but the knowledge of their feelings, their humours, their caprices, their passions ?-touch these, and you gain attention-develope these, and you have conquered your audience.

Among writers of an inferior reputation we often discover a sufficient shrewdness and penetration into human foibles to startle us in details, while they cannot carry their knowledge far enough to please us on the whole. They can paint nature by a happy hit, but they violate all the likeness before they have concluded the plot -they charm us with a reflection and revolt us by a character. Sir John Suckling is one of these writers-his correspondence is witty and thoughtful, and his plays-but little known in comparison to his songs-abound with just remarks and false positions, the most natural lines and the most improbable inventions. Two persons in one of these plays are under sentence of execution, and the poet hits off the vanity of the one by a stroke worthy of a much greater dramatist.

"I have something troubles me,” says Pellagrin.

"What's that?" asks his friend.

"The people,” replies Pellagrin, "will say, as we go along, thou art the properer fellow!

Had the whole character been conceived like that sentence, I should not have forgotten the name of the play, and instead of making a joke, the author would have consummated a creation. Both Madame de Stael and Rousseau appear to me to have possessed this sort of imperfect knowledge. Both are great in aphorisms, and feeble in realizing conceptions of flesh and blood. When Madame de Stael tells us "that great losses, so far from binding men more closely to the advantages they still have left, at once loosen all ties of affection," she speaks like one versed in the mysteries of the human heart, and expresses exactly what she wishes to convey; but when she draws the character of Corinne's lover, she not only confounds all the moral qualities into one impossible compound, but she utterly fails in what she evidently attempts to picture.

The proud, sensitive, generous, high-minded Englishman, with a soul at once alive to genius, and fearing its effect-daring as a soldier, timid as a man the slave of love that tells him to scorn the world, and of opinion that tells him to adore it-this is the new, the delicate, the manycoloured character Madame de Stael conceived, and nothing can be more unlike the heartless and whining pedant she has accomplished.

In Rousseau, every sentence Lord Edouard utters is full of beauty, and sometimes of depth, and yet those sentences give us no conception of the utterer himself. The expressions are all soul, and the character is all clay-nothing can be more brilliant than the sentiments, or more heavy than the speaker.

It is a curious fact that the graver writers have not often succeeded in plot and character in proportion to their success in the allurement of reflection, or the graces of style. While Goldsmith makes us acquainted with all the personages of his unrivalled story-while we sit at the threshold in the summer evenings and sym

pathize with the good vicar in his laudable zeal for monogamy-while ever and anon we steal a look behind through the lattice, and smile at the gay Sophia, who is playing with Dick, or fix our admiration on Olivia, who is practising an air against the young squire comes-while we see the sturdy Burchell crossing the stile, and striding on at his hearty pace with his oak cudgel cutting circles in the air-nay, while we ride with Moses to make his bargains, and prick up our ears when Mr. Jenkinson begins with "Ay, sir! the world is in its dotage;"-while in recalling the characters of that immortal tale, we are recalling the memory of so many living persons with whom we have dined, and walked, and argued—we behold in the gloomy Rasselas of Goldsmith's sager cotemporary, a dim succession of shadowy images without life or identity, mere machines for the grinding of morals, and the nice location of sonorous phraseology. Perhaps indeed Humour is an essential requisite in the flesh-and-blood delineation of character; and a quick perception of the Ridiculous is necessary to

VOL. I.

D

the accurate insight into the True. We can better ascertain the profundity of Machiavel after we have enjoyed the unrivalled humour of his novel.

That delightful egotist-half-good-fellow, halfsage, half-rake, half-divine, the pet gossip of philosophy, the-in one word-inimitable and unimitated Montaigne, insists upon it in right earnest, that continual cheerfulness is the most indisputable sign of wisdom, and that her estate, like that of things in the regions above the moon, is always calm, cloudless, and serene. And in the same essay he recites the old story of Demetrius the grammarian, who, finding in the Temple of Delphos a knot of philosophers chatting away in high glee and comfort, said, "I am greatly mistaken, gentlemen, or by your pleasant countenances you are not engaged in any very profound discourse." Whereon Heracleon answered the grammarian with a "Pshaw, my good friend! it does very well for fellows who live in a perpetual anxiety to know whether the future tense of the verb Ballo should be spelt