General Paoli's. We found here Signor Martinelli of Florence, author of a History of England, in Italian, printed at London.

I spoke of Allan Ramsay's 'Gentle Shepherd,' in the Scottish dialect, as the best pastoral that had ever been written; not only abounding with beautiful rural imagery, and just and pleasing sentiments, but being a real picture of manners; and I offered to teach Dr. Johnson to understand it. "No, sir," said he, "I won't learn it. You shall retain your superiority by my not knowing it."

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An animated debate took place whether Martinelli should continue his History of England to the present day.-GOLDSMITH. "To be sure he should."-JOHNSON. "No, sir, he would give great offence. He would have to tell of almost all the living great what they do not wish told."-GOLDSMITH. It may, perhaps, be necessary for a native to be more cautious; but a foreigner, who comes among us without prejudice, may be considered as holding the place of a judge, and may speak his mind freely."-JOHNSON. "Sir, a foreigner, when he sends a work from the press, ought to be on his guard against catching the error and mistaken enthusiasm of the people among whom he happens to be."-GOLDSMITH. "Sir, he wants only to sell his history, and to tell truth; one an honest, the other a laudable motive."-JOHNSON. 'Sir, they are both laudable motives. It is laudable in a man to wish to live by his labours; but he must write so as he may live by them, not so as he may be knocked on the head. I would advise him to be at Calais before he publishes his history of the present age. A foreigner who attaches himself to any political party in this country is in the worst state that can be imagined; he is looked upon as a mere intermeddler. A native may do it from interest."-Boswell. "Or principle."-GOLDSMITH. "There are people who tell a hundred political lies every day, and are not hurt by it. Surely, then, one may tell truth with safety."-JOHNSON. "Why, sir, in the first place, he who tells a hundred lies has disarmed the force of his lies. But, besides, a man had rather have a hundred lies told of him than one truth which he does not wish should be told."-GOLDSMITH. “For my part, I'd tell truth, and shame the devil."-JOHNSON. Yes, sir; but the devil will be angry. I wish to shame the devil as much as you do, but I should choose to be out of the reach of his claws."-GOLDSMITH. "His claws can do you no harm when you have the shield of truth."

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It having been observed that there was little hospitality in London : JOHNSON. "Nay, sir, any man who has a name, or who has the power of pleasing, will be very generally invited in London. The man Sterne, I have been told, has had engagements for three months."GOLDSMITH. "And a very dull fellow."-JOHNSON. "Why, no, sir." Martinelli told us, that for several years he lived much with Charles Townshend, and that he ventured to tell him he was a bad joker.-— JOHNSON. 66 'Why, sir, thus much I can say upon the subject. One day he and a few more agreed to go and dine in the country, and each of them was to bring a friend in his carriage with him. Charles Townshend asked Fitzherbert to go with him, but told him, ‘you must find somebody to bring you back: I can only carry you there.' Fitzherbert did not much like this arrangement. He, however, consented, observing sarcastically, 'It will do very well; for then the same jokes will serve you in returning as in going!""

An eminent public character being mentioned:-JOHNSON. "I remember being present when he showed himself to be so corrupted, or at least something so different from what I think right, as to maintain, that a member of parliament should go along with his party, right or wrong. Now, sir, this is so remote from native virtue, from scholastic virtue, that a good man must have undergone a great change before he can reconcile himself to such a doctrine. It is maintaining that you may lie to the public; for you lie when you call that right which you think wrong, or the reverse. A friend of ours, who is too much an echo of that gentleman, observed, that a man who does not stick uniformly to a party, is only waiting to be bought. Why, then, said I, he is only waiting to be what that gentleman is already.”

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We talked of the king's coming to see Goldsmith's new play :-"I wish he would," said Goldsmith: adding however, with an affected indifference, Not that it would do me the least good."-JOHNSON. "Well, then, sir, let us say it would do him good (laughing). No, sir, this affectation will not pass;-it is mighty idle. In such a state as ours, who would not wish to please the chief magistrate?"-GOLDSMITH.

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I do wish to please him. I remember a line in Dryden,—

'And every poet is the monarch's friend.'

It ought to be reversed: " * * * *

I spoke of Mr. Harris, of Salisbury, as being a very learned man,

and in particular an eminent Grecian.-JOHNSON. "I am not sure of that. His friends give him out as such, but I know not who of his friends are able to judge of it."—GOLDSMITH. "He is what is much better: he is a worthy, humane man."-JOHNSON. "Nay, sir, that is not to the purpose of our argument: that will as much prove that he can play upon the fiddle as well as Giardini, as that he is an eminent Grecian."-GOLDSMITH. "The greatest musical performers have but small emoluments. Giardini, I am told, does not get above seven hundred a year.”—JOHNSON. "That is indeed but little for a man to get, who does best that which so many endeavour to do. There is nothing, I think, in which the power of art is shown so much, as in playing on the fiddle. In all other things we can do something at first. Any man will forge a bar of iron, if you give him a hammer; not so well as a smith, but tolerably. A man will saw a piece of wood, and make a box, though a clumsy one; but give him a fiddle and a fiddlestick, and he can do nothing."

354.-CHARACTER OF KEATS.

MONCTON MILNES.

[MR. R. MONCTON MILNES, himself no mean poet, has recently published a delightful Life of John Keats. It is a charming contribution to literary biography, and unquestionably tends to raise the general appreciation of the character of that most original poet. We find from his letters that Keats stood up manfully against neglect and abuse; that he had a noble confidence in his own powers to accomplish something excellent; that his poetical capacity was not an immature thing, but was gradually nourished and enlarged by earnest thought and patient study. But, with all his calm endurance, we can scarcely bring ourselves to agree with his accomplished biographer, that the ungenerous attacks upon him did not deeply trouble his spirit. Great minds have the same loathing as Coriolanus, of a display of their wounds. It is delightful, at any rate, to know that such oppression did not enfeeble his mental energy, and that the poetical temperament in his case and in hundreds of others, has been proved to possess the best couragethat of patience and fortitude.]

The last few pages have attempted to awaken a personal interest in the story of Keats almost apart from his literary character-a personal

interest founded on events that might easily have occurred to a man of inferior ability, and rather affecting from their moral than intellectual bearing. But now

"He has outsoar'd the shadow of our night;
Envy and calumny, and hate and pain,
And that unrest which men miscall delight,
Can touch him not, and torture not again;
From the contagion of the world's slow stain
He is secure, and now can never mourn

A heart grown cold, a head grown grey in vain;
Nor, when the spirit's self had ceased to burn,
With sparkless ashes load an unlamented urn:"

and, ere we close altogether these memorials of his short earthly being, let us revert to the great distinctive peculiarities which singled him out from his fellow-men, and gave him his rightful place among “the inheritors of unfulfilled renown."

Let any man of literary accomplishment, though without the habit of writing poetry, or even much taste for reading it, open Endymion' at random (to say nothing of the later and more perfect poems), and examine the characteristics of the page before him, and I shall be surprised if he does not feel that the whole range of literature hardly supplies a parallel phenomenon. As a psychological curiosity, perhaps Chatterton is more wonderful; but in him the immediate ability displayed is rather the full comprehension of, and identification with, the old model, than the effluence of creative genius. In Keats, on the contrary, the originality in the use of his scanty materials, his expansion of them to the proportions of his own imagination, and, above all, his field of diction and expression extending so far beyond his knowledge of literature, is quite inexplicable to any of the ordinary processes of mental education. If his classical learning had been deeper, his seizure of the full spirit of Grecian beauty would have been less surprising; if his English reading had been more extensive, his inexhaustible vocabulary of picturesque and mimetic words could more easily be accounted for; but here is a surgeon's apprentice, with the ordinary culture of the middle classes, rivalling, in æsthetic perceptions of antique life and thought, the most careful scholars of his time and country, and reproducing these impressions in a phraseology as complete and unconventional as if he had mastered the whole history and

the frequent variations of the English tongue, and elaborated a mode of utterance commensurate with his vast ideas.

The artistic absence of moral purpose may offend many readers, and the just harmony of the colouring may appear to others a displeasing monotony; but I think it impossible to lay the book down without feeling that almost every line of it contains solid gold enough to be beaten out, by common literary manufacturers, into a poem of itself. Concentration of imagery, the hitting off a picture at a stroke, the clear, decisive word that brings the thing before you and will not let it go, are the rarest distinction of the early exercise of the faculties. So much more is usually known than digested by sensitive youth, so much more felt than understood, so much more perceived than methodised, that diffusion is fairly permitted in the earlier stages of authorship; and it is held to be one of the advantages, amid some losses, of maturer intelligence, that it learns to fix and hold the beauty it apprehends, and to crystallize the dew of its morning. Such examples to the contrary, as the Windsor Forest' of Pope, are rather scholastic exercises of men who afterwards became great, than the first-fruits of such genius, while all Keats's poems are early productions, and there is nothing beyond them but the thought of what he might have become. Truncated as is this intellectual life, it is still a substantive whole, and the complete statue, of which such a fragment is revealed to us, stands perhaps solely in the temple of the imagination. There is, indeed, progress, continual and visible, in the works of Keats, but it is towards his own ideal of a poet, not towards any defined and tangible model. All that we can do is to transfer that ideal to ourselves, and to believe that, if Keats had lived, that is what he would have been.

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Contrary to the expectation of Mr. Shelley, the appreciation of Keats by men of thought and sensibility gradually rose after his death, until he attained the place he now holds among the poets of his country. By his side, too, the fame of this his friend and eulogist ascended, and now they rest together, associated in the history of the achievements of the human imagination; twin stars, very cheering to the mental mariner tost on the rough ocean of practical life and blown about by the gusts of calumny and misrepresentation; but who, remembering what they have undergone, forgets not that he also is divine.

Nor has Keats been without his direct influence on the poetical