main one of the most amusing figures in English literary history. He lived a long life, from the time of Charles II. until the closing years of the second George, which embraced the golden age of English literature. He intimately knew Dryden and Pope, Addison and Steele, Swift and Dr. Johnson. His writings, with the exception of one book, are almost forgotten, but that one book, his autobiography, entitled, "An Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber, Comedian," is liable to last as long as the language. It is one of the most amusing books ever written. He was neither a wise man nor a good man; he derided gravity, confessed his follies with the frankness of a Rousseau, and was vain even of his vanity. At eighteen he became an actor, and until extreme old age he loved the glare of footlights and "the collision of applauding hands." His book is filled with the gossip of the stage and with sketches of the most eminent actors and actresses of his time. All we know of Betterton, who is reputed the greatest Hamlet that ever lived, of Barton Booth, of the ever charming Mrs. Bracegirdle, with whom half of London was in love, and of many others whose names are still famous in the traditions of the stage, we gain through Cibber. His book has always ranked among the

favorites and has been praised by persons of as opposite temperament and disposition as Dr. Johnson and Horace Walpole.

Cibber's " Apology," although not so well written, ranks with Boswell's "Life of Johnson" as an English classic. No one can read these books without feeling that there is a striking similarity in character and disposition between Cibber and Boswell. They were both as vain of their weaknesses and follies as other men are of wisdom and the sense of decorum. Both fluttered through life like butterflies, and in most respects life was to both a long summer's day of trivialities and delight. Their good spirits were ample enough to carry them through every defeat, and sustain them against every buffet of fortune. Their vanities and frivolities were laughed at in a good-natured way, and that was all. and that was all. Both sought literary distinction, and achieved it, and both were favorite associates with the most distinguished literary men of their times. Johnson once said

of Boswell that he had missed his only chance for fame by not living when "the Dunciad" was written. Cibber did live when "the Dunciad was written, and is the hero of it, Pope representing him as the darling of the Goddess of Dulness. It was a piece of spleen on Pope's part, for what

ever else Cibber might have been, he was not a dunce, and never, under any circumstances, dull. His light and airy spirits never admitted of the least approach to stupidity.

As a playwright Cibber rearranged and altered Shakespeare's "Richard III.," and his version was long accepted by the great actors.

If by any chance one, after hearing the play, should wish to look up the lines,

The aspiring youth that fired the Ephesian dome
Outlives in fame the pious fool that raised it,

or that other climax of passion,

Off with his head! So much for Buckingham!

and should turn to his Shakespeare for the purpose of finding them, he would be much deceived in the result of his search. In fact, the whole play would be more or less of a puzzle to him, and it would only be after some study and research that he would discover that " Richard III.," as it has been acted for nearly two hundred years, is Colley Cibber's alteration and not Shakespeare's tragedy. Edwin Booth, Henry Irving, and Richard Mansfield produced the original play, but it has never seemed to gain the hold on the public that Cibber's curious piece of amalgam did. All the

great actors, from Betterton to the elder Booth, preferred this latter.

Cibber continued to be the King's laureate until his death in 1757, writing an annual birthday ode in honor of that English king who could not speak a syllable of his people's language, and certainly could not construe a line of Cibber's odes. Curious readers will find these effusions in the Gentleman's Magazine and the Annual Register during the period. More absolute doggerel was never written.

DANIEL DEFOE,

FATHER OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL.

(1660?-1731.)

"ROBINSON CRUSOE was properly the first English novel and Daniel Defoe the pioneer in that sort of writing, pointing the way for Richardson, Fielding, Goldsmith, Scott, Bulwer, Dickens, Thackeray and all the host of lesser novelists. It undoubtedly is a peculiar sort of novel, for it is without lovers or love-making, has no heroine and contains neither sentiment nor philosophy. There are critics who suppose that Defoe had in his mind a problem of life to be illustrated by his story, of a man stripped of everything and placed in an uninhabited island to begin all over again and by his own resources build himself up, thus showing the power

over nature.

of man

Defoe was sixty years of age when he wrote this story and it may be that his hero's specula