term implies a multitude of recondite virtues, which it defied the poverty of their mother tongue to express.

'Better to shun the bait than struggle in the snare.' Every one must feel it an unsatisfactory thing if he goes to buy spectacles, and has dust thrown in his eyes by the optician. For the rest, pebbles are dearer than glass without being better, except that they are difficult to break and scratch: the mounting is a matter of taste, and not of science; and all that is needed besides is health to wear the spectacles, and money to pay for them-particulars in which it is beyond our power to afford assistance.

George Hakewell, a worthy who flourished in the early part of the seventeenth century, published a treatise on the Vanitie of the Eye,' which he composed for the comfort of a gentlewoman bereaved of her sight; but however deep may have been his conviction of the vanity of the gentlewoman's eyes, we question if he would have been willing to lose his own, or, having lost them, would have found his moral medecine' an adequate remedy for the mortifying mischief.' All who are not of Mr. Hakewell's stoical school should take care of their sight while they have it, and be cautious of throwing their capital away in the desire to obtain an exorbitant interest. The organs of vision are affected by constitution and habit; and until every man is cast in the same mental and physical mould it is vain to attempt to lay down general rules. Persons, whose business lies with morbid eyes, are apt to consider the world an aviary of owls, and put a prohibition upon practices which, millions pursue without injury to their sight and to the great advantage of everthing else. Fontenelle was told that coffee was a slow poison. Very slow, indeed,' he replied, for it has been eighty years in killing me.' The prudent plan is to pay attention to sensations, and not neglect their warning in the vain hope that it may be neglected with impunity. Pepys returned from the play, his eyes mighty bad,' and recorded that it taught him by a manifest experiment' that the candles of the theatre made them sore; but his passion to gaze on the fair who caused his care' still brought him back to gaze on the light which hurt his sight, and there-when he was expecting total blindness, which was almost, he said, the same as to see himself step into the grave-he sat a suffering spectator, unable to conceal his pain:

And winked and looked, winked and looked,
Winked and looked, and winked again.

Overwrought eyes are often tasked from better motives, and more urgent needs, but often also from want of knowledge and thought,—

from

from ignorance that excessive fatigue, unlike the transitory pictures of vision, sets its stamp in the substance of the organ. With a vizard over his face, and two tubes projecting from his eyes to defend them from the light, Pepys-looking more a monster than a man-was obliged, that he might further deepen the shade, to resign his accustomed seat in front of the window, and take up his position on the other side of the table. He relates the change with strange satisfaction, and rejoices that now the fire in winter will not trouble his back.' This was cold comfort. If his calamity had permitted it, he might have had a screen at his back, instead of on his face, and been neither troubled by fire nor light. He was reasoning, however, after the event, and was right to console himself the best he could; but those who have still the issue in their own hands may be confident that the present advantage of squandering sight is about the same, compared to the future loss, as the advantage to Pepys of losing the use of his eyes that he might shift his chair from the hearth.

ART. III.—Dr. Johnson; his Religious Life and his Death. By the author of Doctor Hookwell,' The Primitive Church in its Episcopacy,' &c. 8vo., pp. 528. 1850.

AMONGST the audacities of book making we remember nothing so bold as Doctor Hookwell.' The religious and literary world do not need to be reminded that the vicarage of Leeds is worthily filled by Dr. Walter Farquhar Hook, well-known for his various theological publications, and for the higher merit of an intelligent and indefatigable discharge of his pastoral duties. This eminent divine, the author of Doctor Hookwell' has made the hero of a three volumed novel, with no other veil than the syllable added to his name, but prefixing his initials-W. F.-and subjoining in full letters his description as Vicar of Leeds. This strange indelicacy of bringing forward a living clergyman as the hero of a work of fiction becomes practically less offensive from the extreme absurdity and insipidity of the performance. It is foreign to our present purpose to inquire whether there are any doctrines attributed to Doctor Hookwell that Dr. Hook need disclaim, though we can have no doubt both his modesty and good taste must be offended by the very gross and clumsy panegyrics pronounced on his shadow. But what concerns us on this occasion is that the mode in which that work was concocted is evidently repeated in this new one :-namely, that the author being in the habit of keeping a common-place

mon-place book, took on the former occasion Dr. Hook, and now takes Dr. Johnson as the text on which he may spin out into a bulky publication all the scattered and frequently worthless scraps of his desultory reading;-secondly, that this is done by one who, extensive as is his common-placing may be, seems incredibly ignorant or negligent of matters that everybody else knows;thirdly, that he has entirely and, as it seems, intentionally misrepresented a leading and important circumstance of that which forms the professed object of his work.

Of his expertness in the noble art of tumefaction our readers will see, that to avoid the same error-our examples must be sparing. The Chapter headed

"His Superstition'

is a collection of anecdotes concerning superstitions, and belief in witches, fairies, ghosts, &c. in The Ancient Greeks and Romans' —'Alexander the Great Pliny the Haunted House at Athens the Poet Prudentius'- Sir M. Hale - Dr. Cotton Mather of Massachusets '-'a waggoner in the county of Salop -a second waggoner in Shropshire'-'a Lady in the Isle of Mull' Mrs. Pallister '-'a Manx servant maid and a hare'— other Manx enthusiasts,' &c., &c. And having spent two pages in these heterogeneous, and most of them ludicrously trivial stories, he at length remembers Dr. Johnson

'But let us come to what may be called Dr. Johnson's superstitions.' And after another dozen pages of similar rambling-barely rational-he winds up the whole chapter of Johnson Superstitions' with

'Johnson was not superstitious ;'

which is very like the celebrated chapter of Horrebow's Iceland, which he might have found in Boswell

'CHAPTER LXXII.-CONCERNING SNAKES.

'There are no snakes to be met with on the island.'

So also, because Dr. Johnson wrote a few epitaphs-none of them very remarkable, but all full of grave and dignified feeling --we have a chapter of

'Epitaphs ;'

in which, after slightly mentioning four or five of Johnson's, our author says,

'Perhaps in no one department of writing has the varied talent of mankind been more displayed than in the writing of epitaphs. Some inscriptions are of a witty, or serio-comic nature; some laudatory of the dead, at the expense of the characters of the living; some enigmatical; some expressing lamentations in true poetry. We find

specimens

specimens of these sorts largely abounding in Grecian and Roman, as well as in English literature. Let a few examples, from modern sources, be given.'-p. 439.

And then he proceeds to copy out of his common-place book some couple of dozen epitaphs, of which the two or three that were worth copying even into a scrap-book, are to be found in every collection, and hardly one of the rest would deserve admission into any. What do our readers think of the following as illustrations of the Religious life and death of Doctor Johnson:Reputed to be inscribed on a tombstone in the churchyard of Llandinabo, in Herefordshire:

Templum, Bellum, Spelunca,

De Terra in Arcû.

Reader! you must at once be given the meaning of this, for probably you would rack your brains in vain. Here it is:

Or of this:

CHURCH-WAR-DEN

OF LLAND-IN-A-BO.'-p. 443.

'Here lies I, at the Church door:
Here lies I, because I's poor!

The farther you go, the more you pay :
Here lies I, as warm as they !'-p. 441.

Or of his quoting as an epitaph six out of eighteen lines of a doggerel libel which appeared in the periodicals of the day (1747), against (which our author does not seem to have suspected) the celebrated Vice Admiral Lestock?

By a similar process, whenever Johnson, or any one else, happens in Boswell's great repository of table-talk to mention any name that our author can find, either in his own common-place book or the Biographical Dictionaries, he seldom fails to favour us with a digression, shorter or longer, concerning not only the person thus named, but any other persons that he can hook well or ill into the same category. For instance, Johnson saw Dr. Blacklock twice in his life, at two breakfasts: on the first occasion, Johnson says, with a warmth accounted for by Blacklock's misfortune, 'Dear Dr. Blacklock, I am glad to see you.' This casual expression of Johnson's sympathy and civility our author exaggerates

into

'Dr. Johnson showed much friendship to the blind poet and divine;' and then runs off into six pages about blind poets, in which he takes occasion to inform the world that Milton also was a blind poet, and that a certain Dr. Lucas was a blind divine. And he further, on Lucas's authority, acquaints us that

Homer, Appius, Cn. Aufidius, Didymus, Walkup, Père Jean l'Aveugle, &c., all of them eminent for their service and usefulness' were as blind as Lucas.-p. 268,

But

But let it not be supposed that he always makes these digressions without due apology and justification. For instance, when mentioning the curious fact that Dr. Johnson had a mother, he takes occasion to say that other people also have had mothers and even fathers, and have found them very useful helps, particularly to their first steps in life :—

'Here we may be permitted-["prodigious bold request"]—to observe the usefulness of parental education. How many children, before escaping from the nursery, have learned lessons of virtue from a mother or a father, that have never been forgotten!'-p. 11. And then he goes on to enumerate several distinguished persons who, like Johnson,' were under obligations to their mothers—for instance, Adam Clarke, and Lord Byron :

-'but of all maternal patterns the mother of St. Augustin ranks the first.'-p. 11.

though if our author knows no more of Saint Monica than he evidently does of poor Mrs. Byron, his praise of a maternal pattern is not worth much. He further thinks it necessary to quote the very passage in which the Rev. Robert Cecil' does not hesitate to confess that he was much indebted to his MOTHER,' and even 'felt the LOSS of his FATHER' (p. 11). The capitals are in the original, and mark very properly the singularity and importance of the facts they refer to.

These scanty specimens must suffice to explain our first objection, namely, that Johnson's name is made the peg on which to hang up or rather the line on which to hang out-much hacknied sentimentality, and some borrowed learning, with an awful and overpowering quantity of twaddle and rigmarole.

Our second, though not applying so extensively, is, as regards any reliance on the compiler's authority, still more serious. To begin with his anachronisms. He calls Addison 'the contemporary of Johnson.' It is true they were alive together for a few years. So were William III. and George II. for a longer period, but who ever thought of calling them contemporaries? He thinks

'probably that excellent paper, in the Rambler, on capital punishments, was written with the fate of poor Dodd in his view.'-p. 188. The Rambler terminated early in 1752. Dodd's misfortune was in 1777, just a quarter of a century later.

6

He censures the 'fulsome eulogy' of Pope's dedication of Parnell's Poems to Lord Oxford, although it was during his lordship's descent from the height of political power' (p. 259). Lord Oxford's fall, as every body but this writer knows, was in 1714, and Pope's verses, about the most feeling and elegant that he ever wrote, were in 1721.

He