paid on sufficient proof of the correctness of the chronometers. Harrison expressed the greatest readiness to explain his inventions, and to subject them to any required test; but such were the delays and disputes of those who had the management of the matter, that he did not procure the whole of his reward until 1767.* Harrison died

That Harrison felt keenly the injustice of the repeated delays to which he was subjected may be seen from the following extract of a letter sent by him to the commissioners, dated May 30, 1765. The letter is printed at length in the Annual Register for that year:-"I cannot help thinking but I am extremely ill used by gentlemen who I might have expected a different treatment from; for if the act of the 12th of Queen Anne be deficient, why have I so long been encou raged under it, in order to bring my invention to perfection? And, after the completion, why was my son sent twice to the West Indies? Had it been said to my son, when he received the last instruction, There will, in case you succeed, be a new act at your return, in order to lay you under new restrictions, which were not thought of in the act of the 12th of Queen Anne,' I say, had this been the case, I might have expected some such treatment as I now meet with. It must be owned that my case is very hard; but I hope I am the first, and, for my country's sake, shall be the last, that suffers by pinning my faith on an English act of parliament. Had I received my just reward, for certainly it may be so called after forty years' close application in the improvement of that talent which it had pleased God to give me, then my invention would have taken the course which all improvements in this world do; that is, I must have instructed workmen in its principles and execution, which I should have been glad to have liad an opportunity of doing. But how widely this is different to what is now proposed, viz. for me to instruct people that I know nothing of, and such as may know nothing of mechanics; and, if I do not make them understand to their satis

in 1776, in his eighty-third year. Many schemes had been proposed before Harrison's invention, but none of them had proved successful. This, however, and others to which it gave rise, have rendered the determination of the longitude almost as certain as improvements in astronomical instruments have made the observation of the latitude. The benefits it has conferred upon navigation are almost incalculable, and can only be conceived by comparison with the uncertainty that prevailed previously, and the accidents often thence arising. The circumstance of government having offered so large a sum as 10,000l. for an invention that should enable the navigator to determine the longitude within sixty miles is sufficient proof of the fearful necessity of improvement that existed within little more than a century of the present time.

faction, I may then have nothing! Hard fate indeed to me, but still harder to the world, which may be deprived of this my invention, which must be the case, except by my open and free manner in describing all the principles of it to gentlemen and workmen, who almost at all times have had free recourse to see my instruments! And if any of those workmen shall have been so ingenious as to have got my invention, how far you may please to reward them for their piracy must be left for you to determine; and I must set myself down in old age, and thank God I can be more easy in that I have made the conquest, and though I have no reward, than if I had come short of the matter, and by some delusion had the reward."

4 н 2

to the other in the most complete contrast. Fielding, a gentleman by birth, liberally educated, had been a writer for the public from the time he was twenty Richardson, who had nearly attained that age before Fielding came into the world (the one was born in 1689, the other in 1707), having begun life as a mechanic, had spent the greater part of it as a tradesman, and had passed his fiftieth year before he became an author. Yet, after they had entered upon the same new field of literature almost together, they found themselves rivals upon that ground for as long as either continued to write. To Richardson certainly belongs priority of date as a novelist: the first part of his Pamela was published in 1740, the conclusion in 1741; and Fielding's Joseph Andrews, originally conceived with the design of turning Richardson's work into ridicule, appeared in 1742. Thus, as if their common choice of the same species of writing, and their antipathies of nature and habit, had not been enough to divide them, it was destined that the two founders of the new school of fiction should begin their career by having a personal quarrel. For their works, notwithstanding all the remarkable points of dissimilarity between those of the one and those of the other, must still be considered as belonging to the same school or form of literary composition, and that a form which they had been the first to exemplify in our language. Unlike as Joseph Andrews was to Pamela, yet the two resembled each other more than either did any other English work of fiction. They were still our two first novels properly so called-our two first artistically constructed epics of real life. And the identity of the species of fictitious narrative cultivated by the two writers became more apparent as its character was more completely developed by their subsequent publications, and each proceeded in proving its capabilities in his own way, without reference to what had been done by the other. Fielding's Jonathan Wild appeared in 1743; Richardson's Clarissa Harlowe-the greatest of his works-was given to the world in 1748; and the next year the greatest birth of Fielding's geniushis Tom Jones-saw the light. Finally, Fielding's Amelia was published in 1751; and Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison in 1753. Fielding died at Lisbon in 1754, at the age of forty-seven; Richardson survived till 1761, but wrote nothing

more.

Meanwhile, however, a third writer had presented himself upon the same field-Smollett, whose Roderick Random had appeared in 1748, his Peregrine Pickle in 1751, and his Count Fathom in 1754, when the energetic Scotsman was yet only in his thirty-fourth year. His Sir Launcelot Greaves followed in 1762, and his Humphrey Clinker in 1771, in the last year of the author's active life. Our third English novelist is as much a writer sui generis as either of his two predecessors, as completely distinguished from each of them in the general character of his genius as they are from each other. Of the three, Richardson had

evidently by far the richest natural soil of mind; his defects sprung from deficiency of cultivation; his power was his own in the strictest sense; not borrowed from books, little aided even by experience of life, derived almost solely from introspection of himself and communion with his own heart. He alone of the three could have written what he did without having himself witnessed and lived through the scenes and characters described, or something like them which only required to be embellished and heightened, and otherwise artistically treated, in order to form an interesting and striking fictitious representation. His fertility of invention, in the most comprehensive meaning of that term, is wonderful,-supplying him on all occasions with a copious stream both of incident and of thought that floods the page, and seems as if it might so flow on and diffuse itself for ever. Yet it must be confessed that he has delineated for us rather human nature than human life-rather the heart and its universal passions, as modified merely by a few broad distinctions of temperament, of education, of external circumstances, than those subtler idiosyncracies which constitute what we properly call character. Many characters, no doubt, there are set before us in his novels, very admirably drawn and discriminated; Pamela, her parents, Mr. B., Mrs. Jewkes, Clarissa, Lovelace, Miss Howe, Sir Charles Grandison, Miss Byron, Clementina, are all delineations of this description of the most part natural, well brought out, and supported by many happy touches: but (with the exception, perhaps, of the last mentioned) they can scarcely be called original conceptions of a high order, creations at once true to nature and new to literature; nor have they added to that population of the world of fiction among which every reader of books has many familiar acquaintances hardly less real to his fancy and feelings than any he has met with in the actual world, and for the most part much more interesting. That which, besides the story, interests us in Richardson's novels, is not the characters of his personages but their sentimentsnot their modes but their motives of action—the anatomy of their hearts and inmost natures, which is unfolded to us with so elaborate an inquisition and such matchless skill. Fielding, on the other hand, has very little of this, and Smollett still less. They set before us their pictures of actual life in much the same way as life itself would have set them before us if our experience had chanced to bring us into contact with the particular situations and personages delineated; we see, commonly, merely what we should have seen as lookers on, not in the particular confidence of any of the figures in the scene; there are they all, acting or talking according to their various circumstances, habits, and humours, and we may look at them and listen to them as attentively as we please; but, if we want to know anything more of them than what is visible to all the world, we must find it out for ourselves in the best way we can, for neither they nor the author will ordinarily tell us a word of it. What both these

writers have given us in their novels is for the most part their own actual experience of life, irradiated, of course, by the lights of fancy and genius, and so made much more brilliant and attractive than it was in the reality, but still in its substance the produce not of meditation but of observation chiefly. Even Fielding, with all his wit, or at least pregnancy of thought and style-for the quality in his writings to which we allude appears to be the result rather of elaboration than of instinctive perceptionwould probably have left us nothing much worth preserving in the proper form of a novel, if he had not had his diversified practical knowledge of society to draw upon, and especially his extensive and intimate acquaintance with the lower orders of all classes, in painting whom he is always greatest and most at home. Within that field, indeed, he is the greatest of all our novelists. Yet he has much more refinement of literary taste than either Smollett or Richardson; and, indeed, of the works of all the three, his alone can be called classical works in reference to their formal character. Both his style and the construction of his stories display a care and artifice altogether unknown to the others, both of whom, writing on without plan or forethought, appear on all occasions to have made use alike of the first words and the first incidents that

presented themselves. Smollett, a practised writer for the press, had the command, indeed, of a style the fluency of which is far from being without force, or rhetorical parade either; but it is animated by no peculiar expressiveness, by no graces either of art or of nature. His power consists in the cordiality of his conception and the breadth and freedom of his delineation of the humorous, both in character and in situation. The feeling of the humorous in Smollett always overpowers, or at least has a tendency to overpower, the merely satirical spirit; which is not the case with Fielding, whose humour has generally a sly vein of satire running through it, even when it is most gay and genial.

But he to whom belongs the finest spirit of whim among all our writers of this class is the immortal author of "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy." Sterne, born in Ireland in 1713, had already published one or two unregarded sermons when the first and second volumes of his most singular novel were brought out at York in the year 1759. The third and fourth volumes followed in 1761; the fifth and sixth in 1762; the seventh and eighth not till 1765; the ninth in 1767. The six volumes of his Yorick's Sermons had also come out in pairs in the intervals; his Sentimental Journey appeared in 1768; and his death took place the same year. Sterne has been charged with imitation and plagiarism; but surely originality is the last quality that can be denied to him. To dispute his possession of that is much the same as it would be to deny that the sun is luminous because some spots have been detected upon its surface. If Sterne has borrowed or stolen some few things from other writers, at least no

one ever had a better right to do so in virtue of the amount that there is in his writings of what is really his own. If he has been much indebted to any predecessor, it is to Rabelais; but, except in one or two detached episodes, he has wholly eschewed the extravagance and grotesqueness in which the genius of Rabelais loves to disport itself, and the tenderness and humanity that pervade his humour are quite unlike anything in the mirth of Rabelais. There is not much humour, indeed, anywhere out of Shakspeare and Cervantes which resembles or can be compared with that of Sterne. It would be difficult to name any writer but one of these two who could have drawn Uncle Toby or Trim. Another common mistake about Sterne is, that the mass of what he has written consists of little better than pure nonsense or rubbish-that his beauties are but grains of gold glittering here and there in a heap of sand, or, at most, rare spots of green scattered over an arid waste. Of no writer could this be said with less correctness. Whatever he has done is wrought with the utmost care, and to the highest polish and perfection. With all his apparent caprices of manner, his language is throughout the purest idiomatic English; nor is there, usually, a touch in any of his pictures that could be spared without injury to the effect. And, in his great work, how completely brought out, how exquisitely finished, is every figure, from Uncle Toby, and Brother Shandy, and Trim, and Yorick, down to Dr. Slop, and Widow Wadman, and Mrs. Bridget, and Obadiah himself! Who would resign any one of them, or any part of any one of them?

It has been observed, with truth, that, although Richardson has on the whole the best claim to the title of inventor of the modern English novel, he never altogether succeeded in throwing off the inflation of the French romance, and representing human beings in the true light and shade of human nature. Undoubtedly the men and women of Fielding and Smollett are of more genuine flesh and blood than the elaborate heroes and heroines who figure in his pages. But both Fielding and Smollett, notwithstanding the fidelity as well as spirit of their style of drawing from real life, have for the most part confined themselves to some two or three departments of the wide field of social existence, rather abounding in strongly marked peculiarities of character than furnishing a fair representation of the common national mind and manners. And Sterne also, in his more aerial way, deals rather with the oddities and quaintnesses of opinion and habit that are to be met with among his countrymen than with the broad general course of our English way of thinking and living. Our first genuine novel of domestic life is Goldsmith's exquisite Vicar of Wakefield, written in 1761, when its author, born in Ireland in 1728, was as yet an obscure doer o. 'all work for the booksellers, but not published till 1766, when his name had already obtained celebrity by his poem of The Traveller. The language contains no work either more truly

English in spirit than the Vicar of Wakefield, or more classical in manner and form. Scarcely anywhere else is there to be found a humour at once so rich and deep and of so unforced and natural a flow; a sunny shower, it may be called, all gladness and love, and irradiating while it refreshes. Never had wit and sprightliness so little of either gall or acid as in Goldsmith; he is truly what his friend Johnson has said of him in his epitaph, "sive risus essent movendi sive lacrymæ, affectuum potens at lenis dominator,"-a ruler of our affections, and mover alike of our laughter and our tears, as gentle as he is prevailing.

As the author of the Traveller and the Deserted Village, published in 1765 and 1771, Goldsmith, who lived till 1774, also holds a distinguished place among the poetical writers of this first quarter of a century of the reign of George III., the poetical produce of which, however, is neither very considerable in quantity, nor any of it of the highest order in quality. Indeed the scanty measure of song which has sufficed to make the fame of some of the most eminent poets of this time is remarkable. Shenstone and Gray, as well as Goldsmith, are instances of this; as was likewise Collins, who died, however, a few years before the commencement of the present period: the whole collected verse of these four, or at least all of it that posterity has cared to remember, would hardly, printed in a good type, make a decent sixpenny pamphlet. Collins, indeed, the greatest among them, died at the early age of thirty-six, and some of the last years of his short life were clouded with a depression of spirits which made intellectual exertion impossible; while his five or six odes which are universally known, including that to Evening and that entitled The Passions, were all written ten years before his death. Shenstone is remembered for his Pastoral Ballad, his Schoolmistress, and an elegy or two. Gray's famous elegy, his two Pindarics, his Ode on Eton College, his Long Story, and a few translations from the Norse and Welsh, and other short pieces, make up nearly all the enduring produce of a life of leisure, which terminated in 1771, at the age of fifty-five, and nearly thirty years of which had been devoted to poetry. And Goldsmith's renown rests upon his two poems already mentioned, which do not together much more than equal in length one of the books of Paradise Lost. Yet Collins, Gray, and Goldsmith are not only the greatest of our minor poets, but the greatest of all the poets of their era; and even Shenstone's slender oaten pipe has made considerable noise in the world. Goldsmith had not the skyey fancy of his predecessor Collins, but there is a glow of heart in his poetry which the school of Pope, to which, in its form at least, it belongs, had scarcely before reached, and which makes it an appropriate prelude to the more fervid song that was to burst forth among us in another generation. Nor does the gorgeous brocade of Gray's verse, even in the two celebrated compositions, The Progress of Poesy and The Bard, at

which, according to Johnson, "the readers of poetry were at first content to gaze in mute amazement," hide the true fire and fancy that animate it, or even the real elegance of taste which had nevertheless been led to array itself so ambitiously. It must be admitted that he carries himself in his stiff and painted robes with an imposing air. But Gray often expresses himself too with ease and simplicity; the most touching of the verses in his Ode to Eton College, for instance, are in that style; and in his Long Story he has given us a fine example of his mastery over the lightest graces and gaieties of song.

One poet, however, of this age is not amenable to the charge of having written too little or at too slow a rate. Churchill published his first poem, The Rosciad, at the age of thirty, in 1776, and the rest of his compositions, including his satire entitled Night-The Ghost-The Prophecy of Famine his Epistle to Hogarth-The Conference-The Duellist-The Author-Gotham-The Candidate The Times - Independence — The Journey-several of them pieces of considerable length, all within the next four years. He was suddenly carried off by an attack of fever in November, 1764. Vigorous as well as fluent, though irregular and coarse, Churchill in his own day was looked upon as a sort of Dryden of the eighteenth century. He was far enough from being Dryden come to life again; but he had evidently formed himself upon the study of that great master; and he probably contributed somewhat to the restoration of a freer spirit and more various flow to our poetry, after the tranquillizing effect of half a century's imitation of the trim regularities of Pope. Cowper, himself at a later date the chief author of this restoration, appears to have looked upon Churchill as his precursor, and even to have made him his model in some respects. But, with little delicacy of taste, or refinement of any sort, Churchill, wrote far too hastily, and too generally upon mere topics of the day, to achieve for himself more than an ephemeral popularity, and, though his name is still a considerable one in our literature, even the best of his poetry is now little read or known.

There still survived also some eminent poetical writers of the preceding age;-among others, Armstrong, born in Scotland in 1709, whose Art of Preserving Health, published in 1744, has the rare merit of an original and characteristic style, full of raciness and manly grace; and Akenside, likewise a physician, the author, at the age of twenty-three, of the Pleasures of Imagination, published in the same year with Armstrong's poem, and giving another example of the treatment of a didactic subject in verse with great ingenuity and success. Akenside's rich though rather diffuse eloquence, and the store of fanciful illustration which he pours out, evidence a wonderfully full mind for so young a man. But neither Akenside nor Armstrong published any verse after the accession of George III.; though the former lived