at morn is dead at night;
Scant space have we for art's delays,
Whose breathless thought so briefly stays,
We may not work--ah! would we might,
With slower pen!'

It must be owned that his melancholy is anything but groundless. The
trick of amenity and good breeding is lost; the graces of an excellence
that is unobtrusive are graces no more. We write as men paint for the
exhibitions: with the consciousness that we must pass without notice if
we do not exceed in colour and subject and tone. The need exists, and
the world bows to it. Mr. Austin Dobson's little sheaf of _Eighteenth
Century Essays_ might be regarded as a protest against the necessity and
the submission. It proves that 'tis possible to be eloquent without
adjectives and elegant without affectation; that to be brilliant you need
not necessarily be extravagant and conceited; that without being maudlin
and sentimental it is not beyond mortal capacity to be pathetic; and that
once upon a time a writer could prove himself a humourist without feeling
it incumbent upon him to be also a jack-pudding.

BOSWELL

His Destiny.

It has been Boswell's fate to be universally read and almost as
universally despised. What he suffered at the hands of Croker and
Macaulay is typical of his fortune. In character, in politics, in
attainments, in capacity, the two were poles apart; but they were agreed
in this: that Boswell must be castigated and contemned, and that they
were the men to do it. Croker's achievement, consider it how you will,
remains the most preposterous in literary history. He could see nothing
in the _Life_ but a highly entertaining compilation greatly in need of
annotation and correction. Accordingly he took up Boswell's text and
interlarded it with scraps of his own and other people's; he pegged into
it a sophisticated version of the _Tour_; and he overwhelmed his amazing
compound with notes and commentaries in which he took occasion to snub,
scold, 'improve,' and insult his author at every turn. What came of it
one knows. Macaulay, in the combined interests of Whiggism and good
literature, made Boswell's quarrel his own, and the expiation was as
bitter as the offence was wanton and scandalous.

His Critic.

But Macaulay, if he did Jeddart justice on Croker, took care not to
forget that Johnson was a Tory hero, and that Boswell was Johnson's
biographer. He was too fond of good reading not to esteem the _Li