a has no love, on condition that he purchases | boys, watching horses, recount, round her freedom. The poor loveless wife literally night-fire in the steppes, the various superpines away before your eyes, in the author's stitions of the country, that is full of poetry simple narrative. Two little episodes, the and racy with nationality. Scattered through "Village Doctor" and the "Village Lovers," the book, too, there are portraits of individuare charming as idyls, irrespective of their als, each representing a class, of the same. value as pictures of manners; and the "Rus- order as two or three we have already exsian Hamlet" has a peculiar humor of its tracted; and thus, on arriving at the close, own, thoroughly national. Unfortunately, it the reader has become insensibly possessed is too long for extract. The Dwarf Kaciane with almost every phase of Russian life. The is, in a literary point of view, a new cha- French translator, M. Ernest Charrière, has racter; and there is a chapter in which some performed his difficult task with great skill. JOHN WILSON CROKER. WITH A PORTRAIT. THE RIGHT HON. JOHN WILSON CROKER | Trafalgar;" "The Battle of Talavera;" a was born in the county of Galway, Ireland, in 1780, but is of English descent. His father was surveyor-general in Ireland, and was a man of ability. The son was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, was called to the bar in 1802, and in 1807, having been retained as counsel at an election for Downpatrick, he was eventually returned as member for that borough, and from that time to the year 1832 sat in the House, representing for five years the university of Dublin. For one-and-twenty years, namely, from 1809 to 1830, he held the office of Secretary to the Admiralty; and in 1828 was sworn of the Privy Council. His industry, his boldness and acuteness in debate, combined with great power of ridicule and complete mastery of details, made him an invaluable member of his party, and marked him out for higher office in some future Tory cabinet. It was, however, his misfortune, that his uncommon shrewdness failed to appreciate either the state of the nation, or the true policy of conservatism; for, in the moment of the passing of the Reform Bill, he declared that he would never sit in a reformed House of Commons;" and from that time he has been politically defunct. His literary career His literary career presents him in a more pleasing aspect. His first publication, a volume called " Familiar Epistles to Frederick E. Jones, Esq.," gave earnest of the then power of sarcasm which marked his more mature productions. It was succeeded by a short pamphlet, which, under the title of "An intercepted Letter from Canton," gave a satirical picture of the city of Dublin. His next efforts were, "Songs of "Sketch of Ireland, Past and Present;" "Letters on the Naval War with America;" "Stories from the History of England, for Children," the model (as Sir Walter Scott states in his preface) of the "Tales of a Grandfather;""Reply to the Letters of Malachi Malagrowther;" "The Suffolk Papers;" Military Events of the French Revolution in 1830;" a translation of "Bassompierre's Embassy to England;" an edited version of the "Letters of Lady Hervey," and of Lord Hervey's "Memoirs of the Reign of George the Second;" and an annotated edition of "Boswell's Life of Johnson." Croker's successful parliamentary and official career brought him into intimacy with the most distinguished literary lights of the day; and in 1809, in conjunction with Scott and Canning, he started the "Quarterly Review," which has ever since owed some of its most vigorous papers to his pen. His "Boswell" was bailed as a truly valuable contribution to the literature of our country, and raised great expectations of the fruit of its author's future leisure; it might, however, have been written by an industrious man with a tithe of Croker's ability. He was once asked at a party, by a bluestocking countess, if he had brought out any new work: "Nothing," he replied, "since the last Mutiny Act." It is now twenty years since the world received any gift from his pen more important than articles in the "Quarterly Review," which seem likely to contain all the observations he desires to make on the history of his own time. From the Athenæum. SATIRE AND SATIRISTS.* SATIRE and Satirists offer an interesting | theme. They are to literature what scandal is to society. All that is most piquant in anecdote, in allusion, in attack, gathers round the heroes of such a study. If we can assume in the writer who devotes himself to it sufficient reading, a pleasant style, a sympathy with the combative in character and the eccentric in manner, the result is sure to be interesting and readable, if no more. In Mr. Hannay's case, it is more. This writer is himself a satirist. Young in years, he has nevertheless long wielded a keen blade, -played with it, as young writers are apt to do, rather recklessly-striking, fairly and unfairly, at friend and at foe, with seemingly equal zest or equal indifference. This personal experience has for him its advantage and its disadvantage. It has given him a sharper relish of satire and a deeper insight into the follies of mankind,-made him familiar with the best models of the worst kind of writing, and taught him how to seize the worst points of a good character. This, as we have hinted, is not all gain to a young writer. But Mr. Hannay is a satirist and something better. In his later writings -and in this book also, though the subject is not quite a genial one-there is largeheartedness, a greater ripeness of understanding, and a disposition to love and to admire good things and good men as well as to say sharp things, than in his early works. The fruit is ripening visibly. The grape is no longer green or sour. Success, as it is wont, has helped to mellow Mr. Hannay's genius-it will be his fault, as well as a loss to literature, if it do not mellow into something rich and good. The fact of our lecturer being a writer of satire has caused him to regard this phase of literature rather from the artistic than the philosophical side. He abounds in pictures, not in definitions. He does not tell us what he means by satire. He puts the thing before us. His faculty is dramatic and pictorial. He recalls a scene, a man, as it were, Satire and Satirists. Six Lectures. By James Hannay. Bogue. visibly. We feel a presence; but we do not get into an intellectual intercourse with it. In short, Mr. Hannay deals in pictures, not in problems. Here, to begin with, is an element of popularity. Critics will object that "satire" as a subject is not touched-either in its relation to human nature or in its relation to literature. Readers will probably dispense very calmly with analysis and philosophy, in favor of point, color, epigram and personality. Having said thus much by way of general introduction, we shall now content ourselves with some few pictures of men and things concerning Satire and the Satirists. Here is Horace, as conceived by Mr. Hannay : His songs would give you a notion that he indulged in a romantic sort of dissipation. This arises from their not being rightly viewed as fancy-pictures-pictures on the ivory of the Latin language-of old Lesbian life, and Ionian life, farther south and long before. To me Horace seems a far homelier, simpler old gentleman than the classical conventionalists would have you suppose. A little, stoutish, weak-eyed, satirical, middle-aged man, sitting-with what hair he had left, smeared with Syrian ointment-crowned, under a vine, drinking in company of a Greek playing or dancing-is to me a ludicrous object. young woman, with an ivy crown on her head, I do not think that the simple and philosophic Horatius, with his eye for satire, was much given to this mode of enjoyment. I am pretty sure that he did enjoy himself; but I rather fancy him eating a too luxurious dinner now and then, cramming himself with tunny-fish, muscles, oysters, hare, thrushes, peacock, and whatever else was going; and atoning for it by much quiet and a little rustication on his farm. I am certain that he was, in the main, a homely little man; and that the finish and elegance he shows in his writings did not appear so conspicuously in his person and in the objects about him. Mr. Hannay's survey begins with Horace, We infer and thus excludes the Greeks. that Aristophanes is not considered as a sa tirist! The exclusions are, moreover, very unaccountable throughout. Mr. Hannay has not one German, Spanish, or Italian on his lists. Yet he can find room for Sir David Lindsay and Buchanan! We turn to his account of Butler, the whole of which we spect the Puritan; and it does not disconhave read with peculiar satisfaction: Butler seems, from Hudibras, to have been somewhat of an odd fellow,-a quaint and eccentric man. His reading and illustration are all out of the way; and his manner dry and crabbed at one time, flowing, and free, and popular at another. I should call him, therefore, a humorist, not only in the literary sense, but in the sense in which we apply the word to one who has some strong peculiarity of character, which he indulges, in whims, in oddities, in comic extravagances, according to the bent of his inclination. There is a kind of likeness between Butler and old Burton, of the Anatomy of Melancholy. Both men had various and unusual reading; both were at once comic and grave; and both, amidst wild and homely pleasantry, shoot out flashes of thought and fancy which are equal to the efforts of anybody. I have little doubt that it was the peculiarity of Butler's temperament which prevented his getting on in the world in those days. With his wit and knowledge of the world, he only wanted a little courtier talent to have got. the something which, according to everybody, ought to have been done for him, actually done. Charles the Second's court was not inaccessible to attractive qualities in either sex. All you wanted (besides wit) was tolerable breeding and some audacity. But I can quite see, from what Butler reveals of his character, that he was a shy, strange, and unmanageable sort of man, who did not "come out" in society. Among humorous writers he must always occupy a very high place. He is a thinker, old Butler, as you see through all his odd comic poem; while as a man of wit, it would be perhaps impossible to name one in whom wit is so absolutely redundant. In particular, his range of witty illustrations, sayings which join wit and fancy, (the wit, as it were, taking wings of fancy,) he is not surpassed, I do not think he is equalled, in the whole range of comic writers with whom I have any acquaintYou remember ance. "For loyalty is still the same, Whether it win or lose the game: No image can be more exquisite than this; and the variety of them is the most remarkable thing about him. Some brilliant men can only draw from a particular province; but Butler lays not only nature under contribution, but history and the arts, and the follies and fancies of mankind, laws, and customs, and sciences, and the common fashions of life. He is the most figura tive of writers. He seems to hold his intellect on the feudal condition of rendering a rose, or a snowball, or some symbolic object, at any moment it may be required. Unlike the writers of mere class sympathies, our author has a heart for all sides. He can enjoy Butler, without ceasing to re cert him to observe that "Hudibras" is the natural expression of the free, laughter-loving, and galliard Cavalier genius, just as "Paradise Lost" is the stern, heroic outgrowth of the Puritan genius. Mr. Hannay breaks a lance with the author of the "English Humorists" in favor of Swift. His essay on Swift is a masterly piece of writing, and would alone suffice to give its author a literary place. Says Mr. Hannay : It is a question of high importance-why such a man had no better position? Your Harleys and your St. Johns (not to mention a crew whose names live only in epigrams and in peerages) parcel out every thing amongst themselves. It is like a Saturnalian feast, where the slaves have the good things, and their masters wait upon them. That is the effect of looking at the Queen-Anne period to me. Davus takes the chair; Leno is opposite him; Gulosus is beside them; and at these orgies of power and plunder, who are the waiters? Jonathan Swift advises the direction of the whole; Mat Prior comes tumbling in with the wine; Joseph Addison says grace, and helps the carving, with his sleeves turned up. Mr. Pope sings. A scandalous spectacle, and absurd feast, indeed! And how shall we understand what makes Swift. ferocious and gloomy, if we don't remember the nature of it? Again, on the same point of Swift's selfseeking: Swift, then-who, if born in a higher place, might have been any thing; who, if born in the middle ages, would have been a bishop or primate-came up to London, and exercised an influence during the Harley and Bolingbroke days, which one cannot appreciate without going to the fountains of information. He held probably the most potent position that a writer has ever held in this country; but all the while held it in a dubious and unrecognized way. He was the patron of men of letters; got them places, and got them money. He "crammed" the ministers; and his pen was not employed in quizzing hoops or patches, or sneering at City people-it was an engine of power over all England. He used it with. In a word, he was a power in the state; as an orator does his tongue-to do something and, indeed, it is one of the few pleasant things to read about in the records of those days-how those who, in their hearts, tried to despise him as "Irish parson". "-how, I say, they dreaded him; how they flattered and courted him; and Harley and Bolingbroke were quarrelling, and how they felt that he was their master! When could not accommodate their egotisms, Swift meditated. As he had helped to govern England, the time, I suppose he expected England to do so that his name occurs in the public history of something for him, in return. Harley got his an share, and Bolingbroke his share; and the tag- | class of literary small satirists-men who rag and bobtail of party, we know, are never hatch sarcasm and live by jesting :without their share ;-now where is the mighty selfishness of Swift's expecting his? As to Swift's position in society, and his mode of defending himself against the fools of high degree who presumed upon it— When he came into the world, observe, the evil of his position was instantaneously felt. The "Irish parson," the ex-dependent of Templethey treated him every way but in a genuine and manly one. They flattered him, they feared him; but they looked on him as an Aladdin, about whom the best thing was his wonderful lamp. They liked Aladdin to come to dinner, and bring his lamp along with him, you know! He tells you himself, that the Lord-Treasurer affected to be sulky and distant one day, after having been friendly the last. Swift took him to task at once; and told him that he must not treat him like a boy. He had had enough of that with Temple, when he was young and poor, and only beginning to feel his strength. He tells us so. He had to make that all clear to my Lord-Treasurer, whose ears must have tingled when he found himself set right on a point of breeding. But instances are not few. James Bridges, Duke of Chandos, was the Dean's friend, it seems, till he got the Dukedom; or, as the Dean has it in the beginning of an epigram : James Bridges and the Dean had long been friends James is beduked, of course their friendship ends; Not a dunce nor a fool of quality but thought he had the right, while many tried to exercise it, of playing this kind of trick with Swift. The brusqueness of his manner was assumed, as a kind of protection against insolence and pertness; and, whatever else may be said of it, can be explained without imputation upon his heart. There are several anecdotes of the display of what we may call the Orson-element in the Dean:-as that of Lady Somebody, who declined to sing to him when her husband asked her, when Swift said, "I suppose you take me for one of your hedge-parsons." The lady cried. There was a scene. When Swift next visited the house, he said, "Well, madam, are you as proud and ill-natured as you were last time I saw you ?" Here, however, are problems touched which need not now be unfolded further. Some of the most amusing--perhaps, also, the most useful-of Mr. Hannay's passages, are those which have relation more or less direct to living manners and present literary forms. In the article on Churchill, who is over-admired and over-praised perhaps by our author, we have a paragraph on the He now "made hay," according to the invaof the shilling which he had charged for the riable practice; charged half-a-crown- instead Rosciad-for his productions; and before long he became a man-about-town, and genius by profession; lived with a set of wits, who talked sarcasm and drank Burgundy; and assumed a hostile position towards the big-wigs of the world generally. He adopted, in those years of triumph and excitement, that kind of moral opinion which has been exemplified in Fielding's Tom Jones, by Charles Surface, and partially by Robert Burns, the doctrine, namely, that if you are a good-hearted fellow and hate humbug, you may set the respectable moralities at defiance. This school, which has had, in every age lately, some brilliant disciples, is rebellious and radical in opinion, highflown in liberality and the generous qualities, and does not go home till morning. Its "porch" is the tavern porch, and its "garden" is Vauxhall and though it has a basis of truth as against an opposite school, it is a very unsatisfactory and unprofitable school, and is only tolerable as a stage towards higher theories of life. I must be content with briefly indicating the writers in whose works the satiric spirit now works. There is Fonblanque, a satiric reasoner; Thackeray, a satiric painter; Dickens, whose satire is embodied in a huge element of comic and grotesque fun, and human enjoyment of life; Landor the classic, who darts beautiful lightning when not more amiably employed; Disraeli, the bitter and the dignified, who browsed in his youth on Byron and Junius, who affects Apollo when he sneers, and Pegasus when he kicks; Aytoun, whose jolly contempt has a good-fellowish air about it, and whose rod seems odorous of whiskey-toddy. Of Jerrold, I may emphatically note, that he has real satiric genius, spontaneous, picturesque, with the beauty and the deadliness of nightshade. Of schools he can speak more freely; and of the school which he happily designates the "Simious" he speaks very freely. He says: The great Satirists of whom I have spoken, I have shown to be for the most part kindly, and The opposite good, and warm-hearted men. view of the matter is cant. I have seen a MS. of Blake the painter, in which, speaking of somebody's praise of somebody else, he says: Christ used the Pharisees in a rougher way. The simious satirist is distinguished by a deficiency of natural reverence mainly. His heart is hard rather; his feelings blunt and dull. He is blind to every thing else but the satirical aspect of things; and if he is brilliant, it is as a cat's back is when rubbed-in the dark! He has generally no sentiment or respect for form, and will spare nothing. He is born suspicious; and if he hears the world admiring any thing, forthwith he concludes that it must be "humbug." He has no regard to the heaps of honor gathered round this object by time, and the affection of wise men. He cries, "Down with it!" As his kinsman, when looking at some vase, or curious massive specimen of gold, sees only his own image in it, our satirist sees the ridiculous only in every object, and forgets that the more clearly he sees it, the more he testifies to its brightness. Or, as his kinsman breaks a cocoa-nut only to get at the milk, he would destroy every thing only to nourish his mean nature. He prides himself as on his commonest qualities, as the negroes who Here is food for laughter and for thought. posed that Mr. Hannay over-estimates the After such a passage, it will hardly be supbitter jest and the grotesque caricature as literary elements. He has no mercy on small satirists and small jokers. From the Scottish Review JOHN FOSTER.* In a humble farm-house in the parish of | he shunned the companionship of boisterous Halifax, between Wainsgate and Hebdenbridge, there lived a worthy couple who sought, by devoting part of their time to weaving, to supplement the scanty profits of their" tiny farm. Husband and wife being strongminded persons, fond of books, and given to deep and protracted musing, it often happened that business and domestic duties had to give way to more congenial pursuits; hence they were noted among their neighbors more for eccentricities and mental superiority, than for success in surrounding themselves with material comfort. Their eldest son, John Foster, was born 17th September, 1770. In him were concentrated the peculiarities of both his parents. Thoughtful, reserved, taciturn, The Life and Correspondence of John Foster. 2 vols. Jackson and Walford, London. boys abroad, while he had no suitable juvenile associates at home. His manners and remarks procured for him the appellation of old-fashioned;" and he soon began to labor under a painful sense of an awkward but entire individuality. His constitutional pensiveness made him recoil from human beings into a cold interior retirement, where he felt as if dissociated from the whole creation. His outward life was marked by a timidity which he called "infinite shyness;" but his inner life was full of restless thought, earnest musings, romantic plans, vivid associations; his imperious imagination haunting him with its strange creations, so as to fill his soul with terrors. Spectres, and skeletons, and scenes of horror were conjured up to meet him in the dark, so that the time of going to bed was an awful period of each day. His sensi |