appy." In the translation, the zeal of the christian conspired with the
warmth and energy of the poet; but Juvenal is not eclipsed. For the
various characters in the original, the reader is pleased, in the
English poem, to meet with cardinal Wolsey, Buckingham stabbed by
Felton, lord Strafford, Clarendon, Charles the twelfth of Sweden; and
for Tully and Demosthenes, Lydiat, Galileo, and archbishop Laud. It is
owing to Johnson's delight in biography, that the name of Lydiat is
called forth from obscurity. It may, therefore, not be useless to tell,
that Lydiat was a learned divine and mathematician in the beginning of
the last century. He attacked the doctrine of Aristotle and Scaliger,
and wrote a number of sermons on the harmony of the evangelists. With
all his merit, he lay in the prison of Bocardo, at Oxford, till bishop
Usher, Laud, and others, paid his debts. He petitioned Charles the first
to be sent to Ethiopia, to procure manuscripts. Having spoken in favour
of monarchy and bishops, he was plundered by the puritans, and twice
carried away, a prisoner, from his rectory. He died, very poor, in 1646.

The tragedy of Irene is founded on a passage in Knolles's History of the
Turks; an author highly commended in the Rambler, No. 122. An incident
in the life of Mahomet the great, first emperor of the Turks, is the
hinge on which the fable is made to move. The substance of the story is
shortly this: In 1453, Mahomet laid siege to Constantinople, and having
reduced the place, became enamoured of a fair Greek, whose name was
Irene. The sultan invited her to embrace the law of the prophet, and to
grace his throne. Enraged at this intended marriage, the janizaries
formed a conspiracy to dethrone the emperor. To avert the impending
danger, Mahomet, in a full assembly of the grandees, "catching with one
hand," as Knolles relates it, "the fair Greek by the hair of her head,
and drawing his falchion with the other, he, at one blow, struck off her
head, to the great terror of them all; and, having so done, said unto
them: 'Now by this, judge whether your emperor is able to bridle his
affections or not.'" The story is simple, and it remained for the author
to amplify it, with proper episodes, and give it complication and
variety. The catastrophe is changed, and horror gives place to terror
and pity. But, after all, the fable is cold and languid. There is not,
throughout the piece, a single situation to excite curiosity, and raise
a