to be the best scholar she ever had. After a few years at the free grammar-school of Lichfield, and one year at Stourbridge, he went to Pembroke College, Oxford, at the age of nineteen. Here he did not confine himself to the studies of the place, but indulged in a wide range of miscellaneous reading. He was too poor to take a degree, and accordingly left Oxford without graduating. After acting for some time as a bookseller's hack, he married a Mrs Porter of Birmingham-a widow with £800. With this money he opened a boarding-school, or "academy" as he called it; but he had never more than three scholars-the most famous of whom was the celebrated player, David Garrick. In 1737 he went up to London, and for the next quarter of a century struggled for a living by the aid of his pen. During the first ten years of his London life he wrote chiefly for the 'Gentleman's Magazine.' In 1738 his London— a poem in heroic metre-appeared. In 1747 he began his famous Dictionary; it was completed in 1755; and the University of Oxford conferred on him the honorary degree of M.A. In 1749 he wrote another poem-also in heroic metre-the 'Vanity of Human Wishes.' In 1750 he had begun the periodical that raised his fame to its full height-a periodical to which he gave the name of The Rambler. It appeared twice a-week; and Dr Johnson wrote every article in it for two years. In 1759 he published the short novel called Rasselas: it was written to defray the expenses of his mother's funeral; and he wrote it "in the evenings of a week.” The year 1762 saw him with a pension from the Government of £300 a-year; and henceforth he was free from heavy hack-work and literary drudgery, and could give himself up to the largest enjoyment of that for which he cared most-social conversation. He was the best talker of his time; and he knew everybody worth knowing -Burke, Goldsmith, Gibbon, the great painter Sir Joshua Reynolds, and many other able men. In 1764 he founded the "Literary Club," which still exists and meets in London. Oddly enough, although a prolific writer, it is to another person-to Mr James Boswell, who first met him in 1763—that he owes his greatest and most lasting fame. A much larger number of persons read Boswell's Life of Johnson-one of the most entertaining books in all literature— than Johnson's own works. Between the years 1779 and 1781 appeared his last and ablest work, The Lives of the Poets, which were written as prefaces to a collective edition of the English Poets, published by several London booksellers. He died in 1784.

3. Johnson's earlier style was full of Latin words; his later style is more purely English than most of the journalistic writing of the present day. His Rambler is full of "long-tailed words in osity and

ation;" but his 'Lives of the Poets' is written in manly, vigorous, and idiomatic English. In verse, he occupies a place between Pope and Goldsmith, and is one of the masters in the "didactic school" of English poetry. His rhythm and periods are swelling and sonorous; and here and there he equals Pope in the terseness and condensation of his language. The following is a fair specimen :—

"Of all the griefs that harass the distressed,
Sure the most bitter is a scornful jest;

Fate never wounds more deep the generous heart,
Than when a blockhead's insult points the dart."

4. OLIVER GOLDSMITH (1728-1774), poet, essayist, historian, and dramatist, was born at Pallas, in the county of Longford, Ireland, in the year 1728. His father was an Irish clergyman, careless, goodhearted, and the original of the famous Dr Primrose, in The Vicar of Wakefield. He was also the original of the "village preacher" in The Deserted Village.

"A man he was to all the country dear,

And passing rich with forty pounds a-year."

Oliver was educated at Trinity College, Dublin; but he left it with no fixed aim. He thought of law, and set off for London, but spent all his money in Dublin. He thought of medicine, and resided two years in Edinburgh. He started for Leyden, in Holland, to continue what he called his medical studies; but he had a thirst to see the world—and so, with a guinea in his pocket, one shirt, and a flute, he set out on his travels through the continent of Europe. At length, on the 1st of February 1756, he landed at Dover, after an absence of two years, without a farthing in his pocket. London reached, he tried many ways of making a living, as assistant to an apothecary, physician, reader for the press, usher in a school, writer in journals. His first work was 'An Inquiry into the State of Polite Learning in Europe,' in 1759; but it appeared without his From that date he wrote books of all kinds, poems, and He died in his chambers in Brick Court, Temple, London, in

name.

plays. 1774.

5. Goldsmith's best poems are The Traveller and The Deserted Village,—both written in the Popian couplet. His best play is She Stoops to Conquer. His best prose work is The Vicar of Wakefield, "the first genuine novel of domestic life." He also wrote histories of England, of Rome, of Animated Nature. All this was done as professional, nay, almost as hack work; but

always in a very pleasant, lively, and readable style. Ease, gracê, charm, naturalness, pleasant rhythm, purity of diction-these were the chief characteristics of his writings. "Almost to all things could he turn his hand "-poem, essay, play, story, history, natural science. Even when satirical, he was good-natured; and his Retaliation is the friendliest and pleasantest of satires. In his poetry, his words seem artless, but are indeed delicately chosen with that consummate art which conceals and effaces itself: where he seems most simple and easy, there he has taken most pains and given most labour.

6. EDMUND BURKE (1729-1797) was born at Dublin in the year 1729. He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin; and in 1747 was entered of the Middle Temple, with the purpose of reading for the Bar. In 1765 he was so fortunate as to enter Parliament as member for Wendover, in Buckinghamshire; and he sat in the House of Commons for nearly thirty years. While in Parliament, he worked hard to obtain justice for the colonists of North America, and to avert the separation of them from the mother country; and also to secure good government for India. At the close of his life, it was his intention to take his seat in the House of Peers as Earl Beaconsfield-the title afterwards assumed by Mr Disraeli; but the death of his son, and only child—for whom the honour was really meant and wished-quite broke his heart, and he never carried out his purpose. He died at Beaconsfield in the year 1797. The lines of Goldsmith on Burke, in his poem of "Retaliation," are well known :

"Here lies our good Edmund, whose genius was such
We scarcely can praise it or blame it too much;
Who, born for the universe, narrowed his mind,
And to party gave up what was meant for mankind;
Who, too deep for his hearers, still went on refining,

And thought of convincing while they thought of dining."

7. Burke's most famous writings are Thoughts on the Cause of the present Discontents, published in 1773; Reflections on the French Revolution (1790); and the Letters on a Regicide Peace (1797). His "Thoughts" is perhaps the best of his works in point of style; his "Reflections," are full of passages of the highest and most noble eloquence. Burke has been described by a great critic as "the supreme writer of the century;" and Macaulay says, that "in richness of imagination, he is superior to every orator ancient and modern." In the power of expressing thought in the strongest, fullest, and most vivid manner, he must be classed with Shakespeare

and Bacon-and with these writers when at their best. He indulges in repetitions; but the repetitions are never monotonous; they serve to place the subject in every possible point of view, and to enable us to see all sides of it. He possessed an enormous vocabulary, and had the fullest power over it; 66 never was a man under whose hands language was more plastic and ductile." He is very fond of metaphor, and is described by an able critic as "the greatest master of metaphor that the world has ever seen."

8. EDWARD GIBBON (1737-1794), the second great prose-writer of the second half of the eighteenth century, was born at Putney, London, in 1737. His father was a wealthy landowner. Young Gibbon was a very sickly child-the only survivor of a delicate family of seven; he was left to pass his time as he pleased, and for the most part to educate himself. But he had the run of several good libraries; and he was an eager and never satiated reader. He was sent to Oxford at the early age of fifteen; and so full was his knowledge in some directions, and so defective in others, that he went there, he tells us himself, "with a stock of knowledge that might have puzzled a doctor, and a degree of ignorance of which a schoolboy would have been ashamed." He was very fond of disputation while at Oxford; and the Dons of the University were astonished to see the pathetic "thin little figure, with a large head, disputing and arguing with the greatest ability." In the course of his reading, he lighted on some French and English books that convinced him for the time of the truth of the Roman Catholic faith; he openly professed his change of belief; and this obliged him to leave the University. His father sent him to Lausanne, and placed him under the care of a Swiss clergyman there, whose arguments were at length successful in bringing him back to a belief in Protestantism. On his return to England in 1758, he lived in his father's house in Hampshire; read largely, as usual; but also joined the Hampshire militia as captain of a company, and the exercises and manœuvres of his regiment gave him an insight into military matters which was afterwards useful to him when he came to write history. He published his first work in 1761. It was an essay on the study of literature, and was written in French. In 1770 his father died; he came into a fortune, entered Parliament, where he sat for eight years, but never spoke; and, in 1776, he began his history of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. This, by far the greatest of his works, was not completed till 1787, and was published in 1788, on his fifty-first birthday. His

account of the completion of the work-it was finished at Lausanne, where he had lived for six years-is full of beauty: "It was on the day, or rather night, of June 27, 1787, between the hours of eleven and twelve, that I wrote the last lines of the last page in a summerhouse in my garden. After laying down my pen, I took several turns in a covered walk of acacias, which commands a prospect of the country, the lake, and the mountains. The air was temperate, the sky was serene. The silver orb of the moon was reflected from the waters, and all nature was silent. I will not describe the first emotion of joy on the recovery of my freedom, and perhaps the establishment of my fame. But my pride was soon humbled, and a sober melancholy was spread over my mind by the idea that I had taken an everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion, and that, whatever might be the future fate of my history, the life of the historian must be short and precarious." Gibbon died in 1794, about one year before the birth of another great historian, Grote, the author of the 'History of Greece.'

9. Gibbon's book is one of the great historical works of the world. It covers a space of about thirteen centuries, from the reign of Trajan (98), to the fall of the Eastern Empire in 1453; and the amount of reading and study required to write it, must have been almost beyond the power of our conceiving. The skill in arranging and disposing the enormous mass of matter in his history is also unparalleled. His style is said by a critic to be "copious, splendid, elegantly rounded, distinguished by supreme artificial skill." It is remarkable for the proportion of Latin words employed. While some parts of our translation of the Bible contain as much as 96 per cent of pure English words, Gibbon has only 58 per cent: the rest, or 42 per cent, are words of Latin origin. In fact, of all our great English writers, Gibbon stands lowest in his use of pure English words; and the two writers who come nearest him in this respect are Johnson and Swift. The great Greek scholar, Professor Porson, said of Gibbon's style, that "there could not be a better exercise for a schoolboy than to turn a page of it into English."

10. Poets. The chief poets of the latter half of the eighteenth century belong to a new world, and show very little trace in their writings of eighteenth-century culture, ideas, or prejudices. Most of the best poets who were born in this half of the eighteenth century and began to write in it-such as Crabbe and Wordsworth-are true denizens, in the character of their minds and feelings, of the nineteenth. The greatest poets of the