more so than might be expected in one who was premature in every thing, and had exhausted the stock of human folly at an age when it is usually found unbroken. All his deceptions, has prevarications, b political tergiversation,&c. were such as should have been looked for in vin of an advanced age, hardened by evil associations, and soured by disap pointed pride or avarice."

His deceptions and prevarications, be it remembered, all relate to the Rowley poems and papers, which are things very like the effect of disappointed pride and avarice! and to call his boyish essays in political controversy political tergiversation is as prepus terous an abuse of language, as it would be to call Mr. Chalmers a judicious critic, or a candid biographer.

Mr. Chalmers is undoubtedly learned, for he writes about catelectics, and there is a well known book within the compass of his classical studies which must have taught him that

Ingenuas didicisse fideliter artes

Emollit mores nec sinit esse feros

but unhappily he has not learnt those arts' faithfully,' for if he bad, his feelings upon this subject would not have been thus brutal.' However dangerous may be the distinction between venial and mortal sins in the practical casuistry of the Romish church, that puritanical spirit whose moral laws are framed in the temper of Draco, is more detestable, and not less pernicious. Mr. Chalmers refers the whole fiction of Rowley to original sin,-the young, man not having been corrupted either by precept or example.' Satan, no doubt, had about as much to do with it as with the burning of the missionaries' printing-office at Serampore, an affair of which they suppose him to have repented, because of the liberal subscriptions which were raised to repair the loss. The deception was not intended to defraud or injure one human being, and might most assuredly have been begun and continued without the slightest sense of criminality in Chatterton. And for the other eccentricities of his life, and its melancholy catastrophe, Mr. Chalmers might have remembered that there were original diseases in the world as well as original sin, and that when the coroner's inquest returned a verdict of insanity after his death, that verdict might very possibly be correct. It is at least rendered highly probable by the fact, that there was a decided insanity in his family.

Mr. Chalmers is not contented with blackening the character of Chatterton; he must also depreciate his writings. He allows them only to be wonderful when considered as the productions of a boy, and says that the coldness with which the collected edition of his works was received by the public, is perhaps a proof that it will not be possible to perpetuate the fame of an author, who has

concealed his best productions under the garb of a barbarous language, which few will be at the trouble of learning. That edition fully answered the purpose for which it was designed; it preserved the sister of Chatterton from poverty and want in her latter years, and enabled her to leave her only child well provided for accord ing to her rank in life,-a late act of justice to the dear and only relatives of a man of high and distinguished genius. As for the fame of Chatterton, which this editor thinks it will not be possible to perpetuate, Mr. Chalmers's opinion will never be weighed in the scale against it. The history of the Bristol Boy will always attract curiosity to his poems, and that curiosity will be amply repaid. Horace Walpole has been frequently inveighed against by the ardent admirers of Chatterton, with more severity than justice, -we recommend Mr. Chalmers to them in future as a proper subject for any castigation which they may be pleased to bestow in prose or in rhyme.

One of the most remarkable of this author's acknowledged poems is a ludicrous description of Whitefield's preaching, and this Mr. Chalmers has thought proper to omit without noticing the omission. That Whitefield is now known to have been a sincere and a good man, is certainly true; it is not less true that he was a fiery enthusiast,--the editor might have been satisfied with vindicating his character in a note, and ought not to have exercised his inquisitorial power by striking out what is a faithful, as well as spirited portrait of a character, the existence of which cannot be denied. Sins of omission, however, are not the only offence of this editor. Cooper, the translator of the Vert-vert, wrote a Latin epitaph upon his first-born child, who died the day after his birth, and had it inscribed upon a monument. In the language of the epitaph there is nothing hyperbolical, except the word desideratissimus should be thought so, when applied to one so young; a very venial trespass it has, however, appeared so preposterous an act of folly and affectation to Mr. Chalmers, that he has thought proper to annex to it in the body of Cooper's works, a burlesque translation, 'which appeared some years ago in the Gentlemen's Magazine,' and which is in such a strain of coarse and witless vulgarity that we verily suspect no person could be capable of admiring it but the writer himself. For example

This lovely boy,

His dad's first joy,

Was son of Squire John,

And Sue, his wife, who led their life,

At town called Thurgaton.

The passage which, according to Mr. Alexander Chalmers's ideas of wit, is thus wittily ridiculed, is as follows:

Hic jacet

Quod mori potuit
Henrici Gilberti Cooper,
Infantis desideratissimi,
Filii natu maximi
Johannis Gilberti Cooper,

De Thurgaton-in agro Nottinghamiensi,
Et Susannæ, uxoris ejus.

It is a duty to notice in the severest manner this gross instance of what cannot be called by a milder term than editorial insolence.

The life of Smollett would furnish a counterpart to the history of Gilbert Stuart, and his Scotch-English Review, as related in one of our former numbers from Mr. D'Israeli's Calamities of Authors. He was the original editor of the Critical Review, and here, says Mr. Chalmers,

'It was his misfortune, that the fair display of his talents and perhaps the genuine sentiments of his heart, were perverted by the prejudices of friendship, or by the more inexcusable impulses of jealousy, revenge, and all that enter into the composition of an irritable character. He seems to have gladly embraced the opportunity, which secrecy afforded, of dealing his blows around without discrimination, and without mercy. It is painful to read the continual personal abuse *he levelled at his rival Mr. Griffiths, and the many vulgar and coarse sarcasms* be directed against every author, who presumed to doubt the infallibility of his opinion. It is no less painful to contemplate the self-sufficiency displayed on every occasion where he can introduce his own character and works.'

A few specimens of this critical offal Mr. Chalmers has inserted, and it may be a wholesome warning for some of those, who pursue the same calling in the same spirit, to behold one of their predecessors deservedly gibbetted for his offences.

Mr. Chalmers repeats with an expression of incredulity, the assertion that Smart wore a path upon one of the paved walks belonging to Pembroke Hall. Smart resided there about fourteen years; we have seen an apartment in which the tiled floor has been worn into a deep path by the feet of an imprisoned king in no longer a space of time. Neither Dr. Anderson, nor the present editor has been able to discover a copy of the Song of David, which Smart composed when confined in a mad-house, indenting the lines with a key upon the wainscot. The loss of a poem composed under such circumstances, by a man of such talents, is greatly to be regretted. The following are some of the few stanzas which have been preserved by the reviewers; Smart has

A poem of Byron's vein might aptly address the Petition of the Relative Pronoun Which to Mr. Chalmers.

never written with more strength and animation,-and perhaps never with so much feeling.

He sung of God, the mighty source

Of all things, the stupendous force
On which all things depend:

From whose right arm, beneath whose eyes,
All period, power, and enterprise,

Commence, and reign, and end.

The world, the clustering spheres he made,
The glorious light, the soothing shade,
Dale, champaign, grove and hill;

The multitudinous abyss,

Where secrecy remains in bliss,

And wisdom hides her skill.
Tell them, I AM, Jehovah said
To Moses, while Earth heard in dread,
And smitten to the heart,

At once above, beneath, around,
All Nature without voice or sound,
Replied, O Lord, THOU ART!

Smart's Song of David is not the only modern poem which has in this manner disappeared; several others are mentioned by Mr. Chalmers. If the Universities and other public libraries, now that they have succeeded in enforcing the heaviest tax that ever was imposed upon literature in any country, should properly preserve the copies which they have obtained, some little advantage may thus arise from a measure, the shameless injustice of which will one day be reprobated as loudly and as universally as it de

serves.

In the life of Wilkie, Mr. Chalmers hints only at his antipathy to clean sheets, and gives at full length the encomium written by Hume upon the Epigoniad in the form of a letter to the Critical Reviewer. In one of his private letters Hume confesses that it was uphill work' to attempt to force this heavy piece of imitative verse-work into notice;-but there seems to have been a national feeling excited among the author's countrymen in his behalf, and Smollet had even the assurance in his history to enumerate the Epigoniad among those things which conferred lustre upon the age of George II!-Paul Whitehead falls under the merited condemnation of his biographer for his share in the orgies at Mednam Abbey; but we know not why the bequest of his heart to be deposited in Lord le Despenser's mausoleum, should be censured as any thing more than a foolish imitation of a not very wise practice among the highest ranks.-Harte's life of Gustavus Adolphus, the editor tells us, was a very unfortunate publication. Hume's House of Tudor came out the same week, and Robertson's

History of Scotland only a month before, and after perusing these, poor Harte's style could not certainly be endured.' 'Mr. Chalmers perhaps may require to be told that industry in collecting, examining, and arranging the materials of history, and fidelity in using them, are the first qualities of an historian; that in those qualities Harte has not been surpassed;-that in the opinion of military men Harte's is the best military history in our language, and that it is rising, and will continue to rise in repute.

A piece is added to Goldsmith's poems which had escaped his former editors,-Threnodia Augustalis, upon the death of the Princess Dowager of Wales, performed at the great room in Soho Square, and hastily written for the occasion. The plan is as common-place as the subject, and there is just a sufficient specimen of blank verse to show that Goldsmith's felicity of style was not universal: this species of composition tetigit et non ornavit. There are, however, lines which redeem the poem. Mr. Chalmers extols Armstrong above Dyer as a poet; and though he admits that Dr. Johnson's Irene is radically defective as a tragedy, praises it for splendour of language, richness of sentiment, and harmony of numbers! The next life contains a yet more unlucky display of this editor's critical attainments. Glover, he tells us, thought that iambic feet only should be used in heroic verse, without admitting any trochaic;-a notion which is much to be regretted in a writer whose judgment as a critic was acknowledged by the best scholars of his time.' A critic of this calibre plays with edge tools when he talks of iambics, trochaics, and catelectics: it should seem almost impossible that a man who has read a single page in either of Glover's long poems should have written so absurd a sentence. He ventures upon verbal criticism also: on a former occasion he complains of a licentious use of the elision in such words as ominous and following, showing that he judges of verse by the eye, and here he instances as words too familiar for heroic poetry-forestall, obtuse, superfluous, authoritative, timber, &c. &c. Mr. Chalmers might as well attempt to build a house without timber and without tools, as to write poetry if such words as these are to be prohibited. Smollet was equally happy in this line of criticism: he censured Grainger for using words which, he said, were either not English, or not used by good authors, as noiseless, redoubtable, feud, and, to his great comfort, was reminded that these very words were used by Shakspeare. Examples of this kind are sufficiently frequent ; but they have not yet taught the cobblers of criticism not to go beyond their last.

The Athenaid, which could not be included in Anderson's collection, is contained in this. It ought always to accompany the Leonidas. Mr. Chalmers censures it because, he says, the events