Page images
PDF
EPUB
[ocr errors]

which, however, there are not more e than eight or ten, the observations on Dryden's Guiscard and, Sigismonda in N° 68, and the reflections on Literature, in No 122, are the best; the critique on Gray's Elegy, which occupies No 55, is, with the exception of the remark on the last stanza, captious and trifling. Mr. Kelly died in 1777, at the early age of thirty-eight: he was a rapid and voluminous writer; and “soon after his death,” says the author of his life in the General Biographical Dictionary," one of his own comedies, A Word to the Wise, which had been acted but once, being driven from the stage by a mob, because our author sometimes wrote in defence of government, was performed for the benefit of his distressed wife and his infant family. On this occasion, Dr. Samuel Johnson, whose charity is wont to assume a variety of shapes, produced a new prologue. It is almost needless to add, that his lines were heard with the most respectful attention, and dismissed with the loudest ap+plause."*...

[ocr errors]

71

14. THE MEDLEY., Of this work the intention only can be praised; it is a thin octavo, consisting of" thirty-one, essays, on various subjects, presented by the author to one of the Governesses # Vol. 12, p. 698.—Edition of 1784.

Ο

of the Lying-In Hospital, in Newcastle, to be printed for the Benefit of that Charity." It was accordingly published, by subscription, at Newcastle, in 1766; and, the object for which it was written being unequivocally excellent, the number of subscribers was very considerable. I wish the execution had done more justice to the motives of the writer; but, with respect both to style and matter, it falls much below mediocrity.

15. THE WHISPERER; a violent party paper, written in opposition to the Government, under Lord North's administration. The first number appeared on Saturday, February the 17th, 1770; and the hundredth, the last with a number affixed, on January the 11th, 1772. There were four numbers extraordinary.

16. THE SCOTCHMAN. This paper, which embraces the same side in politics as the preceding work, commenced immediately on the decease of the Whisperer, the first number being dated January the 21st, 1772; it was continued every Friday, and, with the Whisperer, is remarkable for little beyond the zeal with which it ran its

course.

17. THE FREEHOLDER. This collection of po

litical essays, was published in Ireland in the year 1772, and in the opinion of Mr. Campbell, "has claims upon the favour of every Briton whose heart is not dead to the feelings which the voice of GENUINE FREEDOM is calculated to inspire.” It is the production of Hugh Boyd, Esq.

18. THE BATCHELOR, a title given to a series of essays published in Dublin, of which the best were reprinted in two volumes duodecimo by Becket, of London. The edition in my possession is called the second, with additions, and is dated in the title page 1773. The work, which is carried on under the assumed name of Jeoffry Wagstaffe, consists of forty-seven miscellaneous essays, and an Appendix including twenty-one numbers on political subjects. There is a large portion of wit and humour in this curious production; and N° 46, containing a political Epistle to Gorges Edmond Howard, Esq. with notes explanatory, critical, and historical, by George Faulkner, Esq. and Alderman, is a keen and most laughable satire on the last-mentioned gentleman, whose notoriety as a consequential printer and bookseller, was, at that time, great.

19. THE TEMPLAR. The essays under this title were written by the celebrated Bibliographer, Mr. Samuel Paterson, who was, perhaps, never ex

celled in the art of arranging and digesting catalogues. The Templar did not extend beyond fourteen numbers, of which the last was published in December 1775; it was chiefly designed as an attack upon the newspapers for advertising ecclesiastical offices, and places of trust under government. Mr. Paterson, at the period of his death, which took place on the 29th of October, 1802, in his seventy-seventh year, was on the point of commencing a volume to be called "Memoirs of the Vicissitudes of Literature în England during the latter half of the Eighteenth Century" a work which, from his minute knowledge of literary history, must have been highly interesting to the republic of letters.

20. THE GENTLEMAN. A third short-lived attempt by Mr. Colman to render our common Newspapers the Vehicle of rational amusement. The Gentleman was originally published in the London Packet; and commencing its very transitory existence on Friday, July 10th, 1775, suddenly expired at the close of the sixth number on December the 4th of the same year. There is reason to think, from the specimens before us, that had the Genius and the Gentleman been continued, they would have reflected more credit on the talents of Mr. Colman than even the Con noisseur, which too frequently indicates the juveni

lity of its conductors. The following observations from the third number of the Gentleman, on the diction of Johnson, and the genius of the English language, are so strikingly just, and so well expressed, that few will regret their introduction: here; more especially as style has been throughout these essays a primary object of attention.

"If an author arises, whose deep learning, and large imagination, struggling for expression equal to his conceptions, tempt him to lengthen his periods, and swell his phraseology;' if an intimate. familiarity with the combinations of a dead language now and then betray him into too wide a deviation from the vernacular idiom; such a writer will have the mortification to see the beauties of his style, distorted by aukward imitation, and his errors (if in him they are errors) made ridiculous by aggravation. The language that, in his masterhand, like a well-tuned instrument, "discourses most eloquent musick," under their management utters nothing but discord. The rattling of their periods and tumidity of their phrases, like the noise of a drum or swell of a bladder, are but symptoms of their wind and emptiness.

[ocr errors]

"Ornament of diction, says Quintilian, though the greatest of beauties, is only graceful, when it follows as it were of itself, not when it is pur

« PreviousContinue »