superstructure of the theory which they are | tion-of commendation much colder than what rearing escapes their vigilance. Yet they are he has bestowed on the Creation of that por blind to the obvious unsoundness of the found- tentous bore, Sir Richard Blackmore. Gray ation. It is the same with some eminent law-was, in his dialect, a barren rascal. Churchill yers. Their legal arguments are intellectual was a blockhead. The contempt which he felt prodigies, abounding with the happiest analo- for the trash of Macpherson was indeed just; gies and the most refined distinctions. The but it was, we suspect, just by chance. He principles of their arbitrary science being once despised the Fingal for the very reason which admitted, the statute-book and the reports be- led many men of genius to admire it. He deing once assumed as the foundations of juris- spised it, not because it was essentially comprudence, these men must be allowed to be monplace, but because it had a superficial air perfect masters of logic. But if a question of originality. arises as to the postulates on which their whole He was undoubtedly an excellent judge of system rests, if they are called upon to vindi- compositions fashioned on his own principles. cate the fundamental maxims of that system But when a deeper philosophy was requiredwhich they have passed their lives in study- when he undertook to pronounce judgment on ing, these very men often talk the language of the works of those great minds which "yield savages or of children. Those who have list- homage only to eternal laws"-his failure was ened to a man of this class in his own court, ignominious. He criticised Pope's Epitaphs exand who have witnessed the skill with which cellently. But his observations on Shakspeare's he analyzes and digests a vast mass of evi- plays and Milton's poems seem to us as wretchdence, or reconciles a crowd of precedents ed as if they had been written by Rymer himwhich at first sight seem contradictory, scarce-self, whom we take to have been the worst crily know him again when, a few hours later, tic that ever lived.

they hear him speaking on the other side of Some of Johnson's whims on literary subWestminster Hall in his capacity of legisla-jects can be compared only to that strange, tor. They can scarcely believe that the paltry quirks which are faintly heard through a storm of coughing, and which cannot impose on the plainest country gentleman, can proceed from the same sharp and vigorous intellect which had excited their admiration under the same roof and on the same day.

nervous feeling which made him uneasy if he had not touched every post between the Mitre tavern and his own lodgings. His preference of Latin epitaphs to English epitaphs is an instance. An English epitaph, he said, would disgrace Smollett. He declared that he would not pollute the walls of Westminster Abbey Johnson decided literary questions like a with an English epitaph on Goldsmith. What lawyer, not like a legislator. He never exa- reason there can be for celebrating a British mined foundations where a point was already writer in Latin which there was not for coverruled. His whole code of criticism rested on ing the Roman arches of triumph with Greek pure assumption, for which he sometimes gave inscriptions, or for commemorating the deed a precedent or an authority, but rarely troubled | of the heroes of Thermopyla in Egyptian hiehimself to give a reason drawn from the na-roglyphics, we are utterly unable to imagine. ture of things. He took it for granted that the On men and manners-at least, on the men kind of poetry which flourished in his own and manners of a particular place and a partime, which he had been accustomed to hear ticular age-Johnson had certainly looked with praised from his childhood, and which he had a most observant and discriminating eye. His himself written with success, was the best kind remarks on the education of children, on marof poetry. In his biographical work he has riage, on the economy of families, on the rules repeatedly laid it down as an undeniable pro- of society, are always striking, and generally position that, during the latter part of the seven-sound. In his writings, indeed, the knowledge teenth century and the earlier part of the eight-of life which he possessed in an eminent deeenth, English poetry had been in a constant gree is very imperfectly exhibited. Like those progress of improvement. Waller, Denham, Dryden, and Pope had been, according to him, the great reformers. He judged of all works of the imagination by the standard established among his own contemporaries. Though he allowed Homer to have been a greater man than Virgil, he seems to have thought the Eneid a greater poem than the Iliad. Indeed he well might have thought so, for he preferred Pope's Iliad to Homer's. He pronounced that, after Hoole's translation of Tasso, Fairfax's would hardly be reprinted. He could see no merit in our fine old English ballads, and always spoke with the most provoking contempt of Percy's fondness for them. Of all the great original works which appeared during his time Richardson's novels alone excited his admiraon. He could see little or no merit in Tom Jones, in Gulliver's Travels, or in Tristram Shandy. To Thomson's Castle of Indolence be vouchsafed only a line of cold commenda

unfortunate chiefs of the middle ages, who were suffocated by their own chainmail and cloth of gold, his maxims perish under that load of words, which was designed for their ornament and their defence. But it is clear, from the remains of his conversation, that he had more of that homely wisdom which nothing but experience and observation can give, that any writer since the time of Swift. If he had been content to write as he talked, he might have left books on the practical art of living superior to the Directions to Servants.

Yet even his remarks on society, like his re marks on literature, indicate a mind at least as remarkable for narrowness as for strength. He was no master of the great science of hu man nature. He had studied, not the genus man, but the species Londoner. Nobody was ever so thoroughly conversant with all the forms of life, and all the shades of moral and intellectual character, which were to be seen

from Islington to the Thames, and from Hyde- | over him in conversation. He pronounced Park corner to Mile-end green. But his phi- them, also, to be an indelicate people, because losophy stopped at the first turnpike gate. a French footman touched the sugar with his Of the rural life of England he knew nothing; fingers. That ingenious and amusing travel. and he took it for granted that everybody who ler, M. Simond, has defended his countrymen lived in the country was either stupid or mise- very successfully against Johnson's accusa rable. "Country gentlemen," said he, "must tion, and has pointed out some English prac be unhappy; for they have not enough to keep tices, which, to an impartial spectator, would their lives in motion." As if all those peculiar seem at least as inconsistent with physical habits and associations, which made Fleet cleanliness and social decorum as those which Street and Charing Cross the finest views in Johnson so bitterly reprehended. To the sage, the world to himself, had been essential parts as Boswell loves to call him, it never occurred of human nature. Of remote countries and to doubt that there must be something eternally past times he talked with wild and ignorant and immutably good in the usages to which he presumption. "The Athenians of the age of had been accustomed. In fact, Johnson's reDemosthenes," he said to Mrs. Thrale, "were marks on society beyond the bills of mortality, a people of brutes, a barbarous people." In are generally of much the same kind with conversation with Sir Adam Ferguson he used those of honest Tom Dawson, the English footsimilar language. "The boasted Athenians," man of Dr. Moore's Zeluco. "Suppose the he said, "were barbarians. The inass of every King of France has no sons, but only a daughpeople must be barbarous, where there is no ter, then, when the king dies, this here daughprinting." The fact was this: he saw that a ter, according to that there law, cannot be made Londoner who could not read was a very stupid queen, but the next near relative, provided he and brutal fellow: he saw that great refine- is a man, is made king, and not the last king's ment of taste and activity of intellect were daughter, which, to be sure, is very unjust. rarely found in a Londoner who had not read The French footguards are dressed in blue, much; and because it was by means of and all the marching regiments in white, which books that people acquired almost all their has a very foolish appearance for soldiers; knowledge in the society with which he was and as for blue regimentals, it is only fit for acquainted, he concluded, in defiance of the the blue horse or the artillery." strongest and clearest evidence, that the human Johnson's visit to the Hebrides introduced mind can be cultivated by means of books him to a state of society completely new to alone. An Athenian citizen might possess him: and a salutary suspicion of his own devery few volumes; and even the largest library ficiencies seems on that occasion to have to which he had access might be much less crossed his mind for the first time. He convaluable than Johnson's bookcase in Bolt fessed, in the last paragraph of his Journey, Court. But the Athenian might pass every that his thoughts on national manners were the morning in conversation with Socrates, and thoughts of one who had seen but little; of might hear Pericles speak four or five times one who had passed his time almost wholly in every month. He saw the plays of Sophocles cities. This feeling, however, soon passed and Aristophanes; he walked amidst the away. It is remarkable, that to the last he enfriezes of Phidias and the paintings of Zeuxis; tertained a fixed contempt for all those modes he knew by heart the choruses of Eschylus; of life and those studies, which lead to emanhe heard the rhapsodist at the corner of the cipate the mind from the prejudices of a parstreet reciting the Shield of Achilles, or the ticular age or a particular nation. Of foreign Death of Argus; he was a legislator conver- travel and of history he spoke with the fierce sant with high questions of alliance, revenue, and boisterous contempt of ignorance. "What and war; he was a soldier, trained under a does a man learn by travelling? Is Beauclerk liberal and generous discipline; he was a the better for travelling? What did Lord judge, compelled every day to weigh the ef- Charlemont learn in his travels, except that fect of opposite arguments. These things were there was a snake in one of the pyramids of in themselves an education; an education Egypt?" History was, in his opinion, to use eminently fitted, not indeed, to form exact or the fine expression of Lord Plunkett, an old profound thinkers, but to give quickness to the almanac: historians could, as he conceived, perceptions, delicacy to the taste, fluency to claim no higher dignity than that of almanacthe expression, and politeness to the manners. makers; and his favourite historians were But this Johnson never considered. An Athe- those who, like Lord Hailes, aspired to no nian who did not improve his mind by read-higher dignity. He always spoke with con. ing, was, in his opinion, much such a person as a Cockney who made his mark; much such a person as black Frank before he went to school, and far inferior to a parish-clerk or a printer's devil.

His friends have allowed that he carried to a ridiculous extreme his unjust contempt for foreigners. He pronounced the French to be a very silly people-much behind us-stupid, ignorant creatures. And this judgment he formed after having been at Paris about a month, during which he would not talk French, for fear of giving the natives an advantage

tempt of Robertson. Hume he would not even read. He affronted one of his friends for talk ing 'to him about Catiline's conspiracy, and declared that he never desired to hear of the Punic War again as long as he lived.

Assuredly one fact, which does not directly affect our own interests, considered in itself, s no better worth knowing than another fact. The fact that there is a snake in a pyramid, or the fact that Hannibal crossed the Alps by the Great St. Bernard, are in themselves as unprofitable to us as the fact that there is a green blind in a particular house in Threadneedle

street, or the fact that a Mr. Smith comes into | of those strong plain words, Anglo-Saxon of the city every morning on the top of one of the Norman French, of which the roots lie in the Blackwall stages. But it is certain that those inmost depths of our language; and that he who will not crack the shell of history will never get at the kernel. Johnson, with hasty arrogance, pronounced the kernel worthless, because he saw no value in the shell. The real use of travelling to distant countries, and of studying the annals of past times, is to preserve men from the contraction of mind which those can hardly escape, whose whole communion is with one generation and one neighbourhood, who arrive at conclusions by means of an induction not sufficiently copious, and who therefore constantly confound exceptions with rules, and accidents with essential properties. In short, the real use of travelling, and of studying history, is to keep men from being what Tom Dawson was in fiction, and Samuel Johnson in reality.

on the canvass of Reynolds. There are the spectacles of Burke and the tall thin form of Langton; the courtly sneer of Beauclerk and the beaming smile of Garrick; Gibbon tapping his snuff-box, and Sir Joshua with his trumpet in his ear. In the foreground is that strange figure which is as familiar to us as the figures of those among whom we have been brought up-the gigantic body, the huge massy face, seamed with the scars of disease; the brown coat, the black worsted stockings, the gray wig with a scorched foretop; the dirty hands, the nails bitten and pared to the quick. We see the eyes and mouth moving with convulsive twitches; we see the heavy form rolling; we hear it puffing; and then comes the "Why, sir!" and the "What then, sir?" and the "No, sir!" and the "You dont see your way through the question, sir!"

What a singular destiny has been that of this remarkable man! To be regarded in his own age as a classic, and in ours as a compa nion-to receive from his contemporaries that full homage which men of genius have in general received only from posterity-to be more intimately known to posterity than other men are known to their contemporaries! That kind of fame which is commonly the most transient, is, in his case, the most durable. The reputation of those writings, which he probably expected to be immortal, is every day fading; while those peculiarities of manner, and that careless table-talk, the memory of which, he probably thought, would die with him, are likely to be remembered as long as the English language is spoken in any quarter of the globe.

LORD NUGENT'S MEMORIALS OF HAMPDEN.

[EDINBURGH REVIEW, 1831.]

moirs must be considered as Memoirs of the history of England; and, as such, they well deserve to be attentively perused. They contain some curious facts, which, to us at least, are new, much spirited narrative, many judicious remarks, and much eloquent declamation.

We have read this book with great pleasure, though not exactly with that kind of pleasure which we had expected. We had hoped that Lord Nugent would have been able to collect, from family papers and local traditions, much new and interesting information respecting the ife and character of the renowned leader of the Long Parliament, the first of those great We are not sure that even the want of inEnglish commoners, whose plain addition of formation respecting the private character of Mister, has, to our ears, a more majestic sound Hampden is not in itself a circumstance as than the proudest of the feudal titles. In this strikingly characteristic as any which the hope we have been disappointed; but assuredly most minute chronicler-O'Meara, Las Cases, not from any want of zeal or diligence on the Mrs. Thrale, or Boswell himself-ever recordpart of the noble biographer. Even at Hamp-ed concerning their heroes. The celebrated den, there are, it seems, no important papers relative to the most illustrious proprietor of that ancient domain. The most valuable memorials of him which still exist, belong to the family of his friend, Sir John Eliot. Lord Eliot has furnished the portrait which is engraved for this work, together with some very interesting letters. The portrait is undoubtedly an original, and probably the only original now in existence. The intellectual forehead, the mild penetration of the eye, and the inflexible resolution expressed by the lines of the mouth, sufficiently guaranty the likeness. We shall probably make some extracts from the letters. They contain almost all the new information that Lord Nugent has been able to procure, respecting the private pursuits of the great man whose memory he worships with an enthusiastic, but not an extravagant, veneration.

The public life of Hampden is surrounded by no obscurity. His history, more particularly from the beginning of the year 1640 to his death, is the history of England. These me

* Some Memorials of John Hampden, his Party, and his Times. By LORD NUGENT. 2 vols. 8vo. London. 1831.

Puritan leader is an almost solitary instance of a great man who neither sought nor shunned greatness; who found glory only because glory lay in the plain path of duty. During more than forty years, he was known to his country neighbours as a gentleman of cultivated mind, of high principles, of polished address, happy in his family, and active in the discharge of local duties; to political men, as an honest, industrious, and sensible member of Parlia ment, not eager to display his talents, stanch to his party, and attentive to the interests of his constituents. A great and terrible crisis came. A direct attack was made, by an arbitrary government, on a sacred right of Englishmen, on a right which was the chief security for all their other rights. The nation looked round for a defender. Calmly and unostentatiously the plain Buckinghamshire Es quire placed himself at the head of his countrymen, and right before the face, and across the path of tyranny. The times grew darker and more troubled. Public service, perilous, arduous, delicate, was required; and to every service, the intellect and the courage of this wonderful man were found fully equal. He became a debater of the first order, a most

The story of his early life is soon told. He was the head of a family which had been sex tled in Buckinghamshire before the Conquest. Part of the estate which he inherited had been bestowed by Edward the Confessor on Baldwyn de Hampden, whose name seems to indicate that he was one of the Norman favourites of the last Saxon king. During the contest between the houses of York and Lancaster, the Hampdens adhered to the party of the Red Rose, and were consequently persecuted by Edward the Fourth, and favoured by Henry the Seventh. Under the Tudors, the family was great and flourishing. Griffith Hampden, high sheriff of Buckinghamshire, entertained Elizabeth with great magnificence at his seat. His son, William Hampden, sate in the Parliament which that queen summoned in the year 1593. William married Elizabeth Cromwell, aunt of the celebrated man who afterwards governed the British islands with more than regal power; and from this marriage sprang John Hampden.

dexterous manager of the House of Commons, | that hatred itself could find no blemish on his a negotiator, a soldier. He governed a fierce memory. and turbulent assembly, abounding in able men, as easily as he had governed his family. He showed himself as competent to direct a campaign as to conduct the business of the petty sessions. We can scarcely express the admiration which we feel for a mind so great, and, at the same time, so healthful and so well proportioned; so willingly contracting itself to the humblest duties; so easily expanding itself to the highest; so contented in repose; so powerful in action. Almost every part of this virtuous and blameless life, which is not hidden from us in modest privacy, is a precious and splendid portion of our national history. Had the private conduct of Hampden afforded the slightest pretence for censure, he would have been assailed by the same blind malevolence which, in defiance of the clearest proofs, still continues to call Sir John Eliot an assassin. Had there been even any weak part in the character of Hampden, had his manners been in any respect open to ridicule, we may be sure that no mercy would have been shown to him by the writers of Charles's faction. He was born in 1594. In 1597 his father Those writers have carefully preserved every died, and left him heir to a very large estate. little circumstance which could tend to make After passing some years at the grammar their opponents cdious or contemptible. They school of Thame, young Hampden was sent, have told us that Pym broke down in a speech, at fifteen, to Magdalen College, in the Univerthat Ireton had his nose pulled by Hollis, that sity of Oxford. At nineteen, he was admitted the Earl of Northumberland cudgelled Henry a student of the Inner Temple, where he made Martin, that St. John's manners were sullcu, himself master of the principles of the English that Vane had an ugly face, that Cromwell law. In 1619 he married Elizabeth Symeon, had a red nose. They have made themselves a lady to whom he appears to have been fondmerry with the canting phrases of injudiciously attached. In the following year he was zealots. But neither the artful Clarendon nor the scurrilous Denham could venture to throw the slightest imputation on the morals or the manners of Hampden. What was the opinion Of his private life during his early years, entertained respecting him by the best men of little is known beyond what Clarendon has his time, we learn from Baxter. That eminent told us. "In his entrance into the world,” person eminent not only for his piety and his says that great historian, "he indulged him. fervid devotional eloquence, but for his mode- self in all the license in sports, and exercises, ration, his knowledge of political affairs, and and company, which were used by men of his skill in judging of characters-declared in the most jolly conversation." A remarkable the Saint's Rest, that one of the pleasures which change, however, passed in his character. he hoped to enjoy in Heaven was the society" On a sudden," says Clarendon, "from a life of Hampden. In the editions printed after the of great pleasure and license, he retired to exrestoration, the name of Hampden was omit-traordinary sobriety and strictness, to a more ted. "But I must tell the reader," says Baxter, reserved and melancholy society." It is proba "that I did blot it out, not as changing my ble that this change took place when Hampopinion of the person. Mr. John den was about twenty-five years old. At that Hampden was one that friends and enemies age he was united to a woman whom he loved acknowledged to be most eminent for pru- and esteemed. At that age he entered into dence, piety, and peaceable counsels, having political life. A mind so happily constituted the most universal praise of any gentleman as his, would naturally, under such circumthat I remember of that age. I remember a stances, relinquish the pleasures of dissipation moderate, prudent, aged gentleman, far from for domestic enjoyments and public duties. him, but acquainted with him, whom I have heard saying, that if he might choose what person he would be then in the world, he would be John Hampden." We cannot but regret that we have not fuller memorials of a man, who, after passing through the most severe temptations by which human virtue can be ried, after acting a most conspicuous part in a revolution and a civil war, could yet deserve such praise as this from such authority. Yet the want of memorials is surely the best proof

returned to Parliament by a borough which has in our time obtained a miserable celebrity, the borough of Grampound.

His enemies have allowed that he was a man in whom virtue showed itself in its mildest and least austere form. With the morals of a Puritan, he had the manners of an accomplished courtier. Even after the change in his habits, "he preserved," says Clarendon, "his own natural cheerfulness and vivacity, and, above all, a flowing courtesy to all men." These qualities distinguished him from most of the members of his sect and his party; and, in the great crisis in which he afterwards took