429752 ENTERED According to Act of Congress, in the year 1859, by DERBY & JACKSON, In the Clerk's of the District Court of the United States for the Southern District of New York. GIVMLORD TIBBYKA W. H. TINSON, Stereotyper. GEO. RUSSELL & Co., Primers. INTRODUCTION. NEARLY a hundred years ago, there appeared in England a novel, in five volumes, bearing the quaint and singular title, THE FOOL OF QUALITY. Its author, Henry Brooke, was a man of decided genius, who had passed through many of the vicissitudes of fortune. He was born in Ireland, and became in early life the disciple of Sheridan, Swift, and Pope, and was subsequently the friend of Lyttleton and Pitt, the favourite of the Prince of Wales and others of the nobility of that day. He enjoyed the reputation of being a fine swordsman and dancer, an accomplished wit and poet, a refined courtier, and, in the language of Pope, the minion once of fortune, yet "unspoilt by all her caresses." While at college, Swift prophesied of him a brilliant career, only "regretting that his talent pointed towards poetry, which of all pursuits was most unprofitable." At the age of eighteen, he was admitted as a student of law in the Temple, at which time he formed an intimacy with Pope and Lyttleton, which ripened into an enduring friendship. While here, he wrote and published, under the eye of Pope, a book entitled "Universal Beauty:" a poem abounding in religious mysticism. With Pope he kept up a correspondence for several years. letter written by him from Ireland, expressing great solicitude abo Pope's religious opinions may be found in "Brookiana." Havi heard it intimated that Pope was inclined to irreligion, and it havi been asserted that he "had too much wit to be a man of religio and too much refinement to be that trifling thing called a Christian he was anxious to find out the real state of his friend's mind on th subject and wrote him accordingly. In answer, Pope sent him vindication of his "Essay on Man" from the aspersions of M Crousaz, and affirmed that he sincerely worshipped God, believed his revelations, was resigned to his dispensations, loved all his cr tures; was in charity with all denominations of Christians, howev violently they treated each other, and detested none so much as th profligate race, who would loosen the bands of morality, either und the pretence of religion or free-thinking. He declared that he hat no man as a man, but that he hated vice in any man, that he hat no sect, but he hated uncharitableness in any sect. The Rev. Charles Kingsley, in his preface to the recent Lond edition of THE FOOL OF QUALITY, says of its author: "He had intense capacity for worship. All his life he delighted to look up beings better than himself, and through them to God, as the su and substance of all their goodness, and not in spite of that, b because of that, he was, in the very best sense of the word, a Liber Against all tyranny, cruelty and wrong, against the chicaneries the law and the chicaneries of politicians, his voice was always lo and earnest. Never man lived a more original, self-determine independent life." Though nothing is left to show his real inner life save what c be discovered of his spirit and prevailing thoughts in his writing yet we are informed by his biographers that he was deeply imbu with the doctrines of a sect of spiritualists of that day. If not lower, he was at least a sympathetic admirer of the works |