both works of merit which gratified the lovers of our old literature, and tended considerably to increase the number of such students.

Another meritorious labourer in the same field, is the REV. ALEXANDER GROSART of St. George's, Blackburn, Lancashire. Mr. Grosart has edited the poems of Giles Fletcher, Crashaw, Lord Brooke, Southwell, Vaughan, Marvell, &c.; and is now engaged on the works in verse and prose of Spenser and Daniel. He has also edited editions of the Scottish poets Michae! Bruce, Ferguson, and Alexander Wilson, and the prose works of Wordsworth; the latter in three volumes, undertaken by 'request and appointment of the family."

SELDEN (p. 269, vol. ii.)—The birti.pace of the learned John Selden was Salvington, near West Tarring in Sussex.

SWIFT (p. 158, vol. iii.)-His grandfather was vicar of Goodrich in Herefordshire.... Three of the vicar's sous settled in Ireland.' Swift in his autobiography says four, but the exact number seems to have been five. The eldest, Godwin, was the uncle to whom the dean owed his education. The autobiography has a remarkable passage concerning the infancy of Swift: When he was a year old, an event happened to him that seems very unusual; for his nurse, who was a woman of Whitehaven, being under an absolute necessity of seeing one of her relations, who was then extremely sick, and from whom she expected a legacy, and being at the same time extremely fond of the infant, she stole him on shipboard unknown to his mother and uncle, and carried him with her to Whitehaven, where he continued for almost three years. For, when the matter was discovered, his mother sent orders by all means not to hazard a second voyage, till he could be better able to bear it. The nurse was so careful of him, that before he returned he had learned to spell; and by the time that he was three years old he could read any chapter in the Bible. With the single exception, perhaps, of Lord Macaulay, we have no other instance of such infantile precocity. It appears from Forster's Life of Swift that the dean had first written two years.' then altered it to almost three,' and finally struck out almost.' Hawkesworth altered the word to five,' and was copied by Scott. P. 159.-The statement that Sir William Temple left Stella a sum of £1000 is incorrect. In Temple's will the legacy is thus given: I leave a lease of some lands I have in Monistown, in the county of Wicklow in Ireland, to Esther Johnson, servaat to my sister Giffard' (Lady Giffard). Mr. Forster has shewn that the account wuich Swift has given in his autobiography of his college career is too unfavourable. The dean says he was stopped of his degree for dullness and insufficiency; and at last hardly admitted in a manner little to his credit. which is called in that college speciali gratia.' Mr. Forster obtained part of a college roll indicating Swift's place a the quarterly examination in Eastern term 1685. and of the twenty-one names therein enumerated none of them stand really higher in the examination than Jonathan Swift. He was careless in attending the college chapel; in the classes he was ill in philosophy, good in Greek and Latin, and negligent in theology.' Mr. Forster says: The specialis grat a took its origin from the necessity of providing, that what was substantially merited should not be refused because of a failure in some requirement of the statutes; upon that abuses crept in; but enough has been said to shew that Swift's case could not have been one of those in which it was used to give semblance of worth to the unworthy.

MASON (p. 154. vol. iv).-It should have been mentioned that the last four lines of the Epitaph on Mrs Mason in the Cathedral of Bristol' were written by GRAY. They are immeasurably superior to all the others, and, indeed, are among the finest of the kind in the language:

Tell them though 'tis an awful thing to die

'Twas e'en to thee-yet the dread path once trod,

Heaven lifts its everlasting portals high.

And bids the pure in heart behold their God.

SHELLEY (p. 271, vol. v).—Shelley's first wife. Harriet Westbrook, 'committed suicide by drowning herself in the Serpentine Fiver in December 1816, and Shelley married Miss Godwin a few weeks afterwards (December 30). In justice to the poet we copy a statement on this distressing subject from Mr. C. Kegan Paul's Life of

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CYCLOPÆDIA OF ENGLISH LITERATURE.

Godwin,' 1876: Whatever view may be taken of the breach between husband and wife, it is absolutely certain that Harriet's suicide was not directly caused by her husband's treatment. However his desertion of her contributed, or did not contribute, to the life she afterwards led, the immediate cause of her death was that her father's door was shut against her, though he had at first sheltered her and her children This was done by order of her sister, who would not allow Harriet access to the bedside of her dying father.'

The Life of Godwin,' referred to above, is a work of great interest and importance. Godwin never willingly destroyed a written line, and his biographer found a vast quantity of letters and manuscripts, some of which had never been opened from the time they were laid aside by Godwin's own hand many years before his death in 1836. All were handed over to Mr. Kegan Paul by Sir Percy Shelley, the poet's son, and the co. respondence includes letters from Charles Lamb, Coleridge, Shelley, Wordsworth, Scctt, Mackintosh, Lady Caroline Lamb, Mrs. Iuchbald, and others, besides the letters which passed between Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft during their brief married lite. Perhaps nothing in literary history or biography was ever so painful, and in some aspects revolting, as this Godwin-Wollstonecraft-Shelley story.

MRS. INCHBALD (p. 119, vol. v).-Of this remarkable woman many particulars are related in the Life of Godwin.' by Mr. C. Kegan Paul. Mrs Shelley (Godwin's daughter) says of her: Living in mean lodgings, dressed with an economy allied to penury, without connections. and alone, her beanty, her talents, and the charm of her manners gave her entrance into a delightful circle of society. Apt to fall in love, and desirous to marry, she continued single, because the men who loved and admired her were too worldly to take an actress and a poor author, however lovely and charming, for a wife. Her life was thus spent in an interchange of hardship and amusement, privation and luxury. Her character partook of the same contrast: fond of pleasure, she was prudent in her conduct; penurious in her personal expenditure, she was generous to others. Vain of her beauty, we are told that the gown she wore was not worth a shilling, it was so coarse and shabby. Very susceptible to the softer feelings, she could yet guard herself against passion; and though she might have been called a flirt, her character was unimpeached. I have heard that a rival beauty of her day pettishly complained that when Mrs. Inchbald came into a room, and sat in a chair in the middle of it, as was her wont, every man gathered round it, and it was in vain for any other woman to attempt to gain attention. Godwin could not fail to admire her; she became and continued to be a favourite. Her talents, ber beauty, her manners were ail delightful to him. He used to describe her as a piquante mixture between a lady and a milkmaid, and added that Sheridan declared she was the only authoress whose society pleased him.'

END OF VOLUME VIII.

BEAUMONT, SIR JOHN, poet, i................ 229
Beaux' Stratagem, the, by Farquhar,
iii.
267
258 BECKFORD, WILLIAM, novelist, vi... 96
386 BEDDOES, DR THOMAS, physician, vi 82
BEDDOES, THOMAS LOVELL, drama-
tist, passages from, vi...