example, Rabelais, as if to break the blow, and to appear unconscious of what he has done, writes a chapter or two of pure buffoonery. He, every now and then, flashes you a glimpse of a real face from his magic lantern, and then buries the whole scene in mist. The morality of the work is of the most refined and exalted kind; as for the manners, to be sure, I cannot say much. Swift was anima Rabelaisii habitans in sicco,— the soul of Rabelais dwelling in a dry place. Yet Swift was rare. Can anything beat his remark on King William's motto,-Recepit, non rapuit,— 'that the receiver was as bad as the thief'? T. T. June 15, 1830. SWIFT AND STELLA I think Swift adopted the name of Stella, which is a man's name, with a feminine termination, to denote the mysterious epicene relation in which poor Miss Johnston stood to him. T. T. July 26, 1836. SIR THOMAS BROWNE It would be difficult to describe Browne adequately; exuberant in conception and conceit, dignified, hyper-latinistic, a quiet and sublime enthusiast; yet a fantast, a humourist, a brain with a twist; egotistic like Montaigne, yet with a feeling heart and an active curiosity, which, however, too often degenerates into a hunting after oddities. In his Hydriotaphia, and, indeed, almost all his works, the entireness of his mental action is very observable; he metamorphoses everything, be it what it may, into the subject under consideration. Lit. Rem. II. 236. DONNE The wit of Donne, the wit of Butler, the wit of Pope, the wit of Congreve, the wit of Sheridanhow many disparate things are here expressed by one and the same word, Wit!-Wonder-exciting vigour, intenseness and peculiarity of thought, using at will the almost boundless stories of a capacious memory, and exercised on subjects where we have no right to expect it-this is the wit of Donne ! LORD BROOKE Lit. Rem. I. 149. I do not remember a more beautiful piece of prose in English than the consolation addressed by Lord Brooke (Fulke Greville) to a lady of quality on certain conjugal infelicities. The diction is such that it might have been written now, if we could find any one combining so thoughtful a head with so tender a heart and so exquisite a taste. T. T. July 5, 1834. ASGILL AND DEFOE I know no genuine Saxon English superior to Asgill's. I think his and Defoe's irony often finer than Swift's. T. T. April 30, 1832. DON QUIXOTE Don Quixote is not a man out of his senses, but a man in whom the imagination and the pure reason are so powerful as to make him disregard the evidence of sense when it opposed their conclusions. Sancho is the common sense of the social man-animal, unenlightened and unsanctified by the reason. You see how he reverences his master at the very time he is cheating him. THE BIBLE T. T. Aug. 11, 1832. Our version of the Bible is to be loved and prized for this, as for a thousand other things—that it has preserved a purity of meaning to many terms of natural objects. Without this holdfast, our vitiated imaginations would refine away language to mere abstractions. Hence the French have lost their poetical language; and Mr. Blanco White says the same thing has happened to the Spanish. T. T. June 24, 1827. Intense study of the Bible will keep any writer from being vulgar, in point of style. T. T. June 14, 1830. PILGRIM'S PROGRESS This wonderful work is one of the few books which may be read repeatedly at different times, and each time with a new and different pleasure. I read it once as a theologian-and let me assure you that there is great theological acumen in the work-once with devotional feelings-and once as } a poet. I could not have believed beforehand that Calvinism could be painted in such exquisitely delightful colours. . . . The Pilgrim's Progress is composed in the lowest style of English, without slang or false grammar. If you were to polish it, you would at once destroy the reality of the vision. For works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain. CRASHAW T. T. May 31, 1830. Crashaw seems in his poems to have given the first ebullience of his imagination, unshapen into form, or much of, what we now term, sweetness. In the poem Hope, by way of question and answer, his superiority to Cowley is self-evident. In that on the name of Jesus equally so; but his lines on St. Theresa are the finest. Where he does combine richness of thought and diction nothing can excel, as in the lines you so much admire Since 'tis not to be had at home, But where she may a martyr be. She'l to the Moores, and trade with them She offers them her dearest breath, With Christ's name in't, in change for death For Him she'l teach them how to die. Farewell all pleasures, sports and joys, These verses were ever present to my mind whilst writing the second part of Christabel; if, indeed, by some subtle process of the mind they did not suggest the first thought of the whole poem. Add. T. T. GRAY I think there is something very majestic in Gray's Installation Ode; but as to the Bard and the rest of his lyrics, I must say I think them frigid and artificial. There is more real lyric feeling in Cotton's Ode on Winter. his DR. JOHNSON T. T. Oct. 23, 1833. Dr. Johnson seems to have been really more powerful in discoursing vivâ voce in conversation than with pen in hand. It seems as if the excitement of company called something like reality and consecutiveness into his reasonings, which in his writings I cannot see. His antitheses are almost always verbal only; and sentence after sentence in the Rambler may be pointed out to which you cannot attach any definite |