rl, I should not
mind getting up early myself!'

'Bravo, bravo, my old friend!' said Girodet, as, after a warm embrace
from him, he turned to examine the picture: 'I never expected to hear
of your changing your style, and turning Flemish sign-painter. But it
is no shame for David to end as Rembrandt began.'

ADMIRAL BLAKE.[1]

A good biography is ever welcome; and if it be the biography of a good
and a great man, the cordiality of the _bienvenu_ is doubled. Mr
Prescott remarks,[2] that there is no kind of writing, having truth
and instruction for its main object, which, on the whole, is so
interesting and popular as biography: its superiority, in this point
of view, to history, consisting in the fact, that the latter has to
deal with masses--with nations, which, like corporate societies, seem
to have no soul, and whose chequered vicissitudes may be contemplated
rather with curiosity for the lessons they convey, than with personal
sympathy. Among contemporary biographers, Mr Hepworth Dixon has
already established for himself a name of some distinction by his
popular lives of William Penn and John Howard; nor will his credit
suffer a decline in the instance of the memoir now before us--that of
the gallant and single-minded patriot, Robert Blake. Of this fine old
English worthy, republican as he was, the Tory Hume freely affirms,
that never man, so zealous for a faction, was so much respected and
even esteemed by his opponents. 'Disinterested, generous, liberal;
ambitious only of true glory, dreadful only to his avowed enemies; he
forms one of the most perfect characters of the age, and the
least stained with those errors and vices which were then so
predominant.'[3] Yet hitherto the records of this remarkable man have
been scanty in matter, and scattered in form--the most notable being
Dr Johnson's sketch in the _Gentleman's Magazine_, and another in the
_Encyclopaedia Britannica_. Mr Dixon has consulted several scarce
works, of genuine though obsolete authority, and a large mass of
original documents and family papers, in preparing the present able
and attractive memoir; not omitting a careful examination of the
squibs, satires, and broadsides of that time, in his endeavour to
trace, in forgotten nooks and corners, the anecdotes and details
requisite, as he says, to complete a character thus far chiefly known
by a few heroic outlines. We propose taking a brief survey of his
life-history of the great admiral a