valley, in which 'Rasselas' resides, is sketched with poetical feeling. The habitual melancholy of Johnson is apparent in this work-as when he nobly apostrophises the river Nile- Answer, great Father of waters! thou that rollest thy floods through eighty nations, to the invocations of the daughter of thy native king. Tell me if thou waterest, through all thy course, a single habitation from which thou dost not hear the murmurs of complaint.' When Johnson afterwards penned his depreciatory criticism of Gray, and upbraided him for apostrophising the Thames, adding coarsely, Father Thames has no better means of knowing than himself,' he forgot that he had written 'Rasselas.'

picture that walks out of its frame, or a skeleton's ghost in a hermit's cowl. Where Walpole has improved on the incredible and mysterious, is in his dialogues and style, which are pure and dramatic in effect, and in the more delicate and picturesque tone which he has given to chivalrous manners. Walpole was the third son of the Whig minister, Sir Robert Walpole; was born in 1717, became fourth Earl of Orford 1791, and died in 1797; having not only outlived most of his illustrious contemporaries, but recorded their weaknesses and failings, their private history and peculiarities, in his unrivalled correspondence.

CHARLES JOHNSTONE.

In 1760 The Adventures of a Guinea, by CHARLES JOHNSTONE, amused the town by its sketches of contemporary satire. A second edition was published the same year, and a third in 1761, when the author considerably augmented the work. Johnstone published other novels, which are now utterly forgotten. He went to India in 1782, and was a proprietor of one of the Bengal newspapers. He died in 1800. As Dr Johnson (to whom the manuscript was shown by the bookseller) advised the publication of The Adventures of a Guinea,' and as it experienced considerable success, the novel may be presumed to have possessed superior merit. It exhibits a variety of incidents, related in the style of Le Sage and Smollett, but the satirical portraits are overcharged, and the author, like Juvenal, was too fond of lashing and exaggerating the vices of his age. One of the critics of the novel says, 'it leads us along all the gloomy, and foul, and noisome passages of life, and we escape from it with the feeling of relief with which we would emerge from a vault in which the air was loaded with noxious vapours.' To such satirists who only paint

The baser sides of literature and life, may be contrasted the healthy tone of feeling evinced by Fielding and Smollett, and the playful sarcastic wit of Sterne.

HORACE WALPOLE.

In 1764 HORACE WALPOLE revived the Gothic romance in his interesting little story, The Castle of Otranto, which he at first published anonymously, as a work found in the library of an ancient Catholic

HowWalpole

family in the north of England, and printed at Naples in the black letter in 1529. 'I wished it to be believed ancient,' he said, and almost everybody was imposed upon.' The tale was so well received by the public, that a second edition was soon called for, to which the author prefixed his name. Though designed to blend the two kinds of romance-the ancient, in which all was imagination and improbability, and the modern, in which nature is copied, the peculiar taste of Walpole, who loved to gaze on Gothic toys through Gothic glass,' and the nature of his subject, led him to give the preponderance to the antique. The ancient romances have nothing more incredible than a sword which required a hundred men to lift it; a helmet, that by its own weight forces a passage through a court-yard into an arched vault, big enough for a man to go through; a

Strawberry Hill, near Twickenham; the residence of Horace Walpole.

In the spring of 1766 came out a tale of about equal dimensions with Walpole's Gothic story, but as different in its nature as an English cottage or villa, with its honey-suckle hedge, wall-roses, neat garden, and general air of beauty and comfort, is from a gloomy feudal tower, with its dark walls, moat, and drawbridge. We allude to Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield. Though written two years before, and sold for sixty guineas, the bookseller had kept it back, doubtful of success, till the publication of The Traveller had given Goldsmith a name. Its reception by the public must have been an agreeable surprise. The first edition was published on the 27th of March, a second was called for in May, and a third in August of the same year. What reader could be insensible to the charms of a work so full of kindliness, benevolence, taste, and genius? By that species of mental chemistry which he understood as well as Sterne, Goldsmith extracted the essence of character, separating from it what was trite and worthless, and presenting in incredibly small space a finished representation, bland, humorous, simple, absurd, or elevated, as the story might require. The passions were equally at his bidding within that confined sphere to which he limited their range; and a life of observation and reading (though foolish in action) supplied him with a preg nancy of thought and illustration, the full value of