rather impeaches the equity, and sometimes the judgment, of Pope, at least it contributes to show the groundlessness of Schlosser's objection that the population of the "Dunciad," the characters that filled its stage, were inconsiderable.

FOX AND BURKE.

It is, or it would be, if Mr Schlosser were himself more interesting, a luxury to pursue his ignorance as to facts, and the craziness of his judgment as to the valuation of minds, throughout his comparison of Burke with Fox. The force of antithesis brings out into a feeble life or meaning what, in its own insulation, had been languishing mortally into nonsense. The darkness of Schlosser's "Burke" becomes visible darkness under the glimmering that steals over it from the desperate commonplaces or his "Fox." Fox is painted exactly as he would have been painted fifty years ago by any pet subaltern of the Whig Club, enjoying free pasture in Devonshire House. The practised reader knows well what is coming. Fox is "formed after the model of the ancients"-Fox is "simple"-Fox is "natural"-Fox is "chaste"-Fox is "forcible." Why, yes, in a sense, Fox is even "forcible: " but then, to feel that he was so, you must have heard him; whereas, for fifty-and-one years he has been silent. We of 1858, that can only read him, hearing Fox described as forcible, are disposed to recollect Shakspere's Mr Feeble amongst Falstaff's recruits, who also is described as forcible-viz., as the "most forcible Feeble." And, perhaps, a better description could not be devised for Fox himself -so feeble was he in matter, so forcible in manner; so powerful for instant effect, so impotent for posterity. In the Pythian fury of his gestures-in his screaming voice (for Fox's voice was shrill as a woman's)—in his directness

of purpose, Fox would now remind you of some demon steam-engine on a railroad, some Fire-king or Salmoneus, that had counterfeited Jove's thunderbolts; hissing, bubbling, snorting, fuming; demoniac gas, you think—gas from Acheron must feed that dreadful system of convulsions. But pump out the imaginary gas, and, behold! it is ditch-water. Fox, as Mr Schlosser rightly thinks, was all of a piece-simple in his manners, simple in his style, simple in his thoughts. No waters in him turbid with new crystallisations; everywhere the eye could see to the bottom. No music in him dark with Cassandra meanings. Fox, indeed, disturb decent gentlemen by "allusions to all the sciences, from the integral calculus and metaphysics down to navigation!" Fox would have seen you hanged first. Burke, on the other hand, did all that, and other wickedness besides, which fills an 8vo page în Schlosser; and Schlosser crowns his enormities by charging him, the said Burke (p. 99), with "wearisome tediousness." Among my own acquaintances are several old women, who think on this point precisely as Schlosser thinks; and they go further, for they even charge Burke with "tedious wearisomeness." Oh, sorrowful wo, and also woful sorrow, when an Edmund Burke arises, like a cheeta or hunting-leopard coupled in a tiger-chase with a German poodle. To think, in any Christian spirit, of the jungle-barely to contemplate, in a temper of merciful humanity, the incomprehensible cane-thickets, dark and bristly, into which that bloody cheeta will drag that unoffending poodle!

But surely the least philosophic of readers, who hates philosophy "worse than toad or asp," must yet be aware that, where new growths are not germinating, it is no sort of praise to be free from the throes of growth. Where ex

pansion is hopeless, it is little glory to have escaped distortion. Nor is it any blame that the rich fermentation of grapes should disturb the transparency of their golden fluids. Fox had nothing new to tell us, nor did he hold a position amongst men that required, or would even have allowed, him to tell anything new. He was helmsman to a party; what he had to do, though seeming to give orders, was simply to repeat their orders. "Port your helm," said the party; "Port it is," replied the helmsman. But Burke was no steersman; he was the Orpheus that sailed with the Argonauts; he was their seer, seeing more in his visions than was always intelligible even to himself; he was their watcher through the starry hours; he was their astrological interpreter. Who complains of a prophet for being a little darker of speech than a post-office directory? or of him that reads the stars for being sometimes perplexed?

Yet, even as to facts, Schlosser is always blundering. Post-office directories would be of no use to him, nor link-boys, nor blazing tar-barrels. He wanders in a fog such as sits upon the banks of Cocytus, fancying that Burke in his lifetime was popular, perhaps too popular. Of course, it is so natural to be popular by means of "wearisome tediousness," that Schlosser, above all people, ought to credit such a tale. Burke has been dead just sixty-one years come next autumn. I remember the time from this accident, that my own nearest relative stepped, on a golden day of 1797, into that same suite of rooms at Bath (North Parade) from which, three hours before, the great man had been carried out to die at Beaconsfield. It is, therefore, you see, threescore years and one. Now, ever since then, his collective works have been growing in bulk by the incorporation of juvenile essays (such as his "European Settlements," his "Essay on the Sublime," on

"Lord Bolingbroke," &c.), or (as more recently) by the posthumous publication of his MSS.; and yet, ever since then, in spite of growing age and growing bulk, are becoming more in demand. At this time, half-a-century after his last sigh, Burke is popular; a thing, let me tell

* "Of his MSS. :”—And, if all that I have heard be true, much has somebody to answer for, that so little has been yet published. The two executors of Burke were, Dr Lawrence of Doctors' Commons, a wellknown M.P. in forgotten days, and Windham, a man too like Burke in compass and elasticity of mind ever to be spoken of in connection with forgotten things. Which of them was to blame I know not. But Mr R. Sharpe, M.P. for I know not what borough, told the following story. Let me pause at this name. R., as the reader will rightly suppose, represented the Christian name which his godfathers and his godmothers had indorsed upon him at the baptismal font. Originally this R. had represented Richard: but when Richard had swelled into portly proportions, had become an adult, and taken his seat in the House of Commons, the Pagan public of London raised him to the rank of River; and thenceforwards R. S. stood for "River Sharpe"- this honorary augmentation of old hereditary name being understood to indicate the aregaνrohoyia (or world-without-ending-ness of his eternal talk); in prophetic anticipation of which the poet Horace is supposed to have composed his two famous lines +

"Rusticus expectat dum defluat amnis at ille

Labitur et labetur in omne volubilis ovum.' 99

This Mr R. Sharpe, by the way, was a man of multitudinous dodges. He could (and he did, if you look into the parliamentary mirrors of those days) make a very neat speech upon occasion, and when time was plentiful, else he was generally hurried by business; for he was a London merchant (in the English sense, observe-not the Scottish), exporting, therefore, to every latitude in countless longitudes; so that his own mer

"Famous lines:"-Of which the following translation was executed, the first line by the late Mr William Cobbett (who hated Sharpe), and the last by Dryden:

"Chaw-bacon loiters till the stream be gone;

Which flows-and, as it flows, for ever shall flow on." But naturalists object (to Horace more properly than to Mr Cobbett) that of all men Chaw-bacon, as a rusticus familiar with all features of the rus, is least likely to make such a mistake as that of waiting for a river to run down. A cit, a townsman bred and born, is what Horace must have meant.

you, Schlosser, which never happened before, in island or in continent, amongst Christians or Pagans, to a writer steeped to his lips in personal politics. What a tilth of intellectual lava must that man have interfused amongst the refuse and scoria of such mouldering party rubbish, to

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cantile letters exhausted his whole power of franking. This made him wear a selfish expression of countenance to that army of letter-writing ladies in whose eyes the final cause of an M.P. was, that he might give franks to his female acquaintances--a matter of some importance when a double letter usually cost you a pretty half-crown, which, and not five shillings, is what the French always mean by an écu. Mr Sharpe was chivalrous, nevertheless, and conceived himself a master in the most insinuating modes of deferential gallantry. But his seat in Parliament cost him exactly a thousand pounds sterling per annum. This sum he had to fetch back by franking, which lucrative privilege he applied naturally to all the heaviest despatches of his own firm. And under such circumstances, where each civility to his fair friends could be put into the scales and weighed in his counting-house, reasonably he neither stood nor understood any nonsense." Usque ad aras-i. e., so far as the ledger permitted—he wished to conduct himself towards women en grand seigneur, or even en prince. But to waste a frank upon their nonsense '-a frank that paid all expenses from the Cornish Scillys northwards to John Groat, Esq., in Caithness-was the high road to bankruptcy. Consequently Mr Sharpe was less popular than else he might have been, with so abundant a treasure of anecdotes, of gossip, and (amongst select friends) of high-flavoured scandal. Him, the said Sharpe, I heard more than once at Wordsworth's say, that one or both of the executors had offered to him (the river) a huge travelling trunk, perhaps an imperial or a Salisbury boot (equal to the wardrobe of a family), filled with Burke's MSS., on the simple condition of editing them, with annotations. An Oxford man, and also the celebrated Mr Christian Curwen, then member for Cumberland, made, in my hearing, the same report. The Oxford man, in particular, being questioned as to the probable amount of MS., lamented that the gods had not made him an exciseman, with the gift of gauging barrels and other repositories; that he could not speak upon oath to the cubical contents; but this he could say, that having stripped up his coat-sleeve, he had endeavoured, by such poor machinery as nature had allowed him, to take the soundings of the trunk, but apparently there were none; with his middle finger he could find ro bottom, for it was stopped by a dense stratum of MS.; below which, you know, other strata might lie ad infinitum. For anything proved to the contrary, the trunk might be bottomless.