GEORGE WILSON MEADLEY, the biographer of Paley, was born in the county-palatine of Durham, in the beginning of the year 1774, and received only such an education as a country school could afford. He was destined for the mercantile profession, which was that of his father; but having early imbibed an ardent love of letters and a desire to acquire knowledge, soon became disgusted with the routine of a counting-house, and longed to extend his views and enlarge his mind by visiting foreign countries. His finances, however, not being on a level with his ambition, he had recourse to the only expedient by which his wishes could be realized; and accordingly sailed for the Mediterranean about the year 1796, in the character of a merchant-tourist, and visited Italy, Greece, and Constantinople. After a year and a half spent on this ramble, he returned to his native country, and about this time became acquainted with Dr Paley, who then held a valuable living near BishopWearmouth, the birth-place of his future biographer, and with whom, notwithstanding the total difference of their religious opinions,-Mr Meadley being a Unitarian, and Dr Paley, of course, firmly attached to the tenets of the Church of England,-

he appears to have kept up an intercourse, and lived in a considerable degree of familiarity.

The voyage to the Mediterranean having considerably benefited Mr Meadley's fortune, he was soon after induced, whether by curiosity or interest we know not, to visit Dantzic, Hamburgh, Lubeck, and other parts of Germany; and has left behind him a very judicious account of a pedestrian tour from Hamburgh, through the Duchy of Holstein. The period of his return has not been mentioned in any notice of his life we have seen; but, which is more important, after a residence of some duration in England, he gave to the world, in 1809, the work upon which his literary character chiefly rests, being "Memoirs of William Paley, D.D." and, in the usual style of the sect of politico-religionists to which he belonged, inscribed, " To the friends of Civil and Religious Liberty, of Private Happiness, and Public Virtue." It is singular enough, that the biography of Dr Paley, certainly the ablest and most powerful defender of establishments in religion, should have been undertaken by a man who, from principle, must have been opposed to the Church of which the subject of his work formed one of the most distinguished orna

ments. Upon the whole, however the work is creditably executed; the author throughout exhibits the greatest reverence for the man whose life he had undertaken to record; and although the sentiments peculiar to the sect to which he belonged occasionally betray themselves, they are not so offensively prominent as to disgust; and he has had the good sense to avoid, in a great degree, the error which pervades and vitiates the writings of Belsham, and others of the same sect, who labour incessantly to transmute every thing into metal of their own currency.

His next production was one more congenial to his sectarian views and principles; namely, the Life of Mrs Jebb, a woman of some celebrity in her day, and whose husband, chiefly, as it should seem, by her influence, had very properly resigned his preferments in the Church, when he became a convert to Unitarianism. To us, this performance possesses no manner of interest; for there is something so repug nant to our notions of the legitimate province of the other sex, in a female bustling forward and mingling in religious and political controversy, that it is difficult to endure details, which, though they tend to show that the subject of them was very smart, very clever, and very sarcastic, leave always the impression, that, to gain this little ephemeral notoriety, a sacrifice has been made of that domestic feeling and retiring modesty, which constitute the great and peculiar ornaments of the female character. Besides, the reputation of this literary lady not being embodied in any substantive performance, distinct from the squabbles and bickerings of a small and exasperated sect, we have nothing with which we can connect her name, which, indeed,

has already almost escaped from the general memory.

Besides these works, Mr Meadley, in the year 1813, published, "Memoirs of Algernon Sidney," of which we cannot speak, as we have never had the good fortune to meet with the book. Amidst these literary labours, however, his health began sensibly to decline; and after a lingering illness, his earthly career was brought to a close towards the end of the year 1818. Mr Meadley, though strictly a party writer, appears to have been an amiable and inoffensive man; endowed with a large portion of good sense and with very respectable talents; but without any pretensions to the possession of the higher and rarer gift of genius. His political, may be easily derived from his religious sentiments, though, in his works, there is no indication of that forward, petulant, and insolent spirit of intolerable dogmatism, or of that violence and exacerbation of party feeling for which the writers of his sect have rendered themselves so notorious. As an author, his style, though not deficient in clearness, is often clumsy, and generally inelegant. He possessed industry to accumulate knowledge, but was destitute of the peculiar tact and skill by which it is embellished and adorned.

The next person of whose life we are to give a brief sketch, is the celebrated Dr WOLCOTT, better known by his political nom de guerre of PETER PINDAR; a man equally eccentric both in his genius and character, and remarkable no less for the poignancy and originality, than for the frequent coarseness and brutality of his wit. John Wolcott was born in a village called Dodbrooke in the hundred of Coleridge and county of Devon, in May 1738, and received

the rudiments of his education at the free school of Kingsbridge, and afterwards at a sort of academy kept at Liskeard; after leaving which, he was somewhat prematurely sent to travel on the Continent. After his return, as it was necessary to choose a profession, that of medicine was determined on, and he became apprentice to a relation of his own, a country practitioner, who had generously borne the chief part, if not the whole, of the expence of his education. Young Wolcott, however, made but slender proficiency. in the healing art, and manifested an early and strong predilection for the arts of music, painting, and poetry, but especially the latter. But his kind master thought only of rendering him expert in his art, and for this purpose sent him for some time to London to attend hospital practice, and acquire the most valuable species of professional knowledge, that founded on experience. How long he resided in the metropolis is not distinctly known; but we find, that some time after his return to Cornwall, he received an appointment, to accompany to Jamaica, in the capacity of medical attendant, Sir William Trelawney, who, in 1769, was nominated Governor of that island. To qualify himself more completely for this office, he applied for and obtained the degree of M.D. from one of our Scotch Universities, we presume Aberdeen; and thus prepared set sail, with his Excellency and suite, for the West Indies. Here, however, the worthy Doctor was soon metamorphosed into a parson; for, finding his situation by no means so lucrative as he had anticipated, and a rectory, in the gift of his Excellency, happening to fall vacant, he applied for the appointment; and, for this purpose, procured ordination from the Bishop of London. No

man was ever less qualified for holy orders, either by nature or by principle. We need not wonder, therefore, that he had his duty performed by deputy, and enjoyed all the benefits and conveniences arising from non-residence. But he was not destined to continue long an ornament to the West India Church. His patron died soon after his preferment, in consequence of which he accompanied Lady Trelawney to England, and bade adieu to Jamaica and the pulpit for ever.

On his return from Jamaica, he made an attempt to settle in practice at Truro, from which he was soon driven by his restless and litigious spirit; and a second attempt at Helstone was attended with no better success, probably from a similar cause. It was about this time that he discovered the talents of the late Mr John Opie, and rescued him from worse than Egyptian bondage. He took the youth home with him; gave him instructions in drawing, by which it is said he greatly improved; and, when his reputation had extended, accompanied him first to Exeter, and afterwards to London, where the talents of Opie soon made him known, and procured him encouragement and patronage. It is painful to think, that either irritability on the part of the patron, or ingratitude on that of the pupil, should have created first a coldness, and afterwards an hostility between them, and dissolved a connexion, the formation of which had done honour to both parties.

During his short residence in Jamaica, and for some time after his return, Dr Wolcott appears to have paid little court to the Muses, although, perhaps, like Darwin, he cultivated his talents in secret, and deferred submitting his productions to the public till his genius, ripened

by time and experience, should af ford him greater chance of success. But, be this as it may, before the close of the eighteenth century, his fame had risen so high, and his talents for satirical writing were so much dreaded, that he became a person of consequence to two classes of persons, not often grouped together in the history of a literary man; we mean the booksellers and the ministers. The former courted him, because his works would sell; the latter, because the keenness of his wit pointed him out as a proper person for a party writer. According to his custom, however, he quarrelled with both parties; with the booksellers, about an annuity which they had agreed to pay him for the copyright of his works, and which, from some obscurity in the wording of the agreement, it was attempted to evade; and with the ministers, "because," to use his own words, "he had no whitewash for devils, and would take an annuity of L.300 or L.400 per annum only to be mute." In the case of the booksellers, it is but right to say, that he appears to have had justice on his side; for a law-suit, which at that time appeared inevitable, was avoided by their consenting to pay the annuity, to which he had a fair and undoubted claim. In that of the ministers, it could not be expected that they would pay away the public money merely to purchase the silence of a libeller, and thereby to inspire him with such an idea of his own conse quence as to render him perfectly untractable.

Age and infirmity, however, drew on apace; but though they wasted his body, his mind continued unimpaired to the last. It is said, that he was able, only a few days before his death, to dictate from his bed, verses strongly marked by his former strength and humour. Life he con

sidered a blessing to be enjoyed on any terms, even though accompani ed with torture; and when asked by an acquaintance, only a day previous to his decease, what he could bring him to add to his comfort, he replied, with a sardonic smile, " Bring me back my youth!" He breathed his last at Montgomery's Cottage, Somers' Town, where he had resided for many years, on the 14th of January 1819, being then in the 81st year of his age.

It is matter of extreme regret, that a man so richly endowed by nature as Dr Wolcott should have wasted his great and original powers on subjects of merely ephemeral interest, and which will not be understood by the next generation without a commentary; and that his exuberant wit, and almost boundless powers of fancy, should have been employed in turning into ridicule the innocent foibles of one of the most amiable and virtuous monarchs that ever lived. That he was capa ble of higher and better things than giving a colouring of poetical embellishment to filthy tales, gathered from the very refuse of the retainers of the Court, is sufficiently proved by his Ode to Spring, which contains some fine, vigorous, and healthful stanzas, as well as by frequent scintillations of a lofty spirit, and occasional approaches to sublimity, even in some of his coarsest effusions. Posterity will revenge upon him this misappli cation of his powers, and indeed the work of even-handed retribution seems already begun; for at the present moment, his fame, by no means proportioned to his powers and genius, seems, like that of Churchill, to whom, in some respects, he bore a considerable resemblance, quietly verging to the tomb of all the Ca pulets. And thus the future historian, who pays a tribute of grateful homage to the virtues of George III.,

may forget to notice even the existence of the man, who earned a certain portion both of fame and fortune by traducing and vilifying him.

The following attack on the celebrated biographer of Johnson, is at once graphic and characteristical :

PROFESSOR PLAYFAIR was the eldest son of the Reverend James Playfair, Minister of Benvie in Forfarshire, at which place he was born on the 10th of March 1748. He received the rudiments of his education in his paternal mansion, and at the age of fourteen was sent to the University of St Andrew's, where his genius and industry soon attracted the notice, and gained him the friendship of his teachers. For the mathematical sciences, in which he was afterwards destined to attain such consummate proficiency, he had shown an early and decided predilection; and so distinguished had been his progress in his favourite study, even at College, that Profes

sor Wilkie, when confined by illness, selected him as the person best qualified to read his Lectures on Natural Philosophy; and notwithstanding the great disparity of years between the Professor and the Student, they became intimate friends. At the early age of eighteen, he presented himself as a candidate for the Professorship of Mathematics in the Marischal College of Aberdeen; and after a comparative trial, which lasted eleven days, only two out of six candidates who had appeared, the Reverend Dr Trail, who was appointed to the chair, and Dr Hamilton, who now fills it, were found to be his superiors *. In 1769 he completed his studies, and having left the Uni