we have given must be added, her notes on the English Lakes, which were sent to press in 1795, and the tale of Gaston de Blondeville,' which, although written in the winter of 1802, was not published during the lifetime of its author.

Mrs Radcliffe lived twenty-five years after the composition of The Italian; but her literary exertions during that long period consisted merely, with the exception of the posthumous romance of Gaston de Blondeville,' in the fabrication of a few occasional verses, which do not appear to have been very painfully elaborated. She was in the habit, is stated, of giving much of her time to the perusal of the novels and poems of the day, occasionally attending the opera, the oratorios, or the theatres with her husband, and occupying herself, besides, very assiduously in the management of her household concerns. During part of almost every summer she used to accompany her husband on some excursion of pleasure, which was never, however, extended beyond the limits of England, except on one occasion, in 1794, when they made a tour together through Holland, and the western frontier of Germany, returning down the Rhine. When engaged in this way she generally kept a pretty full journal of occurrences. Another of her favourite amusements-and this, by the bye, reminds us of Madame de Stael-consisted in listening to sonorous recitations in languages even which she did not understand,—her husband taking an affectionate delight in gratifying her here, by reading to her the most musical passages from the Greek and Latin classics. During the last twelve years of her life she was severely afflicted with asthma; and died at last in her 59th year, on the 7th of February, 1823.

Of her personal appearance we are told, that, although of low stature, she was exquisitely proportioned, with a complexion of great delicacy, and eyes, eye-brows, and mouth, of singular loveliness. Having no children, almost her only society was that of books and of her husband; for, being naturally of a retiring disposition, she never was able to conquer her aversion to mixed or crowded assemblies, and even after the blaze of reputation which her works procured for her, continued to dislike of all things the personal notoriety of authorship. Her shrinking sensibility, indeed, with regard to any thing like public notice, seems throughout her whole life to have been quite of the old school. It was with no inconsiderable reluctance that she was at first prevailed upon to turn author at all; and the usual honours and distinctions of the profession she never could be persuaded to accept or allow to be offered to her. Her acuteness and delicacy of feeling did not partake, however, in any degree of the morbid or hypochondriac; and it is gratifying to be told that at the very time when some foolish manufacturer of gossip had circulated a report of her insanity, she was in the enjoyment, not only of the most unclouded reason, but of the most equable and cheerful spirits. Even her genius for the preternatural and the horrible, seems to have been entirely under control and management; her power of sketching the most terrific pictures, and calling up around her the world of mysteries and spectres, being held by her apparently without the obligation imposed upon most other wizards and sorceresses, of becoming, in turn, themselves the thralls of the demons they command.

"Mrs Radcliffe," says a writer in the Edinburgh Review,' "was

as truly an inventor, a great and original writer in the department she had struck out for herself-whether that department was of the highest kind or not-as the Richardsons, Fieldings, and Smolletts, whom she succeeded and for a time threw into the shade; or the Ariosto of the North, before whom her own star has paled its ineffectual fires. The passion of fear, the latent sense of supernatural awe, and curiosity concerning whatever is hidden and mysterious-these were themes and sources of interest which, prior to the appearance of her tales, could scarcely be said to be touched on. The Castle of Otranto' was too obviously a mere caprice of imagination; its gigantic helmets, its pictures descending from their frames, its spectral figures dilating themselves in the moonlight to the height of the castle battlements—if they did not border on the ludicrous, no more impressed the mind with any feeling of awe, than the enchantments and talismans, the genii and peris, of the Arabian Nights. A nearer approach to the proper tone of feeling, was made in the Old English Baron;' but while it must be admitted that Mrs Radcliffe's principle of composition was, to a certain degree, anticipated in that clever production, nothing can illustrate more strongly the superiority of her powers, the more poetical character of her mind, than a comparison of the way in which, in these different works, the principle is wrought out ;-the comparative boldness and rudeness of Clara Reeve's modes of exciting superstitious emotions, as contrasted with the profound art, the multiplied resources, the dextrous display and concealment, the careful study of that class of emotions on which she was to operate, which Mrs Radcliffe displays in her supernatural machinery. Certainly never before or since did any one more accurately perceive the point to which imagination might be wrought up, by a series of hints, glimpses, or half-heard sounds, consistently at the same time with pleasurable emotion, and with the continuance of that very state of curiosity and awe which had been thus created. The clang of a distant door, a footfall on the stair, a halfeffaced stain of blood, a strain of music floating over a wood, or round some decaying chateau-nay, a very rat behind the arras,' become in her hands invested with a mysterious dignity; so finely has the mind been attuned to sympathize with the terrors of the sufferer, by a train of minute details and artful contrasts, in which all sights and sounds combine to awaken and render the feeling more intense. Yet her art is even more visible in what she conceals than in what she displays. 'One shade the more, one ray the less,' would have left the picture in darkness; but to have let in any farther the garish light of day upon her mysteries, would have shown at once the hollowness and meanness of the puppet which alarmed us, and have broken the spell beyond the power of reclasping it. Hence, up to the moment when she chooses to do so herself, by those fatal explanations for which no reader will ever forgive her, she never loses her hold on the mind. The very economy with which she avails herself of the talisman of terror preserves its power to the last, undiminished, if not increased. She merely hints at some fearful thought, and leaves the excited fancy, surrounded by night and silence, to give it colour and form. Of all the passions, that of fear is the only one which Mrs Radcliffe can properly be said to have painted. The deeper mysteries of love, her plummet has never sounded. More wearisome beings than her heroines, and

thing more tolerable and not to be endured' than her love tales, Calprenede or Scudery never invented. As little have the stormier passions of jealousy or hatred, or the dark shades of envious and malignant feeling formed the subjects of her analysis. Within the circle of these passions, indeed, she did not feel that she could walk with security; but her quick perception showed where there was still au opening in a region of obscurity and twilight, as yet all but untrodden. To that, as to the sphere pointed out to her by nature, she at once addressed herself; from that, as from a central point, she surveyed the provinces of passion and imagination, and was content if, without venturing into their labyrinths, she could render their leading and more palpable features available to set off and to brighten by their variety the solemnity and gloom of the department which she had chosen'

John Keats.'

BORN A. D. 1796.-DIED A. D. 1820.

THIS young poet was of humble origin, and born October 29, 1796, at a livery-stable, kept by his grandfather in Moorfields. In childhood he was sent to Mr Clarke's school, at Enfield, where he remained till the age of fifteen, and was then bound apprentice to Mr Hammond, a surgeon, in Church-street, Edmonton. On leaving Mr Hammond, he attended at St. Thomas's hospital; but his inclination to poetry having been cultivated by his teachers at school, who marked his unusual turn of mind, and meeting when he came out in the world with the other encouragements of it natural to literary and stirring times, he found himself unable to pursue his profession, and gave way entirely to the ambition of becoming a great poet. What induced him to exhibit this ainbition with the more eagerness, was an introduction he had at this time to Mr Leigh Hunt, who was struck with admiration at the specimens of premature genius laid before him.

Mr Keats's first volume of poems, many of which were written in his teens, accordingly made its appearance in 1817, when he was in his twenty-first year. This was followed by Endymion, a Poetic Romance,' in 1818; and in the year 1820, he published his last and best work, Lamia, Isabella, and other Poems,' all which publications excited remarkable attention. Mr Keats's poetical faculty was of a nature to make its way into notice under any circumstances, and would unquestionably have done so; but the political and other opinions to which his attention had been early directed, the public connexions to which he was introduced, and the generous enthusiasm, natural to great talents, which would not allow him to conceal either, soon brought on him a host of critics, some of whom were but too happy to mask their political hostility under the guise of public zeal. An attack from a review, the conductors of which were actuated by this motive, completed the difficulties with which Mr Keats had to contend; and his constitution never having been very strong, and undergoing a severe

1 We have taken the liberty of extracting this memoir-the best we have seen of the author of Endymion'-from Gorton's Biographical Dictionary,' a singularly meritorious work.

shock in the illness and death of a younger brother, whose bedside he had attended when he ought to have been nursing an illness of his own, not to mention some other perplexities of a nature too delicate, though unfounded, to be mentioned here, he put forth his last volume with little hope of its doing any thing but showing what he might have done; and withdrew into silence and the arms of his friends to die. It is certain, that he had made up his mind to this premature end a good while before it took place. During his sufferings, which were considerable, owing to the consciousness of what he might have performed, the disdain of his own physical weakness, which subjected him to impressions from his enemies that he otherwise despised, and above all, to a very tender hope which he had reason to indulge, and which he now saw he must give up in this world, he nevertheless exhibited a manly submission, and took a pleasure in showing himself sensible of the attentions he experienced.

After residing some months in the houses of Mr Charles Brown, Mr Leigh Hunt, and other friends at Hampstead, he was prevailed upon to try the climate of Italy, where he arrived, but without effect, in the month of November, 1820, accompanied by his friend, Mr Severn, a young artist of great promise, since well-known as the principal English student at Rome; and in Rome, on the 27th of December following, in the arms of this gentleman, who attended him with undeviating zeal, he expired, completely worn out, and wearied of life. His lingering death-bed was so painful to him, that he used eagerly to watch the countenance of the physician, in hopes of seeing what others would have called the fatal sentence; yet so sweet was his natural taste of life, and so irrepressible his poetical tendencies to the last, that a little before he died, speaking of the grave he was about to occupy, he said, “he felt the daisies growing over him." He was interred in the English burying-ground, near the monument of Caius Cestius, and not far from the grave in which was soon after deposited his poetical mourner, Mr Shelly, who had made him the handsomest offers to come and live with him in Tuscany.

It is a mistake to attribute Mr Keats's death-as Lord Byron has done among others—to the attacks of the critics; and his lordship was told of it, before the passage to that purpose in Don Juan appeared; but a lively couplet, with a good rhyme to it, is hard for a wit to part with. The attacks may have accelerated, and undoubtedly embittered his death; but the cause of it was a consumptive tendency, of an extreme kind, and of long standing. When his body was opened, there was scarcely any portion of lungs remaining. The physicians declared, that they wondered how he could have held out so long; and said, that nothing could have enabled him to do it but the spirit within him. Mr Keats had a very manly, as well as delicate spirit. He was personally courageous in no ordinary degree, and had the usual superiority of genius to little arts and the love of money. His patrimony, which was inconsiderable, he freely used in part, and even risked altogether, to relieve the wants of others, and farther their views. He could be hot now and then; and perhaps was a little proud, owing to the humbleness of his origin, and the front he thought it necessary to present to vulgar abuse. He was handsome, with remarkably beautiful hair, curling in natural ringlets.

Mr Keats's poems have been so often criticised both by friends and enemies, and have succeeded, since his death, in securing him so unequivocal a reputation as a highly promising genius, that it will be necessary to say comparatively little of them here. If it was unlucky for his immediate success, that he came before the public recommended by a political party; it was fortunate for him with posterity, that he began to write at a period when original thinking, and a dependence on a man's own resources, were earnestly inculcated on all sides. Of his standing with posterity we have no doubt. He will be considered, par excellence, as the young poet; as the one who poured forth at the earliest age the greatest unequivocal exuberance, and who proceeded very speedily to show that maturity brought him a judgment equal to the task of pruning it, and rendering it immortal. He had the two highest qualities of a poet, in the highest degree-sensibility and imagination. His 'Endymion," with all its young faults, will be a store-house for the lovers of genuine poetry, both young and old; a wood to wander in; a solitude inhabited by creatures of superhuman beauty and intellect; and superabundant in the luxuries of a poetical domain, not omitting "weeds of glorious feature." Its most obvious fault was a negligence of rhyme ostentatiously careless, which, by the common law of extremes, produced the very effect he wished to avoid—a pressure of itself on the reader. The fragment of Hyperion,' which was his last performance, and which extorted the admiration of Lord Byron, has been compared to those bones of enormous creatures which are occasionally dug up, and remind us of extraordinary and gigantic times.

Percy Bysshe Shelley.

BORN A. D. 1792.—died a. d. 1822.

THIS gifted but erring genius, was the eldest son of Sir Timothy Shelley, Baronet, of Castle Goring, Sussex; and was born at his father's seat, on the 4th of August, 1792. The following biographical notice of him is from the pen of his friend and associate, Captain Medwin:

Percy Bysshe Shelley was removed from a private school at thirteen, and sent to Eton. He there showed a character of great eccentricity, mixed in none of the amusements natural to his age, was of a melancholy and reserved disposition, fond of solitude, and made few friends. Neither did he distinguish himself much at Eton, for he had a great contempt for modern Latin verses, and his studies were directed to any thing rather than the exercises of his class. It was from an early acquaintance with German writers, that he probably imbibed a romantic turn of mind; at least, we find him, before fifteen, publishing two RosaMatilda-like novels, called, Justrozzi,' and 'The Rosicrucian,' that bore no marks of being the productions of a boy, and were much talked of and reprobated as immoral by the journalists of the day. He also made great progress in chemistry. He used to say, that nothing ever delighted him so much as the discovery that there were no elements of earth, fire, or water; but before he left school he nearly lost his life by being blown up in one of his experiments, and gave up the pursuit.