not prepared to say that he is a purely impartial theorist. He advances general positions respecting the happiness of society, founded on limited views of truth, and under the bias of local feelings. He contemplates only one side of the question. It must be always thus in poetry. Let the mind be ever so tranquilly disposed to reflection, yet, if it retains poetical sensation, it will embrace only those speculative opinions that fall in with the tone of the imagination. Yet I am not disposed to consider his principles as absurd, or his representations of life as the mere reveries of fancy.

In The Deserted Village' he is an advocate for the agricultural in preference to the commercial prosperity of a nation; and he pleads for the blessings of the simpler state, not with the vague predilection for the country which is common to poets, but with an earnestness that professes to challenge our soberest belief. Between Rousseau's celebrated letter on the influence of the sciences, and this popular poem, it will not be difficult to discover some resemblance of principles. They arrive at the same conclusions against luxury-the one from contemplating the ruins of a village, and the other from reviewing the downfall of empires. But the English poet is more moderate in his sentiments than the philosopher of Geneva; he neither stretches them to such obvious paradox, nor involves them in so many details of sophistry; nor does he blaspheme all philosophy and knowledge in pronouncing a malediction on luxury. Rousseau is the advocate of savageness, Goldsmith only of simplicity. Still, however, his theory is adverse to trade, and wealth, and arts. He delineates their evils, and disdains their vaunted benefits. This is certainly not philosophical neutrality; but a neutral balancing of arguments would have frozen the spirit of poetry. We must consider him as a pleader on that side of the question which accorded with the predominant state of his heart; and, considered in that light, he is the poetical advocate of many truths. He revisits a spot consecrated by his earliest and tenderest recollections; he misses the bloomy flush of life which had marked its once busy, but now depopulated scenes; he beholds the inroads of monopolising wealth, which had driven the peasant to emigration; and, tracing the sources of the evil to "Trade's proud empire," which has so often proved a transient glory and an enervating good, he laments the state of society "where wealth accumulates and men decay."

Undoubtedly, counter views of the subject might have presented themselves, both to the poet and philosopher. The imagination of either might have contemplated, in remote perspective, the replenishing of empires beyond the deep, and the diffusion of civilised existence, as eventual consolations of futurity for the present sufferings of emigration. But those distant and cold calculations of optimism would have been wholly foreign to the tone and subject of the poem. It was meant to fix our patriotic sympathy on an innocent and suffering class of the community, to refresh our recollections of the simple joys, the sacred and strong local attachments, and all the manly virtues of rustic life. Of such virtues the very remembrance is by degrees obliterated in the breasts of a commercial people. It was meant to rebuke the luxurious and selfish spirit of opulence, which, imitating the pomp and solitude of feudal abodes, without their hospitality and protection, surrounded itself with monotonous pleasure-grounds, which indignantly "spurned the cottage from the green.' On the subject of those misnamed improvements, by the way,

"

the possessors themselves of those places have not been always destitute of compunctions similar to the sentiments of the poet. Mr. Potter, in his 'Observations on the Poor Laws,' has recorded an instance of it. "When the late Earl of Leicester was complimented upon the completion of his great design at Holkham, he replied, "It is a melancholy thing to stand alone in one's country. I look round, not a house is to be seen but mine. I am the Giant of Giant Castle, and have eat up all my neighbours.'

Although Goldsmith has not examined all the points and bearings of the question suggested by the changes in society which were passing before his eyes, he has strongly and affectingly pointed out the immediate evils with which those changes were pregnant. Nor, while the picture of Auburn delights the fancy, does it make a useless appeal to our moral sentiments. It may be well sometimes that society, in the very pride and triumph of its improvement, should be taught to pause and look back upon its former steps-to count the virtues that have been lost, or the victims that have been sacrificed, by its changes. Whatever may be the calculations of the political economist as to ultimate effects,

the circumstance of agricultural wealth being thrown into large masses, and of the small farmer exiled from his scanty domain, foreboded a baneful influence on the independent character of the peasantry, which it is by no means clear that subsequent events have proved to be either slight or imaginary.

Pleasing as Goldsmith is, it is impossible to ascribe variety to his poetical character; and Dr. Johnson has justly remarked something of an echoing resemblance of tone and sentiment between The Traveller' and The Deserted Village.' But the latter is certainly an improvement on its predecessor. The field of contemplation in The Traveller' is rather desultory. The other poem has an endearing locality, and introduces us to beings with whom the imagination contracts an intimate friendship. Fiction in poetry is not the reverse of Truth, but her soft and enchanted resemblance; and this ideal beauty of nature has been seldom united with so much sober fidelity as in the groups and scenery of The Deserted Village.'*

PAUL WHITEHEAD.

[Born, 1710. Died, 1774.]

PAUL WHITEHEAD was the son of a tailor in London, and, after a slender education, was placed as an apprentice to a woollen-draper. He afterwards went to the Temple, in order to study law. Several years of his life (it is not quite clear at what period) were spent in the Fleet prison, owing to a debt which he foolishly contracted, by putting his name to a joint security for 3000l. at the request of his friend Fleetwood, the theatrical manager, who persuaded him that his signature was a mere matter of form. How he obtained his liberation we are not informed.

In the year 1735 he married a Miss Anne Dyer, with whom he obtained 10,000l. She was homely in her person, and very weak in intellect; but Whitehead, it appears, always treated her with respect and tenderness.

He became, in the same year, a satirical rhymer against the

[Where is the poetry of which one-half is good? Is it 'The Eneid'? is it Milton's? is it Dryden's? is it any one's except Pope's and Goldsmith's? of which all is good.-Byron's Works, vol. iv. p. 306.]

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ministry of Walpole; and having published his State Dunces,' a weak echo of the manner of 'The Dunciad,' he was patronised by the opposition, and particularly by Bubb Dodington. In 1739 he published The Manners,' a satire, in which, Mr. Chalmers says, he attacks everything venerable in the constitution. The poem is not worth disputing about; but it is certainly a mere personal lampoon, and no attack on the constitution. For this invective he was summoned to appear at the bar of the House of Lords, but concealed himself for a time, and the affair was dropped. The threat of prosecuting him, it was suspected, was meant as a hint to Pope, that those who satirised the great might bring themselves into danger; and Pope (it is pretended) became more cautious. There would seem, however, to be nothing very terrific in the example of a prosecution that must have been dropped either from clemency or conscious weakness. The ministerial journals took another sort of revenge, by accusing him of irreligion; and the evidence, which they candidly and consistently brought to substantiate the charge, was the letter of a student from Cambridge, who had been himself expelled from the university for atheism.

In 1744 he published another satire, entitled 'The Gymnasiad,' on the most renowned boxers of the day. It had at least the merit of being harmless.

By the interest of Lord Despenser he obtained a place under government, that of deputy-treasurer of the chamber; and, retiring to a handsome cottage which he purchased at Twickenham, he lived in comfort and hospitality, and suffered his small satire and politics to be equally forgotten. Churchill attacked him in a couplet :—

"May I (can worse disgrace on manhood fall?)
Be born a Whitehead, and baptized a Paul."

But though a libertine like Churchill, he seems not to have been the worse man of the two. Sir John Hawkins gives him the character of being good-hearted, even to simplicity; and says that he was esteemed at Twickenham for his kind offices, and for composing quarrels among his neighbours.

WALTER HARTE.

[Born about 1707. Died, 1774.]

THE father of this writer was a fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford, prebendary of Wells, and vicar of St. Mary's at Taunton, in Somersetshire. When Judge Jefferies came to the assizes at Taunton, to execute vengeance on the sharers of Monmouth's rebellion, Mr. Harte waited upon him in private, and remonstrated against his severities. The judge listened to him attentively, though he had never seen him before. It was not in Jefferies' nature to practise humanity; but, in this solitary instance, he showed a respect for its advocate, and in a few months advanced the vicar to a prebendal stall in the cathedral of Bristol. At the Revolution the aged clergyman resigned his preferments, rather than take the oath of allegiance to King William; an action which raises our esteem of his intercession with Jefferies, while it adds to the unsalutary examples of men supporting tyrants, who have had the virtue to hate their tyranny.

The accounts that are preserved of his son, the poet, are not very minute or interesting. The date of his birth has not even been settled. A writer in 'The Gentleman's Magazine' fixes it about 1707; but, by the date of his degrees at the university, this supposition is utterly inadmissible; and, all circumstances considered, it is impossible to suppose that he was born later than 1700. He was educated at Marlborough College, and took his degree of Master of Arts at Oxford in 1720.* He was introduced to Pope at an early period of his life; and, in return for the abundant adulation which he offered to that poet, was rewarded with his encouragement, and even his occasional assistance in versification. Yet, adınirer as he was of Pope, his manner leans more to the imitation of Dryden. In 1727 he published by subscription a volume of poems, which he dedicated to the Earl of Peterborough, who, as the author acknowledges, was the first patron of his Muse. In the preface it is boasted that the

* [This, according to Mr. Croker's showing (Boswell,' vol. i. p. 378), is not the case. The Walter Harte who took his degree of A.M. at Pembroke College, Oxford, in 1720, was not the poet; for he was of St. Mary's Hall, and made A.M. on the 21st of January, 1730. This one fact removes Mr. Campbell's after difficulties.]