interesting post of observation. I shall hope in my next letter to be able to detail more fully the nature of the operations which were undertaken in this sense, as well as to describe the movement as seen from within the Kingdom; for Galicia, though thoroughly Polish in sentiment, is after all only a base of operations. To witness the mode in which they are carried out

it will be necessary to cross the frontier, and though the conditions there are not particularly favourable to the prosecution of calm investigation and inquiry, still, without visiting Warsaw itself, it will be impossible to arrive at any just estimate of the force and vitality of the movement, or to venture upon an opinion as to its ultimate prospects of success.

THIS is a very natural mark of respect from a son to the memory of his father. As a biography the book is well written, and not too long. Whether it is quite the thing for a child to write about a parent, is a question which may be answered in more ways than one. But here is the son's writing, and we must deal with it as we find it. We shall endeavour, at least, to do full justice to the subject.

Charles James Blomfield, late Bishop of London, was the eldest son of Charles Blomfield, a schoolmaster in Bury St Edmunds. He was born on the 29th of May 1786, and after receiving the rudiments of his education under his father, was sent, when eight years old, to the grammar-school of his native town. In constitution he appears to have been delicate from his birth, being subject to affections of the chest; and his stature was for a while so diminutive, that his companions gave him the nickname of Tit Blomfield. Neither the delicacy of his constitution, however, nor the feebleness of his frame, prevented his attaining to early distinction. He was a remarkably forward boy, very quick, and very diligent. Not content to outstrip his contemporaries in classics, he studied of his own accord modern languages, chemistry, and botany,

in order to effect which, he often rose at five o'clock in the morning; and his recreations were found chiefly in scribbling verses, making an electric machine for his own use, and in music. Thus the delicate little fellow grew up, surmounting, as he advanced in years, the feebleness to which he seems never to have yielded, and holding always to one judgment in regard to his own career in after life-" he meant to be a Bishop."

It seems that his father thought at one time of transferring Charles James to Eton, to which, indeed, after being examined in 1799, he was admitted on the foundation. But something in the air of the place displeased the pedagogue, so young Blomfield was carried back to Bury. There he remained till 1804, when he was entered as a pensioner at Trinity College, and in the following year he gained a scholarship. It was the commencement of a career as brilliant and successful as, in modern times at least, has been run in Cambridge. Blomfield soon discovered, that if he meant to take a foremost place in the University, he must give himself up, even more than he had heretofore done, to severe study. The boys from Bury, though well taught, proved inferior in some important parts of scholarship to those of

Eton and the Charterhouse, and young Blomfield was determined to make good this deficiency, let the struggle cost what it might. He got into the habit of spending sixteen, often eighteen, hours out of the twenty-four over his books, and every day he wrote a piece, either of Greek or Latin, as an exercise. This latter practice he rendered less irksome, by indulging occasionally in the composition of an original essay. In general, however, he contented himself with first translating a passage out of some classic author into English, and byand-by, after the interval of a day or two, re-translating it, that he might compare his own with the original version. The consequence was, that during the first four months of his residence, he not only read through Aristophanes, all the Greek tragedians, Herodotus, Thucydides, and a great part of Cicero, but made himself an accurate grammarian and etymologist, capable of holding his own against the best scholar whom either Eton or the Charterhouse had sent up. But this was not achieved without a severe strain upon his energies, and could not have been accomplished at all, had he not been as methodical in the distribution of his time, as he was careful never to throw away the smallest portion of it.

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"His day," says his son and biographer, was generally thus divided. Rising in time for the early chapel service, which he never missed during his undergraduate life except when prevented by illness, he began reading at nine; at twelve allowed himself two hours' recreation, walking or rowing, or occasionally a game at billiards; dined at two, the college dinner hour; and, returning to his books at three, read without interruption till twelve at night, and occasionally till three in the morning. Sometimes he alternated his work, one week sitting up till three, and the next rising at four. The remonstrances of friends or physicians who warned him that he read too hard, were in vain. The objects which he had set before him must be gained, at whatever cost of time and health. Of his industry at this period some proofs still remain, in the

shape of very elaborate note-books, written with that caligraphy which scholars had not yet learned to despise. A Bury Cambridge, in a long vacation, exclaimfriend meeting him in the streets of ed, Why, Charles Blomfield, I believe if you dropped from the sky you would be found with a book in your hand.'”

Industry such as this, combined with talents of no common order, produced its inevitable results. Blomfield carried off every prize for which he competed, and sowed the seeds of a nervous irritability, under which he more or less laboured throughout the remainder of his days. He acquired, at the same time, the respect of his tutors, and gathered round him a circle of friends, all destined to become in after life more or less distinguished. Among these may be specified James Henry Monk, first professor of Greek, and subsequently Bishop of Gloucester; the late Baron Alderson; Sharpe; Hustler of Trinity, a name well known; Frederick Pollock, now Chief Baron; and in the latter part of his course, his own younger brother, Edward Valantine Blomfield, and Thomas Rennell. The society of these young men, most of them his equals, some his superiors in natural ability, proved of the greatest use to Blomfield. It checked the self-appreciation which clever lads easily acquire, and hindered it from degenerating into conceit. It helped likewise to cut off from his manners the rust which youths brought up in a country town seldom entirely escape, and of which some faint traces might to the last be discerned in the shyness with which he was occasionally afflicted. And it was attended with no countervailing disadvantages. Blomfield's set was not a fast set, in the modern acceptation of that term; it was a lively set, and a witty-able to relish fun in every shape, except when profaneness and obscenity might fall upon and dull its lustre. "Few persons," writes Chief Baron Pollock, "were equal to him (Blomfield) in the point and liveliness of

his talk-yet I never heard him originate or repeat an expression which, as a bishop, he could wish unsaid; and though he largely contributed to the vivacity of every party where he was present, and was the author of many witty and smart sayings, which were handed about, he never forgot the decorum that belonged to the path of life he had already chosen."

Blomfield's passion was for classics but as the highest honours in Cambridge were bestowed then, as they are now, on mathematical excellence, he found it necessary, towards the close of 1806, to give up almost the whole of his time to that study. He had already won the Craven scholarship, for which he was examined by Porson, on which occasion, by-the-by, the following incident occurred. Among other passages given to Blomfield to translate, was a difficult and corrupt chorus in Eschylus, to which Porson had applied emendations. Having carefully read these emendations at home, and retaining them well in his memory, Blomfield brought them out with excellent effect at the proper moment, and secured forthwith what he never afterwards forfeited, the admiration and respect of the examiner. He was equally successful the same year in gaining Browne's prize, for a Greek ode on the death of Nelson. But mathematics proved a sore trial to him, and the more so, that all his friends, including his tutor, discouraged his attempt to master them. Blomfield's resolution was, however, unalterable, and, as usual, it carried him through. He appears in the interval between 1806 and 1808 to have worked in couples, so to speak, with his friend Frederick Pollock. The one excelled in classics, the other in mathematics; and they so managed matters as to give and receive no inconsiderable share of mutual assistance. With all his exertions, however, Blomfield missed by two the highest place in the tripos. He came out third wrangler - Bickersteth of

VOL. XCIII.-NO. DLXXII.

Caius, afterwards Lord Langdale, being first, and Bland of St John's second. But, to compensate for this, Blomfield carried away the Chancellor's classical medal; and in the following year gained the member's prize for a Latin dissertation.

A youth capable of such an academical career seldom fails, unless there be some moral obliquity about him, of attaining to eminence in after-life. Blomfield may be said never to have stood still. He was elected Fellow of Trinity in 1809, and immediately set about the work on which his fame as a scholar mainly rests-his edition of the Plays of Eschylus. Not that this was by any means his first effort in the character of a classical critic. He had already contributed to the Edinburgh Review' several articles, particularly two, upon Butler of Shrewsbury's edition of Eschylus,' which attracted a great deal of attention. But articles contributed to reviews and magazines seldom much outlive the month or the quarter of their incubation. Blomfield's Eschylus still keeps its place on the bookshelves of English scholars of the age that is passing. It may not hold the rank which it once did, either there or elsewhere, because the scholarship of 1863 has left the scholarship of 1809-24 far behind. But there it stands. Blomfield's articles, on the contrary, with the controversies to which they gave rise, are clean forgotten. Let us pause, therefore, for a moment, in our history of the good Bishop, in order to tell the younger among our readers who the men of the day were, and what the subjects that mainly occupied their scholarly attention fifty or sixty years ago.

In the latter part of the last and beginning of the present century, the Continent of Europe was closed against Englishmen, and England against foreigners-not only against merchants, traders, and politicians, but against scholars likewise. By fits and starts, indeed, the Græcists

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of Germany, advancing already to the eminence which they have since attained, made both their names and their works known on this side of the water. But such knowledge, as it was never followed up by personal, and seldom by literary intercourse, had little effect in conciliating differences, or breaking down national prejudices. Indeed, effects the very opposite seemed to be produced, particularly in this country. When Porson, for example, got into his controversy with Hermann, almost all England took Porson's part and German scholarship, very little examined for its own sake, became a sort of byword of derision both in Oxford and Cambridge. This is an event in bygone times, perhaps less to be wondered at than lamented; for Porson, while he lived, was as much at the head of the English School of Greek literature as Pope in his day had been at the head of English poetry. His word was law-so much so, that to have called in question the most extravagant of his dicta, would have been fatal to the reputation of the doubter as a scholar.

Porson died in 1808, and then it began to be discovered, that great as he was in correcting the texts of his authors, he was neither so sedulous nor so successful as he might have been in ascertaining the exact sense of what they wrote. He had been a critic rather of words than of things, an emendator, not a commentator, in the proper sense of that term. English Græcists accordingly did what Alexander's generals had done at his decease; they fell asunder, and divided among them the empire over which Porson had long reigned supreme. The leaders of the school which went furthest apart from Porson's principles, were Samuel Parr, Charles Burney, and Butler of Shrewsbury. They were all men of mark; each, however, having his own particular idiosyncracy. Of Parr, it has been justly said, that his scholarship, though prodigious, was never so used as to be of the smallest benefit to the

world. Burney, with much taste, and extensive knowledge, lacked critical acumen. Butler, possessing some skill, and more industry, overlaid his text with quotations from other commentators, and not unfrequently lost himself, and confused his readers, amid the dust which he had heedlessly excited. A second school, which professed to be but the disciples of Porson, while it laboured, like him, to arrive at absolute correctness of text, endeavoured, in language of its own, to clear up whatever seemed to be obscure in the author's meaning. The leaders of this school were Blomfield himself, his brother Edward, Monk, who succeeded to Porson's chair, Kaye, Dobree, Elmsley, and Maltby. If Gaisford had any leaning at all, it was towards this party; but Gaisford, as all the world knows, had crotchets of his own-he loved to stand alone. There was, however, a third, though a less distinguished set, more industrious than well instructed, yet not on that account to be entirely ignored, who, with Valpy at their head, kept the 'Classical Journal' going, and fought the battle of the digamma. The starting of a rival journal, the Museum Criticum,' of which Blomfield was the real parent, and to which he contributed many articles, gave mortal offence to Valpy and his friends. The strife between the journals was, however, a war of a later date,-for the present we have to speak of the two leading schools of Greek literature and of their doings.

We have alluded to Blomfield's early dedication of his energies to the bringing out of a correct edition of the plays of Eschylus. It was a great desideratum among scholars at the time; for the Glasgow edition, though it carried Porson's name on the title-page, had received, in fact, very little of his supervision, and abounded in errors. Alive to the want, and anxious to supply it, the University of Cambridge had requested Porson to edit the great tragedian, undertaking to defray