duction, and this single passage could be supposed to outweigh the proofs of delight in his occupation which Cole has left behind him in more than fifty folios, still it would be less an instance of the calamities of literature, than of the all-applicable truth that-all is vanity. But, in reality, Cole's feelings are sufficiently explained by a fit of low spirits, an hour of indigestion, or a rainy day. Misgivings of this nature are hinted at by a writer entitled to commemoration in Cole's labours, and who, though in a widely different department of literature, was not less laborious than Cole himself,— Dr. Beaumont, author of Psyche, or Love's Mystery, one of the longest and most curious poems in the language. Let the reader bear with one of his clumsy rhymes for the sake of a pleasing picture of the poet's progress. Having reached the last canto of fourand-twenty, which average 1500 lines each, he addresses the End, as the welcome haven which he has now in view.

The mariner will trust no winds, altho'

Upon his sails they blow fair flattery;

No tides which with all fawning smoothness flow,
Can charm his fears into security;

He credits none but thee, who art his bay,
To which thro' calms and storms he hunts his way.

And so have I, cheer'd up with hopes at last
To double thee, endur'd a tedious sea;
Thro' public foaming tempests I have past;
Thro' flattening calms of private suavity;
Thro' interrupting companies thick press,
And thro' the lake of mine own laziness:
Thro' many Syren's charms which me invited,

To dance to easier tunes, the tunes in fashion;
Thro' many cross misgiving thoughts which frighted
My jealous pen, and thro' the conjuration
Of ignorant and envious censures, which
Implacably against all poems itch:

And seeing now I am in ken of thee,

The harbour which inflamed my desire, -
And with this steady patience ballas'd me
In my uneven road-I am on fire,

Till into thy embrace myself I throw,

And on the shore hang up my finished vow.

Here the old poet confesses misgiving thoughts and hours of indolence: yet nothing but ardent hope and indefatigable perseverance could have carried him through a work of such prodigious length and labour. All men in all pursuits have their hours of misgiving there are times when the religious enthusiast endures what he calls desertion; when the soldier regards honour as a bub

ble;

ble; when the slave of avarice feels the worthlessness of wealth, and the ambitious man moralizes upon the emptiness of power. Few more melancholy pictures are presented to us in history than that of Potemkin in his old age playing like a child with his jewels, and the insignia of his various orders, and then weeping because he had at length discovered that they were only baubles. But in attributing this feeling to men of letters, as one of their ordinary calamities, Mr. D'Israeli ascribes to them an evil to which authors, of all men, are least subject, and least of all authors the laborious student. The mood in which a wise man undertakes a literary work of great labour is finely expressed by Father Paul.-Tengo per fermo che quest' opera sarà da pochi letta, ed in breve tempo mancherá di vita; non tanto per difetto di forma, quanto per la natura della materia. Ma a me basta che sia per giovare a qualcuno, a quale conoscendo io che sia per farne suo profitto, la mostraro.

Father Paul indeed was eminently a philosopher; but men without his wisdom have executed tasks not less laborious, and experienced not less delight in the performance of their labour. Our own times have produced one of the most remarkable cases upon record, which Mr. D'Israeli may arrange among his Calamities or his Curiosities, as he thinks fit. The Reverend William Davy, curate of Lustleigh in Devonshire, finished in the year 1807 a work of which the title will be a sufficient sample. A System of Divinity, in a course of Sermons on the First Institutions of Religion; on the Being and Attributes of God; on Some of the most important Articles of the Christian Religion in connexion; and on the several Virtues and Vices of Mankind, with occasional Discourses. Being a compilation from the best sentiments of the polite writers and eminent sound divines, both ancient and modern, on the same subjects, properly connected, with improvements; particularly adapted for the use of chief families and students in divinity, for churches, and for the benefit of mankind in general.' The history of this work, which extends to twenty-six volumes, is a surprizing and mournful case of wasted perseverance. Mr. Davy attempted to publish his collection by subscription; this he found did not answer; so he stopt short, and resolved to print it himself that is, with his own hands. He was poor, and for a reason which is sufficiently apparent, his theological labours could obtain no patronage: but his ardour and invincible patience overcame all difficulties. He purchased as many worn out and cast off types from a country printing-office as sufficed to set up two pages; the outlay could not be more than the value of the metal, and he made a press for himself. With these materials he went to work in the year 1795; performing every

operation himself, and working off page by page,* he struck off forty copies of the first three hundred pages; twenty-six of which he distributed among the universities, the bishops, the Royal Society and the reviews, hoping, no doubt, to receive from some of these quarters the encouragement to which he thought himself entitled. Disappointed in this, he resolved to spare himself any farther expense of paper upon those before whom he had thrown his pearls in vain, and as he had reserved only fourteen copies of the forty with which he commenced, fourteen he continued to print, and at the end of twelve years of unremitting toil, finished the whole six and twenty volumes.

This is a tale which excites respect for the amazing perseverance of the patient labourer, as well as compassion for its misdirection. To those who might regard this perseverance with contempt because it was bestowed upon a course of sermons, we present an instance equally surprizing, in which the actor was not a curate, but a philosopher, in the modern use of the word. Fransham, the Norwich pagan, who died about two years ago, said one day, Every man has some great object which he wishes to accomplish, and why should not I have mine? I will choose such a one as no mortal being ever yet chose, and which no one less than the gods would ever think of attempting. I will get a cup-and-ball, and I will catch the ball on the spiked end six hundred and sixty-six thousand, six hundred and sixty-six times.' And this he did. A memoir of this man's life has been printed, in which this proof, among many others, is given of his craziness-but we are told only of his philosophy! Fransham loved to revile Christianity, and would no doubt have smiled with contempt at the twelve years labour of the curate of Lustleigh.

When energizing objects men pursue,
What are the prodigies they cannot do?'

says Dr. Busby, who has recently immortalized himself by exemplifying in his person what he asserts in his poetry.

Pattison's deplorable history is well related in these desultory volumes: but between this tale of despair and death, and an account of a female author which is almost as melancholy, Mr. D'Israeli has strangely inserted an article upon what he calls the Miseries of the First English Commentator, Dr. Grey, the editor of Hudibras; and this misery consists in a little abuse from War

* He tells his own tale in Latin not less curious than his English. Parce ergo et moderate vixi, et moderate vivendo (ingenio manibusque laborans) satis rerum contraxi ut republicarem; i. e. ad materias acquirendum, scilicet detritos et abjectos typos a typographo, quod sufficiebant ad duas paginas, una semel a me excusa. Nullum typographum, in adjutorem, habeo; et prelum typographicum ipse effeci.

burton,

burton, a sarcasm of Fielding, and a petulant remark of Mrs. Montague,-fitter to have appeared in the Miseries of Human Life,' than in a book which is intended to consist of sad realities. Some very amusing specimens of extravagant personal satire are given from Tom Nash's invectives against Gabriel Harvey.

The ponderosity and prolixity of Gabriel's "period of a mile," are described with a facetious extravagance, which may be given as a specimen of the eloquence of Ridicule. Harvey intituled his various pamphlets "Letters."

"More letters yet from the Doctor? Out upon it, here's a packet of Epistling, as bigge as a packe of woollen cloth, or a stack of salt fish. Carrier, didst thou bring it by wayne, or by horsebacke? By wayne, Sir, and it hath crackt me three axle-trees.-Heavie newes!-Take them again! I will never open them.-My cart (quoth he, deep sighing) hath cryde creake under them fortie times euerie furlong; wherefore if you be a good man rather make mud-walls with them, mend highways, or damme up quagmires with them.-

"When I came to unrip and unbumbast this Gargantuan bag pudding, and found nothing in. it but dogs tripes, swines livers, oxe galls, and sheepes guts, I was in a bitterer chate than anie cooke at a long sermon, when his meat burnes.

"O'tis an vnconscionable vast gor-bellied volume, bigger bulkt than a Dutch hoy, and more cumbersome than a payre of Switzer's galeaze breeches."

And in the same ludicrous style he writes,

"One epistle thereof to John Wolfe (Harvey's Printer) I took and weighed in an Ironmonger's scale, and it counter poyseth a cade* of herrings with three Holland cheeses. It was rumoured about the Court that the guard meant to trie masteries with it before the Queene, and instead of throwing the sledge, or the hammer, to hurle it fourth at the armes end for a wager."

'It was the foible of Harvey to wish to conceal the humble avocation of his father: this forms a perpetual source of the bitterness or the pleasantry of Nash, who, indeed, calls his pamphlet "a full answer to the eldest son of the halter-maker," which, he says, "is death to Gabriel to remember; wherefore from time to time he doth nothing but turmoile his thoughts how to invent new pedigrees, and what great nobleman's bastard he was likely to be, not whose sonne he is reputed to be. Yet he would not have a shoo to put on his foote if his father had not traffiqued with the hangman.-Harvey nor his brothers cannot bear to be called the sonnes of a rope-maker, which by his private confession to some of my friends, was the only thing that most set him afire against Turne over his two bookes he hath published against me, wherein he hath clapt paper God's plentie, if that could press a man to death, and see if, in the way of answer, or otherwise, he once mention the word rope-maker, or come within forty foot of it; except in one place of his first booke, where he nameth it not neither, but goes thus cleanly to

me.

worke:- and may not a good sonne have a reprobate for his father?" a periphrase of a rope-maker, which, if I should shryue myself, I never heard before. According to Nash, Gabriel took his oath before a justice that his father was an honest man, and kept his sons at the Universities a long time. "I confirmed it, and added, Ay! which is more, three proud sonnes, that when they met the hangman, their father's best customer, would not put off their hats to him—”—pp. 26―30.

Humour and malignity were never more eminently displayed than by Nash and his fellows, whom Mr. D'Israeli truly describes as men of no moral principle, but the most pregnant Lucianic wits who ever flourished at one time. They lavished their satire upon Harvey, the Gabrielissime Gabriel as they called him; yet Harvey's good name has survived all their invectives, and will be preserved by Spenser as long as the writings of that great master shall endure,-writings which can never lose their estimation as long as any sense of what is good and beautiful exists among us. Harvey, the happy above happiest men,

I read; that, sitting like a looker-on

Of this world's stage, dost note with critique pen
The sharp dislikes of each condition.

And as one careless of suspition,

Ne fawnest for the favour of the great,

Ne fearest foolish reprehension

Of faulty men, which danger to thee threat,
But freely dost of what thee list, entreat,
Like a great lord of peerelesse liberty.

Harvey was also himself a poet, and Mr. D'Israeli gives a specimen of what he may well call aweful satire, in some verses written in the character of his deceased brother, and addressed to Robert Greene, one of his satirical enemies, upon Greene's death. They are entitled John Harvey the Physician's Welcome to Robert Greene.'

Come, fellow Greene, come to thy gaping grave,

Bid Vanity and Foolery farewell,

That overlong hast played the mad-brain'd knave,
And overloud hast rung the bawdy bell.
Vermin to vermin must repair at last:

No fitter house for busy folk to dwell:

Thy coney-catching pageants are past,—
Some other must those arrant stories tell,-

These hungry worms think long for their repast.

This is very fine; but Harvey might have spared his triumph over the dead. Greene died in the utmost want, and Harvey has preserved his dying letter to a wife-whom, in his career of pro

Greene had written the Art of Coney-catching.'

fligacy,