an entirely new light on the history of the most admired works, or the most brilliant actions. Intellectual discoveries, or heroic deeds, though they shed a broad and lasting lustre round the memory of those that have achieved them, yet occupy but a small part of the life of any individual: And we are not unwilling to penetrate the dazzling glory, and to see how the remaining intervals are filled up;-to look into the minute details, to detect incidental foibles, and to be satisfied what qualities they have in common with ourselves, as well as distinct from us, entitled to our pity, or raised above our imitation. The heads of great men, in short, are not all that we want to get a sight of: we wish to add the limbs, the drapery, the background. What would we not give to any modern Cornelius who would enable us to catch a glimpse of Pope through a glass door, leaning thoughtful on his hand, while composing the Rape of the Lock, or the Epistle of Eloisa; or riding by in a chariot with Lord Bolingbroke, or whispering to Patty Blount, or doing the honours of his grotto to Lady Wortley Montague! How much, then, are we not bound to the writer who gives us a portrait of him, with any thing like tolerable fidelity and exactness, in all these circumstances !-We like to visit the birthplace or the burial-place of famous men, to mark down their bifth-day, or the day on which they died. Cicero's villa, the tomb of Virgil, the house in which Shakespeare was brought up, are objects of romantic interest, and of refined curiosity to the lovers of genius; and a poet's lock of hair, a fac-simile of his handwriting, an ink-stand, or a fragment of an old chair belonging to him, are treasured up as relics of literary devotion. These things are thus valued, only because they bring

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us into a sort of personal contact with such characters; vouch, as it were, for their reality, and convince us that they were living men, as well as mighty minds. Sir Joshua Reynolds relates, that when he was very young, he went to a sale of pictures, and that, shortly after, there was a cry of Mr Pope, Mr Pope!' in the room; when the company made way for him to pass, every one offering his hand in salutation; and that he himself contrived, from where he stood behind, to touch the skirt of his garment. Who, in reading this account, does not extend his hand in involuntary sympathy, and rejoice at this unequivocal testimony and cheerful tribute of applause to living merit,-at this flattering foretaste which the elegant poet received of immortality?

It has been made an objection to the biography of literary men, that the principal events of their lives are their works; and that there is little else to be known of them, either interesting to others, or perhaps creditable to themselves. We do not feel the full force of this objection. It is the very absence of grave transactions or striking vicissitudes that turns our attention more immediately upon themselves, and leaves us at leisure to explore their domestic habits, and descry their little peculiarities of temper. In the intimacy of retirement, we enjoy with them calm contemplation and poetic ease.' We see the careless smile play upon their expressive features: we hear the dictates of unstudied wisdom, or the sallies of sportive wit, fall without disguise from their lips. We draw down genius from its airbuilt citadel in books and libraries; and make it our play-mate, and our companion. We see how poets and philosophers live, converse, and behave,' like other men. We reduce theory to practice; we translate words into things, and books into men. It is, in short, the ideal and abstracted existence of authors that renders their personal character and private history a subject of so much interest. The difficulty of forming almost any inference at all from what men write to what they are, constitutes the chief value of the problem which the literary biographer undertakes to solve. In passing from the public to the private life of kings, of statesmen and warriors, we have, for the most part, the same qualities and personal character brought into action, and displayed on a larger or a smaller scale,—and can, at all events, make a pretty tolerable guess from one to the other. But we have no means to discover whether the moral Addison was the same scrupulous character in his writings and in his daily habits, but in the anecdotes recorded of him. Sir Isaac Newton's Principia do not imply his verses to his dog Tray: there is

nothing to show that the writer of the epistle of Eloise to Abelard was a little, deformed person, or a Papist: nor could we be sure, without the testimony of contemporary writers, that Steele was really the same good-natured easy soul that Isaac Bickerstaff is represented to be. Some of the most popular writers among the ancients, as well as the moderns, (from Plutarch and Montaigne downwards), have accordingly been those who have taken this task of biography occasionally out of the hands of others, and made themselves not the least agreeable part of their subject. It has been observed, that we read the lives of Painters and artists with a peculiar relish. And this seems to be, be→ cause the traditions that are left of their ordinary habits and turn of mind present them in an entirely new point of view. We had before studied them only in their pictures, and the silent images of their art: but we now learn, for the first time, what to think of them as individuals. If we wait with some uneasiness to see how a celebrated Poet or prose writer will acquit himself of a few sentences of common English, it is not surprising if we are still more at a loss what a great painter will -have to say for himself, or how he will put his thoughts into words. We attend to him as to some one attempting to speak a foreign language; make allowances for a difference of dialect; or are struck with the unexpected propriety and elegance of tone. It was a long time before people would believe that Sir Joshua Reynolds wrote his own Discourses.

One principal attraction of Boswell's Life of Johnson, is the contrast which, in some respects, it presents to the Doctor's own. works. The recollection of the author is a foil to the picture of the man: We are suddenly relieved by the abruptness of his manners and the pithiness of his replies, from the circumlocu tion and didactic formality of his style. Instead of the pompous commonplaces which he was too much in the habit of piling together, and rounding into periods in his closet,-his behaviour and conversation in company might be described as a continued exercise of spleen, an indulgence of irritable humours, a masterly display of character. He made none but home thrusts, but desperate lounges, but palpable hits. No turgidity; no flaccidness; no bloated flesh-all was muscular strength and agility. He threw aside the incumbrance of pedantry, and drapery of words. He became a thorough prize-fighter, or, what he himself would term, an intellectual gladiator:'threw down no challenge that he was not able and willing to take up; assumed no pretensions that he did not sturdily main tain; descended from the stilts of his style into the arena of

common sense and observation, and scuffled with all comers for the mastery: Took all advantages, and gave any odds-came off triumphant when in the right, or made the best of a bad cause -instantly seized the weak side of his adversary's argument -wrested what was doubtful to his purpose-made it a drawn battle with the sturdiest of his rivals-or fluttered' his politer antagonists like an eagle in a dovecot!' It was this vigorous and voluntary exercise of his faculties, when freed from all restraint in the intercourse of private society, that has left such a rich harvest for his biographer; and it cannot be denied that it has been well and carefully got in.

The amiable and modest Author of the volume before us, has not been less fortunate in the interest of the principal figure, Pope; nor is the circle of his associates assuredly less brilliant and imposing than that which surrounded Dr Johnson: but he has not been equally bold or happy in the treatment of his subject. The Anecdotes of Pope, compared with Boswell's Memoirs of Johnson, want life and spirit, and connexion. They furnish curious particulars, but minute and disjointed :they want picturesque grouping and dramatic effect. We have the opinions and sayings of eminent men: but they do not grow out of the occasion: we do not know at whose house such a thing happened, nor the effect it had on those who were present. The conversations seldom extend beyond an obser→ vation and a reply. We have good things served up in sandwiches; but we do not sit down, as in Boswell, to an ordinary of fine discourse.'-There is no eating and drinking going on. The different characters have labels with certain words on them put into their mouths, with authentic signatures: but that is all. We have nothing like Wilkes's plying Johnson with the best bits at Dilly's table, and overcoming his Tory prejudices by the good things he offered, and the good things he said: Nor does any Goldsmith drop in after tea with his peach-coloured coat, like one dropped from the clouds, be wildered with his finery and the success of a new work! One never has the idea, as Dunning said to Sir Joshua Reynolds of one of his literary parties, that, while these people were talking, all the rest of the world was quiet. Each person is limit to a sentence, at a time; and the sense, for want of the context, is often imperfect. There is a gap between each conclusion, and at the end of every paragraph we have a new labour to begin. They are not scenes, but soliloquies, with which we are presented: And in reading through the book, we do not seem travelling along a road, but crossing a series of stepping stones: consequently, we do not get on fast with it. It is made up of

word, the living scene does not pass before us;-we have notes. and slips of paper handed out by one of the company, but we are not ourselves admitted to their presence, nor made witnesses of the fray. There is mention made of the manner in which Addison passed his time at home, at Button's, and at Wills's. This indeed was before Mr Spence's time; but Boswell would have followed him to all those places, and brought away from the survivors all that was said at them, in the order of time, place, and person. Spence was as well contented to make a few memorandums at second-hand.

Boswell was probably an inferior man to Spence;-but he was a far better collector of anecdotes, and the very prince, indeed, of retail wits and philosophers; so that, with all possible sense of the value of what he has done, we sometimes can lbardly help wishing that he had lived in the time of Pope, instead of our own. For, to confess the truth, there is scarcely any period of our literature on which we delight so much to dwell, or to which we so often seek to return, as the one to which these pages are devoted. Whatever we may think of the greater lights of a former age, there was none in which literary men were so much to be envied, (if not admired)—or in which, perhaps, familiarity of approach would so little lessen our idea of their importance. It was the acmé of intellectual refinement and civilization; equally remote from Gothic barbarism and vulgar abuse. Poetry, from being a dream of faery land, had taken shelter in the walks of real life. It had left the heights of fancy, to ، stoop to truth, and moralize its song, Instead of dazzling the reader with ecstasies, or startling him with chimeras, it now sought merely to embellish familiar objects, to laugh at petty follies, and to lend the charms of verse and the colours of the imagination to the commonest events. The style both of poetry and prose was grown classical and courtly. It seemed as if the Muses and the Graces, leaving their august abodes, had deserted Mount Parnassus for Windsor Forest and Hampton Court-had thence slipped down to their favourite villa at Twickenham-and had turned aside again at Whitehall stairs, only stopping on this side Temple Bar,-with a train of wit, beauty, fashion, rank and learning, following them,-with lords of the bed-chamber for their gentlemen-ushers, and peeresses of the realm for their maids of honour. Pope was one of those who was admitted into the centre of this circle, and who received and gave new lustre to

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