suasion." Macaulay praised them to excess, declaring that there were in the world no compositions which approached nearer to perfection, and that "Northanger Abbey" was worth "all Dickens and Pliny put together." These judgments, to be sure, are found in his Diary, where, of course, he did not weigh his words very carefully; but praise almost equally high is bestowed upon them in his published works, and he for some time intended writing an essay on Miss Austen to show how highly he esteemed her genius. Miss Austen's finished humour and clear-cut sketches of everyday life were as likely to attract Macaulay as her conventionality and absence of passion were likely to repel Charlotte Brontë. "Why do you like Miss Austen so very much?" wrote the latter to G. H. Lewes. "I am puzzled on that point.... I had not seen 'Pride and Prejudice' till I read that sentence of yours, and then I got the book; and what did I find? An accurate daguerreotyped portrait of a commonplace face; a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers; but no glance of a bright vivid physi ognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck. I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen in their elegant but confined houses." In her chosen walk of fiction, truthful pictures of the ordinary middle-class society we see around us, Miss Austen has no equal; and the extent to which she succeeds in interesting us in her annals of humdrum, commonplace English life is the highest tribute to her genius.

DR. JOHNSON AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES.

Johnson; Goldsmith; Burke; Boswell; Junius;
Hume; Robertson; Gibbon.

HE accession of George III. to the throne in 1760 marks an important era in English political life. The young King, a man of good moral character, mediocre abilities, and inflexible obstinacy, determined to be the real, and not merely the titular sovereign of the country, to break in pieces the oligarchy which had borne. sway in the name of his two predecessors, and to assert what he considered his just rights. How he succeeded in carrying out his purpose; how administration after administration was broken up, either because they would not obey his dictates, or because their policy was marred by the intrigues of the so-called "King's friends;" how his strenuous persistence in an illegal course elevated Wilkes into a popular hero of the first magnitude, and brought about demonstrations of public feeling that almost shook the throne; how his adherence to a foolish and wicked policy caused the American colonies to throw off their allegiance to Great Britain and exhausted the resources of the country, are facts familiar to all. In curious contrast to the troubled state of politics is the placid and anti-revolutionary spirit which animated literature during the earlier part of the reign of George III. Through all the many political changes and political crises of the first twenty-five years of his reign, the stream of English literature flowed quietly on in its accus

tomed channel; the influence of the school of Addison and Pope still remained paramount; poetry and criticism were still fettered by artificial restrictions and conventionality. Here and there, it is true, a voice might be heard that seemed to prophesy the advent of a new literary era; but such voices were few and far between, and were little attended to or rudely condemned in an age that was not yet prepared for them. It was not till the time of the greatest event in modern history-the French Revolution-that the adherents of the so-called romantic school, appealing to feelings that then more or less influenced the minds of all classes, began to establish themselves as a new and great power in literature.

The most prominent figure in the literature of the period with which we are now dealing is that of Samuel Johnson, and round him its history centres. Several of his contemporaries were greater writers than he, but none was so looked up to; none possessed his strong and intensely marked character; and none was so exactly typical of his age alike in his good and in his bad qualities. Born in 1709, the son of a bookseller in Lichfield, he early imbibed from his father those Tory and High Church prejudices which clung to him throughout life. Very early, too, were noticeable his other distinguishing charac teristics-a bodily frame massive and powerful but diseased; a strong propensity to indolence united with an extraordinary capacity for strenuous exertion when compelled to work; a memory capacious, retentive, and exact; a spirit proud yet humble, irascible but forgiving, and combining outward harshness with a deep and genuine tenderness of heart. When at school, though his shortness of sight deprived him of the power of distinguishing himself in field-sports, his strength of intellect and character made him occupy among his classfellows somewhat the same position as he afterwards held in London literary society. Certain of his companions used to attend him in the morning and carry him to school in a species of triumphal procession. "Sir," he once said to Boswell, speaking of his school-days, "they never thought to raise me by comparing me to any one; they never said 'Johnson is as good

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Samuel Johnson.

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In his sixteenth

He then loitered

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very un

& scholar as such a one,' but 'Such a one is as good a scholar as Johnson;' and this was said but of one, but of Lowe: and I do not think he was as good a scholar." year his school education came to an end. at home for two years, "in a state," says Boswell, worthy of his uncommon abilities." His time was not, however, altogether wasted. In his desultory way he read largely, not voyages and travels, but all literature, sir," he told Boswell, "all ancient writers, all manly;" and tried his hand at poetical translations and original verses, not without success. In his nineteenth year he was entered at Pembroke College, Oxford, where he was very proud, very poor, and very miserable. His father was not wealthy enough to bear the expenses of his education at the University, so he must have received assistance elsewhere-from whom is not quite certain. Conscious of great abilities but crushed by poverty, Johnson during hist University career, which lasted about three years, was far from happy. He left Oxford in 1731, without taking a degree. Almost the only distinction won by him was the praise he received for a Latin version of Pope's "Messiah," of which Pope himself declared, "The writer of this poem will leave it doubtful in after-times which was the original, his verses or mine."

In the same year in which Johnson left the University his father died, leaving his affairs in a state approaching to insolvency. Johnson was now compelled to do something to earn a living. At first he tried teaching—that rough apprenticeship through which so many men of letters have had to pass, with pain, but not, perhaps, altogether without profit. The few months during which he was thus engaged he always afterwards looked back to with a kind of shuddering horror. Then he turned his thoughts towards literature, "that general refuge for the destitute," as Carlyle once called it. Settling in Birmingham in 1733, he contributed essays to a local newspaper, and translated from the Latin Lobo's "Voyage to Abyssinia.” It lies before us as we write, a volume of about four hundred pages of some two hundred and eighty words each. For

this work, which was published in 1735, Johnson received the munificent sum of five guineas. It is remarkable that during his whole career, whether working as a Grub Street hack or whether writing in a blaze of popularity, the most distinguished author of his time, Johnson seems to have received less for his productions than almost any of his fellow literary craftsmen.

In 1736 Johnson married. The object of his choice was a widow named Porter, forty-eight years of age, and described as a coarse, vulgar, ugly woman, who painted herself, and who was fantastic both in dress and in manners. It is said (with what degree of truth is not known for certain) that she possessed a fortune of some £800. Johnson's shortness of sight concealed from him her bodily defects, and there is every reason to believe that he was speaking nothing but the truth when he declared, "Sir, it was a love match on both sides.” His wife, whatever may have been her faults, appears to have had a genuine admiration of Johnson's intellectual powers; and we can easily imagine how sweet praise must then have been to the "uncourtly scholar," whose appearance was far from prepossessing, and who had at that time done nothing to show the vast powers that lay concealed beneath his rough and uncouth exterior. On her death, which happened in 1752, Johnson's grief was terrible; and to the end of his life he never ceased to cherish with fond regret the remembrance of his "dear Tetty."

As literature did not appear likely to be sufficiently remunerative to afford sustenance to himself and his wife, Johnson, in 1736, determined to again try schoolmastering. He opened a boarding-school at Edial, in Staffordshire, and announced his intention of instructing young gentlemen in the Greek and Latin languages. The enterprise was an unfortunate one. Johnson was ill-gifted to be a preceptor; and neither his manners nor his appearance were such as to conciliate parents. Few pupils came, and the school was abandoned. Along with David Garrick, Johnson, with little or no money, but with the manuscript of his tragedy "Irene" in his pocket, in 1737 set out for London.

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