This is severe enough; but Rochester has affirmed that "if Shadwell had burnt all he wrote, and printed all he spoke, he would have had more wit and humour than any other poet." Shadwell was a great favourite too with Otway. The plays of this dramatist are sufficiently imbued with the wretched taste and morals of Charles's profligate court. There is a thorough profligacy in his comedies, yet he is said to have been an amiable private character: nay, he actually takes no small credit to himself for the morality of his writings! With equal complacency, and with equal reason, he looked upon himself as the restorer and improver of Molière and of Shakspeare himself! He says, in the preface to his Psyche,' "I will be bold to affirm, that this is as much a play as could be made upon this subject," whereas nothing more utterly contemptible was ever conceived than his treatment of that most beautiful fiction of antiquity. Altering a play from Molière, he says, that he is bold to assert, "without vanity, that Molière's part has not suffered in his hands," whereas he has mangled the witty Frenchman wherever he has touched him. But it is in his improvements of Shakspeare that the consummate vanity and besotted tastelessness of the man shine forth most conspicuously. "Shakspeare," he says, never made more masterly strokes than in Timon of Athens;' yet," he adds, "I can truly say I have made it into a play." This he has done by introducing two female characters, the one a mistress, whom Timon is about to cast off in order to take a wife,—the other his intended bride; the latter jilts him in his misfortunes, the former follows him in private at his death, and kills herself for grief. The following is Mr Shadwell's improved version of the concluding speech of Alcibiades :— 66 "Poor Timon! I once knew thee the most flourishing man Of all th' Athenians; and thou still hadst been so, Had not these smiling flattering knaves devoured thee, And murdered thee with base ingratitude! His death pull'd on the poor Evandra's too, That miracle of constancy and love! Now all repair to their respective homes, Their several trades, their business and diversions; And may its wealth and power e'er increase !" Shadwell is not to be too severely thought of for these absurdities. He lived in an age when men of infinitely higher genius, and who ought to have known better what they were about, and felt more keenly the atrocities they were perpetrating, were guilty of equal, and, in some instances, still more daring profanation. Davenant and Dryden, be it remembered, improved Shakspeare's Tempest;' and Dryden extended the benefit of his powers to the Paradise Lost,' which he kindly turned into rhyme for its future credit with the world! Henry Purcell. BORN A. D. 1658.-DIED A. D. 1695. THIS eminent musician was the pupil of Dr Blow, but his earliest published compositions were formed, according to his own account, after the style of the Italian masters. They consist of twelve sonatas for two violins and a bass, and resemble those of Bassani in their structure. "The unlimited powers of Purcell's genius," says Dr Burney, "embraced every species of musical composition known in his time, and with equal felicity. In writing for the church, whether he adhered to the elaborate style of his predecessors, in which no instrument is employed but the organ, and the several parts are constantly moving in fugue and counterpoint,-or, giving way to feeling and imagination, adopted the new and more expressive style of which he was himself one of the principal inventors, accompanying the voice-parts with instruments to enrich the harmony, he manifested equal abilities and resources. compositions for the theatre, though the colouring and effects of an orchestra were then but little known, yet he employed them more than any of his predecessors had done, and gave to the voice a melody more interesting and impassioned than had yet been heard out of Italy." In Many of our popular songs are the composition of Purcell. Among these may be mentioned Mad Tom,' the first part of which was the work of this composer, and the second, added at a much later period, of Hayden. Another splendid piece of composition is entitled, 'The Croaking of the Toad;' it is a song in three strains, containing some most exquisite passages, such as would do honour to any composer. Much of his most excellent church music still remains in manuscript in our cathedrals, and it is to be feared that some of it was irrecoverably lost in the late burning of York-minster. Purcell died at the early age of 37; having been born in 1658, and dying of consumption in 1695. Had he lived longer he would probably have exercised a deeper influence over our music, and laid the foundation of something like a national school in his art. John Eachard. BORN A. D. 1636.-DIED A. D. 1697. JOHN EACHARD, master of Catharine-hall, Cambridge, and author of several highly erudite and ingenious works, was born about the year 1636. He was educated at Cambridge, where he took the degree of M. A. in 1660. In 1670, he appeared, for the first time, as an author in a piece entitled, The Grounds and Occasions of the Contempt of the Clergy and Religion inquired into.' Eachard was a thorough churchman, but he plainly affirms that "the ignorance of some, and the poverty of others, of the clergy" are daily bringing the church into contempt, and endangering its very existence, as well as impeding its usefulness. He points out several errors, as he regards them, in the system of education which the candidates for holy orders pass through, and in particular, objects to the undue proportion of time and attention required to be bestowed on what is called classical literature. "You shall have lads," says he, "that are arch knaves at the nominative case, and that have a notable quick eye at spying out the verb, who, for want of reading common and familiar books, shall understand no more of what is plain and easy, than a well-educated dog or horse. Or suppose they were taught as they might much easier be than what is commonly offered to them—the principles of arithmetic, geometry, and such alluring parts of learning, as these things undoubtedly would be much more useful, so much more delightful to them, than to be tormented with a tedious story, how Phaeton broke his neck, or how many nuts and apples Tityrus had for his supper." In this lively manner Eachard exposes the absurdity of making a purely classical education, as it is called, the object of the student's exclusive attention, and of supposing that a knowledge of two dead languages is sufficient to equip a man for the due discharge of the practical and active duties of life. Eachard's book made a considerable noise at the time of its appearance, and called forth a number of answerers, "whose memory," says Swift, "if he had not kept alive by replies, it would now be utterly unknown that he was ever answered at all." In 1671, Eachard published a work entitled 'Mr Hobbes' State of Nature considered,' in which the philosopher is handled with a mixture of rudeness and pleasantry which singularly contrasts with his own "starched mathematical method." In 1675, Eachard succeeded Dr John Lightfoot in the mastership of Catharine-hall, and in the year following was created D. D. by royal mandate. He died in July, 1697. His collected works were published by Davies, in 1774, in three volumes, 12mo. John Wallis. BORN A. D. 1616.-DIED A. D. 1703. DR WALLIS, Savillian professor of Geometry in the university of Oxford, was the son of the Rev. John Wallis, rector of Ashford in Kent. In 1632 he was sent to Emanuel college, Cambridge, after having gone through the ordinary routine of school discipline at Tenterden, in his native county, and afterwards at Felsted, in Essex. His tutor at Cambridge was Anthony Burgess. In 1637, he proceeded B. A.; and in 1640, he took the degree of M. A. Having taken orders, he lived about a year as chaplain in the house of Sir Richard Darby ; but we find him soon afterwards holding a fellowship of Queen's college, Cambridge, which he must have renounced on his marriage in 1644. He was appointed one of the secretaries to the Westminster assembly; and at this period he supplied a church in Ironmonger-lane, London. Shortly after the breaking out of the civil war, Wallis obtained a high reputation for his skill in interpreting secret cyphers. "About the beginning," says he, "of our civil wars, a chaplain of Sir William Waller showed me, as a curiosity, an intercepted letter written in cypher, (and it was indeed the first thing I had ever seen of the kind;) and asked me, between jest and earnest, if I could make any thing of it? and was surprised, when I told him, perhaps I might. It was about ten o'clock when we rose from supper; and I withdrew to my chamber to consider of it. By the number of different characters in it, I judged it could be no more than a new alphabet; and before I went to bed I found it out; which was my first attempt upon decyphering: and I was soon pressed to attempt one of a different character, consisting of numerical figures, extending to four or five hundred numbers, with other characters intermixed, which was a letter from secretary Windebank, (then in France,) to his son in England; and was a cypher hard enough, not unbecoming a secretary of state. And when, upon importunity, I had taken a great deal of pains with it without success, I threw it by; but after some time I resumed it again, and had the good hap to master it. Being encouraged by this success beyond expectation, I have ventured upon many others, and seldom failed of any that I have attempted for many years; though of late the French methods of cyphers are grown so extremely intricate, that I have been obliged to quit many of them, without having patience to go through with them." Wallis's fame as a decypherer promised him ample employment from the government, even after the Revolution; but he laboured for thankless and forgetful masters. In a letter to the earl of Nottingham, who was at that time secretary to William III. dated August 4th, 1689, he says: "From the time your lordship's servant brought me the letter yesterday morning, I spent the whole day upon it, (scarce giving myself time to eat,) and most part of the night; and was at it again early this morning, that I might not make your messenger wait too long." In another: "I wrote to his lordship the next day, on account of the difficulty I at first apprehended, the papers being written in a hard cypher, and in a language of which I am not thoroughly master; but sitting close to it in good earnest, I have (notwithstanding that disadvantage) met with better success, and with more speed, than I expected. I have therefore returned to his lordship the papers which were sent me, with an intelligible account of what was there in cypher." Being hard pressed by the earl of Nottingham, to decipher some documents, he thus writes at the conclusion of one of his letters: "But, my lord, it is hard service, and I am quite weary. your honour were sensible how much pains and study it cost me, you would pity me; and there is a proverb of not riding a free horse too hard." The doctor's hint was thrown away for this time: he was a little more plain in his next, wherein he says, "However I am neglected, I am not willing to neglect their majesties' service; and have therefore re-assumed the letters which I had laid by, and which I here send decyphered perhaps it may be thought worth little, after I have bestowed a great deal of pains upon them, and be valued accordingly; but it is not the first time that the like pains have been taken to as little purpose, by my lord," &c.—In another appears the following postscript, dated August 15, 1691: “But, my lord, I do a little wonder to receive so many fresh letters from your lordship without taking any notice of what I wrote in my last, which I thought would have been too plain to need a decypherer; certainly your other clerks are better paid, or else they would not serve you." King William, however, became at last If so sensible of his services as to grant him a pension of £100 per annum, with survivorship to his grandson whom he had instructed in the art of decyphering. About the year 1653, Wallis published his Tractus de Loquelâ Grammatica-physicus; wherein he gives a particular account of the physical or mechanical formation of sounds used in speech. In the year 1699, he published at Oxford three large folios upon mathematics, with the title, Mathesis Universalis.' Part of the third volume of his 'Opera Mathematica,' is employed in preserving and restoring divers ancient Greek authors, which were in danger of being lost. In the year 1642, he published a book, entitled Truth Tried,' in answer to a treatise written by Lord Brook, entitled 'The Nature of Truth.' In the year 1653, he published, in Latin, his Grammar of the English Tongue, for the use of foreigners.' In his Praxis Grammatica,' he gives us the following jeu-d'esprit: "A certain learned French gentleman," he says, "proposed to me the underwritten four chosen French verses, composed on purpose; boasting from it wonderfully of the felicity of his French language, which expressed kindred senses by kindred words; complaining, in the mean while, of our English one, as very often expressing kindred senses by words conjoined by no relation: Quand un cordier, cordant, veult corder une corde; But, that I might show that this felicity of language was not wanting to our own, immediately, without making choice of fresh matter, I translated verbally the same four verses into the English tongue, retaining the same turn of words which he had observed in his, only substituting the word twist, purely English, for the exotic word cord, which he expected me to use: When a twister, a-twisting, will twist him a twist, For the twisting his twist, he three twines doth entwist; And to them these four others : And these: Untwirling the twine that untwisted between, The twain that, in twining before in the twine, In the year 1658, came out his 'Commercium Epistolicum,' being an epistolary correspondence between Brouncker and Dr Wallis, on one part, and Messrs Fermate and Frenicle, (two French gentlemen,) on the other; occasioned by a challenge given by Mr Fermate, to the English, Dutch, and French mathematicians. 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