that nothing is wonderful to the philosopher. In no point are the minds of the two poets more kindred and harmonious than in the sadness and tenderness which perpetually break through their lighter and sprightlier moods. The cypress buds are in their gayest garlands. We have already cited the lines of Menander on the early death of those beloved by the gods. The following are of a darker colour; to us commonplace, but in Greek poetry, from the contrast, impressive : Ὅταν εἰδέναι θέλῃς σεαυτὸν ὅστις εἶ, 'If you would know of what rude stuff you're made, There rest the bones of kings, there tyrants rot; All dust alike, compound one common mass. Reflect on them, and in them see yourself.'- Cumberland. Compare the 'Pallida mors æquo pulsat pede pauperum tabernas The whole ode: 'Moriture Delli! Cedes coemptis saltibus et domo Victima nil miserantis Orci Omnes eodem cogimur.' But it is not in these incidental and natural points that we would insist on the parallel between Menander and Horace it is because each was the best, most lively, most instructive painter of ordinary life, the one in Athens, the other in Rome. Terence, and the Latin comic writers, borrow their manners as well as their plots and characters: all is Athenian, all are copies of a copy. Wherever they attempt to mingle the two, as Plautus sometimes does, does, perhaps to enhance the burlesque, as when, e. g., he appeals to Attic laws before a Roman prætor, the effect, if more comical, is altogether untrue. As in Menander, Athenian life lives, speaks, acts, puts on its broader extravagances and follies, its lighter and more subtle shades and tints; so in Horace, Roman life lives and acts. The poet introduces us to the very fops and bores who walked the Sacred Way, or swept the suburra with their laticlave the magnificos who feasted gluttonous and servile parasites. Every rank, from Davus the slave to Mæcænas, or higher than Mæcænas, appears before us; sometimes, as in the old comedy, they are under their proper names; sometimes, as is general with Menander, they furnish the traits and touches which give actual being to the imaginary character. If the Athenian impersonates in his dramas, and the Roman only describes in his Satires and Epistles, the difference is, that one wrote for a theatrical, the other for an untheatrical people—the one for those among whom the theatre, the legitimate theatre, was native, supreme, perfect; the other, where it was foreign, secondary to more fierce and stirring amusements-domiciliated, but yet a stranger-rarely daring to figure Roman men or Roman manners, and, where it did so, not justifying the bold innovation with acknowledged success. The glorious name of poets may have been denied to, or grudgingly bestowed on, both. In the days of Horace the question was agitated, whether a comedy -a Menandrian comedy-was a poem or not; so the poetic fame of Horace has been rested on his Odes-certainly his least title to that fame; while the Satire and the Epistle, the only form of poetry in which Rome was original, have been held too common and pedestrian to entitle him to that lofty appellation. But if we could imagine Horace lost, and, like Menander, left to us only in some far-scattered fragments, would there be any doubt as to what part of Roman poetry we should pray all-devouring Time to surrender back? About Varius our curiosity is certainly keen, but how little of the rest of the whole range of Roman verse might not Oblivion take in exchange! We may fairly imagine that as great a blank has been created in the subduction of Menander as would have been if Horace were altogether erased from Latin letters; or if he lived but in his Odes, and in a few passages ill chosen from his better works, in here and there a moral line, or a few lifeless passages of his Satires and his Epistles. ART. IV. The Life of Henry Fielding; with Notices of his Writings, his Times, and his Contemporaries. By Frederick Lawrence, of the Middle Temple, Barrister-at-Law. London, 1855. MR. R. LAWRENCE has been a diligent collector of the scattered notices which relate to the life and works of Fielding. Had he stopped here he would have produced a far better book than has resulted from his attempt to execute the more ambitious design of depicting the times and contemporaries' of his hero. The plan itself is extremely objectionable. In order to get at the career of one man, we are compelled to read something about all the persons who flourished, and all the events which happened, in his age; and if the method becomes universal, this general biography and general history of an era must be re-told in connexion with every noted individual who belonged to it. Lives will grow to an intolerable magnitude, the confusion of subjects will be endless and perplexing, the repetitions nauseating. No more accessaries should be grouped around the central figure than are essential to his story, nor can we discover any other ground for the departure from this rule than the one alleged by Swift in his praise of digressions, that it is manifest the society of writers would quickly be reduced to a very inconsiderable number, if men were put upon making books with the fatal confinement of delivering nothing beyond what is to the purpose.' Even in the instances in which eminent men have been closely associated with others, or largely mixed up with public affairs, and where in consequence some latitude must be allowed, it requires the most self-denying judgment to reject superfluous particulars, and the utmost art to blend those which are retained. In this art and judgment Mr. Lawrence is entirely deficient. His digressions have constantly no relation to the career and character of Fielding; they break the thread of the narrative, and are meagre and vapid in themselves. He seems to have been reluctant to lose any of the materials upon which he had stumbled in the course of his researches, a failing which is commonest with those whose stock of knowledge is not very great, and who, in the phrase of Pope, are 'o'erflowing though not full.' But the worst fault of all is, that a large part of Mr. Lawrence's Mr. Lawrence, in his preface, quotes the example of Mr. Forster's well-known 'Life of Goldsmith' in justification of his plan. It is surprising it should not have occurred to him that the cases were entirely different; for Goldsmith, in consequence of Boswell's matchless record, is so intimately connected with the Johnsonian circle that we cannot separate him from his associates. narrative narrative is so mixed up with the embellishments of his fancy, that it is impossible to separate fact from fiction. He belongs to the school of biographical restorers who, from the fragment of an arm or foot, can venture to reproduce the entire figure. There is hardly a page in which, in some particular or other, he has not gone beyond his authorities, and, in general, without the least intimation that his statements are purely conjectural. These imaginative additions have not even the merit of being vivid and picturesque. Like the rest of the book, they are feeble both in style and conception, and this want of accuracy almost neutralises the praise to which Mr. Lawrence would have been entitled for gleaning together the little that has been recorded respecting the most illustrious of English novelists. Henry Fielding was the great-grandson of the Earl of Desmond, who was a son of the Earl of Denbigh. The peer of the novelist's generation asked him why they wrote their names differently, the elder line adhering to the old usage of placing the e before the i (Feilding). 'I cannot tell, my lord,' replied Henry, 'except it be that my branch of the family were the first that knew how to spell.' The Earls of Denbigh derived their origin from the House of Habsburg, which supplied emperors to Germany and kings to Spain; and Gibbon employed the circumstance to point his celebrated eulogy upon our immortal countryman: 'The successors of Charles the Fifth may disdain their brethren of England; but the romance of "Tom Jones," that exquisite picture of human manners, will outlive the palace of the Escurial and the imperial eagle of the House of Austria.' This founder of a glory more durable than that of kings was born at Sharpham Park, in Somersetshire, on the 22nd of April, 1707. His father, Edmund, served under the Duke of Marlborough, and subsequently rose to the rank of lieutenant-general; his mother was a daughter of Mr. Justice Gould. In addition to the novelist, a son and four daughters were the issue of the marriage. When Henry's mother died, the widower took a second wife, by whom he had six sons. This lady also preceded the general to the tomb, and before his own death, in 1741, he had married a third and fourth time. Henry was first instructed at home by Mr. Oliver, a clergyman, the original of Parson Trulliber in 'Joseph Andrews.' Although the minister of the parish, he is described in the novel as devoting his whole attention to farming, and as personally superintending its most grovelling details. His build, habits, and conversation, all partake of his agricultural calling. In a word, he is a mean, ignorant farmer in orders. It may be inferred from this satirical sketch, however embellished in the details, that young Fielding received received from him neither knowledge nor kindness, and the only benefit he probably did his pupil was the unintentional service of furnishing him with the materials for his ludicrous portrait. Henry was next sent to Eton, where he formed an acquaintance with several persons who were afterwards distinguished. One of these was the future great commoner, Mr. Pitt. Fielding soon repaired at this celebrated seminary the neglect of Mr. Oliver, and became conspicuous among his fellows for his knowledge of the Greek and Latin classics. How deeply his mind was imbued with them, how heartily he admired and how much he had profited by them, is evident in all his happiest works. He has, indeed, been accused of a tendency to pedantry; but what with some men is ostentation was in his case the simple application of materials which early habit had made so familiar that they had lost their learned air and were entirely native to him. From Eton, when he was about eighteen years of age, he went to Leyden, where for two years he studied civil law with the diligence of a man who was seriously bent on qualifying himself for his profession. He was then compelled to return to England by the inability of his father to supply him with funds. His biographer, Murphy, laments this interruption to his education, because an ampler store of knowledge might have given such a complete improvement to his talents as would afterwards have shone forth with still greater lustre in his writings.' No observation could be less appropriate. The sky is not more dotted with stars than the works of Fielding with learning; his style shows that he had sedulously trained himself in the school of the best masters, and his own consummate genius did the rest. It could have added nothing to his reputation if, drawing the mass of his ideas from books instead of from nature and imagination, he had shone with a borrowed and not an inherent lustre. But what for his own sake is to be regretted is, that, forced from the steady prosecution of the law, he should have been cast into a career which fostered his tendency to an irregular and licentious life. He arrived in the capital his own master when he was not yet twenty-one. His father was as unable to support him in London as in Leyden; and though the general was good enough to allow him 2007. a year, his son used to say that anybody might pay it who would.' In this situation he had no other resource, to use his own expression, than to become a hackney writer or a hackney coachman.' The alternations of luxury and misery which were the result of the precarious subsistence of the authors of that day who lived by their wits, have been vividly described by Mr. Macaulay. Deprivation only served to sharpen their desires, and when they made a lucky hit they rushed into the extremes of extravagance |