distortion." "The ornamental parts of a work cost the least trouble to a writer, who has any luxuriance of imagination; to support the plain parts with an easy dignity, so that they shall neither become flat on the one hand, nor disgustingly stiff on the other, is a much more difficult task; and yet, if you succeed never so well here, you will receive little thanks from the generality of readers, who will be apt to imagine they could easily perform the same kind of work themselves-till they come to try it." "An author [a prophetic hit, by the way, at some eminent writers since, such as Horsley, Landor, &c.] seems reduced to great extremities who flies to new spelling to distinguish himself." "The only good reason for altering a long established spelling is that the writing may come the nearer to the pronunciation." "It is the easiest thing in the world to coin new words. The most ignorant of the mobility do it every day, and are laughed at for it. Horace gave, it is said, but two, and Virgil one new word to the Latin tongue." Armstrong not only opposes the introduction of new words, but votes for the superannuation of many old. The following passage has considerable ingenuity and wit, and is worthy of his coadjutor Wilkes, who was undoubtedly the smartest man of his time:-"Were I an absolute prince, I should make it capital ever to say encroach or encroachment. I would commit inculcate for all its Latinity to the care of the paviours, and it should never appear above ground again. If you have the least sympathy with the human ear, never say purport while you breathe, nor betwixt, except you have first repeated between till we are quite tired of it. Methinks strongly resembles the broken language of a German, in his first attempts to speak English. Methought lies under the same objection, but it sounds better. It is full time that froward should be thrust out of all good company, especially as perverse is ready at hand to supply his place. Vouchsafe is a very civil gentleman, but as his courtesy is somewhat oldfashioned, we wish he would deign, or condescend, or be pleased to retire. From what rugged road, I wonder, did this swerve deviate into the English language? But this subject-matter! In the name of everything that is disgusting and detestable, what is it? Is it one or two ugly words? What is the meaning of it? Confound me if I could ever guess! Yet one dares hardly peep into a preface for fear of being stared in the face by this nasty subject-matter." "Withal," he slily adds, 'is an old-fashioned, ill-sounding word, but as there is frequent occasion for it, and no other word so perfectly expresses its meaning, we cannot afford to part with it." 66 up We wonder what the author of the above diatribe at new words would have said, had he lived at the present day, when so many innovations are daily and daringly made upon our Queen's English-whether he would have locked " circumambulate;" puffed "fuliginous" up the chimney; sent "fatuous" and "fatuity" to an asylum for idiots; dragged "tenebrious" and "tenebrific," like Cacus, into daylight, and put them publicly to death; wrung the neck of "irridescent;" unsettled the equilibrium of "stand-point; " asked of a hundred "fountain-oceans, flame-pictures, star-galaxies, and bushywhiskered, yet fire-radiant Tantalus-Ixions," if they were not compounds of "inspissated gloom," double-folded ugliness, and transcendent affectation; and, in fine, with wry faces and closed eyes, consented to swallow "subjective" and "objective." Still Armstrong was too intelligent a man not to have admitted, were he living now, that while of late much that is barbarous and chaotic has been violently carted into our tongue, much also that is strikingly expressive and philosophically accurate has been added; that many fine forgotten archaisms have been restored; and that now the British language, enriched by contributions from the French, the Italian, the German, the Scotch, and the Scandinavian, has become, more than at any former period, a thorough reflector of British thought, and a powerful and pliable instrument in the hand of British genius. We might go on culling clever, witty, and penetrating remarks from almost every page of this volume, but must content ourselves with the few following:-" Superficial people are always the most ostentatious. I suppose you may remember that you used to be the fondest and most vain of the thing you were just beginning to learn." "Had Horace wrote his Epistles or Satires in the same kind of numbers with Virgil's 'Eneid,' it would have been a monstrous impropriety, like hunting the fox or hare on a war-horse, with the equipage of a general at a review or on the day of battle." "Where faces resemble each other, you perceive a remarkable resemblance in the voice." "The best part of beauty is in spirit and expression." We give next two rather coarse but vigorous excerpts-"Some people wonder that stupidity and malice should meet. So far from being opposite qualities, they are for the most part husband and wife. And why should you attempt to separate whom the Devil has joined?" "Died by the sting of a snail, would sound oddly in the bills of mortality; yet I have known a woman of beauty, sense, and spirit in love with one of the most insipid fellows that ever glared weary stupidity from a large dead eye. Whence it appears that the infatuation of the Fairy Queen in the 'Midsummer Night's Dream,' extravagant as it seems, is not quite out of nature.' Once more" Virgil is like the sun, bright and cheerful, Lucan is a subterraneous vault on fire. There is such a gloomy solemnity in most of the writers of that age, that you would think the sun had always waded through a sky of blood in the days of those inhuman emperors." It is noticeable, and confirmatory of this, that Lucan was Foster's favourite poet among the ancients. He seemed attracted to him by a gloomy congeniality of genius. How remarkable, we must observe too, that it was through this sky of blood that the mild Morning Star of Christianity first dawned upon the nations! Of Christianity, Armstrong's notions seem not to have been very decided. In these essays he does not often allude to theological subjects at all; and his allusions show little acquaintance with them, and less reverence. He has, for instance, some very shallow and flippant remarks on the origin of evil, in which he plainly asserts that "what we call evil, as well as everything that is good, must certainly spring from the great Fountain of all existence," and "humbly conceives that there cannot be much pleasure in a state that is not, in one shape or other, obnoxious to pain; and that none but the Almighty can enjoy an uninterrupted and immutable happiness!" This is, of course, to deny the Christian heaven. To intimate, besides, that God could not have so contrived man that he might have been susceptible of pleasure without the slightest admixture of pain, is not only to question the existence of angels and of an original state of innocence, but to rob the Being he calls "Almighty" of His attribute of omnipotence! Even God cannot, it is true, work contradictions-He cannot make two and two five—but the existence of happiness without pain is no contradiction; nay, it is in a partial degree a fact. There are, even in this world, hours and days of pure and perfect enjoyment, embittered by no sting, and followed by no reaction; and why should there not be elsewhere cycles, centuries, everlasting ages, of the same? To the fearful consequences of God's being the author of evil-the destruction of all confidence in Him, and hence of all hope from Him—the annihilation of His legal authority, as well as of His benevolent character-Armstrong is totally blind, as well as to the magnitude, the complication, the inveteracy, and the misery produced by "what we call evil," and the fierce antagonism in which it stands to good. A recent writer ("Thorndale; or, The Conflict of Opinions") maintains that evil is a necessary element in the progress of humanity, and that, when that is perfected, we shall even be thankful to evil, not as good, but as the pioneer of good. But in asserting the necessity of this element, he begs the question; in saying that humanity is to be perfected, and evil to be extinguished, he begs it—at least on his own principles—again; and while showing the development of what he calls the "Divine idea " in the history of the universe, he omits to explain how the long prevalence of crime, the fact that the vast majority of the race in every age have been wicked and miserable, and the sacrifice of innumerable past generations of wretched and sindevoured men, to secure the civilisation and advance the morality of the present inhabitants of the globe, are consistent with the Divine justice and the Divine love. We return to recount the very few and far-scattered incidents which comprise the remaining part of the life of this poet. His essays were well received by the public, and enjoyed a rapid sale, although the critics of the time attacked them, and with some justice, for their occasional affectation of smartness, and for the coarse and vulgar profanity of expression which disfigures a few of their pages. Such attacks Armstrong keenly resented, and, with other circumstances, they contributed to produce in him a permanent exasperation of mind. In 1760 he was appointed physician to the army in Germany, where the Seven Years' War was raging. Next year he wrote a poem called "A Day," addressed to Wilkes, and which that gentleman published, with a preface, where he expresses a regret that such a fine production should appear before the public in a fragmentary state. In this poem he hits at Churchill in the following lines : “What news to-day?—I ask you not what rogue, Churchill was not the man to sit silent under such an attack, and ere proceeding on his last “Journey,” he, in the poem of that name, thus satirised his assailant:— “Let them, with Armstrong, taking leave of sense, Read musty lectures on benevolence, Or con the pages of his gaping* Day, Where all his former fame was thrown away; And the vain stiffness of a letter'd Scot. She draws the curtains, and looks comfort dead. And tries to pray for sleep; an Etna burns— "Gaping :" referring to the fragmentary form of "A Day," with its yawning chasms of asterisks. |