fund of anecdote, great diversity of subject, and boundless amusement. The early life of Rousseau, on the contrary, was passed in obscure poverty. He had never known, till the period when first impressions are never effaced, or prejudices incapable of being corrected, the better classes of society; and when, in the full noontide of his renown, he obtained an entrée into the salons of Paris, he appeared as a singular and bizarre character, as a species of wild, unaccountable being, at once the wonder and the shame of literature. All the early prejudices of the poor engraver, of the Genevese petty tradesman, clung to a mind naturally morose and morbidly suspicious; and the simplest act of ordinary civility, or the most ordinary observation, sometimes excited his ill-humour, -sometimes his contempt,-sometimes his envy, and a hatred, which was of the most undying and unforgiving character. This excessive sensibility, this furious misanthropy and mistrust of his own kind, operated first to cloud, and finally to pervert his reason, and rendered him at once, notwithstanding his genius and his eloquence, an object of pity and contempt to all mankind. Nothing could gratify or tranquillise the diseased mind of this irritable and unhappy man,―no good-nature could appease, no kindness soften him. His vanity was boundless and insatiable, and was only less horrible than his entire and absolute heartlessness. At bottom, Jean Jacques was a hypocrite and a villain; and in

every quarrel which he ever had, the impracticable, unmanageable, and unhappy man was ever in the wrong. So far are we from thinking, with Lord B., that this detestable being was ill-used by Voltaire, that we go the whole length of believing, that he merited all the ill things which Voltaire has said of him.

What can be more base and infamous than this man's conduct to Madame d'Epinay and Diderot? It was worthy of the hypocritical monster who dilated, in pages of the purest and most inimitable diction, on the ecstasy of virtuous sympathy, and the charms of natural affection, but who never felt the noblest and most natural passion of the human soul,-the pure, fond, and devoted

love of a parent for his offspring. The man who could send child after child to the foundling hospital could have nothing human about him but the form. The most charitable supposition is, undoubtedly, that the man was a monomaniac. How else

are we to account for his conduct to Hume? The following is Lord B.'s character of the Nouvelle Héloïse :

"This was the origin of the Nouvelle Héloïse,- of all his works the most renowned, and of all, except his posthumous Memoires,' the best, though certainly very greatly overrated both by the public opinion and by his own. He describes the delight he had in composing it as approaching to an actual enjoyment, though it only consisted in the pleasures of an indulged fancy. He wandered all day in the forest of Montmorency; he had his pencil and note-book with him: Theresa walked calmly by. In the afternoon, returning home, he wrote what had occurred on the finest paper, sanded with gold and blue dust, bound with bright-coloured ribands; and he read at night the produce of the day to the mother, who entered not into it with any comprehension, much less tasted it with any relish, but said, Monsieur, cela est bien beau,' and the daughter, who entered not into it at all, but sighed and sobbed when she saw him appear to be moved.

"To deny the great merit of this work would be absurd; the degree in which it has been overrated, owing chiefly to its immorality, and in part also to its vices of taste, not unnaturally leads to its depreciation when the critic soberly and calmly exercises his stern and ungrateful office. But the conception of the piece is, for its simplicity and nature, happy, with the exception which may be taken especially to the unnatural situations of the lovers on meeting after Julie's marriage, to the extravagant as well as dull deathbed scene, and to the episode, the adventures of the English lord. The descriptions of natural scenery are admirable, far superior to the moral painting; for Rousseau's taste in landscape was excellent, while with his moral taste, his perverted sentiments, so wide from truth and nature, always interfered. The interest of the story is quite well sustained, and the turns in it are well represented by the successive letters. The passions are vividly painted, and as by one who had felt their force, though they are not touched with a delicate pencil. The feelings are ill rendered, partly because they are mixed with the perverted sentiments of the ill-regulated, and even diseased mind, in which they are hatched

into life, partly because they are given in the diction of rhetoric, and not of nature. The love which he plumes himself on exhibiting beyond all his predecessors, nay, as if he first had portrayed, and almost alone had felt it, is a mixture of the sensual and the declamatory, with something of the grossness of the one, much of the other's exaggeration. As this is the main object of the book, therefore, the book must be allowed to be a failure. It charmed many; it enchanted both the Bishops Warburton and Hurd, as we see published in their published correspondence; it still holds a high place among the works which prudent mothers withhold from their daughters, and which many daughters contrive to enjoy in secret; it makes a deep impression on hearts as yet little acquainted with real passion, and heads inexpe rienced in the social relations; it assuredly has no great charms either for the experienced or the wise, and is alike condemned by a severe taste in composi tion, and a strict judgment in morals.

"It would be endless to support these remarks by examples; but let us only take, as the fairest test by which to judge the Nouvelle Héloïse, its author's own favourite piece, the Elysée,' and the 'Voyage on the Lake,' at the end of Part IV. They are letters XI. and XVII. of that Part; and he denounces a woe upon whosoever can read them without feeling his heart melt in tenderness.

This is undoubtedly true; true, also, is the character of the seventeenth letter. It is rhetoric, not eloquence; declamation, not the true expression of sentiment; and, we agree

with Lord Brougham, the work is greatly overrated. But who can overrate the magical diction,-the pure, the flowing, the translucent style of the "Confessions ?" In this picture of the baseness of the basest of human hearts, we find vices the most hateful and most revolting; persons and things the most odious, unnatural, and repulsive; yet such is the marvellous charm of the diction, such the magic of the language, that we forget the baseness of the author, and are spell-bound by the witchery which he exercises over us. Lord B. remarks:

"There is no work in the French language than the Confessions' of which the style is more racy, and, indeed, more classically pure. But its diction is idiomatical as well as pure. As if he had lived long enough away from Gene va to lose not only the provincialisms of that place, but also to lose all its pedantry and precision, he writes both with the accuracy and elegance of a Frenchman, and with the freedom of wit and of genius, even of humour and drollery; for the picture of the vulgar young man who supplanted him with Madame de Warens shews no mean power of carica. ture; and the sketches of his own ludi. crous situations, as at the concert he gave in the professor's house at Lausanne, shew the impartiality with which he could exert this power at his own proper cost and charge. The subject is often tiresome; it is almost always his own sufferings, and genius and feelings; al ways, of course, but of that no complaint can be justly made, of his own adven tures; yet we are carried irresistibly along, first of all by the manifest truth and sincerity of the narrative which the fulness of the humiliating confessions at every step attests, and then, and chiefly, by the magical diction,—a diction so idiomatical, and yet so classical, so full of nature and yet so refined by art, so exquisitely graphic without any effort, and so accommodated to its subject without any baseness, that there hardly ex ists another example of the miracles which composition can perform. The I subject is not only wearisome, from its sameness; but, from the absurdity of the author's conduct, and opinions, and feelings, it is revolting; yet on we go, enchained, and incapable of leaving it, how

"Now, the greater part of the first (Letter XI.) is mere description of place; it is landscape-painting, not history-painting; and, with the exception of an extremely unnatural reprimand, given by M. de Walmar to St. Preux, for speaking of the shrubbery where he and Julie used to ramble, and into which, since her marriage, she never went, there is really not one touch of sentiment in the whole; unless, indeed, it can be reckoned such, that on revisiting the Elysée next morning, when he expected to be melted with seeing the walks she had made and used, the flowers she had made and used, the flowers she had planted, &c., he recollects the terrible reprimand of the evening before, and no longer can think of any thing except the happiness of a future state. All this is well written, but it is mere rhetoric; the sentiments are cold, they are unnatural; the reprimand of yesterday never would have stifled the passion of to-day. The last effect that this letter, filled with admirable description of a garden and an aviary, could ever produce, is assuredly that of melting the heart in tenderness; and, as far as this first letter goes, the woe denounced in the Confessions' must attach on all who read it."

often soever we may feel irritated, and all but enraged. The subject is not only wearisome generally, revolting frequently, but it is oftentimes low, vulgar, grovelling, fitted to turn us away from the contemplation with aversion, even with disgust: yet the diction of the great magician is our master; he can impart elegance to the most ordinary and mean things, in his description of them; he can elevate the lowest, even the most nasty ideas, into dignity by the witchery of his language."

Voltaire was eminently a man of the world; Rousseau was eminently a man not of the world. The one charmed by the light grace, the flexibility, and the elegant versatility of his mind; the other by his pathos and his eloquence. Wit, and pleasantry, and satire, were the weapons of Voltaire; pathos and passion the instruments of Rousseau. The in

fluence of Voltaire has been more universal; while that of Rousseau has been, though less extensive, more deep and profound. The one has had hundreds of thousands of admirers, while the other has created more fervid and enthusiastic disciples. Of neither one nor the other, however, has Lord B. told us any thing new; and his style is so clumsy and vicious, and his arrangement so faulty, that these lives will not add to his reputation as an author. There are ten lives in the volume selected, without any regard to time and place,--Voltaire, Rousseau, Hume, Robertson, Black, Watt, Priestley, Cavendish, Davy, and Samson.

The life of Robertson, is, undoubtedly, the best executed. His kinsman thus sums up his estimate of his character as an author:

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"His language was correct, and purely English, avoiding both learned words, and foreign phraseology, and Scottish

expressions; but his speech was strongly tinged with the Scottish accent. His voice I well remember, nor was it easy to forget it; nothing could be more pleasing. It was full, and it was calm; but it had a tone of heartiness and sincerity which I hardly ever knew in any other. He was in person above the middle size; his features were strongly marked; his forehead was high and open; the expression of his mouth was that of repose, of meditation, and of sweetness at the same time. The portrait, by Sir Joshua Reynolds, is a striking likeness. The only particulars of his manners and person which I recollect are his cocked hat, which he always wore, even in the country; his stately gait,

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particularly in a walk which he loved to frequent in the woods at Brougham, where I attended him once while he visited there, and in which he slowly recited sometimes Latin verses, sometimes Greek; a very slight guttural accent in his speech, which gave it a peculiar fulness; and his retaining some oldfashioned modes of address, as using the word 'madam' at full length; and, when he drank wine with any woman, adding, My humble service to you.'

With this extract we must conclude. It is very evident, Lord B.'s habits as a speaker have given to his style a clumsiness and cumbrousness, an involution and a redundancy, little favourable either to clearness, grace, or elegance. But it may be well doubted, whether under anythe most favourable-circumstances his lordship could have become an elegant writer. In the House of Lords, above all, in his encounter with "plain John," he is infinitely amusing; but not even the "laughter much" which he provokes on these occasions is any fitting counterpoise for the infliction of his ponderous volume-a volume which will not, we predict, long survive the session in which it has appeared.

THE CURATE'S VOLUME OF poems.

CHAPTER THE SIXTH.

A LONG residence among his rustic parishioners had gradually, and unknown to himself, tinctured our worthy curate's style of speaking with somewhat of the egotistic air commonly called "laying down the law," a habit so often displayed with ludicrous pomposity by pedagogues, small country-gentlemen, and others who are debarred from frequent intercourse with their equals or superiors. It is sometimes quite refreshing to witness the stupid wonderment with which such gentry will gape and stare when the correctness of any of their previously undisputed dicta is a matter of question, and how they will look round and snort like a

frightened, much-enduring quadruped, that has trespassed out of bounds and got he knows not where. Now any thing like prosing was quite out of the line of Counsellor Hunter's sharp "give-and-take" manner in conversation. Dreamy theories, vague speculations, and "long passages that lead to nothing," or to worn-out conclusions, were things held by him in utter abomination. He was wont to say, "I am not at all obliged to any gentleman for endeavouring to convince me that two and two make four ;" and for problematic opinions, he, like the Great Duke of our own day, was "one of the few men who did not trouble himself about matters over which he had no control," thus, as it were, husbanding his mental powers for the energetic performance of whatever he might take in hand.

On the Saturday in question it was his intention to probe the intellectual faculties of the man to whose care he was about to intrust his only and motherless son, before they were introduced to each other; and, therefore, as the youth was to arrive in the course of the evening, he deemed

that a sufficient reason for entertaining his guest alone at dinner, during

times a little surprised to find himself entangled in a sort of crossexamination, got up, perhaps, for the purpose of trying his temper as well as his intellect. If so, his temper stood the ordeal better than did that of the counsellor when his guest, towards the close of their sitting, fell into the prolix strain before alluded to, and delivered himself of certain dusky apprehensions concerning the consequences of the great increase of the metropolis, proceeded to quote Queen Elizabeth and others respecting "the head becoming too large for the body," and then expressed his own wonder at where the inhabitants came from into the new

streets, and how they found the
means of living there.

"Live upon each other," exclaimed
his host. "Knock at any door you
like, and you'll find somebody who,
in some way, supplies the wants of
others, while others supply his. Take
this square, for instance, a new one.
My neighbours on either side are
merchants, over the way is a brewer,
another is a banker, I am a lawyer,
and so on all round; all needful, in
some way, to each other. Well,
here we are where fields were before,
and we have brought families and ser
vants, which must be fed, clothed, &c.
Our wants increase the trade of the
neighbourhood, the increase of trade
increases rents, excites emulation and
speculation. New streets appear,
new wants, &c. &c. A rule-of-three
sum-as the demand is for houses, &c.
so will be the supply in proportion."

"But," observed Mr. Meadows, thoughtfully, "the extent of the me tropolis is already so great thatthat really I have been endeavouring to guess at what point they may leave off building."

"Don't trouble yourself about the locality; the point of time will be when the demand ceases. Ha! there's Charles." And, starting from his

which all passed off well. Then, by seat, the fond parent made toward

degrees, the salient and retiring points of either character became more apparent. Mr. Meadows was sometimes startled at the abrupt, decisive manner of his host, and some

the door, forgetful of all else but his

son.

They met in the hall. There was a brief whispering; it seemed as though the youth were unwilling to