amour. Adieu, Sir; go on and prosper in your arduous task of presenting to the world the portrait of Johnson's mind and manners. If faithful, brilliant will be its lights, but deep its shades."

Miss SEWARD to JAMES BOSWELL, Esq.

"Lichfield, March 25, 1785.

"No, sir,' there are not any lees-the spirit of your Tour with Johnson runs clear to the last syllable. Those who are not interested in its anecdotes can have little intellectual curiosity and no imagination. Those who are not entertained with the perpetual triumph of sarcastic wit over fair ingenious argument, must be sturdier moralists than even Johnson himself affected to have been; and those who do not love the biographer as they read, whatever imperfection they may find in the massive being whom he so strongly characterises, can have no hearts.

"I confess, however, that it was not without some surprise that I perceived so much exultation avowed concerning the noble blood which flows in your veins; since it is more honourable for a man of distinguished ingenuity to have been obscurely than splendidly descended, because then his distinctions are more exclusively his own. Often, as well you are aware, have nobles, princes, perhaps kings, stood awed in the presence of the son of a Lichfield bookseller. Can the recorder of his life and actions think birth of consequence? Mr. Boswell is too humble in fancying he can derive honour from noble ancestry. It is for the line of Bruce to be proud of the historian of Corsica; it is for the house of Auchinleck, to boast of him who, with the most fervent personal attachment to an illustrious literary character, has yet been sufficiently faithful to the just claims of the public upon biographic fidelity to represent him, not as his weak or prejudiced idolaters might wish to behold him; not in the light in which they desire to contemplate Johnson, who pronounce his writings to be an obscure jargon of pompous pedantry, and his imputed virtues a superstitious farrago of pharasaic ostentation; but as he was, the most wonderful composition of great and absurd, of misanthropy and benevolence, of luminous intellect and prejudiced darkness, that was ever produced in the human breast.

* Letters of Miss Seward, vol. I. p. 38.

"The only part of this work whose omission I could much have wished, is the passage which records the despot's injustice to Mrs. Montagu's* ingenious and able Treatise on Shakespeare. Its omission, as all my correspondents observe, would have been much more consonant than its appearance to the philanthropy of the biographer. "I have, it is true, seen a great deal of nonsense about your Tour in the public prints, and that both in its praise and abuse. It is hard to say who are most absurd, they who vilify its entertaining effusions as vapid and uninteresting, or they who fancy they see a perfect character in the stupendous mortal whom its pages exhibit in lights so striking and so various; bowing down before the relics of popish superstition; repaying the hospitable kindness of the Scotch professors with unfeeling exultation over the barrenness of their country, and the imputed folly of their religion; and roaming, like a Greenland bear, over Caledonia and her lonely isles.

"I have written to the elegant Bardt of Sussex, to Mr. Whalley, who is on the Continent, to my late and everhonoured friend, Dr. John Jebb, and my other literary correspondents upon the merits of your Tour, and in a spirit of warm encomium upon the gay benevolence, characteristic traits, scenic graces, and biographic fidelity which adorn its pages; observing also how valuable a counterpart it forms to Dr. Johnson's Tour to the Hebrides. In one we perceive, through a medium of solemn and sublime eloquence, in what light Scotland, her nobles, her professors, and her chieftains appeared to the august wanderer; in the other how the growling philosopher appeared to them. If the use of biography is to ascertain and discriminate character, its domestic minuteness is its most essential excellence.

"The nearly universal approbation with which those whose opinions are of consequence have mentioned your work to me precludes all ideas of defence against the frothy spleen descending so continually upon ingenious composition from the pen of anonymous criticism. descends in plenteous effusion,

'But leaves no spot or blame behind."‡

It

This lady, celebrated for her literary talents and charity, died at an advanced age, Aug. 25, 1800.

Magazine, LXX. 904.

+ Mr. Hayley.

See an account of her in the Gentleman's

Letters of Miss Seward, vol. I. p. 129.

[From MISS SEWARD.]

"MR. URBAN, January 10, 1786. "I have great confidence in your general penetration, just taste, candour, and integrity; but you must consider that you are in a public character, and ought not to suffer private friendship, with all its amiable fervours, to render you partial, even in a single instance.

"The perfection with which your publication constantly labours to invest the late stupendous, but frail, Dr. Johnson, is injustice to the characters which his prejudice calumniated, and to the talents which his rough sophistry, as Mr. Boswell once emphatically calls his manner of reasoning, so continually depreciated.

66

Surely infidelity is not so very prevalent amongst men of distinguished abilities, as to make it reasonable that we should bestow upon mere orthodoxy of opinion, not enforced with gentleness, but maintained with reviling, the dignity of unswerving and saint-like virtue; nor to exempt from just blame, in a Protestant community, that superstitious reverence of Popish localities, and unaccountable violence against our dissenting brethren, which are recorded by Mr. Boswell. If Presbytery has its errors, they are neither so flagrant, nor so far removed from the established form of worship in England, as are those of the Roman Catholic faith, and monkish ceremonies; to which Dr. Johnson gives so marked and so truly reprehensible a preference.

"Personally to have known the wonderful being, is to obtain the testimony of recollection for the fidelity of Mr. Boswell's anecdotes; since it cannot fail to parallel them; and they enable those who never conversed with him to see him as he was; to perceive the genius and absurdity, wisdom and folly, penetration and prejudice, devotion and superstition, compassion and malevolence, friendship and envy, truth and sophistry, which were blended in the large composition of that man.'

"Over the malignance he records, Mr. Boswell strives to spread a veil; but that veil is not impenetrable. Facts are stubborn things; and, since they are fairly recited, partially seeks to gild them in vain.

"Sensibility must be disgusted at the ungrateful contempt of a brave and hardy nation (tenacious of higher distinctions than wealth and luxury can bestow), with

which Dr. Johnson insulted her professors, at whose tables he was entertained with liberal hospitality, and from whom he received every flattering distinction. Neither can she peruse without indignation other instances of his arrogance; yet must she feel her attention often delighted, and always alive, over this animated work, and pursue, with no languid eye, the growling philosopher, and his more amiable friend, in their rambles over Caledonia and her lonely isles.

"Reviewing Mr. Boswell's Tour in your Magazine for November, you say, that most of Dr. Johnson's opinions of men and books, recorded in that work, will stand the test of severest criticism.

"Examine the following opinions, I beseech you, with impartiality. Mr. Boswell writes, I mentioned Shenstone's having said, that Pope possessed the art of condensing sense more than any body.' Dr. Johnson replied, 'It is not true; there is more sense in a line of Cowley's than in a page, or a sentence, or ten lines (I am not certain of the phrase,) of Pope's.' *

"Sound criticism will hardly vouch for the verity of that assertion; but the praise of another was ever a caustic on the mind of Dr. Johnson, beneath the smart of which truth and justice were too generally disregarded.

66 Cowley had great poetic imagination, some genuine, and a great deal more false wit; but his poems contain little perspicuous rationality; while the clear good sense, with which the verses of Pope abound, render them intelligible to the common reader, in whose perception those of Cowley form a chaos of extraneous and incomprehensible thought, and of unresembling resemblances.

"Is not the indignation honest which impartial people feel when they peruse, in this Tour, the injustice of the despot to his old colleague and townsman, David Garrick, who was to him a liberal friend, and with whom he had lived on terms of professed amity? Mr. Boswell records his having asserted, that David Garrick had not made Shakspeare better known, that it was not in his power to illustrate Shakspeare.

"Now it is well known that when Mr. Garrick appeared on the London theatre, Shakspeare had long been

* In the Idler, No. 77, Johnson praises Cowley for his ease. "Cowley seems to have possessed the power of writing easily beyond any other of our poets."

sunk from general admiration and attention, into the closets of the learned.

"At that period few of his plays were better known than is the Sampson Agonistes at present. Other dramatic schools had prevailed over that of the great Poet of Nature. No plays, be their merit ever so great, are familiar and dear to the many if they are not represented. Johnson's own Irene, so much excelling most of the modern popular tragedies in the genuine beauty of composition, is known but to the few; while almost every passage in the former is present to the minds of the multitude.

"Mr. Garrick did revive the popularity of Shakspeare. He brought his plays on the stage. Innumerable of their most sublime and beautiful passages did he impress on the minds of his crowded audience by the harmony of intonation, by energetic or persuasive accents, by the force of emphasis, and by the grace of action.

"Thus was Garrick Shakspeare's best commentator, not excepting even the ungenerous great man, who falsely asserted, that it was not in Garrick's power to illustrate Shakspeare! and that he had not made him better known! "Had any other person contradicted a fact so established, as that Shakspeare's popularity was revived by David Garrick, Johnson would have said, Sir, the dog lied, and he knew that he lied.'

Ought Mr. Boswell to have recorded Dr. Johnson's unjust contempt of Mrs. Montagu's able and beautiful Treatise on Shakspeare in the life-time of that lady, whose sensibility must painfully shrink from the axe of that barbarian? Let us hope, however, that her laurels will spring the fresher after this merciless cutting. An assault upon a reputation so established must startle the public, and induce it to re-examine a work whose excellence it has acknowledged.

"Every re-perusal of Mrs. Montagu's Treatise on Shakspeare must be to the honour of its author, and to the advantage of their tastes and judgments who familiarise themselves with her writings.

"Your critique on Mr. Boswell's Tour in the Magazine for November observes, that virtue was the best recommendation to Dr. Johnson's friendship, patronage, and praise.

"His attachment to the profligate Richard Savage; the gloss he has thrown over that man's sensuality and ingratitude; his affection for Dr. Goldsmith; the respect