tinual pecuniary embarrassment, and died unhappy, with a debt of £1000, the existence of which led Johnson to ejaculate, "Was ever poet so trusted before?" He lived a bachelor; and the conclusion seems forced upon us that had he married a woman who could have controlled him, he would have been a happier and, more respectable man, but perhaps have done less for literature than he did.

While Goldsmith was a type and presenter of his age, and while he took no high flights in the intellectual realms, he so handled what the age presented that he must be allowed the claim of originality, both in his poems and in the Vicar; and he has had, even to the present day, hosts of imitators. Poems on college gala-days were for a long time faint reflections of his Traveller, and simple, causal stories of quiet life are the teeming progeny of the Vicar, in spite of the Whistonian controversy, and the epitaph of his living wife.

A few of his ballads and songs display great lyric power, but the most of his poetry is not lyric; it is rather a blending of the pastoral and epic with rare success. His minor poems

are few, but favorites. Among these is the beautiful ballad entitled Edwin and Angelina, or The Hermit, which first appeared in The Vicar of Wakefield, but which has since been printed separately among his poems. Of its kind and class

it has no superior. Retaliation is a humorous epitaph upon his friends and co-literati, hitting off their characteristics with truth and point; and The Haunch of Venison - upon which he did not dine-is an amusing incident which might have happened to any Londoner like himself, but which no one could have related so well as he.

He died in 1774, at the age of forty-five; but his famehis better life is more vigorous than ever. Washington Irving, whose writings are similar in style to those of Goldsmith, has extended and perpetuated his reputation in America by writing his Biography; a charming work, many touches of which seem almost autobiographical, as displaying the resemblance between the writer and his subject.

MACKENZIE. - From Sterne and Goldsmith we pass to Mackenzie, who, if not a conscious imitator of the former, is, at least, unconsciously formed upon the model of Sterne, without his genius, but also without his coarseness: in the management of his narrative, he is a medium between Sterne and Walter Scott; indeed, from his long life, he saw the period of both these authors, and his writings partake of the characteristics of both.

Henry Mackenzie was born at Edinburgh, in August, 1745, and lived until 1831, to the ripe age of eighty-six. He was educated at the University of Edinburgh, and afterwards studied law. He wrote some strong political pamphlets in favor of the Pitt government, for which he was rewarded with the office of comptroller of the taxes, which he held to the day of his death.

THE MAN OF FEELING. In 1771 the world was equally astonished and delighted by the appearance of his first novel, The Man of Feeling. In this there are manifest tokens of his debt to Sterne's Sentimental Journey, in the journey of Harley, in the story of the beggar and his dog, and in somewhat of the same forced sensibility in the account of Harley's death.

In 1773 appeared his Man of the World, which was in some sort a sequel to the Man of Feeling, but which wearies by the monotony of the plot.

In 1777 he published Julia de Roubigné, which, in the opinion of many, shares the palm with his first novel: the plot is more varied than that of the second, and the language is exceedingly harmonious elegiac prose. The story is plaintive and painful: virtue is extolled, but made to suffer, in a domestic tragedy, which all readers would be glad to see ending differently.

"At different times Mackenzie edited The Mirror and The Lounger, and he has been called the restorer of the Essay.

His story of the venerable La Roche, contributed to The Mirror, is perhaps the best specimen of his powers as a sentimentalist: it portrays the influence of Christianity, as exhibited in the very face of infidelity, to support the soul in the sorest of trials the death of an only and peerless daughter. His contributions to the above-named periodicals were very numerous and popular.

The name of his first novel was applied to himself as a man. He was known as the man of feeling to the whole community. This was a misnomer: he was kind and affable; his evening parties were delightful; but he had nothing of the pathetic or sentimental about him. On the contrary, he was humorous, practical, and worldly-wise; very fond of field sports and athletic exercises. His sentiment—which has been variously criticized, by some as the perfection of moral pathos, and by others as lackadaisical and canting - may be said to have sprung rather from his observations of life and manners than to have welled spontaneously from any source within his own heart.

Sterne and Goldsmith will be read as long as the English language lasts, and their representative characters will be quoted as models and standards everywhere: Mackenzie is fast falling into an oblivion from which he will only be resuscitated by the historian of English Literature.

CHAPTER XXIX.

THE HISTORICAL TRIAD IN THE SCEPTICAL AGE.

The Sceptical Age.

David Hume.

History of England.

H

ISTORY presents itself to the student in two forms:

The first is chronicle, or a simple relation of facts and statistics; and the second, philosophical history, in which we use these facts and statistics in the consideration of cause and effect, and endeavor to extract a moral from the actions and events recorded. From pregnant causes the philosophic historian traces, at long distances, the important results; or, conversely, from the present condition of things-the good and evil around him he runs back, sometimes remotely, to the causes from which they have sprung. Chronicle is very

pleasing to read, and the reader may be, to some extent, his own philosopher; but the importance of history as a study is found in its philosophy.

As far down as the eighteenth century, almost everything in history partakes of the nature of chronicle. In that century, in obedience to the law of human progress, there sprang up in England and on the Continent the men who first made chronicle material for philosophy, and used philosophy to teach by example what to imitate and what to shun.

What were the circumstances which led, in the eighteenth century, to the simultaneous appearance of Hume, Gibbon, and Robertson, as the originators of a new school of history?

Some of them have been already mentioned in treating of the antiquarian age. We have endeavored to show how the English literati - novelists, essayists, and poets - have been in part unconscious historians. It will also appear that the professed historians themselves have been, in a great measure, the creatures of English history. The fifteenth century was the period when the revival of letters took place, and a great spur was given to mental activity; but the world, like a child, was again learning rudiments, and finding out what it was, and what it possessed at that present time: it received the new classical culture presented to it at the fall of the lower empire, and was content to learn the existing, without endeavoring to create the new, or even to recompose the scattered fragments of the past. The eighteenth century saw a new revival: the world had become a man; great progress was reported in arts, in inventions, and in discoveries; science began to labor at the arduous but important task of classification; new theories of government and laws were propounded; the past was consulted that its experience might be applied; the partisan chronicles needed to be united and compared that truth might be elicited; the philosophic historian was required, and the people were ready to learn, and to criticize, what he produced.

I have ventured to call this the Sceptical Age. It had other characteristics: this was one. We use the word sceptical in its etymological sense: it was an age of inquiry, of doubt to be resolved. Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau, D'Alembert, and Diderot had founded a new school of universal inquiry, and from their bold investigations and startling theories sprang the society of the illuminati, and the race of thinkers. They went too far: they stabbed the truth as it lay in the grasp of error. From thinkers they became free-thinkers: from philosophers they became infidels, and some of them atheists. This was the age which produced "the triumvirate of British historians who," in the words of Montgomery, "exemplified