with tautology and the most barbarous confusion of tongues the polished eloquence which he pretended to ascertain-ungrateful rudeness of the proud pedant-the Bear worrying his dancingmaster.' Yet much as we dislike the parallel of Johnson and the Bear, we readily allow that the late Lord Chesterfield's Code of Education may be aptly and happily compared to that of a dancing master, The noble author, however, was not satisfied by these severe strokes at the great lexicographer, as we perceive by a glance at the third vol.-of which more hereafter: but with respect to the present attack, we must remind those of our readers who had no personal acquaintance with the late Earl of Orford, nor with Dr. Johnson, that the Peer hated Johnson because he was rough in manners and conversation, unwieldy and uncouth in his figure, a Jacobite, and a Christian. Johnson had a natural antipathy to the noble Lord as being a Whig, the son of a Whig minister, effeminate and unmanly in his appearance, dainty and affected in his taste, a Cantabridgian, and a philosopher à la Voltaire. The elements of fire and water cannot be more hostile to each other than this pair. Yet such was the intrinsic merit of both, in different ways, that all who lean towards manly pursuits and eloquence, refined morality, and deep thinking, will bow to the shrine of the one ;while the votaries of lively and quaint wit, fancy, and knowlege of the world, who delight in the records of Gothic manners and antiquities, and in the relation of curious and queer incidents before unnoticed, will be captivated by the writings of the other. Few readers perhaps will be found so just as to allow a due portion of merit to both: yet there is something worthy of admiration by the candid of all parties, in the works of each, however dissimilar. Among the additional Irish peers, the articles concerning Lord Barrington, the second Earl of Egmont, Lord Clive, and Earl Nugent, are piquant, and written with peculiar attention. In the POSTSCRIPT to "Noble Authors," the writer discusses, in his best strain, the validity of claims to poetical merit set up from the authority of Christina de Pisan, by Mademoiselle de Keralio, editor of Bibliotheque des Romans, in favour of JOHN MONTACUTE, Earl of SALISBURY, in the xivth century. After this we are presented with an entertaining appendix to the Royal and Noble Authors, in which we have the history of Charles Duke of Orleans, who was taken prisoner at the battle of Agincourt, and detained during 25 years. He was nephew of Charles VI. of France, and soothed his heavy hours of captivity by the study of our language and poetry, of which a specimen is inserted. -The first vol. of the work before us concludes with the following period : 7 Ν. Β. N. B. This addition was written before the revolution in France in 1789; since when the follies of that nation have soured and plunged into the most execrable barbarity, immorality, injustice, usurpation, and tyranny; have rejected God himself and deified human monsters, and have dared to call this mass of unheard-of crimes " giving liberty to mankind"-by atheism and massacres!" VOL. II. The first article in this volume is the CASTLE OF OTRANTO; an old acquaintance, and for which we had formed a friendship long before we knew whence it came, or were certain that the title did not speak truth, when it pretended that the story was translated by William Marshal, Gent. from the original Italian of Onufrio Muralto, canon of the church of St. Nicholas, at Otranto †. To the 2d edition, in the same year, with the initials of the real author's name, we were not quite so civil; as we could not but lament that a writer " of a refined and polished genius should be an advocate for re-establishing the barbarous superstitions of Gothic devilism! Incredulus odi is, or ought to be, a charm against all such infatuation." In 1791, this romance had the honour of being re-printed, at the beautiful press of Bodoni, at Parma; not in an Italian translation, but in its mother tongue. The next production in this volume is a piece of pleasantry on the marvellous accounts in circulation (1766) concerning the gigantic stature of the inhabitants of Patagonia, under the title of An Account of the Giants lately discovered. These have since so much degenerated, that, from 9 to 11 feet, which Commodore Biron's people made them, late voyagers have cut them down to 5 feet 11, and 6 feet. There are many strokes of humour in this piece, and allusions to the state of Europe and the absurdities of the times. This playful tract is followed by one more serious and important: Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third. We have already paid our tribute of praise to the acuteness of these Doubts, and to the able manner in which they were supported. The ingenious author had indeed the address to teach us how to doubt, and to disturb the public mind on the occasion: but, as he did not pretend to tell us how to solve these doubts satisfactorily, the ideas of men seem to have gradually crept into their former channel; and Shakspeare's character of Richard, founded on the information of the virtuous and conscientious Sir Thomas More, who sacrificed his own life for conscience sake, together with the testimony of the * A very gentle term. † See Vol. XXXII. of our Review, for 1765. generality generality of historians, (though flatterers of the Lancaster party,) fortified by tradition, soon reconciled mankind to the old established opinions, from the belief of which neither good nor harın could accrue to the present age; and indolence, perhaps indifference, has contributed to prevent further inquiry concerning the comeliness of Richard's person, or the goodness of his heart. He is now an established stage tyrant, and the frequenters of our theatres would be equally unwilling to part with the deformity of his person, or the atrocity of his crimes. During the discussion of these Doubts, an open war broke out between our author and Guthrie, Hume, and other writers. Thrown out at first in seeming sport and indifference, the Doubts, when opposed, instantly became certainties in the ⚫ opinion of the author; and it must be owned that the contempt with which he treats every one who thinks differently from himself, on a speculative question of little consequence to any of the great interests of society, is very aristocratic. The Rev. Dr. Miller, Dean of Exeter, and President of the Society of Antiquaries, and the Rev. Mr. Masters, are treated with peculiar asperity. Neatness and wit, but still more fpite and petulance, are displayed in the defence made by the noble peer; more, indeed, than could be expected by those who latterly partook of his general urbanity. All interest concerning this controversy being superseded by more recent subjects, the author's defence seems long and tedious; and after all this heavy coil in " fending and proving" for nearly 30 years, the noble author, in February 1793, for the honour of his heart, wrote the following POSTSCRIPT to his Historic Doubts. • It is afflictive to have lived to find, in an age called not only civilized but enlightened, in this eighteenth century, that such horrors, such unparalleled crimes have been displayed on the most conspicuous theatre in Europe, in Paris the rival of Athens and Rome, that I am forced to allow that a multiplicity of crimes, which I had weakly supposed were too manifold and too absurd to have been perpetrated even in a very dark age, and in a northern island not only not commencing to be polished, but enured to barbarous manners, and hardened by long and barbarous civil wars amongst princes and nobility strictly related-Yes, I must now believe that any atrocity may have been attempted or practised by an ambitious prince of the blood aiming at the crown in the fifteenth century. I can believe (I do not say I do) that Richard duke of Gloucester dipped his hand in the blood of the saint-like Henry the sixth, though so revolting and injudicious an act as to excite the indignation of mankind against him. I can now believe that he contrived the death of his own brother Clarence and I can think it possible, inconceivable as it was, that he aspersed the chastity of his own mother, in order to bastardize the offspring of his eldest brother; for all these extra. 1 vagant excesses have been exhibited in the compass of five years by a monster, by a royal duke, who has actually surpassed all the guilt imputed to Richard the third, and who, devoid of Richard's courage, has acted his enormities openly, and will leave it impossible to any future writer, however disposed to candour, to entertain one historic doubt on the abominable actions of Philip duke of Orleans. • After long plotting the death of his sovereign, a victim as holy as, and infinitely superior in sense and many virtues to, Henry VI. Orleans has dragged that sovereign to the block, and purchased his execution in public, as in public he voted for it. If to the assassination of a brother (like the supposed complicity of Gloucester to that of Clarence) Orleans has not yet concurred; still, when early in the revolution he was plotting the murder of the king, being warned by an associate that he would be detected, he said, "No; for I will have my (natural) brother the abbé St. Far stabbed too, and then nobody will suspect me of being concerned in the murder of my own brother." -So ably can the assassins of an enlightened age refine on and surpass the atrocious deeds of Goths and Barbarians! • Shade of Richard of Gloucester! if my weak pen has been able to wash one bloody speck, one incredible charge from your character, can I but acknowledge that Philip of Orleans has sullied my varnish, and at least has weakened all the arguments that I drew from the improbability of your having waded so deeply into wickedness and impudence that recoiled on yourself, as to calumniate your own mother with adultery. If you did, it was to injure the children of your brother-still you had not the senseless, shameless effrontery to shake your own legitimacy. Philip of Orleans mocks your pitiful selfpartiality-He in person, and not by proxy, has declared his own mother a strumpet, has bastardized himself, and for ever degraded his children as progeny descended from a coachman For what glory, for what object, far be it from me to conjecture! -Who would have a mind congenial enough to that of such a monster, as to be able to guess at his motives?" The next production of our author, which appears in this volume, is entitled ÆDES WALPOLIANE; or, a Description of the Collection of Pictures at Houghton Hall, in Norfolk, the seat of the Right Honorable Sir Robert Walpole, Earl of Orford: to whom it was dedicated when first printed in 1743. Every English lover of painting, or of his country, must lament the loss of so valuable an assemblage of pictures, equal if not superior to any private collection in Europe. It is but too well known that the debts of the first Earl of Orford, which were saddled on his estates by the second, obliged the third (George) to sell this admirable collection of pictures to the late Empress of Russia. The introduction to the catalogue of these pictures, by the late Lord, is an elegant epitome of the history of painting, enriched with a discriminating character of all the principal artists of the several schools of Italy, France, and the Netherlands, We find many additions and new illustrations to this catalogue -since it first appeared. The description of these pictures forms a kind of catalogue raisonné, which, now that our country is bereaved of the several great works of which it consisted, affords an enthusiastic reader that kind of melancholy pleasure which is felt on visiting the tombs in Westminster Abbey; or would be experienced in perusing an enumeration of the books in the Alexandrian library. This edition of the catalogue is embellished with splendid portraits of the first Lord and Lady Orford, and with views and ground-plans of Houghton Hall, which we do not remember to *have before seen, when visiting the pictures with that catalogue in hand. A sermon on painting, preached before the Earl of Or. ford, at Houghton, 1742, has always been printed with this Description. It is, however, but a profane piece of pleasantry, in a bad taste. Nature will prevail, a moral entertainment in one act. The dialogue of this little piece is lively and comic: but it ends abruptly, and is too short for any public use. There is much good sense in the author's Thoughts on Tragedy: but his politeness to Mr. Jephson borders on flattery, as much as, in defending his Historic Doubts, his resentment approaches towards rudeness and scurrility. Thoughts on Comedy' are ingenious and spirited. The author, like Fontenelle, had certainly more humour than feeling; and therefore, in these discussions, he manifests more resources in speaking of Comedy than Tragedy. Detection of a forgery, called "Testament politique du Chevalier Walpole;" or, "Political Testament of Sir Robert Walpole." This will, which seems to have been known only when mentioned by our author, was too absurd and insignificant to merit an answer. It seems, however, to have been piously seized by the son of that great minister, as a vehicle of panegyric on his father; and though it affords us no new and perhaps no impartial information, it has furnished the detector with an opportunity of giving to the public an outline of the political life of his illustrious sire, and an account of the manner in which he spent his ex-ministerial leisure, during the last years of his existence; which, had they not been superseded by the more ample memoirs of his life and administration, lately published, would have been gratifying to posterity. The life of the Rev. Mr. Thomas Baker, of St. John's College, Cambridge, written 1778.' The exordium to this biographical essay is not very flattering to authors; and yet * See M. Rev. for June, Art. ii, our |