of Richard Porson, who had already given proof of his unrivalled acuteness in his Letters to Archdeacon Travis on the subject of the controverted passage about the three witnesses in the First Epistle of John, published in 1790, and who, in the union of extensive and exact knowledge of the Greek language, has had few superiors among modern scholars. Porson, upon whom the mantle of the great Bentley seemed to have descended, and who might perhaps have left a name as illustrious as his if unfortunate habits of life had not wasted as well as probably shortened his days, died at the age of forty-nine in 1808. Other active labourers during this period in the department of classical scholarship were Dr. Thomas Randolph, who died Bishop of London in 1813; Dr. Thomas Burgess, the late Bishop of Salisbury; and the late Bishop of Peterborough, Dr. Herbert Marsh, whose varied acquirements and literary performances embraced politics, theology, and German and Oriental learning, as well as Greek and Latin. The last thirty or forty years of the eighteenth century formed, moreover, the great age of commentatorship upon Shakspeare, and also upon some other portions of our old poetry. Dr. Johnson's first edition of Shakspeare, in eight volumes, appeared in 1765; George Steevens's edition of the Twenty Old Quartos, in four volumes, in 1766; Edward Capel's edition of all the Plays, in ten volumes, in 1768, but his Notes, in three volumes quarto, not till 1783, two years after the author's death; Sir Thomas Hanmer's in six quartos, in 1771; that by Johnson and Steevens, in ten octavos, in 1773; their second edition in 1778; the Supplement to that edition by Edmund Malone, in two volumes, in 1780;

Isaac Reed's first edition (sometimes called the third edition of Johnson and Steevens) in 1786; Malone's first edition, in ten volumes, in 1790; Isaac Reed's second edition, in twenty-one volumes, in 1803; Malone's second, in sixteen volumes, in 1816. We have already mentioned the two volumes on Ireland's forgeries (to the second of which, it may be here stated, an 'Appendix' was added in 1800), published by George Chalmers, the laborious author of many other works, generally written in the most fantastic style, on finance, economical science, and the politics of the day, as well as of various historical and antiquarian compilations, the most important of which, however, his Life of Mary Queen of Scots, and his Caledonia (unfinished), were not published till after the commencement of the present century, as well as the editor of Allan Ramsay, Sir David Lyndsay, and others of our old poets. Following, also, in the path struck out by Warton and Percy, John Pinkerton, Joseph Ritson, David Macpherson, George Ellis, and others investigated, with more or less learning and acuteness, the history of our early poetry, or edited different portions of it.

In Moral Speculation, political, philosophical, and theological, among the principal names belonging to this age of our literature are, besides Burke, Paine, Godwin, Mary Wolstonecraft, Paley, Bishops Watson, Horsely, and Porteus, Priestley, Price, Dr. Geddes, Dr. Campbell of Aberdeen, Dr. MacKnight of Edinburgh, Dr. Blair, &c. Of Thomas Paine's three dexterous and smartly-written works, the first, his Common Sense,' was published in 1776; the next, his Rights of Man,' in 1791-2; the last, his Age of Reason,' in 1794-5.

Mary Wolstonecraft's more declamatory' Vindication of the Rights of Women' came forth immediately after the First Part of Paine's Rights of Man-not unlike the hollow but imposing thunder of the artillery following the flash. Godwin's more systematic exposition of the new philosophy (not destined ever to grow old), his Enquiry concerning Political Justice, and its Influence on general Virtue and Happiness,' appeared in 1793. Bishop Watson, who, besides five volumes of Chemical Essays' and a variety of charges, sermons, addresses, and other occasional publications, had defended the cause of religion against the subtle learning of Gibbon in his 'Apology for Christianity' in 1776, twenty years later wrote his Apology for the Bible' in answer to the bold ignorance of Paine. All these performances, however, attacks and defences alike, having served each its temporary purpose, are already passed, or are fast passing, away into forgetfulness. Not so with Archdeacon Paley's works: his Elements of Moral and Political Philosophy,' published in 1785; his Hora Paulinæ,' in 1790; his View of the Evidence of Christianity,' in 1794; and his Natural Theology,' in 1802—all of which are characterised by a matureness in the conception, and a care and sterling ability in the execution, that will make it long before they are superseded. Finally, we ought not to omit to notice that the first edition of Mr. Malthus's celebrated Essay on the Principle of Population' was published in 1798 in an octavo pamphlet, although it differed hardly more in size than it did in substance from the next edition, expanded into a quarto volume, which appeared in 1803.

SPIRIT OF THE ENGLISH LITERATURE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

It would almost seem as if there were something in the impressiveness of the great chronological event formed by the termination of one century and the commencement of another that had been wont to act with an awakening and fructifying power upon literary genius in this island. Of the three last great sunbursts of our literature, the first, making what has been called the Elizabethan age of our dramatic and other poetry, threw its splendour over the last quarter of the sixteenth and the first of the seventeenth century; the second, famous as the Augustan age of Anne, brightened the earlier years of the eighteenth; the nineteenth century was ushered in by the third. At the termination of the reign of George III., in the year 1820, there were still among us, not to mention minor names, at least nine or ten poetical writers, each (whatever discordance of opinion there may be about either their relative or their absolute merits) commanding universal attention from the reading world to whatever he produced :-Crabbe (to take them in the order of their seniority), Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Scott, Campbell, Moore, Byron, Shelley, and perhaps we ought to add Keats, though rather for what he promised to do if he had lived than for what he had actually done. Many other voices there were from which divine words were often heard, but these were oracles to whom all listened, whose inspiration all men acknowledged. It is such crowding and clustering of remarkable writers that has chiefly distinguished the great literary ages in every country: there are eminent

writers at other times, but then they come singly or in small numbers, as Lucretius, the noblest of the Latin poets, did before the Augustan age of Roman literature; as our own Milton and Dryden did in the interval between our Elizabethan age and that of Anne; as Goldsmith, and Burke, and Johnson, and then Cowper, and Burns, in twos and threes, or one by one, preceded and as it were led in the rush and crush of our last revival. For such single swallows, though they do not make, do yet commonly herald the summer; and accordingly those remarkable writers who have thus appeared between one great age of literature and another have mostly, it may be observed, arisen not in the earlier but in the later portion of the interval-have been not the lagging successors of the last era, but the precursors of the next. But, however it is to be explained or accounted for, it does indeed look as if Nature in this, as in other things, had her times of production and of comparative rest and inactivity-her autumns and her winters—or, as we may otherwise conceive it, her alternations of light and darkness, of day and night. After a busy and brilliant period of usually some thirty or forty years, there has always followed in every country a long term during which the literary spirit, as if over-worked and exhausted, has manifested little real energy or power of life, and even the very demand and taste for the highest kind of literature, for depth, and subtlety, and truth, and originality, and passion, and beauty, has in a great measure ceased with the supply-a sober and slumbrous twilight of imitation and mediocrity, and little more than mechanical dexterity in bookmaking, at least with the generality of the most popular and applauded writers. After all, the re