ordinary life seek to gratify in themselves and their listeners? And both the authors and admirers of such publications, in what respect are they less truants and deserters from their own hearts, and from their appointed task of understanding and amending them, than the most garrulous female chronicler of the goings-on of yesterday in the families of her neighbors and townsfolk ?

I have reprinted the following biographial sketch, partly indeed in the hope that it may be the means of introducing to the reader's knowledge, in case he should not have formed an acquaintance with them already, two of the most interesting biographical works in our language, both for the weight of the matter, and the incuriosa felicitas of the style. I refer to Roger North's Examen, and the Life of his brother, the Lord Keeper Guilford. The pages are all alive with the genuine idioms of our mother-tongue.

A fastidious taste, it is true, will find offence in the occasional vulgarisms, or what we now call slang, which not a few of our writers, shortly after the restoration of Charles II., seem to have affected as a mark of loyalty. These instances, however, are but a trifling drawback. They are not sought for, as is too often and too plainly done by L'Estrange, Collyer, Tom Brown, and their imitators. North never goes out of his way either to seek them or to avoid them; and in the main his language gives us the very nerve, pulse, and sinew of a hearty, healthy, conversational English.

This is my first reason for the insertion of this extract. My other and principal motive may be found in the kindly good-tempered spirit of the passage. But instead of troubling the reader with the painful contrast which so many recollections force on my own feelings, I will refer the character-makers of the present day to the letters of Erasmus and Sir Thomas More to Martin Dorpius, which are commonly annexed to the Encomium Moriæ; and then for a practical comment on the just and affecting sentiments of those two great men, to the works of Roger North, as proofs how alone an English scholar and gentleman will permit himself to delineate his contemporaries even under the strongest prejudices of party spirit, and though employed on the coarsest subjects. A coarser subject than the Chief Justice Saunders can not well be imagined; nor does North use his colors with a

sparing or very delicate hand; and yet the final impression is that of kindness.

EXTRACT FROM NORTH'S LIFE OF THE LORD KEEPER GUILFORD.

The Lord Chief Justice Saunders succeeded in the room of Pemberton. His character and his beginning were equally strange. He was at first no better than a poor beggar boy, if not a parish foundling, without known parents or relations. He had found a way to live by obsequiousness in Clement's Inn, as I remember, and courting the attorney's clerks for scraps. The extraordinary observance and diligence of the boy made the society willing to do him good. He appeared very ambitious to learn to write; and one of the attorneys got a board knocked up at a window on the top of a stair-case; and that was his desk, where he sat and wrote after copies of court and other hands the clerks gave him. He made himself so expert a writer that he took in business, and earned some pence by hackney-writing. And thus by degrees he pushed his faculties, and fell to forms, and, by books that were lent him, became an exquisite entering clerk; and, by the same course of improvement of himself, an able counsel, first in special pleading, then at large; and after he was called to the bar, had practice in the King's Bench court equal to any there. As to his person he was very corpulent and beastly; a mere lump of morbid flesh. He used to say, "By his troggs" (such a humorous way of talking he affected), "none could say he wanted issue of his body, for he had nine in his back." He was a fetid mass, that offended his neighbors at the bar in the sharpest degree. Those, whose ill-fortune it was to stand near him, were confessors, and, in summer-time, almost martyrs. This hateful decay of his carcass came upon him by continual sottishness; for to say nothing of brandy, he was seldom without a pot of ale at his nose, or near him. That exercise was all he used; the rest of his life was sitting at his desk or piping at home; and that home was a tailor's house in Butcher Row, called his lodging, and the man's wife was his nurse or worse; but by virtue of his money, of which he made little account, though he got a great deal, he soon became master of the family; and, being no changeling, he never removed,

* Edit. 1826, vol. ii. p. 41.-Ed.

but was true to his friends, and they to him, to the last hour of his life.

So much for his person and education. As for his parts, none had them more lively than he. Wit and repartee in an affected rusticity were natural to him. He was ever ready, and never at a loss; and none came so near as he to be a match for Serjeant Maynard. His great dexterity was in the art of special pleading, and he would lay snares that often caught his superiors who were not aware of his traps. And he was so fond of success for his clients, that, rather than fail, he would set the court hard with a trick for which he met sometimes with a reprimand, which he would wittily ward off, so that no one was much offended with him. But Hale could not bear his irregularity of life; and for that, and suspicion of his tricks, used to bear hard upon him in the court. But no ill usage from the bench was too hard for his hold of business, being such as scarce any could do but himself. With all this, he had a goodness of nature and disposition in so great a degree, that he may be deservedly styled a philanthrope. He was a very Silenus to the boys, as, in this place I may term the students of the law, to make them merry whenever they had a mind to it. He had nothing of rigid or austere in him. If any near him at the bar grumbled at his stench, he ever converted the complaint into content and laughing with the abundance of his wit. As to his ordinary dealing, he was as honest as the driven snow was white; and why not, having no regard for money, or desire to be rich? nature and condescension, there was not his fellow. I have seen him for hours and half-hours together, before the court sat, stand at the bar with an audience of students over against him, putting of cases and debating so as suited their capacities, and encouraged their industry. And so in the Temple, he seldom moved without a parcel of youths hanging about him, and he merry and jesting with them.

And for good

It will be readily conceived that this man was never cut out to be a presbyter, or any thing that is severe and crabbed. In no time did he lean to faction, but did his business without offence to any. He put off officious talk of government or politics with jests, and so made his wit a catholicon or shield, to cover all his weak places or infirmities. When the court fell into a steady course of using the law against all kinds of offenders, this man

was taken into the king's business; and had the part of drawing and perusal of almost all indictments and informations that were then to be prosecuted, with the pleadings thereon, if any were special; and he had the settling of the large pleadings in the quo warranto against London. His Lordship had no sort of conversation with him but in the way of business and at the bar; but once, after he was in the king's business, he dined with His Lordship, and no more. And there he showed another qualification he had acquired, and that was to play jigs upon a harpsichord; having taught himself with the opportunity of an old virginal of his landlady's; but in such a manner, not for defect, but figure, as to see him were a jest. The king, observing him to be of a free disposition, loyal, friendly, and without greediness or guile, thought of him to be the chief justice of the King's Bench at that nice time. And the ministry could not but approve of it. So great a weight was then at stake, as could not be trusted to men of doubtful principles, or such as any thing might tempt to desert them. While he sat in the court of King's Bench, he gave the rule to the general satisfaction of the lawyers. But his course of life was so different from what it had been, his business incessant, and withal crabbed, and his diet and exercise changed, that the constitution of his body, or head rather, could not sustain it, and he fell into an apoplexy and palsy, which numbed his parts; and he never recovered the strength of them. He outlived the judgment in the quo warranto; but was not present otherwise than by sending his opinion by one of the judges, to be for the king, who at the pronouncing of the judgment, declared it to the court accordingly, which is frequently done in like cases.

ESSAY III.

Proinde si videbitur, fingant isti me latrunculis interim animi causa lusisse, aut si malint, equitasse in arundine longa. Nam quæ tandem est iniquitas, cum omni vitæ instituto suos lusus concedamus, studiis nullum omnino lusum permittere: maxime si nuga seria ducant, atque ita tractentur ludicra, ut ex his aliquanto plus frugis referat lector non omnino naris obesæ quam ex quorundam tetricis ac splendidis argumentis? ERASMUS.*

They may pretend, if they like, that I amuse myself with playing at fox and goose, or, if they prefer it, that I ride the cock-horse on my grandam's crutch. For is it not, I ask, very unfair, when every trade and profession is allowed its own sport and travesty, not to extend the same permission to literature;-especially if trifles are so handled, that a reader of tolerable quickness may occasionally derive from them more food for profitable reflection than from many a work of grand or gloomy argument?

IRUS, the forlorn Irus, whose nourishment consisted in bread and water, whose clothing was of one tattered mantle, and whose bed of an armful of straw, this same Irus, by a rapid transition of fortune, became the most prosperous mortal under the sun. It pleased the gods to snatch him at once out of the dust and to place him by the side of princes. He beheld himself in the possession of incalculable treasures. His palace excelled even the temple of the gods in the pomp of its ornaments; his least sumptuous clothing was of purple and gold, and his table might well have been named the compendium of luxury, the summary of all that the voluptuous ingenuity of men had invented for the gratification of the palate. A numerous train of admiring dependents followed him at every step; those to whom he vouchsafed a gracious look were esteemed already in the high road of fortune, and the favored individual who was permitted to kiss his hand appeared to be the object of common envy. The name of Irus sounding in his ears an unwelcome memento and perpetual reproach of his former poverty, he for this reason named himself

* Præf. ad Moria Encom.