CHAP. XXIX.

Of periodical essay writers, particularly son and Johnson.

promiscuous perusal. It is however, but justice to add, that the few instances referred to, however exceptionable, are of such a kind as to exAddi-pose him to the charge rather of inadvertence, or momentary levity, than of any unfixedness of principle, much less of any depravity of heart.

To hardly any species of composition has the British public been more signally indebted than to the periodical Essay; and, perhaps, it was only from the British press, that such a publication could have issued. The attempt to excite mental appetite, by furnishing, from day to day, intellectual aliment of such peculiar freshness, must have been fatally obstructed by any jealousy of superintendance, or formality of licensing. The abuse of the press is to be deplored as a calamity, and punished as a crime. But let neither prince nor people forget the providential blessings which have been derived to both from its constitutional liberty. As this was one of the invaluable effects of the revolution in 1688, so perhaps no other means more contributed to carry the blessings of that period to their consummate establishment, in the accession of the house of Brunswick.

Of all the periodical works, those of Johnson, in point of strict and undeviating moral purity, unquestionably stand highest. Every page is invariably delicate. It is, therefore, the rare praise of this author, that the most vigilant preceptor may commit his voluminous works into the hands of even his female pupil, without caution, limitation, or reserve: secure that she cannot stumble on a pernicious sentiment, or rise from the perusal with the slightest taint of immorality. Even in his dictionary, moral rectitude has not only been scrupulously maintained, but, as far as the nature of the work would admit, it has been assiduously inculcated. In the authorities which he had adduced, he has collected, with a discrimination which can never be enough admired, a countless multitude of the most noble sentences which English literature afforded; yet he has frequently contented himself with instances borrowed from inferior writers, when he found some passage, which at once served his purpose, and that of religion and morality; and also, as he declared himself, lest he should risk contaminating the mind of the student, by referring him to authors of more celebrity, but less purity. When we reflect how fatally the unsuspected title of Dictionary has been made the vehicle for polluting principle, we shall feel the value of this extreme conscientiousness of Johnson.

Still, however, while we ascribe to this ex

The two writers who have most eminently distinguished themselves in this path of litera. ture, are Addison and Johnson. At a period when religion was held in more than usual contempt, from its having been recently abused to the worst purposes; and when the higher walks of life still exhibited that dissoluteness which the profligate reign of the second Charles had made so deplorably fashionable, Addison seems to have been raised by Providence for the double purpose of improving the public taste, and correcting the public morals. As the powers of the imagination had, in the preceding period,cellent author all that is safe, and all that is been peculiarly abused to the purposes of vice, just, it is less from Johnson than from Addison it was Addison's great object to show that wit that we derive the interesting lessons of life and impurity had no necessary connexion. He and manners; that we learn to trace the exact not only evinced this by his reasonings, but he delineations of character, and to catch the vivid so exemplified it in his own compositions, as to hues, and varied tints of nature. It is true, become in a short time more generally useful, that every sentence of the more recent moralist by becoming more popular than any English is an aphorism, every paragraph a chain of writer who had yet appeared. This well-earned maxims for guiding the understanding and celebrity he endeavoured to turn to the best of guarding the heart. But when Johnson deall purposes; and his success was such as to scribes characters, he rather exhibits vice and prove, that genius is never so advantageously virtue in the abstract, the real existing human employed as in the service of virtue, nor in-being: while Addison presents you with actual fluence so well directed as in rendering piety fashionable. At this distance, when almost all authors have written the better, because Addison wrote first, and when the public taste which he refined has become competent through that refinement, to criticise its benefactor, it is not easy fully to appreciate the value of Addi

son.

To do this, we must attend to the progress of English literature, and make a comparison between him and his predecessors.

But noble as the views of Addison were, and happily as he has, in general, accomplished what he intended; the praise which justly be. longs to him must be qualified by the avowal, that it does not extend to every passage he has written. From the pernicious influence of those very manners which it was his object to correct, some degree of taint has occasionally affected his own pages, which will make it necessary to guard the royal pupil from a wholly

men and women; real life figures, compounded of the faults and the excellencies, the wisdom and the weaknesses, the follies and the virtues of humanity.-By the Avarus, the Ebulus, the Misellus, the Sophron, the Zosima, and the Viator of Johnson, we are instructed in the soundest truths, but we are not struck by any vivid exemplification. We merely hear them, and we hear them with profit, but we do not know them. Whereas with the members of the Spectator's club we are acquainted. Johnson's personages are elaborately carved figures that fill the niches of the saloon; Addison's are the living company which animate it: Johnson's have more drapery; Addison's more countenance, Johnson's gentlemen and ladies, scholars and chambermaids, philosophers and coquets, all argue syllogistically, all converse in the same academic language; divide all their sentences into the same triple members, turn every

phrase with the same measured solemnity, and round every period with the same polished smoothness. Addison's talk learnedly or lightly, think deeply, or prate flippantly, in exact accordance with their character, station, and habits of life.

serve to prepare the mind for more elaborate investigation. If it be objected, that he deals too much in gratuitous praise and vague admiration, it may be answered, that the effect produced by poetry on the mind cannot always be philosophically accounted for; and Addison was too fair, and, in this instance, too cordial a critic to withhold expressions of delight, merely because he could not analyse the causes which produced it.-At any rate, it must be allowed, that he who wrote those exquisite Essays on the Pleasures of the Imagination, could not be superficial through penury. It is allowed, that the criticisms of Johnson are, in general, much more systematic; they possess more depth, as well as more discrimination; but they are less pleasing, because they are not equally good natured. They are more tinctured with luntary admiration. But no critic has been more successful in laying open the internal structure of the poet ;-though he now and then handles the knife so roughly as to disfigure what he means to dissect. His learning was evidently much deeper, as well as better digested, than that of Addison, and the energy of his understanding was almost unrivalled. He therefore, discovers a rare ability in appreciating, with the soundest and most sagacious scrutiny, the poetry of reason and good sense; in the composition of which he also excels. But to the less bounded excursions of high imagina. tion, to the bolder achievements of pure invention he is less just, because less sensible. He appears little alive to that species of writing, whose felicities consist in ease and grace, to the floating forms of ideal beauty, to the sublimer flights of the lyric muse, or to finer touches of dramatic excellence. He would consequently be cold in his approbation, not to say perverse in his discussion of some of these species of beauty, of which, in fact, his feelings were less susceptible.

What reader, when he meets with the description of Sir Roger de Coverly, or Will Wimble, or of the Tory fox-hunter in the Freeholder does not frame in his own mind a living image in each, to which ever after he naturally recurs, and on which his recollection, if we may so speak, rather than his imagination, fastens, as on an old intimate? The lapse of a century, indeed, has induced a considerable change in modes of expression and forms of behaviour. But though manners are mutable, human na. ture is permanent. And it can no more be brought as a charge against the truth of Ad-party spirit, and breathe less generous and vodison's characters that the manners are changed, than it can be produced against the portraits of sir Peter Lely and Vandyck, that the fashions of dress are altered. The human character, like the human figure, is the same in all ages; it is only the exterior and the costume which vary. Grace of attitude, exquisite proportion, and striking resemblance, do not diminish of their first charm, because ruffs, perukes, satin doublets, and slashed sleeves are passed away. Addison's characters may be likened to that expressive style of drawing, which gives the exact contour by a few careless strokes of the pencil. They are rendered amusing, by being in some slight degree carricatures; yet, all is accurate resemblance, nothing is wanton aggravation. They have, in short, that undiscribable grace which will always captivate the reader in proportion to the delicacy of his own perceptions.

Among the benefits which have resulted from the writings of Addison, the attention first drawn to Paradise Lost by his criticisms was not one of the least. His examination of that immortal work, the boast of our island, and of human nature, had the merit of subduing the violence of party-prejudice, and of raising its great author to an eminence in the minds of his countrymen, corresponding to that which he actually held, and will hold, on the scale of genius, till time shall be no more.*

If the critical writings of Addison do not possess the acuteness of Dryden, or the vigour of Johnson, they are familiar and elegant, and

*Milton has dropt his mantle on a poet, inferior in deed to himself, in the loftiness of his conceptions, the variety of his learning, and the structure of his verse; but the felicity of whose genius is only surprassed by the elevation of his piety; whose devout effusions are more penetrating, and almost equally sublime; and who, in his moral and pathetic strokes, familiar illusions, and touching incidents, comes more home to the bosom than even his immortal master. When we observe of this

fine spirit that he felt the beauties of nature with a lover's heart, beheld them with a poet's eye, and delineated them with a painter's hand;-that the minute accuracy of his lesser figures, and the exquisite finish ing of his rural groups, delight the fancy, as much as the sublimity of his nobler images exalt the mind; that in spite of faults and negligencies, and a few instances of ungraceful asperity, he gratifies the judgment as much as he enchants the imagination: that he directs the feelings to virtue, and the heart to heaven. Need we designate the sketch by affixing to it the name of Cow. per.

He had, however, that higher perfection which has been too rarely associated with those faculties, the most discerning taste and the liveliest relish, for the truest as well as the noblest species of the sublime and beautiful. I mean that which belongs to moral excellence. Where this was obvious, it not only conquered his aversion, but attracted his warm affection. It was this which made him the ardent eulogist of Watts, in spite of his non-conformity, and even the advocate of Blackmore, whom it must have been natural for him to despise as a bad poet, and to hate as a whig. It is this best of tastes which he also most displays in that beautiful eulogium of Addison, to which in the present comparison, it would be injustice to both, not to refer the reader.

His Tour to the Hebrides exhibits a delightful specimen of an intellectual traveller, who extracts beauty from barrenness, and builds up a solid mass of instruction with the most slender materials. He leaves to the writer of natural history, whose proper province it is, to run over the world in quest of mosses and grasses, of minerals and fossils. Nor does he swell his book with catalogues of pictures which have neither novelty nor relevancy; nor does he copy, from

chose to call themselves. And never, perhaps, has that wretched character been more admira. bly illustrated than in the simile of the fly on St. Paul's cathedral.

preceding authors, the ancient history of a coun- | be obvious, that we allude to the papers ascribed try of which we only want to know the existing to bishop Berkeley. These essays bear the state; nor does he convert the grand scenes marks of a mind at once vigorous and correct, which display the wonder of the Creator's power deep in reflection, and opulent in imagery. into doubts of his existence, or disbelief of his They are chiefly directed against the free-thinkgovernment: but fulfilling the office of an in-ers, a name by which the infidels of that age quisitive and moral traveller, he presents a lively and interesting view of men and things; of the country which he visited, and of the persons with whom he conversed. And though his inveterate Scottish prejudices now and then break out, his spleen seems rather to have been exercised against trees than men. Towards the latter, his seeming illiberality has in reality more of merriment than malice. In his heart he respected that brave and learned nation.-When he is unfair, his unfairness is often mitigated by some stroke of humour, perhaps of good humour, which effaces the impression of his se-rigid and yet inflated style, an almost total abverity. Whatever faults may be found in the Tour to the Hebrides, it is no small thing, at this period, to possess a book of travels entirely pure from the lightest touch of vanity or impurity, of levity or impiety.

His Rasselas is a work peculiarly adapted to the royal pupil; and though it paints human life in too dark shades, and dwells despondingly on the unattainableness of human happiness, these defects will afford excellent occasions for the sagacious preceptor to unfold, through what pursuits life may be made happy by being made useful; by what superinduced strength the bur. thens of this mortal state may be cheerfully borne, and by what a glorious perspective its termination may be brightened.

The praise which has been given to Addison as an essayist can rarely be extended to many of his coadjutors. Talent more or less we every where meet with, and very ingenious sketches of character; but moral delicacy is so often, and sometimes so shamefully violated, that (whatever may have been the practice,) the Spectator ought to be accounted an unfit book for the indiscriminate perusal of youth.*

Another difference between Addison and Johnson is, that the periodical writings of the former are those in which the powers of his mind appear to most advantage. Not so in the case of Johnson. Solidly valuable as the Rambler must be accounted in the point of celebrity, it probably owes much more to its author than it has conferred on him. A forbidding stateliness, a

sence of ease and cheerfulness, would too probably bring neglect on the great and various excellencies of these volumes, if they had been the single work of their author. But his other writings, and, above all, that inexhaustible fund of pleasure and profit, the Lives of the Poets, will secure perpetuated attention to every work which bears the name of Johnson. On the ground of distinct attractiveness, the Idler is the most engaging of Johnson's porodical works: the manner being less severe, and the matter more amusing.

The Adventurer, perhaps, on account of its interesting tales, and affecting narratives, is, of all others of its class, the most strictly suitable to youth. It also contains much general knowledge, elegant criticism, and various kinds of pleasing information. In almost all these works, the Eastern Tales, Allegories, and Visions, are interesting in the narrative, elevated in the sentiment; pure in the descriptions, and sublime in the moral; they convey lessons peculiarly appropriated to the great, most of the fictitious personages who are made the vehicles of instruction, being either princes or statesmen.

If we advert to religion, the praise of Addison in this infinitely important instance must not be omitted. Johnson never loses sight of religion; but on very few occasions does he particularly dwell upon it. In one or two passages* only has he given vent to his religious feelings; and his sentiments are so soundly, indeed so sub

However the collection of periodical papers, entitled The Freeholder, may be passed over by common readers, it would be unpardonable not to direct to them the attention of a royal pupil. The object at which they aim, the strengthening of the Hanoverian cause against the combined efforts of the house of Stuart and the French court, makes them interesting; and they exhi-limely excellent, that it is impossible not to rebit an exquisite specimen of political zeal without political acrimony. They abound in strokes of wit; and the Tory Fox hunter is perhaps next to the Rural Knight in the Spectator, one of the most entertaining descriptions of charac-gical accuracy. To the latter, exception might ter in our language. Of these, as well as of his other essays, it may be said, that in them the follies, the affectations, and the absurdities of life are pourtrayed with the lightest touches of the most delicate pencil; that never was ridicule more nicely pointed, nor satire more playfully inoffensive.

In the Guardian there is hardly any thing that is seriously exceptionable; and this work is enriched with some essays that are not to be placed beneath even those of Addison. It will Happily all Addison's papers have been selected by Tickell, in his edition of Addison's works. VOL. IL.

gret the scantiness with which he has afforded them. But Addison seems to delight in the subject, and, what is remarkable, his devout feelings seem to have much transcended his theolo

justly be taken in one or two instances;t to the former, never. If it were to be asked, where are the elevating, ennobling, felicitating effects of religion on the human mind as safely stated, and as happily expressed, as in any English author? perhaps a juster answer could scarcely be given than in the devotional papers of Addison.

Number VII. in the Rambler; paper on affliction in the Idler; and the noble passage in the account of Iona. ↑ See particularly that very exceptionable paper in the Spectator, No. 459.-Aiso another on Superstition and

Enthusiasm,

L

CHAP. XXX.

Books of Amusement.

As the royal person will hereafter require books of amusement, as well as instruction, it will be a task of no small delicacy to select such as may be perused with as much profit, and as little injury, as is to be expected from works of mere entertainment. Perhaps there are few books which possess the power of delighting the fancy, without conveying any dangerous lesson to the heart, equally with Don Quixote.

It does not belong to our subject to animadvert on its leading excellence; that incompara ble delicacy of satire, those unrivalled powers of ridicule, which had sufficient force to reclaim the corrupted taste, and sober the distempered imagination of a whole people. This, which on its first appearance was justly considered as its predominant merit, is now become less interesting; because the evil which it assailed no longer existing, the medicine which cured the mad is grown less valuable to the same; yet Don Quixote will be entitled to admiration on imperishable grounds.

commodated to the elevation of the fantastic hero's tiptoe march, when he is sober, and still more to his stilts, when he is raving.

The two very ingenious French and English novelists, who followed Cervantes, though with unequal steps even as to talent, are still farther below their great master both in mental and moral delicacy. Though the scenes, descriptions, and expressions of Le Sage, are far less culpable, in point of decency, than those of his English competitor; yet both concur in the same inexpiable fault, each labouring to excite an interest for a vicious character, each making the hero of his tale an unprincipled profligate.

If novels are read at all in early youth, a practice which we should think, 'more honoured in the breach than the observance,' we should be tempted to give the preference to those works of pure and genuine fancy, which exercise and fill the imagination, in preference to those which, by exhibiting passion and intrigue in bewitching colours, lay hold too intensely on the feelings. We should even venture to pronounce those stories to be most safe, which, by least assimilating with our own habits and manners, are less likely to infect and soften the heart, by those amatory pictures, descriptions, and situations, which too much abound, even in some of the chastest compositions of this nature. The young female is pleasantly interested for the fate of Oriental queens, for Zobeide, or the heroine of Alamoran and Hamet; but she does not put herself in their place; she is not absorbed in their pains or their pleasures; she does not iden

Though Cervantes wrote between two and three hundred years ago, and for a people of a national turn of thinking dissimilar to ours; yet that right good sense, which is of all ages, and all countries, and which pervades this work more almost than even its exquisite wit and humour; those masterly portraits of character; those sound maxims of conduct; those lively touches of nature; those admirably serious les-tify her feelings with theirs, as she too probably sons, though given on ridiculous occasions; those penetrating strokes of feeling; those solemnly sententious phrases, tinctured with the characteristic absurdity of the speaker, without any injury to the truth of the sentiment; that mixture of the wise and the ludicrous, of action always pitiably extravagant, and of judgment often exemplarily sober. In all these excellences Don Quixote is without a parallel.

How admirable (to produce only one instance out of a thousand) is that touch of human nature, where the knight of La Mancha having bestowed the most excessive and high-flown compliments on a gentleman whom he encountered when the delirium of chivalry raged most strongly in his imagination!-The gentleman, who is represented as a person of admirable sense, is led by the effect which these compliments produced on his own mind, to acknow. ledge the weakness of the heart of man, in the foolish pleasure it derives from flattery. So bewitching is praise,' says he, that even I have the weakness to be pleased with it, though at the same time, I know the flatterer to be a madman.'

·

Wit, it has been said, is gay, but humour is grave. It is a striking illustration of this opinion, that the most serious and solemn nation in the world has produced the work of the most genuine humour. Nor is it easy to express how admirably the pomp and stateliness of the Spanish language are suited to the genius of this work. It is not unfavourable to the true heroic, but much more especially it is adapted to the mock dignity of the sorrowful knight. It is ac

does in the case of Sophia Western and the princess of Cleves.-Books of the former description innocently invigorate the fancy, those of the latter convey a contagious sickliness to the mind. The one raises harmless wonder or inoffensive merriment: the other awaken ideas, at best unprofitable. From the flights of the one, we are willing to descend to the rationality of common life; from the seduction of the other, we are disgusted at returning to its insipidity.

There is always some useful instruction in those great original works of invention, whether poetry or romance, which transmit a faithful living picture of the manners of age and country in which the scene is laid. It is this which, independently of its other merits, diffuses that inexpressible charm over the Odyssey: a species of enchantment which is not afforded by any other poem in the world. This, in a less degree, is also one of the striking merits of Don Quixote. And this after having soared so high, if we may descend so low, is the principal recommendation of the Arabian Tales. These Tales also, though faulty in some respects, possess another merit which we should be glad to see transferred to some of the novels of a country nearer home. We learn from these Arabian stories, and indeed from most of the works of imagination of the Mahometan authors, what was the specific religion of the people about whom they write : how much they made religion enter into the ordinary concerns of life; and how observant persons professing religion were of its peculiarities and its worship.

It is but justice to observe, how far more deep

THE WORKS OF HANNAH MORE.

83

ly mischievous the French novel writers are,, but vibrating with the accident of the moment, than those of our own country; they not only and the caprice of the predominant humour; seduce the heart through the senses, and corrupt sacrificing the virtuous child, whose sincerity it through the medium of the imagination, but should have secured his affection, to the prepos fatally strike at the very root and being ofterous flattery of her unnatural sisters-These all virtue, by annihilating all belief in that reli-highly wrought scenes do not merely excite in gion, which is its only vital source and seminal the reader a barren sympathy for the pangs of principle. self-reproach, of destitute age, and suffering royalty, but inculcate a salutary abhorrence of adulation and falsehood; a useful caution against partial and unjust judgment; a sound admoni. tion against paternal injustice and filial ingratitude.

Shakspeare.

But lessons of a nobler kind may be extracted from some works which promise nothing better than mere entertainment; and which will not, to ordinary readers, appear susceptible of any higher purpose. In the hands of a judicious preceptor, many of Shakspeare's tragedies, especially of his historical pieces, and still more such as are rendered peculiarly interesting by local circumstances, by British manners, and by the introduction of royal characters who once filled the English throne, will furnish themes on which to ground much appropriate and instructive conversation.

The beautiful and touching reflection of Henry IV. in those last soul-searching moments, when the possession of a crown became nothing, and the unjust ambition by which he had obtained it every thing-Yet, exhibiting a prince still so far retaining to the last the cautious policy of his character, as to mix his concern for the state, and his affection for his son, with the natural dissimulation of his own temper; and blending the finest sentiment on the uncertainty Those mixed characters especially, which he of human applause and earthly prosperity, with has drawn with such a happy intuition into the a watchful attention to confine the knowledge human mind, in which some of the worst ac- of the unfair means by which he had obtained tions are committed by persons not destitute of the crown to the heir who was to possess it ;good dispositions and amiable qualities, but over- the wily politician predominating to the last whelmed by the storm of unresisted passion, moment, and manifesting rather regret than resinking under strong temptation, or yielding to pentance:-disclosing that the assumed sanctity powerful flattery, are far more instructive in the with which he had been preparing for a crusade, perusal than the 'faultless monsters,' or the he was only a project to check those inquiries into roes of unmixed perfection of less skilful dra- his title to the crown to which peace and rest matists. The agitations, for instance of the might lead; and exhorting the prince, with a timorous Thane, a man not destitute of generous foreseeing subtlety which little became a dying sentiments; but of a high and aspiring mind, monarch, to keep up quarrels with foreign powstimulated by vain credulity, tempting opportu-ers, in order to wear out the memory of domesnity, and an ambitious wife.-Goaded by the tic usurpation;-all this presents a striking exwoman he loved to the crime he hated,-grasp-hibition of a superior mind, so long habituated ing at the crown, but abhorring the sin which was to procure it;-the agonies of guilt combating with the sense of honour-agonies not merely excited by the vulgar dread of detection and of punishment which would have engrossed an ordinary mind, but sharpened by unappeasable remorse: which remorse, however, proves no hindrance to the commission of fresh crimes, -crimes which succeed each other as numerously, and as rapidly, as the visionary progeny of Banquo.-At first,

What he would highly, he would holily:

But a familiarity with horrors soon cured this delicacy; and in his subsequent and multiplied murders, necessity became apology. The whole presents an awful lesson on the terrible consequences of listening to the first slight sugges. tion of sin, and strikingly exemplifies that from harbouring criminal thoughts, to the forming black designs, and perpetrating the most atrocious deeds, the mind is led by a natural progress, and an unresisted rapidity.

The conflicting passions of the capricious Lear! tender and affectionate in the extreme, but whose irregular affections were neither controuled by nature, reason, or justice; a character weak and vehement, fond and cruel; whose kindness was determined by no principle, whose mind was governed by no fixed sense of right,

to the devious paths of worldly wisdom, and crooked policy, as to be unable to desert them, even in the pangs of dissolution.

The pathetic soliloquies of the repentant Wolsey fallen from the pinnacle of wealth and power, to a salutary degradation! A disgrace which restored him to reason, and raised him to religion; which destroyed his fortune but rescued his soul:-his counsels to the rising statesman Cromwell, on the perils of ambition, and the precariousness of royal favour; the vanity of all attachment which has not religion for its basis; the weakness of all fidelity which has not the fear of God for its principle; and the perilous end of that favour of the courtier, which is enjoyed at the dear price of his 'integrity to Heaven!'

The pernicious power of flattery on a female mind, so skilfully exemplified in that memorable scene in which the bloody Richard conquers the aversion of the princess Anne to the murderer of her husband, and of all his royal race! The deplorable error of the feeble-minded princess, in so far forgetting his crimes in his compli ments, as to consent to the monstrous union with the murderer! Can there be a more strik. ing exemplification of a position we have ventured so frequently to establish, of the dangers to which vanity is liable, and of the miseries to which flattery leads?

The reflections of Henry VI. and of Richard