vigour into his style, and he has produced, not alone one of the very best ecclesiastical works of any age, but one of the most readable and interesting works of the present.

Autobiography, Letters, and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale); edited, with Notes and an Introductory Account of her Life and Writings, by A Hayward, Esq., Q.C. (London: Longman.)—It is always interesting to contemplate the history of any person who forms a link between two totally dissimilar ages. Mrs. Piozzi is such a person, having lived through the zenith of the Johnsonian school of English literature, and the eighteenth century style of English manners, into the postdiluvian era of George the Fourth. Unfortunately, however, for the readers of these volumes, Mrs. Piozzi, after the death of Dr. Johnson, sank into a totally different sort of society, and her letters are records of people and events about whom we have little curiosity. The opinions of a really intelligent woman, nurtured at the feet of Johnson upon the new school of literature which sprang up at the end of the last century, would have been highly valuable. But we search in vain through these pages for any allusions to the great writers who flourished in that fertile era. Burns, Coleridge, Southey, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Jeffrey, Miss Edgworth, Miss Austen, Mrs. Radclyffe, Goodwin, Monk Lewis, are names not even once mentioned. Tom Moore is just mentioned, but not as a poet; and the only poem of Byron's on which any opinion is offered is "Cain." Sir Walter Scott, indeed, is more than once introduced, and always for the purpose of depreciating him. His novels are sneered at. "Old Mortality" is "as little like Shakespeare as a glass of peppermint water is to the finest French brandy." To another of the series Mrs. Thrale much prefers "a pretty novel called 'Civilization,'" written by Hannah More. The poet Rogers is mentioned, according to the index, twice; though it seems hardly likely that the Mr. Rogers, spoken of in the year 1819 as an "agreeable young man," should have been the poet who was then fifty-seven years of age. Campbell is not mentioned at all. It seems clear that, first, Mrs. Thrale's marriage, and, secondly, her luckless connection with the Della Cruscan set, had damaged her position in

both fashionable and literary society; though it is satisfactory to observe that the lady took it little to heart, and seems to have been very happy travelling with her Italian spouse, or inditing her "laboured nothings" to a few congenial spirits. Mr. Hayward, the editor of these volumes, objects very strongly to this particular phrase—the one applied to her by Gifford; and, to show his approval, he has plentifully interspersed his pages with selections from them. In doing so, however, he has only shown either quantulá sapientiá a man may wield the critical bâton, or else how completely he has forgotten the maxim of "truth before friendship."

Mrs. Thrale was born of a good Welsh family, on the 16th of January, 1741. In her twenty-second year she married Mr. Thrale, the Southwark brewer, afterwards member for that borough. About two years after her marriage she was introduced to Dr. Johnson, who from that time to his death became a constant visiter, and sometimes a constant inmate, of her house at Streatham, a scene immortalized in Boswell's Johnson, and for ever associated with one of the greatest names in our literature. We should imagine, notwithstanding her own and her editor's protests, that the impression of her which we gather from Boswell is substantially correct. She was evidently a witty, lively, and very well read woman; but affected, flighty, very vain of her literature, and perhaps not on the whole a pattern of domestic virtue. Johnson rebuked her weaknesses; and Boswell has registered his rebukes with a somewhat malicious accuracy, adding some attempts of his own in the same line, which are ludicrous. But we cannot see that he is guilty of any misrepresentations which substantially affect her character.

After her husband's death, she married Piozzi, an Italian singing-master, for whom her passion was so violent that the effort which she made to break herself of it very nearly caused her death. As she was then turned forty, there is in this violent love-sickness alone something which delicacy revolts from, and we can scarcely. wonder that it deeply wounded the feelings of her grown up daughters. Johnson, who had strongly dissuaded her from the match, afterwards, with characteristic good sense, endeavoured to make the best of it. But, before the year was out, Johnson

himself was dead; and very shortly, as we may suppose, under the influence of new scenes, new people, and new manners, the old life became a dream. It was in Italy that she fell in with the Della Cruscans, "a few English of both sexes whom chance had jumbled together at Florence, and who took a fancy to while away their time in scribbling high-flown panegyrics on themselves, and complimentary 'canzonettas' on two or three Italians, who understood too little of the language in which they were written to be disgusted with them.”—(Gifford.) About the same time, a newspaper called the "World" was started in England by a gentleman named Este, which, says Gifford, was perfectly unintelligible, and therefore much read. It suited this periodical to become the exponent and champion of Della Crusca, the head man of the school, and accordingly cargoes of the poetry were consigned to the editor from Florence, and introduced to the English public with a loud flourish of trumpets. Then it was that Gifford pointed his guns at the whole crew of sentimentalists who had come over in an Italian cockboat, to board "The Town." If his firing was not equal to the Dunciad, his foes, at all events, were feebler than Pope's; and they sank at once before his volleys. The shrieks and screams with which the onslaught was received still echo shrilly through Mrs. Piozzi's letters. But Gifford has been very unjustly charged with brutality; for we will be bound that "Thrale's grey widow" would have met with as little mercy from "the gentlemen of the Saturday Review," as Mr. Thackeray so studiously designates the writers in that journal, as ever she did from the sharp old Tory scholar. After her return to England, Mrs. Piozzi divided her time pretty much between her seat in Wales, Brynbella, and Bath, where at the age of nearly eighty she fell in love with an actor, and where she ultimately died in 1822, in the eighty-second year of her age.

There is nothing new in these volumes, and nothing very interesting; but they are a valuable testimony to the general truthfulness of Boswell. Mr. Hayward's biographical sketch of Mrs. Thrale, prefixed to the first volume, is very well done, with much vivacity and discrimination. And, at all events, we may say that the book is absolutely necessary to all persons who wish to possess a complete Johnsonian library.

Private Diary of Travel; Personal Services and Public Events during Mission and Employment with the European Armies in the Campaign of 1812, 1813, and 1814, from the Invasion of Russia to the Capture of Paris; by General Sir R. Wilson. (Murray.)— This volume is edited, as we are further informed in the titlepage, by the general's nephew and son-in-law, the Rev.- Herbert. It is a family volume, full of the private feelings, passions, and prejudices of the writer. Sir R. Wilson was not a man to view either persons or things with calmness, and his writings betray all the distortion which characterised his conduct. His leading principle, of utter hatred to the French and every thing belonging to them, guided him into a subordinate series of prejudices, such as a leaning towards Turkey, both in its political and religious system, which otherwise one could scarcely have expected from such a man. His Turkish descriptions are among the best written and most amusing portions of the volume. Of Russia, his admiration was almost as unbounded as his detestation of France; yet it was, after all, the secondary and subordinate feeling. Still it was quite sufficient to forward the natural bias of his temperament, always leaning towards despotic institutions, until he became much more of a Russian than an Englishman.

Sir R. Wilson had talents which, if they had been fairly devoted to the service of his country, would have given him a name second to few of his age. Unfortunately they were almost all performed in the Russian and Austrian service, and in a capacity wherein he found it impossible to claim public credit for his actions, whatever might have been the private sense entertained of them by those whom they most especially assisted. He was as good a diplomatist as he was a soldier, yet even in this line his country benefited but little by his talents.

As for the present volume, it is one of considerable interest for the insight it affords into the domestic politics of certain great potentates of the day. At this distance of time, we are but little disposed to sympathize with its prejudices; but we cannot read, without emotion, a description of the sensations and scenes following on events on which depended then the destiny of mankind, and to which even now that destiny owes its

course.

The diary, apart from its passions, is written in a fresh, manly, unaffected style, with great modesty when treating of great actions, and of their recognition by great men, which would have turned a less vigorous head. We have many military descriptions of the grand actions of that wonderful period, written with especial ability, and removing all our sensations and excitement over transactions so often handled as to be thoroughly vulgarized. There are few new facts, and no new views, to be found in the volume; its merit lies in the peculiar interest it imparts to what we know by heart already.

Autobiography and Correspondence of Mary Grenville, Mrs. Delany. Edited by Lady Llanover. 3 vols. (Bentley.)—The present demand for every thing that can be called "materials for history" or that presents sketches of society at any era, has evidently furnished the motive for committing the contents of these three volumes, unabridged and unwinnowed, to the hands of the printer. Mrs. Delany, of whom few modern readers will recollect more than that her name is frequently mentioned in Boswell's "Johnson," passed through a long and far from eventful career. She was born in 1700, and married at seventeen Mr. Pendarves, an elderly Cornish squire. This unnatural union is said to have been prompted by political motives, Lord Lansdowne somehow hoping to strengthen his electioneering strength in Cornwall. The victim-for such she was-lived seven years, almost like a captive, immured in her husband's antiquated mansion. At the end of that term, however, she was released by his death, and lived for nearly twenty years thereafter as a free, roving, and literary widow, passing much of her time in Ireland, where in 1743 she again married her second husband, Dr. Delany, being at the time Chancellor of St. Patrick's, and afterwards Dean of Down. Mrs. Delany subsequently mixed much in literary, and even in royal, society. What is more to our present purpose, she was a liberal correspondent and industrious journal-writer, for her private amusement. The result is shewn in the three thick volumes now issued, which bring down the narrative only to the close of the reign of George II., leaving not less than twenty-eight years of autobiographizing and letter-writing still to be printed.