ing. We knew an old lady once, who, in a fit of absence of mind, said grace before sitting down to a rubber of whist. A traditional sporting parson is said to have given out from the reading-desk, "the Collect for the Sunday next before the Derby." Steele's "Christian Hero" was received by the mess of the Fusiliers very much as though a gentleman were to propose to read prayers at Tattersall's the night before the St. Leger. It was all as good as-as-Addison, but it would not do; the fact was that he was not in a position to preach; his comrades might quote against him, "Some parsons are like finger-posts, I've often heard them say. They never go to heaven themselves, A doctor who will not take his own medicine inspires little confidence; but when a man preaches and does not practise, he does an infinity of positive harm. There is no set of men who have served the state better, or done more to raise the moral tone of their associates, than the religious soldier, such as a Gardiner, a Havelock, or a Lieutenant Willoughby; but then they showed the fruit of their teaching in their own lives; we fear that Steele did not. About this time he fought a duel: two officers quarrelled, and Steele made the peace between them with such success that the one with whom he had used his strongest efforts was persuaded that Steele was in the interest of his antagonist, and challenged the peacemaker. Steele was only just recovering from an illness, but was forced to go out, and wounded his man very severely. Adams seems to think that this duel arose indirectly from the badinage which Steele received about "The Christian Hero:" he certainly was in a fair way of never hearing the last of that most ill-timed publication. To save his character he wrote a play, which being very successful, he was forgiven. He had now the character which Mrs. Quickly gives to John Rugby: "No tell-tale nor breed-hate. His worst fault is, that he is given to prayer; he is something peevish that way; but nobody but has his fault. Let that pass." The writing of a play at that time was a rather audacious change from the "Christian Hero" style of literature: the stock argument of most plays was conjugal infidelity of the most shameless kind. Lamb, in defending such plays as were written by Wycherly and Vanbrugh, says that they pretend to no morality because they were written by men who merely created an imaginary picture of society in which morality was a mere matter of philosophical speculation: not by any means a powerful defence, from the most dearly-loved essayist of England after Addison: the fact was that Lamb could not help admiring the great constructive powers and the brilliant wit of these plays, and so he made the best he could of them; he had much better have let them take care of themselves. On certain grounds they are hideously immoral; a Jacquerie or a Reign of Terror would be perfectly justifiable if the morals of the reigning class were so atrocious as they are described in the plays of the Restoration and those immediately following it. Aphra Behn can be pretty strong, but she is generally considered to write on the side of virtue: in the majority of plays at the latter end of the seventeenth century, the popular hero was the adulterer. Lord Macaulay lays all this to the credit of the Puritans; Leigh Hunt is rather more feeble in his excuses than Charles Lamb for these astounding plays. The fact lies in a nutshell; both Charles Lamb and Leigh Hunt saw with their exquisitely critical eyes points of construction and brightness of dialogue rarely equalled in any age; the plays were condemned for their immorality, yet they were so good in particular ways that something had to be said for them. The blacker the negro, the more whitewash required, and certainly Lamb and Hunt daubed them with somewhat untempered mortar. Steele wrote a respectable play: Jeremy Collier, in 1698, had published his attack on the English stage. He had won, having beaten even Congreve. Steele's play, The Funeral, or Grief à la Mode," was acted in 1702, and Steele had the benefit of seeing the change in public opinion. "The Funeral" is respectable, but surely extremely dull reading, in spite of Sydney Smith, who, being like Dickens and Thackeray, far higher than the men he pretended to adore, used them as clothes-horses. The women are rather idiots, are they not? Why anybody wanted to marry any of them is rather a mystery; they did not seem to know anything; they required a great deal more winning than they were worth: they were intolerably affected and dictatorial before marriage; what they were after one can hardly guess. The theory which underlies this play, and one-balf of the more tolerable virtuous plays and novels which followed, is this. A man is determined to marry a particular woman, and she at once pu's on every air of silly coquetry of which she is mistress; the more silly and petulant she is, the more he is supposed to be determined to gain her. Swift, in one of his nameless hideous horrors, has satirized this supposed habit of women in a way which makes one inclined to assist Mr. Calcraft in hanging him. But is the fact true with the majority of women, or was it ever true? Men don't want women to rush into their arms; but a woman who keeps a man at bay too long, through sheer humbug, may gain an ardent lover, but will find herself linked to an exceedingly suspicious husband — a husband who watches for her to make up the arrears of that confidence which she lost in her pre-matrimonial childishnesses. Steele's women are the women of mediocre eighteenth century comedy: and they have at times a rather alarming family likeness to Lady Steele and Lady Warwick, as far as we can judge of those two ladies from the extremely small means at our command. Both Addison and Steele seem to have suffered from the same domestic trouble. Addison, his detractors say, used to take refuge from the wife of his bosom at Bitton's, where he took more wine than was good for a delicate constitution like his; he could not always stand Lady Warwick. Steele was in the same trouble. We find him writing, ment - We hope for the sake of peace Lady Steele was asleep when he got home, and that he remembered to take his boots off before getting into bed; a bullying wife is apt to make a lying husband, and we do not believe in the schoolfellow from India. Addison had to take so much drink to make him talk brilliantly he could never speak in Parlia- that Steele was generally fuddled before Addison began; consequently, the suggestion about the boots is not out of place. Is it not wildly possible that Lady Warwick and Lady Steele might have kept their husbands at home by a different course of treatment, and not driven them to taverns for the sake of society, by simply assisting to entertain their husbands' friends at home, and listening to the best conversation of the century? The play of the "Tender Husband" followed, and then the "Lying Lover." The latter play was unsuccessful; it is possible that Steele attended to Jeremy Collier's strictness too closely, for he is not only dull he preaches. Of this play he told a startled House of Commons 'years after, "it was damned for its piety." The glorious, pious, and immortal memory of the great William might have been drunk pottles deep by Steele but for "the little gentleman in black velvet," who brought a sudden end to that monarch's career. The King's horse stumbled on a molehill, to the great satisfaction of some of the Tories, and to the great dissatisfaction of Defoe and Steele Steele, however, was an Irishman, and managed, though entirely honest, to keep right side uppermost. A very singular thing is told which we should like to see verified: it is said that Steele's name was the last ever written down for preferment by William the Third, and that the 1 fact was discovered after his death. The story has been told in various ways, but it seems to come from Steele himself, who on matters of this kind was no liar: it is in the highest degree probable, but is worth historically about the same as an ex parte state paper from Fetter Lane; that is to say, not worth the paper on which it is written. He fared better than he expected: it is possible that Addison used his influence, now recognized, from his remark. able talents and blameless life, to get Steele appointed gazetter; he was also made gentleman usher to the Prince Consort. He left the army and married; his income at this time is difficult to calculate. He had three hundred pounds a year as gazetteer, and something from other sources: his wife, who lived only a few months, had a property in Barbadoes, which he inherited: we, however, do not find his name on the list of estates on that island forty years later, and it does not seem to be known among the traditions of that very aristocratic dependency. The lady having died suddenly, Steele very soon looked about for another helpmate, also with a little property. The second lady was Miss Scurlock, of Llangunnor, Carmarthen, heiress to four hundred pounds a year. Veni, vidi, vici, Richard Steele might have said of himself. He was then, a handsome fellow of thirty-six, thirty-two, or thirty-one. Nobody seems to know, and therefore we do not pretend to decide. A Richard Steele was born in 1671. If that was the man, he was thirty-six in 1707, at which time he married Miss Scurlock, after a wonderfully short courtship. His statement of his income to her mother is as follows: Ten days after this he is still asking for her mother's consent, and concealing the fact that they are married. He compliments his wife on her filial virtue in only consenting to come to his arms with her mother's blessing. It is very probable that Mrs. Steele's sudden accession of filial piety after marrying without her mother's leave had something to do with the old lady's power of administering the property it is evident, however, that everything was soon comfortable as far as Mrs. Scurlock was concerned; and they shortly after started housekeeping on a scale which would have required about double their income, had the income even existed, which it did not. Steele scarcely saw six hundred pounds cash in reality: he was certainly in debt when he married. During his mother-in-law's lifetime he only got from the Welsh estate what she chose to give him, and on this he and his wife started a style of living which would take nearly three thousand pounds a year now. His excuse was that it was necessary for him to keep up appearances. This laudable effort to advance his fortunes by display only gained him one eminent acquaintance, that is to say, the Sheriff of Middlesex: when he ultimately got out of debt, or nearly so, he died. He started with a town house; a country house at Hampton Court, near Lord Halifax; a carriage and pair, sometimes with four horses, a riding horse for Mrs. Steele, and everything else in proportion. Addison lent him a thousand pounds, which he, as we have said before, repaid; but nothing could keep such extravagance from continual trouble. Why Mrs. Steele allowed it is a question which is easily answered: she was not in possession of facts. Steele did not know the state of his own affairs, and believed in the most agreeable view of them; this he magnified and decorated to make himself agreeable to his wife, with whom he was utterly in love; she developed into a "screw," but can we, on the whole, blame the poor lady because she was not a Mrs. Micawber, and had not the charming habit which that lady had of believing with a splendid devotion in the financial ability of an entirely thriftless husband? ness, 66 Starting almost at the very first, it becomes obvious from Steele's letters to his wife that he was in difficulties, and that she gradually had got the habit of facing facts, and of letting him know, sometimes with very little gentlethat he was not (financially) the man she took him to be. She was devoted to him in the most proper manner, but her devotion took the form of such extreme anxiety about his well-being that the domestic hearth seems to have been warmed with something stronger than sea-coal; that is an elegant way of saying that she made the house too hot to hold him. No novelist, as far as we are aware, has as yet attempted to sketch the character of an invisible woman from the letters of her husband; it is highly probable that no person alive would be likely to succeed in giving the world a detailed character from almost purely one-sided evidence, except George Eliot, who is capable of anything. The only attempt ever made in that way was by a Frenchman in the "Famille Benoiton." In that piece, the woman, who has been the ruin of the family by neglect, is never seen, and only heard of periodically by the fact that she is not at home. Où est Madame?" is asked continually. "Elle est sortie," is the answer. At last, at the dénouement when she might have been of some use, the question is asked, but is answered with a slight difference. Madame has been at home, but is once more gone out. Mrs. Steele, or Lady Steele, is practically as unreal a person as Madame Benoiton, she never appears. A parallel between her and the French lady holds only partially good, however: the author, whether of novel or play, who would sketch the relations between Steele and his wife, must draw on his imagination so far as to represent fact- - a very difficult thing, only to be accomplished by a very first-rate hand. Our imaginary author would have to represent a perfectly doting husband, doting to imbecility, who is eternally making excuses for not coming home; and a wife who is continually wanting him to come home soon, and then making his home so excessively disagreeable that he is glad to get out of it again. The (we hope) imaginary wife of Albert Dürer was not more disagreeable at times than Lady Steele; it would take the pen of a Richter to describe her. Only a nagging woman is capable of driving an honest fellow like Steele into such mean subterfuges to avoid her company unless he could be assured of her temper. The woman was disappointed in her husband's finances; she on the whole behaved well, but hers was not a bosom on which he could lay his head, find peace, and start again diligent and newly strung for fresh effort; the encouragement he got was from his friends: Addison was Steele's wife. They quarrelled, it is true, and Steele was in the wrong; but Addison was the dearest friend Steele ever had, and Steele's friendship for Addison outlasted everything. Lord Macaulay, in one of his essays, declares that Steele never did any good without Addison's assistance. Surely there is a moral inaccuracy here; yet practically there is very much truth in it. Like many other of the critical bulls originally issued from Buccleugh Place, Edinburgh, N. B., it makes one angry until we see the partial truth contained in it. Steele had no home, and he was partly lost without the guidance of his real better half, Addison; but to say that he was powerless without him is to speak inaccurately. Lord Macaulay desired to prove that Addison would, in a future state, sit at the head of all the Whigs in heaven, himself included; nobody ever doubted the fact except sinners and Tories; but in proving it Lord Macaulay goes a little out of his way in running down Steele. Steele had to write against time, with a wife continually demanding money; he did a vast number of things without any assistance from Addison at all; and he certainly as an originator beat Addison hollow. It is idle to say that we should have had Sir Roger de Coverley without Steele, though Addison has developed the character in its most tender and ornamental points; or that Steele's best papers could have been written with the dread of the invasion of a scolding woman into his study. Steele's home was not happy, and so his best papers were written at his office or at worse places. Lord Macaulay does not allow for a foolish woman or an unhappy home. One fragment of a letter from Mrs. Steele to her husband is extremely sad. The poor lady and he had been quarrelling, and very likely he was in the wrong; the chances are about even that he was. She writes, "It is but an addition to our uneasiness to be at variance with one another. I beg your pardon if I have offended you. God forgive you for adding to the sorrow of a heavy heart. That is above all sorrow, but for your sake." Ah, Mrs. Steele! half a dozen such letters as that, and your lover, who wrote to you as a lover to the end, would' have been at your feet, not as a lover but as a husband; you would never have had him write to you about "your rival A-s8-n (Addison). We may misjudge the woman, and we hope that we do; we can go no further with her. She had lived a peaceful life before she married him, possibly, though not a fine one. She had at first a grand time of it with her carriage, and then things went badly: she seems never to have exerted herself, and to have made her home uncomfortable, not through unkindness, but through simple petulance. That she could act bravely on what most women would consider a great matter there is no doubt. Steele confessed to her that he had an illegitimate daughter. She took the young lady into her house and treated her in a way which made her own children jealous. To intending novelists we may mention that the young lady was lovely and accomplished; that Steele intended to marry her to Richard Savage, with a dowry of one thousand pounds (where the thousand pounds was to come from does not appear); that Steele, discovering the real character of Savage, broke off the arrangement; that the young lady married a tradesman below her and became a saintly person, while Richard Savage followed the path which he had chalked out for himself early in life, and went to the devil. If a young novelist cannot make a tale out of that, he or she had better quit the trade at once. The Tatler, one of the greatest English classics, is but rarely read now. Steele originated it, without the least idea that it was to live as long as the language is spoken. Addison, not long gone to Ireland, backed him up, certainly as early as the eighteenth paper. Steele says about Addison, "I was undone by my auxiliary. When I had once called him in I could not subsist without dependence on him." Addison wrote forty-one papers out of two hundred and seventy-one. Steele originated it, and also brought it to an end, in a way for which we are unable to account. It is certain that he made a great deal of money both by the original publication and the republication in volumes. The Spectator followed at once that collection of essays and stories, a large portion of which many of us have had to translate into Latin prose for about six years of our life. The sentiments are transcendent, the English prose absolutely incomparable; but whether for virtuous sentiment or admirable English, Addison reigns supreme, though Tickell, Steele, and Budgell run him hard at times. We doubt very much if the Spectator is greatly read now, save for the adventures of Sir Roger de Coverley and Will Honeycomb, both creations of Steele. We have just read the inimitably witty and pathetic love story of Hilpa and Shalum, and it appears to us exactly the same as it was thirty years ago; the more often you read it the more the judgment of your early insight is confirmed. It has been translated into many languages, and those who say that it is the most outrageous piece of twaddling balderbash in the language are entirely wrong: there are many worse. The sentiments are of the most virtuous kind, absolutely faultless: the only question which could possibly arise in a degraded mind is this: whether the young lady was worth all the trouble? To say that Hilpa had the remotest resemblance to Lady Warwick is to say more than we dare; yet the paper goes to the world with Addison's name, and the circumstances are not entirely dissimilar. teen The Spectator was brought to a close in 1712. Addison published a supplementary volume in 1714 without Steele's help. Therefore the story of Hilpa and Shalum was written two years before his marriage with Lady Warwick. Steele meanwhile had started the Guardian in 1713, with a new set of characters and a new set of writers. Addison, as usual, came to his aid, and wrote forty-one papers to Steele's eighty-two; the rest, numbering forty-two, were written by the great Bishop Berkeley who wrote fourAlexander Pope, and John Gay, Philips, and Rowe it is possible that no paper has ever had such a list of great classical names among its contributory before or since. This will hardly be disputed when we add to the names above mentioned those of Hughes, Budgell, Tickell, Parnell, Wotton, and Young ("Night Thoughts"). It seems incredible that such a paper should come to an abrupt end, but it most undoubtedly did so, and left Steele in a heavy quarrel with Swift. It was a very ugly thing to quarrel with Swift, and there is little good in raking it up. Steele charged Swift with being the Examiner. Swift denied it to Addison, saying that he had saved Steele from ruin by his political power: Addison showed the letter to Steele: Steele wrote to Swift, laughing at his claim of having saved him: Swift's reply is grinding and terrible. He could be inexorably harsh, and was a master of a certain kind of fence; Steele was no match for him in the Dean's own peculiar manner. The Dean had a point, and that was that he had certainly pleaded for Steele to Harley; he made the most of this; but Steele knew, or thought he knew, that the Dean was lying hard about his connection with the Tory paper, the Examiner. The Dean was this kind of mana man rather uncommon, though there are a few in rather eminent positions even now: he loved power; he loved to hold a card in his hand against a man, and let him know that he held it. He held such a card against Steele, and thought that he should smash him by playing it. Steele made him play it, and then laughed in his face, asking him what was the next card. There was no other. Steele, the soldier, the playwright, the Bohemian, stood simply on his own legs, and said, "Here am I, Richard Steele: you, Jonathan Swift, can't say or do anything against me which has not been said and done before: you have no more to say against me; I have my friends, you have yours; let us see who's the best man." Nothing. in this world is so dangerous as driving an honest man, of good ability, with wife to back him up, into a corner. Swift, wifeless, tried it, and Swift came out second best: but he never forgave Steele. The wretched man wrote envenomed personal attacks on Richard Steele, which Steele never could by any chance have read, and when he was quite happy. In the country once we heard one man say to an eminent author, "You caught it in the — last week." 6. Did I?" said the other. "As I never see that paper I do not particularly care." One of the things which half ruined Steele for some time was the publication of the now celebrated Guardian on the demolition of the works at Dunkirk. The sentence which gave most offence was, "The British nation expects the immediate demolition of Dunkirk." This would be about equivalent to saying now, "The British nation expects that her Majesty will see the treaty with Russia carried out in its integrity." A most harmless sentence, but one which was thought, by those who chose to think so, among others by Swift, to be a deadly insult to her Majesty. In this year he was elected to the borough of Stockbridge, at the nomination of the Duke of Newcastle; a petition was lodged against him for bribery, but was never pursued; his enemies intended to inflict a much more serious blow on him than the mere loss of an election. He was duly elected in August, 1713, and took his seat the next March, having meanwhile written a very violent Whig pamphlet, "The Crisis," and three papers in the Englishman, which contained some pretty strong reflections upon Queen Anne. His first parliamentary experience was the extremely unpleasant one of having to defend himself before the House on a charge of sedition. Robert Walpole spoke for him, as did also Walpole's brother, Horace, with Lords Lumley, Hinchinbroke, and Finch. Lord Finch had reason to speak in Steele's favor, for when his sister had been attacked by the Examiner for knitting in church "in the immediate presence of God and the Queen" ("Write God first," says Dogberry), Steele somewhat savagely defended the lovely sinner, who was afterwards Duchess of Somerset. Young Lord Finch had never spoken before, and when he got on his legs he found that he could not say one word. "I can't speak for the man, but I'd fight for him," blundered out the honest young nobleman, sitting down. The House was so pleased with his modesty and pluck that they forced him on his legs again, on which Lord Finch suddenly found his tongue and astonished the House by a most capital speech. Steele, however, was expelled the House by a vote of 248 against 154. Hallam says that it was the first instance in which the House of Commons so identified itself with the executive administration independently of the sovereign's person as to consider itself libelled by those who impugned its measures. There is no appeal against Mr. Hallam, and so we are safe in writing down his account of the matter. Steele now retired into private life, except as far as literature was concerned. He writes to his wife exhorting her not to be dismayed, and also that some one has paid in three thousand pounds to his account. He was but a short time under a cloud; Queen Anne died on the 1st of August, and the tables were completely turned. "DEAR PRUE, I have been loaded with compliments by the Regency. I am assured of something immediately. I desire you to send me a guinea. I shall have cash in the morning. RICH. STEELE." The license for Drury Lane Theatre having expired, it was renewed, Steele being patentee, and receiving about a thousand pounds a year from Colley Cibber and the other managers. He was made Surveyor of the Hampton Court Stables, a magistrate for Middlesex, and deputy-lieutenant. He was also elected to Parliament for Boroughbridge, and took Prue for a jaunt to York, when he went to his election, at which place she stayed, he going on to Boroughbridge alone, and promising her faithfully not to get drunk. But poor Pre was not long to remain Mrs. Steele a grand banquet was given by the deputy-lieutenant of Middlesex to the lord-lieutenant, Lord Clare, and an address to the King was drawn up. Richard Steele, Esq., M. P., wrote it for them, and became Sir Richard Steele, while poor honest Prue, for whom the close of all earthly honors and all earthly vexations was approaching, became her ladyship. The event was celebrated by a splendid banquet to two hundred persons, with all kinds of wine. Addison wrote some lines of exquisite wit, which were spoken after dinner, and which gave the character of Steele in so perfect a manner that his history is complete all Steele's projects and mistakes are touched on with a lov-. ing hand, and at last the guests are informed in confidence that their host intends to convert the Pope immediately. Steele was, however, only moderately rewarded for his sufferings in the cause of party, which in reality had not been very great. Walpole sent him five hundred pounds as a present, and he must have made a tolerable sum by literature. The Rebellion of 1715 came on, and Steele became a commissioner of forfeited estates. About the end of August, 1716, Lady Steele left him with the children, while she went for about a year to her mother's at Carmarthen. There seems to have been no quarrel, but Steele seems to have been most beggarly poor for some reason: he writes, “we had not, when you left us, an inch of candle or a pound of coal in the house, but we do not want now." Steele's letters to his wife thus far are rather wearisome, for Lady Steele seems to have generally been in a bad humor, and once complains that he owes her eight hundred pounds, advising him to take care of his soul; he gives her the same advice and denies the debt. Old Mrs. Scurlock died, and there may have been some amelioration of their affairs; but Steele was bound to make his fortune to please his wife, and, in order to gain that end, threw a large sum of money in a plan for bringing fish to London alive. Salmon was then about five shillings a pound when it could be got in the Thames; the attempt was made to bring it from the Irish rivers, but the fish dashed themselves to pieces in the transit, and the thing was a failure: it shared the fate of his early efforts after the philosopher's stone. Lady Steele, to whom we hope we have done justice, returned to him, and they seem to have been happy together. Steele had previously been in Edinburgh, where he had been well received. In 1718 we find him at Blenheim with the Duke of Marlborough; on the 20th of December, 1718, Lady Steele died. he having, with all his faults of commission and omission, been as much a lover as a husband to her until the last. She was only forty when she died, he being about forty-eight: much as she may have had to undergo from her husband's carelessness in money matters, he never gave her one moment's uneasiness on the score of jealousy. The loss of the woman he loved so dearly was quickly followed by the estrangement of the dearest friend he had ever known. Lord Sunderland introduced a bill limiting the number of the House of Peers, that is to say, preventing the creation of fresh peers by the sovereign for the purpose of carrying any political measure through the Upper House. Steele was furious at the measure, and published a paper called the "Plebiean," in which he argued that the limiting of the number of the peers gave them an almost overwhelming power, for they became an oligarchy almost under the power of the court, whereas, by giving the sovereign the power of creating a majority in their chamber, they were more dependent on the will of the nation as represented by the sovereign. He does not seem to notice the fact that the House of Lords exists only by the will of the sovereign, that is, in reality, by the will of the ministry, for no nobleman can take his seat in the House of Lords without a call from the Crown. Addison took an entirely opposite view from Steele in the "Old Whig." The end was a quarrel in which we think Steele, though he was right in his argument, was wrong in his conduct: he should have been more respectful to Addison. The bill was lost, and the privilege of the Crown remains; but it was a bitter victory for Steele, living as he did by the breath of the ministry. His persecution by the Duke of Newcastle, his loss of fortune, his quiet retirement to Carmarthen, where he forgot his quarrel with Dennis, with Addison everything in a quiet and peaceable end, our space gives us no room to narrate. At the end he had no enemies save Swift and Dennis. Vast sums of money for those times must have passed through his hands. Adams considers that the loss of his patent as Governor of the Comedians amounted to a fine of £10,000! In 1722, when his Conscious Lovers was acted, the King sent him £500. Little seems to have remained. The early mass of debt was too overwhelming. A good man, and a very clever one. He had one great blessing in life, the friendship of Addison; he had one great misfortune, a posthumous reputation greater than his own. He lived with Addison, worked with Addison, and is always spoken of in comparison with him. Addison was so greatly his superior, that Richard Steele will suffer for all time by enforced comparison with a much grander man. FORTY YEARS AGO. WHAT is the difference between popularity and fame? "Popularity," said Lord Mansfield, "may be obtained without merit and lost without a fault." Not so with fame, which is neither to be won nor lost without good reason. It is thus a small thing to be popular, but a great thing to be famous. The advantages of popularity are, that a man has it while he lives, and that it puts money in his pocket; the disadvantages of fame are, that it is, for the most part, posthumous, and consequently pays no baker's, no butcher's, no tailor's bill; and may give no crust of bread to that man living, to whom after death it may give a very considerable stone, with a magniloquent inscription upon it. Popularity is the fashion of the hour; but fame is for all time, or, to speak more correctly, for that comparatively short period of time which the busy world, with its new names and its new wants continually sprouting up, can afford to bestow upon the heroes and heroines, or the great and the good, or the wise men and women of the years that have departed. The first Napoleon asked a portrait painter who was engaged upon a canvas that was to hand down to posterity the lineaments of the great man, how long the aforesaid canvas would last, and was told that with care it might last about five hundred years. "Five hundred years!" exclaimed the emperor, with a contemptuous shrug of his shoulders. "And people call that immortality!" But, as the world goes, five hundred years is an enormously long period for any man's name to remain visible and comprehensible on the page of history or tradition. Even fifty years is a great stretch into futurity for many reputations that loom large in their day and generation. Sometimes fifty days (not to speak of nine days' wonders) are often more than sufficient to draw the veil of oblivion over the names and deeds of men and women, who once strutted their brief hour upon the stage of life, and fondly thought that the eyes of all the world were directed towards them. Forty years ago, people were as familiar as they are now with the names and performances of the eminent men and women who played conspicuous parts in the history, the politics, the law, the literature, the arts, or the fashion of the time. But they were not so familiar with their faces, as we are with those of our contemporaries. There were, in those not very remote days, from which our own are so dissimilar, and seem so far removed, no illustrated newspapers, and periodicals, and the sun had not been enlisted in the noble army of artists. There was consequently greater curiosity on the part of the public than there would be in our day to see the "counterfeit presentment" of the celebrities of the time; and when Fraser's Magazine, which started in 1830, commenced a series of literary portraits. it struck out into what was at that day a novel path, and achieved for its conductors a gratifying success. Eighty of these portraits were published between the years 1830 and 1838, and have just been reissued, with the original memoirs by Doctor Maginn, and illustrative notes by a modern hand, who has executed his task exceedingly well, and produced a volume that should be even more attractive now, than at the time when the portraits first saw the light, dealing as it does with persons and personages of whom the actual generation may have heard much, but of which it knows little. The portraits, light airy sketches, and with the slightest approach to a gentle and piquant but by no means ill-natured caricature, are all by one hand, sometimes, but not invariably, signed Alfred Croquis. They were in no instance taken from actual sittings, but were sketched furtively, or from memory, by one who afterwards became a Royal Academician, and one of the best artists of his time the late Daniel Maclise. It is wonderful that under such circumstances, and with no aid from photography not then existent as an art—or in some instances from published engravings, such admirable likenesses as these should have been possible to take. Of these eighty persons, ten are yet in the land of the living, seven gentlemen and three ladies, and all taking a part more or less prominent in the literature of their time. The seven gentlemen, taken alphabetically and without precedence of rank or merit, are William Harrison Ainsworth, still writing good novels with undiminished fire; John Baldwin Buckstone, still delighting crowded audiences with his inimitable drollery and consummate art; Thomas Carlyle, still teaching the nations how to live, and denouncing "shams;" George Cruikshank, still wielding as deftly as ever his admirable pencil; Benjamin Disraeli, poet, novelist, statesman; the Reverend G. R. Gleig, of Chelsea Hospital; and Earl Russell, Nestor of his party, who published a book only last year, and who is very likely writing another. The ladies are, Mrs. S. C. Hall, with a pen as facile and beneficent as in the days of yore; Miss Harriett Martineau, working possibly, unseen but not unfelt, in the columns of a daily paper; and the Honorable Mrs. Norton-the Sappho of her time - not contented to rest upon her past laurels, but ambitious to win new, and not only winning but deserving them. These portraits originally appeared at a time when our present race of novelists, male and female, were either at school or in the nursery, or had just begun to nibble at the great apple of literary fame; when Charles Dickens was making his first tentative efforts; when William Makepeace Thackeray had never been heard of, out of the office of the Morning Chronicle, and had been scarcely heard of there; and when the thousand and one estimable ladies who now spin novels, instead of spinning cloth, as the ladies of five hundred years ago were accustomed to do, were in their boarding-school days, if indeed they were in this world at all. Forty years ago, fame was not easily to be won, but it was won more easily than it is to day, when so many trumpets are blown into the deafened ears of a much-enduring public, that it cannot well distinguish one blast or one instrument from another. But, nevertheless, among the men and women of those days were many great men and women, as any one, even moderately acquainted with the history of English literature, can discover if he looks over the portraits in this volume. Among the number were Sir Walter Scott, Thomas Campbell, Thomas Moore, William Wordsworth, Samuel Rogers, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Wilson (Christopher North), Edward Lytton Bulwer (Lord Lytton), Pierre Jean de Béranger, Prince Talleyrand, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Lyndhurst, Lord Brougham, William Godwin, Charles Lamb, Leigh Hunt, and many others, who for political or personal reasons, or mere accident, were omitted from Fraser's Walhalla. Among the lesser lights - great lights in their day — whose names have scarcely come down to the newer folk of this generation, the first in Fraser's gallery is a conspicuous example. William Jerdan, editor of the Literary Gazette, was once a power in the Republic of Letters. It was thought that he could make and unmake literary reputations, though he could do nothing of the kind, and he was flattered and feared accordingly by all the smaller fry of literature. He was not unhonored by the greater fry; for he was hospitable, generous, cordial, and the best of company, and lent a helping hand to young and struggling genius whenever it came in his way. Another of the little great men, who seemed great enough for Fraser's purposes, was Louis Eustache Ude, the author of a cookerybook, an artiste who could really cook, and that is saying much. Nobody knows about him now. He has dropped into the deeps of oblivion, dethroned by Soyer, who was in turn dethroned by Francatelli, who still lives, a prosperous gentleman. Who ever heard of Don Telesforo di Trueba y Corio, who is here immortalized? Or of Grant Thorburn, or the gentleman called the Tiger, or the Earl of Munster? But why go over the list? There may be people still living who thought Don Telesforo and the others were very great men; and it is of no avail, even if it were kind and gracious, to dissipate their illusions. Among the portraits that are particularly good in this collection — and the writer gives his opinion from personal remembrance of his old friends-are those of Thomas Campbell, the author of the Pleasures of Hope," and of |