THE LIFE OF HARTE. THE father of WALTER HARTE was the Rev. Walter Harte, fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford, prebendary of Wales, canon of Bristol, and vicar of St. Mary Magdalen, Taunton, Somersetshire. Refusing to take the oaths after the revolution, which placed a new family on the throne, he relinquished all his preferments, in 1691, and retired to Kentbury in Buckinghamshire, where he died February 10, 1736, aged eighty-five. His son informs us, that when Judge Jeffries came to Taunton assizes in the year 1685, to execute his commission upon the unfortunate persons concerned in Monmouth's rebellion, Mr. Harte, then minister of St. Mary Magdalen's, waited on him in private, and remonstrated much against his severities. The Judge listened to him calmly, and with some attention, and though he had never seen him before, advanced him in a few months to a prebendal stall in the cathedral church of Bristol. I thought,' says Dr. Warton, who has introduced this story in his notes on Pope, the reader might not dislike to hear this anecdote of Jeffries, the only one action of his life that I believe does him any credit.' The time of our poet's birth has not been settled. A writer in the Gentleman's Magazine, fixes it about the year 1707, but an earlier date will correspond better with circumstances. He received his education at Marlborough school. At what time he went to Oxford does not appear, but he took his master's degree June 30, 1720, according to the last edition of the graduates of that university, a clear proof that he must have been born long before 1707. With Pope he acquired an early intimacy, and shared rather more of his friendship than that poet was wont to bestow on his brethren. Pope encouraged his poetical enthusiasm, and inserted many lines in his poems, and Harte repaid the instruction of so distinguished a preceptor, by compliments introduced not without elegance and propriety in his essays on Painting and on Satire, and elsewhere. In 1727, he published a volume of poems, dedicated to the gallant and eccentric earl of Peterborough, who was, as the author acknowledges, the first who took notice of him.' This volume was ushered in by a very numerous list of subscribers, among whom is the name of Alexander Pope, for four copies. In 1730, he pub. lished his essay on Satire, 8vo. and in 1735, the essay on Reason, folio, to which Pope contributed very considerably, although no part of his share can be exactly ascertained, except the two first lines. He afterwards published two sermons, the one entitled the Union and Harmony of Reason, Morality, and revealed Religion, preached at St. Mary's, Oxford, February 27, 1736-7, which excited so much admiration, or curiosity, as to pass through five editions. The other was a fast sermon preached at the same place, January 9, 173940. He was afterwards vice-principal of St. Mary Hall, and held in so much reputation as a tutor, that Lord Lyttleton, who was one of his earliest friends, recommended him to the earl of Chesterfield, as a private and travelling preceptor to his natural son. With this young man, to whom his lordship addressed those letters which have had so much vogue, Mr. Harte travelled from the year |